The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc - Thomas de Quincey (books to read for self improvement TXT) 📗

that this very point of Kempis _having_ manufactured Kempis is furiously and hopelessly litigated, three or four nations claiming to have forged his work for him, the shocking old doubt will raise its snaky head once more--whether this forger, who rests in so much darkness, might not, after all, be of English blood. Tom, it may be feared, is known to modern English literature chiefly by an irreverent mention of his name in a line of Peter Pindar's (Dr Wolcot) fifty years back, where he is described as
"Kempis Tom,
Who clearly shows the way to Kingdom Come"
Few in these days can have read him, unless in the Methodist version of John Wesley Among those few, however, happens to be myself, which arose from the accident of having, when a boy of eleven, received a copy of the "De Imitatione Christi" as a bequest from a relation who died very young, from which cause, and from the external prettiness of the book-- being a Glasgow reprint by the celebrated Foulis, and gaily bound--I was induced to look into it, and finally read it many times over, partly out of some sympathy which, even in those days, I had with its simplicity and devotional fervour, but much more from the savage delight I found in laughing at Tom's Latinity that, I freely grant to M Michelet, is inimitable. Yet, after all, it is not certain whether the original _was_ Latin. But, however that may have been, if it is possible that M Michelet [Footnote: "_If M. Michelet can be accurate_"--However, on consideration, this statement does not depend on Michelet. The bibliographer Barbier has absolutely _specified_ sixty in a separate dissertation, _soixante traductions_ among those even that have not escaped the search. The Italian translations are said to be thirty. As to mere editions, not counting the early MSS. for half a century before printing was introduced, those in Latin amount to 2000, and those in French to 1000. Meantime it is very clear to me that this astonishing popularity so entirely unparalleled in literature, could not have existed except in Roman Catholic times, nor subsequently have lingered in any Protestant land. It was the denial of Scripture fountains to thirsty lands which made this slender rill of Scripture truth so passionately welcome.] can be accurate in saying that there are no less than sixty French versions (not editions, observe, but separate versions) existing of the "De Imitatione," how prodigious must have been the adaptation of the book to the religious heart of the fifteenth century! Excepting the Bible, but excepting _that_ only in Protestant lands, no book known to man has had the same distinction. It is the most marvellous bibliographical fact on record.
3. Our English girls, it seems, are as faulty in one way as we English males in another. None of us men could have written the _Opera Omnia_ of Mr. a Kempis; neither could any of our girls have assumed male attire like La Pucelle. But why? Because, says Michelet, English girls and German think so much of an indecorum. Well, that is a good fault, generally speaking. But M. Michelet ought to have remembered a fact in the martyrologies which justifies both parties--the French heroine for doing, and the general choir of English girls for _not_ doing. A female saint, specially renowned in France, had, for a reason as weighty as Joanna's--viz., expressly to shield her modesty among men--worn a male military harness. That reason and that example authorised La Pucelle; but our English girls, as a body, have seldom any such reason, and certainly no such saintly example, to plead. This excuses _them_. Yet, still, if it is indispensable to the national character that our young women should now and then trespass over the frontier of decorum, it then becomes a patriotic duty in me to assure M. Michelet that we _have_ such ardent females among us, and in a long series; some detected in naval hospitals when too sick to remember their disguise; some on fields of battle; multitudes never detected at all; some only suspected; and others discharged without noise by war offices and other absurd people. In our navy, both royal and commercial, and generally from deep remembrances of slighted love, women have sometimes served in disguise for many years, taking contentedly their daily allowance of burgoo, biscuit, or cannon-balls-- anything, in short, digestible or indigestible, that it might please Providence to send. One thing, at least, is to their credit: never any of these poor masks, with their deep silent remembrances, have been detected through murmuring, or what is nautically understood by "skulking." So, for once, M. Michelet has an _erratum_ to enter upon the fly-leaf of his book in presentation copies.
4. But the last of these ebullitions is the most lively. We English, at Orleans, and after Orleans (which is not quite so extraordinary, if all were told), fled before the Maid of Arc. Yes, says M. Michelet, you _did_: deny it, if you can. Deny it, _mon cher_? I don't mean to deny it. Running away, in many cases, is a thing so excellent that no philosopher would, at times, condescend to adopt any other step. All of us nations in Europe, without one exception, have shown our philosophy in that way at times. Even people "_qui ne se rendent pas_" have deigned both to run and to shout, "_Sauve qui peut_!" at odd times of sunset; though, for my part, I have no pleasure in recalling unpleasant remembrances to brave men; and yet, really, being so philosophic, they ought _not_ to be unpleasant. But the amusing feature in M. Michelet's reproach is the way in which he _improves_ and varies against us the charge of running, as if he were singing a catch. Listen to him: They "_showed their backs_" did these English. (Hip, hip, hurrah! three times three!) "_Behind good walls they let themselves be taken_." (Hip, hip! nine times nine!) They "_ran as fast as their legs could carry them_" (Hurrah! twenty- seven times twenty-seven!) They "_ran before a girl_"; they did. (Hurrah! eighty-one times eighty-one!) This reminds one of criminal indictments on the old model in English courts, where (for fear the prisoner should escape) the crown lawyer varied the charge perhaps through forty counts. The law laid its guns so as to rake the accused at every possible angle. While the indictment was reading, he seemed a monster of crime in his own eyes; and yet, after all, the poor fellow had but committed one offence, and not always _that_. N. B.--Not having the French original at hand, I make my quotations from a friend's copy of Mr. Walter Kelly's translation; which seems to me faithful, spirited, and idiomatically English--liable, in fact, only to the single reproach of occasional provincialisms.]
