CHAPTER XXVI
JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET
WhencehasMilletcome?
It was the time when art, still blind to the life around, could find no subjects worthy of it except in the past and in the distance. Then Millet came and overthrew an art vegetating in museums or astray in tropical countries. It was the time when Leopold Robert in Italy tested the noble pose of the school of David upon the peasant, and when the German painters of rustics recognised in the labourer an object for pleasantries and pathetic little scenes. Then Millet stepped forward and painted, with profound simplicity, the people at work in the field, or in their distress, without sentimentality and without beautifying or idealising them. That great utterance, “I work,” the utterance of the nineteenth century, is here spoken aloud for the first time. Rousseau and his fellow-artists were the painters of the country. Millet became the painter of the labourer. He, the great peasant, is the creator of that painting of peasants which is entwined with the deepest roots of intimate landscape. Misunderstood in the beginning, it proclaimed for the first time the new gospel of art before which the people of all nations bow at the present date. What others did later was merely to advance on the path opened by Millet. And as time passes the figure of this powerful man shines more and more brilliantly. The form of Jean François Millet rises so powerfully, so imperiously, and so suddenly that one might almost imagine him to have come from Ibsen’s third kingdom; for he is without forerunners in art. An attempt has been made to bring him into relation with the social and political movement of ideas in the forties, but certainly this is unjust. Millet was in no sense revolutionary. During his whole life he repudiated the designs which some of the democratic party imputed to him, as well as the conclusions which they drew from his works.
Millet’s life in itself explains his art. Never have heart and hand, a man and his work, tallied with each other as they did in him. He does not belong to those painters who, even when one admires them, give one nevertheless a sense that they could just as easily have produced something different. Let any one consider his works and read the letters published in Sensier’s book: the man whom one knows from the letters lives in his works, and these works are the natural illustration of the book in which the man has depicted himself.In the unity of man and artist lies the source of his strength, the secret of his greatness.
Even the circumstances over which he triumphed necessitated his being the painter that he actually was, if he became one at all. He was not born in a city where a child’s eyes are everywhere met by works of art—pictures which no doubt early awaken the feeling for art, but which just as easily disturb a free outlook into nature. Moreover, he did not spring from one of those families where art is itself practised, or where art is discussed and taste early guided upon definite lines. He was a peasant, whose father and grandfather were peasants before him, and whose brothers were farm labourers. He was born in 1814, far away from Paris, in a little Norman village hard by the sea, and there he grew up. The regular and majestic plunge of the waves against the granite rocks of the coast, the solemn murmurs of the ebb and flow of thesea, the moaning of the wind in the apple trees and the old oaks of his father’s garden, were the first sounds which struck upon the ear in Gruchy, near Cherbourg. It has been adduced that his father loved music, and had had success as the leader of the village choir. But though there may have always been a dim capacity for art in the youngster’s blood, there was nothing calculated to strengthen it in his education. Millet’s sturdy father had no idea of making an artist of his son; the boy saw no artist at work in the neighbourhood; nature and instinct guided him alone.
For a man brought up in a city and trained at an academy all things become hackneyed. Many centuries of artistic usage have dimmed their original freshness; and he finds a ready-made phrase coined for everything. Millet stood before the world like the first man in the day of creation. Everything seemed new to him; he was charmed and astonished, and a wild flood of impressions burst in upon him. He did not come under the influence of any tradition, but approached art like the man in the age of stone who first scratched the outline of a mammoth on a piece of ivory, or like the primæval Greek who, according to the legend, invented painting by making a likeness of his beloved with a charred stick upon a wall. No one encouraged him in his first attempts. No one dreamt that this young man was destined to any life other than that of a peasant. From the time he was fourteen until he was eighteen he did every kind of field labour upon his father’s land in the same way as his brothers—hoeing, digging, ploughing, mowing, threshing, sowing the seed, and dressing the ground. But he always had his eyes about him; he drew upon a white patch of wall, without guidance, the picture of a tree, an orchard, or a peasant whom he had chanced to meet on a Sunday when going to church. And he drew so correctly that every one recognised the likenesses. A family council was held upon the matter. His father brought one of his son’s drawings to a certain M. Mouchel in Cherbourg, a strange personage who had once been a painter and had the reputation of being a connoisseur; and he was to decide whether François “had really enough talent for painting to gain his bread by it.” So Millet, the farm-hand, was twenty when he received his first lessons in drawing. He was learning the A B C of art, but humanly speaking he was already Millet. What had roused his talent and induced him to take a stump of charcoal in his hand was not the study of any work of art, but the sight of nature—nature, the great mother of all, who had embraced him, nature with whom and through whom he lived. Through her, visions and emotions were quickened in him, and he felt the secret impulse to give them expression.
