an to be content to be himself, and let the
critics adapt themselves or not, as they choose, to a new phenomenon?

Let us stick a philosophic name to it, and call it repose in activity.
The American might take the candid advice given by one friend to another,
who complained that it was so difficult to get into the right frame of
mind. "The best thing you can do," he said, "is to frame your mind and
hang it up."

WOMEN--IDEAL AND REAL

We have not by any means got to the bottom of Realism. It matters very
little what the novelists and critics say about it--what it is and what
it is not; the attitude of society towards it is the important thing.
Even if the critic could prove that nature and art are the same thing,
and that the fiction which is Real is only a copy of nature, or if
another should prove that Reality is only to be found in the Ideal,
little would be gained. Literature is well enough in its place, art is an
agreeable pastime, and it is right that society should take up either in
seasons when lawn-tennis and polo are impracticable and afternoon teas
become flavorless; but the question that society is or should be
interested in is whether the young woman of the future--upon whose
formation all our social hopes depend--is going to shape herself by a
Realistic or an Ideal standard. It should be said in parenthesis that the
young woman of the passing period has inclined towards Realism in manner
and speech, if not in dress, affecting a sort of frank return to the
easy-going ways of nature itself, even to the adoption of the language of
the stock exchange, the race-course, and the clubs--an offering of
herself on the altar of good-fellowship, with the view, no doubt, of
making life more agreeable to the opposite sex, forgetting the fact that
men fall in love always, or used to in the days when they could afford
that luxury, with an ideal woman, or if not with an ideal woman, with one
whom they idealize. And at this same time the world is full of doubts and
questionings as to whether marriage is a failure. Have these questionings
anything to do with the increasing Realism of women, and a consequent
loss of ideals?

Of course the reader sees that the difficulty in considering this subject
is whether woman is to be estimated as a work of nature or of art. And
here comes in the everlasting question of what is the highest beauty, and
what is most to be desired. The Greek artists, it seems to be well
establishe