JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET 
 
THE DRAWINGS OF 
 
 eUJaOMA 3HT 
 
 JEAN FRANCOIS 
 MILLET 
 
 WITH 
 
 FIFTY FACSIMILE REPRODUCTIONS OF 
 THE MASTER’S WORK 
 
 AND AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY BY 
 
 LEONCE BENEDITE 
 
 Foul 
 
 NC 
 
 1Y\k > 5 
 
 PHILADELPHIA : J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 
 
 , LONDON : WILLIAM HEINEMANN 
 MCMVI 
 
 
THE DRAWINGS OF 
 
 JEAN FRANCOIS 
 MILLET 
 
 WITH 
 
 FIFTY FACSIMILE REPRODUCTIONS OF 
 THE MASTER’S WORK 
 
 AND AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY BY 
 
 LEONCE BENEDITE 
 
 FouO 
 
 NO 
 
 mips 
 
 PHILADELPHIA : J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 
 LONDON : WILLIAM HEINEMANN 
 MCMVI 
 
LIST OF PLATES 
 
 1. The Angelus ( Frontispiece ) 
 
 2. Greville, 1871 
 
 3- Peasant Woman Pasturing her Cow, Barbizon, 1852 
 
 4. The Gleaners. Study for the Picture in the Louvre 
 
 5. The Gleaners 
 
 6. Young Mother Nursing her Baby 
 
 7. A Charcoal-Burner's Hut : Winter Scene 
 
 8. The Vine-Dressers 
 
 9. The Shepherd Boy 
 
 10. Young Woman Returning with Water from the River 
 
 11. The Knitting Lesson 
 
 12. Millet’s House at Barbizon 
 
 13. Going to the Fields 
 
 14. Study for “Women Sewing” 
 
 15. Women Sewing 
 
 16. The Seaweed Gatherers 
 
 17. The Vigil 
 
 18. Cliffs near Greville 
 
 19. The Winnower 
 
 20. Peasant Girl Seated, Asleep 
 
 21. Study at Barbizon 
 
 22. Shepherdess and Flock at the Edge of the Forest 
 
 23. The Water-bearer 
 
 24. The Departure of the Prodigal Son 
 
 25. The Muleteer 
 
 26. Study for “ Almsgiving” 
 
 27. Almsgiving 
 
 v 
 
 V 
 
Study for the Picture exhibited at the 
 
 28. The New-born Calf. 
 
 Salon, 1864 
 
 29. Study for the Picture, “Sheep-Shearing" 
 
 30. The Happy Family 
 
 31. Peasant Woman Cleaning out a Trough 
 
 32. Study of Forest Trees : The Edge of the Wood 
 
 33. The Sower 
 
 34. The Sheaf-Binders 
 
 35. Study for the “ Sheep-Shearers ” 
 
 36. Woman Carding Wool 
 
 37. The Two Haymakers 
 
 38. The Stone-hewer 
 
 39. Peasant Woman Seated 
 
 40. Study of Forest Scenery 
 
 41. Washerwomen 
 
 42. Study of Madame Millet 
 
 43. The River 
 
 44. The Shepherdess 
 
 45. Flocks returning from Pasture 
 
 46. Girl Sweeping 
 
 47. The Ogre Smelling Flesh 
 
 48. Woman Knitting 
 
 49. The Flails 
 
 50. The Man with the Wheelbarrow 
 
 vi 
 
THE DRAWINGS OF JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET 
 
 LLET is the most extraordinary of all the great figures 
 which have made the nineteenth century famous in the 
 domain of Art. He stands apart, in grandiose, austere, and 
 enigmatic outline, like some isolated formation, some 
 spontaneous growth of nature, without analogy in the 
 present, without precedent in the past. Before him none 
 would seem to have looked out on this world of ours with eyes so mournfully 
 clear-sighted and so gravely tender ; none has expressed with an eloquence so 
 simple and so pathetic those sentiments which were stirring human societies 
 to the depths on the morrow of the great crisis that gave birth to the modern 
 world, and on the eve of yet another decisive effort towards a new stage of 
 progress. 
 
 Never, since that inexplicable personality Lenain, to whom he has been 
 compared, had so high and holy a seriousness interpreted the acts and 
 attitudes of the humble folks who make up the mass of mankind ; never, since 
 La Bruyfere, whose name has often been recalled in this connection, had so 
 lucid an insight, or imagery so rugged and striking, been applied to "those 
 savage-looking animals, male and female, scattered up and down the 
 fields, with livid faces and limbs burnt black by the sun, bond-slaves 
 of the soil, which they dig and delve with an invincible obstinacy," to 
 spare "other men the fatigue of sowing, ploughing, and harvesting, in 
 order to live.” 
 
 We cannot compare Millet with Chardin, whose grave, heartfelt 
 sympathy penetrates the everyday life of the petty bourgeoisie; we must set 
 
 A 
 
 I 
 
aside the Dutch and Flemish masters of genre , honest and indifferent observers 
 of domestic realities, or ironical and jovial chroniclers of the gallantries of 
 soldiers and citizens, and of the coarse merrymakings of rustics ; in fact, we 
 must go back to the altogether exceptional figure of Rembrandt to find 
 a mode of thought as closely in communion with his models, a soul as 
 compassionate of poverty and wretchedness, as respectful towards effort and 
 labour, as indulgent to the humble and disinherited of this world, as 
 divinely inspired with the breath of an all-embracing tenderness and 
 solidarity. 
 
 Not that, at the epoch of Millet’s appearance, the ideas he expressed were 
 altogether novel. They were in the air, and we shall see how attempts were 
 made to draw Millet, despite himself, into the camp of the theorists and 
 agitators who were proclaiming the new ideal. He found it no easy matter 
 to defend himself against those misconceptions which contributed to 
 envenom the prejudices awakened by his pictures. But it was, as a matter 
 of fact, the first time such words were spoken and such thoughts formulated 
 in Art apart from any preconceived idea, any definite theory and system, 
 with an energy so extraordinary, a persuasive power so compelling, and 
 all the unconscious force of a nature predestined to the task by the 
 harmonious conjunction of personal temperament, racial aptitude, and 
 special education. 
 
 For Millet was in truth the man of his work. This work was not 
 merely the expression of an intellectual concept, an artist’s day-dream, the 
 reasoned product of a series of thoughts and observations, it does not evoke an 
 imaginary world dreamed, borrowed or assumed, from sights he had gone 
 out of his way to seek ; rather is it the outcome of his life itself, a thing 
 compounded of his most intimate being, his daily thoughts, of all that ever 
 constituted his moral idiosyncrasy, from the first confused notions of child- 
 hood to the weighed and chosen conclusions of his latest years. So again, the 
 figures that people it, the episodes that enliven it, and the setting in which 
 they are placed, are suggested by the habitual actors, the accustomed scenes, 
 the everyday details, of that great and wondrous spectacle of reality, whereof 
 he is not merely a sympathetic or interested spectator, but in which he 
 plays a personal part. 
 
 The work of Millet, and by this we ought to understand only that portion 
 which he has chosen >to acknowledge, is wholly consecrated to the grandeur of 
 
 2 
 
rural life. Indeed, Millet is in the strictest sense a rustic ; he belongs 
 essentially to the fields. “You have done well,” he writes to Thdophile 
 Silvestre, who was preparing a book about him, “ to emphasise the rustic 
 element ; for, in a word, if this side does not come prominently to the fore in 
 what I have done, it means I have done nothing at all . . .” He adds : “ I 
 am a peasant, a peasant.” He was, indeed, actually peasant-born, and peasant- 
 bred up to the age of manhood ; and no sooner, after the first grievous 
 experiences of his artistic ddbut in Paris, does he win some sort of precarious 
 independence, than we find him seeking refuge in the patriarchal life of his 
 forefathers amid the solitude of the fields. 
 
 His whole life has long been familiar to us, thanks to the circumstantial 
 account left by the faithful friend and daily witness, so to say, of the 
 occurrences that marked its course and the work that filled its days. 
 Moreover, a flood of light is thrown upon its whole tenour by the confidences 
 the Master himself vouchsafes in letters, memoranda and fragmentary 
 recollections. 
 
 In order fully to comprehend the bearing of his work and penetrate its 
 subjective and human side, we must ourselves cast a brief, comprehensive 
 glance over his life history, and recall the never-to-be-forgotten hours of his 
 remote past. 
 
 ****##**# 
 
 Gruchy, the birthplace of Jean-Franjois Millet, a hamlet forming part 
 of the Commune of Grdville, lies in the fold of an upland valley that 
 winds down to the lofty granite cliffs of Cape La Hogue, the feet of which 
 are beaten by the sea waves. Millet, then, was born between sky and earth 
 and ocean. He came into the world on October 4, 1814, the second — 
 the eldest being a girl — of the eight children of Jean-Louis-Nicolas 
 Millet, farmer, this constituting him, on his father’s death, head of the 
 family. 
 
 Family affection was strongly developed in Millet ; it remained true and 
 loyal to the end of his life, and to it we owe a faithful picture of the 
 paternal home, where his ancestors, tillers of the soil from father to son, 
 cultivated and enriched the land. It is an unpretending Normandy farm- 
 house, with thatched roof and irregularly spaced windows, its walls half 
 hidden by climbing roses. The front faces the rising sun, and Millet 
 as a child could see from his little bed the dust motes dancing in 
 
 3 
 
the morning beams ; westward, it looks out on a fallow enclosure, 
 surrounded by outbuildings, overtopped by a row of trees bent and 
 battered by the sea winds, where fowls peck on the dunghill and ducks 
 paddle in the pools. Millet was cradled amid the hum of spinning- 
 wheels, the babble of women winding or spinning or carding wool, 
 while the men, listening to their gossip, or drowsing over their own 
 thoughts, would sit plaiting baskets of osier-withies. He dropped asleep 
 to the singing of carols or the long-drawn repetition of legends of the 
 Saints and tales of ghosts and fairies ; he awoke, as he was fond of 
 recalling, to hear the cackling of geese in the farmyard, the cock’s 
 rousing challenge, or the rhythmical beat of the flails in the barn. 
 
