The Art of the Moving Picture | Page 8

the
British Museum, Professor E.A. Wallis Budge; published by G.P.
Putnam's Sons, New York, and Philip Lee Warner, London. This book
is certainly the greatest motion picture I ever attended. I have gone
through it several times, and it is the only book one can read twelve
hours at a stretch, on the Pullman, when he is making thirty-six hour
and forty-eight hour jumps from town to town.
American civilization grows more hieroglyphic every day. The
cartoons of Darling, the advertisements in the back of the magazines
and on the bill-boards and in the street-cars, the acres of photographs in
the Sunday newspapers, 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