st, the physician, the puritan, as
soon as the architects have won over the photoplay people, let these
others take sage counsel and ensnare the architects. Is there a reform
worth while that cannot be embodied and enforced by a builder's
invention? A mere city plan, carried out, or the name or intent of a
quasi-public building and the list of offices within it may bring about
more salutary economic change than all the debating and voting
imaginable. So without too much theorizing, why not erect our new America
and move into it?

CHAPTER XIX

ON COMING FORTH BY DAY

If he will be so indulgent with his author, let the reader approach the
photoplay theatre as though for the first time, having again a new point
of view. Here the poorest can pay and enter from the glaring afternoon
into the twilight of an Ali Baba's cave. The dime is the single
open-sesame required. The half-light wherein the audience is seated, by
which they can read in an emergency, is as bright and dark as that of
some candle-lit churches. It reveals much in the faces and figures of the
audience that cannot be seen by common day. Hard edges are the main
things that we lose. The gain is in all the delicacies of modelling,
tone-relations, form, and color. A hundred evanescent impressions come
and go. There is often a tenderness of appeal about the most rugged face
in the assembly. Humanity takes on its sacred aspect. It is a crude mind
that would insist that these appearances are not real, that the eye does
not see them when all eyes behold them. To say dogmatically that any new
thing seen by half-light is an illusion, is like arguing that a discovery
by the telescope or microscope is unreal. If the appearances are
beautiful besides, they are not only facts, but assets in our lives.

Book-reading is not done in the direct noon-sunlight. We retire to the
shaded porch. It takes two more steps toward quietness of light to read
the human face and figure. Many great paintings and poems are records of
things discovered in this quietness of light.

It is indeed ironical in our Ali Baba's cave to see sheer everydayness
and hardness upon the screen, the audience dragged back to the street
they have escaped. One of the inventions to bring the twilight of the
gathering into brotherhood with the shadows on the screen is a simple
thing known to the trade as the fadeaway, that had its rise in a
commonplace fashion as a method of keeping the story from endin