In a comedy of the history of a newspaper, the very columns of the publication are actors, and may be photographed oftener than the human hero.  And in the higher realms this same tendency gives particular power to the panorama and trappings.  It makes the natural and artificial magnificence more than a narrative, more than a color-scheme, something other than a drama.  In a photoplay by a master, when the American flag is shown, the thirteen stripes are columns of history and the stars are headlines.  The woods and the templed hills are their printing press, almost in a literal sense.

Going back to the illustration of the engine, in chapter two, the non-human thing is a personality, even if it is not beautiful.  When it takes on the ritual of decorative design, this new vitality is made seductive, and when it is an object of nature, this seductive ritual becomes a new pantheism.  The armies upon the mountains they are defending are rooted in the soil like trees.  They resist invasion with the same elementary stubbornness with which the oak resists the storm or the cliff resists the wave.

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Let the reader consider Antony and Cleopatra, the Cines film.  It was brought to America from Italy by George Klein.  This and several ambitious spectacles like it are direct violations of the foregoing principles.  True, it glorifies Rome.  It is equivalent to waving the Italian above the Egyptian flag, quite slowly for two hours.  From the stage standpoint, the magnificence is thoroughgoing.  Viewed as a circus, the acting is elephantine in its grandeur.  All that is needed is pink lemonade sold in the audience.

The famous Cabiria, a tale of war between Rome and Carthage, by D’Annunzio, is a prime example of a success, where Antony and Cleopatra and many European films founded upon the classics have been failures.  With obvious defects as a producer, D’Annunzio appreciates spectacular symbolism.  He has an instinct for the strange and the beautifully infernal, as they are related to decorative design.  Therefore he is able to show us Carthage indeed.  He has an Italian patriotism that amounts to frenzy.  So Rome emerges body and soul from the past, in this spectacle.  He gives us the cruelty of Baal, the intrepidity of the Roman legions.  Everything Punic or Italian in the middle distance or massed background speaks of the very genius of the people concerned and actively generates their kind of lightning.

The principals do not carry out the momentum of this immense resource.  The half a score of leading characters, with the costumes, gestures, and aspects of gods, are after all works of the taxidermist.  They are stuffed gods.  They conduct a silly nickelodeon romance while Carthage rolls on toward her doom.  They are like sparrows fighting for grain on the edge of the battle.