Some of our old English historians write of Jeanne d’Arc, the Pucelle,
as ‘the Puzel.’ The author of the ‘First Part of Henry VI.,’ whether he
was Shakespeare or not, has a pun on the word:
‘Pucelle or puzzel, dolphin or dogfish,’
the word ‘Puzzel’ carrying an unsavoury sense. (Act I. Scene 4.) A
puzzle, in the usual meaning of the word, the Maid was to the dramatist.
I shall not enter into the dispute as to whether Shakespeare was the
author, or part author, of this perplexed drama. But certainly the role
of the Pucelle is either by two different hands, or the one author was
‘in two minds’ about the heroine. Now she appears as la ribaulde
of Glasdale’s taunt, which made her weep, as the ‘bold strumpet’ of
Talbot’s insult in the play. The author adopts or even exaggerates the
falsehoods of Anglo-Burgundian legend. The personal purity of Jeanne
was not denied by her judges. On the other hand the dramatist makes his
‘bold strumpet’ a paladin of courage and a perfect patriot, reconciling
Burgundy to the national cause by a moving speech on ‘the great pity
that was in France.’ How could a ribaulde, a leaguer-lass, a witch,
a sacrificer of blood to devils, display the valour, the absolute
self-sacrifice, the eloquent and tender love of native land attributed
to the Pucelle of the play? Are there two authors, and is Shakespeare
one of them, with his understanding of the human heart? Or is there one
puzzled author producing an impossible and contradictory character?
The dramatist has a curious knowledge of minute points in Jeanne’s
career: he knows and mocks at the sword with five crosses which she
found, apparently by clairvoyance, at Fierbois, but his history is
distorted and dislocated almost beyond recognition. Jeanne proclaims
herself to the Dauphin as the daughter of a shepherd, and as a pure
maid. Later she disclaims both her father and her maidenhood. She avers
that she was first inspired by a vision of the Virgin (which she never
did in fact), and she is haunted by ‘fiends,’ who represent her St.
Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret. After the relief of Orleans
the Dauphin exclaims:
‘No longer on Saint Denis will we cry,
But Joan la Pucelle shall be France’s saint,’
a prophecy which may yet be accomplished. Already accomplished is
d’Alencon’s promise:
‘We’ll set thy statue in some holy place.’
To the Duke of Burgundy, the Pucelle of the play speaks as the Maid
might have spoken:
‘Look on thy country, look on fertile France,
And see the cities and the towns defaced
By wasting ruin of the cruel foe!
As looks the mother on her lowly babe,
When death doth close his tender dying eyes,
See, see, the pining malady of France;
Behold the wounds, the most unnatural wounds,
Which thou thyself hast given her woful breast!
O turn thy edged sword another way;
Strike those that hurt, and hurt not those that help!
One drop of blood drawn from thy country’s bosom
Should grieve thee more than streams of foreign gore;
Return thee, therefore, with a flood of tears,
And wash away thy country’s stained spots.’
Patriotism could find no better words, and how can the dramatist
represent the speaker as a ‘strumpet’ inspired by ‘fiends’? To her
fiends when they desert her, the Pucelle of the play cries:
‘Cannot my body, nor blood sacrifice,
Entreat you to your wonted furtherance?
Then take my soul; my body, soul, and all,
Before that England give the French the foil.’
She is willing to give body and soul for France, and this, in the eyes
of the dramatist, appears to be her crime. For a French girl to bear
a French heart is to stamp her as the tool of devils. It is an odd
theology, and not in the spirit of Shakespeare. Indeed the Pucelle,
while disowning her father and her maidenhood, again speaks to the
English as Jeanne might have spoken:
‘I never had to do with wicked spirits:
But you, that are polluted with your lusts,
Stained with the guiltless blood of innocents,
Corrupt and tainted with a thousand vices,
Because you want the grace that others have,
You judge it straight a thing impossible
To compass wonders but by help of devils.
No, misconceiv’d! Joan of Arc hath been
A virgin from her tender infancy,
Chaste and immaculate in very thought;
Whose maiden blood, thus rigorously effus’d,
Will cry for vengeance at the gates of heaven.’
