This would be hardly a correct description today.  This “lower middle class” has long been joined by the upper middle class.  To be sure, our observer of that long forgotten past added meekly:  “Then there emerges a superior person or two like yourself attracted by mere curiosity and kept in his seat by interest until the very end of the performance; this type sneers aloud to proclaim its superiority and preserve its self-respect, but it never leaves the theater until it must.”  Today you and I are seen there quite often, and we find that our friends have been there, that they have given up the sneering pose and talk about the new photoplay as a matter of course.

Above all, even those who are drawn by the cheapness of the performance would hardly push their dimes under the little window so often if they did not really enjoy the plays and were not stirred by a pleasure which holds them for hours.  After all, it must be the content of the performances which is decisive of the incomparable triumph.  We have no right to conclude from this that only the merits and excellences are the true causes of their success.  A caustic critic would probably suggest that just the opposite traits are responsible.  He would say that the average American is a mixture of business, ragtime, and sentimentality.  He satisfies his business instinct by getting so much for his nickel, he enjoys his ragtime in the slapstick humor, and gratifies his sentimentality with the preposterous melodramas which fill the program.  This is quite true, and yet it is not true at all.  Success has crowned every effort to improve the photostage; the better the plays are the more the audience approves them.  The most ambitious companies are the most flourishing ones.  There must be inner values which make the photoplay so extremely attractive and even fascinating.

To a certain degree the mere technical cleverness of the pictures even today holds the interest spellbound as in those early days when nothing but this technical skill could claim the attention.  We are still startled by every original effect, even if the mere showing of movement has today lost its impressiveness.  Moreover we are captivated by the undeniable beauty of many settings.  The melodrama may be cheap; yet it does not disturb the cultured mind as grossly as a similar tragic vulgarity would on the real stage, because it may have the snowfields of Alaska or the palm trees of Florida as radiant background.  An intellectual interest, too, finds its satisfaction.  We get an insight into spheres which were strange to us.  Where outlying regions of human interest are shown on the theater stage, we must usually be satisfied with some standardized suggestion.  Here in the moving pictures the play may really bring us to mills and factories, to farms and mines, to courtrooms and hospitals, to castles and palaces in any land on earth.