If it is a grown-up legend, it must be more than monumental in its lines, like the great stone face of Hawthorne’s tale.  Even a chair can reach this estate.  For instance, let it be the throne of Wodin, illustrating some passage in Norse mythology.  If this throne has a language, it speaks with the lightning; if it shakes with its threat, it moves the entire mountain range beneath it.  Let the wizard-author-producer climb up from the tricks of Moving Day to the foot-hills where he can see this throne against the sky, as a superarchitect would draw it.  But even if he can give this vision in the films, his task will not be worth while if he is simply a teller of old stories.  Let us have magic shoes about which are more golden dreams than those concerning Cinderella.  Let us have stranger castles than that of Usher, more dazzling chairs than the Siege Perilous.  Let us have the throne of Liberty, not the throne of Wodin.

There is one outstanding photoplay that I always have in mind when I think of film magic.  It illustrates some principles of this chapter and chapter four, as well as many others through the book.  It is Griffith’s production of The Avenging Conscience.  It is also an example of that rare thing, a use of old material that is so inspired that it has the dignity of a new creation.  The raw stuff of the plot is pieced together from the story of The Tell-tale Heart and the poem Annabel Lee.  It has behind it, in the further distance, Poe’s conscience stories of The Black Cat, and William Wilson.  I will describe the film here at length, and apply it to whatever chapters it illustrates.

An austere and cranky bachelor (well impersonated by Spottiswoode Aitken) brings up his orphan nephew with an awkward affection.  The nephew is impersonated by Henry B. Walthall.  The uncle has an ambition that the boy will become a man of letters.  In his attempts at literature the youth is influenced by Poe.  This brings about the Poe quality of his dreams at the crisis.  The uncle is silently exasperated when he sees his boy’s writing-time broken into, and wasted, as he thinks, by an affair with a lovely Annabel (Blanche Sweet).  The intimacy and confidence of the lovers has progressed so far that it is a natural thing for the artless girl to cross the gardens and after hesitation knock at the door.  She wants to know what has delayed her boy.  She is all in a flutter on account of the overdue appointment to go to a party together.  The scene of the pretty hesitancy on the step, her knocking, and the final impatient tapping with her foot is one of the best illustrations of the intimate mood in photoplay episodes.  On the girl’s entrance the uncle overwhelms her and the boy by saying she is pursuing his nephew like a common woman of the town.  The words actually burst through the film, not as a melodramatic, but as an actual insult.  This is a thing almost impossible to do in the photoplay.  This outrage in the midst of an atmosphere of chivalry is one of Griffith’s master-moments.  It accounts for the volcanic fury of the nephew that takes such trouble to burn itself out afterwards.  It is not easy for the young to learn that they must let those people flay them for an hour who have made every sacrifice for them through a life-time.