Something of the gift of Francois Millet, whose peasants are
veritable priests, of those older religious painters who could
portray saintly heads so sweetly and their merely human proteges so
truly, seems indeed to have descended to M. Ferdinand Fabre. In the
Abbe Tigrane, in Lucifer, and elsewhere, he has delineated, with
wonderful power and patience, a strictly ecclesiastical portraiture--
[122] shrewd, passionate, somewhat melancholy heads, which, though
they are often of peasant origin, are never by any chance
undignified. The passions he treats of in priests are, indeed,
strictly clerical, most often their ambitions--not the errant humours
of the mere man in the priest, but movements of spirit properly
incidental to the clerical type itself. Turning to the secular
brothers and sisters of these peasant ecclesiastics, at first sight
so strongly contrasted with them, M. Fabre shows a great acquaintance
with the sources, the effects, of average human feeling; but still in
contact--in contact, as its conscience, its better mind, its ideal--
with the institutions of religion. What constitutes his
distinguishing note as a writer is the recognition of the religious,
the Catholic, ideal, intervening masterfully throughout the picture
he presents of life, as the only mode of poetry realizable by the
poor; and although, of course, it does a great deal more beside,
certainly doing the high work of poetry effectively.
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