the cooperation of Director Eggers, we staged, in the sacred precincts of Fullerton Hall, Mae Marsh in The Wild Girl of the Sierras.  The film was in battered condition, and was turned so fast I could not talk with it satisfactorily and fulfil the well-known principles of chapter fourteen.  But at least I had converted one Art Institute Director to the idea that an ex-student of the Institute could not only write a book about painting-in-motion, but the painting could be shown in an Art Museum as promise of greater things in this world.  It took a deal of will and breaking of precedent, on the part of all concerned, to show this film, The Wild Girl of the Sierras, and I retired from the field a long time.  But now this same Eggers is starting, in Denver, an Art Museum from its very foundations, but on the same constructive scale.  So this enterprise, in my fond and fatuous fancy, is associated with the sweet Mae Marsh as The Wild Girl of the Sierras—­one of the loveliest bits of poetry ever put into screen or fable.

For about one year, off and on, I had the honor to be the photoplay critic of The New Republic, this invitation also based on the first edition of this book.  Looking back upon that experience I am delighted to affirm that not only The New Republic constituency but the world of the college and the university where I moved at that time, while at loss for a policy, were not only willing but eager to take the films with seriousness.

But when I was through with all these dashes into the field, and went back to reciting verses again, no one had given me any light as to who should make the disinterested, non-commercial film for these immediate times, the film that would class, in our civilization, with The New Republic or The Atlantic Monthly or the poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson.  That is, the production not for the trade, but for the soul.  Anita Loos, that good crusader, came out several years ago with the flaming announcement that there was now hope, since a school of films had been heavily endowed for the University of Rochester.  The school was to be largely devoted to producing music for the photoplay, in defiance of chapter fourteen.  But incidentally there were to be motion pictures made to fit good music.  Neither music nor films have as yet shaken the world.

I liked this Rochester idea.  I felt that once it was started the films would take their proper place and dominate the project, disinterested non-commercial films to be classed with the dramas so well stimulated by the great drama department under Professor Baker of Harvard.

As I look back over this history I see that the printed page had counted too much, and the real forces of the visible arts in America had not been definitely enlisted.  They should take the lead.  I would suggest as the three people to interview first on building any Art Museum Photoplay project:  Victor Freeburg, with his long experience of teaching the subject in Columbia, and John Emerson and Anita Loos,