RELIGION: THE FINE ARTS: LITERATURE
A good many people contemplate the future of the world with an
alarmed feeling that vast material progress and enlarged knowledge
of the visible and tangible universe are likely to be accompanied
by intellectual developments dangerous to the religious spirit in
mankind. But to consider thus is to overlook the manifest trend
of human thought at the present time. Of the two influences named,
material progress and enlarged information about the universe, the
former is probably much more directly liable to affect religious
feeling adversely than the latter. Epochs of high civilisation and
great luxury have often accompanied a general tendency to scepticism,
and these conditions are also perhaps (and for the same reasons)
not highly favourable to the highest developments of poetry. There
have been periods of scientific discovery which have coincided with
the spread of irreligion. During the second half of the nineteenth
century there was, for instance, no doubt a great increase of popular
scepticism arising out of popular deductions (or supposed deductions)
from science. Religion unquestionably lost ground in the sense that
dogmatic irreligion became rather fashionable. When the people began
to learn that geological research had entirely upset the Biblical
chronology, and that biological research had proved the development of
animal life by evolutionary processes not compatible with a literal
acceptance of the account of the creation in Genesis; when knowledge
of the developments of language proved that the various tongues
of mankind could not possibly have been the subject of a sudden,
cataclysmal "confusion" at Babel or elsewhere, and when it became
common knowledge that the sun and stars were not suddenly produced
for the convenience of man, but were, on the contrary, for the most
part much older, as suns and stars, than the earth itself; it is not
surprising that minds untrained in philosophical deduction leaped
towards atheism, although, of course, none of these discoveries has
any more to do with religion, as religion, than, say, chemistry has
to do with music. Unless one takes a highly anthropomorphic view of
the subject they are not even inimical to revelation. Of course it is
open to anyone who chooses, to say that if the statements in the Bible,
said to be inspired, are incorrect, the Creator (and Inspirer) either
did not know how He had done His work, or told untruths about it; and
consequently that scientific discovery has disproved revelation. But
that is what I have called a highly anthropomorphic argument, and
it may safely be left to the apologists to demolish. Assuredly it
is not a sort of argument likely to be met with in the cultured and
logical future. But it was an argument which commended itself very
widely to the uncultured and illogical past, and great efforts were
made to deal with it. These efforts were really inimical to religious
faith. Religion having been declared to rest upon the irrefragable
rock of Holy Scripture, there appeared to many excellent people an
urgent necessity that science should be set right, that the theory
of Evolution (by which was meant, for these thinkers, Darwinism) must
be disproved: otherwise all faith must go by the board, and the world
must descend into pure materialism. The Biblical criticism produced in
Germany, and apparently received in the very heart of the Christian
camp, seemed to plain men not merely to assail this irrefragable
rock but to strike at the roots of religion itself. Atheism, having
become unfashionable, was exchanged from an "agnosticism" of which
the popular conception was not a great deal more philosophical. The
whole question of religion was conceived to hang together. The Bible
was the Word of God: if the Bible could not stand, God must fall. And
the stability of the Bible was considered to rest upon scientific
accuracy. A miscellaneous collection of writings, certainly of great,
but of variously computed antiquity, was to be absolutely right (which
no other documents of anything like the same age have ever been) on
scientific facts; otherwise it could not be retained as a text-book of
the churches. The latter (sometimes themselves claiming inspiration)
had declared the Bible to be directly inspired: and by some people
inspiration was taken to imply literal and detailed truth, though
literal and detailed truth would certainly have made the collection
utterly incomprehensible by the persons who have used it during all
but the last comparatively insignificant portion of its existence, and
to most persons even then. Evidently such a conception of the Bible,
accompanied by the opinion that religion could only exist on the basis
of the Bible, was dangerous to popular religion in proportion as the
opinions here summarised met with public support.
