movies has been poor.  It was notably so, it seems to me in the Birth of a Nation and not much better in Cabiria.  Judith of Bethulia (after T.B.  Aldrich) is the best acted “splendor” play that I have seen.  Masterpieces are coming not through spending millions on supes, and “real” temples, and forts; but rather by writing a scenario particularly adapted to film-production, hiring and training actors that know how to act for the camera, preferably those without bad stage habits to unlearn, cutting out all unreal scenery, costume and make-up and keeping everything as simple and as close to the actual as possible.  The best movie play I ever saw was in a ten-cent theatre in St. Louis.  It was a dramatization of Frank Norris’s “McTeague.”  I have never seen it advertised anywhere, and I never heard of the actors, before or since.  But most of it was fine, sincere work, and seeing it made me feel that there is a future for the movie play.

One trouble is that up to date, neither producers nor actors nor the most intelligent and best educated part of the audience take the movies seriously.  Here is one of the marvels of modern times; something that has captured the public as it never was captured before.  And yet most of us look at it as a huge joke, or as something intended to entertain the populace, at which we, too are graciously pleased to be amused.  It might mend matters if we could have every day in some reputable paper a column of readable serious stuff about the current movie plays—­real criticism, not simply the producer’s “blurb.”

Possibly, too, a partnership between the legitimate stage and the movie may be possible and I shall devote to a somewhat wild scheme of this sort the few pages that remain to me.  To begin with, the freedom enjoyed by the Elizabethan dramatists from the limitations imposed by realistic scenery has not been sufficiently insisted upon as an element in their art.  Theirs was a true drame libre, having its analogies with the present attempts of the vers-librists to free poetry from its restrictions of rhyme and metre.  But while the tendency of poetry has always been away from its restrictions, the mise-en-scene in the drama has continually, with the attempts to make it conform to nature, tightened its throttling bands on the real vitality of the stage.

Those who periodically wonder why the dramatists of the Elizabethan age—­the greatest productive period in the history of the English stage—­no longer hold the stage, with the exception of Shakespeare, and who lament that even Shakespeare is yielding his traditional place, have apparently given little thought to this loss of freedom as a contributing cause.  While the writers of vers libre have so far freed themselves that some of them have ceased to write poetry at all, it is a question whether the scenic freedom of the old dramatists may not have played such a vital part in the development of their art, that they owed to it at least some of their pre-eminence.