the Armenians, Russians, Poles and South Americans displayed the placards of Joan of Arc in such abundance as to promote particular curiosity regarding their immediate enthusiasm for her memory.

From the war-front too come remarkable stories. It is said that amid all the devastation wrought by the German guns, there has been no case where any damage has been done to a statue or monument associated with the history of the Maidand there are a great many of these in the regions now so closely contested under heavy and continued artillery. This is undoubtedly an exaggeration, but it would seem that the supernatural character of Joan's life had left its influence upon the popular mind in all that commemorates her.

The little town of Domremy lies on one of the main roads behind the American Sector in France, and there, beside the little house that was once the home of Joan of Arc, stands the quaint little church where she prayed so fervently for her France that is now again in the clutches of a hated enemy. There are new flags in this poor old church and every day since the arrival of our forces the place is reverently visited by our soldiers making pilgrimage to the shrine of Joan; in a place of honor, the altar of Our Lady of Domremy to which Joan was especially devoted and upon which she was accustomed to hang her floral garlands, there hangs in votive offering our sacred flag of the Stars and Stripes.

How little the world for all its boastings has changed since that day of January sixth, 1412, when Joan, "The Maid of Orleans", first saw the light of day, the child of prosperous

villagers of Domremy on the left bank of the Meuse in the lowlands of Lorraine. France, gallant France, lay prostrate through the civil wars brought on by the intrigues of Queen Isabeau of Bavaria who had invited the English claimant and thrown doubt upon the legitimacy of her own son, Charles the Dauphin, who now lurked in his chateau on the Loire, the victim of his own weakness and mania for intrigue.

And today is not the world the prey of two contending systems, one asserting the freedom of man's will to live and choose his rulers, the other an organized autocracy, leaning upon the old heresy of the divine right of kings that would confuse the idea of temporal rulership and priesthood? And do we not behold in our America, the lovely daughter of the soil, pure, without trammels of decadent traditions, single in the purposes of liberty and justice, a new Joan of Arc leading our armies on to the new coronation, the sacring of the people's hopes to a new Rheims of world-peace and righteousness? Without a hope of earthly gain we see her come to the rescue of faith in humanity, to lay upon the altar a sword and a flag never defeated or dishonored, her ears sounding like Joan's with the words, "Go on, go on, Daughter of God; I will be with thee and be thy help!"

In this kinship of ideals is it not but natural that the fame and glory of the real Maid of Orleans-"the Christ of France", as the romancer Dumas dared to call her should be known to all the world and especially to North Americans?

The supernatural in the story of Joan's voices and visions need not lessen the number of her adherents; a great enthusiasm in a noble soul is

so near to the divine that it is hardly necessary to distinguish between them. Mr. C. M. Stevens in his recent volume on “Joan of Arc" goes to too much pains to assure us that Joan was not a mystic, and if we accept his definition of mysticism to apply only to the non-practical, purely contemplative mind, he has good reasons for his statements. But mysticism, in fact, has no direct connection with this quiescence that he imagines; the great mystics of history-St. Francis of Assisi, Saint Catherine of Sienna and St. Teresa of Avila-were all persons of supremely constructive character; they built structures of faith and benevolence and even went so far as to minimize the importance of their visions and experiences, in much the same manner as Joan with her voices and revelations. She was a true mystic in the strictest sense of the word; in her was the union of love with the divine which is the sure test of mystical character. She recognized her mission to lead the Dauphin to his coronation and recognized the moment when this mission was fulfilled; in her martyrdom we witness her passing through the ordeals of human suffering in preparation for her place among the elect ones of eternity.

