FREE ESSAY ON JOAN OF ARC

JOAN OF ARC

Joan of Arc (From Harper's Weekly, 1896) The historical novel is one of those flexible
inventions which can he fitted to the mood or genius of any writer, and can be either
story or history in the proportion he prefers. Walter Scott, who contrived it, tested its
elasticity as fully as any of the long line of romancers who have followed him in every
land and language. It has been a favorite form with readers from the first, and it will
be to the last, because it gives them the feeling that to read so much about people who
once lived and figured in human events is not such a waste of time as to read of people
who never lived at all, or figured in anything but the author's fancy. With a race like
ours, which always desires a reason, or at least an excuse, for enjoying itself, this
feeling no doubt availed much for fiction, and helped to decide the fate of the novel
favorably when its popularity was threatened by the good, stupid Anglo-Saxon conscience.
Probably it had the largest share in establishing fiction as a respectable literary form,
and in giving it the primacy which it now enjoys. Without the success of the monstrous
fables which the gentle Sir Walter palmed off upon his generation in the shape of
historical fiction, we should hardly have revered as masters in a beautiful art the
writers who have since swayed our emotions. Jane Austen, Miss Edgeworth, Hawthorne,
Thackeray, George Eliot, Mr. Henry James, might have sought a hearing from serious
persons in vain for the truth that was in them if the historical novel had not
established fiction in the respect of our race as a pleasure which might be enjoyed
without self- reproach, or as the sugar of a pill which would be none the less powerful
in its effects upon the system because it was agreeable to take. It would be interesting
to know, but not very pertinent to inquire, how far our great humorist's use of the
historical form in fiction was prompted by love of it, or by an instinctive perception
that it was the only form in which he could hope to deliver a message of serious import
without being taken altogether in jest. But, at any rate, we can be sure that in each of
Mark Twain's attempts of this sort, in the Prince and the Pauper, in the Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and in the Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, he was
taken with the imaginative -- that is to say, the true -- nature of his theme, and that
he made this the channel of the rich vein of poetry which runs through all his humor and
keeps it sound whether it is grotesque or whether it is pathetic in effect. The first of
these three books is addressed to children, but it is not children who can get the most
out of it; the last is offered to the sympathy and intelligence of men and women, and yet
I should not be surprised if it made its deepest and most lasting appeal to the generous
heart of youth. But I think that the second will remain the enduring consolation of old
and young alike, and will be ranged in this respect and as a masterpiece of humor beside
the great work of Cervantes. Since the Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha there is nothing
to compare with the Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, and I shall be very much
disappointed in posterity if it does not agree with me. In that colossally amusing
scheme, that infinitely suggestive situation, the author was hampered by no such distinct
records as he has had to grapple with in his Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. He
could launch himself into a realm of fable and turn it into fact by virtue of his own
strong and vivid reality while in a scene whose figures and events are all ascertained by
history his fancy has had to work reversely, and transmute the substance into the airy
fabric of romance. The result will not be accepted without difficulty by two sorts of
critics: the sort who would have had him stick closer to the conventional ideal of the
past, as it has been derived from other romancers, and the sort who would have had him
throw that altogether away and trust to his own divinations of its life and spirit from
the events as set down and from his abundant knowledge of human nature through himself. I
confess that I am of these, and I have the least to complain of, I think. It would be
impossible for any one who was not a prig to keep to the archaic attitude and parlance
which the author attempts here and there; and I wish he had frankly refused to attempt it
at all. I wish his personal recollections of Joan could have been written by some
Southwestern American, translated to Domremy by some such mighty magic of imagination as
launched the Connecticut Yankee into the streets of many-towered Camelot; but I make the
most of the moments when the Sieur Louis de Conte forgets himself into much the sort of
witness I could wish him to be. I am not at all troubled when he comes out with a bit of
good, strong, downright modern American feeling; my suffering begins when he does the
supposed mediaeval thing. Then I suspect that his armor is of tin, that the castles and
rocks are pasteboard, that the mob of citizens and soldiers who fill the air with the
clash of their two-up-and-two-down combats, and the well-known muffled roar of their
voices have been hired in at so much a night, and that Joan is sometimes in an awful
temper behind the scenes; and I am thankful when the brave Sieur Louis forgets himself
again. I have my little theory that human nature is elementally much the same always and
everywhere, and that if the man of intelligence will study this in his own heart he will
