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 aesthetic 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, zoology, 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 Encyclopaedia 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-aesthetic. 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 mediaeval 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 cooeperate 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 mediaeval 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 Caesar 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 aesthetic-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 Duerer, 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 personae 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 Dore, 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 encyclopaedic 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 mediaeval 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 Duerer is classed as a Renaissance painter. Yet his art has its dwelling-place in the early Romanesque savageness and strangeness. And the reader remembers Duerer's brooding muse called Melancholia that so obsessed Kipling in The Light that Failed. But the wonder-quality went into nearly all the Duerer 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 Rubaiyat, 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 aesthetic 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.

THE END