f his race. It is
at least interesting that the two Frenchmen whose art has most in
common with his, Nicolas Poussin and Pierre Corneille, should have been
Normans like himself. In the severely restrained, grandly simple,
profoundly classical work of these three men, that hard-headed,
strong-handed, austere, and manly race has found its artistic
expression.

For Millet is neither a revolutionary nor a sentimentalist, nor even a
romanticist; he is essentially a classicist of the classicists, a
conservative of the conservatives, the one modern exemplar of the grand
style. It is because his art is so old that it was "too new" for even
Corot to understand it; because he harked back beyond the
pseudoclassicism of his time to the great art of the past, and was
classic as Phidias and Giotto and Michelangelo were classic, that he
seemed strange to his contemporaries. In everything he was conservative.
He hated change; he wanted things to remain as they had always been. He
did not especially pity the hard lot of the peasant; he considered it
the natural and inevitable lot of man who "eats bread in the sweat of
his brow." He wanted the people he painted "to look as if they belonged
to their place--as if it would be impossible for them ever to think of
being anything else but what they are." In the herdsman and the
shepherd, the sower and the reaper, he saw the immemorial types of
humanity whose labors have endured since the world began and were
essentially what they now are when Virgil wrote his "Georgics" and when
Jacob kept the flocks of Laban. This is the note of all his work. It is
the permanent, the essential, the eternally significant that he paints.
The apparent localization of his subjects in time and place is an
illusion. He is not concerned with the nineteenth century or with
Barbizon but with mankind. At the very moment when the English
Pre-raphaelites were trying to found a great art on the exhaustive
imitation of natural detail, he eliminated detail as much as possible.
At the very beginning of our modern preoccupation with the direct
representation of facts, he abandoned study from the model almost
entirely and could say that he "had never painted from nature." His
subjects would have struck the amiable Sir Joshua as trivial, yet no one
has ever more completely followed that writer's precepts. His confession
of faith is in the words, "One must be able to make use of the trivial
for the expression of the sublime"; a