Now I propose to take, one after another, certain aspects and
departments of modern life, and describe what I think they will be like
in this paradise of plutocrats, this Utopia of gold and brass in which
the great story of England seems so likely to end. I propose to say what
I think our new masters, the mere millionaires, will do with certain
human interests and institutions, such as art, science, jurisprudence,
or religion--unless we strike soon enough to prevent them. And for the
sake of argument I will take in this article the example of the arts.
Most people have seen a picture called “Bubbles,” which is used for the
advertisement of a celebrated soap, a small cake of which is introduced
into the pictorial design. And anybody with an instinct for design (the
caricaturist of the Daily Herald, for instance), will guess that it was
not originally a part of the design. He will see that the cake of soap
destroys the picture as a picture; as much as if the cake of soap had
been used to Scrub off the paint. Small as it is, it breaks and confuses
the whole balance of objects in the composition. I offer no judgment
here upon Millais’s action in the matter; in fact, I do not know what
it was. The important point for me at the moment is that the picture
was not painted for the soap, but the soap added to the picture. And
the spirit of the corrupting change which has separated us from that
Victorian epoch can be best seen in this: that the Victorian atmosphere,
with all its faults, did not permit such a style of patronage to pass as
a matter of course. Michael Angelo may have been proud to have helped an
emperor or a pope; though, indeed, I think he was prouder than they
were on his own account. I do not believe Sir John Millais was proud of
having helped a soap-boiler. I do not say he thought it wrong; but he
was not proud of it. And that marks precisely the change from his time
to our own. Our merchants have really adopted the style of merchant
princes. They have begun openly to dominate the civilisation of the
State, as the emperors and popes openly dominated in Italy. In Millais’s
time, broadly speaking, art was supposed to mean good art; advertisement
was supposed to mean inferior art. The head of a black man, painted
to advertise somebody’s blacking, could be a rough symbol, like an inn
sign. The black man had only to be black enough. An artist exhibiting
the picture of a negro was expected to know that a black man is not so
black as he is painted. He was expected to render a thousand tints of
grey and brown and violet: for there is no such thing as a black man
just as there is no such thing as a white man. A fairly clear line
separated advertisement from art.