On the side of craftsmanship, I fear nothing is to be expected. The gallant counter-attacks of a John Ruskin and a William Morris against modern industrialism show just how much and how little can be gained from a militant reaction. A hundred passionate spinsters are printing batiks or glazing pottery in as many æsthetic last ditches, but they are mostly doing so at the expense of rich and generous eccentrics, in short are merely subsidised artists disguised as craftsmen. We are getting better designed things from the factory--the museums are working usefully to this end--but this reform only enlists a handful of professional designers, and does nothing to produce the old type of creative craftsman. In short we probably must say good-bye to the craftsman save as a picturesque survival, like the man who is skilful with the rapier or the long bow. All we can hope for is that some improvement in the general taste, which I think is reasonable to look for,--since for a century it could hardly have been lower,--may cause a discriminating demand for better designed factory goods. This of course leaves the problem of the artist and the craftsman just where it was, with the sole difference that the passing of the craftsman shuts off the possibility of any return of the artist to his traditionally best school, the shop of a good craftsman. So if there is to be any useful rebuilding, I feel it must proceed after the very modern precedent of the skyscraper, from the top down. Much might conceivably be done to produce a more coherent and intelligent patronage for the fine arts, much is already being done by museums, art dealers, colleges and universities, and all manner of art societies. Indeed the increased activity of museums, collectors, and colleges in behalf of the acquisition and appreciation of fine works of art has persuaded Mr. R. C. Duffus that we are well launched on an American Renaissance, and to that effect he has published a very interesting book. Far be it from me to minimise the importance of activities in which I have been and am deeply engaged myself. One may gladly admit that to multiply our art treasures--and for a generation the multiplication has been astoundingly accelerated--is in itself an unqualified benefit. But the mere accumulation of great works of art and much talk about them does not imply understanding of them, and the question the humanist must raise is always--Are these masterpieces understood? And how are they understood? Mediæval Rome lay in full artistic decadence when much of the glory of her old art was visible on every hand. To understand any nobly conceived work of art, one must have lived nobly in deed, in imagination, or in both. To own a great work of art may be a mere counsel of personal vanity; to expound a work of art, a mere assertion of self-importance. A whole school of interpretation, which has its faculty, museum, and journal, tears the