e, Paris, by M. Joly. Why was
this model of Notre Dame made with such exquisite pains? Certainly not as
a matter of mere information or cultivation. I venture the first right
these things have to be taken care of in museums is to stimulate to new
creative effort.

I went to look over the Chicago collection with a friend and poet Arthur
Davison Ficke. He said something to this effect: "The first thing I see
when I look at these fragments is the whole cathedral in all its original
proportions. Then I behold the mediaeval marketplace hunched against the
building, burying the foundations, the life of man growing rank and
weedlike around it. Then I see the bishop coming from the door with his
impressive train. But a crusade may go by on the way to the Holy Land. A
crusade may come home battered and in rags. I get the sense of life, as
of a rapid in a river flowing round a great rock."

The cathedral stands for the age-long meditation of the ascetics in the
midst of battling tribes. This brooding architecture has a
blood-brotherhood with the meditating, saint-seeing Jeanne d'Arc.

There is in the Metropolitan Museum a large and famous canvas painted by
the dying Bastien-Lepage;--Jeanne Listening to the Voices. It is a
picture of which the technicians and the poets are equally enamored. The
tale of Jeanne d'Arc could be told, carrying this particular peasant girl
through the story. And for a piece of architectural pageantry akin to the
photoplay ballroom scene already described, yet far above it, there is
nothing more apt for our purpose than the painting by Boutet de Monvel
filling the space at the top of the stair at the Chicago Art Institute.
Though the Bastien-Lepage is a large painting, this is many times the
size. It shows Joan's visit at the court of Chinon. It is big without
being empty. It conveys a glitter which expresses one of the things that
is meant by the phrase: Splendor Photoplay. But for moving picture
purposes it is the Bastien-Lepage Joan that should appear here, set in
dramatic contrast to the Boutet de Monvel Court. Two valuable neighbors
to whom I have read this chapter suggest that the whole Boutet de Monvel
illustrated child's book about our heroine could be used on this grand
scale, for a background.

The Inness room at the Chicago Art Institute is another school for the
meditative producer, if he would evolve his tribute to France on American
soil. Though no photoplay tableau has yet approximated