Many of the Springfield producers are quite able and enterprising, but

to ask for music with photoplays is like asking the man at the news stand

to write an editorial while he sells you the paper. The picture with a

great orchestra in a far-off metropolitan Opera House, may be classed by

fanatic partisanship with Grand Opera. But few can get at it. It has

nothing to do with Democracy.

Of course people with a mechanical imagination, and no other kind, begin

to suggest the talking moving picture at this point, or the phonograph or

the mechanical piano. Let us discuss the talking moving picture only.

That disposes of the others.

If the talking moving picture becomes a reliable mirror of the human

voice and frame, it will be the basis of such a separate art that none of

the photoplay precedents will apply. It will be the _phonoplay_, not the

photoplay. It will be unpleasant for a long time. This book is a struggle

against the non-humanness of the undisciplined photograph. Any film is

correct, realistic, forceful, many times before it is charming. The

actual physical storage-battery of the actor is many hundred miles away.

As a substitute, the human quality must come in the marks of the presence

of the producer. The entire painting must have his brushwork. If we

compare it to a love-letter it must be in his handwriting rather than

worked on a typewriter. If he puts his autograph into the film, it is

after a fierce struggle with the uncanny scientific quality of the

camera's work. His genius and that of the whole company of actors is

exhausted in the task.

The raw phonograph is likewise unmagnetic. Would you set upon the

shoulders of the troupe of actors the additional responsibility of

putting an adequate substitute for human magnetism in the phonographic

disk? The voice that does not actually bleed, that contains no

heart-beats, fails to meet the emergency. Few people have wept over a

phonographic selection from Tristan and Isolde. They are moved at the

actual performance. Why? Look at the opera singer after the last act. His

eyes are burning. His face is flushed. His pulse is high. Reaching his

hotel room, he is far more weary than if he had sung the opera alone

there. He has given out of his brain-fire and blood-beat the same

magnetism that leads men in battle. To speak of it in the crassest terms,

this resource brings him a hundred times more salary than another man

with just as good a voice can command. The output that leaves him

drained at the end of the show cannot be stored in the phonograph

machine. That device is as good in the morning as at noon. It ticks like

a clock.

To perfect the talking moving picture, human magnetism must be put into

the mirror-screen and into the clock. Not only is this imperative, but

clock and mirror must be harmonized, one gently subordinated to the

other. Both cannot rule. In the present talking moving picture the more

highly developed photoplay is dragged by the hair in a dead faint, in the

wake of the screaming savage phonograph. No talking machine on the market

reproduces conversation clearly unless it be elaborately articulated in

unnatural tones with a stiff interval between each question and answer.

Real dialogue goes to ruin.

The talking moving picture came to our town. We were given for one show a

line of minstrels facing the audience, with the interlocutor repeating

his immemorial question, and the end-man giving the immemorial answer.

Then came a scene in a blacksmith shop where certain well-differentiated

rackets were carried over the footlights. No one heard the blacksmith,

unless he stopped to shout straight at us.

The _phonoplay_ can quite possibly reach some divine goal, but it will be

after the speaking powers of the phonograph excel the photographing

powers of the reel, and then the pictures will be brought in as comment

and ornament to the speech. The pictures will be held back by the

phonograph as long as it is more limited in its range. The pictures are

at present freer and more versatile without it. If the _phonoplay_ is

ever established, since it will double the machinery, it must needs

double its prices. It will be the illustrated phonograph, in a more

expensive theatre.

The orchestra is in part a blundering effort by the local manager to

supply the human-magnetic element which he feels lacking in the pictures

on which the producer has not left his autograph. But there is a much

more economic and magnetic accompaniment, the before-mentioned buzzing

commentary of the audience. There will be some people who disturb the

neighbors in front, but the average crowd has developed its manners in

this particular, and when the orchestra is silent, murmurs like a

pleasant brook.

Local manager, why not an advertising campaign in your town that says:

"Beginning Monday and henceforth, ours shall be known as the

Conversational Theatre"? At the door let each person be handed the

following card:--

"You are encouraged to discuss the picture with the friend who

accompanies you to this place. Conversation, of course, must be

sufficiently subdued not to disturb the stranger who did not come with

you to the theatre. If you are so disposed, consider your answers to

these questions: What play or part of a play given in this theatre did

you like most to-day? What the least? What is the best picture you have

ever seen anywhere? What pictures, seen here this month, shall we bring

back?" Here give a list of the recent productions, with squares to mark

by the Australian ballot system: approved or disapproved. The cards with

their answers could be slipped into the ballot-box at the door as the

crowd goes out.

It may be these questions are for the exceptional audiences in residence

districts. Perhaps with most crowds the last interrogation is the only

one worth while. But by gathering habitually the answers to that alone

the place would get the drift of its public, realize its genius, and

become an art-gallery, the people bestowing the blue ribbons. The

photoplay theatres have coupon contests and balloting already: the most

popular young lady, money prizes to the best vote-getter in the audience,

etc. Why not ballot on the matter in hand?

If the cards are sent out by the big producers, a referendum could be

secured that would be invaluable in arguing down to rigid censorship, and

enable them to make their own private censorship more intelligent.

Various styles of experimental cards could be tried till the vital one is

found.

There is growing up in this country a clan of half-formed moving picture

critics. The present stage of their work is indicated by the eloquent

notice describing Your Girl and Mine, in the chapter on "Progress and

Endowment." The metropolitan papers give their photoplay reporters as

much space as the theatrical critics. Here in my home town the twelve

moving picture places take one half a page of chaotic notices daily. The

country is being badly led by professional photoplay news-writers who do

not know where they are going, but are on the way.

But they aptly describe the habitual attendants as moving picture fans.

The fan at the photoplay, as at the baseball grounds, is neither a

low-brow nor a high-brow. He is an enthusiast who is as stirred by the

charge of the photographic cavalry as by the home runs that he watches

from the bleachers. In both places he has the privilege of comment while

the game goes on. In the photoplay theatre it is not so vociferous, but

as keenly felt. Each person roots by himself. He has his own judgment,

and roasts the umpire: who is the keeper of the local theatre: or the

producer, as the case may be. If these opinions of the fan can be

collected and classified, an informal censorship is at once established.

The photoplay reporters can then take the enthusiasts in hand and lead

them to a realization of the finer points in awarding praise and blame.

Even the sporting pages have their expert opinions with due influence on

the betting odds. Out of the work of the photoplay reporters let a

superstructure of art criticism be reared in periodicals like The

Century, Harper's, Scribner's, The Atlantic, The Craftsman, and the

architectural magazines. These are our natural custodians of art. They

should reproduce the most exquisite tableaus, and be as fastidious in

their selection of them as they are in the current examples of the other

arts. Let them spread the news when photoplays keyed to the Rembrandt

mood arrive. The reporters for the newspapers should get their ideas and

refreshment in such places as the Ryerson Art Library of the Chicago Art

Institute. They should begin with such books as Richard Muther's History

of Modern Painting, John C. Van Dyke's Art for Art's Sake, Marquand and

Frothingham's History of Sculpture, A.D.F. Hamlin's History of

Architecture. They should take the business of guidance in this new world

as a sacred trust, knowing they have the power to influence an enormous

democracy.

The moving picture journals and the literati are in straits over the

censorship question. The literati side with the managers, on the

principles of free speech and a free press. But few of the æsthetically

super-wise are persistent fans. They rave for freedom, but are not, as a

general thing, living back in the home town. They do not face the

exigency of having their summer and winter amusement spoiled day after

day.

Extremists among the pious are railing against the moving pictures as

once they railed against novels. They have no notion that this

institution is penetrating to the last backwoods of our civilization,

where its presence is as hard to prevent as the rain. But some of us are

destined to a reaction, almost as strong as the obsession. The

religionists will think they lead it. They will be self-deceived. Moving

picture nausea is already taking hold of numberless people, even when

they are in the purely pagan mood. Forced by their limited purses, their

inability to buy a Ford car, and the like, they go in their loneliness to

film after film till the whole world seems to turn on a reel. When they

are again at home, they see in the dark an imaginary screen with

tremendous pictures, whirling by at a horribly accelerated pace, a

photoplay delirium tremens. Faster and faster the reel turns in the back

of their heads. When the moving picture sea-sickness is upon one, nothing

satisfies but the quietest out of doors, the companionship of the

gentlest of real people. The non-movie-life has charms such as one never

before conceived. The worn citizen feels that the cranks and legislators

can do what they please to the producers. He is through with them.

The moving picture business men do not realize that they have to face

these nervous conditions in their erstwhile friends. They flatter

themselves they are being pursued by some reincarnations of Anthony

Comstock. There are several reasons why photoplay corporations are

callous, along with the sufficient one that they are corporations.

First, they are engaged in a financial orgy. Fortunes are being found by

actors and managers faster than they were dug up in 1849 and 1850 in

California. Forty-niner lawlessness of soul prevails. They talk each

other into a lordly state of mind. All is dash and experiment. Look at

the advertisements in the leading moving picture magazines. They are like

the praise of oil stock or Peruna. They bawl about films founded upon

little classics. They howl about plots that are ostensibly from the

soberest of novels, whose authors they blasphemously invoke. They boo and

blow about twisted, callous scenarios that are bad imitations of the

world's most beloved lyrics.

The producers do not realize the mass effect of the output of the

business. It appears to many as a sea of unharnessed photography: sloppy

conceptions set forth with sharp edges and irrelevant realism. The

jumping, twitching, cold-blooded devices, day after day, create the

aforesaid sea-sickness, that has nothing to do with the questionable

subject. When on top of this we come to the picture that is actually

insulting, we are up in arms indeed. It is supplied by a corporation

magnate removed from his audience in location, fortune, interest, and

mood: an absentee landlord. I was trying to convert a talented and noble

friend to the films. The first time we went there was a prize-fight

between a black and a white man, not advertised, used for a filler. I

said it was queer, and would not happen again. The next time my noble

friend was persuaded to go, there was a cock-fight, incidental to a Cuban

romance. The third visit we beheld a lady who was dying for five minutes,

rolling her eyes about in a way that was fearful to see. The convert was

not made.

It is too easy to produce an unprovoked murder, an inexplicable arson,

neither led up to nor followed by the ordinary human history of such

acts, and therefore as arbitrary as the deeds of idiots or the insane. A

villainous hate, an alleged love, a violent death, are flashed at us,

without being in any sort of tableau logic. The public is ceaselessly

played upon by tactless devices. Therefore it howls, just as children in

the nursery do when the awkward governess tries the very thing the

diplomatic governess, in reasonable time, may bring about.

The producer has the man in the audience who cares for the art peculiarly

at his mercy. Compare him with the person who wants to read a magazine

for an evening. He can look over all the periodicals in the local

book-store in fifteen minutes. He can select the one he wants, take this

bit of printed matter home, go through the contents, find the three

articles he prefers, get an evening of reading out of them, and be happy.

