the change required would be translating the captions, or better still, plays might be produced that require no captions.  This might mean the total reorganization of the movie-play business in this country—­a revolution which I should view with equanimity.  Speaking of captions, here again the average producer appears to agree with Walter Pritchard Eaton that he is catering only to the uneducated.  The writers of most captions seem, indeed, to have abandoned formal instruction in the primary school.  Why should not a movie caption be good literature?  Some of them are.  The Cabiria captions were fine:  though I do not admire that masterpiece.  I am told that D’Annunzio composed them with care, and equal care was evidently used in the translation.  The captions of the George Ade fables are uniformly good, and there are other notable exceptions.  Other places where knowledge of language is required are inadequately taken care of.  Letters from eminent persons make one want to hide under the chairs.  These persons usually sign themselves “Duke of Gandolfo” or “Secretary of State Smith.”  Are grammar school graduates difficult to get, or high-priced?  I beg you to observe that here again lack of realism is my objection.

But divers friends interpose the remark that the movies are already too realistic.  “They leave nothing to the imagination.”  If this were so, it were a grievous fault—­at any rate in so far as the moving-picture play aims at being an art-form.  All good art leaves something to the imagination.  As a matter of fact, however, the movie is the exact complement of the spoken play as read from a book.  Here we have the words in full, the scene and action being left to the imagination except as briefly sketched in the stage direction.  In the movie we have scene and action in full, the words being left to the imagination except as briefly indicated in the captions.  Where captions are very full the form may perhaps be said to be complementary to the novel, where besides the words we are given a written description of scene and action that is often full of detail.  The movie leaves just as much to the imagination as the novel, but what is so left is different in the two cases.  Do I think that everyone in a movie audience makes use of his privilege to imagine what the actors are saying?  No; neither does the novel-reader always image the scene and action.  This does not depend on ignorance or the reverse, but on imaging power.  Exceptional visual and auditive imaging power are rarely present in the same individual.  I happen to have the former.  I automatically see everything of which I read in a novel, and when the descriptions are not detailed, this gets me into trouble.  On a second reading my imaged background may be different and when the earlier one asserts itself there is a conflict that I can compare only to hearing two tunes played at once.  Persons having already good visual imaging power should develop their auditive imaging power by going to the movies