Page:François-Millet.djvu/202

JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET the possibility of indefinite extension; the tiniest corner of the horizon ought to be so painted as to make us feel that it is but a segment of the great circle which bounds our sight." And this, indeed, is the impression given by each of his pictures; none has the character of an isolated fact; it is part of a great whole. As the figures cannot be separated from the landscapes of Millet, as it would be impossible to take away the peasants seen in the open air "which makes them grey, brown and dull like the larks, the partridges and the hares of the field," so likewise none of his landscapes can be divided in our thoughts from the whole of nature, but calls up the vast expanses of the world that surround it. We feel that Millet, like Rousseau, "saw the universal before everything and in everything."

There was, moreover, as it were, a pre-established harmony between his genius and the scenery amid which he had chosen to dwell. The plain around the forest of Fontainebleau of which Millet had made the central point of his artistic existence, and of which the stretch is so vast, is not, as 184