Every day as many photoplays come to our town as magazines come to the

book-store in a week or a month. There are good ones and bad ones buried

in the list. There is no way to sample the films. One has to wait through

the first third of a reel before he has an idea of the merits of a

production, his ten cents is spent, and much of his time is gone. It

would take five hours at least to find the best film in our town for one

day. Meanwhile, nibbling and sampling, the seeker would run such a

gantlet of plot and dash and chase that his eyes and patience would be

exhausted. Recently there returned to the city for a day one of

Griffith's best Biographs, The Last Drop of Water. It was good to see

again. In order to watch this one reel twice I had to wait through five

others of unutterable miscellany.

Since the producers and theatre-managers have us at their mercy,

they are under every obligation to consider our delicate

susceptibilities--granting the proposition that in an ideal world we will

have no legal censorship. As to what to do in this actual nation, let the

reader follow what John Collier has recently written in The Survey.

Collier was the leading force in founding the National Board of

Censorship. As a member of that volunteer extra-legal board which is

independent and high minded, yet accepted by the leading picture

companies, he is able to discuss legislation in a manner which the

present writer cannot hope to match. Read John Collier. But I wish to

suggest that the ideal censorship is that to which the daily press is

subject, the elastic hand of public opinion, if the photoplay can be

brought as near to newspaper conditions in this matter as it is in some

others.

How does public opinion grip the journalist? The editor has a constant

report from his constituency. A popular scoop sells an extra at once. An

attack on the wrong idol cancels fifty subscriptions. People come to the

office to do it, and say why. If there is a piece of real news on the

second page, and fifty letters come in about it that night, next month

when that character of news reappears it gets the front page. Some human

peculiarities are not mentioned, some phrases not used. The total

attribute of the blue-pencil man is diplomacy. But while the motion

pictures come out every day, they get their discipline months afterwards

in the legislation that insists on everything but tact. A tentative

substitute for the letters that come to the editor, the personal call and

cancelled subscription, and the rest, is the system of balloting on the

picture, especially the answer to the question, "What picture seen here

this month, or this week, shall we bring back?" Experience will teach how

to put the queries. By the same system the public might dictate its own

cut-outs. Let us have a democracy and a photoplay business working in

daily rhythm.

CHAPTER XV

THE SUBSTITUTE FOR THE SALOON

This is a special commentary on chapter five, The Picture of Crowd

Splendor. It refers as well to every other type of moving picture that

gets into the slum. But the masses have an extraordinary affinity for the

Crowd Photoplay. As has been said before, the mob comes nightly to behold

its natural face in the glass. Politicians on the platform have swayed

the mass below them. But now, to speak in an Irish way, the crowd takes

the platform, and looking down, sees itself swaying. The slums are an

astonishing assembly of cave-men crawling out of their shelters to

exhibit for the first time in history a common interest on a tremendous

scale in an art form. Below the cliff caves were bar rooms in endless

lines. There are almost as many bar rooms to-day, yet this new thing

breaks the lines as nothing else ever did. Often when a moving picture

house is set up, the saloon on the right hand or the left declares

bankruptcy.

Why do men prefer the photoplay to the drinking place? For no pious

reason, surely. Now they have fire pouring into their eyes instead of

into their bellies. Blood is drawn from the guts to the brain. Though the

picture be the veriest mess, the light and movement cause the beholder to

do a little reptilian thinking. After a day's work a street-sweeper

enters the place, heavy as King Log. A ditch-digger goes in, sick and

surly. It is the state of the body when many men drink themselves into

insensibility. But here the light is as strong in the eye as whiskey in

the throat. Along with the flare, shadow, and mystery, they face the

existence of people, places, costumes, utterly novel. Immigrants are

prodded by these swords of darkness and light to guess at the meaning of

the catch-phrases and headlines that punctuate the play. They strain to

hear their neighbors whisper or spell them out.

The photoplays have done something to reunite the lower-class families.

No longer is the fire-escape the only summer resort for big and little

folks. Here is more fancy and whim than ever before blessed a hot night.

Here, under the wind of an electric fan, they witness everything, from a

burial in Westminster to the birthday parade of the ruler of the land of

Swat.

The usual saloon equipment to delight the eye is one so-called "leg"

picture of a woman, a photograph of a prize-fighter, and some colored

portraits of goats to advertise various brands of beer. Many times, no

doubt, these boys and young men have found visions of a sordid kind while

gazing on the actress, the fighter, or the goats. But what poor material

they had in the wardrobes of memory for the trimmings and habiliments of

vision, to make this lady into Freya, this prize-fighter into Thor, these

goats into the harnessed steeds that drew his chariot! Man's dreams are

rearranged and glorified memories. How could these people reconstruct the

torn carpets and tin cans and waste-paper of their lives into mythology?

How could memories of Ladies' Entrance squalor be made into Castles in

Granada or Carcassonne? The things they drank to see, and saw but

grotesquely, and paid for terribly, now roll before them with no after

pain or punishment. The mumbled conversation, the sociability for which

they leaned over the tables, they have here in the same manner with far

more to talk about. They come, they go home, men and women together, as

casually and impulsively as the men alone ever entered a drinking-place,

but discoursing now of far-off mountains and star-crossed lovers. As

Padraic Colum says in his poem on the herdsman:--

"With thoughts on white ships

And the King of Spain's Daughter."

This is why the saloon on the right hand and on the left in the slum is

apt to move out when the photoplay moves in.

But let us go to the other end of the temperance argument. I beg to be

allowed to relate a personal matter. For some time I was a field-worker

for the Anti-Saloon League of Illinois, being sent every Sunday to a new

region to make the yearly visit on behalf of the league. Such a visitor

is apt to speak to one church in a village, and two in the country, on

each excursion, being met at the station by some leading farmer-citizen

of the section, and driven to these points by him. The talk with this man

was worth it all to me.

The agricultural territory of the United States is naturally dry. This is

because the cross-roads church is the only communal institution, and the

voice of the cross-roads pastor is for teetotalism. The routine of the

farm-hand, while by no means ideal in other respects, keeps him from

craving drink as intensely as other toilers do. A day's work in the open

air fills his veins at nightfall with an opiate of weariness instead of a

high-strung nervousness. The strong men of the community are church

elders, not through fanaticism, but by right of leadership. Through their

office they are committed to prohibition. So opposition to the temperance

movement is scattering. The Anti-Saloon League has organized these

leaders into a nation-wide machine. It sees that they get their weekly

paper, instructing them in the tactics whereby local fights have been

won. A subscription financing the State League is taken once a year. It

counts on the regular list of church benevolences. The state officers

come in to help on the critical local fights. Any country politician

fears their non-partisan denunciation as he does political death. The

local machines thus backed are incurable mugwumps, hold the balance of

power, work in both parties, and have voted dry the agricultural

territory of the United States everywhere, by the township, county, or

state unit.

The only institutions that touch the same territory in a similar way are

the Chautauquas in the prosperous agricultural centres. These, too, by

the same sign are emphatically anti-saloon in their propaganda, serving

to intellectualize and secularize the dry sentiment without taking it out

of the agricultural caste.

There is a definite line between our farm-civilization and the rest. When

a county goes dry, it is generally in spite of the county-seat. Such

temperance people as are in the court-house town represent the

church-vote, which is even then in goodly proportion a retired-farmer

vote. The larger the county-seat, the larger the non-church-going

population and the more stubborn the fight. The majority of miners and

factory workers are on the wet side everywhere. The irritation caused by

the gases in the mines, by the dirty work in the blackness, by the

squalor in which the company houses are built, turns men to drink for

reaction and lamplight and comradeship. The similar fevers and

exasperations of factory life lead the workers to unstring their tense

nerves with liquor. The habit of snuggling up close in factories,

conversing often, bench by bench, machine by machine, inclines them to

get together for their pleasures at the bar. In industrial America there

is an anti-saloon minority in moral sympathy with the temperance wave

brought in by the farmers. But they are outstanding groups. Their

leadership seldom dries up a factory town or a mining region, with all

the help the Anti-Saloon League can give.

In the big cities the temperance movement is scarcely understood. The

choice residential districts are voted dry for real estate reasons. The

men who do this, drink freely at their own clubs or parties. The

temperance question would be fruitlessly argued to the end of time were

it not for the massive agricultural vote rolling and roaring round each

metropolis, reawakening the town churches whose vote is a pitiful

minority but whose spokesmen are occasionally strident.

There is a prophecy abroad that prohibition will be the issue of a

national election. If the question is squarely put, there are enough

farmers and church-people to drive the saloon out of legal existence. The

women's vote, a little more puritanical than the men's vote, will make

the result sure. As one anxious for this victory, I have often speculated

on the situation when all America is nominally dry, at the behest of the

American farmer, the American preacher, and the American woman. When the

use of alcohol is treason, what will become of those all but unbroken

lines of slum saloons? No lesser force than regular troops could dislodge

them, with yesterday's intrenchment.

The entrance of the motion picture house into the arena is indeed

striking, the first enemy of King Alcohol with real power where that king

has deepest hold. If every one of those saloon doors is nailed up by the

Chautauqua orators, the photoplay archway will remain open. The people

will have a shelter where they can readjust themselves, that offers a

substitute for many of the lines of pleasure in the groggery. And a whole

evening costs but a dime apiece. Several rounds of drinks are expensive,

but the people can sit through as many repetitions of this programme as

they desire, for one entrance fee. The dominant genius of the moving

picture place is not a gentleman with a red nose and an eye like a dead

fish, but some producer who, with all his faults, has given every person

in the audience a seven-leagued angel-and-demon telescope.

Since I have announced myself a farmer and a puritan, let me here list

the saloon evils not yet recorded in this chapter. They are separate from

the catalogue of the individualistic woes of the drunkard that are given

in the Scripture. The shame of the American drinking place is the

bar-tender who dominates its thinking. His cynical and hardened soul

wipes out a portion of the influence of the public school, the library,

the self-respecting newspaper. A stream rises no higher than its source,

and through his dead-fish eye and dead-fish brain the group of tired men

look upon all the statesmen and wise ones of the land. Though he says

worse than nothing, his furry tongue, by endless reiteration, is the

American slum oracle. At the present the bar-tender handles the

neighborhood group, the ultimate unit in city politics.

So, good citizen, welcome the coming of the moving picture man as a local

social force. Whatever his private character, the mere formula of his

activities makes him a better type. He may not at first sway his group in

a directly political way, but he will make himself the centre of more

social ideals than the bar-tender ever entertained. And he is beginning

to have as intimate a relation to his public as the bar-tender. In many

cases he stands under his arch in the sheltered lobby and is on

conversing terms with his habitual customers, the length of the afternoon

and evening.

Voting the saloon out of the slums by voting America dry, does not, as of

old, promise to be a successful operation that kills the patient. In the

past some of the photoplay magazines have contained denunciations of the

temperance people for refusing to say anything in behalf of the greatest

practical enemy of the saloon. But it is not too late for the dry forces

to repent. The Anti-Saloon League officers and the photoplay men should

ask each other to dinner. More moving picture theatres in doubtful

territory will help make dry voters. And wet territory voted dry will

bring about a greatly accelerated patronage of the photoplay houses.

