Degas: The Painter of Modern Life

Magazine of Art, November 1890, pages 416-425, 5,166 words

One evening, after a large dinner party, given in honour of the publication of " L'Œuvre," when most of the guests had gone, and the company consisted of les intimes de la maison, a discussion arose as to whether Claude Lantier was or was not a man of talent. Madame Charpentier, by dint of much provocative asseveration that he was undistinguished by hardly any shred of the talent which made Manet a painter for painters, forced Émile Zola to take up the cudgels and defend his hero. Seeing that all were siding with Madame Charpentier, Zola plunged like a bull into the thick of the fray, and did not hesitate to affirm that he had gifted Claude Lantier with infinitely higher qualities than those which nature had bestowed upon Edouard Manet. This statement was received in mute anger by those present, all of whom had been personal friends and warm admirers of Manet's genius, and cared little to hear any word of disparagement spoken of their dead friend. It must be observed that M. Zola intended no disparagement of M. Manet, but he was concerned to defend the theory of his book – namely, that no painter working in the modern movement had achieved a result proportionate to that which had been achieved by at least three or four writers working in the same movement, inspired by the same ideas, animated by the same aestheticism. And, in reply to one who was anxiously urging Degas' claim to the highest consideration, he said, "I cannot accept a man who shuts himself up all his life to draw a ballet-girl as ranking co-equal in dignity and power with Flaubert, Daudet, and Goncourt."

Some four, or perhaps five, years after, one morning in May, a friend tried the door of Degas' studio. It is always strictly fastened, and when shaken vigorously a voice calls from some loophole; if the visitor be an intimate friend, a string is pulled and he is allowed to stumble his way up the cork-screw staircase into the studio. There are there neither Turkey carpets nor Japanese screens, nor indeed any of those signs whereby we know the dwelling of the modern artist. Only at the further end, where the artist works, is there daylight. In perennial gloom and dust the vast canvases of his youth are piled up in formidable barricades. Great wheels belonging to lithographic presses - lithography was for a time one of Degas' avocations – suggest a printing-office. There is much decaying sculpture – dancing-girls modelled in red wax, some dressed in muslim skirts, strange dolls – dolls if you will, but dolls modelled by a man of genius.

Degas was anxious for breakfast. He permitted his visitor to glance at the work in progress, and hurried him away to meal with him – but not in the café. Degas has lately relinquished his café, and breakfasts at home, in an apartment in the Rue Pigalle, overlooking a courtyard full of flowering chestnut-trees. Like white candles the blossoms stand amid the shadowy enchantment of the leaves. Chestnut-trees flowering in the May sunlight of a courtyard, how characteristically Parisian!

As they entered the apartment the eye of the visitor was caught by a faint drawing in red chalk, placed upon a sideboard; he went straight to it. Degas said, " Ah! look at it, I bought it only a few days ago; it is a drawing of a female hand by Ingres; look at those finger-nails, see how they are indicated. '!'hat's my idea. of genius, a man who finds a hand so lovely, so wonderful, so difficult to render, that he will shut himself up all his life, content to do nothing else but indicate finger-nails."

The collocation of these remarks by Zola and Degas – two men of genius, working in the same age, floating in the same stream of tendency, although in diverging currents – cannot fail to move those who are interested in the problem of artistic life. Perhaps never before did chance allow a mutual friend to snatch out of the oblivion of conversation two such complete expressions of artistic sensibility; the document is sufficient, and from it a novelist should be able to construct two living souls. Two types of mind are there in essence; two poles of art are brought into the clearest apprehension, and the insolvable problem, whether it be better to strive for almost everything, or for almost nothing, stares the reader in the face; we see Zola attempting to grasp the universe, and Degas following the vein of gold, following it unerringly,

preserving it scrupulously from running into slate. The whole of Degas' life is in the phrase spoken while showing his visitor the drawing in red chalk by Ingres. For no man's practice ever accorded more nearly with his theory than Degas'. He has shut himself up all his life to draw again and again, in a hundred different combinations, only slightly varied, those few aspects of life which his nature led him to consider artistically, and for which his genius alone holds the artistic formulæ.

