While there is a great deal of literary reference in all the following
argument, I realize, looking back over many attempts to paraphrase it for
various audiences, that its appeal is to those who spend the best part of
their student life in classifying, and judging, and producing works of
sculpture, painting, and architecture. I find the eyes of all others
wandering when I make talks upon the plastic artist's point of view.
This book tries to find that fourth dimension of architecture, painting,
and sculpture, which is the human soul in action, that arrow with wings
which is the flash of fire from the film, or the heart of man, or
Pygmalion's image, when it becomes a woman.
The 1915 edition was used by Victor O. Freeburg as one of the text-books
in the Columbia University School of Journalism, in his classes in
photoplay writing. I was invited several times to address those classes
on my yearly visits to New York. I have addressed many other academic
classes, the invitation being based on this book. Now I realize that
those who approach the theory from the general University standpoint, or
from the history of the drama, had best begin with Freeburg's book, for
he is not only learned in both matters, but presents the special
analogies with skill. Freeburg has an excellent education in the history
of music, and some of the happiest passages in his work relate the
photoplay to the musical theory of the world, as my book relates it to
the general Art Museum point of view of the world. Emphatically, my book
belongs in the Art Institutes as a beginning, or in such religious and
civic bodies as think architecturally. From there it must work its way
out. Of course those bodies touch on a thousand others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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