Thus he maintains that when a stunted tree grows upon sterile soil it is more beautiful in this particular place, because more natural, than a slender tree artificially transplanted. “The beautiful is that which is in keeping. Whether this is to be called realism or idealism I do not know. For me, there is only one manner of painting, and that is to paint with fidelity.” In what concerns poetry old Boileau has already expressed this in the phrase: “Nothing is beautiful except truth”; and Schiller has thrown it into the phrase, “Let us, ultimately, set up truth for beauty.” For the art of the nineteenth century Millet’s words mean the erection of a new principle, of a principle that had the effect of a novel force, that gave the consciousness of a new energy of artistic endeavour, that was a return to that which the earth was to Antæus. And by formulating this principle—the principle that everything is beautiful so far as it is true, and nothing beautiful so far as it is untrue, that beauty is the blossom, but truth the tree—by clearly formulating this principle for the first time, Millet has become the father of the new French and, indeed, of European art, almost more than by his own pictures.

For—and here we come to the limitations of his talent—has Millet as a painter really achieved what he aimed at? No less a person than Fromentin has put this question in his Maîtres d’autrefois. On his visit to Holland he chances for a moment to speak of Millet, and he writes:—

“An entirely original painter, high-minded and disposed to brooding, kind-hearted and genuinely rustic in nature, he has expressed things about the country and its inhabitants, about their toil, their melancholy, and the nobleness of their labour, which a Dutchman would never have discovered. He has represented them in a somewhat barbaric fashion, in a manner to which his ideas gave a more expressive force than his hand possessed. The world has been grateful for his intentions; it has recognised in his method something of the sensibility of a Burns who was a little awkward in expression. But has he left good pictures behind him or not? Has his articulation of form, his method of expression, I mean the envelopment without which his ideas could not exist, the qualities of a good style of painting, and does it afford an enduring testimony? He stands out as a deep thinker if he is compared with Potter and Cuyp; he is an enthralling dreamer if he is opposed to Terborch and Metsu, and he has something peculiarly noble compared with the trivialities of Steen, Ostade, and Brouwer. As a man he puts them all to the blush. Does he outweigh them as a painter?”

Neurdein Frères, photo.
MILLET.THE RAINBOW.

If any one thinks of Millet as a draughtsman he will answer this question without hesitation in the affirmative. His power is firmly rooted in the drawings which constitute half his work. And he has not merely drawn to make sketches or preparations for pictures, like Leonardo, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Watteau, or Delacroix; his drawings were for him real works of art complete in themselves; and his enduring and firmly grounded fame rests upon them. Michael Angelo, Raphael, Leonardo, Rubens, Rembrandt, Prudhon, Millet; that is, more or less, the roll of the greatest draughtsmen in the history of art. His pastels and etchings, his drawings in chalk, pencil, and charcoal, are astonishing through their eminent delicacy of technique. The simpler the medium the greater is the effect achieved. “The Woman Churning” in the Louvre; the quietude of his men reaping, and of his woman-reaper beside the heaps of corn; “The Water Carriers,” who are like Greek kanephoræ; the peasant upon the potato-field, lighting his pipe with a flint and a piece of tinder; the woman sewing by the lamp beside her sleeping child; the vine-dresser resting; the little shepherdess sitting dreamily on a bundle of straw near her flock at pasture,—in all these works in black and white he is as great as he is as a colourist and as a painter in open air. There are no sportive and capricious sunbeams, as in Diaz. Millet’s sun is too serious merely to play over the fields; it is the austere day-star, ripening the harvest, forcing men to sweat over their toil and with no time to waste in jest. And as a landscape painter he differs from Corot in the same vital manner.

