er to the
masses who cannot afford to see real actors. But the cultivated mind
might better enjoy plaster of Paris casts and chromo prints and
graphophone music than the moving pictures with their complete failure
to give us the essentials of the real stage.

We have heard this message, or if it was not expressed in clear words it
surely lingered for a long while in the minds of all those who had a
serious relation to art. It probably still prevails today among many,
even if they appreciate the more ambitious efforts of the
photoplaywrights in the most recent years. The philanthropic pleasure in
the furnishing of cheap entertainment and the recognition that a certain
advance has recently been made seem to alleviate the esthetic situation,
but the core of public opinion remains the same; the moving pictures are
no real art.

And yet all this arguing and all this hasty settling of a most complex
problem is fundamentally wrong. It is based on entirely mistaken ideas
concerning the aims and purposes of art. If those errors were given up
and if the right understanding of the moving pictures were to take hold
of the community, nobody would doubt that the chromo print and the
graphophone and the plaster cast are indeed nothing but inexpensive
substitutes for art with many essential artistic elements left out, and
therefore ultimately unsatisfactory to a truly artistic taste. But
everybody would recognize at the same time that the relation of the
photoplay to the theater is a completely different one and that the
difference counts entirely in favor of the moving pictures. _They are
not and ought never to be imitations of the theater. They can never give
the esthetic values of the theater; but no more can the theater give the
esthetic values of the photoplay._ With the rise of the moving pictures
has come an entirely new independent art which must develop its own life
conditions. The moving pictures would indeed be a complete failure if
that popular theory of art which we suggested were right. But that
theory is wrong from beginning to end, and it must not obstruct the way
to a better insight which recognizes that the stage and the screen are
as fundamentally different as sculpture and painting, or as lyrics and
music. _The drama and the photoplay are two cooerdinated arts, each
perfectly valuable in itself._ The one cannot replace the other; and the
shortcomings of the one as against the other reflect only the fact that
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