In Europe it is legs that no pure-minded
woman is supposed to possess. In China we worship our mother-in-
law and despise our wife; in England we treat our wife with
respect, and regard our mother-in-law as the bulwark of comic
journalism. The stone age, the iron age, the age of faith, the age
of infidelism, the philosophic age, what are they but the passing
fashions of the world? It is fashion, fashion, fashion wherever we
turn. Fashion waits beside our cradle to lead us by the hand
through life. Now literature is sentimental, now hopefully
humorous, now psychological, now new-womanly. Yesterday's pictures
are the laughing-stock of the up-to-date artist of to-day, and to-
day's art will be sneered at to-morrow. Now it is fashionable to
be democratic, to pretend that no virtue or wisdom can exist
outside corduroy, and to abuse the middle classes. One season we
go slumming, and the next we are all socialists. We think we are
thinking; we are simply dressing ourselves up in words we do not
understand for the gods to laugh at us."
"Don't be pessimistic," retorted the Minor Poet, "pessimism is
going out.
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