Illustrations by A. Robida
It was in London, about two years ago, that the question of “the end of books” and
their transformation into something quite different was agitated in a group of book-lovers,
artists, men of science and of learning, on a memorable evening, never to be forgotten
by anyone then present.
We had met that evening, which happened to be one of the scientific Fridays of the
Royal Society, at a lecture given by Sir William Thomson, the eminent English physicist,
professor in the University of Glasgow, universally known for the part he took in
the laying of the first transatlantic cable.
On this Friday evening Sir William had announced to his brilliant audience of savants
and men of the world that the end of the terrestrial globe and of the human race
was mathematically certain to occur in precisely ten million years.
Taking his stand on the theory of Helmholtz, that the sun is a vast sphere in process
of cooling, and, by the law of gravity, of shrinking in proportion as it cools, and
having estimated the energy of the solar heat as four hundred and seventy-six million
horse-power to the superficial square foot of its photosphere, Sir William had demonstrated
that the radius of the photosphere grows about one-hundredth part shorter every two
thousand years, and that it is therefore quite possible to fix the precise hour when
its warmth will be insufficient to maintain life on our planet.
The great philosopher had surprised us no less by his treatment of the antiquity
of the earth, which he showed to be a question of pure mechanics. In the face of
geologists and naturalists he gave it a past history of not more than a score of
millions of years, and showed that life had awakened upon earth in the very hour
of the sun’s birth - what-ever may have been the origin of this fecundating star,
whether the bursting of a pre-existing world or the concentration of nebulae formerly
diffused.
We had left the Royal Institute deeply moved by the great problems which the learned
Glasgow professor had taken such pains to resolve scientifically for the benefit
of his audience. With minds in pain, almost crushed by the immensity of the figures
with which he had been juggling, we were silently walking home, a group of eight
different personalities - philologians, historians, journalists, statisticians, and
merely interested men of the world - walking two and two, like creatures half awake,
down Albemarle Street and Piccadilly.
Edward Lembroke dragged us all into the Junior Athenaeum to supper; and the champagne
had no sooner limbered our half-numbed brains than it was who should speak first
about Sir William Thomson’s lecture and the future destiny of humanity - questions
interesting above all others and usually as varied as the minds of those who discuss
them.
James Whittemore discoursed at length upon the intellectual and moral predominance
which by the end of the next century the younger continents would have over the older
ones. He gave us to understand that the Old World would little by little give up
its claim to omnipotence, and America would lead the van in the march of progress.
Oceanica, born only yesterday, would develop superbly, throwing off the mask of
its ambitions and taking a prominent place in the universal concert of the nations.
Africa, he added, that continent ever explored and ever mysterious, where at a moment’s
warning countries of thousands of square miles are discovered - Africa so painfully
won to civilization, does not seem called to play an eminent part, not withstanding
her immense reservoir of men. She will be the granary of other continents; upon
her soil various invading peoples will by turns play dramas of small importance;
hordes of men will meet and clash to fight and die there in greedy desire to possess
this still virgin soil, but civilization and progress will gain a footing only after
thousands of years, when the prosperity of the United States, having reached its
zenith, will be drawing toward its decline, and when new and fateful evolutions shall
have assigned a new habitat to the new products of human genius.
Julius Pollock, gentle vegetarian and learned naturalist, usually a silent boon
companion, amused himself by imagining the effect upon human customs of the success
of certain interesting chemical experiments transforming the conditions of our social
life. Nutriment will then be accurately portioned out in the form of powders, sirups,
pellets, and biscuits, everything reduced to the smallest possible bulk. No more
bakers, butchers, or wine-merchants then; no more restaurants or grocers; only a
few drugists, and everyone thence-forth free, happy, all wants provided for at the
cost of a few cents; hunger blotted out from the roll of human woes. Especially
the world would cease to be the unclean slaughter-house of peaceful creatures of
grewsome larder set forth for the gratification of gluttony, and would become a fair
garden, sacred to hygiene and the pleasure of the eye. Life would be respected both
in beast and in plants, and over the entrance to this Paradise Regained, becomes
a colossal museum of the creatures of God, might be written, “Look, but do not touch
the exhibits.”
