hotoplay may have in our community
is that of esthetic cultivation. No art reaches a larger audience
daily, no esthetic influence finds spectators in a more receptive frame
of mind. On the other hand no training demands a more persistent and
planful arousing of the mind than the esthetic training, and never is
progress more difficult than when the teacher adjusts himself to the
mere liking of the pupils. The country today would still be without any
symphony concerts and operas if it had only received what the audiences
believed at the moment that they liked best. The esthetically
commonplace will always triumph over the significant unless systematic
efforts are made to reenforce the work of true beauty. Communities at
first always prefer Sousa to Beethoven. The moving picture audience
could only by slow steps be brought from the tasteless and vulgar
eccentricities of the first period to the best plays of today, and the
best plays of today can be nothing but the beginning of the great upward
movement which we hope for in the photoplay. Hardly any teaching can
mean more for our community than the teaching of beauty where it reaches
the masses. The moral impulse and the desire for knowledge are, after
all, deeply implanted in the American crowd, but the longing for beauty
is rudimentary; and yet it means harmony, unity, true satisfaction, and
happiness in life. The people still has to learn the great difference
between true enjoyment and fleeting pleasure, between real beauty and
the mere tickling of the senses.

Of course, there are those, and they may be legion today, who would
deride every plan to make the moving pictures the vehicle of esthetic
education. How can we teach the spirit of true art by a medium which is
in itself the opposite of art? How can we implant the idea of harmony by
that which is in itself a parody on art? We hear the contempt for
"canned drama" and the machine-made theater. Nobody stops to think
whether other arts despise the help of technique. The printed book of
lyric poems is also machine-made; the marble bust has also "preserved"
for two thousand years the beauty of the living woman who was the model
for the Greek sculptor. They tell us that the actor on the stage gives
the human beings as they are in reality, but the moving pictures are
unreal and therefore of incomparably inferior value. They do not
consider that the roses of the summer which we enjoy in the stanzas of
the poet do not exist