exactly to the actual order of events.  The photoplay, on the other hand, does not and must not respect this temporal structure of the physical universe.  At any point the photoplay interrupts the series and brings us back to the past.  We studied this unique feature of the film art when we spoke of the psychology of memory and imagination.  With the full freedom of our fancy, with the whole mobility of our association of ideas, pictures of the past flit through the scenes of the present.  Time is left behind.  Man becomes boy; today is interwoven with the day before yesterday.  The freedom of the mind has triumphed over the unalterable law of the outer world.

It is interesting to watch how playwrights nowadays try to steal the thunder of the photoplay and experiment with time reversals on the legitimate stage.  We are esthetically on the borderland when a grandfather tells his grandchild the story of his own youth as a warning, and instead of the spoken words the events of his early years come before our eyes.  This is, after all, quite similar to a play within a play.  A very different experiment is tried in “Under Cover.”  The third act, which plays on the second floor of the house, ends with an explosion.  The fourth act, which plays downstairs, begins a quarter of an hour before the explosion.  Here we have a real denial of a fundamental condition of the theater.  Or if we stick to recent products of the American stage, we may think of “On Trial,” a play which perhaps comes nearest to a dramatic usurpation of the rights of the photoplay.  We see the court scene and as one witness after another begins to give his testimony the courtroom is replaced by the scenes of the actions about which the witness is to report.  Another clever play, “Between the Lines,” ends the first act with a postman bringing three letters from the three children of the house.  The second, third, and fourth acts lead us to the three different homes from which the letters came and the action in the three places not only precedes the writing of the letters; but goes on at the same time.  The last act, finally, begins with the arrival of the letters which tell the ending of those events in the three homes.  Such experiments are very suggestive but they are not any longer pure dramatic art.  It is always possible to mix arts.  An Italian painter produces very striking effects by putting pieces of glass and stone and rope into his paintings, but they are no longer pure paintings.  The drama in which the later event comes before the earlier is an esthetic barbarism which is entertaining as a clever trick in a graceful superficial play, but intolerable in ambitious dramatic art.  It is not only tolerable but perfectly natural in any photoplay.  The pictorial reflection of the world is not bound by the rigid mechanism of time.  Our mind is here and there, our mind turns to the present and then to the past:  the photoplay can equal it in its freedom from the bondage of the material world.