{"id":79069,"date":"2014-02-26T06:43:12","date_gmt":"2014-02-26T11:43:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=79069"},"modified":"2015-05-10T09:38:22","modified_gmt":"2015-05-10T13:38:22","slug":"the-books-the-complete-essays-of-mark-twain-saint-joan-of-arc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=79069","title":{"rendered":"The Books: The Complete Essays of Mark Twain<\/i>, \u2018Saint Joan of Arc\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"complete-essays\"<\/a><\/p>\n

On the essays shelf<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The Complete Essays Of Mark Twain<\/a>\"\"
\n<\/i><\/p>\n

\nIn these essays, one of Mark Twain’s ongoing themes, one of the philosophical questions he keeps worrying over, reiterating, going back to, is where great-ness or exceptionalism comes from. His theory is that without the proper “circumstance”, no great-ness would be possible. This is not exactly the same as Pasteur’s quote that “fortune favors the prepared mind”, although it is similar. Great-ness does not descend out of thin air, although mediocre people often wish that that were true, because then they would have a chance as well. Genius is sometimes treated as a problem to be solved: people want to explain it away, perhaps because they are fascinated, but also because they want to cut genius down to size, to one explainable reason for it, because it makes them feel better about themselves. You can see that in biographies all the time, where the biographer tries to explain genius by assigning a plot-point to the subject’s life: He was abandoned by his mother, and that is why he split the atom. He had scarlet fever, and that is why he created the Bunsen Burner. He had a peanut allergy and that was why he became Baryshnikov! Whatever. There isn’t one simple explanation for why one human being rises above the rest of us. Mark Twain saw that and accepted it, but also felt that outer circumstances were the most key thing of all to the human race: outer circumstances were responsible for everything, including our moral code. If you were born in the midst of a bunch of Presbyterians, then more likely than not, you would be a Presbyterian too. If you were born in the midst of liberal politics, with no conservatives in sight, more likely than not, you would share those politics. And if you changed any of that, if you switched parties, if you switched opinions on some major moral issue, then more likely than not it was because something in your outer circumstance changed. You moved to a city and were exposed to more diverse opinions, or whatever. Mark Twain was so certain of this he devoted an entire piece called “What Is Man?” to it (it’s a mouthful that piece, and, unlike most of his writing, a big bore, a total slog to get through). Twain felt there was resistance to this “outer circumstance” idea, because if it were true then that would mean you had no self, no soul, you weren’t born with anything organic and specific and special to YOU, it all came from the outside. Mankind wants to think he is special, unique, that he has created his own thought patterns, that they are HIS. Mark Twain doesn’t think so. He lays it out in terms of his own life, how he was formed, and he locates every major change to some eruption in his outer circumstances. He’s so obsessed with the topic that you can imagine him pontificating at various dinner parties, endlessly, about it, getting into Socratic arguments, making people take their questions to logical conclusions. <\/p>\n

In all of this, Mark Twain makes one exception to the “outer circumstances are ALL” theory, and that is the life of Joan of Arc. In the following essay, he can find no rational explanation for her, for her existence and for her actions, nothing in her outer circumstances dictated ANY of it (unless you count the fact that France was under siege – I suppose Joan of Arc would not have been possible if France had been at peace during her lifetime?) Even down to her sex, her short life makes no sense. <\/p>\n

\n\"st-joan-of-arc\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\nHe has read all of the original documents about Joan’s trial and conviction. He has looked for explanations. How did she know so much about the law to defend herself? How did she know so much about martial matters? (And Marshall Mathers?) Why was she always right in her strategic commands? How did she know what she did? She had no learning curve. She wasn’t in training to be a soldier. She was a girl. She was an illiterate peasant girl, too, she didn’t grow up surrounded by soldiers and politicians and lawyers whose work might have rubbed off on her (outer circumstances, again). <\/p>\n

And so Twain marvels in her exceptionalism. The essay is a love letter to Joan, who makes even his persistently rational mind throw up its hands in despair. I love the phrase below: “discovering him to himself”, one of the most important qualities of genius, I’m thinking. Before world renown, it must be recognized\/nurtured by the genius in question. <\/p>\n

The Complete Essays Of Mark Twain<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, ‘Saint Joan of Arc’, by Mark Twain<\/big><\/p>\n

