istinctly more credible. The emotional expression in the
photoplays is therefore often more natural in the small roles which the
outsiders play than in the chief parts of the professionals who feel
that they must outdo nature.

But our whole consideration so far has been onesided and narrow. We have
asked only about the means by which the photoactor expresses his
emotion, and we were naturally confined to the analysis of his bodily
reactions. But while the human individual in our surroundings has hardly
any other means than the bodily expressions to show his emotions and
moods, the photoplaywright is certainly not bound by these limits. Yet
even in life the emotional tone may radiate beyond the body. A person
expresses his mourning by his black clothes and his joy by gay attire,
or he may make the piano or violin ring forth in happiness or moan in
sadness. Even his whole room or house may be penetrated by his spirit of
welcoming cordiality or his emotional setting of forbidding harshness.
The feeling of the soul emanates into the surroundings and the
impression which we get of our neighbor's emotional attitude may be
derived from this external frame of the personality as much as from the
gestures and the face.

This effect of the surrounding surely can and must be much heightened in
the artistic theater play. All the stage settings of the scene ought to
be in harmony with the fundamental emotions of the play, and many an act
owes its success to the unity of emotional impression which results from
the perfect painting of the background; it reverberates to the passions
of the mind. From the highest artistic color and form effects of the
stage in the Reinhardt style down to the cheapest melodrama with soft
blue lights and tender music for the closing scene, the stage
arrangements tell the story of the intimate emotion. But just this
additional expression of the feeling through the medium of the
surrounding scene, through background and setting, through lines and
forms and movements, is very much more at the disposal of the
photoartist. He alone can change the background and all the surroundings
of the acting person from instant to instant. He is not bound to one
setting, he has no technical difficulty in altering the whole scene with
every smile and every frown. To be sure, the theater can give us
changing sunshine and thunderclouds too. But it must go on at the slow
pace and with the clumsiness with which the events in n