The cause of this error is the existence in Millet of an extraordinary power of pessimism, an extraordinary intensity of sadness. Everybody has seen it; everybody has been struck by it. But everybody has misinterpreted it; everybody has read into it a sort of bitter criticism, a sort of condemnation of society. The mind of no single French writer or artist has succeeded in perceiving that this pessimism, this sadness, were not the agitated state of a rebel but the natural, normal state of a man who had received their impress so deeply that he could scarcely conceive of any person being different. All French art for nearly a century has been so remote from Christianity—it may even be said, as a whole, so anti-Christian—that the Christian point of view which sees suffering as a law and as a good has become almost incomprehensible. Some people look suffering in the face but only to fight and curse it. Others turn their eyes from it as an ugly, unpleasing spectacle which they try to forget; and they devote themselves to the pursuit, the attainment or the imagination of joy. None among them could understand that a Millet might find an austere and religious joy in pain.
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