 Part 1 of St. Joan Preface—this is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by David Wales. St. Joan Preface by George Bernard Shaw. Preface, Part 1. Joan the Original and Presumptuous Joan of Arc, a village girl from the Vorge, 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 Hussites, 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 Aroso 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 routines, 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 unwombingly and insufferable presumption. At 18, 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 poo-pooed 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 drying 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 naive 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 twenty three hundred 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 shown 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 a 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 a 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 the 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 crappulous inferiority as well as by a sublime superiority, the question of 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 25 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 termigant, 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 aesthetic. She was very kindly, and though a brave and hearty 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 suburbity, as they called it, that led her thither. 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 Shakespeare, grossly libels her in its concluding scenes in deference to jingle 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 Gingo's 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 had 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 love-born 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 practiced 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 ratitionation, he will never catch Joan's likeness. Her ideal biographer must be free from 19th century prejudices and biases, must understand the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Holy Roman Empire much more intimately than our Hwig historians have ever understood them and must be capable of throwing off sex partialities and their romance and regarding women 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 hearty 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 pursued 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, his 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 raised so powerfully the question, may 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 organised 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 Shakespeare a whole inverted pyramid of wasted research has been based on the assumption that he was an illiterate labourer 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 Don Rémy would have deferred to her as the young lady of the farm. The difference between Joan's case and Shakespeare's is that Shakespeare 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 and 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, but she was 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 understands the corresponding situation of their own country today. Her first convert was the neighbouring commandant at Vaux Colliers and she converted him by telling him about the defeat of the Dauphin's troops at the Battle of Herring 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, a 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 sorted 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 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 burned for this, and finally that she was a saint. They do not prove any of these things, but the variety of the conclusions reached show 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 medical 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 St. Francis and St. 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 wit 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. So 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 this theory of gravitation is not so impressive a mental feat as his astounding chronology which establishes him as the king of mental conjurers. 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's wit exactly as gravitation came to Newton. We can all see now, especially since the late war through 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 St. 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 Rath of the Dauphin as a counter blow to the suspicions then current of his legitimacy and a consequently of his title were military and political master strokes 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 council, as she called her visionary saints, but she was nonetheless 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 19th century said that they were delusions about 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 20th century finds this explanation too vapidly commonplace and demands something more mystic. I think the 20th 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 St. Catherine, St. Margaret, and St. 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 there are forces at work which use individuals for purposes for 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 a 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 super personal need. The diverse manners in which our imaginations dramatize the approach of the super personal forces is a problem for the psychologist not for the historian. Only the historian must understand that visionaries are neither imposters 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 a broken specters, echoes and the like. St. 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 believed about Lee 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 in the 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 electromagnetism is thinking in terms of the celestial vision and when in the case of exceptionally imaginative persons especially those practicing 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 Saint Catherine as the case may be. End of Part 1 Part 2 of Saint Joan Preface by George Bernard Shaw this LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Part 2 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 Saint Catherine and Saint Michael exactly as she was in the 15th century and then finished up with a very energetic training in the Gospel of Saint Louis Pasteur and Paul Baer who would tell her possibly in visions but more probably in pamphlets not to be a superstitious little fool and to empty out Saint Catherine and the rest of the Catholic Agiology 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 Saint Teresa's hormones had gone astray and left her incurably hyperpetuitary 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 news, Saint 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 Saint Catherine was the figurehead. As to the new rites, which would be the Sainer, 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, 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, adrenaline, thymine, epituatrin 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 Saint 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 gathering 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 shown 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 hira was in command of a considerable force not so very far off and if the Arminyaks 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 her 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 a madame Saint Catherine assure 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 hira was not thundering at the gates of waw 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 showed not only the extraordinary decision of her character but also a rationalism carried to its ultimate human test 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 skeptical 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 therefore 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 to 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 mews 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 unground king should not have simply gone to the court as a maid in a woman's dress and urged her counsel upon him in a woman's way as other women with similar missions had to 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 traveling 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 traveled in France at that time and who never dreamt of traveling 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 Transvaal to send Dalesson, Daré, Laïre and the rest to the relief of Dumois at Orléans insisted that she must go herself 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 circuits 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 show pass and Demus says to live women's lives to amuse her had Joan not been one of these 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 botched women in ordinary civil life who manage their own affairs and other peoples including those of their men folk 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 older shatien enough to be against the revolution the exemption of women from military services 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 a Beau Revoir castle jumping from a tower said to be 60 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 has been accused of suicidal mania Joan need not be suspected of it in the Beau Revoir affair there was more at stake than her freedom she was distracted by the news that Compiène was about to fall and she was convinced that she could save it if only she could get free the leap was so perilous that her conscience was not quite easy about it and she expressed this as usual by saying that St. 