CHAPTER V

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.