people painted by Chardin live yet in a world where families receive their harvest and their bread straight from the hand of God.

leans with his elbow on the stone, and his pose is full of naïve grace, while the girl's "eavenly" is reflected in the perfect bliss of his countenance.

Nevertheless, charming as were the sub- J. F. Millet has brought a rare genius to jects of Chardin, and the spirit of his work, the work of interpreting the peacefulness of he was poor in drawing, and his figures are peasant life and its harmony with nature. stiff. He was a John Baptist in the wilder- He loves to paint it out-of-doors, where, in ness of an art which seemed to most a barn-yard or field, his figures are as much a crude reproduction of the lower picturesque part of the landscape as the trees or the Dutch school, and, so far as the tradition- grazing cattle. The rich colors of the womal coloring of Southern schools was con-en's dresses shine as if it were the chief emcerned, he was half clad. It is so through- ployment of the sun, for the time being, to out nature. The first specimens of new paint them, and the red in their cheeks retypes, however higher, are not so graceful as the completed forms of the lower. The first reptile is by no means so graceful as the last fish, and the ape is uglier than many of its real inferiors.

A

Charles Fortin painted poverty, too; not poverty patient and in serene unconsciousness, but merry. Fortin has almost the humor of Dickens. Lately, when I saw at the Olympic Theatre, in London, Mr. Halliday's admirable rendering of "Little Nell and her Grandfather," the scene of Dick Swiveller accompanying the bread-and-beer kitchen feast of the halfstarved "Marchioness" by a performance on his flute of "Away with Melancholy," at the end of which she cries, "It's 'eavenly!" the tableau recalled to me the picture by Fortin called "L'Essai d'une Vocation." kitchen girl pauses in her work of peeling apples, and, leaning back, with a smile of flattered delight quite worthy of the "Marchioness," criticises a performance on the flageolet with which she has just been entertained by a boy in rustic dress and huge wooden shoes. It is the Arcadian shepherd and shepherdess transferred to a Breton cottage, whose walls show signs of wear and tear, but which, one dare affirm, not all the troops of King William will prevent from sheltering happy hearts, or admitting through its cracks the blessed sunshine so long as it lasts. The youthful artist

ports fields of May-thorn and wild roses. With Millet art appears redeeming the laborer from the curse of toil. The rains and breezes, the fresh dews and the light, gather around his peasants as their cheery comrades. Take, for instance, "Des Glaneuses," bending so gracefully in the wide, hospitable field. The placid sky bends over them, the horizon bears no further than comfortable little farm-houses and stacks of wheat. These are their palaces, their pyramids, their Orient and Occident. Travel through the

continue to be an incessant round of hard manual toil in civilized France."

Mr. Jarves's admiration for Jules Breton beyond all the French domestic-genre painters arises in good part, I suspect, from his philosophy of art, which includes social amelioration, and, if I understand him rightly, even political reform, among the legiti mate aims of art. In this I can not agree with him. The frequent contrast between the sombreness of Breton's peasants and

to me a fault. Art at least has received a license from the universe to be an optimist. Whatever be the surrounding evil, for the artist the sun is always at the zenith. His business is to put whatever part of nature he paints-human nature as well as other— just where he wishes us to put his picture, in the best light. Goethe uttered the true voice of art when he wrote:

"What shapest thou here at the world? Tis shapen long ago:

The Maker shaped it, and thought it were best even 80."

