rate their
palm trees, but they count the miles of their sea-coast, and the acres
under cultivation and the height of the peaks, and revel in large
statistics and the bigness generally, and forget how a few men rattle
around in a great deal of scenery. They shout their statistics across the
Rockies and the deserts to New York. The Mississippi Valley is
non-existent to the Californian. His fellow-feeling is for the opposite
coast-line. Through the geographical accident of separation by mountain
and desert from the rest of the country, he becomes a mere shouter,
hurrahing so assiduously that all variety in the voice is lost. Then he
tries gestures, and becomes flamboyant, rococo.

These are the defects of the motion picture qualities also. Its panoramic
tendency runs wild. As an institution it advertises itself with the
sweeping gesture. It has the same passion for coast-line. These are not
the sins of New England. When, in the hands of masters, they become
sources of strength, they will be a different set of virtues from those
of New England.

There is no more natural place for the scattering of confetti than this
state, except the moving picture scene itself. Both have a genius for
gardens and dancing and carnival.

When the Californian relegates the dramatic to secondary scenes, both in
his life and his photoplay, and turns to the genuinely epic and lyric, he
and this instrument may find their immortality together as New England
found its soul in the essays of Emerson. Tide upon tide of Spring comes
into California through all four seasons. Fairy beauty overwhelms the
lumbering grand-stand players. The tiniest garden is a jewelled pathway
of wonder. But the Californian cannot shout "orange blossoms, orange
blossoms; heliotrope, heliotrope!" He cannot boom forth "roseleaves,
roseleaves" so that he does their beauties justice. Here is where the
photoplay can begin to give him a more delicate utterance. And he can go
on into stranger things and evolve all the Splendor Films into higher
types, for the very name of California is splendor. The California
photo-playwright can base his Crowd Picture upon the city-worshipping
mobs of San Francisco. He can derive his Patriotic and Religious
Splendors from something older and more magnificent than the aisles of
the Romanesque, namely: the groves of the giant redwoods.

The campaign for a beautiful nation could very well emanate from the west
coast, where with the slightest ca