The characteristic of Degas personally is mystery. He now refuses to exhibit his works, he shuts his door to all visitors. Like most artists he detests writers, and there is a legend that he successfully grappled with one enterprising but unwelcome interviewer and dropped the unfortunate critic down a flight of stairs. This proves how thoroughly his principles are carried out in practice. “I think that literature has only done harm to art,” he said once to George Moore. “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. You do not even help us to sell our pictures. A man buys a picture, not because he read an article in a newspaper, but 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.” With these strong views one can understand the attitude of Degas to the art world in general. It was a very different attitude from that of Manet who gloried in the fight. “Do you remember,” Degas said once to George Moore (who quotes the conversation in his “Impressions and Opinions”), “how Manet 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.’” This conversation reveals in a curious manner the differing characters of the two men; Manet with that attractive vanity so often to be found in the artistic temperament, Degas, a satiric misanthrope analysing the degraded types which make up the gay life of Paris. [Illustration: DANCING GIRL FASTENING HER SHOE · EDGAR DEGAS ] The work of Degas may be sorted into four main groups—the racing series, the theatrical studies, the drawings of the nude, and a few landscapes. From many points of view the scenes of the _coulisses_ come first. Superb in draughtsmanship, they represent the life of the theatre in a way it has never been represented before. In one we see shivering girls rehearsing upon a cold cheerless stage lit by a few gas jets; in another the _première danseuse_ quivering upon tiptoe amidst the frenzied plaudits of an excited audience. Degas reproduces the atmosphere with a marvellous precision, which only those engaged in the busy turmoil behind the curtain can fully judge. Upon these _scènes de théâtre_ will rest his fame, for humankind is never likely to tire of such vivid renderings of a life always fascinating to the outside world.