Jeanne dArc | Page 5

be more easily understood that France had
reached a period of depression and apparent despair which no principle
of national elasticity or new spring of national impulse was present to
amend. The extraordinary aspect of whole districts in so strong and
populous a country, which disowned the native monarch, and of towns
and castles innumerable which were held by the native nobility in the
name of a foreign king, could scarcely have been possible under other
circumstances. Everything was out of joint. It is said to be
characteristic of the nation that it is unable to play publicly (as we say)
a losing game; but it is equally characteristic of the race to forget its
humiliations as if they had never been, and to come out intact when the
fortune of war changes, more French than ever, almost unabashed and
wholly uninjured, by the catastrophe which had seemed fatal.
If we had any right to theorise on such a subject--which is a thing the
French themselves above all other men love to do,--we should be

disposed to say, that wars and revolutions, legislation and politics, are
things which go on over the head of France, so to speak--boilings on
the surface, with which the great personality of the nation if such a
word may be used, has little to do, and cares but little for; while she
herself, the great race, neither giddy nor fickle, but unusually obstinate,
tenacious, and sober, narrow even in the unwavering pursuit of a
certain kind of well-being congenial to her--goes steadily on, less
susceptible to temporary humiliation than many peoples much less
excitable on the surface, and always coming back into sight when the
commotion is over, acquisitive, money-making, profit-loving,
uninjured in any essential particular by the most terrific of convulsions.
This of course is to be said more or less of every country, the strain of
common life being always, thank God, too strong for every temporary
commotion--but it is true in a special way of France:--witness the
extraordinary manner in which in our own time, and under our own
eyes, that wonderful country righted herself after the tremendous
misfortunes of the Franco-German war, in which for a moment not only
her prestige, her honour, but her money and credit seemed to be lost.
It seems rather a paradox to point attention to the extraordinary tenacity
of this basis of French character, the steady prudence and solidity
which in the end always triumph over the light heart and light head, the
excitability and often rash and dangerous /élan/, which are popularly
supposed to be the chief distinguishing features of France--at the very
moment of beginning such a fairy tale, such a wonderful embodiment
of the visionary and ideal, as is the story of Jeanne d'Arc. To call it a
fairy tale is, however, disrespectful: it is an angelic revelation, a vision
made into flesh and blood, the dream of a woman's fancy, more
ethereal, more impossible than that of any man--even a poet:--for the
man, even in his most uncontrolled imaginations, carries with him a
certain practical limitation of what can be--whereas the woman at her
highest is absolute, and disregards all bounds of possibility. The Maid
of Orleans, the Virgin of France, is the sole being of her kind who has
ever attained full expression in this world. She can neither be classified,
as her countrymen love to classify, nor traced to any system of
evolution as we all attempt to do nowadays. She is the impossible
verified and attained. She is the thing in every race, in every form of

humanity, which the dreaming girl, the visionary maid, held in at every
turn by innumerable restrictions, her feet bound, her actions restrained,
not only by outward force, but by the law of her nature, more effectual
still,-- has desired to be. That voiceless poet, to whom what can be is
nothing, but only what should be if miracle could be attained to fulfil
her trance and rapture of desire--is held by no conditions, modified by
no circumstances; and miracle is all around her, the most credible, the
most real of powers, the very air she breathers. Jeanne of France is the
very flower of this passion of the imagination. She is altogether
impossible from beginning to end of her, inexplicable, alone, with
neither rival nor even second in the one sole ineffable path: yet all true
as one of the oaks in her wood, as one of the flowers in her garden,
simple, actual, made of the flesh and blood which are common to us all.
And she is all the more real because it is France, impure, the country of
light loves and immodest passions, where all that is sensual comes to
the surface, and the courtesan is the queen of ignoble