It is the fashion to attribute to the automobile and the motion-picture all social phenomena not otherwise accounted for. The former has undoubtedly increased our national restlessness, and it has robbed the evening lamp of its cosey bookish intimacy. The screen-drama makes possible the “reading” of a story with the minimum amount of effort. A generation bred on the “movies” will be impatient of the tedious methods of writers who cannot transform character by a click of the camera, but require at least four hundred pages to turn the trick. It is doubtful whether any of the quasi-historical novels that flourished fifteen and twenty years ago and broke a succession of best-selling records would meet with anything approximating the same amiable reception if launched to-day. A trained scenario-writer, unembarrassed by literary standards and intent upon nothing but action, can beat the melodramatic novelist at his own game every time. A copyright novel of adventure cannot compete with the same story at ten cents or a quarter as presented in the epileptic drama, where it lays no burden upon the beholder’s visualizing sense. The resources of the screen for creating thrills are inexhaustible; it draws upon the heavens above, the earth beneath, and the waters under the earth; and as nothing that can be pictured can be untrue--or so the confiding “movie” patron, unfamiliar with the tricks of the business, believes--the screen has also the great advantage of plausibility. The silent drama may therefore exercise a beneficent influence, if it shall prove to have shunted into a new channel of publication great numbers of stories whose justification between covers was always debatable. Already many novels of this type have been resurrected by the industrious screen producers. If, after the long list has been exhausted, we shall be spared the “novelization” of screen scenarios in the fashion of the novelized play, we shall be rid of some of the débris that has handicapped the novelists who have meekly asked to be taken seriously.