“That is all Utopia,” cried John Pool, the humourist. “The animals, my dear Pollock,
will not follow your chemical programme, but will continue to devour one another
according to the mysterious laws of creation. The fly will always be the vulture
of the microbe, the most harmless bird the eagle of the fly; the wolf will keep on
presenting himself with legs of lamb, and the peaceful sheep will continue, as in
the past, to be ‘the tiger of the grass.’ Let us follow the general law, and while
awaiting our turn to be devoured, let us devour.”
Arthur Blackcross, painter and critic of mystical, esoteric, and symbolic art, a
most refined spirit and founder of the already celebrated School of the Aesthetes
of To-morrow, was urged to tell us in his turn what he thought painting would come
to a century and more from now. I think the few lines which follow accurately sum
up his little discourse:
“Is what we call modern art really an art?” he cried. “Do not the artists without
vocation, who practise it fairly well, with a show of talent, sufficiently prove
it to be a trade in which soul is as much lacking as sight? Can we give the name
of works of art to five-sixths of the pictures and statues which litter up our annual
exhibitions? Can we indeed find many painters or sculptors who are truly original
creators?
“We see nothing but copies of all sorts; copies of Old Masters accommodated to modern
taste, adaptations ever false of epochs forever gone by, trite copies of nature as
seen with a photographer’s eye, insipid patchwork imitations of frightful war subjects
such as have made Meissonier famous; nothing new, nothing that takes us out of our
own humanity, nothing that transports us elsewhere. And yet it is the duty of art,
whether by music or poetry or painting, at any cost to carry us beyond ourselves,
that for an instant at least we may hover in that sphere of the unreal where er may
take the idealistic aeropathy cure.
“I verily believe,” Blackcross went on, “that the hour is at hand when the whole
universe will find itself saturated with pictures, dull landscapes, mythological
figures, historic episodes, still life, and all other works soever; the very negroes
will have no more of them. In that divine moment, that avenging instant, painting
will die of inanition; governments will perhaps at last perceive their dense folly
in not having systematically discourages the arts as the only practical way of protecting
and exalting them. In a few countries, resolved upon a general reform, the ideas
of the iconoclasts will prevail; museums will be burned down, that they may no longer
influence budding genius; the commonplace in all its forms will be tabooed; that
is to say, the reproduction of any tangible thing, of anything that we see, of anything
that illustrations, photography, or the theatre can sufficiently well express; and
art, at last given back to itself, will be raised aloft into the upper regions of
revery, seeking there its appropriate figures and symbols.
“Art will then be closed aristocracy; its production will be rare, mystic, devout,
loftily personal. It will perhaps command at most ten or twelve apostles in each
generation, with something like a hundred ardent disciples to admire and encourage
them.
“Beyond the realm of this abstract art photography in colors, photogravure, illustrated
books, will suffice for the gratification of the masses; but exhibitions being interdicted,
landscape painters being ruined by photopainting, historical subjects being for the
future represented by suggestive models which at the pleasure of the operator shall
express pain, surprise, dejection, terror, or death, all photopainting, in short,
having become simply a question of a vast diversity of mechanical processes, a branch
of commerce, there will be no painters in the twenty-first century, but instead of
them a few holy men, true fakirs of the ideal and the beautiful, who amidst the silence
and incomprehension of the masses will produce masterpieces at last worthy of the
name.”
Slowly and with minute detail Arthur Blackcross worked out his vision of the future,
not without success, for our recent visit to the Royal Academy had been hardly more
cheering than those paid to our two great national bazaars of painting in Paris,
at the Champ de Mars and the Champs Elysees.
