THE NEWSPAPER OF THE FUTURE, AND THE FUTURE OF THE NEWSPAPER
Suspending, as hardly within the bounds of manageable conjecture, any
attempt to follow up the suggestion with which the previous chapter
concluded, we can very easily imagine the lines on which newspapers
such as we know are likely to develop mechanically. A number of
processes already existing in embryo can be shown to be capable of
very great extension; and several discoveries which an intelligent
anticipation is capable of predicting could, and doubtless will,
be applied to journalism.
To foresee the future of the newspaper on what may be called the
editorial side is a much more difficult task, because we have here to
take into account the influence of the developed and rationalised
education of the people, which is certain to demand very great
changes. Daily newspapers of the present moment are in a more or less
transitional state. It can hardly, I think, be denied that the papers
which enjoy the greatest popularity exhibit retrogression in many
respects when compared with the best newspapers of twenty-five years
ago. But they are much more widely and popularly read. The collective
influence of their largely-extended circulations is no doubt very
great, though the influence of the newspaper on the individual is
less, and is attained in a different way. The old newspapers aimed,
and the survivors of their class still aim, at an influence based on
argument. They used to report events, speeches and movements of their
age more or less colourlessly, and to comment upon these things more
or less one-sidedly, according to their respective political bias. They
were ponderous, cultured, dignified, and a trifle dull. When an adverse
statesman made a speech which they did not like, they reported it
faithfully, and tore it to pieces in the formidable middle pages. The
leading article was their most important weapon: they sought their
chief effect by its means. But the day of the leading article is nearly
ended. The newspaper of the early--perhaps the immediate--future will
almost certainly dispense with leading articles altogether, and be
much more a news-carrier than an educator. It will attack adverse
opinion by simply not reporting it. It will sometimes, no doubt,
minimise facts unfavourable to its political side by garbling them. But
leading articles had a useful function not yet mentioned--that of
explaining the news-columns. Things which the ordinary (but fairly
intelligent) newspaper-reader was likely to have forgotten, or to be
ignorant of, were (and still are, where leading articles worthy of the
name exist) explained and amplified. In the newspaper of the future,
little paragraphs having the same purpose will no doubt be, as they
already begin to be, tacked on to the ends of news-items: and so far
as comment continues to be given at all, on such matters as political
speeches from the enemy, it will be given in this form. Speeches
from the newspaper's own side will not require comment. Newspaper
space will have too many demands upon it to permit of a statesman's
arguments being first printed semi-verbatim (actual verbatim reporting
hardly exists even now) and then marshalled forth all over again in
editorials. Whatever attempt is made to influence opinion through
political reporting will be made by selective processes. The arguments
of the adversary will be simply suppressed.
Although the old newspaper was really a much more intelligent affair
than the popular dailies of the present decade--and it is chiefly
of daily papers that I am now speaking--it is not very likely that a
reversion will take place. It is a curious feature of all progress,
that however much an existing institution may be perceived to be
retrograde in comparison with older institutions, reversion hardly ever
occurs. We adapt and modify what we have. We do not revive what we have
lost. And the regeneration of the newspaper will be forced upon the
newspaper-office by the development of public intelligence. Comment
will probably during the next few decades be eliminated from daily
journalism altogether, and confined to serious weekly publications,
somewhat on the lines of our monthly reviews, and to other publications
summarising the latter, like the present Review of Reviews, perhaps
the most useful periodical now being issued, with the single exception
of The Times. Thus the daily newspaper will be entirely a vehicle
for the propagation of news, correctly so called: and very likely
it will become almost entirely colourless, politically, because a
well-informed public will resent obvious garbling or clearly unfair
selection. The newspaper reader will no longer (as now) want only to
hear what is said on a side more or less emotionally and hardly at
all reflectively embraced. He will want to know what is said on all
sides, and will make up his own mind, instead of swallowing whole the
printed opinions, real or momentarily assumed, of other people. Thus,
though the frantic popular paper of to-day will no doubt increase
and multiply, and replenish its circulation books, as long as the
present system of blind half-education survives, the newspaper which
satisfies the new age will be a very different affair. It will no
doubt discard many of the trivialities now reported as news, when a
black woman of Timbuctoo could hardly bring forth four piccaninnies
at a birth without the fact getting into the halfpenny London papers;
but it will record the really important news in ways far more graphic,
and with a far more complete appeal to the imagination, than we have
as yet any but the vaguest notion of.
