ot-boiling days and that the color and handling of
his early pictures were greatly admired by so brilliant a virtuoso as
Diaz. But this "flowery manner" would not lend itself to the expression
of his new aims and he had to invent another. He did so stumblingly at
first, and the earliest pictures of his grand style have a certain
harshness and ruggedness of surface and heaviness of color which his
critics could not forgive any more than the Impressionists, who have
outdone that ruggedness, can forgive him his frequent use of a warm
general tone inclining to brownness. His ideal of form and of
composition he possessed complete from the beginning; his mastery of
light and color and the handling of materials was slower of acquirement;
but he did acquire it, and in the end he is as absolute a master of
painting as of drawing. He did not see nature in blue and violet, as
Monet has taught us to see it, and little felicities and facilities of
rendering, and anything approaching cleverness or the parade of
virtuosity he hated; but he knew just what could be done with thick or
thin painting, with opaque or transparent pigment, and he could make his
few and simple colors say anything he chose. In his mature work there is
a profound knowledge of the means to be employed and a great economy
in their use, and there is no approach to indiscriminate or meaningless
loading. "Things are where they are for a purpose," and if the surface
of a picture is rough in any place it is because just that degree of
roughness was necessary to attain the desired effect. He could make mere
paint express light as few artists have been able to do--"The
Shepherdess" is flooded with it--and he could do this without any
sacrifice of the sense of substance in the things on which the light
falls. If some of his canvases are brown it is because brown seemed to
him the appropriate note to express what he had to say; "The Gleaners"
glows with almost the richness of a Giorgione, and other pictures are
honey-toned or cool and silvery or splendidly brilliant. And in whatever
key he painted, the harmony of his tones and colors is as large, as
simple, and as perfect as the harmony of his lines and masses.

[Illustration: Plate 9.--Millet. "The Shepherdess."
In the Chauchard collection, Louvre.]

But if we cannot admit that Millet's drawings are better than his
paintings, we may be very glad he did them. His great epic of the soil
must have lacked many episodes, perh