vate persons, individuals _in
extremis_. If you go to a motion picture and feel yourself suddenly
gripped by the highest dramatic tension, as on the old stage, and reflect
afterward that it was a fight between only two or three men in a room
otherwise empty, stop to analyze what they stood for. They were probably
representatives of groups or races that had been pursuing each other
earlier in the film. Otherwise the conflict, however violent, appealed
mainly to the sense of speed.

So, in The Birth of a Nation, which could better be called The Overthrow
of Negro Rule, the Ku Klux Klan dashes down the road as powerfully as
Niagara pours over the cliff. Finally the white girl Elsie Stoneman
(impersonated by Lillian Gish) is rescued by the Ku Klux Klan from the
mulatto politician, Silas Lynch (impersonated by George Seigmann). The
lady is brought forward as a typical helpless white maiden. The white
leader, Col. Ben Cameron (impersonated by Henry B. Walthall), enters not
as an individual, but as representing the whole Anglo-Saxon Niagara. He
has the mask of the Ku Klux Klan on his face till the crisis has passed.
The wrath of the Southerner against the blacks and their Northern
organizers has been piled up through many previous scenes. As a result
this rescue is a real climax, something the photoplays that trace
strictly personal hatreds cannot achieve.

The Birth of a Nation is a Crowd Picture in a triple sense. On the films,
as in the audience, it turns the crowd into a mob that is either for or
against the Reverend Thomas Dixon's poisonous hatred of the negro.

Griffith is a chameleon in interpreting his authors. Wherever the
scenario shows traces of The Clansman, the original book, by Thomas
Dixon, it is bad. Wherever it is unadulterated Griffith, which is half
the time, it is good. The Reverend Thomas Dixon is a rather stagy Simon
Legree: in his avowed views a deal like the gentleman with the spiritual
hydrophobia in the latter end of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Unconsciously Mr.
Dixon has done his best to prove that Legree was not a fictitious
character.

* * * * *

Joel Chandler Harris, Harry Stillwell Edwards, George W. Cable, Thomas
Nelson Page, James Lane Allen, and Mark Twain are Southern men in Mr.
Griffith's class. I recommend their works to him as a better basis for
future Southern scenarios.

The Birth of a Nation has been very properly denounced for its Simon
Legree qualities by