sommaire_ quite unlike the beautiful simplifications of Raphael or
Ingres, or indeed any of the great masters. They could simplify
without becoming rudimentary; Chavannes cannot.

And now a passing word about the handicraft, the manner of using the
brush. Chavannes shares the modern belief-and only in this is he
modern--that for the service of thought one instrument is as apt as
another, and that, so long as that man's back--he who is pulling at
the rope fastened at the tree's top branches--is filled in with two
grey tints, it matters not at all how the task is accomplished. Truly
the brush has plastered that back as a trowel might, and the result
reminds one of stone and mortar, as Millet's execution reminds one of
mud-pie making. The handicraft is as barbarous in Chavannes as it is
in Millet, and we think of them more as great poets working in a not
wholly sympathetic and, in their hands, somewhat rebellious material.
Chavannes is as an epic poet whose theme is the rude grandeur of the
primeval world, and who sang his rough narrative to a few chords
struck on a sparely-stringed harp that his own hands have fashioned.
And is not Millet a sort of French Wordsworth who in a barbarous
Breton dialect has told us in infinitely touching strains of the noble
submission of the peasant's lot, his unending labours and the
melancholy solitude of the country.

As poet-painters, none admires these great artists more than I, but
the moment we consider them as painters we have to compare the
handicraft of the decoration entitled "Summer" with that of Francis
the First meeting Marie de Medicis; we have to compare the handicraft
of the Sower and the Angelus with that of "Le Bon Bock" and "L'enfant
a Pepee"; and the moment we institute such comparison does not the
inferiority of Chavannes' and Millet's handicraft become visible even