AN OPEN LETTER TO MR. JOHN ERSKINE.
My Dear Sir,—You have written in The Private Life. of Helen of Troy, a great book, which will live. It is a mine of humour and wisdom, but it is much more than that..
Many of us have been and are still bowing down to a false god, the god of ugliness, in painting, in sculpture, in music, in fiction, in poetry, in the drama, and in conduct. And, as the high priestesses of this perverted religion there stalks abroad a " monstrous regiment " of crop-headed, blue-necked, flat-breasted hermaphrodites, who would have us believe that they are the women of the future. We, of the other sex know better. Men of wholesome mind, many of them hardly consciously, cherish an ideal altogether different. the ideal of beauty. Of this ideal Helen has been and will ever be the embodiment, serene, triumphant, eternal. Her star has never set, though it has lately suffered eclipse. She has never lost her place in the innermost shrine of the hearts of men, but you have once more set up her statue on its pedestal. for all to see and worship the goddess incarnate in the human woman.—Yours in deep gratitude,
CLAssicus.
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