Millet (Rolland)/Chapter 2

by Romain Rolland

 

II

Millet's Life up to the Time of his
Settling at Barbizon

 

 

Millet was a Norman. He was born on the 4th of October 1814 in the hamlet of Gruchy, in the parish of Gréville, the district of Beaumont, and the department of La Manche, north of Cotentin, in a region conspicuous for solid good sense and wild country. He was the second of eight children. The name of Jean was given to him after his father, and that of François in honour of St Francis of Assisi.

His family was a fine instance of that reserve of moral strength and dignified thought which often exists among the poorer French people. Tolstoy said, about one of the most famous realistic novels that have appeared in France during the last twenty years: "If the French people were such as it is depicted in this book, the whole history of France would become incomprehensible to me." How, indeed, could beings devoid of any ideal explain a history that is so frequently and so conspicuously full of idealism? The life of Millet would have satisfied him better; in it, he would have recognised types of some of those men who make the real greatness of a nation and often impart to its doings a character of heroism.

Strong bodily and moral health, absolute purity of conduct, strong religious faith and seriousness of mind distinguished all Millet's relatives. His father, Jean Louis Nicolas, was precentor of the parish church; he had some knowledge of music and conducted the rustic choir. It is curious to notice how nature sometimes tries her hand on the father before she succeeds in evolving the genius that will be realised in the son. Jean Louis Nicolas was a gentle, meditative man who had vague artistic instincts. He tried to model in clay and to carve in wood; he liked to observe animals, plants and people, and it was he who first showed François the beauty of the fields. He transmitted to him too his moral austerity, his chastity of mind and disgust for loose talking and jesting.

Millet's mother, Aimée Henriette Adelaide Henry, called du Perron, belonged to a family of rich farmers who had been reckoned gentlefolk. One of her great-uncles was a priest who had risked his life during the Revolution by his proud refusal to take the oath to the Constitution and deny his uncompromising faith; he, in person, was a Hercules and took pleasure in field labour. Another great-uncle was learned in chemistry; a third, a miller, used to read Pascal, Nicole, Montaigne and Charron. But the most original person of the family and the one who had most influence upon Millet was his grandmother, Louise Jumelin. She was an old countrywoman of intense religious faith, a Catholic Puritan living in God like a woman of Port Royal, seeing everything in God and mingling God in every scene of nature and every act of life. One of Millet's earliest recollections was of his grandmother awakening him when he was quite a little child and saying to him: "Up my little François! If you only knew what a long time the birds have been singing the glory of God."

These rare, aristocratic peasants had amazing libraries. The Port Royal books, Bossuet, Fénélon, St Francis of Sales, St Jerome and St Augustin were to be found in them. The boy Millet devoured this strong intellectual food. He had an especial passion for the Bible, which he read in Latin, and for Virgil, beloved by many other great French painters of the period: Delacroix, Corot and Rousseau. The Bucolics and the Georgics enchanted him. He tells us himself that when he came to the line: "It is the hour when the great shadows seek the plain"

Et jam summa procul villarum culmina fumant
Majoresque cadunt altes de montibus umbrae.^[1]

he felt quite disturbed and seized by emotion. As to the Bible, it has been said already that an old illustrated edition first inspired him with the idea of expressing himself in art. To this earliest stratum of his reading which gave him, unawares, the soul of a Frenchman of the seventeenth century, he by and by added a great number of other books. Millet all his life was a great reader. At twenty he discovered Homer, Shakespeare, Byron, Walter

 

THE READING LESSON

Photograph—Braun, Clément & Co.]

 

Scott^[2] and Goethe's Faust; Victor Hugo and Chateaubriand made a great impression upon him. It does not, however, appear that he ever underwent the fascination that romanticism exercised upon the young of his day. He always indeed retained a secret distaste for that touch of the morbid and fevered which belonged to some of the most attractive and most beloved of the romantic writers, such as Musset. "Musset gives one a fever," he said at a later time to his friend Marolle. "It is the only thing he can do. His is a charming, fanciful, deeply poisoned mind; he can only disenchant, deprive of hope or corrupt. The fever passes and leaves one enfeebled, like a man recovering from illness who needs fresh air, sunshine and stars." For his part he returned to the fresh air and the sunshine of the Bible, Homer and Virgil. To these he added Theocritus, with whom he was delighted and whom, according to Piédagnel, he came at last to prefer to his dear Virgil; then Dante and Milton, some of whose lines awoke a deep echo in him. Robert Burns, for whom he had a close fellow-feeling—Montaigne, Bernard Palissy, O. de Serres, Poussin's letters and Bernardin de St Pierre.^[3] Thus his literary knowledge was solid and essentially classical. He drew from it his sanity of mind, his balance and that calm manliness which detesting sentimentality, simper and inflation, speaks simply, soberly and strongly.