Hardly less dangerous was the endeavour of some apologists to assist
the difficulty of belief by attenuating the minimum required of
it. The exposure of their rather circular arguments--basing Faith
on the inspired Bible, and the inspiration of the Bible on its
internal evidence--titillated in the untrained thinker who had
rejected (as he was encouraged to reject) the claim of the Church
to be the repository of inspired tradition, a sense of his own
logical acuteness. With a warm glow of self-approval he abandoned
the ancient shibboleths and left off going to church, being convinced
that no really well-informed intelligence could tolerate the mutual
contradiction of science and religion. With no more ability to
understand the arguments which supported the one than the philosophy
which lay at the root of the other, and quite unaware that religious
belief is capable of development and is as much a product of evolution
as any material phenomenon, he considered according to temperament
that religion was either a mischievous invention calculated to clog
the progress of the world, or a pardonable aberration of amiable
minds seeking consolation in superstition of one sort or another. The
religiously-minded thinker of the same calibre welcomed with enthusiasm
the antagonisms of scientific schools discovered for him by the less
wary of his teachers, and decided that Darwin was wrong, that Huxley
was following false scents, and that science would have to revise
all its later conclusions. In neither case (naturally) was
... "divine philosophy,
Not harsh and crabbèd as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo's lute,"
called into the assize. "Mistakes of Moses," to be either proved
or justified, were popularly supposed to be the touchstone of
religion's fate. Meanwhile, though the combatants in the popular
arena were quite unaware of it, the true thinkers were realising
vast depths which science had left still unexplored, and the very
investigations undertaken to account for the beginnings of life on
this planet were proving the belief in the spontaneous generation
of life a figment. Whatever effect science may have had upon myth,
it was doing nothing to assail the ultimate mystery which is the
basic fact of religion.
By degrees, too, the philosophical untenableness of materialism began
to be popularised, and although it is a great deal easier to accept
(or decline) scientific discoveries without understanding the evidence
for or against them than to grasp such abstract considerations as the
subjectivity of phenomena, popular scepticism began to be directed
into new channels. If we could only know phenomena we really know
nothing; and it was just as likely that the most absurd myths of
the hagiologist might be true as that they might be false--since
one could know nothing. Towards the end of the century there is no
doubt that among the masses of the people the incomprehensibleness of
things in general had the effect of popularising a certain tolerance
of Christianity among the class which, a little earlier, had been
repudiating it altogether; and if church-going, Sabbath-keeping and
other formal acts of religion continued to be mentioned by the clergy
and their adherents as the subject of lamentable negligence, the habits
thus deplored arose, less and less from conviction and more and more
from taste. People stayed away from church not because they rejected
Christianity but because church-going bored them. If the clergy saw
their congregations dwindle they had themselves to thank for it. The
atrocious dulness of nearly all sermons drove away more churchmen
than were lured from their pews by militant irreligion. There is not
the smallest reason to believe that "free thought" propaganda had any
really important part in producing the indifference denounced by the
churches. The simple fact is that a growing appetite for amusements,
athletic and other, and an intolerance of the boredom inflicted by
preachers too indolent or too imperfectly educated to make their
discourses tolerable by an active mind, robbed the churches of their
visitors. A good preacher never lacked a crowded congregation even
in the middle of a week-day in the city of London; nor are such
congregations lacking now.
No doubt the form of education generally adopted in non-Catholic
countries has been a great cause of indifferentism. The fostering of
parental indolence by States which profess to relieve it of the duty
of religious as well as the expense of other teaching, cannot tend to
promote religious education. To take our own country for an example,
fathers, who would make it a duty to instil as well as they were able
the principles of their own faith into the minds of their children if
the board schools were not supposed to teach Christianity, doubtless
neglect that task in the existing conditions, a fact which makes
it quite easy to understand why congregations are so largely made
up of elderly people, while boys and girls, not young enough to be
haled unwillingly to the parental pew, and young men and maidens,
young wives and husbands "educated" on the prevailing system,
tend more and more to amuse themselves, not in irreligion but in
indifference. The squabbles of the sects have made it impossible to
invest Christianity in board schools, unless the law be flagrantly
violated, with any of the importance necessary to the foundation
of a genuinely religious spirit; and the very children find that
religion is treated as a thing of much less importance than sums or
a good handwriting. No one struggles and wrangles about the right
way to do long division. Long division, therefore, is a settled
thing and important. But everybody quarrels and snarls as to who
shall teach his particular kind of religion. Religion, therefore,
is a doubtful sort of thing, about which even grown-up people do not
agree. It cannot be of much importance. If you ask father about it,
he says it is the teacher's business to answer you. And in school, it
has to be attended to at a certain time so as not to interfere with
the real business of the day. Clearly it doesn't much matter; and
the child resolves, as soon as it is old enough, to escape from the
weekly boredom of sitting still for two hours in a stuffy church or
chapel, saying the same things over and over again, and listening to
a dull man in a sort of elevated and ornamented witness-box talking
in a patronising tone about things not easy to understand, and not
in the least practically useful when heard.
