The Valet's Tragedy, and Other Studies Part 17

the word 'Puzzel' carrying an unsavoury sense. (Act I. Scene 4.) A puzzle, in the usual meaning of the word, the Maid was to the dramatist.

I shall not enter into the dispute as to whether Shakespeare was the author, or part author, of this perplexed drama. But certainly the role of the Pucelle is either by two different hands, or the one author was 'in two minds' about the heroine. Now she appears as la ribaulde of Glasdale's taunt, which made her weep, as the 'bold strumpet' of Talbot's insult in the play. The author adopts or even exaggerates the falsehoods of Anglo-Burgundian legend. The personal purity of Jeanne was not denied by her judges. On the other hand the dramatist makes his 'bold strumpet' a paladin of courage and a perfect patriot, reconciling Burgundy to the national cause by a moving speech on 'the great pity that was in France.' How could a ribaulde, a leaguer-la.s.s, a witch, a sacrificer of blood to devils, display the valour, the absolute self-sacrifice, the eloquent and tender love of native land attributed to the Pucelle of the play? Are there two authors, and is Shakespeare one of them, with his understanding of the human heart? Or is there one puzzled author producing an impossible and contradictory character?

The dramatist has a curious knowledge of minute points in Jeanne's career: he knows and mocks at the sword with five crosses which she found, apparently by clairvoyance, at Fierbois, but his history is distorted and dislocated almost beyond recognition. Jeanne proclaims herself to the Dauphin as the daughter of a shepherd, and as a pure maid. Later she disclaims both her father and her maidenhood. She avers that she was first inspired by a vision of the Virgin (which she never did in fact), and she is haunted by 'fiends,' who represent her St.

Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret. After the relief of Orleans the Dauphin exclaims:

'No longer on Saint Denis will we cry, But Joan la Pucelle shall be France's saint,'

a prophecy which may yet be accomplished. Already accomplished is d'Alencon's promise:

'We'll set thy statue in some holy place.'

To the Duke of Burgundy, the Pucelle of the play speaks as the Maid might have spoken:

'Look on thy country, look on fertile France, And see the cities and the towns defaced By wasting ruin of the cruel foe!

As looks the mother on her lowly babe, When death doth close his tender dying eyes, See, see, the pining malady of France; Behold the wounds, the most unnatural wounds, Which thou thyself hast given her woful breast!

O turn thy edged sword another way; Strike those that hurt, and hurt not those that help!

One drop of blood drawn from thy country's bosom Should grieve thee more than streams of foreign gore; Return thee, therefore, with a flood of tears, And wash away thy country's stained spots.'

Patriotism could find no better words, and how can the dramatist represent the speaker as a 'strumpet' inspired by 'fiends'? To her fiends when they desert her, the Pucelle of the play cries:

'Cannot my body, nor blood sacrifice, Entreat you to your wonted furtherance?

Then take my soul; my body, soul, and all, Before that England give the French the foil.'

She is willing to give body and soul for France, and this, in the eyes of the dramatist, appears to be her crime. For a French girl to bear a French heart is to stamp her as the tool of devils. It is an odd theology, and not in the spirit of Shakespeare. Indeed the Pucelle, while disowning her father and her maidenhood, again speaks to the English as Jeanne might have spoken:

'I never had to do with wicked spirits: But you, that are polluted with your l.u.s.ts, Stained with the guiltless blood of innocents, Corrupt and tainted with a thousand vices, Because you want the grace that others have, You judge it straight a thing impossible To compa.s.s wonders but by help of devils.

No, misconceiv'd! Joan of Arc hath been A virgin from her tender infancy, Chaste and immaculate in very thought; Whose maiden blood, thus rigorously effus'd, Will cry for vengeance at the gates of heaven.'

The vengeance was not long delayed. 'The French and my countrymen,'

writes Patrick Abercromby, 'drove the English from province to province, and from town to town' of France, while on England fell the Wars of the Roses. But how can the dramatist make the dealer with fiends speak as the Maid, in effect, did speak at her trial? He adds the most ribald of insults; the Pucelle exclaiming:

'It was Alencon that enjoyed my love!'

The author of the play thus speaks with two voices: in one Jeanne acts and talks as she might have done (had she been given to oratory); in the other she is the termagant of Anglo-Burgundian legend or myth.

