suit
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 _elan_, 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 tr