Millet (Rolland)/Chapter 1

by Romain Rolland

 

I

Moral Character of Millet and of his
Work—His Place in French Art

 

 

The personality of Millet is a surprising one in the France of the nineteenth century. He seems to be a man belonging to another time, another race, a different form of thought. In French art he is a solitary, almost an alien. He was equally misunderstood by his admirers and his detractors. The former hailed him as the bold and truthful interpreter of the new democracy. The latter regarded him as a declaiming socialist who set before the dominating middle classes a melodramatic picture of the suffering workers. Criticism saw political allusions in all his works. The gesture of the Sower appeared to be a threat of the populace, casting to heaven "handfuls of grape-shot." The Gleaners were called by Paul de St Victor "the three Fates of Pauperism." Baudelaire and Huysmans attribute to his peasants the souls of revolutionary orators. All of them look for political and social theses in his pictures or else for dramatic effects. Nothing, however, was farther from Millet's mind: he detested sentimental and melodramatic painting; he was indifferent to politics; he repudiated socialism.

Millet was never able to understand the declamatory meanings attributed to him by his critics. "My critics," he said, "are, I imagine, people of taste and instruction; but I cannot put myself into their skins, and as I have never seen anything in my life except the fields, I try to tell simply, and as best I can, what I have seen." When certain persons took the trouble to explain in a most literary and elaborate manner the expression of his Peasants carrying home a calf born in the fields, he remarked with ironical common sense that "the expression of two men carrying something on a hand-barrow is determined by the weight hanging at the end of their arms. ... If the weight be equal, whether they are carrying the ark of the temple or a calf, a nugget of gold or a stone, they will be subject to the law of the weight and their expression can indicate nothing but that weight." On more than one occasion he declared in violent

 

THE DEATH OF THE CALF

Photograph—Giraudon ]

 

terms his aversion from the theatrical tendencies of contemporary art, and even from the theatre. "The Luxembourg gallery," said he, "has given me an antipathy to the theatre. I have always had a marked dislike to the exaggerations, the falsities and simperings of actors and actresses. I have seen a little of the people belonging to that particular sphere and have become convinced that by dint of trying to assume the personality of someone else they cease to know their own, that they come to speak only according to their parts, and that they lose truth, common sense and the simple feelings of plastic art. If one would produce true and natural art, one must avoid the theatre."

More energetically still did he protest against the claim made by his friends and his enemies to reckon him with the socialist camp. Like many other French artists who lived at the time of the 1848 Revolution, he felt, naturally enough, a fraternal sympathy that drew him towards the people; but it should be noted that neither Millet nor, with the exception of Courbet, any of the greatest among these painters joined in the popular demands. Corot lived entirely outside of politics, not knowing what was going on around him, gentle and calm, hating revolutions and saying that "art is love." Theodore Rousseau, with his thirst for solitude and his scorn for all political or artistic cliques, said: "What has art to do with those things? Art will never come except from some little disregarded corner where some isolated man is studying the mysteries of nature, fully assured that the answer which he finds and which is good for him is good also for humanity, whatever may be the number of succeeding generations." Millet, who was more directly touched than the others by the appellation of socialist because he was not only a painter of landscapes but also and especially a painter of peasants whom he represented with unvarnished realism, protested all his life against the label applied to him. "I repudiate with all my might the democ (democratic) side, as understood in club language," he wrote on the 23rd of April 1867. "I am a peasant of peasants." He thought with Corot that "the mission of art is a mission of love, not of hate, and that, when it presents the sufferings of the poor, it should not aim at exciting envy towards the wealthy classes." He had no feeling of enmity to the rich; but much rather of compassion. "Poor little prince!" said he pityingly, one day when the glories of the Prince Imperial's christening were described to him. Nor did his love of the country lead him into any illusions as to the faults of the peasants. Far from desiring to paint men in revolt marching towards emancipation and progress, he writes that he wishes "the beings whom he represents to have an appearance of being bound to their position so that it should be impossible to imagine them having an idea of being anything different." He does not believe in progress; or he believes only in technical progress, which has nothing to do with the supposed social or moral progress. "What everyone ought to do," said he in 1854, "is to seek progress, in his own profession. To me that is the only way. Everything else is dream or calculation." The idea of the eternity and immutability of things was deeply engraven on his soul. Nothing could be more opposed to the revolutionary idea, or indeed to any political idea. How comes it then that such ideas have been attributed to him? The cause of this error is the existence in Millet of an extraordinary power of pessimism, an extraordinary intensity of sadness. Everybody has seen it; everybody has been struck by it. But everybody has misinterpreted it; everybody has read into it a sort of bitter criticism, a sort of condemnation of society. The mind of no single French writer or artist has succeeded in perceiving that this pessimism, this sadness, were not the agitated state of a rebel but the natural, normal state of a man who had received their impress so deeply that he could scarcely conceive of any person being different. All French art for nearly a century has been so remote from Christianity—it may even be said, as a whole, so anti-Christian—that the Christian point of view which sees suffering as a law and as a good has become almost incomprehensible. Some people look suffering in the face but only to fight and curse it. Others turn their eyes from it as an ugly, unpleasing spectacle which they try to forget; and they devote themselves to the pursuit, the attainment or the imagination of joy. None among them could understand that a Millet might find an austere and religious joy in pain. None of them guessed when they looked at The Gleaners or The Man with the Hoe, oppressed by fatigue, bowed over the earth like beasts beneath a yoke, that the artist who painted them thought their pains natural, good because moral, and beautiful because good.

