A Hundred Years Hence: The Expectations of an Optimist

by T. Baron Russell

Certain predictions in the foregoing chapter will have suggested to all who accept them that the cultivation of pleasure must occupy a large part of the energy of the new age. From the moment when men, sufficiently astute and purposeful to accumulate enormous fortunes if they were permitted to do so, are required by law to desist from useless and injurious money-getting, a vast amount of ingenuity will be diverted to the development of the useless. The skill expended upon money-making—and let it be admitted frankly that, however unscrupulous one may be, it is not easy to become a millionaire—will be turned to the task, almost equally difficult, of spending it satisfactorily. We may consider it as practically certain that the pleasures of the new age will be largely intellectual in their nature. The stupidity of merely sensual pleasures will revolt the intelligence of the future. Athletic sports of some kind, facilitated by certain inventions which can easily be foreseen, will no doubt be a source of much enjoyment, though the growing gentleness of mankind will abolish, as barbarous, games which take the form of modified assault, as football, boxing, wrestling, fencing and the like. We shall certainly acquire a great distaste for fighting in any form when growing humanitarianism shall have put an end to war—a development which may confidently be predicted for the present century. Similarly—“Am I God, to kill and to make alive?”—we shall cease to take life for our amusement; as, for sentimental and other reasons, it has been shown that we shall cease to kill for food.

What then will be our games? One of the most likely instruments of sport will no doubt be the small flying-machine. It is not in the least probable, so far as can at present be foreseen, that purely aërial and self-directed vehicles for purposes of travel or transportation will be a feature of the new civilisation. The dangers and inconvenience of large aërostats are less accidents of imperfect invention than inherent difficulties of the subject. It is very probable that some means of propelling self-supported vehicles between guideways may be discovered. But, as it is not at all likely that any means of suspending the effect of air-resistance can ever be devised, a flying-machine must always be slow and cumbersome. Travel and transportation, to be attractive in the new age, must be rapid in the extreme. Ships no doubt will skim the surface of the sea instead of resting upon it. But air-ships are not very likely to be anything but a sort of vast toy, within, at all events, the next hundred years.

But, as a means of amusement, the idea of aërial travel has great promise. Small one-man flying-machines, or the aërial counterpart of tandem bicycles, will no doubt be common enough. We shall fly for pleasure; and just as thousands of working men and women now take a Saturday-afternoon spin on a bicycle, so they will go for a sky-trip, and visit interesting mountain-tops for (non-alcoholic) picnics. The bicycle or the motor-cycle will perhaps be the point of development. It is quite certain that within the next ten or fifteen years some means will have been discovered by which we can ride on a single wheel. The saving of weight thus effected will go a long way towards surmounting the flight problem. Then, when motor-unicycles are presently propelled by force transmitted (in the same way as Marconi’s telegrams) from a fixed power-house, the difficulty of flight will be within sight of an easy solution. Any competent mechanician of the present day could design a flying-machine if the mere weight of the motive appliance could be overcome. When the motor is fixed on terra firma, and the vehicle only needs to carry a device for utilising the ætheric waves which the source of power wirelessly transmits, flight will be at least as simple a matter as wireless telegraphy is to-day.

When it is possible to cross the Atlantic in a day by means of surface-riding ships, propelled, like the flying-machines, by ætheric force, the field of amusement will be vastly increased, and although (as I shall show) it will no longer be necessary to travel in order to “see the sights” of any part of the world, the pleasure of being present at the actual events of life in different countries will probably never pall. So long as any parts of the world remain comparatively unfamiliar, young men and maidens will love travel. When it is possible, wrapped in warm woollens and provided with portable heating-appliances, to pay a short visit to the Arctic circle and enjoy the matchless spectacle of the Aurora Borealis amid the awe-compelling obscurities of the Polar night: when, with even less inconvenience, we can take a trip to the tropics and witness, here the unchangeable processes of Nature’s luxuriance, there the perhaps immutable conservatism of the East, the new leisure of the coming time will have great stores of recreation for those happy enough to live in the dawning twenty-first century.

