A Talk about M. Millet and Mr. Stevenson, and from Mr. Pennell
The ride from Melun to Barbizon and through the Forest of Fontainebleau was a pilgrimage within a pilgrimage. Like Christian, we were tempted to desert the straight course, and, like him, we yielded. We turned out of our sentimental way to see M. Millet’s house for pleasure.—To be strictly truthful, I must add that another good reason for going by Barbizon was the knowledge that the pavé of the national road only comes to an end at Fontainebleau, together with our eagerness to be out of the train and riding again as soon as possible.—By following the Chailly and Barbizon road to the Forest we could have our desire and spare the tricycle.
It considerately cleared with the early afternoon, and the cloud masses, now white and soft, drifted apart, to leave blue spaces between.—We had a shower or two, but so light we were not wet; and presently the sun coming out set the rain-drops on the bushes and heather by the wayside to glittering.
Not far from Melun we met four bicyclers. Much has been said about the “freemasonry of the wheel.” There is a pleasant suggestion of good-fellowship in the expression, but I think it merely means that cyclers, who abroad will speak to any other cycler who gives them the chance, at home ignore all but friends and acquaintances. At least this is the definition which French, like English, riders practically accept.—Of the four near Melun, two wheeled by as if they did not see us, and the third tried not to smile. The fourth, however, wished us a Bon jour, but it was scarcely disinterested. It turned out he had just ordered a Rotarie from Bordeaux, and wanted to know some thing of the system of our tandem.——
In how many ways could it be used, for example? and what time could we make on it?
—The freemasonry in his case only carried him over level ground. At the foot of the first hill he left us.
We were in a humour for fault-finding. The luggage-carrier, of course, was to blame. Like Christian, we were punished for going out of our way, I suppose. Certain it is that before long we stood still, as he did, and wotted not what to do.—If the blacksmith at Beaumont had been a little more serious in his work, the accident in Paris might not have happened; or indeed, to go back to the beginning of the evil, if Humber & Co. had only known as much as they think they know about their own business, we should not have found ourselves half-way to Chailly with the luggage-carrier hanging on by one screw.—We managed to keep it in place after a fashion; but there was no riding fast, and I do not believe in the whole course of our journey we ever sighted a town so joyously as we did Chailly, lying “dustily slumbering in the plain.”
In our struggles we had pulled off a strap, and I went to the harness-maker’s to see if it could there be re-fastened, while J—— knocked at the blacksmith’s. For five minutes no one answered; and then at last an old woman, clean and neat as her village, opened the door, and made quite a show of briskness by asking what I wanted. She said of course the matter could be attended to. But when I represented I must have it done at once——
“My dear Madam, it is impossible,” she said. “The workmen have been gone two days, and I cannot tell when they will return.”
—At the blacksmith’s J——’s knocks summoned only two children, who stared as if nothing was more unlooked for at the shop than a customer.—Our needs were urgent, and it was useless to attempt to make them understand. J—— went boldly in, and helped himself to wire and a nail.—While he was blacksmithing for himself their mother came out and bade him take whatever he wanted. The workmen had been away a week, and she did not know when they would be back again.—That workmen should leave Chailly to find something to do did not seem surprising. The only wonder was they should think it worth their while to stay there at all.—As we stood in front of the shop, J—— mending the luggage-carrier with an energy I am sure had never gone to the operation before, a little diligence carrying a young lady and an artist in Tam o’ Shanter—there was no mistaking his trade—passed with a great jingling of bells. But even it failed to awake Chailly from its slumbers.
The blacksmith’s wife refused to take any money for the wire and nail.—However, J—— insisting on making some payment, the woman told him he could give sous to the children. I have never seen anything to equal her honesty. When she found that two of her neighbour’s little girls had come in for a share of the profits, she forced them to relinquish it, while she would not allow her own children to keep more than two sous a-piece. Nothing we could say could alter her resolution, and with Spartan-like heroism she seized the extra sous and thrust them into J——’s hand.
