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.