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 were possessed of tails and pointed ears.  Having come so far, we are sometimes inclined to forget that not every step has been an advance and to entertain an illogical confidence that each future step must carry us still further forward; having indubitably progressed in many things, we think of ourselves as progressing in all.  And as the pace of progress in science and in material things has become more and more rapid, we have come to expect a similar pace in art and letters, to imagine that the art of the future must be far finer than the art of the present or than that of the past, and that the art of one decade, or even of one year, must supersede that of the preceding decade or the preceding year, as the 1913 model in automobiles supersedes the model of 1912.  More than ever before “To have done is to hang quite out of fashion,” and the only title to consideration is to do something quite obviously new or to proclaim one’s intention of doing something newer.  The race grows madder and madder.  It was scarce two years since we first heard of “Cubism” when the “Futurists” were calling the “Cubists” reactionary.  Even the gasping critics, pounding manfully in the rear, have thrown away all impedimenta of traditional standards in the desperate effort to keep up with what seems less a march than a stampede.