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Saint Joan Preface - George Bernard Shaw · The Hunchback of Notre Dame

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  Speaker 1: Part one of Saint Joan Preface. This is a LibriVox recording.
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  Speaker 1: All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
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  Speaker 1: information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Recording
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  Speaker 1: by David Wales. Saint Johan Preface by George Bernard Shaw. Preface,
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  Speaker 1: Part one. Joan, the original and presumptuous Joan of arc
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  Speaker 1: a Village girl from the Voyage, was born about fourteen twelve,
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  Speaker 1: Burnt for heresy, witchcraft and sorcery in fourteen thirty one,
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  Speaker 1: rehabilitated after a fashion in fourteen fifty six, Designated venerable
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  Speaker 1: in nineteen o four, declared blessed in nineteen o eight,
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  Speaker 1: and finally canonized in nineteen twenty. She is the most
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  Speaker 1: notable warrior saint in the Christian calendar, and the queerest
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  Speaker 1: fish among the eccentric worthies of the Middle Ages. Though
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  Speaker 1: a professed and most pious Catholic and the projector of
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  Speaker 1: a crusade against the Sites, she was in fact one
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  Speaker 1: of the first Protestant martyrs. She was also one of
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  Speaker 1: the first apostles of nationalism and the first French practitioner
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  Speaker 1: of Napoleonic realism. In warfare, as distinguished from the sporting,
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  Speaker 1: ransom gambling chivalry of her time. She was the pioneer
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  Speaker 1: of rational dressing for women, and, like Queen Christina of
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  Speaker 1: Sweden two centuries later, to say nothing of Catalina de
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  Speaker 1: Aroso and innumerable obscure heroines who have disguised themselves as
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  Speaker 1: men to serve as soldiers and sailors, she refused to
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  Speaker 1: accept the specific woman's lot, and dressed and fought and
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  Speaker 1: lived as men did as she contrived to assert herself
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  Speaker 1: in all these ways with such force that she was
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  Speaker 1: famous throughout Western Europe before she was out of her teens. Indeed,
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  Speaker 1: she never got out of them. It is hardly surprising
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  Speaker 1: that she was judicially burnt, ostensibly for a number of
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  Speaker 1: capital crimes which we know longer punish as such, but
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  Speaker 1: essentially for what we call unwomanly and insufferable presumption. At eighteen,
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  Speaker 1: Joan's pretensions were beyond those of the proudest pope or
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  Speaker 1: the haughtiest emperor. She claimed to be the ambassador and
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  Speaker 1: plenipotentiary of God, and to be in effect a member
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  Speaker 1: of the Church triumphant. Whilst still in the flesh on earth,
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  Speaker 1: she patronized her own king, and summoned the English king
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  Speaker 1: to repentance and obedience to her commands. She lectured, talked down,
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  Speaker 1: and overruled statesmen and prelates. She pooh poohed the plans
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  Speaker 1: of generals leading their troops to victory on plans of
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  Speaker 1: her own. She had an unbounded and quite unconcealed contempt
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  Speaker 1: for official opinion, judgment and authority, and for war office, tactics,
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  Speaker 1: and strategy. Had she been a sage and monarch in
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  Speaker 1: whom the most venerable hierarchy and the most illustrious dynasty converged,
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  Speaker 1: her pretensions and proceedings would have been as trying to
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  Speaker 1: the official mind as the pretensions of Caesar were to Cassius.
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  Speaker 1: As her actual condition was pure upstart, there were only
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  Speaker 1: two opinions about her. One was that she was miraculous,
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  Speaker 1: the other that she was unbearable. Joan and Socrates. If
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  Speaker 1: Joan had been malicious, selfish, cowardly, or stupid, she would
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  Speaker 1: have been one of the most odious persons known to
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  Speaker 1: history instead of one of the most attractive. If she
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  Speaker 1: had been old enough to know the effect she was
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  Speaker 1: producing on the men whom she humiliated by being right
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  Speaker 1: when they were wrong, and had learned to flatter and
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  Speaker 1: manage them. She might have lived as long as Queen Elizabeth,
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  Speaker 1: but she was too young and rustical and inexperienced to
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  Speaker 1: have any such arts. When she was thwarted by men
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  Speaker 1: whom she thought fools, she made no secret of her
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  Speaker 1: opinion of them, or her impatience with their folly, and
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  Speaker 1: she was naive enough to expect them to be obliged
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  Speaker 1: to her for setting them right and keeping them out
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  Speaker 1: of mischief. Now it is always hard for superior wits
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  Speaker 1: to understand the fury roused by their exposures of the
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  Speaker 1: stupidities of comparative dullards. Even Socrates, for all his age
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  Speaker 1: and experience, did not defend himself at his trial like
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  Speaker 1: a man who understood the long accumulated fury that had
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  Speaker 1: burst on him and was clamoring for his death. His accuser,
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  Speaker 1: if born twenty three hundred years later, might have been
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  Speaker 1: picked out of any first class carriage on a suburban
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  Speaker 1: railway during the evening or morning rush from or to
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  Speaker 1: the city, for he had really nothing to say except
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  Speaker 1: that he and his like could not endure being shown
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  Speaker 1: up as idiots every time. Socrates opened his mouth. Socrates,
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  Speaker 1: unconscious of this, was paralyzed by his sense that somehow
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  Speaker 1: he was missing the point of the attack. He petered
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  Speaker 1: out after he had established the fact that he was
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  Speaker 1: an old soldier and a man of honorable life, and
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  Speaker 1: that his accuser was a silly snob. He had no
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  Speaker 1: suspicion of the extent to which his mental superiority had
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  Speaker 1: roused fear and hatred against him in the hearts of men,
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  Speaker 1: towards whom he was conscious of nothing but good will
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  Speaker 1: and good service. Contrast with Napoleon. If Socrates was as
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  Speaker 1: innocent as this at the age of seventy, it may
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  Speaker 1: be imagined how innocent Joan was at the age of seventeen. Now,
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  Speaker 1: Socrates was a man of argument, operating slowly and peacefully
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  Speaker 1: on men's minds, whereas Joan was a woman of action,
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  Speaker 1: operating with impetuous violence on their bodies. That, no doubt
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  Speaker 1: is why the contemporaries of Socrates endured him so long,
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  Speaker 1: and why Joan was destroyed before she was fully grown.
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  Speaker 1: But both of them combined a terrifying ability with a frankness,
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  Speaker 1: personal modesty, and benevolence, which made the furious dislike to
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  Speaker 1: which they fell victims absolutely unreasonable and therefore inapprehensible by themselves. Napoleon,
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  Speaker 1: also possessed of terrifying ability, but neither frank nor disinterested,
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  Speaker 1: had no illusions as to the nature of his popularity.
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  Speaker 1: When he was asked how the world would take his death,
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  Speaker 1: he said it would give a gasp of relief. But
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  Speaker 1: it is not so easy for mental giants, who neither
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  Speaker 1: hate nor intend to injure their fellows, to realize that
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  Speaker 1: nevertheless their fellows hate mental giants and would like to
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  Speaker 1: destroy them, not only enviously because the juxtaposition of a
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  Speaker 1: superior wounds their vanity, but quite humbly and honestly because
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  Speaker 1: it frightens them. Fear will drive men to any extreme,
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  Speaker 1: and the fear inspired by a superior being is a
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  Speaker 1: mystery which cannot be reasoned away, being immeasurable. It is
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  Speaker 1: unbearable when there is no presumption or guarantee of its
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  Speaker 1: benevolence and moral responsibility. In other words, when it has
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  Speaker 1: no official status. The legal and conventional superiority of Herod
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  Speaker 1: and Pilot, and of Annas and Caiaphas inspires fear, But
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  Speaker 1: the fear being a reasonable fear of measurable and avoidable consequences,
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  Speaker 1: which seem salutary and protective, is bearable, whilst the strange
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  Speaker 1: superiority of Christ and the fear it inspires elicit a
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  Speaker 1: shriek of a crucify him from all who cannot divine
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  Speaker 1: its benevolence. Socrates has to drink the hemlock, Christ to
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  Speaker 1: hang on the cross, and Joan to burneth the stake,
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  Speaker 1: whilst Napoleon, though he ends in sent Helena, at least
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  Speaker 1: dies in his bed there, and many terrifying but quite
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  Speaker 1: comprehensible official scoundrels die natural deaths in all the glory
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  Speaker 1: of the kingdoms of the world, proving that it is
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  Speaker 1: far more dangerous to be a saint than to be
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  Speaker 1: a conqueror. Those who have been both, like Mohammed and Joan,
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  Speaker 1: have found that it is the conqueror who must save
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  Speaker 1: the saint, and that defeat and capture mean martyrdom. Joan
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  Speaker 1: was burnt without a hand lifted on her own side
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  Speaker 1: to save her the comrades she had led to victory,
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  Speaker 1: and the enemies she had disgraced and defeated, the French
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  Speaker 1: king she had crowned, and the English king whose grounds
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  Speaker 1: she had kicked into the Laois were equally glad to
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  Speaker 1: be rid of her. Was Joan innocent or guilty? As
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  Speaker 1: this result could have been produced by a crapulous inferiority
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  Speaker 1: as well as by a sublime superiority, the question of
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  Speaker 1: which of the two was operative in Joan's case has
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  Speaker 1: to be faced. It was decided against her by her
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  Speaker 1: contemporaries after a very careful and conscientious trial, and the
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  Speaker 1: reversal of the verdict five years later in form a
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  Speaker 1: rehabilitation of Joan was really only a confirmation of the
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  Speaker 1: validity of the coronation of Charles the seventh. It is
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  Speaker 1: the more impressive reversal by a unanimous posterity culminating in
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  Speaker 1: her canonization, that has quashed the original proceedings and put
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  Speaker 1: her judges on their trial, which so far has been
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  Speaker 1: much more unfair than their trial of her. Nevertheless, the
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  Speaker 1: rehabilitation of fourteen fifty six, corrupt job as it was,
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  Speaker 1: really did produce evidence enough to satisfy all reasonable critics
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  Speaker 1: that Joan was not a common termagant, not a harlot,
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  Speaker 1: not a witch, not a blasphemer, no more an idolater
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  Speaker 1: than the Pope himself, and not ill conducted in any
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  Speaker 1: sense apart from her soldiering, her wearing of men's clothes,
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  Speaker 1: and her audacity. But on the contrary, a good humored
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  Speaker 1: and intact virgin, pious, very temperate. We should call her
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  Speaker 1: meal of bread soaked in the common wine, which is
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  Speaker 1: the drinking water of France, esthetic, very kindly. And though
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  Speaker 1: a brave and hardy soldier, unable to endure loose language
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  Speaker 1: or licentious conduct, she went to the stake without a
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  Speaker 1: stain on her character except the overweening presumption, the superbity,
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  Speaker 1: as they called it, that led her thither. It would
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  Speaker 1: therefore be waste of time now to prove that the
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  Speaker 1: joan of the first part of the Elizabethan Chronicle play
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  Speaker 1: of Henry the sixth, supposed to have been tinkered by Shakespeare,
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  Speaker 1: grossly libels her in its concluding scenes in deference to
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  Speaker 1: Jingle patriotism. The mud that was thrown at her has
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  Speaker 1: dropped off by this time so completely that there is
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  Speaker 1: no need for any modern writer to wash up after it.
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  Speaker 1: What is far more difficult to get rid of is
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  Speaker 1: the mud that is being thrown at her judges, and
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  Speaker 1: the whitewash which disfigures her beyond recognition when Jingo scurrility
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  Speaker 1: had done its worst to her Sectarian squirrility. In this case,
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  Speaker 1: Protestant scurrility used her stake to beat the Roman Catholic
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  Speaker 1: Church and the Inquisition. The easiest way to make these
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  Speaker 1: institutions the villains of a melodrama was to make the
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  Speaker 1: maid its heroine. That melodrama may be dismissed as rubbish.
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  Speaker 1: Joan had a far fairer trial from the Church and
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  Speaker 1: the Inquisition than any prisoner of her type, and in
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  Speaker 1: her situation gets nowadays in any official secular court, and
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  Speaker 1: the decision was strictly according to law. And she was
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  Speaker 1: not a melodramatic heroine, that is, a physically beautiful, lovelorn
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  Speaker 1: parasite on an equally beautiful hero but a genius and
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  Speaker 1: a saint about as completely the opposite of a melodramatic
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  Speaker 1: hero zoe as it is possible for a human being
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  Speaker 1: to be. Let us be clear about the meaning of
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  Speaker 1: the terms. A genius is a person who, seeing farther
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  Speaker 1: and probing deeper than other people, has a different set
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  Speaker 1: of ethical valuations from theirs, and has energy enough to
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  Speaker 1: give effect to this extra vision and its valuations in
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  Speaker 1: whatever manner best suits his or her specific talents. A
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  Speaker 1: saint is one who, having practiced heroic virtues and enjoyed
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  Speaker 1: revelations or powers of the order which the Church classes
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  Speaker 1: technically as supernatural, is eligible for canonization. If a historian
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  Speaker 1: is an anti feminist and does not believe women to
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  Speaker 1: be capable of genius in the traditional masculine departments, he
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  Speaker 1: will never make anything of Joan, whose genius was turned
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  Speaker 1: to practical account mainly in soldiering and politics. If he
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  Speaker 1: is rationalist enough to deny that saints exist and to
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  Speaker 1: hold that new ideas cannot come otherwise than by conscious raticiation,
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  Speaker 1: he will never catch Joan's likeness. Her ideal biographer must
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  Speaker 1: be free from nineteenth century prejudices and biases, must understand
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  Speaker 1: the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Holy
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  Speaker 1: Roman Empire much more intimately than our Whig historians have
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  Speaker 1: ever understood them, and must be capable of throwing off
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  Speaker 1: sex partialities and their romance, and regarding woman as the
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  Speaker 1: female of the human species and not as a different
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  Speaker 1: kind of animal with specific charms and specific imbecilities. Joon's
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  Speaker 1: good looks to put the last point. Roughly, any book
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  Speaker 1: about Joan which begins by describing her as a beauty
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  Speaker 1: may be at once classed as a romance. Not one
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  Speaker 1: of Jones's comrades in village, court or camp, even when
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  Speaker 1: they were straining themselves to please the king by praising her,
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  Speaker 1: ever claimed that she was pretty. All the men who
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  Speaker 1: alluded to the matter declared most emphatically that she was
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  Speaker 1: unattractive sexually, to a degree that seemed to them miraculous,
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  Speaker 1: considering that she was in the bloom of youth and
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  Speaker 1: neither ugly, awkward, deformed, nor unpleasant in her person. The
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  Speaker 1: evident truth is that, like most women of her hardy
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  Speaker 1: managing type, she seemed neutral in the conflict of sex
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  Speaker 1: because men were too much afraid of her to fall
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  Speaker 1: in love with her. She herself was not sexless, in
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  Speaker 1: spite of the virginity she had vowed up to a
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  Speaker 1: point and preserved to her death. She never excluded the
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  Speaker 1: possibility of marriage for herself, but marriage with which preliminary
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  Speaker 1: of the attraction pursued and capture of husband was not
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  Speaker 1: her business. She had something else to do. Byron's formula,
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  Speaker 1: man's love is of man's life a thing apart 'tis
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  Speaker 1: woman's whole existence did not apply to her anymore than
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  Speaker 1: to George Washington or any other masculine worker on the
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  Speaker 1: heroic scale. Had she lived in our time, picture postcards
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  Speaker 1: might have been sold of her as a general. They
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  Speaker 1: would not have been sold of her as a sultana. Nevertheless,
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  Speaker 1: there is one reason for crediting her, with a very
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  Speaker 1: remarkable face. A sculptor of her time in Orleans made
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  Speaker 1: a statue of a helmeted young woman with a face
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  Speaker 1: that is unique in art in point of being evidently
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  Speaker 1: not an ideal face but a portrait, and yet so
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  Speaker 1: uncommon as to be unlike any real woman one has
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  Speaker 1: ever seen. It is surmised that Joanes served unconsciously as
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  Speaker 1: the sculptor's model. There is no proof of this, but
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  Speaker 1: those extraordinarily spaced eyes raised so powerfully the question if
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  Speaker 1: this woman be not Joan, who is she? That I
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  Speaker 1: dispense with further evidence and challenge those who disagree with
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  Speaker 1: me to prove a negative. It is a wonderful phase,
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  Speaker 1: but quite neutral from the point of view of the
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  Speaker 1: operatic beauty fancier. Such a fancier may perhaps be finally
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  Speaker 1: chilled by the prosaic fact that Joan was the defendant
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  Speaker 1: in a suit for breach of promise of marriage, and
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  Speaker 1: that she conducted her own case and won it. Joan's
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  Speaker 1: social position by class. Joan was the daughter of a
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  Speaker 1: working farmer who was one of the head men of
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  Speaker 1: his village, and transacted its feudal business for it with
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  Speaker 1: the neighboring squires and their lawyers. When the castle in
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  Speaker 1: which the villagers were entitled to take refuge from raids
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  Speaker 1: became derelict, he organized a combination of half a dozen
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  Speaker 1: farmers to obtain possession of it, so as to occupy
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  Speaker 1: it when there was any danger of invasion. As a child,
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  Speaker 1: Joan could please herself at times with being the young
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  Speaker 1: lady of this castle. Her mother and brothers were able
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  Speaker 1: to follow and share her fortune at court without making
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  Speaker 1: themselves notably ridiculous. These facts leave us no excuse for
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  Speaker 1: the popular romance that turns every heroine into either a
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  Speaker 1: princess or a beggar maid. In the somewhat similar case
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  Speaker 1: of Shakespeare, a whole inverted pyramid of wasted research has
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  Speaker 1: been based on the assumption that he was an illiterate
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  Speaker 1: laborer in the face of the plainest evidence that his
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  Speaker 1: father was a man of business and at one time
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  Speaker 1: a very prosperous one, married to a woman of some
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  Speaker 1: social pretensions. There is the same tendency to drive Joan
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  Speaker 1: into the position of a hired shepherd girl, though a
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  Speaker 1: hired shepherd girl and donre Mill would have deferred to
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  Speaker 1: her as the young lady of the farm. The difference
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  Speaker 1: between Joan's case and Shakespeare's is that Shakespeare was not illiterate.