Of course this is not the only sort of influence which has been at
work to produce a result likely to affect the attitude of the present
century towards the question. If the facts are as I have stated them
(which I do not think anyone will dispute) we see one very good reason
why the younger generation is just now somewhat irreligious. I do
not believe it is nearly as irreligious as many good people (on both
sides) think. But I do believe that we, at all events, have as a nation
been doing every thing we can to make it so. There is no surer way of
preventing a thing's being done than for the State to make a show of
doing it and then neglect it. If the school boards had not assumed the
duty of teaching children Christianity, parents would have attended
to the matter, and probably done it a great deal better than the
boards could possibly have done it, even in the best conditions. And
if anyone says that you can't teach Christianity, the reply is, that
in the sort of conditions which exist in England at the present time,
the religious spirit is not favoured unless religion is taught. I said
at the beginning that the sort of life we lead now, and that we are
likely to go on living during the next hundred years, is probably more
unfavourable to the spirit than any directly irreligious influence of
science or discovery. People who are crowded into towns, where they
are out of constant touch with Nature and the immensities of space,
and lead a hurried, busy existence unfavourable to deep thought and
mysticism, are much less liable to yearn for some explanation of the
vast incomprehensible universe, the profound misgivings of the soul,
than people who have other opportunities, who know the massive face
of solitude and have lain under the inscrutable stars. The very
frequency of terrible experience, when death stalks in the streets
and a funeral procession is so common a sight that men hardly turn
their unbared heads to look upon it, blunts the sense of awe; and
in the cheap Press the alleged humorist finds it a choice subject
for joking. A hundred years hence, though I hope our humorous Press
won't be quite so ghastly, still more of us will have lived always
in cities, and been rarely intimate with Nature. Unless, therefore,
some new influences supervene, it is likely that the new age will
be even less religiously inclined than the age we live in. Is it
probable that such an influence will arise? Or will the next century
have turned its face altogether from faith and given up in despair
the world-old riddle of the universe?
Assuredly, with the increase, impossible to be denied, of conditions
unfavourable to church-going, the influence which could arrest
the tendencies of thought at present supposed to exist must be a
powerful one. But in computing the exact potency which it would
require to possess we must take an accurate view of the tendencies
themselves. Now, although dogmatic religion has to a certain extent
lost ground, and though formal observances are somewhat neglected,
it would be a fallacy to consider that morality is in consequence
retrograding. The steady growth of such things as teetotalism; the
revolt of the public conscience against tame stag hunting and against
what was aptly called "murderous millinery"; the support afforded to
the societies for the Protection of Children and for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Animals; the generous responses made to any appeal for
public subscriptions to meet any great disaster; the remarkable way in
which the working people, out of their miserable poverty, help each
other in time of strikes; the waves of public indignation which the
exposure of any great injustice is able to arouse; all show that the
world is by no means retrograde in respect of morals. What is often
called the growing sentimentality of the age, which opens all pockets
at the call of want, and doubtless sometimes leads to ridiculous
exhibitions of mistaken feeling, is a proof that the ethical sense
of the people is by no means blunt; and it shows a constant tendency
to become keener. It is mysticism rather than morality which is
chiefly lacking to a re-development of the religious spirit. And
although the opinions of the mass of the people are likely to be
influenced at all times more by the results at which what are called
leaders of thought arrive than by the reasons which lead up to those
conclusions, it is rational to expect that with the improved and much
more thoroughly disseminated education which the necessities of the
coming century are going to enforce upon us, will make the people
more accessible to philosophical reasoning than they have ever been
since Socrates. Consequently, the general attitude of the world a
hundred years hence towards mysticism will depend greatly upon the
conclusions of eminent thinkers. These conclusions will require time
in order to exercise their influence; but it seems probable that the
influence will be towards and not away from mysticism.
An attempt to foresee the probable position, as an institution, of
religion in the future therefore demands the consideration of what
net result is likely to be deduced from science and philosophy by the
improved average intelligence of this century. I speak expressly of
religion as an institution, intending thereby to limit the inquiry to
an attempt to determine the popular view of religion; the pretence to
anticipate the opinions of the great philosophers that this century
will no doubt produce being a little too presumptuous even for the
present writer, who may not be considered in any event to have fallen
into many errors resulting from excessive modesty.
