lack realistic signs with obvious
meanings, and only one of them white and inexplicably strange. It has
been proclaimed further back in this treatise that there is only one
witch in every wood. And to illustrate further, there is but one scarlet
letter in Hawthorne's story of that name, but one wine-cup in all of
Omar, one Bluebird in Maeterlinck's play.

I do not insist that the prospective author-producer adopt the
hieroglyphic method as a routine, if he but consents in his meditative
hours to the point of view that it implies.

The more fastidious photoplay audience that uses the hieroglyphic
hypothesis in analyzing the film before it, will acquire a new tolerance
and understanding of the avalanche of photoplay conceptions, and find a
promise of beauty in what have been properly classed as mediocre and
stereotyped productions.

The nineteenth chapter has a discourse on the Book of the Dead. As a
connecting link with that chapter the reader will note that one of the
marked things about the Egyptian wall-paintings, pictures on the
mummy-case wrappings, papyrus inscriptions, and architectural
conceptions, is that they are but enlarged hieroglyphics, while the
hieroglyphics are but reduced fac-similes of these. So when a few
characters are once understood, the highly colored Egyptian
wall-paintings of the same things are understood. The hieroglyphic of
Osiris is enlarged when they desire to represent him in state. The
hieroglyphic of the soul as a human-headed hawk may be in a line of
writing no taller than the capitals of this book. Immediately above may
be a big painting of the soul, the same hawk placed with the proper care
with reference to its composition on the wall, a pure decoration.

The transition from reduction to enlargement and back again is as rapid
in Egypt as in the photoplay. It follows, among other things, that in
Egypt, as in China and Japan, literary style and mere penmanship and
brushwork are to be conceived as inseparable. No doubt the Egyptian
scholar was the man who could not only compose a poem, but write it down
with a brush. Talent for poetry, deftness in inscribing, and skill in
mural painting were probably gifts of the same person. The photoplay goes
back to this primitive union in styles.

The stages from hieroglyphics through Phoenician and Greek letters to
ours, are of no particular interest here. But the fact that
hieroglyphics can evolve is important. Let us hope that our new
pictu