and, if he continues to receive commissions, he may fairly assume that
he is doing it in a way that is satisfactory. With the decorative or
monumental sculptor he is almost alone among modern artists in being
relieved of the necessity of producing something in the isolation of his
studio and waiting to see if any one will care for it; of trying,
against the grain, to produce something that he thinks may appeal to
the public because it does not appeal to himself; or of attempting to
bamboozle the public into buying what neither he nor the public really
cares for. If he does his best he may feel that he is as fairly earning
his livelihood as his fellow workmen, the blacksmith and the
stonecutter, and is as little dependent as they upon either charity or
humbug. The best that government has done for art in France is the
commissioning of the great decorative paintings of Baudry and Puvis. In
this country, also, governments, national, State, or municipal, are
patronizing art in the best possible way, and in making buildings
splendid for the people are affording opportunity for the creation of a
truly popular art.

Without any artificial aid from the government the illustrator has a
wide popular support and works for the public in a normal way; and,
therefore, illustration has been one of the healthiest and most
vigorous forms of modern art. The portrait-painter, too, is producing
something he knows to be wanted, and, though his art has had to fight
against the competition of the photograph and has been partially
vulgarized by the struggle of the exhibitions, it has yet remained, upon
the whole, comprehensible and human; so that much of the soundest art of
the past century has gone into portraiture. It is the painters of
pictures, landscape or genre, who have most suffered from the
misunderstanding between artist and public. Without guidance some of
them have hewed a path to deserved success. Others have wandered into