The theatre of science; a volume of progress and achievement in the motion picture industry (1914)

of Science 149 underlying psychological insight into the human mind, subtle, yet keen. Fielding scorns the obvious, but his ideas are never those of the visionary. The commercial success of his films is never obscured by the striving after the odd. In each of his plays there is a definite message. The merely routine tale — the hack production— is yet to be sponsored by Romaine Fielding; the man who, wherever he goes, finds himself the lodestone to men, women and children of all classes. He is another Pied Piper of Hamelin, but his music comes not from a reed, but his heart. It is Fielding's optimism, his soundness of character, his tender sympathy, and royal goodfellowship that answer for his irresistible appeal. On the screen, aside from his gifts as an actor, he is not the shadow — the husk of a man — that many players become when the camera translates their' personality. When Romaine Fielding acts it is from the very core of his manhood. This, then, is the writer's tribute to a man and actor whose remarkable development has been such that, although Fielding was associated with myself in business a quarter of a century ago, and I have never seen him since save on a screen, I did not know he was the same man until a few days ago he recalled the past to me in a letter. And now when I look back recalling the young actor's struggles and vicissitudes it seems as if Romaine ; Fielding, who unlike other great directors and authors of photoplays, appears in all of his owti productions, is after all merely a product of the theatre of science. Can it be possible that his twenty years on the stage was wasted? It would seem so, for here we have a man who entered the film studio without fame as actor, stage director or author, and instantly in the