Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/515

Rh intercourse with her: woman young and pretty, woman for the most part stripped bare. It was so held, not only by all Maupassant's comrades in "art"—painters and sculptors, novelists and poets—but also by philosophers, teachers of the rising generation. Thus the celebrated Renan, in his work, "Marcus Aurelius," condemning Christianity for not understanding feminine beauty, speaks plainly as follows: "The fault of Christianity is well disclosed; it is too exclusively moral, it has altogether sacrificed beauty. Whereas, in the eyes of a complete philosophy, beauty, far from being a mere superficial advantage, a danger, an inconvenience, is a gift of God, like virtue. It is as worthy as virtue. A beautiful woman expresses one aspect of the divine purpose, one of God's aims, as effectively as a man of genius, or a virtuous woman. She knows this, and hence her pride. She instinctively feels the infinite treasure which she carries in her body; she well knows that, without cleverness, without talent, without any particular virtue, she counts amongst the highest of God's manifestations. And why prohibit her from advantageously exhibiting the gift which has been awarded her, prohibit her from mounting the diamond which she has received?

"Woman, in embellishing herself, accomplishes a duty; she practises an art, an exquisite art, in a sense the most fascinating of arts. Do not let us be led astray by the smile which certain words provoke in the frivolous.(!) Mankind awards the palm of genius to the artistic Greek, who knew how to solve that most delicate of problems, the adornment of the human body, which is to adorn perfection itself; and yet some people wish to see only an affair of rags in the attempt to further God's finest work, woman's beauty. Woman's toilette, with all its delicacies, is, in its way, high art.

"Epochs and nations which know how to succeed in this are the great epochs and the great nations. The history of Christianity shows that by excluding this species of art it postponed the full development of the social ideal which it conceived to a much later period,