"You are sitting under the trees," he wrote in 1851, "feeling all the ease, all the tranquillity that can possibly be enjoyed; you see some poor figure laden with a faggot come turning out of some little path. The unexpected and always striking way in which this figure appears to you carries your mind instantly to the sadness of human life. . . .

'Quel plaisir a-t-il eu depuis qu'il est au monde?
En est-il un plus pauvre en la machine ronde?'^[1]

La Fontaine, 'Death and the Woodcutter.'

... In tilled lands you see these figures digging and delving. From time to time you see one straighten his loins and wipe his forehead with the back of his hand. Is this the gay frolicsome work in which some people would have us believe? Yet here for me is the real humanity, the great poetry."

Thus, to show the pains of work, and to show at the same time all the poetry and all the beauty of life in these severe pains, was the final aim of Millet's thoughts and of his art. "My programme is work. Every man is doomed to bodily punishment. 'In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread' was written ages ago: an immovable fate that will never change" (1854). We see that there is no protest here; no desire to make life better. Life is sad but Millet loves it as it is. It might almost be said that if sadness did not exist, Millet would have made it afresh, so singular is the charm which it had for him. "I would on no account be deprived of winter," he says somewhere. "Oh! sadness of the fields and woods, not to behold you would be too great a loss!" (1866). To him it was a deep, inborn need: "the basis of melancholy upon which I am established," he writes on the 25th of November 1872. From his childhood up, those who knew him were struck by his melancholy temper. "Ah, my poor child," said the old curé of his village, "you have a heart which will give you a deal

 

THE RETURN OF THE WOODCUTTER

Photograph—Braun, Clement & Co.]

 

of trouble; you don't know how much you will suffer." Like old Michael Angelo who said that the birthday of a human being should be regarded not as a day of joy but as a day of mourning, Millet was never so sad as on days that seemed to most men joyful, such as the beginnings and endings of years, for then the sadness of his memories mingled with the sadness of his presentiments. "Here is another year finishing to-night," he cries. "How sad! I wish all of you as few years as possible." He says himself that he did not know joy. "The joyful side never appears to me. I do not know what it is. I have never seen it. The most cheerful things I know are calm and silence—" (1851). He shows, however, no symptom of uneasiness or depression; his is a serious and peaceful melancholy that has its secret sweetness for souls of his stamp—"the dark pleasure of a melancholy heart," of which La Fontaine speaks. But with La Fontaine the feeling had a dilettante note. With Millet there was nothing of the kind. He was not an artist observing poverty from afar and in other people while keeping himself carefully sheltered. He knew poverty in his own person and accepted it without surprise and without rebellion.

The lives of the principal French painters of his day and of the great landscape painters in particular, constitute a sad martyrology. Except in very few instances, such as those of Corot and Jules Duprè, almost all suffered cruelly from want, indigence, hunger, illness and ill-luck of every kind. The great Theodore Rousseau lived for the greater part of his days in terrible poverty and loneliness and died, struck down by general paralysis, with a mad wife beside him. Troyon died insane. Marilhat died insane. Decamps tormented himself his life long, lived without friends, and died in a tragic way. Paul Huet literally nearly died of hunger and lost his health owing to privations. Even Diaz was acquainted with black poverty and bodily sufferings. It cannot therefore be said that Millet was exceptionally treated by fortune, and he himself refuses to think so. "I do not pretend to be unhappier than many others" (1859); "I feel no resentment against anyone, not thinking myself more of a victim than are many others" (1857). He shared the common fate; he suffered like others from poverty, loneliness and indifference. But that which is exceptional in him and distinguishes him from others is the tranquillity with which he accepts his ill-fortune, as a matter of necessity, a superior and beneficent fate. Human folly, spite and egoism never disturb his admirable calm. "Yes, there are bad people," he says simply, "but there are good ones, and one good makes up to us for many bad. . . . I do not complain" (1844). How often he came to the end of his supplies! The baker refuses him bread, the tradesmen put in the bailiffs; at one time in 1853 he is left with exactly two francs. Again and again the burden of his letters is: "How shall I get my month's rent? For after all the first thing is that the children must eat" (1856). In 1857, the year of the Gleaners, poverty would have driven him to suicide, but that his conscience shrank in horror from the thought. In 1859, the year of the Angelus, he writes, in midwinter: "We only have wood for two or three days and do not know how to get any more. My wife will be confined next month and I shall be without anything."

