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 character 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