Nevertheless, in the midst of all this wealth, this power, and this knowledge, a dull sense of disquietude vexes men’s souls. Man is not yet content. Every day he finds new pretexts or motives for complaining. One of the most oft-repeated of these pretexts or motives is, that the world is becoming uglier. If in our cities any beautiful part remains, it is nearly always the old part. In the historical cities, the new parts are horrible, and form a strange contrast with the older. The altogether-new cities—especially those which have sprung up in the last century in America—appear to the artistic eye almost always like a sort of anteroom to the infernal regions. Architecture has become a mother of monsters. Sculpture and painting, which were once upon a time the two most select amongst the decorative arts, protected and pampered by the great ones of the earth and adored by the masses, are reduced to the necessity of employing a thousand artifices to extort orders out of the negligent malevolence of an epoch, whose ornaments and monuments seem an encumbrance and an excrescence rather than a beauty. There was a time when the dress of men and women was a work of art. At the present day, only that of women has preserved a certain artistic grace and beauty. Let us not dwell upon the countless other forms of ugliness which have invaded our houses with the furniture, the carpets, the candelabra, and the china. The artistic mediocrity of our epoch is surpassed only by the superficiality and confusion of its tastes. Each succeeding year sees that which used to appear the height of elegance and beauty to its predecessors, despised, neglected, and forgotten. All the styles of the past and all the styles of the different countries swirl round us, before the fickle gusts of fashion. Every picture which excites admiration for a moment is quickly forgotten by the fickle taste of an age which ransacks every corner in search of the beautiful, because nowhere can the beautiful be found. Many ask themselves what is the origin of this strange corruption of taste and of the æsthetic sense. But no two people agree on the answer. This one attributes the degeneration to the decadence of traditions, and therefore proposes to open schools and to institute courses of instruction. That one, on the other hand, traces the responsibility to the lack of liberty afforded the public taste and the genius of the artists, a condition of things for which these same traditions are to blame. Such a one therefore inveighs against the schools and the rules of tradition, and would like to see them all swept away. Nobody can explain how it happens that so rich, so wise, and so powerful a civilisation does not succeed in being beautiful, and shows itself powerless to infuse a breath of beauty into anything it creates, be it big or little, into its cities or into the small objects of daily use.