Of what concerned the manual part of his art he understood nothing, and his two teachers in Cherbourg, Mouchel and Langlois, who were half-barbarians themselves, gave him the less knowledge, as only two months later, in 1835, his father died, and the young man returned to his own people as a farm-labourer once more. And it was only after an interruption of three years that a subsidy from the community of Cherbourg, which was collected by his teacher Langlois, and a small sum saved by his parents—six hundred francs all told—enabled him to journey up to Paris. He was twenty-three years of age, a broad-chested Hercules in stature, for till that time he had breathed nothing but the pure, sharp sea air; his handsome face was framed in long fair locks, which fell wildly about his shoulders. What had this peasant to do in the capital! In Delaroche’s school he was calledl’homme des bois. He had all the awkwardness of a provincial, and the artist was only to be surmised from the fire in the glance of his large dark blue eyes. At first Delaroche took peculiar pains with his new pupil. But to submit to training is to follow the lead of another person. A man like Millet, who knew what he wanted, was nolonger to be guided upon set lines. The pictures of Delaroche made no appeal to him. They struck him as being “huge vignettes, theatrical effects without any real sentiment.” And Delaroche soon lost patience with the clumsy peasant, whom he—most unfairly—regarded as stiff-necked and obstinate.
Other aims floated before Millet, and hecouldnot now learn to produce academical compositions, so, as these were alone demanded in the school of Delaroche, he never cleared himself from a reputation for mediocrity. It was the period of the war between the Classicists and the Romanticists. “An Ingres, a Delacroix!” was the battle-cry that rang through the Parisian studios. For Millet neither of these movements had any existence. His memory only clung to the plains of Normandy, and the labourers, shepherds, and fishermen of his home, with whom he mingled in spirit once more. Incessantly he believed himself to hear what he has called “le cri de la terre,” and neither Romanticists nor Classicists caught anything of this cry of the earth. He lived alone with his own thoughts, associating with none of his fellow-artists, and indeed keeping out of their way. Always prepared for some scornful attempt at witticism, he turned his easel round whenever he was approached, or gruffly cut all criticism short with the remark: “What does my painting matter to you? I don’t trouble my head about your bread and grease.” Thus it was that Delaroche certainly taught him very little of the technique of painting, though, at the same time, he taught him no mannerism. He did not learn to paint pretty pictures with beautiful poses, flattering colour, and faces inspired with intellect. He left the studio as he had entered it in 1837, painting with an awkward, thick, heavy, and laborious brush, though with the fresh, untroubled vision which he had had in earlier days. He was still the stranger, the incorrigible Norman peasant.
For a time he exerted himself to make concessions to the public. At seven-and-twenty he had married a Cherbourg girl, who died of consumption three years afterwards. Without acquaintances in Paris, and habituated to domestic life from his youth upwards, he married a second time in 1845. He had to earn his bread, to please, to paint what would sell. So he toiled over pretty pictures of nude women, like those which Diaz had painted with such great success—fair shepherdesses and gallant herdsmen, and bathing girls, in thegenreof Boucher and Fragonard. And he who did this spoke of both of them afterwards as pornographists. But the attempt was vain, for he satisfied neither others nor himself. The peasant of Gruchy could not be piquant, easy, and charming; on the contrary, he remained helpless, awkward, and crude. “Your women bathing come from the cow-house” was the appropriate remark of Diaz in reference to these pictures. When Burger-Thoré, who was the first to take notice of Millet, declared, on the occasion of “The Milkmaid” being exhibited in 1844, that Boucher himself was surpassed in this picture, the critic took a literary licence, because he had a human pity for the poor painter. How little the picture has of the fragrance of the old masters! how laboured it seems! how obvious it is that it was paintedwithout pleasure! Millet was not long at pains to conceal his personality. An “Œdipus” and “The Jewish Captives in Babylon” were his last rhetorical exercises. In 1848 he came forward with a manifesto—“The Winnower,” a peasant in movement and bearing, in his whole character and in the work on which he is employed. Millet returns here to the thoughts and feelings of his youth; for the future he will paint nothing but peasants in all the situations of their rude and simple life. In 1849 he made a great resolve.
