I am the one poet who has a right to claim for his muses Blanche Sweet, Mary Pickford, and Mae Marsh.  I am the one poet who wrote them songs when they were Biograph heroines, before their names were put on the screen, or the name of their director.  Woman’s clubs are always asking me for bits of delicious gossip about myself to fill up literary essays.  Now there’s a bit.  There are two things to be said for those poems.  First, they were heartfelt.  Second, any one could improve on them.

In the fourth chapter of book two I discourse elaborately and formally on The Motion Picture of Fairy Splendor.  And to this carefully balanced technical discourse I would add the informal word, this New Year’s Day, that this type is best illustrated by such fairy-tales as have been most ingratiatingly retold in the books of Padraic Colum, and dazzlingly illustrated by Willy Pogany.  The Colum-Pogany School of Thought is one which the commercial producers have not yet condescended to illustrate in celluloid, and it remains a special province for the Art Museum Film.  Fairy-tales need not be more than one-tenth of a reel long.  Some of the best fairy-tales in the whole history of man can be told in a breath.  And the best motion picture story for fifty years may turn out to be a reel ten minutes long.  Do not let the length of the commercial film tyrannize over your mind, O young art museum photoplay director.  Remember the brevity of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address....

And so my commentary, New Year’s Day, 1922, proceeds, using for points of more and more extensive departure the refrains and old catch-phrases of books two and three.

Chapter V—­The Picture of Crowd Splendor, being the type illustrated by Griffith’s Intolerance.

Chapter VI—­The Picture of Patriotic Splendor, which was illustrated by all the War Films, the one most recently approved and accepted by the public being The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Chapter VII—­The Picture of Religious Splendor, which has no examples, that remain in the memory with any sharpness in 1922, except The Faith Healer, founded on the play by William Vaughn Moody, the poet, with much of the directing and scenario by Mrs. William Vaughn Moody, and a more talked-of commercial film, The Miracle Man.  But not until the religious film is taken out of the commercial field, and allowed to develop unhampered under the Church and the Art Museum, will the splendid religious and ritualistic opportunity be realized.

Chapter VIII—­Sculpture-in-Motion, being a continuation of the argument of chapter two.  The Photoplay of Action.  Like the Action Film, this aspect of composition is much better understood by the commercial people than some other sides of the art.  Some of the best of the William S. Hart productions show appreciation of this quality by the director, the photographer, and the public.  Not only is the man but the horse allowed to be moving bronze, and not mere cowboy pasteboard.  Many of the pictures of Charles Ray make the hero quite a bronze-looking sculpturesque person, despite his yokel raiment.