world, they will not find any thing more beautiful than the azure above; the teeming fruit trees will yield to no Hesperides. Those poor, noisy, blasé people in Paris, how little of the sweetness of this wheat will they get with their café and their spiced entrées! The envious artist has good reason to shun the boulevards, and come out hither to celebrate, if he can not partake, the simple life which gladly lets the deluded world go by while it dwells still in the dear days when Adam delved and Eve span. The the splendors of nature around them seems story is told that a fine lady, who had ordered a picture of Millet, refused it afterward because the artist had painted in one part of it a basket of manure. The artist's eye saw in the basket green grass decked with violets, and golden sheaves, and the roses of children's cheeks. The lady persisted that it was only manure. But had she been able to see, as he did, all the glory of the basket, she could never have had another contented day in her brilliant salon. Nevertheless, after all has been said—and it would be hard to say too much of the grace and finish of Millet's pictures, he has not been the successful delineator of peasant life. There has been a certain monotony in his paintings. His landscapes and his skies have had variety, but his human figures have been too much like each other in look and action. It was an old problem of religious art how to make angels all equally beautiful and yet individual, and many failed in the attempt to solve it where Fra Angelico, almost alone, succeeded. But a corresponding problem awaited art in its return to the earth; and it is not by Millet that all the varieties of character and the play of life, masked under the sombre uniform of tanned skins and homespun dresses, have been discovered and revealed. For this inadequacy of invention, arising, perhaps, from a lack of the microscopic power of eye which detects vast differences under surface sameness, he has made up, to a great extent, by his power as a colorist. His rich colors excite the imagination of the beholder until it sees in the picture what the artist has not put in it.

The mention of J. F. Millet calls up at once the name of Jules Breton. In one respect Breton is the most notable of all the painters of poverty. His pictures report most impressively the democratic feeling which underlies the sympathetic school. Mr. Jarves, after his enthusiastic description of Breton's "Summer Evening," says, most justly, "The chord which vibrates deepest is the brooding sadness, mingled with that inquiring look toward the sinking sun, as if labor asked to know its future. Must it always be thus it seems to inquire of God. Those overworked, strong-limbed peasants may not feel so in their native fields; but Breton makes us anticipate the pertinent question -whether a poor woman's lot shall always

The reformer's zeal, much less his discontent, admirable elsewhere, is inconsistent with the repose of spirit which wins beauty to the side of the artist. M. Edmond About, in a criticism he made on Breton's "Bénédiction des Blés dans l'Artois" when it was exhibited in 1857, did not praise that picture as many felt it deserved; but he recognized felicitously the merit of the artist's colors and the comparative weakness of his figures. "Les choix de ses couleurs est toujours heureux; il a les mains pleines de lumière, et vous diriez qu'il dérobe au soleil des rayons choisis........ On compte trop des têtes de bois dans sa procession de paysans." But unless an artist sees peasants as potential Apollos and Madonnas he can not paint them.

Of Merlé and Henrietta Browne it must be said that they have done fine things, occasionally very fine things, in the direction of which I am speaking. But Merlé is feeble as a colorist, and Madame Browne is often not only heavy in colors but hasty in drawing. She can not give the sparkle of rustic life, nor is she strictly realistic. One can hardly believe that even in her charming picture, "The Puritans," she built the forms from the skeleton up to the clothing of flesh, and then to the drapery, as every true form must be produced. And, indeed, with these, as with many other artists of this school, there is a too frequent tendency to relapse into the vulgarity or mere humor of the Dutch school (out of which the sympathetic was indeed evolved), and interest us rather in some incident of common life, or some occasional performance, rather than in what these people profoundly are, and what they would be in any action, trivial or important.

All of these artists seem to me to be either

forerunners of or a chorus around the repre- | Louvre, felt a natural sorrow at the number sentative man of the French sympathetic of copyists he saw there, some of them eldschool, whose name I have placed at the head of this article.

Edouard Frère is, I freely admit, only the most perfect of his school; I do not know that he can be distinguished from it, unless in that his every work bears evidence of having resulted from a personal acquaintance with his peasants and a more patient study of his subjects. One feels quite sure that he has eaten and slept in the poor cottages he paints, that he has fascinated those children with sweet stories set in sugarplums. And, indeed, that is the exact fact. While the French artists whom the second empire raised, and whose reputations must fall with it, have been in the salons of Paris, and receiving imperial patronage and ribbons, Edouard Frère has been traveling about the by-ways of France, dressed in farmer's gray, chatting in barn-yards and hay-fields with peasants, getting into their good graces, and delighting them with his bonhomie and his pretty pictures. To him they unfolded all their little treasures, and their smiles lasted so long as he remained. Among the fashionable he is shy enough; among the poor he is a disguised prince with endless resources. He has harvested every district of France, always returning with golden sheaves.