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  Speaker 1: He had been to school and knew as much Latin
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  Speaker 1: and Greek as most university patsmen retain, that is, for
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  Speaker 1: practical purposes, none at all. Joan was absolutely illiterate. I
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  Speaker 1: do not know A from B, she said, But many
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  Speaker 1: princesses at that time and for long after might have
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  Speaker 1: said the same. Marie Antoinette, for instance, at Joan's age,
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  Speaker 1: could not spell her own name correctly. But this does
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  Speaker 1: not mean that Joan was an ignorant person, or that
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  Speaker 1: she suffered from the diffidence and sense of social disadvantage
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  Speaker 1: now felt by people who cannot read or write. If
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  Speaker 1: she could not write letters, she could and did dictate
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  Speaker 1: them and attach full and indeed excessive importance to them.
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  Speaker 1: When she was called a shepherd last to her face,
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  Speaker 1: she very warmly resented it and challenged any woman to
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  Speaker 1: compete with her in the household arts of the mistresses
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  Speaker 1: of well furnished houses. She understood the political and milileitary
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  Speaker 1: situation in France much better than most of our newspaper
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  Speaker 1: fed university women graduates understands the corresponding situation of their
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  Speaker 1: own country today. Her first convert was the neighboring commandant
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  Speaker 1: at a beau Collier, and she converted him by telling
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  Speaker 1: him about the defeat of the Dauphin's troops at the
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  Speaker 1: Battle of Herrings, so long before he had official news
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  Speaker 1: of it that he concluded she must have had a
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  Speaker 1: divine revelation. This knowledge of an interest in public affairs
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  Speaker 1: was nothing extraordinary among farmers in a war swept countryside.
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  Speaker 1: Politicians came to the door too often sword in hand
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  Speaker 1: to be disregarded. Jon's people could not afford to be
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  Speaker 1: ignorant of what was going on in the feudal world.
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  Speaker 1: They were not rich, and Joan worked on the farm
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  Speaker 1: as her father did, driving the sheep to pasture and
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  Speaker 1: so forth. But there is no evidence or suggestion of
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  Speaker 1: sortid povert, and no reason to believe that Joan had
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  Speaker 1: to work as a hired servant works, or indeed to
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  Speaker 1: work at all when she preferred to go to confession
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  Speaker 1: or dawdle about waiting for visions and listening to the
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  Speaker 1: church bells to hear voices in them. In short, much
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  Speaker 1: more of a young lady, and even of an intellectual
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  Speaker 1: than most of the daughters of our petty Bourgeoisie. Jones's
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  Speaker 1: voices and visions. Joan's voices and visions have played many
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  Speaker 1: tricks with her reputation. They have been held to prove
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  Speaker 1: that she was mad, that she was a liar and impostor,
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  Speaker 1: that she was a sorceress, she was burned for this,
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  Speaker 1: and finally that she was a saint. They do not
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  Speaker 1: prove any of these things, but the variety of the
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: conclusions reached show how little our matter of fact historians
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  Speaker 1: know about other people's minds, or even about their own.
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  Speaker 1: There are people in the world whose imagination is so
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  Speaker 1: vivid that when they have an idea, it comes to
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  Speaker 1: them as an audible voice, sometimes uttered by a visual figure.
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  Speaker 1: Criminal lunatic asylums are occupied largely by murderers who have
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  Speaker 1: obeyed voices. Thus a woman may hear voices telling her
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  Speaker 1: that she must cut her husband's throat and strangle her
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  Speaker 1: child as they lie asleep, and she may feel obliged
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  Speaker 1: to do what she is told by a medical legal superstition.
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  Speaker 1: It is held in our courts that criminals whose temptations
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  Speaker 1: present themselves under these illusions are not responsible for their
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  Speaker 1: actions and must be treated as insane. But the seers
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  Speaker 1: of visions and the hearers of revelations are not always criminals.
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: The inspirations and intuitions, and unconsciously reasoned conclusions of genius
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: sometimes assume similar illusions. Socrates, Luther's Widenborg Blake saw visions
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: and heard voices, just as Saint Francis and Saint Johan did.
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: If Newton's imagine had been of the same vividly dramatic kind,
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: he might have seen the ghost of Pythagoras walk into
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: the orchard and explain why the apples were falling. Such
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: an illusion would have invalidated neither the theory of gravitation nor
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: Newton's general sanity. What is more, the visionary method of
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: making the discovery would not be a whit more miraculous
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: than the normal method. The test of sanity is not
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: the normality of the method, but the reasonableness of the discovery.
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: If Newton had been informed by Pythagoras that the moon
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: was made of green cheese, then Newton would have been
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: locked up. Gravitation, being a reasoned hypothesis which fitted remarkably
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: well into the Copernican version of the observed physical facts
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: of the universe, established Newton's reputation for extraordinary intelligence, and
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: would have done so no matter how fantastically he had
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: arrived at it. Yet, this of gravitation is not so
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: impressive a mental feat as his astounding chronology, which establishes
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: him as the king of mental conjurers, but a Bedlamite
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: king whose authority no one now accepts. On the subject
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: of the eleventh horn of the beast seen by the
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: prophet Daniel. He was more fantastic than Joan because his
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: imagination was not dramatic but mathematical, and therefore extraordinarily susceptible
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: to numbers. Indeed, if all his works were lost except
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: his chronology, we should say that he was as mad
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: as a hatter. As it is who dares diagnose Newton
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: as a madman. In the same way Joan must be
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: judged a sane woman in spite of her voices, because
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: they never gave her any advice that might not have
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: come to her from her mother's wit, exactly as gravitation
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: came to Newton. We can all see now, especially since
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: the late War, through so many of our women into
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: military life, that Jones campaigning could not have been carried
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: on in petticoats. This was not only because she did
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: a man's work, but because it was morally necessary that
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: sex should be left out of the question as between
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: her and her comrades in arms. She gave this reason
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: herself when she was pressed on the subject, and the
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: fact that this entirely reasonable necessity came to her imagination
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: first as an order from God delivered through the mouth
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: of Saint Catharine does not prove that she was mad.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: The soundness of the order proves that she was unusually sane,
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: but its form proves that her dramatic imagination played tricks
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: with her senses. Her policy was also quite sound. Nobody
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: disputes that the relief of Orleans, followed up by the
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: coronation at raz of the Dauphin, as a counter blow
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: to the suspicions then current of his legitimacy and the
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: consequently of his title, were military and political master strokes
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: that saved France. They might have been planned by Napoleon
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: or any other illusion proof genius. They came to Joan
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: as an instruction from her council, as she called her
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: visionary saints. But she was none the less an able
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: leader of men for imagining her ideas in this way
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: the evolutionary appetite. What then, is the modern view of
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: Joan's voices and visions and messages from God. The nineteenth
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: century said that they were delusions, but that as she
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: was a pretty girl and had been abominably ill treated
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: and finally done to death by a superstitious rabble of
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: medieval priests, hounded on by a corrupt political bishop, it
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: must be assumed that she was the innocent dupe of
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: these delusions. The twentieth century finds this explanation too vapidly commonplace,
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: and demands something more mystic. I think the twentieth century
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: is right, because an explanation which amounts to Joan being
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: mentally defective instead of as she obviously was, mentally excessive,
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: will not wash. I cannot believe, nor if I could
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: could I expect all my readers to believe, as Joan did,
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: that three ocularly visible, well dressed persons named respectively, Saint Catharine,
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: Saint Margaret, and Saint Michael, came down from heaven and
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: gave her certain instructions with which they were charged by
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: God for her. Not that such a belief would be
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: more improbable or fantastic than some modern beliefs which we
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: all swallow. But there are fashions and family habits in belief.
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: And it happens that my fashion being Victorian, and my
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: family habit Protestant. I find myself unable to attach any
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: such objective validity to the form of Joan's visions. But
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: that there are forces at work which use individuals for purposes,
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: for transcending. The purpose of keeping these individuals alive and
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: prosperous and respectable and safe and happy in the middle
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: station in life, which is all any good of bourgeois
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: can reasonably require, is established by the fact that men will,
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: in the pursuit of knowledge and of social readjustments for
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: which they will not be a penny the better, and
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: are indeed often many pence the worse, face poverty, infamy, exile, imprisonment,
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: dreadful hardship, and death. Even the selfish pursuit of personal
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: power does not nerve men to the efforts and sacrifices
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: which are eagerly made in pursuit of extensions of our
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: power over nature, though these extensions may not touch the
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: personal life of the seeker at any point. There is
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: no more mystery about this appetite for knowledge and power
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: than about the appetite for food. Both are known as facts,
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: and as facts only, the difference between them being that
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: the appetite for food is necessary to the life of
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: the hungry man, and is therefore a personal appetite, whereas
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: the other is an appetite for evolution and therefore a
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: super personal need. The diverse manners in which our imaginations
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: dramatize the approach of the superpersonal forces is a problem
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: for the psychologist, not for the historian. Only the historian
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: must understand that visionaries are neither impostors nor lunatics. It
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: is one thing to say that the figure Joan recognized
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: as Saint Catherine was not really Saint Catherine, but the
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: dramatization by Jone's imagination of that pressure upon her, of
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: the driving force that is behind evolution, which I have
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: just called the evolutionary appetite. It is quite another to
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: class her visions with the vision of two moons seen
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: by a drunk person, or with broken specters, echoes and
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: the like. Saint Catharine's instructions were far too cogent for that,
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: and the simplest French peasant who believes in apparitions of
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: celestial personages two favored mortals, is nearer to the scientific
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: truth about Joan than the rationalist and materialist historians and
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: essayists who feel obliged to set down a girl who
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: saw saints and heard them talking to her as either
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: crazy or mendacious if Joan was mad or Christendom was
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: mad too. For people who believed aboutly in the existence
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: of celestial personages are every whit as mad in that
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: sense as the people who think they see them. Luther,
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: when he threw his inkhorn at the devil, was no
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: more mad than any other Augustinian monk. He had a
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: more vivid imagination and had perhaps eaten and slept less.
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: That was all The mere iconography does not matter. All
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: the popular religions in the world are made apprehensible by
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: an array of legendary personages with an almighty father and
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: sometimes a mother and divine child as the central figures.
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: These are presented to the mind's eye in childhood, and
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: the result is a hallucination which persists strongly throughout life
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: when it has been well impressed. Thus all the thinking
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: of the hallucinated adult about the fountain of inspiration which
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: is continually flowing in the universe, or about the promptings
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: of virtue and the revulsions of shame. In short, about
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: aspiration and conscience, both of which forces are matters of fact.
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: More obvious than electromagnetism, is thinking in terms of the
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: celestial vision. And when, in the case of exceptionally imaginative persons,
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: especially those practicing certain appropriate at austerities, the hallucination extends
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: from the mind's eye to the bodies the visionary sees
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: Krishna or the Buddha, or the Blessed Virgin or Saint Catharine,
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: as the case may be. And of Part one Part
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: two of Saint Johan preface by George Bernard Shaw. This
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: libribox recording is in the public domain. Part two The
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: Modern Education of which Joan escaped. It is important to
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: everyone nowadays to understand this, because modern science is making
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: short work of the hallucinations without regard to the vital
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: importance of the things they symbolize. If Joan were reborn today,
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: she would be sent first to a convent school in
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: which she would be mildly taught to connect inspiration and
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: conscience with Saint Catharine and Saint Michael, exactly as she
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: was in the fifties teenth century, and then finished up
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: with a very energetic training in the Gospel of Saint
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: Louis Pasteur and Paulbert, who would tell her, possibly in visions,
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: but more probably in pamphlets, not to be a superstitious
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: little fool, and to empty out Saint Catharine and the
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: rest of the Catholic agiology as an obsolete iconography of
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: exploded myths. It would be rubbed into her that Galileo
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: was a martyr and his persecutor's incorrigible ignoramuses, and that
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: Saint Teresa's hormones had gone astray and left her incurably
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: hyperpituitary or hyperadrenal, or hysteroid or epileptoid, or anything but asteroid.