The news considered most important a hundred years hence will probably
be news as to developments of public opinion. It is hardly conceivable
that exactly the methods of Government which exist at present will
satisfy the developed consciousness of the new time: and most likely
the methods then adopted for the ascertainment of public opinion,
and the machinery devised for giving it administrative effect,
will create subject-matter for a type of journalism of which the
very perceptible rudiments, though still nothing but the rudiments,
already exist. If I am right in expecting great results to flow from
new ideas and practice in our educational system, it is certain that
the notion of political freedom will greatly extend its effect:
and the unavoidable corollary is that movements of public thought
will become a matter of the very keenest journalistic interest and of
the very highest journalistic importance. The most probable means to
be adopted for giving effect, in the middle-distance of the future,
to developed public feeling must be left for discussion in a later
chapter: but when we perceive that the political duty of executing
the will of the people must constitute the paramount work of the
constitution-builder in the latter half of the present century,
we cannot fail to deduce a vast effect on newspapers.
Broadly speaking, what will occur will be the result of clearer
thinking. We shall very likely amend our political institutions after
the characteristic English manner, which is perhaps really the safest,
though it rather suggest the methods of a cobbler who repairs a boot
by, from time to time, successively replacing sole, vamp, golosh and
upper, until there remains a boot which is not a new boot, though it
contains none of the original boot's material. Our constitution has
been built (to employ a better similitude) by a series of architects
who reconstruct and repair the old building, with a constant adhesion
to as much of the old style as they can retain, and who will in the
end present the people with a house entirely reconstructed, but bearing
marks all over it of the original design. We already begin to perceive
that what is regarded as political freedom at the present day has
developed from the entire tyranny of absolute monarchy, through the
modified tyranny of limited monarchies, still not wholly powerless,
to the nearly absolute tyranny of parliaments. The last now begin to
delegate powers to local councils having administrative functions, and
must presently delegate them to local parliaments having legislative
functions on some "home-rule-all-round" principle, not because
decentralisation is liked, but because the intolerable inconveniences
of centralisation will make decentralisation inevitable. The more
energetic propagandists of various systems of constitutional reform
nearly all agree in one respect: they all desire to set up some new
kind of tyranny. Few--except the philosophical anarchists, who suffer
from the opprobrium brought upon the name of anarchists by quite a
different set of thinkers--perceive that to endow with power any sort
of machinery resting on the shifting will of a majority tends very
little towards freedom and not at all towards stability--the latter
even more important in some respects than the former. In proportion
to the development of education (in nature even more than in extent),
it is likely that the present blind faith of the public in the ability
of the State to do almost anything, and the still blinder tendency
of the public to require the State to do all sorts of things which
could be better accomplished otherwise, will diminish, and we shall
perceive the enormous educational disadvantage of allowing the citizen
to lean too heavily on the State. A public properly and sufficiently
educated will, with enormous difficulty (because there is nothing
so hard to get rid of as a bad habit of dependency), gradually
undertake the task of doing for itself by free combination what at
present we try to get done for us by governmental machinery. One
sees how this sort of thing is gradually evolving, in spite of the
violent efforts of politicians to shove the world backwards and
keep us walking on crutches instead of strengthening us to walk
alone. Statutes determining the wages of labourers and the price
of commodities are laughed at as examples of mediæval foolishness,
though (what is exactly the same thing in principle) Government still
interferes with the freights charged by railway companies, and indeed
is obliged thus to interfere because it has already gone out of the
right way by the powers it has granted to railway companies. The new
education--the education which builds character instead of merely
diffusing information (generally useless)--will teach us the far
greater advantages attaching to results attained by free combination,
and the State will be relieved of many functions at present regarded
as essential to it, and often sought to be increased.
