THE BERNARD SHAW LIBRARY
SAINT JOAN
‘He did his best in redressing the fateful unbalance between truth and reality, in lifting mankind to a higher rung of social maturity. He often pointed a scornful finger at human frailty, but his jests were never at the expense of humanity’ Thomas Mann
‘Shaw will not allow complacency; he hates second-hand opinions; he attacks fashion; he continually challenges and unsettles, questioning and provoking us even when he is making us laugh. And he is still at it. No cliché or truism of contemporary life is safe from him’ Michael Holroyd
‘In his works Shaw left us his mind… Today we have no Shavian wizard to awaken us with clarity and paradox, and the loss to our national intelligence is immense’ John Carey, Sunday Times
‘An important writer and an interesting socialist and critic… Thank God he lived’ Peter Levi, Independent
‘He was a Tolstoy with jokes, a modern Dr Johnson, a universal genius who on his own modest reckoning put even Shakespeare in the shade’ John Campbell, Independent
‘His plays were superb exercises in high-level argument on every issue under the sun, from feminism and God, to war and eternity, but they were also hits – and still are’ Paul Johnson, Daily Mail BERNARD SHAW was born in Dublin in 1856. Although essentially shy, he created the persona of G.B.S., the showman, satirist, controversialist, critic, pundit, wit, intellectual buffoon and dramatist. Commentators brought a new adjective into English: Shavian, a term used to embody all his brilliant qualities.
After his arrival in London in 1876 he became an active Socialist and a brilliant platform speaker. He wrote on many social aspects of the day: on Common Sense about the War (1914), How to Settle the Irish Question (1917) and The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928) published by Penguin. He undertook his own education at the British Museum and consequently became keenly interested in cultural subjects. Thus his prolific output included music, art and theatre reviews, which were collected into several volumes, such as Music In London 1890–1894 (3 vols., 1931); Pen Portraits and Reviews (1931); and Our Theatres in the Nineties (3 vols., 1931). He also wrote five novels, including Cashel Byron’s Profession, and a collection of shorter works issued as The Black Girl in Search of God and Some Lesser Tales (also in Penguin).
Shaw conducted a strong attack on the London Theatre and was closely associated with the intellectual revival of British Theatre. His many plays (the full canon runs to 52) fall into several categories: ‘Plays Pleasant’; ‘Plays Unpleasant’; ‘Plays for Puritans’; political plays; chronicle plays; ‘metabiological Pentateuch’ (Back to Methuselah) in five plays; extravaganzas; romances; and fables. He died in 1950.
IMOGEN STUBBS was educated at Oxford and RADA among other places. She has contributed numerous articles to many newspapers and magazines – often in the form of book reviews for The Times and travel articles for Harpers and Queen and Conde Naste Traveller. Her story ‘The Undiscovered Road’ was recently published in Amazonians: The Penguin Book of New Women’s Travel Writing. She also acts, swing dances, has a family and is learning the saxophone.
JOLEY WOOD was educated at the University of Wisconsin and received his M. Phil. in Anglo-Irish Literature from Trinity College, Dublin. He now works as a teacher, and freelance writer and editor. He has written on many twentieth-century Irish writers, particularly James Joyce and Ulysses, and has edited a number of other works. He is currently writing entries on Irish literature for the Encyclopaedia of Ireland (Gill and Macmillan Press).
DAN H. LAURENCE, editor of Shaw’s Collected Letters, his Collected Plays with their Prefaces, Shaw’s Music and (with Daniel Leary) The Complete Prefaces, was Literary Adviser to the Shaw Estate until his retirement in 1990. He is Series Editor for the works of Shaw in Penguin.
