By Ed Staskus
Bernard Shaw was on a roll in the Roaring Twenties. For over a decade he had been scoring theatrical winners, spirited satires of the times, breezy comedies revolving around artificial circumstance, and melodramas based on marriage and family life. When he switched gears it was with “Heartbreak House” in 1920. It was produced in New York City and was well-received. The theme of the play dealt with the ethics of humanism and scientific determinism at loggerheads with each other. It marked a return of a sense of high purpose in the playwright’s work.
It met with less success in London a year later. “It was partly because of miscasting, but chiefly because the London audience was a failure,” Bernard Shaw said with a splash of venom. He was always ready to speak his mind. “The secret of success is to offend the greatest number of people,” he said.
“Back to Methuselah” hit the stage in 1921. An elaborate speculative fantasy, it met with critical acclaim and public listlessness when performed in the United States, which had until then taken Bernard Shaw to its bosom and heaped honors on him in a form everybody understood, namely dollars and cents.
For all of his success as a writer, there were a few cracks in Bernard Shaw’s happiness. He was closing in on his threescore and ten. “Threescore-and-ten’s the mark, and no man with a conscience, and a proper sense of what’s expected of him, has any business to live longer, flying in the face of the Bible,” Charles Dickens wrote. Even though he eventually exceeded the Biblical edict, he knew the remarkable energy of his so far long lifetime was waning. The death of his older sister served as a reminder that even he would one day pass away.
Although “Back to Methuselah” was a good play, there were some critics, like Homer Woodbridge, who believed “as a playwright he has shot his bolt, and that as a preacher he is getting very tiresome.” Even though Bernard Shaw was capable of great disdain, he was still irked by the criticism. He wanted to write another play right away, but had trouble getting started. “Sometimes the urge to write comes over me and I cannot think what to write about,” he said. “This happened before I started ‘Saint Joan.’ I wanted to get to work on something but I hadn’t a subject. ‘Why not write a play on Joan of Arc?’ said my wife. So, I did.”
“Saint Joan” was written in 1923 and produced in 1924. It was a success in both New York City and London. It stilled his most obstinate detractors. The play incorporated two themes Bernard Shaw was interested in, which were history and religion. (Two earlier plays, “Androcles and the Lion” and “The Devil’s Disciple,” had focused on those same concerns.) Essentially a tragedy concerned with a universal issue, namely the conflicts that arise between individuals and the institutions they erect, “Saint Joan” has come to be considered Bernard Shaw’s “last great hurrah.”
Many critics approach the play as one of Bernard Shaw’s best efforts, comparable in importance and popularity to “Man and Superman.” The Oxford History of English Literature has called it his outstanding work, “conceivably the finest and most moving English drama since ‘The Winter’s Tale’ or ‘The Tempest.’ It owns that sure mark of greatness, a stature that remains intact after every consideration has been given to its evident and undeniable imperfections.”
In 1910, long before the appearance of “Saint Joan,” G. K. Chesterton published a biography of Bernard Shaw, even though he had said, “It is indefensibly foolish to attempt to explain a man whose whole object through life has been to explain himself.” After it was published the playwright said, “It is the best work of literary art I have yet provoked. It is a fascinating portrait study and is in the great tradition of literary portraiture.”
G. K. Chesterton and Bernard Shaw had been good friends for many years. They enjoyed debating one another about the world’s problems. The biography begins with a preface that outlines the headaches of preparing a preface for a book about the ‘Master of Prefaces,’ which Bernard Shaw was. The book itself is divided into six parts. The first three parts, “The Irishman,” “The Puritan,” and “The Progressive” describe the soil out of which Bernard Shaw sprang. The last three parts, “The Critic,” “The Dramatist,” and “The Philosopher” delineate the playwright’s activities with and relationship to the stage up to about 1909.
My purpose is to examine the parts of the biography and see to what extent G. K. Chesterton’s observations about Bernard Shaw anticipate the creation of “Saint Joan.” The question I hope to answer is whether or not Bernard Shaw was in a sense ordained to write the play, or something very like it. I don’t think the playwright would scoff at my proposal that there was something miraculous going on. He once said it was funny being asked why he denied miracles “because I never do deny them, but, on the contrary, spend my life largely affirming them. The world is full of miracles.”
