of shooting. In itself that is nothing; but its passage leaves a streak of brightness across the meannesses of daily life, across the dull passions and heavy stupidities of existence." What is literature but that?

Let your story be like that arrow, strong, tested, and well sped with the full force of your creative powers into the void. None of you will ever send it on so long a flight. But, in pondering deeply what you have seen of the fitting of this arrow to the bow, you may learn more than anyone can teach you about the art of writing. Remember that archery is as old an art as minstrelsy, and ancient brother to it. W. D. Kennedy.

HE history of the motion picture is

written in terms of conflict, which has passed through various stages: fights against patent monopolies, struggle for stars, and competition for the ownership of key theatres in large cities. Now, for the first time, it appears that the industrial situation has stabilized, with some four or five strong corporations, which not only produce pictures, but control chains of theatres, competing for a place in the sun. The warfare must now seek a new battleground, and there are indications that it will be the quality of the picture and its dramatic values, rather than the name of the star. Fewer and better theatres, fewer and better pictures, are becoming the order of the day.

Of course, a motion picture is a huge gamble. It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions. It must be pleasing and understandable to a stratum of the public so large that it must include what psychologists call the fourteen-year-old mind, or it will be a financial failure. Here the producer faces an immutable economic law. He

must seek novelty to catch the interest of the sophisticated critics and yet the picture must be primitive to please the millions. A few outstanding men in the industry - you can count them on your fingers have learned certain principles which have enabled them to do this successfully. Yet even they realize that there are promising experiments which they dare not try on account of the risks. They are under a triple cross-fire: from the millions who must have something primitive, from the students of public morals who demand censorship of too-primitive emotional appeals, and from the critics who want something new.

In the past they have depended on literature, past and present, as a source of material, but they are realizing more and more its deficiencies. True, there is a vast storehouse of photo-dramatic ideas in the literature of the past. Yet the public likes a modern application. "Costume plays" are not popular with the producers just now. And modern literature is failing to give them what they

want, largely because it has taken forms not suitable for pictorial presentation.

These forms are the short story, the novel, and the play. Aside from its brevity, there is one serious objection to the short story. The author must maintain a unity of point of view. He must follow his main character like a hound on the scent or the reader is confused. There is little opportunity in ten thousand words to jump around and follow the destinies of characters who have wandered off somewhere else. Yet a photo-play which held the hero always before the camera would be incredibly dull. One great advantage of the camera is quick and numerous shifting of scenes to obtain variety. Some of the best effects are produced by dividing the plot thread, showing alternately the fortunes of two people or groups of people, and later re-uniting them. For example, the split in the wagon train in "The Covered Wagon." If the short story is deficient for this reason, the novel suffers equally from an altogether different disqualification. A good novel contains too much material for picturization. If you have read a novel and then gone to see a photo-play based on it, you can not have failed to notice how much material had to be eliminated. Unfortunately, the author's artistic purpose was perhaps only fully realized by the atmosphere built up by parts of the book which the scenario writer was forced to eliminate. The scenario writer must, therefore, draw upon his own resources to fill the deficiencies created by this "cutting." It is unfair to accuse him of bowdlerizing a novel, without knowing the difficulties under which he works.

Even the play must be a rather hard nut for the adapter to crack. A good tableau here and there must seem to him like an oasis in the desert of dialogue. And always there is the sad and depressing fact that, with a few exceptions like "Abie's Irish Rose," plays are written for people who don't go to the movies.

A realization of the weakness of modern literature as a source for photo-dramatic ma

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terial is reflected in the strengthening of scenario staffs and in the adoption of new experiments such as The Authors' Council of Famous Players-Lasky and in an important fillip to the demand for original scenarios. An offer of fifteen thousand dollars for picture ideas now stands open. In spite of these efforts, overhead expenses on pictures are steadily rising. Writers are vastly ignorant of what is wanted. East coast scenario departments are still working at odds with the west coast. Directors are spending unnecessary time working with continuity writers. And no one is very sure whether or not a million-dollar picture will be a success or failure until the figures are all in. Once upon a time, a certain gentleman of the trade was able to finance his pictures merely on the names of his stars. That day has gone. The critics are going to see to that. The play's the thing! But how can better plays be written and produced?

