A brief lawsuit in which Lillian was involved at this time added greatly to her prestige. In October (1924), for what she felt to be just cause, she had broken off relations with her producers. Suit for breach of contract followed. At the trial, held in a small, crowded room of the Woolworth Building, the chief executive of the picture corporation testified to a number of remarkable things, among them that Miss Gish had engaged herself to marry him, all of which notably failed to convince Judge Julian W. Mack, who, on the second or third morning of the trial, rose and summarily dismissed the case against Lillian, and after a few well-chosen words to her accuser, held him “to bail in the sum of $10,000” (I quote the minutes) “to answer to the charge of perjury.” He was indicted, but Lillian, with no wish, as she said, to send anyone to prison, declined to appear against him, and the case was dismissed.

Lillian’s following was now enormous ... of the whole world, for in no obscure corner of it was her face unfamiliar, or unwelcomed.

There was something almost magical about this universal homage. Men and women alike paid tribute. Reporters ransacked dictionaries for terms that would convey her elusive loveliness—likened it (one of them) to “the haunting sadness of an old Spanish song, heard as the light fades from the evening sky.”

What heaps of letters! And if, as has been said, she was wanting in sex-appeal, why all the marriage proposals? Why so much poetry? Just one young man wrote eleven little volumes of poetry—pretty good poetry, if there is such a thing, even if not entirely sane (what poetry is?)—and it was printed by hand with the utmost care and beauty.

Also, she was being discovered by the “intelligentsia,” whatever that word means. If, as appears, it has to do with intelligence, it would seem to apply to the great masses who had hailed her as an artist and raved over her, almost from the beginning. Never mind—she was now definitely recognized as an Artist—taken up by the elect, who in the long run, have something to say about Art, and affix the official stamp. And having discovered her, they proceeded to burn incense and chant orisons to her as their special saint and dÉesse, just as the others had been doing for a good ten years and more.

As early as 1921, Edward Wagenknecht, a young don of the Chicago University, met her, and straightway hailed her as the “artist’s artist.” Further he declared: “Words, especially prose, seem horribly wooden in discussing her.... Hers is a personality which can be adequately described only in terms of music, or poetry, which is a form of music. In her presence one wants instinctively to talk blank verse.” There was a great deal more to it which I should like to quote, for it was sincere, and trimly phrased. Mr. Wagenknecht has since written a whole chapbook on the subject of Miss Gish, a distinguished performance.^[2] My impression is that he was the advance guard of her later “discoverers.”

I don’t know when Joseph Hergesheimer first came under the Lillian spell, but probably about the time he used her as his model for “Cytherea,” which I regard as something less of a compliment than his article in the American Mercury, April, 1924. In this article, he is supposed to be talking to Lillian.

“No one,” I told her, “who has worked with you, has the slightest idea of what your charm really is. Two men, and not unsuccessfully, have written about it, about you ... James Branch Cabell and myself. James thinks it is Helen of Troy; and if he is right, then you, too, are Helen. I mean that you have the quality which, in a Golden Age, would hold an army about the walls of a city for seven years.”

Hergesheimer was proposing a picture, in which, as he assured her, she would be “like the April moon, a thing for all young men to dream about forever ... the fragrant April moon of men’s hopes ... ‘No one, seeing you, will ever again be deeply interested in other girls.’ I recalled to her the legend of Diana—how a countryman, hearing Diana’s horn through the woods, lost in vague restlessness his familiar content. ‘You will be the clear and unforgettable silver horn.’”

It was in the guise of Jurgen that James Branch Cabell celebrated Lillian, wrote of her as Queen Helen, “the delight of gods and men, who regarded him with grave, kind eyes” ... whom, long ago, Jurgen had loved, in “the garden between dawn and sunrise.”

Then, trembling, Jurgen raised toward his lips the hand of her who was the world’s darling.... “Oh, all my life was a foiled quest of you, Queen Helen, and an unsatiated hungering. And for a while I served my vision, honoring you with clean-handed deeds. Yes, certainly it should be graved upon my tomb, ‘Queen Helen ruled this earth while it stayed worthy.’ But that was very long ago.

“And so farewell to you, Queen Helen! Your beauty has been to me a robber that stripped my life of joy and sorrow, and I desire not ever to dream of your beauty any more.”

Cabell, builder of magic phrases! His words look like other words, but they assemble with a strange ardency, and they march to the pipes of Pan. I am taking Hergesheimer’s word for it that it was Lillian who inspired Cabell’s Helen, though I might have guessed that, anyway.

And then it happened that George Jean Nathan, hard-bitten dramatic critic, hater of movies, suddenly became Lillian-conscious and proceeded to do something about it—something rather special—in Vanity Fair. Wrote Nathan:

That she is one of the few real actresses that the films have brought forth, either here or abroad, is pretty well agreed upon by the majority of critics. But it seems to me that, though the fact is taken for granted, the reasons for her eminence have in but small and misty part been set into print.... The girl is superior to her medium, pathetically so.... The particular genius of Lillian Gish lies in making the definite charmingly indefinite. Her technique consists in thinking out a characterization directly and concretely and then executing it in terms of semi-vague suggestion.... 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. There is ever something pleasantly, alluringly missing, as there is always in the case of women who are truly “acting artists.”

There was a good deal more in this strain. Widely quoted, it made quite a stir. Later—as much as a year, perhaps—Nathan being a bachelor (about the only one the intelligentsia could muster), it was reported from time to time that he was to be married to Miss Gish; then, that they were already married, privately, reports that have been recurrent, or intermittent, or something, ever since. But Nathan was a bachelor, apparently without much intention of becoming anything else, while Lillian was far too occupied for domesticity, the kind of domesticity she saw about her. She was satisfied with her circle as it stood—a circle which included individualities: rude-handed old Dreiser, for instance, and Mencken, and Sinclair Lewis, and Clarence Darrow. No Madame RÉcamier ever had a more loyal following, ever accepted it with such gratitude. And never a thing they said or did wrought a change in her, touched that vanity which is a mortal possession, but is hardly her possession, because, as I suspect, she is not altogether mortal, but a visitant—a dryad, likely enough, who has strayed in from the Old Time and is only puzzled a little, and saddened, maybe, by what she finds here.