The sale of his “Winnower” had brought him five hundred francs, and these five hundred francs gave him courage to defy the world. “Better turn bricklayer than paint against conviction.” Charles Jacque, the painter of animals, who lived opposite to him in the Rue Rochechouard, wanted to quit Paris in 1849 on account of the outbreak of cholera. He proposed that Millet should go with him into the country for a short time; he did so, and the peasant’s son of former times became once more a peasant, to end his days amongst peasants. “In the middle of the forest of Fontainebleau,” said Jacque, “there is a little nest, with a name ending in ‘zon’—not far off and cheap,—Diaz has been telling me a great deal about it.” Millet consented. One fine June day they got into a heavy, rumbling omnibus, with their wives and their five children, and they arrived in Fontainebleau that evening after two hours’ journey. “To-morrow we are going in search of our ‘zon.’” And the next day they went forward on foot to Barbizon, Millet with his twolittle girls upon his shoulders, and his wife carrying in her arms the youngest child, a boy of five months old, having her skirt drawn over her head as a protection against the rain.
As yet the forest had no walks laid out as it has to-day; it was virgin nature, which had never been disturbed. “Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, que c’est beau!” cried Millet, exulting. Once more he stood in the presence of nature, the old love of his youth. The impressions of childhood rushed over him. Born in the country, he had to return to the country to be himself once again. He arrived at Ganne’s inn just as the dinner-hour had assembled twenty persons at the table, artists with their wives and children. “New painters! The pipe, the pipe!” was the cry which greeted the fresh arrivals. Diaz rose, and, in spite of his wooden leg, did the honours of the establishment to the two women with the dignity of a Spanish nobleman, and then turned gravely to Millet and Jacque, saying: “Citizens, you are invited to smoke the pipe of peace.” Whenever the colony of Barbizon received an addition this was always taken down from its sacred place above the door. An expressly appointed jury had then to decide from the ascending rings of smoke whether the new-comer was to be reckoned amongst the “Classicists” or the “Colourists.” Jacque was with one voice declared to be a “Colourist.” As to Millet’s relation to the schools, there was a discrepancy of opinion. “Eh bien,” said Millet, “si vous êtes embarrassés, placez-moi dans la mienne.”Whereupon Diaz, as the others would not let this pass, cried: “Be quiet; it is a good retort, and the fellow looks powerful enough to found a school which will bury us all.” He was right, even though it was late before his prophecy was fulfilled.
Millet was thirty-five when he settled in Barbizon; he had reached the age which Dante calls the middle point of life. He had no further tie with the outward world; he had broken all the bridges behind him, and relied upon himself. He only went back to Paris on business, and he always did so unwillingly and for as short a time as possible. He lived at Barbizon in the midst of nature and in the midst of his models, and to his last day unreservedly gave himself up to the work which in youth he had felt himself called to fulfil. Neither criticism, mockery, nor contempt could lead him any more astray; even if he had wished it, he would have been incapable of following the paths of official art. “Mes critiques,” said he as though by way of excuse, “sont gens instruits et de goût, mais je ne peux me mettre dans leur peau, et comme je n’ai jamais vu de ma vie autre chose que les champs, je tâche de dire comme je peux ce que j’y ai éprouvé quand j’y travaillais.” When such a man triumphs, when he succeeds in forcing upon the world his absolutely personal art, it is not Mahomet who has come to the mountain, but the mountain to Mahomet.
Millet’s life has been, in consequence, a continuous series of renunciations. It is melancholy to read in Sensier’s biography that such a master, even during his Paris days, was forced to turn out copies at twenty francs and portraits at five, and to paint tavern signs or placards for the booths of rope-dancers and horse-dealers, each one of which brought him in a roll of thick sous. When the Revolution of June broke out his capital consisted of thirty francs, which the owner of a small shop had paid him for a sign, and on this he andhis family lived for a fortnight. In Barbizon he boarded with a peasant and lived with his family in a tiny room where wheat was stored and where bread was baked twice in the week; then he took a little house at a hundred and sixty francs a year. In winter he sat in a workroom without a fire, in thick straw shoes and with an old horse-cloth over his shoulders. Living like this he painted “The Sower,” that marvellous strophe in his great poem on the earth. By the produce of a vegetable garden he endeavoured to increase his income, lived on credit with grocer and butcher, and at last had creditors in every direction—in particular Gobillot, the baker of Chailly, from whom he often hid at his friend Jacque’s.
