The
rising tide of "woman's rights," swelling and every year advancing
farther and farther, recoils from it with dismay. There will in my
opinion be no general progress in such eligibility till a sensible,
philosophic, democratic method is substituted.
The whole question--which strikes far, very far deeper than most
people have supposed, (and doubtless, too, something is to be said on
all sides,) is peculiarly an important one in art--is first an ethic,
and then still more an esthetic one. I condense from a paper read
not long since at Cheltenham, England, before the "Social Science
Congress," to the Art Department, by P. H. Rathbone of Liverpool, on
the "Undraped Figure in Art," and the discussion that follow'd:
"When coward Europe suffer'd the unclean Turk to soil the sacred
shores of Greece by his polluting presence, civilization and morality
receiv'd a blow from which they have never entirely recover' d, and
the trail of the serpent has been over European art and European
society ever since. The Turk regarded and regards women as animals
without soul, toys to be play'd with or broken at pleasure, and to be
hidden, partly from shame, but chiefly for the purpose of stimulating
exhausted passion. Such is the unholy origin of the objection to the
nude as a fit subject for art; it is purely Asiatic, and though not
introduced for the first time in the fifteenth century, is yet to be
traced to the source of all impurity--the East. Although the source of
the prejudice is thoroughly unhealthy and impure, yet it is now shared
by many pure-minded and honest, if somewhat uneducated, people.
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