between artist and public had begun, and it has been widening ever
since.

If the people had had little to do with the major arts of painting and
sculpture, there had yet been, all through the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, a truly popular art--an art of furniture making, of
wood-carving, of forging, of pottery. Every craftsman was an artist in
his degree, and every artist was but a craftsman of a superior sort. Our
machine-making, industrial civilization, intent upon material progress
and the satisfaction of material wants, has destroyed this popular art;
and at the same time that the artist lost his patronage from above he
lost his support from below. He has become a superior person, a sort of
demi-gentleman, but he has no longer a splendid nobility to employ him
or a world of artist artisans to surround him and understand him.

And to the modern artist, so isolated, with no tradition behind him, no
direction from above and no support from below, the art of all times and
all countries has become familiar through modern means of communication
and modern processes of reproduction. Having no compelling reason for
doing one thing rather than another, or for choosing one or another way
of doing things, he is shown a thousand things that he may do and a
thousand ways of doing them. Not clearly knowing his own mind he hears
the clash and reverberation of a thousand other minds, and having no
certainties he must listen to countless theories.

Mr. Vedder has spoken of a certain "home-made" character which he
considers the greatest defect of his art, the character of an art
belonging to no distinctive school and having no definite relation to
the time and country in which it is produced. But it is not Mr. Vedder's
art alone that is home-made. It is precisely the characteristic note of