re grow up models for all the world of
plant arrangement and tree-luxury. Our mechanical East is reproved, our
tension is relaxed, our ugliness is challenged every time we look upon
those garden paths and forests.

It is possible for Los Angeles to lay hold of the motion picture as our
national text-book in Art as Boston appropriated to herself the
guardianship of the national text-books of Literature. If California has
a shining soul, and not merely a golden body, let her forget her
seventeen-year-old melodramatics, and turn to her poets who understand
the heart underneath the glory. Edwin Markham, the dean of American
singers, Clark Ashton Smith, the young star treader, George Sterling,
that son of Ancient Merlin, have in their songs the seeds of better
scenarios than California has sent us. There are two poems by George
Sterling that I have had in mind for many a day as conceptions that
should inspire mystic films akin to them. These poems are The Night
Sentries and Tidal King of Nations.

But California can tell us stories that are grim children of the tales of
the wild Ambrose Bierce. Then there is the lovely unforgotten Nora May
French and the austere Edward Rowland Sill.

Edison is the new Gutenberg. He has invented the new printing. The state
that realizes this may lead the soul of America, day after to-morrow.

CHAPTER XVII

PROGRESS AND ENDOWMENT

The moving picture goes almost as far as journalism into the social
fabric in some ways, further in others. Soon, no doubt, many a little
town will have its photographic news-press. We have already the weekly
world-news films from the big centres.

With local journalism will come devices for advertising home enterprises.
Some staple products will be made attractive by having film-actors show
their uses. The motion pictures will be in the public schools to stay.
Text-books in geography, history, zoology, botany, physiology, and other
sciences will be illustrated by standardized films. Along with these
changes, there will be available at certain centres collections of films
equivalent to the Standard Dictionary and the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

And sooner or later we will have a straight-out capture of a complete
film expression by the serious forces of civilization. The merely
impudent motion picture will be relegated to the leisure hours with
yellow journalism. Photoplay libraries are inevitable, as active if not
as multitudinous as the book-circula