If there is one sceptic left as to the hieroglyphic significance of the photoplay, let him now be discomfited by page fifty-nine, Standard Dictionary.  The last letter in this list is a lasso:  [Illustration].  The equivalent of the lasso in the Roman alphabet is the letter T. The crude and facetious would be apt to suggest that the equivalent of the lasso in the photoplay is the word trouble, possibly for the hero, but probably for the villain.  We turn to the other side of the symbol.  The noose may stand for solemn judgment and the hangman, it may also symbolize the snare of the fowler, temptation.  Then there is the spider web, close kin, representing the cruelty of evolution, in The Avenging Conscience.

This list is based on the rows of hieroglyphics most readily at hand.  Any volume on Egypt, such as one of those by Maspero, has a multitude of suggestions for the man inclined to the idea.

If this system of pasteboard scenarios is taken literally, I would like to suggest as a beginning rule that in a play based on twenty hieroglyphics, nineteen should be the black realistic signs with obvious meanings, and only one of them white and inexplicably strange.  It has been proclaimed further back in this treatise that there is only one witch in every wood.  And to illustrate further, there is but one scarlet letter in Hawthorne’s story of that name, but one wine-cup in all of Omar, one Bluebird in Maeterlinck’s play.

I do not insist that the prospective author-producer adopt the hieroglyphic method as a routine, if he but consents in his meditative hours to the point of view that it implies.

The more fastidious photoplay audience that uses the hieroglyphic hypothesis in analyzing the film before it, will acquire a new tolerance and understanding of the avalanche of photoplay conceptions, and find a promise of beauty in what have been properly classed as mediocre and stereotyped productions.

The nineteenth chapter has a discourse on the Book of the Dead.  As a connecting link with that chapter the reader will note that one of the marked things about the Egyptian wall-paintings, pictures on the mummy-case wrappings, papyrus inscriptions, and architectural conceptions, is that they are but enlarged hieroglyphics, while the hieroglyphics are but reduced fac-similes of these.  So when a few characters are once understood, the highly colored Egyptian wall-paintings of the same things are understood.  The hieroglyphic of Osiris is enlarged when they desire to represent him in state.  The hieroglyphic of the soul as a human-headed hawk may be in a line of writing no taller than the capitals of this book.  Immediately above may be a big painting of the soul, the same hawk placed with the proper care with reference to its composition on the wall, a pure decoration.

The transition from reduction to enlargement and back again is as rapid in Egypt as in the photoplay.  It follows, among other things, that in Egypt, as in China and Japan, literary style and mere penmanship and brushwork are to be conceived as inseparable.  No doubt the Egyptian scholar was the man who could not only compose a poem, but write it down with a brush.  Talent for poetry, deftness in inscribing, and skill in mural painting were probably gifts of the same person.  The photoplay goes back to this primitive union in styles.