“Your work on this portrait is your best work, because the model, as I stated to you at the outset would be the case, has called forth your finer selves; she has caused you to feel.  And she has been able to do this because her countenance, her whole being, radiates one of the great passions and faiths of our common humanity—­the look of reverent motherhood.  You recognize that look, that mood; you believe in it; you honor it; you have worked over its living eloquence.  Observe, then, the result.  Turn to your canvases and see how, though proceeding differently, you have all dipped your brushes as in a common medium; how you have all drawn an identical line around that old-time human landmark.  You have in truth copied from her one of the great beacon-lights of expression that has been burning and signaling through ages upon ages of human history—­the look of the mother, the angel of self-sacrifice to the earth.

“While we wait, we might go a little way into this general matter, since you, in the study of portraiture, will always have to deal with it.  This look of hers, which you have caught on your canvases, and all the other great beacon-lights of human expression, stand of course for the inner energies of our lives, the leading forces of our characters.  But, as ages pass, human life changes; its chief elements shift their relative places, some forcing their way to the front, others being pushed to the rear; and the prominent beacon-lights change correspondingly.  Ancient ones go out, new ones appear; and the art of portraiture, which is the undying historian of the human countenance, is subject to this shifting law of the birth and death of its material.

“Perhaps more ancient lights have died out of human faces than modern lights have been kindled to replace them.  Do you understand why?  The reason is this:  throughout an immeasurable time the aim of nature was to make the human countenance as complete an instrument of expression as it could possibly be.  Man, except for his gestures and wordless sounds, for ages had nothing else with which to speak; he must speak with his face.  And thus the primitive face became the chronicle of what was going on within him as well as of what had taken place without.  It was his earliest bulletin-board of intelligence.  It was the first parchment to bear tidings; it was the original newspaper; it was the rude, but vivid, primeval book of the woods.  The human face was all that.  Ages more had to pass before spoken language began, and still other ages before written language began.  Thus for an immeasurable time nature developed the face and multiplied its expressions to enable man to make himself understood.  At last this development was checked; what we may call the natural occupation of the face culminated.  Civilization began, and as soon as civilization began, the decline in natural expressiveness began with it.  Gradually civilization supplanted primeval needs; it contrived other means for doing