acy itself to
read his democratic poems. Sooner or later the kinetoscope will do what
he could not, bring the nobler side of the equality idea to the people
who are so crassly equal.

The photoplay penetrates in our land to the haunts of the wildest or the
dullest. The isolated prospector rides twenty miles to see the same film
that is displayed on Broadway. There is not a civilized or half-civilized
land but may read the Whitmanesque message in time, if once it is put on
the films with power. Photoplay theatres are set up in ports where
sailors revel, in heathen towns where gentlemen adventurers are willing
to make one last throw with fate.

On the other hand, as a recorder Whitman approaches the wildest, rawest
American material and conquers it, at the same time keeping his nerves in
the state in which Swinburne wrote Only the Song of Secret Bird, or
Lanier composed The Ballad of Trees and The Master. J.W. Alexander's
portrait of Whitman in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, is not too
sophisticated. The out-of-door profoundness of this poet is far richer
than one will realize unless he has just returned from some cross-country
adventure afoot. Then if one reads breathlessly by the page and the score
of pages, there is a glory transcendent. For films of American
patriotism to parallel the splendors of Cabiria and Judith of Bethulia,
and to excel them, let us have Whitmanesque scenarios based on moods like
that of By Blue Ontario's Shore, The Salute au Monde, and The Passage to
India. Then the people's message will reach the people at last.

The average Crowd Picture will cling close to the streets that are, and
the usual Patriotic Picture will but remind us of nationality as it is at
present conceived and aflame, and the Religious Picture will for the most
part be close to the standard orthodoxies. The final forms of these merge
into each other, though they approach the heights by different avenues.
We Americans should look for the great photoplay of to-morrow, that will
mark a decade or a century, that prophesies of the flags made one, the
crowds in brotherhood.

CHAPTER VII

RELIGIOUS SPLENDOR

As far as the photoplay is concerned, religious emotion is a form of
crowd-emotion. In the most conventional and rigid church sense this phase
can be conveyed more adequately by the motion picture than by the stage.
There is little, of course, for the anti-ritualist in the art-world
anywhere. The thing that mak