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.