 | CHAPTER XX The art of the moving picture, |  |
CHAPTER XX
THE PROPHET-WIZARD
The whirlwind of cowboys and Indians with
which the photoplay began, came about because
this instrument, in asserting its genius, was
feeling its way toward the most primitive
forms of life it could find.
Now there is a tendency for even wilder
things. We behold the half-draped figures
living in tropical islands or our hairy forefathers
acting out narratives of the stone age.
The moving picture conventionality permits
an abbreviation of drapery. If the primitive
setting is convincing, the figure in the grass-robe
or buffalo hide at once has its rights over
the healthful imagination.
There is in this nation of moving-picture-goers
a hunger for tales of fundamental life that are
not yet told. The cave-man longs with an
incurable homesickness for his ancient day.
One of the fine photoplays of primeval life is
chapter two.
We face the exigency the world over of vast
instruments like national armies being played
against each other as idly and aimlessly as the
checker-men on the cracker-barrels of corner
groceries. And this invention, the kinetoscope,
which affects or will affect as many people as
the guns of Europe, is not yet understood in
its powers, particularly those of bringing back
the primitive in a big rich way. The primitive
is always a new and higher beginning to the
man who understands it. Not yet has the
producer learned that the feeling of the crowd
is patriarchal, splendid. He imagines the
people want nothing but a silly lark.
All this apparatus and opportunity, and no
immortal soul! Yet by faith and a study of
the signs we proclaim that this lantern of
wizard-drama is going to give us in time the
visible things in the fulness of their primeval
force, and some that have been for a long time
invisible. To speak in a metaphor, we are
going to have the primitive life of Genesis, then
all that evolution after: Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, and
on to a new revelation of St. John. In this
is to be retraced, the same round on a higher
spiral of life.
Our democratic dream has been a middleclass
aspiration built on a bog of toil-soddened
minds. The piles beneath the castle of our
near-democratic arts were rotting for lack of
folk-imagination. The Man with the Hoe
had no spark in his brain. But now a light
is blazing. We can build the American soul
broad-based from the foundations. We can
begin with dreams the veriest stone-club warrior
can understand, and as far as an appeal to the
eye can do it, lead him in fancy through every
phase of life to the apocalyptic splendors.
This progress, according to the metaphor of
this chapter, will be led by prophet-wizards.
These were the people that dominated the cavemen
of old. But what, more specifically, are
prophet-wizards?
Let us consider two kinds of present-day
people: scientific inventors, on the one hand,
and makers of art and poetry and the like,
on the other. The especial producers of art
and poetry that we are concerned with in this
chapter we will call prophet-wizards: men like
Albert Dürer, Rembrandt, Blake, Elihu Vedder,
Maeterlinck, Yeats, Francis Thompson.
They have a certain unearthly fascination in
some one or many of their works. A few
other men might be added to the list. Most
great names are better described under other
categories, though as much beloved in their
own way. But these are especially adapted
to being set in opposition to a list of mechanical
inventors that might be called realists by contrast:
the Wright brothers, and H. Pierpont
Langley, Thomas A. Edison, Charles Steinmetz,
John Hays Hammond, Hudson Maxim, Graham
Bell.
The prophet-wizards are of various schools.
But they have a common tendency and character
in bringing forth a type of art peculiarly at
war with the realistic civilization science has
evolved. It is one object of this chapter to
show that, when it comes to a clash between
the two forces, the wizards should rule, and the
realists should serve them.
The two functions go back through history,
sometimes at war, other days in alliance. The
poet and the scientist were brethren in the
centuries of alchemy. Tennyson, bearing in
mind such a period, took the title of Merlin
Gleam.
Wizards and astronomers were one when
the angels sang in Bethlehem, "Peace on Earth,
Good Will to Men." There came magicians,
saying, "Where is he that is born king of the
Jews, for we have seen his star in the east and
have come to worship him?" The modern
world in its gentler moments seems to take a
peculiar thrill of delight from these travellers,
perhaps realizing what has been lost from
parting with such gentle seers and secular
diviners. Every Christmas half the magazines
set them forth in richest colors, riding across
the desert, following the star to the same manger
where the shepherds are depicted.
Those wizard kings, whatever useless charms
and talismans they wore, stood for the unknown
quantity in spiritual life. A magician is a man
who lays hold on the unseen for the mere joy
of it, who steals, if necessary, the holy bread
and the sacred fire. He is often of the remnant
of an ostracized and disestablished priesthood.
He is a free-lance in the soul-world, owing
final allegiance to no established sect. The
fires of prophecy are as apt to descend upon
him as upon members of the established faith.
the wildness and the glory of it, and not always
to compel stiff-necked people to do right.
It seems to me that the scientific and poetic
functions of society should make common cause
again, if they are not, as in Merlin's time,
combined in one personality. They must recognize
that they serve the same society, but
with the understanding that the prophetic function
is the most important, the wizard vocation
the next, and the inventors' and realists' genius
important indeed, but the third consideration.