Bernard Shaw was an Irishman. A connection between his ancestry and Joan of Arc can be made in this way: the maid was a virgin and in the 15th century was considered to be a saint, which she became in actuality 500 years later. Bernard Shaw came from a land variously known as “The Land of Virgins” and “The Land of Saints.” G. K. Chesterton writes that in some other time, in another kind of civilization, Bernard Shaw might have been regarded as a saint, albeit an ascetic and negative one. He embellished the image by marking a strange note in Bernard Shaw, which is “that he is literally unworldly. Worldliness has no human magic for him; he is not bewitched by rank nor drawn on by conviviality at all.”
There is a clear relationship between Bernard Shaw and Joan of Arc. She is “unworldly” to the extent of communicating with spirits and with God himself. In the preface to “Saint Joan” the storyteller writes that this trick of the imagination visits many of those burdened with genius, which he considers Joan of Arc to be.
Bernard Shaw was not unaware of his own genius. In 1924 he concluded that “if Paris perishes in ignorance of my works, the loss will be for Paris and not for me. I do not say that the loss would not be serious; for I am as indispensable as Bergson for a complete modern culture.” He may not have heard voices, but he could appreciate the reason Joan of Arc did.
Like Bernard Shaw, Joan of Arc is not attracted by the trappings of rank .She does not aspire to generalship in the usual sense. Throughout the play she remains aware of her origins and breeding. Conviviality does not strike a chord in her. If it had she would not have alienated almost all of her compatriots. But if she had not she could not have been heroic, since her heroism depends on willfulness and stubbornness, which are antithetical to conviviality. As it happens, her heroic virtues are given free rein.
According to G. K. Chesterton, there are several modal elements that can be ascribed to the Irish. He believes Irishmen succeed in those labors that “require a certain crystalline realism; such professions are the lawyer and the soldier.” Joan of Arc becomes a soldier and argues her own case like a lawyer before the Inquisition. The Irishman is “aggressive, and he attacks, he goes on asking for a thing because he wants it, and he tries really to hurt his enemies because they are his enemies.” Joan of Arc’s arrival on the front signals the beginning of an implacable campaign to oust the English from France and, in the process, to crown the Dauphin king, which she alone seems to want.
The Irish mentality embraces a kind of peculiar and “wild chastity” in regards to sex. Joan of Arc is a peasant girl who is able to remain chaste amid a mob of soldiers, whose sexual desires were often held in abeyance for lengthy periods with great difficulty. She wears armor for more reasons than one.
The last general truth G. K. Chesterton asserts is that “Ireland is a country in which the political conflicts are at least genuine; they are about something.” He goes on to say that they are real because they hinge on the “ three great realities” of patriotism, religion, and hard cash. “Saint Joan” has nothing to do with money, but everything to do with the other two realities. Without being actually cognizant of the issues, Joan of Arc nevertheless promotes nationalism at the cost of the nobles, and undermines the Catholic Church’s contention that one can apprehend God only with the assistance of an assigned intermediary. If political contests are contests for power, “Saint Joan” is unquestionably a story of such a struggle.
Besides being an Irishman, which endowed him with a kind of “intellectual chastity and the fighting spirit,” Bernard Shaw was an Orangeman. He was a Protestant in a Roman Catholic land. There were many Nationalist Irishmen who condemned him as a “West Briton.” Bernard Shaw was “an exile from Ireland living in Ireland,” much as Joan of Arc was an outsider to the land and church she fought for.
The kind of Protestant that Bernard Shaw was amounted to Puritanism. G. K. Chesterton defines the basic tenet of Puritanism in this way: “It is a refusal to contemplate God or goodness with anything lighter or milder than the most fierce concentration of the intellect.” Bernard Shaw wrote in 1912 that if he could “conceive a God as deliberately creating something less than himself, I should class him as a cad. If he were simply satisfied with himself, I should class him as a coxcomb. My God must continually strive to surpass himself.” Just like God must reaffirm and surpass himself so must a Puritan in service to his God.
This touches on Joan of Arc in two ways. First, she eschews, however unwittingly, dealing with her God except on the most immediate basis. She brings all of herself to it. Second, she reaffirms her stance, though in a roundabout way, during and at the conclusion of her trial. Her faith wavers momentarily, but her fierceness wins out in the end. She unequivocally returns to the essential and demanding Puritan idea that “God can only be praised by direct contemplation of him.”