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: She would have been convinced by precept and experiment, that
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: baptism and receiving the body of her Lord were contemptible superstitions,
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: that vaccination and vivisection were enlightened practice. Behind her news,
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: Saints Louis and Paul, there would be not only science
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: purifying religion and being purified by it, but hypochondria, melancholia, cowardice, stupidity, cruelty, muckraking, curiosity,
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: knowledge without wisdom, and everything that the eternal soul in
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: nature lose, instead of the virtues of which Saint Catharine
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: was the figurehead. As to the new rites, which would
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: be the saner joan, the one who carried little children
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: to be baptized of water and the spirit, or the
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: one who sent the police to force their parents to
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: have the most villainous racial poison we know thrust into
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: their veins. The one who told them the story of
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: the Angel and Mary, or the one who questioned them
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: as to their experiences of the Oedipus complex, the one
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: to whom the consecrated wafer was the very body of
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: the virtue that was her salvation, or the one who
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: looked forward to a precise and convenient regulation of her
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: health and her desires by a nicely calculated diet of
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: thyroid extract, adrenaline, thyamen, pituitrin, and insulin, with pigmups of
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: hormone stimulants, the blood of being first carefully fortified with antibodies,
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: against all possible infections by inoculations of infected bacteria and
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: serum from infected animals, and against old age by surgical
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: extirpation of the reproductive ducts or weakly doses of monkey gland.
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: It is true that behind all these quackeries there is
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: a certain body of genuine scientific physiology. But was there,
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: anytheless a certain body of genuine psychology behind Saint Catharine
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: and the Holy Ghost? And which is the healthier mind,
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: the saintly mind or the monkey gland mind? Does not
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: the present cry of back to the Middle Ages, which
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: has been incubat ever since the pre Raphaelite movement began,
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: mean that it is no longer our academy pictures that
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: are intolerable, but our credulities that have not the excuse
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: of being superstitions, our cruelties that have not the excuse
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: of barbarism, our persecutions that have not the excuse of
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: religious faith, our shameless substitution of successful swindlers and scoundrels
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: and quacks for saints as objects of worship, and our
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: deafness and blindness to the calls and visions of the
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: inexorable power that made us and will destroy us if
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: we disregard it. To Joan and her contemporaries, we should
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: appear as a drove of Gatherine swine, possessed by all
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: the unclean spirits cast out by the faith and civilization
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: of the Middle Ages, running violently down a steep place
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: into a hell of high explosives. For us to set
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: up our condition as a standard of sanity and declare
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: Joan mad because she never condescended to it is to
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: prove that we are not only lost, but irredeemable. Let us, then,
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: once for all, drop all nonsense about Joan being cracked
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: and accept her as at least as sane as Florence Nightingale,
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: who also combined a very simple iconography of religious belief
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: with a mind so exceptionally powerful that it kept her
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: in continual trouble with the medical and military pangandrums of
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: her time, failures of the voices, that the voices and
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: visions were illusory, and their wisdom of Joan's own is
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: shown by the occasions on which they failed her, notably
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: during her trial, when they assured her that she would
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: be rescued. Here her hopes flattered her, but they were
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: not unreasonable. Her military colleague Lahire, was in command of
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: a considerable force not so very far off, and if
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: the Armagnax, as her party was called, had really wanted
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: to rescue her, and had put anything like her own
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: vigor into the enterprise, they could have attempted it with
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: very fair chances of success. She did not understand that
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: they were glad to be rid of her, nor that
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: the rescue of her prisoner from the hands of the
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: Church was a much more serious business for a medieval
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: captain or even a medieval king, than its mere physical
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: difficulty as a military exploit suggested. According to her lights,
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: her expectation of a rescue was reasonable. Therefore, she heard
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: Madame Saint Catharine assure her it would happen, that being
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: her way of finding out and making up her own
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: mind when it became evident that she had miscalculated. When
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: she was led to the stake, and Lahira was not
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: thundering at the gates of Won nor charging Warwick's men
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: at arms. She threw over Katherine at once and recanted.
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: Nothing could be more sane or practical. It was not
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: until she discovered that she had gained nothing by her
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: recantation but close imprisonment for life, that she withdrew it
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: and deliberately and explicitly chose burning instead, a decision which
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: showed not only the extraordinary decision of her character, but
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: also a rationalism carried to its ultimate human test of suicide.
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: Yet even in this the illusion persisted, and she announced
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: her relapse as dictated to her by her voices. Joan,
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: a Galtonic visualizer. The most skeptical scientific reader, may therefore
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: accept as a flat fact carrying no implication of unsoundness
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: of mind. That Joan was what Francis Galton and other
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: modern investigators of human faculty call a visualizer. She saw
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: imaginary saying, just as some other people see imaginary diagrams
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: and landscapes with numbers dotted about them, and are therefore
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: able to perform feats of memory and arithmetic impossible to
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: non visualizers. Visualizers will understand this at once. Non visualizers
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: who have never read Galton will be puzzled and incredulous,
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: but a very little inquiry among their acquaintances will reveal
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: to them that the mind's eye is more or less
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: a magic lantern, and that the street is full of
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: normally saying people who have hallucinations of all sorts, which
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: they believe to be part of the normal, permanent equipment
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: of all human beings. Joon's manliness and militarism. Jones's other abnormality,
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: too common among uncommon things to be properly called a peculiarity,
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: was her craze for soldiering and the masculine life. Her
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: father tried to frighten her out of it by threatening
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: to drown her if she ran away with the soldiers,
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: and ordering her brothers to drown her if he were
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: not on the spot. This extravagance was clearly not serious.
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: It must have been addressed to a child young enough
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: to imagine that he was in earnest. Joan must, therefore,
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: as a child, have wanted to run away and be
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: a soldier. The awful prospect of being thrown into the
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: miss and drowned by a terrible father and her big
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: brothers kept her quiet until the father had lost his
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: terrors and the brothers yielded to her natural leadership, and
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: by that time she had since enough to know that
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: the masculine and military life was not a mere matter
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: of running away from home, but the taste for it
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: never left her and was fundamental in determining her career.
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: If anyone doubts this, let him ask himself why a
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: maid charged with a special mission from heaven to the dauphin.
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: This was how Joan saw her very plan for retrieving
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: the desperate situation of the uncrowned king. Should not have
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: simply gone to the court as a maid in a
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: woman's dress and urged her counsel upon him in a
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: woman's way, as other women with similar missions had to
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: come to his mad father and his wise grandfather. Why
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: did she insist on having a soldier's dress and arms,
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: and sword and horse and equipment, and on treating her
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: escort of soldiers as comrades, sleeping side by side with
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: them on the floor at night, as if there were
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: no difference of sex between them. It may be answered
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: that this was the safest way of traveling through a
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: country infested with hostile troops and bands of marauding deserters
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: from both sides. Such an answer has no weight because
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: it applies to all the women who traveled in France
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: at that time, and who never dreamt of traveling otherwise
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: than as women. But even if we accept it, how
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: does it account for the fact that, when the danger
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: was over and she could present herself at court in
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: feminine attire, with perfect safety, and obviously with greater propriety,
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: she presented herself in her man's dress, And instead of
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: urging Charles, like Queen Victoria, urging the War Office to
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: send Roberts to the trans ball, to send Dallassandrey Laille
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: and the rest to the relief of Doumrois at Orleans,
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: insisted that she must go herself and lead the assault
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: in person. Why did she give exhibitions of her dexterity
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: in handling a lance and of her seat as a writer.
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: Why did she accept presence of armor and chargers and
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: masculine circuits, and in every action repudiate the conventional character
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: of a woman. The simple answer to all these questions
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: is that she was the sort of woman that wants
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: to lead a man's life. They are to be found
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: wherever there are armies on foot or navies on the seas,
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: serving in male disguise, eluding detection for astonishingly long periods,
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: and sometimes, no doubt, escaping it entirely. When they are
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: in a position to defy public opinion, they throw off
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: all concealment. You have eu rosa bonneur painting in male
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: blouse and trousers, and George sand living a man's life
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: and almost compelling her Chopas and de Mussays to live
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: women's lives to amuse her. Had Joan not been one
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: of these unwomanly women, she might have been canonized much sooner.
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: But it is not necessary to wear trousers and smoke
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: big cigars to live a man's life anymore than it
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: is necessary to wear petticoats to live a woman's. There
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: are plenty of gowned and bodiced women in ordinary civil
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: life who manage their own affairs and other peoples, including
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: those of their menfolk, and are entirely massive skill in
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: their tastes and pursuits. There always were such women, even
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: in the Victorian days, when women had fewer legal rights
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: than men, and our modern women magistrates, mayors and members
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: of parliament were unknown in reactionary Russia. In our own century,
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: a woman soldier organized an effective regiment of amazons, which
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: disappeared only because it was old or shotian enough to
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: be against the revolution. The exemption of women from military
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: services founded not on any natural inaptitude that men do
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: not share, but on the fact that communities cannot reproduce
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: themselves without plenty of men are more largely dispensable, and
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: are sacrificed. Accordingly, was Joanes suicidal? These two abnormalities were
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: the only ones that were irresistibly prepotent in Joan, and
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: they brought her to the stake. Neither of them was
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: peculiar to her. There was nothing peculiar about her except
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: the vigor and scope of her mind and character, and
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: the intensity of her vital energy. She was accused of
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: a suicidal tendency, and it is a fact that when
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: she attempted to escape from a baux rev Walk castle
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: by jumping from a tower said to be sixty feet high,
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: she took a risk beyond reason, Though she recovered from
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: the crash after a few days fasting. Her death was
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: deliberately chosen as an alternative to life without liberty in battle.
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: She challenged death as Wellington did at Waterloo, and as
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: Nelson habitually did when he walked his quarter deck during
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: his battles, with all his decorations in full blaze. As
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: neither Nelson, nor Wellington, nor any of those who have
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: performed desperate feats and preferred death to captivity has been
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: accused of suicidal mania, Joan need not be suspected of it.
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: The Beaurevois affair, there was more at stake than her freedom.
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: She was distracted by the news that Compienne was about
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: to fall, and she was convinced that she could save
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: it if only she could get free. Still, the leap
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: was so perilous that her conscience was not quite easy
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: about it, and she expressed this as usual by saying
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: that Saint Catharine had forbidden her to do it, but
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: forgave her afterwards for her disobedience. Joan summed up. We
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: may accept and admire Joan then as a sane and
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: shrewd country girl of extraordinary strength of mind and artitude
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: of body. Everything she did was thoroughly calculated, and though
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: the process was so rapid that she was hardly conscious
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: of it and ascribed it all to her voices. She
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: was a woman of policy and not of blind impulse
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: in war. She was as much a realist as Napoleon.
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: She had his eye for artillery and his knowledge of
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: what it could do. She did not expect besieged cities
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: to fall jericho wise at the sound of her trumpet,
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: but like Wellington, adapted her methods of attack to the
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: peculiarities of the defense, and she anticipated the Napoleonic calculation
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: that if you only hold on long enough, the other
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: fellow will give in. For example, her final triumph at
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: Orlean was achieved after her commander de Nois had sounded
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: the retreat at the end of a day's fighting without
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: a decision. She was never, for a moment what so
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: many romancers and playwrights have pretended a romantic young lady.
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: She was a thorough daughter of the soil in her
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: peasant like matter of factness and doggedness, and her acceptance
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: of great lords and kings and prelates as such without
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: idolatry or snobbery, seeing at a glance how much they
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: were individually good for. She had the respectable countrywoman's sense
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: of the value of public decency, and would not tolerate
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: foul language and neglect of religious observance, nor allowed disreputable
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: women to hang about her soldiers. She had one pious
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: ejaculation on non debt and one meaningless oath par mon Martin.
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: And this much swearing she allowed to the incorrigibly blasphemous
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: laiere equally with herself. The value of this prudery was
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: so great in restoring the self respect of the badly
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: demoralized army that, like most of her policy, it justified
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: itself as soundly calculated. She talked too, and dealt with
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: people of all classes, from laborers to kings, without embarrassment
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: or affectation, and got them to do what she wanted
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: when they were not afraid or corrupt. She could coax,
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: and she could hustle, her tongue having a soft side
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: at a sharp edge, she was very capable a born
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: Jones's immaturity and ignorance. All this, however, must be taken
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: with one heavy qualification. She was only a girl in
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: her teens. If we could think of her as a
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: managing woman of fifty, we could seize her type at once,
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: for we have plenty of managing women among us of
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: that age who illustrate perfectly the sort of person she
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: would have become. Had she lived. But she, being only
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: alas when all is said, lacked their knowledge of men's
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: vanities and of the weight and proportion of social forces.
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: She knew nothing of iron hands and velvet gloves. She
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: just used her fists. She thought political changes much easier
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: than they are, and, like Mohammet in his innocence of
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: any world, but the tribal world, wrote letters to kings
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: calling on them to make millennial rearrangements. Consequently, it was
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: only in the enterprises that were really simple and compassible
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: by Swiss physical force, like the Coronation and the Orleans Campaign,
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: that she was successful. Her want of academic education disabled
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: her when she had to deal with such elaborately artificial
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: structures as the great ecclesiastical and social institutions of the
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: Middle Ages. She had a horror of heretics, without suspecting
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: that she was herself a herisiarch, one of the precursors
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: of a sism that rent Europe in two and cost
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: centuries of bloodshed that is not yet staunched. She objected
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: to foreigners on the sensible ground that they were not
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: in their proper place in France, but she had no
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: notion of how this brought her into conflict with Catholicism
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: and feudalism, both essentially international. She worked by common sense,
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: and where scholarship was the only clue to institution, she
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: was in the dark and broke her shins against them,
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: all the more rudely because of her enormous self confidence,
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: which made her the least cautious of human beings in
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: civil affairs. This combination of inept youth and academic ignorance
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: with great natural capacity push, courage, devotion, originality, and oddity
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: fully accounts for all the facts in Joan's career and
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: makes her a creditable historical and human phenomenon. But it
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: clashes most discordantly both with the idologious romance that has
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: grown up around her and the belittling skepticism that reacts
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: against that romance. The maid In literature, English readers would
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: probably like to know how these idolizations and reactions have
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: affected the books they are most familiar with. About Joan.
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: There is the first part of the Shakespearean or pseudo
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: Shakespearean trilogy of Henry the Sixth, in which Joan is
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: one of the reading characters. This portrait of Joan is
• 52:02
  Speaker 1: not more authentic than the description in the London papers
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: of George Washington in seventeen eighty, of Napoleon in eighteen
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: o three, of the German Crown Prince in nineteen fifteen,
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: or of Lenin in nineteen seventeen. It ends in mere scurrility.
