The daily Nome industrial worker., 1916-05-25

reach sno very lofty pinnacle of esteem, blame the uneducated ana uncultured tastes of the public.
 But in the first place about Mitchcll's criticism, it would be in- teresting to understand what is his idea of education. Because one o1 necessity appreciates some literature subtlety or another, it is no pre- sumption that that one is a cultured or educated person. And all this talk about ignorant or uneducated masses is more or less bosh any way, for when all is said and done, it is tho popular opinion always that has unerringly detected genHs in literature.
 The high browed concepts oi genius of another age are not the concept which outlive the popular notions. Quite the contrary and il is a somewhat severe commentarr upon even such a critic as Samual Johnson that the very poet who should have by him been most severely criticized and whose repu- tation was blasted with q few phrases l to which no more importance was at tached than to the merits of the writer, the poet Grey should also have been the one whom the popp- lar notions gave credit fer being the equal of Pope and the superior a good many others.
 The task of writing for educated people. for the middle class who have had education thrust upon them is wearisome in tho extreme, Yet it is for these that tho mass ot literature whether novels or plays are provided The mediocrity and inferiority Of the greater portion of modern writing is due precisely to the fact that the educated taste that demands it is of an inferior nature.
 As far as tho movies are con concerned they are still in their infancy. But they open field for acting that no dramatist with an eye upon literary expression and and verbal witticism could possibly create Moreover inasmuch as four ffths of the dramatic is in the act ing and not in the wording, the movies lose very little by the ab- sence of spoken words.
 Where the weakness of the mo- vie lies is in its copying the melo- dramatic tendency of middle class society. The illegal loves of the bourgeois, the struggle to outshtne ones neighbor in ostentatious wealth, the greedy desires to achieve social distinction and the uncertain pleasures of leisured claSs-these are the subjects tha, are thrown / upon screen after screen in a multitude of plots all more or less akin.
 But there are possibilities. A writer in Solidarity some time ago drew attention to such productior as Tess of the Storm Country wherein Mary Pickford stars in a wonderful manner. The subject i; not the hackneyed subject of middle class romance, mean, sordid and often pitifully ridiculous, but a story of the people painted ani cer' tainly acted with wonderful power and realism. The opportunity fol the establishment of a real series of motion plays which will depict life as it really is, the life os the workers in the sense that play like Hauptmann's Weavcrs' is story oi the workers, are endless but harly as yet touched upon. These things ap peal to all audience whether in the sense educated that Mitchell means or not.
 The fact that the written drama has outlived it's usefulness Is al most as self evident as the fact that an epic poem is today impossible But that education and culture ol the lack of these things are the cause of the decay is not correct. | - -