The war between the scientists and the
prophet-wizards has come about because of
the half-defined ambition of the scientists to
rule or ruin. They give us the steam-engine,
the skyscraper, the steam-heat, the flying machine,
the elevated railroad, the apartment
house, the newspaper, the breakfast food, the
weapons of the army, the weapons of the
navy, and think that they have beautified our
existence.
Moreover some one rises at this point to
make a plea for the scientific imagination.
He says the inventor-scientists have brought
us the mystery of electricity, which is no hocus-pocus,
but a special manifestation of the Immanent
the student in the laboratory brought us the
X-ray, the wireless telegraph, the mystery of
radium, the mystery of all the formerly unharnessed
power of God which man is beginning
to gather into the hollow of his hand.
The one who pleads for the scientific imagination
points out that Edison has been called
the American Wizard. All honor to Edison and
his kind. And I admit specifically that Edison
took the first great mechanical step to give us
the practical kinetoscope and make it possible
that the photographs, even of inanimate objects
thrown upon the mirror-screen, may become
celestial actors. But the final phase of the
transfiguration is not the work of this inventor
or any other. As long as the photoplays are in
the hands of men like Edison they are mere
voodooism. We have nothing but Moving
Day, as heretofore described. It is only in
the hands of the prophetic photoplaywright
and allied artists that the kinetoscope reels
become as mysterious and dazzling to the thinking
spirit as the wheels of Ezekiel in the first
chapter of his prophecy. One can climb into
the operator's box and watch the sword-like
stream of light till he is as dazzled in flesh
the lamp. But this is while a glittering vision
and not a mere invention is being thrown upon
the screen.
The scientific man can explain away the
vision as a matter of the technique of double
exposure, double printing, trick-turning, or
stopping down. And having reduced it to
terms and shown the process, he expects us
to become secular and casual again. But of
course the sun itself is a mere trick of heat and
light, a dynamo, an incandescent globe, to the
man in the laboratory. To us it must be a fire
upon the altar.
Transubstantiation must begin. Our young
magicians must derive strange new pulse-beats
from the veins of the earth, from the sap
of the trees, from the lightning of the sky,
as well as the alchemical acids, metals, and
flames. Then they will kindle the beginning
mysteries for our cause. They will build up
a priesthood that is free, yet authorized to freedom.
It will be established and disestablished
according to the intrinsic authority of the light
revealed.
Now for a closer view of this vocation.
The picture of Religious Splendor has its
scenes, which, in the hands of the best commercial
producers, can be made as worth while
as the work of men like Tissot. Such films are
by no means to be thought of lightly. This sort
of work will remain in the minds of many of
the severely orthodox as the only kind of a
religious picture worthy of classification. But
there are many further fields.
Just as the wireless receiving station or the
telephone switchboard become heroes in the
photoplay, so Aaron's rod that confounded the
Egyptians, the brazen serpent that Moses uplifted
in the wilderness, the ram's horn that
caused the fall of Jericho, the mantle of Elijah
descending upon the shoulders of Elisha from
the chariot of fire, can take on a physical electrical
power and a hundred times spiritual
meaning that they could not have in the dead
stage properties of the old miracle play or the
realism of the Tissot school. The waterfall and
the tossing sea are dramatis personæ in the
ordinary film romance. So the Red Sea overwhelming
Pharaoh, the fires of Nebuchadnezzar's
furnace sparing and sheltering the three holy
children, can become celestial actors. And
winged couriers can appear, in the pictures,
to Joshua, saying, "As captain of the
host of the Lord am I now come."
The pure mechanic does not accept the
doctrine. "Your alleged supernatural appearance,"
he says, "is based on such a simple fact
as this: two pictures can be taken on one
film."
But the analogy holds. Many primitive
peoples are endowed with memories that are
double photographs. The world faiths, based
upon centuries of these appearances, are
none the less to be revered because machine-ridden
men have temporarily lost the power
of seeing their thoughts as pictures in the air,
and for the time abandoned the task of adding
to tradition.
Man will not only see visions again, but
machines themselves, in the hands of prophets,
will see visions. In the hands of commercial
men they are seeing alleged visions, and the term
"vision" is a part of moving-picture studio slang,
unutterably cheapening religion and tradition.
When Confucius came, he said one of his tasks
was the rectification of names. The leaders
of this age should see that this word "vision"
comes to mean something more than a piece
serious minds that the mass of men shall never
again see pictures out of Heaven except through
such mediums as the kinetoscope lens, let all
the higher forces of our land courageously lay
hold upon this thing that saves us from perpetual
spiritual blindness.
When the thought of primitive man, embodied
in misty forms on the landscape, reached epic
proportions in the Greek, he saw the Olympians
more plainly than he beheld the Acropolis.
Myron, Polykleitos, Phidias, Scopas, Lysippus,
Praxiteles, discerned the gods and demigods
so clearly they afterward cut them from the
hard marble without wavering. Our guardian
angels of to-day must be as clearly seen and
nobly hewn.
A double mental vision is as fundamental
in human nature as the double necessity for
air and light. It is as obvious as that a thing
can be both written and spoken. We have
maintained that the kinetoscope in the hands
of artists is a higher form of picture writing.
