hotoplay. The good citizens who can most easily
grasp the distinction should be there to perpetuate the higher welfare of
these institutions side by side. This parallel development should come,
if for no other reason, because the two arts are still roughly classed
together by the public. The elect cannot teach the public what the drama
is till they show them precisely what the photoplay is and is not. Just
as the university has departments of both History and English teaching in
amity, each one illuminating the work of the other, so these two forms
should live in each other's sight in fine and friendly contrast. At
present they are in blind and jealous warfare.

CHAPTER XIII

HIEROGLYPHICS

I have read this chapter to a pretty neighbor who has approved of the
preceding portions of the book, whose mind, therefore, I cannot but
respect. My neighbor classes this discussion of hieroglyphics as a
fanciful flight rather than a sober argument. I submit the verdict, then
struggle against it while you read.

The invention of the photoplay is as great a step as was the beginning of
picture-writing in the stone age. And the cave-men and women of our slums
seem to be the people most affected by this novelty, which is but an
expression of the old in that spiral of life which is going higher while
seeming to repeat the ancient phase.

There happens to be here on the table a book on Egypt by Rawlinson that I
used to thumb long ago. A footnote says: "The font of hieroglyphic type
used in this work contains eight hundred forms. But there are many other
forms beside." There is more light on Egypt in later works than in
Rawlinson, but the statement quoted will serve for our text.

Several complex methods of making visible scenarios are listed in this
work. Here is one that is mechanically simple. Let the man searching for
tableau combinations, even if he is of the practical commercial type,
prepare himself with eight hundred signs from Egypt. He can construct the
outlines of his scenarios by placing these little pictures in rows. It
may not be impractical to cut his hundreds of them from black cardboard
and shuffle them on his table every morning. The list will contain all
elementary and familiar things. Let him first give the most literal
meaning to the patterns. Then if he desires to rise above the commercial
field, let him turn over each cardboard, making the white undersurface
uppermost, and there write a more abstract m