the midday sun, its grain stacks and laborers and distant farmstead, all
tremulous in the reflected waves of heat, indistinct and almost
indecipherable yet unmistakable, is nearly as wonderful; and no one has
ever so rendered the solemnity and the mystery of night as has he in the
marvellous "Sheepfold" of the Walters collection. But the greatest of
all his landscapes--one of the greatest landscapes ever painted--is his
"Spring" (Pl. 10), of the Louvre, a pure landscape this time, containing
no figure. In the intense green of the sunlit woods against the black
rain-clouds that are passing away, in the jewel-like brilliancy of the
blossoming apple-trees, and the wet grass in that clear air after the
shower; in the glorious rainbow drawn in dancing light across the sky,
we may see, if anywhere in art, some reflection of the "infinite
splendors" which Millet tells us he saw in nature.

[Illustration: Plate 8.--Millet. "The First Steps."]

In the face of such results as these it seems absurd to discuss the
question whether or not Millet was technically a master of his trade, as
if the methods that produced them could possibly be anything but good
methods for the purpose; but it is still too much the fashion to say and
think that the great artist was a poor painter--to speak slightingly of
his accomplishment in oil-painting and to seem to prefer 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