THE CULT OF PLEASURE
Certain predictions in the foregoing chapter will have suggested to
all who accept them that the cultivation of pleasure must occupy a
large part of the energy of the new age. From the moment when men,
sufficiently astute and purposeful to accumulate enormous fortunes
if they were permitted to do so, are required by law to desist from
useless and injurious money-getting, a vast amount of ingenuity will
be diverted to the development of the useless. The skill expended upon
money-making--and let it be admitted frankly that, however unscrupulous
one may be, it is not easy to become a millionaire--will be turned to
the task, almost equally difficult, of spending it satisfactorily. We
may consider it as practically certain that the pleasures of the
new age will be largely intellectual in their nature. The stupidity
of merely sensual pleasures will revolt the intelligence of the
future. Athletic sports of some kind, facilitated by certain inventions
which can easily be foreseen, will no doubt be a source of much
enjoyment, though the growing gentleness of mankind will abolish, as
barbarous, games which take the form of modified assault, as football,
boxing, wrestling, fencing and the like. We shall certainly acquire a
great distaste for fighting in any form when growing humanitarianism
shall have put an end to war--a development which may confidently be
predicted for the present century. Similarly--"Am I God, to kill and
to make alive?"--we shall cease to take life for our amusement; as,
for sentimental and other reasons, it has been shown that we shall
cease to kill for food.
What then will be our games? One of the most likely instruments
of sport will no doubt be the small flying-machine. It is not in
the least probable, so far as can at present be foreseen, that
purely aërial and self-directed vehicles for purposes of travel
or transportation will be a feature of the new civilisation. The
dangers and inconvenience of large aërostats are less accidents of
imperfect invention than inherent difficulties of the subject. It is
very probable that some means of propelling self-supported vehicles
between guideways may be discovered. But, as it is not at all likely
that any means of suspending the effect of air-resistance can ever be
devised, a flying-machine must always be slow and cumbersome. Travel
and transportation, to be attractive in the new age, must be rapid in
the extreme. Ships no doubt will skim the surface of the sea instead
of resting upon it. But air-ships are not very likely to be anything
but a sort of vast toy, within, at all events, the next hundred years.
But, as a means of amusement, the idea of aërial travel has great
promise. Small one-man flying-machines, or the aërial counterpart
of tandem bicycles, will no doubt be common enough. We shall fly for
pleasure; and just as thousands of working men and women now take a
Saturday-afternoon spin on a bicycle, so they will go for a sky-trip,
and visit interesting mountain-tops for (non-alcoholic) picnics. The
bicycle or the motor-cycle will perhaps be the point of development. It
is quite certain that within the next ten or fifteen years some means
will have been discovered by which we can ride on a single wheel. The
saving of weight thus effected will go a long way towards surmounting
the flight problem. Then, when motor-unicycles are presently propelled
by force transmitted (in the same way as Marconi's telegrams) from a
fixed power-house, the difficulty of flight will be within sight of
an easy solution. Any competent mechanician of the present day could
design a flying-machine if the mere weight of the motive appliance
could be overcome. When the motor is fixed on terra firma, and the
vehicle only needs to carry a device for utilising the ætheric waves
which the source of power wirelessly transmits, flight will be at
least as simple a matter as wireless telegraphy is to-day.
When it is possible to cross the Atlantic in a day by means of
surface-riding ships, propelled, like the flying-machines, by
ætheric force, the field of amusement will be vastly increased,
and although (as I shall show) it will no longer be necessary to
travel in order to "see the sights" of any part of the world, the
pleasure of being present at the actual events of life in different
countries will probably never pall. So long as any parts of the world
remain comparatively unfamiliar, young men and maidens will love
travel. When it is possible, wrapped in warm woollens and provided
with portable heating-appliances, to pay a short visit to the Arctic
circle and enjoy the matchless spectacle of the Aurora Borealis amid
the awe-compelling obscurities of the Polar night: when, with even
less inconvenience, we can take a trip to the tropics and witness,
here the unchangeable processes of Nature's luxuriance, there the
perhaps immutable conservatism of the East, the new leisure of the
coming time will have great stores of recreation for those happy
enough to live in the dawning twenty-first century.
