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 alike.  The book illustration may be said to come in through the ear, by reading the title aloud in imagination.  And the other is effective with no title at all.  The scenario writer who will study to the bottom of the matter in Whistler’s Gentle Art of Making Enemies will be equipped to welcome the distinction between the old-fashioned stage, where the word rules, and the photoplay, where splendor and ritual are all.  It is not the same distinction, but a kindred one.

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But let us consider the details of the matter.  The stage has its exits and entrances at the side and back.  The standard photoplays have their exits and entrances across the imaginary footlight line, even in the most stirring mob and battle scenes.  In Judith of Bethulia, though the people seem to be coming from everywhere and going everywhere, when we watch close, we see that the individuals enter at the near right-hand corner and exit at the near left-hand corner, or enter at the near left-hand corner and exit at the near right-hand corner.

Consider the devices whereby the stage actor holds the audience as he goes out at the side and back.  He sighs, gestures, howls, and strides.  With what studious preparation he ripens his quietness, if he goes out that way.  In the new contraption, the moving picture, the hero or villain in exit strides past the nose of the camera, growing much bigger than a human being, marching toward us as though he would step on our heads, disappearing when largest.  There is an explosive power about the mildest motion picture exit, be the actor skilful or the reverse.  The people left in the scene are pygmies compared with each disappearing cyclops.  Likewise, when the actor enters again, his mechanical importance is overwhelming.  Therefore, for his first entrance the motion picture star does not require the preparations that are made on the stage.  The support does not need to warm the spectators to the problem, then talk them into surrender.

When the veteran stage-producer as a beginning photoplay producer tries to give us a dialogue in the motion pictures, he makes it so dull no one follows.  He does not realize that his camera-born opportunity to magnify persons and things instantly, to interweave them as actors on one level, to alternate scenes at the slightest whim, are the big substitutes for dialogue.  By alternating scenes rapidly, flash after flash: