n one general and comprehensive formula, and the typical has
been evolved from the actual. What generations of Greek sculptors did in
their slow perfectioning of certain fixed types he has done almost at
once. We have no longer a man sowing, but "The Sower" (Pl. 2),
justifying the title he instinctively gave it by its air of permanence,
of inevitability, of universality. All the significance which there is
or ever has been for mankind in that primaeval action of sowing the seed
is crystallized into its necessary expression. The thing is done once
for all, and need never--can never be done again. Has any one else
had this power since Michelangelo created his "Adam"?

[Illustration: Plate 5.--Millet. "The Potato Planters."
In the Quincy A. Shaw Collection.]

If even Millet never again attained quite the august impressiveness of
this picture it is because no other action of rustic man has so wide or
so deep a meaning for us as this of sowing. All the meaning there is in
an action he could make us feel with entire certainty, and always he
proceeds by this method of elimination, concentration, simplification,
insistence on the essential and the essential only. One of the most
perfect of all his pictures--more perfect than "The Sower" on account of
qualities of mere painting, of color, and of the rendering of landscape,
of which I shall speak later--is "The Gleaners" (Pl. 3). Here one figure
is not enough to express the continuousness of the movement; the utmost
simplification will not make you feel, as powerfully as he wishes you to
feel it, the crawling progress, the bending together of back and
thighs, the groping of worn fingers in the stubble. The line must be
reinforced and reduplicated, and a second figure, almost a facsimile of
the first, is added. Even this is not enough. He adds a third figure,
not gathering the ear, but about to do so, standing, but stooped forward
and bounded by one great, almost uninterrupted curve from the peak of
the cap over her eyes to the heel which half slips out of the sabot, and
the thing is done. The whole day's work is resumed in that one moment.
The task has endured for hours and will endure till sunset, with only an
occasional break while the back is half-straightened--there is not time
to straighten it wholly. It is the triumph of significant composition,
as "The Sower" is the triumph of significant draughtsmanship.

Or, when an action is more complicated and difficult of suggestion