ve we nothing to express
except a dying harem instinct and the motherliness of kind women to a
neglected class? We ought to be grateful to this motherliness, which has
kept art alive in an age of ignorance; but we should see that it is only
a _pis-aller_, and women should see this as well as men. The female
attitude towards art has been itself the result of a wrong relation
between women and men, a relation half-animal, half-romantic, and
therefore not quite real. This relation, even while it has ceased to
exist more and more in fact, has still continued to express itself
aesthetically; and in art it has become a mere obsolete nuisance. One may
care nothing for art and yet long to be rid of the meaningless
frivolities of our domestic art. One may wish to clear them away as so
much litter and trash; and this clearance is necessary so that we may
purge our vision and see what is beautiful. We are almost rid of the
manners of the King's mistress, and most women no longer try to appeal
to men by their charming unreason. It is not merely that the appeal
fails now; they themselves refuse to make it, out of self-respect. But
they still remain irrational in their tastes; or at least they have not
learned that all this aesthetic irrationality misrepresents them, that it
is forced upon them by tradesmen, that it is as inexpressive as a
sentimental music-hall song sung by a gramophone. But now that men have
given women the vote, and so proved that they take them seriously at
last, they have the right to speak plainly on this matter. The feminine
influence upon art has been bad. Let us admit that it has been the
result of a bad masculine influence upon women, that it has been supreme
because men have become philistine; but the fact remains that it has
been bad. Art must be taken seriously if it is to be worth anything. It
must be the expression of what is serious and real in the human mind.
But all this feminine art has expressed, and has tried to glorify,
something false and worthless. Therefore it has been ugly, and we are
all sick of its ugliness. We look to women, now that they are equalled
with men by an act of legal justice, to deliver us from it. They disown
the Pompadour in fact; let them disown her in art.

An Unpopular Master

Nicholas Poussin is one of the great painters of the world; yet it is
easier to give reasons for disliking him than for liking him. After his
death there was a wa