of the day.  But if too much has been made of Millet’s peasant origin, perhaps hardly enough has been made of his race.  It is at least interesting that the two Frenchmen whose art has most in common with his, Nicolas Poussin and Pierre Corneille, should have been Normans like himself.  In the severely restrained, grandly simple, profoundly classical work of these three men, that hard-headed, strong-handed, austere, and manly race has found its artistic expression.

For Millet is neither a revolutionary nor a sentimentalist, nor even a romanticist; he is essentially a classicist of the classicists, a conservative of the conservatives, the one modern exemplar of the grand style.  It is because his art is so old that it was “too new” for even Corot to understand it; because he harked back beyond the pseudoclassicism of his time to the great art of the past, and was classic as Phidias and Giotto and Michelangelo were classic, that he seemed strange to his contemporaries.  In everything he was conservative.  He hated change; he wanted things to remain as they had always been.  He did not especially pity the hard lot of the peasant; he considered it the natural and inevitable lot of man who “eats bread in the sweat of his brow.”  He wanted the people he painted “to look as if they belonged to their place—­as if it would be impossible for them ever to think of being anything else but what they are.”  In the herdsman and the shepherd, the sower and the reaper, he saw the immemorial types of humanity whose labors have endured since the world began and were essentially what they now are when Virgil wrote his “Georgics” and when Jacob kept the flocks of Laban.  This is the note of all his work.  It is the permanent, the essential, the eternally significant that he paints.  The apparent localization of his subjects in time and place is an illusion.  He is not concerned with the nineteenth century or with Barbizon but with mankind.  At the very moment when the English Pre-raphaelites were trying to found a great art on the exhaustive imitation of natural detail, he eliminated detail as much as possible.  At the very beginning of our modern preoccupation with the direct representation of facts, he abandoned study from the model almost entirely and could say that he “had never painted from nature.”  His subjects would have struck the amiable Sir Joshua as trivial, yet no one has ever more completely followed that writer’s precepts.  His confession of faith is in the words, “One must be able to make use of the trivial for the expression of the sublime”; and this painter of “rustic genre” is the world’s greatest master of the sublime after Michelangelo.

[Illustration:  Plate 4.—­Millet.  “The Spaders.”]