SWEETNESS AND LIGHT FROM THE CINEMATOGRAPH? T HE word "cinematograph" was

not generally enough accepted at the time to be included as common form in the second volume of Sir James Murray's "New English Dictionary." It is given there only with a cross-reference to the word " kinematograph," its more legitimate rival, which has since been nearly trampled out of existence by popular usage. Yet now we have before us a Circular, to which weighty names are appended, urging that the "cinematograph" be employed as a regular instrument of education. So be it. We cannot fight against custom or the cinematograph. To parody a famous phrase about the theatre, " the cinemato- graph is irresistible ; organize the cinematograph." So say in effect the Headmasters of Eton, Winchester, and Rugby, the Bishop of Birmingham, Lord Meath, Archbishop Bourne, Mr. A. P. Graves (who is honorary secretary to the committee which now addresses the circular to the educational authorities), and others. The invention of MM. Lnmiere came to us from the Ville Lumiere. Let us hope that it will do credit to the omens which clustered about its birth, and bring light and sweetness to the elementary schools of England. The cine- matograph is certainly a fact to be accepted and used. We need not, however, pretend to be plus royaliste qui is roi—more cinematographic in our sympathies than the members of the Cinematograph Committee. In their Circular they begin with the vices and demerits of the cinematograph,

and give the machine a pretty good slating for the harm it has demonstrably done. The abuses are summarized as incitements to dissipation, coarseness, illicit passion, theft, robbery, arson, and homicide :—

"In France, Germany, Denmark, and Finland the same moral evils [as in the United States] flowing from the unregulated use of the moving picture have been noted. To these must be added the following results of the statistical inquiry, covering the cases of 3,852 pupils of their local board schools, undertaken by the Stavanger Teachers' Association. It proved that the biograph theatres had been used as schools of crime, with the result that a great number of children confined in reformatories or houses of correction owed their presence there to the incitements of criminal films. Forty-six primary teachers testified to the cinematograph leading to thieving. Petty theft, indeed, has enormously increased amongst their scholars since the introduction of the cinemato- graph. To this must be added instances of coarseness, directly referred to moving pictures, calculated to stir up the lower in- stincts. There is a very significant addition to these revelations. According to the report of the Stavanger Savings Bank, the sale of saving-stamps in 1910 had decreased by 9•3 per cent., whereas in the previous year there had been an increase of 26.8 per cent. in the children's savings. ' We have here,' comment the Stavanger teachers, 'a great danger, threatening not only the future economic position of the town, but the children themselves, who become slaves of pleasure, have little or no appreciation of the value of money, do not think of saving, and, generally speaking, become less fit to fight the battle of life.' " This is only an example. Similar testimony comes from nearly every civilized country. The argument of the Circular, then, is that this hundred-headed hydra cannot be killed. No doubt he is as much master of the situation as the rabbits in Australia. He must be corralled, lassooed, broken, and turned to the use of man. At conferences on the taming of the beast opinion inclined to following the lead of other countries—particularly of the United States—in recognizing the value of the cinematograph for teaching geography, nature- study, and various branches of science such as mechanics and vegetable physiology. The suggestion of the Circular is that a cinematograph should be installed in every school lantern- room. This suggestion is offered in studiously temperate language.

And here we wish to emphasize our opinion that great as may be the usefulness of moving pictures, when not only carefully selected, but carefully restricted in frequency, careless or excessive use of them must be, from an educational point of view, disastrous. Young minds do not learn, in any true sense of the word, by having information, unselected and heterogeneous, poured in upon them, but by assimilating what is given them by an active process analogous to physical; digestion, and, to insure that this process is made possible, great care must be exercised, not only in the choosing of the films, but in the times of their exhibition. If it is seriously held that in any given district children packed into a cinema theatre, without discretion or restriction, will be better employed than they would be outside, we suggest that a state of things exists which requires to be dealt with in another way. Before therefore the cinematograph can be incorporated amongst our teaching apparatus, certain safeguards will have to be adopted ; exciting scenes will have to be avoided; the films will have to be prepared by educational experts ; they must not be passed too rapidly before the children's eyes, and therefore only a limited number of them should be employed for a single lesson. Lessons illustrated by the cinematograph should not be given to any class more than once a week, and, in lessons on nature-study and science, the children's own powers of observa- tion should not be interfered with by presentations of growth and change in vegetable and animal life, which have not, as far as possible, been followed by them. On the other hand, such presentations of growth and change may well be used for the pur- pose of summarizing a series of observations or where observation is impossible.

We cannot resist a conclusion expressed with so much moderation. A negative rather than a positive assent may of course be given to the use of the cinematograph in teaching. but assent in some form seems the only course. The flickering objects on the screen may not be the ideal of synoptic teaching, but when children become accustomed to the cinematograph as a part of a curriculum they will not be so anxious as now to divert their pennies from the Savings Bank

to the ravishing novelties of the picture palace.

To be reconciled to the cinematograph in every school one has indeed to remember without ceasing the place it has won for better or worse. We can imagine the spirit of the greatest English critic of education, the apostle of Sweetness and Light, declaring itself in the abstract on this new educational contrivance. He would not have studied the context of events and would be wrong and unpractical, as he often was, but should we not even so lower our eyes and have just a passing spasm of misgiving if he charged us with an " original short- coming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions " P There was no cinematograph, he would tell us, on the banks of the Ilissus. In the days when elyeee meant motion in Hellas, all motion was grace. No convulsive flickering there! In one of his letters, Matthew Arnold, when he

was hard at work inspecting schools, wrote to a friend, " Here is my programme for this afternoon : Avalanches—The Steam Engine—The Thames—India-Rubber—Bricks—The Battle of Poictiers—Subtraction—The Reindeer—The Gun- powder Plot—The Jordan. Alluring, is it not P Twenty minutes each, and the days of one's life are only threescore years and ten." Would he think a cinematographic repre- sentation of an avalanche in action, of the parts of a steam engine with a special view of the works at Crewe, of the vault where Guy Fawkes was discovered, and so forth, alluring P We fear he would boggle at the cinematographic repro- duction of the processes of vegetable physiology. Even though the span of life is but threescore years and ten, he would object (on the score of delicacy) to a cabbage on the screen growing from seed and unfolding itself to a crinkled ripeness in thirty seconds.

" Yon must arouse perception," he would say. "Perception is the result of observation and comparison, and these things come from verification. Go into the fields to see your cabbage grow. Or if there are no fields near enough, bring a cabbage to the school and let us turn up the lights and honestly look at it. Never accept the shadow for the substance. That is the root of all English claptrap, and the reason why the Philistines do not recognize beauty when they see it. You think it more wonderful to be taught by a machine than by a man or a woman. But it is not. It is far less wonderful. Look at the mechanical triumphs of your clicking apparatus, revealing luridly the he of the cabbage, and then think of the vision of Nature at the same work, completing itself on all sides and achieving by sweet and mellow changes the perfection of beauty. The cinematograph is not for the

instruction of the Indo-European race which invented the Muses, and Chivalry, and the Madonna. The diorhs is the man who desires light, but not the light of the cinematograph."

We imagine the spirit of Matthew Arnold driving the fascinated children out of the darkness of the lantern-room into the open, snatching a volume of Keats from his pocket, and reading with tears :—

" Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core ;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to sot budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease ; For Summer has o'erbrimm'd their clammy cells."

All very unreasonable and superfine, of course We our- selves, we hope, are reasonable. " The cinematograph is irresistible ; organize the cinematograph "—only we think it will have to be used as carefully as the circular proposes. It will be a very good servant but a very bad master.