The Art of the Moving Picture | Page 8

make us into a hieroglyphic civilization far nearer to Egypt than to England. Let us then accept for our classic land, for our standard of form, the country naturally our own. Hieroglyphics are so much nearer to the American mood than the rest of the Egyptian legacy, that Americans seldom get as far as the Hieroglyphics to discover how congenial they are. Seeing the mummies, good Americans flee. But there is not a man in America writing advertisements or making cartoons or films but would find delightful the standard books of Hieroglyphics sent out by the British Museum, once he gave them a chance. They represent that very aspect of visual life which Europe understands so little in America, and which has been expanding so enormously even the last year. Hallowe'en, for instance, lasts a whole week now, with mummers on the streets every night, October 25-31.
Chapter XX
--The Prophet-Wizard. Who do we mean by The Prophet-Wizard? We mean not only artists, such as are named in this chapter, but dreamers and workers like Johnny Appleseed, or Abraham Lincoln. The best account of Johnny Appleseed is in Harper's Monthly for November, 1871. People do not know Abraham Lincoln till they have visited the grave of Anne Rutledge, at Petersburg, Illinois, then New Old Salem a mile away. New Old Salem is a prophet's hill, on the edge of the Sangamon, with lovely woods all around. Here a brooding soul could be born, and here the dreamer Abraham Lincoln spent his real youth. I do not call him a dreamer in a cheap and sentimental effort to describe a man of aspiration. Lincoln told and interpreted his visions like Joseph and Daniel in the Old Testament, revealing them to the members of his cabinet, in great trials of the Civil War. People who do not see visions and dream dreams in the good Old Testament sense have no right to leadership in America. I would prefer photoplays filled with such visions and oracles to the state papers written by "practical men." As it is, we are ruled indirectly by photoplays owned and controlled by men who should be in the shoe-string and hook-and-eye trade. Apparently their digestions are good, they are in excellent health, and they keep out of jail.
Chapter XXI
--The Acceptable Year of the Lord. If I may be pardoned for referring again to the same book, I assumed, in The Golden Book of Springfield, Illinois, that the Acceptable Year of the Lord would come for my city beginning November 1, 2018, and that up to that time, amid much of joy, there would also be much of thwarting and tribulation. But in the beginning of that mystic November, the Soul of My City, named Avanel, would become as much a part of the city as Pallas Athena was Athens, and indeed I wrote into the book much of the spirit of the photoplay outlined, pages 147 through 150. But in The Golden Book I changed the lady the city worshipped from a golden image into a living, breathing young girl, descendant of that great American, Daniel Boone, and her name, obviously, Avanel Boone. With her tribe she incarnates all the mystic ideals of the Boones of Kentucky.
All this but a prelude to saying that I have just passed through the city of Santa Fe, New Mexico. It is a Santa Fe full of the glory of the New Architecture of which I have spoken, and the issuing of a book of cowboy songs collected, and many of them written, by N. Howard Thorp, a citizen of Santa Fe, and thrilling with the issuing of a book of poems about the Glory of New Mexico. This book is called Red Earth. It is by Alice Corbin Henderson. And Santa Fe is full of the glory of a magnificent State Capitol that is an art gallery of the whole southwest, and the glories of the studio of William Penhallow Henderson, who has painted our New Arabia more splendidly than it was ever painted before, with the real character thereof, and no theatricals. This is just the kind of a town I hoped for when I wrote my first draft of The Art of the Moving Picture. Here now is literature and art. When they become one art as of old in Egypt, we will have New Mexico Hieroglyphics from the Hendersons and their kind, and their surrounding Indian pupils, a basis for the American Motion Picture more acceptable, and more patriotic, and more organic for us than the Egyptian.
And I come the same month to Denver, and find a New Art Museum projected, which I hope has much indeed to do with the Acceptable Year of the Lord, when films as vital as the Santa Fe songs and pictures and architecture can