results is Professor Koopman, librarian of Brown University, whose plea
has been addressed chiefly to printers. Professor Koopman dwells
particularly on the influence of short lines on legibility. The eye must
jump from the end of each line back to the beginning of the next, and this
jump is shorter and less fatiguing with the shorter line, though it must
be oftener performed. Owing largely to his demonstration, "The Printing
Art," a trade magazine published in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has changed
its make-up from a one-column to a two-column page. It should be noted,
however, that a uniform, standard length of line is even more to be
desired than a short one. When the eye has become accustomed to one length
for its linear leaps, these leaps can be performed with relative ease and
can be taken care of subconsciously. When the lengths vary capriciously
from one book, or magazine, to another, or even from one page to another,
as they so often do, the effort to get accustomed to the new length is
more tiring than we realize. Probably this factor, next to the size of
type, is most effective in tiring the middle-aged eye, and in keeping it
tired. The opinion may be ventured that the reason for our continued
toleration of the small type used in the daily newspapers is that their
columns are narrow, and still more, that these are everywhere of
practically uniform width.
The indifference of publishers to the important feature of the physical
make-up of books appears from the fact that in not a single case is it
included among the descriptive items in their catalogue entries. Libraries
are in precisely the same class of offenders. A reader or a possible
purchaser of books is supposed to be interested in the fact that a book is
published in Boston, has four hundred and thirty-two pages, and is
illustrated, but not at all in its legibility. Neither publishers nor
libraries have any way of getting information on the subject, except by
going to the books themselves. Occasionally a remainder-catalogue,
containing bargains whose charms it is desired to set forth with unusual
detail, states that a certain book is in "large type," or even in "fine,
large type," but these words are nowhere defined, and the purchaser cannot
depend on their accuracy. An edition of Scott, recently advertised
extensively as in "large, clear type," proved on examination to be printed
in ten-point.
In gathering the large-type collection for the St. Louis Library
fourteen-point was decided upon as the standard, which means, of course,
types with a face somewhere between the smallest size that is usually
found on a fourteen-point body, even if actually on a smaller body, and
the largest that this can carry, even if on a larger body. The latter is
unusually large, but it would not do to place the standard below
fourteen-point, because that would lower the minimum, which is none too
large as it is. The first effort was to collect such large-type books,
already in the library, as would be likely to interest the general reader.
In the collection of nearly 400,000 volumes, it was found by diligent
search that only 150 would answer this description. Most octavo volumes of
travel are in large type, but only a selected number of these was placed
in the collection to avoid overloading it with this particular class. This
statement applies also to some other classes, and to certain types of
books, such as some government reports and some scientific monographs,
which have no representatives in the group. The next step was to
supplement the collection by purchase. All available publishers'
catalogues were examined, but after a period of twelve months it was found
possible to spend only $65.00 in the purchase of 120 additional books. A
circular letter was then sent to ninety-two publishers, explaining the
purpose of the collection and asking for information regarding books in
fourteen-point type, or larger, issued by them. To these there were
received sixty-three answers. In twenty-nine instances, no books in type
of this size were issued by the recipients of the circulars. In six cases,
the answer included brief lists of from two to twelve titles of large-type
books; and in several other cases, the publishers stated that the labor of
ascertaining which of their publications are in large type would be
prohibitive, as it would involve actual inspection of each and every
volume on their lists. In two instances, however, after a second letter,
explaining further the aims of the collection, publishers promised to
undertake the work. The final result has been that the Library now has
over four hundred volumes in the collection. This is surely not an
imposing number, but it appears to represent the available resources of a
country in which 1,000 publishers are annually issuing 11,000 volumes--to
say nothing of the British and Continental output. In the list of the
collection and in the entries, the size of the type, the leading, and the
size of the book itself are to be distinctly stated. The last-mentioned
item is necessary because the use of large type sometimes involves a heavy
volume, awkward to hold in the hand. The collection for adults in the St.
