SAINT JOAN
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Saint Joan: a Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue. By Bernard
Shaw.
[Illustration: a tragedy mask]
BRENTANO’S - New York
MCMXXVI
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COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
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All rights reserved
First Printing, June, 1924
Second Printing, October, 1924
Third Printing, November, 1924
Fourth Printing, February, 1925
Fifth Printing, April, 1926
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
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PREFACE TO SAINT JOAN
Joan the Original and Presumptuous.
Joan of Arc, a village girl from the Vosges, was born about 1412; burnt
for heresy, witchcraft, and sorcery in 1431; rehabilitated after a
fashion in 1456; designated Venerable in 1904; declared Blessed in 1908;
and finally canonized in 1920. She is the most notable Warrior Saint in
the Christian calendar, and the queerest fish among the eccentric
worthies of the Middle Ages. Though a professed and most pious Catholic,
and the projector of a Crusade against the Husites, she was in fact one
of the first Protestant martyrs. She was also one of the first apostles
of Nationalism, and the first French practitioner of Napoleonic realism
in warfare as distinguished from the sporting ransom-gambling chivalry
of her time. She was the pioneer of rational dressing for women, and,
like Queen Christina of Sweden two centuries later, to say nothing of
the Chevalier D’Eon and innumerable obscure heroines who have disguised
themselves as men to serve as soldiers and sailors, she refused to
accept the specific woman’s lot, and dressed and fought and lived as men
did.
As she contrived to assert herself in all these ways with such force
that she was famous throughout western Europe before she was out of her
teens (indeed she never got out of them), it is hardly surprising that
she was judicially burnt, ostensibly for a number of capital crimes
which we no longer punish as such, but essentially for what we call
unwomanly and insufferable presumption. At eighteen Joan’s pretensions
were beyond those of the proudest Pope or the haughtiest emperor. She
claimed to be the ambassador and plenipotentiary of God, and to be, in
effect, a member of the Church Triumphant whilst still in the flesh on
earth. She patronized her own king, and summoned the English king to
repentance and obedience to her commands. She lectured, talked down, and
overruled statesmen and prelates. She poohpoohed the plans of generals,
leading their troops to victory on plans of her own. She had an
unbounded and quite unconcealed contempt for official opinion, judgment,
and authority, and for War Office tactics and strategy. Had she been a
sage and monarch in whom the most venerable hierarchy and the most
illustrious dynasty converged, her pretensions and proceedings would
have been as trying to the official mind as the pretensions of Caesar
were to Cassius. As her actual condition was pure upstart, there were
only two opinions about her. One was that she was miraculous: the other
that she was unbearable.
Joan and Socrates.
If Joan had been malicious, selfish, cowardly or stupid, she would have
been one of the most odious persons known to history instead of one of
the most attractive. If she had been old enough to know the effect she
was producing on the men whom she humiliated by being right when they
were wrong, and had learned to flatter and manage them, she might have
lived as long as Queen Elizabeth. But she was too young and rustical and
inexperienced to have any such arts. When she was thwarted by men whom
she thought fools, she made no secret of her opinion of them or her
impatience with their folly; and she was naïve enough to expect them to
be obliged to her for setting them right and keeping them out of
mischief. Now it is always hard for superior wits to understand the fury
roused by their exposures of the stupidities of comparative dullards.
Even Socrates, for all his age and experience, did not defend himself at
his trial like a man who understood the long accumulated fury that had
burst on him, and was clamoring for his death. His accuser, if born 2300
years later, might have been picked out of any first class carriage on a
suburban railway during the evening or morning rush from or to the City;
for he had really nothing to say except that he and his like could not
endure being shewn up as idiots every time Socrates opened his mouth.
Socrates, unconscious of this, was paralyzed by his sense that somehow
he was missing the point of the attack. He petered out after he had
established the fact that he was an old soldier and a man of honorable
life, and that his accuser was a silly snob. He had no suspicion of the
extent to which his mental superiority had roused fear and hatred
against him in the hearts of men towards whom he was conscious of
nothing but good will and good service.
Contrast with Napoleon.
If Socrates was as innocent as this at the age of seventy, it may be
imagined how innocent Joan was at the age of seventeen. Now Socrates was
a man of argument, operating slowly and peacefully on men’s minds,
whereas Joan was a woman of action, operating with impetuous violence on
their bodies. That, no doubt, is why the contemporaries of Socrates
endured him so long, and why Joan was destroyed before she was fully
grown. But both of them combined terrifying ability with a frankness,
personal modesty, and benevolence which made the furious dislike to
which they fell victims absolutely unreasonable, and therefore
inapprehensible by themselves. Napoleon, also possessed of terrifying
ability, but neither frank nor disinterested, had no illusions as to the
nature of his popularity. When he was asked how the world would take his
death, he said it would give a gasp of relief. But it is not so easy for
mental giants who neither hate nor intend to injure their fellows to
realize that nevertheless their fellows hate mental giants and would
like to destroy them, not only enviously because the juxtaposition of a
superior wounds their vanity, but quite humbly and honestly because it
frightens them. Fear will drive men to any extreme; and the fear
inspired by a superior being is a mystery which cannot be reasoned away.
Being immeasurable it is unbearable when there is no presumption or
guarantee of its benevolence and moral responsibility: in other words,
when it has no official status. The legal and conventional superiority
of Herod and Pilate, and of Annas and Caiphas, inspires fear; but the
fear, being a reasonable fear of measurable and avoidable consequences
which seem salutary and protective, is bearable; whilst the strange
superiority of Christ and the fear it inspires elicit a shriek of
Crucify Him from all who cannot divine its benevolence. Socrates has to
drink the hemlock, Christ to hang on the cross, and Joan to burn at the
stake, whilst Napoleon, though he ends in St Helena, at least dies in
his bed there; and many terrifying but quite comprehensible official
scoundrels die natural deaths in all the glory of the kingdoms of this
world, proving that it is far more dangerous to be a saint than to be a
conqueror. Those who have been both, like Mahomet and Joan, have found
that it is the conqueror who must save the saint, and that defeat and
capture mean martyrdom. Joan was burnt without a hand lifted on her own
side to save her. The comrades she had led to victory and the enemies
she had disgraced and defeated, the French king she had crowned and the
English king whose crown she had kicked into the Loire, were equally
glad to be rid of her.
Was Joan Innocent or Guilty?
As this result could have been produced by a crapulous inferiority as
well as by a sublime superiority, the question which of the two was
operative in Joan’s case has to be faced. It was decided against her by
her contemporaries after a very careful and conscientious trial; and the
reversal of the verdict twentyfive years later, in form a
rehabilitation of Joan, was really only a confirmation of the validity
of the coronation of Charles VII. It is the more impressive reversal by
a unanimous Posterity, culminating in her canonization, that has quashed
the original proceedings, and put her judges on their trial, which, so
far, has been much more unfair than their trial of her. Nevertheless the
rehabilitation of 1456, corrupt job as it was, really did produce
evidence enough to satisfy all reasonable critics that Joan was not a
common termagant, not a harlot, not a witch, not a blasphemer, no more
an idolater than the Pope himself, and not ill conducted in any sense
apart from her soldiering, her wearing of men’s clothes, and her
audacity, but on the contrary good-humored, an intact virgin, very
pious, very temperate (we should call her meal of bread soaked in the
common wine which is the drinking water of France ascetic), very kindly,
and, though a brave and hardy soldier, unable to endure loose language
or licentious conduct. She went to the stake without a stain on her
character except the overweening presumption, the superbity as they
called it, that led her thither. It would therefore be waste of time now
to prove that the Joan of the first part of the Elizabethan chronicle
play of Henry VI (supposed to have been tinkered by Shakespear) grossly
libels her in its concluding scenes in deference to Jingo patriotism.
The mud that was thrown at her has dropped off by this time so
completely that there is no need for any modern writer to wash up after
it. What is far more difficult to get rid of is the mud that is being
thrown at her judges, and the whitewash which disfigures her beyond
recognition. When Jingo scurrility had done its worst to her, sectarian
scurrility (in this case Protestant scurrility) used her stake to beat
the Roman Catholic Church and the Inquisition. The easiest way to make
these institutions the villains of a melodrama was to make The Maid its
heroine. That melodrama may be dismissed as rubbish. Joan got a far
fairer trial from the Church and the Inquisition than any prisoner of
her type and in her situation gets nowadays in any official secular
court; and the decision was strictly according to law. And she was not a
melodramatic heroine: that is, a physically beautiful lovelorn parasite
on an equally beautiful hero, but a genius and a saint, about as
completely the opposite of a melodramatic heroine as it is possible for
a human being to be.
Let us be clear about the meaning of the terms. A genius is a person
who, seeing farther and probing deeper than other people, has a
different set of ethical valuations from theirs, and has energy enough
to give effect to this extra vision and its valuations in whatever
manner best suits his or her specific talents. A saint is one who having
practised heroic virtues, and enjoyed revelations or powers of the order
which The Church classes technically as supernatural, is eligible for
canonization. If a historian is an Anti-Feminist, and does not believe
women to be capable of genius in the traditional masculine departments,
he will never make anything of Joan, whose genius was turned to
practical account mainly in soldiering and politics. If he is
Rationalist enough to deny that saints exist, and to hold that new ideas
cannot come otherwise than by conscious ratiocination, he will never
catch Joan’s likeness. Her ideal biographer must be free from nineteenth
century prejudices and biases; must understand the Middle Ages, the
Roman Catholic Church, and the Holy Roman Empire much more intimately
than our Whig historians have ever understood them; and must be capable
of throwing off sex partialities and their romance, and regarding woman
as the female of the human species, and not as a different kind of
animal with specific charms and specific imbecilities.
Joan’s Good Looks.
To put the last point roughly, any book about Joan which begins by
describing her as a beauty may be at once classed as a romance. Not one
of Joan’s comrades, in village, court, or camp, even when they were
straining themselves to please the king by praising her, ever claimed
that she was pretty. All the men who alluded to the matter declared most
emphatically that she was unattractive sexually to a degree that seemed
to them miraculous, considering that she was in the bloom of youth, and
neither ugly, awkward, deformed, nor unpleasant in her person. The
evident truth is that like most women of her hardy managing type she
seemed neutral in the conflict of sex because men were too much afraid
of her to fall in love with her. She herself was not sexless: in spite
of the virginity she had vowed up to a point, and preserved to her
death, she never excluded the possibility of marriage for herself. But
marriage, with its preliminary of the attraction, pursuit, and capture
of a husband, was not her business: she had something else to do.
Byron’s formula, “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart: ’tis
woman’s whole existence” did not apply to her any more than to George
Washington or any other masculine worker on the heroic scale. Had she
lived in our time, picture postcards might have been sold of her as a
general: they would not have been sold of her as a sultana. Nevertheless
there is one reason for crediting her with a very remarkable face. A
sculptor of her time in Orleans made a statue of a helmeted young woman
with a face that is unique in art in point of being evidently not an
ideal face but a portrait, and yet so uncommon as to be unlike any real
woman one has ever seen. It is surmised that Joan served unconsciously
as the sculptor’s model. There is no proof of this; but those
extraordinarily spaced eyes raise so powerfully the question “If this
woman be not Joan, who is she?” that I dispense with further evidence,
and challenge those who disagree with me to prove a negative. It is a
wonderful face, but quite neutral from the point of view of the operatic
beauty fancier.
Such a fancier may perhaps be finally chilled by the prosaic fact that
Joan was the defendant in a suit for breach of promise of marriage, and
that she conducted her own case and won it.
Joan’s Social Position.
By class Joan was the daughter of a working farmer who was one of the
headmen of his village, and transacted its feudal business for it with
the neighboring squires and their lawyers. When the castle in which the
villagers were entitled to take refuge from raids became derelict, he
organized a combination of half a dozen farmers to obtain possession of
it so as to occupy it when there was any danger of invasion. As a child,
Joan could please herself at times with being the young lady of this
castle. Her mother and brothers were able to follow and share her
fortune at court without making themselves notably ridiculous. These
facts leave us no excuse for the popular romance that turns every
heroine into either a princess or a beggarmaid. In the somewhat similar
case of Shakespear a whole inverted pyramid of wasted research has been
based on the assumption that he was an illiterate laborer, in the face
of the plainest evidence that his father was a man of business, and at
one time a very prosperous one, married to a woman of some social
pretensions. There is the same tendency to drive Joan into the position
of a hired shepherd girl, though a hired shepherd girl in Domrémy would
have deferred to her as the young lady of the farm.
The difference between Joan’s case and Shakespear’s is that Shakespear
was not illiterate. He had been to school, and knew as much Latin and
Greek as most university passmen retain: that is, for practical
purposes, none at all. Joan was absolutely illiterate. “I do not know A
from B” she said. But many princesses at that time and for long after
might have said the same. Marie Antoinette, for instance, at Joan’s age
could not spell her own name correctly. But this does not mean that Joan
was an ignorant person, or that she suffered from the diffidence and
sense of social disadvantage now felt by people who cannot read or
write. If she could not write letters, she could and did dictate them
and attach full and indeed excessive importance to them. When she was
called a shepherd lass to her face she very warmly resented it, and
challenged any woman to compete with her in the household arts of the
mistresses of well furnished houses. She understood the political and
military situation in France much better than most of our newspaper fed
university women-graduates understand the corresponding situation of
their own country today. Her first convert was the neighboring
commandant at Vaucouleurs; and she converted him by telling him about
the defeat of the Dauphin’s troops at the Battle of Herrings so long
before he had official news of it that he concluded she must have had a
divine revelation. This knowledge of and interest in public affairs was
nothing extraordinary among farmers in a warswept countryside.
Politicians came to the door too often sword in hand to be disregarded:
Joan’s people could not afford to be ignorant of what was going on in
the feudal world. They were not rich; and Joan worked on the farm as her
father did, driving the sheep to pasture and so forth; but there is no
evidence or suggestion of sordid poverty, and no reason to believe that
Joan had to work as a hired servant works, or indeed to work at all when
she preferred to go to confession, or dawdle about waiting for visions
and listening to the church bells to hear voices in them. In short, much
more of a young lady, and even of an intellectual, than most of the
daughters of our petty bourgeoisie.
Joan’s Voices and Visions.
Joan’s voices and visions have played many tricks with her reputation.