Now the working of free combination for the attainment of these
results would be almost impossible without the constant interchange
of views which newspapers subserve, and without careful newsgathering
as to the progress in detail of various schemes and of public opinion
concerning them.
To say that this kind of thing will constitute the most important class
of news is not to imply that the public will develop an unintelligent
indifference to news of other kind, though it is allowable to hope that
it will develop an intelligent indifference to the trivialities at
present solemnly chronicled by the popular papers. It may be doubted
whether, even now, the public is quite so passionately interested in
the minutiæ of murder trials as editors imagine: but with invention
steadily moving on, and its consequences habitually developing in
unexpected ways, there will be plenty of "news" to chronicle.
Of course the one class of news which is at once the most expensive
and the most helpful to a daily paper--I mean its individual
"exclusive" war correspondence--will be done with by the end of this
century. Remembering the rate of progress foreseen in the early part
of this work [8] and the moral nature of that progress, we may take
it as quite certain that war as an institution will be as obsolete
as gladiators in the year 2000. Even if the increasing amenity of the
human race did not abolish war, two other things would be certain to
do so. One is the enormous development, already clearly in sight,
of the means of destruction: the other the revolt of the peoples
against the stupendous cost, not merely or chiefly in time of war,
but also in time of peace, of modern armaments. The rising tide of
educated democracy must inevitably banish war. We have lately, in
our own South African experience, seen how crushingly expensive, how
intolerably impoverishing, a tiny war can be: and all this is a mere
trifle compared with what it had cost us to be even very ill-prepared
for even such an insignificant combat. This kind of thing cannot go
on for very long and the peace of Dives [9] must soon be upon us.
But even while war still continues to recur it is likely that the
newspapers will have to sacrifice many of the advantages which they
at present derive from the intense popular appetite for the details of
organised death. The war-correspondent, when he can use the telegraph,
is a great nuisance to commanders in the field, and the increasing
difficulties and importance of modern combat will have the effect,
eventually, of causing generals to forbid telegraphic communication
from the field or its neighbourhood altogether, on account of the
information, useful to an alert enemy, liable to find its way through
the wires. Consequently [10] war correspondence will be all under
strict censorship, and will take the form chiefly of written and
photographic descriptions, in a documentary form, probably conveyed
by the organisation controlled by the fighting army itself. These may
perhaps be telegraphed to the newspaper office from some intermediate
port when the theatre of war is distant--for unquestionably we
shall, before very long, be able to telegraph pictures quite as
easily as words. And this brings us face to face with one of the
most interesting and important developments to be looked for in the
vending of news. Beyond doubt, newspaper illustration will, in even the
near future, be the subject of great and, in fact, of revolutionary
improvement. Every daily paper will be copiously illustrated, and
illustrated in colour. It is easy to foresee that before many years
we shall be able to photograph any object or scene in its natural
colours at one operation. We can already do so in three, and by the
same number of machinings we can reproduce such pictures in print,
provided we can afford to print slowly enough and on a sufficiently
smooth paper. The process is in its earliest infancy as yet. We shall
ultimately make it far more practicable. But even so, printing presses
of the present sort are far too slow for newspaper use. A hundred
years hence magazines and weekly periodicals may perhaps still be
printed on greatly improved presses; but daily papers will be produced
by photography alone. Already the Röntgen rays will print a dozen or
more images at a time on superimposed sensitive papers. In the next
century all that will be necessary in order to multiply type-matter
and illustrations in any number of colours will be to place the
original on a pile of paper and expose it to the rays of some source
of energy, when the whole matter will be impressed upon every sheet,
and this not by any mere contact of type and process-blocks with paper
(which involves serious difficulties, owing to the interference of the
paper-surface with the grain of the etched "screen") but by direct
action of light, or of some influence taking the place of light,
so that perfectly clear pictures will be produced. And news of all
sorts will be the subject of this kind of illustration.
