Here then comes the romance of the photoplay.  A tribe that has thought in words since the days that it worshipped Thor and told legends of the cunning of the tongue of Loki, suddenly begins to think in pictures.  The leaders of the people, and of culture, scarcely know the photoplay exists.  But in the remote villages the players mentioned in this work are as well known and as fairly understood in their general psychology as any candidates for president bearing political messages.  There is many a babe in the proletariat not over four years old who has received more pictures into its eye than it has had words enter its ear.  The young couple go with their first-born and it sits gaping on its mother’s knee.  Often the images are violent and unseemly, a chaos of rawness and squirm, but scattered through the experience is a delineation of the world.  Pekin and China, Harvard and Massachusetts, Portland and Oregon, Benares and India, become imaginary playgrounds.  By the time the hopeful has reached its geography lesson in the public school it has travelled indeed.  Almost any word that means a picture in the text of the geography or history or third reader is apt to be translated unconsciously into moving picture terms.  In the next decade, simply from the development of the average eye, cities akin to the beginnings of Florence will be born among us as surely as Chaucer came, upon the first ripening of the English tongue, after Caedmon and Beowulf.  Sculptors, painters, architects, and park gardeners who now have their followers by the hundreds will have admirers by the hundred thousand.  The voters will respond to the aspirations of these artists as the back-woodsmen followed Poor Richard’s Almanac, or the trappers in their coon-skin caps were fired to patriotism by Patrick Henry.

* * * * *

This ends the second section of the book.  Were it not for the passage on The Battle Hymn of the Republic, the chapters thus far might be entitled:  “an open letter to Griffith and the producers and actors he has trained.”  Contrary to my prudent inclinations, he is the star of the piece, except on one page where he is the villain.  This stardom came about slowly.  In making the final revision, looking up the producers of the important reels, especially those from the beginning of the photoplay business, numbers of times the photoplays have turned out to be the work of this former leading man of Nance O’Neil.

No one can pretend to a full knowledge of the films.  They come faster than rain in April.  It would take a man every day of the year, working day and night, to see all that come to Springfield.  But in the photoplay world, as I understand it, D.W.  Griffith is the king-figure.

So far, in this work I have endeavored to keep to the established dogmas of Art.  I hope that the main lines of the argument will appeal to the people who have classified and related the beautiful works of man that have preceded the moving pictures.  Let the reader make his own essay on the subject for the local papers and send the clipping to me.  The next photoplay book that may appear from this hand may be construed to meet his point of view.  It will try to agree or disagree in clear language.  Many a controversy must come before a method of criticism is fully established.