with his aspiration for beauty. Above all, if we would have him
interpret for us our ideals we must have ideals worthy of such
interpretation. Without this co-operation on our part we may have a
better art than we deserve, for noble artists will be born, and they
will give us an art noble in its essence however mutilated and shorn of
its effectiveness by our neglect. It is only by being worthy of it that
we can hope to have an art we may be proud of--an art lofty in its
inspiration, consummate in its achievement, disciplined in its strength.




II

JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET


Jean François Millet, who lived hard and died poor, is now perhaps the
most famous artist of the nineteenth century. His slightest work is
fought for by dealers and collectors, and his more important pictures,
if they chance to change hands, bring colossal and almost incredible
prices. And of all modern reputations his, so far as we can see, seems
most likely to be enduring. If any painter of the immediate past is
definitively numbered with the great masters, it is he. Yet the popular
admiration for his art is based on a I misapprehension almost as
profound as that of those contemporaries who decried and opposed him.
They thought him violent, rude, ill-educated, a "man of the woods," a
revolutionist, almost a communist. We are apt to think of him as a
gentle sentimentalist, a soul full of compassion for the hard lot of the
poor, a man whose art achieves greatness by sheer feeling rather than by