What will happen will in detail be this. The teleautoscope [11] (the
instrument by which sight will be wirelessly telegraphed) will exhibit
the actual facts in every newspaper office from colour-photographs
taken on the spot. What it shows will be rephotographed and reproduced
in colours.
The amount of verbal description needed will thus be much
diminished. Where an event can be long anticipated--when it is an
event like the Delhi Durbar or the christening of the Czarewitch,
for instance--elaborate preparations will be made, and very perfect
results published. And difficulties of merely photographic detail,
which at present restrict rapid photography to events in full sunlight,
having been overcome, and instantaneous photography by artificial
light having been made possible, such an event as an important
theatrical production in London will be pictorially reported in the
New York and San Francisco papers next morning. Where an event is of
an unexpected character--such as a great fire, a riot, or some sudden
cataclysm of Nature--the teleautoscope will still be employed with
great advantage. Take, for instance, the case of some large public
building or some theatre destroyed by fire--though fires will not be
so frequent in the new age as they are to-day. The local newspaper
artists will select from their portfolios photographs of the building
kept on hand for such occasions and get to work on them with paint-box
and colours, depicting the progress of what they will perhaps still
cling sufficiently to tradition to call the "conflagration"; and
they will transmit these efforts when it is not possible to transmit
actual photographs of the event. And of course, when all is over, the
ruins will be photographed in colours from every desirable standpoint,
and the descriptive photographer will, in a great measure, supplant
the penny-a-liner. Many pieces of news will doubtless be photographed
from the small one-man air-carriages, the employment of which, as a
means of recreation, we have already foreseen. [12]
The real "news" of the world will therefore be served up with far more
vividness than even the most feverish present-day journalism dreams
of, and the newspaper will be far more quickly "read," because long
descriptive articles will have gone out of fashion, and a series of
pictures, occupying much more space, but apprehended by the mind with
far greater rapidity, will supply their place. Even in what remains
of the printed word I think that great compression is probable. It
must be remembered that even in the best-educated parts of England
we are hardly through the first generation which universally knows
how to read, and already newspaper-English is taking on a character
of its own, very different from the "journalese" of the old-fashioned
reporters. By degrees a sort of slang, distinguished chiefly by brevity
and conciseness, will evolve itself in the newspapers, especially
those published in large towns--though indeed it is quite evident that
in a few years daily newspapers will be published nowhere else. This
terse, quick language will, after a period of reprobation, be adopted
even by the less progressive newspapers, at first shocked to tears
of indignant printer's ink by the defilement of the mother tongue,
and it will accelerate vastly the task of "running through the paper,"
a task which must, even in the less hurried manners which I foresee for
the future, be made as speedy as possible by the newspaper that would
thrive and increase its circulation. Thus literature, already restive
in an uncongenial wedlock, will finally obtain divorce from daily
journalism. This does not mean that literature will perish. On the
contrary, it will develop. And the periodicals other than newspapers
will excel our own in merit of every sort. They will be permanent,
dignified and, above all, literary. For with the education of the
people really carried to perfection, and with universal leisure,
the result of improved social arrangements even more than of improved
mechanical processes, we shall have a demand for a really intelligent
periodical literature, for really artistic illustrations, which will
make it commercially possible to publish matter that only artificial
endowment could support nowadays.
And shall we be content with it? Certainly not; for the new age will
still be an age of progress, and the very perfection of the periodical
Press will be the greatest of all stimulants to further effort.
