ined. 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
established, never used a model, as our artists almost invariably do, in
their plastic and pictorial creations. The antique Greek statues, or
their copies, which give us the highest conceptions of feminine charm and
manly beauty, were made after no woman, or man born of woman, but were
creations of the ideal raised to the highest conception by the passionate
love and long study of nature, but never by faithful copying of it. The
Romans copied the Greek art. The Greek in his best days created the ideal
figure, which we love to accept as nature. Generation after generation
the Greek learned to draw and learned to observe, until he was able to
transmute his knowledge into the forms of grace and beauty which satisfy
us as nature at her best; just as the novelist trains all his powers by
the observation of life until he is able to transmute all the raw
material into a creation of fiction w