his head. Suddenly at a sharp accent of his bow the storm breaks, we are
carried to the wildness of rugged rocks or to the raging sea; and again
comes tranquillity over the world, the little country village of his
youth fills the background, the harvest is brought from the fields, the
sun sets upon a scene of happiness, and while the bow slowly sinks, the
walls and ceiling of his attic close in again. No shade, no tint, no hue
of his emotions has escaped us; we followed them as if we had heard the
rejoicing and the sadness, the storm and the peace of his melodious
tones. Such imaginative settings can be only the extreme; they would not
be fit for the routine play. But, however much weaker and fainter the
echo of the surroundings may be in the realistic pictures of the
standard photoplay, the chances are abundant everywhere and no skillful
playwright will ever disregard them entirely. Not the portrait of the
man but the picture as a whole has to be filled with emotional
exuberance.

Everything so far has referred to the emotions of the persons in the
play, but this cannot be sufficient. When we were interested in
attention and memory we did not ask about the act of attention and
memory in the persons of the play, but in the spectator, and we
recognized that these mental activities and excitements in the audience
were projected into the moving pictures. Just here was the center of
our interest, because it showed that uniqueness of the means with which
the photoplaywright can work. If we want to shape the question now in
the same way, we ought to ask how it is with the emotions of the
spectator. But then two different groups of cases must be distinguished.
On the one side we have those emotions in which the feelings of the
persons in the play are transmitted to our own soul. On the other side,
we find those feelings with which we respond to the scenes in the play,
feelings which may be entirely different, perhaps exactly opposite to