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