The art of the ballet counts for much in the evolution of many favorite effects of contemporary drawing, and not merely because Degas--who meant to me everything when I was writing on the ballets, standing in the wings, writing verses in which I was conscious of transgressing no law or art in taking that scarcely touched material for new uses--has drawn dancers, with his reserved, essentially classical mastery of form. By its rapidity of flight within bounds, by its bird-like and flowerlike caprices of color and motion, by that appeal to the imagination which comes from its silence (to which music is but like an accompanying shadow, so closely, so discreetly does it follow the feet of the dancers), by its appeal to the eyes and to the senses, its adorable artificiality, the ballet has tempted almost every draughtsman, as the interiors of music-halls have also been singularly tempting, with their extraordinary tricks of light, their suddenness of gesture, their fantastic humanity. And pantomime, too, in the French and correct, rather than in the English and incorrect sense of that word, has had its significant influence. And the point of view is the point of view of Pierrot-- "_Le subtil génie De sa malice infinie De poète-grimacier_"-- Verlaine's _Pierrot Gamin._ 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.