University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XIX

ON COMING FORTH BY DAY

If he will be so indulgent with his author,
let the reader approach the photoplay theatre
as though for the first time, having again a
new point of view. Here the poorest can pay
and enter from the glaring afternoon into the
twilight of an Ali Baba's cave. The dime
is the single open-sesame required. The half-light
wherein the audience is seated, by which
they can read in an emergency, is as bright
and dark as that of some candle-lit churches.
It reveals much in the faces and figures of
the audience that cannot be seen by common
day. Hard edges are the main things that
we lose. The gain is in all the delicacies of
modelling, tone-relations, form, and color. A
hundred evanescent impressions come and go.
There is often a tenderness of appeal about the
most rugged face in the assembly. Humanity
takes on its sacred aspect. It is a crude mind
that would insist that these appearances are

not real, that the eye does not see them when
all eyes behold them. To say dogmatically
that any new thing seen by half-light is an illusion,
is like arguing that a discovery by the
telescope or microscope is unreal. If the appearances
are beautiful besides, they are not
only facts, but assets in our lives.

Book-reading is not done in the direct noon-sunlight.
We retire to the shaded porch. It
takes two more steps toward quietness of light
to read the human face and figure. Many great
paintings and poems are records of things discovered
in this quietness of light.

It is indeed ironical in our Ali Baba's cave to
see sheer everydayness and hardness upon
the screen, the audience dragged back to the
street they have escaped. One of the inventions
to bring the twilight of the gathering into
brotherhood with the shadows on the screen is
a simple thing known to the trade as the fadeaway,
that had its rise in a commonplace fashion
as a method of keeping the story from ending
with the white glare of the empty screen. As
a result of the device the figures in the first
episode emerge from the dimness and in the last
one go back into the shadow whence they came,
as foam returns to the darkness of an evening

sea. In the imaginative pictures the principle
begins to be applied more largely, till
throughout the fairy story the figures float
in and out from the unknown, as fancies
should. This method in its simplicity counts
more to keep the place an Ali Baba's cave than
many a more complicated procedure. In luxurious
scenes it brings the soft edges of Correggio,
and in solemn ones a light and shadow akin
to the effects of Rembrandt.

Now we have a darkness on which we can
paint, an unspoiled twilight. We need not call
it the Arabian's cave. There is a tomb we
might have definitely in mind, an Egyptian
burying-place where with a torch we might
enter, read the inscriptions, and see the illustrations
from the Book of the Dead on the wall,
or finding that ancient papyrus in the mummy-case,
unroll it and show it to the eager assembly,
and have the feeling of return. Man is an
Egyptian first, before he is any other type of
civilized being. The Nile flows through his
heart. So let this cave be Egypt, let us incline
ourselves to revere the unconscious memories
that echo within us when we see the hieroglyphics
of Osiris, and Isis. Egypt was our long
brooding youth. We built the mysteriousness

of the Universe into the Pyramids, carved it
into every line of the Sphinx. We thought always
of the immemorial.

The reel now before us is the mighty judgment
roll dealing with the question of our
departure in such a way that any man who
beholds it will bear the impress of the admonition
upon his heart forever. Those Egyptian
priests did no little thing, when amid their
superstitions they still proclaimed the Judgment.
Let no one consider himself ready for
death, till like the men by the Nile he can
call up every scene, face with courage every
exigency of the ordeal.

There is one copy of the Book of the Dead of
especial interest, made for the Scribe Ani, with
exquisite marginal drawings. Copies may be
found in our large libraries. The particular
fac-simile I had the honor to see was in the
Lenox Library, New York, several years ago.
Ani, according to the formula of the priesthood,
goes through the adventures required of
a shade before he reaches the court of Osiris.
All the Egyptian pictures on tomb-wall and
temple are but enlarged picture-writing made
into tableaus. Through such tableaus Ani
moves. The Ani manuscript has so fascinated

some of the Egyptologists that it is copied in
figures fifteen feet high on the walls of two of
the rooms of the British Museum. And you
can read the story eloquently told in Maspero.

