as capable of writing a text for his own
sketches as of making sketches for the text of others. He has made
pictures without words and words without pictures. He has written some
very clever ghost-stories, and drawn and painted some very immediate
realities. He has lately given himself up to these latter objects, and
discovered that they have mysteries more absorbing than any others. I
find in Harper, in 1885. "A Wild-goose Chase" through North Germany and
Denmark, in which both pencil and pen are Mr. Millet's, and both show
the natural and the trained observer.

He knows the art-schools of the Continent, the studios of Paris, the
"dodges" of Antwerp, the subjects, the models of Venice, and has had
much aesthetic as well as much personal experience. He has draped and
distributed Greek plays at Harvard, as well as ridden over Balkans to
post pressing letters, and given publicity to English villages in which
susceptible Americans may get the strongest sensations with the least
trouble to themselves. If the trouble in each case will have been
largely his, this is but congruous with the fact that he has not only
found time to have a great deal of history himself, but has suffered
himself to be converted by others into an element--beneficent I should
call it if discretion did not forbid me--of _their_ history. Springing
from a very old New England stock, he has found the practice of art a
wonderful antidote, in his own language, "for belated Puritanism." He is
very modern, in the sense of having tried many things and availed
himself of all of the facilities of his time; but especially on this
ground of having fought out for himself the battle of the Puritan habit
and the aesthetic experiment. His experiment was admirably successful
from the moment that the Puritan levity was forced to consent to its
becoming a serious one. In other words, if Mr. Millet is artistically
interesting to-day (and to the author of these remarks he is highly so),
it is because he is a striking example of what the typical American
quality can achieve.

He began by having an excellent pencil, because as a thoroughly
practical man he could not possibly have had a weak one. But nothing
is more remunerative to follow than the stages by which "faculty" in
general (which is what I mean by the characteristic American quality)
has become the particular faculty; so that if in the artist's present
work one recognizes--recognizes even fondly--the national han