Then comes the awakening.  To every one who sees the film for the first time it is like the forgiveness of sins.  The boy finds his uncle still alive.  In revulsion from himself, he takes the old man into his arms.  The uncle has already begun to be ashamed of his terrible words, and has prayed for a contrite heart.  The radiant Annabel is shown in the early dawn rising and hurrying to her lover in spite of her pride.  She will bravely take back her last night’s final word.  She cannot live without him.  The uncle makes amends to the girl.  The three are in the inconsistent but very human mood of sweet forgiveness for love’s sake, that sometimes overtakes the bitterest of us after some crisis in our days.

The happy pair are shown, walking through the hills.  Thrown upon the clouds for them are the moods of the poet-lover’s heart.  They look into the woods and see his fancies of Spring, the things that he will some day write.  These pageants might be longer.  They furnish the great climax.  They make a consistent parallel and contrast with the ghoul-visions that end with the confession to the detective.  They wipe that terror from the mind.  They do not represent Poe.  The rabbits, the leopard, the fairies, Cupid and Psyche in the clouds, and the little loves from the hollow trees are contributions to the original poetry of the eye.

Finally, the central part of this production of the Avenging Conscience is no dilution of Poe, but an adequate interpretation, a story he might have written.  Those who have the European respect for Poe’s work will be most apt to be satisfied with this section, including the photographic texture which may be said to be an authentic equivalent of his prose.  How often Poe has been primly patronized for his majestic quality, the wizard power which looms above all his method and subject-matter and furnishes the only reason for its existence!

For Griffith to embroider this Poe Interpretation in the centre of a fairly consistent fabric, and move on into a radiant climax of his own that is in organic relation to the whole, is an achievement indeed.  The final criticism is that the play is derivative.  It is not built from new material in all its parts, as was the original story.  One must be a student of Poe to get its ultimate flavor.  But in reading Poe’s own stories, one need not be a reader of any one special preceding writer to get the strange and solemn exultation of that literary enchanter.  He is the quintessence of his own lonely soul.

Though the wizard element is paramount in the Poe episode of this film, the appeal to the conscience is only secondary to this.  It is keener than in Poe, owing to the human elements before and after.  The Chameleon producer approximates in The Avenging Conscience the type of mystic teacher, discussed in the twentieth chapter:  “The Prophet-Wizard.”

CHAPTER XI

ARCHITECTURE-IN-MOTION