Much deeper than the impressions received from books must have been those made upon the boy Millet by nature. He has written his recollections of his early childhood cradled by the hum of spinning wheels, the noises of geese and cocks, the throb of the flail amid the grain, the church bells and ghost stories. His home, the picture of which he exhibited in the Salon of 1866, was a large thatched building of rough stones standing exposed to all the winds at the edge of a cliff and neighboured by an aged and stunted elm-tree. The sea was a little way from the village; it edged the horizon and filled the child with a sort of terror. He retained throughout life the remembrance of a storm when five or six vessels were wrecked hard by and when he saw a heap of dead bodies lying on the beach under a great sail. As soon as he was old enough to help his father and mother he worked with them in the fields, mowing, making hay, winnowing, ploughing, manuring, sowing, and so taking part personally in all those acts of rustic life, the poetic and mysterious grandeur of which he was afterwards to express. Through them he became more and more deeply attached to the soil and especially to that Norman soil which he never ceased to love. He never forgot his own country. "Oh how I belong to my own place!" he wrote, when he saw it again on the 12th of August 1871, a few years before his death.

His artistic proclivities showed themselves very early. As a child, when his relations were taking their afternoon sleep, he would draw the fields. His father knew enough to see and understand his vocation, but the family was poor, and the ground had to be tilled. Without a murmur, without a protest, little François submitted; and quite simply, with that entire absence of selfish ambition, that inborn stoicism which he showed throughout his life, he sacrificed his tastes in order to fulfil his duties to those around him. His father was remorseful. One day when François showed him a charcoal portrait done from memory of a bowed old man, he said: "My poor François, I see plainly that you are tormented by that idea; I should have been very glad to send you to learn that painting business which they say is such a fine one, but I could not; you are the eldest of the boys and I needed you too much. Now your brothers are growing up and I will not keep you from learning what you wish so much to know." They went together to Cherbourg to see a painter of the school of David, called Mouchel, an artist of no great distinction but a peasant at heart. Millet showed him two drawings of his own invention: one represented two shepherds, the other a man coming out of a house at night and distributing loaves, with these words of St Luke: "Et si non dabit illi surgeus eo quod amicus ejus sit, propter improbitatem tamen ejus surget et dabit illi quotquot habet necessarios."^[4] The stupefied painter said to the father: "You will be damned for having kept him back so long, for there is the stuff of a great artist in your boy." It was only from that day that Millet's artistic education began. He was then over twenty years of age.

He was hardly established at Cherbourg when his father fell ill of a brain fever; he returned hurriedly to the village, where he arrived in time to be present at the death-bed of his father, who died without recognising him (November 1835). Millet desired to give up painting once more, so as to stay at Gruchy, devote himself to his family and become the head of the household. It was his grandmother who told him that he "must accept the will of God," and obliged him to go back to Cherbourg. He there entered the studio of Langlois, who was a pupil of Gros, and regarded in the neighbourhood as a great man. Langlois, struck by his progress, begged an allowance from the town to enable Millet to go and study in Paris. 400 francs (₤20) were given him.

 

***

 

Millet left for Paris in January 1837. His family were very uneasy at beholding him go away to the city of perdition, to Babylon. He himself was full of remorse for leaving his mother and grandmother. The journey was a sad one. The country round Paris seemed to him "stage scenery." He arrived one January Saturday evening, when it was snowing, in "black, muddy, smoky Paris." He has narrated in an admirably written page, that depicts all the dark sadness and austere grandeur of his soul, the agonies that he, a humble peasant, healthy, religious and pure-minded, experienced on his first contact with the corrupt civilisation of a large town.