know pretty well what all other men have been in essentials. As to manners, I think that
a man who knew the Southwest in the days of slavery, when the primitive distinctions
between high and low, bond and free, lord and villein, were enforced with the violence of
passions stronger than the laws, could make a shrewd guess at mediaeval life; and I am
inclined to accept Mark Twain's feudal ruffians, gentle and simple, as like enough, or as
much like as one can get them at this late day. At least, they are like something, and
the trouble with the more romantic reproductions is that they are like nothing. A jolly
thing about it, and a true thing, is the fun that his people get out of the affair. It is
a vast frolic, in certain aspects, that mystical mission of the inspired Maid, and Joan
herself is not above having her laugh at times. Her men-at-arms, who drive the English
before them under her miraculous lead, are the boys who like to drink deep and to talk
tall; to get the joke on one another, and the dead wood. Without this sort of relief I
own that I should find their campaigns rather trying, and, without the hope of
overhearing some of their lusty drollery, I should not care to follow them in all their
hard fighting. I fancy it is the chance of this that gives the author himself so much
stomach for battle; it seems worth while to lay a lot of fellows in plate-armor low if
you can have them clatter down to the music of a burly jest and a roaring laugh. He is
not at the trouble to maintain the solemnity of the dominant strain throughout; and he
has made his Sieur de Conte not only a devout believer in the divine authority of Joan,
but a delicately tender sympathizer with her when she suffers as a poor, simple
shepherd-girl for the deeds of the prophetess. De Conte is a very human and lovable
character, and is rather apt to speak with the generous feeling and the righteous love
and hate of Mark Twain, whose humor has never been sullied with anything mean or cruel.
The minor note is heard mostly through De Conte's story of the trial and martyrdom of
Joan, which is studied faithfully from the histories, and which I think is the best part
of the book. It is extremely pathetic at moments, and as one reads the heart swells with
pity for the victim of one of the cruelest wrongs ever done, as if the suffering from it
were not over four hundred years ago. It would not be easy to convey a sense of the
reverent tenderness with which the character of Joan is developed in this fiction, and
she is made a sensible warm motion from the myth that she seems in history. The wonder of
her career is something that grows upon the reader to the end, and remains with him while
he is left tingling with compassion for the hapless child who lived so gloriously and
died so piteously. What can we say, in this age of science, that will explain away the
miracle of that age of faith? For these things really happened. There was actually this
peasant maid who believed she heard voices from Heaven bidding her take command of the
French armies and drive the English out of her country; who took command of them without
other authority than such as the belief of her prince and his people gave her; who
prophesied of the victories she should win, and won them; who broke the power of the
invaders; and who then, as if God thought she had given proofs enough of her divine
commission, fell into their power and was burned for a heretic and an idolater. It reads
like a wild and foolish invention, but it is every word most serious truth. It is
preposterous, it is impossible, but it is all undeniable. What can we say to it in the
last year of this incredulous old century, nodding to its close? We cannot deny it. What
was it all? Was Joan's power the force dormant in the people which her claim of
inspiration awoke to mighty deeds? If it was merely that, how came this poor, ignorant
girl by the skill to lead armies, to take towns, to advise councils, and to change the
fate of a whole nation? It was she who recreated France, and changed her from a province
of England to the great monarchy she became. Could a dream, an illusion, a superstition,
do this? What, then, are dreams and illusions and superstitions, that our wisdom should
be so eager to get rid of them? We know that for the present the force which could remove
mountains is pretty much gone out of the world. Faith has ceased to be, but we have some
lively hopes of electricity. We now employ it to exanimate people; perhaps we shall yet
find it valuable to reanimate them. Or will faith come back again, and will the future
ages be some of them religious? I shall not attempt to answer these questions, which
have, with a good number of others, been suggested by this curious book of the
arch-humorist of the century. I fancy they will occur to most other readers, who will
share my interest in the devout, the mystical, the knightly treatment of the story of
Joan of Arc by Mark Twain. Voltaire tried to make her a laughingstock and a by-word. He
was a very great wit, but he failed to defame her, for the facts were against him. It is
our humorist's fortune to have the facts with him, and whatever we think Joan of Arc,
inspired or deluded, we shall feel the wonder of them the more for the light his
imagination has thrown upon them. I dare say there are a good many faults in the book. It
is unequal; its archaism is often superficially a failure; if you look at it merely on
the technical side, the outbursts of the nineteenth-century American in the armor of the
fifteenth-century Frenchman are solecisms. But, in spite of all this, the book has a
vitalizing force. Joan lives in it again, and dies, and then lives on in the love and
pity and wonder of the reader.