Romain Rolland

“ It is a vast battle of which the year beholds the epic incidents: seed-time, harvest, red sunsets, pallid dawns, storms, the fall of the leaf, the passage of migrating birds, the succession of days and months; for nothing is insignificant, everything seems to play its part in this warfare between man and nature. Even in landscapes from which the human figure is absent, and in which day is breaking over sleeping lands, the conflict is heard muttering, ready to break out afresh. ”

“ 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 childhood, their unconscious expressions, their individualities which say nothing, but feel themselves overburdened by life, or suffer patiently without cries or complainings, undergoing the human law without even having an idea of asking satisfaction from any body. ”

“ And this, indeed, is the impression given by each of his pictures; none has the character of an isolated fact; it is part of a great whole. As the figures cannot be separated from the landscapes of Millet, as it would be impossible to take away the peasants seen in the open air "which makes them grey, brown and dull like the larks, the partridges and the hares of the field," so likewise none of his landscapes can be divided in our thoughts from the whole of nature, but calls up the vast expanses of the world that surround it. ”

“ There is no love; there are few or no anecdotes; he rarely paints young men; and the women whom he represents are all at work; they are sewing, turning hay, shearing sheep, carrying pails or fulfilling motherly duties, feeding and teaching children. The highest poetry and the only joy of his work lies in family affection. There is no room here for useless beauty. Millet said of Jules Breton's country girl: "They are too pretty to stay in the village." On every man and every woman he imposes the necessity of work. ”

“ Thence arise all those great qualities of Millet's work which may be called oratorical: their solid composition, their logic, their feeling of rhythm, their imperious unity which forces itself upon the mind like a fine speech. He taught Wheelwright the necessity of concentrating his attention upon his subject, seeing the principal point, and subordinating all the rest to it. A picture demands unity, equilibrium, poise and harmony, and this ought, according to Millet, to exist even between the picture and its frame. ”

“ The matter would rather seem to be a book than a picture. "Characterisation, that is the aim," wrote Millet again. "In art one must have a main thought, express it eloquently, preserve it in oneself and communicate it to others strongly as though by the die of a medal." ”

“ I imagine that, at first sight Rembrandt must have appeared to him too much of a "virtuoso;" and he could never endure "virtuosity." "Rembrandt," he said, "did not repel me, but he blinded me." Only by degrees did Millet reach the profound truth and the sublime heart of Rembrandt. On the other hand though he was shocked by Rubens he forgave him everything because he was "strong." "I always liked what was powerful, and would have given all Boucher for a naked woman by Rubens." Millet passionately loved strength; and his usual designation of the masters was the strong men. ”

“ This is the antique in painting." Even Baudelaire, when he desires to criticise Millet whom he does not like, does so not by denying but by emphasising the classical nature of his talent. "M. Millet," he says, particularly aims at style; he does not conceal the fact, he displays it and glories in it. But style does not succeed with him. Instead of simply drawing out the poetry inherent in his subject, he wishes, at all costs, to add something to it. All his peasants are outcasts on a small scale and have pretensions to philosophy, and melancholy, and the Raphaelesque." ”

“ He imprints the moral physiognomy of beings and things in an indelible way. His vigorous mind, clear and free from complexities, imparts relief and noble expression to the outline, to the drawing that marks the limits of an object or a figure; he suppresses secondary details; he generalises the scheme. By these means he attains effects of epic power. A humble figure, a shed, an abandoned plough in a desert expanse, assume aspects of grandeur; the smallest gesture acquires a large solemnity. ”

“ And while Millet's faults are mitigated here, his virtues show themselves at their full value. His modelling is magnificent and his touch large; these chalk drawings are works made to be seen at a distance, tone melts into tone, and their general effect is decorative.
In the case of an artist who subordinates the whole work to one leading idea, the value of the work is the value of the idea; details can never save it. It will be frankly good or bad; there is no middle course. ”

“ But he mistrusted these too easy effects; he was afraid of sentimentality and might well have said, as Michael Angelo did to Francis of Holland: "good painting will never draw a tear." He particularly delighted in the first and last hours of the day, when the light falls level upon the upturned furrows as in The Angelus and when the distances are bathed in a fine powdery light, as in some of his Shepherds and Shepherdesses. And in spite of all this it cannot be said that he is a painter of half-tones. ”

“ It is evident that all this does not deal with plastic beauty. The only beauties that Millet seems to require from painting are clearness and force. "I would rather say nothing than express myself feebly." His are the conceptions of a writer, an orator, a man of action, a great intellectual artist whose aim is less to please by his work than to move men by his thought and his will. ”

“ He explains himself clearly upon the point. "With us, art is no longer anything more than an accessory, a drawing room accomplishment, whereas formerly, and even down to the middle ages it was one of the columns of ancient society, its conscience and the expression of its religious feeling." The blame of this decadence lies not only with the artists; it rests on the whole of society and especially upon those who direct it or claim to direct it, the intellectual aristocracy: "What have the best brains of our period done for art? ”