Much of this perplexity still haunts the histories of the Maid. Her courage, purity, patriotism, and clear-sighted military and political common-sense; the marvellous wisdom of her replies to her judges--as of her own St. Catherine before the fifty philosophers of her legend--are universally acknowledged. This girl of seventeen, in fact, alone of the French folk, understood the political and military situation. To restore the confidence of France it was necessary that the Dauphin should penetrate the English lines to Rheims, and there be crowned. She broke the lines, she led him to Rheims, and crowned him. England was besieging his last hold in the north and centre, Orleans, on a military policy of pure 'bluff.' The city was at no time really invested. The besieging force, as English official doc.u.ments prove, was utterly inadequate to its task, except so far as prestige and confidence gave power. Jeanne simply destroyed and reversed the prestige, and, after a brilliant campaign on the Loire, opened the way to Rheims. The next step was to take Paris, and Paris she certainly would have taken, but the long delays of politicians enabled Beaufort to secure peace with Scotland, under James I., and to throw into Paris the English troops collected for a crusade against the Hussites.* The Maid, unsupported, if not actually betrayed, failed and was wounded before Paris, and prestige returned for a while to the English party. She won minor victories, was taken at Compiegne (May 1430), and a year later crowned her career by martyrdom.

But she had turned the tide, and within the six years of her prophecy Paris returned to the national cause. The English lost, in losing Paris, 'a greater gage than Orleans.'

*The Scottish immobility was secured in May-June 1429, the months of the Maid's Loire campaign. Exchequer Rolls, iv. ciii. 466. Bain, Calendar, iv. 212, Foedera, x. 428,1704-1717.

So much is universally acknowledged, but how did the Maid accomplish her marvels? Brave as she certainly was, wise as she certainly was, beautiful as she is said to have been, she would neither have risked her unparalleled adventure, nor been followed, but for her strange visions and 'voices.' She left her village and began her mission, as she said, in contradiction to the strong common-sense of her normal character. She resisted for long the advice that came to her in the apparent shape of audible external voices and external visions of saint and angel. By a statement of actual facts which she could not possibly have learned in any normal way, she overcame, it is said, the resistance of the Governor of Vaucouleurs, and obtained an escort to convey her to the King at Chinon.* She conquered the doubts of the Dauphin by a similar display of supernormal knowledge. She satisfied, at Poictiers, the divines of the national party after a prolonged examination, of which the record, 'The Book of Poictiers,' has disappeared. In these ways she inspired the confidence which, in the real feebleness of the invading army, was all that was needed to ensure the relief of Orleans, while, as Dunois attested, she shook the confidence which was the strength of England.

About these facts the historical evidence is as good as for any other events of the war.

*Refer to paragraph commencing "The 'Journal du Siege d'Orleans'"

infra.

The essence, then, of the marvels wrought by Jeanne d'Arc lay in what she called her 'Voices,' the mysterious monitions, to her audible, and a.s.sociated with visions of the heavenly speakers. Brave, pure, wise, and probably beautiful as she was, the King of France would not have trusted a peasant la.s.s, and men disheartened by frequent disaster would not have followed her, but for her voices.

The science or theology of the age had three possible ways of explaining these experiences:

1. The Maid actually was inspired by Michael, Margaret, and Catherine.

From them she learned secrets of the future, of words unspoken save in the King's private prayer, and of events distant in s.p.a.ce, like the defeat of the French and Scots at Rouvray, which she announced, on the day of the occurrence, to Baudricourt, hundreds of leagues away, at Vaucouleurs.

2. The monitions came from 'fiends.' This was the view of the prosecutors in general at her trial, and of the author of 'Henry VI., Part I.'

3. One of her judges, Beaupere, was a man of some courage and consistency. He maintained, at the trial of Rouen, and at the trial of Rehabilitation (1452-1456), that the voices were mere illusions of a girl who fasted much. In her fasts she would construe natural sounds, as of church bells, or perhaps of the wind among woods, into audible words, as Red Indian seers do to this day.

This third solution must and does neglect, or explain by chance occurrence, or deny, the coincidences between facts not normally knowable, and the monitions of the Voices, accepted as genuine, though inexplicable, by M. Quicherat, the great palaeographer and historian of Jeanne.* He by no means held a brief for the Church; Father Ayroles continually quarrels with Quicherat, as a Freethinker. He certainly was a free thinker in the sense that he was the first historian who did not accept the theory of direct inspiration by saints (still less by fiends), and yet took liberty to admit that the Maid possessed knowledge not normally acquired. Other 'freethinking' sympathisers with the heroine have shuffled, have skated adroitly past and round the facts, as Father Ayroles amusingly demonstrates in his many pa.s.sages of arms with Michelet, Simeon Luce, Henri Martin, Fabre, and his other opponents.

