e
French butler waiting at the door to announce lunch, Mark Twain
concluded an analysis of modern religion with "--why the God _I_ believe
in is too busy spinning spheres to have time to listen to human
prayers."

How often his words have been in our mind since war has shaken our
planet.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE ARTIST AND HIS COSTUME

The world has the habit of deriding that which it does not understand.
It is the most primitive way of bolstering one's limitations. How often
the woman or man with a God-given sense of the beautiful, the fitting,
harmony between costume and setting, is described as poseur or poseuse
by those who lack the same instinct. In a sense, of course, everything
man does, beyond obeying the rudimentary instincts of the savage, is an
affectation, and it is not possible to claim that even our contemporary
costuming of man or woman always has _raison d'etre_.

We accept as the natural, unaffected raiment for woman and man that
which custom has taught us to recognise as appropriate, with or without
reason for being. For example, the tall, shiny, inflexible silk hat of
man, and the tortuous high French heels of woman are in themselves
neither beautiful, fitting, nor made to meet the special demands of any
setting or circumstance. Both hat and heels are fashions, unbeautiful
and uncomfortable, but to the eye of man to-day serve as insignia of
formal dress, decreed by society.

The artist nature has always assumed poetic license in the matter of
dress, and as a rule defied custom, to follow an inborn feeling for
beauty. That much-maligned short velvet coat and soft loose tie of the
painter or writer, happen to have a most decided _raison d'etre_; they
represent comfort, convenience, and in the case of the velvet coat,
satisfy a sensitiveness to texture, incomprehensible to other natures.
As for the long hair of some artists, it can be a pose, but it has in
many cases been absorption in work, or poverty--the actual lack of money
for the conventional haircut. In cities we consider long hair on a man
as effeminate, an indication of physical weakness, but the Russian
peasant, most sturdy of individuals, wears his hair long, and so do many
others among extremely primitive masculine types, who live their lives
beyond the reach of Fashion and barbers.

The short hair of the sincere woman artist is to save time at the
toilette.

There is always a limited number of men and women who, in ordinary acts