We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
^Uhe World's Leading cJVLovin^ ^i6iure CyVfa^azine
PHOTOPLAY
Vol. XVII
January, 1920
No. 2
^Uhe Law of Example
HERE and there in verse we come across some version or other of the rhapsodic exclamation, "Let me write the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws!''
Investigation proves that it was Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun who wrote with a great deal of cool truth in 1703; "I once \new a very wise man who believed if one were permitted to ma\e all the ballads he need not care who should ma\e the laws of a nation.""
The fact remains that the law of example has always been of more farreaching influence than the law of the statute-boo\s. V\/henever an art has become part of a people's daily life it has been more than a reflection; it has been a hand-boo\ of manners and morals; a code of existence.
The great art of the Gree\s gave its form to every phase of Hellenic existence. The more monumental arts of the Egyptians became the thing they lived for. The luxurious commerical arts of Augustan Rome became the daily pattern of the Imperial world. The splendors of the Italian Renaissance were reflected in a corresponding uplift of all the cities from whence they shone — and who shall say whether the awa\ening of the people made the art, or whether the art awa\ened the people'^ Assuredly the rise of a grand literature in Elizabethan England reflected a day of power, but as surely the English culture of today has its roots implanted in the deep subsoil of Sha\espeare and his contemporaries.
The Motion Picture in America is the most comprehensive movement toward a universal artexpression in several centuries. The picture is an admitted force, but if it is to be a force for betterment it must mirror life — not a saccharine ma\e-believe nor a perverse existence. We can adjust our moral ma\e-up in a mirror, but not in the distorting glasses of Coney Island. The songs of our day are for the eyes, and in the great art that we have created there rises a law potent though unsummoned: the law of example.