6
FORMING THE VICTORIAN IMAGINATION
CHAUCER’S KNIGHT AND TWAIN’S SAINT
THE PHRASE ‘I know what I know’ will bring up many hits on any internet search engine. Moreover, almost everybody understands what it means: that you really don’t have any substantial reasons for knowing what you do, but you are quite sure that whatever you know is right.
How is it that we acquire this certainty? In the case of song lyrics, where this phrase appears prominently, it is because we all think we know something about love and sex and people. Divorce statistics indicate that we are wrong about half the time (and American country music themes indicate a failure rate far higher than that).
Similarly, most of us have some ideas about what the medieval world was like. This is because of literature and movies. For the individual who reads, of course, knowing what we know comes from literature.
CHAUCER’S KNIGHT
Generations of American and British schoolchildren have read Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In many cases the language has been modernised. The original, composed between 1387 and 1400, requires considerably more effort to understand than Shakespeare or the King James Bible. While most pupils do not move past the Prologue and the more socially acceptable stories, well-informed college and university students hurry on to the racier tales. In between lie numerous stories that modern readers do not fancy. Among these is a story told by a pilgrim who was long believed to be a pious crusader who has spent his youth and wealth fighting for his Lord.
Chaucer’s knight was looked upon as a figure who personified the best ideals of chivalry and crusading. How else was one to read this passage?
A Knyght ther was, and that a worthy man,
That fro the tyme that he first bigan
To riden out, he loved chivalrie,
Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie.
Ful worthy was he in his lordes werre,
And therto hadde he ridden, no man ferre,
As wel in cristendom as in hethenesse.
And evere honoured for his worthynesse.
At Alisaundre he was whan it was wonne.
Ful ofte tyme he hadde the bord bigonne
Aboven alle nacions in Pruce;
In Lettow hadde he reysed and in Ruce,
No Cristen man so ofte of his degree.
…
And of his port as meeke as is a mayde.
He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde
In al his lyf unto no maner wight.
He was a verray, parfit gentil knyght.
But, for to tellen yow of his array,
His hors were goode, but he was nat gay.
Of fustian he wered a gypon
Al bismotered with his habergeon,
For he was late ycome from his viage,
And wente for to doon his pilgrymage.
General Prologue, 43–78
The Knight’s Tale has not been a twentieth-century favourite. This would probably surprise medieval readers, who were undoubtedly happy that the knight was the first of the Canterbury pilgrims to offer up a tale. His story of honour and love lacked the blood and guts of combat and tournament, but it was sufficient that he was able to describe the swiftly disappearing chivalric codes whose passing was almost universally regretted.
It was not just that the Knight represented the last of the chivalric warriors, but that he was the representative of a noble breed about to cede the battlefield to ruder and more brutal warriors – to mercenaries. Subsequent generations of readers had in mind not only the loss of an admirable type, but nobility in thought and blood was giving way to the lower standards and lower classes of modern times; hand-crafted products were vanishing in a mass-produced world; and men and women who understood literature, art and history were being elbowed aside by those with hands coarsened by trade and commerce. Foremost among those arguing this was John Aubrey (1626–97), a prominent antiquarian and scholar, a friend of the historian and political philosopher Hobbes, a founding member of the Royal Academy (1660), and a pioneer of field archaeology. Aubrey was well known for his extraordinarily wide reading and his unusual memory for details – hence his reputation as an antiquarian (who collected information) rather than as a historian (who evaluated facts and interpretations). Aubrey was an enthusiast who attracted a wide reading public even into the Victorian era. A great stylist, he knew how to tell a story and how to win converts to his views. His most lasting success was probably in persuading the public that the monuments at Avebury and Stonehenge were built by the Druids. Modern scholars know that this cannot be, but Druid societies inspired by Aubrey still celebrate the solstices on the prehistoric sites as often as the authorities will allow them.
Among Aubrey’s enthusiasms was Chaucer’s Knight. It would not be amiss to derive the traditional interpretation from his view that the modern era (the seventeenth century in his case, the nineteenth for many of his readers) was marked by a similar passing away of idealism. Men and women of both eras could look back with nostalgia on the fourteenth century and, with a sigh, point to Chaucer’s Knight as the last great literary figure of the Hundred Years War, when commoners began shooting down horsemen before they had the opportunity to become legends. Each audience yearned for spiritual inspiration.
