Rousseau used to say that if you had not your picture in the first five lines you would never have it, and he laid down as a rule that whenever you worked on it you should go over the whole and keep it together, growing in all parts pari passu.  Wishing to give me a lesson in values one day as he was painting, he turned his palette over and painted a complete little scheme of a picture on the back of it, suggested by the subject before us as we looked out of the studio window.  He showed me his studies from nature, mere notes of form and of local color and pastel.  It was to me always a puzzle that, even in the educated art circles of Paris, Corot should have found so great a popularity as compared to that of Rousseau.  Without in the least disparaging the greatness of Corot’s best work, such for instance as the St. Sebastian and some other classical subjects, the names of which I cannot recall, the range of conception and treatment is limited as compared with that of Rousseau.  This alone would give Corot a lower rank, in the absence of a marked superiority in some special high quality—­superiority which does not exist, for the picked work of Rousseau possesses technical excellences all its own, as consummate as anything in the world’s landscape art, while the range of treatment and subject, so much greater in Rousseau than in Corot, puts the limited and mannered art of the latter as a whole in a distinct inferiority.

Of Millet I saw much less, but enough to know the man and his art, simple and human, the one as the other.  His love for manhood in its most primitive attainable types, those furnished by the peasant, was the outcome of his conception of art, such as the Greek of the early schools conceived it, the expression of humanity in a simple and therefore noble state, and of the honest, open, healthy nature of the man himself, averse to all sophistication of society, reverent of an ideal in art, and intolerant of affectations.  He conceived and executed his pictures in the pure Greek spirit, working out his ideal as his imagination presented it to him, not as the model served him.  The form is of his own day, the spirit of his art that of all time and of all good art, the elaboration of a type and not merely the reproduction of a picturesque model.  It is the custom now to class all peasant subjects, emulating the forms of Millet, as belonging to his art.  Nothing is more absurd, for the art of Millet was subjective, not realistic; it was in the feeling of the art of Phidias and the Italian renaissance, not in the modern pose plastique.  The peasant in it was merely incidental to his sympathy with ideal life.  Millet was himself a peasant, he used to say, and his moral purpose, if he had any, was the glorification, so far as art can effect it, of his class, the class which above all others in his eyes dignified humanity and held his sympathy.  This feeling was with him no affectation, but the deliberate, final conclusion of his life—­he reverenced the sabot and the blouse, the implements of tillage and work, as the Greek did his gods and the implements of war and glory; he saw humanity reduced to its simplest and most noble physical functions and possibilities, as the Greek did the perfection of the physical form, but he lacked the perception of the types of pure beauty of the Greek.