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.