It is the fashion nowadays to discuss the crisis which threatens all the arts. We must, however, remember to preserve a distinction. We must divide the arts into two categories: those which serve to amuse men by helping them to pass the time agreeably, like music, the theatre, and, to a certain degree, literature; and those which serve to beautify the world, like architecture, sculpture, painting, and all the decorative arts. It is patent that the crisis which we are considering is much more serious among the arts embraced by the second category. No epoch has spent so much money in beautifying the world as has our own; no age has supported so formidable an army of architects, sculptors, decorators, and cabinet-makers; no age has built so many cities, palaces, monuments, bridges, plazas, and gardens. In the midst of lavish plenty, why are we so discontented with the results obtained; why have not Americans, in view of the enormous sums which they have spent to beautify their cities, succeeded in building a St. Mark’s or a Notre Dame? They have all the materials,—money, artists, the desire to create beautiful things. What then do they lack? They lack one single thing—time. One day, in New York, I was praising an example of American architecture to an American architect of great talent. “Yes, yes,” he answered with a touch of satire, “my fellow countrymen would willingly spend a hundred million dollars to build a church as beautiful as St. Mark’s in Venice, but they would command me, as a condition of my undertaking the work, to finish it within eighteen months.” That is a significant phrase. How is it possible to beautify a world which is incessantly in transformation, wherein nothing is stable, and which wishes to multiply everything it possesses—buildings, as it would furniture? To create beautiful palaces, to construct beautiful furniture, to attain the distant ideal of perfection, time is essential—time and wise deliberation, reasonable limitation of the multiplicity of human demands, and a certain stability in taste. No one could have built St. Mark’s or Notre Dame in eighteen months, and France could not have created her famous decorative styles of the eighteenth century if public taste had been so fickle as ours, and if everybody at that time had wished every ten years to change his furniture.