The more distinctively intellectual pleasures of the new age will be much subserved by one class of invention, of which the rudiments already exist. By means of the phonograph we are able, not very perfectly, to reproduce as often as we desire sounds created in favourable circumstances. By various kinds of kinetoscope we can reproduce a rudimentary sort of picture of an event which has taken place in a good light. But when the phonograph has been developed, when moving pictures have been perfected, what a vast implement of amusement may be foreseen! Each of these inventions is comparatively new. If we imagine the discovery of means, developed from the phonograph, by which any sounds which have once existed in the presence of a recording machine can be reproduced at will, not in a makeshift sort of way, but without any loss of timbre and quality, with perfect articulation where articulation is necessary, with exactly correct time-regulation automatically determined by the first enunciation, and all this cheaply and compendiously, what vast resources of cultured enjoyment are offered to the lover of music! How many people, denied the pleasure of learning to understand good music by the difficulties and exertion attendant upon our infrequent and expensive concerts, will become true lovers and appreciators of it! For music is only to be really enjoyed by the average man when it is repeatedly heard, repeatedly considered. Certainly the people of the new age will be epicures of the emotions which comprehended music is so nobly capable of stirring.

No doubt the new age will have solved, in a far more satisfactory way than we have been able to solve as yet, the problem of chromatic photography. When colour influences photographic plates or some contrivance substituted for them, not indirectly by a mechanical sorting-out of tints, but by affecting directly the optical properties of the plates or whatever may succeed plates, we shall have marvellously accurate pictures.[1]

Nor is this all. The kinetoscope, as at present exhibited under various unpleasing names, is imperfect in two ways: first because it is powerless to reproduce colour, and secondly because it gives at best a mere magic-lantern picture violently out of focus, and by its pulsatory motion horribly distressing to the eyes. Chromatic photography will overcome the former difficulty. When we find out how to increase greatly the receptive rapidity of photographic emulsion without spoiling what photographers call the “grain” of it; or when we have improved, as we every year are improving, the optical qualities of lenses, we shall be able to have our pictures in focus. The distressing flicker of moving pictures is an objection purely mechanical in its cause. But when, as they will be in a few years, all these objections except the first have been removed, and even when we have colour-photography in a true sense of the word, there will still remain one field to conquer. We must have, instead of moving pictures, something which represents all objects as solid. The difference is the difference between an ordinary photograph and a highly-improved stereoscopic picture magnified to life-size. When these advantages are attained it will be possible to represent, exactly as it happened, any event which has been suitably photographed.

The utility of this as a means of intelligent amusement will be at once perceived. Imagine the theatre of the future. Probably it will not be beyond the means of the rich, even when restrained from over-possession as it is evident that they must be, to have theatre-rooms in their own houses. But the masses will no doubt go to the theatre much as they do now. Only instead of seeing a company of actors and actresses, more or less mediocre, engaged in the degrading task of repeating time after time the same words, the same gestures, the same actions, they will see the performance of a complete “star” company, as once enacted at its very best, reproduced as often as it may be wanted, the perfected kinetoscope exhibiting the spectacle of the stage, the talking machine and the phonograph (doubtless differentiated) rendering perfectly the voices of the actors and the music of the orchestra. There will be no need for the employment of inferior actors in the small parts. As the production of any play will only demand that it be worked up to the point of perfection and then performed once, there will be no difficulty in securing the most perfect rendering that it is capable of. The actor’s art will be immensely elevated, not only by his relief from the drudgery of repeated performance and by the leisure thus afforded him for study and reflection, but also by the removal of what is keenly felt by all players of sensibility and ambition as one of the greatest drawbacks of the stage. We are accustomed to the actor’s complaint that whereas the author, the sculptor, the painter, the composer of music, makes for himself a fame imperishable as the products of his art, the actor frets his hour and disappears from the stage, to be promptly forgotten by an ungrateful public. Well, the actor’s art, like the art of the executant musician, will have the endowment of permanency. And there will be a magnificent opportunity for the actor as artist, in that he will be able to compare himself and his fellows with the actors who are dead and can act no more. It is probably true that Irving is the greatest actor since Garrick, but who can prove it? The actor’s art is transient to-day: it will be permanent, it will be classical, in the next century. By this fact not only will the pleasures of the theatre be made cheap, convenient and varied, but the art of the theatre will be vastly improved.