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: The impression left by it is that the playwright, having
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: begun by an attempt to make Joan a beautiful and
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: romantic figure, was told by his scandalized company that English
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: patriotism would never stand a sympathetic representation of a French
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: conqueror of English troops, and that unless he at once
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: introduced all the old charges against Joan of being a
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: sorceress and harlot, and assumed her to be guilty of
• 52:48
  Speaker 1: all of them, his play could not be produced. As
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: likely as not, this is what actually happened. Indeed, there
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: is only one other apparent way of accounting for the
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: sympathetic recas presentation of Joan as a heroine, culminating in
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: her eloquent appeal to the Duke of Burgundy, followed by
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: the black guardedly scerrility of the concluding scenes. That other
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: way is to assume that the original play was wholly scurrilous,
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: and that Shakespeare touched up the earlier scenes, as the
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: work belongs to a period at which he was only
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: beginning his practice as a dinker of old works, before
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: his own style was fully formed and hardened. It is
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: impossible to verify this guess. His finger is not unmistakably
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: evident in the play, which is poor and base in
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: its moral tone, but he may have tried to redeem
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: it from downright infamy by shedding a momentary glamour on
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: the figure of the maid. When we jump over two
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: centuries to Schiller, we find di umfrauv on Orleans drowned
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: in a witch's cauldron of raging romance. Schiller's Joan has
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: not a single point of contact with the real Joan,
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: nor indeed with any mortal woman that ever walked this earth.
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: There is really nothing to be said of his play
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: but that it is not about Joan at all, and
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: can hardly be said to pretend to be, for he
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: makes her die on the battlefield, finding her burning unbearable.
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: Before Schiller came Voltaire, who burlesqued Homer in a mock
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: epic called La Pousse. It is the fashion to dismiss
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: this with virtuous indignation as an obscene libel, and I
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: certainly cannot defend it against the charge of extravagant in decorum.
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: But its purpose was not to depict Joan, but to
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: kill with ridicule everything that Voltaire righteously hated in the
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: institutions and fashions of his own day. He made Joan ridiculous,
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: but not contemptible nor comparatively unchaste. And as he also
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: made Homer and Saint Peter, and Saint Deini, and the
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: brave d Noirs ridiculous, and the other heroines of the
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: poem very unchased. Indeed, he may be said to have
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: let Joan off very easily. But indeed the personal adventures
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: of the characters are so outrageous and so homerically free
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: from any pretense at or even possibility of the historical veracity,
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: that those who affect to take them seriously only make
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: themselves Petsniffian Samuel Butler believed the Iliad to be a
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: burblesque of Greek jingleism and Greek religion, written by a
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: hostage or a slave, and La Picelle makes Butler's theory
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: almost convincing. Voltaire represents Agnes Sorel, the Dauphin's mistress, whom
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: Joan never met, as a woman with a consuming passion
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: for the chastess, concubinole fidelity, whose fate it was to
• 55:59
  Speaker 1: be continued annually falling into the hands of licentious foes
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: and suffering the worst extremities of rapine. The combats in
• 56:08
  Speaker 1: which Joan rides a flying donkey, or in which taken
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: unaware with no clothes on, she defends Agnes with her
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: sword and inflicts appropriate mutilations on her. Assailants can be
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: laughed at as they are intended to be without scruple,
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: for no sane person could mistake them for sober history,
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: and it may be that their ribeled irreverence is more
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: wholesome than the beglamoured sentimentality of Schiller. Certainly, Voltaire should
• 56:39
  Speaker 1: not have asserted that Jones's father was a priest, but
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: when he was out to erasel la Thom the French urt,
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: he stuck at nothing. So far, the literary representations of
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: the maid were legendary, but the publication of Byquithyrat in
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: eighteen forty one of the reports of her trial and
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: rehabilitation placed the subject on a new footing. These entirely
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: realistic documents created a living interest in Joan which Voltaire's
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: mock homerics and Schiller's romantic nonsense missed. Typical products of
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: that interest in America and England are the histories of
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: Joan by Mark Twain and Andrew Lang. Mark Twain was
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: converted to downright worship of Joan directly by QUISCHERA later on,
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: another man of genius, Anatole France, reacted against the quishieratic
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: wave of enthusiasm and wrote a Life of Joan in
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: which he attributed Joan's ideas to clerical prompting and her
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: military success to an adroit use of her by Dunois
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: as a mascot. In short, he denied that she had
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: any serious military or political ability. At this Andrew saw
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: read and went for Anatole scalp in a rival life
• 57:57
  Speaker 1: of Her, which should be read as active to the other.
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: Lang had no difficulty in showing that Joan's ability was
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: not an unnatural fiction to be explained away as an
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: illusion manufactured by priests and soldiers, but a straightforward fact.
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: It has been lightly pleaded in explanation that Anatole France
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: is a Parisian of the art world, into whose scheme
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: of things the able, hard headed, hard handed female, though
• 58:28
  Speaker 1: she dominates provincial France and business Paris, does not enter
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: whereas Lang was a Scot, and every Scot knows that
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: the Gray Mare is as likely as not to be
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: the better horse. But this explanation does not convince me.
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: I cannot believe that anatole France does not know what
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: everybody knows. I wish everybody knew all that he knows.
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: One feels antipathies at work in his book. He is
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: not anti Joan, but he is anti clerical, anti mystic,
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: and fundamentally unable to believe that there ever was any
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: such person as the real Joan. Mark Twain's Joan skirted
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: to the ground and with as many petticoats as Noah's wife.
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: In a toy arc is an attempt to combine Bayard
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: with Esther Summerson from Bleak House into an unimpeachable American
• 59:21
  Speaker 1: school teacher in armor. Like Esther Summerson, she makes her
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: creator ridiculous, and yet, being the work of a man
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: of genius, remains a creditable human Goody goody In spite
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: of her creator's infatuation. It is the description rather than
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: the valuation that is wrong. Andrew Lang and Mark Twain
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: are equally determined to make Joan a beautiful and most
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: ladylike Victorian, but both of them recognize and insist on
• 59:52
  Speaker 1: her capacity for leadership, though the Scot's scholar is less
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: romantic about it than the Mississippi pilot. But then Lang was,
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: by lifelong professional habit, a critic of biographies rather than
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: a biographer, whereas Mark Twain writes his biography frankly in
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: the form of a Romance Protestant misunderstanding of the Middle Ages.
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: They had, however, one disability in common. To understand Joan's history,
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: it is not enough to understand her character. You must
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: understand her environment as well. Joan in a nineteenth century
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: environment is as incongresos a figure as she would appear
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: were she to walk down Piccadilly to day in her
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: fifteenth century armour. To see her in her proper perspective,
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: you must understand Christendom and the Catholic Church, the Holy
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: Roman Empire, and the feudal system as they existed and
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: were understood in the Middle Ages. If you confuse the
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: Middle Ages with the Dark Ages, and are in the
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: habit of ridiculing your aunt for wearing medieval clothes, meaning
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: those in vogue in the eighteen nineties, and are quite
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: convinced that the world has progressed enormously, both morally and
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: mechanically since Jone's time. Then you will never understand why
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 1: Joan was burnt, much less feel that you might have
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: voted for burning her yourself if you had been a
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 1: member of the court that tried her. And until you
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: feel that you know nothing essential about her, that the
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: Mississippi Pilot should have broken down on. This misunderstanding is
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: natural enough. Mark Twain, the innocent abroad who saw the
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: lovely churches of the Middle Ages without a throb of emotion,
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: author of A Yankee in the Court of King Arthur,
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: in which the heroes and heroines of medieval chivalry are
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: guise seen through the eyes of a street Arab was
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: clearly out of court from the beginning. Andrew Lang was
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: better read, but like Walter Scott, he enjoyed medieval history
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: as a string of border romance rather than as the
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: record of a high European civilization based on a Catholic faith.
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: Both of them were baptized as Protestants, and impressed by
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: all their schooling and most of their reading, with the
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: belief that Catholic bishops who burnt heretics were persecutors capable
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: of any villainy, that all heretics were Albigensians or Ghosites,
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: or Jews or Protestants of the highest character, and that
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: the Inquisition was a chamber of horrors, invented expressly and
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: exclusively for such burnings. Accordingly we find them representing Peter Coauchamp,
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: Bishop of Beauvois, the judge who sent Joan to the
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: state as an unconscionable scoundrel, and all the questions put
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: to her as traps to ensnare and destroy her. And
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: they assume unhesitatingly that the two or three score of
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: canons and doctors of law and divinity who sat with
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: Coauchamp as assessors were exact reproductions of him, on slightly
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: less elevated chairs and with a different headdress. End of
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: Part two, Part three of Saint Joan, preface by George
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: Bernard Shaw. This libribox recording is in the public domain.
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 1: Part three Compared to Fairness of Joan's Trial, the truth
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: is that Coauchamp was threatened and insulted by the English
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: for being too considerate to Joan. A recent French writer
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: denies that Joan was burnt, and holds that Coauchamp spirited
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: her away and burnt somebody or something else in her place,
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: and that the pretender who subsequently personated her at Orban
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: and elsewhere was not a pretender but the real, authentic Joan.
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: He is able to cite Coachmp's pro Joon partiality in
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: support of his view the assessors. The objection to them
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: is not that they were a row of uniformed rascals,
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: but that they were political partisans of Joan's enemies. This
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: is a valid objection to all such trials, but in
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: the absence of neutral tribunals, they are unavoidable. A trial
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: by Jones's French partisans would have been as unfair as
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: the trial by her French opponents, and an equally mixed
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: tribunal would have produced a deadlock. Such recent trials, as
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: those of Edith Cavell by a German tribunal and Roger
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: Casement by an English one, were open to the same objection,
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: but they went forward to the death Nevertheless, because neutral
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: tribunals were not available, Edith, like Joan, was an arch heretic.
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: In the middle of the war, she declared before the
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: world that patriotism is not enough. She nursed enemies back
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: to health and assisted their prisoners to escape, making it
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: abundantly clear that she would help any fugitive or distressed
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: person without asking whose siet he was on, and acknowledging
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: no distinction before Christ between Tommy and Jerry, and Pete too,
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: the poorlieu Well might Edith have wished that she could
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: bring the Middle Ages back and have fifty civilians learned
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: in the law or vowed to the service of God,
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 1: to support two skilled judges in trying her case according
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: to the Catholic law of Christendom, and to argue it
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 1: out with her at sitting after sitting for many weeks.
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: The modern military inquisition was not so squeamish. It shot
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: her out of hand, and her countrymen, seeing in this
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: a good opportunity for lecturing the enemy on his intolerance,
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: put up a statue to her, but took particular care
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: not to inscribe on the pedestal Patriotism is not enough,
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: for which omission and the lie. It implies they will
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: need edith interception when they are themselves brought to judgment.
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: If any heavenly power thinks such moral cowards capable of
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 1: pleading to an intelligible indictment, the point need to be
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 1: no further labored. Joan was persecuted essentially as she would
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: be persecuted today. The change from burning to hanging or
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 1: shooting may strike us as a change for the better.
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: The change from careful trial under ordinary law to recklessly
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: summary military terrorism may strike us as a change for
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: the worse. But as far as toleration is concerned, the
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: trial and execution in Roya in fourteen thirty one might
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: have been an event of today, and we may charge
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: our consciences accordingly. If Joan had to be dealt with
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: by us in London, she would be treated with no
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: more toleration than Miss Sylvia Pankers, or the peculiar people,
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 1: or the parents who keep their children from the elementary school,
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: or any of the other others who crossed the line.
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: We have to draw, rightly or wrongly, between the tolerable
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 1: and the intolerable. Joan not tried as a political offender. Besides,
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: Joan's trial was not like casements a national political trial
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 1: ecclesiastical courts and the courts of the Inquisition. Joan was
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: tried by a combination of the two were courts Christian,
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: that is, international courts, and she was tried not as
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: a traitress, but as a heretic, blasphemer, sorceress and idolator.
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: Her alleged offenses were not political offenses against England nor
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: against the Burgundian faction in France, but against God and
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: against the common morality of Christendom. And although the idea
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: we call nationalism was so foreign to the medieval conception
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: of Christian society that it might almost have been directly
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: charged against Joan as an additional heresy, yet it was
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 1: not so charged. And it is unreasonable to suppose that
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: the political bias of a body of Frenchmen like the
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 1: assessors would on this point have run strongly in favor
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: of the English foreigners, even if they had been making
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: themselves particularly agreeable in France, instead of just the contrary
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: against a frenchwoman who had vanquished them. The tragic part
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 1: of the trial was that Joan, like most prisoners, tried
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: for anything but the simplest breaches of the ten commandments
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: did not understand what they were accusing her of. She
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: was much more like Mark Twain than like Peter Coauchamp.
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: Her attachment to the Church was very different from the
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 1: bishops and does not in fact bear close examination from
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: his point of view. She delighted in the solaces the
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: Church offers to sensitive souls. To her, confession and communion
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: were luxuries besides which the vulgar pleasures of the senses
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: were trash. Her prayers were wonderful conversations with her three saints.
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 1: Her piety seemed superhuman to the formerly dutiful people whose
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: religion was only a task to them. But when the
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 1: Church was not offering her her favorite luxuries but calling
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: on her to accept its interpretation of God's will and
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: to sacrifice her own, she flatly refused and made it
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: clear that her notion of a Catholic church was one
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: in which the pope was Pope Joan. How could the
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 1: church tolerate that when it had just destroyed huss and
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 1: had watched the career of Wickliffe with a growing anger
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 1: that would have brought him too to the stake had
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: he not died a natural death before the wrath fell
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: on him in his grave. Neither Hus nor Wickliffe was
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: as bluntly defiant as Joan. Both were reformers of the
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: Church like Luther, whilst Joan, like Missus Eddy, was quite
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: prepared to supersede Saint Peter as the rock on which
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: the church was built, and like Muhammad, was always ready
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: with a private revelation from God to settle every question
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 1: and fit every occasion. The enormity of Jones's pretension was
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: proved by her own unconsciousness of it, which we call
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 1: her innocence and her friends call her simplicity. Her solutions
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: of the problems presented to her seemed, and indeed mostly were,
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: the plainest common sense, and the revelation to her by
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 1: her voices was to her a simple matter of fact.
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: How could plain, common sense and simple fact seem to
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: her to be that hideous thing heresy? When rival prophetesses
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: came into the field, she was down on them at
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 1: once for liars and humbugs, but she never thought of
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 1: them as heretics. She was in a state of invincible
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 1: ignorance as to the Church's view, and the Church could
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: not tolerate her pretensions without either waiving its authority or
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 1: giving her a place beside the tree during her lifetime
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: and in her teens, which was unthinkable. Thus, an irresistible
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: force met an immovable object and developed the heat that
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: consumed poor Joan. Mark and Andrew would have shared her
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: innocence and her fate had they been dealt with by
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 1: the Inquisition. That is why their accounts of the trial
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: are as absurd as hers might have been. Could she
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 1: have written one. All that can be said for their
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 1: assumption that Coauchamp was a vulgar villain and that the
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: question put to Joan were traps is that it was
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: the support of the Inquiry which rehabilitated her twenty five
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: years later. But this rehabilitation was as corrupt as the
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 1: contrary proceeding applied to Cromwell. By our restoration reactionaries, Coauchamp
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 1: had been dug up and his body thrown into the
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: common sewer. Nothing was easier than to accuse him of
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: cozinage and declare the whole trial void. On that account,
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: that was what everybody wanted, from Charles the Victorious, whose
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: credit was bound up with the maids, to the patriotic
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 1: nationalist populace who idolized Joan's memory, the English were gone,
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 1: and a verdict in their favor would have been an
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 1: outrage on the throne and on the patriotism which Joan
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 1: had set on foot. We have none of these overwhelming
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: motives of political convenience and popularity to bias us. For us,
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: the first trial stands valid, and the rehabilitation would be
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: negligible but for the massive, sincere testimony it produced as
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 1: to Jones's engaging personal character. The question then arises, how
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 1: did the church get over the verdict of the first
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: trial when it canonized Joan five hundred years later? The Church,
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: uncompromised by its amends, easily enough. In the Catholic Church,
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 1: far more than in law, there is no wrong without
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: a remedy. It does not defer to Jonesque private judgment
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 1: as such, the supremacy of private judgment for the individual
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: being the quintessence of Protestantism. Nevertheless, it finds a place
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: for private judgment in Excelsies by admitting that the highest
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: wisdom may come as a divine revelation to an individual.