The vengeance was not long delayed. ‘The French and my countrymen,’
writes Patrick Abercromby, ‘drove the English from province to province,
and from town to town’ of France, while on England fell the Wars of the
Roses. But how can the dramatist make the dealer with fiends speak as
the Maid, in effect, did speak at her trial? He adds the most ribald of
insults; the Pucelle exclaiming:
‘It was Alencon that enjoyed my love!’
The author of the play thus speaks with two voices: in one Jeanne acts
and talks as she might have done (had she been given to oratory); in the
other she is the termagant of Anglo-Burgundian legend or myth.
Much of this perplexity still haunts the histories of the Maid. Her
courage, purity, patriotism, and clear-sighted military and political
common-sense; the marvellous wisdom of her replies to her judges--as of
her own St. Catherine before the fifty philosophers of her legend--are
universally acknowledged. This girl of seventeen, in fact, alone of the
French folk, understood the political and military situation. To restore
the confidence of France it was necessary that the Dauphin should
penetrate the English lines to Rheims, and there be crowned. She broke
the lines, she led him to Rheims, and crowned him. England was besieging
his last hold in the north and centre, Orleans, on a military policy
of pure ‘bluff.’ The city was at no time really invested. The besieging
force, as English official documents prove, was utterly inadequate to
its task, except so far as prestige and confidence gave power. Jeanne
simply destroyed and reversed the prestige, and, after a brilliant
campaign on the Loire, opened the way to Rheims. The next step was
to take Paris, and Paris she certainly would have taken, but the long
delays of politicians enabled Beaufort to secure peace with Scotland,
under James I., and to throw into Paris the English troops collected for
a crusade against the Hussites.* The Maid, unsupported, if not actually
betrayed, failed and was wounded before Paris, and prestige returned
for a while to the English party. She won minor victories, was taken at
Compiegne (May 1430), and a year later crowned her career by martyrdom.
But she had turned the tide, and within the six years of her prophecy
Paris returned to the national cause. The English lost, in losing Paris,
‘a greater gage than Orleans.’
*The Scottish immobility was secured in May-June 1429, the months of
the Maid’s Loire campaign. Exchequer Rolls, iv. ciii. 466. Bain,
Calendar, iv. 212, Foedera, x. 428,1704-1717.
So much is universally acknowledged, but how did the Maid accomplish
her marvels? Brave as she certainly was, wise as she certainly was,
beautiful as she is said to have been, she would neither have risked her
unparalleled adventure, nor been followed, but for her strange visions
and ‘voices.’ She left her village and began her mission, as she said,
in contradiction to the strong common-sense of her normal character. She
resisted for long the advice that came to her in the apparent shape of
audible external voices and external visions of saint and angel. By a
statement of actual facts which she could not possibly have learned in
any normal way, she overcame, it is said, the resistance of the Governor
of Vaucouleurs, and obtained an escort to convey her to the King at
Chinon.* She conquered the doubts of the Dauphin by a similar display of
supernormal knowledge. She satisfied, at Poictiers, the divines of the
national party after a prolonged examination, of which the record, ‘The
Book of Poictiers,’ has disappeared. In these ways she inspired the
confidence which, in the real feebleness of the invading army, was
all that was needed to ensure the relief of Orleans, while, as Dunois
attested, she shook the confidence which was the strength of England.
About these facts the historical evidence is as good as for any other
events of the war.
*Refer to paragraph commencing “The ‘Journal du Siege d’Orleans’”
infra.
The essence, then, of the marvels wrought by Jeanne d’Arc lay in what
she called her ‘Voices,’ the mysterious monitions, to her audible, and
associated with visions of the heavenly speakers. Brave, pure, wise, and
probably beautiful as she was, the King of France would not have trusted
a peasant lass, and men disheartened by frequent disaster would not have
followed her, but for her voices.
The science or theology of the age had three possible ways of explaining
these experiences:
1. The Maid actually was inspired by Michael, Margaret, and Catherine.
From them she learned secrets of the future, of words unspoken save
in the King’s private prayer, and of events distant in space, like the
defeat of the French and Scots at Rouvray, which she announced, on the
day of the occurrence, to Baudricourt, hundreds of leagues away, at
Vaucouleurs.
2. The monitions came from ‘fiends.’ This was the view of the
prosecutors in general at her trial, and of the author of ‘Henry VI.,
Part I.’
