XVI THE LESSONS OF THE PICTURE THEATRE
It came upon me with a sudden sense of revelation, for when I went into the theatre my thoughts were heavy with the weight of war. The friend with whom I had dined had insisted, and though at first I had refused, she had compromised with my objections. "Come and see some pictures, if you cannot face a three-act play," she had said. "I can promise you something quite remarkable, and when you have had enough, just rise and I will follow." But in the end it was my friend who suggested leaving, because she had a long day's work before her and knew that I too had an engagement nearly two hundred miles from town. And when I told her that she had shown me more than she herself had seen, and that I would not have missed that couple of hours' illumination on any account, she merely said she would not attempt to understand, but was very glad.
I have been greatly concerned with problems of peace and war from the woman's view-point. So many women have written to me about the question, some from far-away corners of the States, others from remote English country-sides. I feel the ferment in the blood of every thinking woman; I know how surely and inevitably the time is coming when men and women must face the problem of world control side by side. It has seemed to me that only one force can avail to end war, and that is the force of education supplementing the efforts and strengthening the bands of brotherhood. But how should one make the dry bones of education live for those to whom education is now no more than dry bones? We can reach the children whose imagination is yet immature, how reach the grown up, immersed in the struggle for life and bringing even to their leisure the harassed mind and tired brain? How make the path clear, how stir to the depths their slumbering sense of the world that lies beyond their working day? When I went into the Scala Theatre in London the problem was a baffling one, when I had seen "The Birth of a Nation" I realised the truth that such pictures in the hands of men with insight and vision may yet move the world.
We of England may well forget the follies of our forebears, and the American with Anglo-Saxon blood in his veins may well forgive them, while both tingle with pride at the accomplishment of those "Mayflower" Pilgrims who paved the way for the coming of a nation destined I think in the near future to become the wealthiest, most powerful, and, one hopes, the most progressive on the face of the earth. But who realised, save in a vague and uncertain fashion, the true glory of America's brief history? Who could visualise the scenes to which statesmen and orators recur from time to time? Of the general public few indeed if any, to the rank and file the experience of seeing the past flower into life before them must have been such a one as Keats describes—
"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken,
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise
Silent, upon a peak in Darien."