ying
the matter of being an Egyptian priest for a little while, the
author-producer may learn in the end how best to express and satisfy the
spirit-hungers that are peculiarly American. It is sometimes out of the
oldest dream that the youngest vision is born.

CHAPTER XX

THE PROPHET-WIZARD

The whirlwind of cowboys and Indians with which the photoplay began, came
about because this instrument, in asserting its genius, was feeling its
way toward the most primitive forms of life it could find.

Now there is a tendency for even wilder things. We behold the half-draped
figures living in tropical islands or our hairy fore-fathers acting out
narratives of the stone age. The moving picture conventionality permits
an abbreviation of drapery. If the primitive setting is convincing, the
figure in the grass-robe or buffalo hide at once has its rights over the
healthful imagination.

There is in this nation of moving-picture-goers a hunger for tales of
fundamental life that are not yet told. The cave-man longs with an
incurable homesickness for his ancient day. One of the fine photoplays of
primeval life is the story called Man's Genesis, described in chapter
two.

We face the exigency the world over of vast instruments like national
armies being played against each other as idly and aimlessly as the
checker-men on the cracker-barrels of corner groceries. And this
invention, the kinetoscope, which affects or will affect as many people
as the guns of Europe, is not yet understood in its powers, particularly
those of bringing back the primitive in a big rich way. The primitive is
always a new and higher beginning to the man who understands it. Not yet
has the producer learned that the feeling of the crowd is patriarchal,
splendid. He imagines the people want nothing but a silly lark.

All this apparatus and opportunity, and no immortal soul! Yet by faith
and a study of the signs we proclaim that this lantern of wizard-drama is
going to give us in time the visible things in the fulness of their
primeval force, and some that have been for a long time invisible. To
speak in a metaphor, we are going to have the primitive life of Genesis,
then all that evolution after: Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy,
Joshua, Judges, and on to a new revelation of St. John. In this
adolescence of Democracy the history of man is to be retraced, the same
round on a higher spiral of life.

Our democratic dream has been a middle-clas