re-alphabets can take on richness and significance, as time goes on,
without losing their literal values. They may develop into something more
all-pervading, yet more highly wrought, than any written speech.
Languages when they evolve produce stylists, and we will some day
distinguish the different photoplay masters as we now delight in the
separate tang of O. Henry and Mark Twain and Howells. When these are
ancient times, we will have scholars and critics learned in the flavors
of early moving picture traditions with their histories of movements and
schools, their grammars, and anthologies.

Now some words as to the Anglo-Saxon language and its relation to
pictures. In England and America our plastic arts are but beginning.
Yesterday we were preeminently a word-civilization. England built her
mediaeval cathedrals, but they left no legacy among craftsmen. Art had to
lean on imported favorites like Van Dyck till the days of Sir Joshua
Reynolds and the founding of the Royal Society. Consider that the friends
of Reynolds were of the circle of Doctor Johnson. Literary tradition had
grown old. Then England had her beginning of landscape gardening. Later
she saw the rise of Constable, Ruskin, and Turner, and their iridescent
successors. Still to-day in England the average leading citizen matches
word against word,--using them as algebraic formulas,--rather than
picture against picture, when he arranges his thoughts under the eaves of
his mind. To step into the Art world is to step out of the beaten path of
British dreams. Shakespeare is still king, not Rossetti, nor yet
Christopher Wren. Moreover, it was the book-reading colonial who led our
rebellion against the very royalty that founded the Academy. The
public-speaking American wrote the Declaration of Independence. It was
not the work of the painting or cathedral-building Englishman. We were
led by Patrick Henry, the orator, Benjamin Franklin, the printer.

The more characteristic America became, the less she had to do with the
plastic arts. The emigrant-train carried many a Bible and Dictionary
packed in beside the guns and axes. It carried the Elizabethan writers,
AEsop's Fables, Blackstone's Commentaries, the revised statutes of
Indiana, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Parson Weems' Life of Washington.
But, obviously, there was no place for the Elgin marbles. Giotto's tower
could not be loaded in with the dried apples and the seedcorn.

Yesterday morning, though our arts