nd
of local color and pastel. It was to me always a puzzle that, even in
the educated art circles of Paris, Corot should have found so great
a popularity as compared to that of Rousseau. Without in the least
disparaging the greatness of Corot's best work, such for instance as
the St. Sebastian and some other classical subjects, the names of
which I cannot recall, the range of conception and treatment is
limited as compared with that of Rousseau. This alone would give Corot
a lower rank, in the absence of a marked superiority in some special
high quality--superiority which does not exist, for the picked work of
Rousseau possesses technical excellences all its own, as consummate as
anything in the world's landscape art, while the range of treatment
and subject, so much greater in Rousseau than in Corot, puts the
limited and mannered art of the latter as a whole in a distinct
inferiority.

Of Millet I saw much less, but enough to know the man and his art,
simple and human, the one as the other. His love for manhood in its
most primitive attainable types, those furnished by the peasant, was
the outcome of his conception of art, such as the Greek of the early
schools conceived it, the expression of humanity in a simple and
therefore noble state, and of the honest, open, healthy nature of the
man himself, averse to all sophistication of society, reverent of
an ideal in art, and intolerant of affectations. He conceived and
executed his pictures in the pure Greek spirit, working out his ideal
as his imagination presented it to him, not as the model served him.
The form is of his own day, the spirit of his art that of all time
and of all good art, the elaboration of a type and not merely the
reproduction of a picturesque model. It is the custom now to class all
peasant subjects, emulating the forms of Millet, as belonging to his
art. Nothing is more absurd, for the art of Millet was subjective, not
realistic; it was in the feeling of the art of Phidias and the Italian
renaissance, not in the modern _pose plastique_. The peasant in it was
merely incidental to his sympathy with ideal life. Millet was himself
a peasant, he used to say, and his moral purpose, if he had any, was
the glorification, so far as art can effect it, of his class, the
class which above all others in his eyes dignified humanity and held
his sympathy. This feeling was with him no affectation, but the
deliberate, final conclusion of his life--he reverenced the