Although, in some of their characteristics, they will be greatly
ameliorated, advertisements may very likely still constitute
one ground of discontent with the newspaper of the future. They
sometimes are, in the newspaper of to-day, the subject of complaint
not altogether reasonable, because if there were no advertisements
there could be no newspapers. At all events, without this powerful
source of revenue our newspapers could be neither so cheap nor so
liberally conducted as they are; and all the economies of the new
age will probably be insufficient to enable newspaper proprietors
to dispense with them. The better and the more generously-conducted
newspapers are, the more money they spend in the careful collection,
editing, printing and illustrating of public information, the more
dependent they will become on the revenue from advertising, which
is the sinew of journalism; and the more widely and attentively
newspapers are read, the greater will be the revenue they are able to
command from this source. Moreover, they would be incomplete without
this feature. The unreflecting newspaper-reader, who anathematises
his favourite journal because its weight and bulk are increased by
the presence of advertisements which he does not want, seldom takes
into account the fact that there are plenty of his fellow-readers
who do want them, or some of them, and that he himself is often in
the same predicament. Thousands of copies of newspapers are bought
every day in order to consult advertisements which they are known
to contain. A man who purposes to take his family to a concert often
buys The Daily Telegraph because he knows that The Daily Telegraph has
more concert announcements in it than any other paper, and that it is
in fact a practically complete directory to all the current musical
opportunities of the Metropolis. Another man, who wants a secretary,
or a steward for his estate, probably orders The Times because he
knows that the best class of secretaries and stewards advertise in
The Times for employment. One hardly goes to the theatre or buys a
supply of coals without looking at the daily paper for information;
and assuredly this information is not inserted without being paid
for; in other words, it forms part of the advertisements. Deprived of
newspaper advertisements as a way of announcing its need of clerks,
warehousemen, labourers and assistants of all kinds, commerce, even
if it could manage without advertisements of the sort more commonly
thought of when the nuisance of them is being condemned, could hardly
keep up its organisation at all. Thus, so far from this feature of our
newspapers being a grievance, it is both directly and indirectly a boon
to all who read them. And when we remember in addition that the cost
of the paper and printing alone in a copy of most newspapers exceeds
the price at which each copy is sold by the proprietor, so that the
whole cost of newsgathering, the whole cost of editing, the fees of
contributors and artists, and the cost of pictures and engraving, as
well as the profit which induces persons to embark upon an enterprise
so troublesome and precarious as newspaper-publishing, must be obtained
from the cost of advertisements and from this alone, we cannot doubt
that the enormously developed newspaper of a hundred years hence will
"give us bold advertisement," even as now, and that our descendants
will have the intelligence to be very glad that it does so.
This being unquestionable, we can hardly think that we have made a
complete forecast of the newspaper of the future unless we consider
what sort of advertisements it will contain, and in order to do this
we must consider just what advertising is likely to be needed in the
new age.
As every condition of commerce must necessarily be affected by the
mechanical and economic developments of another century, evidently
advertising will have to undergo vast changes in order to adapt itself
to new requirements. Already competition and the urgent demand of the
public for all possible utilities and luxuries to be supplied with
the greatest economy of money and trouble have produced changes in
the machinery of supply and demand which must develop at an increasing
speed as time goes on. One tendency of these things is current talk;
we speak of "eliminating the middleman." Well, the middleman will
certainly be eliminated by the end of the century, and one of the
forces which will help to eliminate him is the very force with which,
at present, he endeavours, with a high degree of transient success, to
defend himself--the very force we have to discuss here; advertisement.
So long as a population is scattered into groups in small towns,
and hampered by difficulty and expense in transportation, there is
an evident advantage in the retail-shop system. But we can hardly
with convenience remain a nation of shopkeepers in the present and
future state of concentration and with cheapened transport. It is
only necessary to observe the different ways in which we supply
ourselves with commodities, according to where we live, in order to
understand the tendencies at work. In a village remote from any large
town there are generally one or two general shops, at which a highly
miscellaneous collection of merchandise is handled. The smaller the
village the more miscellaneous the stock kept at a single trading
establishment. In a small town the shops differentiate themselves
more: but they still cross the boundary lines of trade, and one
gets tobacco at the chemist's and goes to the draper's for writing
materials and books. When we come to towns somewhat larger, trades
keep more to themselves, and it is often possible to find a place
where there are no miscellaneous shops at all, except those owned by
the industrial co-operative societies now so common and so useful to
the thriftier artisans. It is only when we enter the largest towns
and cities of all that we find large shops divided into departments
and again selling almost everything under one roof.
