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.
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