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.

Yet these ladies know that they have not the revenues of the Pompadour;
they must have their art, their make-believe, as cheap as possible; and
it has been one of the triumphs of modern industry to provide them with
cheap imitations of the luxury of the Pompadour. Hence the machine-made
frivolities of the most respectable homes, the hair-brushes with backs
of stamped silver, the scent-bottles of imitation cut-glass, the
draperies with printed rose-buds on them, the general
artificial-floweriness and flimsiness and superfluity of naughtiness of
our domestic art. It expresses a feminine romance to which the male
indulgently consents, as if he were really the voluptuous monarch whose
mistress the female, aesthetically, pretends to be. In this world of
aesthetic make-believe our homes are not respectable; they would scorn to
be so, for to the romantic female mind, when it occupies itself with
art, the improper is the artistic.

But this needs a more precise demonstration. We wonder at our modern
passion for superfluous ornament. We shall understand it only if we
discover its origin. The King's mistress liked everything about her to
be ornamented, because it was a point of honour w