After experiencing these things, we rode out on the great plain of Barbizon. It would be affectation to pretend we did not at once think and speak of Millet. Was it not partly to see his house and country we had come this way? His fields, with here and there scattered grey boulders, and in the middle distance a cluster of trees, stretched from either side of the road to the far low horizon, the beauty of their monotony being but accentuated by the afternoon’s soft cloud-shadows. It seemed to us a bright, broad prospect, though I suppose we should have found it full of infinite sadness.—There was not much pathos in near cabbage-patches glowing and shining in two o’clock sunlight, and we could not believe the weariness of the peasants to be quite genuine. Their melancholy seemed less hopelessness, than consciousness of their duty to pose as pathetic features in the landscape.—Even an old woman, a real Millet, with sabots and handkerchief turban, and a bundle of grass on her back, stopped on her homeward way to strike a weary attitude on a stone heap by the wayside the minute she saw J——’s sketch-book.—The peasants of Barbizon have not served an apprenticeship as models for nothing. They have learned to realise their sufferings, and to make the most of them.——
“Now I know,” said J——, putting up his sketch-book, “if I were to tell her to put her arms or her legs or head in another position, she would say, ‘Mais non, Monsieur, it was thus I posed for Monsieur Millet,’ or Monsieur somebody else. Bah! it’s all a fashion!”
—The old woman, disappointed, got up and walked onwards, to be speedily out-distanced by us.
But J——, as is his habit when he once “gets going,” went on.——
“How’s a picture painted here nowadays any way? Nothing could be simpler. First you get your model;—she’s most probably stood for hundreds of other men, and knows more about the business than you do yourself; your master tells you how to pose her; you put her in a cabbage-patch or kitchen prepared for the purpose, like those in Chailly, for example; paint the background as carefully as you know how, and your picture’s made. It’s easier to learn how to paint than to find motives for yourself; so follow as closely as possible in other men’s steps; choose the simplest subjects you can; above all, be in the fashion. There are as good subjects at home as in Barbizon for Americans who would but go and look for them.”
—By this time, fortunately, we were in Barbizon, and the necessity of evolving a French sentence with which to ask his way brought J——’s lecture to an end.—There could be no doubt that the village was the headquarters for artists. Here and there and everywhere, among the low grey gabled houses, were studios; and scarcely were we in the village street before we found an exhibition of pictures.—It has been recorded that already Barbizon’s artistic popularity is waning, and that even its secondary lights have deserted it. We were convinced of its decline when we saw that several of the studios were for rent, and confirmed in this conviction by a visit to the Exhibition. It was a shade worse than a Royal Academy, and at a first glance appeared to be a collection of fireworks. On a close examination the fireworks resolved themselves into green trees sprawling against patches of vivid blue sky, and flaming yellow flowers growing in rank luxuriance in low-toned plains.—There were one or two Millets, of course; but what would Millet himself have said to them? It is only fair to add that a few small unpretending canvases were not without merit.
From what we saw in Barbizon, I do not think it improbable that in another generation there will not be an artist in the village, and that Millet will have been forgotten by the villagers.—Though his family still live there, the children of the place seem to know nothing of his greatness. The first boys of whom we asked the way to the house, pointed vaguely down the long winding street, and thought, but were not quite sure, we should find it if we kept straight on. After we left the Exhibition, other boys whom we questioned declared they had never heard the name of Millet; and when we refused to let them off so easily, told us we must go back in the very direction from which we had come. No, we insisted, it was not there.——
“Ah!” they thought, “Monsieur must mean Monsieur Millet le charbonnier.”
—Such is fame at home!
Finally, after many explanations on our part, and conversation with unseen elders behind a garden wall on theirs, a man near by explained just where the Maison Millet was.
