Meanwhile we can, in some slight measure, foretell one or two of the
directions in which our future artistic readjustment is most likely to
begin, even apart from that presumable social reorganisation and
industrial progress which will give greater leisure and comfort to the
workers, and make their individual character the guide, and not the
slave, of this machinery. Such a direction is already indicated by one
of our few original and popular forms of art: the picture-book and the
poster, which, by the new processes of our colour printing, have
placed some of the most fanciful and delicate of our artists--men like
Caldecott and Walter Crane, like Cheret and Boutet de Monvel, at the
service of everyone equally. Moreover, it is probable that long before
machinery is so perfected as to demand individual guidance, preference
and therefore desire for beauty, and long before a corresponding
readjustment of work and leisure, the eye will have again become
attentive through the necessities of rational education. The habit of
teaching both adults and children by demonstration rather than
precept, by awaking the imagination rather than burdening the memory,
will quite undoubtedly recall attention to visible things, and thereby
open new fields to art: geography, geology, natural history, let alone
history in its vaster modern sociological and anthropological aspect,
will insist upon being taught no longer merely through books, but
through collections of visible objects; and, for all purposes of
reconstructive and synthetic conception, through pictures.
And, what is more, the sciences will afford a new field for poetic
contemplation; while the philosophy born of such sciences will
synthetise new modes of seeing life and demand new visible symbols.
The future will create cosmogonies and Divine Comedies more numerous,
more various, than those on sculptured Egyptian temples and Gothic
cathedrals, and Bibles more imaginative perhaps than the ones painted
in the Pisa Campo Santo and in the Sixtine Chapel. The future? Nay, we
can see a sample already in the present. I am alluding to the panels
by Albert Besnard in the School of Pharmacy in Paris, a series
illustrating the making of medicinal drugs, their employment and the
method and subject-matter of the sciences on which pharmaceutical
practice is based. Not merely the plucking and drying of the herbs in
sunny, quiet botanical gardens, and the sorting and mingling of earths
and metals among the furnaces of the laboratory; not merely the first
tremendous tragic fight between the sudden sickness and the physician,
and the first pathetic, hard-won victory, the first weary but
rapturous return out of doors of the convalescent; but the life of the
men on whose science our power for life against death is based: the
botanists knee-deep in the pale spring woods; the geologists in the
snowy hollows of the great blue mountain; the men themselves, the
youths listening and the elder men teaching, grave and eager
intellectual faces, in the lecture rooms. And, finally, the things
which fill the minds of these men, their thoughts and dreams, the
poetry they have given to the world; the poetry of that infinitely
remote, dim past, evoked out of cavern remains and fossils--the lake
dwellers among the mists of melting glaciers; the primæval horses
playing on the still manless shores; the great saurians plunging in
the waves of long-dried seas; the jungles which are now our coal beds;
and see! the beginning of organic life, the first callow vegetation on
the stagnant waters in the dawn-light of the world. The place is but a
mean boarded and glazed vestibule; full of the sickly fumes of
chemicals; and the people who haunt it are only future apothecaries.
But the compositions are as spacious and solemn, the colours as tender
and brilliant, and the poetry as high and contemplative as that of any
mediæval fresco; it is all new also, undreamed of, _sui generis_, in
its impersonal cosmic suggestiveness, as in its colouring of opal, and
metallic patinas, and tea rose and Alpine ice cave.