Teaching concerning art which can be given to girls has to be approached with a sense of responsibility from conviction of the importance of its bearing on character as a whole. Let anyone who has tried it pass in review a number of girls as they grow up, and judge whether their instinct in art does not give a key to their character, always supposing that they have some inclination to reflect on matters of beauty, for there are some who are candidly indifferent to beauty if they can have excitement. They have probably been spoiled as children and find it hard to recover. Excitement has worn the senses so that their report grows dull and feeble. Imagination runs on other lines and requires stimulants; there is no stillness of mind in which the perception of beauty and harmony and fitness can grow up. There are others--may they be few--in whose minds there is little room for anything but success. Utilitarians in social life, their determination is to get on, and this spirit pervades all they do; it has the making of the hardest-grained worldliness: to these art has nothing to say. But there are others to whom it has a definite message, and their response to it corresponds to various schools or stages of art. There are some who are daring and explicit in their taste; they resent the curb, and rush into what is extravagant with a very feeble protest against it from within themselves. Beside them are simpler minds, merely exuberant, for whom there can never be enough light or colour in their picture of life. If they are gifted with enough intelligence to steady their joyful constitution of mind, these will often develop a taste that is fine and true. In the background of the group are generally a few silent members of sensitive temperament and deeper intuition, who see with marvellous quickness, but see too much to be happy and content, almost too much to be true. 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.