3. One of her judges, Beaupere, was a man of some courage and
consistency. He maintained, at the trial of Rouen, and at the trial of
Rehabilitation (1452-1456), that the voices were mere illusions of a
girl who fasted much. In her fasts she would construe natural sounds, as
of church bells, or perhaps of the wind among woods, into audible words,
as Red Indian seers do to this day.
This third solution must and does neglect, or explain by chance
occurrence, or deny, the coincidences between facts not normally
knowable, and the monitions of the Voices, accepted as genuine, though
inexplicable, by M. Quicherat, the great palaeographer and historian
of Jeanne.* He by no means held a brief for the Church; Father Ayroles
continually quarrels with Quicherat, as a Freethinker. He certainly was
a free thinker in the sense that he was the first historian who did
not accept the theory of direct inspiration by saints (still less by
fiends), and yet took liberty to admit that the Maid possessed knowledge
not normally acquired. Other ‘freethinking’ sympathisers with the
heroine have shuffled, have skated adroitly past and round the facts, as
Father Ayroles amusingly demonstrates in his many passages of arms with
Michelet, Simeon Luce, Henri Martin, Fabre, and his other opponents.
M. Quicherat merely says that, if we are not to accept the marvels as
genuine, we must abandon the whole of the rest of the evidence as to
Jeanne d’Arc, and there he leaves the matter.
*Quicherat’s five volumes of documents, the Proces, is now
accessible, as far as records of the two trials go, in the English
version edited by Mr. Douglas Murray.
Can we not carry the question further? Has the psychological research
of the last half-century added nothing to our means of dealing with the
problem? Negatively, at least, something is gained. Science no longer
avers, with M. Lelut in his book on the Daemon of Socrates, that every
one who has experience of hallucinations, of impressions of the senses
not produced by objective causes, is mad. It is admitted that sane and
healthy persons may have hallucinations of lights, of voices, of visual
appearances. The researches of Mr. Galton, of M. Richet, of Brierre
du Boismont, of Mr. Gurney, and an army of other psychologists, have
secured this position.
Maniacs have hallucinations, especially of voices, but all who have
hallucinations are not maniacs. Jeanne d’Arc, so subject to ‘airy
tongues,’ was beyond all doubt a girl of extraordinary physical strength
and endurance, of the highest natural lucidity and common-sense, and
of health which neither wounds, nor fatigue, nor cruel treatment, could
seriously impair. Wounded again and again, she continued to animate the
troops by her voice, and was in arms undaunted next day. Her leap of
sixty feet from the battlements of Beaurevoir stunned but did not long
incapacitate her. Hunger, bonds, and the protracted weariness of months
of cross-examination produced an illness but left her intellect as keen,
her courage as unabated, her humour as vivacious, her memory as minutely
accurate as ever. There never was a more sane and healthy human being.
We never hear that, in the moments of her strange experiences, she was
‘entranced,’ or even dissociated from the actual occurrences of the
hour. She heard her voices, though not distinctly, in the uproar of
the brawling court which tried her at Rouen; she saw her visions in the
imminent deadly breach, when she rallied her men to victory. In this
alertness she is a contrast to a modern seeress, subject, like her,
to monitions of an hallucinatory kind, but subject during intervals of
somnambulisme. To her case, which has been carefully, humorously, and
sceptically studied, we shall return.
Meantime let us take voices and visions on the lowest, most prevalent,
and least startling level. A large proportion of people, including the
writer, are familiar with the momentary visions beheld with shut eyes
between waking and sleeping (illusions hypnagogiques). The waking self
is alert enough to contemplate these processions of figures and
faces, these landscapes too, which (in my own case) it is incapable of
purposefully calling up.
Thus, in a form of experience which is almost as common as ordinary
dreaming, we see that the semi-somnolent self possesses a faculty not
always given to the waking self. Compared with my own waking self, for
instance, my half-asleep self is almost a personality of genius. He can
create visions that the waking self can remember, but cannot originate,
and cannot trace to any memory of waking impressions. These apparently
trivial things thus point to the existence of almost wholly submerged
potentialities in a mind so everyday, commonplace, and, so to speak,
superficial as mine. This fact suggests that people who own such minds,
the vast majority of mankind, ought not to make themselves the measure
of the potentialities of minds of a rarer class, say that of Jeanne
d’Arc. The secret of natures like hers cannot be discovered, so long as
scientific men incapable even of ordinary ‘visualising’ (as Mr. Galton
found) make themselves the canon or measure of human nature.
