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VISUAL EDUCATION
mense international audience. Barrie is hardly a writer of thrillers, and yet the theaters fill up when "Sentimental Tommy" is on.
There is a considerable group of preeminently worth-while authors who command a perpetual audience as the generations come and go. This audience is a thoughtful audience, looking for true ideas, whether they involve hectic action or placid contemplation. They want to see ideas worked out by somebody in whom they have confidence. They make a concession when they go to see "Les Miserables" worked out in one evening. They know the book can't do that, and they know that time is required for digestion and absorption as the chapters move along. I believe they would be willing to go two evenings, or even six, to see great literature given adequate expression on the screen, without hurry and without cuts of whole chapters of atmosphere and description.
In dramatizing a great work, the telescoping process now made necessary by the two-hour performance limit involves a serious loss of many of the subtle effects produced by the author's descriptions, impossible to represent in stage action.
We do not set two-hour limits to reading a book, else all novels would be the short-story length. The bloodand-thunder serial has proved that it is not necessary to limit a dramatization to a two-hour performance. There is nothing magic about two hours, that novels of all sizes and types can be jammed into the two-hour box and made to fit. Genius should not be hampered by such an artificial limitation as "the customary two hours."
Chinese Used to "Serial" Plays
Even the Chinese have escaped that. They go to a play as they would go to college, prepared to stay some time, with intervals for meals. So also with the Greeks and the audiences of the Middle Ages, where great spectacles frequently took all day and in some cases several days.
The serial has improved on the Chinese arrangement, as it does not necessitate giving up work and all other engagements to concentrate for a day or two on a play. Coming once a week for an hour or two, there is time for working out the details of a literary masterpiece, and yet nobody has to resign from work to do it. An exact analogy is furnished by the serial story of the magazines, with installments coming once a week or even once a month. That is the proper way to read a great work — with intervals for what Herbart calls Eeflection and Absorption. That is the way most great novels first reached the public in the days of Dickens and of Scott.
Serials Impossible to Stage
There are obvious reasons why the American stage drama has been unable to give serials : the immense amount of memory work and rehearsals for the actors, the impossibility of holding a troupe together "en tour," where engagements for one performance of a single play would involve a week.
But the silent drama has arrived for such a time as this. After its initial production, it requires no troupe, no hotels and railroad trains, no scenery. Just a little ribbon of celluloid coming in a metal box through the mails every week — a beam of condensed sunlight — ■ (Continued on page 241)
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