“Science has accounted for that, rather prosaically, I believe.”
“Science is always accounting for things, and then by and by, it accounts for them again, in another way.”
One day, when I was rather down, she said to me:
“I know all about how futile one’s work can seem—how inconsequential. So many times last Spring I thought: ‘What am I doing this for? Dressing up and pretending to be something I am not—selling myself to these people. ‘Vanya’ was a beautiful play, and I loved it ... but to do it publicly. It was just offering oneself to be seen, for money. I never had quite that feeling, doing the pictures. The audience was not present; we were doing the picture primarily for ourselves—at least it seemed so—making a panoramic painting, on a screen.”
One day I made use of the word “dooryard.” Surprisingly, I found it new to her, but she liked the sound—the picture it conveyed. “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed,” I quoted from Whitman. She thought it a beautiful phrase.
In the article she had written for Oliver Sayler’s book, I read—as already she had said to me:
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.
But then, one day, she said:
“The silent film came to an end none too soon; it had gone as far as it could go.”