Let us, for the sake of argument, suppose that some sane persons are
capable of hallucinatory impressions akin to but less transient than
illusions hypnagogiques, when, as far as they or others can perceive,
they are wide awake. Of such sane persons Goethe and Herschel were
examples. In this way we can most easily envisage, or make thinkable
by ourselves, the nature of the experiences of Jeanne d’Arc and other
seers.
In the other state of semi-somnolence, while still alert enough to watch
and reason on the phenomena, we occasionally, though less commonly, hear
what may be called ‘inner voices.’ That is to say, we do not suppose
that any one from without is speaking to us, but we hear, as it were, a
voice within us making some remark, usually disjointed enough, and not
suggested by any traceable train of thought of which we are conscious at
the time. This experience partly enables us to understand the cases of
sane persons who, when to all appearance wide awake, occasionally hear
voices which appear to be objective and caused by actual vibrations of
the atmosphere. I am acquainted with at least four persons, all of them
healthy, and normal enough, who have had such experiences. In all four
cases, the apparent voice (though the listeners have no superstitious
belief on the subject) has communicated intelligence which proved to
be correct. But in only one instance, I think, was the information
thus communicated beyond the reach of conjecture, based perhaps on some
observation unconsciously made or so little attended to when made that
it could not be recalled by the ordinary memory.
We are to suppose, then, that in such cases the person concerned being
to all appearance fully awake, his or her mind has presented a thought,
not as a thought, but in the shape of words that seemed to be externally
audible. One hearer, in fact, at the moment wondered that the apparent
speaker indicated by the voice and words should be shouting so loud in
an hotel. The apparent speaker was actually not in the hotel, but at
a considerable distance, well out of earshot, and, though in a nervous
crisis, was not shouting at all. We know that, between sleeping and
waking, our minds can present to us a thought in the apparent form of
articulate words, internally audible. The hearers, when fully awake,
of words that seem to be externally audible, probably do but carry the
semi-vigilant experience to a higher degree, as do the beholders of
visual hallucinations, when wide awake. In this way, at least, we can
most nearly attain to understanding their experiences. To a relatively
small proportion of people, in wakeful existence, experiences occur
with distinctness, which to a large proportion of persons occur but
indistinctly,
‘On the margin grey
‘Twixt the soul’s night and day.’
Let us put it, then, that Jeanne d’Arc’s was an advanced case of the
mental and bodily constitution exemplified by the relatively small
proportion of people, the sane seers of visual hallucinations and
hearers of unreal voices. Her thoughts--let us say the thoughts of
the deepest region of her being--presented themselves in visual forms,
taking the shapes of favourite saints--familiar to her in works of
sacred art--attended by an hallucinatory brightness of light [‘a
photism’), and apparently uttering words of advice which was in conflict
with Jeanne’s great natural shrewdness and strong sense of duty to
her parents. ‘She MUST go into France,’ and for two or three years she
pleaded her ignorance and incompetence. She declined to go. She COULD
resist her voices. In prison at Beaurevoir, they forbade her to leap
from the tower. But her natural impatience and hopefulness prevailed,
and she leaped. ‘I would rather trust my soul to God than my body to the
English.’ This she confessed to as sinful, though not, she hoped, of
the nature of deadly sin. Her inmost and her superficial nature were in
conflict.
It is now desirable to give, as briefly as possible, Jeanne’s own
account of the nature of her experiences, as recorded in the book of her
trial at Rouen, with other secondhand accounts, offered on oath, at
her trial of Rehabilitation, by witnesses to whom she had spoken on the
subject. She was always reticent on the theme.
The period when Jeanne supposed herself to see her first visions was
physiologically critical. She was either between thirteen and fourteen,
or between twelve and thirteen. M. Simeon Luce, in his ‘Jeanne d’Arc
a Domremy,’ held that she was of the more advanced age, and his date
(1425) fitted in with some public events, which, in his opinion, were
probably the occasions of the experiences. Pere Ayroles prefers the
earlier period (1424) when the aforesaid public events had not yet
occurred. After examining the evidence on both sides, I am disposed to
think, or rather I am certain, that Pere Ayroles is in the right. In
either case Jeanne was at a critical age, when, as I understand, female
children are occasionally subject to illusions. Speaking then as a
non-scientific student, I submit that on the side of ordinary causes for
the visions and voices we have: