CHAPTER IX

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.