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Warwick, to carry off the great dialectic scene, this also mysteriously un–
"dated" in spite of the period context of Shaw's preoccupation, putting
Joan in her place in history as the first Protestant. But he would never
have claimed that this particular big sympathetic part would do with a
little coaching, and although Miss Hagen brought more to it than that,
so that one even thought of her training as flawless and her restraint a
great relief, it was not enough. The part was unmagical, and therefore
untrue; Shaw's Joan is one of Shaw's women it is true, and no doubt
it is difficult to keep the captain of the girls' hockey team out of her
captainship, but it can and must be done. She is a saint; the wind
changes and hens lay eggs because of her. On a visit to the Moscow
anti-ecclesiastical museum, when he was shown the preserved bodies of
two peasants, exhibited as proof that this phenomenon was not peculiar
to saints, Shaw is said to have asked: "And how do you know that
those two were not saints?" And he gave Joan that wonder of English
prose, concerning the beauty of life, "Bread has no sorrow for me,
and water no affliction. But to shut me from the light of the sky and
the sight of the fields and flowers ..."
But there is a difficulty, something beyond Shaw's rabid limitation
of sexlessness which by itself can un-saint a saint as well as de-humanize
an ordinary heroine. "To me God does not yet exist," he wrote to
Tolstoy; "but there is a creative force constantly struggling to evolve an
executive organ of godlike knowledge and power ..." -known as the
doctrine of Creative Evolution, whose ministers would be men of genius,
unless the genius happened to be "himself a woman." It is at this point
that Shaw's humanity, in which his best admirers never claimed for him
any great wealth or depth beyond the autobiographical projection, is in–
sufficient to protect him from the taint of the old-fashioned. Joan is in
fact merely a genius, and although he had a high sense of the mysteries
of genius and was not "on one of my larks" in referring to them in any
particular case as sainthood, he had to make her the next thing to a boy
to be capable of them. (He had first contemplated a play about Moham–
med.) This is not at all to argue for a more orthodox view of saints, but
only to maintain that this Joan, with all her excellent and probably endur–
ing lines and her appealing qualities, is in an impossible position as the
agent of an anachronistic Will-which also, although that is not particul–
arly relevant to this play, sits on the other side of some fifty years of
increased knowledge of human motivation. Consequently she is an im–
possible role for any actress; and her peculiar variety of exaltation (as
though Alfred Doolittle heard such voices) seems destined to become
harder to play, her last line ("How long, 0 Lord, how long?") more