TERRY JONES
In 1985 Aubrey’s widely accepted interpretation was challenged by a most unlikely scholar – Terry Jones, who until then had been known only as a member of the sensationally successful Monty Python troupe. True, Jones’s insights into medieval attitudes had enlivened Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), but who could take seriously anyone associated with ‘the holy hand grenade’? Jones, however, was a widely read polymath who knew his stuff and knew how to present it. In Chaucer’s Knight. The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary, he described the knight as a strange figure for ‘the quintessence of chivalry’ (as one scholar had put it): no family mentioned, no coat-of-arms, unhandsome, no interest in courtesy or courtly love, and definitely not well-to-do. In an era when Englishmen were fighting in desperate wars for their king, this knight had not served in a single one. More damning, the list of crusades was less a roll of honourable service than of ‘appalling massacres, scenes of sadism and pillage and, on one occasion (the siege of Alexandria) notorious for the disgrace which the English knights, in particular brought upon themselves’.
Chaucer’s Knight was, Jones argued, a medieval mercenary. Moreover, he asserted, any contemporary of Chaucer would have recognised him as such.
This was taking the Establishment head-on! This was a revolutionary thesis that would make every textbook instantly outdated, a thesis proposed by an outsider, to boot. Yet, surprisingly, criticism has been mild. Perhaps this was because Chaucer was so little taught in universities nowadays that it was not worth quarrelling about. Perhaps it was because Jones tapped into the prevailing anti-war attitudes of the academy at just the right moment. And perhaps it was because his arguments were persuasive.
Or were they? While undergraduates were thrilled by his challenge to their professors, as they gained experience and perspective, they generally rethought the arguments. The Old Guard, who were unused to such passion in Chaucerian studies, were not persuaded. Jones himself soon realised that he had been too passionate in his denunciations of the professional soldiery of that era and had given too little weight to the widespread approval of religious wars: ‘it was precisely because Chaucer believed in the old values of chivalry that he portrayed in the Knight the very type who, during his lifetime, represented the destruction of those values.’ But this caveat, which he put into the preface of his second edition, suffered the fate of almost all such efforts – most readers assumed that ‘second edition’ meant ‘second printing’ (as it so often does) and, therefore, did not look to see what might have been changed.*
If we move past the contest over whether Chaucer’s contemporaries would have recognised the knight as a positive or negative model, we still have to deal with three questions:
1 |
Why this gentle story, if the teller were so rude? |
2 |
If the Knight had been a mercenary, why had he not fought in France? Jones employs the Knight’s employment record – having fought in disreputable wars, even for infidels, when his king needed the aid of every fighting man – to suggest that contemporaries would have recognised the Knight as a crude mercenary. However, every broadsword cuts both ways, and none too sharply. The Hundred Years War provided better opportunities for wealth and fame than wars against dangerous enemies in the eastern Mediterranean and the Baltic Seas. Why did the Knight choose obscure wars posturing as crusades? He was pious, but did that mean he was of necessity stupid? Did pious people have no sense of where money was to be made? Perhaps a great historian of an earlier generation, Huizinga, gave us an answer in his remark that the ‘knight-errant, fantastic and useless, will always be poor and without ties, as the first Templars had been’. |
3 |
Why was Chaucer so subtly critical of the knight, when he depicted the squire as a vain peacock, a youthful fashion-plate? Chaucer generally pulled no punches. Why did he disguise his criticism of the knight so carefully? Unless, as Jones suggests, contemporaries would have picked up on the subtle hints, then failed to let us in on the joke. |
Those were powerful questions, almost as powerful as the inertia of tradition.
Jones has not been discouraged. After all, his book went into a second edition, with its corrections, and sold well. Money has charms that sooth many a wound.
‘THE KNIGHT’S TALE’
The Knight’s story took place in Athens – a city Chaucer’s listeners would have known well because it was ruled by Latin lords. Theseus, the king of Athens, was with Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons, when he met a group of mourning women. Told to his horror that they were widows who were not allowed to bury their slain husbands, he vowed revenge upon the tyrant. Marching with his ‘hoorde of chevalrie’ upon Thebes, he slew King Creon and made it possible for the bones to be properly buried. While his men were stripping the dead – a universal post-combat activity for the lower classes – they came upon two young men, side by side, badly wounded. They were Palamon and Arctia, cousins of Creon’s family and, therefore, dangerous to Theseus’s control of the city. He sent them to Athens, to be held in prison without possibility of ransom. And so on.
