JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET
often ridiculous and their good taste doubtful; but what a power of creation, and how their rough good humour recalls past times! It is all as childish as a fairy-tale and as real as the simplicity of bygone ages. There are recollections in their art of the Lancelots and the Amadises. One could stay for hours before these kind giants." The most curious and characteristic of these judgments of Millet's is, in its very narrowness that which he delivers in a single line upon Velasquez. He never liked him. He understands, he says, the beauty of his painting: "but his compositions seem to me to have nothing in them."
His favourite masters were the Italian primitives, the French masters of the seventeenth century, and Michael Angelo.
It was a moral sympathy which drew him particularly to the primitives. He loved "these gentle masters who have made the creature so fervent, that it becomes beautiful—and so nobly beautiful, that it becomes good." Their piety, their simplicity and their suffering moved him. "I have retained," he said, "my first leaning towards the primitive masters, towards their subjects which are as simple as child-
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