In addition to all this he was often ill; worn out in spite of his robust peasant constitution by the hard life that he was compelled to live; several times he was at death's door: in 1838 when he was in extremis, in 1848 when hope was given up, when he lay delirious for a month and was penniless; in 1859 when he was on the point of going blind, and was spitting blood. Moreover, he continually suffered, sometimes for weeks at a time, from frightful sick headaches and pains in the eyes. He hardly complains, is never angry, never astonished at the hardness of his lot. One day when his means were completely exhausted, a friend brought him some small alms extracted from the government; he found Millet at home without fire, without light, seated on a trunk with his shoulders bent like a person suffering from cold. Millet said simply: "Thank you, it comes at the right time; we have eaten nothing for two days; but the great point is that the children have not suffered. They have had food up to the present time." He called his wife. "There," said he, "I will go and buy some wood for I am very cold." He did not say another word nor refer to the matter again^[2] (1848). It may be said that sorrow was his best friend, and gave him an austere delight. "Art is not a diversion," he wrote once. "It is a conflict, a complication of wheels in which one is crushed. I am not a philosopher. I do not wish to do away with pain, nor to find a formula that will make me stoical and indifferent. Pain is perhaps the thing that gives artists the strongest power of expression" (1847). And in truth he is attracted, fascinated by the expression of pain. It is this that he looks for in the work of his favourite masters; it seems to exercise a mystic spell upon him. "There were moments when I felt as though I were pierced by the arrows of a Saint Sebastian as I looked at Mantegna's martyrs. These masters are like mesmerists." And in another place, "When I saw Michael Angelo's drawing that represents a man in a swoon, the expression of the relaxed muscles, the planes and reliefs of that face sinking under bodily suffering, gave me quite a succession of sensations. I felt myself like him, tormented by pain. I pitied him. I suffered in the same body, with the same limbs." This approaches the sort of ecstatic intoxication experienced by a Saint Francis or a Saint Catherine of Siena at the vision of the crucified Christ whose wounds and stigmata became impressed upon their own bodies.

There is more in this than mere analogy. It was not for nothing that the patron saint of François Millet was Francis of Assisi. In his strange asceticism, in the attraction exercised on him by suffering, I recognise the powerful impression of Christian thought. Millet (and this is the fundamental reason of his moral originality amid his contemporaries), Millet was religious in his soul. We shall see, later on, how passionately Christian was the environment from which he sprang and how Jansenist, how

 

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST IN A KNITTED CAP

Photograph—Braun, Clément & Co.]

 

almost Puritan was the atmosphere in which his character was formed. When he had to leave home to go to Paris his grandmother, who had a great influence upon his mind, said to him: "I would rather see you dead than apostate and unfaithful to God's commands." At a later time when he had begun to make his way in Paris she reminded him again: "Remember, my François, that you were a Christian before you were a painter; do not sacrifice to things indecent. . . . Paint for eternity, and think that the trump which will call to judgment is on the eve of sounding." These religious admonitions were in complete accord with Millet's feelings. From his childhood he had been brought up on devotional books, the Fathers of the Church, the ecclesiastical orators of the seventeenth century and above all the Bible, which he called "The Painters' Book." His first attempts were inspired by the Bible. "Some old Bible engravings," says Sensier, "gave him a wish to imitate them." When he first presented himself to a painter as a would-be pupil, he brought a drawing, the subject of which was taken from Saint Luke. He continually sought the Scriptures for allusions to his own thoughts or state, and translated these into pictures. In 1846 he expressed the evil attractions of Paris in a Temptation of Saint Jerome. In 1848 his exile from his mother and his kin inspired a Babylonish Captivity and a Hagar and Ishmael in the Desert. In 1851, racked by the thought of his mother, ill and far away, who "did not know either how to live or how to die, so greatly did she long to see him again," and was to die without having seen him because he had not money enough for the journey from Paris to Greville in Normandy, he painted Tobias and his Wife waiting, in the hope of their son's return. In this way he continued to mingle the Scriptures with his life. According to Burty, he had a scheme of "taking up, like Rembrandt, but from a French point of view, the interpretation of the Bible." In this department he confined himself to some attempts, such as Ruth and Boaz, and if in these he was not particularly successful, the reason is that his realistic genius lacked the poetic invention necessary to evoke scenes for which nature did not afford him models; he was closely bound to what he saw; but into all that he saw, he breathed the spirit of the Scriptures. His mind was full of them, he quoted them often (even a little too often for the taste of some of his friends); towards the end of his life he used often to read them of an evening to his family. In them lies the explanation of his pictures and of that ceaseless struggle of man with the earth which he never tired of painting and of which the significance is neither political nor social, but religious, and is expressed by those verses of Genesis that Millet so often repeated, verses which are the motto of his life and of his work:

