She is only three feet high, or thereabouts, and quite two thousand years old, or more; but she is ever young—
"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety!"
and a very giantess in beauty. For she is a reduction in plaster of the famous statue at the Louvre.
They call her the Venus of Milo, or Melos! It is a calumny—a libel. She is no Venus, except in good looks; and if she errs at all, it is on the side of austerity. She is not only pootiness but wirtue incarnate (if one can be incarnate in marble), from the crown of her lovely head to the sole of her remaining foot—a very beautiful foot, though by no means a small one—it has never worn a high-heel shoe!
Like all the best of its kind, and its kind the best, she never sates nor palls, and the more I look at her the more I see to love and worship—and, alas! the more dissatisfied I feel—not indeed with the living beauty, ripe and real, that I see about and around—mere life is such a beauty in itself that no stone ideal can ever hope to match it! But dissatisfied with the means at my command to do the living beauty justice—a little bit of paper, a steel pen, and a bottle of ink—and, alas! fingers and an eye less skilled than they would have been if I had gone straight to a school of art instead of a laboratory for chemistry!
And now for social pictorial satire considered as a fine art.
They who have practised it hitherto, from Hogarth downward, have not been many—you can count their names on your fingers! And the wide popularity they have won may be due as much to their scarcity as to the interest we all take in having the mirror held up to ourselves—to the malicious pleasure we all feel at seeing our neighbours held up to gentle ridicule or well-merited reproof; most of all, perhaps, to the realistic charm that lies in all true representation of the social aspects with which we are most familiar, ugly as these are often apt to be, with our chimney-pot hats, and trousers that unfit us, it seems, for serious and elaborate pictorial treatment at the hands of the foremost painters of our own times—except when we sit to them for our portraits; then they have willy-nilly to make the best of us, just as we are!
[Illustration: REFINEMENTS OF MODERN SPEECH
(SCENE—A Drawing-room in "Passionate Brompton.")
FAIR AESTHETIC (suddenly, and in deepest tones to Smith, who has just been introduced to take her in to Dinner).