A considerable time ago (at far too early an age, in fact) I read
Voltaire’s “La Pucelle,” a savage sarcasm on the traditional purity of
Joan of Arc, very dirty, and very funny. I had not thought of it again
for years, but it came back into my mind this morning because I began
to turn over the leaves of the new “Jeanne d’Arc,” by that great and
graceful writer, Anatole France. It is written in a tone of tender
sympathy, and a sort of sad reverence; it never loses touch with a
noble tact and courtesy, like that of a gentleman escorting a peasant
girl through the modern crowd. It is invariably respectful to Joan, and
even respectful to her religion. And being myself a furious admirer of
Joan the Maid, I have reflectively compared the two methods, and I come
to the conclusion that I prefer Voltaire’s.
When a man of Voltaire’s school has to explode a saint or a great
religious hero, he says that such a person is a common human fool, or a
common human fraud. But when a man like Anatole France has to explode a
saint, he explains a saint as somebody belonging to his particular
fussy little literary set. Voltaire read human nature into Joan of Arc,
though it was only the brutal part of human nature. At least it was not
specially Voltaire’s nature. But M. France read M. France’s nature into
Joan of Arc—all the cold kindness, all the homeless sentimental sin of
the modern literary man. There is one book that it recalled to me with
startling vividness, though I have not seen the matter mentioned
anywhere; Renan’s “Vie de Jésus.” It has just the same general
intention: that if you do not attack Christianity, you can at least
patronise it. My own instinct, apart from my opinions, would be quite
the other way. If I disbelieved in Christianity, I should be the
loudest blasphemer in Hyde Park. Nothing ought to be too big for a
brave man to attack; but there are some things too big for a man to
patronise.
And I must say that the historical method seems to me excessively
unreasonable. I have no knowledge of history, but I have as much
knowledge of reason as Anatole France. And, if anything is irrational,
it seems to me that the Renan-France way of dealing with miraculous
stories is irrational. The Renan-France method is simply this: you
explain supernatural stories that have some foundation simply by
inventing natural stories that have no foundation. Suppose that you are
confronted with the statement that Jack climbed up the beanstalk into
the sky. It is perfectly philosophical to reply that you do not think
that he did. It is (in my opinion) even more philosophical to reply
that he may very probably have done so. But the Renan-France method is
to write like this: “When we consider Jack’s curious and even perilous
heredity, which no doubt was derived from a female greengrocer and a
profligate priest, we can easily understand how the ideas of heaven and
a beanstalk came to be combined in his mind. Moreover, there is little
doubt that he must have met some wandering conjurer from India, who
told him about the tricks of the mango plant, and how it is sent up to
the sky. We can imagine these two friends, the old man and the young,
wandering in the woods together at evening, looking at the red and
level clouds, as on that night when the old man pointed to a small
beanstalk, and told his too imaginative companion that this also might
be made to scale the heavens. And then, when we remember the quite
exceptional psychology of Jack, when we remember how there was in him a
union of the prosaic, the love of plain vegetables, with an almost
irrelevant eagerness for the unattainable, for invisibility and the
void, we shall no longer wonder that it was to him especially that was
sent this sweet, though merely symbolic, dream of the tree uniting
earth and heaven.” That is the way that Renan and France write, only
they do it better. But, really, a rationalist like myself becomes a
little impatient and feels inclined to say, “But, hang it all, what do
you know about the heredity of Jack or the psychology of Jack? You know
nothing about Jack at all, except that some people say that he climbed
up a beanstalk. Nobody would ever have thought of mentioning him if he
hadn’t. You must interpret him in terms of the beanstalk religion; you
cannot merely interpret religion in terms of him. We have the materials
of this story, and we can believe them or not. But we have not got the
materials to make another story.”
It is no exaggeration to say that this is the manner of M. Anatole
France in dealing with Joan of Arc. Because her miracle is incredible
to his somewhat old-fashioned materialism, he does not therefore
dismiss it and her to fairyland with Jack and the Beanstalk. He tries
to invent a real story, for which he can find no real evidence. He
produces a scientific explanation which is quite destitute of any
scientific proof. It is as if I (being entirely ignorant of botany and
chemistry) said that the beanstalk grew to the sky because nitrogen and
argon got into the subsidiary ducts of the corolla. To take the most
obvious example, the principal character in M. France’s story is a
person who never existed at all. All Joan’s wisdom and energy, it
seems, came from a certain priest, of whom there is not the tiniest
trace in all the multitudinous records of her life. The only foundation
I can find for this fancy is the highly undemocratic idea that a
peasant girl could not possibly have any ideas of her own. It is very
hard for a freethinker to remain democratic. The writer seems
altogether to forget what is meant by the moral atmosphere of a
community. To say that Joan must have learnt her vision of a virgin
overthrowing evil from _a_ priest, is like saying that some modern girl
in London, pitying the poor, must have learnt it from _a_ Labour
Member. She would learn it where the Labour Member learnt it—in the
whole state of our society.
But that is the modern method: the method of the reverent sceptic. When
you find a life entirely incredible and incomprehensible from the
outside, you pretend that you understand the inside. As Renan, the
rationalist, could not make any sense out of Christ’s most public acts,
he proceeded to make an ingenious system out of His private thoughts.
As Anatole France, on his own intellectual principle, cannot believe in
what Joan of Arc did, he professes to be her dearest friend, and to
know exactly what she meant. I cannot feel it to be a very rational
manner of writing history; and sooner or later we shall have to find
some more solid way of dealing with those spiritual phenomena with
which all history is as closely spotted and spangled as the sky is with
stars.
Joan of Arc is a wild and wonderful thing enough, but she is much saner
than most of her critics and biographers. We shall not recover the
common sense of Joan until we have recovered her mysticism. Our wars
fail, because they begin with something sensible and obvious—such as
getting to Pretoria by Christmas. But her war succeeded—because it
began with something wild and perfect—the saints delivering France. She
put her idealism in the right place, and her realism also in the right
place: we moderns get both displaced. She put her dreams and her
sentiment into her aims, where they ought to be; she put her
practicality into her practice. In modern Imperial wars, the case is
reversed. Our dreams, our aims are always, we insist, quite practical.
It is our practice that is dreamy.
It is not for us to explain this flaming figure in terms of our tired
and querulous culture. Rather we must try to explain ourselves by the
blaze of such fixed stars. Those who called her a witch hot from hell
were much more sensible than those who depict her as a silly
sentimental maiden prompted by her parish priest. If I have to choose
between the two schools of her scattered enemies, I could take my place
with those subtle clerks who thought her divine mission devilish,
rather than with those rustic aunts and uncles who thought it
impossible.