This chapter is ended.  You will of course expect to be exhorted to visit some photoplay emporium.  But you need not look for fairy-tales.  They are much harder to find than they should be.  But you can observe even in the advertisements and cartoons the technical elements of the story of the old lady and the pig.  And you can note several other things that show how much more quickly than on the stage the borderline of All Saints’ Day and Hallowe’en can be crossed.  Note how easily memories are called up, and appear in the midst of the room.  In any plays whatever, you will find these apparitions and recollections.  The dullest hero is given glorious visualizing power.  Note the “fadeaway” at the beginning and the end of the reel, whereby all things emerge from the twilight and sink back into the twilight at last.  These are some of the indestructible least common denominators of folk stories old and new.  When skilfully used, they can all exercise a power over the audience, such as the crystal has over the crystal-gazer.

But this discussion will be resumed, on another plane, in the tenth chapter:  “Furniture, Trappings, and Inventions in Motion.”

CHAPTER V

THE PICTURE OF CROWD SPLENDOR

Henceforth the reader will use his discretion as to when he will read the chapter and when he will go to the picture show to verify it.

The shoddiest silent drama may contain noble views of the sea.  This part is almost sure to be good.  It is a fundamental resource.

A special development of this aptitude in the hands of an expert gives the sea of humanity, not metaphorically but literally:  the whirling of dancers in ballrooms, handkerchief-waving masses of people in balconies, hat-waving political ratification meetings, ragged glowering strikers, and gossiping, dickering people in the marketplace.  Only Griffith and his close disciples can do these as well as almost any manager can reproduce the ocean.  Yet the sea of humanity is dramatically blood-brother to the Pacific, Atlantic, or Mediterranean.  It takes this new invention, the kinetoscope, to bring us these panoramic drama-elements.  By the law of compensation, while the motion picture is shallow in showing private passion, it is powerful in conveying the passions of masses of men.  Bernard Shaw, in a recent number of the Metropolitan, answered several questions in regard to the photoplay.  Here are two bits from his discourse:—­

“Strike the dialogue from Moliere’s Tartuffe, and what audience would bear its mere stage-business?  Imagine the scene in which Iago poisons Othello’s mind against Desdemona, conveyed in dumb show.  What becomes of the difference between Shakespeare and Sheridan Knowles in the film?  Or between Shakespeare’s Lear and any one else’s Lear?  No, it seems to me that all the interest lies in the new opening for the mass of dramatic talent formerly disabled by incidental deficiencies of one sort or another that do not matter in the picture-theatre....”