The circumstantial incidents of the execution, unless with more space than I can now command, I should be unwilling to relate. I should fear to injure, by imperfect report, a martyrdom which to myself appears so unspeakably grand. Yet, for a purpose, pointing not at Joanna, but at M. Michelet--viz, to convince him that an Englishman is capable of thinking more highly of La Pucelle than even her admiring countrymen--I shall, in parting, allude to one or two traits in Joanna's demeanour on the scaffold, and to one or two in that of the bystanders, which authorise me in questioning an opinion of his upon this martyr's firmness. The reader ought to be reminded that Joanna D'Arc was subjected to an unusually unfair trial of opinion. Any of the elder Christian martyrs had not much to fear of _personal_ rancour. The martyr was chiefly regarded as the enemy of Caesar; at times, also, where any knowledge of the Christian faith and morals existed, with the enmity that arises spontaneously in the worldly against the spiritual. But the martyr, though disloyal, was not supposed to be therefore anti- national; and still less was _individually_ hateful. What was hated (if anything) belonged to his class, not to himself separately. Now, Joanna, if hated at all, was hated personally, and in Rouen on national grounds. Hence there would be a certainty of calumny arising against _her_ such as would not affect martyrs in general. That being the case, it would follow of necessity that some people would impute to her a willingness to recant. No innocence could escape _that_. Now, had she really testified this willingness on the scaffold, it would have argued nothing at all but the weakness of a genial nature shrinking from the instant approach of torment. And those will often pity that weakness most who, in their own persons, would yield to it least. Meantime, there never was a calumny uttered that drew less support from the recorded circumstances. It rests upon no _positive_ testimony, and it has a weight of contradicting testimony to stem. And yet, strange to say, M, Michelet, who at times seems to admire the Maid of Arc as much as I do, is the one sole writer among her _friends_ who lends some countenance to this odious slander. His words are that, if she did not utter this word _recant_ with her lips, she uttered it in her heart. "Whether she _said_ the word is uncertain; but I affirm that she _thought_ it."
Now, I affirm that she did not; not in any sense of the word "_thought_" applicable to the case. Here is France calumniating La Pucelle; here is England defending her. M. Michelet can only mean that, on _a priori_ principles, every woman must be presumed liable to such a weakness; that Joanna was a woman; _ergo_, that she was liable to such a weakness. That is, he only supposes her to have uttered the word by an argument which presumes it impossible for anybody to have done otherwise. I, on the contrary, throw the onus of the argument not on presumable tendencies of nature, but on the known facts of that morning's execution, as recorded by multitudes. What else, I demand, than mere weight of metal, absolute nobility of deportment, broke the vast line of battle then arrayed against her? What else but her meek, saintly demeanour won, from the enemies that till now had believed her a witch, tears of rapturous admiration? "Ten thousand men," says M. Michelet himself--"ten thousand men wept"; and of these ten thousand the majority were political enemies knitted together by cords of superstition. What else was it but her constancy, united with her angelic gentleness, that drove the fanatic English soldier--who had sworn to throw a fagot on her scaffold as _his_ tribute of abhorrence, that _did_ so, that fulfilled his vow-- suddenly to turn away a penitent for life, saying everywhere that he had seen a dove rising upon wings to heaven from the ashes where she had stood? What else drove the executioner to kneel at every shrine for pardon to _his_ share in the tragedy? And, if all this were insufficient, then I cite the closing act of her life as valid on her behalf, were all other testimonies against her. The executioner had been directed to apply his torch from below. He did so. The fiery smoke rose upward in billowing volumes. A Dominican monk was then standing almost at her side. Wrapped up in his sublime office, he saw not the danger, but still persisted in his prayers. Even then, when the last enemy was racing up the fiery stairs to seize her, even at that moment did this noblest of girls think only for _him_, the one friend that would not forsake her, and not for herself; bidding him with her last breath to care for his own preservation, but to leave _her_ to God. That girl, whose latest breath ascended in this sublime expression of self-oblivion, did not utter the word _recant_ either with her lips or in her