Perhaps. But you will never speak with the tongues of angels—and of men. I will admit the dulness of the theatre if you will grant the absurdity of the mechanics you employ. I will ask you only if the moving picture will ever become human?
D. G.
I do not know. I am not sure that humanity is very translatable. But we have ecstasy. In the projector lies all wonderful adventure, and I go into a dingy, stuffy, moving-picture house with the foreknowledge that something strange and wonderful, though it be at times cheap and vulgar, will be shown me. In a drab world the movie is an instrument of miracles. The gross caricatures are perhaps truer than the realism of the theatre. I see a Rabelaisian madness in the millions of broken plates. In a thousand flying custard pies I recognize an eternal impulse of humankind. In the mad comings and goings of impossible characters I still see some persuasion that life is “wanton and wondrous and forever well.” Here, in this theatre, life was once glorified. But the grandeur has died out and we must restore it as we can.
W. P. E.
Not in my time, I fear. For me the past is not dead, so you cannot restore it. And here, in the end, you have my last objection to the moving picture. You are destroying the imagination of mankind. There are no more mysteries since your work has come into being. Everything is visible. Everything is explained.
D. G.
Except the soul, my dear sir.[4]