exist and we can trace, more or less clearly, the process by which the
final result was arrived at. At first we have merely a peasant sowing
grain; an everyday incident, truly enough observed but nothing more.
Gradually the background is cut down, the space restricted, the figure
enlarged until it fills its frame as a metope of the Parthenon is
filled. The gesture is ever enlarged and given more sweep and majesty,
the silhouette is simplified and divested of all accidental or
insignificant detail. A thousand previous observations are compared and
resumed in one general and comprehensive formula, and the typical has
been evolved from the actual. What generations of Greek sculptors did in
their slow perfectioning of certain fixed types he has done almost at
once. We have no longer a man sowing, but "The Sower" (Pl. 2),
justifying the title he instinctively gave it by its air of permanence,
of inevitability, of universality. All the significance which there is
or ever has been for mankind in that primæval action of sowing the seed
is crystallized into its necessary expression. The thing is done once
for all, and need never--can never be done again. Has any one else
had this power since Michelangelo created his "Adam"?

[Illustration: Plate 5.--Millet. "The Potato Planters."
In the Quincy A. Shaw Collection.]

If even Millet never again attained quite the august impressiveness of
this picture it is because no other action of rustic man has so wide or
so deep a meaning for us as this of sowing. All the meaning there is in
an action he could make us feel with entire certainty, and always he
proceeds by this method of elimination, concentration, simplification,
insistence on the essential and the essential only. One of the most
perfect of all his pictures--more perfect than "The Sower" on account of
qualities of mere painting, of color, and of the rendering of landscape,