First, gentle and kindly reader, let us discuss sculpture in its most literal sense:  after that, less realistically, but perhaps more adequately.  Let us begin with Annette Kellerman in Neptune’s Daughter.  This film has a crude plot constructed to show off Annette’s various athletic resources.  It is good photography, and a big idea so far as the swimming episodes are concerned.  An artist haunted by picture-conceptions equivalent to the musical thoughts back of Wagner’s Rhine-maidens could have made of Annette, in her mermaid’s dress, a notable figure.  Or a story akin to the mermaid tale of Hans Christian Andersen, or Matthew Arnold’s poem of the forsaken merman, could have made this picturesque witch of the salt water truly significant, and still retained the most beautiful parts of the photoplay as it was exhibited.  It is an exceedingly irrelevant imagination that shows her in other scenes as a duellist, for instance, because forsooth she can fence.  As a child of the ocean, half fish, half woman, she is indeed convincing.  Such mermaids as this have haunted sailors, and lured them on the rocks to their doom, from the day the siren sang till the hour the Lorelei sang no more.  The scene with the baby mermaid, when she swims with the pretty creature on her back, is irresistible.  Why are our managers so mechanical?  Why do they flatten out at the moment the fancy of the tiniest reader of fairy-tales begins to be alive?  Most of Annette’s support were stage dummies.  Neptune was a lame Santa Claus with cotton whiskers.

But as for the bearing of the film on this chapter:  the human figure is within its rights whenever it is as free from self-consciousness as was the life-radiating Annette in the heavenly clear waters of Bermuda.  On the other hand, Neptune and his pasteboard diadem and wooden-pointed pitchfork, should have put on his dressing-gown and retired.  As a toe dancer in an alleged court scene, on land, Annette was a mere simperer.  Possibly Pavlowa as a swimmer in Bermuda waters would have been as much of a mistake.  Each queen to her kingdom.

For living, moving sculpture, the human eye requires a costume and a part in unity with the meaning of that particular figure.  There is the Greek dress of Mordkin in the arrow dance.  There is Annette’s breast covering of shells, and wonderful flowing mermaid hair, clothing her as the midnight does the moon.  The new costume freedom of the photoplay allows such limitation of clothing as would be probable when one is honestly in touch with wild nature and preoccupied with vigorous exercise.  Thus the cave-man and desert island narratives, though seldom well done, when produced with verisimilitude, give an opportunity for the native human frame in the logical wrappings of reeds and skins.  But those who in a silly hurry seek excuses, are generally merely ridiculous, like the barefoot man who is terribly tender about walking on the pebbles, or the wild man who is white as celery or grass under a board.  There is no short cut to vitality.