Degas was older than Manet. He had run through all phases of French art since Ingres. His first pictures, "Spartan Youths" and "Semiramis building the Walls of Babylon," might indeed have been painted by Ingres, to whom he looks up even now as to the first star in the firmament of French art. Then for a time he was influenced by the suggestive and tender intimacy in feeling and the soft, quiet harmony of Chardin. He had also an enthusiasm for Delacroix: less for his exaggerated colouring than for the lofty mark of style in the gestures and movements painted by this great Romanticist, which Degas endeavoured to transfer to the pantomime of the ballet. From Manet he learnt softness and fluency of modelling. And finally the Japanese communicated to him the principle of their dispersed composition, the choice of standpoint, allowing the artist to look up from beneath or down from above, the taste for fantastic decoration, the suggestive method of emphasising this and suppressing that, the surprise of detail introduced here and there in a perfectly arbitrary fashion. From the original and bizarre union of all these elements he formed his exquisite, marvellously expressive, and entirely personal style, which is hard to describe with the pen, and would be defectively indicated by reference to Besnard, who is allied to him in the treatment of light. It is only in literature that Degas has a parallel. If a comparison between them be at all possible, it might be said that his style in many ways recalls that of the brothers de Goncourt. As these have enriched their language with a new vocabulary for the expression of new emotions, Degas has made for himself a new technique. Utterly despising everything pretty and anecdotic, he has the secret of gaining the effect intended by refinements of drawing and tone-values, just as the de Goncourts by the association of words; he has borrowed phrases from all the lexicons of painting; he has mixed oils, pastel, and water-colour together, and, such as he is to-day, he must, like the de Goncourts, be reckoned amongst the most delicate and refined artists of the century.