But it is easier to find performers who fit this chapter, than to find films.  Having read so far, it is probably not quite nine o’clock in the evening.  Go around the corner to the nearest theatre.  You will not be apt to find a pure example of the Intimate-and-friendly Moving Picture, but some one or two scenes will make plain the intent of the phrase.  Imagine the most winsome tableau that passes before you, extended logically through one or three reels, with no melodramatic interruptions or awful smashes.  For a further discussion of these smashes, and other items in this chapter, read the ninth chapter, entitled “Painting-in-Motion.”

CHAPTER IV

THE MOTION PICTURE OF FAIRY SPLENDOR

Again, kind reader, let us assume it is eight o’clock in the evening, for purposes of future climax which you no doubt anticipate.

Just as the Action Motion Picture has its photographic basis in the race down the high-road, just as the Intimate Motion Picture has its photographic basis in the close-up interior scene, so the Photoplay of Splendor, in its four forms, is based on the fact that the kinetoscope can take in the most varied of out-of-door landscapes.  It can reproduce fairy dells.  It can give every ripple of the lily-pond.  It can show us cathedrals within and without.  It can take in the panorama of cyclopaean cloud, bending forest, storm-hung mountain.  In like manner it can put on the screen great impersonal mobs of men.  It can give us tremendous armies, moving as oceans move.  The pictures of Fairy Splendor, Crowd Splendor, Patriotic Splendor, and Religious Splendor are but the embodiments of these backgrounds.

And a photographic corollary quite useful in these four forms is that the camera has a kind of Hallowe’en witch-power.  This power is the subject of this chapter.

The world-old legends and revelations of men in connection with the lovely out of doors, or lonely shrines, or derived from inspired crusading humanity moving in masses, can now be fitly retold.  Also the fairy wand can do its work, the little dryad can come from the tree.  And the spirits that guard the Republic can be seen walking on the clouds above the harvest-fields.

But we are concerned with the humblest voodooism at present.

Perhaps the world’s oldest motion picture plot is a tale in Mother Goose.  It ends somewhat in this fashion:—­

    The old lady said to the cat:—­
    “Cat, cat, kill rat. 
    Rat will not gnaw rope,
    Rope will not hang butcher,
    Butcher will not kill ox,
    Ox will not drink water,
    Water will not quench fire,
    Fire will not burn stick,
    Stick will not beat dog,
    Dog will not bite pig,
    Pig will not jump over the stile,
    And I cannot get home to-night.”

By some means the present writer does not remember, the cat was persuaded to approach the rat.  The rest was like a tale of European diplomacy:—­