ith her to advertise
the King's devotion to her in the costliness of all her surroundings. He
loved her so much that he had paid for all this ornamentation. She, like
Cleopatra, was always proving the potency of her charms by melting
pearls in vinegar. Like a prize ox, she was hung with the trophies of
her physical pre-eminence. In all the art which we call Louis Quinze
there is this advertisement of the labour spent upon it. It proclaims
that a vast deal of trouble has been taken in the making of it, and we
can see the artist utterly subdued to this trouble, utterly the slave of
the mistress's exorbitant whims. This advertisement of labour spent,
without the reality, has been the mark of all popular domestic art ever
since.

The beautiful is the ornamented--namely, that which looks as if it had
taken a great deal of trouble to make. The trouble now is taken by
machinery, and so, with the cost, is minimized; and what it produces is
ugliness, an ugliness which could not be mistaken for beauty but for the
notion that it does express a desirable state of being in those who
possess it. And this desirable state is the state of the King's
mistress, of a siren who can have whatever she desires because of the
potency of her charms. How otherwise can we explain the passion for
superfluous machine-made ornament which makes our respectable homes so
hideous? The machine simulates a trouble that has not been taken, and so
gives proof of a voluptuous infatuation that does not exist. The
hardworking mother of a family buys out of her scanty allowance a
scent-bottle that looks as if it had been laboriously cut for a King's
mistress, whereas really it has been moulded by machinery to keep up
the delusion, unconsciously cherished by her, that she lives in a world
of irresistible and unscrupulous feminine charm. And her husband endures
indulgently all this superfluous ugliness because he, too, believes that
it is the function of art to make the drawing-room of the mother of a
family look like the boudoir of a siren.

Most of this make-believe remains unconscious. We are all so used to it
that we do not see in it the expression of the dying harem instinct in
women. Yet it persists, even where the harem instinct would be
passionately repudiated. It persists often in the dress of the most
defiant suffragette, in outbreaks of incongruous frivolity, forlorn
tawdry roses that still whisper memories of the Pompadour and her
triumphant guilty s