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 aesthetic 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
thought about it himself, he did so because he could treat this material
_pictorially_ with more freedom and less artificiality, with more zest
and enthusiasm, with a deeper sympathy and a more intimate knowledge of
its artistic characteristics, its pictorial potentialities.
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