“ Every line, every touch, as he showed Wheelwright, has a meaning. One must make oneself master of it. One must learn to see, that is to say, to draw [11] —to seize the "drawing of things," that is to say the vital and essential qualities of things. "The drawing of things," as Poussin says, "must be the exact expression of the ideas of things."
This point can only be reached if we are strongly moved by what we see. Impression forces expression. "I should like to do nothing which was not the result of an impression received from the appearance of nature, either in landscape or in figures.... ”

“ There will be no limit. Your picture may prolong itself indefinitely; you will never reach the end of it. You will never have finished. The whole is the only thing that is finished in a picture. Strictly speaking you might do without colour, but you can do nothing without harmony.'"
There are so many points of resemblance between some passages of this fine painting lesson and Millet's judgments that we may believe these principles to have been brought to maturity by the two friends in common, and that both must often have studied Poussin. ”

“ And as the hours of the day go on, this silent struggle continues, ever harsher, ever fiercer beneath the consuming sun, until man is worn out; conquered by his own victory like the Man with a hoe, standing, bent, his body broken, his mind annihilated, in the glory of the light, or the Vine-dresser resting, with his burning eyes, his open mouth, his arms dropping between his outstretched legs, sitting, damp with sweat, stifled with heat;—until at last the inevitable end comes, and Death sets a limit to the long task and the many hardships ”

“ To paint men in the sincerity of their nature and their habits, at their work, accomplishing their civic and domestic duties, with their actual countenances, above all without posturing; to surprise them in the undress of their consciousness, as an aim of general education: such seems to me the real starting point of modern art." But Proudhon wished to make art subserve political ends, and Millet would not have that. Moreover Proudhon does not so much as name Millet, and his whole book seems written to extol Courbet alone. ”

“ No matter what the subject may be, there is always a principal object upon which your eye rests continually; the other objects are but complementary, they interest you less; beyond them, there is nothing for your eye: this is the true limit of the picture. ”

“ The aim of art is not form but expression. "To have done a certain number of things which say nothing is not to have produced something. He writes to Sensier on the 21st of October 1854, "There is only production where there is expression." Therefore Millet hated mere executive skill. "Woe to the artist who shows his talent rather than his picture! ”

“ Art began to weaken from the moment when people no longer rested directly and simply upon impressions coming from nature, and when executive cleverness at once came to take nature's place: then began the decadence. ”

“ The painter does not make it spring into life on the canvas: he removes one after another the veils which concealed it," do we not seem to hear Poussin saying in his pride of intellect, after conceiving the idea of a picture: "The thought of it has been fixed, and that is the principal thing."
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One of the natural consequences of Millet's intellectuality is that he was perhaps even greater still in his drawings than in his paintings. He felt himself more at ease in them. To pastels and drawings he gave his best work in the last stage of his life, after 1864. ”

“ It is well to remark, however, that these principles are not those of Millet alone, but of Théodore Rousseau too, though he appears so unlike Millet and so much occupied with technical method and with arrangement of colours. The Barbizon painters are not, whatever may be supposed, essentially colourists; they have, above all, the classic French sense of composition, of the central idea and the unity of the whole. "Form is the first thing to be observed," said Rousseau to one of his pupils, M. L. Letronne. "Every touch is to be of value to the whole and to express something." ”

“ Beauty is expression." Thus beauty is in the mind not in the body. Poussin wrote in the same way: "Beauty is altogether apart from the material body." And Lomazzo, the theorist of Michael Angelo's school, said: "La bellezza è lontana dalla materia." [12] Millet continues: "We may say that everything is beautiful if it comes in its right time and place, and on the contrary that nothing can be beautiful if it comes in the wrong place. Which is more beautiful, a straight tree or a twisted tree? ”

“ The accessories of their people are 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. ”

“ But of all the Italians of the fifteenth century, the one who seems to have moved him most deeply is the harsh and tragic Mantegna. "Masters of his kind have an incomparable power. They throw in your face the joys and sorrows that possess them." ”

“ Everywhere must be a ruling idea, the "mother-idea," which governs the work, and according to the laws of which all the elements that contribute to the action are co-ordinated on a rigorous plan—all others being mercilessly shorn away as useless. ”

“ Poussin and Mantegna unhesitatingly sacrifice beauty to style, and neither Poussin nor Mantegna, nor yet Michael Angelo is, truly speaking, a colourist; their colour is their weak point and Poussin, who recognizes this, does not hesitate to hold colour very cheap. "The singular application bestowed on the study of colour," said he, "is an obstacle which prevents people from attaining the real aim of painting; and the man who attaches himself to the main thing ”