controls the
text-book in English and dominates our high schools. Ironic feelings in
this matter on the part of western men are based somewhat on envy and
illegitimate cussedness, but are also grounded in the honest hope of a
healthful rivalry. They want new romanticists and artists as indigenous
to their soil as was Hawthorne to witch-haunted Salem or Longfellow to
the chestnuts of his native heath. Whatever may be said of the
patriarchs, from Oliver Wendell Holmes to Amos Bronson Alcott, they were
true sons of the New England stone fences and meeting houses. They could
not have been born or nurtured anywhere else on the face of the earth.

Some of us view with a peculiar thrill the prospect that Los Angeles may
become the Boston of the photoplay. Perhaps it would be better to say the
Florence, because California reminds one of colorful Italy more than of
any part of the United States. Yet there is a difference.

The present-day man-in-the-street, man-about-town Californian has an
obvious magnificence about him that is allied to the eucalyptus tree,
the pomegranate. California is a gilded state. It has not the sordidness
of gold, as has Wall Street, but it is the embodiment of the natural ore
that the ragged prospector finds. The gold of California is the color of
the orange, the glitter of dawn in the Yosemite, the hue of the golden
gate that opens the sunset way to mystic and terrible Cathay and
Hindustan.

The enemy of California says the state is magnificent but thin. He
declares it is as though it were painted on a Brobdingnagian piece of
gilt paper, and he who dampens his finger and thrusts it through finds an
alkali valley on the other side, the lonely prickly pear, and a heap of
ashes from a deserted camp-fire. He says the citizens of this state lack
the richness of an aesthetic and religious tradition. He says there is no
substitute for time. But even these things make for coincidence. This
apparent thinness California has in common with the routine photoplay,
which is at times as shallow in its thought as the shadow it throws upon
the screen. This newness California has in common with all photoplays. It
is thrillingly possible for the state and the art to acquire spiritual
tradition and depth together.

Part of the thinness of California is not only its youth, but the result
of the physical fact that the human race is there spread over so many
acres of land. They try not only to count their mines and enume