The Maid of Orleans
A considerable time ago (at far too early an age, in fact) I read
Voltaire's "La Pucelle," a savage sarcasm on the traditional purity of
Joan of Arc, very dirty, and very funny. I had not thought of it again
for years, but it came back into my mind this morning because I began to
turn over the leaves of the new "Jeanne d'Arc," by that great and
graceful writer, Anatole France. It is written in a tone of tender
sympathy, and a sort of sad reverence; it never loses touch with a noble
tact and courtesy, like that of a gentleman escorting a peasant girl
through the modern crowd. It is invariably respectful to Joan, and even
respectful to her religion. And being myself a furious admirer of Joan
the Maid, I have reflectively compared the two methods, and I come to
the conclusion that I prefer Voltaire's.
When a man of Voltaire's school has to explode a saint or a great
religious hero, he says that such a person is a common human fool, or a
common human fraud. But when a man like Anatole France has to explode a
saint, he explains a saint as somebody belonging to his particular fussy
little literary set. Voltaire read human nature into Joan of Arc, though
it was only the brutal part of human nature. At least it was not
specially Voltaire's nature. But M. France read M. France's nature into
Joan of Arc—all the cold kindness, all the homeless sentimental sin of
the modern literary man. There is one book that it recalled to me with
startling vividness, though I have not seen the matter mentioned
anywhere; Renan's "Vie de Jésus." It has just the same general
intention: that if you do not attack Christianity, you can at least
patronise it. My own instinct, apart from my opinions, would be quite
the other way. If I disbelieved in Christianity, I should be the loudest
blasphemer in Hyde Park. Nothing ought to be too big for a brave man to
attack; but there are some things too big for a man to patronise.
And I must say that the historical method seems to me excessively
unreasonable. I have no knowledge of history, but I have as much
knowledge of reason as Anatole France. And, if anything is irrational,
it seems to me that the Renan-France way of dealing with miraculous
stories is irrational. The Renan-France method is simply this: you
explain supernatural stories that have some foundation simply by
inventing natural stories that have no foundation. Suppose that you are
confronted with the statement that Jack climbed up the beanstalk into
the sky. It is perfectly philosophical to reply that you do not think
that he did. It is (in my opinion) even more philosophical to reply that
he may very probably have done so. But the Renan-France method is to
write like this: "When we consider Jack's curious and even perilous
heredity, which no doubt was derived from a female greengrocer and a
profligate priest, we can easily understand how the ideas of heaven and
a beanstalk came to be combined in his mind. Moreover, there is little
doubt that he must have met some wandering conjurer from India, who told
him about the tricks of the mango plant, and how it is sent up to the
sky. We can imagine these two friends, the old man and the young,
wandering in the woods together at evening, looking at the red and level
clouds, as on that night when the old man pointed to a small beanstalk,
and told his too imaginative companion that this also might be made to
scale the heavens. And then, when we remember the quite exceptional
psychology of Jack, when we remember how there was in him a union of the
prosaic, the love of plain vegetables, with an almost irrelevant
eagerness for the unattainable, for invisibility and the void, we shall
no longer wonder that it was to him especially that was sent this sweet,
though merely symbolic, dream of the tree uniting earth and heaven."
That is the way that Renan and France write, only they do it better.
But, really, a rationalist like myself becomes a little impatient and
feels inclined to say, "But, hang it all, what do you know about the
heredity of Jack or the psychology of Jack? You know nothing about Jack
at all, except that some people say that he climbed up a beanstalk.
Nobody would ever have thought of mentioning him if he hadn't. You must
interpret him in terms of the beanstalk religion; you cannot merely
interpret religion in terms of him. We have the materials of this story,
and we can believe them or not. But we have not got the materials to
make another story."
It is no exaggeration to say that this is the manner of M. Anatole
France in dealing with Joan of Arc. Because her miracle is incredible to
his somewhat old-fashioned materialism, he does not therefore dismiss it
and her to fairyland with Jack and the Beanstalk. He tries to invent a
real story, for which he can find no real evidence. He produces a
scientific explanation which is quite destitute of any scientific proof.
It is as if I (being entirely ignorant of botany and chemistry) said
that the beanstalk grew to the sky because nitrogen and argon got into
the subsidiary ducts of the corolla. To take the most obvious example,
the principal character in M. France's story is a person who never
existed at all. All Joan's wisdom and energy, it seems, came from a
certain priest, of whom there is not the tiniest trace in all the
multitudinous records of her life. The only foundation I can find for
this fancy is the highly undemocratic idea that a peasant girl could not
possibly have any ideas of her own. It is very hard for a freethinker to
remain democratic. The writer seems altogether to forget what is meant
by the moral atmosphere of a community. To say that Joan must have
learnt her vision of a virgin overthrowing evil from a priest, is
like saying that some modern girl in London, pitying the poor, must have
learnt it from a Labour Member. She would learn it where the Labour
Member learnt it—in the whole state of our society.
But that is the modern method: the method of the reverent sceptic. When
you find a life entirely incredible and incomprehensible from the
outside, you pretend that you understand the inside. As Renan, the
rationalist, could not make any sense out of Christ's most public acts,
he proceeded to make an ingenious system out of His private thoughts. As
Anatole France, on his own intellectual principle, cannot believe in
what Joan of Arc did, he professes to be her dearest friend, and to know
exactly what she meant. I cannot feel it to be a very rational manner of
writing history; and sooner or later we shall have to find some more
solid way of dealing with those spiritual phenomena with which all
history is as closely spotted and spangled as the sky is with stars.
Joan of Arc is a wild and wonderful thing enough, but she is much saner
than most of her critics and biographers. We shall not recover the
common sense of Joan until we have recovered her mysticism. Our wars
fail, because they begin with something sensible and obvious—such as
getting to Pretoria by Christmas. But her war succeeded—because it
began with something wild and perfect—the saints delivering France. She
put her idealism in the right place, and her realism also in the right
place: we moderns get both displaced. She put her dreams and her
sentiment into her aims, where they ought to be; she put her
practicality into her practice. In modern Imperial wars, the case is
reversed. Our dreams, our aims are always, we insist, quite practical.
It is our practice that is dreamy.
It is not for us to explain this flaming figure in terms of our tired
and querulous culture. Rather we must try to explain ourselves by the
blaze of such fixed stars. Those who called her a witch hot from hell
were much more sensible than those who depict her as a silly sentimental
maiden prompted by her parish priest. If I have to choose between the
two schools of her scattered enemies, I could take my place with those
subtle clerks who thought her divine mission devilish, rather than with
those rustic aunts and uncles who thought it impossible.
-All Things Considered (1908)
Quotes by and posts relating to one of the most influential authors of the 20th century, G.K. Chesterton
A blog dedicated to providing quotes by and posts relating to one of the most influential (and quotable!) authors of the twentieth century, G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936). If you do not know much about GKC, I suggest visiting the webpage of the American Chesterton Society as well as this wonderful Chesterton Facebook Page by a fellow Chestertonian
I also have created a list detailing examples of the influence of Chesterton if you are interested, that I work on from time to time.
(Moreover, for a list of short GKC quotes, I have created one here, citing the sources)
"...Stevenson had found that the secret of life lies in laughter and humility."
-Heretics (1905)
_____________________
I also have created a list detailing examples of the influence of Chesterton if you are interested, that I work on from time to time.
(Moreover, for a list of short GKC quotes, I have created one here, citing the sources)
"...Stevenson had found that the secret of life lies in laughter and humility."
-Heretics (1905)
_____________________
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