Naturally it is different in the case of the artist who is not excellently good, but the Emperor was not considering such. These artists too, however, insist on living and must find a market for their wares. It is an age of advertisement, the growth of new economic conditions, for advertisement creates as well as reveals new markets. Hence the vast host of mediocrities, not only in art but in almost every field of human activity, nowadays advertise and seek patronage because only in this way can they find purchasers and live. These artists, often men of talent, dislike having to advertise; they would rather work for art's sake, but having to do so need not hinder them from working for art's sake, since all that is meant by that much misused phrase is that while the artist is working he shall not think of the reward of his work, but simply and solely of how to do the best work he can. Before leaving the Emperor's speech one is tempted to inquire what should be the attitude of a sovereign towards art and artists. For the Englishman the doctrine of Individualism--the thing he is so apt to make a fetish of--gives an answer, and, it may be, the right one. The Englishman will probably say that if in any one province of life more than in another freedom should be allowed to originality of conception regarding the form as well as the substance, the manner as well as the matter, it is in the province of art, always provided, of course, that the artist is sane and not guilty of indecency. The artist, like the poet, is born not made; you cannot make an artist, you can only make an artisan. The artist, who represents the Creator, the creative faculty, can influence man: man cannot, and should not try to, influence the artist, but can, and should only, offer him the materials for his art, smooth the way for his endeavour, encourage him in it by sympathetic yet candid criticism, and above all, when he can afford it, by buying the result of his endeavour when it is successful. This should be the attitude of both monarch and Maecenas: it is an attitude of benevolent neutrality. "I know," such a Maecenas might say to the artist, "that your artistic faculties move in an atmosphere above as well as on the earth, as I know that above the atmosphere of oxygen and hydrogen which envelops the earth there is an ethereal, a rarefied atmosphere, which stretches to worlds of which all we know is that they exist. If your spirit can soar above this earthly atmosphere, well and good. I, for one, shall do nothing to limit or hinder it: I shall only welcome and applaud and reward whatever effort you make to bring our inner being a step, long or short, nearer to the source of celestial light. Consequently, I offer you no instructions and put no fetters on your imagination."