They have been held to prove that she was mad, that she was a liar and
imposter, that she was a sorceress (she was burnt for this), and finally
that she was a saint. They do not prove any of these things; but the
variety of the conclusions reached shew how little our matter-of-fact
historians know about other people’s minds, or even about their own.
There are people in the world whose imagination is so vivid that when
they have an idea it comes to them as an audible voice, sometimes
uttered by a visible figure. Criminal lunatic asylums are occupied
largely by murderers who have obeyed voices. Thus a woman may hear
voices telling her that she must cut her husband’s throat and strangle
her child as they lie asleep; and she may feel obliged to do what she is
told. By a medico-legal superstition it is held in our courts that
criminals whose temptations present themselves under these illusions are
not responsible for their actions, and must be treated as insane. But
the seers of visions and the hearers of revelations are not always
criminals. The inspirations and intuitions and unconsciously reasoned
conclusions of genius sometimes assume similar illusions. Socrates,
Luther, Swedenborg, Blake saw visions and heard voices just as Saint
Francis and Saint Joan did. If Newton’s imagination had been of the same
vividly dramatic kind he might have seen the ghost of Pythagoras walk
into the orchard and explain why the apples were falling. Such an
illusion would have invalidated neither the theory of gravitation nor
Newton’s general sanity. What is more, the visionary method of making
the discovery would not be a whit more miraculous than the normal
method. The test of sanity is not the normality of the method but the
reasonableness of the discovery. If Newton had been informed by
Pythagoras that the moon was made of green cheese, then Newton would
have been locked up. Gravitation, being a reasoned hypothesis which
fitted remarkably well into the Copernican version of the observed
physical facts of the universe, established Newton’s reputation for
extraordinary intelligence, and would have done so no matter how
fantastically he had arrived at it. Yet his theory of gravitation is not
so impressive a mental feat as his astounding chronology, which
establishes him as the king of mental conjurors, but a Bedlamite king
whose authority no one now accepts. On the subject of the eleventh horn
of the beast seen by the prophet Daniel he was more fantastic than Joan,
because his imagination was not dramatic but mathematical and therefore
extraordinarily susceptible to numbers: indeed if all his works were
lost except his chronology we should say that he was as mad as a hatter.
As it is, who dares diagnose Newton as a madman?
In the same way Joan must be judged a sane woman in spite of her voices
because they never gave her any advice that might not have come to her
from her mother wit exactly as gravitation came to Newton. We can all
see now, especially since the late war threw so many of our women into
military life, that Joan’s campaigning could not have been carried on in
petticoats. This was not only because she did a man’s work, but because
it was morally necessary that sex should be left out of the question as
between her and her comrades-in-arms. She gave this reason herself when
she was pressed on the subject; and the fact that this entirely
reasonable necessity came to her imagination first as an order from God
delivered through the mouth of Saint Catherine does not prove that she
was mad. The soundness of the order proves that she was unusually sane;
but its form proves that her dramatic imagination played tricks with her
senses. Her policy was also quite sound: nobody disputes that the relief
of Orleans, followed up by the coronation at Rheims of the Dauphin as a
counterblow to the suspicions then current of his legitimacy and
consequently of his title, were military and political masterstrokes
that saved France. They might have been planned by Napoleon or any other
illusionproof genius. They came to Joan as an instruction from her
Counsel, as she called her visionary saints; but she was none the less
an able leader of men for imagining her ideas in this way.
The Evolutionary Appetite.
What then is the modern view of Joan’s voices and visions and messages
from God? The nineteenth century said that they were delusions, but that
as she was a pretty girl, and had been abominably ill-treated and
finally done to death by a superstitious rabble of medieval priests
hounded on by a corrupt political bishop, it must be assumed that she
was the innocent dupe of these delusions. The twentieth century finds
this explanation too vapidly commonplace, and demands something more
mystic. I think the twentieth century is right, because an explanation
which amounts to Joan being mentally defective instead of, as she
obviously was, mentally excessive, will not wash. I cannot believe, nor,
if I could, could I expect all my readers to believe, as Joan did, that
three ocularly visible well dressed persons, named respectively Saint
Catherine, Saint Margaret, and Saint Michael, came down from heaven and
gave her certain instructions with which they were charged by God for
her. Not that such a belief would be more improbable or fantastic than
some modern beliefs which we all swallow; but there are fashions and
family habits in belief, and it happens that, my fashion being Victorian
and my family habit Protestant, I find myself unable to attach any such
objective validity to the form of Joan’s visions.
But that there are forces at work which use individuals for purposes far
transcending the purpose of keeping these individuals alive and
prosperous and respectable and safe and happy in the middle station in
life, which is all any good bourgeois can reasonably require, is
established by the fact that men will, in the pursuit of knowledge and
of social readjustments for which they will not be a penny the better,
and are indeed often many pence the worse, face poverty, infamy, exile,
imprisonment, dreadful hardship, and death. Even the selfish pursuit of
personal power does not nerve men to the efforts and sacrifices which
are eagerly made in pursuit of extensions of our power over nature,
though these extensions may not touch the personal life of the seeker at
any point. There is no more mystery about this appetite for knowledge
and power than about the appetite for food: both are known as facts and
as facts only, the difference between them being that the appetite for
food is necessary to the life of the hungry man and is therefore a
personal appetite, whereas the other is an appetite for evolution, and
therefore a superpersonal need.
The diverse manners in which our imaginations dramatize the approach of
the superpersonal forces is a problem for the psychologist, not for the
historian. Only, the historian must understand that visionaries are
neither impostors nor lunatics. It is one thing to say that the figure
Joan recognized as St Catherine was not really St Catherine, but the
dramatization by Joan’s imagination of that pressure upon her of the
driving force that is behind evolution which I have just called the
evolutionary appetite. It is quite another to class her visions with the
vision of two moons seen by a drunken person, or with Brocken spectres,
echoes and the like. Saint Catherine’s instructions were far too cogent
for that; and the simplest French peasant who believes in apparitions of
celestial personages to favored mortals is nearer to the scientific
truth about Joan than the Rationalist and Materialist historians and
essayists who feel obliged to set down a girl who saw saints and heard
them talking to her as either crazy or mendacious. If Joan was mad, all
Christendom was mad too; for people who believe devoutly in the
existence of celestial personages are every whit as mad in that sense as
the people who think they see them. Luther, when he threw his inkhorn at
the devil, was no more mad than any other Augustinian monk: he had a
more vivid imagination, and had perhaps eaten and slept less: that was
all.
The mere Iconography does not matter.
All the popular religions in the world are made apprehensible by an
array of legendary personages, with an Almighty Father, and sometimes a
mother and divine child, as the central figures. These are presented to
the mind’s eye in childhood; and the result is a hallucination which
persists strongly throughout life when it has been well impressed. Thus
all the thinking of the hallucinated adult about the fountain of
inspiration which is continually flowing in the universe, or about the
promptings of virtue and the revulsions of shame: in short, about
aspiration and conscience, both of which forces are matters of fact more
obvious than electro-magnetism, is thinking in terms of the celestial
vision. And when in the case of exceptionally imaginative persons,
especially those practising certain appropriate austerities, the
hallucination extends from the mind’s eye to the body’s, the visionary
sees Krishna or the Buddha or the Blessed Virgin or St Catherine as the
case may be.
The Modern Education which Joan escaped.
It is important to everyone nowadays to understand this, because modern
science is making short work of the hallucinations without regard to the
vital importance of the things they symbolize. If Joan were reborn today
she would be sent, first to a convent school in which she would be
mildly taught to connect inspiration and conscience with St Catherine
and St Michael exactly as she was in the fifteenth century, and then
finished up with a very energetic training in the gospel of Saints Louis
Pasteur and Paul Bert, who would tell her (possibly in visions but more
probably in pamphlets) not to be a superstitious little fool, and to
empty out St Catherine and the rest of the Catholic hagiology as an
obsolete iconography of exploded myths. It would be rubbed into her that
Galileo was a martyr, and his persecutors incorrigible ignoramuses, and
that St Teresa’s hormones had gone astray and left her incurably
hyperpituitary or hyperadrenal or hysteroid or epileptoid or anything
but asteroid. She would have been convinced by precept and experiment
that baptism and receiving the body of her Lord were contemptible
superstitions, and that vaccination and vivisection were enlightened
practices. Behind her new Saints Louis and Paul there would be not only
Science purifying Religion and being purified by it, but hypochondria,
melancholia, cowardice, stupidity, cruelty, muckraking curiosity,
knowledge without wisdom, and everything that the eternal soul in Nature
loathes, instead of the virtues of which St Catherine was the figure
head. As to the new rites, which would be the saner Joan? the one who
carried little children to be baptized of water and the spirit, or the
one who sent the police to force their parents to have the most
villainous racial poison we know thrust into their veins? the one who
told them the story of the angel and Mary, or the one who questioned
them as to their experiences of the Edipus complex? the one to whom the
consecrated wafer was the very body of the virtue that was her
salvation, or the one who looked forward to a precise and convenient
regulation of her health and her desires by a nicely calculated diet of
thyroid extract, adrenalin, thymin, pituitrin, and insulin, with
pick-me-ups of hormone stimulants, the blood being first carefully
fortified with antibodies against all possible infections by
inoculations of infected bacteria and serum from infected animals, and
against old age by surgical extirpation of the reproductive ducts or
weekly doses of monkey gland?
It is true that behind all these quackeries there is a certain body of
genuine scientific physiology. But was there any the less a certain body
of genuine psychology behind St Catherine and the Holy Ghost? And which
is the healthier mind? the saintly mind or the monkey gland mind? Does
not the present cry of Back to the Middle Ages, which has been
incubating ever since the pre-Raphaelite movement began, mean that it is
no longer our Academy pictures that are intolerable, but our credulities
that have not the excuse of being superstitions, our cruelties that have
not the excuse of barbarism, our persecutions that have not the excuse
of religious faith, our shameless substitution of successful swindlers
and scoundrels and quacks for saints as objects of worship, and our
deafness and blindness to the calls and visions of the inexorable power
that made us, and will destroy us if we disregard it? To Joan and her
contemporaries we should appear as a drove of Gadarene swine, possessed
by all the unclean spirits cast out by the faith and civilization of the
Middle Ages, running violently down a steep place into a hell of high
explosives. For us to set up our condition as a standard of sanity, and
declare Joan mad because she never condescended to it, is to prove that
we are not only lost but irredeemable. Let us then once for all drop all
nonsense about Joan being cracked, and accept her as at least as sane as
Florence Nightingale, who also combined a very simple iconography of
religious belief with a mind so exceptionally powerful that it kept her
in continual trouble with the medical and military panjandrums of her
time.
Failures of the Voices.
That the voices and visions were illusory, and their wisdom all Joan’s
own, is shewn by the occasions on which they failed her, notably during
her trial, when they assured her that she would be rescued. Here her
hopes flattered her; but they were not unreasonable: her military
colleague La Hire was in command of a considerable force not so very far
off; and if the Armagnacs, as her party was called, had really wanted to
rescue her, and had put anything like her own vigor into the enterprise,
they could have attempted it with very fair chances of success. She did
not understand that they were glad to be rid of her, nor that the rescue
of a prisoner from the hands of the Church was a much more serious
business for a medieval captain, or even a medieval king, than its mere
physical difficulty as a military exploit suggested. According to her
lights her expectation of a rescue was reasonable; therefore she heard
Madame Saint Catherine assuring her it would happen, that being her way
of finding out and making up her own mind. When it became evident that
she had miscalculated: when she was led to the stake, and La Hire was
not thundering at the gates of Rouen nor charging Warwick’s men at arms,
she threw over Saint Catherine at once, and recanted. Nothing could be
more sane or practical. It was not until she discovered that she had
gained nothing by her recantation but close imprisonment for life that
she withdrew it, and deliberately and explicitly chose burning instead:
a decision which shewed not only the extraordinary decision of her
character, but also a Rationalism carried to its ultimate human tests of
suicide. Yet even in this the illusion persisted; and she announced her
relapse as dictated to her by her voices.
Joan a Galtonic Visualizer.
The most sceptical scientific reader may therefore accept as a flat
fact, carrying no implication of unsoundness of mind, that Joan was what
Francis Galton and other modern investigators of human faculty call a
visualizer. She saw imaginary saints just as some other people see
imaginary diagrams and landscapes with numbers dotted about them, and
are thereby able to perform feats of memory and arithmetic impossible to
non-visualizers. Visualizers will understand this at once.
Non-visualizers who have never read Galton will be puzzled and
incredulous. But a very little inquiry among their acquaintances will
reveal to them that the mind’s eye is more or less a magic lantern, and
that the street is full of normally sane people who have hallucinations
of all sorts which they believe to be part of the normal permanent
equipment of all human beings.
Joan’s Manliness and Militarism.
Joan’s other abnormality, too common among uncommon things to be
properly called a peculiarity, was her craze for soldiering and the
masculine life. Her father tried to frighten her out of it by
threatening to drown her if she ran away with the soldiers, and ordering
her brothers to drown her if he were not on the spot. This extravagance
was clearly not serious: it must have been addressed to a child young
enough to imagine that he was in earnest. Joan must therefore as a child
have wanted to run away and be a soldier. The awful prospect of being
thrown into the Meuse and drowned by a terrible father and her big
brothers kept her quiet until the father had lost his terrors and the
brothers yielded to her natural leadership; and by that time she had
sense enough to know that the masculine and military life was not a mere
matter of running away from home. But the taste for it never left her,
and was fundamental in determining her career.
If anyone doubts this, let him ask himself why a maid charged with a
special mission from heaven to the Dauphin (this was how Joan saw her
very able plan for retrieving the desperate situation of the uncrowned
king) should not have simply gone to the court as a maid, in woman’s
dress, and urged her counsel upon him in a woman’s way, as other women
with similar missions had come to his mad father and his wise
grandfather. Why did she insist on having a soldier’s dress and arms and
sword and horse and equipment, and on treating her escort of soldiers as
comrades, sleeping side by side with them on the floor at night as if
there were no difference of sex between them? It may be answered that
this was the safest way of travelling through a country infested with
hostile troops and bands of marauding deserters from both sides. Such an
answer has no weight, because it applies to all the women who travelled
in France at that time, and who never dreamt of travelling otherwise
than as women. But even if we accept it, how does it account for the
fact that when the danger was over, and she could present herself at
court in feminine attire with perfect safety and obviously with greater
propriety, she presented herself in her man’s dress, and instead of
urging Charles, like Queen Victoria urging the War Office to send
Roberts to the Tranvaal, to send D’Alençon, De Rais, La Hire and the
rest to the relief of Dunois at Orleans, insisted that she must go
herself and lead the assault in person? Why did she give exhibitions of
her dexterity in handling a lance, and of her seat as a rider? Why did
she accept presents of armor and chargers and masculine surcoats, and in
every action repudiate the conventional character of a woman? The simple
answer to all these questions is that she was the sort of woman that
wants to lead a man’s life. They are to be found wherever there are
armies on foot or navies on the seas, serving in male disguise, eluding
detection for astonishingly long periods, and sometimes, no doubt,
escaping it entirely. When they are in a position to defy public opinion
they throw off all concealment. You have your Rosa Bonheur painting in
male blouse and trousers, and George Sand living a man’s life and almost
compelling her Chopins and De Mussets to live women’s lives to amuse
her. Had Joan not been one of those “unwomanly women,” she might have
been canonized much sooner.