In the hands of prophet-wizards it will be a
higher form of vision-seeing.
I have said that the commercial men are
seeing alleged visions. Take, for instance, the
Dante. Though it has a scattering of noble
passages, and in some brief episodes it is an
enhancement of Gustave Doré, taking it as a
whole, it is a false thing. It is full of apparitions
worked out with mechanical skill, yet
Dante's soul is not back of the fires and swords
of light. It gives to the uninitiated an outline
of the stage paraphernalia of the Inferno.
It has an encyclopædic value. If Dante
himself had been the high director in the plenitude
of his resources, it might still have had
that hollowness. A list of words making a
poem and a set of apparently equivalent pictures
forming a photoplay may have an entirely
different outcome. It may be like trying to
see a perfume or listen to a taste. Religion
that comes in wholly through the eye has a
new world in the films, whose relation to the
old is only discovered by experiment and intuition,
patience and devotion.
But let us imagine the grandson of an Italian
immigrant to America, a young seer, trained
in the photoplay technique by the high American
masters, knowing all the moving picture
resources as Dante knew Italian song and
mediæval learning. Assume that he has a
be a Modernist Catholic if you will. Let him
begin his message in the timber lands of Minnesota
or the forests of Alaska. "In midway of
this our mortal life I found me in a gloomy
wood astray." Then let him paint new pictures
of just punishment beyond the grave, and
merciful rehabilitation and great reward. Let
his Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise be built of
those things which are deepest and highest in
the modern mind, yet capable of emerging in
picture-writing form.
Men are needed, therefore they will come.
And lest they come weeping, accursed, and
alone, let us ask, how shall we recognize them?
There is no standard by which to discern the
true from the false prophet, except the mood
that is engendered by contemplating the messengers
of the past. Every man has his own
roll call of noble magicians selected from the
larger group. But here are the names with
which this chapter began, with some words on
their work.
Albert Dürer is classed as a Renaissance
painter. Yet his art has its dwelling-place in
the early Romanesque savageness and strangeness.
And the reader remembers Dürer's
obsessed Kipling in The Light that Failed.
But the wonder-quality went into nearly all
the Dürer wood-cuts and etchings. Rembrandt
is a prophet-wizard, not only in his
shadowy portraits, but in his etchings of holy
scenes even his simplest cobweb lines become
incantations. Other artists in the high tides
of history have had kindred qualities, but
coming close to our day, Elihu Vedder, the
American, the illustrator of the Rubáiyát, found
it a poem questioning all things, and his very
illustrations answer in a certain fashion with
winds of infinity, and bring the songs of Omar
near to the Book of Job. Vedder's portraits
of Lazarus and Samson are conceptions that
touch the hem of the unknown. George Frederick
Watts was a painter of portraits of the
soul itself, as in his delineations of Burne-Jones
and Morris and Tennyson.
It is a curious thing that two prophet-wizards
have combined pictures and song. Blake and
Rossetti, whatever the failure of their technique,
never lacked in enchantment. Students of
the motion picture side of poetry would
naturally turn to such men for spiritual precedents.
Blake, that strange Londoner, in his
enchanter doing his work with the engraving
tool in his hand.
Rossetti's Dante's Dream is a painting on
the edge of every poet's paradise. As for
the poetry of these two men, there are Blake's
Songs of Innocence, and Rossetti's Blessed
Damozel and his Burden of Nineveh.
As for the other poets, we have Coleridge,
the author of Christabel, that piece of winter
witchcraft, Kubla Khan, that oriental dazzlement,
and the Ancient Mariner, that most
English of all this list of enchantments. Of
Tennyson's work, besides Merlin and the
Gleam, there are the poems when the mantle
was surely on his shoulders: The Lady of
Shalott, The Lotus Eaters, Sir Galahad, and
St. Agnes' Eve.
Edgar Poe, always a magician, blends this
power with the prophetical note in the poem,
The Haunted Palace, and in the stories of William
Wilson, The Black Cat and The Tell-tale
Heart. This prophet-wizard side of a man
otherwise a wizard only, has been well illustrated
in The Avenging Conscience photoplay.
From Maeterlinck we have The Bluebird
and many another dream. I devoutly hope
this master. But some disciple of his
should conquer the photoplay medium, giving
us great original works.
Yeats has bestowed upon us The Land of
Heart's Desire, The Secret Rose, and many
another piece of imaginative glory. Let us
hope that we may be spared any attempts to
hastily paraphrase his wonders for the motion
pictures. But the man that reads Yeats will
be better prepared to do his own work in the
films, or to greet the young new masters when
they come.
Finally, Francis Thompson, in The Hound
of Heaven, has written a song that the young
wizard may lean upon forevermore for private
guidance. It is composed of equal parts of
wonder and conscience. With this poem in
his heart, the roar of the elevated railroad will
be no more in his ears, and he will dream of
palaces of righteousness, and lead other men
to dream of them till the houses of mammon
fade away.
| CHAPTER XX The art of the moving picture, | |