There is every strategic reason why these two forces should patch up a

truce.

Meanwhile, the cave-man, reader of picture-writing, is given a chance to

admit light into his mind, whatever he puts to his lips. Let us look for

the day, be it a puritan triumph or not, when the sons and the daughters

of the slums shall prophesy, the young men shall see visions, the old men

dream dreams.

CHAPTER XVI

CALIFORNIA AND AMERICA

The moving picture captains of industry, like the California gold finders

of 1849, making colossal fortunes in two or three years, have the same

glorious irresponsibility and occasional need of the sheriff. They are

Californians more literally than this. Around Los Angeles the greatest

and most characteristic moving picture colonies are being built. Each

photoplay magazine has its California letter, telling of the

putting-up of new studios, and the transfer of actors, with much

slap-you-on-the-back personal gossip. This is the outgrowth of the fact

that every type of the photoplay but the intimate is founded on some

phase of the out-of-doors. Being thus dependent, the plant can best be

set up where there is no winter. Besides this, the Los Angeles region has

the sea, the mountains, the desert, and many kinds of grove and field.

Landscape and architecture are sub-tropical. But for a description of

California, ask any traveller or study the background of almost any

photoplay.

If the photoplay is the consistent utterance of its scenes, if the actors

are incarnations of the land they walk upon, as they should be,

California indeed stands a chance to achieve through the films an

utterance of her own. Will this land furthest west be the first to

capture the inner spirit of this newest and most curious of the arts? It

certainly has the opportunity that comes with the actors, producers, and

equipment. Let us hope that every region will develop the silent

photographic pageant in a local form as outlined in the chapter on

Progress and Endowment. Already the California sort, in the commercial

channels, has become the broadly accepted if mediocre national form.

People who revere the Pilgrim Fathers of 1620 have often wished those

gentlemen had moored their bark in the region of Los Angeles rather than

Plymouth Rock, that Boston had been founded there. At last that landing

is achieved.

Patriotic art students have discussed with mingled irony and admiration

the Boston domination of the only American culture of the nineteenth

century, namely, literature. Indianapolis has had her day since then,

Chicago is lifting her head. Nevertheless Boston still controls the

text-book in English and dominates our high schools. Ironic feelings in

this matter on the part of western men are based somewhat on envy and

illegitimate cussedness, but are also grounded in the honest hope of a

healthful rivalry. They want new romanticists and artists as indigenous

to their soil as was Hawthorne to witch-haunted Salem or Longfellow to

the chestnuts of his native heath. Whatever may be said of the

patriarchs, from Oliver Wendell Holmes to Amos Bronson Alcott, they were

true sons of the New England stone fences and meeting houses. They could

not have been born or nurtured anywhere else on the face of the earth.

Some of us view with a peculiar thrill the prospect that Los Angeles may

become the Boston of the photoplay. Perhaps it would be better to say the

Florence, because California reminds one of colorful Italy more than of

any part of the United States. Yet there is a difference.

The present-day man-in-the-street, man-about-town Californian has an

obvious magnificence about him that is allied to the eucalyptus tree,

the pomegranate. California is a gilded state. It has not the sordidness

of gold, as has Wall Street, but it is the embodiment of the natural ore

that the ragged prospector finds. The gold of California is the color of

the orange, the glitter of dawn in the Yosemite, the hue of the golden

gate that opens the sunset way to mystic and terrible Cathay and

Hindustan.

The enemy of California says the state is magnificent but thin. He

declares it is as though it were painted on a Brobdingnagian piece of

gilt paper, and he who dampens his finger and thrusts it through finds an

alkali valley on the other side, the lonely prickly pear, and a heap of

ashes from a deserted camp-fire. He says the citizens of this state lack

the richness of an æsthetic and religious tradition. He says there is no

substitute for time. But even these things make for coincidence. This

apparent thinness California has in common with the routine photoplay,

which is at times as shallow in its thought as the shadow it throws upon

the screen. This newness California has in common with all photoplays. It

is thrillingly possible for the state and the art to acquire spiritual

tradition and depth together.

Part of the thinness of California is not only its youth, but the result

of the physical fact that the human race is there spread over so many

acres of land. They try not only to count their mines and enumerate their

palm trees, but they count the miles of their sea-coast, and the acres

under cultivation and the height of the peaks, and revel in large

statistics and the bigness generally, and forget how a few men rattle

around in a great deal of scenery. They shout their statistics across the

Rockies and the deserts to New York. The Mississippi Valley is

non-existent to the Californian. His fellow-feeling is for the opposite

coast-line. Through the geographical accident of separation by mountain

and desert from the rest of the country, he becomes a mere shouter,

hurrahing so assiduously that all variety in the voice is lost. Then he

tries gestures, and becomes flamboyant, rococo.

These are the defects of the motion picture qualities also. Its panoramic

tendency runs wild. As an institution it advertises itself with the

sweeping gesture. It has the same passion for coast-line. These are not

the sins of New England. When, in the hands of masters, they become

sources of strength, they will be a different set of virtues from those

of New England.

There is no more natural place for the scattering of confetti than this

state, except the moving picture scene itself. Both have a genius for

gardens and dancing and carnival.

When the Californian relegates the dramatic to secondary scenes, both in

his life and his photoplay, and turns to the genuinely epic and lyric, he

and this instrument may find their immortality together as New England

found its soul in the essays of Emerson. Tide upon tide of Spring comes

into California through all four seasons. Fairy beauty overwhelms the

lumbering grand-stand players. The tiniest garden is a jewelled pathway

of wonder. But the Californian cannot shout "orange blossoms, orange

blossoms; heliotrope, heliotrope!" He cannot boom forth "roseleaves,

roseleaves" so that he does their beauties justice. Here is where the

photoplay can begin to give him a more delicate utterance. And he can go

on into stranger things and evolve all the Splendor Films into higher

types, for the very name of California is splendor. The California

photo-playwright can base his Crowd Picture upon the city-worshipping

mobs of San Francisco. He can derive his Patriotic and Religious

Splendors from something older and more magnificent than the aisles of

the Romanesque, namely: the groves of the giant redwoods.

The campaign for a beautiful nation could very well emanate from the west

coast, where with the slightest care grow up models for all the world of

plant arrangement and tree-luxury. Our mechanical East is reproved, our

tension is relaxed, our ugliness is challenged every time we look upon

those garden paths and forests.

It is possible for Los Angeles to lay hold of the motion picture as our

national text-book in Art as Boston appropriated to herself the

guardianship of the national text-books of Literature. If California has

a shining soul, and not merely a golden body, let her forget her

seventeen-year-old melodramatics, and turn to her poets who understand

the heart underneath the glory. Edwin Markham, the dean of American

singers, Clark Ashton Smith, the young star treader, George Sterling,

that son of Ancient Merlin, have in their songs the seeds of better

scenarios than California has sent us. There are two poems by George

Sterling that I have had in mind for many a day as conceptions that

should inspire mystic films akin to them. These poems are The Night

Sentries and Tidal King of Nations.

But California can tell us stories that are grim children of the tales of

the wild Ambrose Bierce. Then there is the lovely unforgotten Nora May

French and the austere Edward Rowland Sill.

Edison is the new Gutenberg. He has invented the new printing. The state

that realizes this may lead the soul of America, day after to-morrow.

CHAPTER XVII

PROGRESS AND ENDOWMENT

The moving picture goes almost as far as journalism into the social

fabric in some ways, further in others. Soon, no doubt, many a little

town will have its photographic news-press. We have already the weekly

world-news films from the big centres.

With local journalism will come devices for advertising home enterprises.

Some staple products will be made attractive by having film-actors show

their uses. The motion pictures will be in the public schools to stay.

Text-books in geography, history, zoõlogy, botany, physiology, and other

sciences will be illustrated by standardized films. Along with these

changes, there will be available at certain centres collections of films

equivalent to the Standard Dictionary and the Encyclopædia Britannica.

And sooner or later we will have a straight-out capture of a complete

film expression by the serious forces of civilization. The merely

impudent motion picture will be relegated to the leisure hours with

yellow journalism. Photoplay libraries are inevitable, as active if not

as multitudinous as the book-circulating libraries. The oncoming

machinery and expense of the motion picture is immense. Where will the

money come from? No one knows. What the people want they will get. The

race of man cannot afford automobiles, but has them nevertheless. We

cannot run away into non-automobile existence or non-steam-engine or

non-movie life long at a time. We must conquer this thing. While the more

stately scientific and educational aspects just enumerated are slowly on

their way, the artists must be up and about their ameliorative work.

Every considerable effort to develop a noble idiom will count in the

final result, as the writers of early English made possible the language

of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton. We are perfecting a medium to be

used as long as Chinese ideographs have been. It will no doubt, like the

Chinese language, record in the end massive and classical treatises,

imperial chronicles, law-codes, traditions, and religious admonitions.

All this by the _motion picture_ as a recording instrument, not

necessarily the _photoplay_, a much more limited thing, a form of art.

What shall be done in especial by this generation of idealists, whose

flags rise and go down, whose battle line wavers and breaks a thousand

times? What is the high quixotic splendid call? We know of a group of

public-spirited people who advocate, in endowed films, "safety first,"

another that champions total abstinence. Often their work seems lost in

the mass of commercial production, but it is a good beginning. Such

citizens take an established studio for a specified time and at the end

put on the market a production that backs up their particular idea. There

are certain terms between the owners of the film and the proprietors of

the studio for the division of the income, the profits of the cult being

spent on further propaganda. The product need not necessarily be the type

outlined in chapter two, The Photoplay of Action. Often some other sort

might establish the cause more deeply. But most of the propaganda films

are of the action variety, because of the dynamic character of the people

who produce them. Fired by fanatic zeal, the auto speeds faster, the

rescuing hero runs harder, the stern policeman and sheriff become more

jumpy, all that the audience may be converted. Here if anywhere

meditation on the actual resources of charm and force in the art is a

fitting thing. The crusader should realize that it is not a good Action

Play nor even a good argument unless it is indeed the Winged Victory

sort. The gods are not always on the side of those who throw fits.

There is here appended a newspaper description of a crusading film, that,

despite the implications of the notice, has many passages of charm. It is

two-thirds Action Photoplay, one-third Intimate-and-friendly. The notice

does not imply that at times the story takes pains to be gentle. This bit

of writing is all too typical of film journalism.

"Not only as an argument for suffrage but as a play with a story, a

punch, and a mission, 'Your Girl and Mine' is produced under the

direction of the National Woman's Suffrage Association at the Capitol

to-day.

"Olive Wyndham forsook the legitimate stage for the time to pose as the

heroine of the play. Katherine Kaelred, leading lady of 'Joseph and his

Brethren,' took the part of a woman lawyer battling for the right.

Sydney Booth, of the 'Yellow Ticket' company posed as the hero of the

experiment. John Charles and Katharine Henry played the villain and the

honest working girl. About three hundred secondaries were engaged along

with the principals.

