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

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 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