 The life led by this little rustic society, at once so laborious and so placid, 
 was quite patriarchal. The household was numerous, as in Biblical days, 
 embracing, besides father, mother and eight children, the grandmother and 
 a great-uncle on the paternal side, as well as one or two servants. The 
 Scriptural comparison suggested is no mere literary artifice in this case. No 
 family could have been found where the virtues of former days were more 
 simply and sincerely practised. To the last moments of his glorious and 
 troubled existence Millet never ceased to think, with a heart bursting- 
 with love and tenderness, and torn with regret and yearning, of the simple 
 folks, brave and strong and noble-hearted, who guided his first steps with 
 heedful affection and smiled benignly on his boyish games. From his 
 description we know the humble but revered grandmother, bred in the austere 
 teaching of the Port-Royalists, whose Jansenism was tempered by an 
 infinite tolerance and a boundless devotion to others, and whose speech 
 was full of an admirable and simple grandeur. “ Remember the virtues of 
 your forefathers,” we shall find her saying to him when he is embarking for 
 the great and terrible unknown of Paris. Again later, when she fears he 
 may be degrading his brush by subjects unworthy of his talent: “Follow," 
 the old peasant woman writes to him in the language of a more heroic 
 age, “ follow the example of one of your own profession, who used to say : 
 
 1 I paint for Eternity.’ ” 
 
 Then we may see portrayed by the same hand the paternal great-uncle, 
 whose mighty stature had grown into a family legend, the Abbd Charles 
 Millet, priest and peasant, who, like another St. Christopher, would carry the 
 little Francois afield with him in his herculean arms, hang his cassock 
 4 
 
 on 
 
some bush to drive his plough through the rich earth, and say mass in the 
 farmhouse with the pewter chalice which Millet preserved as a relic all his life. 
 This figure, though not so clearly defined as the other, for the child was only 
 seven years old at the date of his great-uncle’s death, yet filled a large space 
 in the grateful memory of the painter. Then there is his mother, a notable 
 housewife, a sober-minded, careful, submissive woman ; and the father, mild 
 and serious of bearing, with a kindly, venerable face, altogether a worthy 
 parent of the great artist whom he foreshadows by his plain, solid virtues and 
 instinctive gifts. He was undoubtedly the most delicately appreciative and 
 surest guide of the nascent predilections of the young lad, already marked out 
 as one of the elect. A thoughtful, observant man, keenly sensible to the 
 beauties of nature, he possessed a fine feeling for music, organised the 
 village choir, and amused himself with modelling in clay and wood- 
 carving. With the keen-sightedness of love he early divined the latent 
 talents that foretold his son’s vocation. The boy received a special share of 
 paternal thought and guidance, in this healthy, invigorating atmosphere of 
 peace and concord, piety, uprightness and loving-kindness. His sensitive 
 nature, equally direct and delicate in its outlook, was nourished in the 
 stimulating warmth of a gentle home-life like some rare and tender plant. 
 These early years made Millet the man who was in due course to develop 
 into the artist, and left traces never to be obliterated in his whole 
 personality. 
 
 All the more cultured persons of his little circle were eager to help in the 
 lad’s education, and — a noteworthy fact this — he already manifested such 
 clear signs of his future genius that not one of his successive masters had any 
 doubt that he was predestined to greatness. First there was the old Curd of 
 Grdville, who was amazed to observe the child’s acute sensibility, and predicted 
 his sufferings in after years. There was the schoolmaster, spending his 
 vacation in the country, who delighted to take the lad with him for a long 
 day's walk and set him talking about what he saw by the wayside, and who 
 returned astounded at this peasant child, "whose soul was as charming as a 
 poem.” There was the humble little dauber at Cherbourg, Mouchel or Moncel 
 by name, to whom Jean-Louis-Nicolas took his son as soon as the boy’s 
 vocation seemed to him beyond doubt. Without a moment’s hesitation, at 
 first sight of his little sketches, Mouchel declared the child to have in him 
 “ the makings of a great painter.” Langlois again, a pupil of David’s, whose 
 
 5 
 
studio he entered somewhat later, was equally confident and clear-sighted 
 in his predictions, when he assured the Conseil Municipal, from whom he 
 solicited a bursary for his pupil, “ of the gratitude all mankind will owe them 
 for having been the first to help to endow France with another great man.” 
 Each and all, Delaroche himself included, felt the disquieting charm of this 
 extraordinary youth, so gentle, yet so uncouth and intractable, and were ready 
 to tell him, with a mixture of uneasiness and respect, “ You are different to 
 other people. When it needed so many efforts and so fierce a struggle, such 
 strength of determination and force of will, in the midst of almost chronic 
 distress, to compel recognition among the cultured public, these plain 
 provincial folk of the Norman countryside, with the happy confidence of 
 their sturdy, unprejudiced judgment, had already discovered the genius of 
 the sublime dreamer born in their midst. 
 
 Millet had already reached man’s estate when his father finally resolved 
 to throw open the way to his natural bent. He was in fact eighteen when 
 he was introduced to Mouchel. The studies of his boyhood had been long 
 in abeyance, in order that he might help his father in the work of the farm. 
 He ploughed, sowed, hoed, reaped, wielding all the different implements of 
 agriculture in turn with sufficient adroitness; he noted the course of the 
 seasons, he foretold the rain or the sunshine of the morrow by the varying 
 aspects of wind and weather; he worked amid the peasants, his fellow 
 toilers, amid the patient, laborious beasts of the field, amid the browsing, 
 bleating flocks, amid the cackling poultry, surrounded by all those living 
 things, human, animal and vegetable, active or somnolent, which make up 
 the panorama of rustic existence. 
 
 Yet he is no actor mechanically playing his own particular part, he 
 understands both his own life and that of other men ; he divines the mutual 
 connection of things, the unity underlying the variegated spectacle of 
 existence; already he penetrates “cette vie d'ensemble that life of the 
 universe as a whole which later on he made it his constant preoccupation to 
 express in his work. Henceforth his views are lucid and consistent. A 
 capital and decisive change has taken place in the young man’s mind. He 
 lives consciously and sees his road clear before him ; he knows what he sees, 
 and understands the sights his eyes rest on. This little forsaken corner of 
 the world offers him day by day incomparable spectacles of well-ordered 
 activity or peaceful solitude, of light and joy, of mystery and melancholy, 
 
while the sea is ever at hand to display to him the splendours of its 
 eternal yet ever-changing aspects, and the appalling tragedies of its storms. 
 So this new faculty of seeing makes another man of him — a complete 
 and competent human being ; he is now a conscious agent, and comprehends 
 the higher meaning of his own acts. 
 
 This miracle was wrought by Virgil. The Curd of Grdville, whom he 
 accompanied for a while to the more distant parish to which he was appointed, 
 had interested himself in young Francois at the time when he was pre- 
 paring for his first Communion ; he had noted the lad's keen intelligence 
 and had taught him Latin enough to enable him to read the Bible and the 
 classical authors in that tongue. He expounded Virgil to him, and the charm 
 of the Bucolics and Georgies produced a profound effect on his mind. He 
 loved in after years to recall the impression left by those mighty words, so 
 full of wisdom and music : 
 
 Majoresque cadunt celsis de montibus umbrae. 
 ********* 
 
 Virgil opened his eyes to the grandeur of the daily spectacle of country life. 
 
 Virgil and the Bible, the ancient Bible, the old-fashioned pictures of 
 which he loved to copy, and the great-uncle’s and grandmother’s austere 
 library — St. Augustine and St. Jerome, the Port-Royal philosophers, together 
 with Bossuet and F^ndlon — such in those days formed the ascetic diet on 
 which his intelligence was nourished. When his work in the fields left him 
 free, during the time of the midday rest, he tried in uncertain, stammering 
 accents to reproduce the models — men, animals, trees, aspects of garden or 
 sea — that met his eye everywhere. His father watched his attempts with 
 affectionate curiosity, till one day the likeness of an old villager, bent and 
 bowed, which he had caught on coming out of church, struck all his friends 
 so much that Jean-Louis-Nicolas was vividly impressed and determined to 
 take a decisive step. 
 
 **##*#### 
 
 The two drawings which Francois made to submit to his first master, 
 simple and artless as they are, already show the distinctive characteristics of 
 the future painter. The first was a modern Bucolic, a group of two shepherds 
 in a field under a hill, one playing the flute at the foot of a tree, while the other 
 stands listening as he watches his flock. The landscape was taken directly 
 from the surroundings of the paternal home. The second had a more 
 
 7 
 
subjective and mystical motive. It represented a peasant stepping from his 
 cottage door, beneath a starlit sky, to offer bread to a passing beggar. It bore 
 a text from Scripture in explanation of the subject. This first essay marked 
 the starting-point of Millet’s rustic inspiration and revealed the beginnings of 
 those sentiments of pity, tenderness and sympathy which illumine all his 
 future work. 
 
 These two drawings are of the utmost importance in the history of Millet’s 
 life and art ; they demonstrate, as we shall show presently, that though 
 Millet was not unconscious of the ideas of his day, his starting point is 
 entirely personal and lies quite outside current events. What he was by 
 independent development at that period of his life, he will continue to be 
 when, after retracing his first tentative steps along other [roads, he recovers 
 the true path of his genius. Even these abortive attempts were not entirely 
 without effect in the formation of his moral and artistic individuality. While the 
 diversion of his talents to subjects of mere virtuosity gave his brush supple- 
 ness and versatility and freed his hand from the pedantic technicalities of 
 the studio, the mortifications, disillusionments and disappointments of his 
 Parisian days, the isolation in which he found himself, threw him back upon 
 the jealously guarded Eden of the inner life, and by force of contrast brought 
 him closer and closer to the simple past and the vision of country life and 
 country scenes that was ever present to his mind. 
 
 From 1835, the date of his entering Mouchel’s studio, to 1847, the year 
 which saw his career definitely determined, he lived through a dozen years of 
 vicissitudes more or less lamentable. 
 
 He remained hardly two months with Mouchel, his first master, an odd 
 personage to fill that position ; he was barely seven years his pupil’s senior ; 
 and there was much in his character to attract Millet’s sympathy, and confirm 
 his nascent predilections. Hence we cannot altogether ignore this humble 
 figure, forgotten by History, this “ inspired anchorite,” who, we are told, had 
 married a peasant woman and lived like a peasant himself ; he had the soul 
 of a St. Francis of Assisi, adoring animals, lost in ecstatic contemplation of 
 Nature, worshipping Art and those artists who strove to paint the realities of 
 life. Just when Millet was beginning to feel, with his master, the stimulus of 
 the Dutch and Flemish painters, Rembrandt, Teniers, Brouwer, the Breughels, 
 whom his instructor held up to his youthful admiration, he was recalled to 
 Gruchy to the bedside of his dying father. 
 
