Watteau, the Prince of Court Painters, is the only painter of _la
galanterie_ who has given seriousness to the elegance of that passing
moment, who has fixed that moment in an attitude which becomes eternal.
In a similar gravity in the treatment of "light" subjects, and for a
similar skill in giving them beauty and distinction, we must come down
to Degas. In Degas the ballet and the _café_ replace the Italian comedy
of masks and the afternoon conversation in a park. But in Degas there is
the same instantaneous notation of movement and the same choice and
strange richness of color; with a quite comparable fondness for seizing
what is true in artificial life, and for what is sad and serious in
humanity at play. But Watteau, unlike Degas, is never cruel.
Never, as Watteau, "a seeker after something in the world, that is there
in no satisfying measure or not at all," Degas, implacably _farouche_,
the inexorable observer of women's flesh, in the wings of music-halls,
in _café-concerts_, loves and hates and adores this strange mystery of
women's flesh which he evokes, often curiously poisonous, but always
with a caressing touch, a magic atmosphere that gives heat and life and
light to all his pictures. Where Renoir is pagan and sensual, Degas is
sensuous and a moralist. In the purity of his science, the perhaps
impurity of his passion, he is inimitable. Is not his style--for
painters have their own styles--the style of sensation--a style which is
almost entirely made of sensations? He flashes on our vision _vrai
vérité_ of things, the very essence of them--not so much the essence
of truth as of what appears in the visible world to the eyes that see
it.
No one ever painted _maquillage_ as he does, nor the strokes of light
that shine in a dancer's eyes, nor the silk of her rose-colored tights
that outline her nervous legs; nor the effects--sudden and certain--of
what I have seen for years from the stage: silhouettes and faces and
bodies and patches of light, a cigarette in a man's mouth; and, in the
wings, miracles of change, of caprice, of fantasy, and of what seems and
is not an endless motion of the dancers. I have always felt that the
rhythm of dancing is a kind of arrested music, which Degas has certainly
given us, as in the feet that poise, the silent waves of wandering sound
of the dancer's moving melody, and her magic. A man of singular, but not
universal, genius, Degas, his work being done, leaves behind him a sense
of intense regret; for he created a new art in painting, that is to say,
in painting the sex he adored, without pity and without malice.