that only the movie can offer, they are abandoning the unique advantages of that environment, to a large degree.  They build fake cities, they set all their interiors in fake studio rooms, where everything is imitation; even when they let us see a bit of outdoors, it is not what it pretends to be.  We have all seen, on the screen, bluffs 200 feet high on the coast of Virginia and palm trees growing in the borough of the Bronx.  And they hire stage actors to interpret the stagiest of stage plots in as stagy a way as they know how.  I am taking the movie seriously because I like it and because I see that I share that liking with a vast throng of persons with whom it is probably the only thing I have in common—­persons separated from me by differences of training and education that would seem to make a common ground of any kind well-nigh impossible.  With some persons the fact that the movie is democratic puts it outside the pale at once.  Nothing, in their estimation, is worth discussing unless appreciation of it is limited to the few.  Their attitude is that of the mother who said to the nurse:  “Go and see what baby is doing, and tell him he musn’t.”  “Let us,” they say “find out what people like, and then try to make them like something else.”  To such I have nothing to say.  We ought rather, I believe, to find out the kind of thing that people like and then do our best to see that they get it in the best quality—­that it is used in every way possible to pull them out of the mud, instead of rubbing their noses further in.

On the other hand, some capable critics, like Mr. Walter Pritchard Eaton, decry the movies because they are undemocratic—­because they are offering a form of entertainment appealing only to the uneducated and thus segregating them from the educated, who presumably all attend the regular theatre, sitting in the parquet at two dollars per.  One wonders whether Mr. Eaton has attended a moving-picture theatre since 1903.  I believe the movie to be by all odds the most democratic form of intellectual (by which I mean non-physical) entertainment ever offered; and I base my belief on wide observation of audiences in theatres of many different grades.  Now this democracy shows itself not only in the composition of audiences but in their manifestations of approval.  I do not mean that everyone in an audience always likes the same thing.  Some outrageous “slap-stick” comedy rejoices one and offends another.  A particularly foolish plot may satisfy in one place while it bores in another.  But everywhere I find one thing that appeals to everybody—­realism.  Just as soon as there appears on the screen something that does not know how to pose and is forced by nature to be natural—­an animal or a young child, for instance—­there are immediate manifestations of interest and delight.

The least “stagy” actors are almost always favorites.  Mary Pickford stands at the head.  There is not an ounce of staginess in her make-up.  She was never particularly successful on the stage.  Some of her work seems to me ideal acting for the screen—­simple, appealing, absolutely true.  Of course she is not always at her best.