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The Early Life of J. F. Millet.

THE artist of the Angelus and the Semeur is perhaps the painter of modern times to whom the epithet "heroic" applies most readily and fitly. His work has been described as a painted epic," himself as a Michelangelo of the glebe;" and to those who are in sympathy with his art and its motives, with the type and quality of his sentiment and the manner of its expression, the descriptions are only adequate, and the claims implied in them no more than just. Of course there are many to whom they must seem fantastically exaggerated. Millet has been but five or six years dead, and his triumph is but now beginning. The world has not yet had time nor opportunity to search out his meanings, which are profound-as Beethoven's were-nor to learn to understand his practice, which was peculiar-as was Rembrandt's; and for some time to come there must be picture-lovers not a few who will decline to feel interested in what he had to say, or to be at the pains of studying the terms in which he said it. There is likely to be no such dissent about the man himself; nor is it probable that there will ever be two opinions as to the interest of his life. His story is sad enough in many ways; but it is encouraging in the main, and it is eminently instructive. It may be divided into three parts: one, 1814-1837, telling of Millet's origin and education; another, 1837-1849, of his apprenticeship to art and his stay in Paris; a third, 1849-1875, of his sojourn in the Forest of Fontainebleau and his achievement as a finished and an individual artist. The last two are mainly records of production more or less unpopular, and effort more or less unsuccessful, in a worldly sense at all events; there are many such chapters in the chronicle of art, and there will certainly be many more. Of the first, the general colouring of which is one of contentment and tranquillity, the circumstances are uncommon and peculiar enough to seem worth lingering over and narrating with some fulness of detail.

I.

Gruchy is a little hamlet in the Norman commune of Greville, perched upon the iron cliffs of the Hogue, and overlooking the troubled waters of Cherbourg Roads. It was there, on October 4, 1814, that Millet was born. His birth year was the year of the Campaign of France, it will be remembered, and of the abdication at Fontainebleau ; and, the true child of his time-which was one of desperate defensive wars and the agony of a great ambition, when hope and endeavour

alternated with doubt and dejection, and general distress had created a disposition to individual charity-he seems to have always retained an impression of his ante-natal circumstances. He was a man strong in heart and intellect, and noble and dignified in character, with an indomitable will and a lofty audacity of purpose. But his imagination, while it was heroic and daring, was also mystical and solemn; he perceived the melancholy of things more readily than the joy in them; his message was one of peace and of pity. He represents the full and anxious year that gave him being as it must have seemed to the strong, patient, longsuffering class from which be sprang. Genius and the artistic sentiment apart, he was a peasant of the best and highest type, with that development of certain special capacities and qualities-as quiet hardihood, tenacity under trial, and dignified and thoughtful submissiveness-which some five-and-twenty years of war and revolution and unwilling conquest might be expected to induce.

He was exceptionally fortunate in the circumstances of his early environment and the facts of his ancestry and immediate parentage. Few men have had such excellent preparation for a peculiar task, and fewer still have made so good a use of their opportunity. The bent of his genius and the nature of his function were determined for him from the first. He was a peasant born and bred, and in him the sympathies and aspirations of many generations of peasants found special expression. The several strains uniting in him-of Millet, and Jumelin, and Henry du Perron-were exceptionally choice and vigorous. His father, JeanLouis, son of Nicolas Millet and Louise Jumelin, came of an alliance between two families of varying temperaments and widely different capacities. The characteristics of the Millets were honesty, sobriety, simplicity, and laboriousness; in the Jumelins, with all of these, there was a dash of mysticism, a note of imaginativeness, a tendency to intellectual and emotional independence. The Millets worked hard, lived cleanly and kindly, and worshipped humbly and with all their hearts; the Jumelins practised science, and essayed adventure, and were versed in theology, in the moralists, in the literature and doctrine of Port-Royal. Jean-Louis, the heir of the two houses, had the distinguishing qualities of both. Tall and straight and limber, with fine hands and mild black eyes and curling and abundant hair, he was deeply religious, very thoughtful, very earnest and serious in temper, and so pure in heart and habit that his neighbours would refrain from oaths and coarse talk in his presence. And withal he was a kind of inarticulate poet. He had a fine voice and a good ear; the quire he led and trained was famed throughout the department; his music, says Sensier, is copied out in a hand that reminds you of a medieval scribe's. He was fond of plants and trees, and interested in the ways and characters of animals, and curiously susceptible to the influences of nature; and he was always seeking to fix, or to translate, his impressions, sometimes by modelling in clay, sometimes by carving in wood. "Vois donc," he would say to