Maupassant says in his preface to Flaubert's letters to George Sand: – " Nearly always an artist hides a secret ambition, foreign to art. Often it is glory that we follow, the radiating glory that places us, living, in apotheosis, frenzies minds, forces hands to applaud, and captures women's

Hearts. … Others follow money, whether for itself, or the satisfaction that it gives – luxuries of life and the delicacies of the table.

"Gustave Flaubert loved letters in so absolute a fashion that, in his soul, filled with this love, no other ambition could find a place."

With the single substitution of the word "painting" for "letters," this might be written with perfect truth of Degas. To those who want to write about him he says, "Leave me alone; you didn't come here to count how many shirts I have in my wardrobe?" "No, but your art, I want to write about it." "My art, what do you want to say about it? Do you think you can explain the merits of a picture to those who do not see them? Dites . . . I can find the best and clearest words to explain my meaning, and I have spoken to the most intelligent people about art, and they have not understood – to B – , for instance; when as among people who understand words are not necessary, you say – humph, he, ha, and everything has been said. My opinion has always been the same. I think that literature has only done harm to art. You puff out the artist with vanity, you inculcate the taste for notoriety, and that is all; you do not advance public taste by one jot. … Notwithstanding all your scribbling it never was in a worse state than it is at present. … Dites? You do not even help us to sell our pictures. A man buys a picture not because he read an article in a newspaper, hut because a friend, who he thinks knows something about pictures, told him it would be worth twice as much ten years hence as it is worth to-day … Dites? "

In these days, when people live with the view to reading their names in the paper, such austerity must appear to many like affectation; let such people undeceive themselves. Never was man more sincere; when Degas speaks thus he speaks the very essence of his being. But perhaps even more difficult than the acceptation of this fact will be found the association of such sentiments with a sweet genial nature, untouched with misanthropy or personal cynicism. Degas is only really cynical in his art, and although irony is an essential part of him, it finds expression in a kindly consciousness of the little weaknesses of human nature when directed against those he loves. For instance, when he is in company with anyone who knew Manet, his confrère and compeer in realistic pictorial art, and the friend of his life, he loves to allude to those little childishnesses of disposition which make Manet's memory a well-beloved, even a sacred thing.

"Do you remember," Degas said, as he hurries his friend along the Rue Pigalle, "how he used to turn on me when I wouldn't send my pictures to the Salon? He would say, 'You, Degas, you are above the level of the sea, but for my part, if I get into an omnibus and some one doesn't say "M. Manet, how are you, where are you going?" I am disappointed, for I know then that I am not famous.'" Manet's vanity, which a strange boyishness of disposition rendered attractive and engaging, is clearly one of Degas' happiest memories, but all the meanness of la vie de parade, so persistently sought by Mr. Whistler, is bitterly displeasing to him. Speaking to Mr. Whistler, he said, "My dear friend, you conduct yourself in life just as if you had no talent at all." Again speaking of the same person, and at the time when he was having numerous photographs taken, Degas said, " You cannot talk to him; he throws his cloak around him – and goes

off to the photographer."

A dozen, a hundred other instances, all more or less illustrative of the trait so dominant and decisive in Degas, which leads him to despise all that vain clamour which many artists are apt to consider essential, and without which they are inclined to deem themselves unjustly treated or misunderstood, might be cited. One more will, however, suffice. Speaking to a young man hungering for drawing-room successes, he says, and with that jog of the elbow so familiar in him, "Jeune M – dans mon temps on n 'arrivait pas, dites?" And what softens this austerity, and not only makes it bearable but most winsome and engaging, is the conviction which his manner instils of the very real truth, of the unimpeachableness of the wisdom which he expresses by the general conduct of his life and by phrases pregnant with meaning in conversation. Nor is it ever the black wisdom of the pessimist which says there is no worth in anything but death, but the deeper wisdom bom of pessimism but tempered in the deepest needs of life, which says: ''Expend not your strength in vain struggling in the illusive world, which tempts you out of yourself; success and failure lie within and not without you; know yourself, and seek to bring yourself into harmony with the Will from which you cannot escape, but with which you may bring yourself into obedience, and so obtain peace."

