It ought to be possible now, as it once was, to define decency in terms outside our emotions, not variable with our private taste but fixed in the conditions of the artist’s work. When man is inspired by the world he sees to make some lasting record of his feeling about it, and selects a medium to express himself in,—wood, stone, metal, color, language,—he immediately encounters certain problems and difficulties in his medium, certain limitations in it which he must submit to, if he would convey his meaning with precision. The limitations of his medium, therefore, dictate to the artist his first lessons in decorum. For if you will not respect those limitations, you will find yourself saying what you did not intend; instead of beauty, you will convey some effect humorous or grotesque or ugly. It is at least bearable to see actual garments on the wax figures in shop-windows; we dress up dolls. But not even the shop window could tolerate a marble statue with clothes on. When the artist learns that some things, though excellent in themselves, do not come out in his medium with the effect he desires, his good sense and the sincerity of his art compel him to leave these subjects for other mediums. The themes he thus abandons are not indecent in the sense of obscenity or filth, not bad in themselves, but they do not fit his art—or, as writers used to say, do not belong to its decorum. The decorum of art may seem to the moralist far less important than the decency his own strong emotions feel after, but the moralist is wrong. The decorum of art is the deeper kind of decency, for it is based on lasting principles, and it leads to an understanding of the positive good in art, to beauty, as the moralist’s concern for decency often does not. You cannot explain on moral grounds why the glorification of the body in Walt Whitman, let us say, is sometimes disconcerting, yet the glorification of it in Greek sculpture seems not only decent but noble. The artist could explain the matter if he understood the decorum of artistic mediums. In so far as he does not understand it, he adds to the confusion of the arts in our time; he fills our magazines, for example, with photographs of Greek dances, and is himself, let us hope, disturbed by the grotesque contortions he has perpetuated. The dance was probably a graceful flow of motion; of all that flow, however, only a few moments would be in the decorum of the camera—moments of poise, in which motion might be suggested but not represented. But the photographer was charmed by the moments of motion, which are the essence of dance decorum, and he gives us a picture of grim-faced ladies suspended in the air, with frantic gestures of fingers and toes.