A Hundred Years Hence: The Expectations of an Optimist

by T. Baron Russell

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[1] 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[2] 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.