may say perhaps without being too fanciful, a truly symphonic quality
that renders them unique. "The Suicide" is like a chord on a violin. But
it is when we come to speak of the "Fontainebleau Group," in especial, I
think, that the æsthetic susceptibility characteristic of the latter
half of the nineteenth century feels, to borrow M. Taine's introduction
to his lectures on "The Ideal in Art," that the subject is one only to
be treated in poetry.

Of the noblest of all so-called "schools," Millet is perhaps the most
popular member. His popularity is in great part, certainly, due to his
literary side, to the sentiment which pervades, which drenches, one may
say, all his later work--his work after he had, on overhearing himself
characterized as a painter of naked women, betaken himself to his true
subject, the French peasant. A literary, and a very powerful literary
side, Millet undoubtedly has; and instead of being a weakness in him it
is a power. His sentimental appeal is far from being surplusage, but, as
is not I think popularly appreciated, it is subordinate, and the fact
of its subordination gives it what potency it has. It is idle to deny
this potency, for his portrayal of the French peasant in his varied
aspects has probably been as efficient a characterization as that of
George Sand herself. But, if a moral instead of an æsthetic effect had
been Millet's chief intention, we may be sure that it would have been
made far less incisively than it has been. Compare, for example, his
peasant pictures with those of the almost purely literary painter Jules
Breton, who has evidently chosen his field for its sentimental rather
than its pictorial value, and whose work is, perhaps accordingly, by
contrast with Millet's, noticeably external and superficial even on the
literary side. When Millet ceased to deal in the Correggio manner with
Correggiesque subjects, and devoted himself to the material that was
really native to him, to his own peasant genius--whatever he may have