conceal that this Woman's Club was
composed of the tuneful Nine--acknowledged that there was a great deal
in what their contrary-minded sister said. They did not blame her one
bit for the way she felt; they would have felt just so themselves in her
place; but being as it were professionally dedicated to the beautiful in
all its established forms, they thought themselves bound to direct her
attention to one or two aspects of the case which she had apparently
overlooked. They were only sorry that she was not there to take her own
part; and they confessed, in her behalf, that it _was_ ridiculous for
poetry to turn the language upside down, and to take it apart and put it
together wrong-end to, as it did. If anybody spoke the language so, or
in prose wrote it so, they would certainly be a fool; but the Muses
wished the sister to observe that every art existed by its convention,
or by what in the moral world Ibsen would call its life-lie. If you
looked at it from the colloquial standpoint, music was the absurdest
thing in the world. In the orchestral part of an opera, for instance,
there were more repetitions than in the scolding of the worst kind of
shrew, and if you were to go about singing what you had to say, and
singing it over and over, and stretching it out by runs and trills, or
even expressing yourself in _recitativo secco_, it would simply set
people wild. In painting it was worse, if anything: you had to make
believe that things two inches high were life-size, and that there were
relief and distance where there was nothing but a flat canvas, and that
colors which were really like nothing in nature were natural. As for
sculpture, it was too laughable for anything, whether you took it in
bas-reliefs with persons stuck onto walls, half or three-quarters out,
or in groups with people in eternal action; or in single figures,
standing on one leg or holding out arms that would drop off if they were
not supported by stone pegs; or sitting down outdoors bareheaded where
they would take their deaths of cold, or get sun-struck, or lay up
rheumatism to beat the band, in the rain and snow and often without a
stitch of clothes on.

All this and more the Muses freely conceded to the position of the
contrary-minded correspondent of the Easy Chair, and having behaved so
handsomely, they felt justified in adding that her demand seemed to them
perfectly preposterous. It was the very essence and office of poetry
_not_ to conform to