his son, as they were walking afield, comme cet arbre est grand et bien fait; il est aussi beau à voir qu'une fleur: "-or, as they were looking out of window after the midday meal, "Vois donc comme cette maison à moitié enterrée derrière le champ est bien; il me semble qu'on devrait la dessiner ainsi." Of this good man's wife, née Henry, or Henry du Perron, nothing is recorded but that she came of a family of yeomen many generations old, and was a woman of exemplary life and a beautiful disposition. With her, as with her husband, devoutness was second nature. They were pious and charitable, as they were hardworking and thrifty and affectionate, without effort and without afterthought. They were poor, but they gave freely of their substance, and would accept of none but honourable gains. They were hardly literate, but they knew the Bible by heart, and Augustine and Jerome were household oracles with them. They worked as only French peasants can and do, but they remained generous and unsophisticated always; and when, years afterwards, Madame Millet writes to her son in Paris, she is found expressing herself in terms and with an accent that recall the mothers of antiquity. Nor were they alone in virtue among the members of their household. Had they stood in need of examples, they would have found them without crossing their own threshold. Domesticated with them were the painter's great-uncle, the Abbé Charles Millet, and his grandmother Louise. The Abbé, a man of great simplicity and sweetness, and of enormous personal strength, had been eased of his functions by the operation of the Revolution, and, after having been hunted for his life, had settled quietly down to till the fields he had been used to bless. He was a kind of ideal country curate, three parts labourer and one part churchman—a half-heroic bête du bon Dieu, one of the draught oxen of the Church; taking a pride in building walls and dykes, without help, of stones that he only could lift; teaching stray urchins their accidence and their catechism for the love of God, and to keep them out of mischief; watching over his infant grand-nephew with the imperturbable and slow solicitude of an animal for its young. The grandmother was of another temper. She was a woman of singular piety and humanity, and, for all her fervent Catholicism, a kind of unconscious Pantheist, who saw the Deity in all created things, and his action in all natural and human incidents. She had a great deal of character and intelligence, her culture was exceptional, she was full of morality and good counsel, hers was an enterprising and commanding personality; in another state of life she would. certainly have been a personage of mark. She was the artist's godmother; and she named him François after her patron, the good saint of Assisi, the lover of nature, the open-air apostle, the evangelist of the birds-as fortunate and appropriate a protector for a landscape painter, I think, as could well be found in the calendar. He was her special charge for many years, and her character and teaching were among the best and most active influences of his life. One of his earliest recollections is of a bright morning when she came and roused him from sleep,

saying to him, with gentle and loving reproachfulness, "Si tu savais comme il y a longtemps que les oiseaux chantent la gloire du bon Dieu;" and in 1846, she writes to him of the St. Jerome he is painting, and bids him "work for Eternity" always. "Pour quelque raison que ce puisse être," she adds in her antique and simple French, " ne te permets jamais de faire de mauvais ouvrages, ne perds pas la présence de Dieu; avec saint Jérôme, pense incessament entendre la trompette qui doit nous appeler au Jugement." Her life and conversation were of a piece with these counsels; and Millet, who was passionately and devoutly attached to her, may well have had her in his mind when he painted and etched the third and eldest of his Glaneuses: the three majestic and mystical figures-as of priestesses upon a sacred beach, gathering the pebbles for some lofty and momentous act of divination-the" Parca of Poverty," as they have been called, in which he has embodied all the solemn and pathetic beauty and all the old-world dignity and romance of the gleaner's toil. His work, indeed, may be described as in some sort an expression of ideas that, in a greater or less degree and in one or another form, were common to the three or four of his immediate kindred of whom I have spoken. It is hard to believe that they would not have understood his greater pictures better than did, or could, the most enthusiastic of his critics. He dealt with facts they knew in a spirit that, elevated and ennobled as it had come to be, was, after all, the same with that in which they wrought out their own fortunes and lived their own lives. To me, indeed, they have a sort of share in Millet's whole achievement; for I cannot but think his character and genius, original and personal as they were, to have been largely inherited from them, and to have been deeply moulded and permanently impressed by them as well; so that they may, in a certain sense, be said to have been as much his masters as Poussin and Michelangelo themselves.