A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue
Definitive text under the editorial supervision of
DAN H. LAURENCE
with ‘On Playing Joan’ by
IMOGEN STUBBS
and an Introduction by
JOLEY WOOD
PENGUIN BOOKS
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The play first produced in New York 1923; in London 1924
First
published 1924
First published in Penguin Books 1946
Reprinted with
‘On Playing Joan’ and a new Introduction in Penguin Classics
2001
Reissued with a new Chronology 2003
1
Copyright 1924, 1930 by George Bernard Shaw
Copyright 1951 by The
Public Trustee as Executor of the Estate of George Bernard Shaw
Copyright ©
The Public Trustee as Executor of the Estate of George Bernard Shaw,
1957
‘On Playing Joan’ copyright © Imogen Stubbs
2001
Introduction copyright © Joley Wood 2001
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors of the additional preliminary material have been asserted
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ISBN: 978-0-14-192144-0
Chronology of the Life and Times of Bernard Shaw
‘On Playing Joan’ by Imogen Stubbs
Introduction by Joley Wood
Preface
SAINT JOAN
Principal Works of Bernard Shaw
1856 Born in Dublin on 26 July
1871 After only short periods of schooling, started work as an office boy in a Dublin firm of land agents
1873 Mother and sisters moved to London
1876 Joined mother in London; she taught singing and his sister Lucy sang professionally in musical plays
1879 While working for the Edison Telephone Company, began to meet the earliest British socialists, including, in 1880, Sidney Webb and Beatrice Potter (later Mrs Webb) who became lifelong friends
1879–81 Wrote five novels, four published serially in magazines
1884 Joined the Fabian Society, which advocated gradual progress towards socialism, and began giving lectures both to the Fabians and on their behalf. At about the same time, met the hugely influential theatre critic William Archer, who helped Shaw to find work as a critic. First meeting with William Morris whose disciple he became
1885 Appointed as a book reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette and music critic for the new Dramatic Review
1886–9 Art critic for The World
1888–90 Music critic for The Star (under the pseudonym ‘Corno di Bassetto’)
1889 Attended English première of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House
1890–4 Music critic for The World (writing as GBS)
1891 Published The Quintessence of Ibsenism
1892 Widowers’ Houses (his first published play) given a private performance by the Independent Theatre in London
1894 Arms and the Man produced at the Avenue Theatre in London; then by actor-manager Richard Mansfield in New York
1895–8 Drama critic for The Saturday Review
1897 Encouraged by the success of The Devil’s Disciple in New York, gave up most of his work as a critic
1897–1903 Elected borough councillor for the London borough of St Pancras
1898 Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant published. Married Charlotte Payne-Townshend. Began concentrating on his writing as playwright and essayist
1899 The newly founded Stage Society produced You Never Can Tell, followed by Candida and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion in 1900
1904–7 Granville Barker and Vedrenne take over the (Royal) Court Theatre in a challenge to the commercial West End theatre system. Eleven Shaw plays produced at the Court including the newly written Man and Superman, John Bull’s Other Island, Major Barbara and The Doctor’s Dilemma
1905 Bought a country home at Ayot St Lawrence, approximately 25 miles north of London (retaining an apartment in Adelphi Terrace, off the Strand)
1910 Misalliance produced at the Duke of York’s Theatre
1913 Androcles and the Lion at St James’s Theatre. World première of Pygmalion in Vienna (in German), followed by a production in Berlin
1914 Pygmalion produced by Herbert Beerbohm Tree, at His Majesty’s Theatre. Common Sense about the War published
1920 Heartbreak House produced at the Royal Court. Completed Back to Methuselah, a five-part cycle of plays, transforming the biblical version of creation and human destiny into post-Darwinian science fiction
1924 Saint Joan produced at the New Theatre
1925 Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. First English public performance of Mrs Warren’s Profession (banned by the censor since 1898)
1928 Published The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism
1929 The Apple Cart, produced at the first Malvern Festival, organized by Barry Jackson’s Birmingham Repertory Theatre with Shaw as its figurehead
1931 Visited Moscow, and met Stanislavski, Gorki and Stalin
1932 Too True to be Good produced at Malvern. Published fable of The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God following a visit to South Africa
1933 Travelled to India, Hong Kong, China, Japan and the USA
1936 Celebrated 80th birthday. Gave up driving
1938 Awarded Oscar for the best screenplay for Gabriel Pascal’s film of Pygmalion. Geneva (featuring caricatures of Hitler and Mussolini called before the International Court of Justice at the Hague) transferred from Malvern to Saville Theatre, and then to St James’s Theatre
1939 Ceremonially presented with the deeds of a site (in South Kensington) for the National Theatre of Great Britain
