alien, on to the
alleged motion picture punch, when the Doctor is the god from the
machine. There is no doctor on the stage in the original Ghosts. But
there is a physician in the Doll's House, a scientific, quietly moving
oracle, crisp, Spartan, sophisticated.

Is this photoplay physician such a one? The boy and his half-sister are
in their wedding-clothes in the big church. Pastor Manders is saying the
ceremony. The audience and building are indeed showy. The doctor charges
up the aisle at the moment people are told to speak or forever hold their
peace. He has tact. He simply breaks up the marriage right there. He does
not tell the guests why. But he takes the wedding party into the pastor's
study and there blazes at the bride and groom the long-suppressed truth
that they are brother and sister. Always an orotund man, he has the
Chautauqua manner indeed in this exigency.

He brings to one's mind the tearful book, much loved in childhood, Parted
at the Altar, or Why Was it Thus? And four able actors have the task of
telling the audience by facial expression only, that they have been
struck by moral lightning. They stand in a row, facing the people,
endeavoring to make the crisis of an alleged Ibsen play out of a crashing
melodrama.

The final death of young Alving is depicted with an approximation of
Ibsen's mood. But the only ways to suggest such feelings in silence, do
not convey them in full to the audience, but merely narrate them.
Wherever in Ghosts we have quiet voices that are like the slow drip of
hydrochloric acid, in the photoplay we have no quiet gestures that will
do trenchant work. Instead there are endless writhings and rushings
about, done with a deal of skill, but destructive of the last remnants of
Ibsen.

Up past the point of the clutching hand this film is the prime example
for study for the person who would know once for all the differences
between the photoplays and the stage dramas. Along with it might be
classed Mrs. Fiske's decorative moving picture Tess, in which there is
every determination to convey the original Mrs. Fiske illusion without
her voice and breathing presence. To people who know her well it is a
surprisingly good tintype of our beloved friend, for the family album.
The relentless Thomas Hardy is nowhere to be found. There are two moments
of dramatic life set among many of delicious pictorial quality: when Tess
baptizes her child, and when she smooths its little grave with a