plendour.

But besides all this unconscious feminine influence upon art, there is
the influence of women who care consciously for art; and it also has an
enervating effect on the artist. For the female patron of art, just
because there are so few male patrons of it, is apt to take a motherly
interest in the artist. To her he is a delightful wayward child rather
than a real man occupied with real things, like her husband or her
father or her brother: not one who can earn money for her and fight for
her and protect her, but rather one who needs to be protected and
humoured in a world which cares so little for art. To her, with all her
passion for art, it is something in its nature irrational, and, like a
child, delightful because irrational. It is an escape from reality
rather than a part of it. And so she will believe whatever the artist
tells her because he is an artist, not because he is a man of sense; and
she encourages him to be more of an artist than a man of sense. She
encourages him to be extravagantly aesthetic, and enjoys all his
extravagance as a diversion from the sound masculinity of her own
mankind. There is room in her prosperous, easy world for these
diversions from business, just as there is room for charity or, perhaps,
religion. The world can afford artists as it can afford pets; as it can
afford beautiful, cultivated women. And that also is the view of her
husband, if he is good-natured. But to him, just because art and artists
are the proper concern of his wife, they are even less serious than they
are to her. She may persuade herself that she takes them quite
seriously, but he pretends to do so only out of politeness, and as he
would pretend to take her clothes seriously. For him the type of the
artist is still the pianist who gives locks of his over-abundant hair to
ladies. Even if the artist is a painter and cuts his hair and dresses
like a man, he still belongs to the feminine world and excites himself
about matters that do not concern men. Men can afford him, and so they
tolerate him; but he is one of the expenses they would cut down if it
were necessary to cut down expenses.

Well, it is necessary to cut down expenses now; and yet in ages much
sterner and poorer than our own art was the concern of men, and they
afforded it because it was not to them a mere feminine luxury. They
afforded the towering churches of the Middle Ages because they expressed
the religious passion of all mankind; and ha