 8 
 
From that moment the whole aspect of his life was altered; the family was 
 broken up, the household ruined, events to be followed presently by the 
 dispersal of his relatives and the tragic end of mother and grandmother, the 
 two beings most dear to the exile’s heart. He made a gallant effort to take 
 the father’s place at home and on the farm. But something had broken in the 
 bonds that attached him directly to the soil. He had tasted a philtre for which 
 there is no antidote. His fate was sealed ; henceforth he was vowed to Art ; 
 his path lay clearly marked out before him, the Via Dolorosa of immortality. 
 Such was the conviction of his friends and of the grandmother, who had 
 resumed the direction of the household ; she remembered his father’s pious 
 wish, and sent Frangois back to Cherbourg, where the lad’s artistic future had 
 aroused the interest of certain benevolent amateurs. The results were : his 
 second apprenticeship under Langlois, a period of much enthusiastic reading, 
 when he devoured Chateaubriand, Scott, and Victor Hugo ; the departmental 
 bursary, painfully won and repeatedly disputed ; and finally, the departure for 
 Paris. He arrived at the capital in January 1837, in a state of moral 
 distress difficult to picture ! At first it involved absolute loneliness, without 
 stay or support of any kind, for this gentle soul, so shy and sensitive. He 
 was overwhelmed by the dismal grey sky, the sense of suffocation in the 
 narrow crowded streets shut in by tall gloomy houses ; chilled by the 
 cramped icy-cold garret, with its depressing view of chimney-pots, that 
 seemed to offer the spectacle of some vast graveyard, dotted with a fantastic 
 jumble of shabby tombstones; depressed by the mean ugliness of the 
 surroundings, amid which the timid, uncouth country lad, proud, independent, 
 and untameable, had to fight his difficult way. After a sore struggle 
 against diffidence and despondency came his first visit to the atelier , 
 and the rough miscellaneous society of his fellow students, most of them 
 insolently or stolidly contemptuous, whom the “ wild man of the woods,” 
 as they nicknamed him, was constrained to keep at arm’s length. Another 
 trial was the unfairness of the master, who, in the competition for the 
 prix de Rome , overlooked the merits of other candidates to favour his 
 own protlgd. Lastly, there was the crushing humiliation of dire poverty. 
 
 So shy and timid was he that he dared not so much as ask his way in the 
 streets, and took several days to discover the Louvre. But once there it was 
 indeed a promised land, a very harbour of refuge. Henceforth he had 
 guides, philosophers, and friends, dumb yet eloquent ; he was no longer 
 
 B 
 
 9 
 
lonely, and could face the struggle with all the purpose, energy and obstinacy 
 of the peasant. Presently, resolved to pursue his way without useless and 
 unavailing regrets, he sought to supplement his meagre allowance, again and 
 again disputed and cut down ; he painted his fellow lodgers, occupants of the 
 neighbouring garrets, the servants, even the concierge and the charbonnier. A 
 friend, the only one he had made, who shared his room, urged him to try little 
 figure-pieces, in the taste of the eighteenth century, which the minor genre 
 painters, inspired by the decadent Romanticism of the day, were bringing into 
 vogue. These the good-natured Marolle volunteered to “place” with the 
 dealers. However, Millet made his actual debut with a Charity in the style 
 of Michelangelo — the Master who from that time seems to have most deeply 
 impressed him. The attempt having met with no sort of success, he made up 
 his mind to follow his friend’s advice to the letter, and produced a series of 
 little pastels which recall, more or less imperfectly, Boucher and Fragonard. 
 Marolle eventually managed to get a louis for the lot. These productions, 
 once esteemed so lightly, are beginning to be collected nowadays. To judge 
 by sundry specimens, they lack neither spirit nor cleverness, and might 
 perhaps have made the reputation of a second-rate painter. There is even 
 a Vert-vert of a strongly marked comic flavour that recalls Daumier. The 
 production of these pot-boilers, bringing him into contact as it did with 
 the elegance of the eighteenth century, at any rate served to wean him 
 by degrees from the methods of Delaroche's studio. 
 
 To the Salon of 1840 he sent two portraits, resolved to put his fortune 
 to the touch ; and one of these was accepted. This was something of 
 a triumph at a time when, as Millet found to his cost later on, the best 
 men were almost invariably proscribed. Content with this small foretaste 
 of success, he returned in the fine summer days, as he had formed the 
 habit of doing every year, to the humble farmhouse at Gruchy, to draw 
 in fresh life with the air of his native place, among the kindly folks who 
 now only lived for him. He then settled for a time at Cherbourg, where 
 he had all sorts of paltry difficulties with the Municipality. He managed, 
 however, to make a living by some portrait commissions ; and finally, 
 his tender, sensitive nature craving a companion and moral support, he 
 married a young girl who was one of his models. This, the painter’s first 
 marriage — a union which lasted barely three years — was so unhappy that 
 Millet, his biographer tells us, would never refer to this painful period of 
 
 o 
 
his life, when bitter poverty assailed him by the bedside of a sick and dying 
 wife. 
 
 Returning to Paris in 1842, he left the capital again in 1844, after 
 his wife’s death, for Cherbourg. This time he had a better reception 
 there, thanks to a small success obtained at the Salon. He painted 
 portraits, and in 1845 he took a second wife, Catherine Lemaire, a native 
 of Lorient, who became the mother of his children and the faithful and 
 devoted companion of his toilsome life. 
 
 At last he enjoyed a moment’s respite. Making a stay of some 
 length at Havre, he obtained a number of comparatively advantageous 
 commissions for portraits and genre subjects, and by the end of 1845 
 was able to return to Paris after amassing quite a little store of ready 
 money. He remained there till 1849. At that date, agitated by politics 
 and scared by the cholera, he took refuge, temporarily as he supposed, at 
 Barbizon, which became his home for the rest of his days. Circumstances 
 were leading him to the definitive realisation of his ideal of life and 
 contemplation. He was about to re-establish, in the solitude of the fields 
 and woods, amid the simple toilers and lowly homesteads of the country, 
 his own patriarchal hearth, after the likeness of that of his early years ; 
 he was about to find himself in daily communion, as of old, with the 
 toil and travail of men labouring to subdue the soil and wrestling to 
 circumvent the seasons, with the scenes, so touching and dignified in 
 their domesticity, of women plying their household tasks or bending 
 over their little ones, with the spectacle, eternally the same yet eternally 
 new, of mankind living in the bosom of Nature, and of Nature enfolding 
 mankind in her splendour, her mystery, and her majesty. 
 
 However, it was not till the year 1851 that Millet finally renounced the 
 hesitations of the past to consecrate himself unreservedly to what he began to 
 feel was his true vocation. Sensier tells us under what circumstances this 
 decision was taken. Ever since 1844, when he had won some success at the 
 Salon with his Legon d Equitation (The Riding Lesson), a pastel drawing 
 of children which had delighted discerning critics by a certain charming 
 gauchene and by its fresh pure colour, Millet wavered for several years 
 between two provisional manners. In the first, when making ambitious 
 efforts for the Salons, he sacrificed to the traditional motives of the 
 schools, painting heroic, classical, or Biblical subjects : St. Jerome tempted by 
 
 1 1 
 
Women , 1845, CEdipus unbound from the Tree , 1847, Captivity of the Jews at 
 Babylon, which was exhibited in 1848, together with The Winnower, Samson 
 and Delilah , Mercury carrying off the Flocks of Argus, Hagar and Ishmael. 
 In the second, he surrenders himself to the inspiration of mythology and 
 character-subjects imbued with a daintily voluptuous Paganism, the outcome 
 of his dallyings with the sensuous prettinesses of the eighteenth century. 
 In this class we find An Offering to Pan, Daphnis and Chloe, and studies 
 of women bathing, nude women asleep and peeping fauns, nude women 
 reclining on a bed and seen from behind, nude or half-nude girls as 
 nymphs or dryads seated in the woods, or, again, children at play looking 
 like Cupids. 
 
 If Millet, like too many others, had mistaken his proper vocation, and 
 persevered in these two directions, there is little doubt that he would have 
 made a fortune and died a member of the Institut. 
 
 Whatever criticism was bestowed on his exhibited pictures, chiefly from 
 the point of view of his technique, which, following the methods popularised 
 by the Romantic school, and modified by the artful chemical combina- 
 tions of Ddcamps and the luscious concoctions of Diaz, delighted in an 
 exaggerated richness of colour, a most flattering welcome was extended to 
 his historical canvases, at any rate to his CEdipus, conceived in the taste 
 of Delacroix, whose panegyric was presently repeated by the pens of the 
 most famous critics, such men as Thord and Thflophile Gautier. As for 
 his other compositions, the harmony between figures and landscape, the quiet 
 warmth of tone, less brilliant but also less meretricious than that of Diaz, 
 bring him into line with Delacroix ; they show a quality at once familiar and 
 impressive, sensuous yet chaste, while in the nude studies there is something 
 that recalls the antique — the antique as conceived at the time by Chassdriau, 
 and as understood at a later date by Gustave Moreau and Puvis de Cha- 
 vannes. These little compositions, with their voluptuous and melancholy 
 note, appealed with extraordinary force to his admirers and friends. 
 
 There were two such at this period of Millet’s life, who were admitted to 
 some degree of intimacy and sustained him with their warmest sympathy — I 
 mean, I need hardly say, Diaz and Charles Jacque. It is likely enough 
 that the vacillation still noticeable in Millet’s manner was due to some extent 
 to the diverse influences of these two friends. 
 
 Surrounded and stimulated by the group of painters who, whether under 
 
 12 
 
stress of contemporary political events, or for reasons of a purely artistic 
 order, were turning to the study of realities in town and country, Jacque, 
 who had already achieved a reputation by his drawings and engravings, had 
 for the last two or three years devoted himself to painting, was now an 
 ardent disciple of the old Dutch and Flemish masters, and was beginning to 
 win success with his studies of poultry and pigs. At the same moment we 
 find Millet venturing upon some tentative excursions into country scenes 
 with subjects in which the seductions of genre were hardly distinguishable 
 from the genuine aspects of rustic life. We are spectators of a transition, 
 more or less pronounced, from the past, which he is soon to repudiate 
 altogether, to the definite and final conception of his artistic mission, which 
 is destined to grow more and more precise as time goes on. 
 
 In fact, after A Young Man wheeling a barrow of weeds, a homely scene 
 that seems, as Sensier puts it, “ an echo of Fragonard in a robuster vein,” and 
 A Girl carrying a Lamb , a motive of which the artist afterwards gave another 
 version, he steps out more and more boldly and swiftly along the path to 
 subjects of real, we may even say of present day, life. He paints a mother 
 asking alms, a mother suckling her child, quarrymen hauling stone with a 
 windlass at Charenton, navvies working at the Montmartre excavations, 
 the workman’s Monday morning, etc., till he ends with the decisive figure 
 of The Winnower (Salon of 1848), which forms the definite starting-point 
 of this new departure. 
 
 Everything seems to show that he found in Jacque, on whom Millet 
 was, in his turn, to exert so marked an influence later on, an encourage- 
 ment to persevere in the new way, which was indeed the natural path of his 
 genius ; on the other hand, we may fairly assume that Diaz's enthusiasm for 
 what has been styled Millet’s “ flowery manner,” closely akin to his own 
 voluptuous and iridescent handling, may have kept him longer than would 
 have been the case, perhaps, had he been left to himself, intent on the 
 material glorification of beauty by brilliant renderings of the nude. A word 
 overheard in the street saved him. 
 
