JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET
look at what I do, see the terrors and the splendours of night. I wish I could make them hear the songs, the silences, the rustlings of the air. I wish I could make infinity perceptible."
He mingled the poetry and emotion of his heart with everything that he saw. He is unique rather through the heart than through his art as a painter. That lofty, melancholy heart of his had none like it, save the heart of Michael Angelo. He is a kind of democratic Michael Angelo. "O Dante of the yokels, Michael Angelo of clowns" Robert Contaz called him, in a sonnet, in 1863. Some of his friends perceived, indeed, a certain physical likeness between Michael Angelo and him (rather, I imagine, in the general expression than in actual feature). See the portrait of Millet in a woollen cap, of the year 1847.
Assuredly Millet's disposition was remote from the heroic poetry and frenzied passion of the great Florentine. But he had an austere and pure realism of his own. He had also his amazing and eternal gravity. No ray of gaiety ever lightens his work. Everything