The more distinctively intellectual pleasures of the new age will
be much subserved by one class of invention, of which the rudiments
already exist. By means of the phonograph we are able, not very
perfectly, to reproduce as often as we desire sounds created in
favourable circumstances. By various kinds of kinetoscope we can
reproduce a rudimentary sort of picture of an event which has taken
place in a good light. But when the phonograph has been developed, when
moving pictures have been perfected, what a vast implement of amusement
may be foreseen! Each of these inventions is comparatively new. If
we imagine the discovery of means, developed from the phonograph,
by which any sounds which have once existed in the presence of a
recording machine can be reproduced at will, not in a makeshift sort
of way, but without any loss of timbre and quality, with perfect
articulation where articulation is necessary, with exactly correct
time-regulation automatically determined by the first enunciation, and
all this cheaply and compendiously, what vast resources of cultured
enjoyment are offered to the lover of music! How many people, denied
the pleasure of learning to understand good music by the difficulties
and exertion attendant upon our infrequent and expensive concerts,
will become true lovers and appreciators of it! For music is only to
be really enjoyed by the average man when it is repeatedly heard,
repeatedly considered. Certainly the people of the new age will be
epicures of the emotions which comprehended music is so nobly capable
of stirring.
No doubt the new age will have solved, in a far more satisfactory
way than we have been able to solve as yet, the problem of chromatic
photography. When colour influences photographic plates or some
contrivance substituted for them, not indirectly by a mechanical
sorting-out of tints, but by affecting directly the optical
properties of the plates or whatever may succeed plates, we shall
have marvellously accurate pictures. [6]
Nor is this all. The kinetoscope, as at present exhibited under
various unpleasing names, is imperfect in two ways: first because
it is powerless to reproduce colour, and secondly because it gives
at best a mere magic-lantern picture violently out of focus, and by
its pulsatory motion horribly distressing to the eyes. Chromatic
photography will overcome the former difficulty. When we find out
how to increase greatly the receptive rapidity of photographic
emulsion without spoiling what photographers call the "grain" of
it; or when we have improved, as we every year are improving, the
optical qualities of lenses, we shall be able to have our pictures
in focus. The distressing flicker of moving pictures is an objection
purely mechanical in its cause. But when, as they will be in a few
years, all these objections except the first have been removed, and
even when we have colour-photography in a true sense of the word,
there will still remain one field to conquer. We must have, instead of
moving pictures, something which represents all objects as solid. The
difference is the difference between an ordinary photograph and a
highly-improved stereoscopic picture magnified to life-size. When
these advantages are attained it will be possible to represent,
exactly as it happened, any event which has been suitably photographed.
The utility of this as a means of intelligent amusement will be at once
perceived. Imagine the theatre of the future. Probably it will not be
beyond the means of the rich, even when restrained from over-possession
as it is evident that they must be, to have theatre-rooms in their own
houses. But the masses will no doubt go to the theatre much as they do
now. Only instead of seeing a company of actors and actresses, more or
less mediocre, engaged in the degrading task of repeating time after
time the same words, the same gestures, the same actions, they will
see the performance of a complete "star" company, as once enacted at
its very best, reproduced as often as it may be wanted, the perfected
kinetoscope exhibiting the spectacle of the stage, the talking machine
and the phonograph (doubtless differentiated) rendering perfectly the
voices of the actors and the music of the orchestra. There will be
no need for the employment of inferior actors in the small parts. As
the production of any play will only demand that it be worked up to
the point of perfection and then performed once, there will be no
difficulty in securing the most perfect rendering that it is capable
of. The actor's art will be immensely elevated, not only by his
relief from the drudgery of repeated performance and by the leisure
thus afforded him for study and reflection, but also by the removal
of what is keenly felt by all players of sensibility and ambition as
one of the greatest drawbacks of the stage. We are accustomed to the
actor's complaint that whereas the author, the sculptor, the painter,
the composer of music, makes for himself a fame imperishable as the
products of his art, the actor frets his hour and disappears from
the stage, to be promptly forgotten by an ungrateful public. Well,
the actor's art, like the art of the executant musician, will have the
endowment of permanency. And there will be a magnificent opportunity
for the actor as artist, in that he will be able to compare himself
and his fellows with the actors who are dead and can act no more. It
is probably true that Irving is the greatest actor since Garrick,
but who can prove it? The actor's art is transient to-day: it will
be permanent, it will be classical, in the next century. By this fact
not only will the pleasures of the theatre be made cheap, convenient
and varied, but the art of the theatre will be vastly improved.
Just as the actor will be spared the drudgery of mechanical, parrotlike
repetition, so the indifferent maidens of the new age will have no
need to waste their time in learning to play upon musical instruments
more or less imperfectly. No doubt some who are not professional
musicians will do so for their own pleasure. But the professional
executant himself will cease, like the actor, to rank as a sort of
superior harlequin or performing animal, exhibiting his powers for
the diversion of an assembled public. What he has once played can,
if he choose, be constantly repeated. The executant will be paid by
a royalty on each reproduction, when he is wise. Less prudent artists
will sell their records for a lump sum, just as the unthrifty author
sells his copyrights. But let it be noted that, on the assumption
that the reproduction is perfect, the evolution above predicted
is a highly artistic one. Instead of the executant or singer being
judged by his performance on an occasion when fatigue, illness or
unfavourable circumstances may militate against his perfect success,
when the nerve-shattering conditions of the platform probably in any
case offend his susceptibilities and detract from the perfection of
his performance, he will be able to found his reputation upon the
very best performance he is capable of. He will be able to try and
try again in the privacy of his study. When he has satisfied himself,
and then alone, will he publish his artistic effort to the world. He
can destroy as many unsatisfactory records as he pleases, just as
the sculptor can break up his clay when he has not succeeded, just
as the painter can paint out his picture when it has not pleased him,
and be judged only by his best.