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 1: On sufficient evidence, it will declare that individual a saint. Thus,
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: as revelation may come by way of an enlightenment, of
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: the private judgment no less than by the words of
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 1: a celestial personage appearing in a vision. A saint may
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 1: be defined as a person of heroic virtue whose private
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: judgment is privileged. Many innovating saints, notably Francis and Clair,
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 1: have been in conflict with the Church during their lives,
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 1: and have thus raised the question whether they were heretics
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 1: or saints. Francis might have gone to the stake had
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 1: he lived longer. It is, therefore, by no means impossible
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 1: for a person to be excommunicated as a heretic, and,
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: on further consideration, canonized as a saint. Excommunication by a
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: provincial ecclesiastical court is not one of the acts for
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 1: which the Church claims infallibility. Perhaps I had better inform
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 1: my Protestant readers that the famous dogma of peopal infallibility
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: is by far the most modest pretension of the kind
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: in existence. Compared with our infallible democracies, our infallible medical councils,
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: our infallible astronomers, our infallible judges, and our infallible parliaments.
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 1: The pope is on his knees in the dust, confessing
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 1: his ignorance before the throne of God, asking only that
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: as to certain historical matters on which he has clearly
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 1: more sources of information open to him than anyone else,
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 1: his decision shall be taken as final. The Church may,
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: and perhaps some day will canonize Galileo without compromising such
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: infallibility as it claims for the pope, if not without
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: compromising the infallibility claimed for the Book of Joshua by
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 1: simple souls whose rational faith in more important things has
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 1: become bound up with a quite irrational faith in the
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: chronicle of Joshua's campaigns as a treatise on physics. Therefore,
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: the Church will probably not canonize Galileo yet, awhile, though
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: it might do worse. But it has been able to
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 1: canonize Joan without any compromise at all. She never doubted
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: that the sun went round the earth. She had seen
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: it do so too often. Still, there was a great
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: wrong done to Joan and to the conscience of the
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 1: world by her burning to Compendra, say to Padeney, which
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 1: is the devil's sentimentality, cannot excuse it when we have
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 1: admitted that the tribunal was not only ones legal, but
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 1: exceptionally merciful in respect of sparing Joone the torture which
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: was customary when she was abdurate as to taking the oath,
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: and that Beauchamp was far more self disciplined and conscientious,
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 1: both as priest and lawyer, than any English judge ever
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: dreams of being in a political case in which his
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: party and class prejudices are involved. The human fact remains
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: that the burning of Joan of Arc was a horror,
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 1: and that a historian who would defend it would defend anything.
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: The final criticism of its physical side is implied in
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 1: the refusal of the Marquess Islanders to be persuaded that
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 1: the English did not eat Joan. Why they asked should
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: anyone take the trouble to roast a human being? Except
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 1: with that object, they cannot conceive its being a pleasure.
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 1: As we have no answer for them, that is not
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 1: shameful to us. Let us blush for our more complicated
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 1: and pretentious sectry before we proceed to unravel the business further,
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 1: and see what other lessons it contains for us. Cruelty
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 1: modern and medieval. First, let us get rid of the
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: notion that the mere physical cruelty of the burning has
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 1: any special significance Joan was burnt, just as dozens of
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 1: less interesting heretics were burnt in her time. Christ In
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: being crucified, only shared the fate of thousands of forgotten malefactors.
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 1: They have no pre eminence in mere physical pain. Much
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 1: more horrible executions than theirs are on record, to say
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 1: nothing of the agonies of so called natural death at
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: its worst. Joan was burnt more than five hundred years ago,
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: more than three hundred years later, that is, only about
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: one hundred years before I was born, a woman was
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 1: burnt on Stephens Green in my native city of Dublin,
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 1: for coining, which was held to be treason. In my
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 1: preface to the recent volume on English prisons under Local
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: Government by Sydney and Beatrice Webb, I have mentioned that
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: when I was already a grown man, I saw Richard
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 1: Wagner conduct two concerts, and that when Richard Wagner was
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: a young man, he saw and avoided a crowd of
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 1: people hastening to see a soldier broken on the wheel
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: by the more cruel of the two ways of carrying
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: out that hideous method of execution. Also that the penalty
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 1: of hanging, drawing and quartering unmentionable in its details, was
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 1: abolished so recently that there are men living who have
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 1: been sentenced to it. We are still flogging criminals and
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: clamoring for more flogging. Not even the most sensationally frightful
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: of these atrocities inflicted on its victim. The misery, degradation,
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: and conscious waste and loss of life suffered in our
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 1: modern prisons, especially the model ones, without as far as
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: I can see, rousing any more compunction than the burning
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 1: of heretics did in the Middle Ages. We have not
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: even the excuse of getting some fun out of our prisons,
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: as the Middle Ages did out of their stakes and
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: wheels and gibbets. Joan herself judged this matter when she
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: had to choose between imprisonment and the stake, and chose
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: the stake, And thereby she deprived the Church of the
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: plea that it was guiltless of her death, which was
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: the work of the secular arm. The Church should have
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 1: confined itself to excommunicating her there it was within its rights.
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 1: She had refused to accept its authority or comply with
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 1: its conditions, and it could say with truth, you are
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: not one of us. Go forth and find the religion
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: that suits you, or found one for yourself. It had
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 1: no right to say, you may return to us now
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 1: that you have recanted, but you shall stay in a
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 1: dungeon all the rest of your life. Unfortunately, the Church
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: did not believe that there was any genuine soul saving
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 1: religion outside itself, and it was deeply corrupted, as all
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 1: the churches were and still are, by primitive calibanism in
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 1: Browning sense, or the propitiation of a dreaded deity by
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 1: suffering and sacrifice. Its method was not cruelty for Cruelty's sake,
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 1: but cruelty for the salvation of Joan's soul. Joan, however,
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: believed that the saving of her soul was her own
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: business and not that of Le Jean de Glies. By
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 1: using that term as she did mistrustfully and contemptuously, she
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 1: announced herself as in Germ, an anti clerical, as thorough
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 1: going as Voltaire or anatole France. Had she said, in
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 1: so many words, to the dustbin, with the church militant
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 1: and its black goatd ofviduals, I recognize only the Church
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 1: triumphant in heaven, she would hardly have put her view
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 1: more plainly Catholic anti clericalism must not leave it to
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 1: be inferred here that one cannot be an anti clerical
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 1: and a good Catholic. To all the reforming popes have
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 1: been vehement anti clerical's, veritable scourges of the clergy. All
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 1: the great orders arose from dissatisfaction with the priests, that
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: of the Franciscans with priestly snobbery, that of the Dominicans
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 1: with priestly laziness and laodicnism, that of the Jesuits with
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: priestly apathy and ignorance and indiscipline. The most bigoted ulster
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 1: orangeman or lester low church bourgeois, as described by mister
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 1: Henry Nevinson, is a mere gallio compared to Machiavelli, who,
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 1: though no Protestant, was a fierce anti clerical. Any Catholic may,
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 1: and many Catholics do, denounce any priest or body of
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 1: priests as lazy, drunken, idol, dissolate, and unworthy of their
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 1: great Church and their function as the pastors of their
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 1: flocks of human souls. But to say that the souls
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 1: of the people are no business of the churchmen is
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 1: to go a step further, a step across the rubicon.
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 1: Joan virtually took that step. Catholicism not yet Catholic enough.
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: And so if we admit, as we must, that the
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 1: burning of Joan was a mistake, we must broaden Catholicism
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 1: sufficiently to include her in its charter. Our churches must
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: admit that no official organization of mortal men whose vocation
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 1: does not carry with it extraordinary mental powers. And this
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: is all that any church militant can, in the face
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 1: of fact and history, pretend to be, can keep peace
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 1: with the private judgment of persons of genius, except when,
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: by a very rare accident, the genius happens to be pope,
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 1: and not even then unless he is an exceedingly overbearing pope.
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 1: The churches must learn humility as well as teach the
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 1: Apostolic succession cannot be secured or confined by the laying
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 1: on of hands. The tongues of fire have descended on
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 1: heathens and outcasts too often for that, leaving anointed churchmen
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 1: to scandalize history as worldly rascals. When the Church militant
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: behaves as if it were already the Church triumphant, it
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: makes these appalling blunders about Joan and Bruno and Galileo
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 1: and the rest, which makes it so difficult for a
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 1: freethinker to join it. And a church which has no
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 1: place for freethinkers, nay, which does not inculcate and encourage
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: freethinking with a complete belief that thought, when really free, must,
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: by its own law, take the path that leads to
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 1: the church's bosom, not only has no future in modern culture,
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: but obviously has no faith in the valid science of
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 1: its own tenets, and is guilty of the heresy that
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: theology and science are two different and opposite impulses, rivals
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 1: for human allegiance. I have before me the letter of
• 1:24:07
  Speaker 1: a Catholic priest in your play, he writes, I see
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 1: the dramatic presentation of the conflict of the regal sasserdotal
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 1: and prophetical powers in which Joan was crushed. To me,
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 1: it is not the victory of any one of them
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 1: over the others that will bring peace and the reign
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 1: of the saints in the Kingdom of God, but their
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 1: fruitful interaction in a costly but noble state of tension.
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: The Pope himself could not put it better, nor can I.
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 1: We must accept the tension and maintain it nobly without
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: letting ourselves be tempted to relieve it by burning the thread.
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: This is Joan's lesson to the Church, and its formulation
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 1: by the hand of a priest emboldens me to claim
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 1: that her canonization was a magnificently Catholic gesture, as the
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 1: canonization of a Protestant saint by the Church of Rome.
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 1: But its special value and virtue cannot be apparent until
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 1: it is known and understood as such. If any simple
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 1: priest for whom this is too hard a saying tells
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 1: me that it was not so intended, I shall remind
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 1: him that the Church is in the hands of God,
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 1: and not as simple priests imagine God in the hands
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: of the Church. So if he answers too confidently for
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 1: God's intention, he may be asked, hast thou entered into
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 1: the springs of the sea, or hast thou walked in
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 1: the recesses of the deep? And Joan's own answer is
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 1: also the answer of old. Though he slay me, yet
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: will I trust in him? But I will maintain my
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: own ways before him. The law of change is the
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 1: law of God. When Joan maintained her own ways, she claimed,
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 1: like job that there was not only God and the
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 1: Church to be considered, but the Word made flesh, that is,
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 1: the unaveraged individual, representing life, possibly at its highest actual
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: human evolution, and possibly at its lowest, but never at
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: its merely mathematical average. Now there is no deification of
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 1: the democratic average. In the theory of the church. It
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 1: is an avowed hierarchy in which the members are sifted,
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 1: until at the end of the process an individual stands
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 1: supreme as the vicar of Christ. But when the process
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 1: is examined, it appears that its successive steps of selection
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 1: and election are of the superior by the inferior, the
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 1: cardinal vice of democracy, with the result that great popes
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: are as rare and accidental as great kings, and that
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 1: it has sometimes been safer for an aspirant to the
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 1: chair and the keys to pass as a moribundaughtered than
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 1: as an energetic saint. At best. Very few popes have
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 1: been canonized or could be without letting down the standard
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 1: of sanctity set by the self elected saints. No other
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 1: result could have been reasonably expected, for it is not
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 1: possible that an official organization of the spiritual needs of
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 1: millions of men and women mostly poor and ignorant, should
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 1: compete successfully in the selection of its principles with the
• 1:27:24
  Speaker 1: direct choice of the Holy Ghost as it flashes with
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: unerring aim upon the individual. Nor can any college of
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 1: cardinals pray effectively that its choice may be inspired. The
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 1: conscious prayer of the inferior may be that his choice
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 1: may light on a greater than himself, but the subconscious
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 1: intention of his self preserving individuality must be to find
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: a trustworthy servant of his own purposes. The saints and prophets,
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 1: though they may be accidentally in this or that official
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 1: position or rank, are always really self selected, like chom
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 1: And since neither Church nor state, by the secular necessities
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 1: of its constitution, can guarantee even the recognition of such
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 1: self chosen missions, there is nothing for us but to
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 1: make it a point of honor to privilege heresy to
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: the last bearable degree, on the simple ground that all
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 1: evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear as
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 1: heresy and misconduct. In short, though all society is founded
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 1: on intolerance, all improvement is founded on tolerance, or the
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 1: recognition of the fact that the law of evolution is
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 1: ibsence law of change, and as the law of God
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 1: in any sense of the word, which can now command
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 1: a faith proof against science, is a law of evolution.
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: It follows that the law of God is a law
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 1: of change, and that when the churches set themselves against
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 1: change as such, they are setting themselves against the law
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 1: of God. Credulity modern and medieval. When Abernethy, the famous doctor,
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 1: was asked why he indulged himself with all the habits
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 1: he warned his patience against as unhealthy, he replied that
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 1: his business was that of a direction post, which points
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 1: out the way to a place that does not go
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 1: thither itself. He might have added that neither does it
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 1: compel the traveler to go thither, nor prevent him from
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 1: seeking some other way. Unfortunately, our clerical direction posts always
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 1: do coerce the traveler when they have the political power
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 1: to do so. When the Church was a temporal as
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 1: well as a spiritual power, and for long after to
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 1: the full extent to which it could control or influence
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 1: the temporal power, it enforced conformity by persecutions that were
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 1: all the more ruthless because their intention was so excellent.
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: When the doctor has succeeded to the priest and can
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 1: do practically what he likes with Parliament and the press
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 1: through the blind faith in him, which has succeeded to
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 1: the far more critical faith in the parson. Legal compulsion
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 1: to take the doctor's prescription, however, poisonous is a carried
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 1: to an extent that would have horrified the Inquisition and
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 1: staggered Archbishop laud. Our credulity is grosser than that of
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 1: the Middle Ages, because the priest had no such direct
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 1: pecuniary interest in our sins as the doctor has in
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 1: our diseases. He did not starve when all was well
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 1: with his flock, nor prosper when they were perishing, as
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 1: our private commercial doctors must. Also, the medieval cleric believed
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: that something extremely unpleasant would happen to him after death
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: if he was unscrupulous, a belief now practically extinct among
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 1: persons receiving a dogmatically materialist education. Our professional corporations are
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 1: trade unions without souls to be damned, and they will
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 1: soon drive us to remind them that they have bodies
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 1: to be kicked. The Vatican was never soulless. At worst,
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 1: it was a political conspiracy to make the Church supreme
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 1: temporarily as well as spiritually, Therefore, the question raised by
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 1: Joan's burning is a burning question still, though the penalties
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 1: involved are not so sensational. That is why I am
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 1: probing it. If it were only an historical curiosity, I
• 1:31:35
  Speaker 1: would not waste my reader's time and my own on
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 1: it for five minutes. Toleration modern and medieval. The more
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 1: closely we grapple with it, the more difficult it becomes.