"The light of the street lamps, half quenched by the fog, the vast number of horses and carriages, jostling and crossing one another, the narrow streets, the smell and the atmosphere of Paris affected my head and my heart as if they would suffocate me. I was overtaken by a burst of sobs which I could not stop. I wished to be stronger than my feelings, but they overcame me with their whole power. I only succeeded in checking my tears by throwing into my face handfuls of water that I took from a street fountain. There was a print-seller there, and I looked at his pictures while I crunched my last apple from home. The lithographs displeased me greatly; they were scenes with grisettes in low dresses, women bathing, women dressing. Paris seemed to me lugubrious and insipid. I went away to a lodging-house where I spent my first night in a sort of continual nightmare. My room was but an ill-smelling hole with no daylight. At dawn I got up and rushed out into the air; light had come and I regained calm and determination; sadness remained and I remembered the lamentations of Job: "Let the day perish in which I was born, and the night in which it was said, 'There is a man child conceived.' It was thus that I accosted Paris, not cursing it, but in terror at understanding nothing of its material and spiritual life."

He had many things to suffer from Paris. It stifled him physically and morally. He could not breathe. His large countryman's appetite was distressed. He used to take his meals in taverns with coachmen from his own part of the country. He had letters of introduction of which he did not make use. He was morbidly touchy and so much afraid of Parisian mockery that he did not dare to speak to anyone, nor make any enquiries, nor even to ask his way to "the old museum," that is to say the Louvre, for which he consequently spent several days in searching, wandering haphazard about Paris. He was jealous of his independence and would not enter the Ecole des Beaux Arts because he dreaded the discipline. The pleasures and balls of the students disgusted him. He was absolutely alone and perishing of ennui. He fell ill of a fever which endangered his life. He would have gone home again but for the Louvre, the pictures and drawings in which (especially those of the Early Italians, of Michael Angelo and of Poussin) filled him with real ecstasy. We shall return, in the last chapter, to the estimates which he made of them and in which, while judging the masters whom he loved, he unconsciously depicted himself. It is to be remarked, however, that he made, so to speak, no copy of these works.

He finally decided to enter Delaroche's studio, where he had Couture, Hébert, Yvon and Feyen-Perrin for companions. He kept himself apart from the others. "The incomprehensible, weariful studio-slang and the puns tired him to death." As he was not of a patient temper and had great physical strength (as a child he had exercised his muscles in school battles) nobody dared to make too much fun of him; he was nick-named "the man of the woods." Delaroche, who had no genius at all but a great deal of intelligence and an intuition of genius, treated him with a mixture of esteem and hostility. Sometimes he would tell him harshly that he needed to be "ruled with a rod of iron," sometimes he would look at his work, sigh and go away without saying anything or giving any sort of advice; but when Millet left his studio he made endeavours to bring him back, saying to him: "You are not like everybody else." Millet worked his best and drew obediently from the antique; at a later date he told a friend that Delaroche used to make his pupils draw the statue of Germanicus once a fortnight, "which was a good deal." At last he could bear it no longer. As Delaroche himself said, "he knew too much and not enough" to follow these academic lessons. He left the studio and took a room with a companion in the Val de Grâce quarter. He went to the Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève to study the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer, Jean Cousin, Michael Angelo, Poussin, Vasari's Lives, and everything that could help him to closer intimacy with his great friends of the past.

These were years of bitter poverty. In order to live, Millet had to paint imitations of Watteau, whom he did not like, and of Boucher, who disgusted him. He held out a long time against this humiliation but his comrade persuaded him. Sometimes he returned to the Bible and painted Jacob in the tents of Laban or Ruth and Boaz. He sold these works at from five to ten francs apiece. Every year from 1838 to 1840 he went to spend some

 

PORTRAIT OF MILLET PAINTED BY HIMSELF

Photograph—Braun, Clément & Co.]

 

weeks at Gruchy, where he took portraits of his relations. He managed to lose the wretched pension of 300 francs which the municipality of Cherbourg paid him irregularly, by painting too realistic a likeness, which was not considered sufficiently respectful, of a recently deceased mayor. On the other hand, the stir made by this affair and the success of his first exhibited work in the Salon where a portrait by him was hung in 1840, attracted to him the sympathies of young people in his own neighbourhood. A young girl fell in love with him and he married her in November 1841. This happiness was a source of fresh and cruel sorrows to Millet. His wife was delicate; she was constantly ill during the few years she spent beside him; their life was very hard; in 1842 the Salon refused Millet's pictures; it was a daily struggle for existence. The poor wife was too weak to resist. She died, after long sufferings, in April 1844. Millet was again alone. He did not long remain so. On another journey to Cherbourg he made the acquaintance of a young girl who loved him silently, Catherine Lemaire, of Lorient. He married her in 1845. She was to be the faithful partner of his whole life, the unshaken friend who shared his trials with him, and like him, patiently and stoically.