For a little while we discussed the general ideas of our symbolic friend, and it
was the founder of the School of the Aesthetes of To-morrow himself who changed the
course of conversation by an abrupt appeal to me for my literary views and opinions.
“Come, my worthy Bibliophile, it is your turn to speak. Tell us how it will be
with letters, with literature and books a hundred years hence! Since we are remodelling
the society of the future to suit ourselves, this evening, each of us throwing a
ray of light into the darkness of the centuries to come, I pray you illuminate certain
horizons with a beam from your revolving light.”
Cries of “Yes, yes!” cordial and pressing entreaties followed; and as we were all
kindred spirits, and it was pleasant to hear one another think, the atmosphere of
this club corner being sympathetic and agreeable, I made no demur, but improvised
my discourse as follows:
“What is my view of the destiny of books, my dear friends? The question is interesting,
and fires me all the more because in good faith I never put it to myself before this
hour.
“If by books you are to be understood as referring to our innumerable collections
of paper, printed, sewed, and bound in a cover announcing the title of the work,
I own to you frankly that I do not believe (and the progress of electricity and
modern mechanism forbids me to believe) that Gutenberg’s invention can do otherwise
than sooner or later fall into desuetude as a means of current interpretation of
out mental products.
“Printing, which Rivarol so judiciously called the artillery of thought, and of
which Luther said that it is the last and best gift by which God advances the things
of the Gospel - printing, which has changed the destiny of Europe, and which, especially
during the last two centuries, has governed opinion through the book, the pamphlet,
and the newspaper - printing, which since 1436 has reigned despotically over the
mind of man, is, in my opinion, threatened with death by the various devices for
registering sound which have lately been invented, and which little by little will
go on to perfection.
“Not withstanding the enormous progress which has gradually been made in the printing-press,
in spite of the already existing composing-machines, easy to run, and furnishing
new characters freshly moulded in movable matrices, it still appears to me that
the art in which Fust and Scheffer, Estienne and Vascosa, Aldus Manutius and Nicholas
Jenson successively excelled, has attained its acme of perfection, and that our grand-children
will no longer trust their works to this somewhat antiquated process, now become
very easy to replace by phonography, which is yet in its initial stage, and of which
we have much to hope.”
There was an uproar of interruption and inquiry among my hearers; astonished “oh’s!”
ironical “ah’s!” doubtful “eh! eh’s!” and mingled with a deepening murmur of denial
such phrases as “But that’s impossible!” “What do you mean by that?” I had some
difficulty in restoring silence enough to permit me to resume my remarks and explain
myself more at length.
“Let me tell you that the ideas which I am about to open to you are less affirmative
that they are not ripened by reflection. I serve them up to you just as they come
to me, with an appearance of paradox. However, there is nothing like a paradox for
containing truth; the wildest paradoxes of the philosophers of the eighteenth century
are to-day already partly realized.
“I take my stand, therefore, upon this incontestable fact, that the man of leisure
becomes daily more reluctant to undergo fatigue, that he eagerly seeks for what he
calls the comfortable, that is to say for every means of sparing himself the play
and the waste of the organs. You will surely agree with me that reading, as we practise
it today, soon brings on great weariness; for not only does it require of the brain
a sustained attention which consumes a large proportion of the cerebral phosphates,
but it also forces our bodies into various fatiguing attitudes. If we are reading
one of our great newspapers it constrains us to acquire a certain dexterity in the
art of turning and folding the sheets; if we hold the paper wide open it is not long
before the muscles of tension are overtaxed, and finally, if we address ourselves
to the book, the necessity of cutting the leaves and tuning them one after another,
ends by producing an enervated condition very distressing in the long run.
