Mary.

The people are hungry for this fine and spiritual thing that Botticelli
painted in the faces of his muses and heavenly creatures. Because the mob
catch the very glimpse of it in Mary's face, they follow her night after
night in the films. They are never quite satisfied with the plays,
because the managers are not artists enough to know they should sometimes
put her into sacred pictures and not have her always the village hoyden,
in plays not even hoydenish. But perhaps in this argument I have but
betrayed myself as Mary's infatuated partisan.

So let there be recorded here the name of another actress who is always
in the intimate-and-friendly mood and adapted to close-up interiors,
Marguerite Clark. She is endowed by nature to act, in the same film, the
eight-year-old village pet, the irrepressible sixteen-year-old, and
finally the shining bride of twenty. But no production in which she acts
that has happened to come under my eye has done justice to these
possibilities. The transitions from one of these stages to the other are
not marked by the producer with sufficient delicate graduation, emphasis,
and contrast. Her plots have been but sugared nonsense, or swashbuckling
ups and downs. She shines in a bevy of girls. She has sometimes been
given the bevy.

But it is easier to find performers who fit this chapter, than to find
films. Having read so far, it is probably not quite nine o'clock in the
evening. Go around the corner to the nearest theatre. You will not be apt
to find a pure example of the Intimate-and-friendly Moving Picture, but
some one or two scenes will make plain the intent of the phrase. Imagine
the most winsome tableau that passes before you, extended logically
through one or three reels, with no melodramatic interruptions or awful
smashes. For a further discussion of these smashes, and other items in
this chapter, read the ninth chapter, entitled "Painting-in-Motion."

CHAPTER IV

THE MOTION PICTURE OF FAIRY SPLENDOR

Again, kind reader, let us assume it is eight o'clock in the evening, for
purposes of future climax which you no doubt anticipate.

Just as the Action Motion Picture has its photographic basis in the race
down the high-road, just as the Intimate Motion Picture has its
photographic basis in the close-up interior scene, so the Photoplay of
Splendor, in its four forms, is based on the fact that the kinetoscope
can take in the most varied of out-of-door landscapes. It can