that would spring at once to any musician's mind, passing by the thousands upon thousands of scores devised by lesser composers for lesser plays. Of course, it has usually been the poetic drama (do we ever hear Shakespeare or Rostand without it?) which has seemed to call for incidental music, but, with more or less disastrous consequences, to be sure, it has accompanied the unfolding of many a "drawing-room" comedy, especially during the eighties.
On the whole, as a matter of fact, more films follow the general lines of Lady Windermere's Fan or Peg o' My Heart than those of poetic dramas such as Cymbeline or La Samaritaine. The case, however, is not analogous to that of the spoken drama. For, in motion-pictures, a poetic play sheds its poetry and becomes, like its neighbour, a skeleton of action. There is no conceivable distinction in the movies, beyond one created by preference, or taste, or the quality of the performance and the photography, between Dante's Inferno and a film in which the beloved Charlie Chaplin looms large.
When the first moving-picture was exposed on the screen it seems to have occurred at once to its projector that some kind of music must accompany its unreeling. The silence evidently appalled him.[1] A moving-picture is not unlike a
- ↑ In Chapter XIV of The Art of the Moving Picture, Vachel
