e painting of women, the ignorant commentator sometimes asks
himself in what supreme sense it was worth while for an artist to expend
his powers upon the portrait of some society fool who could pay him
twelve hundred pounds therefor; or in what supreme sense a painter can
be called an artist who prefers such a task, and the flesh-pots, to the
portrayal of womanhood at its highest. There are attributes of womanhood
which directly serve human life, present and to come--attributes of
vitality and faithfulness, attributes of body and bosom, of mind and of
feeling, which it is within the power of the great artist to portray;
and it is in worthily portraying the greatest things, and in this
alone, that he transcends the status of the decorator.

It is worth while also to refer here to sculpture; something can be
taught by its means. The Venus of Milo is not only a great work of art;
it is also a representation of the physiological ideal. Its model was a
woman eminently capable of motherhood. The corset is beyond question
undesirable from every point of view, and it may be of service by means
of such a statue as this to teach the girl's eye what are the right
proportions of the body. She is constantly being faced with gross and
preposterous perversions of the female figure as they are to be seen in
the fashion plates of every feminine journal. It is as well that she
should have opportunities of occasionally seeing something better.

A note upon the corset may not be out of place here. We know that its
use is of no small antiquity. We have lately come to learn that
civilization stepped across to Europe from Asia, using Crete as a
stepping-stone; and in frescoes found in the palace of Minos, at
Knossos, by Dr. Arthur Evans, we find that the corset was employed to
distort the female figure nearly four thousand years ago, as it is
to-day. There must be some clue deep in human nature to the persistence
of a custom which is in itself so absurd. Those who have studied the
work of such writers as Westermarck, and who cannot but agree that on
the whole he is right in the contention that each sex desires to
accentuate the features of its sex, will be prepared to accept Dr.
Havelock Ellis's interpretation of the corset. By constricting the
waist it accentuates the salience of the bosom and hips. This may simply
be an expression of the desire to emphasize sex, but it may with still
more insight be looked upon, as the latter writer has sug