We can only come within reasonable limits of safety and consistency
in such an inquiry by allowing here, as I have allowed all through,
for a great increase in general intelligence. Probably the mass of the
population will be less greatly removed in reflective and reasoning
powers from the greatest minds than at present; because the changes
which have been predicted are likely to have more effect in raising
the general standard of intelligence than in producing individual
and exceptional minds of very great calibre.
No doubt the people will be in closer touch with advanced thinkers than
now. But I do not see any reason for supposing that the latter can be
conspicuously greater than the thinkers of past time, from Plato to
Herbert Spencer. Consequently it is impossible to restrict the inquiry
to strictly popular developments. We must ask what direction abstract
thought is likely to take: and it certainly does not seem that the
influence of recent discoveries in physics--especially those which
have produced the new theory of the constitution of the atom--can
tend to materialism. With atoms resolved by the latest science into
electrons, which have been declared in a passage already cited to be
not merely carriers of electrical charge but the electrical charges
themselves, the objectivity of matter has assuredly not received any
new support. And if speculation as to the beginning of things (always
the kind of speculation most important to philosophy, where philosophy
is made the handmaid of religion) is relieved of the necessity of
accounting for the creation of matter, and only has to concern itself
with the creation of force, we evidently approach the more abstract
conception of a "Something not ourselves" which is admittedly the
philosophical necessity most favourable to spiritual religion.
But for many people natural religion is a poor alternative for
revelation, and if we interrogate probability as to the future of a
faith in directly-revealed religion we approach a much more difficult
question. The verbal inspiration of Scripture appears to be no longer
regarded as a necessity of this faith; and with its final abandonment
we shall no doubt enter upon a period of much more abstract thought
and of vaguer belief, but (as I think) also a far more spiritual
attitude towards the Unseen. From the moment when faith is relieved
of all danger from the critical discrediting of any particular set of
documents, it is of course freed from certain great dangers. Probably
the Christian of the year 2000 will have abandoned all dependence
upon the authenticity of the original sources of information, and will
be quite ready to let what used to be regarded as the foundations of
belief take their place with other mythologies. But this position need
not be regarded as irreligious; possibly it need not be considered
un-Christian. The hospitality which all truly religious thought
begins to extend, not merely to uncanonical scriptures but to the
best religious thought of all ages, will strengthen rather than
weaken the spiritual attitude; and, however we may probe into the
sciences of life and of the universe, the awful mysteries which lie
beyond the sphere of science will always tempt man to speculate and
to aspire. Always we shall yearn towards the eternities which preceded
and the eternities which must follow the little interval that we call
Time. Always beside the grave that has closed upon what we have loved,
despair will lure us on to seek consolation in a faith which promises
re-union beyond the bourn. Always the manifold injustice of Fate will
make aspiration inevitable. Always the uplifting spectacle of the
stars, the immensities of ocean and infinite mysteries of the soul of
man will make us welcome the spiritual teaching which can throw gleams
of mystic illumination upon the riddles of the universe and justify the
ways of God to man. We may not always see our way to find efficacy in
ritual incense; we may not long continue to ask direct interventions of
the Deity in prayers which we know in a literal sense to be unthinkable
and profane; we may cease the impertinence of offering suggestions to
the Maker of the world on the subject of next week's weather; and yet
when we uplift our hearts in aspiration and beg that we may divine more
spiritually the nature of the Creator, and learn to love our neighbour
more effectually and with a better enlightenment, we may still pray
and know that our prayer is answered. If we cease to think that wicked
men descend into some chastisement of which fire and flames are the
abandoned symbols, we may still realise that none can act against
the moral intuitions of his nature without mutilating his own soul:
and if this soul of man be immortal, its punishment is thus eternal
also, and can be cancelled only by the act of divine mercy which we
shall still call man's redemption. We begin to know something of the
mind's independence of the body where (in phenomena of which evidence
seems to be accumulating) mind can speak to mind by other means than
the senses: and everything which points that way cuts fresh ground
from under the notion that bodily death is the end of us. Although
the philosophical theory of immortality does not need this evidence,
faith is assisted by it. On the great ideas which are the support and
justification of religion there seems no reason to suppose that the
discoveries of the next hundred years are likely to throw discredit.
