that all over the
world you find something to imitate." To us imitation means prose, to
him it meant poetry; science itself meant poetry, and illusion was the
only ugliness. "Nature never breaks her own law." It is we who try to
find freedom in lawlessness, which is ignorance, ugliness, illusion.
"Falsehood is so utterly vile that, though it should praise the great
works of God, it offends against His divinity." There is Leonardo's
religion; and if still it is too cold for us, it is because we have not
his pure spiritual fire in ourselves.

The Pompadour in Art

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,