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: At first sight, we are disposed to repeat that Joan
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 1: should have been excommunicated and then left to go her
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 1: own way, though she would have protested vehemently against so
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 1: cruel a deprivation of her spiritualfy food for confession, absolution,
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 1: and the body of her Lord were first necessaries of
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: life to her. Such a spirit as Jones might have
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 1: got over that difficulty, as the Church of England got
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 1: over the bulls of Pope Leo by making a church
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 1: of her own and affirming it to be the temple
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 1: of the true and original faith from which her persecutors
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 1: had strayed. But as such a proceeding was in the
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 1: eyes of both church and state at that time, a
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 1: spreading of damnation and anarchy, its toleration involved a greater
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 1: strain on faith and freedom than political and ecclesiastical human
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 1: nature could bear. It is easy to say that the
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 1: Church should have waited for the alleged evil results instead
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 1: of assuming that they would occur and what they would be.
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 1: That sounds simple enough. But if a modern public health
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 1: authority were to leave people entirely to their own devices
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 1: in the matter of sanitation, saying we have nothing to
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 1: do with drainage or your views about drainage, but if
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 1: you catch smallpox or typhus, we will prosecute you and
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 1: have you punished very severely. Like the authorities in Butler's Erejuan,
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 1: it would either be removed to the county asylum or
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 1: reminded that a's neglect of sanitation may kill the child
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 1: of B two miles off, or start an epidemic in
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 1: which the most conscientious sanitarians may perish. We must face
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 1: the fact that society is founded on intolerance. There are
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 1: glaring cases of the abuse of intolerance, but they are
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 1: quite as characteristic of our own age as of the
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 1: Middle Ages. The typical modern example and contrast is compulsory inoculation,
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 1: replacing what was virtually compulsory baptism. But compulsion to inoculate
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 1: is objected to as a crudely unscientific and mischievous anti
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 1: sanitary quackery, not in the least because we think it
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 1: wrong to compel people to protect their children from disease.
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 1: Its opponents would make it a crime, and will probably
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 1: succeed in doing so, and that will be just as
• 1:34:10
  Speaker 1: intolerant as making it compulsory. Neither the pasturians nor their opponents.
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 1: The sanitarians would leave parents free to bring up their
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 1: children naked, though that course also has some plausible advocates.
• 1:34:26
  Speaker 1: We may prate of toleration as we will, but society
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 1: must always draw a line somewhere between allowable conduct and
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 1: insanity or crime. In spite of the risk of mistaking
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 1: sages for lunatics and saviors for blasphemers, we must persecute
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 1: even to the death, And all we can do to
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 1: mitigate the danger of persecution is first to be very
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 1: careful what we persecute, and second to bear in mind
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 1: that unless there is a large liberty to shock conventional
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 1: people and a a well informed sense of the value
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 1: of originality, individuality, and eccentricity, the result will be a
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 1: parent stagnation covering a repression of evolutionary forces which will
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 1: eventually explode with extravagant and probably destructive violence. Variability of toleration,
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 1: the degree of tolerance attainable at any moment, depends on
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 1: the strain under which society is maintaining its cohesion. In war,
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 1: for instance, we suppress the Gospels and put Quakers in prison,
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 1: muzzle the newspapers, and make it a serious offense to
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 1: show a light at night. Under the strain of invasion.
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 1: The French government in seventeen ninety two struck off four
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 1: thousand heads, mostly on grounds that would not, in time
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 1: of settled peace, have provoked any government to chloroform a dog.
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 1: And in nineteen twenty the British government slaughtered and burnt
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 1: in Ireland to persecute the advocates of a constitutional change
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: which it had presently to affect itself. Later on, the
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 1: FASCISTI in Italy did everything that the Black Intans did
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 1: in Ireland, with some grotesquely ferocious variations, under the strain
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 1: of an unskilled attempt at industrial revolution by socialists who
• 1:36:24
  Speaker 1: understood socialism even less than capitalists understand capitalism. In the
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 1: United States, an incredibly savage persecution of Russians took place
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 1: during the scare spread by the Russian Bolshevik Revolution after
• 1:36:39
  Speaker 1: nineteen seventeen. These instances could easily be multiplied, but they
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 1: are enough to show that between a maximum of indulgent
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 1: toleration and a ruthlessly intolerant terrorism, there is a scale
• 1:36:53
  Speaker 1: through which toleration is continually rising or falling, and that
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 1: there was not the smallest ground for the self complacent
• 1:37:00
  Speaker 1: conviction of the nineteenth century that it was more tolerant
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: than the fifteenth, or that such an event as the
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 1: execution of Joan could not possibly occur in what we
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 1: call our own more enlightened times. Thousands of women, each
• 1:37:17
  Speaker 1: of them a thousand times less dangerous and terrifying to
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 1: our governments than Joan was to the government of her day,
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 1: have within the last ten years been slaughtered, starved to death,
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 1: burnt out of house and home, and what not that
• 1:37:33
  Speaker 1: persecution and terror could do to them in the course
• 1:37:36
  Speaker 1: of crusades far more tyrannically pretentious than the medieval crusades,
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 1: which proposed nothing more hyperbolical than the rescue of the
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 1: Holy Sepulcher from the Saracens. The Inquisition, with its English equivalent,
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 1: the Star Chamber, are gone in the sense that their
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 1: names are now disused. But can any of the modern
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 1: substancetitudes for the Inquisition, the special tribunals and commissions, the
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 1: punitive expeditions, the suspensions of the Habeas Corpus Act, the
• 1:38:09
  Speaker 1: proclamations of martial law and of minor states of siege,
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 1: and the rest of them claimed that their victims have
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 1: as fair a trial, as well considered a body of
• 1:38:20
  Speaker 1: law to govern their cases, or as conscientious a judge
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 1: to insist on strict legality of procedure, as Joan had
• 1:38:29
  Speaker 1: from the Inquisition and from the spirit of the Middle Ages,
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 1: even when her country was under the heaviest strain of
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 1: civil and foreign war from US, she would have had
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 1: no trial and no law except a defense of the
• 1:38:43
  Speaker 1: Realm Act suspending all law, and for judge, she would
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 1: have had at best a bothered major and at worst
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 1: a promoted advocate in ermine and scarlet, to whom the
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 1: scruples of a trained ecclesiastic like Beauchamp would seem ridiculous
• 1:39:01
  Speaker 1: and ungentlemanly. And of Part three, Part four of A
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 1: Saint John preface by George Bernard Shaw, this LibriVox recording
• 1:39:16
  Speaker 1: is in the public domain. Part four, The conflict between
• 1:39:20
  Speaker 1: genius and discipline. Having thus brought the matter home to ourselves,
• 1:39:26
  Speaker 1: we may now consider the special feature of Jones's mental
• 1:39:29
  Speaker 1: constitution which made her so unmanageable. What is to be done,
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 1: on the one hand with rulers who will not give
• 1:39:36
  Speaker 1: any reason for their orders, and on the other with
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 1: people who cannot understand the reasons when they are given.
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 1: The government of the world, political, industrial, and domestic has
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 1: to be carried on mostly by the giving and obeying
• 1:39:50
  Speaker 1: of orders. Under just these conditions, don't argue. Do as
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 1: you're told has to be said, not only to children
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 1: and soldiers, but practically to everybody. Fortunately, most people do
• 1:40:02
  Speaker 1: not want to argue. They are only too glad to
• 1:40:05
  Speaker 1: be save the trouble of thinking for themselves, and the
• 1:40:08
  Speaker 1: ablest and most independent thinkers are content to understand their
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 1: own special department. In other departments, they will unhesitatingly ask
• 1:40:18
  Speaker 1: for and accept the instructions of a policeman or the
• 1:40:21
  Speaker 1: advice of a tailor, without demanding or desiring explanations. Nevertheless,
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 1: there must be some ground for attaching authority to an order.
• 1:40:31
  Speaker 1: A child will obey its parents a soldier, his officer,
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 1: a philosopher, a railway porter, and a workman a foreman,
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 1: all without question, because it is generally accepted that those
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 1: who give the orders understand what they are about, and
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 1: are duly authorized and even obliged to give them, and
• 1:40:50
  Speaker 1: because in the practical emergencies of daily life there is
• 1:40:54
  Speaker 1: no time for lessons and explanations, or for arguments as
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 1: to their validity. Such obediences are as necessary to the
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 1: continuous operation of our social system as the revolutions of
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 1: the earth are to the succession of day and night.
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 1: But they are not so spontaneous as they seem. They
• 1:41:13
  Speaker 1: have to be very carefully arranged and maintained. A bishop
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 1: will defer to and obey a king, but let a
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 1: curate venture to give him an order, however necessary and sensible,
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 1: and the bishop will forget his cloth and damn the
• 1:41:28
  Speaker 1: curate's impudence. The more obedient a man is to accredited authority,
• 1:41:33
  Speaker 1: the more jealous he is of allowing any unauthorized person
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 1: to order him about. With all this in mind, consider
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 1: the career of Joam. She was a village girl in
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 1: authority over sheep and pigs, dogs and chickens, and to
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 1: some extent over her father's higher laborers when he hired any,
• 1:41:53
  Speaker 1: but over no one else on earth outside the farm.
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 1: She had no authority, no prestige, no claim to the
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 1: smallest deference. Yet she ordered everybody about, from her uncle
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 1: to the king, the archbishop, and the military general staff.
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 1: Her uncle obeyed her like a sheep, and took her
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 1: to the castle of the local commander, who, on being
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 1: ordered about, tried to assert himself, but soon collapsed and obeyed,
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 1: and so on up to the king. As we have seen,
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 1: this would have been unbearably irritating even if her orders
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 1: had been offered as rational solutions of the desperate difficulties
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 1: in which her social superiors found themselves just then. But
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 1: they were not so offered, nor were they offered as
• 1:42:39
  Speaker 1: the expression of Jones's arbitrary will. It was never I
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 1: say so, but always God says so, Joan as theocrat.
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 1: Leaders who take that line have no trouble with some
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 1: people and no end of trouble with others. They need
• 1:42:57
  Speaker 1: never fear a lukewarm reception. Either they are messengers of
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 1: God or they are blasphemous impostors. In the Middle Ages,
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 1: the general belief in witchcraft greatly intensified this contrast, because
• 1:43:10
  Speaker 1: when an apparent miracle happened, as in the case of
• 1:43:13
  Speaker 1: the wind changing at Orleon, it proved a divine mission
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 1: to the credulous and proved a contract with the devil
• 1:43:21
  Speaker 1: to the skeptical. All through, Joan had to depend on
• 1:43:25
  Speaker 1: those who accepted her as an incarnate angel against those
• 1:43:29
  Speaker 1: who added to an intense resentment of her presumption a
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 1: bigoted abhorrence of her as a witch. To this abhorrence,
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 1: we must add the extreme irritation of those who did
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 1: not believe in the voices and regarded her as a
• 1:43:44
  Speaker 1: liar and impostor. It is hard to conceive anything more
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 1: infuriating to a statesman or a military commander, or to
• 1:43:53
  Speaker 1: a court favorite than to be overruled at every turn,
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 1: or to be robbed of the ear of the reigning
• 1:43:59
  Speaker 1: sovereign by an impudent, young upstart practicing on the credulity
• 1:44:03
  Speaker 1: of the populace and the vanity and silliness of an
• 1:44:06
  Speaker 1: immature prince by exploiting a few of those lucky coincidences
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 1: which pass as miracles with uncritical people. Not only were
• 1:44:16
  Speaker 1: the envy, snobbery, and competitive ambition of the baser natures
• 1:44:20
  Speaker 1: exacerbated by Jones's success, but among the friendly ones that
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 1: were clever enough to be critical, a quite reasonable skepticism
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 1: and mistrust of her ability, founded on a fair observation
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 1: of her obvious ignorance and temerity were at work against her.
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 1: And as she met all remonstrances and all criticisms not
• 1:44:41
  Speaker 1: with arguments or persuasion, but with a flat appeal to
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 1: the authority of God and a claim to be in
• 1:44:48
  Speaker 1: God's special confidence, she must have seemed to all who
• 1:44:51
  Speaker 1: were not infatuated by her so insufferable that nothing but
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 1: an unbroken chain of overwhelming success in the military and
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 1: political field could have saved her from the wrath that
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 1: finally destroyed her. Unbroken success essential in theocracy. To forge
• 1:45:12
  Speaker 1: suss a chain, she needed to be the King, the
• 1:45:15
  Speaker 1: Archbishop of Rance, the Bastard of Orleans, and herself into
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 1: the bargain, and that was impossible from the moment when
• 1:45:23
  Speaker 1: she failed to simulate Charles to follow up his coronation
• 1:45:27
  Speaker 1: with a swoop on Paris, she was lost. The fact
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 1: that she insisted on this whilst the King and the
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 1: rest timidly and foolishly thought they could square the Duke
• 1:45:37
  Speaker 1: of Burgundy and effect a combination with him against the English.
• 1:45:42
  Speaker 1: Made her a terrifying nuisance to them, and from that
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 1: time onward she could do nothing but prowl about the battlefields,
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 1: waiting for some lucky chance to sweep the captains into
• 1:45:53
  Speaker 1: a big move. But it was to the enemy that
• 1:45:56
  Speaker 1: the chance came. She was taken prisoner by the Burgundians
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 1: fighting before Campient, and at once discovered that she had
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 1: not a friend in the political world. Had she escaped,
• 1:46:08
  Speaker 1: she would probably have fought on until the English were gone,
• 1:46:12
  Speaker 1: and then had to shake the dust of the court
• 1:46:15
  Speaker 1: off her feet and retire to Don Remi, as Garibaldi
• 1:46:19
  Speaker 1: had to retire to Caprera. Modern distortions of Jones's history. This,
• 1:46:27
  Speaker 1: i think, is all that we can now pretend to
• 1:46:30
  Speaker 1: say about the prose of Jones's career. The romance of
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 1: her rise, the tragedy of her execution, and the comedy
• 1:46:37
  Speaker 1: of the attempts of posterity to make amends for that
• 1:46:41
  Speaker 1: execution belonged to my play, and not to my preface,
• 1:46:45
  Speaker 1: which must be confined to a sober essay on the facts.
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 1: That such an essay as badly needed can be ascertained
• 1:46:53
  Speaker 1: by examining any of our standard works of reference. They
• 1:46:58
  Speaker 1: give accurately enough the facts of the visit to Vanculaire,
• 1:47:02
  Speaker 1: the enunciation to Charles asch known, the raising of the
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 1: siege of Orleans and the subsequent battles, the coronation at Rance,
• 1:47:11
  Speaker 1: the capture at Compienne, and the trial and execution at Rouen,
• 1:47:15
  Speaker 1: with their dates and the names of the people concerned.
