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.