The Mystery of Joan of Arc

One great difficulty in regarding the figure of Saint Joan with necessarily modern eyes is that, prior to becoming a canonized saint, she became a sentimental heroine of polite literature. It is no slight upon Miss V. Sackville-West’s recent study of the Pucelle—in some respects one of the best in any language—to suggest that, in our time, every spinster, with nothing else in particular to do, writes an essay on her. Before paying, then, our sincere respects to Miss Sackville-West’s biography and to Willard Trask’s “Joan of Arc: A Self Portrait,”—in particular to the biography—we are not going to add our bit to the quota of sighs and tears, but will limit ourselves to discussing Saint Joan from one or two recently established angles which may or may not be novel to the reader.

If we except a lost mystery play on the Siege of Orleans, directed by her old comrade-in-arms, the Marshal de Rais (also condemned as a warlock by the Inquisition), the Pucelle first appears in beautiful letters in Shakespeare’s play, “Henry VI,” most of which he did not write. Had the Bard and his collaborators represented Joan as a possible saint, or even as a good girl, they would probably have been lynched in the chauvinist England of Elizabeth. Nationalist sentiment demanded that they represent her as a sinister adventuress and a witch, and it is interesting to find, thanks to Miss Sackville-West, one of the sources of their libel in Caxton, her contemporary, who circulated the story that Joan declared herself with child to escape being burnt, but (the evasion being refuted) “she was brent” all the same.

In 1841 Quicherat published the first verbatim account of the trial at Rouen, an entirely realistic document, similar to Mr. Trask’s invaluable little volume, which created a vital interest in Joan as a personality. Every student of the Maid, from Andrew Lang and Mark Twain down to Bernard Shaw and Miss Sackville-West, has leaned heavily and indeed necessarily on Quicherat. About ten years later the French historian, Michelet, produced his beautiful “Histoire de France,” which includes what may be called the romantic approach to Joan as employed by a very great artist in emotion and in words,

Michelet, who like many another bourgeois liked to think he came from the “people,” had, none the less, an hysterical but sincere feeling for the latter, a kind of socialistic nationalism very common in his native country. Consequently he treated Joan as the most perfect expression of the peuple, and far from blaming the Catholic Church exclusively for her destruction, his marvelous pages on the Maid degenerate here and there into mere abuse of England and the English, a form of abuse, however, which contains, even now, some food for reflection. . . . “This great people, among so many good and solid qualities, has a vice which ruins even its virtues—the vice of pride. It is very sensitive also; the English suffer infinitely from it, and put more pride into concealing their mortification.” Pride then, according to Michelet, caused the passion of Saint Joan, just as envy, according to Napoleon, caused the French Revolution. The burning at Rouen was an act of revenge on the part of the army of occupation because the “Godams” had run away more than once from a wench. We do not escape from Christian metaphysics and abstractions merely by becoming romantics and revolutionaries.

This particular volume by Michelet caused a contemporary English romantic, Thomas De Quincey, to see red, and in a fighting mood he produced a reply in the form of an essay whose indignation, directed especially against the ecclesiastical authorities, was the source of Mark Twain’s novel on the same subject. It was, evidently, high time for some form of scientific history to intervene; and from that moment such efforts did not lack. There was Andrew Lang’s “Maid of France,” conceded by Miss Sackville-West to be “the best English biography of Jeanne”; and there was the two-volume, sceptical study by good old Anatole France, which, together with the “Rabelais” from the same senile hand, is probably the dullest and most inaccurate book that ever came from a clever man. Last of all, there was Mr. Shaw’s brilliant and moving play, first produced in 1923 by the Theatre Guild of New York City. Incidentally, it seems rather curious that Miss Sackville-West barely mentions Shaw in her long book, though she shrinks, far more than the dramatist, from facing squarely the two controversial issues of the Church Trial and of Joan’s “Voices,” while appearing, at the same time, to range herself on the Shavian side as regards both points. We are reminded also that she never mentions Margaret Murray, who sought to prove in her interesting book, “Witchcraft in Western Europe,” that Joan was really a member of a coven, and hence was rightly condemned by the Inquisition as a witch.

