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 drama is concerned with the slow, inevitable approaches to these intensities.  On the other hand, the motion picture, though often appearing to deal with these things, as a matter of fact uses substitutes, many of which have been listed.  But to review:  its first substitute is the excitement of speed-mania stretched on the framework of an obvious plot.  Or it deals with delicate informal anecdote as the short story does, or fairy legerdemain, or patriotic banners, or great surging mobs of the proletariat, or big scenic outlooks, or miraculous beings made visible.  And the further it gets from Euripides, Ibsen, Shakespeare, or Moliere—­the more it becomes like a mural painting from which flashes of lightning come—­the more it realizes its genius.  Men like Gordon Craig and Granville Barker are almost wasting their genius on the theatre.  The Splendor Photoplays are the great outlet for their type of imagination.