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240 THE HOUSE THAT SHADOWS BUILT
production and by propaganda, censorship, and even embargo, to discourage American imports.
Yet even if Europe had met us, during the period when the motion picture was finding itself, in equal and unfettered competition, we might have swept the world just the same. Probably they would have created pictures more acceptable to critical taste; but this narrative concerns itself with the motion picture as an industry, not as an art. The modern American stock, with its romantic background and its mixed origins, has positive qualities which equip it for this very job.
To begin with. Heaven endowed us above any other peoples with a developed narrative sense. We are story tellers. The peasants and wood cutters in the cafes of France and Belgium or Germany talk politics, primitive philosophy, even music and art. Northwestern lumbermen smoking in the shack after supper, Arizona cowboys squatting round the camp fire, fishermen mending their nets on the Gloucester wharves, tell racy anecdotes of self-experienced or vicarious adventure. The short story is our one first-class achievement in literature. We put this faculty into our films. Assisted by the imaginative Russians, the Germans have of late produced motion pictures excelling ours in sheer art. The sophisticated and the critical rave over Dr. CalagarVs Cabinet and The Last Laugh: but the populace remains calm. In these great films, and even more in the ordinary product of German, French, and British studios, there is