Ionic Sea and Athena like the white ship upon the waves.  The audiences in the tragedies should be shown like wheat-fields on the hill-sides, always stately yet blown by the wind, and Athena the one sower and reaper.  Crowds should descend the steps of the Acropolis, nymphs and fauns and Olympians, carved as it were from the marble, yet flowing like a white cataract down into the town, bearing with them Athena, their soul.  All this in the Photoplay of Pericles.

No civic or national incarnation since that time appeals to the poets like the French worship of the Maid of Orleans.  In Percy MacKaye’s book, The Present Hour, he says on the French attitude toward the war:—­

    “Half artist and half anchorite,
    Part siren and part Socrates,
    Her face—­alluring fair, yet recondite—­
    Smiled through her salons and academies.

    “Lightly she wore her double mask,
    Till sudden, at war’s kindling spark,
    Her inmost self, in shining mail and casque,
    Blazed to the world her single soul—­Jeanne d’Arc!”

To make a more elaborate showing of what is meant by architecture-in-motion, let us progress through the centuries and suppose that the builder has this enthusiasm for France, that he is slowly setting about to build a photoplay around the idea of the Maid.

First let him take the mural painting point of view.  Bear in mind these characteristics of that art:  it is wall-painting that is an organic part of the surface on which it appears:  it is on the same lines as the building and adapted to the colors and forms of the structure of which it is a part.

The wall-splendors of America that are the most scattered about in inexpensive copies are the decorations of the Boston Public Library.  Note the pillar-like quality of Sargent’s prophets, the solemn dignity of Abbey’s Holy Grail series, the grand horizontals and perpendiculars of the work of Puvis de Chavannes.  The last is the orthodox mural painter of the world, but the other two will serve the present purpose also.  These architectural paintings if they were dramatized, still retaining their powerful lines, would be three exceedingly varied examples of what is meant by architecture-in-motion.  The visions that appear to Jeanne d’Arc might be delineated in the mood of some one of these three painters.  The styles will not mix in the same episode.

A painter from old time we mention here, not because he was orthodox, but because of his genius for the drawing of action, and because he covered tremendous wall-spaces with Venetian tone and color, is Tintoretto.  If there is a mistrust that the mural painting standard will tend to destroy the sense of action, Tintoretto will restore confidence in that regard.  As the Winged Victory represents flying in sculpture, so his work is the extreme example of action with the brush.  The Venetians called him the furious painter.  One must understand a man through his admirers.  So explore Ruskin’s sayings on Tintoretto.