It may be argued that one has seen women--working women especially--whose breasts were firm bowls of beauty, whose buttocks were exquisitely curved, whose bellies would have satisfied the inspired author of _The Song of Songs_, and yet the women who owned such physical graces have not conspicuously possessed the finer spiritual graces. But we do not enhance one half of human perfection by belittling the other half. And we rarely conceive of any high perfection on one side without some approach to it on the other. Even Jesus--though the whole of his story demands that his visage should be more marred than any man's--is always pictured as beautiful. And do you suppose that the slave girl Blandina would have gone into the arena at Lyons to present her white body as the immortal symbol of the love of Jesus if her breasts had drooped down, and her buttocks swept low, and her abdomen protruded? The human heart is more subtly constructed. Those romantic Christian hagiologists saw to that. And--to come nearer to the point--could her fine tension of soul have been built up on a body as dissolute and weak as a candle in the sun?
We need to-day a great revival of the sense of responsibility, not only in the soul but in the body. We want a new sort of _esprit de corps_. We need it especially for women, for women, under modern conditions, even less than men, have no use for sagging bodies or sagging souls. It is only by the sanction of nakedness that this can be achieved. "Take this hint from the dancer," a distinguished American dancer has said, "the fewer clothes the better; woman is clumsy because she is overweighted with clothes." With whatever terror we may view any general claim to the right of nakedness, the mere liability to nakedness, the mere freedom to be naked, at once introduces a new motive into life. It becomes a moralising force of the most strenuous urgency. Clothes can no more be put before us as a substitute for the person. The dressmaker can no longer arrogate the functions of a Creator. The way is opened for the appearance in civilisation of a real human race.
_January_ 11.--There seem to be two extreme and opposed styles of writing: the liquid style that flows, and the bronze or marmoreal style that is moulded or carved. Thus there is in English the style of Jeremy Taylor and Newman and Ruskin, and there is the style of Bacon and Landor and Pater, the lyrically-impetuous men and the artistically-deliberate men.