, as
is that, for instance, of digging, he takes it at the beginning and at
the end, as in "The Spaders" (Pl. 4), and makes you understand
everything between. One man is doubled over his spade, his whole weight
brought to bear on the pressing foot which drives the blade into the
ground. The other, with arms outstretched, gives the twisting motion
which lets the loosened earth fall where it is to lie. Each of these
positions is so thoroughly understood and so definitely expressed that
all the other positions of the action are implied in them. You feel the
recurrent rhythm of the movement and could almost count the falling of
the clods.

So far did Millet push the elimination of non-essentials that his heads
have often scarcely any features, his hands, one might say, are without
fingers, and his draperies are so simplified as to suggest the witty
remark that his peasants are too poor to afford any folds in their
garments. The setting of the great, bony planes of jaw and cheek and
temple, the bulk and solidity of the skull, and the direction of the
face--these were, often enough, all he wanted of a head. Look at the
hand of the woman in "The Potato Planters" (Pl. 5), or at those of the
man in the same picture, and see how little detail there is in them, yet
how surely the master's sovereign draughtsmanship has made you feel
their actual structure and function! And how inevitably the garments,
with their few and simple folds, mould and accent the figures beneath
them, "becoming, as it were, a part of the body and expressing, even
more than the nude, the larger and simpler forms of nature"! How
explicitly the action of the bodies is registered, how perfectly the
amount of effort apparent is proportioned to the end to be attained! One
can feel, to an ounce, it seems, the strain upon the muscles implied by
that hoe-full of earth. Or look at the easier attitude of "The
Grafter" (Pl. 6), engaged upon his gentler task, and at the monumental
silhouette of the wife, standing there, babe in arms, a type of eternal
motherhood and of the fruitfulness to come.

[Illustration: Plate 6.--Millet. "The Grafter."
In the collection of William Rockefeller.]

Oftener than anything, perhaps, it was the sense of weight that
interested Millet. It is the adjustment of her body to the weight of the
child she carries that gives her statuesque pose to the wife of the
grafter. It is the drag of the buckets upon the arms that gives her
whole charac