His funeral, indeed, was celebrated with no great parade, for it took place far from Paris. It was a cold, dull morning, and there was mist and rain. Not many friends had come, only a few painters and critics. At eleven o’clock the procession was set in order. And it moved in the rain quickly over the two centimètres from Barbizon to Chailly. Even those who had hastened from various villages, drawn by curiosity, could not half fill the church. But in Paris the announcement of death raised all the greater stir. When forty newspapers were displayed in a picture-dealer’s shop on the morning after his demise, all Paris assembled and the excitement was universal. In the critical notices he was named in the same breath with Watteau, Leonardo, Raphael, and Michael Angelo. The auction which was held soon afterwards in the Hôtel Drouot for the disposal of the sketches which he had left behind him brought his family three hundred and twenty-one thousand francs. And in these days, the very drawings and pastels which were bought for six thousand francs immediately after his death have on the average risen in value to thirty thousand, while the greater number of his pictures rose to a figure beyond the reach of European purchasers, and passed across the ocean to the happy land of dollars. Under such circumstances to speak any longer of Millet being misunderstood, or to sing hymns of praise upon him as a counterblast to the undervaluation of Millet in the beginning, would be knocking at an open door. It is merely necessary to inquire in an entirely objective spirit what position he occupies in the history of modern painting, and what future generations will say of him.

L’Art.
MILLET.VINE-DRESSER RESTING.
(By permission of M. Charles Millet.)

Millet’s importance is to some extent ethical; he is not the first who painted peasants, but he is the first who has represented them truthfully, in all their ruggedness, and likewise in their greatness—not for the amusement of others, but as they claim a right to their own existence. The spirit of the rustic is naturally grave and heavy, and the number of his ideas and emotions is small. He has neither wit nor sentimentalism. And when in his leisure moments he sometimes gives way to a broad, noisy merriment, his gaiety often resembles intoxication, and is not infrequently its consequence. His life, which forces him to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, always reminds him of the hard fundamental conditions of existence. He looks at everything in a spirit of calculation and strict economy. Even the earth he stands on wakens in him a mood of seriousness. It is gravely sublime, this nature with its wide horizon and its boundless sky. At certain seasons it wears a friendly smile, especially for those who have escaped for a few hours from town. But for him who always lives in its midst it is not the good, tender mother that the townsman fancies. It has its oppressive heats in summer and its bitter winter frosts; its majesty is austere. And nowhere more austere than in Millet’s home, amid those plains of Normandy, swept by the rude wind, where he spent his youth as a farm labourer.

From this peasant life, painting, before his time, had collected merely trivial anecdotes with a conventional optimism. It was through no very adequate conception of man that peasants, in those earlier pictures, had always to be celebrating marriages, golden weddings, and baptisms, dancing rustic dances, making comic proposals, behaving themselves awkwardly with advocates, or scuffling in the tavern for the amusement of those who frequent exhibitions. They had really won their right to existence by their labour. “The most joyful thing I know,” writes Millet in a celebrated letter to Sensier in 1851, “is the peace, the silence, that one enjoys in the woods or on the tilled lands. One sees a poor, heavily laden creature with a bundle of faggots advancing from a narrow path in the fields. The manner in which this figure comes suddenly before one is a momentary reminder of the fundamental condition of human life, toil. On the tilled land around one watches figures hoeing and digging. One sees how this or that one rises and wipes away the sweat with the back of his hand. ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.’ Is that merry, enlivening work, as some people would like to persuade us? And yet it is here that I find the true humanity, the great poetry.”

Perhaps in his conception of peasant life Millet has been even a little too serious; perhaps his melancholy spirit has looked too much on the sad side of the peasant’s life. For Millet was altogether a man of temperament and feelings. His family life had made him so even as a boy. To see this, one needs only to read in Sensier’s book of his old grandmother, who was his godmother likewise, to hear how he felt in after-years the news of his father’s death and of his mother’s, and how he burst into tears because he had not given his last embrace to the departed. Of course, a man who was so sad and dreamy might be expected to lay special stress on the dark side of rustic life, its toil and trouble and exhaustion. He had not that easy spirit which amara lento temperat risu. The passage beneath the peasant-picture in Holbein’s “Dance of Death” might stand as motto for his whole work—

“À la sueur de ton visage Tu gagneras ta pauvre vie; Après travail et long usage Voici la mort qui te convie.”

Mansell, photo.
MILLET.AT THE WELL.