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134 THE CINEMA
artist should not sit and grumble in some little cafe reserved for the avant-garde. He should make the best out of the great chance offered him to create something good for a public numbered in millions. It is in those terms that the universal success of such rare artists as Chaplin must be measured. They made the institution of the cinema serve the art of the film, as it must when the film artist can command the greater public on the scale that Chaplin has done for over a quarter of a century.
The condition of the cinema is that of extremes. There is no middle stream in which experiment can thrive with a reasonable chance of success. You either serve the greater public in those terms which the distributor-exhibitor, the professional accountant-showman, determines, or you must be a genius commanding the respect of everyone because it has been established in the distributor-exhibitor mind that your particular kind of artistic eccentricity can attract audiences and make money. Otherwise, there is small chance for you except now and then to throw a pinch of art into a mess of conventional showmanship. There is no equivalent in the cinema to the Little Theatre movement, which helps to refresh and enliven the drama with some measure of experiment. Artistic success must normally exist in terms of boxoffice success, unless the artist manages to inveigle out of his employers some sort of momentary freedom.
The position of Shakespeare three and a half centuries ago makes an interesting parallel to the conditions in which the present-day film-maker works. Shakespeare, a provincial from Stratford, became a playwright presumably because he had the sheer initiative to leave home and enter the theatre as the profession of his choice. He evidently learnt his craft the hard way, graduating through acting and some hack-work in scripting to the position of dramatist and theatre owner. Like the film-makers of today, he entered his chosen profession in some junior capacity and worked