rector. Woman's clubs are always asking me for
bits of delicious gossip about myself to fill up literary essays. Now
there's a bit. There are two things to be said for those poems. First,
they were heartfelt. Second, any one could improve on them.

In the fourth chapter of book two I discourse elaborately and formally on
The Motion Picture of Fairy Splendor. And to this carefully balanced
technical discourse I would add the informal word, this New Year's Day,
that this type is best illustrated by such fairy-tales as have been most
ingratiatingly retold in the books of Padraic Colum, and dazzlingly
illustrated by Willy Pogany. The Colum-Pogany School of Thought is one
which the commercial producers have not yet condescended to illustrate in
celluloid, and it remains a special province for the Art Museum Film.
Fairy-tales need not be more than one-tenth of a reel long. Some of the
best fairy-tales in the whole history of man can be told in a breath.
And the best motion picture story for fifty years may turn out to be a
reel ten minutes long. Do not let the length of the commercial film
tyrannize over your mind, O young art museum photoplay director. Remember
the brevity of Lincoln's Gettysburg address....

And so my commentary, New Year's Day, 1922, proceeds, using for points of
more and more extensive departure the refrains and old catch-phrases of
books two and three.

Chapter V--The Picture of Crowd Splendor, being the type illustrated by
Griffith's Intolerance.

Chapter VI--The Picture of Patriotic Splendor, which was illustrated by
all the War Films, the one most recently approved and accepted by the
public being The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Chapter VII--The Picture of Religious Splendor, which has no examples,
that remain in the memory with any sharpness in 1922, except The Faith
Healer, founded on the play by William Vaughn Moody, the poet, with much
of the directing and scenario by Mrs. William Vaughn Moody, and a more
talked-of commercial film, The Miracle Man. But not until the religious
film is taken out of the commercial field, and allowed to develop
unhampered under the Church and the Art Museum, will the splendid
religious and ritualistic opportunity be realized.

Chapter VIII--Sculpture-in-Motion, being a continuation of the argument
of chapter two. The Photoplay of Action. Like the Action Film, this
aspect of composition is much better understood by the commercial people
than some other side