Utopia of Usurers | Page 2

threat is justified at the very moment
when it is falsified. Now I have said again and again (and I shall
continue to say again and again on all the most inappropriate occasions)
that we must hit Capitalism, and hit it hard, for the plain and definite
reason that it is growing stronger. Most of the excuses which serve the
capitalists as masks are, of course, the excuses of hypocrites. They lie
when they claim philanthropy; they no more feel any particular love of
men than Albu felt an affection for Chinamen. They lie when they say
they have reached their position through their own organising ability.
They generally have to pay men to organise the mine, exactly as they
pay men to go down it. They often lie about the present wealth, as they
generally lie about their past poverty. But when they say that they are
going in for a "constructive social policy," they do not lie. They really
are going in for a constructive social policy. And we must go in for an
equally destructive social policy; and destroy, while it is still
half-constructed, the accursed thing which they construct.
The Example of the Arts
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.
The First Effect
I should say the first effect of the triumph of the capitalist (if we allow
him to triumph) will be that that line of demarcation will entirely
disappear. There will be no art that might not just as well be

advertisement. I do not necessarily mean that there will be no good art;
much of it might be, much of it already is, very good art. You may put
it, if you please, in the form that there has been a vast improvement in
advertisements. Certainly there would be nothing surprising if the head
of a negro