“The art of being moved by the wit, the gayety, and the thought of others must soon
demand greater facilities. I believe, then, in the success of everything which will
favor and encourage the indolence and selfishness of men; the elevator has done away
with the toilsome climbing of stairs; phonography will probably be the destruction
of printing. Our eyes are made to see and reflect the beauties of nature, and not
to wear themselves out in the reading of texts; they have been too long abused, and
I like to fancy that some one will soon discover the need there is that they should
be relieved by laying a greater burden upon our ears. This will be to establish
an equitable compensation in out general physical economy.”
“Very well, very well,” cried my attentive companions, “but the practical side of
this? How do you suppose that we shall succeed in making phonographs at once portable
enough, light enough, and sufficiently resisting to register long romances which,
at present, contain four or five hundred pages, without getting out of order; upon
what cylinders of hardened wax will you stereotype the articles and news items of
journalism; finally, with the aid of what sort of piles will you generate the electric
motors of your future phonograph? All this is to be explained, and it does not appear
to us easy to make it practical.”
“Nevertheless it will all be done,” I replied. “There will be registering cylinders
as light as celluloid penholders, capable of containing five or six hundred words
and working up on very tenuous axles, and occupying not more than five square inches;
all the vibrations of the voice will be reproduced in them; we shall attain to perfection
in this apparatus as surely as we have obtained precision in the smallest and most
ornamental watches.
“As to the electricity, that will often be found in the individual himself. Each
will work his pocket apparatus by a fluent current ingeniously set in action; the
whole system may be kept in a simple opera-glass case, and suspended by a strap
from the shoulder.
“As for the book, or let us rather say, for by that time books ‘will have lived’,
as for the novel, or the storyograph, the author will become his own publisher.
To avoid imitations and counterfeits he will be obliged, first of all, to go to the
Patent-Office, there to deposit his voice, and register its lowest and highest notes,
giving all the counter-hearings necessary for the recognition of any imitation of
his deposit. The Government will realize great profits by these patents.
“Having thus made himself right with the law, the author will talk his work, fixing
it upon registering cylinders. He will himself put these patented cylinders on sale;
they will be delivered in cases for the consumption of hearers.
“Men of letters will not be called Writers in the time soon to be, but rather, Narrators.
Little by little the taste for style and for pompously decorated phrases will die
away, but the art of utterance will take on un-heard-of-importance. Certain Narrators
will be sought out for their fine address, their contagious sympathy, their thrilling
warmth, and the perfect accuracy, he fine punctuation of their voice.
“The ladies will no longer say in speaking of a successful author, ‘What a charming
writer!’ All shuddering with emotion they will sigh, ‘Ah, how this “Teller’s” voice
thrills you, charms you, moves you! What adorable low tones, what heart-rending
accents of love! When you hear his voice you are fairly exhausted with emotion.
There is no ravisher of the ear like him!”
My friend James Whittemore interrupted me. “And what will become of the libraries,
dear friend, and of the books?”
“Libraries will be transformed into phonographotecks, or rather, phonostereoteks;
they will contain the works of human genius on properly labelled cylinders, methodically
arranged in little cases, rows upon rows, on shelves. The favourite editions will
be the autophonographs of artists most in vogue; for example, every one will be asking
for Coquelin’s ‘Moliere’, Irving’s ‘Shakespeare’, Salvini’s ‘Dante’, Eleonora Duse’s
‘Dumas fils’, Sara Bernhardt’s ‘Hugo’ Mounet Sully’s ‘Balzac’; while Goethe, Milton,
Byron, Dickens, Emerson, Tennyson, Musset, and others will have been ‘vibrated upon
cylinders by favorite Tellers’.
“The bibliophiles, who will have become phonographiles, will still surround themselves
with rare works; they will send out their cylinders to be bound in morocco cases,
adorned with fine gildings and symbolic figures, as in former days. The titles will
be imprinted on the circumference of the voice of a master of the drama, of poetry,
or of music, giving impromptu and unpublished variants of celebrated works.
