Albert Bigelow Paine

“ Lillian Gish, who has ever held high the torch of beauty during her entire career as stage and screen star, and with undeviating purpose has been representative of the finest and best traditions of the theater, adds another triumph to her list of admirable achievements. As the ethereal and wistful Helena she is all the author could have hoped for. Something more intangible she gives to the rôle than her delicate loveliness, her undeniable charm and the richness of her experience as a sincere and gifted actress. ”

“ The smile of the Gish girl is a bit of happiness trembling on a bed of death; the tears of the Gish girl ... are the tears that old Johann Strauss wrote into the rosemary of his waltzes. The whole secret of the young woman’s remarkably effective acting rests, as I have observed, in her carefully devised and skillfully negotiated technique of playing always, as it were, behind a veil of silver chiffon.... She is always present, she always dominates the scene, yet one feels somehow that she is ever just out of sight around the corner. One never feels that one is seeing her entirely. ”

“ Certainly, she is not a pushing person. Instead of crowding into the limelight, she seems always to be withdrawing from it. Yet wherever she goes her own radiance follows her and lights her up. Try as you may, you cannot get her out of your eye. Just what this rare thing is I hesitate to say. But a first-nighter did say to me, “She is sublime.”
Whatever it may be, it is there in the eyes, the face, the hair, the voice, the form of Lillian Gish.
True enough, but it was a qualification that in future would make it difficult for her to get a part in any play having more than one major rôle. ”

“ Vidor’s signal, she smoothed her apron—a tattered piece of black cotton—with a delicate gesture.
The preservation of an illusion through reality is always a feat, an illusion being of such a fragile, rarefied substance. Usually we learn to be satisfied with treasured remnants. Thus, it is with pride in my good fortune, and with gratitude to Lillian for being what she is, that I present to you an illusion, not only intact but even increased in value—Miss Gish!
With her usual thoroughness, Lillian had prepared for the difficult rôle of Mimi, especially for the tragic end. ”

“ The Tribune said: “It is the most beautiful motion picture we have ever seen, or ever expect to see. When it was over, we wanted to rush up to everyone we met and cry: ‘Oh, don’t miss it, don’t miss it!’” There was a great deal more in the same strain, echoed by every critic. The elder Schildkraut said of it: “I have seen every actress of Europe and America during the last half century. Lillian Gish’s scene in the closet, where she is hiding in terror from her brutal father, is the finest work I have ever witnessed.” ”

“ They painted life on the circuit as happy—just a long pleasure trip. If they forgot the broken nights on wretched trains, the scanty, stale food, the dragging weariness of delays ... oh, well, they were human. Lillian and Dorothy became excited. They had never been to a theatre, except to the Christmas-tree performance in Baltimore. That had been beautiful. Especially Maxine Elliot. Now, they were going to be beautiful, like Maxine. Tearfully Mary Gish began to assemble two little wardrobes—scanty little wardrobes, of a size to go into two cheap little telescope bags. ”

“ One day her pony swerved, or stopped, or something, and Dorothy didn’t. So she broke her arm, a thing so terrifying to Lillian that she scrambled quickly from her horse and hid behind the merry-go-round. The alarm reached the Gish taffy stand, and Dorothy’s beloved Don came on a dead run and bore her in his arms to her mother. Don, so noble and brave and beautiful—how heavenly—worth breaking one’s arm for. Then there was the ride to the hospital in the clanging ambulance, with everybody getting out of the way! ”

“ Always, it is Lillian who is playing, and always you want it to be Lillian, just as all those people she has played—Hester Prynne, Mimi, the White Sister, poor little Lucy Burrows, and Helena—would wish to be Lillian, if they could see her in their parts. ”

“ Lately he said—to the writer:
“Dorothy was more apt at getting the director’s idea than Lillian, quicker to follow it, more easily satisfied with the result. Lillian conceived an ideal, and patiently sought to realize it. Genius is like that: the ideal becomes real to it.”
From his lofty hotel window, David Wark Griffith looked out across the tops of Babylon. Reflectively, he added:
“She is the best actress in New York—the best I know. She has the most brains. Joseph Medill Patterson once said to me: ‘Lillian Gish has the best mind of any woman I ever met.’ But I knew that, already.” ”

“ The keepers of the M-G-M wardrobe are the nicest wardrobe women in Hollywood, but even their elastic patience is tried on days when the picture and scene require a mediocre costuming of extras. Their sympathetic ears are deafened with cries of:
“But, Mother Coulter, I can’t wear this—why, it’s awful! Can’t I at least have a pretty cape to cover up this horror?” “Mrs. Piper, you wouldn’t make me actually wear such an ugly dress!” Each feels that anything less than the very best is not her type. ”

“ Chekhov’s houses all were full of sorrow—the pathetic gloom of thwarted human ambitions and desires, of blasted human ideals. Like any of us who happens to think about it, Chekhov did not at all know whether life was a tragedy or a comedy, so he called his plays comedies, and laughed them off on us, letting the tragedy take care of itself, and sink in, and add itself to our own, to make certain that we had our share. ”

