perfectly and permanently expressed. Whatever Millet has done is
done. He has "characterized the type," as it was his dream to do, and
written "hands off" across his subject for all future adventurers.

Finally, he rises to an almost lyric fervor in that picture of the
little "Goose Girl" bathing, which is one of the most purely and
exquisitely beautiful things in art. In this smooth, young body
quivering with anticipation of the coolness of the water; in these
rounded, slender limbs with their long, firm, supple lines; in the
unconscious, half-awkward grace of attitude and in the glory of
sunlight splashing through the shadow of the willows, there is a whole
song of joy and youth and the goodness of the world. The picture exists
in a drawing or pastel, which has been photographed by Braun, as well as
in the oil-painting, and Millet's habit of returning again and again to
a favorite subject renders it difficult to be certain which is the
earlier of the two; but I imagine this drawing to be a study for the
picture. At first sight the figure in it is more obviously beautiful
than in the other version, and it is only after a time that one begins
to understand the changes that the artist was impelled to make. It is
almost too graceful, too much like an antique nymph. No one could find
any fault with it, but by an almost imperceptible stiffening of the line
here and there, a little greater turn of the foot upon the ankle and of
the hand upon the wrist, the figure in the painting has been given an
accent of rusticity that makes it more human, more natural, and more
appealing. She is no longer a possible Galatea or Arethusa, she is only
a goose girl, and we feel but the more strongly on that account the
eternal poem of the healthy human form.

[Illustration: Plate 7.--Millet. "The New-Born Calf."
In the Art Institute, Chicago.]

The especial study of the nineteenth century was landscape, and Millet
was so far a man of his time that he was a great landscape painter; but
his treatment of landscape was unlike any other, and, like his own
treatment of the figure, in its insistence on essentials, its
elimination of the accidental, its austere and grand simplicity. I have
heard, somewhere, a story of his saying, in answer to praise of his work
or inquiry as to his meaning: "I was trying to express the difference
between the things that lie flat and the things that stand upright."
That is the real motive of one of his masterpieces-