1943 Death of Charlotte Shaw
1944 Published Everybody’s Political What’s What?, an instant best-seller
1946 On his 90th birthday, honoured with the freedom of both Dublin and the borough of St Pancras
1950 Died on 2 November
1955 Alan J. Lerner based the book and lyrics of the musical My Fair Lady closely on Pygmalion
1856 End of the Crimean War. Sigmund Freud born
1859 Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species published. Construction of the Suez Canal started
1861–5 American Civil War
1866 The Fenians, Irish Republicans, opposed the English occupation of Ireland
1867 Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ published
1870 Education Act made primary schooling compulsory in England and Wales
1871 Year of political change in Europe: Italy and Germany both unified
1883 Death of Marx. The left-wing Fabian Society founded
1886 Home Rule for Ireland first proposed by Gladstone’s Liberal government; the Conservative Lord Salisbury became Prime Minister
1887 Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee
1892 Keir Hardie elected as first Independent Socialist Member of Parliament
1895 Oscar Wilde imprisoned for homosexual offences. Lumière brothers patented cinematograph
1897 Irish Literary Theatre founded by W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn
1899–1902 Anglo-Boer War in South Africa
1901 Death of Queen Victoria, accession of Edward VII
1907 Rudyard Kipling the first British winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
1911 Members of Parliament paid a salary for the first time. Women’s Freedom League founded
1914–18 First World War
1916 Easter Rising by Irish Nationalists in Dublin
1920 League of Nations created. Government of Ireland Act, partitioning Ireland
1922 Continuing civil war in Ireland
1924 First Labour government in Britain, under Ramsay Macdonald; replaced by the Conservative Unionists, under Stanley Baldwin. Death of Lenin
1928 Women over twenty-one in the United Kingdom given the vote
1929 New York Stock Exchange crash led to world economic depression. Election of second Labour minority government in Britain (which became a multi-party National government in 1931)
1933 Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany
1939–45 Second World War
1945 Labour Party, under Clement Attlee, won the election, replacing the wartime leader Winston Churchill.
1946 First meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations
1948 British National Health Service founded
by Imogen Stubbs
A leading actress shares her personal memories of the challenges to be found in playing Joan, mirroring the sense of fun in Joan herself and in much of Shaw’s play.
When the part of Shaw’s Joan was first proposed to me, it set me thinking about the audience expectations of a play called Saint Joan, written by an Anglo-Irishman in the 1920s about a dead French girl who had just been canonized for her efforts to get the English out of France several hundred years previously.
It sounded like a dead tree on a lonely road. I’d ‘done’ Saint Joan at school – I’d seen the statue, so to speak. The words ‘not relevant’ kept singing in my head (along with ‘Didn’t the 47-year-old Sybil Thorndike, to whom I bear no resemblance, play her “definitively?”’). Having toured the play around Britain and into the West End, I think – I hope – I was quite wrong about the relevance of the play (though probably not about Sybil Thorndike).
One is wary of being an apologist for Shaw when he is such a great apologist for himself, but by placing himself as an amused observer of human endeavour, his arguments are as provocative now – in a society which, for instance, still struggles with the notion of the ordination of women priests – as they were when he wrote the play.
But (rather obviously) what greatly fascinates me is the story of Joan – the Cinderella with a ‘Ready-Brek’ glow, yes, but also the intractable teenager with the intolerance of youth and the naiveté and dogged determination of a child; a woman who was burned to death at an age when most people’s lives have hardly begun.
Shaw presents a girl who has an anarchic sense of humour, who is sometimes hard, violent, hysterical, proud, serene, vulnerable, always courageous. He is accountable to her, and he requires the same loyalty from the actress who plays Joan, to whom he also entrusts the difficult task of playing ‘Faith’ as a quality of life.
The play presents two other practical challenges to an actress. One is coping with the fact that your fellow actors cannot resist hiding speakers on stage, so in the middle of a big speech you might suddenly hear a muddled: ‘Hey, Joanie – it’s me Saint Catherine. Can you hear me?’ The other is, miracle of miracles, the wind changing. This requires a banner, a wind machine, and a sense of humour. We had nightmares with that moment. The poor boy whose only line was to leap up and down and shout ‘The wind! The wind! – It’s CHANGED!’ would either have to scream above the sound of a Boeing 707 taking off, or stare at the limp banner and say ‘The wind! The wind! I’m sure it’s about to change’, rush into the wings screaming ‘Point the machine higher you idiots’ and then rush back on stage and say ‘God has spoken’.