 One evening, Sensier tells us, he noticed two young men examining a 
 painting of his in a picture-dealer’s window. “ Do you know who it is 
 by ? ” asked one. “ Oh yes 1 ” replied the other ; “ one Millet, who paints 
 nothing but naked women.” 
 
 Cut to the quick, and realising with bitter chagrin the mistake he had 
 
 13 
 
made, he had the courage to abandon work which at any rate ensured him 
 his daily bread ; it was a hard sacrifice, but it gave him the bitter-sweet 
 satisfaction of feeling himself at last his own man. 
 
 #######** 
 
 The Vanneur was received with greater favour than the Captivity des 
 Juifs a Babylone, which latter, despite its undoubted merits, left the general 
 public indifferent. It may be that the Vanneur came at a propitious moment. 
 It was now 1848 ; the slow fermentation of minds during the successive periods 
 of political servitude to which the French nation had been subjected, had 
 culminated in the establishment of the Second Republic, amid an eruption of 
 the most fantastic utopias and wildly chimerical schemes that ever generous 
 hearts conceived in a glowing atmosphere of republican and democratic 
 mysticism. 
 
 It is difficult in these calmer days to imagine the general frenzy of 
 enthusiasm which fired the men of that epoch. The door stood wide to every 
 flattering hope. The idea of an age of universal brotherhood about to dawn 
 upon the world was in the air. Indeed, this date of 1848 did actually mark 
 the completion of a second stage in the enfranchisement of human societies, 
 morally, socially, and politically. It was the starting point of a fresh 
 advance along the path of progress. The events of February reacted 
 upon all Europe. We may truly say that the origin, development and 
 methodical organisation of that democratic ideal which has become the 
 ideal of all modern nations date from 1848. 
 
 This date of 1848, all important in the history of public affairs, is 
 equally memorable, and for the same reasons, in the history of contem- 
 porary Art. It may be the epoch of 1830, that of the Romantic movement, 
 shines with a more brilliant lustre, whether by reason of the famous battles 
 that were then fought out, or because of the pre-eminent chieftains who led 
 the heroic combatants on either side ; but it cannot be denied that the 
 victory remained indecisive, and that the artistic mind was not yet com- 
 pletely emancipated from the prejudices, conventionalities, and routines of 
 darker days. In literature the Romantic masters had created a dialect, 
 free, fluent, and independent, competent to express all the inward emotions 
 of the soul no less than all the external aspects of the universe ; they had 
 made Painting an admirable instrument, a means of expression of a vigour, 
 sonority, variety, and richness hitherto undreamt of ; but they fell in their 
 H 
 
turn into the very same mistakes as the Classicists they had attacked 
 so gallantly. They, too, went on living in books, drawing their inspiration 
 from the past — albeit it was another past, substituting Ossian, Byron, and 
 Walter Scott for Plutarch, Livy, and Homer, replacing the gods, princes, 
 and heroes of antiquity by the kings, knights, and martyrs of Christianity. 
 Their imagination, violently awakened by an unprecedented impulse of 
 poetic exaltation, continued to move in an imaginary world. They knew 
 nothing of the men of their own day and of contemporary life. “ In 
 olden days,’ Thord could write, “ Art was for gods and princes ; it may 
 be that the time has come to offer it to man.” 
 
 This was the ideal the generation of 1848 was to follow, and Millet 
 was, voluntarily or not, its highest and most significant incarnation. 
 
 Already, on the very morrow of the great triumphs of 1830, a reaction had 
 set in against the new tyranny of the “ Gothic.” Revolutionaries, like 
 Lasiron in his “Salon” of 1833, were protesting that Art had only been 
 emancipated from one clique to be enslaved by another, and that every day 
 it was getting further from its true aim, which is, he declared, “truth and 
 actuality ” ; they began to lift up their voices on behalf of the formula they 
 were the first to christen Naturalism. 
 
 This conception of things manifested itself more especially among the 
 landscapists, by a more reverent and humble study of Nature, not now in her 
 abnormal effects, her unexpected and exceptional manifestations, but under 
 her most usual and familiar aspects. An ever-growing interest was shown 
 in the familiar characteristics of domestic nature, those most intimately 
 connected with man ; and this interest develops into a more enlightened, 
 more intelligent, more emotional sympathy with the lowly dwellers in its 
 midst. 
 
 But the special circumstances which preceded and accompanied the 
 Revolution of 1848, and indeed largely brought it about, precipitated 
 the movement, and hastened the birth of what was known subsequently 
 as “The Democratic School,” which proclaimed, in opposition to the selfish 
 watchword of degenerate Romanticism, “ Art for Art’s sake,” the new gospel 
 of “Art for Man’s sake.” 
 
 The philosophic doctrine of Saint-Simonism and its various offshoots 
 had a considerable share in the formation of this new ideal of altruism, 
 social sympathy, fraternal equality, in which the moral obligations imposed 
 
 15 
 
upon mankind were dominated by the new cult, which rallied all the 
 churches and creeds to its banner, the cult of the great universal law of 
 Labour. 
 
 As in ethics, so in literature, this philosophical ferment produced a 
 democratic, social and popular movement of great intensity — ranging from 
 the superhuman work of Balzac to George Sand’s romances of country life 
 and the rustic songs of Pierre Dupont. In due course the movement reacted 
 on the arts. Indeed, it was all the more violently felt in this direction, because 
 the artists, long in revolt against the intolerance of Juries which closed the 
 doors of exhibitions to the most gifted of their number, readily merged their 
 professional interests in their social and political hopes. This great 
 democratic crisis, moreover, produced a special phenomenon in this 
 particular world. It had the effect of recalling the artists, the majority 
 of whom were of plebeian origin, to the surroundings from which they had 
 sprung, it detached them from historic legends in which they took but a 
 languid interest, and opened their eyes to the neglected beauties and 
 grandeurs of their daily existence. 
 
 Thus the Revolution of 1848 gave a strong impetus to the arts in the 
 realistic and popular direction, and finally determined the course of the 
 currents of thought which had been setting in various directions ever 
 since the beginning of the century. 
 
 It is impossible to form an exact appreciation of the part Millet played in 
 his generation and the place he deserves to occupy among the artists of 
 the second half of the nineteeenth century, without taking' into account the 
 previous attempts made to recall Art to the natural mission it had so long 
 forgotten : that of fixing the picture of the society to which it corresponds. 
 So long had the nation been absorbed in the sovereign, and the people 
 divorced from public life, that painting ignored the masses. At this, the 
 dawn of our modern world, the public needed the influence of the Dutch and 
 Flemish masters of genre — eagerly collected for some years and brought 
 within the reach of everybody in the public galleries — to recall attention to 
 the working classes and suggest all that might be drawn from this source of 
 inspiration. At first it was approached very tentatively and timidly, the new 
 attempts being indeed limited to exact imitation of the models ; the careful 
 finish was minutely reproduced, and the theme was popularised by insistence 
 on “ the subject,” i.e., the element of sentiment anecdotically expressed, 
 16 
 
on which painters relied to make their false pictures of contemporary life 
 acceptable to the public. 
 
 The dawn of new ideas is apparent, however, in G^ricault’s Lime- 
 Kiln, in the Louvre, to take an example which forcibly heralds Millet 
 from afar. Even Granet, Leopold Robert and Schnetz, men who, inca- 
 pacitated by the prejudices of their training from expressing the grandeur 
 and dignity of the country scenes of their native land, were constrained to 
 satisfy their love of truth, their taste for the picturesque and their sympathy 
 with the lowly, by interpreting the joys and sorrows, the work and play, 
 the loves and revenges of Italian peasants, show a definite desire to treat 
 these subjects of popular inspiration with the gravity they merit, with the 
 dignity inherent in them, with all they have preserved of the heroic and 
 epic in their familiar aspects, in a word, with the breadth of treatment and 
 sense of style hitherto reserved exclusively for History. Yet, as we see from 
 these very instances, so great was the difficulty of carrying this ideal into 
 execution, of giving expression to this lofty classic formula, that Painting 
 hesitated, and has gone on hesitating almost to the present moment, between 
 a hidebound subserviency to the Dutch masters, and that quest after exotic 
 beauties which sent our artists wandering to Italy and the East. 
 
 Even in Millet’s own circle, the early realists who foreshadowed him, and 
 whose direct successors were presently to rally round Courbet and his 
 aggressive banner, fare forth on their search after actualities, from Brittany 
 to the Pyrenees, from Alsace to Auvergne, even from Spain to Algeria and 
 Morocco. They cannot rid their imaginations of a hankering, still purely 
 romantic, after the picturesque. 
 
 Nevertheless, to determine the precise features of Millet’s own art, and 
 to indicate his points of contact with that of his period, it will be well to 
 recall the names of certain artists who had in some degree a premonition 
 of what he realised with such incomparable grandeur. 
 
 Certain of these, it might even be claimed, exercised some slight influence 
 on Millet at the point of his career we are now considering. Nor does such a 
 fact in any way detract from his greatness, proving as it does that it 
 was not by hitherto unattempted representations of things in a world 
 never before explored, but by adding to the higher moral joys of 
 humanity new treasures of emotion and contemplation, that he has earned 
 our gratitude. 
 
 c 
 
 17 
 
Amongst the rest there was at this date one master, one powerful and 
 unique personality, who has long been an object of public curiosity, viz., 
 Decamps. This strange personage, standing apart from all the rival schools 
 amid which he grew to maturity, neither Classic nor Romantic, but both at 
 once by virtue of his preoccupation with style and his demand for imagination, 
 his love of the picturesque and his cravings after realism, to say nothing of 
 his very definite ideas of technique, undoubtedly exerted the most potent 
 preparatory influence on the development of modern Art. 
 
 A stern student of antiquity, with a visionary’s insight into its secrets, and 
 at the same time the founder of Orientalism, he had fixed his inquiring eyes not 
 only on the popular life of Italy, but on the familiar aspects of his own 
 country, picking up the brush that had fallen from the hands of G^ricault to 
 paint, with a laborious and complex technique, an intense and concentrated 
 purpose, farmyards, canal horses, beggars, muleteers, which he set in vigorous 
 outline against wide landscapes violently illuminated. Decamps was the 
 unanimously accepted leader of all the realists who at that epoch were 
 tossing feverishly in the vortex of events, and preparing, so to speak, the 
 way for Millet. 
 