Ransom was a subject that all Chaucer’s contemporaries understood.
THE SQUIRE
Most readers are more interested in the knight’s squire than in the knight. From the Prologue it was clear that he was familiar with the most recent fashions in popular high culture, and when he was asked to speak, he was instructed to talk of Love.
The squire’s tale was about a Tatar ruler who often warred on Russia, slaying many stout heroes. Still in the prime of life, he had two fine sons and a beautiful daughter, Canacee. One summer day he held a lavish feast. Suddenly, into the hall came a strange knight. Not green, as another similar tale has it, but on a horse of brass, holding a mirror, with a ring on his thumb and an unsheathed sword on his belt. The horse, he said, could bear the ruler to even the most distant land swiftly. The mirror could reveal all matter of secrets, whether an enemy’s approach or a lover’s falsehood. The ring, if worn by Princess Canacee or carried in her purse, would allow her to understand the speech of birds. The sword would not only cut through any armour, but, when applied flat to a wound, would cure it instantly!
The squire did not finish the tale, a lucky accident for which the modern reader is thankful.
THE TEN WORTHIES
Maurice Keen has written at length about outlaw knights and free companies, at one point citing a conversation that Du Guesclin, the tenth worthy of contemporary chivalry (the first nine were heroes of antiquity), had with a mercenary captain. ‘This is an excellent wine,’ he noted. ‘How much did you pay for it?’ The response was witty but disconcerting, ‘I don’t know, the vendor was not alive at the time we acquired it.’ Is this the way a ‘worthy man’ would have behaved?
There were, in short, contemporary critics of chivalry. But the remedy of the time was not to debunk chivalry or do away with it. It was to appeal again to the spirit of loyalty and service that lay at the heart of the chivalric code. Ridicule came in with Cervantes, in Don Quixote, but it was not widespread until modern times.
MARK TWAIN’S MIDDLE AGES
America’s greatest novelist, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain, 1835–1910 – coming in and going out with Halley’s Comet, he said), wrote three ‘historical romances’: The Prince and the Pauper (1881), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1895). As novels they are either marred (or made readable) by his wry sense of humour. That is, he was a smart alec and proud of it. Most of his comments on medieval society were aimed directly at contemporary counterparts; and he never lacked an opinion on any subject. It is at this cross-section of the humorous and serious that Terry Jones and Mark Twain meet.
TWAIN’S RULES OF WRITING
After reading James Fennimore Cooper’s popular novel, The Deerslayer, Twain wrote a critique that has made it forever impossible for Twain’s readers to ever enjoy Cooper again. At least, not in the way Cooper intended. At that time, in 1895, after Twain had already completed his three ‘medieval romances’, he wrote the essay which included his rules for writing. These first five should be kept in mind by every author:
1 |
A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. |
The episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help develop it. |
|
3 |
The personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. |
4 |
The personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. |
5 |
When the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. |
In each ‘romance’ Twain introduces minor characters either as foils to the narrator or for comic relief. In Saint Joan, for example, he has a giant nicknamed the Dwarf and a boastful coward nicknamed the Paladin. Whether these and the other minor characters actually talk like human beings may be questionable. Twain could never resist a joke or an opportunity to express an opinion.
Twain would have enjoyed an evening with Terry Jones. Twain was famous for his collection of wise and witty friends and entertaining them in his home. Terry Jones is good at that, too.
‘THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER’
Although the Prince (Edward VI, 1547–53) and Tom Canty (the prince’s common-born look-alike) lived in the sixteenth century, the social conventions and even the language are closer to the Middle Ages than to the democratic present. Twain was a master of American dialects and personalities (to read Huckleberry Finn silently is to miss half the fun), but his efforts to imitate those of an earlier era are only partly successful (perhaps they should be read aloud, too, preferably to a youthful audience). When young Edward takes his new acquaintance into the palace, this conversation results:
‘Tom Canty, an’ it please thee, sir.’
‘This an odd one. Where dost live?’
‘In the city, please thee, sir – Offal Court, out of Pudding Lane.’
‘Offal Court! Truly ’tis another odd one. Hast parents?’
When the prince proposed an exchange of clothing, the misadventures began. Edward was thrown out of the palace as an interloping pauper, while Tom Canty found himself in the ill-fitting guise of a prince. Called to the bedside of the expiring Henry VIII, the courtiers explained that the boy had gone mad. The king was doubtful.