G. K. Chesterton maintains that, because he is a Puritan, Bernard Shaw is never frivolous. The same can be said for Joan of Arc. She does not make war wearing a ball gown. While talking to the artist Walter Tittle in 1924 George Shaw said Joan of Arc’s idea “in wearing man’s clothes was a sensible one; she was a soldier, and could not be bothered with skirts, and as she was associated with soldiers constantly it was more modest to dress as one of them.” But this was one of the counts against her at the trial, and was interpreted by the Catholic Church as wanton immodesty. Joan of Arc never uses her wit for fun – so much like Bernard Shaw’s, in that it is not a sense of humor, which implies that truth is tricky. She rather uses it as one of the means to attain her goals. She joshes the Dauphin to give him courage. When she pokes fun at religious leaders it is because she understands they are her enemies. She uses her wit like a weapon. It is, like a Calvinist’s and like Bernard Shaw’s, consistent as a sharp tongue eager to engage.
An aspect of all Puritans is that they are austere. Bernard Shaw’s Puritan teachers “could not prevent him from taking up theatricals, but they made him take theatricals seriously .” Joan of Arc is similarly austere. During her trial she declares that she could comfortably live on bread and water. Her aversion to excess is signaled by her reaction to everlasting imprisonment as punishment for her heresy. Her recantation is recanted. She instinctively recoils from that judgment because it would deny her the lifeforce of nature, and also because she believes the verdict is wildly extravagant. Death has preference because it pales in the face of profligacy.
He austerity in the play is occasionally belied by some historical inaccuracies. The critic J. Van Kan has observed that Joan of Arc would sooner have endured diabolical cruelties at the hands of her torturers than to admit a naturalistic explanation for her “voices.” On the whole, though, considering her sincerity, background, and mission, and the means she employs to fulfill her destiny, she is an austere character. Bernard Shaw answered for his errors of strict fact when he wrote to a critic of his representation of Joan of Arc’s nature that he had “ no theory about Joan, and understand her no more than I understand myself.”
If Bernard Shaw’s vocation was as a playwright, then his avocation was as a progressive. G. K Chesterton writes that he was born in an epoch that had taken the great political and moral successes of the 19th century and fashioned them into portals of nothing. “The moral world was pretty well all windows and no house by the time George Bernard Shaw arrived on the scene.” The reason it was mostly windows by the time he got to London was that morality had morphed into mud. Bernard Shaw waded into the mudflat and “thoroughly trashed all competitors in the difficult art of being at the same time modern and intelligent.” He kept revolutionists on their toes by such declarations as that physical science was a mystical fake. He didn’t go into details and left it at that.
As a progressive Bernard Shaw concentrated on two crusades. The first was the humanitarian cause. “At its best and noblest it meant a sort of mystical identification of our life with the whole life of nature,” G. K. Chesterton says, though he does not mention what it is at its worst. Joan of Arc’s identification with a similar cause can be shown by two examples. First, although she went to war, it was specifically to save her homeland. On the battlefield she did not actually kill anyone. Second, she prefers the stake to exile from nature.
Another cause Bernard Shaw committed himself to was Socialism. G. K. Chesterton says that this exemplifies the same trait as his humanitarianism. If it does, then Joan of Arc leaving the farming life of her parents to live among a gaggle of soldiers is a reflection of her sociological leanings and human compassion
G. K Chesterton admires Bernard Shaw’s moral and social persuasions, but says thst his “great defect was and is the lack of democratic sentiment.” This particular lack is exactly what sends Joan of Arc on the warpath and to her death. She fails to see that her trial is political, not religious. In addition, she is unable or unwilling to delegate authority, and consequently comes to be considered arrogant and disagreeable. She and her spirit oracles cannot make a mistake. He body will fail Joan of Arc. She may not be a democrat, but, like Bernard Shaw, she makes an excellent republican. Her death will be a success. The two of them “are more for the Public Thing than the Private Thing.”
I have emphasized the first three parts of G. K. Chesterton’s biography because they have the most to reveal about Bernard Shaw’s nature and character, and by inference Joan of Arc herself. The last three parts say less about who Bernard Shaw was and more about what he did up to 1910, which was that he wrote a few lackadaisical novels and a good many good plays. Each of these imaginings had a plot and a theme. Some of the attitudes expressed in the plays and other writings can be brought to bear on “Saint Joan.”