There are few biographical notes of importance to be made concerning Frère. He was born in Paris in 1819, and at the age of seventeen entered the studio of Paul Delaroche, who recognized his genius. His first picture in any public exhibition appeared in 1843-Le Petit Gourmand," I think. He then did a vast deal of work; he was what the French called "fécond;" but there was never any hasty stroke-it was all industry. It was marvelous to the critics this character had come out of the studio of Delaroche. The stately swan had hatched out a wild creature, which took to the woods immediately. As the wood-birds take their color from the ground and the brown leaves, so there was a countrified look about this pupil of Delaroche; but the results were in this case certain œufs d'or which Parisian critics could not mistake. He painted the country children in all their performances and amusements, in a way that made him the Columbus of a before undiscovered world around the capital. "Le Petit Curieux," "Le Petit Saltimbanque," "Les Raisins," "La Cuisinière," "La Poule aux ŒŒufs d'Or," and many other early works (all painted before 1855), excited much interest, and began to appear in engravings among the people. This popularity among the peasants brought him the decoration of the Legion of Honor in 1852. He also received medals from the Expositions three times.

erly men, "who it was pitiful to think had passed through life without so much success as now to paint pictures of their own." But really nearly all the artists of Europe are copyists, if not of particular paintings inherited from other ages and places, still imitators of their style and aim. What should we say of Homer had he devoted himself to the portrayal of the life of ancient Egypt and the battles of Rameses, or of Dante had he occupied his pen with the dead ages of Chaldea? Just what we ought to say of the artists who to-day aim to report to us classic lands and periods instead of what they themselves see. There was something revolutionary in this quiet little Frenchman, who, even amidst the impressive classic and romantic figures of his master, said, "What he has done for dukes, saints, and heroes, I will try and do for these inglorious folk of the by-ways. The microscope reveals galaxies as wonderful as the telescope; and the heroisms of the cottage, the courtly splendors of the gypsy child with diamond eyes and hair woven of sunshine, all these are ensphered by grand laws, as the dewdrop is rounded by the law of the world." The rise of such a school of art in France corresponds with the rise of transcendentalism in Germany and in New England. It was an outflowering from St. Augustine's faith: "God is great in the great, but greatest in the small."

What I say of Frère I say of his school. He represents the one bud on the stem of art which promises a flower for the Western World. He who would do any thing great must be the son of his time, and his work must be rooted in the need of the hour. The tendency of thinkers in every department of human interest to attend to the lowly; of statesmanship to redress the slave, the pauper, the Irishman; of science to search dust and atoms; of romance to hover about the struggles of the poor-is reflected in France in things nearest France, and Beauty is her religion. We have had the art of heroes, that of saints, those of castles, wars, fables; we return to that which we had overlooked-shining at our doors. Unquestionably the chief secret of the novel effects produced by the artists of whom I have written is their resource of sympathy. Many years ago Ruskin said: "It is mainly because the one painter has communion of heart with his subject, and the other only casts his eye upon it feelinglessly, that the work of the one is greater than that of the other." The same author recognized the presence in the artist of human sorrows “a humble and romantic sympathy; a vague desire in his own mind to live in cottages rather than in palaces; a joy in humble Nathaniel Hawthorne, when he visited the things; a contentment and delight in make

shifts; a secret persuasion (in many respects | knows not how to mend them, and also that a true one) that there is in these ruined cot- the strange pleasure he feels in them must tages a happiness often quite as great as in kings' palaces, and a virtue and nearness to God infinitely greater and holier than can be commonly found in any other kind of place; so that the misery in which he exults is not, as he sees it, misery, but nobleness-poor and sick in body, and beloved."* And thus, being nowise sure that these things can be mended at all, and very sure that he

have some good reason in the nature of things, he yields to his destiny, enjoys his dark canal without scruple, and mourns over every improvement in the town, and every movement made by its sanitary commissioners, as a miser would over a planned robbery of his chest; in all this being not only innocent, but even respectable and admirable, compared with the person who has no pleas ure in sights of this kind, but only in fair façades, trim gardens, and park palings, and