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 artitude 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 Jericho wise at the sound of her trumpet but like Wellington adapted her methods of attack to irregularities of the defense 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 Orléans was achieved after her commander Joan Noir 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 was a thorough daughter of the soil in her peasant like 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 country woman sense of the value of public decency and would not tolerate foul language and neglect of religious observance nor allow disreputable women to hang about her soldiers she had one pious ejaculation and one meaningless oath and this much swearing she allowed to the incorrigibly blasphemous lair 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 Jones 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 50 we could 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 at last 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 and velvet gloves she just used her fists she thought political changes much easier than they are and like Muhammad 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 Orléans 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 herici arc one of the precursors of ascism 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 common sense and where scholarship was the only clue to institution 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 Jones' career and makes her a creditable historical and human phenomenon but it clashes most discordantly both with the idolatrous romance that has grown up around her and the belittling skepticism that reacts against that romance the maid in literature English readers would probably like to know how these idolatizations and reactions have affected the books they are most familiar with about Jones there is the first part of the Shakespearean or pseudo-shakesperian trilogy of Henry VI in which Joan is one of the leading characters this portrait of Joan is not more authentic than the description in the London papers of George Washington in 1780 of Napoleon in 1803 of the German Crown Prince in 1915 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 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 black-guardedly scurrility of the concluding scenes that other way is to assume that the original play was wholly scurrilous and that Shakespeare touched up the earlier scenes as the work belongs to a period at which he was only beginning his practice as a dinker 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 glamour on the figure of the maid when we jump over two centuries to Schiller we find the young Frau von Orleans drowned in a witch's cauldron 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 burlesque 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 in decorum 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 Saint Peter and Saint 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 pretense at or even possibility of the historical veracity that those who affect to take them seriously only make themselves pecsnithian Samuel Butler believed the Iliad to be a burlesque of Greek jingoism and Greek religion written by a hostage or a slave and Lapicel makes Butler's theory almost convincing Voltaire represents Agnes Rael the Dolphins mistress whom Joan never met as a woman with a consuming passion for the chastis 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 to be that their ribbled irreverence is more wholesome than the be glamored sentimentality of Schiller certainly Voltaire should not have asserted that Joan's father was a priest but when he was out to erase la femme the French church he stuck at nothing so far the literary representations of the maid were legendary but the publication by Keterin 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 Kishara later on another man of genius, Anatole France reacted against the Kisharate 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 mascot 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 showing 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 hard-headed hard-handed female though she dominates provincial France and business Paris does not enter whereas Lang was a Scott and every Scott 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-Jone 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 arc is an attempt to combine by yard with Esther Somerson from Bleak House into an unimpeachable American school teacher in armor like Esther Somerson she makes her creator ridiculous and yet being the work of a man of genius remains a creditable human goodie-goody in spite of her creators 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 lady like 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 a biography frankly in the form of a romance Protestant misunderstanding 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 19th century environment is as incongruous a figure as she would appear were she to walk down Piccadilly today in her 15th 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 1890s 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 or 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 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 in 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 Albegencians or Husaits or Jews or Protestants of the Buddhist character and that the inquisition was a chamber of horrors invented expressly and exclusively for such burnings accordingly we find them representing Peter Colchon 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 separately that the two or three score of cannons and doctors of law and divinity who sat with Colchon as assessors were exact reproductions of him on slightly less elevated chairs and with a different headdress. End of Part 2 Part 3 of St. Joan Preface by George Bernard Shaw this LibreBox recording is in the public domain. Part 3 The truth is that Colchon 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 Colchon spirited her away and burnt somebody or something else in her place and that the pretender who subsequently personated her at Orléans and elsewhere was not a pretender but he is able to cite Colchon's pro-Jone 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 a trial by her French opponents and an equally mixed tribunal would have produced a deadlock. Such recent trials as those of Edith Cabell by a German tribunal and Roger Kaismont 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 who side he was on and acknowledging no distinction before Christ between Tommy and Jerry and to be to the poor lieu. Well might Edith have wished that she could bring the Middle Ages back and have 50 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 to 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 Rowan 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 that she would be treated with no more toleration than Miss Sylvia bankers 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 Jones trial was not like casements 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 traitor's but as a heretic blasphemer sorceress and idolater her alleged offenses were not political offenses 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 