"Cursed is the ground. . . . Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread!"

***

It was essential that attention should be called at the very beginning of this study to such exceptional religious and moral originality. This, far more even than his genius as an artist, assures to Millet his special place in French art of the nineteenth century—or, one might almost say, outside of that art. Few persons have felt this thoroughly. The comprehension of it demands a religious heart. It is not strange, therefore, that it should have struck Tolstoy, who in his book, "What is Art?" after bringing so severe an indictment against civilisation, excepts Millet and ranks his Angelus, and still more his Man with the Hoe, among the few paintings "which impart the Christian feeling of love for God and one's neighbour," the works of art which may be called "religious," and which fulfil the words of St John: "The union of men with God and with one another."

It is easily conceivable that such a view did not occur to the chosen minds of France. But the same reasons that set Millet apart from the chosen set him closer to the people, of whom he is almost the sole interpreter. It may be said that French art has remained no less aristocratic than in the seventeenth century, and that nothing links it to the main body of the nation. It is above all a Parisian art, and while the works of some few hundred dilettante

 

THE REST

Photograph—Giraudon]

 

and worldlings present France as a land of pleasure and free thought—which, in reality, it is not—Millet has this interest of his own: that he is the voice of those who are the majority and who do not speak because they are busy doing; those millions of dwellers in rural France who have remained obscurely religious and harshly enslaved by sorrow, who are, in fact, inimical to Paris, and, until the last few years, were indifferent to and apart from the apparent evolution of society. As Burty aptly says, Millet had genius enough to "draw forth the passive virtue of an agricultural race." The reason was that he belonged to that race. His whole life, from childhood to death, was spent amid the labours of peasants. He had all their passions and all their prejudices, the hatred of Paris and of the Parisian spirit and the ardent love of the land. He knew not only how to paint the ground but how to till it. He had been a good ploughman and was proud of it, and, on occasion, as he walked around Barbizon would set his hand to the plough and draw long, straight furrows across the plain. One of his friends, speaking of a portrait taken of him about 1861, which shows him standing against a wall, his head raised, his hat in his hand and his hair pushed back, his feet shod with heavy wooden shoes, compares him to "a peasant chief about to be shot." To the end he violently proclaimed his country origin as opposed to Paris. "I will never be made to bow. I will never have the art of Parisian drawing-rooms forced upon me. A peasant I was born, a peasant I will die. I will stay on my own soil without yielding so much as the breadth of a wooden shoe."

Finally, before beginning to study the life and work of Millet, I have to make one observation which especially concerns an English public. It is that this great peasant painter, the faithful representative in contemporary art of the French people, is by his temperament and his Biblical spirit more akin to the intellectual oligarchy of England or America than to that of France. Indeed it was by American and English people (as we shall see) that he was earliest understood; among them that he immediately found his first purchasers and his first pupils; and it is in their countries, I am convinced, that moral comprehension and love of his work will remain most pure. The one aim of this essay is to help in making Millet even better known and loved in England by showing how many affinities this great man—though so French in mind and style—had with England.

 

 

1. In all the world what pleasure has he seen?
   Lives any poorer on this round machine?
2. A. Sensier, "The Life and Work of J. F. Millet," 1881. I shall often have recourse to this book, which is a most precious collection of documents (letters and conversations) on the subject of Millet. Alfred Sensier (1815-1877), who was the intimate friend of Millet and Rousseau, and assisted them with touching devotion, was a second clerk in the Ministry of the Interior. His name deserves to remain associated with those of his great friends to whom he did so much good in their lives and whose features and souls he has preserved to posterity.