He put a question to Tom in French. Tom stood silent a moment, embarrassed by having so many eyes centred upon him, then said, diffidently – ‘I have no knowledge of this tongue, so please your majesty.’
The king fell back upon his couch; the attendants flew to his assistance …
The king then advised, in a statement sure to bring joy to the heart of every poor young scholar: ‘Over-study hath done this, and somewhat too much of confinement. Away with his books and teachers – see yet to it! Pleasure him with sports, beguile him in wholesome ways, so that his health my come again.’
‘A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT’
This slim book was more fanciful, the manuscript of a stranger who claimed to have been transported somehow – he isn’t quite sure how – back into the sixth century:
… there was a fellow on a horse, looking down at me – a fellow fresh out of a picture-book. He was in old-time iron armor from head to heel, with a helmet on his head the shape of a nail-keg with slits in it; and he had a shield, and a sword, and a prodigious spear; and his horse had armor on, too, and a steel horn projecting from his forehead, and gorgeous red and green trappings that hung down all around him like a bed-quilt, nearly to the ground.
‘Fair sir, will ye just?’ said this fellow.
‘Will I which?’
‘Will ye try a passage of arms of land or lady or for – ’
‘What are you giving me?’ I said. ‘Get along back to your circus, or I’ll report you.’
Informed that he was a prisoner, and faced by a very dangerous-looking weapon, the narrator agreed to accompany his captor to Camelot. While the knight was arranging to display him to the knights of the Round Table, he was allowed to wander around inside the castle. There he encountered an old man:
‘Friend, do me a kindness. Do you belong to the asylum, or are you just here for a visit, or something like that?’
‘Marry, fair sir, messemeth – ’
‘That will do,’ I said. ‘I reckon you are a patient.’
He soon met Arthur’s famous knights, who were hardly more sophisticated or intelligent than country boys looking for opportunities to fight and brag. Worse, Merlin was a cheap trickster and Arthur was ready to believe anything any of them said. As the narrator listened, bored and unbelieving, to the exaggerated tales of Launcelot’s most recent feats of arms, he noticed:
Well, it was touching to see the queen blush and smile, and look embarrassed and happy, and fling furtive glances at Sir Launcelot that would have got him shot, in Arkansas, to a dead certainty.
As for the stories, they were bawdy to the extreme, and totally implausible. Hence, like Froissart’s reports, they were terribly popular:
Now Sir Kay arose and began to fire up on his history-mill, with me for fuel. It was time for me to feel serious, and I did. Sir Kay told how he had encountered me in a far land of barbarians who all wore the same ridiculous garb that I did – a garb that was a work of enchantment and intended to make the wearer secure from hurt by human hands. However, he had nullified the force of the enchantment by prayer, and had killed my thirteen knights in a three-hours’ battle and taken me prisoner, sparing my life so that so strange a curiosity as I was might be exhibited to the wonder and admiration of the king and the court.
The narrator’s knowledge of astronomy saved him from a burning, and soon he was in charge of everything in Arthur’s realm. Known by his new title, ‘the Boss’, he brought in electric power, telephones and, most important, soap! He even tried to find alternative employment for the knights of the Round Table: ‘Knight-errantry is a most chuckle-headed trade, and it is tedious hard work, too, but I begin to see that there is money in it, after all, if you have luck.’ However, when the market goes bust, all you have left is a ‘rubbish pile of battered corpses and a barrel or two of busted hardware.’ This made him very unpopular.
What was worse is the unwillingness of anyone, noble or commoner, to imagine a better or even different state of affairs. Perhaps what the place needed was a guillotine and executioner, but the narrator was not the man for that. The sixth-century commoner’s understanding of political economy was about equal to that of the average star of stage and screen – nil.
‘SAINT JOAN’
In contrast to the slapstick comedy of A Connecticut Yankee, Twain’s last essay into medieval history was upbeat and serious. It was, purportedly, a recollection of one of Joan’s closest associates:
When we reflect that her century was the brutalest, the wickedest, the rottenest in history since the dark ages, we are lost in wonder at the miracle of such a product from such a soil.
… Joan of Arc, a mere child in years, ignorant, unlettered, a poor village girl unknown and without influence, found a great nation lying in chains, helpless and hopeless under an alien domination, its treasury bankrupt, its soldiers disheartened and dispersed, all spirit torpid, all courage dead in the hearts of the people through long years of foreign and domestic outrage and oppression, their King cowed, resigned to its fate, and preparing to fly the country; and she laid her hand upon this nation, this corpse, and it rose and followed her. She led it from victory to victory, she turned back the tide of the Hundred Years’ War, she finally crippled the English power, and did with the earned title of DELIVERER OF FRANCE, which she bears to this day.
