Page:Pictorial beauty on the screen.djvu/61

 twenty feet in diameter, and our eyes have to get busy in the effort to cover the whole field at once. They rove quickly over several square yards of screen until that face is completely surveyed and every detail noted. Lots of looking! Yes, but that "star" gets fifty thousand dollars a month! Can't fool the camera though—crow's-feet on both sides—fourteen diamonds in the left ear-drop and

Flash to a broad, quiet, soft gray landscape, with a lone rider on the horizon—oh, pshaw!—diamonds must 'a' been glass though—anyway, this picture's good for sore eyes—kind o' easy feelin'—Indian scout maybe—or a

Flash to a close-up of a Mexican bandit, etc., etc. And our eyes get busy again mapping out the whole subject from hat to hoof, from bridle to tail. Exciting! Oh, yes, indeed, and interesting too, but not as art; for those little muscles up there are jerked around too much, they are working overtime, and soon get weary.

"Oh, well, I reckon I can stand the strain," says some heckler, who "don't quite, you know, get this high-brow stuff." Of course, he can stand it. We have stood the mad orchestra of the elevated trains, and the riveters, and the neighbor's parrot for years, but we do not call it music.

The difference between noise and harmony is a physical difference. If this were not true, no one could ever tune your piano. Jarring, clashing, discordant sounds displease the ear. Just why noise displeases is not for us to say. But we have already explained three reasons why bad motion pictures hurt the eyes. Let us remember them. First, sudden shifts from