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.
I have seen many Hamlets. I have seen romantic, tragic, passionate, morbid, enigmatical, over-subtle and over-exceptional Hamlets, the very bells on the cap of "Fortune's fool." And as almost every actor has acted this part, every one of them gives a different interpretation: that is to say, from the time of Shakespeare to our own age. One knows that Shakespeare, besides other of the dramatists, acted at least one part, which seems to have surprised his audience: the Ghost in _Hamlet._ And as Shakespeare put more of his inner self into Hamlet's mouth than into the mouth of any of his other characters, it is not to be forgotten that perhaps the most wonderful prose in our language is spoken by Hamlet in that famous scene with the Players. Take, for instance, this speech:
I have of late--but wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercise; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, that most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave over-hanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable: in action how like an angel! in appearance how like a god! The beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.