Authors: Declan Kiberd
H. L. Mencken also contended that "within all the great religions there arise, from time to time, cults, which seek to rid worship of its formalization and artificiality. One of the most familiar of them is
called
mysticism". Joan is such a mystic, one of the elect who hears voices and deals directly with God. She therefore finds God wholly real and assumes neither a different voice nor an alternative vocabulary when speaking either to or about him. She bypasses all forms of liturgy and all human mediators with the divine. She experiences religion in its pristine mystical form. Of mysticism Mencken has written:
The priests of all faiths naturally view such practices with suspicion, for they tend to discount the value of dogma and to make the devotee self-reliant and intractable. Open any treatise on pastoral theology and you will find the author warning his sacerdotal readers against old women who pray too much and are otherwise too intimate with God. If all the faithful inclined to mysticism, there would be empty pews in the churches and the whole ecclesiastical structure would begin to rock.
10
For a brief period, at the end of the middle ages, Protestantism offered a return to the mystical experience, by curtailing the self-importance of priests and by leaving the faithful soul alone in the presence of the word of God. Joan is the creature of just such a moment in the history of religion; but, as a moment, it could not last for long. By the year 1522
Luther was already excommunicating the
Anabaptists with ail the intolerant certainty of a medieval pope, and his followers were docilely accepting his teaching, which had already erected itself as a scaffolding of rational analysis around the mystical moment.
As an exponent of late Catholicism, however, Shaw's Joan can be presented as an authentic precursor of true Protestantism, whose childishness takes an appropriate form. This, also, needs some explanation. Catholicism had tended to pursue sanctity within the quarantine of the monastery, a holy place set apart from the hubbub of life; but Protestantism was to reject such a self-conscious form of saintliness and to insist that virtue could only be virtue if tested out in the world. The puritan
John Milton wrote, for instance, that he could never praise "a fugitive and cloistered virtue".
11
This Renaissance debate anticipates a nineteenth-century dispute as to whether childhood innocence should be quarantined or tested out in the world. Shaw took the latter view – Blake had always been a major influence on his thinking – and he saw Joan as an innocent abroad rather than enclosed.
As child, as woman, as manly soldier, as saint, as foremother of Protestantism and of French nationalism, Joan is one of the most versatile and composite heroines in the history of literature. The actress
Judi Dench has said that, technically, the role is one of the most
difficult in the theatre, since "when you're old enough to play it, you're too old".
12
Another difficulty is that Joan falls into none of the obvious categories of female heroism. There is a traditional way for an actress to play a queen, or a mother, or a romantic beauty, or even a saint; but Joan, in her day, was none of these things. She became, therefore, an open space into which any age or author could read a preferred meaning – to the feminist, a liberated woman; to the religious, a saint; to the French, a patriot; and so on.
Since Catholics are encouraged to believe unreservedly or not at all, so Joan's canonization implied a complete repudiation of those who tried and sentenced her.
13
Shaw rejected such Manichean analysis and in his play depicted no clash of good against evil, preferring to see the conflict as one of consensus against conviction. This allowed him to create complex characters who are a credible blend of idealism and cynicism, of fervour and pragmatism.
Like a latter-day Marxist, Joan speaks as if history had a necessary shape and the whole duty of the individual were to recognize that necessity. For now, according to her, nothing should come between king and people, just as no priests should come between the soul and its god. Joan's idea is rather similar to the argument by James Connolly in
Labour in Irish History
that a Gaelic ruler held land in trust to God on behalf of an entire people.
14
Warwick knows that if the people look to the king rather than their immediate feudal lord, then aristocracy is lost. And he fears that the Church might work willingly with the centralized power of the king: which is to say that he predicts what eventually happened. His enemy is two-pronged: Protestant private judgement in theology, the national separatist idea in politics.
This is a reminder that in his writings on Ireland Shaw consistently equated these two forces, on the basis that a truly Protestant Ireland would necessarily throw off English misrule. He was well aware that the whole idea of a united Ireland under a central administration was a largely Protestant invention: and that the corollary was obvious – the words "Catholic" and "nationalist" did not so easily go together as some glib Irish persons hoped. Nationalism, says Cauchon in the play, "is essentially anti-Catholic ... for the Catholic Church knows only one realm, Christ's Kingdom".
15
The Archbishop points out caustically that, though the mob may love Joan, it cannot save her from the stake: only the church can do that. She replies in the tones of mystics from
Eckhardt to
Simone Weil: "What is my loneliness before the loneliness of my country and my God?"
16
The voices have never played her false.
