How the isolation of the artist with the virtual extinction of the craftsman has come about is a commonplace of history which need be recalled here only in its broad lines. The factory within a century has done away with the craftsman designer. Still earlier the crumbling of the old aristocracy of birth and religion at once put an end to community of taste at the top, and gave exaggerated scope to the already strongly rising ideal of originality and individuality as highest æsthetic values. A stable and spiritually profitable patronage ceased and was succeeded by a capricious and heavy handed patronage from a new wealth undisciplined either by tradition or by fine and broad personal experience. The artist’s immemorial task of realising himself in society became almost impossibly difficult. If he were weak and clever, his resort was to sycophancy; if he were strong and wise, there was little for him but patience, resignation, and a tragic hopefulness; if he were strong and unwise, he became a rebel. And the rebel, in a manner perfectly familiar to the neurologist, built up his compensations, by which he extolled that isolation which was really his sore misfortune as his superiority and his advantage, until after three generations it has become a common conviction among artists that their proper task is self-expression in a void, that there should be no desire to communicate and, obviously, no need to be understood. And just at the moment when the position of the artist was becoming barely tenable, the number of artists increased inordinately. The craftsman who didn’t want to go into a factory but wanted to use his head and hands delicately, had to become an artist, while wholesale methods of education in the practice of art made the way to becoming an artist easy to any young person with a modicum of money and diligence. As if that were not enough, the false glamour thrown about the artist life by romantic poets and novelists brought new hordes of the unfit to join the bewildered survivors from the old régime. III Now, any going back to the conditions of the Middle Ages or to those of the Renaissance is of course impossible; but if craftsmanship and art are again to become normal functions in a helpful social order, the old formulas, at least in principle, must hold. There will be no generally fine craftsmanship until most people want well-made things and get them from craftsmen who design; and the so-called fine arts will have no general importance until there are many patrons with a common bond of taste which is sympathetic to most artists. Is there anything which promises so desirable a reconstruction?