And for all reward, the French king whom she had crowned stood supine and indifferent while French priests took the noble child, the most innocent, the most lovely, the most adorable the ages have produced, and burned her alive at the stake.
France in 1429 was in chaos – the English held Normandy in the west, Paris in the centre of the nation and Gascony in the south; the Burgundian duke held the north, the east and part of the south, and what little remained was dominated by independent-minded lords and rampaging gangs of unemployed mercenaries and robbers. The dauphin had no plans, no ambition and no advisors who were any better than he. Years of military disaster had taught them all to hide in their mouldering fortresses and hope that the English would go away.
Into this situation a young girl, inspired by visions, thrust herself. She was not even French, as most people understood France – she came from Lorraine. To everyone’s surprise the dauphin believed her prediction that he would be crowned king in Rheims and would eventually retake all of France from the English. He gave her an army to relieve the city of Orleans, which had been besieged by the English for seven months. It was up to her, however, to persuade the army’s leaders to let the troops fight.
The opportunity came sooner than expected. As Joan arrived at Orleans, a battle was in progress:
…when we approached the French were getting whipped and were falling back. But when Joan came charging through the disorder with her banner displayed, crying, ‘Forward, men – follow me!’ there was a change; the French turned about and surged forward like a solid wave of the sea, and swept the English before them, hacking and slashing, and being hacked and slashed, in a way that was terrible to see … then our forces to the rear broke through with a great shout and joined us, and then the English fought a retreating fight, but in a fine and gallant way, and we drove them to their fortress foot by foot, they facing us all the time, and their reserves on the walls raining showers of arrows, cross-bow bolts, and stone cannon-balls upon us.
Not satisfied with victory in the field, Joan ordered an assault on the walls, which was ultimately successful. The French had won their first battle! It was too much of a shock for the generals – they had to find some of way reining in this impulsive maid. But, according to Twain, the courtiers had lost control of the army: ‘France was going to take the offensive; that France, so used to retreating, was going to advance; that France, so long accustomed to skulking, was going to face about and strike. The joy of the people passed all bounds.’
The attack on the next fort was too daring for any of the generals, but Joan would brook no delay – that would merely give the enemy time to reinforce their endangered positions. As it was, ‘The English fought like – well, they fought like the English; when that is said, there is no more to say.’ Joan’s army prevailed. Her next stroke was at the centre of the defensive system; and it, too, was successful.
The hot-blooded English commander, Talbot, restrained his temper long enough to accept terms for an honourable surrender, but marched away in a fury, determined to collect another army and return to take full revenge for his humiliation. However, his plans were upset by Joan’s immediate offensive, the attack on his fortress at Jargeau. Although Joan’s artillery blew holes in the wall, the defenders fought like furies:
The enemy’s resistance was so effective and so stubborn that our people began to show signs of doubt and dismay. Seeing this, Joan raised her inspiring battle-cry and descended into the fosse herself. … She started up a scaling-ladder, but a great stone flung from above came crashing down upon her helmet and stretched her, wounded and stunned upon the ground. But only for a moment … There was a grand rush, and a fierce roar of war-cries, and we swarmed over the ramparts like ants. The garrison fled, we pursued; Jargeau was ours!
Talbot was too late, but he could still save the situation if he could bring the French to combat in open country. Hastily collecting all the forces he could, he marched immediately upon Joan, who was by now already known as the Maid of Orleans and was widely hailed as a saint. One sharp combat could restore the world to its proper balance, he believed, one battle that could tear away Joan’s grasp on French morale. But there could be no delay.
It was already too late. When Joan published her famous challenge, demanding that Talbot take his men home while they still had time, the English response was a threat to burn her alive and advice that she should go back to her proper trade of minding cows. Her inspiring response was: ‘Go back and say to Lord Talbot this, from me, “Come out of your bastilles with your host, and I will come with mine; if I beat you, go in peace out of France; if you beat me, burn me, according to your desire”.’
Reinforcements began to appear in Joan’s camp. Knights and mercenaries who had sceptically mocked her now offered their services. Their numbers and status were sufficiently impressive to overcome the king’s ministers, who were still seeking to block her every move – caution, combined with jealousy and incompetence, would have had her wait. Wait for what? The courtiers could not say, but they advised waiting.