It would be ignoring the most obvious characteristics of mankind to
suppose that the pleasures of the new age will be limited to a mere
mechanical development of those which we enjoy at present. There
can be no doubt that new delights will be invented. With a general
improvement in intelligence and in the standard of comfort; with a
moneyed class compelled, by the enactments which we have imagined, to
enjoy a considerable accession of leisure; with conditions which will,
as we have hoped, reduce materially the necessary hours of labour
for the worker; with some of the most engrossing amusements of the
present age abolished for sentimental reasons; we may take it for
granted that a great demand for new recreations will develop. Some
of these considerations might easily give us pause. We might perhaps
fear that vice--either the extension of existing vices or (if that
indeed be possible) the invention of new ones--might be a terrifying
problem of the next century, if we had not foreseen, concurrently
with the other developments anticipated, a marked moral improvement
in human nature. There is in the calculations of the pessimist and
the reactionary no fallacy more mischievous than the oft-recited
aphorism that human nature is the same in all places and at all
times. That is precisely what human nature is not. Spectacles which
delighted ancient Rome would revolt modern civilisation. Spectacles
which are still keenly enjoyed in Spain would revolt England or the
United States, and probably awaken the activity of the police. Human
morality has demonstrably advanced in historic time: it has very
perceptibly advanced, as I showed in an earlier chapter, [7] during
the nineteenth century. But the improvement in this respect which the
next hundred years will show must, in all human probability, greatly
excel that of the past time. And thus, though a sane and reasonable
anticipation will not exclude the possibility of regrettable accidents
in the future moral history of mankind, it will also regard them as
probably transient. The vices regarded as incident to complicated
civilisations have perhaps been too hastily considered by despairing
moralists. Vice is essentially stupid. It is only in occasional, in
sporadic instances that we are presented with the terrible spectacle
of great intelligences depraved by gross immorality and animalism:
and even then, this combination is only possible where a high degree
of culture is in contact with a widespread unintelligence. Most likely
it will be found, when the abstract laws of vice come to be mapped out
with more exactness than, so far as I am aware, they have yet been,
that the degeneracies and immoralities of greatly-civilised ages are
in reality only the product of luxury seated upon degradation. The
French moralists of the eighteenth century had a glimmering of this
in their idyllic pictures of reformed society, when the old morality
of the simple life was to return with the abolition of oligarchic
splendour and popular misery.
In one direction we may see means by which intelligent
recreation may be supposed capable of vast developments. Already
the study of the psychical side of man has been the means of
extraordinary discoveries. Our knowledge of hypnotism, suggestion,
thought-transference and similar psychological wonders, obscured though
it has unhappily been by charlatanism and the importation into the
subject of irrelevant follies, has great promise for the future man,
whose psychical faculties will unquestionably develop at the expense of
his animal instincts. It is hardly possible to limit our conception of
the means by which thought will be communicated in the next century,
but we may see just where the change will probably come. A printed
essay, such as this, is obviously a successive translation of thought
into words (in the brain), then of the words into letters, and then of
letters into type, which is picked up by the eye, retranslated into
words by one part of the brain, and finally transmuted into thought
again in another part. If some method can be discovered of abolishing
one or more of these processes, thought can be conveyed from brain to
brain at an enormously increased pace, and with a delicacy of which we
have no present conception. This development is not so inconceivable
as it at first appears. We know as yet almost nothing of the processes
by which (for instance) vibration, accepted by the ear as sound, is,
in the brain-cells behind the ear, converted into thought. Speech
and writing are purely conventional devices. If, instead of using
these conventions, we can learn to transmit ideas immediately from
brain to brain, the next step may be an extraordinary development of
intellectual pleasures, in the case of those individuals whose tastes
are capable of thus being ministered to. But to say this is not to
imply that the ordinary means of human intercommunication will be
dispensed with. For most occasions, and for all but the subtlest and
most refined necessities of thought, no doubt books, newspapers and
letters will remain a feature of everyday life--though of course with
such modifications as the progress of the century will have called
forth. The future of the newspaper in particular is a subject of such
great importance that it requires to be discussed in detail.