 Millet himself, both when his fancy is attracted to classical subjects, as also 
 in the first tentative efforts of his modern outlook, reveals the influence 
 Decamps wielded over his contemporaries. He did not know him personally 
 till much later, at Barbizon, when his most important works had already made 
 him famous, and Decamps himself had manifested a lively curiosity to make 
 the acquaintance of an artist who interested him so profoundly. But, secluded 
 as his life had been, Millet was too far-seeing, too enquiring, and too well- 
 informed, to hold entirely aloof from the things of art and life. At a sub- 
 sequent period, when he was to seek refuge in his solitude at Barbizon, we 
 see from his correspondence how burning a desire he felt to know and learn. 
 He was far from locking himself up in his artistic pride, and scorning the 
 advice of other masters. On his first arrival in Paris, he went straight to 
 the Louvre, dividing all his time there between the early Italians and Michel- 
 angelo, Correggio and Giorgione, Poussin and even Lesueur. When later on 
 he receives the commission for his decorations in the Boulevard Haussmann, 
 we shall find him visiting Fontainebleau to see “ those fine old giants ” Rosso 
 and Primaticcio. Later again, he was drawn to the art of Japan by the 
 “ natural and human element ” he discerned in it, and he wrote to his friend 
 18 
 
Fenardant, who was starting for Italy, to bring him back, if possible, photo- 
 graphs of antiquities, of wall-paintings at Herculaneum and Pompeii, or of 
 old masters, “ from Cimabue to Michelangelo inclusive,” his sole pre- 
 occupation being to have “ those figures of men, and also of animals, 
 which show least of academies and models.” 
 
 He is no mere creature of instinct then, but an intellect conscious of itself 
 and aware of its own bent. Defending himself energetically against the 
 compromises of the schools, he was far from indifferent to the ferment of 
 new forms and new ideas about him. Nor is Decamps’ passing influence 
 upon Millet merely deducible from internal evidences ; it is an indisputable 
 fact of great importance, observed and attested by penetrating contemporary 
 critics such as Thord. 
 
 But among contemporaries who anticipate him in the delineation of 
 popular subjects, there are two at least whose names deserve to be remembered. 
 One is the worthy Cals, the son of a working-man and one of the people to 
 the end, who spent his life under the same moral and social conditions as 
 Millet. A mild recluse of the same contemplative, dreamy, and mystic 
 disposition, he worked in his humble home from 1835 onwards, producing 
 a series of paintings of poor people, vagabonds, proletarians, to use a word 
 then just coming into vogue, peasants going to work in the fields or returning 
 at nightfall, goodwives spinning by the fireside, mothers bending over their 
 children’s cradles. These homely scenes were bathed in a grey, melancholy 
 atmosphere of touching and poignant tenderness. 
 
 There is no evidence to show that Millet knew, at any rate at the 
 beginning of his career, this obscure forerunner, who, indeed, achieved little 
 or no celebrity beyond a limited group of friends and admirers till after his 
 death. 
 
 But there was a second predecessor, who died in somewhat miserable 
 circumstances, though for a while he filled an important post and did good 
 service to the State. His name still awaits rehabilitation. Jeauron still 
 suffers from the unjust oblivion to which he has been condemned. 
 
 Jeauron makes his appearance in Millet’s life at the critical date of 1848. 
 He had just been nominated by the Republican Government Director of the 
 National Museums. This is not the place to discuss the important traces of 
 his activity in the great collections of the Louvre. Having heard of Millet’s 
 distress, he brought Ledru-Rollin to see him ; the politician procured him a 
 
 19 
 
commission of 1800 francs, and purchased the Vanneur on his own 
 account. 
 
 Later, when Jeauron had retired to Marseilles in a mood of melancholy 
 resignation to fill the inferior post of Director of the local Ecole des Beaux 
 Arts, we find Millet writing him a few words of sympathy and appreciation. 
 At the time with which we are dealing, he had already exhibited for seven- 
 teen years. Dominated by his democratic leanings, he had been among the 
 first to celebrate the daily aspects of popular life in a perfectly novel aspect. 
 Delineator of the heroes of July, of rugged handicraftsmen, blacksmiths, 
 ploughmen, smugglers, Thord called him “ the most plebeian of painters,” 
 and again declared him to be “ a plebeian painter, even in the treatment 
 of landscape.” He had illustrated Louis Blanc’s Histoire de Dix Ans , and 
 Ledru-Rollin, who favoured his tendencies, agreeing as they did with his 
 own political ideal, had commissioned him to execute a series of studies 
 illustrating the life of the working-man. Jeauron is very unjustly neglected 
 nowadays, and his works, dispersed in various provincial galleries, no 
 longer recall him to our minds. But all who have had an opportunity 
 of examining his vigorous drawings — carefully thought out, strongly 
 accentuated, deliberately planned and decisively expressed, — must acknow- 
 ledge some connection between them and Millet’s work, dealing as they 
 did at the same period with analogous subjects. 
 
 Even if we see in this a chance affinity, resulting from identity of origin 
 and attachment to the same traditions, we cannot deny it altogether ; and 
 it is instructive to note it, as it accounts for the reception accorded to 
 Millet in his new departure, and defines the absolutely novel elements 
 he gave to contemporary Art. 
 
 For we may declare in all confidence that the Vanneur , so far as subject 
 goes, was no isolated phenomenon. We need but glance round the walls of 
 this same Salon of 1848, which throw its doors open to artists of all shades 
 of thought, and we shall find works of similar inspiration figuring under 
 the names of Cals, Antigua, Fujen, of Bonhomme with his interiors of forges 
 and rolling-mills, of Loubon of Marseilles, with his Mineurs du Tunnel 
 de la Nerthe (Miners in the Tunnel of the Nerthe), of Chaplin, the future 
 “ Boucher of the Second Empire,” still working on his first subjects — swine 
 and swineherds, the mountaineers and spinstresses of Auvergne — of Lambert 
 himself, the future painter of cats, with his farmhouse kitchens, of Edouard 
 
 20 
 
Frfere, of Hebert, with his Woman Churning, of Luminais, who made his 
 ddbut with Breton landscapes, like Leleux, before devoting himself to 
 Merovingian history. Then there is our friend Jeauron, and Courbet, who 
 began as a painter of battles, and Bonvin, another newcomer — to say nothing 
 of the brothers Leleux, Lessoire and Ed. Hddouin, travelling for the moment 
 in Algeria. Neither must we forget the gallant Daumier, who, in his 
 obscure, unobtrusive way, was attempting to do for the city what Millet 
 had done for the country, and last, but not least, a young sympathiser, one 
 who threw himself heart and soul into the struggle, but who eventually 
 developed in an optimistic direction, as a devotee of plastic form and 
 harmony of composition, continuing the work of Leopold Robert on more 
 realistic lines — I mean Jules Breton. 
 
 I have said enough to show that the If anneur cannot have come as a 
 surprise to the people of Millet’s generation ; it was no sudden and 
 spontaneous apparition. It answered, in its manner, to an ideal virtually 
 accepted. But it is just this manner that gives it a place apart from and 
 above similar works of the same date, and marked it out for the admiration 
 of some, and the imbecile animosity of others. 
 
 The universal ideal set forth by political agitators and speculative 
 thinkers had indeed so far gained ground that work was now looked upon 
 as a patent of nobility, a duty, a law. The perilous experiments which owed 
 their origin to this utopia of the "rights of labour” — rights in which the 
 artists, too, claimed their share — are familiar to us all. This ideal was 
 bound to crystallise, and in Art it took the form of a typical figure — that 
 of the toiler, the worker in the factory or the field, the artisan and 
 the peasant, whose struggles and hardships, whose home life and home 
 surroundings, whose griefs and joys, whose protests and aspirations, 
 continue to be glorified anew at each fresh stage of social and democratic 
 progress. 
 
 Among those who were guided by this realistic and popular inspiration, 
 some were attracted mainly by the picturesque elements of the Romantic 
 movement in the midst of which they had developed, while others were 
 governed by political and philosophical convictions. They were thus 
 divided between the spirit of curiosity and the spirit of system — to say 
 nothing of the common sentiment which united all who were opposed to 
 tyranny and routine and made Realism their battlecry. Realism, in 
 
 21 
 
fact, was about to replace Romanticism in the battle against officialdom, 
 and to be supplanted in its turn by Impressionism — one and all formu- 
 laries that express the same impatience, the same discontent, the same 
 revolt against dogmas, churches, and pontiffs. 
 
 # * * • * * * * * 
 
 Amid these divergent currents Millet remains essentially isolated. He 
 stands aloof by the very individuality of his mental attitude. His 
 objective is not the same. He has enlisted under no banner, and makes 
 no claim to lead or control any faction. This is why, in the rapid 
 development of this modern, popular, realistic movement, the opposing 
 forces rallied, not round Millet, but round Courbet, who with his lofty 
 insolence, his superb scorn, and his readiness to incur odium and 
 unpopularity, became the very incarnation of Realism — a realism to 
 which he will claim to give a philosophical and mathematical significance, 
 a rationalistic, positivist, and exclusive character. Millet was far from 
 falling into the perversities of his turbulent rival. He was essentially a 
 creature of the wilds, a lonely recluse who found no followers, even when 
 he was understood and loved, and whose influence, an all-important factor 
 in the artistic consciousness of modern times, did not begin to make itself 
 really felt till after his death. He was no wanton destroyer of the past, 
 no noisy propagandist of a new art — though Corot, perplexed and agitated 
 by his pictures, declared them to be for him, as indeed they were for all, 
 “ a new world." Far from being a revolutionist, a professional agitator, 
 his temperament inclined him rather towards submission to natural laws 
 and respect for tradition. And for him tradition was represented mainly 
 by the giant who dominates it, Michelangelo, and the great classicist who 
 directs it, Poussin. These were the two leaders he venerated and pre- 
 ferred. The innate conservatism of his peasant nature ruled him in these 
 matters, both in his philosophical tendencies and in his aesthetic activity. 
 Unresponsive to the enthusiasms and infatuations of the moment, he 
 remained profoundly himself, in spite of the earlier avatars forced on 
 his genius by circumstances. So conservative was his mental attitude 
 that he confesses he was long in learning to appreciate the only painter 
 among the moderns who inspired him with genuine admiration — 
 Delacroix. 
 
 How strange then and how cruel was the misunderstanding which 
 
 22 
 
discovered in his work a plan of campaign, a propaganda in favour of 
 revolutionary and socialist ideals ! For as such his chief works were received, 
 particularly his Sower of 1850, who seemed, the critics wrote, “to be hurling 
 handfuls of grapeshot in the face of heaven,” and still more, his Labourer 
 Resting on his Hoe, of 1863, a subject in connection with which his admirers 
 appositely recalled the savage phrases of Labruyere. A furious battle between 
 admirers and detractors raged round this figure. We cannot read without 
 sorrow certain perverse utterances signed with some of the greatest names in 
 criticism one, for instance, in which Paul de Saint-Victor accuses Millet of 
 glorifying imbecility, and jestingly describes this solemn and affecting 
 subject as “ the murderer Dumollard burying a servant girl.” 
 
