It is an important fact in the history of the arts for the last century or more that in England and America, if not elsewhere, the chief interest in all the arts, including literature, has been taken by women rather than by men. In the great ages of art it was not so. Women, so far as we can tell, had little to do with the art of Greece in the fifth century or with the art of the Middle Ages. There were female patrons of art at the Renaissance, but they were exceptions subject to the prevailing masculine taste. Art was and remained a proper interest of men up to the eighteenth century. Women first began to control it and to affect its character at the mistress-ridden Court of Louis XV. But in the nineteenth century men began to think they were too busy to concern themselves with the arts. Men of power, when they were not working, needed to take exercise and left it to their wives to patronize the arts. And so the notion grew that art was a feminine concern, and even artists were pets for women. The great man, especially in America, liked his wife to have every luxury. The exquisite life she led was itself a proof of his success; and she was for him a living work of art, able to live so because of the abundance of his strength. In her, that strength passed into ornament and became beautiful; she was a friendly, faithful Delilah to his Samson, a Delilah who did not shear his locks. And so he came to think of art itself as being in its nature feminine if not effeminate, as a luxury and ornament of life, as everything, in fact, except a means of expression for himself and other men.
This female control of art began, as I have said, at the mistress-ridden Court of Louis XV, and it has unfortunately kept the stamp of its origin. At that Court art, to suit the tastes of the Pompadour and the Du Barri, became consciously frivolous, became almost a part of the toilet. The artist was the slave of the mistress, and seems to have enjoyed his chains. In this slavery he did produce something charming; he did invest that narrow and artificial Heaven of the Court with some of the infinite beauty and music of a real Heaven. But out of this refined harem art there has sprung a harem art of the whole world which has infested the homes even of perfectly respectable ladies ever since. All over Europe the ideals of applied art have remained the ideals of the Pompadour; and only by a stern and conscious effort have either women or men been able to escape from them. Everywhere there has spread a strange disease of romantic snobbery, the sufferers from which, in their efforts at aesthetic expression, always pretend to be what they are not. Excellent mothers of families, in their furniture and sometimes even in their clothes, pretend to be King’s mistresses. Of course, if this pretence were put into words and so presented to their consciousness, they would be indignant. It has for them no connexion with conduct; it is purely aesthetic, but art means to them make-believe, the make-believe that they live an entirely frivolous life of pleasure provided for them by masculine power and devotion.
