d hall, and they
always had to discover how much the dramatic effect was reduced because
the feeling of distance from reality was weakened. The photoplay and the
theater in this respect are evidently alike. The screen too suggests
from the very start the complete unreality of the events.

But each further step leads us to remarkable differences between the
stage play and the film play. In every respect the film play is further
away from the physical reality than the drama and in every respect this
greater distance from the physical world brings it nearer to the mental
world. The stage shows us living men. It is not the real Romeo and not
the real Juliet; and yet the actor and the actress have the ringing
voices of true people, breathe like them, have living colors like them,
and fill physical space like them. What is left in the photoplay? The
voice has been stilled: the photoplay is a dumb show. Yet we must not
forget that this alone is a step away from reality which has often been
taken in the midst of the dramatic world. Whoever knows the history of
the theater is aware of the tremendous role which the pantomime has
played in the development of mankind. From the old half-religious
pantomimic and suggestive dances out of which the beginnings of the real
drama grew to the fully religious pantomimes of medieval ages and,
further on, to many silent mimic elements in modern performances, we
find a continuity of conventions which make the pantomime almost the
real background of all dramatic development. We know how popular the
pantomimes were among the Greeks, and how they stood in the foreground
in the imperial period of Rome. Old Rome cherished the mimic clowns, but
still more the tragic pantomimics. "Their very nod speaks, their hands
talk and their fingers have a voice." After the fall of the Roman empire
the church used the pantomime for the portrayal of sacred history, and
later centuries enjoyed very unsacred histories in the pantomimes of
their ballets. Even complex artistic tragedies without words have
triumphed on our present-day stage. "L'Enfant Prodigue" which came from
Paris, "Sumurun" which came from Berlin, "Petroushka" which came from
Petrograd, conquered the American stage; and surely the loss of speech,
while it increased the remoteness from reality, by no means destroyed
the continuous consciousness of the bodily existence of the actors.

Moreover the student of a modern pantomime cannot overlook a
char