He was forced to accept a loaf from Rousseau for his famishing family, and small sums with which he was subsidised by Diaz. “I have received the hundred francs,” he writes in a letter to Sensier, “and they came just at the right time; neither my wife nor I had tasted food for four-and-twenty hours. It is a blessing that the little ones, at any rate, have not been in want.”
All his efforts to exhibit in Paris were vain. Even in 1859 “Death and the Woodcutter” was rejected by the Salon. The public laughed, being accustomed to peasants in a comic opera, and, at best, his pictures were honoured by a caricature in a humorous paper. Even the most delicate connoisseurs had not the right historical perspective to appreciate the greatness of Millet, so far was it in advance of the age. And all this is so much the sadder when one thinks of the price which his works fetched at a later period, when one reads that drawings for which he could get with difficulty from twenty to forty francs are the works for which as many thousands are now offered. It was only from the middle of the fifties that he began to sell at the rate of from two hundred and fifty to three hundred francs a picture. Rousseau was the first to offer him a large sum, buying his “Woodcutter” for four thousand francs, on the pretext that an American was the purchaser. Dupré helped him to dispose of “The Gleaners” for two thousand francs. An agreement which the picture-dealer Arthur Stevens, brother of Stevens the painter, concluded with him had to be dissolved six months afterwards, since Millet’s time had not yet come. At last, in 1863, when he painted four large decorative pictures—“The Four Seasons,” which are, by the way, his weakest works—for the dining-room of the architect Feydau, superfluity came in place of need. He was then in a position, like Rousseau and Jacque, to buy himself a little house in Barbizon, close to the road by which the place is entered and opposite Ganne’s inn. Wild vine, ivy, and jessamine clambered round it, and two bushes of white roses twisted their branches around the window. It was surrounded by a large garden, in which field-flowers bloomed amongst vegetables and fruit-trees, whilst a border of white roses and elders led to another little house which he used as a studio. Behind was a poultry-yard, and behind that again a thickly grown little shrubbery. Here he lived, simple and upright, with his art and his own belongings, as a peasant and a father of a family, like an Old Testament patriarch. His father had had nine children, and he himself had nine. While he painted the little ones played in the garden, the elder daughters worked, and when the younger children made too much noise, Jeanne, who was seven years old, would say with gravity,“Chut! Papa travaille.” After the evening meal he danced his youngest boy upon his knee and told Norman tales, or they all went out together into the forest, which the children calledla forêt noire, because it was so wild, gloomy, and magnificent.
Millet’s poverty was not quite so great as might be supposed from Sensier’s book. Chintreuil, Théodore Rousseau, and many others were acquainted with poverty likewise, and bore it with courage. It may even be said that, all things considered, success came to Millet early. The real misfortune for an artist is to have had success, to have been rich, and later to see himself forgotten when he is stricken with poverty. Millet’s course was the opposite. From the beginning of the sixties his reputation was no longer in question. At the World Exhibition of 1867 he was showered with all outward honours. He was represented by nine pictures and received the great medal. The whole world knew his name, subsistence was abundantly assured to him, and all the younger class of artists honoured him like a god. In the Salon of 1869 he was on the hanging committee. The picture-dealers, who had passed him by in earlier days, now beset his doors; he lived to see his “Woman with the Lamp” for which he had received a hundred and fifty francs, sold for thirty-eight thousand five hundred at Richard’s sale. “Allons, ils commencent à comprendre que c’est de la peinture serieuse.” M. de Chennevières commissioned him to take part in the paintings in the Panthéon, and he began the work. But strength was denied him; he was prostrated by a violent fever, and on 20th January 1875, at six o’clock in the morning, Millet was dead. He was then sixty.
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 twocentimètresfrom 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.
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 fromtown. 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 whichamara 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 visageTu gagneras ta pauvre vie;Après travail et long usageVoici la mort qui te convie.”
“À la sueur de ton visage
Tu gagneras ta pauvre vie;
Après travail et long usage
Voici la mort qui te convie.”
