A successful literal use of sculpture is in the film Oil and Water.  Blanche Sweet is the leader of the play within a play which occupies the first reel.  Here the Olympians and the Muses, with a grace that we fancy was Greek, lead a dance that traces the story of the spring, summer, and autumn of life.  Finally the supple dancers turn gray and old and die, but not before they have given us a vision from the Ionian islands.  The play might have been inspired from reading Keats’ Lamia, but is probably derived from the work of Isadora Duncan.  This chapter has hereafter only a passing word or two on literal sculptural effects.  It has more in mind the carver’s attitude toward all that passes before the eye.

The sculptor George Gray Barnard is responsible for none of the views in this discourse, but he has talked to me at length about his sense of discovery in watching the most ordinary motion pictures, and his delight in following them with their endless combinations of masses and flowing surfaces.

The little far-away people on the old-fashioned speaking stage do not appeal to the plastic sense in this way.  They are, by comparison, mere bits of pasteboard with sweet voices, while, on the other hand, the photoplay foreground is full of dumb giants.  The bodies of these giants are in high sculptural relief.  Where the lights are quite glaring and the photography is bad, many of the figures are as hard in their impact on the eye as lime-white plaster-casts, no matter what the clothing.  There are several passages of this sort in the otherwise beautiful Enoch Arden, where the shipwrecked sailor is depicted on his desert island in the glaring sun.

What materials should the photoplay figures suggest?  There are as many possible materials as there are subjects for pictures and tone schemes to be considered.  But we will take for illustration wood, bronze, and marble, since they have been used in the old sculptural art.

There is found in most art shows a type of carved wood gargoyle where the work and the subject are at one, not only in the color of the wood, but in the way the material masses itself, in bulk betrays its qualities.  We will suppose a moving picture humorist who is in the same mood as the carver.  He chooses a story of quaint old ladies, street gamins, and fat aldermen.  Imagine the figures with the same massing and interplay suddenly invested with life, yet giving to the eye a pleasure kindred to that which is found in carved wood, and bringing to the fancy a similar humor.

Or there is a type of Action Story where the mood of the figures is that of bronze, with the aesthetic resources of that metal:  its elasticity; its emphasis on the tendon, ligament, and bone, rather than on the muscle; and an attribute that we will call the panther-like quality.  Hermon A. MacNeil has a memorable piece of work in the yard of the architect Shaw, at Lake Forest, Illinois.  It is called “The Sun Vow.”  A little Indian is shooting toward the sun, while the old warrior, crouching immediately behind him, follows with his eye the direction of the arrow.  Few pieces of sculpture come readily to mind that show more happily the qualities of bronze as distinguished from other materials.  To imagine such a group done in marble, carved wood, or Della Robbia ware is to destroy the very image in the fancy.