"It is melodrama of the most thrilling sort, in spite of the fact that

there is a moral concealed in the very title of the play. But who is

worried by a moral in a play which has an exciting hand-to-hand fight

between a man and a woman in one of the earliest acts, when the quick

march of events ranges from a wedding to a murder and an automobile

abduction scene that breaks all former speed-records. 'The Cause' comes

in most symbolically and poetically, a symbolic figure that 'fades out'

at critical periods in the plot. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, the famous

suffrage leader, appears personally in the film.

"'Your Girl and Mine' is a big play with a big mission built on a big

scale. It is a whole evening's entertainment, and a very interesting

evening at that." Here endeth the newspaper notice. Compare it with the

Biograph advertisement of Judith in chapter six.

There is nothing in the film that rasps like this account of it. The

clipping serves to give the street-atmosphere through which our Woman's

Suffrage Joan of Arcs move to conquest and glory with unstained banners.

The obvious amendments to the production as an instrument of persuasion

are two. Firstly there should be five reels instead of six, every scene

shortened a bit to bring this result. Secondly, the lieutenant governor

of the state, who is the Rudolf Rassendyll of the production, does not

enter the story soon enough, and is too James K. Hacketty all at once. We

are jerked into admiration of him, rather than ensnared. But after that

the gentleman behaves more handsomely than any of the distinguished

lieutenant governors in real life the present writer happens to remember.

The figure of Aunt Jane, the queenly serious woman of affairs, is one to

admire and love. Her effectiveness without excess or strain is in itself

an argument for giving woman the vote. The newspaper notice does not

state the facts in saying the symbolical figure "fades out" at critical

periods in the plot. On the contrary, she appears at critical periods,

clothed in white, solemn and royal. She comes into the groups with an

adequate allurement, pointing the moral of each situation while she

shines brightest. The two children for whom the contest is fought are

winsome little girls. By the side of their mother in the garden or in the

nursery they are a potent argument for the natural rights of femininity.

The film is by no means ultra-æsthetic. The implications of the clipping

are correct to that degree. But the resources of beauty within the ready

command of the advising professional producer are used by the women for

all they are worth. It could not be asked of them that they evolve

technical novelties.

Yet the figures of Aunt Jane and the Goddess of Suffrage are something

new in their fashion. Aunt Jane is a spiritual sister to that

unprecedented woman, Jane Addams, who went to the Hague conference for

Peace in the midst of war, which heroic action the future will not

forget. Aunt Jane does justice to that breed of women amid the sweetness

and flowers and mere scenario perils of the photoplay story. The presence

of the "Votes for Women" figure is the beginning of a line of photoplay

goddesses that serious propaganda in the new medium will make part of the

American Spiritual Hierarchy. In the imaginary film of Our Lady

Springfield, described in the chapter on Architecture-in-Motion, a

kindred divinity is presumed to stand by the side of the statue when it

first reaches the earth.

High-minded graduates of university courses in sociology and schools of

philanthropy, devout readers of The Survey, The Chicago Public, The

Masses, The New Republic, La Follette's, are going to advocate

increasingly, their varied and sometimes contradictory causes, in films.

These will generally be produced by heroic exertions in the studio, and

much passing of the subscription paper outside.

Then there are endowments already in existence that will no doubt be

diverted to the photoplay channel. In every state house, and in

Washington, D.C., increasing quantities of dead printed matter have been

turned out year after year. They have served to kindle various furnaces

and feed the paper-mills a second time. Many of these routine reports

will remain in innocuous desuetude. But one-fourth of them, perhaps, are

capable of being embodied in films. If they are scientific

demonstrations, they can be made into realistic motion picture records.

If they are exhortations, they can be transformed into plays with a

moral, brothers of the film Your Girl and Mine. The appropriations for

public printing should include such work hereafter.

The scientific museums distribute routine pamphlets that would set the

whole world right on certain points if they were but read by said world.

Let them be filmed and started. Whatever the congressman is permitted to

frank to his constituency, let him send in the motion picture form when

it is the expedient and expressive way.

When men work for the high degrees in the universities, they labor on a

piece of literary conspiracy called a thesis which no one outside the

university hears of again. The gist of this research work that is dead to

the democracy, through the university merits of thoroughness, moderation

of statement, and final touch of discovery, would have a chance to live

and grip the people in a motion picture transcript, if not a photoplay.

It would be University Extension. The relentless fire of criticism which

the heads of the departments would pour on the production before they

allowed it to pass would result in a standardization of the sense of

scientific fact over the land. Suppose the film has the coat of arms of

the University of Chicago along with the name of the young graduate whose

thesis it is. He would have a chance to reflect credit on the university

even as much as a foot-ball player.

Large undertakings might be under way, like those described in the

chapter on Architecture-in-Motion. But these would require much more than

the ordinary outlay for thesis work, less, perhaps, than is taken for

Athletics. Lyman Howe and several other world-explorers have already set

the pace in the more human side of the educative film. The list of Mr.

Howe's offerings from the first would reveal many a one that would have

run the gantlet of a university department. He points out a new direction

for old energies, whereby professors may become citizens.

Let the cave-man, reader of picture-writing, be allowed to ponder over

scientific truth. He is at present the victim of the alleged truth of the

specious and sentimental variety of photograph. It gives the precise

edges of the coat or collar of the smirking masher and the exact fibre in

the dress of the jumping-jack. The eye grows weary of sharp points and

hard edges that mean nothing. All this idiotic precision is going to

waste. It should be enlisted in the cause of science and abated

everywhere else. The edges in art are as mysterious as in science they

are exact.

Some of the higher forms of the Intimate Moving Picture play should be

endowed by local coteries representing their particular region. Every

community of fifty thousand has its group of the cultured who have

heretofore studied and imitated things done in the big cities. Some of

these coteries will in exceptional cases become creative and begin to

express their habitation and name. The Intimate Photoplay is capable of

that delicacy and that informality which should characterize neighborhood

enterprises.

The plays could be acted by the group who, season after season, have

secured the opera house for the annual amateur show. Other dramatic

ability could be found in the high-schools. There is enough talent in any

place to make an artistic revolution, if once that region is aflame with

a common vision. The spirit that made the Irish Players, all so racy of

the soil, can also move the company of local photoplayers in Topeka, or

Indianapolis, or Denver. Then let them speak for their town, not only in

great occasional enterprises, but steadily, in little fancies, genre

pictures, developing a technique that will finally make magnificence

possible.

There was given not long ago, at the Illinois Country Club here, a

performance of The Yellow Jacket by the Coburn Players. It at once seemed

an integral part of this chapter.

The two flags used for a chariot, the bamboo poles for oars, the red sack

for a decapitated head, etc., were all convincing, through a direct

resemblance as well as the passionate acting. They suggest a possible

type of hieroglyphics to be developed by the leader of the local group.

Let the enthusiast study this westernized Chinese play for primitive

representative methods. It can be found in book form, a most readable

work. It is by G.C. Hazelton, Jr., and J.H. Benrimo. The resemblance

between the stage property and the thing represented is fairly close. The

moving flags on each side of the actor suggest the actual color and

progress of the chariot, and abstractly suggest its magnificence. The red

sack used for a bloody head has at least the color and size of one. The

dressed-up block of wood used for a child is the length of an infant of

the age described and wears the general costume thereof. The farmer's

hoe, though exaggerated, is still an agricultural implement.

The evening's list of properties is economical, filling one wagon, rather

than three. Photographic realism is splendidly put to rout by powerful

representation. When the villager desires to embody some episode that if

realistically given would require a setting beyond the means of the

available endowment, and does not like the near-Egyptian method, let him

evolve his near-Chinese set of symbols.

The Yellow Jacket was written after long familiarity with the Chinese

Theatre in San Francisco. The play is a glory to that city as well as to

Hazelton and Benrimo. But every town in the United States has something

as striking as the Chinese Theatre, to the man who keeps the eye of his

soul open. It has its Ministerial Association, its boys' secret society,

its red-eyed political gang, its grubby Justice of the Peace court, its

free school for the teaching of Hebrew, its snobbish chapel, its

fire-engine house, its milliner's shop. All these could be made visible

in photoplays as flies are preserved in amber.

Edgar Lee Masters looked about him and discovered the village graveyard,

and made it as wonderful as Noah's Ark, or Adam naming the animals, by

supplying honest inscriptions to the headstones. Such stories can be told

by the Chinese theatrical system as well. As many different films could

be included under the general title: "Seven Old Families, and Why they

Went to Smash." Or a less ominous series would be "Seven Victorious

Souls." For there are triumphs every day under the drab monotony of an

apparently defeated town: conquests worthy of the waving of sun-banners.

Above all, The Yellow Jacket points a moral for this chapter because

there was conscience behind it. First: the rectitude of the Chinese

actors of San Francisco who kept the dramatic tradition alive, a

tradition that was bequeathed from the ancient generations. Then the

artistic integrity of the men who readapted the tradition for western

consumption, and their religious attitude that kept the high teaching and

devout feeling for human life intact in the play. Then the zeal of the

Drama League that indorsed it for the country. Then the earnest work of

the Coburn Players who embodied it devoutly, so that the whole company

became dear friends forever.

By some such ladder of conscience as this can the local scenario be

endowed, written, acted, filmed, and made a real part of the community

life. The Yellow Jacket was a drama, not a photoplay. This chapter does

not urge that it be readapted for a photoplay in San Francisco or

anywhere else. But a kindred painting-in-motion, something as beautiful

and worthy and intimate, in strictly photoplay terms, might well be the

flower of the work of the local groups of film actors.

Harriet Monroe's magazine, "Poetry" (Chicago), has given us a new sect,

the Imagists:--Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, John Gould Fletcher, Amy

Lowell, F.S. Flint, D.H. Lawrence, and others. They are gathering

followers and imitators. To these followers I would say: the Imagist

impulse need not be confined to verse. Why would you be imitators of

these leaders when you might be creators in a new medium? There is a

clear parallelism between their point of view in verse and the

Intimate-and-friendly Photoplay, especially when it is developed from the

standpoint of the last part of chapter nine, _space measured without

sound plus time measured without sound_.

There is no clan to-day more purely devoted to art for art's sake than

the Imagist clan. An Imagist film would offer a noble challenge to the

overstrained emotion, the over-loaded splendor, the mere repetition of

what are at present the finest photoplays. Now even the masterpieces are

incontinent. Except for some of the old one-reel Biographs of Griffith's

beginning, there is nothing of Doric restraint from the best to the

worst. Read some of the poems of the people listed above, then imagine

the same moods in the films. Imagist photoplays would be Japanese prints

taking on life, animated Japanese paintings, Pompeian mosaics in

kaleidoscopic but logical succession, Beardsley drawings made into actors

and scenery, Greek vase-paintings in motion.

Scarcely a photoplay but hints at the Imagists in one scene. Then the

illusion is lost in the next turn of the reel. Perhaps it would be a

sound observance to confine this form of motion picture to a half reel or

quarter reel, just as the Imagist poem is generally a half or quarter

page. A series of them could fill a special evening.

The Imagists are colorists. Some people do not consider that photographic

black, white, and gray are color. But here for instance are seven colors

which the Imagists might use: (1) The whiteness of swans in the light.

