Woman and Artist

by Max O'Rell

"My dear Lorimer," exclaimed Philip, "if you are going to argue out that subject with Dora, you are lost, I warn you. You will get the worst of it."

"Well, you will admit this much, I suppose," said Dora, "that the models chosen are generally beautiful. English models are even more than beautiful, they are mostly pure in form."

"Quite so, but no artist has a right to expose a woman's nude figure to the public gaze. In sculpture it may be permissible,—the cold purity of the marble saves everything,—but never in painting."

"Shake up the Englishman," said Dora, laughing, "and the Puritan rises to the surface. I thought you were artistic, my dear friend. One may forgive a Puritan, but a pruritan, excuse the word. Oh!... I have met people who only saw in the Venus de Milo a woman with no clothes on. Poor Venus! I wish she could grow a pair of arms and hands to box the ears of such Philistines. Of course, I must say, these people were not of our society."

"Well, call me prejudiced if you will; but I hate to see woman robbed of her modesty ... and of her clothes, for the edification of a profane public, especially a public as inartistic as our English one. Your remark about the Venus de Milo proves that I am right. In France it is another matter. The public understands. It knows that such and such a picture is beautiful, and why it is beautiful. Even the workmen over there have been visitors of picture galleries from generation to generation, and I have heard some, at the Louvre and the Luxembourg, making criticisms of pictures that they looked at, criticisms which proved to me that they had more true appreciation of painting than the fashionable crowd that goes to the Royal Academy on private view day. No, I say, the nude in France, if you will; but in England, Heaven preserve us from it!"

"And yet," said Dora, in a calmer tone of voice, "the novelists and dramatists of to-day, for the most part, do exactly the same thing."

"What do you mean to say? Novelists and dramatists describe the emotions, the passions of the soul. To uncover the heart and uncover the body are two vastly different things. Add to that, in England on the stage, if not in the novel, that virtue triumphs invariably."

"Yes, but at what cost? Firstly, often at the expense of insulting one's common-sense; but that is the fault of a public that insists on being sent home, perfectly convinced that the hero and heroine still henceforth live happily ever after. That is not the worst of it. Before seeing the triumph of virtue, often an impossible kind of virtue, one must assist at the heartrending dissection of a woman's soul. All the deformities of her heart are laid bare. I suppose you call that realism too, I call it clinical surgery—that is to say, my dear friend, that modern fiction exhales a strong odour of carbolic acid. Ah, I must say I prefer a picture in which a woman is presented in all her beauty of form and colour, to a novel or a play, in which we see woman represented as impure, corrupted" ...

"I told you that you would be beaten, Lorimer. Own yourself vanquished."

"My dear madam," said Lorimer, "you preach to a convert. But I must remind you that converting the British public is not my rôle. I serve up to that worthy public, which has always been kind to me, the dish of its predilection. We cannot always put on the stage Pauls and Virginias, who, moreover, are getting rarer every day, as you will admit."