But in spirited etchings he has likewise represented old weather-beaten walls, the bright films of spring, the large outlines of peasant folk, the tender down of young chickens, the light play of the wind upon the sea, murmuring brooks, and quiet haunts of the wood. Like Millet, he had in an eminent degree the gift of simplification, the greatest quality that an artist can have. With three or four strokes he could plant a figure on its feet, give life to an animal, or construct a landscape. He was the most intimate friend of Jean François Millet, and painted part of what Millet painted also. CHAPTER XXVI JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET Whence has _Millet_ come? It was the time when art, still blind to the life around, could find no subjects worthy of it except in the past and in the distance. Then Millet came and overthrew an art vegetating in museums or astray in tropical countries. It was the time when Leopold Robert in Italy tested the noble pose of the school of David upon the peasant, and when the German painters of rustics recognised in the labourer an object for pleasantries and pathetic little scenes. Then Millet stepped forward and painted, with profound simplicity, the people at work in the field, or in their distress, without sentimentality and without beautifying or idealising them. That great utterance, "I work," the utterance of the nineteenth century, is here spoken aloud for the first time. Rousseau and his fellow-artists were the painters of the country. Millet became the painter of the labourer. He, the great peasant, is the creator of that painting of peasants which is entwined with the deepest roots of intimate landscape. Misunderstood in the beginning, it proclaimed for the first time the new gospel of art before which the people of all nations bow at the present date. What others did later was merely to advance on the path opened by Millet. And as time passes the figure of this powerful man shines more and more brilliantly. The form of Jean François Millet rises so powerfully, so imperiously, and so suddenly that one might almost imagine him to have come from Ibsen's third kingdom; for he is without forerunners in art. An attempt has been made to bring him into relation with the social and political movement of ideas in the forties, but certainly this is unjust. Millet was in no sense revolutionary. During his whole life he repudiated the designs which some of the democratic party imputed to him, as well as the conclusions which they drew from his works.