impulses of the mind.  Their harmonies and disharmonies, their fusing and blending, is not controlled by any outer necessity, but by the inner agreement and disagreement of our free impulses.  And yet in this world of musical freedom, everything is completely controlled by esthetic necessities.  No sphere of practical life stands under such rigid rules as the realm of the composer.  However bold the musical genius may be he cannot emancipate himself from the iron rule that his work must show complete unity in itself.  All the separate prescriptions which the musical student has to learn are ultimately only the consequences of this central demand which music, the freest of the arts, shares with all the others.  In the case of the film, too, the freedom from the physical forms of space, time, and causality does not mean any liberation from this esthetic bondage either.  On the contrary, just as music is surrounded by more technical rules than literature, the photoplay must be held together by the esthetic demands still more firmly than is the drama.  The arts which are subordinated to the conditions of space, time, and causality find a certain firmness of structure in these material forms which contain an element of outer connectedness.  But where these forms are given up and where the freedom of mental play replaces their outer necessity, everything would fall asunder if the esthetic unity were disregarded.

This unity is, first of all, the unity of action.  The demand for it is the same which we know from the drama.  The temptation to neglect it is nowhere greater than in the photoplay where outside matter can so easily be introduced or independent interests developed.  It is certainly true for the photoplay, as for every work of art, that nothing has the right to existence in its midst which is not internally needed for the unfolding of the unified action.  Wherever two plots are given to us, we receive less by far than if we had only one plot.  We leave the sphere of valuable art entirely when a unified action is ruined by mixing it with declamation, and propaganda which is not organically interwoven with the action itself.  It may be still fresh in memory what an esthetically intolerable helter-skelter performance was offered to the public in “The Battlecry of Peace.”  Nothing can be more injurious to the esthetic cultivation of the people than such performances which hold the attention of the spectators by ambitious detail and yet destroy their esthetic sensibility by a complete disregard of the fundamental principle of art, the demand for unity.  But we recognized also that this unity involves complete isolation.  We annihilate beauty when we link the artistic creation with practical interests and transform the spectator into a selfishly interested bystander.  The scenic background of the play is not presented in order that we decide whether we want to spend our next vacation there.  The interior decoration of the rooms is not exhibited as a display for a department store.  The men and women who carry out the action of the plot must not be people whom we may meet tomorrow on the street.  All the threads of the play must be knotted together in the play itself and none should be connected with our outside interests.  A good photoplay must be isolated and complete in itself like a beautiful melody.  It is not an advertisement for the newest fashions.