Corot, the old bachelor, dallies with nature; Millet, nine times a father, knows her only as the fertile mother, nourishing all her children. The temperament of the brooding, melancholy man breaks out in his very conception of nature: “Oh, if they knew how beautiful the forest is! I stroll into it sometimes of an evening, and always return with a sense of being overwhelmed. It has a quiet and majesty which are terrible, so that I have often a feeling of actual fear. I do not know what the trees talk about amongst themselves, but they say to each other something which we do not understand, because we do not speak the same language. That they are not making bad jokes seems certain.” He loved what Corot has never painted—the sod, the sod as sod, the sod which steams beneath the rays of the fertilising sun. And yet, despite all difference of temperament, he stands beside Corot as perhaps the greatest landscape painter of the century. His landscapes are vacant and devoid of charm; they smell of the earth rather than of jessamine, yet it is as if the Earth-Spirit itself were invisibly brooding over them. A few colours enable him to attain that great harmony which is elsewhere peculiar to Corot alone, and which, when his work was over, he so often discussed with his neighbour Rousseau. With a few brilliant and easily executed shadings he gives expression to the vibration of the atmosphere, the lustre of the sky at sunset, the massive structure of the ground, the blissful tremor upon the plain at sunrise. At one time he renders the morning mist lying over the fields, at another the haze of sultry noon, veiling and as it were absorbing the outlines and colours of all objects, the light of sunset streaming over field and woodland with a tender, tremulous glimmering, the delicate silver tone which veils the landscape on clear moonlight nights.

S. Low & Co.
THE BARBIZON STONE.

There is not another artist of the century who renders night as Millet does in his pastels. One of the most charming and poetic works is the biblical and mystical night-piece “The Flight into Egypt.” As he strides forward Saint Joseph holds upon his arm the Child, whose head is surrounded by a shining halo, whilst the Mother moves slowly along the banks of the Nile riding upon an ass. The stars twinkle, the moon throws its tremulous light uncertainly over the plain. Joseph and Mary are Barbizon peasants, and yet these great figures breathe of the Sistine Chapel and of Michael Angelo. And which of the old masters has so eloquently rendered the sacred silence of night as Millet has done in his “Shepherd at the Pen”? The landscapes which he has drawn awaken the impression of spaciousness as only Rembrandt’s etchings have done, and that of fine atmosphere as only Corot’s pictures. A marvellously transparent and tender evening sky rests over his picture of cows coming down to drink at the lake, and a liquid moonlight washes over the crests of the waves around “The Sailing Boat.” The garden in stormy light with a high-lying avenue spanned by a rainbow—the motive which he developed for the well-known picture in the Louvre—is found again and again in several pastels, which progress from a simple to a more complicated treatment of the theme. Everything is transparent and delicate, full of air and light, and the air and light are themselves full of magic and melting charm.

But it is a different matter when one attempts to answer Fromentin’s question in the form in which it is put. For without in any way detracting from Millet’s importance, one may quietly make the declaration: No, Millet was not a good painter. Later generations, with which he will no longer be in touch through his ethical greatness, if they consider his paintings alone, will scarcely understand the high estimation in which he is held at present. For although many works which have come into private collections in Boston, New York, and Baltimore are, in their original form, withdrawn from judgment, they are certainly not better than the many works brought together in the Millet Exhibition of 1886 or the World Exhibition of 1889. And these had collectively a clumsiness, and a dry and heavy colouring, which are not merely old-fashioned, primitive, and antediluvian in comparison with the works of modern painters, but which fall far below the level of their own time in the quality of colour. The conception in Millet’s paintings is always admirable, but never the technique; he makes his appeal as a poet only, and never as a painter. His painting is often anxiously careful, heavy, and thick, and looks as if it had been filled in with masonry; it is dirty and dismal, and wanting in free and airy tones. Sometimes it is brutal and hard, and occasionally it is curiously indecisive in effect. Even his best pictures—“The Angelus” not excepted—give no æsthetic pleasure to the eye. The most ordinary fault in his painting is that it is soft, greasy, and woolly. He is not light enough with what should be light, nor fleeting enough with what is fleeting. And this defect is especially felt in his treatment of clothes. They are of a massive, distressing solidity, as if moulded in brass, and not woven from flax and wool. The same is true of his air, which has an oily and material effect. Even in “The Gleaners” the aspect is cold and gloomy; it is without the intensity of light which is shed through the atmosphere, and streams ever changing over the earth.