Mary Pickford can be a doll, a village belle, or a church angel.  Her powers as a doll are hinted at in the title of the production:  Such a Little Queen.  I remember her when she was a village belle in that film that came out before producers or actors were known by name.  It was sugar-sweet.  It was called:  What the Daisy Said.  If these productions had conformed to their titles sincerely, with the highest photoplay art we would have had two more examples for this chapter.

Why do the people love Mary?  Not on account of the Daniel Frohman style of handling her appearances.  He presents her to us in what are almost the old-fashioned stage terms:  the productions energetic and full of painstaking detail but dominated by a dream that is a theatrical hybrid.  It is neither good moving picture nor good stage play.  Yet Mary could be cast as a cloudy Olympian or a church angel if her managers wanted her to be such.  She herself was transfigured in the Dawn of Tomorrow, but the film-version of that play was merely a well mounted melodrama.

Why do the people love Mary?  Because of a certain aspect of her face in her highest mood.  Botticelli painted her portrait many centuries ago when by some necromancy she appeared to him in this phase of herself.  There is in the Chicago Art Institute at the top of the stairs on the north wall a noble copy of a fresco by that painter, the copy by Mrs. MacMonnies.  It is very near the Winged Victory of Samothrace.  In the picture the muses sit enthroned.  The loveliest of them all is a startling replica of 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.