Frenchman 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 French woman who had banquished them the tragic part of the trial was that Joan like most prisoners tried for anything but the simplest breaches of the 10 commandments did not understand what they were accusing her of she was much more like Mark Twain than like Peter Colchon her attachment to the church was very different from the bishops 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 the holy 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 Huss and had watched the career of Wickliffe with a growing anger that would have brought him to to the stake had he not died a natural death before the wrath fell on him and his grave neither Huss nor Wickliffe was as bluntly defiant as Joan both were reformers of the church like Luther whilst Joan like Mrs. Eddie was quite prepared to supersede Saint Peter as the rock on the church was built and like Muhammad 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 call her simplicity her solutions of the problems presented to her seemed and indeed mostly were the plainest common sense and the revelation to her by her voices was to her a simple matter of fact how could plain common sense and simple fact seem to her to be that hideous thing heresy when rival prophet says that came into the field she was down on them at once for liars and on bugs but she never thought of them as heretics she was in a state of invincible ignorance as to the church's view to 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 object 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 question put to Joan were traps is that it was the support of the inquiry which rehabilitated her 25 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 cousinage 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 maids 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 massive sincere testimony it produced as to Joan's engaging personal character the question then arises how did the church get over the verdict of the first trial when it canonized Joan 500 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 Joan's private judgment as such the supremacy of private judgment for the individual being the quintessence of Protestantism thus 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 the words of a celestial personage appearing in a vision a saint may be defined as a person of heroic virtue the judgment is privileged many innovating saints notably Francis and Claire 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 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 adogment of people infallibility is by far the most modest pretension of the kind in existence compared with 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 someday 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 a while 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 to componder a say to pardon a which is the devil sentimentality cannot excuse it when we have admitted that the tribunal was not only honest and legal but criminally merciful in respect of sparing Joan the torture which was customary when she was abduate as to taking the oath and that cochon 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 in class prejudices are involved the human fact remains that the burning of Joan of Arc was a horror and that historian who would defend it would defend anything the final criticism of his physical side is implied in the refusal of the Marcaesis 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 it's 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 with thousands of forgotten malpractors they have no preeminence 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 Sieben'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 Sydney 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 of 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 steak and chose the steak 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 sense or the propitiation of a dreaded deity 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 de glisse by using that term as she did mistrustfully and contemptuously she announced herself as in germ and anti-clerical as Thoreau going as Voltaire in France had she said in so many words to the dustbin with the church militant and its black coated 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 to the radicals 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 leodicineism that of the Jesuits with priestly apathy and ignorance and indiscipline the most bigoted ulster orangeman or lester low church by Mr. Henry Nevenson 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 disillet 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 and the churches 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 education does not carry with it extraordinary mental powers and this is all that any church militant can in the face of fact in history pretend to be can keep peace 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 do 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 makes it difficult for a free thinker to join it and a church which has no place for free thinkers nay which does not inculcate and encourage free thinking 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 to 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 intention he may be asked has thou entered into the springs of the sea or has 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 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 unaverage 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 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 daughter then 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 principles with the direct choice of the holy ghost as it flashes with unearing aim upon the individual nor can any college of cardinals pay 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 subconscious intention of his self-preserving individuality must be to find a trustworthy servant of 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 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 intolerance 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 Cridulity 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 traveler to go thither nor prevent him from seeking some other way unfortunately our clerical direction post always do coerce the traveler 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 the ego compulsion to take the doctor's prescription however poisonous is a carried to an extent that would have horrified the inquisition and staggered Archbishop Lord our Cridulity 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 Jones 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 side 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 necessaries of life to her such a spirit as Jones might have got over that difficulty as the Church of England got over the bowls of Pope Leo by making a church of her own and affirming it to be the temple 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 and 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 arrow horn it would either come 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 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 it will probably succeed in doing so and that will be just as intolerant making it compulsory neither the pastorians 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 pray 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 politics and saviours 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 and muzzle the newspapers and make it a serious offence to show a light at night under the strain of invasion the French government in 1792 struck off 4,000 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 social change which it had presently to affect itself later on the faciste 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 socialist who understood socialism even less than capitalist understand capitalism in the united states the 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 show 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 of self complacent conviction of the 19th century that it was more tolerant than the 15th 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 altered 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 Sepulcher 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 the 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 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 defense 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 un-gentlemanly. End of part three