(2) The whiteness of swans in a gentle shadow. (3) The color of a

sunburned man in the light. (4) His color in a gentle shadow. (5) His

color in a deeper shadow. (6) The blackness of black velvet in the light.

(7) The blackness of black velvet in a deep shadow. And to use these

colors with definite steps from one to the other does not militate

against an artistic mystery of edge and softness in the flow of line.

There is a list of possible Imagist textures which is only limited by the

number of things to be seen in the world. Probably only seven or ten

would be used in one scheme and the same list kept through one

production.

The Imagist photoplay will put discipline into the inner ranks of the

enlightened and remind the sculptors, painters, and architects of the

movies that there is a continence even beyond sculpture and that seas of

realism may not have the power of a little well-considered elimination.

The use of the scientific film by established institutions like schools

and state governments has been discussed. Let the Church also, in her own

way, avail herself of the motion picture, whole-heartedly, as in

mediæval time she took over the marvel of Italian painting. There was a

stage in her history when religious representation was by Byzantine

mosaics, noble in color, having an architectural use, but curious indeed

to behold from the standpoint of those who crave a sensitive emotional

record. The first paintings of Cimabue and Giotto, giving these formulas

a touch of life, were hailed with joy by all Italy. Now the Church

Universal has an opportunity to establish her new painters if she will.

She has taken over in the course of history, for her glory, miracle

plays, Romanesque and Gothic architecture, stained glass windows, and the

music of St. Cecilia's organ. Why not this new splendor? The Cathedral of

St. John the Divine, on Morningside Heights, should establish in its

crypt motion pictures as thoroughly considered as the lines of that

building, if possible designed by the architects thereof, with the same

sense of permanency.

This chapter does not advocate that the Church lay hold of the photoplays

as one more medium for reillustrating the stories of the Bible as they

are given in the Sunday-school papers. It is not pietistic simpering that

will feed the spirit of Christendom, but a steady church-patronage of

the most skilful and original motion picture artists. Let the Church

follow the precedent which finally gave us Fra Angelico, Botticelli,

Andrea del Sarto, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Correggio,

Titian, Paul Veronese, Tintoretto, and the rest.

Who will endow the successors of the present woman's suffrage film, and

other great crusading films? Who will see that the public documents and

university researches take on the form of motion pictures? Who will endow

the local photoplay and the Imagist photoplay? Who will take the first

great measures to insure motion picture splendors in the church?

Things such as these come on the winds of to-morrow. But let the crusader

look about him, and where it is possible, put in the diplomatic word, and

coöperate with the Gray Norns.

CHAPTER XVIII

ARCHITECTS AS CRUSADERS

Many a worker sees his future America as a Utopia, in which his own

profession, achieving dictatorship, alleviates the ills of men. The

militarist grows dithyrambic in showing how war makes for the blessings

of peace. The economic teacher argues that if we follow his political

economy, none of us will have to economize. The church-fanatic says if

all churches will merge with his organization, none of them will have to

try to behave again. They will just naturally be good. The physician

hopes to abolish the devil by sanitation. We have our Utopias. Despite

levity, the present writer thinks that such hopes are among the most

useful things the earth possesses.

A normal man in the full tide of his activities finds that a

world-machinery could logically be built up by his profession. At least

in the heyday of his working hours his vocation satisfies his heart. So

he wants the entire human race to taste that satisfaction. Approximate

Utopias have been built from the beginning. Many civilizations have had

some dominant craft to carry them the major part of the way. The priests

have made India. The classical student has preserved Old China to its

present hour of new life. The samurai knights have made Japan. Sailors

have evolved the British Empire. One of the enticing future Americas is

that of the architect. Let the architect appropriate the photoplay as his

means of propaganda and begin. From its intrinsic genius it can give his

profession a start beyond all others in dominating this land. Or such is

one of many speculations of the present writer.

The photoplay can speak the language of the man who has a mind World's

Fair size. That we are going to have successive generations of such

builders may be reasonably implied from past expositions. Beginning with

Philadelphia in 1876, and going on to San Francisco and San Diego in

1915, nothing seems to stop us from the habit. Let us enlarge this

proclivity into a national mission in as definite a movement, as

thoroughly thought out as the evolution of the public school system, the

formation of the Steel Trust, and the like. After duly weighing all the

world's fairs, let our architects set about making the whole of the

United States into a permanent one. Supposing the date to begin the

erection be 1930. Till that time there should be tireless if indirect

propaganda that will further the architectural state of mind, and later

bring about the elucidation of the plans while they are being perfected.

For many years this America, founded on the psychology of the Splendor

Photoplay, will be evolving. It might be conceived as a going concern at

a certain date within the lives of men now living, but it should never

cease to develop.

To make films of a more beautiful United States is as practical and worth

while a custom as to make military spy maps of every inch of a neighbor's

territory, putting in each fence and cross-roads. Those who would satisfy

the national pride with something besides battle flags must give our

people an objective as shining and splendid as war when it is most

glittering, something Napoleonic, and with no outward pretence of

excessive virtue. We want a substitute as dramatic internationally, yet

world-winning, friend making. If America is to become the financial

centre through no fault of her own, that fact must have a symbol other

than guns on the sea-coast.

If it is inexpedient for the architectural patriarchs and their young

hopefuls to take over the films bodily, let a board of strategy be formed

who make it their business to eat dinner with the scenario writers,

producers, and owners, conspiring with them in some practical way.

Why should we not consider ourselves a deathless Panama-Pacific

Exposition on a coast-to-coast scale? Let Chicago be the transportation

building, Denver the mining building. Let Kansas City be the agricultural

building and Jacksonville, Florida, the horticultural building, and so

around the states.

Even as in mediæval times men rode for hundreds of miles through perils

to the permanent fairs of the free cities, the world-travellers will

attend this exhibit, and many of them will in the end become citizens.

Our immigration will be something more than tide upon tide of raw labor.

The Architects would send forth publicity films which are not only

delineations of a future Cincinnati, Cleveland, or St. Louis, but whole

counties and states and groups of states could be planned at one time,

with the development of their natural fauna, flora, and forestry.

Wherever nature has been rendered desolate by industry or mere haste,

there let the architect and park-architect proclaim the plan. Wherever

she is still splendid and untamed, let her not be violated.

America is in the state of mind where she must visualize herself again.

If it is not possible to bring in the New Jerusalem to-day, by public

act, with every citizen eating bread and honey under his vine and

fig-tree, owning forty acres and a mule, singing hymns and saying prayers

all his leisure hours, it is still reasonable to think out tremendous

things the American people can do, in the light of what they have done,

without sacrificing any of their native cussedness or kick. It was

sprawling Chicago that in 1893 achieved the White City. The automobile

routes bind the states together closer than muddy counties were held in

1893. A "Permanent World's Fair" may be a phrase distressing to the

literal mind. Perhaps it would be better to say "An Architect's America."

Let each city take expert counsel from the architectural demigods how to

tear out the dirty core of its principal business square and erect a

combination of civic centre and permanent and glorious bazaar. Let the

public debate the types of state flower, tree, and shrub that are

expedient, the varieties of villages and middle-sized towns, farm-homes,

and connecting parkways.

Sometimes it seems to me the American expositions are as characteristic

things as our land has achieved. They went through without hesitation.

The difficulties of one did not deter the erection of the next. The

United States may be in many things slack. Often the democracy looks

hopelessly shoddy. But it cannot be denied that our people have always

risen to the dignity of these great architectural projects.

Once the population understand they are dealing with the same type of

idea on a grander scale, they will follow to the end. We are not

proposing an economic revolution, or that human nature be suddenly

altered. If California can remain in the World's Fair state of mind for

four or five years, and finally achieve such a splendid result, all the

states can undertake a similar project conjointly, and because of the

momentum of a nation moving together, remain in that mind for the length

of the life of a man.

Here we have this great instrument, the motion picture, the fourth

largest industry in the United States, attended daily by ten million

people, and in ten days by a hundred million, capable of interpreting the

largest conceivable ideas that come within the range of the plastic arts,

and those ideas have not been supplied. It is still the plaything of

newly rich vaudeville managers. The nation goes daily, through intrinsic

interest in the device, and is dosed with such continued stories as the

Adventures of Kathlyn, What Happened to Mary, and the Million Dollar

Mystery, stretched on through reel after reel, week after week. Kathlyn

had no especial adventures. Nothing in particular happened to Mary. The

million dollar mystery was: why did the millionaires who owned such a

magnificent instrument descend to such silliness and impose it on the

people? Why cannot our weekly story be henceforth some great plan that is

being worked out, whose history will delight us? For instance, every

stage of the building of the Panama Canal was followed with the greatest

interest in the films. But there was not enough of it to keep the films

busy.

The great material projects are often easier to realize than the little

moral reforms. Beautiful architectural undertakings, while appearing to

be material, and succeeding by the laws of American enterprise, bring

with them the healing hand of beauty. Beauty is not directly pious, but

does more civilizing in its proper hour than many sermons or laws.

The world seems to be in the hands of adventurers. Why not this for the

adventure of the American architects? If something akin to this plan does

not come to pass through photoplay propaganda, it means there is no

American builder with the blood of Julius Cæsar in his veins. If there is

the old brute lust for empire left in any builder, let him awake. The

world is before him.

As for the other Utopians, the economist, the physician, the puritan, as

soon as the architects have won over the photoplay people, let these

others take sage counsel and ensnare the architects. Is there a reform

worth while that cannot be embodied and enforced by a builder's

invention? A mere city plan, carried out, or the name or intent of a

quasi-public building and the list of offices within it may bring about

more salutary economic change than all the debating and voting

imaginable. So without too much theorizing, why not erect our new America

and move into it?

CHAPTER XIX

ON COMING FORTH BY DAY

If he will be so indulgent with his author, let the reader approach the

photoplay theatre as though for the first time, having again a new point

of view. Here the poorest can pay and enter from the glaring afternoon

into the twilight of an Ali Baba's cave. The dime is the single

open-sesame required. The half-light wherein the audience is seated, by

which they can read in an emergency, is as bright and dark as that of

some candle-lit churches. It reveals much in the faces and figures of the

audience that cannot be seen by common day. Hard edges are the main

things that we lose. The gain is in all the delicacies of modelling,

tone-relations, form, and color. A hundred evanescent impressions come

and go. There is often a tenderness of appeal about the most rugged face

in the assembly. Humanity takes on its sacred aspect. It is a crude mind

that would insist that these appearances are not real, that the eye does

not see them when all eyes behold them. To say dogmatically that any new

thing seen by half-light is an illusion, is like arguing that a discovery

by the telescope or microscope is unreal. If the appearances are

beautiful besides, they are not only facts, but assets in our lives.

Book-reading is not done in the direct noon-sunlight. We retire to the

shaded porch. It takes two more steps toward quietness of light to read

the human face and figure. Many great paintings and poems are records of

things discovered in this quietness of light.

