one and that the difference counts entirely in favor of the moving pictures. They are not and ought never to be imitations of the theater.  They can never give the esthetic values of the theater; but no more can the theater give the esthetic values of the photoplay. With the rise of the moving pictures has come an entirely new independent art which must develop its own life conditions.  The moving pictures would indeed be a complete failure if that popular theory of art which we suggested were right.  But that theory is wrong from beginning to end, and it must not obstruct the way to a better insight which recognizes that the stage and the screen are as fundamentally different as sculpture and painting, or as lyrics and music. The drama and the photoplay are two cooerdinated arts, each perfectly valuable in itself. The one cannot replace the other; and the shortcomings of the one as against the other reflect only the fact that the one has a history of fifteen years while the other has one of five thousand.  This is the thesis which we want to prove, and the first step to it must be to ask:  what is the aim of art if not the imitation of reality?

But can the claim that art imitates nature or rather that imitation is the essence of art be upheld if we seriously look over the field of artistic creations?  Would it not involve the expectation that the artistic value would be the greater, the more the ideal of imitation is approached?  A perfect imitation which looks exactly like the original would give us the highest art.  Yet every page in the history of art tells us the opposite.  We admire the marble statue and we despise as inartistic the colored wax figures.  There is no difficulty in producing colored wax figures which look so completely like real persons that the visitor at an exhibit may easily be deceived and may ask information from the wax man leaning over the railing.  On the other hand what a tremendous distance between reality and the marble statue with its uniform white surface!  It could never deceive us and as an imitation it would certainly be a failure.  Is it different with a painting?  Here the color may be quite similar to the original, but unlike the marble it has lost its depth and shows us nature on a flat surface.  Again we could never be deceived, and it is not the painter’s ambition to make us believe for a moment that reality is before us.  Moreover neither the sculptor nor the painter gives us less valuable work when they offer us a bust or a painted head only instead of the whole figure; and yet we have never seen in reality a human body ending at the chest.  We admire a fine etching hardly less than a painting.  Here we have neither the plastic effect of the sculpture nor the color of the painting.  The essential features of the real model are left out.  As an imitation it would fail disastrously.  What is imitated in a lyric poem?  Through more than two thousand years we have appreciated the works of the great dramatists