In art and literature, I am inclined to believe that we shall look back to the Victorian era as a time of great activity and high performance.  The two tendencies here which militate against the appearance of the greatest figures are, in the first place, the great accumulations of art and literature, and in the second place the democratic desire to share those treasures.  The accumulation of pictures, music, and books makes it undoubtedly very hard for a new artist, in whatever region, to gain prestige.  There is so much that is undoubtedly great and good for a student of art and literature 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.