This is the chief road on which the forward march of the last twenty years has been most rapid.

The theater and the vaudeville and the novel had to yield room and ample room to the play of the flitting pictures.

What was the real principle of the inner development on this artistic side?
The little scenes which the first pictures offered could hardly have been called plays.

They would have been unable to hold the attention by their own contents.

Their only charm was really the pleasure in the perfection with which the apparatus rendered the actual movements.