Ani knocks at many doors in the underworld.
Monstrous gatekeepers are squatting on their
haunches with huge knives to slice him if he
cannot remember their names or give the right
password, or by spells the priests have taught
him, convince the sentinels that he is Osiris
himself. To further the illusion the name of
Osiris is inscribed on his breast. While he is
passing these perils his little wife is looking
on by a sort of clairvoyant sympathy, though
she is still alive. She is depicted mourning
him and embracing his mummy on earth at
the same time she accompanies him through the
shadows.

Ani ploughs and sows and reaps in the fields
of the underworld. He is carried past a dreadful
place on the back of the cow Hathor. After
as many adventures as Browning's Childe
Roland he steps into the judgment-hall of
the gods. They sit in majestic rows. He
makes the proper sacrifices, and advances
to the scales of justice. There he sees his
own heart weighed against the ostrich-feather

of Truth, by the jackal-god Anubis, who has
already presided at his embalming. His own
soul, in the form of a human-headed hawk,
watches the ceremony. His ghost, which is
another entity, looks through the door with
his little wife. Both of them watch with tense
anxiety. The fate of every phase of his personality
depends upon the purity of his heart.

Lying in wait behind Anubis is a monster,
part crocodile, part lion, part hippopotamus.
This terror will eat the heart of Ani if it is found
corrupt. At last he is declared justified.
Thoth, the ibis-headed God of Writing, records
the verdict on his tablet. The justified Ani
moves on past the baffled devourer, with the
mystic presence of his little wife rejoicing at
his side. They go to the awful court of Osiris.
She makes sacrifice with him there. The God
of the Dead is indeed a strange deity, a seated
semi-animated mummy, with all the appurtenances
of royalty, and with the four sons of
Horus on a lotus before him, and his two wives,
Isis and Nephthys, standing behind his throne
with their hands on his shoulders.

The justified soul now boards the boat in
which the sun rides as it journeys through the
night. He rises a glorious boatman in the

morning, working an oar to speed the craft
through the high ocean of the noon sky. Henceforth
he makes the eternal round with the sun.
Therefore in Ancient Egypt the roll was called,
not the Book of the Dead, but The Chapters
on Coming Forth by Day.

This book on motion pictures does not profess
to be an expert treatise on Egyptology
as well. The learned folk are welcome to
amend the modernisms that have crept into
it. But the fact remains that something like
this story in one form or another held Egypt
spell-bound for many hundred years. It was
the force behind every mummification. It was
the reason for the whole Egyptian system of
life, death, and entombment, for the man not
embalmed could not make the journey. So the
explorer finds the Egyptian with a roll of this
papyrus as a guide-book on his mummy breast.
The soul needed to return for refreshment
periodically to the stone chamber, and the
mummy mutilated or destroyed could not entertain
the guest. Egypt cried out through
thousands of years for the ultimate resurrection
of the whole man, his coming forth by day.

We need not fear that a story that so dominated
a race will be lost on modern souls when

vividly set forth. Is it too much to expect that
some American prophet-wizard of the future
will give us this film in the spirit of an Egyptian
priest?

The Greeks, the wisest people in our limited
system of classics, bowed down before the
Egyptian hierarchy. That cult must have
had a fine personal authority and glamour to
master such men. The unseen mysteries were
always on the Egyptian heart as a burden and
a consolation, and though there may have
been jugglers in the outer courts of these
temples, as there have been in the courts of all
temples, no mere actor could make an Egyptian
priest of himself. Their very alphabet has a
regal enchantment in its lines, and the same
æsthetic-mystical power remains in their pylons
and images under the blaze of the all-revealing
noonday sun.

Here is a nation, America, going for dreams
into caves as shadowy as the tomb of Queen
Thi. There they find too often, not that ancient
priestess and ruler, nor any of her kin, nor yet
Ani the scribe, nor yet any of the kings, but
shabby rags of fancy, or circuses that were
better in the street.

Because ten million people daily enter into

the cave, something akin to Egyptian wizardry,
certain national rituals, will be born. By
studying the matter of being an Egyptian
priest for a little while, the author-producer
may learn in the end how best to express and
satisfy the spirit-hungers that are peculiarly
American. It is sometimes out of the oldest
dream that the youngest vision is born.