were growing every day, we were still
more of a word-civilization than the English. Our architectural,
painting, and sculptural history is concerned with men now living, or
their immediate predecessors. And even such work as we have is pretty
largely a cult by the wealthy. This is the more a cause for misgiving
because, in a democracy, the arts, like the political parties, are not
founded till they have touched the county chairman, the ward leader, the
individual voter. The museums in a democracy should go as far as the
public libraries. Every town has its library. There are not twenty Art
museums in the land.

Here then comes the romance of the photoplay. A tribe that has thought in
words since the days that it worshipped Thor and told legends of the
cunning of the tongue of Loki, suddenly begins to think in pictures. The
leaders of the people, and of culture, scarcely know the photoplay
exists. But in the remote villages the players mentioned in this work are
as well known and as fairly understood in their general psychology as any
candidates for president bearing political messages. There is many a
babe in the proletariat not over four years old who has received more
pictures into its eye than it has had words enter its ear. The young
couple go with their first-born and it sits gaping on its mother's knee.
Often the images are violent and unseemly, a chaos of rawness and squirm,
but scattered through the experience is a delineation of the world. Pekin
and China, Harvard and Massachusetts, Portland and Oregon, Benares and
India, become imaginary playgrounds. By the time the hopeful has reached
its geography lesson in the public school it has travelled indeed. Almost
any word that means a picture in the text of the geography or history or
third reader is apt to be translated unconsciously into moving picture
terms. In the next decade, simply from the development of the average
eye, cities akin to the beginnings of Florence will be born among us as
surely as Chaucer came, upon the first ripening of the English tongue,
after Caedmon and Beowulf. Sculptors, painters, architects, and park
gardeners who now have their followers by the hundreds will have admirers
by the hundred thousand. The voters will respond to the aspirations of
these artists as the back-woodsmen followed Poor Richard's Almanac, or
the trappers in their coon-skin caps were fired to patriotism by Patrick
Henry.

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