But it is not necessary to wear trousers and smoke big cigars to live a
man’s life any more than it is necessary to wear petticoats to live a
woman’s. There are plenty of gowned and bodiced women in ordinary civil
life who manage their own affairs and other people’s, including those of
their menfolk, and are entirely masculine in their tastes and pursuits.
There always were such women, even in the Victorian days when women had
fewer legal rights than men, and our modern women magistrates, mayors,
and members of Parliament were unknown. In reactionary Russia in our own
century a woman soldier organized an effective regiment of amazons,
which disappeared only because it was Aldershottian enough to be against
the Revolution. The exemption of women from military service is founded,
not on any natural inaptitude that men do not share, but on the fact
that communities cannot reproduce themselves without plenty of women.
Men are more largely dispensable, and are sacrificed accordingly.
Was Joan Suicidal.
These two abnormalities were the only ones that were irresistibly
prepotent in Joan; and they brought her to the stake. Neither of them
was peculiar to her. There was nothing peculiar about her except the
vigor and scope of her mind and character, and the intensity of her
vital energy. She was accused of a suicidal tendency; and it is a fact
that when she attempted to escape from Beaurevoir Castle by jumping from
a tower said to be sixty feet high, she took a risk beyond reason,
though she recovered from the crash after a few days fasting. Her death
was deliberately chosen as an alternative to life without liberty. In
battle she challenged death as Wellington did at Waterloo, and as Nelson
habitually did when he walked his quarter deck during his battles with
all his decorations in full blaze. As neither Nelson nor Wellington nor
any of those who have performed desperate feats, and preferred death to
captivity, have been accused of suicidal mania, Joan need not be
suspected of it. In the Beaurevoir affair there was more at stake than
her freedom. She was distracted by the news that Compiègne was about to
fall; and she was convinced that she could save it if only she could get
free. Still, the leap was so perilous that her conscience was not quite
easy about it; and she expressed this, as usual, by saying that Saint
Catherine had forbidden her to do it, but forgave her afterwards for her
disobedience.
Joan Summed Up.
We may accept and admire Joan, then, as a sane and shrewd country girl
of extraordinary strength of mind and hardihood of body. Everything she
did was thoroughly calculated; and though the process was so rapid that
she was hardly conscious of it, and ascribed it all to her voices, she
was a woman of policy and not of blind impulse. In war she was as much a
realist as Napoleon: she had his eye for artillery and his knowledge of
what it could do. She did not expect besieged cities to fall Jerichowise
at the sound of her trumpet, but, like Wellington, adapted her methods
of attack to the peculiarities of the defence; and she anticipated the
Napoleonic calculation that if you only hold on long enough the other
fellow will give in: for example, her final triumph at Orleans was
achieved after her commander Dunois had sounded the retreat at the end
of a day’s fighting without a decision. She was never for a moment what
so many romancers and playwrights have pretended: a romantic young lady.
She was a thorough daughter of the soil in her peasantlike
matter-of-factness and doggedness, and her acceptance of great lords and
kings and prelates as such without idolatry or snobbery, seeing at a
glance how much they were individually good for. She had the respectable
countrywoman’s sense of the value of public decency, and would not
tolerate foul language and neglect of religious observances, nor allow
disreputable women to hang about her soldiers. She had one pious
ejaculation “_En nom Dé!_” and one meaningless oath “_Par mon martin_”;
and this much swearing she allowed to the incorrigibly blasphemous La
Hire equally with herself. The value of this prudery was so great in
restoring the self-respect of the badly demoralized army that, like most
of her policy, it justified itself as soundly calculated. She talked to
and dealt with people of all classes, from laborers to kings, without
embarrassment or affectation, and got them to do what she wanted when
they were not afraid or corrupt. She could coax and she could hustle,
her tongue having a soft side and a sharp edge. She was very capable: a
born boss.
Joan’s Immaturity and Ignorance.
All this, however, must be taken with one heavy qualification. She was
only a girl in her teens. If we could think of her as a managing woman
of fifty we should seize her type at once; for we have plenty of
managing women among us of that age who illustrate perfectly the sort of
person she would have become had she lived. But she, being only a lass
when all is said, lacked their knowledge of men’s vanities and of the
weight and proportion of social forces. She knew nothing of iron hands
in velvet gloves: she just used her fists. She thought political changes
much easier than they are, and, like Mahomet in his innocence of any
world but the tribal world, wrote letters to kings calling on them to
make millennial rearrangements. Consequently it was only in the
enterprises that were really simple and compassable by swift physical
force, like the coronation and the Orleans campaign, that she was
successful.
Her want of academic education disabled her when she had to deal with
such elaborately artificial structures as the great ecclesiastical and
social institutions of the Middle Ages. She had a horror of heretics
without suspecting that she was herself a heresiarch, one of the
precursors of a schism that rent Europe in two, and cost centuries of
bloodshed that is not yet staunched. She objected to foreigners on the
sensible ground that they were not in their proper place in France; but
she had no notion of how this brought her into conflict with Catholicism
and Feudalism, both essentially international. She worked by
commonsense; and where scholarship was the only clue to institutions she
was in the dark and broke her shins against them, all the more rudely
because of her enormous self-confidence, which made her the least
cautious of human beings in civil affairs.
This combination of inept youth and academic ignorance with great
natural capacity, push, courage, devotion, originality and oddity, fully
accounts for all the facts in Joan’s career, and makes her a credible
historical and human phenomenon; but it clashes most discordantly both
with the idolatrous romance that has grown up round her, and the
belittling scepticism that reacts against that romance.
The Maid in Literature.
English readers would probably like to know how these idolizations
and reactions have affected the books they are most familiar with
about Joan. There is the first part of the Shakesperean, or
pseudo-Shakesperean trilogy of Henry VI, in which Joan is one of the
leading characters. This portrait of Joan is not more authentic than
the descriptions in the London papers of George Washington in 1780,
of Napoleon in 1803, of the German Crown Prince in 1917, or of Lenin
in 1917. It ends in mere scurrility. The impression left by it is
that the playwright, having begun by an attempt to make Joan a
beautiful and romantic figure, was told by his scandalized company
that English patriotism would never stand a sympathetic representation
of a French conqueror of English troops, and that unless he at once
introduced all the old charges against Joan of being a sorceress and
a harlot, and assumed her to be guilty of all of them, his play
could not be produced. As likely as not, this is what actually
happened: indeed there is only one other apparent way of accounting
for the sympathetic representation of Joan as a heroine culminating
in her eloquent appeal to the Duke of Burgundy, followed by the
blackguardly scurrility of the concluding scenes. That other way is
to assume that the original play was wholly scurrilous, and that
Shakespear touched up the earlier scenes. As the work belongs to a
period at which he was only beginning his practice as a tinker of
old works, before his own style was fully formed and hardened, it is
impossible to verify this guess. His finger is not unmistakably
evident in the play, which is poor and base in its moral tone; but
he may have tried to redeem it from downright infamy by shedding a
momentary glamor on the figure of The Maid.
When we jump over two centuries to Schiller, we find Die Jungfrau von
Orleans drowned in a witch’s caldron of raging romance. Schiller’s Joan
has not a single point of contact with the real Joan, nor indeed with
any mortal woman that ever walked this earth. There is really nothing to
be said of his play but that it is not about Joan at all, and can hardly
be said to pretend to be; for he makes her die on the battlefield,
finding her burning unbearable. Before Schiller came Voltaire, who
burlesqued Homer in a mock epic called La Pucelle. It is the fashion to
dismiss this with virtuous indignation as an obscene libel; and I
certainly cannot defend it against the charge of extravagant indecorum.
But its purpose was not to depict Joan, but to kill with ridicule
everything that Voltaire righteously hated in the institutions and
fashions of his own day. He made Joan ridiculous, but not contemptible
nor (comparatively) unchaste; and as he also made Homer and St Peter and
St Denis and the brave Dunois ridiculous, and the other heroines of the
poem very unchaste indeed, he may be said to have let Joan off very
easily. But indeed the personal adventures of the characters are so
outrageous, and so Homerically free from any pretence at or even
possibility of historical veracity, that those who affect to take them
seriously only make themselves Pecksniffian. Samuel Butler believed The
Iliad to be a burlesque of Greek Jingoism and Greek religion, written by
a hostage or a slave; and La Pucelle makes Butler’s theory almost
convincing. Voltaire represents Agnes Sorel, the Dauphin’s mistress,
whom Joan never met, as a woman with a consuming passion for the
chastest concubinal fidelity, whose fate it was to be continually
falling into the hands of licentious foes and suffering the worst
extremities of rapine. The combats in which Joan rides a flying donkey,
or in which, taken unaware with no clothes on, she defends Agnes with
her sword, and inflicts appropriate mutilations on her assailants, can
be laughed at as they are intended to be without scruple; for no sane
person could mistake them for sober history; and it may be that their
ribald irreverence is more wholesome than the beglamored sentimentality
of Schiller. Certainly Voltaire should not have asserted that Joan’s
father was a priest; but when he was out to _écraser l’infâme_ (the
French Church) he stuck at nothing.
So far, the literary representations of The Maid were legendary. But the
publication by Quicherat in 1841 of the reports of her trial and
rehabilitation placed the subject on a new footing. These entirely
realistic documents created a living interest in Joan which Voltaire’s
mock Homerics and Schiller’s romantic nonsense missed. Typical products
of that interest in America and England are the histories of Joan by
Mark Twain and Andrew Lang. Mark Twain was converted to downright
worship of Joan directly by Quicherat. Later on, another man of Genius,
Anatole France, reacted against the Quicheratic wave of enthusiasm, and
wrote a Life of Joan in which he attributed Joan’s ideas to clerical
prompting and her military success to an adroit use of her by Dunois as
a _mascotte_: in short, he denied that she had any serious military or
political ability. At this Andrew saw red, and went for Anatole’s scalp
in a rival Life of her which should be read as a corrective to the
other. Lang had no difficulty in shewing that Joan’s ability was not an
unnatural fiction to be explained away as an illusion manufactured by
priests and soldiers, but a straightforward fact.
It has been lightly pleaded in explanation that Anatole France is a
Parisian of the art world, into whose scheme of things the able,
hardheaded, hardhanded female, though she dominates provincial France
and business Paris, does not enter; whereas Lang was a Scot, and every
Scot knows that the grey mare is as likely as not to be the better
horse. But this explanation does not convince me. I cannot believe that
Anatole France does not know what everybody knows. I wish everybody knew
all that he knows. One feels antipathies at work in his book. He is not
anti-Joan; but he is anti-clerical, anti-mystic, and fundamentally
unable to believe that there ever was any such person as the real Joan.
Mark Twain’s Joan, skirted to the ground, and with as many petticoats as
Noah’s wife in a toy ark, is an attempt to combine Bayard with Esther
Summerson from Bleak House into an unimpeachable American school teacher
in armor. Like Esther Summerson she makes her creator ridiculous, and
yet, being the work of a man of genius, remains a credible human
goodygoody in spite of her creator’s infatuation. It is the description
rather than the valuation that is wrong. Andrew Lang and Mark Twain are
equally determined to make Joan a beautiful and most ladylike Victorian;
but both of them recognize and insist on her capacity for leadership,
though the Scots scholar is less romantic about it than the Mississippi
pilot. But then Lang was, by lifelong professional habit, a critic of
biographies rather than a biographer, whereas Mark Twain writes his
biography frankly in the form of a romance.
Protestant Misunderstandings of the Middle Ages.
They had, however, one disability in common. To understand Joan’s
history it is not enough to understand her character: you must
understand her environment as well. Joan in a nineteenth-twentieth
century environment is as incongruous a figure as she would appear were
she to walk down Piccadilly today in her fifteenth century armor. To see
her in her proper perspective you must understand Christendom and the
Catholic Church, the Holy Roman Empire and the Feudal System, as they
existed and were understood in the Middle Ages. If you confuse the
Middle Ages with the Dark Ages, and are in the habit of ridiculing your
aunt for wearing “medieval clothes,” meaning those in vogue in the
eighteen-nineties, and are quite convinced that the world has progressed
enormously, both morally and mechanically, since Joan’s time, then you
will never understand why Joan was burnt, much less feel that you might
have voted for burning her yourself if you had been a member of the
court that tried her; and until you feel that you know nothing essential
about her.
That the Mississippi pilot should have broken down on this
misunderstanding is natural enough. Mark Twain, the Innocent Abroad, who
saw the lovely churches of the Middle Ages without a throb of emotion,
author of A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, in which the heroes and
heroines of medieval chivalry are guys seen through the eyes of a street
arab, was clearly out of court from the beginning. Andrew Lang was
better read; but, like Walter Scott, he enjoyed medieval history as a
string of border romances rather than as the record of a high European
civilization based on a catholic faith. Both of them were baptized as
Protestants, and impressed by all their schooling and most of their
reading with the belief that Catholic bishops who burnt heretics were
persecutors capable of any villainy; that all heretics were Albigensians
or Husites or Jews or Protestants of the highest character; and that the
Inquisition was a Chamber of Horrors invented expressly and exclusively
for such burnings. Accordingly we find them representing Peter Cauchon,
Bishop of Beauvais, the judge who sent Joan to the stake, as an
unconscionable scoundrel, and all the questions put to her as “traps” to
ensnare and destroy her. And they assume unhesitatingly that the two or
three score of canons and doctors of law and divinity who sat with
Cauchon as assessors, were exact reproductions of him on slightly less
elevated chairs and with a different headdress.
