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 than another
could put into a day's painful labor, and some of his slightest sketches
are astonishingly and commandingly expressive. Other of his drawings
were worked out and pondered over almost as lovingly as his completest
pictures. But so instinctively and inevitably was he a composer that
everything he touched is a complete whole--his merest sketch or his most
elaborated design is a unit. He has left no fragments. His paintings,
his countless drawings, his few etchings and woodcuts are all of a
piece. About everything there is that air of finality which marks the
work destined to become permanently a classic.

[Illustration: Plate 10.--Millet. "Spring."
In the Louvre.]

Here and there, by one or another writer, most or all of what I have
been trying to say has been said already. It is the more likely to be
true. And if these true things have been said, many other things have
been said also which seem to me not so true, or little to the purpose,
so that the image I have been trying to create must differ, for better
or for worse, from that which another might have made. At least I may
have looked at the truth from a slightly different angle and so have
shown it in a new perspective. And, at any rate, it is well that true
things should be said again from time to time. It can do no harm that