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.