Since the objective of the pictorialists in the late 19th and very early 20th century was to legitimize photography as art by emulating the quasi impressionistic look of that era's paintings a gamut of techniques were used. Besides soft focus, there could be extensive retouching, painting on the print and/or negative, toning, printing on highly textured paper, etching the negative and a variety of other manipulations. It's ironic that some of the filters that can be employed in Photoshop echo that early era very strongly despite nearly unlimited "film speed" equivalents in digigraphy.
Since photography has been long established as a legitimate art form, the tenets of modernism no longer need to be taken as essential to validate the medium. But in its era, even if film speeds were comparable to our current stock, pictorialism would probably still have needed to exist and pinhole work, and the methods listed above, would have likely been employed to "prove" that photography wasn't merely an artless mechanical medium.