Comparative Fairness of Joan’s Trial.
The truth is that Cauchon was threatened and insulted by the English for
being too considerate to Joan. A recent French writer denies that Joan
was burnt, and holds that Cauchon spirited her away and burnt somebody
or something else in her place, and that the pretender who subsequently
personated her at Orleans and elsewhere was not a pretender but the real
authentic Joan. He is able to cite Cauchon’s pro-Joan partiality in
support of his view. As to the assessors, the objection to them is not
that they were a row of uniform rascals, but that they were political
partisans of Joan’s enemies. This is a valid objection to all such
trials; but in the absence of neutral tribunals they are unavoidable. A
trial by Joan’s French partisans would have been as unfair as the trial
by her French opponents; and an equally mixed tribunal would have
produced a deadlock. Such recent trials as those of Edith Cavell by a
German tribunal and Roger Casement by an English one were open to the
same objection; but they went forward to the death nevertheless, because
neutral tribunals were not available. Edith, like Joan, was an arch
heretic: in the middle of the war she declared before the world that
“Patriotism is not enough.” She nursed enemies back to health, and
assisted their prisoners to escape, making it abundantly clear that she
would help any fugitive or distressed person without asking whose side
he was on, and acknowledging no distinction before Christ between Tommy
and Jerry and Pitou the _poilu_. Well might Edith have wished that she
could bring the Middle Ages back, and have fifty civilians learned in
the law or vowed to the service of God, to support two skilled judges in
trying her case according to the Catholic law of Christendom, and to
argue it out with her at sitting after sitting for many weeks. The
modern military Inquisition was not so squeamish. It shot her out of
hand; and her countrymen, seeing in this a good opportunity for
lecturing the enemy on his intolerance, put up a statue to her, but took
particular care not to inscribe on the pedestal “Patriotism is not
enough,” for which omission, and the lie it implies, they will need
Edith’s intercession when they are themselves brought to judgment, if
any heavenly power thinks such moral cowards capable of pleading to an
intelligible indictment.
The point need be no further labored. Joan was persecuted essentially as
she would be persecuted today. The change from burning to hanging or
shooting may strike us as a change for the better. The change from
careful trial under ordinary law to recklessly summary military
terrorism may strike us as a change for the worse. But as far as
toleration is concerned the trial and execution in Rouen in 1431 might
have been an event of today; and we may charge our consciences
accordingly. If Joan had to be dealt with by us in London she would be
treated with no more toleration than Miss Silvia Pankhurst, or the
Peculiar People, or the parents who keep their children from the
elementary school, or any of the others who cross the line we have to
draw, rightly or wrongly, between the tolerable and the intolerable.
Joan not tried as a Political Offender.
Besides, Joan’s trial was not, like Casement’s, a national political
trial. Ecclesiastical courts and the courts of the Inquisition (Joan was
tried by a combination of the two) were Courts Christian: that is,
international courts; and she was tried, not as a traitress, but as a
heretic, blasphemer, sorceress and idolater. Her alleged offences were
not political offences against England, nor against the Burgundian
faction in France, but against God and against the common morality of
Christendom. And although the idea we call Nationalism was so foreign to
the medieval conception of Christian society that it might almost have
been directly charged against Joan as an additional heresy, yet it was
not so charged; and it is unreasonable to suppose that the political
bias of a body of Frenchmen like the assessors would on this point have
run strongly in favor of the English foreigners (even if they had been
making themselves particularly agreeable in France instead of just the
contrary) against a Frenchwoman who had vanquished them.
The tragic part of the trial was that Joan, like most prisoners tried
for anything but the simplest breaches of the ten commandments, did not
understand what they were accusing her of. She was much more like Mark
Twain than like Peter Cauchon. Her attachment to the Church was very
different from the Bishop’s, and does not, in fact, bear close
examination from his point of view. She delighted in the solaces the
Church offers to sensitive souls: to her, confession and communion were
luxuries beside which the vulgar pleasures of the senses were trash. Her
prayers were wonderful conversations with her three saints. Her piety
seemed superhuman to the formally dutiful people whose religion was only
a task to them. But when the Church was not offering her her favorite
luxuries, but calling on her to accept its interpretation of God’s will,
and to sacrifice her own, she flatly refused, and made it clear that her
notion of a Catholic Church was one in which the Pope was Pope Joan. How
could the Church tolerate that, when it had just destroyed Hus, and had
watched the career of Wycliffe with a growing anger that would have
brought him, too, to the stake, had he not died a natural death before
the wrath fell on him in his grave? Neither Hus nor Wycliffe was as
bluntly defiant as Joan: both were reformers of the Church like Luther;
whilst Joan, like Mrs Eddy, was quite prepared to supersede St Peter as
the rock on which the Church was built, and, like Mahomet, was always
ready with a private revelation from God to settle every question and
fit every occasion.
The enormity of Joan’s pretension was proved by her own unconsciousness
of it, which we call her innocence, and her friends called her
simplicity. Her solutions of the problems presented to her seemed, and
indeed mostly were, the plainest commonsense, and their revelation to
her by her Voices was to her a simple matter of fact. How could plain
commonsense and simple fact seem to her to be that hideous thing,
heresy? When rival prophetesses came into the field, she was down on
them at once for liars and humbugs; but she never thought of them as
heretics. She was in a state of invincible ignorance as to the Church’s
view; and the Church could not tolerate her pretensions without either
waiving its authority or giving her a place beside the Trinity during
her lifetime and in her teens, which was unthinkable. Thus an
irresistible force met an immovable obstacle, and developed the heat
that consumed poor Joan.
Mark and Andrew would have shared her innocence and her fate had they
been dealt with by the Inquisition: that is why their accounts of the
trial are as absurd as hers might have been could she have written one.
All that can be said for their assumption that Cauchon was a vulgar
villain, and that the questions put to Joan were traps, is that it has
the support of the inquiry which rehabilitated her twentyfive years
later. But this rehabilitation was as corrupt as the contrary proceeding
applied to Cromwell by our Restoration reactionaries. Cauchon had been
dug up, and his body thrown into the common sewer. Nothing was easier
than to accuse him of cozenage, and declare the whole trial void on that
account. That was what everybody wanted, from Charles the Victorious,
whose credit was bound up with The Maid’s, to the patriotic Nationalist
populace, who idolized Joan’s memory. The English were gone; and a
verdict in their favor would have been an outrage on the throne and on
the patriotism which Joan had set on foot.
We have none of these overwhelming motives of political convenience and
popularity to bias us. For us the first trial stands valid; and the
rehabilitation would be negligible but for the mass of sincere testimony
it produced as to Joan’s engaging personal character. The question then
arises: how did The Church get over the verdict at the first trial when
it canonized Joan five hundred years later?
The Church uncompromised by its Amends.
Easily enough. In the Catholic Church, far more than in law, there is no
wrong without a remedy. It does not defer to Joanesque private judgment
as such, the supremacy of private judgment for the individual being the
quintessence of Protestantism; nevertheless it finds a place for private
judgment _in excelsis_ by admitting that the highest wisdom may come as
a divine revelation to an individual. On sufficient evidence it will
declare that individual a saint. Thus, as revelation may come by way of
an enlightenment of the private judgment no less than by words of a
celestial personage appearing in a vision, a saint may be defined as a
person of heroic virtue whose private judgment is privileged. Many
innovating saints, notably Francis and Clare, have been in conflict with
the Church during their lives, and have thus raised the question whether
they were heretics or saints. Francis might have gone to the stake had
he lived longer. It is therefore by no means impossible for a person to
be excommunicated as a heretic, and on further consideration canonized
as a saint. Excommunication by a provincial ecclesiastical court is not
one of the acts for which the Church claims infallibility. Perhaps I had
better inform my Protestant readers that the famous Dogma of Papal
Infallibility is by far the most modest pretension of the kind in
existence. Compared to our infallible democracies, our infallible
medical councils, our infallible astronomers, our infallible judges, and
our infallible parliaments, the Pope is on his knees in the dust
confessing his ignorance before the throne of God, asking only that as
to certain historical matters on which he has clearly more sources of
information open to him than anyone else his decision shall be taken as
final. The Church may, and perhaps some day will, canonize Galileo
without compromising such infallibility as it claims for the Pope, if
not without compromising the infallibility claimed for the Book of
Joshua by simple souls whose rational faith in more important things has
become bound up with a quite irrational faith in the chronicle of
Joshua’s campaigns as a treatise on physics. Therefore the Church will
probably not canonize Galileo yet awhile, though it might do worse. But
it has been able to canonize Joan without any compromise at all. She
never doubted that the sun went round the earth: she had seen it do so
too often.
Still, there was a great wrong done to Joan and to the conscience of the
world by her burning. _Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner_, which is
the Devil’s sentimentality, cannot excuse it. When we have admitted that
the tribunal was not only honest and legal, but exceptionally merciful
in respect of sparing Joan the torture which was customary when she was
obdurate as to taking the oath, and that Cauchon was far more
self-disciplined and conscientious both as priest and lawyer than any
English judge ever dreams of being in a political case in which his
party and class prejudices are involved, the human fact remains that the
burning of Joan of Arc was a horror, and that a historian who would
defend it would defend anything. The final criticism of its physical
side is implied in the refusal of the Marquesas islanders to be
persuaded that the English did not eat Joan. Why, they ask, should
anyone take the trouble to roast a human being except with that object?
They cannot conceive its being a pleasure. As we have no answer for them
that is not shameful to us, let us blush for our more complicated and
pretentious savagery before we proceed to unravel the business further,
and see what other lessons it contains for us.
Cruelty, Modern and Medieval.
First, let us get rid of the notion that the mere physical cruelty of
the burning has any special significance. Joan was burnt just as dozens
of less interesting heretics were burnt in her time. Christ, in being
crucified, only shared the fate of thousands of forgotten malefactors.
They have no pre-eminence in mere physical pain: much more horrible
executions than theirs are on record, to say nothing of the agonies of
so-called natural death at its worst.
Joan was burnt more than five hundred years ago. More than three hundred
years later: that is, only about a hundred years before I was born, a
woman was burnt on Stephen’s Green in my native city of Dublin for
coining, which was held to be treason. In my preface to the recent
volume on English Prisons under Local Government, by Sidney and Beatrice
Webb, I have mentioned that when I was already a grown man I saw Richard
Wagner conduct two concerts, and that when Richard Wagner was a young
man he saw and avoided a crowd of people hastening to see a soldier
broken on the wheel by the more cruel of the two ways of carrying out
that hideous method of execution. Also that the penalty of hanging,
drawing and quartering, unmentionable in its details, was abolished so
recently that there are men living who have been sentenced to it. We are
still flogging criminals, and clamoring for more flogging. Not even the
most sensationally frightful of these atrocities inflicted on its victim
the misery, degradation, and conscious waste and loss of life suffered
in our modern prisons, especially the model ones, without, as far as I
can see, rousing any more compunction than the burning of heretics did
in the Middle Ages. We have not even the excuse of getting some fun out
of our prisons as the Middle Ages did out of their stakes and wheels and
gibbets. Joan herself judged this matter when she had to choose between
imprisonment and the stake, and chose the stake. And thereby she
deprived The Church of the plea that it was guiltless of her death,
which was the work of the secular arm. The Church should have confined
itself to excommunicating her. There it was within its rights: she had
refused to accept its authority or comply with its conditions; and it
could say with truth “You are not one of us: go forth and find the
religion that suits you, or found one for yourself.” It had no right to
say “You may return to us now that you have recanted; but you shall stay
in a dungeon all the rest of your life.” Unfortunately, The Church did
not believe that there was any genuine soul saving religion outside
itself; and it was deeply corrupted, as all the churches were and still
are, by primitive Calibanism (in Browning’s sense), or the propitiation
of a dreaded deity by suffering and sacrifice. Its method was not
cruelty for cruelty’s sake, but cruelty for the salvation of Joan’s
soul. Joan, however, believed that the saving of her soul was her own
business, and not that of _les gens d’église_. By using that term as she
did, mistrustfully and contemptuously, she announced herself as, in
germ, an anti-Clerical as thoroughgoing as Voltaire or Anatole France.
Had she said in so many words “To the dustbin with the Church Militant
and its blackcoated officials: I recognize only the Church Triumphant in
heaven,” she would hardly have put her view more plainly.
Catholic Anti-Clericalism.
I must not leave it to be inferred here that one cannot be an
anti-Clerical and a good Catholic too. All the reforming Popes have been
vehement anti-Clericals, veritable scourges of the clergy. All the great
Orders arose from dissatisfaction with the priests: that of the
Franciscans with priestly snobbery, that of the Dominicans with priestly
laziness and Laodiceanism, that of the Jesuits with priestly apathy and
ignorance and indiscipline. The most bigoted Ulster Orangeman or
Leicester Low Church bourgeois (as described by Mr Henry Nevinson) is a
mere Gallio compared to Machiavelli, who, though no Protestant, was a
fierce anti-Clerical. Any Catholic may, and many Catholics do, denounce
any priest or body of priests, as lazy, drunken, idle, dissolute, and
unworthy of their great Church and their function as the pastors of
their flocks of human souls. But to say that the souls of the people are
no business of the Churchmen is to go a step further, a step across the
Rubicon. Joan virtually took that step.
Catholicism not yet Catholic Enough.
And so, if we admit, as we must, that the burning of Joan was a mistake,
we must broaden Catholicism sufficiently to include her in its charter.
Our Churches must admit that no official organization of mortal men
whose vocation does not carry with it extraordinary mental powers (and
this is all that any Church Militant can in the face of fact and history
pretend to be), can keep pace with the private judgment of persons of
genius except when, by a very rare accident, the genius happens to be
Pope, and not even then unless he is an exceedingly overbearing Pope.
The Churches must learn humility as well as teach it. The Apostolic
Succession cannot be secured or confined by the laying on of hands: the
tongues of fire have descended on heathens and outcasts too often for
that, leaving anointed Churchmen to scandalize History as worldly
rascals. When the Church Militant behaves as if it were already the
Church Triumphant, it makes these appalling blunders about Joan and
Bruno and Galileo and the rest which make it so difficult for a
Freethinker to join it; and a Church which has no place for
Freethinkers: nay, which does not inculcate and encourage freethinking
with a complete belief that thought, when really free, must by its own
law take the path that leads to The Church’s bosom, not only has no
future in modern culture, but obviously has no faith in the valid
science of its own tenets, and is guilty of the heresy that theology and
science are two different and opposite impulses, rivals for human
allegiance.