This grave and sad trait in Millet’s character sets him, for example, in abrupt contrast with Corot. Corot had a cheerful temperament, which noticed what was kindly in nature everywhere. His favourite hour was morning, when the sun rises and the lark exults, when the mists are dissipated and the shining dew lies upon the grass like pearls. His favourite season was spring, bringing with the new leaves life and joy upon the earth. And if he sometimes peopled this laughing world with peasant lads and maidens in place of the joyous creatures of his fancy, they were only those for whom life is a feast rather than a round of hard toil. Compared with so sanguine a man as Corot, Millet is melancholy all through; whilst the former renders the spring, the latter chooses the oppressive and enervating sultriness of summer. From experience he knew that hard toil which makes men old before their time, which kills body and spirit, and turns the image of God into an ugly, misshapen, and rheumatic thing; and perhaps he has been one-sided in seeing only this in the life of the peasant. Nevertheless, it is inapposite to cite as a parallel to Millet’s paintings of the peasant that cruel description of the rustic made in the time of LouisXIVby Labruyère: “One sees scattered over the field dwarfed creatures that look like some strange kind of animal, black, withered, and sun-burnt, fastened to the earth, in which they grub with invincible stubbornness; they have something resembling articulate language, and when they raise themselves they show a human countenance,—as a matter of fact they are men. At night they retire to their holes, where they live on black bread, water, and roots. They save other men the trouble of sowing, ploughing, and gathering in the harvest, and so gain the advantage of not themselves being in want of the bread that they have sown.” Yes, Millet’s peasants toil, and they toil hard, but in bowing over the earth at their work they are, in a sense, proudly raised by their whole peasant nature. Millet has made human beings out of the manikins of illustrated humour, and in this lies his ethical greatness.
As his whole life passed without untruth or artificiality, so his whole endeavour as an artist was to keep artificiality and untruth at a distance. After a period ofgenrepainting which disposed of things in an arbitrary manner, he opened a way for the new movement with its unconditional devotion to reality. The “historical painters” having conjured up the past with the assistanceof old masterpieces, it was something to the credit of thegenrepainters that, instead of looking back, they began to look around them. Fragments of reality were arranged—in correspondence with the principle of Classical landscape painting—according to the rules of composition known to history to maketableaux vivantscrowded with figures; and such pictures related a cheerful or a moving episode of the painter’s invention. Millet’s virtue is to have set emotion in the place of invention, to have set a part of nature grasped in its totality with spontaneous freshness in the place of composition pieced together from scattered observation and forcing life into inconsistent relations—to have set painting in the place of history and anecdote. As Rousseau and his fellows discovered the poetry of work-a-day nature, Millet discovered that of ordinary life. The foundation of modern art could only be laid on painting which no longer subjected the world to one-sided rules of beauty, but set itself piously to watch for the beauty of things as they were, and renounced all literary episodes. Millet does not appear to think that any one is listening to him; he communes with himself alone. He does not care to make his ideas thoroughly distinct and salient by repetitions and antitheses; he renders his emotion, and that is all. And thus painting receives new life from him: his pictures are not compositions that one sees, but emotions that one feels; it is not a painter who speaks through them, but, a man. From the first he had the faculty of seeing things simply, directly, and naturally; and to exercise himself in this faculty he began with the plainest things: a labourer in the field, resting upon his spade and looking straight before him; a sower amid the furrows, on which flights of birds are settling down; a man standing in a ploughed field, putting on his coat; a woman stitching in a room; a girl at the window behind a pot of marguerites. He is never weary of drawing land broken up for cultivation, and oftener still he draws huddled flocks of sheep upon a heath, their woolly backs stretching with an undulatory motion, and a shepherd lad or a girl in their midst.
“The Sower” (1850), “The Peasants going to their Work,” “The Hay-trussers,” “The Reapers,” “A Sheep-shearer,” “The Labourer grafting a Tree” (1855), “A Shepherd,” and “The Gleaners” (1857) are his principal works in the fifties. And what a deep intuition of nature is to be found in “The Gleaners”! They have no impassioned countenances, and their movements aim at no declamatory effect of contrast. They do not seek compassion, but merely do their work. It is this which gives them loftiness and dignity. They are themselves products of nature, plants of which the commonest is not without a certain pure and simple beauty. Look at their hands. They are not hands to be kissed, but to be cordially pressed. They are brave hands, which have done hard work from youth upwards—reddened with frost, chapped by soda, swollen with toil, or burnt by the sun.
