Shorter Prose Pieces | Page 2

which is the secret of all beautiful art, of the plastic
work of the Greeks and of the pictures of Jean Francois Millet equally.
I do not think that the sovereignty and empire of women's beauty has at
all passed away, though we may no longer go to war for them as the
Greeks did for the daughter of Leda. The greatest empire still remains
for them--the empire of art. And, indeed, this wonderful face, seen last
night for the first time in America, has filled and permeated with the
pervading image of its type the whole of our modern art in England.

Last century it was the romantic type which dominated in art, the type
loved by Reynolds and Gainsborough, of wonderful contrasts of colour,
of exquisite and varying charm of expression, but without that definite
plastic feeling which divides classic from romantic work. This type
degenerated into mere facile prettiness in the hands of lesser masters,
and, in protest against it, was created by the hands of the
Pre-Raphaelites a new type, with its rare combination of Greek form
with Florentine mysticism. But this mysticism becomes over- strained
and a burden, rather than an aid to expression, and a desire for the pure
Hellenic joy and serenity came in its place; and in all our modern work,
in the paintings of such men as Albert Moore and Leighton and
Whistler, we can trace the influence of this single face giving fresh life
and inspiration in the form of a new artistic ideal.

SLAVES OF FASHION

Miss Leffler-Arnim's statement, in a lecture delivered recently at St.
Saviour's Hospital, that "she had heard of instances where ladies were
so determined not to exceed the fashionable measurement that they had
actually held on to a cross-bar while their maids fastened the
fifteen-inch corset," has excited a good deal of incredulity, but there is
nothing really improbable in it. From the sixteenth century to our own
day there is hardly any form of torture that has not been inflicted on
girls, and endured by women, in obedience to the dictates of an
unreasonable and monstrous Fashion. "In order to obtain a real Spanish
figure," says Montaigne, "what a Gehenna of suffering will not women
endure, drawn in and compressed by great coches entering the flesh;
nay, sometimes they even die thereof!" "A few days after my arrival at
school," Mrs. Somerville tells us in her memoirs, "although perfectly
straight and well made, I was enclosed in stiff stays, with a steel busk
in front; while above my frock, bands drew my shoulders back till the
shoulder-blades met. Then a steel rod with a semi-circle, which went
under my chin, was clasped to the steel busk in my stays. In this
constrained state I and most of the younger girls had to prepare our
lessons"; and in the life of Miss Edgeworth we read that, being sent to a

certain fashionable establishment, "she underwent all the usual tortures
of back- boards, iron collars and dumbs, and also (because she was a
very tiny person) the unusual one of being hung by the neck to draw
out the muscles and increase the growth," a signal failure in her case.
Indeed, instances of absolute mutilation and misery are so common in
the past that it is unnecessary to multiply them; but it is really sad to
think that in our own day a civilized woman can hang on to a cross-bar
while her maid laces her waist into a fifteen- inch circle. To begin with,
the waist is not a circle at all, but an oval; nor can there be any greater
error than to imagine that an unnaturally small waist gives an air of
grace, or even of slightness, to the whole figure. Its effect, as a rule, is
simply to exaggerate the width of the shoulders and the hips; and those
whose figures possess that stateliness which is called stoutness by the
vulgar, convert what is a quality into a defect by yielding to the silly
edicts of Fashion on the subject of tight-lacing. The fashionable
English waist, also, is not merely far too small, and consequently quite
out of proportion to the rest of the figure, but it is worn far too low
down. I use the expression "worn" advisedly, for a waist nowadays
seems to be regarded as an article of apparel to be put on when and
where one likes. A long waist always implies shortness of the lower
limbs, and, from the artistic point of view, has the effect of diminishing
the height; and I am glad to see that many of the most charming women
in Paris are returning to the idea of the Directoire style of dress. This
style is not by any means perfect, but at