ing less than the spiritual dominion of the whole earth. Hence his expeditions to well-nigh every state in Europe, and his upset with the United States, jealous, for their prerogative of individuality, of all importations from the Old World. The members of his family in charge of what headquarters would fain have regarded as the 'American province,' having to choose between the two allegiances, consented to become 'good Americans' by declining to take their orders from London. He never forgot that, if indeed he ever forgave. It was Gallicanism in a new phase. He might have done better if he had confined his labors to his own country, for necessarily what he gained in breadth he lost in depth. You can hardly have it both ways when the supply of energy is more or less a fixed quantity. He tried to meet the difficulty by rising to every opportunity of improved facilities of transit: at the age of seventy-four he took to the motor-car to enable him to increase his output. In our day he would have been scouring the skies at the rate of 100 miles an hour, and shouting sermons through the megaphone as he sped.

The Manchester Guardian

His travels-proportions duly allowed for-reduced those of St. Paul to a promenade. He shared every hardship with his people; and if any complained that he took more than his portion he could have said, like the animal in the fable, ‘Because I am the lion.' Those of his household knew how it told on his strength; he alone seemed unaware. One of his eyes had long failed him; and, at the age of 83, the other had to be removed by an operation, followed by tortures that left him no peace; and total blindness supervened. All this without a service missed, beyond the bare necessities of the case. Three months after, as one of his biographers puts it, he laid down his sword.'

He had reserved the power of naming a successor, and he exercised it in favor of his son, the eldest of his children, who, since boyhood, had known his mind. This right of choice pertains to every holder of the office: the shepherd chooses the flock, not the flock the shepherd. But, as all history shows, there is no mortal means of ensuring the succession of faculty. The difficulty must be left as it stands.

I CONFESS to a strong repugnance to what the Daily Mail, in one of its fitful tributes to the classics, calls the 'Kinema,' but known to its multitude of lovers as the 'Cinema,' or the 'Cinny,' or the 'Pictures.' This disThis distaste, far from having weakened, has strengthened with time. On the rare occasions when I go I am always entertained, though feebly, I admit, and with a sense of surprise. On the other hand, I am always annoyed, irritated, and thoroughly incensed at something or other. There is also something about the atmosphere of these places perhaps I ought to say palaces, picture palaces that is disturbing, and on reflection I feel sure that it is their air of finality.

By air of finality I mean their obvious assertion that they are the last thing in the world, that, after æons of unparalleled effort homo sapiens has at length produced this. And what is And what is this? A structure of tin, iron, or wood and cement (mostly cement) with gilded protuberances as ornament, flimsy as a building, as architecture inferior to the mud huts of the Pallywals, and inside the darkness of the Styx and a picture, full of scratches and streaks, of men galloping on horses or burglars climbing into a house or soldiers marching past a bandstand. But I mean more than this by their 'air of finality.' I mean that one has the feeling that this is where the great mass of the population gets its real knowledge of the world, and that what they see on the films they believe. This is their well of truth, and they genu

inely believe that truth can be obtained for sixpence, or, now that prices have gone up, for one and six. Even the peasant of one thousand years ago, who could neither read nor write, knew better than this, and in the legend in which he tells us what life has taught him he makes a god, even Odin, pluck out an eye in payment of a tiny draught of true knowledge. But the men and women of to-day — the townsmen and women-whose ignorance is all the more abysmal and dangerous for being coated with a thin foil of superficial knowledge, really think that the world lies behind a turnstile in Oxford Street or Tottenham Court Road.

The cocksureness of the film is, to the uncontaminated spectator, amazing. It will give you everything exactly as it happened. Time and place present no obstacles to it. It will show you the Rape of Helen or the Fall of Troy or the Sack of Rome as readily as last week's polo match. Nothing in history is safe from the falsifying corruption of this most monstrous fakir. It would give us the Crucifixion if it were not restrained by a still flickering religious sentiment, and its distortions of contemporary events are as bad as its delusive spectacles of the past.

