The writer seems altogether to forget what is meant
by the moral atmosphere of a community. To say that Joan must have
learnt her vision of a virgin overthrowing evil from _a_ priest, is
like saying that some modern girl in London, pitying the poor, must have
learnt it from _a_ Labour Member. She would learn it where the Labour
Member learnt it--in the whole state of our society.
But that is the modern method: the method of the reverent sceptic. When
you find a life entirely incredible and incomprehensible from the
outside, you pretend that you understand the inside. As Renan, the
rationalist, could not make any sense out of Christ's most public acts,
he proceeded to make an ingenious system out of His private thoughts. As
Anatole France, on his own intellectual principle, cannot believe in
what Joan of Arc did, he professes to be her dearest friend, and to know
exactly what she meant. I cannot feel it to be a very rational manner of
writing history; and sooner or later we shall have to find some more
solid way of dealing with those spiritual phenomena with which all
history is as closely spotted and spangled as the sky is with stars.
Joan of Arc is a wild and wonderful thing enough, but she is much saner
than most of her critics and biographers.
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