It is indeed ironical in our Ali Baba's cave to see sheer everydayness

and hardness upon the screen, the audience dragged back to the street

they have escaped. One of the inventions to bring the twilight of the

gathering into brotherhood with the shadows on the screen is a simple

thing known to the trade as the fadeaway, that had its rise in a

commonplace fashion as a method of keeping the story from ending with the

white glare of the empty screen. As a result of the device the figures in

the first episode emerge from the dimness and in the last one go back

into the shadow whence they came, as foam returns to the darkness of an

evening sea. In the imaginative pictures the principle begins to be

applied more largely, till throughout the fairy story the figures float

in and out from the unknown, as fancies should. This method in its

simplicity counts more to keep the place an Ali Baba's cave than many a

more complicated procedure. In luxurious scenes it brings the soft edges

of Correggio, and in solemn ones a light and shadow akin to the effects

of Rembrandt.

Now we have a darkness on which we can paint, an unspoiled twilight. We

need not call it the Arabian's cave. There is a tomb we might have

definitely in mind, an Egyptian burying-place where with a torch we might

enter, read the inscriptions, and see the illustrations from the Book of

the Dead on the wall, or finding that ancient papyrus in the mummy-case,

unroll it and show it to the eager assembly, and have the feeling of

return. Man is an Egyptian first, before he is any other type of

civilized being. The Nile flows through his heart. So let this cave be

Egypt, let us incline ourselves to revere the unconscious memories that

echo within us when we see the hieroglyphics of Osiris, and Isis. Egypt

was our long brooding youth. We built the mysteriousness of the Universe

into the Pyramids, carved it into every line of the Sphinx. We thought

always of the immemorial.

The reel now before us is the mighty judgment roll dealing with the

question of our departure in such a way that any man who beholds it will

bear the impress of the admonition upon his heart forever. Those Egyptian

priests did no little thing, when amid their superstitions they still

proclaimed the Judgment. Let no one consider himself ready for death,

till like the men by the Nile he can call up every scene, face with

courage every exigency of the ordeal.

There is one copy of the Book of the Dead of especial interest, made for

the Scribe Ani, with exquisite marginal drawings. Copies may be found in

our large libraries. The particular fac-simile I had the honor to see was

in the Lenox Library, New York, several years ago. Ani, according to the

formula of the priesthood, goes through the adventures required of a

shade before he reaches the court of Osiris. All the Egyptian pictures on

tomb-wall and temple are but enlarged picture-writing made into tableaus.

Through such tableaus Ani moves. The Ani manuscript has so fascinated

some of the Egyptologists that it is copied in figures fifteen feet high

on the walls of two of the rooms of the British Museum. And you can read

the story eloquently told in Maspero.

Ani knocks at many doors in the underworld. Monstrous gatekeepers are

squatting on their haunches with huge knives to slice him if he cannot

remember their names or give the right password, or by spells the priests

have taught him, convince the sentinels that he is Osiris himself. To

further the illusion the name of Osiris is inscribed on his breast. While

he is passing these perils his little wife is looking on by a sort of

clairvoyant sympathy, though she is still alive. She is depicted mourning

him and embracing his mummy on earth at the same time she accompanies him

through the shadows.

Ani ploughs and sows and reaps in the fields of the underworld. He is

carried past a dreadful place on the back of the cow Hathor. After as

many adventures as Browning's Childe Roland he steps into the

judgment-hall of the gods. They sit in majestic rows. He makes the proper

sacrifices, and advances to the scales of justice. There he sees his own

heart weighed against the ostrich-feather of Truth, by the jackal-god

Anubis, who has already presided at his embalming. His own soul, in the

form of a human-headed hawk, watches the ceremony. His ghost, which is

another entity, looks through the door with his little wife. Both of them

watch with tense anxiety. The fate of every phase of his personality

depends upon the purity of his heart.

Lying in wait behind Anubis is a monster, part crocodile, part lion, part

hippopotamus. This terror will eat the heart of Ani if it is found

corrupt. At last he is declared justified. Thoth, the ibis-headed God of

Writing, records the verdict on his tablet. The justified Ani moves on

past the baffled devourer, with the mystic presence of his little wife

rejoicing at his side. They go to the awful court of Osiris. She makes

sacrifice with him there. The God of the Dead is indeed a strange deity,

a seated semi-animated mummy, with all the appurtenances of royalty, and

with the four sons of Horus on a lotus before him, and his two wives,

Isis and Nephthys, standing behind his throne with their hands on his

shoulders.

The justified soul now boards the boat in which the sun rides as it

journeys through the night. He rises a glorious boatman in the morning,

working an oar to speed the craft through the high ocean of the noon sky.

Henceforth he makes the eternal round with the sun. Therefore in Ancient

Egypt the roll was called, not the Book of the Dead, but _The Chapters on

Coming Forth by Day_.

This book on motion pictures does not profess to be an expert treatise on

Egyptology as well. The learned folk are welcome to amend the modernisms

that have crept into it. But the fact remains that something like this

story in one form or another held Egypt spell-bound for many hundred

years. It was the force behind every mummification. It was the reason for

the whole Egyptian system of life, death, and entombment, for the man not

embalmed could not make the journey. So the explorer finds the Egyptian

with a roll of this papyrus as a guide-book on his mummy breast. The soul

needed to return for refreshment periodically to the stone chamber, and

the mummy mutilated or destroyed could not entertain the guest. Egypt

cried out through thousands of years for the ultimate resurrection of the

whole man, his _coming forth by day_.

We need not fear that a story that so dominated a race will be lost on

modern souls when vividly set forth. Is it too much to expect that some

American prophet-wizard of the future will give us this film in the

spirit of an Egyptian priest?

The Greeks, the wisest people in our limited system of classics, bowed

down before the Egyptian hierarchy. That cult must have had a fine

personal authority and glamour to master such men. The unseen mysteries

were always on the Egyptian heart as a burden and a consolation, and

though there may have been jugglers in the outer courts of these temples,

as there have been in the courts of all temples, no mere actor could make

an Egyptian priest of himself. Their very alphabet has a regal

enchantment in its lines, and the same æsthetic-mystical power remains in

their pylons and images under the blaze of the all-revealing noonday sun.

Here is a nation, America, going for dreams into caves as shadowy as the

tomb of Queen Thi. There they find too often, not that ancient priestess

and ruler, nor any of her kin, nor yet Ani the scribe, nor yet any of the

kings, but shabby rags of fancy, or circuses that were better in the

street.

Because ten million people daily enter into the cave, something akin to

Egyptian wizardry, certain national rituals, will be born. By studying

the matter of being an Egyptian priest for a little while, the

author-producer may learn in the end how best to express and satisfy the

spirit-hungers that are peculiarly American. It is sometimes out of the

oldest dream that the youngest vision is born.

CHAPTER XX

THE PROPHET-WIZARD

The whirlwind of cowboys and Indians with which the photoplay began, came

about because this instrument, in asserting its genius, was feeling its

way toward the most primitive forms of life it could find.

Now there is a tendency for even wilder things. We behold the half-draped

figures living in tropical islands or our hairy fore-fathers acting out

narratives of the stone age. The moving picture conventionality permits

an abbreviation of drapery. If the primitive setting is convincing, the

figure in the grass-robe or buffalo hide at once has its rights over the

healthful imagination.

There is in this nation of moving-picture-goers a hunger for tales of

fundamental life that are not yet told. The cave-man longs with an

incurable homesickness for his ancient day. One of the fine photoplays of

primeval life is the story called Man's Genesis, described in chapter

two.

We face the exigency the world over of vast instruments like national

armies being played against each other as idly and aimlessly as the

checker-men on the cracker-barrels of corner groceries. And this

invention, the kinetoscope, which affects or will affect as many people

as the guns of Europe, is not yet understood in its powers, particularly

those of bringing back the primitive in a big rich way. The primitive is

always a new and higher beginning to the man who understands it. Not yet

has the producer learned that the feeling of the crowd is patriarchal,

splendid. He imagines the people want nothing but a silly lark.

All this apparatus and opportunity, and no immortal soul! Yet by faith

and a study of the signs we proclaim that this lantern of wizard-drama is

going to give us in time the visible things in the fulness of their

primeval force, and some that have been for a long time invisible. To

speak in a metaphor, we are going to have the primitive life of Genesis,

then all that evolution after: Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy,

Joshua, Judges, and on to a new revelation of St. John. In this

adolescence of Democracy the history of man is to be retraced, the same

round on a higher spiral of life.

Our democratic dream has been a middle-class aspiration built on a bog of

toil-soddened minds. The piles beneath the castle of our near-democratic

arts were rotting for lack of folk-imagination. The Man with the Hoe had

no spark in his brain. But now a light is blazing. We can build the

American soul broad-based from the foundations. We can begin with dreams

the veriest stone-club warrior can understand, and as far as an appeal to

the eye can do it, lead him in fancy through every phase of life to the

apocalyptic splendors.

This progress, according to the metaphor of this chapter, will be led by

prophet-wizards. These were the people that dominated the cave-men of

old. But what, more specifically, are prophet-wizards?

Let us consider two kinds of present-day people: scientific inventors, on

the one hand, and makers of art and poetry and the like, on the other.

The especial producers of art and poetry that we are concerned with in

this chapter we will call prophet-wizards: men like Albert Dürer,

Rembrandt, Blake, Elihu Vedder, Watts, Rossetti, Tennyson, Coleridge,

Poe, Maeterlinck, Yeats, Francis Thompson.

They have a certain unearthly fascination in some one or many of their

works. A few other men might be added to the list. Most great names are

better described under other categories, though as much beloved in their

own way. But these are especially adapted to being set in opposition to a

list of mechanical inventors that might be called realists by contrast:

the Wright brothers, and H. Pierpont Langley, Thomas A. Edison, Charles

Steinmetz, John Hays Hammond, Hudson Maxim, Graham Bell.

The prophet-wizards are of various schools. But they have a common

tendency and character in bringing forth a type of art peculiarly at war

with the realistic civilization science has evolved. It is one object of

this chapter to show that, when it comes to a clash between the two

forces, the wizards should rule, and the realists should serve them.

The two functions go back through history, sometimes at war, other days

in alliance. The poet and the scientist were brethren in the centuries of

alchemy. Tennyson, bearing in mind such a period, took the title of

Merlin in his veiled autobiography, Merlin and the Gleam.

Wizards and astronomers were one when the angels sang in Bethlehem,

"Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men." There came magicians, saying, "Where

is he that is born king of the Jews, for we have seen his star in the

east and have come to worship him?" The modern world in its gentler

moments seems to take a peculiar thrill of delight from these travellers,

perhaps realizing what has been lost from parting with such gentle seers

and secular diviners. Every Christmas half the magazines set them forth

in richest colors, riding across the desert, following the star to the

same manger where the shepherds are depicted.

Those wizard kings, whatever useless charms and talismans they wore,

stood for the unknown quantity in spiritual life. A magician is a man who

lays hold on the unseen for the mere joy of it, who steals, if necessary,

the holy bread and the sacred fire. He is often of the remnant of an

ostracized and disestablished priesthood. He is a free-lance in the

soul-world, owing final allegiance to no established sect. The fires of

prophecy are as apt to descend upon him as upon members of the

established faith. He loves the mysterious for the beauty of it, the

wildness and the glory of it, and not always to compel stiff-necked

people to do right.

