This chapter has implied that the performers were but paint on the canvas.  They are both paint and models.  They are models in the sense that the young Ellen Terry was the inspiration for Watts’ Sir Galahad.  They resemble the persons in private life who furnish the basis for novels.  Dickens’ mother was the original of Mrs. Nickleby.  His father entered into Wilkins Micawber.  But these people are not perpetually thrust upon us as Mr. and Mrs. Dickens.  We are glad to find them in the Dickens biographies.  When the stories begin, it is Micawber and Mrs. Nickleby we want, and the Charles Dickens atmosphere.

The photoplays of the future will be written from the foundations for the films.  The soundest actors, photographers, and producers will be those who emphasize the points wherein the photoplay is unique.  What is adapted to complete expression in one art generally secures but half expression in another.  The supreme photoplay will give us things that have been but half expressed in all other mediums allied to it.

Once this principle is grasped there is every reason why the same people who have interested themselves in the advanced experimental drama should take hold of the super-photoplay.  The good citizens who can most easily grasp the distinction should be there to perpetuate the higher welfare of these institutions side by side.  This parallel development should come, if for no other reason, because the two arts are still roughly classed together by the public.  The elect cannot teach the public what the drama is till they show them precisely what the photoplay is and is not.  Just as the university has departments of both History and English teaching in amity, each one illuminating the work of the other, so these two forms should live in each other’s sight in fine and friendly contrast.  At present they are in blind and jealous warfare.

CHAPTER XIII

HIEROGLYPHICS

I have read this chapter to a pretty neighbor who has approved of the preceding portions of the book, whose mind, therefore, I cannot but respect.  My neighbor classes this discussion of hieroglyphics as a fanciful flight rather than a sober argument.  I submit the verdict, then struggle against it while you read.

The invention of the photoplay is as great a step as was the beginning of picture-writing in the stone age.  And the cave-men and women of our slums seem to be the people most affected by this novelty, which is but an expression of the old in that spiral of life which is going higher while seeming to repeat the ancient phase.

There happens to be here on the table a book on Egypt by Rawlinson that I used to thumb long ago.  A footnote says:  “The font of hieroglyphic type used in this work contains eight hundred forms.  But there are many other forms beside.”  There is more light on Egypt in later works than in Rawlinson, but the statement quoted will serve for our text.