A considerable time ago (at far too early an age, in fact) I read Voltaire’s “La Pucelle,” a savage sarcasm on the traditional purity of Joan of Arc, very dirty, and very funny.  I had not thought of it again for years, but it came back into my mind this morning because I began to turn over the leaves of the new “Jeanne d’Arc,” by that great and graceful writer, Anatole France.  It is written in a tone of tender sympathy, and a sort of sad reverence; it never loses touch with a noble tact and courtesy, like that of a gentleman escorting a peasant girl through the modern crowd.  It is invariably respectful to Joan, and even respectful to her religion.  And being myself a furious admirer of Joan the Maid, I have reflectively compared the two methods, and I come to the conclusion that I prefer Voltaire’s.

When a man of Voltaire’s school has to explode a saint or a great religious hero, he says that such a person is a common human fool, or a common human fraud.  But when a man like Anatole France has to explode a saint, he explains a saint as somebody belonging to his particular fussy little literary set.  Voltaire read human nature into Joan of Arc, though it was only the brutal part of human nature.  At least it was not specially Voltaire’s nature.  But M. France read M. France’s nature into Joan of Arc—­all the cold kindness, all the homeless sentimental sin of the modern literary man.  There is one book that it recalled to me with startling vividness, though I have not seen the matter mentioned anywhere; Renan’s “Vie de Jesus.”  It has just the same general intention:  that if you do not attack Christianity, you can at least patronise it.  My own instinct, apart from my opinions, would be quite the other way.  If I disbelieved in Christianity, I should be the loudest blasphemer in Hyde Park.  Nothing ought to be too big for a brave man to attack; but there are some things too big for a man to patronise.

And I must say that the historical method seems to me excessively unreasonable.  I have no knowledge of history, but I have as much knowledge of reason as Anatole France.  And, if anything is irrational, it seems to me that the Renan-France way of dealing with miraculous stories is irrational.  The Renan-France method is simply this:  you explain supernatural stories that have some foundation simply by inventing natural stories that have no foundation.  Suppose that you are confronted with the statement that Jack climbed up the beanstalk into the sky.  It is perfectly philosophical to reply that you do not think that he did.  It is (in my opinion) even more philosophical to reply that he may very probably have done so.  But the Renan-France method is to write like this:  “When we consider Jack’s curious and even perilous heredity, which no doubt was derived from a female greengrocer and a profligate priest, we can easily understand how the ideas of heaven and a beanstalk came to be combined in his mind.  Moreover, there