• 1:47:18
  Speaker 1: But they all break down on the melodramatic legend of
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 1: the wicked bishop and the entrapped maiden and the rest
• 1:47:24
  Speaker 1: of it. It would be far less misleading if they
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 1: were wrong as to the facts, and right in their
• 1:47:31
  Speaker 1: view of the facts. As it is, they illustrate the
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 1: too little considered truth that the fashion in which we
• 1:47:38
  Speaker 1: think changes like the fashion of our clothes, and that
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 1: it is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to
• 1:47:46
  Speaker 1: think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.
• 1:47:50
  Speaker 1: History always out of date. This, by the way, is
• 1:47:53
  Speaker 1: why children are never taught contemporary history. Their history books
• 1:47:57
  Speaker 1: deal with periods of which the thinking had passed out
• 1:48:00
  Speaker 1: of fashion and the circumstances no longer apply to active life.
• 1:48:05
  Speaker 1: For example, they are taught history about Washington and told
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 1: lies about Lenin. In Washington's time, they were told lies
• 1:48:13
  Speaker 1: the same lies about Washington, and taught history about Cromwell.
• 1:48:18
  Speaker 1: In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they were told lies
• 1:48:21
  Speaker 1: about Joan, and by this time might very well be
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 1: told the truth about her. Unfortunately, the lies did not
• 1:48:29
  Speaker 1: cease when the political circumstances became obsolete. The Reformation, which
• 1:48:34
  Speaker 1: Joan had unconsciously anticipated, kept the questions which arose in
• 1:48:39
  Speaker 1: her case burning up to our own day. You can
• 1:48:42
  Speaker 1: see plenty of the burnt houses still in Ireland, with
• 1:48:46
  Speaker 1: the result that Joan has remained the subject of anti
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 1: clerical lies, of specifically Protestant lies, and of Roman Catholic
• 1:48:55
  Speaker 1: evasions of her unconscious Protestantism. The truth in our throats,
• 1:49:01
  Speaker 1: with all the sauces it is served with, it will
• 1:49:04
  Speaker 1: never go down until we take it without any sauce
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 1: at all. The real Joan not marvelous enough for us,
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 1: but even in its simplicity, the faith demanded by Joan
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 1: is one in which the anti metaphysical temper of nineteenth
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 1: century civilization, which remains powerful in England and America and
• 1:49:25
  Speaker 1: is tyrannical in France contemptuously refuses her. We do not
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 1: like her. Contemporaries rush to the opposite extreme in a
• 1:49:35
  Speaker 1: recoil from her, as from a witch, self sold to
• 1:49:39
  Speaker 1: the devil, because we do not believe in the devil,
• 1:49:42
  Speaker 1: nor in the possibility of commercial contracts with him. Our credulity,
• 1:49:47
  Speaker 1: though enormous, is not boundless, and our stock of it
• 1:49:51
  Speaker 1: is quite used up by our mediums clairvoyance, handreaders, slate writers,
• 1:49:57
  Speaker 1: Christian scientists, psychoanalysts, elect chronic vibration diviners, therapeutists of all schools,
• 1:50:04
  Speaker 1: registered and unregistered, astrologers, astronomers who tell us that the
• 1:50:09
  Speaker 1: Sun is nearly one hundred million miles away and the
• 1:50:12
  Speaker 1: bettlegeese as ten times as big as the whole universe,
• 1:50:16
  Speaker 1: physicists who balance bettle geese by describing the incredible smallness
• 1:50:20
  Speaker 1: of the atom, and a host of other marvel bongers
• 1:50:24
  Speaker 1: whose credulity would have dissolved the Middle Ages in a
• 1:50:27
  Speaker 1: roar of skeptical merriment. In the Middle Ages, people believed
• 1:50:31
  Speaker 1: that the Earth was flat, for which they had at
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 1: least the evidence of their senses. We believe it to
• 1:50:37
  Speaker 1: be round, not because as many as one percent of
• 1:50:40
  Speaker 1: us could give the physical reasons for so quaint a belief,
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 1: But because modern science has convinced us that nothing that
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 1: is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless,
• 1:50:56
  Speaker 1: or outrageous is scientific. Not, by the way, be taken
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 1: as implying that the Earth is flat, or that all
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 1: or any of our amazing credulities are delusions or impostures.
• 1:51:10
  Speaker 1: I am only defending my own age against the charge
• 1:51:13
  Speaker 1: of being less imaginative than the Middle Ages. I affirm
• 1:51:17
  Speaker 1: that the nineteenth century and still more the twentieth can
• 1:51:20
  Speaker 1: knock the fifteenth into a cocktat in point of susceptibility
• 1:51:24
  Speaker 1: to marvels and saints and prophets and musicians and monsters
• 1:51:29
  Speaker 1: and fairy tales of all kinds. The proportion of marvel
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 1: to immediately credible statements in the latest edition of the
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 1: Encyclopedia Britannica is enormously greater than in the Bible. The
• 1:51:43
  Speaker 1: medieval doctors of divinity, who did not pretend to settle
• 1:51:46
  Speaker 1: how many angels could dance on the point of a needle,
• 1:51:49
  Speaker 1: cut a very poor figure as far as romantic credulity
• 1:51:53
  Speaker 1: is concerned beside the modern physicists, who have settled to
• 1:51:57
  Speaker 1: the billionth of a millimeter every movement and position in
• 1:52:01
  Speaker 1: the dance of the electron. Not for worlds would I
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 1: question the precise accuracy of these calculations, or the existence
• 1:52:09
  Speaker 1: of electrons, whatever they may be. The fate of Joan
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 1: is a warning to me against such heresy. But why
• 1:52:16
  Speaker 1: the men who believe in electrons should regard themselves as
• 1:52:19
  Speaker 1: less credulous than the men who believed in angels is
• 1:52:23
  Speaker 1: not apparent to me. If they refuse to believe with
• 1:52:26
  Speaker 1: the Roumant assessors of fourteen thirty one that Joan was
• 1:52:30
  Speaker 1: a witch, it is not because that explanation is too marvelous,
• 1:52:35
  Speaker 1: but because it is not marvelous enough the stage limits
• 1:52:40
  Speaker 1: of historical representation. For the story of Joan, I refer
• 1:52:44
  Speaker 1: the reader to the play which follows. It contains all
• 1:52:48
  Speaker 1: that need be known about her. But as it is
• 1:52:51
  Speaker 1: for stage use, I have had to condense into three
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 1: and a half hours a series of events which, in
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 1: their historical happening were spread over four times as many months.
• 1:53:01
  Speaker 1: For the theater imposes unities of time and place from
• 1:53:05
  Speaker 1: which nature, in her boundless wastefulness is free. Therefore, the
• 1:53:09
  Speaker 1: reader must not suppose that Joan really put Robert de
• 1:53:13
  Speaker 1: Baudricourt in her pocket in fifteen minutes, nor that her excommunication, recantation, relapse,
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 1: and death at the stake were a matter of half
• 1:53:23
  Speaker 1: an hour or so. Neither do I claim more for
• 1:53:26
  Speaker 1: my dramatizations of Joan's contemporaries than that some of them
• 1:53:31
  Speaker 1: are probably slightly more like the originals than those imaginary
• 1:53:35
  Speaker 1: portraits of all the popes from Saint Peter onward through
• 1:53:38
  Speaker 1: the dark Ages, which are still gravely exhibited in the
• 1:53:42
  Speaker 1: Eufidzi in Florence, or were when I was there last.
• 1:53:47
  Speaker 1: My du Noirs would do equally well for the Duke Dalisson.
• 1:53:51
  Speaker 1: Both left descriptions of Joan so similar that, as a
• 1:53:55
  Speaker 1: man always describes himself unconsciously, whenever he described anyone else,
• 1:54:01
  Speaker 1: I have inferred that these good natured young men were
• 1:54:05
  Speaker 1: very like one another in mind. So I have lumped
• 1:54:08
  Speaker 1: the twain into a single figure, thereby saving the theater
• 1:54:11
  Speaker 1: manager a salary and a suit of armour. De Noa's
• 1:54:15
  Speaker 1: face still on record at Chateau Dain, is a suggestive help,
• 1:54:20
  Speaker 1: But I really know no more about these men and
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 1: their circle than Shakespeare knew about Falconbridge and the Duke
• 1:54:26
  Speaker 1: of Austria, or about Macbeth and macduff. In view of
• 1:54:30
  Speaker 1: things they did in history and have to do again
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 1: in the play, I can only invent appropriate characters for
• 1:54:37
  Speaker 1: them in Shakespeare's manner, avoid in the Elizabethan drama. I have, however,
• 1:54:43
  Speaker 1: one advantage over the Elizabethans. I write in full view
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 1: of the Middle Ages, which may be said to have
• 1:54:50
  Speaker 1: been rediscovered in the middle of the nineteenth century after
• 1:54:53
  Speaker 1: an eclipse of about four hundred and fifty years. The
• 1:54:57
  Speaker 1: renaissance of antique literature and art in the sixth eighth
• 1:55:00
  Speaker 1: century and the lusty growth of capitalism between them buried
• 1:55:04
  Speaker 1: the Middle Ages and their resurrection is a second Renaissance.
• 1:55:09
  Speaker 1: Now there is not a breath of medieval atmosphere in
• 1:55:12
  Speaker 1: Shakespeare's histories. His Jawn of Gaunt is like a study
• 1:55:16
  Speaker 1: of the Old Age of Drake. Although he was a
• 1:55:19
  Speaker 1: Catholic by family tradition, his figures are all intensely Protestant individualists, skeptical,
• 1:55:26
  Speaker 1: self centered in everything but their love affairs, and completely
• 1:55:31
  Speaker 1: personal and selfish. Even in them. His kings are not statesmen,
• 1:55:36
  Speaker 1: his cardinals have no religion. A novice can read his
• 1:55:40
  Speaker 1: place from one end to the other without learning that
• 1:55:42
  Speaker 1: the world is finely governed by forces expressing themselves in
• 1:55:46
  Speaker 1: religions and laws which make epochs, rather than by vulgarly
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 1: ambitious individuals, who may rouse the divinity which shapes our
• 1:55:56
  Speaker 1: ends rough hew them. How we will is mentioned fatalistically,
• 1:56:01
  Speaker 1: only to be forgotten immediately, like a passing vague apprehension.
• 1:56:06
  Speaker 1: To Shakespeare, as to Mark Twain, Couchamp would have been
• 1:56:10
  Speaker 1: a tyrant and a bully instead of a Catholic, and
• 1:56:13
  Speaker 1: the inquisitor Leametre would have been a sadist instead of
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 1: a lawyer. Warwick would have had no more feudal quality
• 1:56:20
  Speaker 1: than his successor, the Kingmaker. As in the play of
• 1:56:24
  Speaker 1: Henry the sixth, we should have seen them all completely
• 1:56:27
  Speaker 1: satisfied that if they would only to their own selves
• 1:56:31
  Speaker 1: be true, they could not then be false to any man,
• 1:56:34
  Speaker 1: a precept which represents the reaction against medievalism at its intenses,
• 1:56:40
  Speaker 1: as if they were beings in the air without public
• 1:56:43
  Speaker 1: responsibilities of any kind. All Shakespeare's characters are so. That
• 1:56:49
  Speaker 1: is why they seem natural to our middle classes. Who
• 1:56:52
  Speaker 1: are comfortable and irresponsible at other people's expense, and are
• 1:56:56
  Speaker 1: neither ashamed of that condition nor even conscious of it.
• 1:57:00
  Speaker 1: Nature abhors this vacuum in Shakespeare, and I have taken
• 1:57:04
  Speaker 1: care to let the medieval atmosphere blow through my play freely.
• 1:57:09
  Speaker 1: Those who see it performed will not mistake the startling
• 1:57:12
  Speaker 1: event at records for a mere personal accident. They will
• 1:57:16
  Speaker 1: have before them not only the visible and human puppets,
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 1: but the Church, the Inquisition, the feudal system, with divine inspiration,
• 1:57:25
  Speaker 1: always beating against their two inelastic limits, all more terrible
• 1:57:30
  Speaker 1: in their dramatic force than any of the little mortal
• 1:57:33
  Speaker 1: figures clanking about in plate armor or moving silently in
• 1:57:37
  Speaker 1: the frocks and hoods of the Order of Saint Dominic
• 1:57:41
  Speaker 1: tragedy not melodrama. There are no villains in the peace. Crime,
• 1:57:46
  Speaker 1: like disease, is not interesting. It is something to be
• 1:57:49
  Speaker 1: done away with by general consent, and that is all
• 1:57:53
  Speaker 1: about it. It is what men do at their best
• 1:57:57
  Speaker 1: with good intentions, and what normal men and women find
• 1:58:00
  Speaker 1: that they must and will do in spite of their
• 1:58:02
  Speaker 1: intentions that really concerns us. The rascally bishop and the
• 1:58:07
  Speaker 1: cruel inquisitor of Mark Twain and Andrew Lang are as
• 1:58:10
  Speaker 1: dull as pickpockets, and they reduce Joan to the level
• 1:58:14
  Speaker 1: of the even less interesting person whose pocket is picked.
• 1:58:18
  Speaker 1: I have represented both of them as capable and eloquent
• 1:58:21
  Speaker 1: exponents of the Church militant and the Church litigant, because
• 1:58:26
  Speaker 1: only by doing so can I maintain my drama on
• 1:58:29
  Speaker 1: the level of high tragedy and save it from becoming
• 1:58:32
  Speaker 1: a mere police court sensation. A villain in a play
• 1:58:36
  Speaker 1: can never be anything more than a diabulus ex machina,
• 1:58:40
  Speaker 1: possibly a more exciting expedient than a Deus ex machina,
• 1:58:45
  Speaker 1: but both equally mechanical and therefore interesting only as mechanism.
• 1:58:51
  Speaker 1: It is I repeat what normally innocent people do that
• 1:58:55
  Speaker 1: concerns us, And if Joan had not been burnt by
• 1:58:58
  Speaker 1: normally innocent people in the energy of their righteousness, her
• 1:59:03
  Speaker 1: death at their hands would have no more significance than
• 1:59:06
  Speaker 1: the Tokyo earthquake, which burnt a great many maidens. The
• 1:59:10
  Speaker 1: tragedy of such murders is that they are not committed
• 1:59:13
  Speaker 1: by murderers. They are judicial murders, pious murders, and this
• 1:59:19
  Speaker 1: contradiction at once brings an element of comedy into the tragedy.