 Very possibly the noisy braggadocio and anarchical manifestoes of the 
 master of Ornans, had something to do with the painful misconceptions 
 which caused Millet so much suffering. The scandal provoked by the one 
 artist involved the other, for different as their ideals were, both were 
 disturbing the peace of the sated and self-satisfied. Accordingly, while 
 some tried to draw him into their camp, others repelled and insulted him. 
 Lonely and independent, the great and unhappy man was refractory on the 
 one hand, and indignant on the other, while his friends exhausted themselves 
 in vain efforts to defend him amidst contentions, the consequences of 
 which were poverty and lifelong embarrassment for himself and his large 
 family. 
 
 Yet he had a genuine horror of politicians and demagogues, and this 
 revolution, which all his fellow-artists greeted with joyous enthusiasm, their 
 hearts swelling with ardent hopes, caused him nothing but uneasiness and 
 distress. He had always, from his days in Delaroche's atelier, set his face 
 against the Socialist propaganda— which Jacque, later on, took a pleasure, 
 spiced perhaps with malice, in upholding in his presence. Thinker and 
 dreamer, no one was ever less fit for action and battle. So, albeit his openness 
 of mind, his generosity of soul, drew him in the direction of new ideas and 
 liberal associations, albeit he took part in the competition for a figure of the 
 Republic, albeit he accepted the patronage of Ledru-Rollin, and when the time 
 came, fired his shot like the rest on the June barricades, the turmoil, 
 declamations, fusillades, and slaughter of his day horrified and disgusted 
 him ; he turned from them to withdraw more deeply into himself and to take 
 refuge in the peaceful country, where he was presently to fix his abode. 
 
 23 
 
Not that Millet, indeed, held aloof, or wished to hold aloof, from the moral 
 and social interests of his century. He shared the publicly expressed 
 sentiments of his contemporaries— of sympathy for the lowly and down- 
 trodden, the hardworking and suffering masses, the disinherited of the earth ; 
 but he cherished his convictions not on any a priori grounds, as the result 
 of theory or speculation, reason or enthusiasm. He felt them before they were 
 urged upon him by the echoes of speeches, books and newspapers, political 
 clubs and meetings. He found them in the depths of his own heart — 
 these emotions of love and pity for those who were, indeed, his fellows and 
 kinsmen. 
 
 “ I repudiate with all my might,” he writes, “ the democratic doctrine 
 — as understood in political clubs, and attributed to me ... I have never 
 dreamt of pleading a cause of any sort. I am a peasant — a peasant.” A 
 peasant ! This is the secret of that stern yet tender eloquence, harsh or 
 caressing, an eloquence unheard before, which surprised the attention of 
 his contemporaries, disturbing and disconcerting them till they came to 
 grasp its true meaning and its grandeur. He had lived the life and shared 
 the toil of those to whose struggles and labour, to whose sorrows and grave, 
 monotonous pleasures, he gave expression. He is their interpreter, their 
 strenuous spokesman. If character and conditions helped him, it was chiefly 
 by turning his thoughts back upon himself, and so leading him towards a 
 more profound and thorough comprehension, towards the vision of the 
 Gruchy farm-lad, who, like the little Giotto quitting his goats, left the 
 plough to carry the two sketches that decided his future to Cherbourg, 
 works in which he had already laid bare the original inspiration of his art 
 — love of country life and the sentiment of pity and solidarity. “ Indeed,” 
 he says himself in words it is needless to paraphrase, “the foundation of 
 everything is always this, that a man must be touched himself to be able 
 to touch others, and that all which is based merely on speculation, no 
 matter how ingenious, cannot effect that end, because it is impossible 
 it should have the breath of life in it." This is the reason why, without 
 a notion of system or investigation, without any thought of protest or self- 
 defence, trying to say simple things simply, those holy things he had within 
 him from a child by virtue of faith, honesty and the earnestness that 
 comes of absolute sincerity, “ he penetrated,” as Sensier puts it, “ despite 
 himself and without knowing how, to the quick of the question under 
 
debate, and realised a work, originated an art, of a moral and social 
 significance he little suspected. 
 
 ****»###* 
 
 In the course of the twenty-seven years which form the last and most 
 important stage of his career, Millet worked out his whole dream of life 
 and labour. He dwelt henceforth in the bosom of the Forest, his great 
 and glorious fairy kingdom, where he reigned jointly with the illustrious 
 friend, whose name is inseparable from his in death and immortality, 
 Theodore Rousseau. He lives amid the fields, made homely by the presence 
 and activity of man, himself in the centre of this activity, which he sees 
 accomplished in a regular rhythm, following the course of the seasons 
 and the march of the planets, with all the solemnity of a great natural 
 operation, all the majesty of a divine law. 
 
 Henceforth, Millets life and work were one. He was merged in the 
 changing phantasmagoria of Nature, and with the primitive, rustic population 
 of workers round him, himself an indefatigable worker, whom neither 
 ill-success nor grinding poverty, nor precarious health could discourage. 
 His patriarchal family of nine children, governed by an admirable helpmate, 
 was presently augmented by two young brothers, ambitious to follow in 
 their elder’s footsteps. 
 
 In this primitive household, a sequel to the old Gruchy home, he never 
 ceased painting and drawing the world about him ; transcribing thus the life 
 he saw, he combined the recollections of his boyhood and the observations 
 renewed with what emotion ! — the last time he revisited his native soil, 
 with impressions received day by day from the immediate reality of his 
 woodland village. 
 
 The Winnower of 1848 was succeeded by a Sower, which at once defined 
 his uncompromising ideal of rustic sentiment, so clearly indeed that the 
 work, as we know, was received as a profession of faith. It was followed 
 by a series of sheaf-binders, harvesters, potato-planters, etc. So by degrees 
 this vast conception of rural life shapes and co-ordinates itself in his mind. 
 He sees all the phases and aspects of labour; and this rustic world, apparently 
 so limited, offers him such abundance of picturesque material — material 
 always renewable at pleasure — that for all the days and nights, all the months 
 and years, of his unflagging industry, by painting or pastel, by drawing or 
 etching, he can never exhaust it. Nay, he might have spent all the years 
 
of a second lifetime over the same tasks without either wearying or repeating 
 himself. For he never returned to the same motives without seeing them 
 each time in a new light, or “ forcing the subject," as he says, “ expressing 
 it to the utmost." 
 
 Works which mark effort or struggle or which display patience and skill 
 are numerous. Here stands the Winnower, shaking his wicker fan in 
 the amber mist and mysterious penumbra of the barn ; there, in the bare field 
 sloping up to the high horizon, against which we see the outlines of horses 
 ploughing, the Sower moves along with a heavy, measured tread, trampling 
 the clods, while with a broad, sweeping gesture of his arm he scatters the 
 grain among the gaping furrows. Here again Sheaf-binders, their crouching 
 bodies forming a sculpturesque mass with the sheaves they grasp in their 
 arms, seem to be wrestling in the misty, laden atmosphere, full of sunshine, 
 dust, and motes. Then there is the Fruit-grower, almost motionless, so care- 
 fully, with quiet, restrained, deliberate gestures, does he make the graft with 
 his pocket-knife when the patch of bark is stripped from the fruit-tree, while 
 a young woman, gravely attentive, and an inquisitive workman watch the 
 skilful process of selection and fecundation. We turn to a warm Spring 
 landscape, where a group of peasants are putting in potatoes. The field 
 lies far from the cottage home ; so father and mother have brought the child 
 along with them on an ass, which browses in happy content by the trunk 
 of an ancient pear-tree, in the hollow of which the improvised cradle is 
 placed. Spud in hand, the man opens a hole, into which the woman throws 
 two or three tubers ; and this prosaic task assumes an air of homely dignity, 
 the atmosphere of a Biblical scene, in the glory and tranquillity of the vernal 
 air. All these laborious figures, so patient, calm and courageous, are com- 
 pleted and surpassed by two strange and haunting types — L Homme a la Hone 
 and Le Vigneron (The Man with the Hoe, The Vine-dresser). These two 
 extraordinary beings, in which the uncouth, savage side of the life of the people 
 is brought out with unparalleled vigour, have set much ink flowing. The 
 truth is, take them as we will, and there is only one way of doing so nowa- 
 days, they sum up with the utmost possible force of expression Millet’s 
 compassionate comprehension of that merciless and unceasing slavery, the 
 Gehenna to which mankind seems condemned from the beginning by the 
 divine malediction. “In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread," God 
 said to man from the threshold of Paradise, and this is the explanation 
 26 
 
Millet contents himself with giving, in protest against the revolutionary 
 significance his contemporaries were pointing out in these “ savage-looking 
 animals,” as Labruyfere called them. Millet does not paint revolt, he paints 
 resignation. The peasant never revolts. Against whom, against what, 
 should he rebel ? He is submissive to the decrees of Nature. He knows 
 beforehand that the work of a whole season may be destroyed by a single 
 hailstorm, a night’s frost, a mere change of direction in the mighty currents 
 that govern the system of the heavens. He bows beneath disaster, and 
 makes ready to start afresh. 
 
 This is where the work of Constantin Meunier, the heir of his genius, 
 differs from Millet’s. Meunier paints the workman, and more especially the 
 miner. The latter, dealing with forces disciplined by man, has his share in 
 the progress achieved, and this progress can only be carried out by his 
 intermediation. Hence his consciousness of his own activity in the part he is 
 called upon to play, and the claims he makes upon those who employ him. 
 The “ right to labour," of which there was so much talk in Millet’s circle, was 
 soon to develop into “the rights of labour.” Such the phrase that was to be 
 spoken, when Millet had passed away, by new generations familiar with those 
 upheavals of the masses, that new and unprecedented struggle between two 
 forces, heretofore unknown and still unnamed, but to-day so equally matched 
 and so powerful that their strife is vaster than the conflict of any other human 
 forces — Capital and Labour. It is principally in the countries of “ intensive ” 
 industry that this modification of Millet’s spirit was to appear — for instance, 
 in Belgium, where, side by side with Constantin Meunier’s work, are found 
 the realistic and mystic productions of Leon Frdddric, Struys, Lacmans, etc. 
 Millet knows nothing of crowds; rural life only admits of very limited 
 associations — the old-world associations of the family and the farm, which 
 resembles that of the tribe. Neither is he familiar with the Strike , a subject 
 which Roll is to essay later. He knows only the peasant — the man whose 
 foot is bound to the soil ; and in another symbol, yet more significant, Millet 
 shows us his unalterable resignation ; going back to La Fontaine’s familiar 
 theme, he paints La Mort et le Bucheron (Death and the Woodcutter). In 
 spite of weariness and misery, how sturdily the woodcutter clings to his 
 when the great Consoler, whom he has over-hastily invoked, actually 
 appears. 
 
