Saint Joan E-Book

George Bernard Shaw

• Herausgeber: Renard Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 341

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

The life of fifteenth-century heroine Joan of Arc is the stuff of legend, and her cruel death (burnt at the stake aged just nineteen) led to her being declared a martyr, granting her an extraordinary legacy. Following her canonisation in 1920, and against a history of overly romanticised retellings of the story, Bernard Shaw put pen to paper to give a more accurate account, without resorting to demonising her persecutors; as he writes in his preface, 'there are no villains in the piece'. It was an immediate success, securing him the Nobel Prize for Literature, although critics were initially divided by this frank approach – T.S. Eliot was outraged, saying, 'instead of the saint or the strumpet of the legends he has turned her into a great middle-class reformer.' Nonetheless – or perhaps even because of this controversy – Saint Joan is considered one of Shaw's finest and most important plays. This edition has an introduction by Simon Mundy, who has spent several years as Vice-President of PEN International's Writers for Peace Committee, and extensive explanatory notes.

Leseprobe

Saint Joan

A Chronicle Play in Six Scenesand an Epilogue

george bernard shaw

with an introduction by

simon mundy

renard press

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Saint Joan first published in 1924

This edition first published by Renard Press Ltd in 2022

Edited text and Notes © Renard Press Ltd, 2022Introduction © Simon Mundy, 2022

Cover design by Will Dady

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contents

Introduction

Preface

Saint Joan

scene i

scene ii

scene iii

scene iv

scene v

scene vi

Epilogue

Notes

saint joan

introduction

Fair But Not Kind

Shaw was 67 – the same age that I am now – when Saint Joan was first produced, on the 28th of December 1923. Worried about how it might be received in London, he arranged for it to open in Broadway’s Garrick Theatre first. The Theatre Guild which managed the Garrick was specifically interested in plays that might not entice commercial producers, and presented several of Shaw’s, as well as Eugene O’Neill’s. Joan was played by the twenty-five-year-old Winifred Lenihan, and it came to be the role that defined her reputation. Established in New York, Saint Joan crossed back to London three months later, where Sybil Thorndike, at thirty-one, who Shaw had in mind from the start, played Joan at the New Theatre (at present the Noël Coward Theatre, but known for many years as the Albery) on St Martin’s Lane. The play was directed by Thorndike’s husband, Lewis Casson.

Each of the scenes had music by John Foulds, a thoroughly respected composer and an interesting choice, since his vast World Requiem had just been performed at the Royal Albert Hall for Armistice Day. Foulds made a suite out of his Saint Joan music, which he conducted at the Proms, then in the Queen’s Hall, next to the present-day BBC Broadcasting House, in 1925. A few years later Foulds went to India and became one of the first composers to try to bridge Indian and Western classical music. The complete score for Saint Joan was destroyed in a WWII fire.

It is surprising, perhaps, that Shaw did not turn to his contemporary and great friend, Edward Elgar, who was at a bit of a loose end in 1923, but who was writing theatre music, having composed a splendid score for a similarly mediaeval but less serious production, Lawrence Binyon’s King Arthur, at the Old Vic the previous March. Elgar and Shaw admired each other and got on famously, possibly because of their contradictions. Shaw was Protestant Anglo-Irish and would have been perfectly at home two hundred years earlier in the Dublin of Swift and Congreve; Elgar was English Midlands Catholic. Shaw was Fabiansocialist; Elgar was firmly Tory. Shaw was in favour of Home Rule for Ireland; Elgar was against it. Both, though, came from lower-middle-class backgrounds, and were firmly entrenched in the upper echelons of Londonsociety, though never quite comfortable in it.

The debate about Irish independence had descended into vicious conflict by 1923. Shaw was appalled by the actions of the British, but not amazed. He had a suitably low opinion of both Lloyd George and Baldwin, realising that neither of them understood Ireland, or particularly cared. A decade earlier he had set out his own unconventional views on the issue, and they explain a great deal about why he wrote Saint Joan after the violence had erupted, Ulster had separated from the other three provinces and the Irish Free State had just been formed (at the end of 1922).

