to make acquaintance with, that we are apt
to be content with the old vintages. The result is that there are a
good many artists who in a time of less productivity would have made
themselves an enduring reputation, and who now must be content to be
recognised only by a few. The difficulty can, I think, only be met by
some principle of selection being more rigidly applied. We shall have
to be content to skim the cream of the old as well as of the new, and
to allow the second-rate work of first-rate performers to sink into
oblivion. But at the same time there might be a great future before
any artist who could discover a new medium of utterance. It seems at
present, to take literature, as if every form of human expression had
been exploited. We have the lyric, the epic, the satire, the narrative,
the letter, the diary, conversation, all embalmed in art. But there is
probably some other medium possible which will become perfectly
obvious the moment it is seized upon and used. To take an instance from
pictorial art. At present, colour is only used in a genre manner, to
clothe some dramatic motive. But there seems no prima facie reason why
colour should not be used symphonically like music. In music we obtain
pleasure from an orderly sequence of vibrations, and there seems no real
reason why the eye should not be charmed with colour-sequences just as
the ear is charmed with sound-sequences. So in literature it would
seem as though we might get closer still to the expression of mere
personality, by the medium of some sublimated form of reverie, the
thought blended and tinged in the subtlest gradations, without the
clumsy necessity of sacrificing the sequence of thought to the barbarous
devices of metre and rhyme, or to the still more childish devices of
incident and drama. Flaubert, it will be remembered, looked forward to a
time when a writer would not require a subject at all, but would express
emotion and thought directly rather than pictorially. To utter the
unuttered thought--that is really the problem of literature in the
future; and if a writer could be found to free himself from all
stereotyped forms of expression, and to give utterance to the strange
texture of thought and fancy, which differentiates each single
personality so distinctly, so integrally, from other personalities, and
which we cannot communicate to our dearest and nearest, he might enter
upon a new province of art.

But the second tendency which at th