By way of parenthesis, it is an error to assume that a picture which will please this larger public need displease the more sophisticated. Far from it. Good literature itself is basically primitive, with a veneer of the sort of sophistication which the readers of the day want, or think they want. But as soon as writers desert the baser elements because of their absorption in the color and texture of the veneer, they go astray. Just now there is a how-to-do among critics about our great literary renaissance. We are supposed to be "getting down to fundamentals." It is true that we see plenty of baseness in modern fiction, especially in dialogue and in description, but this itself is only veneer, colorful perhaps, but lacking proportion, and covering a fundamental weakness in dramatic appeal.

As editor of a magazine devoted to the interests of writers, I confess to a growing sense of helplessness as to how I may point the way to the real fundamentals of creative literary effort. It has seemed to me that modern literature has come to a stale-mate.

It is waiting, as industry waited for generations, for advances that scholarship alone can make. The series of atomic weights may seem a far cry from the automobile, but the automobile would have been impossible without it. Every form of literature is only a special adaptation of some undiscovered fundamental law. What we all need-publishers, writers, photo-play producers, educators is a basic theory of the emotional receptiveness of the primitive mind to dramatic stimuli.

There are many theories of short-story writing, novel writing, play writing, some of them sound and some not, but there is nowhere the expression of a philosophy of creative writing, having its roots in folk-lore and regarding all modern forms merely as special adaptations. The photo-play, which must be more primitive than printed literature because it must reach a larger stratum of the public than anything put down on paper, might be expected to contain some of the same elements in somewhere near the same proportions. In the absence of any scholarly treatment of the subject, it is interesting and perhaps not altogether futile to begin to formulate some sort of rough working theory. As a starting point, I should like to offer a suggestion, however much it may be open to attack. Indeed, if it is enough to invite attack it is enough for a beginning.

Let us consider what appear to be four factors not necessarily elements in primin primitive dramatic appeal. They are not all alike in nature so that they might be better described merely as casual outcroppings of some as yet undiscovered fundamental law. They

are:

(1) Clash or struggle
(2) Self-sacrificing love
(3) Pageantry

(4) White and black magic

And let us say that the effectiveness of the presentation of any one or any combination of these depends in large measure on how completely it is made possible for the average man to imagine himself an actor in the

drama. In this, plausiblity may be one element, clarity of detail another, and modernity another.

Clash or struggle is at the heart of dramatic or narrative interest. There are, as we know, different types of clash: man against man, man against the forces of nature, man against society, man against environment, man against inner man. All are interesting. You have noticed how a street crowd will gather at the cry of "Fight"- man against man. Remember the newspaper space given to Floyd Collins in the Kentucky Cave — man against the forces of nature. The Gray-Snyder murder trial — man against society. The intensity of our interest depends on our sympathy with one of the clashing forces. To a Michigan graduate, a Harvard-Yale game is only a spectacle. To a Harvard or Yale man, it may be an emotional experience. The task of the photo-dramatist is to describe not only the clash, but to arouse the primitive mind to sympathy with one of the contestants. To accomplish this, he has the widely-held prejudices, beliefs, and traditions of the millions to work with.

The portrayal of self-sacrificing love, often in contrast to lust, is, from one point of view, only one of the means by which he can gain this sympathy for his characters. Yet, in another sense, it is a prime factor in itself. Very often it is worth careful presentation even at the expense of action. You will rarely find a successful long photo-drama which does not employ it. Mr. Zukor is reported to have said in an interview recently that he regarded it as the vital element in a successful photoplay. Yet it must be well done if it is to be done at all, and it is one of the things that it is difficult to do in a short photo-play, just as it is difficult to do in a short story.

The word "pageantry" is possibly not completely descriptive of the idea it is meant to convey. It is the nearest approach in our vocabulary, however. It involves more than pomp and circumstance. It means the mass movement of men or objects on a grand scale. An army on the move is pageantry; a horse

race is pageantry; a mob is pageantry; a train of covered wagons is pageantry; the drive of the herd of elephants in "Chang" is pageantry. It has a basic appeal to the primitive mind and can be presented far more effectively in pictures than in words. Our vocabulary breaks down and we become confused with a multiplicity of details when we try to describe a pageant.

If the movies have surpassed literature in the presentation of pageantry, they have not appealed as well as they might to the innate curiosity of the primitive mind about the unseen world, which we call, for want of a better title, white and black magic. It includes religion, dreams, portents, prophecies, superstitions, childhood imaginings, miracles, used sometimes as direct motivation, sometimes to heighten suspense, sometimes purely as atmosphere. In the last three photo-plays I have seen, "The King of Kings," "Beau Geste," and "Chang," there are evidences that it is coming into its own.

