THE MILLET EXHIBITION.
00LE DES BEAUX ARTS, PARIS.
Fon those who are at Paris this springtime for the purpose of seeing pictures, there is an exhibition which will well recompense them for the long labour of the endless galleries of the Palais d'Industrie, with their acres of canvas and tons of statuary. At the P.cole des Beaux Arts is the exhibition held of which we are speaking, and it is in honour of an artist who, whilst he lived, could scarcely gain recognition for his art, or subsistence for himself. Jean Frangoia Millet has, however, become since his death too widely famous for us to dwell once more on the long struggle of his life, and, as his biographer says in the notice prefixed to the catalogue of the present exhibition, this moment of formal recognition is hardly the one in which it would be good taste to dwell on the enduring injustice which the artist once experienced. Let us take what consolation we may from the bestowal of this public recognition, and from the promise of the "statue to the memory of the master" which is proposed to be erected with the proceeds of the exhibition, and look only at the character of the work which once raised so fierce a controversy, and which has since had so vital an influence upon contemporary French painters. Most of our readers know, either by hearsay or actual experience,. what were the superficial characteristics of Millet's work; they have either Been or heard of its simplicity, its freedom from convention, its preference for the ordinary toils and experiences of rural life as compared with subjects of more generally attractive character ; and they know, too, that the artist lived very much the same life as that which formed the subject of his pictures,— that, a peasant of the peasants, he ate frugally, lodged roughly,. and lived as simply as his gleaners, his woodcutters, and his shepherds. But it is possible that many of those who know these facts have hardly sufficient acquaintance with the actual works of this peasant-painter to understand why they should have raised such a storm of opposition; and without under- standing this, it is impossible to see why Millet should only have received honour and fame since his death.
Events march so quickly nowadays, that we had almost for- gotten that in Art, as in many other matters, free-thought was not long since the one unpardonable sin. Above all, in France, where the traditions of the classical school still linger, and• where the "grand style" may be seen to-day still holding its own despairingly in the teeth of modern innovations, was any departure from the accustomed methods of representing Nature tabooed. Artists trained in the laborious acquirement of den- terities of workmanship and conventionalities of arrangement and conception, looked with unfeigned horror and disgust at an innovator such as Millet, who not only disregarded their rules, but seemed as if he was bent on proving with how great im- punity they could be broken. We do not intend to dwell upon the great revolution in landscape-painting which was effected. in Millet's time, and mainly by his own work and that of the little group of artists who shared his ideas, such as Rousseau, Danbigny, and Corot ; it is sufficient to note that all of them met with much the same opposition, neglect, an& insult, and all have since been jastified by time. The French school of landscape-painting at the present day owes its existence to these men, and is based on their methods, as cer- tainly as they in their turn owed much to Constable and the
elder English landscapists. But Millet's special work was not his return to Nature in the rendering of natural scenery and effect, nor was it even his choice of simple, unconventional sub- jects for his pictures. Other painters might have done both these things, and though their work would no doubt have met with some opposition from the critics, it would have aroused no great personal animosity. To bring this about, it was necessary for the artist not only to leave the established track, but to open one in a diametrically opposite direction ; and it was this which Millet, to a great extent unintention- ally, effected. He did not question so much the means by which artists had sought for beauty ; he questioned the beauty itself. He set up an ideal of beauty which was diametrically, fundamentally opposed to that of the schools, and which, if it is accepted, leads to the neglect of their most cherished tradition,. 'All these years,' he cried, in his pictures, 'you painters have been on the wrong track ; life does not want any convention to make it lovely, to make it pictorial. The commonest pictures of the commonest people, the roughest clothes, the plainest, most every-day scenes,—it is in all these that you may find the secret of loveliness, and find it most securely. In human toil and emotion ; in the relation thereto of the natural world ; in free, untaught movements of pleasure, labour, or sorrow ; in all those vital facts which have marked the path of man from age to age ; in storm and sunshine, dawn and twilight, seed-time and harvest, winter and summer,—it is there you must seek for beauty, not in your studios and your histories, your traditions and your craftsman- ship.' Here was a Protestant with a vengeance ! No wonder the Catholic world of artists would have none of him !
It was not, however, for many years that Millet wholly arrived at the subjects and the method of treatment which were to be the base of his fame. At first, in trying in vain to reconcile the public taste with his peculiar ideas of technique and treatment, he wasted year after year painting mythological subjects, portraits, and imaginary compositions, and it was not till the year 1848 (when he was thirty-two) that he settled down to tell the story of the peasant life as it is, not as it might be prettily repre- sented to be.
