rattle around in a great deal of scenery.  They shout their statistics across the Rockies and the deserts to New York.  The Mississippi Valley is non-existent to the Californian.  His fellow-feeling is for the opposite coast-line.  Through the geographical accident of separation by mountain and desert from the rest of the country, he becomes a mere shouter, hurrahing so assiduously that all variety in the voice is lost.  Then he tries gestures, and becomes flamboyant, rococo.

These are the defects of the motion picture qualities also.  Its panoramic tendency runs wild.  As an institution it advertises itself with the sweeping gesture.  It has the same passion for coast-line.  These are not the sins of New England.  When, in the hands of masters, they become sources of strength, they will be a different set of virtues from those of New England.

There is no more natural place for the scattering of confetti than this state, except the moving picture scene itself.  Both have a genius for gardens and dancing and carnival.

When the Californian relegates the dramatic to secondary scenes, both in his life and his photoplay, and turns to the genuinely epic and lyric, he and this instrument may find their immortality together as New England found its soul in the essays of Emerson.  Tide upon tide of Spring comes into California through all four seasons.  Fairy beauty overwhelms the lumbering grand-stand players.  The tiniest garden is a jewelled pathway of wonder.  But the Californian cannot shout “orange blossoms, orange blossoms; heliotrope, heliotrope!” He cannot boom forth “roseleaves, roseleaves” so that he does their beauties justice.  Here is where the photoplay can begin to give him a more delicate utterance.  And he can go on into stranger things and evolve all the Splendor Films into higher types, for the very name of California is splendor.  The California photo-playwright can base his Crowd Picture upon the city-worshipping mobs of San Francisco.  He can derive his Patriotic and Religious Splendors from something older and more magnificent than the aisles of the Romanesque, namely:  the groves of the giant redwoods.

The campaign for a beautiful nation could very well emanate from the west coast, where with the slightest care grow up models for all the world of plant arrangement and tree-luxury.  Our mechanical East is reproved, our tension is relaxed, our ugliness is challenged every time we look upon those garden paths and forests.

It is possible for Los Angeles to lay hold of the motion picture as our national text-book in Art as Boston appropriated to herself the guardianship of the national text-books of Literature.  If California has a shining soul, and not merely a golden body, let her forget her seventeen-year-old melodramatics, and turn to her poets who understand the heart underneath the glory.  Edwin Markham, the dean of American singers, Clark Ashton Smith, the young star treader, George Sterling, that son of Ancient Merlin, have in their songs the seeds of better scenarios than California has sent us.  There are two poems by George Sterling that I have had in mind for many a day as conceptions that should inspire mystic films akin to them.  These poems are The Night Sentries and Tidal King of Nations.