Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/395

 SAINT JOAN OF ARC

dinar y person, we understand that the measure of his talent will not explain the whole result, nor even the largest part of it; no, it is the atmosphere in which the talent was cradled that explains; it is the training which it received while it grew, the nurture it got from reading, study, example, the encourage ment it gathered from self -recognition and recogni tion from the outside at each stage of its develop ment : when we know all these details, then we know why the man was ready when his opportunity came. We should expect Edison s surroundings and atmos phere to have the largest share in discovering him to himself and to the world; and we should expect him to live and die undiscovered in a land where an inventor could find no comradeship, no sympathy, no ambition-rousing atmosphere of recognition and applause Dahomey, for instance. Dahomey could not find an Edison out ; in Dahomey an Edison could not find himself out. Broadly speaking, genius is not born with sight, but blind; and it is not itself that opens its eyes, but the subtle influences of a myriad of stimulating exterior circumstances.

We all know r this to be not a guess, but a mere commonplace fact, a truism. Lorraine was Joan of Arc s Dahomey. And there the Riddle confronts us. We can understand how she could be born with military genius, with leonine courage, with incom parable fortitude, with a mind which was in several particulars a prodigy a mind which included among its specialties the lawyer s gift of detecting traps laid by the adversary in cunning and treacherous ar rangements of seemingly innocent words, the orator s

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