At Barbizon Millet’s life moved on so quietly that there is nothing to record in it almost, save a long list of pictures painted, and a gradual growth, not in popularity (for that Millet never really attained at all), but in the esteem of the best judges, which of course brought with it at last, first ease, then comfort, and finally comparative riches.  Millet was able now to paint such subjects as pleased him best, and he threw himself into his work with all the fervour of his intensely earnest and poetical nature.  Whatever might be the subject which he undertook, he knew how to handle it so that it became instinct with his own fine feeling for the life he saw around him.  In 1852 he painted his “Man spreading Manure.”  In itself, that is not a very exalted or beautiful occupation; but what Millet saw in it was the man, not the manure—­ the toiling, sorrowing, human fellow-being, whose labour and whose spirit he knew so well how to appreciate.  And in this view of the subject he makes us all at once sympathize.  Other pictures of this period are such as “The Gleaners,” “The Reapers,” “A Peasant grafting a Tree,” “The Potato Planters,” and so forth.  These were very different subjects indeed from the dignified kings and queens painted by Delaroche, or the fiery battle-pieces of Delacroix but they touch a chord in our souls which those great painters fail to strike, and his treatment of them is always truthful, tender, melancholy, and exquisite.

Bit by bit, French artistic opinion began to recognize the real greatness of the retiring painter at Barbizon.  He came to be looked upon as a true artist, and his pictures sold every year for increasingly large prices.  Still, he had not been officially recognized; and in France, where everything, even to art and the theatre, is under governmental regulation, this want of official countenance is always severely felt.  At last, in 1867, Millet was awarded the medal of the first class, and was appointed a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.  The latter distinction carries with it the right to wear that little tag of ribbon on the coat which all Frenchmen prize so highly; for to be “decorated,” as it is called, is in France a spur to ambition of something the same sort as a knighthood or a peerage in England, though of course it lies within the reach of a far greater number of citizens.  There is something to our ideas rather absurd in the notion of bestowing such a tag of ribbon on a man of Millet’s aims and occupations; but all honours are honours just according to the estimation of the man who receives them and the society in which he lives; and Millet no doubt prized his admission to the Legion of Honour all the more because it had been so long delayed and so little truckled for.