Louis Library, as it now exists, may be divided into the following
classes, according to the reasons that seem to have prompted the use of
large type:
1. Large books printed on a somewhat generous scale and intended to sell
at a high price, the size of the type being merely incidental to this
plan. These include books of travel, history, or biography in several
volumes, somewhat high-priced sets of standard authors, and books intended
for gifts.
2. Books containing so little material that large type, thick paper, and
wide margins were necessary to make a volume easy to handle and use. These
include many short stories of magazine length, which for some inscrutable
reason are now often issued in separate form.
3. Books printed in large type for aesthetic reasons. These are few,
beauty and artistic form being apparently linked in some way with
illegibility by many printers, no matter what the size of the type-face.
The large-type collection is used, not only by elderly persons, but also
in greater number by young persons whose oculists forbid them to read fine
print, or who do not desire to wear glasses. The absence of a wide range
in the collection drives others away to books that are, doubtless, in many
cases bad for their eyes. Some books that have not been popular in the
general collection have done well here, while old favorites have not been
taken out. Such facts as these mean little with so limited a collection.
Until readers awake to the dangers of small print and the comfort of large
type there will not be sufficient pressure on our publishers to induce
them to put forth more books suitable for tired eyes. It is probably too
much to expect that the trade itself will try to push literature whose
printed form obeys the rules of ocular hygiene. All that we can reasonably
ask is that type-size shall be reported on in catalogues, so that those
who want books in large type may know what is obtainable and where to go
for it.
It has often been noted that physicians are the only class of professional
men whose activities, if properly carried on, tend directly to make the
profession unnecessary. Medicine tends more and more to be preventive
rather than curative. We must therefore look to the oculists to take the
first steps towards lessening the number of their prospective patients by
inculcating rational notions about the effects of the printed page on the
eye. Teachers, librarians, parents, the press--all can do their part. And
when a demand for larger print has thus been created the trade will
respond. Meanwhile, libraries should be unremitting in their efforts to
ascertain what material in large type already exists, to collect it, and
to call attention to it in every legitimate way.
THE MAGIC CASEMENT[16]
[16] Read before the Town and Gown Club, St. Louis.
Anyone who talks or writes about the "movies" is likely to be
misunderstood. There is little to be said now about the moving picture as
a moving picture, unless one wants to discuss its optics or mechanics. The
time is past when anyone went to see a moving picture as a curiosity. It
was once the eighth wonder of the world; it long ago abdicated that
position to join its dispossessed brothers the telephone, the X-ray, the
wireless telegraph and the phonograph. What we now go to see is not the
moving picture, but what the moving picture shows us; it is no more than a
window through which we gaze--the poet's "magic casement" opening
(sometimes) "on the foam of perilous seas." We may no more praise or
condemn the moving picture for what it shows us than we may praise or
condemn a proscenium arch or the glass in a show window.
The critic who thinks that the movies are lowering our tastes, or doing
anything else objectionable, as well as he who thinks they are educating
the masses, is not of the opinion that the moving pictures are doing these
things because they show moving objects on a screen, but because of the
character of what is photographed for such exhibition.
Thoughts on the movies, therefore, must be rather thoughts on things that
are currently shown us by means of the movies; thoughts also on some of
the things that we might see and do not. I have compared the screen above
to a proscenium arch and a show window, but both of these are selective:
the screen is as broad as the world. It is especially adapted to show
realities; through it one may see the coast of Dalmatia as viewed from a
steamer, the habits of animals in the African jungle, or the play of
emotion on the faces of an audience at a ball game in Philadelphia. I am
pleased to see that more and more of these interesting realities are shown
daily in the movie theatres. There has been a determined effort to make
them unpopular by calling them "educational," but they seem likely to
outlive it. One is educated, of course, by everything that he sees or
does, but why rub it in? The boy who thoroughly likes to go sailing will
get more out of it than he who goes because he thinks it will be "an
educational experience." As one who goes to the movies I confess that I
enjoy its realities. Probably they educate me, and I take that with due
meekness. Some of these realities I enjoy because they are unfamiliar,
like the boiling of the lava lake in the Hawaiian craters and the changing
crowds in the streets of Manila; some because they are familiar, like a
college foot-ball game or the movement of vessels in the North River at
New York.
