ed from the work of Isadora Duncan. This chapter has hereafter only
a passing word or two on literal sculptural effects. It has more in mind
the carver's attitude toward all that passes before the eye.

The sculptor George Gray Barnard is responsible for none of the views in
this discourse, but he has talked to me at length about his sense of
discovery in watching the most ordinary motion pictures, and his delight
in following them with their endless combinations of masses and flowing
surfaces.

The little far-away people on the old-fashioned speaking stage do not
appeal to the plastic sense in this way. They are, by comparison, mere
bits of pasteboard with sweet voices, while, on the other hand, the
photoplay foreground is full of dumb giants. The bodies of these giants
are in high sculptural relief. Where the lights are quite glaring and the
photography is bad, many of the figures are as hard in their impact on
the eye as lime-white plaster-casts, no matter what the clothing. There
are several passages of this sort in the otherwise beautiful Enoch Arden,
where the shipwrecked sailor is depicted on his desert island in the
glaring sun.

What materials should the photoplay figures suggest? There are as many
possible materials as there are subjects for pictures and tone schemes
to be considered. But we will take for illustration wood, bronze, and
marble, since they have been used in the old sculptural art.

There is found in most art shows a type of carved wood gargoyle where the
work and the subject are at one, not only in the color of the wood, but
in the way the material masses itself, in bulk betrays its qualities. We
will suppose a moving picture humorist who is in the same mood as the
carver. He chooses a story of quaint old ladies, street gamins, and fat
aldermen. Imagine the figures with the same massing and interplay
suddenly invested with life, yet giving to the eye a pleasure kindred to
that which is found in carved wood, and bringing to the fancy a similar
humor.

Or there is a type of Action Story where the mood of the figures is that
of bronze, with the aesthetic resources of that metal: its elasticity; its
emphasis on the tendon, ligament, and bone, rather than on the muscle;
and an attribute that we will call the panther-like quality. Hermon A.
MacNeil has a memorable piece of work in the yard of the architect Shaw,
at Lake Forest, Illinois. It is called "The Sun Vow." A little Indian is
shooting tow