Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/400

 MARK TWAIN

generals were sounding the retreat, she staggered to her feet and led the assault again and took that place by storm.

There is no blemish in that rounded and beautiful character.

How strange it is! that almost invariably the artist remembers only one detail one minor and meaningless detail of the personality of Joan of Arc : to wit, that she was a peasant girl and forgets all the rest ; and so he paints her as a strapping middle- aged fish woman, with costume to match, and in her face the spirituality of a ham. He is slave to his one idea, and forgets to observe that the supremely great souls are never lodged in gross bodies. No brawn, no muscle, could endure the work that their bodies must do; they do their miracles by the spirit, which has fifty times the strength and staying- power of brawn and muscle. The Napoleons are little, not big; and they work twenty hours in the twenty-four, and come up fresh, while the big soldiers with the little hearts faint around them with fatigue. We know what Joan of Arc was like, without asking merely by what she did. The artist should paint her spirit then he could not fail to paint her body aright. She would rise before us, then, a vision to win us, not repel : a lithe young slender figure, instinct with &quot;the unbought grace of youth,&quot; dear and bonny and lovable, the face beautiful, and trans figured with the light of that lustrous intellect and the fires of that unquenchable spirit.

Taking into account, as I have suggested before, all the circumstances her origin, youth, sex, illit-

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