Under these circumstances, the adroit artists quickly learn the art of exploiting the uncertainties and inexperiences of the public, and win riches and honours. The crazy and the charlatans seek to intimidate the public by perpetrating novelties of extravagant audacity. Serious and conscientious artists there are nowadays, of course, but everyone has new formulæ of his own art, differing from those of everyone else, and proclaims his to be the only true, fruitful, and admirable formulæ, at the same time denouncing all others as freaks. By what standard are we to judge these quarrels? Bewildered by so many different attempts and judgments, the public ends by turning to the antique. It has a vague idea that the past ages may have been inferior to our own in all other respects, but in art were superior to it. It knows that a work of art at least one century old may be more or less beautiful, but that it is at least a serious work of art, conceived and carried out in good faith, not for the mystification of an ingenuous public by some daring theory of novelty. So the Europeans are wrong in ridiculing the passion of the Americans for ancient things. This passion has the same origin on the other side of the Atlantic as it has on this. In art, our civilisation is destined to remain inferior to ancient civilisations, which it has overshadowed with its wisdom, its power, and its wealth. This is the reason for the rapid growth in the value of the antique in art, even in the age of modernity _à outrance_. We need feel no shame in avowing it openly. Civilisations and epochs, like individuals, cannot have and expect everything; and the share which has fallen to us of the good things of the earth is so large, that we can readily console ourselves for the loss of this particular one. Who reasoned thus would reason wisely. Nevertheless, the fact is of greater importance than it appears. It shows that the balance between the ancient culture of Europe and the spirit of American culture—that balance which might perhaps have produced the most brilliant civilisation in history—will never be perfectly secured, at least so long as the conditions of the world remain what they now are. America will be able to continue her Europeanisation, and Europe her Americanisation, as we have seen is the case. But this interchange of influences will not have as its only result the increase of the wealth of Europe and of the culture of America. It will give birth in the two worlds to a discontent and an unrest which nothing will be able to allay.