Yet a stronger power of the photoplay probably lies in its own dramatic qualities.  The rhythm of the play is marked by unnatural rapidity.  As the words are absent which, in the drama as in life, fill the gaps between the actions, the gestures and deeds themselves can follow one another much more quickly.  Happenings which would fill an hour on the stage can hardly fill more than twenty minutes on the screen.  This heightens the feeling of vitality in the spectator.  He feels as if he were passing through life with a sharper accent which stirs his personal energies.  The usual make-up of the photoplay must strengthen this effect inasmuch as the wordlessness of the picture drama favors a certain simplification of the social conflicts.  The subtler shades of the motives naturally demand speech.  The later plays of Ibsen could hardly be transformed into photoplays.  Where words are missing the characters tend to become stereotyped and the motives to be deprived of their complexity.  The plot of the photoplay is usually based on the fundamental emotions which are common to all and which are understood by everybody.  Love and hate, gratitude and envy, hope and fear, pity and jealousy, repentance and sinfulness, and all the similar crude emotions have been sufficient for the construction of most scenarios.  The more mature development of the photoplay will certainly overcome this primitive character, as, while such an effort to reduce human life to simple instincts is very convenient for the photoplay, it is not at all necessary.  In any case where this tendency prevails it must help greatly to excite and to intensify the personal feeling of life and to stir the depths of the human mind.

But the richest source of the unique satisfaction in the photoplay is probably that esthetic feeling which is significant for the new art and which we have understood from its psychological conditions. The massive outer world has lost its weight, it has been freed from space, time, and causality, and it has been clothed in the forms of our own consciousness.  The mind has triumphed over matter and the pictures roll on with the ease of musical tones.  It is a superb enjoyment which no other art can furnish us. No wonder that temples for the new goddess are built in every little hamlet.

The intensity with which the plays take hold of the audience cannot remain without strong social effects.  It has even been reported that sensory hallucinations and illusions have crept in; neurasthenic persons are especially inclined to experience touch or temperature or smell or sound impressions from what they see on the screen.  The associations become as vivid as realities, because the mind is so completely given up to the moving pictures.  The applause into which the audiences, especially of rural communities, break out at a happy turn of the melodramatic pictures is another symptom of the strange fascination.  But it is evident that such a penetrating influence