The Greeks were unified in many ways; and their highly socialised minds gave room for a more general development of art, as well as many other social faculties.
Household decoration was not conspicuous, nor elaborate attire; and while their women were necessarily beautiful as the daughters of such men, it was the men whose beauty was most admired and immortalised. The women stayed at home, as now, but the home did not absorb men, too, as it does now. When art caters to private tastes, to domestic tastes, to the wholly private and domestic tastes of women, art goes down.
The Home was the birthplace of Art, as of so many other human faculties, but is no sufficing area for it. So long as the lives of our women are spent at home, their tastes limited by it, their abilities, ambitions, and desires limited by it, so long will the domestic influence lower art.
"So much the worse for art!" will stoutly cry the defenders of the home; and they would be right if we could have but one. We can have both.
A larger womanhood, a civilised womanhood, specialised, broad-minded, working and caring for the public good as well as the private, will give us not only better homes, but homes more beautiful. The child will be cradled in an atmosphere of harmonious loveliness, and its influence will be felt in all life. This is no trifle of an artificially cultivated æsthetic taste; it is one of nature's deepest laws. "Art" may vary and suffer in different stages of our growth, but the laws of beauty remain the same; and a race reared under those laws will be the nobler.
These more developed women will outgrow the magpie taste that hoards all manner of gay baubles; the monkey-taste that imitates whatever it sees; the savage taste that distorts the human body; they will recognise in that body one infinitely noble expression of beauty, and refuse to dishonour it with ugliness.
They will learn to care for proportion as well as plumpness, for health as well as complexion, for strength and activity as essentials to living loveliness, and to see that no dress can be beautiful which in any way contradicts the body it should but serve and glorify. We do not know, because we have not seen, the difference to our lives which will be made by this large sense of beauty in the woman—in the home; but we may be assured that, while she stays continually there, we shall have but our present stage of domestic art.
IX
DOMESTIC ETHICS
The relation of the home to ethics is so vital, so intimate, so extensive, as to call for the utmost care and patience in its study.
The "domestic virtues" are well known to us, and well loved. We have a general conviction that all our virtues as well as charity begin at home; that the ethical progress of man is a steady stream flowing out of the home, and as far as we compare one virtue with another, we assume the domestic virtues to be the best.