wavering
hand. But in the stage-version the dramatic poignancy begins with the
going up of the curtain, and lasts till it descends.

The prime example of complete failure is Sarah Bernhardt's Camille. It is
indeed a tintype of the consumptive heroine, with every group entire, and
taken at full length. Much space is occupied by the floor and the
overhead portions of the stage setting. It lasts as long as would the
spoken performance, and wherever there is a dialogue we must imagine said
conversation if we can. It might be compared to watching Camille from the
top gallery through smoked glass, with one's ears stopped with cotton.

It would be well for the beginning student to find some way to see the
first two of these three, or some other attempts to revamp the classic,
for instance Mrs. Fiske's painstaking reproduction of Vanity Fair,
bearing in mind the list of differences which this chapter now furnishes.

There is no denying that many stage managers who have taken up photoplays
are struggling with the Shakespearian French and Norwegian traditions in
the new medium. Many of the moving pictures discussed in this book are
rewritten stage dramas, and one, Judith of Bethulia, is a pronounced
success. But in order to be real photoplays the stage dramas must be
overhauled indeed, turned inside out and upside down. The successful
motion picture expresses itself through mechanical devices that are being
evolved every hour. Upon those many new bits of machinery are founded
novel methods of combination in another field of logic, not dramatic
logic, but tableau logic. But the old-line managers, taking up
photoplays, begin by making curious miniatures of stage presentations.
They try to have most things as before. Later they take on the moving
picture technique in a superficial way, but they, and the host of
talented actors in the prime of life and Broadway success, retain the
dramatic state of mind.

It is a principle of criticism, the world over, that the distinctions
between the arts must be clearly marked, even by those who afterwards mix
those arts. Take, for instance, the perpetual quarrel between the artists
and the half-educated about literary painting. Whistler fought that
battle in England. He tried to beat it into the head of John Bull that a
painting is one thing, a mere illustration for a story another thing. But
the novice is always stubborn. To him Hindu and Arabic are both foreign
languages, therefore just alik