It will then be answered, not without a sneer, 'And what would

you prefer? Would you go back to the elegant early Victorian female,
with ringlets and smelling-bottle, doing a little in water colors,
dabbling a little in Italian, playing a little on the harp,
writing in vulgar albums and painting on senseless screens?
Do you prefer that?' To which I answer, 'Emphatically, yes
It will then be answered, not without a sneer, 'And what would
you prefer? Would you go back to the elegant early Victorian female,
with ringlets and smelling-bottle, doing a little in water colors,
dabbling a little in Italian, playing a little on the harp,
writing in vulgar albums and painting on senseless screens?
Do you prefer that?' To which I answer, 'Emphatically, yes.'
I solidly prefer it to the new female education, for this reason,
that I can see in it an intellectual design, while there is
none in the other. I am by no means sure that even in point
of practical fact that elegant female would not have been
more than a match for most of the inelegant females.
I fancy Jane Austen was stronger, sharper and shrewder than
Charlotte Bronte; I am quite certain she was stronger, sharper and
shrewder than George Eliot. She could do one thing neither
of them could do: she could coolly and sensibly describe a man.
I am not sure that the old great lady who could only smatter
Italian was not more vigorous than the new great lady who can
only stammer American; nor am I certain that the bygone
duchesses who were scarcely successful when they painted
Melrose Abbey, were so much more weak-minded than the modern
duchesses who paint only their own faces, and are bad at that.
But that is not the point. What was the theory, what was the idea,
in their old, weak water-colors and their shaky Italian? The idea
was the same which in a ruder rank expressed itself in home-made
wines and hereditary recipes; and which still, in a thousand
unexpected ways, can be found clinging to the women of the poor.
It was the idea I urged in the second part of this book:
that the world must keep one great amateur, lest we all become
artists and perish. Somebody must renounce all specialist conquests,
that she may conquer all the conquerors. That she may be a queen
of life, she must not be a private soldier in it. I do not think
the elegant female with her bad Italian was a perfect product,
any more than I think the slum woman talking gin and funerals
is a perfect product; alas! there are few perfect products.
But they come from a comprehensible idea; and the new woman comes
from nothing and nowhere. It is right to have an ideal, it is
right to have the right ideal, and these two have the right ideal.
The slum mother with her funerals is the degenerate daughter
of Antigone, the obstinate priestess of the household gods.
The lady talking bad Italian was the decayed tenth cousin of Portia,
the great and golden Italian lady, the Renascence amateur of life,
who could be a barrister because she could be anything.
Sunken and neglected in the sea of modern monotony and imitation,
the types hold tightly to their original truths. Antigone, ugly,
dirty and often drunken, will still bury her father.
The elegant female, vapid and fading away to nothing, still feels
faintly the fundamental difference between herself and her husband:
that he must be Something in the City, that she may be everything
in the country.

How many times have you been disappointed in some article of dress,

because when you planned it you were unable to see it all at once so as
to get the full effect; or else you could not see yourself in it, and so
be able to judge whether it suited you! How many homes have in them
draperies and rugs and wall paper and furniture which are in constant
quarrel because someone could not see before they were assembled that
they were never intended to keep company! How many people who plan their
own houses, would build them just the same again after seeing them
completed? The man who can see a building complete before a brick has
been laid or a timber put in place, who can see it not only in its
details one by one as he runs them over in his mind, but can see the
building in its entirety, is the only one who is safe to plan the
structure
How many times have you been disappointed in some article of dress,
because when you planned it you were unable to see it all at once so as
to get the full effect; or else you could not see yourself in it, and so
be able to judge whether it suited you! How many homes have in them
draperies and rugs and wall paper and furniture which are in constant
quarrel because someone could not see before they were assembled that
they were never intended to keep company! How many people who plan their
own houses, would build them just the same again after seeing them
completed? The man who can see a building complete before a brick has
been laid or a timber put in place, who can see it not only in its
details one by one as he runs them over in his mind, but can see the
building in its entirety, is the only one who is safe to plan the
structure. And this is the man who is drawing a large salary as an
architect, for imaginations of this kind are in demand. Only the one who
can see in his 'mind"s eye,' before it is begun, the thing he would
create, is capable to plan its construction. And who will say that
ability to work with images of these kinds is not of just as high a type
as that which results in the construction of plots upon which stories
are built!

Hitherto figures on smoking and athletics have been open to question

because comparisons were made between groups that are not of necessity
of the same physical and mental type, having no important difference
except in the use of tobacco
Hitherto figures on smoking and athletics have been open to question
because comparisons were made between groups that are not of necessity
of the same physical and mental type, having no important difference
except in the use of tobacco. But Prof. Pack has sought to avoid this
objection. As he points out, the football squad is probably as nearly a
homogeneous group as it is possible to find. It seems reasonable to
account for the inferior physical and mental work of these particular
groups of smokers on the theory that in the main the well known toxic
effects of tobacco are sufficient to create this difference.

Medical treatment by a physician can always mitigate and shorten the

duration of a cold and lessen the danger of complications, the symptoms
of which can not always be appreciated by the patient
Medical treatment by a physician can always mitigate and shorten the
duration of a cold and lessen the danger of complications, the symptoms
of which can not always be appreciated by the patient.

'The second maxim is: _Never suffer an exception to occur until the new

habit is securely rooted in your life
'The second maxim is: _Never suffer an exception to occur until the new
habit is securely rooted in your life._ Each lapse is like letting fall
a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes
more than a great many turns will wind again. _Continuity_ of training
is the great means of making the nervous system act infallibly right....
The need of securing success nerves one to future vigor.

The concluding chapter (IX

The concluding chapter (IX.) of the Book reflects on the great
difficulty of hitting the mean in all things, and of correctly
estimating all the requisite circumstances, in each particular case.
He gives as practical rules:--To avoid at all events the worst
extreme; to keep farthest from our natural bent; to guard against the
snare of pleasure. Slight mistakes on either side are little blamed,
but grave and conspicuous cases incur severe censure. Yet how far the
censure ought to go, is difficult to lay down beforehand in general
terms. There is the same difficulty in regard to all particular cases,
and all the facts of sense: which must be left, after all, to the
judgment of Sensible Perception [Greek: aisthaesis].