It is this story which the paintings and pastels now gathered together show the beholder in unaffected and unsparing narrative ; not dealing with it brutally or coldly, but refusing to tamper with its facts or conceal its sorrows. And over it all the painter sheds kindly the light of his genius and his sympathy; watches for the moments when the figures that are bent over the corn-fields combine together in almost classic beauty, when the labourers pause as the Angelus rings out in the still evening, and when the sower swings the seed from his outstretched hand as he strides over the furrow, with a large gesture full of freedom and grace. The artist will not flatter his hero, the peasant; but will have us feel with him and for him as he is, and will keep telling ns, too, in many a subtle and suggestive way, that this rustic toil is part of the ordained order of things, and has about it something of the permanence and grandeur of Nature herself. Perhaps this is Millet's greatest artistic excellence,—that he has drawn closer in his pictures the ties that bind together mankind and the natural world ; that he has shown us labour and sorrow, surrounded and brought into enduring connection of beauty with the changing permanence of sun and shadow, with the brightness of the spring and the desolation of the winter. And in so doing he has thought, or seemed to think, not a whit of himself, but as of a man who had a message to deliver faithfully. As a result, this painter achieved a truth of poetry to rural life such as no other artist has ever rivalled. His peasants have a magnificence of gesture such as one might well call classic, though it is drawn not from the study of ancient art, but from the source whence that art drew its inspiration. But beyond this technical beauty of free natural gesture, there resides in these Millet idylls a poetry of very rare and subtle quality, such as is hard to define without using words which will seem to those unacquainted with the pictures to be of overstrained significance. For the poetry which Millet saw and embodied in his work is that of the eternal struggle of mankind for mere existence ; the war that man wages against the stubborn earth and the changing seasons,—which only ends with life itself.
Many of these scraps of rustic poetry—these records of silent, unconscious endurance, and never-ending toil—are now at the 2oole den Beaux Arts, though many of the most famous have been transplanted to America and several to England. A collec- tion of this artist's works which does not include either " La Tondcuse," "Lo Semeur," "La Mort et le Buckaroo," or "La Femme portant des Seaux," can hardly be considered as fully representative ; but it is, we suppose, the best of which the cir- cumstances would admit. Here, at all events, is "The Angelus," most beautiful of rustic idylls, with its sombre depth of colour and warm evening light, its stillness and peace. Who is to criticise a picture such as this, which offends all rules of com- position, and yet seems only to gain in beauty by so doing P Why should these two figures, stuck side by side in the middle of a potato meadow, without special attractiveness of feature or surrounding, and in their coarse work-a-day clothes, contain such a subtle power of attractiveness P Any one who could answer that question fully would go nigh to solving the most impenetrable mystery of Art,—the mystery by which forms and colours, arranged in certain combinations by a sympathetic hand, are transmuted into emotion, and become powerful to convey distinct emotions to whoever sees them. One or two small hints of the truth one may perceive,—of which perhaps the chief is, that much of the effect of this picture, as of many another great work, springs from the recognition of its simple veracity ; its veracity, moreover, to an emotion,—a sentiment, if you will, of universal appeaL We realise the day's toil in the fields, the fading away of the light, and the growing weariness of the peasants, till at last, when the sun has fairly sunk to rest, and the long labour of the day is over, the chimes of the Angelus steal gently through the evening, and the woman bows over her rosary, and the man doffs his cap in reverence as the bells ring to evensong at last. Who is there so dull of heart and mind as not to grasp a little of the beauty in such a scene, and who would wish to have it arranged for him in any other manner than the simple one which the artist has here given us P We cannot deal at length in our brief space with the subjects of the other works, which have been for the most part frequently described ; but it is worth while to point out from the side of technical criticism a fact which is now made certain for the first time, though it has been frequently suspected ; and that is the superiority of Millet's pastels over his oil-paintings. We have here a perfect opportunity of comparing his work in this respect, as in several cases there are in this collection both the pastel and the oil-painting of the same subject, and of the same size. In almost every case is the pastel the finer, the finer both in subtlety of colour and in perfection of execution.• The oil-painting gains, it is true, in depth, but loses in vigour and simplicity, and has, for the most part, a laboured aspect, as if the hand which produced it were working in a medium to which it was not entirely fitted. Compare in this respect the great picture of sheep in a stubble field with three wheatatacks in the background, known as " Autumn," or " L'Homme h la Verte," or " Le Printemps,"—in all of these the same comparative heavi- ness of touch and dullness of impression is evident in the picture. Perhaps the most beautiful of all the works here is the second pastel design for " The Sower " (the finished painting is not here), which for tenderness of colour and suggestion of movement is unsurpassable ; it has all the grace and strength of the artist's best work, with no touch of exaggeration, and is in some ways, wo think, superior to the finished design of the same subject which forms the frontis- piece to Sensier's "Life of Millet "—and which was the one finally adopted for the oil-painting. Where all the designs, however, are so fine, selection is a somewhat invidious task, and must be to a considerable degree a question of the mood of the moment. Certainly, for the sadder, sterner aspect of country life, few of these compositions will compare with the girl bringing her sheep home in the twilight, her dark figure scarcely distinguishable from the flock behind her. The drawing is instinct with pathos, with slow, toilsome move- ment, with the lack of anticipation ; the absence alike of hope and fear,—representing a life wherein habit supplies the place of impulse, and endurance is easy because it has been life-long. And as a feature of the lighter side of the peasant's life, take the composition of the goose-girl who is about to bathe in the little rivulet before her. Not by any means an ideal figure, with her strong, straight arms and large hands, her thick ankles, her knees enlarged with much kneeling,—Millet has, indeed, carefully avoided making her ideal; but still, somehow, with her clothes she has slipped off the peasant, and some of the weariness and submission of the
• Relatively to the material employed.
labourer, and become a part of the natural life about her, in harmony with the gram and flowers of the river-bank, the flat- tering leaves above, and the geese who come sailing down the water towards her.
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