I like the realities, too, in the dramatic performances that still occupy
and probably will continue to occupy, most of the time at a movie theatre.
Here I come into conflict with the producer. Like every other adapter he
can not cut loose from the old when he essays the new. We no longer wear
swords, but we still carry the buttons for the sword belt, and it is only
recently that semi-tropic Americans gave up the dress of north-temperate
Europe. So the movie producer can not forget the theatre. Now the theatre
has some advantages that the movie can never attain--notably the use of
speech. The movie, on the other hand, has unlimited freedom of scene and
the use of real backgrounds. We do not object to a certain amount of what
we call "staginess" on the stage--it is a part of its art; as the pigment
is part of that of the painter. We are surrounded by symbols; we are not
surprised that costume, gesture and voice are also symbolic instead of
purely natural. But in the moving picture play it is, or should be,
different. The costume and make-up, the posture and gesture, that seem
appropriate in front of a painted house or tree on a back-drop, become so
out-of-place as to be repulsive when one sees them in front of a real
house and real trees, branches moving in the wind, running water--all the
familiar accompaniments of nature. The movie producers, being unable to
get away from their stage experience, are failing to grasp their
opportunity. Instead of creating a drama of reality to correspond with the
real environment that only the movie can offer, they are abandoning the
unique advantages of that environment, to a large degree. They build fake
cities, they set all their interiors in fake studio rooms, where
everything is imitation; even when they let us see a bit of outdoors, it
is not what it pretends to be. We have all seen, on the screen, bluffs 200
feet high on the coast of Virginia and palm trees growing in the borough
of the Bronx. And they hire stage actors to interpret the stagiest of
stage plots in as stagy a way as they know how. I am taking the movie
seriously because I like it and because I see that I share that liking
with a vast throng of persons with whom it is probably the only thing I
have in common--persons separated from me by differences of training and
education that would seem to make a common ground of any kind well-nigh
impossible. With some persons the fact that the movie is democratic puts
it outside the pale at once. Nothing, in their estimation, is worth
discussing unless appreciation of it is limited to the few. Their attitude
is that of the mother who said to the nurse: "Go and see what baby is
doing, and tell him he musn't." "Let us," they say, "find out what people
like, and then try to make them like something else." To such I have
nothing to say. We ought rather, I believe, to find out the kind of thing
that people like and then do our best to see that they get it in the best
quality--that it is used in every way possible to pull them out of the
mud, instead of rubbing their noses further in.
On the other hand, some capable critics, like Mr. Walter Pritchard Eaton,
decry the movies because they are undemocratic--because they are offering
a form of entertainment appealing only to the uneducated and thus
segregating them from the educated, who presumably all attend the regular
theatre, sitting in the parquet at two dollars per. One wonders whether
Mr. Eaton has attended a moving-picture theatre since 1903. I believe the
movie to be by all odds the most democratic form of intellectual (by which
I mean non-physical) entertainment ever offered; and I base my belief on
wide observation of audiences in theatres of many different grades. Now
this democracy shows itself not only in the composition of audiences but
in their manifestations of approval. I do not mean that everyone in an
audience always likes the same thing. Some outrageous "slap-stick" comedy
rejoices one and offends another. A particularly foolish plot may satisfy
in one place while it bores in another. But everywhere I find one thing
that appeals to everybody--realism. Just as soon as there appears on the
screen something that does not know how to pose and is forced by nature to
be natural--an animal or a young child, for instance--there are immediate
manifestations of interest and delight.
The least "stagy" actors are almost always favorites. Mary Pickford stands
at the head. There is not an ounce of staginess in her make-up. She was
never particularly successful on the stage. Some of her work seems to me
ideal acting for the screen--simple, appealing, absolutely true. Of course
she is not always at her best.
