it is subordinate, and the fact of its subordination gives it what potency it has.  It is idle to deny this potency, for his portrayal of the French peasant in his varied aspects has probably been as efficient a characterization as that of George Sand herself.  But, if a moral instead of an aesthetic effect had been Millet’s chief intention, we may be sure that it would have been made far less incisively than it has been.  Compare, for example, his peasant pictures with those of the almost purely literary painter Jules Breton, who has evidently chosen his field for its sentimental rather than its pictorial value, and whose work is, perhaps accordingly, by contrast with Millet’s, noticeably external and superficial even on the literary side.  When Millet ceased to deal in the Correggio manner with Correggiesque subjects, and devoted himself to the material that was really native to him, to his own peasant genius—­whatever he may have thought about it himself, he did so because he could treat this material pictorially with more freedom and less artificiality, with more zest and enthusiasm, with a deeper sympathy and a more intimate knowledge of its artistic characteristics, its pictorial potentialities.  He is, I think, as a painter, a shade too much preoccupied with this material, he is a little too philosophical in regard to it, his pathetic struggle for existence exaggerated his sentimental affiliations with it somewhat, he made it too exclusively his subject, perhaps.  We gain, it may be, at his expense.  With his artistic gifts he might have been more fortunate, had his range been broader.  But in the main it is his pictorial handling of this material, with which he was in such acute sympathy, that distinguishes his work, and that will preserve its fame long after its humanitarian and sentimental appeal has ceased to be as potent as it now is—­at the same time that it has itself enforced this appeal in the subordinating manner I have suggested.  When he was asked his intention, in his picture of a maimed calf borne away on a litter by two men, he said it was simply to indicate the sense of weight in the muscular movement and attitude of the bearers’ arms.

His great distinction, in fine, is artistic.  His early painting of conventional subjects is not without significance in its witness to the quality of his talent.  Another may paint French peasants all his life and never make them permanently interesting, because he has not Millet’s admirable instinct and equipment as a painter.  He is a superb colorist, at times—­always an enthusiastic one; there is something almost unregulated in his delight in color, in his fondness for glowing and resplendent tone.  No one gets farther away from the academic grayness, the colorless chiaro-oscuro of the conventional painters.  He runs his key up and loads his canvas, occasionally, in what one may call not so much barbaric as uncultivated and elementary fashion.  He cares so much for color that sometimes, when his effect