There remains to be considered the much less difficult problem of the sort of progress likely to be made in the mechanical implements of the fine arts. Some conceivable developments in what may be called the mechanism of literature have been discussed in the chapter on journalism, and just as it was there predicted that the forms of language hallowed by tradition and made classic by antiquity and intrinsic beauty must always continue to be employed, so in the arts it is impossible to believe that the classical methods of expression can ever become obsolete. But to say this is not to imply that new processes are incapable of being applied to the arts. Nothing which the future may evolve as a modelling substance can conceivably render obsolete clay or make marble antiquated; but innovation is always possible and may always in the right hands yield new tributes of loveliness. Prejudice is difficult to overcome where art is in question. But as was recently seen in the invention of solid oil paints, new media are quite capable of creating new modes of expression, and daring as is the flight of imagination required by such a notion, may it not be conceived that the new methods of intercommunication between mind and mind, which may develop out of the new psychology of our own age, might furnish the medium of a new literature? In music it does not seem necessary to surmise that the classical gamut must be the last word of melodic thought. The barrier between East and West in regard to musical expression--a barrier as yet so firm as to make us feel that "never the twain can meet"--is precisely of this nature. A remark by an Indian scholar educated in England, and as well versed in Western as in Eastern art, is pregnant of promise. He said to a friend of the present writer, "There is no doubt that in every form of invention, in every development of intellect, you surpass us, save in one. Your music is poor and mean, compared with the music of the East." Now to any English ear the music of Asia is as yet a mere snarl of incomprehensible cacophonies, destitute alike of melody, harmony or rhythm. But that it has laws of its own, intricate, involved and subtle, no one can doubt. I remember, one night, finding my way into a Chinese lodging-house in an Australian city. From one of the cubicles with which it was filled came what seemed to me "a rueful noise and a ghastful"--a noise as if some more than usually vocal tom-cat were being severely ill-used.