would have us believe? Yet here for me is the real humanity, the great poetry."
Thus, to show the pains of work, and to show at the same time all the poetry and all the beauty of life in these severe pains, was the final aim of Millet's thoughts and of his art. "My programme is work. Every man is doomed to bodily punishment. 'In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread' was written ages ago: an immovable fate that will never change" (1854). We see that there is no protest here; no desire to make life better. Life is sad but Millet loves it as it is. It might almost be said that if sadness did not exist, Millet would have made it afresh, so singular is the charm which it had for him. "I would on no account be deprived of winter," he says somewhere. "Oh! sadness of the fields and woods, not to behold you would be too great a loss!" (1866). To him it was a deep, inborn need: "the basis of melancholy upon which I am established," he writes on the 25th of November 1872. From his childhood up, those who knew him were struck by his melancholy temper. "Ah, my poor child," said the old curé of his village, "you have a heart which will give you a deal
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