yond the accepted forms of art.

Then there comes in a new and interesting question as to whether it is
possible that any new species of art will be developed, or whether all
the forms of art are more or less in our hands. It is possible to
conceive that music may in the future desert form in favour of colour;
it is possible to conceive that painters might produce pictures of pure
colour, quite apart from any imitation of natural objects, in which
colour might aspire more to the condition of music, and modulate from
tone to tone.

In literary art, the movement in the direction of realistic art, as
opposed to idealistic, is the most marked development of later days.
But I believe that there is still a further possibility of development,
a combination of prose and poetry, which may be confidently expected in
the future.

It is clear, I think, that the old instinct which tended to make a
division between poetry and prose is being gradually obliterated. The
rhythmical structure of poetry, and above all the device of rhyme, is
essentially immature and childish: the use by poets of rhythmical beat
and verbal assonance is simply the endeavour to captivate what is a
primeval and even barbarous instinct. The pleasure which children take
in beating their hands upon a table, in rapping out a tattoo with a
stick, in putting together unmeaning structures of rhyme, is not
necessarily an artistic thing at all; what lies at the root of it is
the pleasure of the conscious perception of similarity and regularity.
This same tendency is to be seen in our buildings, in the love of
geometrical forms, so that the elementary perception is better pleased
by contemplating a building with a door in the middle and the same
number of windows on each side, than in contemplating the structure of
a tree. Uneducated people are far more charmed by the appearance of a
rock which has a resemblance to something else--a human face or an
animal--than by a beautifully proportioned and irregular crag. The
uncultivated human being, again, loves geometrical forms in nature,
such as the crystal and the basalt column, or the magnified snowflake,
better than it loves forms of lavish wildness. We gather about our
dwellings flowers which please by their sharply defined tint, and their
correspondence of petal with petal; and yet there is just as precisely
ordered a structure in natural objects, which appear to be fortuitous
in shape and outline, as there is in thin