On the other hand, as a recorder Whitman approaches the wildest, rawest American material and conquers it, at the same time keeping his nerves in the state in which Swinburne wrote Only the Song of Secret Bird, or Lanier composed The Ballad of Trees and The Master.  J.W.  Alexander’s portrait of Whitman in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, is not too sophisticated.  The out-of-door profoundness of this poet is far richer than one will realize unless he has just returned from some cross-country adventure afoot.  Then if one reads breathlessly by the page and the score of pages, there is a glory transcendent.  For films of American patriotism to parallel the splendors of Cabiria and Judith of Bethulia, and to excel them, let us have Whitmanesque scenarios based on moods like that of By Blue Ontario’s Shore, The Salute au Monde, and The Passage to India.  Then the people’s message will reach the people at last.

The average Crowd Picture will cling close to the streets that are, and the usual Patriotic Picture will but remind us of nationality as it is at present conceived and aflame, and the Religious Picture will for the most part be close to the standard orthodoxies.  The final forms of these merge into each other, though they approach the heights by different avenues.  We Americans should look for the great photoplay of to-morrow, that will mark a decade or a century, that prophesies of the flags made one, the crowds in brotherhood.

CHAPTER VII

RELIGIOUS SPLENDOR

As far as the photoplay is concerned, religious emotion is a form of crowd-emotion.  In the most conventional and rigid church sense this phase can be conveyed more adequately by the motion picture than by the stage.  There is little, of course, for the anti-ritualist in the art-world anywhere.  The thing that makes cathedrals real shrines in the eye of the reverent traveller makes them, with their religious processions and the like, impressive in splendor-films.

For instance, I have long remembered the essentials of the film, The Death of Thomas Becket.  It may not compare in technique with some of our present moving picture achievements, but the idea must have been particularly adapted to the film medium.  The story has stayed in my mind with great persistence, not only as a narrative, but as the first hint to me that orthodox religious feeling has here an undeveloped field.

Green tells the story in this way, in his History of the English People:—­

“Four knights of the King’s court, stirred to outrage by a passionate outburst of their master’s wrath, crossed the sea and on the twenty-ninth of December forced their way into the Archbishop’s palace.  After a stormy parley with him in his chamber they withdrew to arm.  Thomas was hurried by his clerks into the cathedral, but as he reached the steps leading from the transept into the choir his pursuers burst in from the cloisters.  ‘Where,’ cried Reginald Fitzurse, ’is the traitor, Thomas Becket?’ ‘Here am I, no traitor, but a priest of God,’ he replied.  And again descending the steps he placed himself with his back against a pillar and fronted his foes....  The brutal murder was received with a thrill of horror throughout Christendom.  Miracles were wrought at the martyr’s tomb, etc....”