Let us stick a philosophic name to it, and call it repose in activity.  The American might take the candid advice given by one friend to another, who complained that it was so difficult to get into the right frame of mind.  “The best thing you can do,” he said, “is to frame your mind and hang it up.”

WOMEN—­IDEAL AND REAL

We have not by any means got to the bottom of Realism.  It matters very little what the novelists and critics say about it—­what it is and what it is not; the attitude of society towards it is the important thing.  Even if the critic could prove that nature and art are the same thing, and that the fiction which is Real is only a copy of nature, or if another should prove that Reality is only to be found in the Ideal, little would be gained.  Literature is well enough in its place, art is an agreeable pastime, and it is right that society should take up either in seasons when lawn-tennis and polo are impracticable and afternoon teas become flavorless; but the question that society is or should be interested in is whether the young woman of the future—­upon whose formation all our social hopes depend—­is going to shape herself by a Realistic or an Ideal standard.  It should be said in parenthesis that the young woman of the passing period has inclined towards Realism in manner and speech, if not in dress, affecting a sort of frank return to the easy-going ways of nature itself, even to the adoption of the language of the stock exchange, the race-course, and the clubs—­an offering of herself on the altar of good-fellowship, with the view, no doubt, of making life more agreeable to the opposite sex, 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