A few steps farther on we reached it. As, I suppose, many other pilgrims have done, we sat a while on the shady stone seat opposite. A rather abrupt turn just there hid the road as it wound towards the forest. But we could look back some distance down the long village street, at the low houses and high garden walls.—The famous Maison Millet, built right on the road, grey, with brown moss-grown roof, did not differ from the other peasant cottages. Even the one large window, extending almost the entire height of the house, was scarcely a mark of distinction in studio-crowded Barbizon; just as, probably, during Millet’s lifetime, his poverty and troubles, and failure to make both ends meet, were matters of course among the hard-working villagers.—And yet this humble cottage is already better known and honoured as a place of pilgrimage in the artistic world, than the palaces that crown Campden Hill and cluster around Palace Gate, Kensington; even as the works that came from it will be remembered when the pictures painted within the palace-studios have long since been forgotten.—We did not ask to go into the house. I believe visitors are admitted; but it seems almost cruel to treat it as a mere museum for curious tourists, while the Millet family is still in charge. So we rested in the pleasant shade, looking over to the unassuming grey cottage where one or two plaster-casts showed through the window, the branches of a tall tree waved over the chimney, and an elder-bush, beneath the weight of its berries, bent far over the garden wall, on the other side of which Millet so often walked and stood to watch the west and the setting sun.—No one was to be seen but two or three children, who examined the tricycle as they talked in whispers. But we could hear near voices and the clatter of dishes. And then the wind would come in great gusts from over the forest, shaking down the leaves on its way, and drowning all other noises.
We felt the great contrast when we went from the little house where life was always sad, to Siron’s, “that excellent artist’s barrack, managed upon easy principles.”—Its cheerfulness was proclaimed by its large sign representing a jolly landlord holding a pig’s head on a dish, while a young lady and gentleman, apparently in an ecstasy of content at the prospect of a good meal, lay prostrate before it, one on either side, and an appreciative dog sniffed at it from the foreground.—It seemed more eloquent in its way than the sign before the other village inn, whereon a young lady sat at her easel, and two or three young men peeped over her shoulder, and he who painted it for his dinner was no poor artist in one sense of the word.
Often enough at Siron’s, as at the Maison Millet, there has been the difficulty of making both ends meet. But at the inn it has been turned into comedy rather than tragedy, and if money has not been forthcoming at once, Siron has been willing to wait, knowing that it would in the end.—Men of other professions, if they lived together in communities, as artists often do, could hardly show so fair a record. For all the talk and definitions of so-called Bohemianism, an artist is never in debt longer than he can help.—It would be fortunate for tradespeople if the same could be said of all men.
A waiter in a dress-coat, which was certainly not what we had come to Barbizon to see, showed us into the “high inn-chamber panelled” with sketches, where we took great pleasure in noting that the best were by Americans.—We next ordered groseille, for which it was our privilege to pay double the price asked elsewhere. I hope the charges for artists living in Barbizon are not the same as those for an artist passing through, disguised as a tricycler.—But Siron’s, with its elegant waiter and prices, and its Exhibition open to the public, was not the Siron’s we had expected. We had thought to find a true artists’ inn, like certain Venetian and Florentine dens we knew of;—we had come instead to a show for the tourist.—And indeed all Barbizon, with its picture galleries and studios to let, and posing peasants, seemed no better than a convenient stopping-place, to which drivers from Fontainebleau could bring travellers, and allow them to spend their francs for the benefit of Barbizonians.—Thus, from Millet’s misery the people have reaped a golden harvest.
Stranger still is the fact, that the country where Millet could see but suffering humanity, with a forest or open landscape in harmony with it, is now recommended as a place in which to learn mirth and vivacious contentment.—Millet’s portion in Barbizon was headache and heartache, so that now and then, in his despair, he cried out to his friends that, physically and morally, he was going down hill. Over the way at Siron’s other men stayed on in the village, because near the forest they were sure of physical and moral good health, air, light, perfumes, and the shapes of things concording for them in happy harmony.——
“There is no place,” says Mr. Stevenson, “where the young are more gladly conscious of their youth, or the old better contented with their age.”