To sum up, then, I believe that the effect of improved education
will be to conserve rather than to destroy religion; but I do not
believe that religion will be a historical so much as a philosophical
conception. The present great obstacle to religious feeling in
non-Catholic countries, namely the pretence of the State to "teach
religion" as if it were a science or an art, will have been removed
some while before this time next century, and individual effort will
be cultivated in this, as in certain other respects, instead of being
repressed. The Bible will be read for its morals, its poetry, its
literature; and the aspiration to conceive the Divine will continue
to take the shape of some kind of public worship probably much unlike
anything which we now practise, and totally divorced from any faith
in miracles and verbal inspiration. In religion men will seek their
consolation against the buffeting and injustice of destiny, and in a
more reasoned notion of immortality dry their eyes before the poignant
spectacle of Death.
The whole tendency of the modern mind is to become more spiritually
imaginative. We are often scornfully told that this is an age of
hysteria, when the mere fact is that it is an age of imagination. The
highly civilised life of our day [28] naturally exalts intelligence
in comparison with mere activity of body; mind gains ascendency
over muscle. It is much more important to worldly success just now
that a man should be able to think accurately than that he should
be able to lift great weights, endure great physical fatigues or
fight satisfactorily. Consequently, there is a great premium upon
intelligence, and only a much smaller premium upon bodily strength;
and this condition of affairs is likely to become accentuated as
the present century develops. With increase of intellectual agility
we obtain increase of subtlety and intuition, and of those finer
perceptive and critical faculties which make expression of the
emotions important and interesting. It has often been argued that
epochs of high civilisation are unfavourable to poetry and the fine
arts, and a well-known passage of Macaulay argues the point at some
length. Whether such an epoch as that of a hundred years hence be
probably fertile in art or no, assuredly appreciation of the fine
arts will be widespread and acute. Of course you can never account
for the extraordinary phenomenon called genius, and while it is
no doubt true that genius, like everything else, is the product of
its age, yet genius consistently transcends its age. The number of
minds in a thousand able to bring a reasonable degree of competent
appreciation to the writings of Shakespeare is much greater now than
when Shakespeare wrote. There never was a time when a great writer,
or a great painter (despite what happened to Whistler) was in less
danger of public neglect than the present. And the next century
will be yet more critical than this. Every one of the fine arts
will be more generally and more subtly appreciated than now. The
existing masterpieces of antiquity will be even more reverently
enjoyed than now, and the lessons they embody will be more completely
assimilated. It remains to be answered, whether the next century will
be fertile in new masterpieces of literature and art.
There has been, in my opinion, too great a readiness on the part of
most writers to assume that high civilisation necessarily creates
epochs of ugliness. No doubt railways, factories and other civilised
and civilising conveniences do not, in the natural course of things,
tend to assume forms gratifying to the æsthetician. The present
tendency of domestic architecture, for instance, shows an abject sort
of spirit by basing any effort which it may make for comeliness on
an attempt to imitate the picturesqueness of the past rather than to
form new and beautiful styles adapted to modern requirements. Because
old red-brick, timbered rough-cast, and the quaintly-shaped buildings
of old time please the eye by contrast more than by inherent beauty,
unintelligent builders just now think they can redeem dwelling-houses
from plain ugliness by imitating these peculiarities, and they are
encouraged in this course by the people who are to live in such houses
and by the exploiters of estate development. But such fine examples as
the new Westminster Cathedral show that the spirit of beauty has not
left our architects. The growing intelligence of the new age ought, at
all events, to develop, as its resources will reward, originality. And
the developed æstheticism of the age will demand beautiful buildings,
not slavishly copied from the antique, but created by the imagination
of the modern. Reverence for natural beauty, already manifest in the
revolt against advertisement-boards in juxtaposition with notable
scenery and even along the sides of railways (where one would have
thought that a little more ugliness could do no great harm) will
no doubt be accentuated when the unviolated virginities of Nature
have become fewer; and a steady growth of public taste is evidenced
even now by the success of the better sort of street advertisements
and the failure of the uglier kind, as demonstrated by the steady
abandonment of the latter. The most fashionable artists no longer
think it beneath them to design wall-posters. If the advertisers
who pay their large fees find it profitable to purchase art in an
expensive market, it must be because popular taste is better than it
used to be; and even if the cult of the photograph and the process
block in illustrated newspapers, to the detriment of drawings and
wood engravings, be cited as evidence in the other direction, we have
a right to quote in rebuttal of this the rather violent efforts of
the more intelligent class of amateurs to secure a recognition of
selective and manipulated photography as an art. Moreover, just as
some critics have argued that it is better for the people to read
the atrocious letterpress of the popular papers than not to read
anything, it can also presumably be contended that it is better for
the people to look at photographs reproduced by "process" than not
to look at any pictures at all, though, in reality, it is doubtful
whether bad pictures and inferior "literature" are not much worse
and much more degrading to popular taste than none. That we really
do care for pictures even in England (however little critical ability
we may possess to distinguish good pictures from bad) is evidenced by
the crowds which throng the Royal Academy. It would be better if they
thronged the National Gallery; but even the Royal Academy is evidence:
and the success of the sixpenny-admission plan on the days when it is
adopted, and the large attendance at Burlington House on Bank Holidays,
prove that the taste for pictures is shared even by the least educated
part of the public. Thus there is no reason to be found in present
tendencies for apprehending a decay of æstheticism as a result of
material progress. Probably even the cheap papers will eventually
improve, both in their reading-matter and in their illustrations,
when it grows less profitable than it is at present to print the
worst attainable examples of both.