To the stage illusions that depend on costume and make-up, the screen is
particularly unfriendly. Especially in the "close-ups" the effect is
similar to that which one would have if he were standing close to the
actor looking directly into his face. It is useless to depend on ordinary
make-up under these circumstances. Either it should be of the description
used by Sherlock Holmes and other celebrated detectives (we rely on
hearsay) which deceives the very elect at close quarters, or else the
producer must choose for his characters those that naturally "look the
parts." In particular, the lady who, although long past forty, continues
to play _ingenue_ parts and "gets away with it" on the stage, must get
away _from_ it, when it comes to the screen. The "close up" tells the sad
story at once. The part of a sixteen-year-old girl must be played by a
real one. Another concession to realism, you see. And what is true of
persons is true of their environment. I have already registered my
disapproval of the "Universal City" type of production. It is almost as
easy for the expert to pick out the fake Russian village or the pasteboard
Virginia court-house as it is for him to spot the wrinkles in the
countenance of the school girl who left school in 1892. Next to a fake
environment the patchwork scene enrages one--the railway that is
double-track with 90-pound rails in one scene and single-track with
streaks of rust in the next; the train that is hauled in quick succession
by locomotives of the Mogul type, the Atlantic and the wood-burning
vintage of 1868. There is here an impudent assumption in the producer, of
a lack of intelligence in his audience, that is quite maddening. The same
lack of correspondence appears between different parts of the same street,
and between the outside and inside of houses. I am told by friends that I
am quite unreasonable in the extent to which I carry my demands for
realism in the movies. "What would you have?" they ask. I would have a
producing company that should advertise, "We have no studio" and use only
real backgrounds--the actual localities represented. "Do you mean to tell
me," my friend goes on, "that you would carry your company to Spain
whenever the scene of their play is laid in that country? The expense
would be prohibitive." I most certainly should not, and this because of
the very realism that I am advocating. Plays laid in Spain should be acted
not only in Spain but by Spaniards. The most objectionable kind of fake is
that in which Americans are made to do duty for Spaniards, Hindus or
Japanese when their appearance, action and bearing clearly indicate that
they were born and brought up in Skowhegan, Maine or Crawfordsville,
Indiana. I have seen Mary Pickford in "Madame Butterfly", and I testify
sadly that not even she can succeed here. No; if we want Spanish plays let
us use those made on Spanish soil. Let us have free interchange of films
between all film-producing countries. All the change required would be
translating the captions, or better still, plays might be produced that
require no captions. This might mean the total reorganization of the
movie-play business in this country--a revolution which I should view with
equanimity. Speaking of captions, here again the average producer appears
to agree with Walter Pritchard Eaton that he is catering only to the
uneducated. The writers of most captions seem, indeed, to have abandoned
formal instruction in the primary school. Why should not a movie caption
be good literature? Some of them are. The Cabiria captions were fine:
though I do not admire that masterpiece. I am told that D'Annunzio
composed them with care, and equal care was evidently used in the
translation. The captions of the George Ade fables are uniformly good, and
there are other notable exceptions. Other places where knowledge of
language is required are inadequately taken care of. Letters from eminent
persons make one want to hide under the chairs. These persons usually sign
themselves "Duke of Gandolfo" or "Secretary of State Smith." Are grammar
school graduates difficult to get, or high-priced? I beg you to observe
that here again lack of realism is my objection.
