nity to
interest wide circles in psychological experiments and mental tests and
in this way to spread the knowledge of their importance for vocational
guidance and the practical affairs of life.

Yet that power of the moving pictures to supplement the school room and
the newspaper and the library by spreading information and knowledge is,
after all, secondary to their general task, to bring entertainment and
amusement to the masses. This is the chief road on which the forward
march of the last twenty years has been most rapid. The theater and the
vaudeville and the novel had to yield room and ample room to the play of
the flitting pictures. What was the real principle of the inner
development on this artistic side? The little scenes which the first
pictures offered could hardly have been called plays. They would have
been unable to hold the attention by their own contents. Their only
charm was really the pleasure in the perfection with which the apparatus
rendered the actual movements. But soon touching episodes were staged,
little humorous scenes or melodramatic actions were played before the
camera, and the same emotions stirred which up to that time only the
true theater play had awakened. The aim seemed to be to have a real
substitute for the stage. The most evident gain of this new scheme was
the reduction of expenses. One actor is now able to entertain many
thousand audiences at the same time, one stage setting is sufficient to
give pleasure to millions. The theater can thus be democratized.
Everybody's purse allows him to see the greatest artists and in every
village a stage can be set up and the joy of a true theater performance
can be spread to the remotest corner of the lands. Just as the
graphophone can multiply without limit the music of the concert hall,
the singer, and the orchestra, so, it seemed, would the photoplay
reproduce the theater performance without end.

Of course, the substitute could not be equal to the original. The color
was lacking, the real depth of the objective stage was missing, and
above all the spoken word had been silenced. The few interspersed
descriptive texts, the so-called "leaders," had to hint at that which
in the real drama the speeches of the actors explain and elaborate. It
was thus surely only the shadow of a true theater, different not only as
a photograph is compared with a painting, but different as a photograph
is compared with the original man. And yet, however meager