ht in the muscular
movement and attitude of the bearers' arms.

His great distinction, in fine, is artistic. His early painting of
conventional subjects is not without significance in its witness to the
quality of his talent. Another may paint French peasants all his life
and never make them permanently interesting, because he has not Millet's
admirable instinct and equipment as a painter. He is a superb colorist,
at times--always an enthusiastic one; there is something almost
unregulated in his delight in color, in his fondness for glowing and
resplendent tone. No one gets farther away from the academic grayness,
the colorless chiaro-oscuro of the conventional painters. He runs his
key up and loads his canvas, occasionally, in what one may call not so
much barbaric as uncultivated and elementary fashion. He cares so much
for color that sometimes, when his effect is intended to be purely
atmospheric, as in the "Angelus," he misses its justness and fitness,
and so, in insisting on color, obtains from the color point of view
itself an infelicitous--a colored--result. Occasionally he bathes a
scene in yellow mist that obscures all accentuations and play of values.
But always his feeling for color betrays him a painter rather than a
moralist. And in composition he is, I should say, even more
distinguished. His composition is almost always distinctly elegant. Even
in so simple a scheme as that of "The Sower," the lines are as fine as
those of a Raphael. And the way in which balance is preserved, masses
are distributed, and an organic play of parts related to each other and
each to the sum of them is secured, is in all of his large works so
salient an element of their admirable excellence, that, to those who
appreciate it, the dependence of his popularity upon the sentimental
suggestion of the raw material with which he dealt seems almost
grotesque. In his line and mass and the relations of these in
composition, there is a severity, a restraint, a conformity to
tradition, however personally felt and individually modified, that
evince a strong classic strain in this most unacademic of painters.
Millet was certainly an original genius, if there ever was one. In spite
of, and in open hostility to, the popular and conventional painting of
his day, he followed his own bent and went his own way. Better, perhaps,
than any other painter, he represents absolute emancipation from the
prescribed, from routine and formulary. But it would