I once played a character called Anna Lee in a television series which attracted a certain following of young teenage girls who, in their much-appreciated devotion, came to see Saint Joan with no prior knowledge of the play and much trepidation that their hard-saved pennies were about to be squandered.
What I found so rewarding (and a relief) was that these girls generally seemed to respond to the character of Joan. Variously – and rather surprisingly – they said that they saw something in Joan of Anne Frank, of the boy in ET, of Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V. But, overwhelmingly, they saw a heroine who was killed for many of the choices that they took for granted.
They saw a teenager whose combustible combination of naïvety and raw presumption led her to fight passive acceptance of chauvinism and the status quo; someone who believed in spiritual forces greater than the self-appointed ones on earth; a loner, whose journey seems to be one suffered by many teenage icons – defiant, proud, alone, sad, disillusioned, dead and then celebrated. They saw someone who saved her country, only to be burned at the stake because any girl with cropped short hair wearing trousers and clompy boots, any girl only interested in platonic relationships, any girl having a sense of vocation or a quality of leadership must automatically be a witch. ‘I might almost… have been a man,’ laments Joan towards the end of the play. ‘Pity I wasn’t; I should not have bothered you all so much then.’
For teenage girls it is perhaps hard to measure the success of the sexual revolution, but I like to hope that, standing unchaperoned at the stage door in Levi’s and Doctor Marten boots, with their cropped hair-dos and their wonderful bubbling confidence as they poured forth their opinions and their aspirations, they got some measure of it.
As to Joan’s relevance to me or mine to her – I’m not an intractable teenager, but I most certainly was once. I’m not a country girl, but I can see my Northumbrian origins as a source of reference. I’m not a lone girl amongst soldiers, but I was one of very few girls at a boys’ school. I have not been drawn into conflict with every male authority figure I have encountered, but I have been in the first-year intake of women into a male college (Oxford’s Exeter College) and I have witnessed the terror some men have of female intrusion into a male domain. I should also add that with our production, with male producers, a predominately male cast, and a female director, the opposite was true. Finally, like Joan, I think I am aware of the difference between ‘Life’ and ‘Existence’, and the potential destruction of all that seems to define ‘Life’ by cant and cynicism and misperception of reality. I have not heard voices – but I live in hope.
Whether she is considered miraculous or unbearable, the inspiration of women like Joan will always be relevant: ‘O God, that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?’
All Joans are relevant but some Joans are more relevant than others – I think Shaw’s Saint Joan is the right one to be received by the twenty-first century.
by Joley Wood
In 1913, after already creating a significant body of work, George Bernard Shaw conceived of a drama about Joan of Arc in a letter to a friend. Shaw completed Saint Joan in 1923, and for the next two years the play encountered mixed reception (often in the same review), with criticisms of length and the epilogue often mitigated by acknowledgements of an underlying genius. In 1925 Saint Joan earned Shaw both his first success on the French stage and the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Saint Joan is Shaw’s most acclaimed historically based play, what Thomas Mann called ‘the most fervent thing Shaw ever wrote’. Luigi Pirandello felt that Shaw respected the ‘considerations of art’ and sustained a poetic emotion throughout the play. Shaw found in Joan’s heresy a fitting emblem of the human spirit. In 1920 Joan of Arc was canonized a saint by the Catholic Church. Joan’s brash yet accurate critique of authority resonated with Shaw, and he realized that her canonization risked whitewashing this most Shavian quality of hers. Shaw hoped that his play would restore this quality she had to the public eye, and modelled his Joan on friends of his who also challenged the social status quo: these included the physically vigorous, well-disciplined and seemingly sexless hostess of the Fabian Summer Schools, Mary Hankinson; and T. E. Lawrence, or Lawrence of Arabia, who had recently taken part in a Middle Eastern national unification movement similar to Joan’s French endeavour. This kind of antagonistic character can be an enticing challenge for an actor to play, and since Sybil Thorn-dike many, including Joan Plowright, Frances de la Tour and, recently, Imogen Stubbs, have attempted to embody this spirit – when a film version that was to be financed by General Charles de Gaulle was discussed, de Gaulle even suggested that he should play St Joan in preference to the casted Greta Garbo.
