THE MOVIE AS THE HOPE OF CIVILIZATION
NO conscientious writer begins the final chapter of a book that has engaged his energies for a considerable period of time without a feeling of mingled regret and apprehension. He lays aside reluctantly a piece of work which, at its inception, seemed worth doing, and whose doing has given him real pleasure; and, at the same time, he is haunted by the fear that for the attainment of the purpose which he has had in view he has left something of vital importance unsaid, has failed to marshal his facts, figures, suggestions and arguments to the best advantage, and may have allowed at times his own enthusiasm for the subject he has had in hand to repel his less sympathetic readers. This latter possibility is especially disquieting to a writer who has endeavored to stress the significance of the movie, in its constantly multiplying manifestations, as a new but possibly determining factor in the struggle of modern civilization to save itself from the many foes besetting it. It is hard for “the man on the street,” a clear-headed but rather unimaginative being, for whom, among others, this book is written, to admit that what has seemed to him for years past to be but a more or less interesting form of amusement, too much given to errors of taste and judgment, has become, of late, through an amazingly rapid process of evolution, a world power, the influence of which upon the lives of individuals and of nations can not easily be over-estimated. But the business, politics and international affairs of the world are dominated for the most part by this same man on the street, and it is imperative, for the sake of his own ultimate welfare, as well as for the good of the race at large, that he be made to realize that the screen as an entertainer, educator, drummer, possessing a monopoly of the race’s only universal language, is worthy of his most earnest attention.
In a letter recently written by President Harding to President Sills of Bowdoin College is to be found the following interesting prophecy:
We shall from this time forward have a much more adequate conception of the essential unity of the whole story of mankind, and a keener realization of the fact that all its factors must be weighed and appraised if any of them are to be accurately estimated and understood. I feel strongly that such a broader view of history, if it can be implanted in the community’s mind in the future through the efforts of educators and writers, will contribute greatly to uphold the hands and strengthen the efforts of those who will have to deal with the great problem of human destiny, particularly with that of preserving peace and outlawing war.
This recently accepted broader view of history which, as President Harding says, is an influence making for peace, a new ally to the world forces struggling for a higher and better civilization, can not be implanted in the minds of the public, as I have demonstrated in the first chapter of this book, through educators and writers employing only the old media for the dissemination of their teachings. Neither the book, the rostrum, the pulpit, the printed word, nor all of them combined, have made, nor can they make, that kind of impress upon the much-too-illiterate public which will compel the race to cease committing its habitual crimes and blunders.
But, strangely enough, at the very moment when the enlightened minds of all nations, through the words of contemporary statesmen, scholars and writers, have become convinced of the “essential unity” of human history there has been granted to mankind a medium for the universal dissemination of new ideas, discoveries, facts and generalizations that has in it the power to perform for the race a service the necessity for which President Harding has eloquently demonstrated. Scientists and historians have of late served as continuity writers for the great picture drama of man’s past, and, lo, the story of the race reveals itself not as scattered, unrelated incidents but as a majestic, coördinated tale, but partially told, whose dénouement may be more splendid than we have hitherto dared to hope it could be.
No student of world affairs can fail to be impressed, despite the cataclysm that overtook the race in 1914, by the pathetic but hopeful and inspiring fact that mankind, by a reasonable and not too difficult confinement of his energies to civilized, peaceful, constructive activities, could raise itself to a much higher plane of civilization in a comparatively short time from the slough of despondency in which it now finds itself. All that is necessary to give Man the buoyancy, courage and incentive necessary to overcome the evils that beset the world is the assurance that the iconoclasm that periodically destroys his own handiwork, the destructive mischievousness of an evil spirit that he has not as yet exorcised, shall never again be allowed to function, that wide-spread wars shall be permanently relegated to the bloody, accusatory past. The osteopaths assert that a slight maladjustment of even a small bone in a man’s skeleton may doom him to death from some fatal malady seemingly unrelated to the framework of his body. Whatsoever may be the truth in this assertion, it serves to illustrate the point I am making, namely, that the cause of war—any war, small or great,—appears to be almost always ludicrously insignificant compared to the damage it does. We are always face to face with the hideous fact that any slight dislocation of the bony structure of modern civilization might, as was shown by the recent war of wars, bring about its complete annihilation. Surely it is incumbent upon us, if we are not, as a race, madmen or morons, to take full advantage of any new medium or method that presents itself for the safeguarding of peace on earth, for the furtherance of good will to men.
