That Marvel—The Movie / A Glance at Its Past, Its Promising Present and Its Significant Future

by Edward S. Van Zile

THE MOVIE’S NEW SIGNIFICANCE

With striking unanimity contemporary writers dealing with the problems vexing humanity to-day express amazement at the fact that the race has learned so little from its variegated past, that age after age it commits, under new conditions and with changes in terminology, ancient blunders resulting, as they did aforetime, in the tragedies of war, revolution, famine, epidemics and poverty. As of old, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse periodically sally forth, to have their evil way with men; more potent, through long practice, in their iconoclasm, as they have proved in recent years, than they were in the days of our ancestors. The individual, unless he be a moron, learns lessons from experience, avoids committing errors that marred his past and may become, eventually, worthy the name of a civilized, even a highly civilized, being. But there are many experts in mob psychology who despondently assert that, while the individual may demonstrate his well-nigh infinite superiority to his jungle progenitors, the seeming progress of the race as a whole has been merely illusory, that mankind is inherently as savage to-day as it was countless centuries ago.

But why should not the race at large follow the course pursued by the average individual and derive from its past errors a mandatory enlightenment enabling it to avoid those recurrent retrogressions that furnish the cynic with arguments against the proposition that mankind is gradually ascending to a higher plane of civilization? Various answers may be given to this query, but the one to which this chapter calls attention is to the effect that to the vast majority of the human race the story of mankind’s struggles and failures, triumphs and defeats, attainment of high civilizations only to lose them again, is a sealed book. The individual man can recall every detail of his experience of life and can pursue a course of safety by aid of the lighthouse of his past. If this prerogative of the individual could be magnified to include all mankind might not the time come presently when no generation would repeat the costly errors of preceding generations? Would not the mass learn and profit by experience, as does the unit?

Now, is there any possible method whereby the human race can be induced to go to school to its recorded past, to the end that our posterity may establish eventually a civilization permanently safe from the internal and external forces of disintegration that have destroyed so many mighty civilizations founded by our forefathers? Is there any way by which men in the mass may employ mass history in the same advantageous manner adopted by individuals who use their “dead selves as stepping-stones to higher things?” Lothrop Stoddard’s recent book, in which he demonstrates most ably the disquieting fact that contemporary civilization is menaced by many and grave perils, presents to a public that habitually resents disturbance of its self-complacent optimism an array of startling data making the above queries, to put it mildly, extremely pertinent. “Of the countless tribes of men,” says Stoddard, “many have perished utterly while others have stopped by the wayside, apparently incapable of going forward, and have either vegetated or sunk into decadence. Man’s trail is littered with the wrecks of dead civilizations and dotted with the graves of promising peoples stricken by an untimely end.”

But wrecks, whether they be of former civilizations or of vessels lost upon fatal rocks and reefs, have their value for succeeding nations and mariners. They serve to point warning fingers away from the shoals of destruction toward the far-flung deeps where progress and safety are to be found. It was with this thought in mind, we have no doubt, that Wells and Van Loon gave to the reading public recently their absorbingly interesting volumes dealing with the rise of man from the amœba to his present status as lord of the earth. Both these authors have been shocked and horrified by the race’s manifestation in recent years of its tendency to revert at times to the murderous practices of its cave-man progenitors. That an antidote against periodical returns upon mankind’s part to the evil practices of the past might be found in the popularization of histories telling a coherent story of our race’s ups and downs was a thought that must have come to both Wells and Van Loon when they essayed the stupendous tasks that they have so worthily accomplished. But while the basic idea underlying their activities as historians is sound—for mankind must take cognizance of its past errors if it is to indulge in hope for the future—the depressing fact confronts us that the printed book, no matter how great may be its apparent vogue, reaches but a very small percentage of even the highly intelligent public. No. If the evils afflicting mankind were to have been cured through books the race would be free to-day from the major disorders that threaten the health, if not the life, of existing civilization.

Upon this point, Frederick Palmer, in his interesting and inspiring book, “The Folly of Nations,” says:

Our increasing library shelves are heavy with the records of all human activities, colossal accumulations of historical and scientific researches and the literature of imagination and philosophy—but one who seeks works on how to keep the peace finds that he has meagre references.... I have before me a list of the books and pamphlets the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace has published. If I have found little new in them, or in any books on the subject, it is because it may be needless for me to search among their details for the great truths I have seen in the vividness of gun flashes on the field of battle....

The sentence in italics above, in which Palmer asserts that the great truths that have been revealed to him have come to him not from books but from the vividness of gun flashes on the field of battle, brings us to the crux of our argument, and will be used presently as a point of departure for what may prove to be a constructive suggestion of some value. If mankind is to be taught to follow the method employed by the individual in using the errors of the past to ensure a better future the race must be enabled to visualize its past. If it refuses to gain enlightenment through books some other medium for making history the savior of posterity must be found. And it has been found. The great truths that were revealed by gun flashes to Frederick Palmer can find their way to the hearts and minds of the masses of men if we are wise and far-sighted enough to make full and intelligent use of a new medium through which Man may gaze upon the mistakes and shortcomings of his past, and, forewarned, avoid them in the future.

The race has found at last its universal language, its Esperanto not of the ear and tongue but of the eye. The evolution of the motion picture, developing in a few years from a toy kinetoscope to a Griffith wonder-worker, has made possible, for the first time in the history of humanity, an appeal to the heart and mind and soul of man that overcomes the ancient handicap of the confusion of tongues. After many centuries the check to human progress given at the Tower of Babel has come to an end at the entrance to the motion-picture palace. It has been made possible at last for history to reveal its secrets, and vouchsafe its warnings, not to the comparatively few who read scholarly books, but to the millions who, as democracy conquers the earth, have become masters of the destiny of nations.

In a brilliant and impressive address delivered last July by Will H. Hays at Boston, Mass., before the National Education Association, the speaker presented facts and figures demonstrating the marvellous progress made of late by the motion picture as a medium for instruction in both schools and colleges. He said: