joy in existence, are his attributes, and while the muses are feminine,
he is the god of poesy and music. So the Milo Venus has all the traits
of womanhood, but not in excess, and her sweet, dignified presence
reminds us that she is a goddess, and not a weak, self-conscious woman,
like the Medicean image. But the type of womanhood in western Europe and
America has emphasized all that is weak, all that is sentimental, all
that is helpless in woman, and attenuated it to such delicate
proportions as to give it a strange and unnatural charm, like the beauty
of consumption. Let us recognize it as an exquisite creation of art, not
of nature, as wonderful as the pouter pigeon or the saffron rose. The
delicate whiteness of the complexion, scarcely tinged with pink, the
fine silky hair, the fragile, willowy form, the tiny hand and foot, the
languid blue eye, the soft, low voice, the sensitive nerves that shrink
from every breath of heaven, and weep at every tale of woe, the slight
cough that touches your compassion, the trembling step that appeals to
you for help, are not these all characteristic of that fair, frail,
lovely being, to whom sonnets are written and homage tendered when she
is young and rich.

A celebrated painter once heard a woman of this stamp commended as "very
graceful." "Graceful!" he indignantly exclaimed, "weakness isn't grace!
strength and agility are the conditions of grace."

One of the services of true art is to hold before us models of beauty
which keep the eye pure amid the corruptions of fashion. The Diana does
not suggest any training of corsets or wearing of long skirts, yet
poetry and fiction have helped to perpetuate this idea of the lady.
Shakespeare has given us his Ophelia and Desdemona, creations of this
false theory, and I have heard men declare them to be perfect types of
womanhood. In Ruffini's charming story of _Doctor Antonio_, we have the
same lovely heroine in our prosaic modern life. But mark how all these
women utterly fail in the great hours of trial. All untrue to the
demands of their love, all incapable of mating the men who have sought
them. But in Portia, in Miranda, in Imogen, we have women in whom is all
the charm of womanhood without its exaggeration; they are independent
noble existences, capable of living alone, and therefore able to meet
nobly all the conditions of life and of love.[28]

We can almost forgive Charles Reade's later flippant creations of women,
in whom mor