iness. Moreover, the adjectives 'manly' or 'womanly,' applied to
works of art, or the artistic surfaces of men and women, are
irrelevant--that is to say, impertinent. You have no right to ask a
poem or a picture to look manly or womanly, any more than you have any
right to ask a man or a woman to look manly or womanly. There is no such
thing as looking manly or womanly. There is looking beautiful or ugly,
distinguished or commonplace, individual or insignificant. The one law
of externals is beauty in all its various manifestations. To ask the sex
of a beautiful person is as absurd as it would be to ask the publisher
the sex of a beautiful book. Such questions are for midwives and
doctors.

It was once the fashion for heroes to shed tears on the smallest
occasion, and it does not appear that they fought the worse for it; some
of the firmest, bravest, most undaunted, most dignified, most noble,
most stately human beings have been women; as some of the softest,
mildest, most pitiful and flexible, most kind, civil, obliging, humane,
tender, timorous and modest human beings have been men. Indeed, some of
the bravest men that ever trod this planet have worn corsets, and it
needs more courage nowadays for a man to wear his hair long than to
machine-gun a whole African nation. Moreover, quite the nicest women one
knows ride bicycles--in the rational costume.

THE FALLACY OF A NATION

It is, I am given to understand, a familiar axiom of mathematics that no
number of ciphers placed in front of significant units, or tens or
hundreds of units, adds in the smallest degree to the numerical value of
those units. The figure one becomes of no more importance however many
noughts are marshalled in front of it--though, indeed, in the
mathematics of human nature this is not so. Is not a man or woman
considered great in proportion to the number of ciphers that walk in
front of him, from a humble brace of domestics to guards of honour and
imperial armies?

A parallel profound truth of mathematics is that a nought, however many
times it be multiplied, remains nought; but again we find the reverse
obtain in the mathematics of human nature. One might have supposed that
the result of one nobody multiplied even fifty million times would still
be nobody. However, such is far from being the case. Fifty million
nobodies make--a nation. Of course, there is no need for so many. I am
reckoning as a British subject, and speak of fifty million