Certainly the Hieroglyphic chapter is in words of one syllable and any kindergarten teacher can understand it.  Chapter nineteen adds a bit to the idea.  I do not know how warranted I am in displaying Egyptian learning.  Newspaper reporters never tire of getting me to talk about hieroglyphics in their relation to the photoplays, and always give me respectful headlines on the theme.  I can only say that up to this hour, every time I have toured art museums, I have begun with the Egyptian exhibit, and if my patient guest was willing, lectured on every period on to the present time, giving a little time to the principal exhibits in each room, but I have always found myself returning to Egypt as a standard.  It seems my natural classic land of art.  So when I took up hieroglyphics more seriously last summer, I found them extraordinarily easy as though I were looking at a “movie” in a book.  I think Egyptian picture-writing came easy because I have analyzed so many hundreds of photoplay films, merely for recreation, and the same style of composition is in both.  Any child who reads one can read the other.  But of course the literal translation must be there at hand to correct all wrong guesses.  I figure that in just one thousand years I can read hieroglyphics without a pony.  But meanwhile, I tour museums and I ride Pharaoh’s “horse,” and suggest to all photoplay enthusiasts they do the same.  I recommend these two books most heartily:  Elementary Egyptian Grammar, by Margaret A. Murray, London, Bernard Quaritch, 11 Grafton Street, Bond Street, W., and the three volumes of the Book of the Dead, which are, indeed, the Papyrus of Ani, referred to in this chapter, pages 255-258.  It is edited, translated, and reproduced in fac-simile by the keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in the British Museum, Professor E.A.  Wallis Budge; published by G.P.  Putnam’s Sons, New York, and Philip Lee Warner, London.  This book is certainly the greatest motion picture I ever attended.  I have gone through it several times, and it is the only book one can read twelve hours at a stretch, on the Pullman, when he is making thirty-six hour and forty-eight hour jumps from town to town.

American civilization grows more hieroglyphic every day.  The cartoons of Darling, the advertisements in the back of the magazines and on the bill-boards and in the street-cars, the acres of photographs in the Sunday newspapers, make us into a hieroglyphic civilization far nearer to Egypt than to England.  Let us then accept for our classic land, for our standard of form, the country naturally our own.  Hieroglyphics are so much nearer to the American mood than the rest of the Egyptian legacy, that Americans seldom get as far as the Hieroglyphics to discover how congenial they are.  Seeing the mummies, good Americans flee.  But there is not a man in America writing advertisements or making cartoons or films but would find delightful the standard books of Hieroglyphics sent out by the British Museum, once he gave them a chance.  They represent that very aspect of visual life which Europe understands so little in America, and which has been expanding so enormously even the last year.  Hallowe’en, for instance, lasts a whole week now, with mummers on the streets every night, October 25-31.