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,