Of course it would be very easy to argue that the tendency of all this
is rather to develop a somewhat higher standard of mediocrity than to
produce brilliant examples of art in any manifestation. Beauty, up to
a certain point, can be bought. The demand will evoke the supply. But
the highest manifestations of the beautiful must be the spontaneous
product of subtle brains and lissom fingers working for Art's
sake. Yet it is also not very difficult to show that circumstances
affect production even of the highest. An example may be found in
the extraordinary merit of modern French sculpture, as compared with
the wretched work produced in England. In the Paris Salon, which may
be said to correspond with our Royal Academy, sculpture is shown
in a manner which renders the huddled cloak-room full of mediocre
marble and third-rate work in clay at Burlington House almost too
painful to be ludicrous. However meritorious the work of an English
statuary, he would get no chance--does get no chance--in the Academy
exhibition: and there is every justification for the opinion that
it is not bad work which in this country produces official neglect,
nor good work which in France has for many years led to the loving
care with which sculpture is shown in Paris; but on the contrary,
that the real opportunity which a French sculptor obtains has been
just as instrumental in fostering the art there as our own utter
neglect to appreciate sculpture of genius has been in stifling the
art here. The French treatment of sculpture has not merely raised the
standard of average production. It has fostered actual genius. Even
so the opportunities which the social conditions of a hundred years
hence will afford to art will assuredly promote the artistic conditions
favourable to the development and fostering of genius, whenever genius,
in its shy, fairy-like way, contrives to be born, no man knows how. A
general power of appreciating masterpieces has never been alleged to
be unfavourable to their production. What is unfavourable to it in
a highly civilised age is the hurry and preoccupation which leave
no time for the appreciative faculties to employ themselves. It
has been very well said that the feature most inimical to art in
American civilisation is the absence of a "leisure class." If there
be any validity in the conclusions for which I have been trying to win
acceptance [29] in the earlier chapters of this work, the new age will
be an age of greatly increased leisure in all ranks, and this condition
ought to favour art in every way as highly as the improvement in the
nature as well as in the extent of education must also favour it. And
in this there will be both action and reaction--increased leisure
and improved appreciation tending to foster genius, genius in the
glorious perfection of its work generously returning the benefit by
cultivating and refining the æsthetic sense of the new age.
Similarly in literature we may hope that the atrocious consequences of
instruction applied to a vast number of minds which no attempt is made
to educate will be only temporary. Popular "literature" and journalism
at the present time might well strike with despair the most hopeful
heart. But when we remember that no attempt whatever is being made to
educate the faculty of imagination, and that we stubbornly restrict
all teaching to a vehement effort to cram as many facts as possible
into the mind of the scholar, with no endeavour at all to improve
the qualities of that mind itself; and when we grant, as I think any
reasonably intelligent prevision of the future must grant, that all
this will before many decades have to give place to really educational
processes: it seems evident that the future will gradually fling aside
in deserved contempt the basely illiterate products of the printing
press which enrich popular publishers and newspaper proprietors to-day,
redeem poetry from its present practical neglect, and revive and enrich
the belles lettres, which, even in the latter part of the nineteenth
century and these latter years of the dawning twentieth century, have
contrived to appear in masterpieces for which readers, fit, if few,
have never ceased to exist. One result of this will be to end, and
end for ever, the idiotic and reactionary policy of "limited editions"
for beautiful books, by which alone, in many cases, the production of
such books has been made possible. As the public for fine literature
decently printed becomes gradually larger, there will no longer be
any object in accentuating popular ignorance by withholding from the
greatest part of the public the opportunity to possess and to enjoy
the best work in letters that the age is producing, and it will be
possible for the poet of delicate imagination, the essayist of subtle
insight, and the story-teller of restrained and modest genius, to be
as well paid as the inventors of nightmare horrors and the biographers
of impossibly ingenious detectives apparently are to-day.