Mr. Shaw, it will be recalled, scored three points in his play and preface: first, her Voices were due to a kind of autosuggestion called “Galtonic visualizing,” though this in no wise invalidates their good advice and Joan’s personal good sense; second, “she got a fairer trial from the Church than any prisoner of her type gets nowadays in any secular court”; third, she was properly condemned from the Catholic standpoint, as a heretic, a kind of unconscious Protestant, because she put her Voices (read “private judgment”) above that of the Church militant and visible before which she was tried, and in which she undoubtedly believed. It follows from this last that the Church committed a magnificent gesture of the “I’m sorry” kind when it canonized in 1920 the former heretic and unconscious Protestant.

Mr. Shaw’s conclusions were received with somewhat wry emotions, both by his agnostic friends and by Roman Catholics. It was all very well for an unnamed ecclesiastic to extol his play (vide the preface) and for priests to write appreciative articles with such titles as: “Is Mr. Shaw among the Prophets?” but, but . . . ? Was it right, as Christopher Hollis later pointed out, that the Church be defended from the outside and upon inaccurate premises? His defence, then, such as it was, was that of a rational institution by an irrational man, “an attempt to explain Catholicism in terms of Creative Evolution” or the elan vital. To come down to instances, it seemed unreasonable to assume that the virtue of sanctity was an exclusively Protestant virtue. It seemed burking the question to label the miraculous element in Saint Joan’s experiences “Galtonic visualizing,” as if the experiences in question were rendered any less miraculous by attaching to them the name of a college professor. Galtonic visualizing, as Mr. Hollis again pointed out, is merely a business of effects without causes. When Mr. Shaw, however, harped on the familiar assertion that the English are natural heretics, and pointed to their behavior at Rouen as evidence, he was, we think, on slightly surer ground than when he approached the fairness of the ecclesiastical trial or the reality of Saint Joan’s supernatural experiences.

Miss Sackville-West who, in her lengthy, solid, and very creditable study of the Maid, is much more conservative and wary than Mr. Shaw, has contrived to please everybody by investigating the whole story of Joan in a thoroughgoing and scientific fashion, and then adding a remarkable last chapter wherein full respects are paid to the mystical approach, or the heart of Joan’s mystery, or whatever one chooses to call it. “She is a figure who challenges some of the profoundest tenets of what we do and what we do not believe.” Disclaiming any orthodox beliefs herself, Miss Sackville-West thinks that the so-called scientific and the so-called religious lines of approach may some day prove to be not parallel but convergent. Saint Joan was probably born with a sixth sense of receptivity to which such words as “miraculous” and “supernatural” may fitly be attached. As regards the “fairness” of the Rouen trial, Miss Sackville-West does not fail to mention Joan’s reiterated appeal to the Pope and the Council of Basel, something completely ignored by Mr. Shaw and something which makes nonsense of his defence of Cauchon, the Inquisitor, and the other heartless and frightened shavepates at the mercy of an English army howling for blood. Finally, Miss Sackville-West rescues Saint Joan from the schoolma’ams by reminding the reader that she was the least sentimental of saints. Not for her the roses and mignonette, as for the “Little Flower,” but rather the laurels and the bays—to say nothing of the thorns. It is a very fine biography indeed, and may well prove to be the last word on its subject in our tongue.

Mr. Trask’s able and delicate editing of a little book designed to enshrine all the Maid’s authentic sayings, from the fields of Domremy to the stake in Rouen Market, will be especially valuable to teachers and students. Similar to one or two books in French, it proves that an anthology can be more impressive in this case than a big volume, crammed with research. We regret the frontispiece, representing the Maid holding a bouquet under a tree, suggestive of old-fashioned Sunday School presents, of a saccharinity very different from the rough, virile sweetness of the text and of its canonized source.