,
her everything--she was only eighteen years old.

Now put that heart into such a breast--eighteen years old--and give it
that masterly intellect which showed in the face, and furnish it
with that almost god-like spirit, and what are you going to have? The
conventional Joan of Arc? Not by any means. That is impossible. I cannot
comprehend any such thing as that.

You must have a creature like that young and fair and beautiful girl we
just saw. And her spirit must look out of the eyes. The figure should
be--the figure should be in harmony with all that, but, oh, what we get
in the conventional picture, and it is always the conventional picture!

I hope you will allow me to say that your guild, when you take the
conventional, you have got it at second-hand. Certainly, if you had
studied and studied, then you might have something else as a result, but
when you have the common convention you stick to that.

You cannot prevail upon the artist to do it; he always gives you a Joan
of Arc--that lovely creature that started a great career at thirteen,
but whose greatness arrived when she was eighteen; and merely, because
she was a girl he can not see the divinity in her, and so he paints a
peasant, a coarse and lubberly figure--the figure of a cotton-bale, and
he clothes that in the coarsest raiment of the peasant region just like
a fish woman, her hair cropped short like a Russian peasant, and that
face of hers, which should be beautiful and which should radiate all the
glories which are in the spirit and in her heart that expression in that
face is always just the fixed expression of a ham.

But now Mr. Beard has intimated a moment ago, and so has Sir
Purdon-Clarke also, that the artist, the illustrator, does not often
get the idea of the man whose book he is illustrating. Here is a very
remarkable instance of the other thing in Mr. Beard, who illustrated a
book of mine. You may never have heard of it. I will tell you about it
now--A Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

Now, Beard got everything that I put into that book and a little more
besides. Those pictures of Beard's in that book--oh, from the first
page to the last is one vast sardonic laugh at the trivialities, the
servilities of our poor human race, and also at the professions and
the insolence of priest-craft and king-craft--those creatures that make
slaves of themselves and have not the manliness to shake it off. Beard
put it all in that book. I meant it to be the