aps whole books and cantos, if it
had been written only in the slower and more elaborate method. The
comparative slightness and rapidity of execution of his drawings and
pastels enabled him to register many inventions and observations that we
must otherwise have missed, and many of these are of the highest value.
His long training in seizing the essential in anything he saw enabled
him, often, to put more meaning into a single rapid line than another
could put into a day's painful labor, and some of his slightest sketches
are astonishingly and commandingly expressive. Other of his drawings
were worked out and pondered over almost as lovingly as his completest
pictures. But so instinctively and inevitably was he a composer that
everything he touched is a complete whole--his merest sketch or his most
elaborated design is a unit. He has left no fragments. His paintings,
his countless drawings, his few etchings and woodcuts are all of a
piece. About everything there is that air of finality which marks the
work destined to become permanently a classic.

[Illustration: Plate 10.--Millet. "Spring."
In the Louvre.]

Here and there, by one or another writer, most or all of what I have
been trying to say has been said already. It is the more likely to be
true. And if these true things have been said, many other things have
been said also which seem to me not so true, or little to the purpose,
so that the image I have been trying to create must differ, for better
or for worse, from that which another might have made. At least I may
have looked at the truth from a slightly different angle and so have
shown it in a new perspective. And, at any rate, it is well that true
things should be said again from time to time. It can do no harm that
one more person should endeavor to give a reason for his admiration of a
great and true artist and should express his conviction that among the
world's great masters the final place of Jean Francois Millet is not
destined to be the lowest.

III

THE ILLUSION OF PROGRESS[B]

[B] Read before the joint meeting of The American Academy of Arts and
Letters and The National Institute of Arts and Letters, December 13, 1912.

In these days all of us, even Academicians, are to some extent believers
in progress. Our golden age is no longer in the past, but in the future.
We know that our early ancestors were a race of wretched cave-dwellers,
and we believe that our still earlier ancestors wer