“ Juliana was her name, and as lovely as one of Raphael’s cherubs—lovely, even among Italian children, all of whom have little madonna faces, because for generations expectant mothers have knelt ardently before altars and wayside shrines. Lillian and Dorothy became fond of Juliana, took walks with her, carrying her, board and all—a burden which increased daily as Juliana got fatter and fatter. They wished Juliana would not grow quite so fast; there were scenes where they had to run with her. Italian babies are seldom warm, in winter. ”

“ Griffith did know Lillian, and the motion-picture industry is conducted like no other business on earth.
To begin with, it is not really a business at all—not merchandising. You are not buying something which you are to sell again. You are creating something—painting a canvas, doing it with human beings. Your accessories are mechanical, but even here, the personal element is a chief factor—the enthusiasm and good-will of the photographers, the electricians, the stage-hands. Griffith believed that Lillian could shape these to her taste. ”

“ I think of her today as a slender figure, walking through a field of ripening grain, that parts before her, and closes behind her as she passes along. Her interest in life lies in the beautiful, exquisite things not far away, and in the welfare of those about her. She moves steadily forward, her feet firmly set. She is without envy, or malice, and totally without curiosity. ”

“ Acting in itself is not an art—it is merely repeating lines and gestures, more or less in the manner of the director. But to give these things a special quality—to make them produce a particular mood in the mind of the hearer—to stir something deep down in the heart of the audience—something not measurable by any physical law—something fourth-dimensional—that is art, and may become a very great and sublime one. ”

“ The in-growing life of a Russian farm-house, the tragedy of a cherry orchard, are meaningless to them, or only amusing. It was amusing to Chekhov, too, who laughed—a little—that he might not weep—too much.
Lillian was at home again during the Newark engagement, going across the river each evening and matinée afternoon, unpretentiously by bus, with tiresome changes. She might have gone as befitted a great star, but she preferred to go modestly, and, as she thought, more suitably. ”

“ One remembers Griffith waiting for the blizzard in New England, and echoes Lillian’s heartfelt utterance. The day had come when Nature’s effects were no longer in favor—were even resented, as an imitation; and one who has seen the picture must confess that those eight wind machines were not easily to be outdone.
The most depressing of Lillian’s films, “Wind,” is one of the best—beautiful in its sheer ferocity. ”

“ And then, a few days later, that princess of comediennes, light-hearted Dorothy, “a bright flag flying in the breeze,” to whom all the days are good days, all music good music, to whom all clouds are lined with silver and spanned with rainbows. The likeness between the sisters, whatever it had been earlier, was hardly more now than a family suggestion that flashed faintly at long intervals. They were, in fact, about as different as it is possible for sisters to be.
Daily we rebuilt the sequence of the years—for Lillian a new occupation which she entered into with zest. ”

“ I do not believe in the sound film. Something very right, very true, very precious, was cut short on the verge of its ultimate and certain perfection by the intrusion of spoken dialogue and by the consequent throw-back of the cinema toward the theatre. The silent film was slowly coming into its own as an independent art which had nothing to do with the theatre, an art closely allied with music, dependent on music, an art which visualized music, creating independently to a certain point and completed thereafter by music. ”

“ Many actors, even among the best, work by another method. They absorb the feeling of the plot, fling themselves into a scene, depending upon an angel to kindle the divine fire. This method never was Lillian’s. To her, the bush never of itself became a burning bush. She lit the fire and tended it. She knew the effect she wanted to produce, and found no research too tedious, no rehearsal too long—no effort too great, to achieve her end.
“Way Down East” was shown in October. Griffith, with Lillian and Barthelmess, were present in person, in the larger cities. ”

“ He seems never to have attempted anything of the sort, and if he secretly followed Lillian, she did not know it. Probably it was Mary Gish herself that he most wanted to see. Those wise ones who know all about the world will not fail to explain that he deserved his tragedy....
Night and day the Loom of Circumstance weaves its inevitable pattern. The filaments proceed from a million sources, stretching backward through eternity. Incredibly they unite, and once united the gods themselves cannot change the design. ”

“ If Ronnie Colman—Giovanni, I mean—had, perforce, to renounce his heart’s desire, surely a simpler and less unbeautiful way than that might have been invented. A volcano, an earthquake and a flood—such a rumpus, only to bring death and redemption to one unhappy soldier! To have let him ride or sail out of the picture, going back to Africa, would have been infinitely less expensive, and even more heartbreaking, assuming that this was what the picture intended to be. ”

“ Inasmuch as a delicate, real flesh-and-blood, child might not stand the wear of being handled in that reckless way, a neatly made dummy-duplicate of Lillian was placed in the pit for the hero to grab. Lillian had been carefully taught to creep to safe hiding behind some of the papier-mâché rocks before the explosion, and knew just how to do it. ”

“ I could not understand it. The actress in her home is so often disappointing. Her beauty is the beauty of her rôle—of her lines, her make-up, of the lights—she lays it aside with her part—leaves it in the dressing-room. ”

“ Then another picture comes into my mind as I often saw her at parties, sitting uncomfortably in the quietest corner she could find, talking generally to some elderly person until the time came to go home, where she always went as soon as possible.
Her hands are expressive of her whole personality, delicately modelled, yet with a look of latent strength and capability about them. She uses them beautifully.
She has no fidgety movements. She is one of the few women I know who have learned the art of perfect stillness. ”