The horrors of her imprisonment and trials at the hands of an inflamed enemy aided by a band of soulless ecclesiastics is an open book for all to read. Joan in vain appealed from their decisions to the Pope in Rome; she demanded to be taken to the Church prisons; but in spite of all she was handed over to the English invaders by the pitiful clique ruling at the University of Paris. This clique was French and Catholic in a way, but it no more represented France than it did the

Church, and considering these facts the strictures of Anatole France fall away into mere shouts of malice. Voltaire declared that one set of ecclesiastics at the behest of the King of England declared her guilty as"a liar, pernicious, deceiver of the people, soothsayer, superstitious, a blasphemer against God, presumptuous, miscreant, boaster, cruel, idolatress, dissolute, and invoker of devils, apostate, schismatic and heretic"

while another set, at the behest of the King of France, declared her innocent and a true daughter of the Church. "This", says Mr. C. M. Stevens, "is utterly untrue, because the set who condemned her were wholly a revengeful, political group under the pressure of military necessity, and on the other hand no motive but solely the question of righteousness inspired the others, although the change was direct reflection on the King of France and a very sore, self-inflicted rebuke and reversal for many of the highest officials of the Church."

"Spenser could not create and Shakespeare could not imagine such a being as Joan of Arc," declared Andrew Lang in a brilliant passage, and it seems an entirely modern quality in our minds that enables us to picture the glorious Maid in silver armor on her white steed waving her holy white banner over the thick of the fighting men at Orleans and Patay. This is a blaze of light upon the dark page of history-a glory that is seen again only in the raging flames that consumed her body and released her sainted soul in the market-place of Rouen, May 30, 1431.

From the first days of her career Joan was the chosen subject of poet and artist. Two years before her

death Christine de Pisan in her poem had compared her with Deborah, Judith and Queen Esther; soon she was to appear as a character in the plays of Shakespeare and Schiller.

In music she has been celebrated by the great work of Tschaikowsky and Gounod's "Third Mass in Honor of the Blessed Joan of Arc", which as he tells us in his "Autobiography", was composed "on his knees in the Cathedral of Rheims, on the stone on which the Maid of Orleans knelt at the consecration of Charles VII".

In painting and sculpture there are the early etching of Gualtier of 1612, and the masterpiece of BastienLepage, "Joan and Her Voices", now in the Metropolitan Museum of New York; the most famous sculptures are those of the Princess Marie of Orleans, of Chapu and Fremiet in

Paris, and of Anna Vaughan Hyatt on Riverside Drive in New York City. This sums up the enthusiasm beautifully expressed in the lines of the poet Frederick Welty:"Domremy! O Domremy! how the haunted woodland sighs,

For the falling of her footsteps, for the laughing of her eyes! Domremy! O Domremy! Across the meadow dews,

She is coming, she is coming, by the turning of the Meuse. They've crowned her at the Vatican, and named her Queen of France, And bade her rule from Vosges and recall each errant lance.

She is coming, she is coming, in the rising of the sun,

To rule, to rule in Vosges till the years of God are run."

The Wonderful Story of Joan of Arc: The Meaning of Her Life for America. By C. M. Stevens, New York: Cupples and Leon Co.

"Well," says my friend the jaded novel-reader, "what am I to read instead of novels?"

He says this with apprehension and even with hostility, for he is afraid.

To which I reply that, broadly speaking, he cannot read non-fiction without replacing definite ignorance by definite knowledge, and that practically the whole material of knowledge lies before him, somewhere in that Free Library of his, and that he can take any bricks he chooses out of it and begin to build them into the edifice of his own being. "Start where you like," I say, "only start."

"Yes," he retorts, "that's all very well!" (His favorite phrase!) "But where? I inhabit a small industrial town in a Midland county, cut off from everything."

He isn't cut off from the earth, anyway. So I say, "Try geography, for example."

Only his politeness prevents him from exclaiming: "The man's mad! Me-geography-at my age!"