I have before me the letter of a Catholic priest. “In your play,” he
writes, “I see the dramatic presentation of the conflict of the Regal,
sacerdotal, and Prophetical powers, in which Joan was crushed. To me it
is not the victory of any one of them over the others that will bring
peace and the Reign of the Saints in the Kingdom of God, but their
fruitful interaction in a costly but noble state of tension.” The Pope
himself could not put it better; nor can I. We must accept the tension,
and maintain it nobly without letting ourselves be tempted to relieve it
by burning the thread. This is Joan’s lesson to The Church; and its
formulation by the hand of a priest emboldens me to claim that her
canonization was a magnificently Catholic gesture as the canonization of
a Protestant saint by the Church of Rome. But its special value and
virtue cannot be apparent until it is known and understood as such. If
any simple priest for whom this is too hard a saying tells me that it
was not so intended, I shall remind him that the Church is in the hands
of God, and not, as simple priests imagine, God in the hands of the
Church; so if he answers too confidently for God’s intentions he may be
asked “Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? or hast thou
walked in the recesses of the deep?” And Joan’s own answer is also the
answer of old: “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him; _but I will
maintain my own ways before Him_.”
The Law of Change is the Law of God.
When Joan maintained her own ways she claimed, like Job, that there was
not only God and the Church to be considered, but the Word made Flesh:
that is, the unaveraged individual, representing life possibly at its
highest actual human evolution and possibly at its lowest, but never at
its merely mathematical average. Now there is no deification of the
democratic average in the theory of the Church: it is an avowed
hierarchy in which the members are sifted until at the end of the
process an individual stands supreme as the Vicar of Christ. But when
the process is examined it appears that its successive steps of
selection and election are of the superior by the inferior (the cardinal
vice of democracy), with the result that great popes are as rare and
accidental as great kings, and that it has sometimes been safer for an
aspirant to the Chair and the Keys to pass as a moribund dotard than as
an energetic saint. At best very few popes have been canonized, or could
be without letting down the standard of sanctity set by the self-elected
saints.
No other result could have been reasonably expected; for it is not
possible that an official organization of the spiritual needs of
millions of men and women, mostly poor and ignorant, should compete
successfully in the selection of its principals with the direct choice
of the Holy Ghost as it flashes with unerring aim upon the individual.
Nor can any College of Cardinals pray effectively that its choice may be
inspired. The conscious prayer of the inferior may be that his choice
may light on a greater than himself; but the sub-conscious intention of
his self-preserving individuality must be to find a trustworthy servant
for his own purposes. The saints and prophets, though they may be
accidentally in this or that official position or rank, are always
really self-selected, like Joan. And since neither Church nor State, by
the secular necessities of its constitution, can guarantee even the
recognition of such self-chosen missions, there is nothing for us but to
make it a point of honor to privilege heresy to the last bearable degree
on the simple ground that all evolution in thought and conduct must at
first appear as heresy and misconduct. In short, though all society is
founded on intolerance, all improvement is founded on tolerance, or the
recognition of the fact that the law of evolution is Ibsen’s law of
change. And as the law of God, in any sense of the word which can now
command a faith proof against science is a law of evolution, it follows
that the law of God is a law of change, and that when the Churches set
themselves against change as such, they are setting themselves against
the law of God.
Credulity, Modern and Medieval.
When Abernethy, the famous doctor, was asked why he indulged himself
with all the habits he warned his patients against as unhealthy, he
replied that his business was that of a direction post, which points out
the way to a place, but does not go thither itself. He might have added
that neither does it compel the traveller to go thither, nor prevent him
from seeking some other way. Unfortunately our clerical direction posts
always do coerce the traveller when they have the political power to do
so. When the Church was a temporal as well as a spiritual power, and for
long after to the full extent to which it could control or influence the
temporal power, it enforced conformity by persecutions that were all the
more ruthless because their intention was so excellent. Today, when the
doctor has succeeded to the priest, and can do practically what he likes
with parliament and the press through the blind faith in him which has
succeeded to the far more critical faith in the parson, legal compulsion
to take the doctor’s prescription, however poisonous, is carried to an
extent that would have horrified the Inquisition and staggered
Archbishop Laud. Our credulity is grosser than that of the Middle Ages,
because the priest had no such direct pecuniary interest in our sins as
the doctor has in our diseases: he did not starve when all was well with
his flock, nor prosper when they were perishing, as our private
commercial doctors must. Also the medieval cleric believed that
something extremely unpleasant would happen to him after death if he was
unscrupulous, a belief now practically extinct among persons receiving a
dogmatically materialist education. Our professional corporations are
Trade Unions without souls to be damned! and they will soon drive us to
remind them that they have bodies to be kicked. The Vatican was never
soulless: at worst it was a political conspiracy to make the Church
supreme temporally as well as spiritually. Therefore the question raised
by Joan’s burning is a burning question still, though the penalties
involved are not so sensational. That is why I am probing it. If it were
only an historical curiosity I would not waste my reader’s time and my
own on it for five minutes.
Toleration, Modern and Medieval.
The more closely we grapple with it the more difficult it becomes. At
first sight we are disposed to repeat that Joan should have been
excommunicated and then left to go her own way, though she would have
protested vehemently against so cruel a deprivation of her spiritual
food; for confession, absolution, and the body of her Lord were first
necessities of life to her. Such a spirit as Joan’s might have got over
that difficulty as the Church of England got over the Bulls of Pope Leo,
by making a Church of her own, and affirming it to be the temple of the
true and original faith from which her persecutors had strayed. But as
such a proceeding was, in the eyes of both Church and State at that
time, a spreading of damnation and anarchy, its toleration involved a
greater strain on faith in freedom than political and ecclesiastical
human nature could bear. It is easy to say that the Church should have
waited for the alleged evil results instead of assuming that they would
occur, and what they would be. That sounds simple enough; but if a
modern Public Health Authority were to leave people entirely to their
own devices in the matter of sanitation, saying, “We have nothing to do
with drainage or your views about drainage; but if you catch smallpox or
typhus we will prosecute you and have you punished very severely like
the authorities in Butler’s Erewhon,” it would either be removed to the
County Asylum or reminded that A’s neglect of sanitation may kill the
child of B two miles off, or start an epidemic in which the most
conscientious sanitarians may perish.
We must face the fact that society is founded on intolerance. There are
glaring cases of the abuse of intolerance; but they are quite as
characteristic of our own age as of the Middle Ages. The typical modern
example and contrast is compulsory inoculation replacing what was
virtually compulsory baptism. But compulsion to inoculate is objected to
as a crudely unscientific and mischievous anti-sanitary quackery, not in
the least because we think it wrong to compel people to protect their
children from disease. Its opponents would make it a crime, and will
probably succeed in doing so; and that will be just as intolerant as
making it compulsory. Neither the Pasteurians nor their opponents the
Sanitarians would leave parents free to bring up their children naked,
though that course also has some plausible advocates. We may prate of
toleration as we will; but society must always draw a line somewhere
between allowable conduct and insanity or crime, in spite of the risk of
mistaking sages for lunatics and saviors for blasphemers. We must
persecute, even to the death; and all we can do to mitigate the danger
of persecution is, first, to be very careful what we persecute, and
second, to bear in mind that unless there is a large liberty to shock
conventional people, and a well informed sense of the value of
originality, individuality, and eccentricity, the result will be
apparent stagnation covering a repression of evolutionary forces which
will eventually explode with extravagant and probably destructive
violence.
Variability of Toleration.
The degree of tolerance attainable at any moment depends on the strain
under which society is maintaining its cohesion. In war, for instance,
we suppress the gospels and put Quakers in prison, muzzle the
newspapers, and make it a serious offence to shew a light at night.
Under the strain of invasion the French Government in 1792 struck off
4000 heads, mostly on grounds that would not in time of settled peace
have provoked any Government to chloroform a dog; and in 1920 the
British Government slaughtered and burnt in Ireland to persecute the
advocates of a constitutional change which it had presently to effect
itself. Later on the Fascisti in Italy did everything that the Black and
Tans did in Ireland, with some grotesquely ferocious variations, under
the strain of an unskilled attempt at industrial revolution by
Socialists who understood Socialism even less than Capitalists
understand Capitalism. In the United States an incredibly savage
persecution of Russians took place during the scare spread by the
Russian Bolshevik revolution after 1917. These instances could easily be
multiplied; but they are enough to shew that between a maximum of
indulgent toleration and a ruthlessly intolerant Terrorism there is a
scale through which toleration is continually rising or falling, and
that there was not the smallest ground for the self-complacent
conviction of the nineteenth century that it was more tolerant than the
fifteenth, or that such an event as the execution of Joan could not
possibly occur in what we call our own more enlightened times. Thousands
of women, each of them a thousand times less dangerous and terrifying to
our Governments than Joan was to the Government of her day, have within
the last ten years been slaughtered, starved to death, burnt out of
house and home, and what not that Persecution and Terror could do to
them, in the course of Crusades far more tyrannically pretentious than
the medieval Crusades which proposed nothing more hyperbolical than the
rescue of the Holy Sepulchre from the Saracens. The Inquisition, with
its English equivalent the Star Chamber, are gone in the sense that
their names are now disused; but can any of the modern substitutes for
the Inquisition, the Special Tribunals and Commissions, the punitive
expeditions, the suspensions of the Habeas Corpus Act, the proclamations
of martial law and of minor states of siege, and the rest of them, claim
that their victims have as fair a trial, as well considered a body of
law to govern their cases, or as conscientious a judge to insist on
strict legality of procedure as Joan had from the Inquisition and from
the spirit of the Middle Ages even when her country was under the
heaviest strain of civil and foreign war? From us she would have had no
trial and no law except a Defence of The Realm Act suspending all law;
and for judge she would have had, at best, a bothered major, and at
worst a promoted advocate in ermine and scarlet to whom the scruples of
a trained ecclesiastic like Cauchon would seem ridiculous and
ungentlemanly.
The Conflict between Genius and Discipline.
Having thus brought the matter home to ourselves, we may now consider
the special feature of Joan’s mental constitution which made her so
unmanageable. What is to be done on the one hand with rulers who will
not give any reason for their orders, and on the other with people who
cannot understand the reasons when they are given? The government of the
world, political, industrial, and domestic, has to be carried on mostly
by the giving and obeying of orders under just these conditions. “Dont
argue: do as you are told” has to be said not only to children and
soldiers, but practically to everybody. Fortunately most people do not
want to argue: they are only too glad to be saved the trouble of
thinking for themselves. And the ablest and most independent thinkers
are content to understand their own special department. In other
departments they will unhesitatingly ask for and accept the instructions
of a policeman or the advice of a tailor without demanding or desiring
explanations.
Nevertheless, there must be some ground for attaching authority to an
order. A child will obey its parents, a soldier his officer, a
philosopher a railway porter, and a workman a foreman, all without
question, because it is generally accepted that those who give the
orders understand what they are about, and are duly authorized and even
obliged to give them, and because, in the practical emergencies of daily
life, there is no time for lessons and explanations, or for arguments as
to their validity. Such obediences are as necessary to the continuous
operation of our social system as the revolutions of the earth are to
the succession of night and day. But they are not so spontaneous as they
seem: they have to be very carefully arranged and maintained. A bishop
will defer to and obey a king; but let a curate venture to give him an
order, however necessary and sensible, and the bishop will forget his
cloth and damn the curate’s impudence. The more obedient a man is to
accredited authority the more jealous he is of allowing any unauthorized
person to order him about.
With all this in mind, consider the career of Joan. She was a village
girl, in authority over sheep and pigs, dogs and chickens, and to some
extent over her father’s hired laborers when he hired any, but over no
one else on earth. Outside the farm she had no authority, no prestige,
no claim to the smallest deference. Yet she ordered everybody about,
from her uncle to the king, the archbishop, and the military General
Staff. Her uncle obeyed her like a sheep, and took her to the castle of
the local commander, who, on being ordered about, tried to assert
himself, but soon collapsed and obeyed. And so on up to the king, as we
have seen. This would have been unbearably irritating even if her orders
had been offered as rational solutions of the desperate difficulties in
which her social superiors found themselves just then. But they were not
so offered. Nor were they offered as the expression of Joan’s arbitrary
will. It was never “I say so,” but always “God says so.”
Joan as Theocrat.
Leaders who take that line have no trouble with some people, and no end
of trouble with others. They need never fear a lukewarm reception.
Either they are messengers of God, or they are blasphemous impostors. In
the Middle Ages the general belief in witchcraft greatly intensified
this contrast, because when an apparent miracle happened (as in the case
of the wind changing at Orleans) it proved the divine mission to the
credulous, and proved a contract with the devil to the sceptical. All
through, Joan had to depend on those who accepted her as an incarnate
angel against those who added to an intense resentment of her
presumption a bigoted abhorrence of her as a witch. To this abhorrence
we must add the extreme irritation of those who did not believe in the
voices, and regarded her as a liar and impostor. It is hard to conceive
anything more infuriating to a statesman or a military commander, or to
a court favorite, than to be overruled at every turn, or to be robbed of
the ear of the reigning sovereign, by an impudent young upstart
practising on the credulity of the populace and the vanity and silliness
of an immature prince by exploiting a few of those lucky coincidences
which pass as miracles with uncritical people. Not only were the envy,
snobbery, and competitive ambition of the baser natures exacerbated by
Joan’s success, but among the friendly ones that were clever enough to
be critical a quite reasonable scepticism and mistrust of her ability,
founded on a fair observation of her obvious ignorance and temerity,
were at work against her. And as she met all remonstrances and all
criticisms, not with arguments or persuasion, but with a flat appeal to
the authority of God and a claim to be in God’s special confidence, she
must have seemed, to all who were not infatuated by her, so insufferable
that nothing but an unbroken chain of overwhelming successes in the
military and political field could have saved her from the wrath that
finally destroyed her.
Unbroken Success essential in Theocracy.
