The stages from hieroglyphics through Phoenician and Greek letters to ours, are of no particular interest here.  But the fact that hieroglyphics can evolve is important.  Let us hope that our new picture-alphabets can take on richness and significance, as time goes on, without losing their literal values.  They may develop into something more all-pervading, yet more highly wrought, than any written speech.  Languages when they evolve produce stylists, and we will some day distinguish the different photoplay masters as we now delight in the separate tang of O. Henry and Mark Twain and Howells.  When these are ancient times, we will have scholars and critics learned in the flavors of early moving picture traditions with their histories of movements and schools, their grammars, and anthologies.

Now some words as to the Anglo-Saxon language and its relation to pictures.  In England and America our plastic arts are but beginning.  Yesterday we were preeminently a word-civilization.  England built her mediaeval cathedrals, but they left no legacy among craftsmen.  Art had to lean on imported favorites like Van Dyck till the days of Sir Joshua Reynolds and the founding of the Royal Society.  Consider that the friends of Reynolds were of the circle of Doctor Johnson.  Literary tradition had grown old.  Then England had her beginning of landscape gardening.  Later she saw the rise of Constable, Ruskin, and Turner, and their iridescent successors.  Still to-day in England the average leading citizen matches word against word,—­using them as algebraic formulas,—­rather than picture against picture, when he arranges his thoughts under the eaves of his mind.  To step into the Art world is to step out of the beaten path of British dreams.  Shakespeare is still king, not Rossetti, nor yet Christopher Wren.  Moreover, it was the book-reading colonial who led our rebellion against the very royalty that founded the Academy.  The public-speaking American wrote the Declaration of Independence.  It was not the work of the painting or cathedral-building Englishman.  We were led by Patrick Henry, the orator, Benjamin Franklin, the printer.

The more characteristic America became, the less she had to do with the plastic arts.  The emigrant-train carried many a Bible and Dictionary packed in beside the guns and axes.  It carried the Elizabethan writers, AEsop’s Fables, Blackstone’s Commentaries, the revised statutes of Indiana, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Parson Weems’ Life of Washington.  But, obviously, there was no place for the Elgin marbles.  Giotto’s tower could not be loaded in with the dried apples and the seedcorn.

Yesterday morning, though our arts were growing every day, we were still more of a word-civilization than the English.  Our architectural, painting, and sculptural history is concerned with men now living, or their immediate predecessors.  And even such work as we have is pretty largely a cult by the wealthy.  This is the more a cause for misgiving because, in a democracy, the arts, like the political parties, are not founded till they have touched the county chairman, the ward leader, the individual voter.  The museums in a democracy should go as far as the public libraries.  Every town has its library.  There are not twenty Art museums in the land.