They incline towards another extreme, an ideal so high-pitched
as to become unreal, and it meets with the penalty of unreality in
over-balancing itself. Children nearly always pull to one side or the
other; it is a work of long patience even to make them accept that there
should be a golden mean. Did they ever need it so much as they do now?
Probably each generation in turn, from Solomon's time onward, has asked
the same question. But in the modern world there can hardly have been a
time in which the principle of moderation needed to be more sustained,
for there has never been a time when circumstances made man more daring
in face of the forces of nature, and this same daring in other
directions, less beautiful, is apt to become defiant and unashamed of
excess. It asserts itself most loudly in modern French art, but we are
following close behind, less logical and with more remaining traditions
of correctness, but influenced beyond what we like to own.
In the education of girls, which is subject to so many limitations, very
often short in itself, always too short for what would be desirable to
attain, the best way to harmonize aesthetic teaching is not to treat it
in different departments, but to centre all round the general history of
art.
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