Page:The Dial vol. 15 (July 1 - December 16, 1893).djvu/80

68] the point of view or arrangement as in the diction. Through his very straightforwardness and idiomatic energy, the author often grows truly impressive and pathetic; while we never lose our faith in his truthfulness or his common sense. He has graphically rendered Jeanne's lovable qualities—those qualities that saints and martyrs, alas I do not inevitably possess. She is more than Michelet's woman of genius in these pages—more even than De Quincey's heroic saint. To Lord Ronald, whose research has breathed the breath of life into this dim and lovely shade, she is just the gentle, infinitely compassionate, but not unwise woman, who is the guardian angel in her family, or her village, or her nation, as opportunity may offer. Her people were well-to-do farmers, her father holding a certain position in the community as the oldest inhabitant (doyen) of the village, and ranking next to the mayor. The family owned "about twenty acres of land, twelve of which were arable, four were meadowlands, and four were used for fuel." Besides this, they had some two to three hundred francs kept safe for use in case of emergency, and the furniture, goods, and chattels of their modest home. "All told, the fortune of the family of Joan attained an annual income of about two hundred pounds of our money." A thousand dollars a year needs doubling, if not trebling, to reduce it to our standard; and Lord Ronald very sensibly remarks that it was "a not inconsiderable revenue at that time; and with it they were enabled to raise a family in comfort, and to give alms and hospitality to the poor."

Of this family, Jeanne was the fifth child, and, it would appear, was rather indulged by her parents. She was not, for all the wonderful visions that saved France, a mystic or a solitary; she joined in all the sports of her playmates, and was a leader and a favorite.

She was a pious little girl, and loved to listen at her mother's knee to the recital of the marvels of the saints; she was also patriotic, and almost as dearly loved to hear the brave deeds of Frenchmen in war. Her mother would rehearse these legends while spinning; and the little, glowing-faced maid would listen while her heart swelled. But though she felt intensely, she was a reticent child. No doubt the worthy Isambeau, or Mère D'Arc, sometimes whispered to a confidant that Joan "was never one to talk, but as good and willing a child as ever breathed,"—for, after all, vary the idiom, and the language of mothers is the same in all tongues and all generations. Perhaps, had the mother lived she might have persuaded Joan out of her visions—which had been the better for Mère d' Arc's daughter, and the worse for France.

It was a strange, heavy time,—a time of dreams and portents, a time of misery in many forms. There had been famines and horrible new diseases. The crazed and starving peasants had risen in revolt, aimlessly striking at the nearest, rushing about like mad dogs, biting, and being at last hunted down, at the end of a useless, brutal, bloody struggle. There were two popes, and religion itself seemed shaken. Society was in a ferment. In such times superstition flourishes. To Frenchmen especially, the day was full of bitterness. The French king had been stripped of his provinces until there remained to the dauphin, north of the Loire, only "a pitiful half-dozen places." No wonder visions came to the French maiden whose heart was hot with brooding over the humiliation of her country! Whatever they were—and we need not follow Michelet into an ingenious psychical dissertation, since Joan's character depends on their veracity not at all,—she undoubtedly counted them real, "and was not disobedient to the heavenly vision."

It is a wonderful tale, that of her determining to forsake all that she loved, to lead the troops of the dauphin, "out of the great pity that she felt for the land of France"; her journey to the dauphin, and the manner in which her superb enthusiasm, her modesty, and her natural shrewd sense conquered first the common people (who never fail to respond, for good or evil, to the note of genuine and tremendous earnestness), then the soldiers and the nobles, last of all the priests themselves. Was the Maid a great general? Was she a leader? Or was she simply an enthusiast who came at the right moment?

No one can read the most direct accounts without suspecting that Joan had a long head. She knew nothing of the technique of war which, it is to be remembered, was simpler far in those days than these, but she intuitively seized upon the wisest plan of campaign, possibly because it was the most daring. Her