It is based on entirely mistaken ideas concerning the aims and purposes of art.

If those errors were given up and if the right understanding of the moving pictures were to take hold of the community, nobody would doubt that the chromo print and the graphophone and the plaster cast are indeed nothing but inexpensive substitutes for art with many essential artistic elements left out, and therefore ultimately unsatisfactory to a truly artistic taste.

But everybody would recognize at the same time that the relation of the photoplay to the theater is a completely different one and that the difference counts entirely in favor of the moving pictures.

_They are not and ought never to be imitations of the theater.

They can never give the esthetic values of the theater; but no more can the theater give the esthetic values of the photoplay._ With the rise of the moving pictures has come an entirely new independent art which must develop its own life conditions.