THE OLD WELL-CURB
And one has but to put into his pocket a few of those clever newspapers which satirize society people in spirited and well-drawn lines, and carry them into the country, to discover that the picturesque flees the city and loves the country; so far, that is, as people are concerned. There is certainly something wrong with our modern dress; it is impossible to discover anything suggestive or poetic in it, or to make any thing artistic out of it. Well-dressed individual men and women are often attractive to the eye; but when this is true it is because the charm of the person survives the monotonous uniformity of good clothes. Nothing can make the evening dress in which man extinguishes his personality either significant or artistic; but the man in overalls and shirt-sleeves is often a strikingly picturesque figure. Country life as a whole is steeped in the picturesque, in spite of the machines which so largely take the place of the old-time hand labor. One must go to the fields to find the poetry of human occupation; the man in the street is often interesting but he rarely stirs the imagination; the man in the fields constantly sets the imagination loose. What elemental strength and meaning are expressed in those peasant-figures of Millet? They belong to the world in which they toil; they disclose their identity with it; they express something of its meaning in their vigorous or bent forms.
IMMIGRANT WOMEN HOEING POTATOES
WAITING FOR MILKING-TIME
The entire life of the field is poetic in the true sense; from the hour when the last snow begins to melt to the hour when the last sheaf of grain goes creaking through the bars. The sower, moving across the open furrows, has a kind of antique picturesqueness; he seems to have stepped out of that ancient frieze with which the earliest habits encircled the oldest days. He expresses freedom, virility, personality in every movement; the eye follows him with a deepening impression that here is something native and original: a man in first-hand relations with his world. The reaper who follows him when sun and cloud have done their share, is not less striking and effective; and when the sheaves lie in rows or piles on the freshly cut stubble, the slow-moving, noisily creaking wagon, constantly pausing to take on its ripe load, seems a fit accessory in the staging of this pastoral drama. The fact that this poetry of motion is bound to toil so arduous and exacting that it often becomes a kind of relentless drudgery, is full of significance to those who believe that beauty is not esoteric, but the affluence of universal life in its normal relations and occupations.
AFTER WORK