In accordance with this philosophy, Degas thinks as little of Turkey carpets and Japanese screens as of newspaper applause, and is unconcerned to paint his walls lemon yellow; he puts his aestheticism upon his canvases, and leaves time to tint the fading whitewash with golden tints. They are naked of ornament, except a few chefs-d'œuvre which he will not part with, a few portraits, a few pictures painted in his youth, and "Semiramis Building the Walls of Babylon." Manet used to say," Why don't you exhibit it, cela fera de la variété dans votre œuvre?" and a large picture of some Spartan youths wrestling which Gérôme once ventured to criticise, when Degas answered, "Je suppose que ce n'est pas assez turc pour vous, Gérôme." Not in his dress nor in his manner will you note anything glaringly distinctive, but for those who know him the suit of pepper-and-salt and the blue necktie tied round a loose collar are full of him. For those who know him the round shoulders, the rolling gait, and the bright, hearty, essentially manly voice are brimmed with individuality; but the casual visitor of the Café de la Rochefoucauld would have to be more than usually endowed with the critical sense to discern that Degas was not an ordinary man. To pass through the world unobserved by those who cannot understand him – that is, by the crowd – and to create all the while an art so astonishingly new and so personal that it will defy imitator, competitor, or rival, seems to be his ambition, if so gross a term can be used without falsifying the conception of his character. For Degas seems without desire of present or future notoriety. If he could create his future as he has created his present, his future would be found to be no more than a continuation of his present. As he has in life resolutely separated himself from all possibility of praise, except from those who understand him, he would probably, if he could, defend himself against all those noisy and posthumous honours which came to the share of J.F. Millet; and there can be but little doubt that he desires not at all to be sold by picture-dealers for fabulous prices, but rather to have a quiet nook in a public gallery where the few would come to study. Be this as it may, it is certain that to-day his one wish is to escape the attention of the crowd. He often says his only desire is to have eyesight to work ten hours a day. But he neither condemns nor condones the tastes and the occupations of others; he is merely satisfied that, so far as he is concerned, all the world has for giving is untroubled leisure to pursue the art he has so laboriously invented. For this end he has for many years consistently refused to exhibit in the Salon; now he declines altogether to show his pictures publicly.

In old times, after a long day spent in his studio, he would come to the Nouvelle Athènes late in the evening, about ten o'clock. There he was sure of meeting Manet, Pissaro, and Duranty, and with books and cigarettes the time passed in agreeable aestheticisms. Pissaro dreamy and vague; Manet loud, declamatory, and eager for medals and decorations; Degas sharp, deep, more profound, scornfully sarcastic; Duranty clear-headed, dry, full of repressed disappointment. But about the time of Manet's death the centre of art shifted from the Nouvelle Athènes to the Café de la Rochefoucauld. Degas followed it. He was seen there every evening, and every morning he breakfasted there – every year looming up greater and more brilliant in the admiration of the young men. Latterly Degas has abandoned café life. He dines with Ludovic Halévy and a few friends whom he has known all his life; he goes to the opera or the circus to draw and find new motives for pictures. Speaking to a landscape-painter at the Cirque Fernando, he said, "À vous il faut la vie naturelle, à moi la vie factice."

Of his family history it is difficult t.o obtain any information. Degas is the last person of whom inquiry could be made. He would at once smell an article, and he nips such projects as a terrier nips rats. The unfortunate interlocutor would meet with this answer, ''I didn't know that you were a reporter in disguise; if I had I shouldn't have received yon.'' It is rumoured, however, that he is a man of some private fortune, and a story is in circulation that he sacrificed the greater part of his income to save his brother, who had lost everything by imprudent speculation in American securities. But what concerns us is his artistic not his family history.