But I do not mean by geography the rivers of Europe in their order, or the capitals of the United States, or the manufacturers of Rutlandshire. I mean realistic, verifiable, onthe-spot geography. I believe in always beginning close at hand-it is a trick that gives actuality, and actuality excites extraordinary interest. In that Free Library of his there is certain to be a descriptive work (probably several) about his native town, district, or county. Let him take, for instance, the nearest rivers, and con

sider them-why they run as they do run, and what influence they have, or have had, on the life of the community. Dwellers in industrial districts seldom think of their region as an arrangement of hill and vale watered by rivers eternally wandering. There are a quarter of a million people in the district centred round Stoke-onTrent, and I am prepared to accuse a whole populace by stating that a couple of hundred thousand of them have never given a serious thought to the Trent, don't know where it rises, nor into what river it flows, nor anything whatever about it. Yet the Trent is a very interesting stream.

I said rivers; I might have said hills, table-lands, woods, anything. Or instead of geography I might have said geology, or natural history; they all go together; they are all equally easy and equally difficult. A local acquaintance with any of them, however imperfect and fragmentary, will stimulate the vigor and relish of existence in a manner which is positively astounding. I use the word deliberately

astounding. To a man who is a geographer of his district, every stroll around is an adventure, a confirmation or a contradiction of theory, a spying out of the land. And the further he proceeds in his studies, the more clearly he will see the intimate connection between local geography and local social development. And this correlating of one subject with another, this perception that all knowledge is bound together, affords one of the most delightful mental ex

periences that a man can have. After all, it is, you know, much more amusing to be informed than to be ignorant. I touch no moral issue. I am regarding the matter solely from the point of view of a prodigious lark.

"Yes," says my jaded novel-reader, gloomily, "that is all very well-."

He means that it may be all very well for other people, but not for him. I don't know why. It is remarkable how people of at least average common sense will admit the sweet advantages of knowledge and the awful horrors of ignorance, and then behave as though there was some mysterious bar to knowledge. There is no mysterious bar to knowledge. To have knowledge all one has to do is to take it. No charge! No formality! No difficulty! It is like being (lawfully) in a ripe orchard. Every man who has enough energy and perseverance to earn his living can get as much knowledge as he chooses. And people who have the obstinacy to drag themselves all through a novel that bores them, have surely enough obstinacy to continue with whatever they have begun! I have known men who were directing large and complicated businesses spend thirty hours a week in absolute crass tedium because they thought they had not the brains to acquire knowledge enough to amuse their leisure hours! It was comic, but it was also tragic.

At any rate the experiment is easy. To begin, you merely have to begin! The effect can be judged in a month, a fortnight, a week. No man who studied local geography daily for a fortnight could ever again look on his native district with the old lack-lustre eyes. It is not necessary to have mastered the immense work of Elisée Reclus before the fun and reward of geography can commence.

Those who are not attracted by the syllables of the word geography may be drawn toward history. And the thought of Lord Acton's universal learning need not affright them. Everywhere in England, even in the district inhabited by my jaded novelreader, some important or picturesque historical event has occurred. The beginner can always begin there. He can accumulate information about just that; he can mentally put the event in its surroundings and invest it with the actuality of place. And his inquiries will lead him both backwards and forwards in history. He can either specialize in the local, or, if his imagination is grandiose, he can sweep the world. He will do best to start by actualizing something.

But there are persons for whom this revolving earth is too small. To them I might respectfully indicate the stars, together with Sir Norman Lockyer's Primer of Astronomy, price one shilling (Macmillan). I would not assert that this booklet is "more interesting than any novel", but I do not mind admitting that I have myself written novels less interesting. It could be mastered in a fortnight by anybody who is capable of earning a pound a week in the open market. When you have mastered it you cannot even put your overcoat on in autumn without pleasurably reflecting that the necessity for your overcoat is due to the fact that the plane of the equator is somewhat tilted to the plane of the earth's orbit.

And if "none of these things moves" the jaded novel-reader, there always remains the great subject, the subject of subjects, the supreme preoccupation of man. Namely, himself. Psychology, physiology, conduct, morals, autobiographies, confessions-a most palpitating business, once you set out on it.