There is the same difficulty when we come to literature.  What would Chaucer or Spenser have thought of Browning or Swinburne?  Would such poetry have seemed to them like an inspired product of art, or a delirious torrent of unintelligible verbiage?  Of course, they would not have understood the language, to begin with; and the thought, the interfusion of philosophy, the new problems, would have been absolutely incomprehensible.  Probably if one could have questioned Spenser, he would have felt that the last word had probably been said in poetry, and would not have been able to conceive of its development in any direction.

The great genius who is also effective is generally the man who is not very far ahead of his age, but just a little ahead of it—­who foresees not the remote possibilities of artistic development, but just the increased amount of colour and quality which the received forms can bear, and which are consequently likely to be acceptable to people of artistic perceptions.  If a Tennyson had lived in the time of Pope, he would doubtless have used the heroic couplet faithfully, and put into it just a small increase of melody, a slightly more graceful play of thought, a finer observation of natural things—­but he probably would not have strayed beyond 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