on. The high-school girls can do a moderate amount of giggling
without breaking the spell. There is no spell, in the stage sense, to
break. People can climb over each other's knees to get in or out. If the
picture is political, they murmur war-cries to one another. If the film
suggests what some of the neighbors have been doing, they can regale each
other with the richest sewing society report.

The people in the motion picture audience total about two hundred, any
time, but they come in groups of two or three at no specified hour. The
newcomers do not, as in Vaudeville, make themselves part of a jocular
army. Strictly as individuals they judge the panorama. If they
disapprove, there is grumbling under their breath, but no hissing. I have
never heard an audience in a photoplay theatre clap its hands even when
the house was bursting with people. Yet they often see the film through
twice. When they have had enough, they stroll home. They manifest their
favorable verdict by sending some other member of the family to "see the
picture." If the people so delegated are likewise satisfied, they may ask
the man at the door if he is going to bring it back. That is the moving
picture kind of cheering.

It was a theatrical sin when the old-fashioned stage actor was rendered
unimportant by his scenery. But the motion picture actor is but the mood
of the mob or the landscape or the department store behind him, reduced
to a single hieroglyphic.

The stage-interior is large. The motion-picture interior is small. The
stage out-of-door scene is at best artificial and little and is generally
at rest, or its movement is tainted with artificiality. The waves dash,
but not dashingly, the water flows, but not flowingly. The motion
picture out-of-door scene is as big as the universe. And only pictures of
the Sahara are without magnificent motion.

The photoplay is as far from the stage on the one hand as it is from the
novel on the other. Its nearest analogy in literature is, perhaps, the
short story, or the lyric poem. The key-words of the stage are _passion_
and _character_; of the photoplay, _splendor_ and _speed_. The stage in
its greatest power deals with pity for some one especially unfortunate,
with whom we grow well acquainted; with some private revenge against some
particular despoiler; traces the beginning and culmination of joy based
on the gratification of some preference, or love for some person, whose
charm is all his own. The