University of Virginia Library

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 meaning of the hieroglyphic,
one that has a fairly close relation to his
way of thinking about the primary form. From
a proper balance of primary and secondary
meanings photoplays with souls could come.
Not that he must needs become an expert
Egyptologist. Yet it would profit any photoplay
man to study to think like the Egyptians,

the great picture-writing people. There is as
much reason for this course as for the Bible
student's apprenticeship in Hebrew.

Hieroglyphics can prove their worth, even
without the help of an Egyptian history.
Humorous and startling analogies can be
pointed out by opening the Standard Dictionary,
page fifty-nine. Look under the word
alphabet. There is the diagram of the evolution
of inscriptions from the Egyptian and
Phœnician idea of what letters should be, on
through the Greek and Roman systems.

In the Egyptian row is the picture of a
throne, [ILLUSTRATION] that has its equivalent in the Roman
letter C. And a throne has as much place in
what might be called the moving-picture
alphabet as the letter C has in ours. There
are sometimes three thrones in this small town
of Springfield in an evening. When you see
one flashed on the screen, you know instantly
you are dealing with royalty or its implications.
The last one I saw that made any particular impression
was when Mary Pickford acted in Such
a Little Queen. I only wished then that she had
a more convincing throne. Let us cut one out
of black cardboard. Turning the cardboard
over to write on it the spirit-meaning, we inscribe

some such phrase as The Throne of
Wisdom or The Throne of Liberty.

Here is the hieroglyphic of a hand: [ILLUSTRATION]
Roman equivalent, the letter D. The human
hand, magnified till it is as big as the whole
screen, is as useful in the moving picture alphabet
as the letter D in the printed alphabet.
This hand may open a lock. It may pour
poison in a bottle. It may work a telegraph
key. Then turning the white side of the cardboard
uppermost we inscribe something to the
effect that this hand may write on the wall,
as at the feast of Belshazzar. Or it may represent
some such conception as Rodin's Hand
of God, discussed in the Sculpture-in-motion
chapter.

Here is a duck: [ILLUSTRATION] Roman equivalent, the
letter Z. In the motion pictures this bird,
a somewhat z-shaped animal, suggests the
finality of Arcadian peace. It is the last
and fittest ornament of the mill-pond. Nothing
very terrible can happen with a duck in the
foreground. There is no use turning it over.
It would take Maeterlinck or Swedenborg to
find the mystic meaning of a duck. A duck
looks to me like a caricature of an alderman.

Here is a sieve: [ILLUSTRATION] Roman equivalent, H.
A sieve placed on the kitchen-table, close-up,
suggests domesticity, hired girl humors, broad
farce. We will expect the bride to make her
first cake, or the flour to begin to fly into the
face of the intrusive ice-man. But, as to the
other side of the cardboard, the sieve has its
place in higher symbolism. It has been recorded
by many a sage and singer that the
Almighty Powers sift men like wheat.

Here is the picture of a bowl: [ILLUSTRATION]
Roman equivalent, the letter K. A bowl
seen through the photoplay window on the
cottage table suggests Johnny's early supper
of bread and milk. But as to the white side
of the cardboard, out of a bowl of kindred
form Omar may take his moonlit wine, or
the higher gods may lift up the very wine of
time to the lips of men, as Swinburne sings in
Atalanta in Calydon.

Here is a lioness: [ILLUSTRATION] Roman equivalent,
the letter L. The lion or lioness creeps through
the photoplay jungle to give the primary
picture-word of terror in this new universal
alphabet. The present writer has seen
several valuable lions unmistakably shot and
killed in the motion pictures, and charged up

to profit and loss, just as steam-engines or
houses are sometimes blown up or burned down.
But of late there is a disposition to use the
trained lion (or lioness) for all sorts of effects.
No doubt the king and queen of beasts will
become as versatile and humbly useful as the
letter L itself: that is, in the commonplace
routine photoplay. We turn the cardboard over
and the lion becomes a resource of glory and
terror, a symbol of cruel persecutions or deathless
courage, sign of the zodiac that Poe in
Ulalume calls the Lair of the Lion.

Here is an owl: [ILLUSTRATION] Roman equivalent, the
letter M. The only use of the owl I can
record is to be inscribed on the white surface.
In The Avenging Conscience, as described in
chapter ten, the murderer marks the ticking
of the heart of his victim while watching the
swinging of the pendulum of the old clock, then
in watching the tapping of the detective's
pencil on the table, then in the tapping of
his foot on the floor. Finally a handsome owl
is shown in the branches outside hoot-hooting
in time with the action of the pencil, and the
pendulum, and the dead man's heart.

But here is a wonderful thing, an actual picture
that has lived on, retaining its ancient

imitative sound and form: [ILLUSTRATION] the
letter N, the drawing of a wave, with the sound
of a wave still within it. One could well imagine
the Nile in the winds of the dawn making
such a sound: "NN, N, N," lapping at the reeds
upon its banks. Certainly the glittering water
scenes are a dominant part of moving picture
Esperanto. On the white reverse of the symbol,
the spiritual meaning of water will range
from the metaphor of the purity of the dew to
the sea as a sign of infinity.

Here is a window with closed shutters: [ILLUSTRATION]
Latin equivalent, the letter P. It is a reminder
of the technical outline of this book. The
Intimate Photoplay, as I have said, is but a
window where we open the shutters and peep
into some one's cottage. As to the soul
meaning in the opening or closing of the
shutters, it ranges from Noah's opening the
hatches to send forth the dove, to the promises
of blessing when the Windows of Heaven should
be opened.

