enormous field, piled with endowments mountain high, it should be
possible to establish the theory and practice of the photoplay as a fine
art. Readers who do not care for the history of any art, readers who
have neither curiosity nor aspiration in regard to any of the ten or
eleven muses who now dance around Apollo, such shabby readers had best
lay the book down now. Shabby readers do not like great issues. My poor
little sermon is concerned with a great issue, the clearing of the way
for a critical standard, whereby the ultimate photoplay may be judged. I
cannot teach office-boys ways to make "quick money" in the "movies." That
seems to be the delicately implied purpose of the mass of books on the
photoplay subject. They are, indeed, a sickening array. Freeburg's book
is one of the noble exceptions. And I have paid tribute elsewhere to John
Emerson and Anita Loos. They have written a crusading book, and many
crusading articles.

After five years of exceedingly lonely art study, in which I had always
specialized in museum exhibits, prowling around like a lost dog, I began
to intensify my museum study, and at the same time shout about what I was
discovering. From nineteen hundred and five on I did orate my opinions to
a group of advanced students. We assembled weekly for several winters in
the Metropolitan Museum, New York, for the discussion of the
masterpieces in historic order, from Egypt to America. From that
standpoint, the work least often found, hardest to make, least popular in
the street, may be in the end the one most treasured in a world-museum as
a counsellor and stimulus of mankind. Throughout this book I try to bring
to bear the same simple standards of form, composition, mood, and motive
that we used in finding the fundamental exhibits; the standards which are
taken for granted in art histories and schools, radical or conservative,
anywhere.