Great results often flow from small causes. Pascal said that if Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter the history of the world would have been different. Similarly it may be truly said that if a peasant girl of DomrÉmy had not had hallucinations, France would now have been a British province. And it is curious to reflect that the Church which burnt her as a heretic and sorcerer has her, and her only, to thank for such hold as it still maintains on France, for the latter would have become Protestant if England had won. The Roman church now recognises this, and has beatified the Maid. The next step will be her canonisation as a saint. Thus does the whirligig of Time bring its revenges.

Jeanne d’Arc was born in the village of DomrÉmy near Vaucouleurs, on the border of Champagne and Lorraine, on January 6th, 1412. She was taught to spin and to sew, but not to read or write, these accomplishments being beyond what was necessary for people in her station of life. Her parents were devout, and she was brought up piously. Her nature was gentle, modest, and religious, but with no physical weakness or morbid abnormality—on the contrary, she was exceptionally strong, as her later history proves.

At or about the age of thirteen, Jeanne began to experience what psychology now calls “auditory hallucinations”. That is, she heard voices—usually accompanied by a bright light—when no visible person was present. This, of course, is a common symptom of impending mental disorder; but no insanity developed in Jeanne d’Arc. Startled she naturally was at first, but continuation led to familiarity and trust. The voices gave good counsel of a commonplace kind, as, for instance, that she “must be a good girl and go regularly to church.” Soon, however, she began to have visions: saw St Michael, St Catherine, and St Margaret; was given instructions as to her mission; eventually made her way to the Dauphin; put herself at the head of 6,000 men, and advanced to the relief of Orleans, which was besieged by the conquering English. After a fortnight of hard fighting the siege was raised, and the enemy driven off. The tide of war had turned, and in three months the Dauphin was crowned King at Rheims, as Charles the Seventh.

At this point Jeanne felt that her mission was accomplished. But her wish to return to her family was over-ruled by king and archbishop, and she took part in the further fighting against the allied English and Burgundian forces, showing great bravery and tactical skill. But in November, 1430, in a desperate sally from Compiegne—which was besieged by the Duke of Burgundy—she fell into the enemy’s hands, was sold to the English, and thrown into a dungeon at their headquarters in Rouen.

After a year’s imprisonment she was brought to trial—a mock trial before the Bishop of Beauvais, in an ecclesiastical court. Learned doctors of the church did their best to entangle the simple girl in their dialectical toils; but she showed a remarkable power of keeping to her simple affirmations and of avoiding heretical statements. “God has always been my Lord in all that I have done”. But the trial was only pretence, for her fate was already decided. She was burnt to death, amid the jeers and execration of a rabble of brutal soldiery, in a Rouen market-place on May 30th, 1431.

The life of the Maid supplies a problem which orthodox science cannot solve. She was a simple peasant girl, with no ambitions hankering after a career. She rebelled pathetically against her mission. “I had far rather rest and spin by my mother’s side, for this is no work of my choosing, but I must go and do it, for my Lord wills it.” She cannot be dismissed on the “simple idiot” theory of Voltaire, for her genius in war and her aptitude in repartee undoubtedly prove exceptional mental powers, unschooled though she was in what we call education. We cannot call her a mere hysteric, for her health and strength were superb. A man of science once said to an AbbÉ: “Come to the SalpÊtriÈre Hospital, and I will show you twenty Jeannes d’Arc.” To which the AbbÉ responded: “Has one of them given us back Alsace and Lorraine?”

There is the crux, as Andrew Lang quietly remarked.

The retort was certainly neat. Still, though the SalpÊtriÈre hysterics have not won back Alsace and Lorraine, it is nevertheless true that a great movement may be started, or kept going when started, by fraud, hallucination, and credulity. The Mormons, for example, are a strong body, but the origins of their faith will not bear much criticism. The Book of Mormon, handed down from heaven by an angel, is more than we can swallow. No one saw its “metal leaves”—from which Joseph Smith translated—except Joseph himself. We have our own opinion about Joseph’s truthfulness. Somewhat similarly with spiritualism. The great movement is there, based partly on fact as I believe, but supported by some fraud and much ignorance and credulity. May it not have been somewhat thus with Jeanne? She delivered France, and her importance in history is great; but may not her mission and her doings have been the outcome of merely subjective hallucinations, induced by the brooding of her specially religious and patriotic mind on the woes of her country? The army, being ignorant and superstitious, would readily believe in the supernatural character of her mission, and great energy and valour would follow as a matter of course—for a man fights well when he believes that Providence is on his side.

That is the usual kind of theory in explanation of the facts. But it is not fully satisfactory. How came it—one may ask—that this untutored peasant girl could persuade not only the rude soldiery, but also the Dauphin and the court, of her Divine appointment? How came she to be given the command of an army? Surely a post of such responsibility and power would not be given to a peasant girl of eighteen, on the mere strength of her own claim to inspiration. It seems, at least, very improbable.

Now it seems (though the materialistic school of historians conveniently ignore or belittle it) that there is strong evidence in support of the idea that Jeanne gave the Dauphin some proof of the possession of supernormal faculties. In fact, the evidence is so strong that Mr Lang called it “unimpeachable”—and Mr Lang did not usually err on the side of credulity in these matters. Among other curious things, Jeanne seems to have repeated to Charles the words of a prayer which he had made mentally, and she also made some kind of clairvoyant discovery of a sword hidden behind the altar of Fierbois church. Schiller’s magnificent dramatic poem “Die Jungfrau von Orleans,” though unhistorical in some details, is substantially accurate on these points concerning clairvoyance and mind-reading.

As to the voices and visions, a Protestant will have a certain prejudice with regard to the St Michael, St Catherine, and St Margaret stories, though he may very possibly be wrong in his disbelief. But, waiving that, it may be true that some genuine inspiration was truly given to the Maid from the deeper strata of her own soul, and that these monitions externalised themselves in the forms in which her thought habitually ran. If she had been a Greek of two thousand years earlier, her visions would probably have taken the form of Apollo and Pallas Athene; yet they might equally well have contained truth and good counsel, as did the utterances of the Oracles.

And, speaking of the Greeks, we may remember that the wisest of that race had similar experiences. Socrates—the pre-eminent type of sanity and mental burliness—was counselled by his “daimon”; by a warning Voice which, truly, did not give positive advice like Jeanne’s, but which intervened to stop him when about to make some wrong decision. Again—to jump suddenly down to modern times—Charles Dickens says in his letters that the characters of his novels took on a kind of independent existence, and that Mrs Gamp, his greatest creation, spoke to him (generally in church) as with an actual voice. In fact, all cases of creative genius, whether in literature, art, or invention, are examples of an uprush from unknown mental depths: the process is not the same as the intellectual process of reasoning. In these cases, as for instance with Socrates, Jeanne d’Arc, Dickens, the deeper strata of the mind may be supposed to send up thoughts so vigorously that they become externalised as hallucinations; not necessarily morbid or injurious, though of course many hallucinations are undoubtedly both. The inspiration rises from below the conscious threshold. It is as if “given”; and the normal conscious mind looks on in passive astonishment. Alles ist als wie geschenkt, says Goethe—and he knew, if anybody did. A similar thing happens, on a more ordinary plane, when a problem that has baffled the working mind is solved in sleep. In short, the normal consciousness is not all there is of us; there are levels and powers below the threshold. And it seems likely that the new psychology is on the track of a better explanation of Socrates and Jeanne d’Arc, as well as of the nature of genius in general, than has yet been excogitated by the philosophers. Certainly these things supply interesting material for study, and many curious discoveries are now being made in this field of research.