sapprehension almost as
profound as that of those contemporaries who decried and opposed him.
They thought him violent, rude, ill-educated, a "man of the woods," a
revolutionist, almost a communist. We are apt to think of him as a
gentle sentimentalist, a soul full of compassion for the hard lot of the
poor, a man whose art achieves greatness by sheer feeling rather than by
knowledge and intellect. In spite of his own letters, in spite of the
testimony of many who knew him well, in spite of more than one piece of
illuminating criticism, these two misconceptions endure; and, for the
many, Millet is still either the painter of "The Man with the Hoe," a
powerful but somewhat exceptional work, or the painter of "L'Angelus,"
precisely the least characteristic picture he ever produced. There is a
legendary Millet, in many ways a very different man from the real one,
and, while the facts of his life are well known and undisputed, the
interpretation of them is colored by preconceptions and strained to make
them fit the legend.

Altogether too much, for instance, has been made of the fact that
Millet was born a peasant. He was so, but so were half the artists and
poets who come up to Paris and fill the schools and the cafes of the
student quarters. To any one who has known these young _rapins_, and
wondered at the grave and distinguished members of the Institute into
which many of them have afterward developed, it is evident that this
studious youth--who read Virgil in the original and Homer and
Shakespeare and Goethe in translations--probably had a much more
cultivated mind and a much sounder education than most of his fellow
students under Delaroche. Seven years after this Norman farmer's son
came to Paris, with a pension of 600 francs voted by the town council of
Cherbourg, the son of a Breton sabot-maker followed him there with a
precisely similar pension voted by the town council of Roche-sur-Yon;
and the pupil of Langlois had had at least equal opportunities with
the pupil of Sartoris. Both cases were entirely typical of French
methods of encouraging the fine arts, and the peasant origin of Millet
is precisely as significant as the peasant origin of Baudry.

[Illustration: Plate 2.--Millet. "The Sower."
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vanderbilt collection.]

Baudry persevered in the course marked out for him and, after failing
three times, received the _Prix de Rome_ and became the pensioner of the
state. Millet too