The Inquisition is thereby divided. The Dominican Ladvenu hears
echoes of the saints in her voice, while the Inquisitor hears only a diabolical pride alongside natural humility within the same soul. He reminds Joan of the fickleness of the common people as contrasted with the stability of the Church. Yet the Church itself has
not
been consistent, having surrendered her to a merely
political
force, her English enemies. Like those critics who read into Joan's life whatever meanings they wish, her inquisitors are wayward and shifting in their accusations – of flying like a witch, of wearing men's clothes, of theological
disobedience. Shaw himself believes in the need for order but he knows also that progress depends on disobedience. Hence the paradox finally conceded by Cauchon: that the
heretic is always better dead, for mortal
eyes
cannot distinguish saint from heretic.
Her answers to cross-questioning show Joan possessed of a clear mind. She dressed as a soldier to avoid sexual impropriety. Asked if she is in a state of grace, she says "If not, may God bring me to it; if I am, may he keep me in it".
17
She turns the allegation of heresy skilfully back into the faces of her accusers, but is condemned anyway to solitary confinement to the end of her days in order to protect her soul. And all this after repenting! This is an interesting moment, for it allows Shaw to relaunch his old critique of jails as effective centres of penal correction. Far from shielding her,
prison is more likely to expose her to the vices of the assembled criminals. Shaw's case against prisons is much the same as the puritan case against monasteries: both are unnatural communities, where people of a similar disposition are artificially banded together in an over-intense fashion, rather than being distributed evenly across a community on which they can act, if they are holy, or which can act upon them for their correction, if they are not. In effect, what the Inquisitor sentences Joan to is the life of a nun, eating simple food in solitary contemplation. She cannot accept this: the palpable injustice of the verdict convinces her once again that her accusers are idiots and it seems to her that they must be wrong about her voices too. So she goes to the stake.
The Epilogue simply establishes the further folly of all consensus viewpoints, by depicting the men who, a generation after her death, found it safe to declare her accusers not only mistaken but corrupt. Shaw has been at pains to show them as humane, if intellectually limited, men. Thus he rejects moral absolutism and prefers to focus instead on the appalling ordinariness of persecution: the worst tyrannies are the ones never noticed, because based on accepted everyday criteria. The road to hell is truly paved with the good intentions of sincere functionaries: as Joan says on her reappearance "They were as
honest a lot of poor fools as ever burned their betters". Or, as the still-living Charles says to the now-dead Cauchon: "It is always you good men that do the big mischiefs".
18
The English chaplain de Stogumber appears, to confess that he connived in the cruelty to Joan simply because he had no idea from his own experience of what it would entail. "Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those who have no imagination?"
19
and the answer is "Yes". The Catholic Church had to wait four hundred years before it found it safe to canonize its first Protestant!
And no sooner is she canonized than Joan fears that this may be a way of neutralizing her subversive powers. Canonized, and therefore forgotten. And so she returns insistently, forgotten but not gone, to say "Woe unto me when all men praise me!" and to ask when will the world be ready to receive its saints: "How long, Oh Lord, how long?"
20
For she is burned at the stake every day: and she will burn again.
Shaw wrote most of
Saint Joan
while sojourning in Glengariff
and Parknasilla, County Kerry, in the summer of 1923: and he took the opportunity to test his "trial scene" by reading it aloud to two Catholic priests, Fathers
Leonard and
Sheehy.
1
Writing in the heart of republican Kerry, the backdrop of so many recent battles, Shaw must have sensed many local resonances in the theme of a nation fighting free of the shackles of foreign ownership. Like many of the Irish rebels, Joan was not a landless peasant but the offspring of strong farmer stock: "I come from the land ..." The strange alliance of noblemen and clergy against the Maid would have been instantly decoded by Fathers Leonard and Sheehy as symbolic of those Catholic bishops who defended Anglo-Irish privilege and who excommunicated members of the
Irish Republican Army. Even more challenging to them would have been Shaw's implication that nationalism was not necessarily to be equated with Catholicism, despite their imminent elision in the infant state. Throughout the play, Joan displays a subversive and enigmatic character, which refuses to reduce itself to a formula, a strangely open space which disrupts all complacent codes with which she comes into contact, as their sponsors wander in bafflement around her apparent irresolution. She refuses to become predictable or categorizable, even though she stays always simple.
Rejecting the idea of a national heroine as a "little old woman" or restored Cathleen-ní-Houlihan-style queen, Shaw celebrated instead an ideal androgyne. Deriding the
masculinist values so often linked to notions of nationhood in the rhetoric which had been generated by the Great War and the Easter Rising, he explored the "flapper" psychology of the postwar period, including the new fashionability of the manly woman. Dismissing the sectarianism of both the north of Ireland and the south, he proposed his Joan as a Protestantized Catholic. Thus, he broke free of imperialist thinking; but he insisted, nonetheless, that the
presence of the invading English had been a constructive element in the shaping of a French – or, by implication, an Irish – identity. Joan's self is wonderfully multiple: while others wish to simplify it for the sake of control, she refuses to surrender any of her identities, whether as soldier, woman, saint or mystic.
