me-and-space music is developed. The music of
silent motion is the most abstract of moving picture attributes and will
probably remain the least comprehended. Like the quality of Walter
Pater's Marius the Epicurean, or that of Shelley's Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty, it will not satisfy the sudden and the brash.

* * * * *

The reader will find in his round of the picture theatres many single
scenes and parts of plays that elucidate the title of this chapter. Often
the first two-thirds of the story will fit it well. Then the producers,
finding that, for reasons they do not understand, with the best and most
earnest actors they cannot work the three reels into an emotional climax,
introduce some stupid disaster and rescue utterly irrelevant to the
character-parts and the paintings that have preceded. Whether the alleged
thesis be love, hate, or ambition, cottage charm, daisy dell sweetness,
or the ivy beauty of an ancient estate, the resource for the final punch
seems to be something like a train-wreck. But the transfiguration of the
actors, not their destruction or rescue, is the goal. The last moment of
the play is great, not when it is a grandiose salvation from a burning
house, that knocks every delicate preceding idea in the head, but a
tableau that is as logical as the awakening of the Sleeping Beauty after
the hero has explored all the charmed castle.

CHAPTER X

FURNITURE, TRAPPINGS, AND INVENTIONS IN MOTION

The Action Pictures are sculpture-in-motion, the Intimate Pictures,
paintings-in-motion, the Splendor Pictures, many and diverse. It seems
far-fetched, perhaps, to complete the analogy and say they are
architecture-in-motion; yet, patient reader, unless I am mistaken, that
assumption can be given a value in time without straining your
imagination.

Landscape gardening, mural painting, church building, and furniture
making as well, are some of the things that come under the head of
architecture. They are discussed between the covers of any architectural
magazine. There is a particular relation in the photoplay between Crowd
Pictures and landscape conceptions, between Patriotic Films and mural
paintings, between Religious Films and architecture. And there is just as
much of a relation between Fairy Tales and furniture, which same is
discussed in this chapter.

Let us return to Moving Day, chapter four. This idea has been represented
many times with a certain samenes