 But Millets work is not exclusively conceived in this rather pessimistic 
 
 27 
 
vein. His temperament lacked gaiety, as he knew, and rural life only admits, 
 by way of reaction from its normal condition of hardship and struggle, of 
 the uproarious pleasures of the tavern, where the rustic abdicates all his 
 dignity as a man. Millet realised that he had not the soul of a Teniers or an 
 Ostade ; but his gravity was occasionally illumined by a smile. Indeed at 
 times when he enjoyed a certain comfort and freedom from the carking cares 
 of existence, he loved to paint, as pendants to his great pictures of labour and 
 sorrow, peaceful studies of country life instinct with the poetry that springs 
 from a sense of duty accomplished. They depict very commonplace actions — 
 a man wheeling a load of dung, peasants with a handbarrow carrying A 
 new-born Calf. Later, he painted The Pig-Killers, a winter incident, perfectly 
 familiar to every countryman, but elevated by a certain touch of tragic horror. 
 But the further he progresses in his work, the more he comes under peaceful, 
 gentle influences, and the more tenderly does his sympathy go out to women 
 and children and the austere yet gentle atmosphere of the poor man's hearth. 
 His great rustic epic is in a special sense, we may say, the hymn of praise of 
 the rustic housewife. He delights to follow her in all her familiar tasks, 
 and here no doubt his general outlook is intensified by a more subjective 
 element of tenderness and gratitude to the brave-hearted women who 
 watched over his childhood and the gallant helpmate who directs the 
 household she maintains by her daily toil. 
 
 Women’s work in the fields was glorified more especially in the Glaneuses 
 (The Gleaners), one of the gems of the Louvre. It is one of the master's 
 strongest and most eloquent works. Three poor women, their heads bound 
 with blue or pink kerchiefs, their coarse dresses clinging in straight, plain 
 folds about their limbs, stoop to pick up the ears of corn left behind by the 
 reapers ; the figures stand out sharply against the sky in sculpturesque relief. 
 In the background harvesters are loading huge waggons, heaped high with 
 the corn-sheaves, while all around the atmosphere is blanched, so to speak, 
 with the intensity of heat, saturated with vaporous emanations enveloping 
 the austere Michelangelesque figures in the vibrant air. 
 
 Then we have his studies of home-life : women carding wool, spinning 
 or knitting, sewing or darning, on long winter evenings by the yellow 
 lamplight ; a little girl sweeping the threshold ; a young woman going 
 with her buckets to the well, or lingering by a willow to take breath or 
 dream in the bright spring sunshine on her way back from fetching water 
 28 
 
at the river; washerwomen displaying their vigorous statuesque forms in 
 outline against the evening sky, or pouring the boiling linen into the washtub 
 with one of those bold, Sibylline gestures only to be seen in active life; a 
 dairymaid churning, a housewife watching the pot boil, a fanner's wife 
 feeding her hens or ducklings under the blossoming apple-trees — there is no 
 single act of the peasant-woman’s life, or, broadly speaking, of woman’s 
 life, which Millet has not illustrated. 
 
 But he is stirred to yet more reverent tenderness when he portrays her 
 in the part of mother. Exquisitely simple are La Becqude (Feeding-time) 
 in the Lille Museum, and Motherly Solicitude in the Thorny Thidry Collection 
 in the Louvre ; touching in their unaffected charm The Happy Family, 
 The First Steps, The Soup, Bedtime, the Sick Child, Giving Alms, and 
 the admirable and pathetic A Knitting Lesson, the pride of the Staats 
 Forbes Collection, which includes nearly all the choicest examples above 
 named all express in the highest degree the ardent, earnest sympathy the 
 great painter feels for mothers and their little ones. 
 
 Again, among all these rustic figures, of men and still more of women, 
 there is one in particular which has fascinated him — that of the Shepherd or 
 the Shepherdess. In all this primitive world the shepherd seems still more 
 primitive. The same contemplative spirit animates him which animated our 
 most remote ancestors. He is still, as in days of yore, culler of simples, bone- 
 setter, flute-player, seer, and wizard more or less. He is mysterious to his 
 fellows ; and even more so to the poet, in whose eyes he is meditation and 
 solitude personified. Millet understood him as no one else did, and has 
 immortalised him in haunting conceptions. Here the Shepherd stands erect 
 amid his flock, his slouched hat pressed down over his eyes, his long body 
 amplified by his rough cloak, leaning on his staff, his grand and enigmatic 
 figure outlined against the golden sky ; there he heads his little army of sheep 
 beneath the glorious sunlight or the fantastic moonshine. Millet sees it all 
 and reproduces it all in pictures that are amongst the most fascinating 
 productions of his brush. As for the Shepherdess, he made a type of her 
 so sincere, so charming and so sylvan that his very detractors were 
 disarmed. His “ Shepherdess with her Flock” was acclaimed a masterpiece, 
 and the State hastened as usual, too late — to offer to acquire it from the 
 artist, who had already sold it. Again we see her, on the outskirts of a wood, 
 keeping her sheep, or returning at evening from the pastures while her 
 
 29 
 
watchful dog makes sure that none of the flock goes astray ; or she is sitting 
 under a flowering elder-bush, her sabots crossed, her knotted staff beside 
 her, dreaming over her coarse knitting ; or he shows her holding in her 
 tender arms the newly dropped lamb, followed by its bleating mother ; or she 
 stands watching with some companion a flight of migratory birds on the 
 wing. It even seems as if a passing memory of earlier days, the days when 
 he used to surprise dryads and satyrs lurking in the woods, had inspired 
 his brush for a moment when he painted that exquisite figure, at once 
 rustic and antique, beautiful as a statue, voluptuous yet chaste, the figure 
 of the little Goose-girl, bathing with her cackling charges in the cool 
 waters of a shady river-pool. 
 
 In this grandiose harmony which unites nature with mankind, nature 
 plays her part as a vast and magnificent accompaniment. But the further 
 Millet advanced along the path of life, the more susceptible he became to the 
 inherent beauties of landscape — so much so that very often he devotes his 
 attention solely to his beloved fields. His last visits to Grdville and Gruchy, 
 for instance, turned his thoughts to them more fondly than ever. There 
 are so many recollections he would fain carry away with him from “ these 
 fields that now belong to strangers.” He makes haste to paint divers 
 aspects of his native countryside, feeling, now that he is approaching the 
 end of his life, that he is “ more and more closely attached to it.” “ Oh ! let 
 me say once more, I am the man my native place has made me ! ” he cries. 
 To this inspiration we owe a corner of the village of Grdville, his Cliffs 
 near Gruchy and the little Chtirch of Grdville , with its humble steeple, its 
 low-roofed nave and its unpretending churchyard rudely enclosed with coarse 
 masonry. He feels the pathos of this humble, old-fashioned aspect of 
 things, this “simple, homely look,” he says, “as of the world old Breughel 
 painted.” For he saw his landscapes with the eyes of a Primitive ; he 
 finds in them “ many aspects of olden times,” and thinks that many a village 
 of his native Normandy recalls those “we see represented in old tapestries.” 
 In some of his pen or pencil drawings, heightened with coloured chalks 
 or a few incisive splashes of water-colour, he seems to have been thinking 
 of Albert Diirer’s notes of travel. 
 
 From his first settlement at Barbizon, Millet was filled with a passionate 
 love for the Forest, the great Forest which his fancy delighted to people 
 with an intense life of its own, dreaming of all the simple, primitive 
 30 
 
beings that dwelt in it, and understanding their mysterious language, the 
 source of supernatural terrors to man. But he seems to have left to his 
 great comrade Rousseau the task of interpreting the splendour and mystery 
 of the forest trees. The neighbourhood of the Forest is never more than 
 suggested in his pictures ; he shows us its outskirts only. His dealings 
 with the sea are very different ; not only does he love the sea, but he 
 penetrates its meaning as few can ; it is a friend of his childhood. When 
 in later life he returned to its shores, he made pictures of it in which the 
 sentiment of the threefold solitude of sky and earth and ocean was 
 rendered with such power that Thdophile Silvestre could say, in language 
 of lyric fervour, " it is no composition, but an outpouring of the spirit ; 
 it is all space, light, soul . . . ; ” it is a painted psalm.” 
 
 In other words, Millet was no mere descriptive painter. He enters just 
 as profoundly into the sentiment of natural objects as into the soul of 
 man, and models his landscape with the same masterly unity of conception 
 as his figures. He strives to disengage the shapes of things in space ; 
 indeed it almost seems as if it were space itself he seeks to paint. He 
 declares : “ I see in the first instance two things only — sky and earth, 
 separated by the horizon ; then imaginary lines, rising or falling. I build 
 my design on these essentials ; all the rest is merely accident or episode.” 
 And, indeed, his purpose was to make men feel “the emotion of lonely 
 places, the mysterious poetry of harmonious or tragic skies.” “ I would 
 wish,” he writes again, “ to make those who look at my pictures feel 
 what I know — the terrors and splendours of night. One ought to be able 
 to suggest the songs and silences and rustlings of the air. We must 
 think of the infinite.” He would even have the very cackling of his 
 geese “resound in space.” “Oh! life,” he cries, “the life of universal 
 nature I ” in words that sum up his ideal as a landscape painter. 
 
 In this grand naturalistic work there are two exceptional pages that 
 seem to form, as it were, the two principal parts of a magnificent sym- 
 phony to Nature. Nor is this musical metaphor a mere idle conceit 
 in this connection ; for there is only one name that can fittingly be 
 spoken together with his as a master of orchestration, the name of 
 Beethoven. 
 
 The first is LHrver (Winter) ; a vast expanse of barren land under a grey 
 sky rises to a horizon on which is shadowed the vague outline of a belfry, 
 
 3i 
 
showing above a confused mass representing a village. In the distance is a 
 plough abandoned in the furrows, and in the foreground a harrow lies as if 
 forgotten, its teeth still imbedded in the wet clods, while a great flight of crows 
 hovers in the air before settling on the broken ground. It is a poignant 
 reflection of the sadness of the deserted fields, and the solitude of the 
 earth’s winter sleep. 
 
