That marvel - the movie : a glance at its reckless past, its promising present, and its significant future (1923)

52 THAT MARVEL— THE MOVIE partially satisfied by the drama. The invention of the printing-press gave to a soul-hungry race the book, with its infinite capacity for telling tales, old and new, to the grown-up children of the race. But from Guttenberg's time to Edison's Man had found no new medium through which his eternal craving for stories could be assuaged. Literature and the drama, despite the impetus vouchsafed to them by the printing-press, are of aristocratic origin and have failed to adapt themselves whole-heartedly to the broadening tendencies and demands of the age. Democracy needed a new approach to the romance of existence, an approach that the millions could make without too great a sacrifice, and, lo, the movies blazed the way to it, despite the fact that their advance guard was for the most part unworthy of the high mission that chance had thrust upon it. These pioneers had in their hands the fifth device which Man has found for satisfying his soul's appetite for inspiring tales, more universal in its appeal than the tongue, the play, the novel or the poem, and many of them degraded it, alienating in the beginning those conservative, constructive forces in the community which have only recently come to the assistance of the screen. Wells and Van Loon, each in his own interesting way, have told us recently the tragi-comic story of