To forge such a chain she needed to be the King, the Archbishop of
Rheims, the Bastard of Orleans, and herself into the bargain; and that
was impossible. From the moment when she failed to stimulate Charles to
follow up his coronation with a swoop on Paris she was lost. The fact
that she insisted on this whilst the king and the rest timidly and
foolishly thought they could square the Duke of Burgundy, and effect a
combination with him against the English, made her a terrifying nuisance
to them; and from that time onward she could do nothing but prowl about
the battlefields waiting for some lucky chance to sweep the captains
into a big move. But it was to the enemy that the chance came: she was
taken prisoner by the Burgundians fighting before Compiègne, and at once
discovered that she had not a friend in the political world. Had she
escaped she would probably have fought on until the English were gone,
and then had to shake the dust of the court off her feet, and retire to
Domrémy as Garibaldi had to retire to Caprera.
Modern Distortions of Joan’s History.
This, I think, is all that we can now pretend to say about the prose of
Joan’s career. The romance of her rise, the tragedy of her execution,
and the comedy of the attempts of posterity to make amends for that
execution, belong to my play and not to my preface, which must be
confined to a sober essay on the facts. That such an essay is badly
needed can be ascertained by examining any of our standard works of
reference. They give accurately enough the facts about the visit to
Vaucouleurs, the annunciation to Charles at Chinon, the raising of the
siege of Orleans and the subsequent battles, the coronation at Rheims,
the capture at Compiègne, and the trial and execution at Rouen, with
their dates and the names of the people concerned; but they all break
down on the melodramatic legend of the wicked bishop and the entrapped
maiden and the rest of it. It would be far less misleading if they were
wrong as to the facts, and right in their view of the facts. As it is,
they illustrate the too little considered truth that the fashion in
which we think changes like the fashion of our clothes, and that it is
difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in
the fashion of their own period.
History always out of Date.
This, by the way, is why children are never taught contemporary history.
Their history books deal with periods of which the thinking has passed
out of fashion, and the circumstances no longer apply to active life.
For example, they are taught history about Washington, and told lies
about Lenin. In Washington’s time they were told lies (the same lies)
about Washington, and taught history about Cromwell. In the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries they were told lies about Joan, and by this time
might very well be told the truth about her. Unfortunately the lies did
not cease when the political circumstances became obsolete. The
Reformation, which Joan had unconsciously anticipated, kept the
questions which arose in her case burning up to our own day (you can see
plenty of the burnt houses still in Ireland), with the result that Joan
has remained the subject of anti-Clerical lies, of specifically
Protestant lies, and of Roman Catholic evasions of her unconscious
Protestantism. The truth sticks in our throats with all the sauces it is
served with: it will never go down until we take it without any sauce at
all.
The Real Joan not Marvellous Enough for Us.
But even in its simplicity, the faith demanded by Joan is one which the
anti-metaphysical temper of nineteenth century civilization, which
remains powerful in England and America, and is tyrannical in France,
contemptuously refuses her. We do not, like her contemporaries, rush to
the opposite extreme in a recoil from her as from a witch self-sold to
the devil, because we do not believe in the devil nor in the possibility
of commercial contracts with him. Our credulity, though enormous, is not
boundless; and our stock of it is quite used up by our mediums,
clairvoyants, hand readers, slate writers, Christian Scientists,
psycho-analysts, electronic vibration diviners, therapeutists of all
schools registered and unregistered, astrologers, astronomers who tell
us that the sun is nearly a hundred million miles away and that
Betelgeuse is ten times as big as the whole universe, physicists who
balance Betelgeuse by describing the incredible smallness of the atom,
and a host of other marvel mongers whose credulity would have dissolved
the Middle Ages in a roar of sceptical merriment. In the Middle Ages
people believed that the earth was flat, for which they had at least the
evidence of their senses: we believe it to be round, not because as many
as one per cent of us could give the physical reasons for so quaint a
belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is
obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable,
extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is
scientific.
I must not, by the way, be taken as implying that the earth is flat, or
that all or any of our amazing credulities are delusions or impostures.
I am only defending my own age against the charge of being less
imaginative than the Middle Ages. I affirm that the nineteenth century,
and still more the twentieth, can knock the fifteenth into a cocked hat
in point of susceptibility to marvels and miracles and saints and
prophets and magicians and monsters and fairy tales of all kinds. The
proportion of marvel to immediately credible statement in the latest
edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica is enormously greater than in the
Bible. The medieval doctors of divinity who did not pretend to settle
how many angels could dance on the point of a needle cut a very poor
figure as far as romantic credulity is concerned beside the modern
physicists who have settled to the billionth of a millimetre every
movement and position in the dance of the electrons. Not for worlds
would I question the precise accuracy of these calculations or the
existence of electrons (whatever they may be). The fate of Joan is a
warning to me against such heresy. But why the men who believe in
electrons should regard themselves as less credulous than the men who
believed in angels is not apparent to me. If they refuse to believe,
with the Rouen assessors of 1431, that Joan was a witch, it is not
because that explanation is too marvellous, but because it is not
marvellous enough.
The Stage Limits of Historical Representation.
For the story of Joan I refer the reader to the play which follows. It
contains all that need be known about her; but as it is for stage use I
have had to condense into three and a half hours a series of events
which in their historical happening were spread over four times as many
months; for the theatre imposes unities of time and place from which
Nature in her boundless wastefulness is free. Therefore the reader must
not suppose that Joan really put Robert de Baudricourt in her pocket in
fifteen minutes, nor that her excommunication, recantation, relapse, and
death at the stake were a matter of half an hour or so. Neither do I
claim more for my dramatizations of Joan’s contemporaries than that some
of them are probably slightly more like the originals than those
imaginary portraits of all the Popes from Saint Peter onward through the
Dark Ages which are still gravely exhibited in the Uffizi in Florence
(or were when I was there last). My Dunois would do equally well for the
Duc d’Alençon. Both left descriptions of Joan so similar that, as a man
always describes himself unconsciously whenever he describes anyone
else, I have inferred that these goodnatured young men were very like
one another in mind; so I have lumped the twain into a single figure,
thereby saving the theatre manager a salary and a suit of armor. Dunois’
face, still on record at Châteaudun, is a suggestive help. But I really
know no more about these men and their circle than Shakespear knew about
Falconbridge and the Duke of Austria, or about Macbeth and Macduff. In
view of the things they did in history, and have to do again in the
play, I can only invent appropriate characters for them in Shakespear’s
manner.
A Void in the Elizabethan Drama.
I have, however, one advantage over the Elizabethans. I write in full
view of the Middle Ages, which may be said to have been rediscovered in
the middle of the nineteenth century after an eclipse of about four
hundred and fifty years. The Renascence of antique literature and art in
the sixteenth century, and the lusty growth of Capitalism, between them
buried the Middle Ages; and their resurrection is a second Renascence.
Now there is not a breath of medieval atmosphere in Shakespear’s
histories. His John of Gaunt is like a study of the old age of Drake.
Although he was a Catholic by family tradition, his figures are all
intensely Protestant, individualist, sceptical, self-centered in
everything but their love affairs, and completely personal and selfish
even in them. His kings are not statesmen: his cardinals have no
religion: a novice can read his plays from one end to the other without
learning that the world is finally governed by forces expressing
themselves in religions and laws which make epochs rather than by
vulgarly ambitious individuals who make rows. The divinity which shapes
our ends, rough hew them how we will, is mentioned fatalistically only
to be forgotten immediately like a passing vague apprehension. To
Shakespear as to Mark Twain, Cauchon would have been a tyrant and a
bully instead of a Catholic, and the inquisitor Lemaître would have been
a Sadist instead of a lawyer. Warwick would have had no more feudal
quality than his successor the King Maker has in the play of Henry VI.
We should have seen them all completely satisfied that if they would
only to their own selves be true they could not then be false to any man
(a precept which represents the reaction against medievalism at its
intensest) as if they were beings in the air, without public
responsibilities of any kind. All Shakespear’s characters are so: that
is why they seem natural to our middle classes, who are comfortable and
irresponsible at other people’s expense, and are neither ashamed of that
condition nor even conscious of it. Nature abhors this vacuum in
Shakespear; and I have taken care to let the medieval atmosphere blow
through my play freely. Those who see it performed will not mistake the
startling event it records for a mere personal accident. They will have
before them not only the visible and human puppets, but the Church, the
Inquisition, the Feudal System, with divine inspiration always beating
against their too inelastic limits: all more terrible in their dramatic
force than any of the little mortal figures clanking about in plate
armor or moving silently in the frocks and hoods of the order of St
Dominic.
Tragedy not Melodrama.
There are no villains in the piece. Crime, like disease, is not
interesting: it is something to be done away with by general consent,
and that is all about it. It is what men do at their best, with good
intentions, and what normal men and women find that they must and will
do in spite of their intentions, that really concern us. The rascally
bishop and the cruel inquisitor of Mark Twain and Andrew Lang are as
dull as pickpockets; and they reduce Joan to the level of the even less
interesting person whose pocket is picked. I have represented both of
them as capable and eloquent exponents of The Church Militant and The
Church Litigant, because only by doing so can I maintain my drama on the
level of high tragedy and save it from becoming a mere police court
sensation. A villain in a play can never be anything more than a
_diabolus ex machina_, possibly a more exciting expedient than a _deus
ex machina_, but both equally mechanical, and therefore interesting only
as mechanism. It is, I repeat, what normally innocent people do that
concerns us; and if Joan had not been burnt by normally innocent people
in the energy of their righteousness her death at their hands would have
no more significance than the Tokyo earthquake, which burnt a great many
maidens. The tragedy of such murders is that they are not committed by
murderers. They are judicial murders, pious murders; and this
contradiction at once brings an element of comedy into the tragedy: the
angels may weep at the murder, but the gods laugh at the murderers.
The Inevitable Flatteries of Tragedy.
Here then we have a reason why my drama of Saint Joan’s career, though
it may give the essential truth of it, gives an inexact picture of some
accidental facts. It goes almost without saying that the old Jeanne
d’Arc melodramas, reducing everything to a conflict of villain and hero,
or in Joan’s case villain and heroine, not only miss the point entirely,
but falsify the characters, making Cauchon a scoundrel, Joan a prima
donna, and Dunois a lover. But the writer of high tragedy and comedy,
aiming at the innermost attainable truth, must needs flatter Cauchon
nearly as much as the melodramatist vilifies him. Although there is, as
far as I have been able to discover, nothing against Cauchon that
convicts him of bad faith or exceptional severity in his judicial
relations with Joan, or of as much anti-prisoner, pro-police, class and
sectarian bias as we now take for granted in our own courts, yet there
is hardly more warrant for classing him as a great Catholic churchman,
completely proof against the passions roused by the temporal situation.
Neither does the inquisitor Lemaître, in such scanty accounts of him as
are now recoverable, appear quite so able a master of his duties and of
the case before him as I have given him credit for being. But it is the
business of the stage to make its figures more intelligible to
themselves than they would be in real life; for by no other means can
they be made intelligible to the audience. And in this case Cauchon and
Lemaître have to make intelligible not only themselves but the Church
and the Inquisition, just as Warwick has to make the feudal system
intelligible, the three between them having thus to make a twentieth
century audience conscious of an epoch fundamentally different from its
own. Obviously the real Cauchon, Lemaître, and Warwick could not have
done this: they were part of the Middle Ages themselves, and therefore
as unconscious of its peculiarities as of the atomic formula of the air
they breathed. But the play would be unintelligible if I had not endowed
them with enough of this consciousness to enable them to explain their
attitude to the twentieth century. All I claim is that by this
inevitable sacrifice of verisimilitude I have secured in the only
possible way sufficient veracity to justify me in claiming that as far
as I can gather from the available documentation, and from such powers
of divination as I possess, the things I represent these three exponents
of the drama as saying are the things they actually would have said if
they had known what they were really doing. And beyond this neither
drama nor history can go in my hands.
Some well-meant Proposals for the Improvement of the Play.
I have to thank several critics on both sides of the Atlantic, including
some whose admiration for my play is most generously enthusiastic, for
their heartfelt instructions as to how it can be improved. They point
out that by the excision of the epilogue and all the references to such
undramatic and tedious matters as the Church, the feudal system, the
Inquisition, the theory of heresy and so forth, all of which, they point
out, would be ruthlessly blue pencilled by any experienced manager, the
play could be considerably shortened. I think they are mistaken. The
experienced knights of the blue pencil, having saved an hour and a half
by disembowelling the play, would at once proceed to waste two hours in
building elaborate scenery, having real water in the river Loire and a
real bridge across it, and staging an obviously sham fight for
possession of it, with the victorious French led by Joan on a real
horse. The coronation would eclipse all previous theatrical displays,
shewing, first, the procession through the streets of Rheims, and then
the service in the cathedral, with special music written for both. Joan
would be burnt on the stage, as Mr Matheson Lang always is in The
Wandering Jew, on the principle that it does not matter in the least why
a woman is burnt provided she is burnt, and people can pay to see it
done. The intervals between the acts whilst these splendors were being
built up and then demolished by the stage carpenters would seem eternal,
to the great profit of the refreshment bars. And the weary and
demoralized audience would lose their last trains and curse me for
writing such inordinately long and intolerably dreary and meaningless
plays. But the applause of the press would be unanimous. Nobody who
knows the stage history of Shakespear will doubt that this is what would
happen if I knew my business so little as to listen to these well
intentioned but disastrous counsellors: indeed it probably will happen
when I am no longer in control of the performing rights. So perhaps it
will be as well for the public to see the play while I am still alive.
The Epilogue.
As to the epilogue, I could hardly be expected to stultify myself by
implying that Joan’s history in the world ended unhappily with her
execution, instead of beginning there. It was necessary by hook or crook
to shew the canonized Joan as well as the incinerated one; for many a
woman has got herself burnt by carelessly whisking a muslin skirt into
the drawing room fireplace, but getting canonized is a different matter,
and a more important one. So I am afraid the epilogue must stand.
To the Critics, lest they should feel Ignored.
To a professional critic (I have been one myself) theatre-going is the
curse of Adam. The play is the evil he is paid to endure in the sweat of
his brow; and the sooner it is over, the better. This would seem to
place him in irreconcilable opposition to the paying playgoer, from
whose point of view the longer the play, the more entertainment he gets
for his money. It does in fact so place him, especially in the
provinces, where the playgoer goes to the theatre for the sake of the
play solely, and insists so effectively on a certain number of hours’
entertainment that touring managers are sometimes seriously embarrassed
by the brevity of the London plays they have to deal in.
For in London the critics are reinforced by a considerable body of
persons who go to the theatre as many others go to church, to display
their best clothes and compare them with other people’s; to be in the
fashion, and have something to talk about at dinner parties; to adore a
pet performer; to pass the evening anywhere rather than at home: in
short, for any or every reason except interest in dramatic art as such.