Degas was a pupil of Ingres, and any mention of this always pleases him, for he looks upon Ingres as the first star in the firmament of French art. And, indeed, Degas is the only one who ever reflected, even dimly, anything of the genius of the great master. The likeness to Ingres which some affect to see in Flandrin's work is entirely superficial, but in the "Semiramis Building the Walls of Babylon " and in the "Spartan Youths" there is a strange fair likeness to the master, mixed with another beauty, still latent, but ready for afflorescence, even as the beauty of the mother floats evanescent upon the face of the daughter hardly pubescent yet. But if Degas took from Ingres that method of drawing which may be defined as drawing by the character in contradistinction to that of drawing by the masses, he applied the method differently and developed it in a different direction. Degas bears the same relation to Ingres as Bret Harte does to Dickens. In Bret Harte and in Dickens the method is obviously the same when you go to its root, but the subject-matter is so different that the method is in all outward characteristics transformed, and no complaint of want of originality of treatment is for a moment tenable. So it is with Degas; at the root his drawing is as classical as Ingres', but by changing the subject-matter from antiquity to the boards of the opera-house, and taking curiosity for leading characteristic, he created an art cognate and coequal with Goncourt's, rising sometimes to the height of a page by Balzac. With marvellous perception he follows every curve and characteristic irregularity, writing the very soul of his model upon his canvas. He will paint portraits only of those whom he knows intimately, for it is part of his method only to paint his sitter in that environment which is habitual to her or him. With stagey curtains, balustrades, and conventional poses, he will have nothing to do. He will watch the sitter until he learns all her or his tricks of expression and movement, and then will reproduce all of them and with such exactitude and sympathetic insight that the very inner life of the man is laid bare. Mr. Whistler, whose short-sightedness allows him to see none of these beauties in nature, has declared that all such excellences are literary and not pictorial, and the fact that he was born in Baltimore has led him to contradict all that the natural sciences have said on racial tendencies and hereditary faculties. But there are some who still believe that the "Ten o'clock" has not altogether overthrown science and history, and covered with ridicule all art that does not limit itself to a harmony in a couple of tints. And that Degas may render more fervidly all the characteristics that race, heredity, and mode of life have endowed his sitter with, he makes numerous drawings and paints from them; but he never paints direct from life. And as he sought new subject-matter, he sought for new means by which he might reproduce his subject in an original and novel manner. At one time he renounced oil-painting entirely, and would only work in pastel or distemper. Then, again, it was water-colour painting, and sometimes in the same picture he would abandon one medium for another. There are examples extant of pictures begun in water-colour, continued in gouache, and afterwards completed in oils, and if the picture be examined carefully it will be found that the finishing hand has been given with pen and ink. Degas has worked upon his lithographs, introducing a number of new figures into the picture by means of pastel. He has done beautiful sculpture, but not content with taking a ballet-girl for subject, has declined to model the skirt, and had one made by the nearest milliner. In all dangerous ways and perilous straits he has sought to shipwreck his genius; but genius knows no shipwreck, and triumphs in spite of obstacles. Not even Wagner has tested more thoroughly than Degas the invincibility of genius.

If led to speak on the marvellous personality of his art, Degas will say, "It is strange, for I assure you no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament – temperament is the word – I know nothing. When people talk about temperament it always seems to me like the strong man in the fair, who straddles his legs and asks some one to step up on the palm of his hand." Again, in reply to an assurance that he of all men now working, whether with pen or pencil, is surest of the future, he will say, "It is very difficult to be great as the old masters were great. In the great ages you were great or you did not exist at all, but in these days everything conspires to support the feeble."

