aring himself
characterized as a painter of naked women, betaken himself to his true
subject, the French peasant. A literary, and a very powerful literary
side, Millet undoubtedly has; and instead of being a weakness in him it
is a power. His sentimental appeal is far from being surplusage, but, as
is not I think popularly appreciated, it is subordinate, and the fact
of its subordination gives it what potency it has. It is idle to deny
this potency, for his portrayal of the French peasant in his varied
aspects has probably been as efficient a characterization as that of
George Sand herself. But, if a moral instead of an aesthetic effect had
been Millet's chief intention, we may be sure that it would have been
made far less incisively than it has been. Compare, for example, his
peasant pictures with those of the almost purely literary painter Jules
Breton, who has evidently chosen his field for its sentimental rather
than its pictorial value, and whose work is, perhaps accordingly, by
contrast with Millet's, noticeably external and superficial even on the
literary side. When Millet ceased to deal in the Correggio manner with
Correggiesque subjects, and devoted himself to the material that was
really native to him, to his own peasant genius--whatever he may have
thought about it himself, he did so because he could treat this material
_pictorially_ with more freedom and less artificiality, with more zest
and enthusiasm, with a deeper sympathy and a more intimate knowledge of
its artistic characteristics, its pictorial potentialities. He is, I
think, as a painter, a shade too much preoccupied with this material, he
is a little too philosophical in regard to it, his pathetic struggle for
existence exaggerated his sentimental affiliations with it somewhat, he
made it too exclusively his subject, perhaps. We gain, it may be, at his
expense. With his artistic gifts he might have been more fortunate, had
his range been broader. But in the main it is his pictorial handling of
this material, with which he was in such acute sympathy, that
distinguishes his work, and that will preserve its fame long after its
humanitarian and sentimental appeal has ceased to be as potent as it now
is--at the same time that it has itself enforced this appeal in the
subordinating manner I have suggested. When he was asked his intention,
in his picture of a maimed calf borne away on a litter by two men, he
said it was simply to indicate the sense of weig