Utopia of Usurers | Page 3

advertising Somebody's Blacking now adays were finished
with as careful and subtle colours as one of the old and superstitious
painters would have wasted on the negro king who brought gifts to
Christ. But the improvement of advertisements is the degradation of
artists. It is their degradation for this clear and vital reason: that the
artist will work, not only to please the rich, but only to increase their
riches; which is a considerable step lower. After all, it was as a human
being that a pope took pleasure in a cartoon of Raphael or a prince took
pleasure in a statuette of Cellini. The prince paid for the statuette; but
he did not expect the statuette to pay him. It is my impression that no
cake of soap can be found anywhere in the cartoons which the Pope
ordered of Raphael. And no one who knows the small-minded cynicism
of our plutocracy, its secrecy, its gambling spirit, its contempt of
conscience, can doubt that the artist-advertiser will often be assisting
enterprises over which he will have no moral control, and of which he
could feel no moral approval. He will be working to spread quack
medicines, queer investments; and will work for Marconi instead of
Medici. And to this base ingenuity he will have to bend the proudest
and purest of the virtues of the intellect, the power to attract his
brethren, and the noble duty of praise. For that picture by Millais is a
very allegorical picture. It is almost a prophecy of what uses are
awaiting the beauty of the child unborn. The praise will be of a kind
that may correctly be called soap; and the enterprises of a kind that may
truly be described as Bubbles.
II. Letters and the New Laureates
In these articles I only take two or three examples of the first and
fundamental fact of our time. I mean the fact that the capitalists of our
community are becoming quite openly the kings of it. In my last (and
first) article, I took the case of Art and advertisement. I pointed out that
Art must be growing worse--merely because advertisement is growing
better. In those days Millais condescended to Pears' soap. In these days

I really think it would be Pears who condescended to Millais. But here I
turn to an art I know more about, that of journalism. Only in my ease
the art verges on artlessness.
The great difficulty with the English lies in the absence of something
one may call democratic imagination. We find it easy to realise an
individual, but very hard to realise that the great masses consist of
individuals. Our system has been aristocratic: in the special sense of
there being only a few actors on the stage. And the back scene is kept
quite dark, though it is really a throng of faces. Home Rule tended to be
not so much the Irish as the Grand Old Man. The Boer War tended not
to be so much South Africa as simply "Joe." And it is the amusing but
distressing fact that every class of political leadership, as it comes to
the front in its turn, catches the rays of this isolating lime-light; and
becomes a small aristocracy. Certainly no one has the aristocratic
complaint so badly as the Labour Party. At the recent Congress, the real
difference between Larkin and the English Labour leaders was not so
much in anything right or wrong in what he said, as in something
elemental and even mystical in the way he suggested a mob. But it
must be plain, even to those who agree with the more official policy,
that for Mr. Havelock Wilson the principal question was Mr. Havelock
Wilson; and that Mr. Sexton was mainly considering the dignity and
fine feelings of Mr. Sexton. You may say they were as sensitive as
aristocrats, or as sulky as babies; the point is that the feeling was
personal. But Larkin, like Danton, not only talks like ten thousand men
talking, but he also has some of the carelessness of the colossus of
Arcis; "Que mon nom soit fletri, que la France soit libre."
A Dance of Degradation
It is needless to say that this respecting of persons has led all the other
parties a dance of degradation. We ruin South Africa because it would
be a slight on Lord Gladstone to save South Africa. We have a bad
army, because it would be a snub to Lord Haldane to have a good army.
And no Tory is allowed to say "Marconi" for fear Mr. George should
say "Kynoch." But this curious personal element, with its appalling
lack of patriotism, has appeared in a new and curious form in another

department of life; the department of literature, especially periodical
literature.