The Midland Author:Unknown Author Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Beauty and Order, the Old Question By Lewis Wokthington Smith The warfare between the artist and the moralist seems still to have truces only, and no peace... more ». For such men as Richard Le Gallienne, the shibboleth of beauty is the persistent and ultimate thing. For a George Sylvester Viereck, gleefully hitting every head whose bonnet does not shade eyes of leering coquetry or whose military cap does not suggest a thirst to be appeased only by abundant schooners of beer, puritanism is the great blot on the face of American civilization. What is beauty? What is puritanism? These are questions for each of which there is more than one answer. Doubtless that is as it should be, if we are not to be human machines, and yet some answers must be better than others, truer, more enduring, fuller of the flowering finalities of life. Not long ago I walked by a miserable row of buildings in a quarter of the town where they are not infrequent. Down the steps of one of the apartments came a gentle-looking woman dressed in a fashion of quiet refinement that was a sufficient advertisement of the conflict between her tastes and the limitations of her life. I saw her, and she was pleasant to see, but I could not stop with face or figure. They had their charm, but were the things that my woman of the sweet chin and the fair brow must make the substance of her daily life in those mean quarters beautiful? That wns my question. It stayed with me,and it will go with me again whenever I pass the door out of which she sallied into the sunlight the day I saw her, bravely trying to make a ribbon and a feather tease the eyes into believing her the all she wished to be. "So audacious has beauty become in these latter days, so proudly she walks abroad, making so superb an appeal to the desire of the eye,...« less