“Part of the thinness of California is not only its youth, but the result of the physical fact that the human race is there spread over so many acres of land. “Good” Californians count their mines and enumerate their palm trees. They count the miles of their sea-coast, and the acres under cultivation and the height of the peaks, and revel in large statistics and the bigness generally, and forget how a few men rattle around in a great deal of scenery. They shout the statistics across the Rockies and the deserts to New York. The Mississippi valley is non-existent to the Californian. His fellow-feeling is for the opposite coast line. Through the geographical accident of separation by mountain and desert from the rest of the country, he becomes a mere shouter, hurrahing so assiduously that all variety in the voice is lost. Then he tries gestures, and becomes flamboyant, rococo. “These are the defects of the motion picture qualities. Also its panoramic tendency runs wild. As an institution it advertises itself with a sweeping gesture. It has the same passion for coast-line. These are not the sins of New England. When, in the hands of masters, they become sources of strength, they will be a different set of virtues from those of New England.... “When the Californian relegates the dramatic to secondary scenes, both in his life and his photoplay, and turns to the genuinely epic and lyric, he and this instrument may find their immortality together as New England found its soul in the essays of Emerson. Tide upon tide of Spring comes into California, through all four seasons. Fairy beauty overwhelms the lumbering grand-stand players. The tiniest garden is a jewelled pathway of wonder. But the Californian cannot shout ‘orange blossoms, orange blossoms; heliotrope, heliotrope.’ He cannot boom forth ‘roseleaves, roseleaves’ so that he does their beauties justice. Here is where the photoplay can begin to give him a more delicate utterance. And he can go on into stranger things, and evolve all the _Splendor Films_ into higher types, for the very name of California is splendor.... The California photoplaywright can base his _Crowd Picture_ upon the city-worshipping mobs of San Francisco. He can derive his _Patriotic_ and _Religious Splendors_ from something older and more magnificent than the aisles of the Romanesque, namely: the groves of the giant redwoods. “The campaigns for a beautiful nation could very well emanate from the west coast, where, with the slightest care, grow up models for all the world of plant arrangement and tree-luxury. Our mechanical east is reproved, our tension is relaxed, our ugliness is challenged, every time we look upon those garden-paths and forests.