Perhaps they were right, had Fastolfe (Twain added an optional ‘e’ to the name) been the English commander. He would have allowed her to wear down her army in attacks on strong fortifications, then struck. ‘But that fierce Talbot would hear of no delay.’ He took up a strong position toward nightfall, awaiting the customary wild French cavalry charge, then the deadly rain of English arrows, the slaughter of the wounded, and the enrichment of the soldiers from the bodies of the fallen.
But Joan told the army to make camp. The night was dark, and the rain light but steady. By morning the English army was slipping away, enticing her to follow into a trap. Joan did not pursue, but moved on the nearest English forts, persuading the garrisons one by one to surrender. Talbot had to turn again.
Joan lay in wait. She knew where the English were, but they had only the vaguest ideas as to the size of her force or its location.
The two armies came together near the village of Patay. Talbot’s army was strung out on the march; the van and the artillery were well to the front, the main force following along at a distance. When the van encountered the first French resistance, it formed a line of battle; then Fastolfe urged his main force into a gallop to join them. He had no warning that Joan was watching from a height, waiting for him to get firmly into the trap.
Her generals urged her to attack, to catch Fastolfe in the flank. But she waited. ‘Now’, they said. ‘Not yet, wait’, she responded.
At last, finally ready, she ordered the charge, with the horsemen to come in on the English rear:
Fastolfe’s hard-driven battle corps raged on like an avalanche toward the waiting advance guard. Suddenly these conceived the idea that it was flying in panic before Joan; and so in that instant it broke and swarmed away in a mad panic itself, with Talbot storming and cursing after it.
The battle was over quickly. The last major English army had been routed. It was not Shakespeare’s Henry VI: ‘The fraud of England, not the force of France, Hath now entrapp’d the noble-minded Talbot.’ No matter. In seven weeks Joan had liberated France. There was now no force able to block the triumphant procession to Rheims for the coronation of the dauphin as Charles VII. There would have been little resistance to taking Paris and much of the rest of English-held France. But the king was not yet equal to the task. He left Joan to soldier on alone, and when she was captured, fighting against overwhelming forces, he did nothing to obtain her release.
TRIAL AND MARTYRDOM
Twain was no historian, at least not a historian of twentieth-century professional standards. There is much in his text that can be questioned or discarded, but his description of the trial was based on the actual words of the testimony. Also, at this point he completely abandoned the artificial formality of the French-into-medieval-English. From now on, his Saint Joan spoke almost entirely in the clear, understandable speech of the modern American middle class. And he stood on his own soapbox to proclaim:
With Joan of Arc love of country was more than a sentiment – it was a passion. She was the genius of Patriotism – she was Patriotism embodied, concreted, made flesh and palpable to the touch and visible to the eye.
Love, Mercy, Charity, Fortitude, War, Peace, Poetry, Music – these may be symbolised as any shall prefer: by figures of either sex and of any age; but a slender girl in her first young bloom, with the martyr’s crown upon her head, and in her hand the sword that severed her country’s bonds – shall not this, and no other stand for Patriotism through all the ages until time shall end?
The life-long reader of Twain has to put this book down amazed. Is this the same sceptic who derided war, who burlesqued saints in book after book, lecture after lecture, who declared once that God made man a little lower than the angels and a little higher than the French?
Yes, it is the same Twain who remarks at one battle: ‘There, hand-to-hand, we fought like wild beasts, for there was no give-up to those English – there was no way to convince one of those people but to kill him, and even then he doubted. At least so it was thought, in those days, and maintained by many.’
He put these words into the mouth of one speechifier:
The old state of things was defeat, defeat, defeat – and by consequence we had troops with no dash, no heart, no hope. Would you assault stone walls with such? No – there was but one way, with that kind: sit down before a place and wait, wait – starve it out, if you could. The new case is the very opposite; it is this: men all on fire with pluck and dash and vim and fury and energy – a restrained conflagration! What would you do with in? Hold it down and let is smoulder and perish and go out? What would Joan of Arc do with it? Turn it loose, by the Lord God of heaven and earth, and let it swallow up the foe in the whirlwind of its fires.
One could not get that kind of spirit from mercenaries.
* N.B. if any reader owns any of my books printed before 1990, throw them away and get the second edition! In some cases almost every paragraph has been changed.