Since that red day in June, 1914, when the assassin Gavrilo Princip fired the shot that not only echoed around the world but almost overturned the very pillars of civilization’s temple, two antagonistic tendencies upon the part of mankind have displayed themselves with unprecedented impressiveness. Man’s destructiveness has been raised to the nth power, while his constructive ingenuity has been exhibited in an amazing and encouraging way. The laboratories of the world to-day are solving problems the solution of which places the human race absolutely in control of its own destiny. It may, if it so chooses, commit suicide through high explosives or poison gas, or it may devote itself successfully to the overthrow and annihilation of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, War, Famine, Poverty and Disease.
Now what bearing has all this upon the subject-matter of this book, what has a biography of the movie got to do with the choice mankind must presently make between a higher civilization and a return to savagery, between the call of the millennium and the lure of the jungle, between science making earth a paradise and science making earth a hell? If my preceding chapters have not supplied a convincing answer to this query, let me, even though I repeat myself, endeavor, before I bring this labor of love to a close, to formulate a concise, but comprehensive and convincing, answer to a question that future generations may consider the most important that the soul of Man ever asked of the physical universe. Is it not conceivable that posterity will laud us of to-day for inventing the Esperanto of the Eye and marvel at us because we failed to make full use of it to attain that enlightenment which is the sine qua non of our race’s salvation? May not our descendants revere us for inventing the screen, while, at the same time, they mock at us for our delay in taking advantage of its highest possibilities as an ally to progress, as a defense against racial deterioration?
In various parts of the world of late, in the Arctic regions, in South and Central America, in Mexico and New Mexico, in South Africa and Egypt, in Asia Minor and elsewhere, archæologists have, through excavations and allied activities, brought to light the remains of prehistoric civilizations so remote in time and so high in character that a new aspect has been given to various periods in the progress of the race from the cave and jungle to Paris and New York. It is unquestionable that Man during the countless ages that have passed has attained at times in various localities a condition of cultured enlightenment that appears admirable from our modern point of view only to lose it again either through internal or external foes, or through both combined. The outstanding and highly significant fact is this, that the human race, no matter how splendid a development it might display sporadically and locally, could make no general and permanent progress until the nations had devised some method of wide-spread intercommunication. The earth is a graveyard of great cities and great peoples who were forced to pass into oblivion without revealing to the outer barbarians of their time the secret of their greatness. Nor was a highly civilized people in one part of the world able to form ties with some equally advanced people far afield—and so, though they both possessed the key to the higher knowledge, they were ignorant of each other and both were doomed eventually to perish.
To-day civilization, so far as its surface manifestations are concerned, is not a localized but a world-wide phenomenon. It can not be completely buried, as have been so many of its miniature predecessors. The Congo has its telephones and the Arctic region its wireless. But in so far as modern civilization is more comprehensive than the Babylonian or the Egyptian, is not provincial but cosmopolitan, so would its downfall be more tragically appalling than any catastrophe that has yet afflicted the human race. And from all parts of the world come to us the voices of observant men and women who, alive to the warnings vouchsafed to us by the recent war of wars, are imploring humanity to look not with passion but with reason at the situation of the world to-day and to take measures at once that shall drag us back from the edge of the precipice we have reached.
Has the Esperanto of the Eye, the only medium the race has ever devised for universal intercommunication, come too late to rescue mankind from impending doom? Not if rulers, law-makers, teachers, preachers, diplomatists, statesmen, all men and women who influence the heart, mind and conscience of human groups, small or great, realize in time that in the screen the race has found a medium which, rightly used, could mould for it a future infinitely superior to its deplorable past.
There will be, I fully realize, those who will jeer at the basic idea underlying the contention that I have made in this little book, ridicule me for believing that, although a man cannot raise himself by his boot-straps, mankind at large can elevate itself by means of the regenerated, ever-increasingly-potent movie. Nevertheless, as I have been describing in some detail the evolutionary steps that have raised the screen from a toy to a world power, have broadened its scope from a plaything to a sleepless influence affecting the destinies of men and nations, I have been constantly more convinced that the suggestion regarding a great world centre for the enlightenment of mankind through visual instruction, made in my first chapter, becomes every month more feasible, as it also, as the days pass and the world appears to go from bad to worse, grows more imperatively necessary. The screen is a mirror in which the race can see itself as it has been and as it is, and a tongue, comprehended of all men, that might, if it rises to its great mission, bring salvation to the world.
“A lighthouse of the past, a university of universities, a fountain of all revealed knowledge, inculcated through a medium understood of all men, a Mecca for the pilgrims of progress from all comers of the earth,”—that is my dream, and, for having dreamed it, I know that I am a better man. By the same token, the human race would become a better race if it possessed the foresight and common-sense to make my dream come true!