It seems to me that the scientific and poetic functions of society should

make common cause again, if they are not, as in Merlin's time, combined

in one personality. They must recognize that they serve the same society,

but with the understanding that the prophetic function is the most

important, the wizard vocation the next, and the inventors' and realists'

genius important indeed, but the third consideration. The war between the

scientists and the prophet-wizards has come about because of the

half-defined ambition of the scientists to rule or ruin. They give us the

steam-engine, the skyscraper, the steam-heat, the flying machine, the

elevated railroad, the apartment house, the newspaper, the breakfast

food, the weapons of the army, the weapons of the navy, and think that

they have beautified our existence.

Moreover some one rises at this point to make a plea for the scientific

imagination. He says the inventor-scientists have brought us the mystery

of electricity, which is no hocus-pocus, but a special manifestation of

the Immanent God within us and about us. He says the student in the

laboratory brought us the X-ray, the wireless telegraph, the mystery of

radium, the mystery of all the formerly unharnessed power of God which

man is beginning to gather into the hollow of his hand.

The one who pleads for the scientific imagination points out that Edison

has been called the American Wizard. All honor to Edison and his kind.

And I admit specifically that Edison took the first great mechanical step

to give us the practical kinetoscope and make it possible that the

photographs, even of inanimate objects thrown upon the mirror-screen, may

become celestial actors. But the final phase of the transfiguration is

not the work of this inventor or any other. As long as the photoplays are

in the hands of men like Edison they are mere voodooism. We have nothing

but Moving Day, as heretofore described. It is only in the hands of the

prophetic photo-playwright and allied artists that the kinetoscope reels

become as mysterious and dazzling to the thinking spirit as the wheels of

Ezekiel in the first chapter of his prophecy. One can climb into the

operator's box and watch the sword-like stream of light till he is as

dazzled in flesh and spirit as the moth that burns its wings in the

lamp. But this is while a glittering vision and not a mere invention is

being thrown upon the screen.

The scientific man can explain away the vision as a matter of the

technique of double exposure, double printing, trick-turning, or stopping

down. And having reduced it to terms and shown the process, he expects us

to become secular and casual again. But of course the sun itself is a

mere trick of heat and light, a dynamo, an incandescent globe, to the man

in the laboratory. To us it must be a fire upon the altar.

Transubstantiation must begin. Our young magicians must derive strange

new pulse-beats from the veins of the earth, from the sap of the trees,

from the lightning of the sky, as well as the alchemical acids, metals,

and flames. Then they will kindle the beginning mysteries for our cause.

They will build up a priesthood that is free, yet authorized to freedom.

It will be established and disestablished according to the intrinsic

authority of the light revealed.

Now for a closer view of this vocation.

The picture of Religious Splendor has its obvious form in the

delineation of Biblical scenes, which, in the hands of the best

commercial producers, can be made as worth while as the work of men like

Tissot. Such films are by no means to be thought of lightly. This sort of

work will remain in the minds of many of the severely orthodox as the

only kind of a religious picture worthy of classification. But there are

many further fields.

Just as the wireless receiving station or the telephone switchboard

become heroes in the photoplay, so Aaron's rod that confounded the

Egyptians, the brazen serpent that Moses up-lifted in the wilderness, the

ram's horn that caused the fall of Jericho, the mantle of Elijah

descending upon the shoulders of Elisha from the chariot of fire, can

take on a physical electrical power and a hundred times spiritual meaning

that they could not have in the dead stage properties of the old miracle

play or the realism of the Tissot school. The waterfall and the tossing

sea are dramatis personæ in the ordinary film romance. So the Red Sea

overwhelming Pharaoh, the fires of Nebuchadnezzar's furnace sparing and

sheltering the three holy children, can become celestial actors. And

winged couriers can appear, in the pictures, with missions of import,

just as an angel descended to Joshua, saying, "As captain of the host of

the Lord am I now come."

The pure mechanic does not accept the doctrine. "Your alleged

supernatural appearance," he says, "is based on such a simple fact as

this: two pictures can be taken on one film."

But the analogy holds. Many primitive peoples are endowed with memories

that are double photographs. The world faiths, based upon centuries of

these appearances, are none the less to be revered because machine-ridden

men have temporarily lost the power of seeing their thoughts as pictures

in the air, and for the time abandoned the task of adding to tradition.

Man will not only see visions again, but machines themselves, in the

hands of prophets, will see visions. In the hands of commercial men they

are seeing alleged visions, and the term "_vision_" is a part of

moving-picture studio slang, unutterably cheapening religion and

tradition. When Confucius came, he said one of his tasks was the

rectification of names. The leaders of this age should see that this word

"_vision_" comes to mean something more than a piece of studio slang. If

it is the conviction of serious minds that the mass of men shall never

again see pictures out of Heaven except through such mediums as the

kinetoscope lens, let all the higher forces of our land courageously lay

hold upon this thing that saves us from perpetual spiritual blindness.

When the thought of primitive man, embodied in misty forms on the

landscape, reached epic proportions in the Greek, he saw the Olympians

more plainly than he beheld the Acropolis. Myron, Polykleitos, Phidias,

Scopas, Lysippus, Praxiteles, discerned the gods and demigods so clearly

they afterward cut them from the hard marble without wavering. Our

guardian angels of to-day must be as clearly seen and nobly hewn.

A double mental vision is as fundamental in human nature as the double

necessity for air and light. It is as obvious as that a thing can be both

written and spoken. We have maintained that the kinetoscope in the hands

of artists is a higher form of picture writing. In the hands of

prophet-wizards it will be a higher form of vision-seeing.

I have said that the commercial men are seeing alleged visions. Take, for

instance, the large Italian film that attempts to popularize Dante.

Though it has a scattering of noble passages, and in some brief episodes

it is an enhancement of Gustave Doré, taking it as a whole, it is a false

thing. It is full of apparitions worked out with mechanical skill, yet

Dante's soul is not back of the fires and swords of light. It gives to

the uninitiated an outline of the stage paraphernalia of the Inferno. It

has an encyclopædic value. If Dante himself had been the high director in

the plenitude of his resources, it might still have had that hollowness.

A list of words making a poem and a set of apparently equivalent pictures

forming a photoplay may have an entirely different outcome. It may be

like trying to see a perfume or listen to a taste. Religion that comes in

wholly through the eye has a new world in the films, whose relation to

the old is only discovered by experiment and intuition, patience and

devotion.

But let us imagine the grandson of an Italian immigrant to America, a

young seer, trained in the photoplay technique by the high American

masters, knowing all the moving picture resources as Dante knew Italian

song and mediæval learning. Assume that he has a genius akin to that of

the Florentine. Let him be a Modernist Catholic if you will. Let him

begin his message in the timber lands of Minnesota or the forests of

Alaska. "In midway of this our mortal life I found me in a gloomy wood

astray." Then let him paint new pictures of just punishment beyond the

grave, and merciful rehabilitation and great reward. Let his Hell,

Purgatory, and Paradise be built of those things which are deepest and

highest in the modern mind, yet capable of emerging in picture-writing

form.

Men are needed, therefore they will come. And lest they come weeping,

accursed, and alone, let us ask, how shall we recognize them? There is no

standard by which to discern the true from the false prophet, except the

mood that is engendered by contemplating the messengers of the past.

Every man has his own roll call of noble magicians selected from the

larger group. But here are the names with which this chapter began, with

some words on their work.

Albert Dürer is classed as a Renaissance painter. Yet his art has its

dwelling-place in the early Romanesque savageness and strangeness. And

the reader remembers Dürer's brooding muse called Melancholia that so

obsessed Kipling in The Light that Failed. But the wonder-quality went

into nearly all the Dürer wood-cuts and etchings. Rembrandt is a

prophet-wizard, not only in his shadowy portraits, but in his etchings of

holy scenes even his simplest cobweb lines become incantations. Other

artists in the high tides of history have had kindred qualities, but

coming close to our day, Elihu Vedder, the American, the illustrator of

the Rubáiyát, found it a poem questioning all things, and his very

illustrations answer in a certain fashion with winds of infinity, and

bring the songs of Omar near to the Book of Job. Vedder's portraits of

Lazarus and Samson are conceptions that touch the hem of the unknown.

George Frederick Watts was a painter of portraits of the soul itself, as

in his delineations of Burne-Jones and Morris and Tennyson.

It is a curious thing that two prophet-wizards have combined pictures and

song. Blake and Rossetti, whatever the failure of their technique, never

lacked in enchantment. Students of the motion picture side of poetry

would naturally turn to such men for spiritual precedents. Blake, that

strange Londoner, in his book of Job, is the paramount example of the

enchanter doing his work with the engraving tool in his hand.

Rossetti's Dante's Dream is a painting on the edge of every poet's

paradise. As for the poetry of these two men, there are Blake's Songs of

Innocence, and Rossetti's Blessed Damozel and his Burden of Nineveh.

As for the other poets, we have Coleridge, the author of Christabel, that

piece of winter witchcraft, Kubla Khan, that oriental dazzlement, and the

Ancient Mariner, that most English of all this list of enchantments. Of

Tennyson's work, besides Merlin and the Gleam, there are the poems when

the mantle was surely on his shoulders: The Lady of Shalott, The Lotus

Eaters, Sir Galahad, and St. Agnes' Eve.

Edgar Poe, always a magician, blends this power with the prophetical note

in the poem, The Haunted Palace, and in the stories of William Wilson,

The Black Cat and The Tell-tale Heart. This prophet-wizard side of a man

otherwise a wizard only, has been well illustrated in The Avenging

Conscience photoplay.

From Maeterlinck we have The Bluebird and many another dream. I devoutly

hope I will never see in the films an attempt to paraphrase this master.

But some disciple of his should conquer the photoplay medium, giving us

great original works.

Yeats has bestowed upon us The Land of Heart's Desire, The Secret Rose,

and many another piece of imaginative glory. Let us hope that we may be

spared any attempts to hastily paraphrase his wonders for the motion

pictures. But the man that reads Yeats will be better prepared to do his

own work in the films, or to greet the young new masters when they come.

Finally, Francis Thompson, in The Hound of Heaven, has written a song

that the young wizard may lean upon forevermore for private guidance. It

is composed of equal parts of wonder and conscience. With this poem in

his heart, the roar of the elevated railroad will be no more in his ears,

and he will dream of palaces of righteousness, and lead other men to

dream of them till the houses of mammon fade away.