M. Quicherat merely says that, if we are not to accept the marvels as genuine, we must abandon the whole of the rest of the evidence as to Jeanne d'Arc, and there he leaves the matter.

*Quicherat's five volumes of doc.u.ments, the Proces, is now accessible, as far as records of the two trials go, in the English version edited by Mr. Douglas Murray.

Can we not carry the question further? Has the psychological research of the last half-century added nothing to our means of dealing with the problem? Negatively, at least, something is gained. Science no longer avers, with M. Lelut in his book on the Daemon of Socrates, that every one who has experience of hallucinations, of impressions of the senses not produced by objective causes, is mad. It is admitted that sane and healthy persons may have hallucinations of lights, of voices, of visual appearances. The researches of Mr. Galton, of M. Richet, of Brierre du Boismont, of Mr. Gurney, and an army of other psychologists, have secured this position.

Maniacs have hallucinations, especially of voices, but all who have hallucinations are not maniacs. Jeanne d'Arc, so subject to 'airy tongues,' was beyond all doubt a girl of extraordinary physical strength and endurance, of the highest natural lucidity and common-sense, and of health which neither wounds, nor fatigue, nor cruel treatment, could seriously impair. Wounded again and again, she continued to animate the troops by her voice, and was in arms undaunted next day. Her leap of sixty feet from the battlements of Beaurevoir stunned but did not long incapacitate her. Hunger, bonds, and the protracted weariness of months of cross-examination produced an illness but left her intellect as keen, her courage as unabated, her humour as vivacious, her memory as minutely accurate as ever. There never was a more sane and healthy human being.

We never hear that, in the moments of her strange experiences, she was 'entranced,' or even dissociated from the actual occurrences of the hour. She heard her voices, though not distinctly, in the uproar of the brawling court which tried her at Rouen; she saw her visions in the imminent deadly breach, when she rallied her men to victory. In this alertness she is a contrast to a modern seeress, subject, like her, to monitions of an hallucinatory kind, but subject during intervals of somnambulisme. To her case, which has been carefully, humorously, and sceptically studied, we shall return.

Meantime let us take voices and visions on the lowest, most prevalent, and least startling level. A large proportion of people, including the writer, are familiar with the momentary visions beheld with shut eyes between waking and sleeping (illusions hypnagogiques). The waking self is alert enough to contemplate these processions of figures and faces, these landscapes too, which (in my own case) it is incapable of purposefully calling up.

Thus, in a form of experience which is almost as common as ordinary dreaming, we see that the semi-somnolent self possesses a faculty not always given to the waking self. Compared with my own waking self, for instance, my half-asleep self is almost a personality of genius. He can create visions that the waking self can remember, but cannot originate, and cannot trace to any memory of waking impressions. These apparently trivial things thus point to the existence of almost wholly submerged potentialities in a mind so everyday, commonplace, and, so to speak, superficial as mine. This fact suggests that people who own such minds, the vast majority of mankind, ought not to make themselves the measure of the potentialities of minds of a rarer cla.s.s, say that of Jeanne d'Arc. The secret of natures like hers cannot be discovered, so long as scientific men incapable even of ordinary 'visualising' (as Mr. Galton found) make themselves the canon or measure of human nature.

Let us, for the sake of argument, suppose that some sane persons are capable of hallucinatory impressions akin to but less transient than illusions hypnagogiques, when, as far as they or others can perceive, they are wide awake. Of such sane persons Goethe and Herschel were examples. In this way we can most easily envisage, or make thinkable by ourselves, the nature of the experiences of Jeanne d'Arc and other seers.

In the other state of semi-somnolence, while still alert enough to watch and reason on the phenomena, we occasionally, though less commonly, hear what may be called 'inner voices.' That is to say, we do not suppose that any one from without is speaking to us, but we hear, as it were, a voice within us making some remark, usually disjointed enough, and not suggested by any traceable train of thought of which we are conscious at the time. This experience partly enables us to understand the cases of sane persons who, when to all appearance wide awake, occasionally hear voices which appear to be objective and caused by actual vibrations of the atmosphere. I am acquainted with at least four persons, all of them healthy, and normal enough, who have had such experiences. In all four cases, the apparent voice (though the listeners have no superst.i.tious belief on the subject) has communicated intelligence which proved to be correct. But in only one instance, I think, was the information thus communicated beyond the reach of conjecture, based perhaps on some observation unconsciously made or so little attended to when made that it could not be recalled by the ordinary memory.