Here is the picture of an angle: [ILLUSTRATION] Latin
equivalent, Q. This is another reminder of the
technical outline. The photoplay interior, as
has been reiterated, is small and three-cornered.

Here the heroine does her plotting, flirting, and
primping, etc. I will leave the spiritual interpretation
of the angle to Emerson, Swedenborg,
or Maeterlinck.

Here is the picture of a mouth: [ILLUSTRATION] Latin
equivalent, the letter R. If we turn from the
dictionary to the monuments, we will see that
the Egyptians used all the human features in
their pictures. We do not separate the features
as frequently as did that ancient people, but we
conventionalize them as often. Nine-tenths of
the actors have faces as fixed as the masks of
the Greek chorus: they have the hero-mask with
the protruding chin, the villain-frown, the comedian-grin,
the fixed innocent-girl simper. These
formulas have their place in the broad effects
of Crowd Pictures and in comedies. Then there
are sudden abandonments of the mask. Griffith's
pupils, Henry Walthall and Blanche Sweet,
seem to me to be the greatest people in the photoplays:
for one reason their faces are as sensitive
to changing emotion as the surfaces of fair lakes
in the wind. There is a passage in Enoch Arden
where Annie, impersonated by Lillian Gish, another
pupil of Griffith, is waiting in suspense
for the return of her husband. She changes
from lips of waiting, with a touch of apprehension,

to a delighted laugh of welcome, her
head making a half-turn toward the door.
The audience is so moved by the beauty of the
slow change they do not know whether her face
is the size of the screen or the size of a postage-stamp.
As a matter of fact it fills the whole
end of the theatre.

Thus much as to faces that are not hieroglyphics.
Yet fixed facial hieroglyphics have
many legitimate uses. For instance in The
Avenging Conscience, as the play works toward
the climax and the guilty man is breaking down,
the eye of the detective is thrown on the screen
with all else hid in shadow, a watching, relentless
eye. And this suggests a special talisman
of the old Egyptians, a sign called the
Eyes of Horus, meaning the all-beholding sun.

Here is the picture of an inundated garden:
[ILLUSTRATION] Latin equivalent, the letter S. In our
photoplays the garden is an ever-present resource,
and at an instant's necessity suggests
the glory of nature, or sweet privacy, and
kindred things. The Egyptian lotus garden had
to be inundated to be a success. Ours needs
but the hired man with the hose, who sometimes
supplies broad comedy. But we turn over
the cardboard, for the deeper meaning of this

hieroglyphic. Our gardens can, as of old, run
the solemn range from those of Babylon to those
of the Resurrection.

If there is one sceptic left as to the hieroglyphic
significance of the photoplay, let him
now be discomfited by page fifty-nine, Standard
Dictionary. The last letter in this list is a
lasso: [ILLUSTRATION]. The equivalent of the lasso in
the Roman alphabet is the letter T. The
crude and facetious would be apt to suggest
that the equivalent of the lasso in the photoplay
is the word trouble, possibly for the hero,
but probably for the villian. We turn to the
other side of the symbol. The noose may stand
for solemn judgment and the hangman, it may
also symbolize the snare of the fowler, temptation.
Then there is the spider web, close kin,
representing the cruelty of evolution, in The
Avenging Conscience.

This list is based on the rows of hieroglyphics
most readily at hand. Any volume on Egypt,
such as one of those by Maspero, has a multitude
of suggestions for the man inclined to the idea.

If this system of pasteboard scenarios is
taken literally, I would like to suggest as a
beginning rule that in a play based on twenty
hieroglyphics, nineteen should be the black

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 Phœnician
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 picture-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 preëminently a word-civilization.
England built her mediæval 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, Æsop'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 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 firstborn
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 Cædmon 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 backwoodsmen
followed Poor Richard's Almanac,
or the trappers in their coon-skin caps were
fired to patriotism by Patrick Henry.

This ends the second section of the book.
Were it not for the passage on The Battle
Hymn of the Republic, the chapters thus far
might be entitled: "an open letter to Griffith
and the producers and actors he has trained."
Contrary to my prudent inclinations, he is
the star of the piece, except on one page where
he is the villain. This stardom came about
slowly. In making the final revision, looking
up the producers of the important reels, especially
those from the beginning of the photoplay
business, numbers of times the photoplays
have turned out to be the work of this former
leading man of Nance O'Neil.

No one can pretend to a full knowledge of the
films. They come faster than rain in April.
It would take a man every day of the year,
working day and night, to see all that come to
Springfield. But in the photoplay world, as I
understand it, D. W. Griffith is the king-figure.

So far, in this work I have endeavored to keep
to the established dogmas of Art. I hope that

the main lines of the argument will appeal to
the people who have classified and related the
beautiful works of man that have preceded the
moving pictures. Let the reader make his own
essay on the subject for the local papers and send
the clipping to me. The next photoplay book
that may appear from this hand may be construed
to meet his point of view. It will try to
agree or disagree in clear language. Many a
controversy must come before a method of criticism
is fully established.

* * * * * *

At this point I climb from the oracular platform
and go down through my own chosen
underbrush for haphazard adventure. I renounce
the platform. Whatever it may be
that I find, pawpaw or may-apple or spray
of willow, if you do not want it, throw it
over the edge of the hill, without ado, to the
birds or squirrels or kine, and do not include
it in your controversial discourse. It is not a
part of the dogmatic system of photoplay criticism.