Just as the actor will be spared the drudgery of mechanical, parrotlike repetition, so the indifferent maidens of the new age will have no need to waste their time in learning to play upon musical instruments more or less imperfectly. No doubt some who are not professional musicians will do so for their own pleasure. But the professional executant himself will cease, like the actor, to rank as a sort of superior harlequin or performing animal, exhibiting his powers for the diversion of an assembled public. What he has once played can, if he choose, be constantly repeated. The executant will be paid by a royalty on each reproduction, when he is wise. Less prudent artists will sell their records for a lump sum, just as the unthrifty author sells his copyrights. But let it be noted that, on the assumption that the reproduction is perfect, the evolution above predicted is a highly artistic one. Instead of the executant or singer being judged by his performance on an occasion when fatigue, illness or unfavourable circumstances may militate against his perfect success, when the nerve-shattering conditions of the platform probably in any case offend his susceptibilities and detract from the perfection of his performance, he will be able to found his reputation upon the very best performance he is capable of. He will be able to try and try again in the privacy of his study. When he has satisfied himself, and then alone, will he publish his artistic effort to the world. He can destroy as many unsatisfactory records as he pleases, just as the sculptor can break up his clay when he has not succeeded, just as the painter can paint out his picture when it has not pleased him, and be judged only by his best.

It would be ignoring the most obvious characteristics of mankind to suppose that the pleasures of the new age will be limited to a mere mechanical development of those which we enjoy at present. There can be no doubt that new delights will be invented. With a general improvement in intelligence and in the standard of comfort; with a moneyed class compelled, by the enactments which we have imagined, to enjoy a considerable accession of leisure; with conditions which will, as we have hoped, reduce materially the necessary hours of labour for the worker; with some of the most engrossing amusements of the present age abolished for sentimental reasons; we may take it for granted that a great demand for new recreations will develop. Some of these considerations might easily give us pause. We might perhaps fear that vice—either the extension of existing vices or (if that indeed be possible) the invention of new ones—might be a terrifying problem of the next century, if we had not foreseen, concurrently with the other developments anticipated, a marked moral improvement in human nature. There is in the calculations of the pessimist and the reactionary no fallacy more mischievous than the oft-recited aphorism that human nature is the same in all places and at all times. That is precisely what human nature is not. Spectacles which delighted ancient Rome would revolt modern civilisation. Spectacles which are still keenly enjoyed in Spain would revolt England or the United States, and probably awaken the activity of the police. Human morality has demonstrably advanced in historic time: it has very perceptibly advanced, as I showed in an earlier chapter,[2] during the nineteenth century. But the improvement in this respect which the next hundred years will show must, in all human probability, greatly excel that of the past time. And thus, though a sane and reasonable anticipation will not exclude the possibility of regrettable accidents in the future moral history of mankind, it will also regard them as probably transient. The vices regarded as incident to complicated civilisations have perhaps been too hastily considered by despairing moralists. Vice is essentially stupid. It is only in occasional, in sporadic instances that we are presented with the terrible spectacle of great intelligences depraved by gross immorality and animalism: and even then, this combination is only possible where a high degree of culture is in contact with a widespread unintelligence. Most likely it will be found, when the abstract laws of vice come to be mapped out with more exactness than, so far as I am aware, they have yet been, that the degeneracies and immoralities of greatly-civilised ages are in reality only the product of luxury seated upon degradation. The French moralists of the eighteenth century had a glimmering of this in their idyllic pictures of reformed society, when the old morality of the simple life was to return with the abolition of oligarchic splendour and popular misery.