his drawings and pastels to his pictures.  We have seen that he was a supremely able technician in his pot-boiling days and that the color and handling of his early pictures were greatly admired by so brilliant a virtuoso as Diaz.  But this “flowery manner” would not lend itself to the expression of his new aims and he had to invent another.  He did so stumblingly at first, and the earliest pictures of his grand style have a certain harshness and ruggedness of surface and heaviness of color which his critics could not forgive any more than the Impressionists, who have outdone that ruggedness, can forgive him his frequent use of a warm general tone inclining to brownness.  His ideal of form and of composition he possessed complete from the beginning; his mastery of light and color and the handling of materials was slower of acquirement; but he did acquire it, and in the end he is as absolute a master of painting as of drawing.  He did not see nature in blue and violet, as Monet has taught us to see it, and little felicities and facilities of rendering, and anything approaching cleverness or the parade of virtuosity he hated; but he knew just what could be done with thick or thin painting, with opaque or transparent pigment, and he could make his few and simple colors say anything he chose.  In his mature work there is a profound knowledge of the means to be employed and a great economy in their use, and there is no approach to indiscriminate or meaningless loading.  “Things are where they are for a purpose,” and if the surface of a picture is rough in any place it is because just that degree of roughness was necessary to attain the desired effect.  He could make mere paint express light as few artists have been able to do—­“The Shepherdess” is flooded with it—­and he could do this without any sacrifice of the sense of substance in the things on which the light falls.  If some of his canvases are brown it is because brown seemed to him the appropriate note to express what he had to say; “The Gleaners” glows with almost the richness of a Giorgione, and other pictures are honey-toned or cool and silvery or splendidly brilliant.  And in whatever key he painted, the harmony of his tones and colors is as large, as simple, and as perfect as the harmony of his lines and masses.

[Illustration:  Plate 9.—­Millet.  “The Shepherdess.”  In the Chauchard collection, Louvre.]

But if we cannot admit that Millet’s drawings are better than his paintings, we may be very glad he did them.  His great epic of the soil must have lacked many episodes, perhaps whole books and cantos, if it had been written only in the slower and more elaborate method.  The comparative slightness and rapidity of execution of his drawings and pastels enabled him to register many inventions and observations that we must otherwise have missed, and many of these are of the highest value.  His long training in seizing the essential in anything he saw enabled him, often, to put more meaning into a single rapid line