Saint Joan : $b A chronicle play in six scenes and an epilogueShaw, Bernard
HistoryHistory
Saint Joan : $b A chronicle play in six scenes and an epilogue
Shaw, Bernard
Christian women saints -- Drama; France -- History -- Charles VII, 1422-1461 -- Drama; Joan, of Arc, Saint, 1412-1431 -- Drama
Let us be clear about the meaning of the terms. A genius is a person
who, seeing farther and probing deeper than other people, has a
different set of ethical valuations from theirs, and has energy enough
to give effect to this extra vision and its valuations in whatever
manner best suits his or her specific talents. A saint is one who having
practised heroic virtues, and enjoyed revelations or powers of the order
which The Church classes technically as supernatural, is eligible for
canonization. If a historian is an Anti-Feminist, and does not believe
women to be capable of genius in the traditional masculine departments,
he will never make anything of Joan, whose genius was turned to
practical account mainly in soldiering and politics. If he is
Rationalist enough to deny that saints exist, and to hold that new ideas
cannot come otherwise than by conscious ratiocination, he will never
catch Joan’s likeness. Her ideal biographer must be free from nineteenth
century prejudices and biases; must understand the Middle Ages, the
Roman Catholic Church, and the Holy Roman Empire much more intimately
than our Whig historians have ever understood them; and must be capable
of throwing off sex partialities and their romance, and regarding woman
as the female of the human species, and not as a different kind of
animal with specific charms and specific imbecilities.
Joan’s Good Looks.
To put the last point roughly, any book about Joan which begins by
describing her as a beauty may be at once classed as a romance. Not one
of Joan’s comrades, in village, court, or camp, even when they were
straining themselves to please the king by praising her, ever claimed
that she was pretty. All the men who alluded to the matter declared most
emphatically that she was unattractive sexually to a degree that seemed
to them miraculous, considering that she was in the bloom of youth, and
neither ugly, awkward, deformed, nor unpleasant in her person. The
evident truth is that like most women of her hardy managing type she
seemed neutral in the conflict of sex because men were too much afraid
of her to fall in love with her. She herself was not sexless: in spite
of the virginity she had vowed up to a point, and preserved to her
death, she never excluded the possibility of marriage for herself. But
marriage, with its preliminary of the attraction, pursuit, and capture
of a husband, was not her business: she had something else to do.
Byron’s formula, “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart: ’tis
woman’s whole existence” did not apply to her any more than to George
Washington or any other masculine worker on the heroic scale. Had she
lived in our time, picture postcards might have been sold of her as a
general: they would not have been sold of her as a sultana. Nevertheless
there is one reason for crediting her with a very remarkable face. A
sculptor of her time in Orleans made a statue of a helmeted young woman
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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