But, you will say, what about historical novels and all that literature which represents life, to say nothing of the theatre! To which I answer that literature and the drama live by their imaginative truth. The film makes no effort to attain imaginative

truth, just as it makes no effort to appeal to the imagination. It simply says: 'You would like to see Marshal Foch? Here he is.' But its picture of Marshal Foch is a lie, in the sense that a photograph is a lie. We have a use for photographs; they serve a practical purpose; but if a friend dies we know that one of his letters brings his presence back to us more vividly than a million photographs. So that at its best the film does little for us, but when it gives instead of Marshal Foch at the Guildhall, Julius Cæsar landing in Britain, it does something which outrages life, mocking us with a ridiculous substitute for which no abuse is too strong.

The only service the film can do us is to render an eternal picture of events which it has recorded as they happened. As an art medium it is the clumsiest and most inefficient ever devised by the wit of man; although many people think, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that it must be the best simply because it is the newest. But let us imagine any single job that an imaginative artist might set himself to do. Let us imagine Mr. Wells setting out to reveal the soul of a man like Kipps or Mr. Polly! Imagine him having to do it by means of a film! Put Kipps in his draper's shop and does not the film immediately scream for a roaring farce? I could make a magnificent film, far better than anything I have ever seen, out of a young man serving in a draper's shop, showing the customers coming in, the shop-girls, the shop-walkers, the rolls of cloth, the ribbons, laces, hosiery, etc., all in action; but as for revealing character Mr. Wells could reveal more of man's character in a page of print than any billion-dollar American company in ten miles of film.

But the Picture Palace rests secure on the modern city-dweller's lack of imagination. Art demands imaginative power in the onlooker, reader, or listeners, whether it be painting, literature, or music. The film demands none; like the merest gossip it will tell you all. It whizzes before your eyes reality, the world — and at such lightning speed that nothing is left upon the brain but a confused blur. It gives you that aspect of life which an inhabitant of Mars would get who stood for a few moments on an island in Oxford or Piccadilly Circus and gazed upon the traffic of the reality locked within the breasts of the passers-by and of the lives they lead he would know nothing, but yet he would be under the delusion that he saw all. He would be under that delusion if he were a being of little imagination; which is precisely why the Picture Theatre is so dangerous a pleasure for its habitués, for it only lives by flattering and playing to that weakness.

But now let me tell you of my last visit to a Picture Palace. We walked slowly down the street looking for it, and at last we saw close to the pavement a colossal figure covered in gold lace. We passed behind him, took our tickets, and proceeded upstairs, where, blinking in the dark, we sat, or half reclined, upon comfortable divans. We had been enticed thither, as a famous lady novelist would say, by an advertisement of a Charlie Chaplin film, for Charlie Chaplin seems to me to be the one genuine artist the film has given us. We discovered later that Charlie was on next week. This is the sort of thing that will always happen to a casual visitor. The picture showing was a drama of love, secret police, patriotism, German spies, and the Wild West all linked together in the most efficient American method; the

idea obviously being to combine into one film as many popular stunts as possible. We were jumped from hotel to ranch and from ranch to hotel and succeeded in witnessing in every one of them the most exciting moments in the lives of a number of men, and this, I will admit, had much of the pleasure in an intensified form of a good detective yarn. The only objection I had was to the propagandist element in it and the crudity of the letterpress shown between the scenes. These explanations are the veriest drivel and ought to be cut. When a spy is found with a letter which the plot demands shall incriminate him let us not be shown the letter, which in the present instance read something like this:

'Stir up trouble between Mexico and the United States; get bombs ready, and graves dug.'

Why show rubbish of this sort? One does not want plot or coherence or intelligibility or explanations in a film picture; one only wants exciting scenes,

Land and Water

men fighting or being ducked in ponds or being tracked by bloodhounds.

The next picture was a comic one. In it two milk-bottle thieves had a series of wild adventures in the mansion of a retired cigar merchant. This film was full of invention; one ingenious incident succeeded another, and in places it was uproariously funny. Perhaps the best bit was where the two thieves try to smuggle away a safe under a carpet, but it was nearly all amusing and one of the thieves was one of the best imitators of Charlie Chaplin I have seen, though he constantly missed making points where his original would have scored.

The film as a medium for farce has a future. The only films I have seen that I have enjoyed have been comic ones, although, by the way, let me record my absolute detestation of the popular ‘Mutt and Jeff.'

VOL. 15-NO. 779