Shaw calls Saint Joan ‘a Chronicle play’, but it can be argued that he has written his own kind of tragedy, embodying a Shavian challenge to prevailing artistic and social norms. Artistically, Shaw challenges previously accepted models of stage tragedy by offering an alternative to the classical form. Aristotelian tragedy depends upon some flaw or error by the protagonist that sets the tragic machinery into motion. Shaw’s notion of tragedy, however, functions on a different register. We are not invited to take part in someone’s error, but in the distress one encounters when the right thing was done, yet failure was always imminent. Hence it is Joan’s strengths, not her faults, that bring about her downfall. One critic has noted the similarity of Shaw’s approach to tragedy and G. W. F. Hegel’s outlook in his Philosophy of Fine Art: ‘two opposed Rights come forth: the one breaks itself to pieces against the other: in this way, both alike suffer loss; while both alike are justified the one towards the other: not as if this were right, that other wrong’. Shaw’s intentions seem like-minded. In his original Preface he notes ‘It is what men do at their best, with good intentions, and what normal men and women find that they must and will do in spite of their intentions, that really concern us’; and Joan is burned ‘by normally innocent people in the energy of their righteousness’. In other words, neither Joan nor her executioners are in error; both act with ‘good’ yet mutually contradictory intentions, the strain of which leads to the destruction of one or the other. Indeed, this may be a more poignant form of tragedy than one dealing in error. The audience of classical Aristotelian tragedy always has the consolation that the error leads to the downfall. Shaw removes this possibility by eliminating the error, sealing off those mental doors that offer some sense of relief, and thus brings his audience closer to a desperate tragic sense.
Aristotle was not the only Greek influence upon Shaw’s tragedy. The narrative of Prometheus represented the ‘staple of tragedy’ for Shaw. The Titan gave fire to humanity against the wishes of the gods and was severely punished through eternal physical torture, yet remained defiant and thus became a martyr for his actions. Similarly, Joan gave nationhood to a people and was then burned at the stake for being a heretical threat to the authorities, yet still prayed while she burned – ‘What more do you want for a tragedy as great as that of Prometheus?’ said Shaw. In his original Preface to Saint Joan, Shaw also compared Joan to Socrates: both had a similar ability to infuriate authorities because their actions had the side effect of revealing where those authorities were wrong, or even foolish.
Shaw felt that this challenge of fresh principles to held ideals was necessary for human evolution. Hence objections like Joan’s, pointing out where improvement is needed, may in many cases be silenced, but history shows that such reactions only prove the validity of the objection. Thus Prometheus’ liver becomes a scavenger’s eternal lunch while he shows no remorse; Socrates drinks his last tea while he continues teaching; and Joan goes up in a blaze to her angels while she persists in praying – all becoming martyrs for the cause of reason in the face of the irrational. As Shaw wrote, ‘the angels may weep at the murder, but the gods laugh at the murderers’.
Shaw saw the irony of how Joan, after four long centuries, was being brought into the fold of a suppressive authority she stood against. Thus when she is canonized a saint in the Epilogue, Shaw has Joan state ‘But I never made any such claim.’ Joan’s situation is ironically reflected in Shaw’s winning the Nobel Prize for the play. In its own way the Prize is a canonization of his spirit, yet it is hardly in keeping with the antiestablishment tone of his drama: ‘The Nobel Prize was a hideous calamity for me,’ he wrote to a friend; ‘… It was really almost as bad as my 70th birthday.’ Shaw had the final say by using the award money to establish an Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation.
It is true that Shaw altered the historical facts somewhat in his characterizations: this was not because his grasp on the facts was loose, but rather to create the social tensions needed to drive the play. He attempted to distil the facts of a historical event in order to locate its sense and re-recreate that sense on stage through an artistic means, a form that falls somewhere between historiography and histrionics. Therefore, despite what history may show, no character in his play need be entirely good or bad – ‘There are no villains in the piece,’ Shaw wrote in his Preface, ‘It is, I repeat, what normally innocent people do that concerns us.’