CHAPTER XXI

THE ACCEPTABLE YEAR OF THE LORD

Without airing my private theology I earnestly request the most sceptical

reader of this book to assume that miracles in a Biblical sense have

occurred. Let him take it for granted in the fashion of the strictly

æsthetic commentator who writes in sympathy with a Fra Angelico painting,

or as that great modernist, Paul Sabatier, does as he approaches the

problems of faith in the life of St. Francis. Let him also assume, for

the length of time that he is reading this chapter if no longer, that

miracles, in a Biblical sense, as vivid and as real to the body of the

Church, will again occur two thousand years in the future: events as

wonderful as those others, twenty centuries back. Let us anticipate that

many of these will be upon American soil. Particularly as sons and

daughters of a new country it is a spiritual necessity for us to look

forward to traditions, because we have so few from the past identified

with the six feet of black earth beneath us.

The functions of the prophet whereby he definitely painted future

sublimities have been too soon abolished in the minds of the wise. Mere

forecasting is left to the weather bureau so far as a great section of

the purely literary and cultured are concerned. The term prophet has

survived in literature to be applied to men like Carlyle: fiery spiritual

leaders who speak with little pretence of revealing to-morrow.

But in the street, definite forecasting of future events is still the

vulgar use of the term. Dozens of sober historians predicted the present

war with a clean-cut story that was carried out with much faithfulness of

detail, considering the thousand interests involved. They have been

called prophets in a congratulatory secular tone by the man in the

street. These felicitations come because well-authorized merchants in

futures have been put out of countenance from the days of Jonah and

Balaam till now. It is indeed a risky vocation. Yet there is an

undeniable line of successful forecasting by the hardy, to be found in

the Scripture and in history. In direct proportion as these men of fiery

speech were free from sheer silliness, their outlook has been considered

and debated by the gravest people round them. The heart of man craves the

seer. Take, for instance, the promise of the restoration of Jerusalem in

glory that fills the latter part of the Old Testament. It moves the

Jewish Zionist, the true race-Jew, to this hour. He is even now

endeavoring to fulfil the prophecy.

Consider the words of John the Baptist, "One mightier than I cometh, the

latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose: he shall baptize you

with the Holy Ghost and with fire." A magnificent foreshadowing, being

both a spiritual insight and the statement of a great definite event.

The heeded seers of the civilization of this our day have been secular in

their outlook. Perhaps the most striking was Karl Marx, in the middle of

the capitalistic system tracing its development from feudalism and

pointing out as inevitable, long before they came, such modern

institutions as the Steel Trust and the Standard Oil Company. It remains

to be seen whether the Marxian prophecy of the international alliance of

workingmen that is obscured by the present conflict in Europe, and other

of his forecastings, will be ultimately verified.

There have been secular teachers like Darwin, who, by a scientific

reconstruction of the past, have implied an evolutionary future based on

the biological outlook. Deductions from the teachings of Darwin are said

to control those who mould the international doings of Germany and Japan.

There have been inventor-seers like Jules Verne. In Twenty Thousand

Leagues under the Sea he dimly discerned the submarine. There is a type

of social prophet allied to Verne. Edward Bellamy, in Looking Backward,

reduced the world to a matter of pressing the button, turning on the

phonograph. It was a combination of glorified department-store and Coney

Island, on a cooperative basis. A seventeen-year-old boy from the

country, making his first visit to the Woolworth building in New York,

and riding in the subway when it is not too crowded, might be persuaded

by an eloquent city relative that this is Bellamy's New Jerusalem.

A soul with a greater insight is H.G. Wells. But he too, in spite of his

humanitarian heart, has, in a great mass of his work, the laboratory

imagination. Serious Americans pronounce themselves beneficiaries of

Wells' works, and I confess myself edified and thoroughly grateful.

Nevertheless, one smells chemicals in the next room when he reads most of

Wells' prophecies. The X-ray has moved that Englishman's mind more

dangerously than moonlight touches the brain of the chanting witch. One

striking and typical story is The Food of the Gods. It is not only a fine

speculation, but a great parable. The reader may prefer other tales. Many

times Wells has gone into his laboratory to invent our future, in the

same state of mind in which an automobile manufacturer works out an

improvement in his car. His disposition has greatly mellowed of late, in

this respect, but underneath he is the same Wells.

Citizens of America, wise or foolish, when they look into the coming

days, have the submarine mood of Verne, the press-the-button complacency

of Bellamy, the wireless telegraph enthusiasm of Wells. If they express

hopes that can be put into pictures with definite edges, they order

machinery piled to the skies. They see the redeemed United States running

deftly in its jewelled sockets, ticking like a watch.

This, their own chosen outlook, wearies the imaginations of our people,

they do not know why. It gives no full-orbed apocalyptic joy. Only to the

young mechanical engineer does such a hope express real Utopia. He can

always keep ahead of the devices that herald its approach. No matter what

day we attain and how busy we are adjusting ourselves, he can be moving

on, inventing more to-morrows; ruling the age, not being ruled by it.

Because this Utopia is in the air, a goodly portion of the precocious

boys turn to mechanical engineering. Youths with this bent are the most

healthful and inspiring young citizens we have. They and their like will

fulfil a multitude of the hopes of men like Verne, Bellamy, and Wells.

But if every mechanical inventor on earth voiced his dearest wish and

lived to see it worked out, the real drama of prophecy and fulfilment, as

written in the imagination of the human race, would remain uncompleted.

As Mrs. Browning says in Lady Geraldine's Courtship:--

If we trod the deeps of ocean, if we struck the stars in rising,

If we wrapped the globe intensely with one hot electric breath,

'Twere but power within our tether, no new spirit-power comprising,

And in life we were not greater men, nor bolder men in death.

St. John beheld the New Jerusalem coming down out of Heaven prepared as a

bride adorned for her husband, not equipped as a touring car varnished

for its owner.

It is my hope that the moving picture prophet-wizards will set before the

world a new group of pictures of the future. The chapter on The Architect

as a Crusader endeavors to show how, by proclaiming that America will

become a permanent World's Fair, she can be made so within the lives of

men now living, if courageous architects have the campaign in hand. There

are other hopes that look a long way further. They peer as far into the

coming day as the Chinese historian looks into the past. And then they

are but halfway to the millennium.

Any standard illustrator could give us Verne or Bellamy or Wells if he

did his best. _But we want pictures beyond the skill of any delineator in

the old mediums, yet within the power of the wizard photoplay producer_.

Oh you who are coming to-morrow, show us everyday America as it will be

when we are only halfway to the millennium yet thousands of years in the

future! Tell what type of honors men will covet, what property they will

still be apt to steal, what murders they will commit, what the law court

and the jail will be or what will be the substitutes, how the newspaper

will appear, the office, the busy street.

Picture to America the lovers in her half-millennium, when usage shall

have become iron-handed once again, when noble sweethearts must break

beautiful customs for the sake of their dreams. Show us the gantlet of

strange courtliness they must pass through before they reach one another,

obstacles brought about by the immemorial distinctions of scholarship

gowns or service badges.

Make a picture of a world where machinery is so highly developed it

utterly disappeared long ago. Show us the antique United States, with ivy

vines upon the popular socialist churches, and weather-beaten images of

socialist saints in the niches of the doors. Show us the battered

fountains, the brooding universities, the dusty libraries. Show us houses

of administration with statues of heroes in front of them and gentle

banners flowing from their pinnacles. Then paint pictures of the oldest

trees of the time, and tree-revering ceremonies, with unique costumes and

a special priesthood.

Show us the marriage procession, the christening, the consecration of the

boy and girl to the state. Show us the political processions and election

riots. Show us the people with their graceful games, their religious

pantomimes. Show us impartially the memorial scenes to celebrate the

great men and women, and the funerals of the poor. And then moving on

toward the millennium itself, show America after her victories have been

won, and she has grown old, as old as the Sphinx. Then give us the Dragon

and Armageddon and the Lake of Fire.

Author-producer-photographer, who would prophesy, read the last book in

the Bible, not to copy it in form and color, but that its power and grace

and terror may enter into you. Delineate in your own way, as you are led

on your own Patmos, the picture of our land redeemed. After fasting and

prayer, let the Spirit conduct you till you see in definite line and form

the throngs of the brotherhood of man, the colonnades where the arts are

expounded, the gardens where the children dance.

That which man desires, that will man become. He largely fulfils his own

prediction and vision. Let him therefore have a care how he prophesies

and prays. We shall have a tin heaven and a tin earth, if the scientists

are allowed exclusive command of our highest hours.

Let us turn to Luke iv. 17.

"And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And

when he had opened the book he found the place where it was written:--

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he hath anointed me to preach

the Gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to

preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind,

to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of

the Lord.

"And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat

down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened

on him. And he began to say unto them: 'This day is this Scripture

fulfilled in your ears.'

"And all bare him witness, and wondered at the gracious words which

proceeded out of his mouth. And they said: 'Is not this Joseph's son?'"

I am moved to think Christ fulfilled that prophecy because he had read it

from childhood. It is my entirely personal speculation, not brought forth

dogmatically, that Scripture is not so much inspired as it is curiously

and miraculously inspiring.

If the New Isaiahs of this time will write their forecastings in

photoplay hieroglyphics, the children in times to come, having seen those

films from infancy, or their later paraphrases in more perfect form, can

rise and say, "This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears." But

without prophecy there is no fulfilment, without Isaiah there is no

Christ.

America is often shallow in her dreams because she has no past in the

European and Asiatic sense. Our soil has no Roman coin or buried altar or

Buddhist tope. For this reason multitudes of American artists have moved

to Europe, and only the most universal of wars has driven them home. Year

after year Europe drained us of our beauty-lovers, our highest painters

and sculptors and the like. They have come pouring home, confused

expatriates, trying to adjust themselves. It is time for the American

craftsman and artist to grasp the fact that we must be men enough to

construct a to-morrow that grows rich in forecastings in the same way

that the past of Europe grows rich in sweet or terrible legends as men go

back into it.

* * * * *

Scenario writers, producers, photoplay actors, endowers of exquisite

films, sects using special motion pictures for a predetermined end, all

you who are taking the work as a sacred trust, I bid you God-speed. Let

us resolve that whatever America's to-morrow may be, she shall have a day

that is beautiful and not crass, spiritual, not material. Let us resolve

that she shall dream dreams deeper than the sea and higher than the

clouds of heaven, that she shall come forth crowned and transfigured with

her statesmen and wizards and saints and sages about her, with magic

behind her and miracle before her.

Pray that you be delivered from the temptation to cynicism and the

timidities of orthodoxy. Pray that the workers in this your glorious new

art be delivered from the mere lust of the flesh and pride of life. Let

your spirits outflame your burning bodies.

Consider what it will do to your souls, if you are true to your trust.

Every year, despite earthly sorrow and the punishment of your mortal

sins, despite all weakness and all of Time's revenges upon you, despite

Nature's reproofs and the whips of the angels, new visions will come, new

prophecies will come. You will be seasoned spirits in the eyes of the

wise. The record of your ripeness will be found in your craftsmanship.

You will be God's thoroughbreds.

* * * * *

It has come then, this new weapon of men, and the face of the whole earth

changes. In after centuries its beginning will be indeed remembered.

It has come, this new weapon of men, and by faith and a study of the

signs we proclaim that it will go on and on in immemorial wonder.

VACHEL LINDSAY.

SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS,

Nov. 1, 1915.