Nor is the screen really committing sacrilege in making use of the literary achievements of master tale-tellers. Since the movies first began to present photoplays based upon the world’s great novels, there has been a constantly increasing demand at our circulating libraries for the works of worth-while authors possessing the narrative gift. The telephone actually increased the vogue of the telegraph. The wireless is enlarging the working-field of the telephone. By the same token, the screen is not narrowing but broadening the realm of letters. The appeal that it makes to countless millions who have been hitherto indifferent to, or ignorant of, the outstanding achievements of our great imaginative writers is a new and potent factor in the intellectual and spiritual life of the people. Furthermore, the movie, in its traffic with the best in fiction, is of service to the man of letters who is sufficiently open-minded to welcome new contacts with old masterpieces. The screen does not merely bring great stories down to the masses, it frequently revivifies the enthusiasm of the aging and jaded book-worm for great stories. Is it disloyalty to my degree of Doctor of Humane Letters to confess that within the year my youth has been temporarily renewed for a few hours as I watched the screen telling me in a new way Dumas’s stories of “The Three Musketeers” and “The Count of Monte Cristo”? Would I not be a hopeless literary snob if I refused to admit that I derived pure and unadulterated joy from the unfolding before my eyes of half-forgotten tales which had been among the keenest delights of my romance-loving boyhood? If this be treason, at all events it’s honesty. I have acquired the habit of late of patronizing the theatre that advertises a picture-play derived from some novel, old or new, and recounts, by means of the silent drama, a story worthy of repetition. While on this phase of my general subject, I find that I can go conscientiously further than I have above and assert that the screen may, in certain instances, present an author’s narrative with even greater impressiveness than his printed book was able to compass. “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” was, to the minds of many competent critics, a much overrated novel. It displayed not only the merits of Ibañez as a story-teller but also his grave defects. His tale was rather clumsily developed, and its interest was not cumulative. It is hardly going too far to say that the author narrowly avoided handicapping his achievement by an anti-climax.