ter to the magnificent "Woman Carrying Water," in the
Vanderbilt collection. It is the erect carriage, the cautious, rhythmic
walk, keeping step together, forced upon them by the sense of weight,
which gives that gravity and solemnity to the bearers of "The New-Born
Calf" (Pl. 7), which was ridiculed by Millet's critics as more befitting
the bearers of the bull Apis or the Holy Sacrament. The artist himself
was explicit in this instance as in that of the "Woman Carrying Water."
"The expression of two men carrying a load on a litter," he says,
"naturally depends on the weight which rests upon their arms. Thus, if
the weight is equal, their expression will be the same, whether they
bear the Ark of the Covenant or a calf, an ingot of gold or a stone."
Find that expression, whether in face or figure, render it clearly,
"with largeness and simplicity," and you have a great, a grave, a
classic work of art. "We are never so truly Greek," he said, "as when we
are simply painting our own impressions." Certainly his own way of
painting his impressions was more Greek than anything else in the whole
range of modern art.

In the epic grandeur of such pictures as these there is something akin
to sadness, though assuredly Millet did not mean them to be sad. Did he
not say of the "Woman Carrying Water": "I have avoided, as I always do,
with a sort of horror, everything that might verge on the sentimental"?
He wished her to seem "to do her work simply and cheerfully ... as a
part of her daily task and the habit of her life." And he was not always
in the austere and epical mood. He could be idyllic as well, and if he
could not see "the joyous side" of life or nature he could feel and make
us feel the charm of tranquillity. Indeed, this remark of his about the
joyous side of things was made in the dark, early days when life was
hardest for him. He broadened in his view as he grew older and
conditions became more tolerable, and he has painted a whole series of
little pictures of family life and of childhood that, in their smiling
seriousness, are endlessly delightful. The same science, the same
thoughtfulness, the same concentration and intellectual grasp that
defined for us the superb gesture of "The Sower" have gone to the
depiction of the adorable uncertainty, between walking and falling, of
those "First Steps" (Pl. 8) from the mother's lap to the outstretched
arms of the father; and the result, in this case as in the other, is a
thing