It is the same with his early environment as with the facts of his kinship. Walter Scott himself, the most fortunate of scholars, was not so well placed for the study of Border lore and Border character as Millet for the study of the external aspects and the inner meanings of peasant life. At Gruchy, between the green and pleasant Norman landscape and the solemn and mysterious seas, manners were simple, and life was earnest and hard. The villagers tilled their own little plots for food, spun their own linens, coopered their own tubs and pails, and carpentered their own tools and furniture. In summer time they lived much in the open air. On winter nights they gathered round the fire to sew and spin and work in wicker, and to tell old stories and sing old songs. They were no fishers. If they harvested the sea it was for weed and drift, wherewith to fatten their fields and feed their hearths.

*

* Some of them made money now and then as smugglers' labourers. The contraband trade was still profitable; the Channel teemed with knavish luggers and sloops;

For they were essentially a race of husbandmen, and they had enough to do with reaping and shearing, and grafting and harrowing and delving, and the hundred other tasks of rustic labour. Of late the farmer and his lot have suffered change. Science has come to him, and steam, and machinery-" the Divil's oän teäm." He has grown positive and professional; and his trade, the oldest trade of all, has lost its antique airs of naturalness and individuality. In Millet's day its associations were yet biblical and solemn, its practice was yet personal and traditional. The sower still went forth to sow; and the painter's own Semeur is in some sort an illustration of the matter and spirit of the admirable line,

Wi' joy the tentie seedsman stalks,

of Robert Burns. The sentiment of gleaning was practically the same that it had been with Naomi and Ruth. The corn was reaped with sickles, and threshed upon a floor with flails, and ground into flour between stones under the impulse of water or of wind. The art of ploughing was human and majestic; and it was natural to see, upon some brown upland slopes, or far away on the luminous level of the plain, that noblest of all the sights of labour-a ploughman working with his team, the stately pacing horses, the shining shares, the alert and busy following of birds, the straight furrows lengthening and multiplying under the workman's will. The elemental forces were romantic and passionate as of yore; and to the shepherd watching his flock by night the darkness had all its terrors yet, and there was a mystical and sacred quality in the inexplicable stars. Ghostly presences were still formidable and dreadful, so that doubtfulness and awe came with the shadows, and the dawning light gave argument for gratitude and joy. Millet was reared upon the Bible, the most open-air of books, and bred to open-air employment under all the old solemn and picturesque conditions. Hardly had he entered upon his teens ere he went to work in the fields; and till two or three and twenty he was to all intents and purposes as diligent and complete a husbandman as Burns himself. During infancy, that is to say, and during youth and early manhood, while his imagination was at its quickest and freshest, and while his sympathies were readiest and most receptive, he was engaged in assimilating a world of sincere and memorable impressions. With the innumerable details of country life and labour he was familiar, both physically and intellectually, from the very first. He grew up among them, and took part in them; they entered into and became a portion of his being; he learned by actual experience to apprehend and express the peculiar sentiment of

and on dark and moonless nights, when cargo could be run, there was plenty of work for long-shore hands all down the coast. It is characteristic of the Millets that they would not meddle with this traffic, and would neither deal in smuggled wares nor handle smugglers' wages. They were strict, too, in the matter of wreckage, and would have nothing whatever to do with it.