ample of a success, where Antony and Cleopatra
and many European films founded upon the classics have been failures.
With obvious defects as a producer, D'Annunzio appreciates spectacular
symbolism. He has an instinct for the strange and the beautifully
infernal, as they are related to decorative design. Therefore he is able
to show us Carthage indeed. He has an Italian patriotism that amounts to
frenzy. So Rome emerges body and soul from the past, in this spectacle.
He gives us the cruelty of Baal, the intrepidity of the Roman legions.
Everything Punic or Italian in the middle distance or massed background
speaks of the very genius of the people concerned and actively generates
their kind of lightning.

The principals do not carry out the momentum of this immense resource.
The half a score of leading characters, with the costumes, gestures, and
aspects of gods, are after all works of the taxidermist. They are
stuffed gods. They conduct a silly nickelodeon romance while Carthage
rolls on toward her doom. They are like sparrows fighting for grain on
the edge of the battle.

The doings of his principals are sufficiently evident to be grasped with
a word or two of printed insert on the films. But he sentimentalizes
about them. He adds side-elaborations of the plot that would require much
time to make clear, and a hard working novelist to make interesting. We
are sentenced to stop and gaze long upon this array of printing in the
darkness, just at the moment the tenth wave of glory seems ready to sweep
in. But one hundred words cannot be a photoplay climax. The climax must
be in a tableau that is to the eye as the rising sun itself, that follows
the thousand flags of the dawn.

In the New York performance, and presumably in other large cities, there
was also an orchestra. Behold then, one layer of great photoplay, one
layer of bad melodrama, one layer of explanation, and a final cement of
music. It is as though in an art museum there should be a man at the door
selling would-be masterly short-stories about the paintings, and a man
with a violin playing the catalogue. But for further discourse on the
orchestra read the fourteenth chapter.

I left Cabiria with mixed emotions. And I had to forget the distressful
eye-strain. Few eyes submit without destruction to three hours of film.
But the mistakes of Cabiria are those of the pioneer work of genius. It
has in it twenty great productions. It abounds in suggestions. Once the