• 1:59:24
  Speaker 1: The angels may weep at the murder, but the gods
• 1:59:27
  Speaker 1: laugh at the murderers the inevitable flatteries of tragedy. Here,
• 1:59:33
  Speaker 1: then we have a reason why my drama of Saint
• 1:59:36
  Speaker 1: John's career, though it may give the essential truth of it,
• 1:59:40
  Speaker 1: gives an inexact picture of some accidental facts. It goes
• 1:59:45
  Speaker 1: almost without saying that the old Jean d'Arc melodramas reducing
• 1:59:50
  Speaker 1: everything to a conflict of villain and hero or in
• 1:59:53
  Speaker 1: Jones's case, a villain and heroine, not only miss the
• 1:59:57
  Speaker 1: point entirely but falsify the character, making Coachmp a scoundrel,
• 2:00:02
  Speaker 1: Joan of Prima Donna and du nois a lover. But
• 2:00:06
  Speaker 1: the writer of high tragedy and comedy, aiming at the
• 2:00:10
  Speaker 1: innermost attainable truth, must needs flatter Coachon nearly as much
• 2:00:14
  Speaker 1: as the melodramatist vilifies him, although there is, as far
• 2:00:19
  Speaker 1: as I have been able to discover, nothing against Coauchamp
• 2:00:22
  Speaker 1: that convicts him of bad faith or exceptional severity in
• 2:00:26
  Speaker 1: his judicial relations with Joan, or of as much anti prisoner,
• 2:00:32
  Speaker 1: pro police, class and sectarian bias, as we now take
• 2:00:36
  Speaker 1: for granted in our own courts. Yet there is hardly
• 2:00:39
  Speaker 1: more warrant for classing him as a great Catholic churchman,
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 1: completely proof against the passions roused by the temporal situation.
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 1: Neither does the inquisitor Leametra, in such scanty accounts of him,
• 2:00:54
  Speaker 1: as are now recoverable, appear quite so able a master
• 2:00:58
  Speaker 1: of his duties and of the case before him, as
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 1: I have given him credit for being. But it is
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 1: the business of the stage to make its figures more
• 2:01:06
  Speaker 1: intelligible to themselves than they would be in real life,
• 2:01:10
  Speaker 1: for by no other means can they be made intelligible
• 2:01:14
  Speaker 1: to the audience. And in this case, Coauchamp and Lemetre
• 2:01:18
  Speaker 1: have made intelligible not only themselves, but the Church and
• 2:01:22
  Speaker 1: the Inquisition, just as Warwick has to make the feudal
• 2:01:26
  Speaker 1: system intelligible, the three between them having thus to make
• 2:01:30
  Speaker 1: a twentieth century audience conscious of an epic fundamentally different
• 2:01:34
  Speaker 1: from its own. Obviously, the real coachon, Leamitra and Warwick
• 2:01:39
  Speaker 1: could not have done this. They were part of the
• 2:01:42
  Speaker 1: Middle Ages themselves, and therefore as unconscious of its peculiarities
• 2:01:47
  Speaker 1: as of the atomic formula of the air they breathed.
• 2:01:50
  Speaker 1: But the play would be unintelligible if I had not
• 2:01:54
  Speaker 1: endowed them with enough of this consciousness to enable them
• 2:01:58
  Speaker 1: to explain their attitude to the twentieth century. All I
• 2:02:02
  Speaker 1: claim is that by this inevitable sacrifice of versimilitude, I
• 2:02:06
  Speaker 1: have secured, in the only possible way, sufficient veracity to
• 2:02:11
  Speaker 1: justify me in claiming that, as far as I can
• 2:02:14
  Speaker 1: gather from the available documentation and from such powers of
• 2:02:18
  Speaker 1: divination as I possess, the things I represent these three
• 2:02:22
  Speaker 1: exponents of the drama as saying are the things they
• 2:02:26
  Speaker 1: actually would have said if they had known what they
• 2:02:29
  Speaker 1: were really doing. And beyond this, neither drama nor history
• 2:02:34
  Speaker 1: can go in my hands. Some well meant proposals for
• 2:02:39
  Speaker 1: the improvement of the play. I have to thank several
• 2:02:42
  Speaker 1: critics on both sides of the Atlantic, including some whose
• 2:02:46
  Speaker 1: admiration for my play is most generously enthusiastic, for their
• 2:02:50
  Speaker 1: heartfelt instructions as to how it can be improved. They
• 2:02:54
  Speaker 1: point out that by the excision of the epilogue and
• 2:02:57
  Speaker 1: all the references to such undramatic and tedious matters as
• 2:03:01
  Speaker 1: the Church, the feudal system, the inquisition, the theory of heresy,
• 2:03:05
  Speaker 1: and so forth, all of which they point out would
• 2:03:08
  Speaker 1: be ruthlessly blue penciled by any experienced manager. The play
• 2:03:13
  Speaker 1: could be considerably shortened. I think they are mistaken the
• 2:03:17
  Speaker 1: experienced knights of the Blue pencil, having saved an hour
• 2:03:21
  Speaker 1: and a half by disemboweling, the play would at once
• 2:03:24
  Speaker 1: proceed to waste two hours in building elaborate scenery, having
• 2:03:28
  Speaker 1: real water in the River Loire and a real bridge
• 2:03:31
  Speaker 1: across it, and staging an obviously sham fight for possession
• 2:03:36
  Speaker 1: of it, with the victorious French led by Joan on
• 2:03:39
  Speaker 1: a real horse. The coronation would eclipse all previous theatrical displays,
• 2:03:44
  Speaker 1: showing first the procession through the streets of Rance and
• 2:03:48
  Speaker 1: then the service in the cathedral, with special music written
• 2:03:51
  Speaker 1: for both. Joan would be burnt on the stage, as
• 2:03:55
  Speaker 1: mister Matheson Lang always is in The Wandering Jew, on
• 2:03:58
  Speaker 1: the principle that it does not matter in the least
• 2:04:01
  Speaker 1: why a woman is burnt, provided she is burnt and
• 2:04:05
  Speaker 1: people can pay to see it done. The intervals between
• 2:04:08
  Speaker 1: the acts, whilst these splendors were being built up and
• 2:04:12
  Speaker 1: then demolished by the stage carpenters would seem eternal to
• 2:04:16
  Speaker 1: the great profit of the refreshment bars, and the weary
• 2:04:20
  Speaker 1: and demoralized audience would lose their last trains and curse
• 2:04:24
  Speaker 1: me for writing such inordinately long and intolerably dreary and
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 1: meaningless plays. But the applause of the press would be unanimous.
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 1: Nobody who knows the stage history of Shakespeare will doubt
• 2:04:37
  Speaker 1: that this is what would happen if I knew my
• 2:04:40
  Speaker 1: business so little as to listen to these well intentioned
• 2:04:43
  Speaker 1: but disastrous counselors. Indeed, it probably will happen when I
• 2:04:48
  Speaker 1: am no longer in control of the performing rights. So
• 2:04:51
  Speaker 1: perhaps it will be as well for the public to
• 2:04:54
  Speaker 1: see the play while I am still alive the epilogue.
• 2:05:00
  Speaker 1: As to the epilogue, I could hardly be expected to
• 2:05:03
  Speaker 1: stultify myself by implying that Joan's history in the world
• 2:05:07
  Speaker 1: ended unhappily with her execution, instead of beginning there. It
• 2:05:12
  Speaker 1: was necessary by Hooker Crook to show the canonized Joan
• 2:05:16
  Speaker 1: as well as the incinerated one. For many a woman
• 2:05:19
  Speaker 1: has got herself burnt by carelessly whisking a muslin skirt
• 2:05:23
  Speaker 1: into the drawing room fireplace. But getting canonized is a
• 2:05:27
  Speaker 1: different matter, and a more important one. So I am
• 2:05:30
  Speaker 1: afraid the epilogue must stand to the critics lest they
• 2:05:35
  Speaker 1: should feel ignored. To a professional critic, I have been
• 2:05:40
  Speaker 1: one myself. Theater going is the curse of Adam. The
• 2:05:44
  Speaker 1: play is the evil he is paid to endure in
• 2:05:47
  Speaker 1: the sweat of his brow, and the sooner it is over,
• 2:05:50
  Speaker 1: the better. This would seem to place him in irreconcilable
• 2:05:54
  Speaker 1: opposition to the paying playgoer, from whose point of view,
• 2:05:58
  Speaker 1: the longer the play, the more entertainment he gets for
• 2:06:01
  Speaker 1: his money. It does, in fact so place him, especially
• 2:06:05
  Speaker 1: in the provinces where the playgoer goes to the theater
• 2:06:08
  Speaker 1: for the sake of the play solely, and insists so
• 2:06:11
  Speaker 1: effectively on a certain number of hours entertainment that touring
• 2:06:16
  Speaker 1: managers are sometimes seriously embarrassed by the brevity of the
• 2:06:20
  Speaker 1: London plays they have to deal in. For in London,
• 2:06:23
  Speaker 1: the critics are reinforced by a considerable body of persons
• 2:06:27
  Speaker 1: who go to the theater as many others go to church,
• 2:06:31
  Speaker 1: to display their best clothes and compare them with other peoples,
• 2:06:35
  Speaker 1: to be in the fashion and have something to talk
• 2:06:37
  Speaker 1: about at dinner parties, to adore a pet performer, to
• 2:06:42
  Speaker 1: pass the evening anywhere rather than at home. In short,
• 2:06:46
  Speaker 1: for any or every reason, accept interest in dramatic art
• 2:06:49
  Speaker 1: as such in fashionable centers. The number of irreligious people
• 2:06:54
  Speaker 1: who go to church, of unmusical people who go to
• 2:06:57
  Speaker 1: concerts and operas, and of undramatic people who go to
• 2:07:01
  Speaker 1: the theater is so prodigious that sermons have been cut
• 2:07:05
  Speaker 1: down to ten minutes and plays to two hours. And
• 2:07:09
  Speaker 1: even at that congregations sit longing for the benediction, and
• 2:07:14
  Speaker 1: audiences for the final curtain so that they may get
• 2:07:17
  Speaker 1: away to the lunch or supper they really crave for,
• 2:07:20
  Speaker 1: after arriving as late as or later than the hour
• 2:07:25
  Speaker 1: of beginning can possibly be made for them. Thus, from
• 2:07:29
  Speaker 1: the stalls and in the press, an atmosphere of hypocrisy spreads.
• 2:07:33
  Speaker 1: Nobody says straight out that genuine drama is a tedious nuisance,
• 2:07:38
  Speaker 1: and that to ask people to endure more than two
• 2:07:40
  Speaker 1: hours of it with two long intervals of relief is
• 2:07:44
  Speaker 1: an intolerable imposition. Nobody says, I hate classical tragedy and
• 2:07:49
  Speaker 1: comedy as I hate sermons and symphonies, But I like
• 2:07:52
  Speaker 1: police news and divorce news, and any kind of dancing
• 2:07:55
  Speaker 1: or decoration that has an aphrodisiac effect on me or
• 2:07:59
  Speaker 1: on my wayf or husband, and whatever superior people may pretend.
• 2:08:03
  Speaker 1: I cannot associate pleasure with any sort of intellectual activity,
• 2:08:08
  Speaker 1: and I don't believe anybody else can either. Such things
• 2:08:13
  Speaker 1: are not said yet. Nine tenths of what is offered
• 2:08:16
  Speaker 1: as criticism of the drama in the metropolitan press of
• 2:08:19
  Speaker 1: Europe and America is nothing but a muddled paraphrase of it.
• 2:08:23
  Speaker 1: If it does not mean that, it means nothing. I
• 2:08:27
  Speaker 1: do not complain of this, though it complains very reasonably
• 2:08:31
  Speaker 1: of me. But I can take no more notice of
• 2:08:34
  Speaker 1: it than Einstein of the people who are incapable of mathematics.
• 2:08:38
  Speaker 1: I write in the classical manner for those who pay
• 2:08:41
  Speaker 1: for admission to a theater because they like classical comedy
• 2:08:45
  Speaker 1: or tragedy for its own sake, and like it so
• 2:08:48
  Speaker 1: much when it is good of its kind and well done,
• 2:08:52
  Speaker 1: that they tear themselves away from it with reluctance to
• 2:08:55
  Speaker 1: catch the very latest train or omnibus that will take
• 2:08:58
  Speaker 1: them home, if or from arriving late from an eight
• 2:09:02
  Speaker 1: or half past eight o'clock dinner, so as to escape
• 2:09:05
  Speaker 1: at least the first half hour of the performance. They
• 2:09:08
  Speaker 1: stand in queues outside the theater doors for hours beforehand
• 2:09:13
  Speaker 1: in bitingly cold weather to secure a seat. In countries
• 2:09:17
  Speaker 1: where a play lasts a week, they bring baskets of
• 2:09:19
  Speaker 1: provisions and sit it out. These are the patrons on
• 2:09:22
  Speaker 1: whom I depend for my bread. I do not give
• 2:09:25
  Speaker 1: them performances twelve hours long, because circumstances do not at
• 2:09:29
  Speaker 1: present make such entertainments feasible. Though a performance beginning after
• 2:09:34
  Speaker 1: breakfast and ending at sunset is as possible physically and
• 2:09:38
  Speaker 1: artistically in Surrey or Middlesect as in Oberamergau, and an
• 2:09:43
  Speaker 1: all night sitting in a theater would be at least
• 2:09:46
  Speaker 1: as enjoyable as an all night sitting in the House
• 2:09:49
  Speaker 1: of Commons, and much more useful. But in Saint Joan
• 2:09:53
  Speaker 1: I have done my best by going to the well
• 2:09:55
  Speaker 1: established classical limit of three and a half hours. Practically
• 2:09:59
  Speaker 1: continue is playing, barring the one interval imposed by considerations
• 2:10:05
  Speaker 1: which have nothing to do with art. I know that
• 2:10:08
  Speaker 1: this is hard on the pseudo critics and on the
• 2:10:10
  Speaker 1: fashionable people, whose play going is a hypocrisy. I cannot
• 2:10:16
  Speaker 1: help feeling some compassion for them when they assure me
• 2:10:19
  Speaker 1: that my play, though a great play, must fail hopelessly
• 2:10:24
  Speaker 1: because it does not begin at a quarter to nine
• 2:10:26
  Speaker 1: and end at eleven. The facts are overwhelmingly against them.
• 2:10:31
  Speaker 1: They forget that all men are not as they are. Still,
• 2:10:35
  Speaker 1: I am sorry for them, And though I cannot, for
• 2:10:37
  Speaker 1: their sakes undo my work and help the people who
• 2:10:41
  Speaker 1: hate the theater to drive out the people who love it,
• 2:10:44
  Speaker 1: Yet I may point out to them that they have
• 2:10:46
  Speaker 1: several remedies in their own hands. They can escape the
• 2:10:50
  Speaker 1: first part of the play by their usual practice of
• 2:10:52
  Speaker 1: arriving late. They can escape the epilogue by not waiting
• 2:10:56
  Speaker 1: for it. And if the irreducible minimum thus attained and
• 2:11:00
  Speaker 1: is still too painful, they can stay away altogether. But
• 2:11:04
  Speaker 1: I deprecate this extreme course, because it is good neither
• 2:11:08
  Speaker 1: for my pocket nor for their own souls. Already a
• 2:11:12
  Speaker 1: few of them, noticing that what matters is not the
• 2:11:15
  Speaker 1: absolute length of time occupied by a play, but the
• 2:11:18
  Speaker 1: speed with which that time passes, are discovering that the theater,
• 2:11:23
  Speaker 1: though purgatorial in its Aristotelian moments, is not necessarily always
• 2:11:28
  Speaker 1: the dull place they have so often found it. What
• 2:11:31
  Speaker 1: do its discomforts matter when the play makes us forget them?
• 2:11:36
  Speaker 1: Iat Saint Lawrence, May nineteen twenty four, End of Part four,
• 2:11:44
  Speaker 1: end of Saint Joan, Preface by George Bernard Shaw,