ex, 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 which satisfies us. We may be sure
that if the Greek artist had employed the service of models in his
studio, his art would have been merely a passing phase in human history.
But as it is, the world has ever since been in love with his ideal woman,
and still believes in her possibility.

Now the young woman of today should not be deceived into the notion of a
preferable Realistic development because the novelist of today gets her
to sit to him as his model. This may be no certain indication that she is
either good art or good nature. Indeed she may be quite drifting away
from the ideal that a woman ought to aim at if we are to have a society
that is not always tending into a realistic vulgarity and commonplace. It
is perfectly true that a woman is her own excuse for being, and in a way
she is doing enough for the world by simply being a woman. It is
difficult