Millet, Wagner and Whitman lived in the open air; with towns and cities they had small sympathy; they felt themselves no better and no wiser than common folks; they associated with working men and toiling women; they had no definite ideas as to who were "bad" and who "good."
They are frank, primitive, simple. They are masculine—and in their actions you never get a trace of coyness, hesitancy, affectation or trifling coquetry. They have nothing to conceal: they look at you out of frank, open eyes. They know the pains of earth too well to dance nimbly through life and laugh the hours away. They are sober, serious, earnest, but not grim. Their faces are bronzed by sun and wind; their hands are not concealed by gloves; their shirts are open to the breast, as though they wanted room to breathe deeply and full; the boots they wear are coarse and thick-soled, as if the wearer had come from afar and yet had many long miles to go. But the two things that impress you most are: they are in no haste; and they are unafraid.
All can approach such men as these. Possibly the smug and self-satisfied do not care to; but men in distress—those who are worn, or old, or misunderstood—children, outcasts, those far from home and who long to get back, silently slip weak hands in theirs and ask, "May we go your way?"
Can you read "Captain, My Captain," or listen to the "Pilgrims' Chorus," or look upon "The Man With the Hoe" without tears?
And so we will continue our little journey.
Charles Warren Stoddard relates that in one of the far-off islands of the South Sea, he found savages so untouched by civilization that they did not know enough to tell a lie. It was somewhat such a savage as this with whom we have to deal.
He was nineteen years old, six feet high, weighed one hundred sixty pounds, and as he had never shaved, had a downy beard all over his face. His great shock of brown hair tumbled to his shoulders. His face was bronzed, his hands big and bony, and his dark gray eyes looked out of their calm depths straight into yours—eyes that did not blink, eyes of love and patience, eyes like the eyes of an animal that does not know enough to fear.
He was the son of a peasant, and the descendant of a long line of peasants, who lived on the coast of Normandy—plain, toiling peasants whose lives were deeply rooted into the rocky soil that gave them scanty sustenance. If they ever journeyed it was as sailors—going out with the tide—and if they did not come back it was only because those who go down to the sea in ships sometimes never do.
And now this first-born of the peasant flock was going to leave his native village of Gruchy.