"The members of the European nobility have seldom been interested in art. They have been too busy wearing military uniforms or pursuing the elusive fox all over the landscape."
"But that is just the point I was making," said Cooper indignantly.
"Yes, but not so clearly as I have formulated it," said Harding. "The fact is that art has always flourished under the patronage of the merchant class. The Athenians were a trading people. Lorenzo the Magnificent came from a family of pawn-brokers. Rembrandt sold his pictures to the sturdy, and quite homely, tea and coffee merchants of Holland. It is preposterous to suppose that because a man is lucky in the stock market he is incapable of appreciating the very best things in art. He is not incapable; only he keeps his interests separate. From ten o'clock to three our patron of the arts is busy downtown attending to the unfortunate financiers whom he has caught on the wrong side of the market. If Cooper here were a Cubist painter, and you gave him the run of a great art collector's front office on settlement day, he could produce any number of pictures entitled Nude Speculator Descending a Wall Street Staircase."
"The European aristocracy doesn't always despise us," I said. "Occasionally an American will be decorated by the Grand Duke of Sonderklasse-Ganzgut with the cross of the Bald Eagle of the Third Class, the person thus honoured being worth nine hundred million dollars and the area of the Prince's dominions being eighty-nine square miles."
[VIII]
THE MODERN INQUISITION
Questionnaire: A favourite indoor amusement in uplift circles.
His eyes were bloodshot and he stared forward into vacancy.