“The Narrators, blithe authors that they will be, will relate the current events
of current life, will make a study of rendering the sounds that accompany - sometimes
with ironical effect, like an orchestration of Nature - the exchange of commonplace
conversation, the joyful exclamations of assembled crowds, the dialects of strange
people. The evocations of the Marseillais or the Auvergnats will amuse the French
as the jargon of the Irishman and the Westerner will excite the laughter of Americans
of the East.
“Authors who are not sensitive to vocal harmonies, or who lack the flexibility of
voice necessary to a fine utterance, will avail themselves of the services of hired
actors or singers to warehouse their work in the accommodating cylinder. We have
to-day our secretaries and copyists; there will then be ‘phonists’ and ‘clamists’
to interpret utterances dictated by the creator of literature.
“Hearers will not regret the time when they were readers; with eyes unwearied, with
countenances refreshed, their air of careless freedom will witness to the benefits
of the contemplative life. Stretched upon sofas or cradled in rocking-chairs, they
will enjoy in silence the marvellous adventures which the flexible tube will conduct
to ears dilated with interest.
“At home, walking, sightseeing, these fortunate hearers will experience the ineffable
delight of reconciling hygiene with instruction; of nourishing their minds while
exercising their muscles; for there will be pocket phono-opera-graphs, for use during
excursions among Alpine mountains or in the canons of the Colorado.”
“Your dream is most aristocratic,” interposed Julius Pollock, the humanitarian;
“the future will be more democratic. I should like to see the people more favored.”
“They will be, my gentle poet,” I replied, gayly, going on to develop my vision
of the future; ‘nothing will be lacking for them on this head; they may intoxicate
themselves on literature as on pure water, and as cheaply, too, for there will then
be fountains of literature in the streets as there are now hydrants.
“At every open place in the city little buildings will be erected, with hearing
tubes corresponding to certain works hung all around for the benefit of the studious
passer-by. They will be easily worked by the mere pressure of a button. On the
other side, a sort of automatic book-dealer, set in motion by a nickel in the slot,
will for this trifling sum give the works of Dickens, Dumas pere, or Longfellow,
on long rolls all prepared for home consumption.
“I go even farther: the author who desires personally to bring his work to the public
knowledge after the fashion of trouveres of the Middle Ages carrying them
about from house to house, may draw a modest but always remunerative profit by renting
to all the inmates of the same apartment-house a sort of portable organ, which may
be slung over the shoulder, composed of an infinite number of small tubes connected
with his auditory shop, by means of which his works may be wafted through the open
windows to the ears of such lodgers as may desire amusement in a moment of leisure,
or cheer in an hour of solitude.
“People of small means will not be ruined, you must admit, by tax of four or five
cents for an hour’s ‘hearing’, and the fees of the wandering author will be relatively
important by the multiplicity of hearings furnished to each house in the same quarter.
“Is this all? By no means. The phonography of the future will be at the service
of our grandchildren on all the occasions of life. Every restaurant-table will be
provided with its phonographic collection; the public carriages, the waiting-rooms,
the state-rooms of steamers, the halls and chambers of hotels will contain phonographotecks
for the use of travellers. The railways will replace the parlor car by a sort of
Pullman Circulating Library, which will cause travellers to forget the weariness
of the way while leaving their eyes free to admire the landscapes through which they
are passing.
“I shall not undertake to enter into the technical details of the methods of operating
these new interpreters of human thought, these multiplicators of human speech; but
rest assured that books will be forsaken by all the dwellers upon this globe, and
printing will absolutely pass out of use except for the service it may still be able
to render to commerce and private relations; and even there the writing-machine,
by that time fully developed, will probably suffice for all needs.
“And the daily paper’, you will ask me, ‘the great press of England and America,
what will you do with that?’
