One night I went out from Los Angeles with my moral telescope to make some observations in the movie firmament. Music was playing, but the Muse of Music would never recognize it. In Collins’ Ode, Music was a “heavenly maid,” played in Greece and was Wisdom’s aid, chaste and sublime—perhaps, but not here. It was jazz gone drunk and crazy, to the great delight of prodigal sons and daughters. Through clouds of cigarette smoke I saw the movie stars. These “heavenly bodies” have very earthly souls. Some were fixed stars at tables, others falling into partners’ arms, and shooting stars were shooting love glances at each other. Some other stars seemed votaries of Astarte, the licentious goddess to whom a temple has been erected in Hollywood, where I was entertained by a French countess, who regaled me with tea, fresh cakes and a veritable Madame de Stael (not stale) vivacious conversation on travel, music, art, literature and religion. Although she was French, I fully understood her good English accent and gesture, as I did the meaning of her charming sister who went to the piano and sang, “I love you.” Morals and movies are not inseparable. Hollywood is the modern Daphne Grove where the Seventh of the Ten Commandments is frequently forgotten or erased. Southern California, the “land of the flea,” is also an artists’ paradise. The paint most advertised is cosmetics. The dearest paintings I noticed were those walking on the streets. The Angelenos are expert painters of scenery and theatre signs, of auto bodies, and of their own faces with liquor. But why is art necessary at all? They have climate, and that divides the honor with charity in covering a multitude of sins. Nature has placed all California artists in the shade by placing on her easel the matchless pieces of sea, field and mountain. Practical art is found in the “drawings” of gold ore from the soil and money from the pockets of the speculators. The water color is irrigation that turns the brown earth green. The “oil” is petroleum from which modern mining masters are making millions compared with the price the oils of the old masters bring. Murder is one of the fine arts of Los Angeles, promoted by autos which assume the pedestrian has no rights and deliberately knock him right and left and leave him bruised and bleeding. The trouble is not so much wine as auto-intoxication. There is an auto to every thirteen inhabitants, which may account for so many unlucky accidents. The auto roads in the state are the finest in the world. They can’t be called “rotten” even though they are made from decomposed granite.