In it I found, not an appeal to have the art museum used--which would have been an old though welcome story--not this, but much to my surprise, the art museum actually at work, one of the very wheels on which our culture rolled forward upon its hopeful way.

I saw among other museums the one whose destinies I was tenderly guiding, playing in Lindsay's book the part that is played by the classic myths in Milton, or by the dictionary in the writings of the rest of us.

For once the museum and its contents appeared, not as a lovely curiosity, but as one of the basic, and in a sense humble necessities of life.

To paraphrase the author's own text, the art museum, like the furniture in a good movie, was actually "in motion"-- a character in the play.

On this point of view as on a pivot turns the whole book.
In The Art of the Moving Picture the nature and domain of a new Muse is defined.