suggestion once sown in her dreaming soul--to perceive a kind of
miraculous reasonableness in it, to see its necessity, and how
everything pointed towards such a deliverance. It would have seemed
natural to believe that the prophecies of the countryside which promised
a virgin from an oak grove, a maiden from Lorraine, to deliver France,
might have affected her mind, did we not have it from her own voice
that she had never heard that prophecy(1); but the word of the blessed
Michael, so often repeated, was more than an old wife's tale; and the
child's alarm would seem to have died away as she came to her full
growth. And Jeanne was no ethereal spirit lost in visions, but a
robust and capable peasant girl, fearing little, and full of sense and
determination, as well as of an inspiration so far above the level of
the crowd. We hear with wonder afterwards that she had the making of a
great general in her untutored female soul,--which is perhaps the most
wonderful thing in her career,--and saw with the eye of an experienced
and able soldier, as even Dunois did not always see it, the fit order
of an attack, the best arrangement of the forces at her command. This I
honestly avow is to me the most incredible point in the story. I am not
disturbed by the apparition of the saints; there is in them an ineffable
appropriateness and fitness against which the imagination, at least,
has not a word to say. The wonder is not, to the natural mind, that such
interpositions of heaven come, but that they come so seldom. But that
Jacques d'Arc's daughter, the little girl over her sewing, whose only
fault was that she went to church too often, should have the genius of a
soldier, is too bewildering for words to say. A poet, yes, an inspiring
influence leading on to miraculous victory; but a general, skilful
with the rude artillery of the time, divining the better way in
strategy,--this is a wonder beyond the reach of our faculties; yet
according to Alençon, Dunois, and other military authorities, it was
true.