of the moving pictures this inner state is objectified.  The mind is filled with emotions; and by means of the camera the whole scenery echoes them.  Even in the most objective factor of the mind, the perception, we find this peculiar oscillation.  We perceive the movement; and yet we perceive it as something which has not its independent character as an outer world process, because our mind has built it up from single pictures rapidly following one another.  We perceive things in their plastic depth; and yet again the depth is not that of the outer world.  We are aware of its unreality and of the pictorial flatness of the impressions.

In every one of these features the contrast to the mental impressions from the real stage is obvious.  There in the theater we know at every moment that we see real plastic men before us, that they are really in motion when they walk and talk and that, on the other hand, it is our own doing and not a part of the play when our attention turns to this or that detail, when our memory brings back events of the past, when our imagination surrounds them with fancies and emotions.  And here, it seems, we have a definite starting point for an esthetic comparison.  If we raise the unavoidable question—­how does the photoplay compare with the drama?—­we seem to have sufficient material on hand to form an esthetic judgment.  The verdict, it appears, can hardly be doubtful.  Must we not say art is imitation of nature?  The drama can show us on the stage a true imitation of real life.  The scenes proceed just as they would happen anywhere in the outer world.  Men of flesh and blood with really plastic bodies stand before us.  They move like any moving body in our surroundings.  Moreover those happenings on the stage, just like the events in life, are independent of our subjective attention and memory and imagination.  They go their objective course.  Thus the theater comes so near to its purpose of imitating the world of men that the comparison with the photoplay suggests almost a disastrous failure of the art of the film.  The color of the world has disappeared, the persons are dumb, no sound reaches our ear.  The depth of the scene appears unreal, the motion has lost its natural character.  Worst of all, the objective course of events is falsified; our own attention and memory and imagination have shifted and remodeled the events until they look as nature could never show them.  What we really see can hardly be called any longer an imitation of the world, such as the theater gives us.

When the graphophone repeats a Beethoven symphony, the voluminousness of the orchestra is reduced to a thin feeble surface sound, and no one would accept this product of the disk and the diaphragm as a full substitute for the performance of the real orchestra.  But, after all, every instrument is actually represented, and we can still discriminate the violins and the celli and the flutes in exactly the same order and tonal and rhythmic relation in which they appear in