Page:François-Millet.djvu/183

JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET whether his figures or colouring conform to a certain general idea of beauty, but what is his personal idea, and whether he has expressed it well. "Our matter of concern with the artist is his aim and the manner in which he has attained it," wrote Millet to Camille Lemonnier in 1872. And elsewhere, in a letter written in June 1863 to the critic Pelloquet, on the subject of the Man with a hoe: "It is not so much the things represented which make beauty as the necessity which has been felt of representing them; and that very necessity creates the degree of power with which the task has been executed." He means (for Millet's style, like Poussin's, is often abstract and obscure, and a commentary is not unnecessary), he means, that the beauty or ugliness of the object represented matters little. The thing that counts in art is the passionate impulse that compels the artist to create his work, and it is this passion which gives the work its power of expression, and consequently its beauty; for it is the same thing. "Beauty does not dwell in the face; it glows in the entirety of a figure, and in whatever suits the action of the subject. 165