In fashionable centres the number of irreligious people who go to
church, of unmusical people who go to concerts and operas, and of
undramatic people who go to the theatre, is so prodigious that sermons
have been cut down to ten minutes and plays to two hours; and, even at
that, congregations sit longing for the benediction and audiences for
the final curtain, so that they may get away to the lunch or supper they
really crave for, after arriving as late as (or later than) the hour of
beginning can possibly be made for them.
Thus from the stalls and in the Press an atmosphere of hypocrisy
spreads. Nobody says straight out that genuine drama is a tedious
nuisance, and that to ask people to endure more than two hours of it
(with two long intervals of relief) is an intolerable imposition. Nobody
says “I hate classical tragedy and comedy as I hate sermons and
symphonies; but I like police news and divorce news and any kind of
dancing or decoration that has an aphrodisiac effect on me or on my wife
or husband. And whatever superior people may pretend, I cannot associate
pleasure with any sort of intellectual activity; and I dont believe
anyone else can either.” Such things are not said; yet nine-tenths of
what is offered as criticism of the drama in the metropolitan Press of
Europe and America is nothing but a muddled paraphrase of it. If it does
not mean that, it means nothing.
I do not complain of this, though it complains very unreasonably of me.
But I can take no more notice of it than Einstein of the people who are
incapable of mathematics. I write in the classical manner for those who
pay for admission to a theatre because they like classical comedy or
tragedy for its own sake, and like it so much when it is good of its
kind and well done that they tear themselves away from it with
reluctance to catch the very latest train or omnibus that will take them
home. Far from arriving late from an eight or half-past eight o’clock
dinner so as to escape at least the first half-hour of the performance,
they stand in queues outside the theatre doors for hours beforehand in
bitingly cold weather to secure a seat. In countries where a play lasts
a week, they bring baskets of provisions and sit it out. These are the
patrons on whom I depend for my bread. I do not give them performances
twelve hours long, because circumstances do not at present make such
entertainments feasible; though a performance beginning after breakfast
and ending at sunset is as possible physically and artistically in
Surrey or Middlesex as in Ober-Ammergau; and an all-night sitting in a
theatre would be at least as enjoyable as an all-night sitting in the
House of Commons, and much more useful. But in St Joan I have done my
best by going to the well-established classical limit of three and a
half hours practically continuous playing, barring the one interval
imposed by considerations which have nothing to do with art. I know that
this is hard on the pseudo-critics and on the fashionable people whose
playing is a hypocrisy. I cannot help feeling some compassion for them
when they assure me that my play, though a great play, must fail
hopelessly, because it does not begin at a quarter to nine and end at
eleven. The facts are overwhelmingly against them. They forget that all
men are not as they are. Still, I am sorry for them; and though I cannot
for their sakes undo my work and help the people who hate the theatre to
drive out the people who love it, yet I may point out to them that they
have several remedies in their own hands. They can escape the first part
of the play by their usual practice of arriving late. They can escape
the epilogue by not waiting for it. And if the irreducible minimum thus
attained is still too painful, they can stay away altogether. But I
deprecate this extreme course, because it is good neither for my pocket
nor for their own souls. Already a few of them, noticing that what
matters is not the absolute length of time occupied by a play, but the
speed with which that time passes, are discovering that the theatre,
though purgatorial in its Aristotelian moments, is not necessarily
always the dull place they have so often found it. What do its
discomforts matter when the play makes us forget them?
AYOT ST LAWRENCE,
_May 1924_.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_Saint Joan was performed for the first time by The Theatre Guild in the
Garrick Theatre, New York City, on the 28th December 1923, with Winifred
Lenihan in the title-part. Its first performance in London took place on
the 26th March 1924 in the New Theatre in St Martin’s Lane, with Sybil
Thorndike as the Saint._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
Preface— PAGE
Joan the Original and Presumptuous v
Joan and Socrates vii
Contrast with Napoleon viii
Was Joan Innocent or Guilty? x
Joan’s Good Looks xiii
Joan’s Social Position xiv
Joan’s Voices and Visions xvii
The Evolutionary Appetite xx
The mere Iconography does not matter xxiii
The Modern Education which Joan escaped xxiii
Failures of the Voices xxvi
Joan a Galtonic Visualizer xxviii
Joan’s Manliness and Militarism xxviii
Was Joan Suicidal? xxxi
Joan Summed Up xxxii
Joan’s Immaturity and Ignorance xxxiv
The Maid in Literature xxxv
Protestant Misunderstandings of the Middle Ages xl
Comparative Fairness of Joan’s Trial xlii
Joan not tried as a Political Offender xliv
The Church uncompromised by its Amends xlviii
Cruelty, Modern and Medieval l
Catholic Anti-Clericalism liii
Catholicism not yet Catholic Enough liv
The Law of Change is the Law of God lvi
Credulity, Modern and Medieval lviii
Toleration, Modern and Medieval lix
Variability of Toleration lxi
The Conflict between Genius and Discipline lxiv
Joan as Theocrat lxvi
Unbroken Success essential in Theocracy lxvii
Modern Distortions of Joan’s History lxviii
History always out of Date lxix
The Real Joan not Marvellous Enough for Us lxx
The Stage Limits of Historical Representation lxxii
A Void in the Elizabethan Drama lxxiii
Tragedy, not Melodrama lxxv
The Inevitable Flatteries of Tragedy lxxvi
Some well-meant Proposals for the Improvement of the Play lxxviii
The Epilogue lxxx
To the Critics, lest they should feel Ignored lxxx
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SAINT JOAN
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SAINT JOAN
SCENE I
_A fine spring morning on the river Meuse, between Lorraine and
Champagne, in the year 1429 A.D., in the castle of Vaucouleurs._
_Captain Robert de Baudricourt, a military squire, handsome and
physically energetic, but with no will of his own, is disguising that
defect in his usual fashion by storming terribly at his steward, a
trodden worm, scanty of flesh, scanty of hair, who might be any age from
18 to 55, being the sort of man whom age cannot wither because he has
never bloomed._
_The two are in a sunny stone chamber on the first floor of the castle.
At a plain strong oak table, seated in chair to match, the captain
presents his left profile. The steward stands facing him at the other
side of the table, if so deprecatory a stance as his can be called
standing. The mullioned thirteenth-century window is open behind him.
Near it in the corner is a turret with a narrow arched doorway leading
to a winding stair which descends to the courtyard. There is a stout
fourlegged stool under the table, and a wooden chest under the window._
ROBERT. No eggs! No eggs!! Thousand thunders, man, what do you mean by
no eggs?
STEWARD. Sir: it is not my fault. It is the act of God.
ROBERT. Blasphemy. You tell me there are no eggs; and you blame your
Maker for it.
STEWARD. Sir: what can I do? I cannot lay eggs.
ROBERT [_sarcastic_] Ha! You jest about it.
STEWARD. No, sir, God knows. We all have to go without eggs just as you
have, sir. The hens will not lay.
ROBERT. Indeed! [_Rising_] Now listen to me, you.
STEWARD [_humbly_] Yes, sir.
ROBERT. What am I?
STEWARD. What are you, sir?
ROBERT [_coming at him_] Yes: what am I? Am I Robert, squire of
Baudricourt and captain of this castle of Vaucouleurs: or am I a cowboy?
STEWARD. Oh, sir, you know you are a greater man here than the king
himself.
ROBERT. Precisely. And now, do you know what you are?
STEWARD. I am nobody, sir, except that I have the honor to be your
steward.
ROBERT [_driving him to the wall, adjective by adjective_] You have not
only the honor of being my steward, but the privilege of being the
worst, most incompetent, drivelling snivelling jibbering jabbering idiot
of a steward in France. [_He strides back to the table._]
STEWARD [_cowering on the chest_] Yes, sir: to a great man like you I
must seem like that.
ROBERT [_turning_] My fault, I suppose. Eh?
STEWARD [_coming to him deprecatingly_] Oh, sir: you always give my most
innocent words such a turn!
ROBERT. I will give your neck a turn if you dare tell me, when I ask you
how many eggs there are, that you cannot lay any.
STEWARD [_protesting_] Oh sir, oh sir—
ROBERT. No: not oh sir, oh sir, but no sir, no sir. My three Barbary
hens and the black are the best layers in Champagne. And you come and
tell me that there are no eggs! Who stole them? Tell me that, before I
kick you out through the castle gate for a liar and a seller of my goods
to thieves. The milk was short yesterday, too: do not forget that.
STEWARD [_desperate_] I know, sir. I know only too well. There is no
milk: there are no eggs: tomorrow there will be nothing.
ROBERT. Nothing! You will steal the lot: eh?
STEWARD. No, sir: nobody will steal anything. But there is a spell on
us: we are bewitched.
ROBERT. That story is not good enough for me. Robert de Baudricourt
burns witches and hangs thieves. Go. Bring me four dozen eggs and two
gallons of milk here in this room before noon, or Heaven have mercy on
your bones! I will teach you to make a fool of me. [_He resumes his seat
with an air of finality_].
STEWARD. Sir: I tell you there are no eggs. There will be none—not if
you were to kill me for it—as long as The Maid is at the door.
ROBERT. The Maid! What maid? What are you talking about?
STEWARD. The girl from Lorraine, sir. From Domremy.
ROBERT [_rising in fearful wrath_] Thirty thousand thunders! Fifty
thousand devils! Do you mean to say that that girl, who had the
impudence to ask to see me two days ago, and whom I told you to send
back to her father with my orders that he was to give her a good hiding,
is here still?
STEWARD. I have told her to go, sir. She wont.
ROBERT. I did not tell you to tell her to go: I told you to throw her
out. You have fifty men-at-arms and a dozen lumps of ablebodied servants
to carry out my orders. Are they afraid of her?
STEWARD. She is so positive, sir.
ROBERT [_seizing him by the scruff of the neck_] Positive! Now see here.
I am going to throw you downstairs.
STEWARD. No, sir. Please.
ROBERT. Well, stop me by being positive. It’s quite easy: any slut of a
girl can do it.
STEWARD [_hanging limp in his hands_] Sir, sir: you cannot get rid of
her by throwing me out. [_Robert has to let him drop. He squats on his
knees on the floor, contemplating his master resignedly._] You see, sir,
you are much more positive than I am. But so is she.
ROBERT. I am stronger than you are, you fool.
STEWARD. No, sir: it isnt that: it’s your strong character, sir. She is
weaker than we are: she is only a slip of a girl; but we cannot make her
go.
ROBERT. You parcel of curs: you are afraid of her.
STEWARD [_rising cautiously_] No, sir: we are afraid of you; but she
puts courage into us. She really doesnt seem to be afraid of anything.
Perhaps you could frighten her, sir.
ROBERT [_grimly_] Perhaps. Where is she now?
STEWARD. Down in the courtyard, sir, talking to the soldiers as usual.
She is always talking to the soldiers except when she is praying.
ROBERT. Praying! Ha! You believe she prays, you idiot. I know the sort
of girl that is always talking to soldiers. She shall talk to me a bit.
[_He goes to the window and shouts fiercely through it_] Hallo, you
there!
A GIRL’S VOICE [_bright, strong and rough_] Is it me, sir?
ROBERT. Yes, you.
THE VOICE. Be you captain?
ROBERT. Yes, damn your impudence, I be captain. Come up here. [_To the
soldiers in the yard_] Shew her the way, you. And shove her along quick.
[_He leaves the window and returns to his place at the table, where he
sits magisterially._]
STEWARD [_whispering_] She wants to go and be a soldier herself. She
wants you to give her soldier’s clothes. Armor, sir! And a sword!
Actually! [_He steals behind Robert_].
_Joan appears in the turret doorway. She is an ablebodied country girl
of 17 or 18, respectably dressed in red, with an uncommon face: eyes
very wide apart and bulging as they often do in very imaginative people,
a long well-shaped nose with wide nostrils, a short upper lip, resolute
but full-lipped mouth, and handsome fighting chin. She comes eagerly to
the table, delighted at having penetrated to Baudricourt’s presence at
last, and full of hope as to the result. His scowl does not check or
frighten her in the least. Her voice is normally a hearty coaxing voice,
very confident, very appealing, very hard to resist._
JOAN [_bobbing a curtsey_] Good morning, captain squire. Captain: you
are to give me a horse and armor and some soldiers, and send me to the
Dauphin. Those are your orders from my Lord.
ROBERT [_outraged_] Orders from your lord! And who the devil may your
lord be? Go back to him, and tell him that I am neither duke nor peer at
his orders: I am squire of Baudricourt; and I take no orders except from
the king.
JOAN [_reassuringly_] Yes, squire: that is all right. My Lord is the
King of Heaven.
ROBERT. Why, the girl’s mad. [_To the steward_] Why didnt you tell me
so, you blockhead?
STEWARD. Sir: do not anger her: give her what she wants.
JOAN [_impatient, but friendly_] They all say I am mad until I talk to
them, squire. But you see that it is the will of God that you are to do
what He has put into my mind.
ROBERT. It is the will of God that I shall send you back to your father
with orders to put you under lock and key and thrash the madness out of
you. What have you to say to that?
JOAN. You think you will, squire; but you will find it all coming quite
different. You said you would not see me; but here I am.
STEWARD [_appealing_] Yes, sir. You see, sir.
ROBERT. Hold your tongue, you.
STEWARD [_abjectly_] Yes, sir.
ROBERT [_to Joan, with a sour loss of confidence_] So you are presuming
on my seeing you, are you?
JOAN [_sweetly_] Yes, squire.
ROBERT [_feeling that he has lost ground, brings down his two fists
squarely on the table, and inflates his chest imposingly to cure the
unwelcome and only too familiar sensation_] Now listen to me. I am going
to assert myself.
JOAN [_busily_] Please do, squire. The horse will cost sixteen francs.
It is a good deal of money; but I can save it on the armor. I can find a
soldier’s armor that will fit me well enough: I am very hardy; and I do
not need beautiful armor made to my measure like you wear. I shall not
want many soldiers: the Dauphin will give me all I need to raise the
siege of Orleans.
ROBERT [_flabbergasted_] To raise the siege of Orleans!
JOAN [_simply_] Yes, squire: that is what God is sending me to do. Three
men will be enough for you to send with me if they are good men and
gentle to me. They have promised to come with me. Polly and Jack and—
ROBERT. Polly!! You impudent baggage, do you dare call squire Bertrand
de Poulengey Polly to my face?
