I am the one poet who has a right to claim for his muses Blanche Sweet,
Mary Pickford, and Mae Marsh. I am the one poet who wrote them songs when
they were Biograph heroines, before their names were put on the screen,
or the name of their director. Woman's clubs are always asking me for
bits of delicious gossip about myself to fill up literary essays. Now
there's a bit. There are two things to be said for those poems. First,
they were heartfelt. Second, any one could improve on them.

In the fourth chapter of book two I discourse elaborately and formally on
The Motion Picture of Fairy Splendor. And to this carefully balanced
technical discourse I would add the informal word, this New Year's Day,
that this type is best illustrated by such fairy-tales as have been most
ingratiatingly retold in the books of Padraic Colum, and dazzlingly
illustrated by Willy Pogany. The Colum-Pogany School of Thought is one
which the commercial producers have not yet condescended to illustrate in
celluloid, and it remains a special province for the Art Museum Film.
Fairy-tales need not be more than one-tenth of a reel long. Some of the
best fairy-tales in the whole history of man can be told in a breath.
And the best motion picture story for fifty years may turn out to be a
reel ten minutes long. Do not let the length of the commercial film
tyrannize over your mind, O young art museum photoplay director. Remember
the brevity of Lincoln's Gettysburg address....

And so my commentary, New Year's Day, 1922, proceeds, using for points of
more and more extensive departure the refrains and old catch-phrases of
books two and three.

Chapter V--The Picture of Crowd Splendor, being the type illustrated by
Griffith's Intolerance.