The conditions in these large towns are an index to what is likely to
occur a hundred years hence: because (as has already been seen) towns
will certainly grow, and the population will become more concentrated,
while, even where improved facilities for travel enable men to live at
a great distance from their work, the same facilities will enable their
wives to do their shopping in the centres of commerce. Consequently,
except for a few highly perishable commodities, such as milk, butter
and the like, small shopkeepers in residential neighbourhoods will
be driven out of business, as they are in fact already being driven
out of it in the suburbs and dependencies of all large cities.
It is always possible for a large miscellaneous trader to sell at
a smaller percentage of profit than a trader in a single class of
merchandise: and by his bulkier purchases the former is also able
to start with a lower cost price, and thus he is in every way better
situated to meet the demand for cheapness. He can also meet the demand
for convenience, because when he is getting almost the whole trade of a
family, even at some little distance, he can afford to arrange for the
transportation of goods in ways convenient to the purchaser. Thus the
small shopkeeper will lose custom in every way and the large shopkeeper
will gain custom. But there is still a middleman. We have not yet begun
to see how he is to be eliminated, but only how he is to be limited
in his numbers while being individually pampered with increased trade.
No one who observes the trend of things, however, can have failed to
note how, from both sides, the middleman, quâ middleman, is liable
to be squeezed out. These very large retailers tend more and more to
become, little by little, manufacturers instead of merely agents for
the manufactures of other people. Very often they are actually forced
to this by the difficulty of obtaining a regular supply of goods of
satisfactory quality from the existing factories. One of the largest
companies doing a miscellaneous retailing business has an enormous
estate in the neighbourhood of London covered with orchards where fruit
is grown for sale and for jam-making; and it has factories of various
kinds dotted all round the Metropolis, though a few years ago it was a
simple trading concern which manufactured nothing. On the other hand,
large manufacturers in many trades (of which the boot trade is an
example which must have come under the notice of every reader) are
tending to open retail shops of their own in favourable localities,
so as to obtain the retailer's commission as well as the manufacturer's
profit. Evidently these large manufacturer-shopkeepers are more likely
to be extensive advertisers than small one-shop retailers.
Another circumstance which will tend to the increase of advertising
is already apparent in the growing tendency of the public to prefer
branded or packed commodities before bulk goods. Such groceries as tea,
oatmeal and the like are more and more purchased in packets bearing
a manufacturer's name or trade-mark, instead of being purchased from
bulk and wrapped up by the grocer. The obvious reason is that by this
means a housewife can secure a greater uniformity of quality. She
finds that she likes a certain manufacturer's oatmeal better than any
other, and always buys it; whereas if she bought bulk-oatmeal she would
have the product now of one mill, now of another, and these products
would vary. The only way in which a manufacturer can call attention
to his speciality is to advertise it. The immediate consequence of
this movement is the degradation of the retailer, who ceases to be the
custodian (so to speak) of his customers' interest and becomes a mere
hander-out of packed specialities. It is not very likely that every
manufacturer of such specialities will become a retailer with shops
everywhere; but it is practically certain that trusts will be formed
on a sort of co-operative principle by combinations of manufacturers,
who will divide among themselves the expense of organisation and obtain
the whole profit without having to share it with any middleman. And
in many departments of commerce the elimination of the retailer will
be secured by the utilisation of improved transport, orders being
received at the works by letter or telephone and executed direct
from manufacturer to consumer. Such business can only be stimulated
through advertisement, and the newspaper of the future constitutes
the most convenient medium for such advertisement.
