and the novelists, it is a feverish little
creature, full of nervous energy, but without muscular force; of frail
health and feeble organization; a prey to morbid fancies which she has
no strength to control or to resist; now weeping away her life in the
pain of finding that her husband, a man gross and material because
husband, does not understand her; now sighing over her delicious sins
in the arms of the lover who does; without reasoning faculties, but
with divine intuitions that are as good as revelations; without cool
judgment, but with the light of burning passions that guide her just as
well; thinking by her heart, yet carrying the most refined metaphysics
into her love; subtle; incomprehensible by the coarser brain of man; a
creature born to bewilder and to be misled, to love and to be adored, to
madden men and to be destroyed by them.

It does not much signify that the reality is a shrewd, calculating,
unromantic woman, with a hard face and keen eyes, who for the most part
makes a good practical wife to her common-sense middle-aged husband, who
thinks more of her social position than of her feelings, more of her
children than of her lovers, more of her purse than of her heart, and
whose great object of life is a daily struggle for centimes. It pleases
the French to idealize their eminently practical and worldly-wise women
into this queer compound of hysterics and adultery; and if it pleases
them it need not displease us.

To the German his ideal is of two kinds--one, his Martha, the domestic
broad-faced _Hausmutter_, who cooks good dinners at small cost, and
mends the family linen as religiously as if this were the Eleventh
Commandment especially appointed for feminine fingers to keep, the
poetic culmination of whom is Charlotte cutting bread and butter; the
other, his Mary, his Bettina, full of mind and aesthetics, and
heart-uplifting love, yearning after the infinite with holes in her
stockings and her shoes down at heel. For what are coarse material
mendings to the aesthetic soul yearning after the infinite, and
worshipping at the feet of the prophet?

In Italy the ideal woman of modern times is the ardent patriot, full of
active energy, or physical force, and dauntless courage.

In Poland it is the patriot too, but of a more refined and etherealized
type, passively resenting Tartar tyranny by the subtlest feminine scorn,
and living in perpetual music and mourning.

In Spain it is a woman beautiful and