ful in
an artistic way, too, with no knowledge and little thought of the
history of his own branch of art, and with little curiosity as to its
philosophy or its poetry. And, on the other hand, a man may be a very
earnest student, and a happy and delighted student of the history and
criticism of art, and know nothing, and care as little, about the
profession or practice of any art, or about studio ways and studio
traditions. I do not know that in any branch of human study this
distinction is so marked and so strong. This is to be regretted, for
many reasons, but it can hardly be done away with so long as the
community is generally careless of both the theoretical and the
practical--so long as the students and the practitioners alike feel
themselves nearly isolated units, floating in a sea of good-humored
indifference. This state of things only time can alter. Only time can
civilize our new community in intellectual and perspective matters;
but there are some other conditions which are more immediately in our
power to modify, perhaps--let us see:

It is as true as if it had not been repeated, even to fatigue and
boredom, that the arts of decoration have been in a bad way for a good
part of the century past, at least among some European and
Europeanized nations. I do not imagine that a Frenchman would admit
that architecture and the arts of decoration had ever languished in
his own society. Your cultivated Frenchman would say that some periods
were better than others, but that there were no bad periods; he would
say that, to be sure, the style of the First Napoleon's Empire was not
a very fortunate style,--too stiff, too absurdly pseudo-classic,
unworthy of France, a poor enough successor of the dainty and playful
art of Louis XV, or the somewhat more refined and restrained art of
Louis XVI: but he would say that it was art still, and the period a
not wholly inartistic period; and even of the dull times of the
Napoleon of Peace, from 1830 to 1848, while he would confess to a
great deal of languor and lack of public spirit of all sorts, except
in the struggle which the Romantic artists, headed by Delacroix, waged
with the Classicists, headed by Ingres; while he would admit that the
abundant wood-cuts and lithographs, the painting and statues much less
abundant even in proportion, and the buildings very few and
unimportant, were not sufficient to make up a great artistical epoch,
that is, for France; yet as for its being an