The intrinsic nature of the vastly-extended advertising of the new
age will be influenced by the new growth of public intelligence. Once
almost wholly, and now to a very great extent, addressed to the least
intelligent faculties of the public--the faculties most liable to
be influenced by large type and ad captandum phrasing--advertising
will in the future world become gradually more and more intelligent in
tone. It will seek to influence demand by argument instead of clamour,
a tendency already more apparent every year. Cheap attention-calling
tricks and clap-trap will be wholly replaced, as they are already
being greatly replaced, by serious exposition; and advertisements,
instead of being mere repetitions of stale catch-words, will be
made interesting and informative, so that they will be welcomed
instead of being shunned; and it will be just as suicidal for a
manufacturer to publish silly or fallacious claims to notoriety as
for a shopkeeper of the present day to seek custom by telling lies
to his customers. Skilful writers will be employed upon the work, and
skilful journalists will think it no derogation from their dignity to
be employed in the writing of commercial advertisements. No doubt the
methods of illustration employed in journalism proper will also be
pressed into the service of the advertiser, and in this, as in other
respects, our "divine discontent" will still look for improvements,
and the newspaper of the future will be a vast improvement upon the
newspaper of to-day.
Although the distinction between journalism and literature is likely to
define itself more and more sharply--periodicals growing more literary,
and newspapers less literary--it is here convenient to pause for a
moment on the question of the direction in which literature is likely
to develop--meaning especially imaginative literature and poetry. The
past of this development, widely considered, has been, of course, since
the close of the eighteenth century, from the classical, through the
romantic, to the realistic school; and the last has been associated
with a greatly-increased and minute consideration of language as an
implement of exact and elegant expression. Literature has become,
and will no doubt continue to be, increasingly self-conscious. Happy
effects are deliberately sought for. Felicity of phrase is no longer
a matter of unconscious, almost accidental, accomplishment; it is
purposefully and deliberately obtained. We no longer expect inspiration
from the Muses, but climb Parnassus with arduous consciousness of our
meritorious pedestrianism. The methodical, scientific orderliness
of modern thought has, in short, invaded even the field of art,
and we have sometimes an air of trying to make of literature an exact
process. Perhaps very great literature, and certainly, according to all
precedent, very great poetry, cannot be produced in that way. There
is something of mystery about them, something of the instinctive, of
the elemental, or, to speak with a more critical exactness, of the
spiritual. And the development and circumstances of very elaborate
civilisation do not wholly favour the spiritual. But to conclude
from this that great poetry will never again be written would be to
overlook one of the disturbing, the cataclysmal factors of human
life. This factor is one of the greatest pitfalls of the would-be
prophet. By examining the past, one could predict almost unfailingly
the future, if there were not always, and in every department of life,
the strange, incalculable thing which, for want of a better name,
we call genius, to be reckoned with, to be almost alarmed by. We
may examine, we may reason, we may reckon up almost anything; but
athwart all our conjectures, charm we never so wisely, comes genius,
and revolutionises everything! It is the one thing which no formula can
embrace. Not in the realms of literature and art alone will it break in
and stultify our best prevision. In every department of life we must
tread cautiously, aware that no one who would forecast the future can
afford to neglect its disturbing possibilities. We must prayerfully
and joyously expect that from time to time genius will suddenly arrive
and pass across the stage, changing everything, bringing to naught
our cunningest anticipations; and as it is peculiarly the quality of
literature to be thus perturbed and regenerated, we must not even
attempt to predict what schools the literature of the future will
pass through. The only thing we can be certain of is that from time
to time some epoch-making mind will express itself. Acquainted with
all the devices of the schools it will brush them all aside, and half
unconsciously, half a-dream, as if indeed it were literally "inspired,"
it will establish new standards, engender new methods, and endow the
time with new delights. Criticism will dissect, examine and explain,
until the creative mind is almost persuaded that it has all along
understood itself; but the one thing by which criticism must ever
be eluded, the one thing which must ever elude prophecy, is genius
itself. When all is said that man can say, and all is said in vain,
the best explanation of the unexplainable is perhaps the old one, that
genius brings in some way a message from outside the world. Perhaps,
since there is always a demand for something which man can worship,
this inspiration may be the subject of the conscious adoration of
the new age. Perhaps we have here the subject of the religion of
the future; for inspiration, as we may most conveniently name this
mystery, has just that character of the unknowable half-seized,
which is precisely what the soul of man is ever yearning for.