“The Labourer grafting a Tree” of 1855 is entirely idyllic. In the midst of one of those walled-in spaces which are half courtyard and half garden, separating in villages the barns from the house, there is standing a man who has cut a tree and is grafting a fresh twig. His wife is looking on, with their youngest child in her arms. Everything around bears the mark of order, cleanliness, and content. Their clothes have neither spot nor hole, and wear well under the anxious care of the wife. Here is the old French peasant, true to the soil, and living and dying in the place of his birth: it is a picture of patriarchal simplicity. In 1859 appeared “The Angelus,” that work which chimes like a low-toned and far-off peal of bells. “I mean,” he said—“I mean the bells to be heard sounding, and only natural truth of expression can produce the effect.” Nothing is wanting in these creations, neither simplicity nor truth. The longer they are looked at, the more something is seen in them which goes beyond reality. “The Man with the Mattock,” the celebrated picture of 1863, is altogether a work of great style; it recalls antique statues and the figures of Michael Angelo, without in any way resembling them. In his daring veracity Millet despised all the artificial grace and arbitrary beatification which others introduced into rustic life; and while, in turning from it, he rested only on the most conscientious reverence for nature, his profound draughtsmanlike knowledge of the human form has given a dignity and a large style to the motions of the peasant which no one discovered beforehis time. There is a simplicity, a harmony, and a largeness in the lines of his pictures such as only the greatest artists have had. He reached it in the same way as Rousseau and Corot reached their style in landscape: absorbed and saturated by reality, he was able, in the moment of creation, to dispense with the model without suffering for it, and to attain truth and condensation without being hindered by petty detail.
He himself went about in Barbizon like a peasant. And he might have been seen wandering over the woods and fields with an old, red cloak, wooden shoes, and a weather-beaten straw hat. He rose at sunrise, and wandered about the country as his parents had done. He guarded no flocks, drove no cows, and no yokes of oxen or horses; he carried neither mattock nor spade, but rested on his stick; he was equipped only with the faculty of observation and poetic intuition. He went about like the people he met, roamed round the houses, entered the courtyards, looked over the hedges, knew the gleaners and reapers, the girls who took care of the geese, and the shepherds in their big cloaks, as they stood motionless amongst their flocks, resting on a staff. He entered the wash-house, the bake-house, and the dairies where the butter was being churned. He witnessed the birth of a calf or the death of a pig, or leant with folded arms on the garden wall and looked into the setting sun, as it threw a rosy veil over field and forest. He heard the chime of vesper bells, watched the people pray and then return home. And he returned also, and read the Bible by lamplight, while his wife sewed and the children slept. When all was quiet he closed the book and began to dream. Once more he saw all that he had come across in the course of the day. He had gone out without canvas or colours; he had merely noted down in passing a few motives in his sketch-book: as a rule he never took his pencil from his pocket, but merelymeditated, his mind being compelled to notice all that his eye saw. Then he went through it again in his memory. On the morrow he painted.
His study seems to have been an incessant exercise of the eye to see and to retain the essential, the great lines in nature as in the human body. Advancing upon Daumier’s path, he divested figures of all that is merely accidental, and simplified them, to bring the character and ground-note more into relief. This simplification, this marvellous way of expressing forcibly as much as possible with the smallest means, no one has ever understood like Millet. There is nothing superfluous, nothing petty, and everything bears witness to an epic spirit attracted by what is great and heroic. His drawing was never encumbered by what was subsidiary and anecdotic; his mind was fixed on the decisive lines which characterise a movement, and give it rhythm. It was just this feeling for rhythm which his harmonious nature possessed in the very highest degree. He did not give his peasants Grecian noses, and he never lost himself in arid and trivial observation; he simplified and sublimated their outlines, making them the heroes and martyrs of toil. His figures have a majesty of style, an august grandeur; and something almost resembling the antique style of relief is found in his pictures. It is no doubt characteristic that the only works of art which he had in his studio were plaster casts of the metopes of the Parthenon. He himself was like a man of antique times, both in the simplicity of his life and in his outward appearance—a peasant inwooden shoes who had, set upon his shoulders, the head of the Zeus of Otricoli. And as his biography reads like an Homeric poem, so his great and simple art sought for what was primitive, aboriginal, and heroic. Note the Michelangelesque motions of “The Sower.” The peasant, striding on with a firm tread, seems to show by his large movements his consciousness of the grandeur of his daily toil: he is the heroic embodiment of man, swaying the earth, making it fruitful and subservient to his own purposes.
