animent thereof must likewise be adapted
to being distributed everywhere. The present writer has seen, here in his
home place, population sixty thousand, all the films discussed in this
book but Cabiria and The Birth of a Nation. It is a photoplay paradise,
the spoken theatre is practically banished. Unfortunately the local
moving picture managers think it necessary to have orchestras. The
musicians they can secure make tunes that are most squalid and horrible.
With fathomless imbecility, hoochey koochey strains are on the air while
heroes are dying. The Miserere is in our ears when the lovers are
reconciled. Ragtime is imposed upon us while the old mother prays for her
lost boy. Sometimes the musician with this variety of sympathy abandons
himself to thrilling improvisation.

My thoughts on this subject began to take form several years ago, when
the film this book has much praised, The Battle Hymn of the Republic,
came to town. The proprietor of one theatre put in front of his shop a
twenty-foot sign "The Battle Hymn of the Republic, by Harriet Beecher
Stowe, brought back by special request." He had probably read Julia Ward
Howe's name on the film forty times before the sign went up. His
assistant, I presume his daughter, played "In the Shade of the Old Apple
Tree" hour after hour, while the great film was rolling by. Many old
soldiers were coming to see it. I asked the assistant why she did not
play and sing the Battle Hymn. She said they "just couldn't find it." Are
the distributors willing to send out a musician with each film?

Many of the Springfield producers are quite able and enterprising, but
to ask for music with photoplays is like asking the man at the news stand
to write an editorial while he sells you the paper. The picture with a
great orchestra in a far-off metropolitan Opera House, may be classed by
fanatic partisanship with Grand Opera. But few can get at it. It has
nothing to do with Democracy.

Of course people with a mechanical imagination, and no other kind, begin
to suggest the talking moving picture at this point, or the phonograph or
the mechanical piano. Let us discuss the talking moving picture only.
That disposes of the others.

If the talking moving picture becomes a reliable mirror of the human
voice and frame, it will be the basis of such a separate art that none of
the photoplay precedents will apply. It will be the _phonoplay_, not the
photoplay. It will be unpleasant for a long time.