These clear indications of imitation of detail serve to corroborate the evidence of general imitation of style. Indeed Dalmeyda sees in the whole temperament of Xenophon a close affinity to Chariton. Xenophon introduces the most startling events without fanfare. Characteristic of his style are accumulated questions, pathetic résumés, oaths, invocations of the gods, apostrophes of men and of things particularly of that fatal beauty which the young hero and heroine deplore because of their misery. Xenophon’s relation to Chariton in all this is striking.[103] The plot of the novel has seemed to some critics epic in its chronological narrative of successive adventures. Others find the structure a tragic plot with an angry god demanding satisfaction for the sin of arrogance and the guilty hero involving in his own nemesis the one most dear to him. It is true that this and other resemblances to tragedy exist. The story of Manto and her false denunciation of Habrocomes for an attempt to rape her after she has failed to win his love goes back to the Phaedra story of Euripides’ _Hippolytus_. The noble goatherd husband of Anthia finds his prototype in Electra’s peasant husband in Euripides’ play. The scene where Anthia on her wedding-night takes poison which proves to be a sleeping potion, to avoid a new marriage and keep her troth to her lost love seems to be the antecedent of the poison scene in Shakespeare’s _Romeo and Juliet_. To me, however, this novelette finds its closest affiliation in another successor. Both the structure and the devices used to arouse emotion anticipate the modern cinema. This contemporary form of amusement is such an accepted part of modern life that we hardly need to read the books about the cinema by Allerdyce Nicoll, Lewis Jacobs, Maurice Bardèche and others to understand “the Rise of the American Film.” Personally I go to the movies to escape from routine and from painful thoughts of our own times. Occasionally I allow myself to be educated about _Steel_ or _The River_. I prefer to industrial films or films of social problems like lynching, prison conditions, housing, films with biographies of great historical characters: Pasteur, Zola, Rembrandt. I like films set in local history such as _Maryland_ or _Kentucky_ or _Gone with the Wind_ or _The Howards of Virginia_ or _The North West Mounted Police_. I have to shut my eyes during the fighting and the cruelties of _Sea Hawk_ and _All This and Heaven Too_. But I like the cinematic rapidity of changes of scene, the control by the camera of space and magnitude, the extension of the time-limit, the fade-ins and fade-outs which can create fantastic visions, the value of the flash-back to recall what has been already seen, the concentration of interest achieved by close-ups.