It is natural that in these days, when the approved gospel is that it is better to be dead than not to be Real, society should try to approach nature by the way of the materialistically ignoble, and even go such a pace of Realism as literature finds it difficult to keep up with; but it is doubtful if the young woman will get around to any desirable state of nature by this route.  We may not be able to explain why servile imitation of nature degrades art and degrades woman, but both deteriorate without an ideal so high that there is no earthly model for it.  Would you like to marry, perhaps, a Greek statue? says the justly contemptuous critic.

Not at all, at least not a Roman copy of one.  But it would be better to marry a woman who would rather be like a Greek statue than like some of these figures, without even an idea for clothing, which are lying about on green banks in our spring exhibitions.

THE ART OF IDLENESS

Idleness seems to be the last accomplishment of civilization.  To be idle gracefully and contentedly and picturesquely is an art.  It is one in which the Americans, who do so many things well, do not excel.  They have made the excuse that they have not time, or, if they have leisure, that their temperament and nervous organization do not permit it.  This excuse will pass for a while, for we are a new people, and probably we are more highly and sensitively organized than any other nation—­at least the physiologists say so; but the excuse seems more and more inadequate as we accumulate wealth, and consequently have leisure.  We shall not criticise the American colonies in Paris and Rome and Florence, and in other Continental places where they congregate.  They know whether they are restless or contented, and what examples they set to the peoples who get their ideas of republican simplicity and virtue from the Americans who sojourn among them.  They know whether with all their leisure they get placidity of mind and the real rest which the older nations have learned to enjoy.  It may not be the most desirable thing for a human being to be idle, but if he will be, he should be so in a creditable manner, and with some enjoyment to himself.  It is no slander to say that we in America have not yet found out the secret of this.  Perhaps we shall not until our energies are spent and we are in a state of decay.  At present we put as much energy into our pleasure as into our work, for it is inbred in us that laziness is a sin.  This is the Puritan idea, and it must be said for it that in our experience virtue and idleness are not commonly companions.  But this does not go to the bottom of the matter.