THE fifty years of the cinema present us with a scrambled recapitulation of the more than two hundred year history of the novel. In D. W. Griffith, the cinema had its Samuel Richardson; the director of Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920), One Exciting Night (1922), and hundreds of other films voiced many of the same moral conceptions and occupied an approximately similar position with respect to the development of the film art as the author of Pamela and Clarissa did with respect to the development of the novel.
