Essays on Art | Page 9

with our own
passions. He seems to be speaking to himself as if he had forgotten the
whole audience of mankind, but in what he says he ignores the personal
part of himself; he is most passionate when most impersonal. "To the
ambitious, whom neither the boon of life nor the beauty of the world
suffices to content, it comes as a penance that life with them is
squandered and that they possess neither the benefits nor the beauty of
the world." That might be a platitude said by some one else; but we
know that in it Leonardo expresses his faith. The boon of life, the

beauty of the world, were enough for him without ambition, without
even further affections. He left father and mother and wealth, and even
achievement, to follow them; and he left all those not out of coldness,
or fear, or idleness, but because his own passion drew him away. No
cold man could have said, "Where there is most power of feeling, there
of martyrs is the greatest martyr." It is difficult for us northerners to
understand the intellectual passion of the South, to see even that it is
passion; most difficult of all for us to see that in men like Leonardo the
passion for beauty itself is intellectual. We, with our romanticism, our
sense of exile, can never find that identity which he found between
beauty and reality. "This benign nature so provides 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, 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