When Bernard Shaw was a critic for the Saturday Review he defended the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. He informed everyone that Ibsen “was not artistic, but moral; that his dramas were didactic and that all great art was didactic.” Bernard Shaw might as well have been talking about himself.. He went to great lengths to make his plays didactic. The original version of “Back to Methuselah” took three days to perform. If one was willing to stay and listen, one couldn’t help but get the point. Many of his plays sport prefaces and epilogues intended to make the meaning clear as a bell. With “Saint Joan” Bernard Shaw was doing what Socrates believed to be the highest duty of a teacher, which was exposing prejudices and misconceptions in order to arrive at the truth.
In Plato’s “The Last Days of Socrates” the doomed philosopher invents a persona for “The Laws and Constitution of Athens” in order to find out whether or not he should flee the sentence of death that hangs over him. It is worthwhile pointing out that Bernard Shaw likewise creates spokesmen for the political and religious adventures of the time, and then posits Joan of Arc against them. The dialogues that ensue set forth the relative positions of all involved and then, in the epilogue, synthesize those positions. This is done subtly enough so that Bernard Shaw’s conception of the truth is set forth forthrightly, and yet space is left for the audience to come to their own conclusions. In this vein the critic F. F. Rattray said that “it is a tribute to Shaw that both Catholics and Protestants have been satisfied with how their respective cases have been dealt with in it.”
G. K. Chesterton writes that in “Arms and the Man” there was, among other elements of style, “one thing not unimportant; there was savage sincerity.” In the future, out of the remote past, Joan of Arc lay in wait. A warrior of ferocious sincerity, she seems an apt character for Bernard Shaw’s pen. She fits right into his style.
Idealism is not the same as sincerity. Bernard Shaw published “The Philanderer” in 1898 as part of “Plays Unpleasant.” It was in part an exposition of the ”dangers of ideals, the sacrifice of people to principles.” It strongly suggested that “ the idealist is more concerned about the sin than the sinner.” Bernard Shaw went on to recapitulate this idea in “Saint Joan.” He used the Catholic Church to demonstrate the inhumanity of doggedly adhering to a single creed. That might be their only crime. They harm not only others, but eventually themselves, as well. They disregard the fact that happiness is a practical, not an abstract concern.
One of Bernard Shaw’s most important plays, and the last one I will talk about in relation to “Saint Joan,” is “Man and Superman.” The play mixes many themes but one stands out, which is his discovery of Frederick Nietzsche and the concept of the Superman. Frederick Nietzsche believed that just as man had evolved from primates, leaving them behind on the evolutionary ladder, man would ultimately give rise to a new breed of man, higher than Homo Sapiens as he is higher than the apes. In Frederick Nietzsche’s mind this eventually became interwoven with anachronistic ideas about valor and a hatred of pity. Bernard Shaw was not taken in by these latter beliefs, for, as G. K. Chesterton says, “It would require more than ten thousand mad Polish professors to make Bernard Shaw anything but a generous and compassionate man.”
Bernard Shaw came to believe that man’s only hope was in evolution. Consequently, he made the hero of “Man and Superman” a woman, whose justification in seeking a mate suitable for producing a better race is that she will be the mother of the coming Superman. One of the ideas buttressing the play is that nature desires ideal marriages.
Insomuch as it must be a woman who produces the Superman, it may be that Bernard Shaw envisioned Joan of Arc as a precursor to the woman who would do it. One of Joan of Arc’s achievements is that she promotes a redefinition of the role of women in society. Her other achievement is that she is an example of how evolution is thought to work, which is along the lines of sudden changes or mutations. The tragedy of Joan of Arc is that she appeared to soon, too fast, and too insistent in the 15th century. An unlikely pioneer, she was crucified in the name of conventional morality. Her gifts and genius doomed her, as the old customs and obligations proved too strong. But she signals a new set of virtues and indicates that the time will come. It is inevitable, even though she raises the cry “How long, how long?” to her God.
Posing the question of whether Bernard Shaw was fated to write “Saint Joan” reveals the answer to be “Who knows?” There is some evidence suggesting the seed of the play was in him, but the evidence must remain circumstantial. Nobody knows enough about the secret workings of fate to make assertions about its nature. Everybody knows enough about it to connect some of the dots. We are not prisoners of fate, even though some people meet their destiny on the road they take to avoid it. Rather, for good or ill, we are prisoners of our own minds.
Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com.
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