JOAN. His friends call him so, squire: I did not know he had any other
name. Jack—
ROBERT. That is Monsieur John of Metz, I suppose?
JOAN. Yes, squire. Jack will come willingly: he is a very kind
gentleman, and gives me money to give to the poor. I think John Godsave
will come, and Dick the Archer, and their servants John of Honecourt and
Julian. There will be no trouble for you, squire: I have arranged it
all: you have only to give the order.
ROBERT [_contemplating her in a stupor of amazement_] Well, I am damned!
JOAN [_with muffled sweetness_] No, squire: God is very merciful; and
the blessed saints Catherine and Margaret, who speak to me every day
[_he gapes_], will intercede for you. You will go to paradise; and your
name will be remembered for ever as my first helper.
ROBERT [_to the steward, still much bothered, but changing his tone as
he pursues a new clue_] Is this true about Monsieur de Poulengey?
STEWARD [_eagerly_] Yes, sir, and about Monsieur de Metz too. They both
want to go with her.
ROBERT [_thoughtful_] Mf! [_He goes to the window, and shouts into the
courtyard_] Hallo! You there: send Monsieur de Poulengey to me, will
you? [_He turns to Joan_]. Get out; and wait in the yard.
JOAN [_smiling brightly at him_] Right, squire. [_She goes out_].
ROBERT [_to the steward_] Go with her, you, you dithering imbecile. Stay
within call; and keep your eye on her. I shall have her up here again.
STEWARD. Do so in God’s name, sir. Think of those hens, the best layers
in Champagne; and—
ROBERT. Think of my boot; and take your backside out of reach of it.
_The steward retreats hastily and finds himself confronted in the
doorway by Bertrand de Poulengey, a lymphatic French gentleman-at-arms,
aged 36 or thereabout, employed in the department of the
provost-marshal, dreamily absent-minded, seldom speaking unless spoken
to, and then slow and obstinate in reply: altogether in contrast to the
self-assertive, loud-mouthed, superficially energetic, fundamentally
will-less Robert. The steward makes way for him, and vanishes._
_Poulengey salutes, and stands awaiting orders._
ROBERT [_genially_]. It isnt service, Polly. A friendly talk. Sit down.
[_He hooks the stool from under the table with his instep_].
_Poulengey, relaxing, comes into the room; places the stool between the
table and the window; and sits down ruminatively. Robert, half sitting
on the end of the table, begins the friendly talk._
ROBERT. Now listen to me, Polly. I must talk to you like a father.
_Poulengey looks up at him gravely for a moment, but says nothing._
ROBERT. It’s about this girl you are interested in. Now, I have seen
her. I have talked to her. First, she’s mad. That doesnt matter.
Second, she’s not a farm wench. She’s a bourgeoise. That matters a good
deal. I know her class exactly. Her father came here last year to
represent his village in a lawsuit: he is one of their notables. A
farmer. Not a gentleman farmer: he makes money by it, and lives by it.
Still, not a laborer. Not a mechanic. He might have a cousin a lawyer,
or in the Church. These sort of people may be of no account socially;
but they can give a lot of bother to the authorities. That is to say, to
me. Now no doubt it seems to you a very simple thing to take this girl
away, humbugging her into the belief that you are taking her to the
Dauphin. But if you get her into trouble, you may get me into no end of
a mess, as I am her father’s lord, and responsible for her protection.
So friends or no friends, Polly, hands off her.
POULENGEY [_with deliberate impressiveness_] I should as soon think of
the Blessed Virgin herself in that way, as of this girl.
ROBERT [_coming off the table_] But she says you and Jack and Dick have
offered to go with her. What for? You are not going to tell me that you
take her crazy notion of going to the Dauphin seriously, are you?
POULENGEY [_slowly_] There is something about her. They are pretty
foulmouthed and foulminded down there in the guardroom, some of them.
But there hasnt been a word that has anything to do with her being a
woman. They have stopped swearing before her. There is something.
Something. It may be worth trying.
ROBERT. Oh, come, Polly! pull yourself together. Commonsense was never
your strong point; but this is a little too much. [_He retreats
disgustedly_].
POULENGEY [_unmoved_] What is the good of commonsense? If we had any
commonsense we should join the Duke of Burgundy and the English king.
They hold half the country, right down to the Loire. They have Paris.
They have this castle: you know very well that we had to surrender it to
the Duke of Bedford, and that you are only holding it on parole. The
Dauphin is in Chinon, like a rat in a corner, except that he wont
fight. We dont even know that he is the Dauphin: his mother says he
isnt; and she ought to know. Think of that! the queen denying the
legitimacy of her own son!
ROBERT. Well, she married her daughter to the English king. Can you
blame the woman?
POULENGEY. I blame nobody. But thanks to her, the Dauphin is down and
out; and we may as well face it. The English will take Orleans: the
Bastard will not be able to stop them.
ROBERT. He beat the English the year before last at Montargis. I was
with him.
POULENGEY. No matter: his men are cowed now; and he cant work miracles.
And I tell you that nothing can save our side now but a miracle.
ROBERT. Miracles are all right, Polly. The only difficulty about them is
that they dont happen nowadays.
POULENGEY. I used to think so. I am not so sure now. [_Rising and moving
ruminatively towards the window_] At all events this is not a time to
leave any stone unturned. There is something about the girl.
ROBERT. Oh! You think the girl can work miracles, do you?
POULENGEY. I think the girl herself is a bit of a miracle. Anyhow, she
is the last card left in our hand. Better play her than throw up the
game. [_He wanders to the turret_].
ROBERT [_wavering_] You really think that?
POULENGEY [_turning_] Is there anything else left for us to think?
ROBERT [_going to him_] Look here, Polly. If you were in my place would
you let a girl like that do you out of sixteen francs for a horse?
POULENGEY. I will pay for the horse.
ROBERT. You will!
POULENGEY. Yes: I will back my opinion.
ROBERT. You will really gamble on a forlorn hope to the tune of sixteen
francs?
POULENGEY. It is not a gamble.
ROBERT. What else is it?
POULENGEY. It is a certainty. Her words, and her ardent faith in God
have put fire into me.
ROBERT [_giving him up_] Whew! You are as mad as she is.
POULENGEY [_obstinately_] We want a few mad people now. See where the
sane ones have landed us!
ROBERT [_his irresoluteness now openly swamping his affected
decisiveness_] I shall feel like a precious fool. Still, if you feel
sure—?
POULENGEY. I feel sure enough to take her to Chinon—unless you stop me.
ROBERT. This is not fair. You are putting the responsibility on me.
POULENGEY. It is on you whichever way you decide.
ROBERT. Yes: that’s just it. Which way am I to decide. You dont see how
awkward this is for me. [_Snatching at a dilatory step with an
unconscious hope that Joan will make up his mind for him_] Do you think
I ought to have another talk to her?
POULENGEY [_rising_] Yes. [_He goes to the window and calls_] Joan!
JOAN’S VOICE. Will he let us go, Polly?
POULENGEY. Come up. Come in. [_Turning to Robert_] Shall I leave you
with her?
ROBERT. No: stay here; and back me up.
_Poulengey sits down on the chest. Robert goes back to his magisterial
chair, but remains standing to inflate himself more imposingly. Joan
comes in, full of good news._
JOAN. Jack will go halves for the horse.
ROBERT. Well!! [_He sits, deflated_].
POULENGEY [_gravely_] Sit down, Joan.
JOAN [_checked a little, and looking to Robert_] May I?
ROBERT. Do what you are told.
_Joan curtsies and sits down on the stool between them. Robert outfaces
his perplexity with his most peremptory air._
ROBERT. What is your name?
JOAN [_chattily_] They always call me Jenny in Lorraine. Here in France
I am Joan. The soldiers call me The Maid.
ROBERT. What is your surname?
JOAN. Surname? What is that? My father sometimes calls himself d’Arc;
but I know nothing about it. You met my father. He—
ROBERT. Yes, yes; I remember. You come from Domremy in Lorraine, I
think.
JOAN. Yes; but what does it matter? we all speak French.
ROBERT. Dont ask questions: answer them. How old are you?
JOAN. Seventeen: so they tell me. It might be nineteen. I dont
remember.
ROBERT. What did you mean when you said that St Catherine and St
Margaret talked to you every day?
JOAN. They do.
ROBERT. What are they like?
JOAN [_suddenly obstinate_] I will tell you nothing about that: they
have not given me leave.
ROBERT. But you actually see them; and they talk to you just as I am
talking to you?
JOAN. No: it is quite different. I cannot tell you: you must not talk to
me about my voices.
ROBERT. How do you mean? voices?
JOAN. I hear voices telling me what to do. They come from God.
ROBERT. They come from your imagination.
JOAN. Of course. That is how the messages of God come to us.
POULENGEY. Checkmate.
ROBERT. No fear! [_To Joan_] So God says you are to raise the siege of
Orleans?
JOAN. And to crown the Dauphin in Rheims Cathedral.
ROBERT. [_gasping_] Crown the D⸺! Gosh!
JOAN. And to make the English leave France.
ROBERT [_sarcastic_] Anything else?
JOAN [_charming_] Not just at present, thank you, squire.
ROBERT. I suppose you think raising a siege is as easy as chasing a cow
out of a meadow. You think soldiering is anybody’s job?
JOAN. I do not think it can be very difficult if God is on your side,
and you are willing to put your life in His hand. But many soldiers are
very simple.
ROBERT [_grimly_] Simple! Did you ever see English soldiers fighting?
JOAN. They are only men. God made them just like us; but He gave them
their own country and their own language; and it is not His will that
they should come into our country and try to speak our language.
ROBERT. Who has been putting such nonsense into your head? Dont you
know that soldiers are subject to their feudal lord, and that it is
nothing to them or to you whether he is the duke of Burgundy or the king
of England or the king of France? What has their language to do with it?
JOAN. I do not understand that a bit. We are all subject to the King of
Heaven; and He gave us our countries and our languages, and meant us to
keep them. If it were not so it would be murder to kill an Englishman in
battle; and you, squire, would be in great danger of hell fire. You must
not think about your duty to your feudal lord, but about your duty to
God.
POULENGEY. It’s no use, Robert: she can choke you like that every time.
ROBERT. Can she, by Saint Dennis! We shall see. [_To Joan_] We are not
talking about God: we are talking about practical affairs. I ask you
again, girl, have you ever seen English soldiers fighting? Have you ever
seen them plundering, burning, turning the countryside into a desert?
Have you heard no tales of their Black Prince who was blacker than the
devil himself, or of the English king’s father?
JOAN. You must not be afraid, Robert—
ROBERT. Damn you, I am not afraid. And who gave you leave to call me
Robert?
JOAN. You were called so in church in the name of our Lord. All the
other names are your father’s or your brother’s or anybody’s.
ROBERT. Tcha!
JOAN. Listen to me, squire. At Domremy we had to fly to the next village
to escape from the English soldiers. Three of them were left behind,
wounded. I came to know these three poor goddams quite well. They had
not half my strength.
ROBERT. Do you know why they are called goddams?
JOAN. No. Everyone calls them goddams.
ROBERT. It is because they are always calling on their God to condemn
their souls to perdition. That is what goddam means in their language.
How do you like it?
JOAN. God will be merciful to them; and they will act like His good
children when they go back to the country He made for them, and made
them for. I have heard the tales of the Black Prince. The moment he
touched the soil of our country the devil entered into him and made him
a black fiend. But at home, in the place made for him by God, he was
good. It is always so. If I went into England against the will of God to
conquer England, and tried to live there and speak its language, the
devil would enter into me; and when I was old I should shudder to
remember the wickedness I did.
ROBERT. Perhaps. But the more devil you were the better you might fight.
That is why the goddams will take Orleans. And you cannot stop them, nor
ten thousand like you.
JOAN. One thousand like me can stop them. Ten like me can stop them with
God on our side. [_She rises impetuously, and goes at him, unable to sit
quiet any longer_]. You do not understand, squire. Our soldiers are
always beaten because they are fighting only to save their skins; and
the shortest way to save your skin is to run away. Our knights are
thinking only of the money they will make in ransoms: it is not kill or
be killed with them, but pay or be paid. But I will teach them all to
fight that the will of God may be done in France; and then they will
drive the poor goddams before them like sheep. You and Polly will live
to see the day when there will not be an English soldier on the soil of
France; and there will be but one king there: not the feudal English
king, but God’s French one.
ROBERT [_to Poulengey_] This may be all rot, Polly; but the troops might
swallow it, though nothing that we can say seems able to put any fight
into them. Even the Dauphin might swallow it. And if she can put fight
into him, she can put it into anybody.
POULENGEY. I can see no harm in trying. Can you? And there is something
about the girl—
ROBERT [_turning to Joan_] Now listen you to me; and [_desperately_]
dont cut in before I have time to think.
JOAN [_plumping down on the stool again, like an obedient schoolgirl_]
Yes, squire.
ROBERT. Your orders are, that you are to go to Chinon under the escort
of this gentleman and three of his friends.
JOAN [_radiant, clasping her hands_] Oh, squire! Your head is all
circled with light, like a saint’s.
POULENGEY. How is she to get into the royal presence?
ROBERT [_who has looked up for his halo rather apprehensively_] I dont
know: how did she get into my presence? If the Dauphin can keep her out
he is a better man than I take him for. [_Rising_] I will send her to
Chinon; and she can say I sent her. Then let come what may: I can do no
more.
JOAN. And the dress? I may have a soldier’s dress, maynt I, squire?
ROBERT. Have what you please. I wash my hands of it.
JOAN [_wildly excited by her success_] Come, Polly. [_She dashes out_].
ROBERT [_shaking Poulengey’s hand_] Goodbye, old man, I am taking a big
chance. Few other men would have done it. But as you say, there is
something about her.
POULENGEY. Yes: there is something about her. Goodbye. [_He goes out_].
_Robert, still very doubtful whether he has not been made a fool of by
a crazy female, and a social inferior to boot, scratches his head and
slowly comes back from the door._
_The steward runs in with a basket._
STEWARD. Sir, sir—
ROBERT. What now?
STEWARD. The hens are laying like mad, sir. Five dozen eggs!
ROBERT [_stiffens convulsively; crosses himself; and forms with his pale
lips the words_] Christ in heaven! [_Aloud but breathless_] She did come
from God.
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