of conventions which make the pantomime almost the real background of all dramatic development.  We know how popular the pantomimes were among the Greeks, and how they stood in the foreground in the imperial period of Rome.  Old Rome cherished the mimic clowns, but still more the tragic pantomimics.  “Their very nod speaks, their hands talk and their fingers have a voice.”  After the fall of the Roman empire the church used the pantomime for the portrayal of sacred history, and later centuries enjoyed very unsacred histories in the pantomimes of their ballets.  Even complex artistic tragedies without words have triumphed on our present-day stage.  “L’Enfant Prodigue” which came from Paris, “Sumurun” which came from Berlin, “Petroushka” which came from Petrograd, conquered the American stage; and surely the loss of speech, while it increased the remoteness from reality, by no means destroyed the continuous consciousness of the bodily existence of the actors.

Moreover the student of a modern pantomime cannot overlook a characteristic difference between the speechless performance on the stage and that of the actors of a photoplay.  The expression of the inner states, the whole system of gestures, is decidedly different:  and here we might say that the photoplay stands nearer to life than the pantomime.  Of course, the photoplayer must somewhat exaggerate the natural expression.  The whole rhythm and intensity of his gestures must be more marked than it would be with actors who accompany their movements by spoken words and who express the meaning of their thoughts and feelings by the content of what they say.  Nevertheless the photoplayer uses the regular channels of mental discharge.  He acts simply as a very emotional person might act.  But the actor who plays in a pantomime cannot be satisfied with that.  He is expected to add something which is entirely unnatural, namely a kind of artificial demonstration of his emotions.  He must not only behave like an angry man, but he must behave like a man who is consciously interested in his anger and wants to demonstrate it to others.  He exhibits his emotions for the spectators.  He really acts theatrically for the benefit of the bystanders.  If he did not try to do so, his means of conveying a rich story and a real conflict of human passions would be too meager.  The photoplayer, with the rapid changes of scenes, has other possibilities of conveying his intentions.  He must not yield to the temptation to play a pantomime on the screen, or he will seriously injure the artistic quality of the reel.

The really decisive distance from bodily reality, however, is created by the substitution of the actor’s picture for the actor himself.  Lights and shades replace the manifoldness of color effects and mere perspective must furnish the suggestion of depth.  We traced it when we discussed the psychology of kinematoscopic perception.  But we must not put the emphasis on the wrong point.  The natural tendency might