 To counterbalance this we have the companion picture, Le Print emps 
 (Spring). This is like some strange fairy scene. A field with a deeply rutted 
 cart-track running across it, bordered by a few apple or cherry trees in 
 blossom ; in the background, closing the horizon, a tall mass of trees against 
 the sky. But, simple as the motif is, all the gracious charm of springtime is 
 there and all the tragic splendour of storm. Anguish and terror are still in 
 the air, yet the charm of returning peace is already felt ; the heavy, lowering 
 clouds are rolling away, while the rainbow throws its glorious arch of many 
 colours across the brilliant scene, where the distant trees, illumined as by a 
 supernatural light, stand out as if bathed in the gold of the sky behind. 
 There is an element of the miraculous, of the fantastic ; but the fairylike is the 
 dominant note — the fairylike beauty Nature offers to eyes that can see. And 
 Millet knows how to give us back the eyes of childhood ; we may recover from 
 him the candid outlook and simple wonder of our earliest years. It is the 
 marvellous underlying plain reality, the unrealised loveliness of everyday 
 sights, made visible by the power of truth. Everything is there, the dripping 
 trees flashing back the light, the ruffled daisies and buttercups beside the 
 gleaming pools, the hollies bent and bowed by the storm, the apple blossoms 
 refreshed by the rain, re-opening their petals, like little rosy flames. 
 
 Millet’s work then constitutes a great rustic cycle. It is at once the 
 peasant’s epopee and a hymn of praise and thanksgiving to the Earth, a 
 grandiose poem, by turns bucolic, lyric, pathetic, and even tragic, to the 
 eternal forces of Nature and to man’s handiwork. 
 
 For this great contemplative soul was the first to realise the combination 
 of the two elements which compose the whole Universe for our comprehension, 
 Nature and Man — Nature, immense, unmeasured and immeasurable, of which 
 we can penetrate but a fragment ; Man, himself but an infinitesimal atom of 
 Nature, yet in some sort the equal of the universal whole, because he bears 
 within him the unfathomable mystery of consciousness and of suffering. 
 
 32 
 
In vain was this unity sought by his predecessors ; at best it was divined 
 by Delacroix, who introduces Nature in the magnificent score of his observa- 
 tions as symphonic accompaniment to the part played by Man, seeking to 
 admit us, by the magic of this tumultuous and passionate music, to the vast 
 unknown of the human soul. Millet was the first to grasp the mysterious 
 law of their mutual relations. Nature is henceforth neither an isolated entity, 
 indifferent to the doings of Man, nor a mere decorative accessory, remote and 
 superficial ; while, on the other hand, Man ceases to be a sort of lay-figure 
 to fill in landscape. Millet was the first, in his esoteric pantheism, who felt 
 what he used to call “la vie de l’ensemble ” — the life of the Universe as 
 a whole — and to express the unity of the two great elements, Nature and 
 Man, in one sad and solemn harmony. 
 
 Brought face to face with Nature, he lavished all the resources of his mind 
 in enthusiastic, reverent and attentive scrutiny, seeking to discover the mighty 
 mystery of her workings and read the lesson of her laws. Face to face with 
 Man, he drew upon the inward treasure-house of his brotherly sympathy, 
 mingling, despite himself, his subjective personality with his independent 
 observations. Thus he ranges from the most subtle distinctions of analysis 
 to the most eloquent combinations of synthesis. He paints as true a picture 
 of the peasant and the field as of the earth and man. The fact is that in his 
 eyes the peasant, as his friend Sensier justly observed, “is the whole human 
 family his existence being in close connection with natural laws, he has 
 retained much that is primary and universal ; he is more in conformity 
 with the type which Millet’s mind conceived. For rustic life and pastoral life 
 present permanent characteristics from age to age. On the other hand, the 
 fields in their limitless expanse — that “expanse,” he says, “which has so 
 often set me dreaming ” — represent for him a fragment of this poor little 
 globe that rolls man’s destinies through the skies. 
 
 Millet, then, was the first painter to insist on the relation of man to 
 the planet he inhabits, and that of the planet to the immensity of the Universe. 
 None before him had set these forth in their common humility as in their 
 common grandeur. With what touching truthfulness he determines the 
 lowly place man holds in creation, his vocation of toil and struggle and 
 renewed effort; with what courage he speaks of “the distressing but 
 inevitable condition of human existence — fatigue,” and “the chief virtue 
 of the peasant — resignation.” But though he recognises his wretched 
 
and precarious lot, Millet exalts the simple dignity of the peasant’s life, 
 the eternal nobility of his work, nay, even his personal and essential beauty — 
 a rugged beauty, blunt in outline and uncouth in form, but yet so expressive 
 that it affects us more powerfully than all the graces of plastic art. 
 
 Millet indeed has given us a definition of the beautiful, not to be 
 found in the manuals of aesthetics. “ Everything is beautiful,” he says, 
 “ provided it occurs in its proper time and proper place. Nothing 
 can be beautiful coming out of the season.” “ Beauty,” he declares again, 
 “ is fitness.” 
 
 Thus, without wasting a thought on theses and theories, doctrines and 
 platforms, day-dreams of philanthropists and agitations of social reformers, 
 without going outside himself at all, the little Gruchy farm-lad, whose mind 
 had been awakened by two or three noble lines of Virgil, arrived by natural 
 process at the formula of these purely modern sentiments — respect for 
 poverty, sympathy for lowly conditions, admiration for the grandeur and 
 beauty of labour ; in a word, he has given the highest expression to that 
 noble dream of human brotherhood which was haunting all generous souls. 
 
 Can we therefore describe Millet as a realist, if we must have one word to 
 sum up a man ? Yes, he is a realist perhaps, but he is much more. His 
 realism was not of the same stuff as the propagandist, doctrinaire realism of 
 those about him. He was more concerned with general truths than with 
 precise exactitude, with harmony of tones than with scrupulous fidelity 
 in reproduction. Yet, throughout his work, we shall never find a Gruchy 
 peasant set in a Barbizon landscape ; we shall always see the heavenly 
 bodies occupying their proper place in the skies, according to the hour or 
 the season, the trees suitable to the soils where they grow, the branches 
 pointing as the prevalent winds have bent them. The peasant that was 
 in him could never be guilty of such flagrant blunders on the most 
 elementary points as we see committed by the professional artists of our 
 exhibitions. 
 
 “ We must,” he writes in fine, sententious phrase, “ we must be able to 
 make the trivial express the sublime ; there lies its true power." Again he 
 says, “ things exist only in virtue of the substance they contain,” or again 
 elsewhere, “there can be no production but where there is expression.” In 
 fact a valuable collection might be made of the maxims, vigorous and 
 clear-cut as medals, which might be selected from his letters. He is not a 
 
realist then ; his truth is of a much higher order. He is a seer. He ennobles 
 whatever he touches not by amplification but by simplification. He looks 
 only for the essential, he regards things, as he says himself, only “ in their 
 fundamental aspects.” Nay, his truth is of so lofty a kind that it goes beyond 
 the mere reproduction of the appearances and activities of reality, that his 
 figures wear the guise of symbols, and his smallest accessories — like the 
 harrow left alone and forgotten on the cold ground, in the middle of a bare 
 field, under the wintry sky — carry an extraordinary importance of meaning. 
 
 Nor is Millet a devotee of technique, a virtuoso skilled in the mechanical 
 tricks of the trade. He never allows himself to be harassed by obsessions 
 such as those which distracted his great forerunner, Decamps. By a cruel 
 irony, the latter, haunted by his chronic nightmare of some new alchemy 
 of the palette, was so bewitched by the spontaneous methods of his 
 brother artist that he went one day to surprise him, half surreptitiously, 
 in his lonely retreat at Barbizon. From the day he devoted himself whole- 
 heartedly to his rustic subjects, Millet forgot all his earlier studio-devices, 
 f ainting was henceforth for him simply a means of expression which 
 he strove to make the submissive slave of his thought. It was a subject 
 on which he often pondered, less in connection with his own practice than 
 with what he saw others doing. “Alas for the artist who exhibits his 
 talent before his work 1 ” he exclaimed ; and he expatiated often on the 
 error of painters who, he says, using a word borrowed from Montaigne, 
 “ instead of naturalising Art, artificialise ( artialiser ) Nature.” Millet's 
 line, in fact, became more and more virile and austere, a kind of hand- 
 writing in which all may read his thought. And it was, as a matter of 
 fact, precisely this thought itself, this grandiose mirage of reality, which 
 struck his contemporaries— so much so that, as is generally known, his 
 drawings were, and still are, more eagerly sought after than his pictures. 
 
 To sum up, a great religious and mystic emanation rose from Millet’s 
 work, to hover over the remaining years of the century. In its single-minded 
 and ingenuous simplicity this work will have carried more conviction than all 
 the writings of Fourier, Proudhon and Auguste Comte. It has enriched 
 the artistic consciousness of our time and opened a way, heretofore 
 unexplored, to future ages. So, between Corot and Courbet, who died 
 almost at the same time as himself, and whose work, like his, only took on 
 its proper importance on the morrow, Millet presides over the transformation 
 
 35 
 
of modern art. The results of his painstaking scrutiny of Nature, in particular 
 of his scrupulous observation of the varied play of light, in its normal or 
 indirect effects, as vibrations of aerial masses, combined with Corot's subtle 
 studies of atmosphere to prepare the way for Impressionism, which sprang 
 from the ranks of the realists grouped round Courbet. 
 
 But Millet’s great achievement was his vital apprehension of man and 
 man’s labour. He made the cry of earth audible, to quote an admirable 
 phrase. In virtue of this gift the mightiest magicians of our age join 
 hands with him — Puvis de Chavannes, Cazin, Constantin Meunier. A 
 melancholy and meditative Nazarene, he proclaimed in art a gospel we 
 should call new were it not that of all the great visionaries who have served 
 as guides to humanity. He learned the old truth, which should never be 
 forgotten, that none can touch others unless he is touched himself. Further, 
 that a man must be the man of his work, that reasoning and exposition 
 alone will never convince, and that the great secret we must learn before 
 we can reach the hearts of men is summed up in the simple words — to 
 feel, to love. 
 
of modern art The results < f his j un '-taking scrutiny of Nature, in particular 
 of. hi? ycrj|l>i!i(f>u?H.obsen i '.ini' the varied play of light,. it: its norma! or 
 
 indirect effects, as vibration of > masses, combined with • r is subtle 
 studies of atmosphere t e '"v vay for Impressionism. • ii» . sprang 
 from the rank . • ■ mned round Courbet.’ 
 
 But Millet < u.i hi- >. ital apprehen -.on an and 
 
 man - lab . -v of earth audible, to quote a:i a inraMc 
 
 phr t tb ties* 'tgicians of our age join 
 
 ha • < r, nrnnes, Ca ■ < - amtin Meunier. A 
 
 mel. !i iy and meditative \azarene, he proclaimed in art a gospel we 
 should cali ;:ev, were it not that of all the great visionaries who have served 
 as guides 10 humanity. He learned the old truth, which should never be 
 forgotten, that none can touch others unless he is touched himself. Further, 
 that a man must be the man of his work, that reasoning and exposition 
 alone will never convince, and that the great secret we must learn before 
 we can reach the hearts of men is summed up in the simple words — to 
 feel, to love. 
 
PEASANT WOMAN PASTURING HER COW, 
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 The drawings of Jean Francois Millet •