It can hardly have been a coincidence that, at that moment when Catholic triumphalists were seeking to make the independent Irish state an instrument of their theology, Shaw should have asserted that the woman canonized by the
Vatican in 1920 was really an honorary
Protestant. Nor can it have been an accident that the Protestant characters who began as peripheral figures on O'Casey's stage should so often have ended as the moral centres of the dramatic action. Repeatedly, in such writings of the 1920s and 1930s, the Protestant ethic emerges in sharp focus against a general Roman Catholic backdrop, as if to suggest that the artists were keenly alert to the dangers of a narrowly Catholic definition of Irish identity. A strange paradox emerged from all this: the mission to
Protestantize Irish culture was only achieved to a significant degree
after
its sponsors had effectively conceded defeat in the political sphere. The ulterior motive of political oppression finally failed: the declared, "insincere" motive was honoured in the end, but in a highly occluded way within the zones of an. Of no set of texts is this more true than of the poems collected by W. B. Yeats in his 1933 volume entitled
The Winding Stair.
If the lyrics of
The Tower
had been bound by a unifying theme, that must have been a Protestant scepticism about the worship of ideals or images: and, for Yeats, an ideal was invariably crystallized in an image. There was great danger in such raids on the ineffable, and the greatest danger of all lay in the indifference which might be the price of full knowledge: a discovery rendered in the bleak, bitter monosyllables at the end of "Leda and the Swan". If the half-said thing remained a mystery, the fully-rendered thing was by that very virtue lost – an idea which appears, slightly rephrased, in his autobiography: "Now that I have written it out, I may even begin to forget it".
2
This, under one aspect, is an idea of ritual purgation, but it has its liabilities as well. Even in the very exigencies of expression Yeats found a necessary and prior indifference, as in his account – in
Autobiographies
– of the actress who could mimic religious fervour and repentance only after their abatement, because by then they left her lukewarm enough to regard them from a dispassionate distance. Art itself might therefore be often no more than a successful faking of feelings which are all-but-dead to the artist. In conception and in execution, therefore, it might indeed be
a scandal to the puritan conscience, a style bereft of honest content, a play-acting by the insincere.
Many of Yeats's essays on the folk poetry of the peasantry mix such a puritan
distrust of "imitation"
per se
with a specifically national suspicion of the emulation of English forms which do not fit Irish experience. "If we busy ourselves with poetry and the countryman, two things which have always mixed with one another in life as on the stage", he wrote in 1902, "we may recover, in the course of years, a lost art which, being an imitation of nothing English, may bring our actors a secure fame and a sufficient livelihood".
3
In later decades, as a mature playwright, Yeats grew ever more scornful of the modes of "English" realism in an art which all too obviously sought to imitate, and in that sense compete with, life. Yeats's love of anti-representational theatre, a theatre which presents a truth of internal coherence rather than exterior correspondence to a known world, may have unexpected roots in his puritan unease at a too-easy confusion of art and life. The older, more primitive but more honestly conventional an forms are praised as being also much more beautiful, as opening up a magnificently alternative world rather than a badly-faked version of this one: "We have to prepare a stage for the whole wealth of modern lyricism, for an art that is close to pure music, for those energies that would free the arts from imitation, that would ally acting to decoration and to the dance".
4
To answer the gnawing fear that art may, nonetheless, be an act in bad faith, it became necessary for the older Yeats to strive to bring into being a man who could decently lie behind his own artist's utterances. The worry which shadows the later poems of Yeats is that his youthful elevation of style over content was morally culpable, an exercise of "power" without appropriate "knowledge". He had seen the rape of Leda as a version of artistic inspiration, but a scandal as well; and so he identified more with the put-upon woman than the supernatural assailant. The fear that people are violated rather than illuminated by image-worship is repeated in
"The Mother of God" in the 1933 volume; the subject is, of course, the Virgin Mary, a figure who traditionally raises the issue for Irish Protestants:
What is this flesh I purchased with my pains,
This fallen star my milk sustains,
This love that makes my heart's blood stop,
Or strikes a sudden chill into my bones
And bids my hair stand up?
5
Again, the experience is ambiguous. In directly adopting the female voice, the poet seems more unnerved than illuminated, as he assumes Mary's ignorance under visitation by the image. He, too, is a vehicle for such visitors of power, but one lacking in philosophic knowledge of what it may all portend. So in "Vacillation", he feels obliged to ask "What, be a singer born, and lack a theme?"
6
Like Samuel Beckett who made destitution sumptuous with possibility,
Yeats could indeed proclaim that failure as a new theme in itself, and contend that
style
in such an art was no mere decoration, but a code-word for puritan self-conquest, for the perpetual struggle that is the pilgrim's progress. This would be the element in Beckett's writings saluted with the immortal quip "Themes, madame, I know not themes"; or, as Yeats was wont to ask, "What theme had Homer but original sin?"
