To the Finland Station Quotes

“Michelet has done a good deal, it is true, to make Jeanne d’Arc popular and famous; but it was as the spokesman for the national sense of the people, not as a mystic or a saint, that she interested him. “What legend is more beautiful,” he writes, “than this incontestable story? But one must be careful not to make it into a legend. One must piously preserve all its circumstances, even the most human; one must respect its touching and terrible humanity…However deeply the historian may have been moved in writing this gospel, he has kept a firm hold on the real and never yielded to the temptation of idealism.” And he insisted that Jeanne d’Arc had established the modern type of hero of action, “contrary to passive Christianity.” His approach was thus entirely rational, based squarely on the philosophy of the eighteenth century – anti-clerical, democratic. And for this reason, the History fo the Middle Ages, important as it is, and for all its acute insight and its passages of marvelous eloquence, seems to me less satisfactory than the other parts of Michelet’s history.What Michelet admires are not the virtues which the chivalrous and Christian centuries cultivated, but the heroisms of the scientist and the artist, the Protestant in religion and politics, the efforts of man to understand his situation and rationally to control his development. Throughout the Middle Ages, Michelet is impatient for the Renaissance.”
― Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station