But divers friends interpose the remark that the movies are already too
realistic. "They leave nothing to the imagination." If this were so, it
were a grievous fault--at any rate in so far as the moving-picture play
aims at being an art-form. All good art leaves something to the
imagination. As a matter of fact, however, the movie is the exact
complement of the spoken play as read from a book. Here we have the words
in full, the scene and action being left to the imagination except as
briefly sketched in the stage direction. In the movie we have scene and
action in full, the words being left to the imagination except as briefly
indicated in the captions. Where captions are very full the form may
perhaps be said to be complementary to the novel, where besides the words
we are given a written description of scene and action that is often full
of detail. The movie leaves just as much to the imagination as the novel,
but what is so left is different in the two cases. Do I think that
everyone in a movie audience makes use of his privilege to imagine what
the actors are saying? No; neither does the novel-reader always image the
scene and action. This does not depend on ignorance or the reverse, but on
imaging power. Exceptional visual and auditive imaging power are rarely
present in the same individual. I happen to have the former. I
automatically see everything of which I read in a novel, and when the
descriptions are not detailed, this gets me into trouble. On a second
reading my imaged background may be different and when the earlier one
asserts itself there is a conflict that I can compare only to hearing two
tunes played at once. Persons having already good visual imaging power
should develop their auditive imaging power by going to the movies and
hearing what the actors say; these with deficient visual imagery should
read novels and see the scenery. But to say that the movies allow no scope
for the imagination is absurd. As I said at the outset, the movie play is
just a play seen through the medium of a moving picture. It is like seeing
a drama near enough to note the slightest play of feature and at the same
time so far away that the actors can not be heard--somewhat like seeing a
distant play through a fine telescope. The action should therefore differ
in no respect from what would be proper if the words were intended to be
heard. Doubtless this imposes a special duty upon both the author of the
scenario and the producer, and they do not always respond to it. Action is
introduced that fails to be intelligible without the words, and to clear
it up the actors are made to use pantomime. Pantomime is an interesting
and valuable form of dramatic art, but it is essentially symbolic and
stagy and has, I believe, no place in the moving picture play as we have
developed it. If owing to the faulty construction of the play, or a lack
of skill on the part of producer or actors, all sorts of gestures and
grimaces become necessary that would not be required if the words were
heard, the production can not be considered good. Sometimes, of course,
words are _seen_; though not heard. The story of the deaf mutes who read
the lips of the movie actors, and detected remarks not at all in
consonance with the action of the play, is doubtless familiar. It crops up
in various places and is as ubiquitous as Washington's Headquarters. It is
good enough to be true, but I have never run it to earth yet. Even those
of us who are not deaf-mutes, however, may detect an exclamation now and
then and it gives great force to the action, though I doubt whether it is
quite legitimate in a purely picture-play.
I beg leave to doubt whether realism is fostered by a method of production
said to be in vogue among first rate producers; namely keeping actors in
ignorance of the play and directing the action as it goes on.
"Come in now, Mr. Smith; sit in that chair; cross your legs; light a
cigar; register perplexity; you hear a sound; jump to your feet"--and so
on. This may save the producer trouble, but it reduces the actors to
marionettes; it is not thus that masterpieces are turned out.
Is there any chance of a movie masterpiece, anyway? Yes, but not in the
direction that most producers see it. What Vachell Lindsay calls
"Splendor" in the movies is an interesting and striking feature of
them--the moving of masses of people amid great architectural
construction--sieges, triumphs, battles, mobs--but all this is akin to
scenery. Its movements are like those of the trees or the surf. One can
not make a play entirely of scenery, though the contrary seems to be the
view of some managers, even on the stage of the regular theatre. So far,
the individual acting and plot construction in the great spectacular
movies has been poor. It was notably so, it seems to me in the Birth of a
Nation and not much better in Cabiria. Judith of Bethulia (after T.B.
Aldrich) is the best acted "splendor" play that I have seen. Masterpieces
are coming not through spending millions on supes, and "real" temples, and
forts; but rather by writing a scenario particularly adapted to
film-production, hiring and training actors that know how to act for the
camera, preferably those without bad stage habits to unlearn, cutting out
all unreal scenery, costume and make-up and keeping everything as simple
and as close to the actual as possible. The best movie play I ever saw was
in a ten-cent theatre in St. Louis. It was a dramatization of Frank
Norris's "McTeague." I have never seen it advertised anywhere, and I never
heard of the actors, before or since. But most of it was fine, sincere
work, and seeing it made me feel that there is a future for the movie
play.