On the other hand, this reproach, which, couched in its usual form, is unjust, contains a modicum of truth, which however applies to Europe as well as to America. I have often had occasion to notice in wealthy modern houses—in Europe as well as in America, but in America more than in Europe—that they are adorned with many extremely beautiful old pieces, but that these are too numerous, and too heterogeneous. You find in a modern drawing-room material of every epoch and from all parts of the world; from ancient Greece, and from China of the last century, from the Italian Middle Ages and from contemporary Persia. Consequently modern houses are too much like small museums, in which numbers of wonderful little antiques, picked up wherever they were to be had, are exposed to view, and in which the modern furniture and adornments serve as the show-case in which the antiques are displayed, instead of being, as they were in the eighteenth century, the principal decoration, of which some beautiful antique was the appropriate ornament and complement. This inversion of the natural order of things would be inexplicable, were we not all of us persuaded more or less consciously that old things must necessarily be more beautiful than modern ones. For this reason we are willing that what we make, the modern, shall be subordinated and serve as a tool to the antique. In short, the antique, in Europe as in America, has acquired nowadays a value of its own in art, merely on the score of its antiquity. I need not dwell on the strangeness of this prejudice in favour of antiques in an age and in countries in which, directly one leaves the field of art behind, one finds so keen a craze for the modern. Not to be up-to-date is at the present day the greatest reproach we can fling at a man in Europe and in America, especially in America. Why then does modernity in art arouse, not only in old Europe, but also, and perhaps more, in young America, so much diffidence and mistrust? Why do we, notwithstanding the attempts which modern artists make to emulate the ancients or to create new things, turn to the past when we want to possess or enjoy something really beautiful? May this contradiction be the effort of a last surviving prejudice? For centuries, man was educated to consider all antique things, only because they were antique, preferable to modern ones. In many respects, we have conquered this venerable prejudice. May our attachment to the antique in art be the last and most persistent survival of this sentiment, itself destined to disappear?