 

***

 

Trials were not wanting. When once Millet had gone back to Paris with his wife, he was now without means of leaving it to see his mother again. "I was nailed to a rock," he said, "and condemned to hard labour without end." He painted a Saint Jerome, which was refused by the Salon of 1846. Not having money enough to buy another canvas, he painted Oedipus released from the Tree upon the same. He made visible efforts, at this time, to conquer the hostility of his judges by a scrupulous regard to form, and did not yet give his mind to expressing his personal thought. If these efforts had no success with the general public, they at least attracted the attention of critics like Théophile Gautier and Thoré, and painters like Diaz, Couture and Troyon. It was at this date too that he made the acquaintance of Alfred Sensier, whose beautiful book was to preserve for us so faithful and pious an image of him. Children had been born to him. His indigence was extreme; his wife and he concealed it with dignity. But life in Paris became more and more burdensome to him; he liked no part of it; he remained indifferent and an alien, in the bottom of his heart hostile to the artistic, literary and philosophic movement and the political agitations that eventually brought about the Revolution of 1848.

The Revolution, however, was not useless to him. When it broke out Millet was at the end of his resources and was seriously ill. The Salon of 1848 was opened freely to everybody; the Republic had abolished the hanging committee. Millet who for some time past had been trying his hand at painting national types, mechanics, quarrymen, navvies, the poverty-stricken beggars, etc., exhibited his first great picture of the people's life—The Winnower.^[5] This marks a date in French art and it is noteworthy that it so exactly coincides with the popular revolution. Théophile Gautier was much struck by The Winnower. The new government which displayed an interest in all innovators and had just been showing particular favour to Theodore Rousseau and Dupré, gave Millet 500 francs for his picture; and Ledru Rollin gave him a commission for 1200 francs. These marks of the Republic's good will to artists did, no doubt, attract Millet for the moment towards politics; for we find him taking part—not successfully, however—in a competition for a projected statue of the Republic. He represented her without a red cap, crowned with ears of wheat and holding out in one hand honey-cakes and in the other a palette and brushes—such, in a word, as his imagination must have dreamed her, a goddess of the peasant and the artist. He also made a couple of chalk drawings in which the sentiment is much more high flown, and which still exist; in one of them Liberty is to be seen dragging kings by the hair of the head, in the other victoriously brandishing her spear.

This attack of Jacobinism did not last long. The insurrection of July broke out; poverty

 

THE WINNOWER

Photograph—Braun, Clément & Co.]

 

came back. Millet drew title-pages for songs and did not get paid for them; he was brought to the point of exchanging drawings for shoes and pictures for a bed; in a fortunate moment when he was quite destitute, an order came in for 30 francs from a midwife who wanted a sign-board. His distaste for politics received the finishing touch when he was obliged to defend the Assembly against the insurgents, and to assist in taking the barricades in the Rochechouart quarter. These scenes inspired him with a horror of war. To escape these sad impressions he went out of Paris as much as he could; he would go to the plain of Montmartre or to St Ouen, filling his eyes and his memory with everyday rustic scenes, and when he got home would paint his impressions: horses at a drinking trough, or oxen being led to the slaughter-house. Thus, he made his way dimly towards the decisive hour in which he was to attain full comprehension of his genius and to break every link with Parisian art.

For some years he had been feeling his way, hesitating to declare himself and continuing to paint pictures of peasant life and academic pictures at the same time. The words of an unknown speaker brought the crisis. Walking one day in Paris, Millet paused to look at a reproduction of one of his works in a shop window. He heard a passer-by say to a friend: "That's by Millet, who paints nothing but naked women." To him these words were the cruellest of insults. He went home and said to his wife: "If you choose, I will never do any more of this sort of painting; our life will be harder than ever, and you will have to suffer, but I shall be free and accomplish what has long filled my mind." Without any discussion Madame Millet courageously replied, "I am ready; do what you wish." Thenceforward Millet became Millet the peasant painter.

 

 

1. "And now all around and afar smoke rises from the roofs of farms and the large shadows fall from the high mountains."
2. On reading Scott again at a later time he perceived that he no longer found any pleasure in his works.
3. On the other hand his scientific knowledge was extremely weak and indeed almost non-existent. In mathematics, he says himself that he did not go beyond addition. "I understand nothing about subtraction or the later rules."
4. "Though he will not rise and give him because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him as many as he needeth."—Luke xi. 8.
5. Millet sent a Babylonish Captivity to the Salon at the same time, the canvas of which he afterwards made use of (as he had done with the St Jerome) for the Woman Sheep-Shearing.