and operas if it had only received what the audiences believed at the moment that they liked best.  The esthetically commonplace will always triumph over the significant unless systematic efforts are made to reenforce the work of true beauty.  Communities at first always prefer Sousa to Beethoven.  The moving picture audience could only by slow steps be brought from the tasteless and vulgar eccentricities of the first period to the best plays of today, and the best plays of today can be nothing but the beginning of the great upward movement which we hope for in the photoplay.  Hardly any teaching can mean more for our community than the teaching of beauty where it reaches the masses.  The moral impulse and the desire for knowledge are, after all, deeply implanted in the American crowd, but the longing for beauty is rudimentary; and yet it means harmony, unity, true satisfaction, and happiness in life.  The people still has to learn the great difference between true enjoyment and fleeting pleasure, between real beauty and the mere tickling of the senses.

Of course, there are those, and they may be legion today, who would deride every plan to make the moving pictures the vehicle of esthetic education.  How can we teach the spirit of true art by a medium which is in itself the opposite of art?  How can we implant the idea of harmony by that which is in itself a parody on art?  We hear the contempt for “canned drama” and the machine-made theater.  Nobody stops to think whether other arts despise the help of technique.  The printed book of lyric poems is also machine-made; the marble bust has also “preserved” for two thousand years the beauty of the living woman who was the model for the Greek sculptor.  They tell us that the actor on the stage gives the human beings as they are in reality, but the moving pictures are unreal and therefore of incomparably inferior value.  They do not consider that the roses of the summer which we enjoy in the stanzas of the poet do not exist in reality in the forms of iambic verse and of rhymes; they live in color and odor, but their color and odor fade away, while the roses in the stanzas live on forever.  They fancy that the value of an art depends upon its nearness to the reality of physical nature.

It has been the chief task of our whole discussion to prove the shallowness of such arguments and objections.  We recognized that art is a way to overcome nature and to create out of the chaotic material of the world something entirely new, entirely unreal, which embodies perfect unity and harmony.  The different arts are different ways of abstracting from reality; and when we began to analyze the psychology of the moving pictures we soon became aware that the photoplay has a way to perform this task of art with entire originality, independent of the art of the theater, as much as poetry is independent of music or sculpture of painting.  It is an art in itself.  Only the future can teach us whether it will become a great art, whether a Leonardo,