It is as sound a composition as Hawthorne ever produced.  The painting of the child is another tribute to the physical-spiritual textures from which humanity is made.  Ah, you producer who have grown squeaky whipping your people into what you called action, consider the dynamics of these figures that would be almost motionless in real life.  Remember there must be a spirit-action under the other, or all is dead.

Yet that soul may be the muse of Comedy.  If Hawthorne and his kind are not your fashion, turn to models that have their feet on the earth always, yet successfully aspire.  Key some of your intimate humorous scenes to the Dutch Little Masters of Painting, such pictures as Gerard Terburg’s Music Lesson in the Chicago Art Institute.  The thing is as well designed as a Dutch house, wind-mill, or clock.  And it is more elegant than any of these.  There is humor enough in the picture to last one reel through.  The society dame of the period, in her pretty raiment, fingers the strings of her musical instrument, while the master stands by her with the baton.  The painter has enjoyed the satire, from her elegant little hands to the teacher’s well-combed locks.  It is very plain that she does not want to study music with any sincerity, and he does not desire to develop the ability of this particular person.  There may be a flirtation in the background.  Yet these people are not hollow as gourds, and they are not caricatured.  The Dutch Little Masters have indulged in numberless characterizations of mundane humanity.  But they are never so preoccupied with the story that it is an anecdote rather than a picture.  It is, first of all, a piece of elegant painting-fabric.  Next it is a scrap of Dutch philosophy or aspiration.

Let Whistler turn over in his grave while we enlist him for the cause of democracy.  One view of the technique of this man might summarize it thus:  fastidiousness in choice of subject, the picture well within the frame, low relief, a Velasquez study of tones and a Japanese study of spaces.  Let us, dear and patient reader, particularly dwell upon the spacing.  A Whistler, or a good Japanese print, might be described as a kaleidoscope suddenly arrested and transfixed at the moment of most exquisite relations in the pieces of glass.  An Intimate Play of a kindred sort would start to turning the kaleidoscope again, losing fine relations only to gain those which are more exquisite and novel.  All motion pictures might be characterized as space measured without sound, plus time measured without sound.  This description fits in a special way the delicate form of the Intimate Motion Picture, and there can be studied out, free from irrelevant issues.