In serious art the naked figure is more frequently presented in France than in England, and it is quite customary in England to look upon it as a French evil. I need hardly remind the reader that the country where the naked figure was first studied with attention was not France, but Greece, and that every nation where art has been a serious pursuit has sedulously revived that study. It is trying to the patience to attempt any reasoning with people who can see nothing but lasciviousness in the higher forms of art. It seems to me natural that men who have devoted years to the study of the human form should desire to express their knowledge in works more important than the studies they make for their private use, in works that may have some possible chance of immortality. The study itself can never be repressed. The clothed figures in pictures that the Philistine does not object to can only be drawn well by a student of the nude. Many artists, like the President of the Royal Academy, first take the praiseworthy trouble to draw every figure naked, even when it is draped afterwards. Why the objection should be so specially raised against French art I do not know, unless it be for the same reason which makes people cry aloud against French immorality and pass in charitable silence Italian and Austrian immorality. As a matter of fact, with a few exceptions, the French school of sculpture is as dignified as it is learned. [Sidenote: French Painting.] [Sidenote: Realism.] French painting is less dignified because nearer to ordinary nature, but the fault to be found with it is chiefly that the nude figures of the present day are insufficiently idealised; it is not indecency as such, but a low prosaic realism that has established itself in this art; you do not meet with a nymph or a dryad, but with a portrait of some model. I remember hearing a French artist (himself an exhibitor of severely ideal nude figures) maintain that the nude by itself was decent, and so was clothing, but he abominated the two in the same picture. There have been plenty of examples of this unnatural union in past times, and in pictures which are now the pride of the great galleries; however, the most important contemporary instance is not a French picture but an Austrian, the _Entry of Charles the Fifth into Antwerp_, by Hans Makart. PART VII SOCIETY CHAPTER I CASTE [Sidenote: Caste not abolished.] England and France are alike in this, that caste is not yet abolished in either country, and they also resemble each other in passing through a state of false caste which appears to be intermediary between true caste and a future casteless condition of society. The two nations differ, however, in the kinds of false caste through which they are passing, and the purpose of the present chapter will be to examine the nature of the difference. [Sidenote: True Caste.]