Back in 1912 he had given a speech saying, ‘[the] fact that I am an Irishman has always filled me with a wild and inextinguishable pride. I am also proud of being a Protestant, though Protestantism is to me a great historic movement of Reformation, Aspiration and Self-Assertion against spiritual tyrannies rather than that organisation of false gentility which so often takes its name in vain in Ireland. Already at this meeting pride in Protestantism as something essentially Irish has broken out again and again. I cannot describe what I feel when English Unionists are kind enough to say, “Oh, you are in danger of being persecuted by your Roman Catholic fellow countrymen. England will protect you.” I would rather be burnt at the stake by Irish Catholics than protected by Englishmen. We Protestants know perfectly well that we are quite able to take care of ourselves, thank you. I do not want to banish religion from politics, though I do want to abolish the thing miscalled religion in this controversy from the world altogether. I want to bring religion back into politics. There is nothing that revolts me in the present state of things more than the unnatural religious calm in Ireland. I do not want a peaceful Ireland in that sense. I want a turbulent Ireland. All free and healthy nations are full of the turbulence of controversy, political, religious, social: all sorts of controversy. Without it you can have no progress, no life. In Ireland we Protestant Nationalists dare not utter a controversial word lest we should be misunderstood on the great question of national rights. I have much to say in criticism of Catholicism in Ireland; but I dare not say it lest I should be supposed to be speaking on behalf of Unionism. I have quite as much to say in criticism of Irish Protestantism; but that, too, I must not say lest I should discredit my Protestant colleagues against the day when they will have to claim their share in the self-government of Ireland… The denial of Home Rule corrupts every election and every division in Parliament… We Irish Protestants are bound and gagged at every turn by the Union. As to the persecution scare, I decline to give any guarantees. I am not going to say, “Please, kind English masters, if you give us Home Rule we will be good boys.” We will persecute and be persecuted if we like, as the English do; we are not children: we do not offer conditions of good behaviour as the price of our national rights. No nation should be called upon to make such conditions. Wherever there is a Church that Church will persecute if it can; but the remedy for that is Democracy. We Protestants will take our chance. If you come to that, think of the chances our Catholic priesthood is taking. Look at what has happened to them in Free France! Look at what has happened to them in Rome itself! Many of them would be glad enough to be safe in the island of the saints. I am far more anxious about the future of the unfortunate English when they lose us. What will they do without us to think for them? The English are a remarkable race; but they have no common sense. We never lose our common sense. The English people say that if we got Home Rule we should cut each other’s throats. Who has a better right to cut them? They are very glad to get us to cut the throats of their enemies. Why should we not have the same privilege among ourselves? What will prevent it?’

Shaw explains his intentions and his views on Joan of Arc so comprehensively in his preface (which takes even longer to read than the play itself) that there is no need for me to introduce them. It is worth, though, saying a little about why his play and his essay are still relevant a hundred years later. Theatre fashions are very different, and the way most people watch drama nowadays is on a screen. Unlike in Shaw’s time, no European governments inflict physical punishments on prisoners (at least, not legally), instead incarcerating them in the manner Joan rejected in favour of being burnt at the stake. Nonetheless, just as Shaw’s 1920s had not moved as far from the Middle Ages as people liked to assert, the 2020s are dealing with similar strains and ideologies, even when the vocabulary has changed.

His social philosophy, seen as advanced to the point of eccentricity in his lifetime, still seems impressive now. So many of Shaw’s plays are led by women, and they are often the most forceful and vibrant characters. His views on women’s equality pass the sternest Guardian reader’s tests, but he was no puritan, and would not be impressed by politically manufactured culture wars. The section on tolerance in the preface is especially relevant, as is his warning against the assumption that contemporary prejudices and beliefs have any more validity or objective superiority than those of our ancestors. Universal suffrage for democracy was only just emerging as a serious idea by 1923, and Shaw’s warning that it leads to mediocrity because those who are inferior are unlikely to elect the best leaders is proving to be uncomfortably accurate. The other options, of autocracy or (as right-wing Eastern European demagogues would have it) illiberal democracy are even less palatable. The sceptical socialist Shaw would have been appalled, if not surprised, by the emergence of Trump, but clearly agreed with his supporters in refusing vaccinations, even in a pandemic, and mistrusting scientific absolutes.

I would argue, in support of our century, that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the European Convention that supports it, does give us a secular blueprint for civilised behaviour, even though far too many governments fall short of the requirements. On the other hand, the drift away from multilateralism, a supranational authority imposing legal order – which in Joan’s time Shaw saw as the best justification for the Catholic Church – and the abuse of the doctrine of national sovereignty by governments to allow them to torment their citizens, would prove Shaw’s point about belief in moral progress being spurious.

The twenty-first century has seen reaction against personal insecurity and perceived disrespect take the form of zealously conservative Protestantism and Islam. This resurgence of religious fervour at exactly the point when secular rationalism is at its zenith is a truly Shavian contradiction. The commitment of religious extremists, sacrificing bodily safety for a perceived greater common cause, was something that not only Joan but any World War soldier understood only too well. The difficulty for 2020s commentators who are not at the extremes of politics is to identify an acceptable cause worthy of that sacrifice – especially when it also involves sacrificing people who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Shaw wrote his play only a matter of months after the Catholic Church had moved as far from burning Joan as possible by declaring her a saint. The dilemma for officialdom is that, while the law is always changing with society and political priorities, its consequences for individuals remain devastating. The tension between legal conformity and the need for single people to rise above it in order to galvanise change is just as important now as in 1429 or 1923 – ask any of those standing up to tyranny in China, Russia, Turkey, Myanmar, Sudan and a host of other nations. Like Joan, most do not argue against the validity of the state or of international law. They just demand it be fair and kind to the people who have to endure the outcomes.

simon mundy

Caithness,January 2022

preface

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 Catalina de Eraúso 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 pooh-poohed 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 learnt 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 Caiaphas,* 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 Muhammad 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 twenty-five 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 a 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 further 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 Orléans 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 neighbouring 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 beggar-maid. 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 war-swept 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 impostor, 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 visual 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 Orléans, 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 illusion-proof 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, muck-raking curiosity, knowledge without wisdom and everything that the eternal soul in Nature loathes, instead of the virtues of which St Catherine was the figurehead. 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 Oedipus complex?*