“Il marche dans la plaine immense,Va, vient, lance la graine au loin,Rouvre sa main et recommence;Et je médite, obscur témoin,Pendant que déployant ses voilesL’ombre où se mêle une rumeurSemble élargir jusqu’aux étoilesLe geste auguste du semeur.”
“Il marche dans la plaine immense,
Va, vient, lance la graine au loin,
Rouvre sa main et recommence;
Et je médite, obscur témoin,
Pendant que déployant ses voiles
L’ombre où se mêle une rumeur
Semble élargir jusqu’aux étoiles
Le geste auguste du semeur.”
Note the epical quietude of “The Gleaners,” the three Fates of poverty, as Gautier called them, the priestly dignity of “The Woodcutter,” the almost Indian solemnity of “The Woman leading her Cow to Grass.” She stands in her wooden shoes as if on a pedestal, her dress falls into sculpturesque folds, and a grave and melancholy hebetude is imprinted on her countenance. Millet is the Michael Angelo of peasants. In their large simplicity his pictures make the appeal of religious painting, at once plastic and mystical.
But it is in no sense merely through instinct that Millet has attained this altitude of style. Although the son of a peasant, and himself a peasant and the painter of peasants, he knew thoroughly well what he wanted to do; and this aim of his he has not only formulated practically in his pictures, but has made theoretically clear in his letters and treatises. For Millet was not simply a man who had a turn for dreaming; he had, at the same time, a brooding, philosophic mind, in which the ideas of a thinkerwere harboured beside the emotions of a poet. In the portrait of himself, given on the title-page of Sensier’s book, a portrait in which he has something sickly, something ethereal and tinged with romance, only one side of his nature is expressed. The great medallion of Chappu reveals the other side: the keen, consecutive thinker, to be found in the luminous and remorselessly logical letters. In this respect he is the true representative of his race. In opposition to theespritand graceful levity of the Parisian, a quieter and more healthy human understanding counts as the chief characteristic of the Norman; and this clear and precise capacity for thought was intensified in Millet by incessant intellectual training.
Even as a child he had received a good education from his uncle, who was an ecclesiastic, and he learnt enough Latin to read theGeorgicsof Virgil and other ancient authors in the original text. He knows them almost by heart, and cites them continually in his letters. When he came to Paris he spent long hours in the galleries, not copying this or that portion of a picture, but fathoming works of art to their inmost core with a clear eye. In Cherbourg he devoured the whole of Vasari in the library, and read all he could find about Dürer, Leonardo, Michael Angelo, and Poussin. Even in Barbizon he remained throughout his whole life an eager reader. Shakespeare fills him with admiration; Theocritus and Burns are his favourite poets. “Theocritus makes it evident to me,” he says, “that one is never more Greek than when one simply renders one’s own impressions, let them come whence they may.” When not painting or studying nature he had always a book in his hand, andknew no more cordial pleasure than when a friend increased his little library by the present of a fresh one. Though in his youth he tilled the ground and ploughed, and in later days lived like a peasant, he was better instructed than most painters; he was a philosopher, a scholar. His manner in speaking was leisurely, quiet, persuasive, full of conviction, and impregnated by his own peculiar ideas, which he had thoroughly thought out.
“My dear Millet,” wrote a critic, “you must sometimes see good-looking peasants and pretty country girls.” To which Millet replied: “No doubt; but beauty does not lie in the face. It lies in the harmony between man and his industry. Your pretty country girls prefer to go up to town; it does not suit them to glean and gather faggots and pump water. Beauty is expression. When I paint a mother I try to render her beautiful by the mere look she gives her child.” He goes on to say that what has been once clearly seen is beautiful if it is simply and sincerely interpreted. Everything is beautiful which is in its place, and nothing is beautiful which appears out of place. Therefore no emasculation of characters is ever beautiful. Apollo is Apollo and Socrates is Socrates. Mingle them and they both lose, and become a mixture which is neither fish nor flesh. This was what brought about the decadence of modern art. “Au lieu de naturaliser l’art, ils artialisent la nature.” The Luxembourg Gallery had shown him that he ought not to go to the theatre to create true art. “Je voudrais que les êtres que je représente aient l’air voués à leur position; et qu’il soit impossible d’imaginer qu’il leur puisse venir à l’idée d’être autre chose que ce qu’ils sont. On est dans un milieu d’un caractère ou d’un autre, mais celui qu’on adopte doit primer. On devrait être habitué à ne recevoir de la nature ses impressions de quelque sorte qu’elles soient et quelque temperament qu’on ait. Il faut être imprégné et saturé d’elle, et ne penser que ce qu’elle vous fait penser. Il faut croire qu’elle est assez riche pour fournir à tout. Et où puiserait-on, sinon à la source? Pourquoi donc à perpétuité proposer aux gens, comme but suprême à atteindre, ce que de hautes intelligences ont découvert en elle. Voila donc qu’on rendrait les productions de quelques-uns le type et le but de toutes les productions à venir. Les gens de génie sont comme doués de la baguette divinatoire; les uns découvrent que, dans la nature, ici se trouve cela, les autres autre chose ailleurs, selon le temperament de leur flair. Leurs productions vous assurent dans cette idée que celui-là trouve qui est fait pour trouver, mais il est plaisant de voir, quand le trésor est déterré et enlevé, que des gens viennent à perpétuité gratter à cette place-là. Il faut savoir découvrir où il y a des truffes. Un chien qui n’a pas de flair ne peut que faire triste chasse, puisqu’il ne va qu’en voyant chasser celui qui sent la bête et qui naturellement va le premier.... Un immense orgueil ou une immense sottise seulement peut faire croire à certains hommes qu’ils sont de force à redresser les prétendus manques de goût et les erreurs de la nature. Les œuvres que nous aimons, ce n’est qu’à cause qu’elles procèdent d’elle. Les autres ne sont que des œuvres pédantes et vides. On peut partir de tous les points pour arriver au sublime, et tout est propre à l’exprimer, si on a une assez haute visée. Alors ceque vous aimez avec le plus d’emportement et de passion devient votre beau à vous et qui s’impose aux autres. Que chacun apporte le sien. L’impression force l’expression. Tout l’arsenal de la nature est à la disposition des hommes. Qui oserait décider qu’une pomme de terre est inférieure à une grenade.”
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 thateverything 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 hisMaîtres 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?”
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’ssun 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.
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 gardenin 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 wasnota 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 ofclothes. 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.
And this is a declaration of what was left for later artists to achieve. The problem of putting real human beings in their true surroundings was stated by Millet, solved in his pastels, and left unsolved in his oil paintings. This same problem had to be taken up afresh by his successors, and followed to its furthest consequences. At the same time, it was necessary to widen the choice of subject.
For it is characteristic of Millet, the great peasant, that his art is exclusively concerned with peasants. His sensitive spirit, which from youth upwards had compassion for the hard toil and misery of the country folk, was blind to the sufferings of the artisans of the city, amid whom he had lived in Paris in his student days. Theouvrier, too, has his poetry and his grandeur. As there is a cry of the earth, so is there also a cry, as loud and as eloquent, which goes up from the pavement of great cities. Millet lived in Paris during a critical and terrible time. He was there during the years of ferment at the close of the reign of Louis Philippe. Around him there muttered all the terrors of Socialism and Communism. He was there during the February Revolution and during the days of June. While the artisans fought on the barricades he was painting “The Winnower.” The misery of Paris and the sufferings of the populace did not move him. Millet, the peasant, had a heart only for the peasantry. He was blind to the sufferings, blind to the charms of modern city life. Paris seemed to him a “miserable, dirty nest.” There was no picturesque aspect of the great town that fascinated him. He felt neither its grace, its elegance and charming frivolity, nor remarked the mighty modern movement of ideas and the noble humanity which set their seal upon that humanitarian century. The development of French art had to move in both of these directions. It was partly necessary to take up afresh with improved instruments the problem of the modern conception of colour, touched on by Millet; it was partly necessary to extend from the painting of peasants to modern life the principle formulated by Millet, “Le beau c’est le vrai,” to transfer it from the forest of Fontainebleau to Paris, from the solitude to life, from the evening gloom to sunlight, from the softness of romance to hard reality.
The fourth book of this work will be devoted to the consideration of those masters who, acting on this principle, extended beyond the range of Millet and brought the art which he had created to fuller fruition.