"Chesterton, G.K. - Usurers and other Essays" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chesterton G.K)

I. Art and Advertisement

I propose, subject to the patience of the reader, to devote two or three
articles to prophecy. Like all healthy-minded prophets, sacred and
profane, I can only prophesy when I am in a rage and think things look
ugly for everybody. And like all healthy-minded prophets, I prophesy in
the hope that my prophecy may not come true. For the prediction made by
the true soothsayer is like the warning given by a good doctor. And the
doctor has really triumphed when the patient he condemned to death has
revived to life. The 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