There remains to be considered the much less difficult problem of the
sort of progress likely to be made in the mechanical implements of
the fine arts. Some conceivable developments in what may be called
the mechanism of literature have been discussed in the chapter on
journalism, and just as it was there predicted that the forms of
language hallowed by tradition and made classic by antiquity and
intrinsic beauty must always continue to be employed, so in the arts
it is impossible to believe that the classical methods of expression
can ever become obsolete. But to say this is not to imply that new
processes are incapable of being applied to the arts. Nothing which
the future may evolve as a modelling substance can conceivably
render obsolete clay or make marble antiquated; but innovation
is always possible and may always in the right hands yield new
tributes of loveliness. Prejudice is difficult to overcome where
art is in question. But as was recently seen in the invention of
solid oil paints, new media are quite capable of creating new modes
of expression, and daring as is the flight of imagination required
by such a notion, may it not be conceived that the new methods of
intercommunication between mind and mind, which may develop out of
the new psychology of our own age, might furnish the medium of a
new literature?
In music it does not seem necessary to surmise that the classical gamut
must be the last word of melodic thought. The barrier between East
and West in regard to musical expression--a barrier as yet so firm as
to make us feel that "never the twain can meet"--is precisely of this
nature. A remark by an Indian scholar educated in England, and as well
versed in Western as in Eastern art, is pregnant of promise. He said
to a friend of the present writer, "There is no doubt that in every
form of invention, in every development of intellect, you surpass us,
save in one. Your music is poor and mean, compared with the music of
the East."
Now to any English ear the music of Asia is as yet a mere snarl of
incomprehensible cacophonies, destitute alike of melody, harmony
or rhythm. But that it has laws of its own, intricate, involved and
subtle, no one can doubt. I remember, one night, finding my way into a
Chinese lodging-house in an Australian city. From one of the cubicles
with which it was filled came what seemed to me "a rueful noise and
a ghastful"--a noise as if some more than usually vocal tom-cat were
being severely ill-used.
From time to time the noise ceased, to be succeeded by energetic
disputations in the thin nasal and guttural tones of South China,
themselves, I knew, graduated in pitch, as all Chinese talk requires
to be in order to be understood. Making my way to the source of these
sounds, I found four young Chinamen. One of them was engaged in an
unabashed bathing of his lower limbs. Other two were squatting on the
floor to enjoy the music of the fourth, who sat on a high packing-case,
holding a book in his toes, and performing on an instrument something
like a violin. From time to time one of the others would interrupt,
criticising the executant, and the book would then be referred to
with energy and something as much like excitement as one ever sees
a Chinaman display. The musician would extract a few notes from the
instrument, clearly in defence of his rendering. Then the tumult
would die down while the wailing of the smitten strings went on again.
Now it cannot be impossible to fathom the obscurities of Oriental
music: and it is quite possible that they may, in the future, yield
new harmonies and melodies as yet undreamed-of to the West; for the
difference is mainly, if I understand aright what Orientals say of it,
a difference of scale. No doubt the conventions are all different. I
have often observed in India that music considered to possess a jovial
character is a shrill wailing in slow time; whereas funereal music
always sounds a lively air. Western civilisation finds no difficulty
in comprehending the decorative art of India and the Far East, nor
in highly appreciating it. May not Eastern music have gifts for us
as yet undreamed-of?
But of course painting has a much more direct appeal to the emotions
than music, and it is not at all difficult to imagine--nay, it is
hardly possible to doubt--that a new manner in painting will from
time to time develop, arriving out of newly-invented implements
and materials.
Doubtless improved methods of reproduction will multiply the numbers
of those who can enjoy the masterpieces of the new age and of the
old, just as in music it will unquestionably be possible to repeat
satisfactorily an indefinite number of times any sounds that have
once existed. Neither will any of the arts permanently suffer by the
mechanical improvements applied to them--though the first employment
of the latter will doubtless often have results which will be, to
the artist, rather terrible.