No critic would dare to assert or even to suggest that Degas' art was greater than Ingres'; not, however, because such a belief might not find foothold in his soul, but because such suggestion would be unseemly. In truth, the resemblance between the two men is very remote, and hardly to be understood by anyone but an artist. Ingres relied entirely on purity and orderliness of line; the line is still pure in Degas, but it is petulant with curiosity. Ingres accepted classical composition; Degas has violated every rule of composition. Ingres accepted the subject-matter that the genius of antiquity has consecrated; Degas has introduced subject-matter heretofore deemed impossible in art. Bret Harte changed the scene from London to California, but others had or might have written of these miners without displaying any striking originality in choice of subject. Baudelaire is the only one I can name who did what Degas has done – that is, to tread, nay more, to walk, firmly where none has walked before. It may be wise or unwise to do this, but artists will understand the almost superhuman genius it requires to take subject-matter that has never .received artistic treatment before, and bring it at once within the sacred pale. To do this is usually the work of two or three generations. Baudelaire was the only poet who ever did this; Degas is the only painter. Of all impossible things in this world to treat artistically the ballet-girl seemed the most impossible, but Degas accomplished that feat. He has done so many dancers and so often repeated himself that it is difficult to specify any particular one. But one picture rises up in my mind – perhaps it is the finest of all. It represents two girls practising at the rail; one is straining forward lifting her leg into torturous position – her back is turned, and oh! the

miraculous drawing of that bent back! The other is seen in profile – the pose is probably less arduous, and she stands, not ungracefully, her left leg thrown behind her, resting upon the rail. The arrangement of the picture is most unacademical; the figures are half-way up the canvas, and the great space of bare floor is balanced by the watering-pot. This picture is probably an early one. It was natural to begin with dancers at rest; those wild flights of dancers – the première danseuse springing amid the coryphées down to the footlights, her thin arms raised, the vivid glare of the limelight revealing every characteristic contour of face and neck – must have been a later development. The philosophy of this art is in Degas' own words, "La danseuse n'est qu'un pretexte pour le dessin." Dancers fly out of the picture, a single leg crosses the foreground. The première danseuse stands on tiptoe, supported by the coryphées, or she rests on one knee, the light upon her bosom, her arms leaned back, the curtain all the while falling. As he has done with the ballet, so he has done with the racecourse. A racehorse walks past a white post which cuts his head in twain.

The violation of all the principles of composition is the work of the first fool that chooses to make the caricature of art his career, but, like Wagner, Degas is possessed of such intuitive knowledge of the qualities inherent in the various elements that nature presents that he is enabled, after having disintegrated, to re-integrate them, and with surety of ever finding a new and more elegant synthesis. After the dancers came the washerwoman. It is one thing to paint washerwomen amid decorative shadows, as Teniers would have done, and another thing to draw washerwomen yawning over the ironing–table in sharp outline upon a dark background. But perhaps the most astonishing revolution of all was the introduction of the shop window into art.Think of a large plate-glass window, full of bonnets, a girl leaning forward to gather one! Think of the monstrous and wholly unbearable thing any other painter would have contrived from such a subject; and then imagine a dim, strange picture, the subject of which is hardly at first clear; a strangely contrived composition, full of the dim, sweet, sad poetry of female work. For are not those bonnets the signs and symbols of long hours of weariness and dejection? and the woman that gathers them, iron-handed fashion has moulded and set her seal upon. See the fat woman trying on the bonnet before the pier-glass, the shopwomen around her. How the lives of those poor women are epitomised and depicted in a gesture! Years of servility and obeisance to customers, all the life of the fashionable woman's shop is there. Degas says, "Les artistes sont tellement pressés! et que nous faisons bien notre affaire avec les choses qu'ils ont

oublieés." ("Artists are always in such a hurry, and we find all that we want in what they have

left behind.")

