Page:Pictorial beauty on the screen.djvu/238

 Those words are surely full of emotional, imaginative appeal. Yes, but not for the director of the Fox "Evangeline." He inserts the line as a title, then shows Evangeline strolling over a forest path, and then "cuts in" a close-up of hands playing across the strings of a gigantic harp!

There is nothing mysterious about the emotions of any moderately intelligent person who sees things like that on the screen. "Movie stuff!" he groans, and wonders "how they have the nerve to get away with it." We have a quarrel with the director, not because he has failed to picturize the imagined sweetness of that silence which comes when exquisite music has ceased, but because he has considered it necessary to picturize anything at all in support of the poet's words.

This brings us again to the question whether art should strive to present any beauty other than that of the subject represented. Was he a great artist who, according to an old fable, painted fruit so realistically that the birds came to peck at it? And would Michelangelo have been a better artist if he had given his marble statues the colors of real flesh, or if he had made statues with flesh soft to the touch and capable of perspiring on a hot day? We think not.

Art may please through illusion, but never by deception. We get a peculiar emotional experience from imagining that Michelangelo's "Moses" is alive with human grandeur, but we should not like to be caught in a mob of idiots staring at some more realistically sculptural Moses, in the expectation that he was about to make a speech or perform a trick. Neither can we go into ecstasies over the fact that the fur mantle in