7
So Yeats's autobiography became the account of a man with a very few poses labouring to give birth to a self which might turn them into themes.
R. P. Blackmur phrased the matter even more subtly when he proclaimed that Yeats's search was for a mode of expression rather than for a dogma to express.
8
This idea – of the limited importance of having ideas – is canvassed repeatedly in
Autobiographies,
where each truly great character is praised for choosing only one pose and holding to it: Raphael and Titian for constantly striking one note, and Homer for relentlessly pursuing "original sin".
Yeats's is a poetry which would, in all probability, cease to communicate if it were ever fully known, because its images would retain no power in reserve. Such reserves could, however, frighten a poet who, like Beckett, could break off the illusion created by his own writings, sometimes in mid-sentence. On the other hand, he must have wondered whether the poetry that ensued was not a surrender to stereotypes of the non-analytic, impulse-driven Celt, whose verbal skill outstripped his intellectual control; and he must have been even more perturbed by a too-easy mastery, by the trite or facile triumph of a kind represented by the golden bird in "Sailing to
Byzantium". That figure achieved its qualified triumph as a subordinate image, but only at the cost of mobility and growth.
In "Sailing to Byzantium" the golden bird was "set upon" a golden bough to sing to lords and ladies and a drowsy Emperor. Now, in "Byzantium", art is no longer a mere servant of the Emperor, but has been elevated to the status of the imperial itself. Is the poem, thereby, a celebration of imperialism? Hardly, for it is the dangers, violence, even deadliness of image-making and of artistic triumph which are uppermost here. The twilight days of empire are dismissed at the opening with contempt, as are the unredeemed images:
The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night-walker's song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit and a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
9
The scene sketched is one of late-imperial, O'Caseyesque disorder, as prostitutes live off the remaining drunks of a bedraggled imperial army; and the attempt is to convert that tainted place into another Byzantium, a holy city where art and religion meet, as in the cathedral dome. This will be achieved by the poet's capacity to summon and then to purge a satisfactory image, to use art as a means of reaching God. To
Sturge Moore's famous criticism that the golden bird of the earlier poem was as much of nature as of man's body, there will now be an answering supernatural affirmation. Yet, for all its rhetorical brilliance and technical power, the poem itself seems quite unsatisfied with its own resolution. The miraculous bird in stanza three is described as "embittered by the moon", by the world of time, seasons and human generation. The technical problem posed for the poet in "The Second Coming" is faced yet again: how to employ merely earthly images to conjure an unearthly condition, which will be free of all images and image-making? How can
images
be used meaningfully to describe a state in which all earthly symbolic codes have been cut free of their moorings? It can only be done by negatives:
At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit. . .
10
– and
that
to evoke flames at street-corners where soul is purified by an act of imagination! The technique is doomed to fail and the poem itself concedes it: "an agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve" is Yeats's evocation of the unpurged guilt of dead souls arriving in heaven. In fact, the final stanza, though continuing to assert the imperial imagination's power to break up the bitter furies of our complex world into the eternal shapes of art, ends by returning us to the opening stanza and to its mire, fury and late-imperial squalor:
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget. . .
Here was enacted yet another failed attempt to escape from art to the higher zones of the soul.
Yeats believed that martyr and saint must first show a capacity for all those worldly things that they subsequently renounce; and so must the artist show a capacity to experience the religious vision. This explains why Yeats, in the words of a brilliant critic, saw art not as something you escaped to so much as something you escaped from.
11
Yet he remained haunted by the mystery of art which he flouted. Since it was apparently futile to use art in the attempt to transcend art, the planned escape could never be fully achieved. Hence the rising curve of rhetorical expectation in each stanzas deliberated syntax, followed by the inexorable "downer" of final lines such as
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve . . .
or
I call it death-in-life or life-in-death
12
That last line is self-lacerating, being a patently poor approximation for the "superhuman" and a borrowing from Coleridge to boot. These last-line exercises in bathos enact the same trajectory of anticlimax, which may be found in the closing lines of the stanzas of "Among School Children", where again the poet is distraught by the way in which images live on to tease most cruelly their authors with a mockery of their initial high intentions.
The poems of
The Winding Stair
offer some kind of answer to the bleak pessimism of
The Tower.
As Yeats in ill-health turns into a character out of Beckett, he flirts ever more closely with the possibility of his own death; and, with each flirtation, feels himself summoned back to life, if only for one more celebration of the colossal vitality displayed by friends like Hugh Lane and Lady Gregory in the face of their own mortality. In
"Coole Park and Ballylee 1931", Yeats again evokes the swan as an emblem of Anglo-Irish power and pride; but, linked to the ailing Lady Gregory in this way, the image is no longer threatening. Rather, its very strength and careless pride leave it precarious and vulnerable to bestial instincts of a lesser kind: