Of what expressive poetry Meunier is capable we recognise with admiration in a statue of an animal, the mine-horse—one of those unfortunate nags which are brought to the mine as foals, in order to draw the coal waggons to the galleries, and who are condemned to spend the whole of their lives in the bowels of the earth, far from the sun. The animal’s head droops, its lips are flabby, eyes half-closed, ears sunken, flanks fallen in; the whole wretchedness of an innocent creature condemned to night and woe is embodied in this shivering beast. The mine-nag has certainly no sense of its disconsolate fate; it does not miss the sun, or long for green pastures. It does not envy its luckier brothers who can skip in the fresh grass beneath the blue sky. Meunier has all these feelings for it; he infuses them into the animal’s stupid soul; but doubly amazing is the power with which he himself can express through a coarse animal body humanly lofty tragedy. What had already become clear to me when I saw Meunier’s works separately in the _salon_ at the Champs de Mars, deepened itself within me, at the sight of the whole collection of them, into a certain conviction that Meunier is, perhaps unconsciously, a pupil of Millet’s. He learnt from him to look with reverence on the homely men who with holy zeal, without gazing to the left or right, with body and soul in their work, wrest the works of civilisation from the forces of nature. He improves Millet’s peasants and artisans into the plastic and monumental. It is the same simplicity, almost crudeness; the same contempt of pose, the same extreme energy of activity, and the same deep, inward life as in the master who painted the “Angelus.” And what makes the most vivid impression on us in Meunier, as in Millet, is the ardent piety with which the sight of true and earnestly working people fills him—people who rise high in their apparently humble, yet fruitful and, through its connection with the corporate life of mankind, especially significant labour. An artist, however, who discloses to us such outlooks on the path of civilisation, and such insight into the human soul, has some claim to a place near the acknowledged masters. III THE QUESTION OF STYLE