We are to suppose, then, that in such cases the person concerned being to all appearance fully awake, his or her mind has presented a thought, not as a thought, but in the shape of words that seemed to be externally audible. One hearer, in fact, at the moment wondered that the apparent speaker indicated by the voice and words should be shouting so loud in an hotel. The apparent speaker was actually not in the hotel, but at a considerable distance, well out of earshot, and, though in a nervous crisis, was not shouting at all. We know that, between sleeping and waking, our minds can present to us a thought in the apparent form of articulate words, internally audible. The hearers, when fully awake, of words that seem to be externally audible, probably do but carry the semi-vigilant experience to a higher degree, as do the beholders of visual hallucinations, when wide awake. In this way, at least, we can most nearly attain to understanding their experiences. To a relatively small proportion of people, in wakeful existence, experiences occur with distinctness, which to a large proportion of persons occur but indistinctly,

'On the margin grey 'Twixt the soul's night and day.'

Let us put it, then, that Jeanne d'Arc's was an advanced case of the mental and bodily const.i.tution exemplified by the relatively small proportion of people, the sane seers of visual hallucinations and hearers of unreal voices. Her thoughts--let us say the thoughts of the deepest region of her being--presented themselves in visual forms, taking the shapes of favourite saints--familiar to her in works of sacred art--attended by an hallucinatory brightness of light ('a photism'), and apparently uttering words of advice which was in conflict with Jeanne's great natural shrewdness and strong sense of duty to her parents. 'She MUST go into France,' and for two or three years she pleaded her ignorance and incompetence. She declined to go. She COULD resist her voices. In prison at Beaurevoir, they forbade her to leap from the tower. But her natural impatience and hopefulness prevailed, and she leaped. 'I would rather trust my soul to G.o.d than my body to the English.' This she confessed to as sinful, though not, she hoped, of the nature of deadly sin. Her inmost and her superficial nature were in conflict.

It is now desirable to give, as briefly as possible, Jeanne's own account of the nature of her experiences, as recorded in the book of her trial at Rouen, with other secondhand accounts, offered on oath, at her trial of Rehabilitation, by witnesses to whom she had spoken on the subject. She was always reticent on the theme.

The period when Jeanne supposed herself to see her first visions was physiologically critical. She was either between thirteen and fourteen, or between twelve and thirteen. M. Simeon Luce, in his 'Jeanne d'Arc a Domremy,' held that she was of the more advanced age, and his date (1425) fitted in with some public events, which, in his opinion, were probably the occasions of the experiences. Pere Ayroles prefers the earlier period (1424) when the aforesaid public events had not yet occurred. After examining the evidence on both sides, I am disposed to think, or rather I am certain, that Pere Ayroles is in the right. In either case Jeanne was at a critical age, when, as I understand, female children are occasionally subject to illusions. Speaking then as a non-scientific student, I submit that on the side of ordinary causes for the visions and voices we have:

1. The period in Jeanne's life when they began.

2. Her habits of fasting and prayer.

3. Her intense patriotic enthusiasm, which may, for all that we know, have been her mood before the voices announced to her the mission.

Let us then examine the evidence as to the origin and nature of the alleged phenomena.

I shall begin with the letter of the Senechal de Berry, Perceval de Boulainvilliers, to the Duke of Milan.* The date is June 21st, 1429, six weeks after the relief of Orleans. After a few such tales as that the c.o.c.ks crowed when Jeanne was born, and that her flock was lucky, he dates her first vision peractis aetatis suae duodecim annis, 'after she was twelve.' Briefly, the tale is that, in a rustic race for flowers, one of the other children cried, 'Joanna, video te volantem juxta terrain,' 'Joan, I see you flying near the ground.' This is the one solitary hint of 'levitation' (so common in hagiology and witchcraft) which occurs in the career of the Maid. This kind of story is so persistent that I knew it must have been told in connection with the Irvingite movement in Scotland. And it was! There is, perhaps, just one trace that flying was believed to be an accomplishment of Jeanne's. When Frere Richard came to her at Troyes, he made, she says, the sign of the cross.** She answered, 'Approchez hardiment, je ne m'envouleray pas.'

Now the contemporary St. Colette was not infrequently 'levitated'!