In "The King of Kings" it is used, as it was in all ancient literature, as direct motivation, the will of the gods working on the destinies of man. In "Beau Geste" the use of Viking Funeral, a childhood imagining, is similar in a way to Shakspere's use of the prophecies of the witches, to throw the shadow of coming events. In "Chang," the talisman hung up to frighten the wild elephant herd from the ricefield reminds one of Huck Finn's superstitions in "Tom Sawyer," used merely to create atmosphere. The most sophisticated modern will never outgrow his curiosity about the unseen world, however much he may pride himself on his matter-of-fact view toward life. He still enjoys Dickens's "Christmas Carol" and Kipling's "Brushwood Boy" and "They" and a hundred other stories like them. Sometimes I wonder if it would n't be worth while for the motion picture producers to require each scenario writer on their staffs to read "The Golden Bough."

This classification clash, sacrificial love, pageantry, and the unseen world—, rough and incomplete as it is, may be of some use in the critical study of pictures. Try it. Consider the combinations of the various elements in the photo-plays you see, the balance struck between them. Is there too much pageantry? A few producers seem to be carried away by it. In a war picture we may expect to find an ideal combination, except that the lastthe unseen worldmay be neglected. Armies in battle are both clash and pageantry. Patriotism is a form of sacrificial love. The director is forced by the very nature of his theme to utilize three of these four great elementary appeals to the primitive imagination. In "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" we see all four — and, by the way, few pictures have a stranger history than this. It was produced at a time when the world was apparently sick of the war. The president of Metro, it is said, was following a pure hunch against all the dictates of common sense when he had it filmed. Yet it was a smashing success. Some may say this was due in part to the discovery of Rudolph Valentino as an actor. Others are not quite so sure. Possibly there are more fundamental reasons for the success of a picture than the quality of acting or the novelty of theme, however important these factors may be.

To summarize: the successful motion picture must appeal to the primitive mind. Literature, past and modern, is an unreliable source of ready-to-use material for the screen. It is partially satisfactory as a source of story-ideas which must, however, be selected for their primitive emotional appeals and adapted to the special medium. Both selection and adaptation would be helped by a fundamental theory of primitive emotional receptiveness to dramatic stimuli.

Are we met at last on common ground to search for what is real in all creative effort? W. D. Kennedy.

HERE was a catch in the announce

to notice until I received a twelve-page poem for criticism. I had forgotten to set any limit to the length of poems submitted. I shall be obliged hereafter to confine our discussion to short works only; a poem of twenty lines is reasonable.

The poem which brought this slip to my attention is a narrative entitled "Paradise," which deals with the life of a brother and sister. The climax of the story is his death in the late war. Up to that point, the diction was simple and crisp, the emotion was held in restraint, and the treatment in general was unaffected and straightforward. But at the climax- and here is a familiar weakness in modern verse - the author distrusted her own powers; she ceased to record the situation at first hand, and fell back on a secondhand phraseology which, since it had been used again and again to stimulate emotion, she thought would be serviceable in communicating her own. Of course it vitiates the whole effect of the work. Let us concede that her emotion was sincere, as it doubtless was. Yet let us remark at the same time how insincere, how trite, are the phrases by which she attempts to communicate it. The boy is described as setting off for "over there," and at his departure, "it braced us all to keep our heart throbs hid." He speaks of the war thus:

"Bully scrap! you bet I could n't bear
To keep hands off. I'll be back just as soon
As this job's done"

If any young man spoke of the war thus, it was merely because, like this author, he had read half a dozen novels in which the heroes were made to employ such phrases, and so he considered them the proper ones for the occasion. After the brother has been killed in France, we are told that

"The sky is black, all but a gold star."

Again, the emotional effect of the gold star is second rate; it cheapens the climax because it brings to mind the dreary waste of sentimental songs, posters, and war stories which flourished during the overwrought period of a great conflict but withered at once in the clear, cold light of the aftermath. I am in no way implying that time can diminish the sombre power of the tragedy; I am pointing out that the war-time symbols of that tragedy must be discarded for others less shopworn. In repeating the superficial diction of the war, our author has destroyed the war's underlying significance, and, incidentally, capped a fine poem with a weak climax.

As it happens, the employment of secondhand phrases is the prevalent fault in most of the poems so far submitted. It seems that in regarding a landscape or undergoing an experience too many writers at once concern themselves not with what is happening to