In effect Shaw creates a kind of absurdist social critique through his drama: the protagonist is sent into an irrational situation believed to be perfectly sound to everyone except her, and this situation is then logically followed to its irrational conclusion. Shaw shares this approach with other writers from his native Ireland, from Swift’s social commentaries and Wilde’s satires to Joyce’s cultural observations and Beckett’s existential critiques. ‘English literature must be saved (by an Irishman, as usual),’ wrote Shaw, ‘from the disgrace of having nothing to show concerning Joan…’
The outsider who has found a way in often brings an unknown perspective to a culture, and this critique of the irrational is part of a tradition of analysis that does not simply turn things on its head, but shows how an ignored fault can eventually undo a greater structure. In this case Joan is the outsider to the established French Catholic Church and State. French Nationalism makes sense to Shaw’s Joan, because it is she and other French-speaking peasants who require the attention of their king, not people who do not even live in France. Joan’s desire to commune directly with her god without an overly bureaucratic clergy intervening reveals a Church that has unknowingly placed itself above the deity. And Joan’s battle savvy and instincts were that of a soldier, so it was perfectly logical to her to be dressing and acting as such. This is a person achieving her potential, not a destiny determined by gender – and how would a ‘womanly’ woman be treated in a camp of soldiers? Not as a soldier. Joan did the commonsensical thing, and was persecuted for it. In a final Shavian twist, the Epilogue proves to the audience that, despite four centuries of hindsight, our mortal eyes would not be able to distinguish a saint from a heretic; were Joan alive today, she would still be persecuted.
Joan of Arc, a village girl from the Vosges, was born about 1412; burnt for heresy, witchcraft, and sorcery in 1431; rehabilitated after a fashion in 1456; designated Venerable in 1904; declared Blessed in 1908; and finally canonized in 1920. She is the most notable Warrior Saint in the Christian calendar, and the queerest fish among the eccentric worthies of the Middle Ages. Though a professed and most pious Catholic, and the projector of a Crusade against the Husites, she was in fact one of the first Protestant martyrs. She was also one of the first apostles of Nationalism, and the first French practitioner of Napoleonic realism in warfare as distinguished from the sporting ransom-gambling chivalry of her time. She was the pioneer of rational dressing for women, and, like Queen Christina of Sweden two centuries later, to say nothing of Catalina de Erauso and innumerable obscure heroines who have disguised themselves as men to serve as soldiers and sailors, she refused to accept the specific woman’s lot, and dressed and fought and lived as men did.
As she contrived to assert herself in all these ways with such force that she was famous throughout western Europe before she was out of her teens (indeed she never got out of them), it is hardly surprising that she was judicially burnt, ostensibly for a number of capital crimes which we no longer punish as such, but essentially for what we call unwomanly and insufferable presumption. At eighteen Joan’s pretensions were beyond those of the proudest Pope or the haughtiest emperor. She claimed to be the ambassador and plenipotentiary of God, and to be, in effect, a member of the Church Triumphant whilst still in the flesh on earth. She patronized her own king, and summoned the English king to repentance and obedience to her commands. She lectured, talked down, and overruled statesmen and prelates. She pooh-poohed the plans of generals, leading their troops to victory on plans of her own. She had an unbounded and quite unconcealed contempt for official opinion, judgment, and authority, and for War Office tactics and strategy. Had she been a sage and monarch in whom the most venerable hierarchy and the most illustrious dynasty converged, her pretensions and proceedings would have been as trying to the official mind as the pretensions of Caesar were to Cassius. As her actual condition was pure upstart, there were only two opinions about her. One was that she was miraculous: the other that she was unbearable.
If Joan had been malicious, selfish, cowardly, or stupid, she would have been one of the most odious persons known to history instead of one of the most attractive. If she had been old enough to know the effect she was producing on the men whom she humiliated by being right when they were wrong, and had learned to flatter and manage them, she might have lived as long as Queen Elizabeth. But she was too young and rustical and inexperienced to have any such arts. When she was thwarted by men whom she thought fools, she made no secret of her opinion of them or her impatience with their folly; and she was naïve enough to expect them to be obliged to her for setting them right and keeping them out of mischief. Now it is always hard for superior wits to understand the fury roused by their exposures of the stupidities of comparative dullards. Even Socrates, for all his age and experience, did not defend himself at his trial like a man who understood the long accumulated fury that had burst