She is the Wonder of the Ages. And when we consider her origin, her early circumstances, her sex, and that she did all the things upon which her renown rests while she was still a young girl, we recognize that while our race continues she will be also the Riddle of the Ages. When we set about accounting for a Napoleon or a Shakespeare or a Raphael or a Wagner or an Edison or other extraordinary person, we understand that the measure of his talent will not explain the whole result, nor even the largest part of it; no, it is the atmosphere in which the talent was cradled that explains; it is the training which it received while it grew, the nurture it got from reading, study, example, the encouragement it gathered from self-recognition and recognition from the outside at each stage of its development: when we know all these details, then we know why the man was ready when his opportunity came. We should expect Edison’s surroundings and atmosphere to have the largest share in discovering him to himself and to the world; and we should expect him to live and die undiscovered in a land where an inventor could find no comradeship ,no sympathy, no ambition-rousing atmosphere of recognition and applause – Dahomey, for instance. Dahomey could not find an Edison out; in Dahomey an Edison could not find himself out. Broadly speaking, genius is not born with sight, but blind; and it is not itself that opens its eyes, but the subtle influences of a myriad of stimulating exterior circumstances.<\/p>\n

We all know this to be not a guess, but a mere commonplace fact, a truism. Lorraine was Joan of Arc’s Dahomey. And there the Riddle confronts us. We can understand how she could be born with military genius, with leonine courage, with incomparable fortitude, with a mind which was in several particulars a prodigy – a mind which included among its specialties the lawyer’s gift of detecting traps laid by the adversary in cunning and treacherous arrangements of seemingly innocent words, the orator’s gift of eloquence, the advocate’s gift of presenting a case in clear and compact form, the judge’s gift of sorting and weighing evidence, and finally, something recognizable as more than a mere trace of the statesman’s gift of understanding a political situation and how to make profitable use of such opportunities as it offers; we can comprehend how she could be born with these great qualities, but we cannot comprehend how they became immediately usable and effective without the developing forces of a sympathetic atmosphere and the training which comes of teaching, study, practice – years of practice – and the crowning and perfecting help of a thousand mistakes. We can understand how the possibilities of the future perfect peach are all lying hid in the humble bitter-almond, but we cannot conceive of the peach springing directly from the almost without the intervening long seasons of patient cultivation and development. Out of a cattle-pasturing peasant village lost in the remoteness of an unvisited wilderness and atrophied with ages of stupefaction and ignorance we cannot see a Joan of Arc issue equipped to the last detail for her amazing career and hope to be able to explain the riddle of it, labor at it as we may.<\/p>\n

It is beyond us. All the rules fail in this girl’s case. In the world’s history she stands alone – quite alone. Others have been great in their first public exhibition of generalship, valor, legal talent, diplomacy, fortitude; but always their previous years and associations had been in a larger or smaller degree a preparation for these things. There have been no exceptions to the rule. But Joan was competent in a law case at sixteen without ever having seen a law-book or a court-house before; she had no training in soldiership and no associations with it, yet she was a competent general in her first campaign; she was brave in her first battle, yet her courage had had no education – not even the education which a boy’s courage gets from never-ceasing reminders that it is not permissible for a boy to be a coward, but only in a girl; friendless, alone, ignorant, in the blossom of her youth, she saw week after week, a prisoner in chains, before her assemblage of judges, enemies hunting her to her death, the ablest minds of France, and answered them out of an untaught wisdom which overmatched their learning, baffled their tricks and treacheries with a native sagacity which compelled their wonder, and scored every day a victory against these incredible odds and camped unchallenged on the field. In the history of the human intellect, untrained, inexperienced, and using only its birthright equipment of untried capacities, there is nothing which approaches this. Joan of Arc stands alone, and must continue to stand alone, by reason of the unfellowed fact that in the things wherein she was great she was so without shade or suggestion of help from preparatory teaching, practice, environment, or experience. There is no one to compare her with, none to measure her by; for all others among the illustrious grew<\/i> toward their high place in an atmosphere and surroundings which discovered their gift to them and nourished it and promoted it, intentionally or unconsciously. There have been other young generals, but they were not girls; young generals, but they had been soldiers before they were generals: she began<\/i> as a general; she commanded the first army she ever saw; she led it from victory to victory, and never lost a battle with it; there have been young commanders-in-chief, but none so young as she: she is the only soldier in history who has held the supreme command of a nation’s armies at the age of seventeen.<\/p>\n