the original.  The graphophone music appears, therefore, much better fitted for replacing the orchestra than the moving pictures are to be a substitute for the theater.  There all the essential elements seem conserved; here just the essentials seem to be lost and the aim of the drama to imitate life with the greatest possible reality seems hopelessly beyond the flat, colorless pictures of the photoplay.  Still more might we say that the plaster of Paris cast is a fair substitute for the marble statue.  It shares with the beautiful marble work the same form and imitates the body of the living man just as well as the marble statue.  Moreover, this product of the mechanical process has the same white color which the original work of the sculptor possesses.  Hence we must acknowledge it as a fair approach to the plastic work of art.  In the same way the chromo print gives the essentials of the oil painting.  Everywhere the technical process has secured a reproduction of the work of art which sounds or looks almost like the work of the great artist, and only the technique of the moving pictures, which so clearly tries to reproduce the theater performance, stands so utterly far behind the art of the actor.  Is not an esthetic judgment of rejection demanded by good taste and sober criticism?  We may tolerate the photoplay because, by the inexpensive technical method which allows an unlimited multiplication of the performances, it brings at least a shadow of the theater to the masses who cannot afford to see real actors.  But the cultivated mind might better enjoy plaster of Paris casts and chromo prints and graphophone music than the moving pictures with their complete failure to give us the essentials of the real stage.

We have heard this message, or if it was not expressed in clear words it surely lingered for a long while in the minds of all those who had a serious relation to art.  It probably still prevails today among many, even if they appreciate the more ambitious efforts of the photoplaywrights in the most recent years.  The philanthropic pleasure in the furnishing of cheap entertainment and the recognition that a certain advance has recently been made seem to alleviate the esthetic situation, but the core of public opinion remains the same; the moving pictures are no real art.

And yet all this arguing and all this hasty settling of a most complex problem is fundamentally wrong.  It is based on entirely mistaken ideas concerning the aims and purposes of art.  If those errors were given up and if the right understanding of the moving pictures were to take hold of the community, nobody would doubt that the chromo print and the graphophone and the plaster cast are indeed nothing but inexpensive substitutes for art with many essential artistic elements left out, and therefore ultimately unsatisfactory to a truly artistic taste.  But everybody would recognize at the same time that the relation of the photoplay to the theater is a completely different