“Have no fear; it will follow the general law, for public curiosity will go on forever
increasing, and men will soon be dissatisfied with printed interviews more or less
correctly reported. They will insist upon hearing the interviewee, upon listening
to the discourse of the fashionable orator, hearing the actual song, the very voice
of the diva whose first appearance was made over-night. What but the phonographic
journal can give them all this? The voices of the whole world will be gathered up
in the celluloid rolls which the post will bring morning by morning to the subscribing
hearers. Valets and ladies-maids will soon learn how to put them in place, the axle
of the cylinder upon the two supports of the motor, and will carry them to master
of mistress at the hour of awakening. Lying soft and warm upon their pillow they
may hear it all, as if in a dream - foreign telegrams, financial news, humorous articles,
the news of the day.
“Journalism will naturally be transformed; the highest situations will be reserved
for robust young men with strong, resonant voices, trained rather in the art of enunciation
than in the search for words or the turn of phrases; literary mandarinism will disappear,
literators will gain only an infinitely small number of hearers, for the important
point will be to be quickly informed in a few words without comment.
“In all newspaper offices there will be Speaking Halls where the editors will record
in a clear voice the news received by telephonic despatch; these will be immediately
registered by an ingenious apparatus arranged in the acoustic receiver; the cylinders
thus obtained will be stereotyped in great numbers and posted in small boxes before
three o’clock in the morning, except where by agreement with the telephone company
the hearing of the newspaper is arranged for by private lines to subscribers’ houses,
as is already the case with theatrophones.”
William Blackcross, the amiable critic and aesthete, who up to this point had kindly
listened without interrupting my flights of fancy, now deemed it the proper moment
for asking a few questions.
“Permit me to inquire,” he said, “how you will make good the want of illustrations?
Man is always an overgrown baby, and he will always ask for pictures and take pleasure
in the representation of things which he imagines or has heard of from others.”
“Your objection does not embarrass me,” I replied; “illustrations will be abundant
and realistic enough to satisfy the most exacting. You perhaps forget the great
discovery of To-morrow, that which is soon to amaze us all; I mean the Kinetograph
of Thomas Edison, of which I was so happy as to see the first trial at Orange Park,
New Jersey, during a recent visit to the great electrician.
“The kinetograph will be the illustrator of daily life; not only shall we see it
operating in its case, but by a system of lenses and reflectors all the figures in
action which it will present in photochromo may be projected upon large white screens
in our homes. Scenes described in works of fiction an romances of adventure will
be imitated by appropriately dressed figurants and immediately recorded. We shall
also have, by way of supplement to the daily phonographic journal, a series of illustrations
of the day, slices of active life, so to speak, fresh cut from the actual. We shall
see the new pieces and the actors at the theatre, as easily as we may already hear
them, in our own homes; we shall have the portrait, and, better still, the very play
of countenance, of famous men, criminals, beautiful women. It will not be art, it
is true, but at least it will be life, natural under all its make-up, clear, precise,
and sometimes even cruel.
“It is evident,” I said, in closing this too vague sketch of the intellectual life
of To-morrow, “that in all this there will be sombre features now unforeseen. Just
as oculists have multiplied since the invention of journalism, so with the phonography
yet to be, the aurists will begin to abound. They will find a way to note all the
sensibilities of the ear, an to discover names of more new auricular maladies than
will really exist; but no progress has ever been made without changing the place
of some of our ills.
“Be all this as it may, I think that if books have a destiny, that destiny is on
the eye of being accomplished; the printed book is about to disappear, After us
the last of the books, gentlemen!”
This after-supper prophecy had some little success even among the most sceptical
of my indulgent listeners; and John Pool had the general approval when he cries,
in the moment of our parting:
“Either the books must go, or they must swallow us up. I calculate that, take the
whole world over, from eighty to on hundred thousand books appear every year; at
an average of a thousand copies, this makes more than a hundred millions of books,
the majority of which contain only the wildest extravagances or the most chimerical
follies, and propagate only prejudice and error. Our social condition forces us
to hear many stupid things every day. A few more or less do not amount to very great
suffering in the end; but what happiness not to be obliged to read them, and to be
able at least to close our eyes upon the annihilation of printed things!”