But perhaps the most astonishing of all Degas' innovations are his studies of the nude. The nude has become well-nigh incapable of artistic treatment. Even the more naive are beginning to see that the well-known nymph exhibiting her beauty by the borders of a stream can be endured no longer. Let the artist strive as he will, he will not escape the conventional; he is running an impossible race. Broad harmonies of colour are hardly to be thought of; the gracious mystery of human emotion is out of all question – he must rely on whatever measure of elegant drawing he can include in his delineation of arms, neck, and thigh; and who in sheer beauty has a new word to say? Since Gainsborough and Ingres all have failed to infuse new life into the worn-out theme. But cynicism was the great means of eloquence of the Middle Ages; and with cynicism Degas has again rendered the nude an artistic possibility. Three coarse women, middle-aged and deformed by toil, are perhaps the most wonderful. One sponges herself in a tin bath; another passes a rough nightdress over her lumpy shoulders, and the touching ugliness of this poor human creature goes straight to the heart. Then follows a long series conceived in the same spirit. A woman who has stepped out of a bath examines her arm. Degas says, "La bête humaine qui s'occupe d'elle-même; une chatte qui se Iêche." Yes, it is the portrayal of the animal life of the human being, the animal conscious of nothing but itself. "Hitherto," Degas says, as he shows his visitor three large peasant women plunging into a river, not to bathe, but to wash or cool themselves (one drags a dog in after her), "the nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience, but these women of mine are honest, simple folk, unconcerned by any other interests than those involved in their physical condition. Here is another; she is washing her feet. It is as if you looked through a key-hole."

From the quotations scattered in the foregoing paragraphs the reader has probably gathered that Degas is not deficient in verbal wit. Mr. Whistler has in this line some reputation, but in sarcasm he is to Degas what Theodore Hook was to Swift, and when Degas is present Mr. Whistler's conversation is distinguished by "brilliant flashes of silence." Speaking of him one day, Degas said, "Oui, il est venu me voir." "Well, what did he say to you?" "Rien, il a fait quelques coups de mèche, voila tout." One day, in the Nouvelle Athènes, a young man spoke to him of how well Manet knew how to take criticism. "Oui, oui, Manet est très Parisien, ii comprend la plaisanterie." ("Yes, Manet is a true Parisian, he knows how to take a joke.'') Speaking of Besnard's plagiarisms, "Oui, oui, ii role avec nos propres ailes." Speaking of Bastien-Lepage's picture, "La recolte des pommes de terres," "C'est le Bouguereau du mouvement moderne;" and of Roll's picture of "Work," "Il y a cinquante figures, mais je ne vois pas la foule; on fait unc foule avec cinq et non pas avec cinquante.'' (" There are fifty figures, but I see no crowd ; you can make a crowd with five figures, not with fifty.") At a dinner at Bougival he said, looking at some large trees massed in shadow, " How beautiful they would be if Corot had painted them!" And speaking of Besnard's effort to attain lightness of treatment, he said, "C'est un homme qui veut danser avec des semelles de plomb.'' ("He is a man who tries to dance with leaden soles.")

But notwithstanding avoidance of newspaper advertisement, Degas now occupies the most enviable position an artist can attain. He is always the theme of conversation when artists meet, and if the highest honour is to obtain the admiration of your fellow-workers, that honour has been bestowed on Degas as it has been bestowed upon none other. His pictures are bought principally by artists, and when not by them by their immediate entourage'. So it was before with Courbet, Millet, and Corot; and so all artists and connoisseurs believe it will be with Degas. Within the last few years his prices have gone up fifty per cent; ten years hence they will have gone up a hundred per cent., and that is as certain as that the sun will rise to-morrow. That any work of his will be sold for twenty thousand pounds is not probable; the downcast eye full of bashful sentiment so popular with the uneducated does not exist in Degas; but it is certain that young artists of today value his work far higher than Millet's. He is, in truth, their god, and his influence is visible in a great deal of the work here and in France that strives to be most modern. But it must be admitted that the influence is a pernicious one. Some have calumniated Degas' art flagrantly and abominably, dragging his genius through every gutter, over every dunghill of low commonplace; others have tried to assimilate it honourably and reverentially, but without much success.True genius has no inheritors. Tennyson's parable of the gardener who once owned a unique flower, the like of which did not exist upon earth, until the wind carried the seeds far and wide, does not hold good in the instance of Degas. 'l'he winds, it is true, have carried the seeds into other gardens, but none have flourished except in native soil, and the best result the thieves have obtained is a scanty hybrid blossom, devoid alike of scent and hue.