lementary part of the
ethics of honesty. If the characters are not wicked, the book is. This
older and firmer conception of right as existing outside human weakness
and without reference to human error can be felt in the very lightest
and loosest of the works of old English literature. It is commonly
unmeaning enough to call Shakspere a great moralist; but in this
particular way Shakspere is a very typical moralist. Whenever he alludes
to right and wrong it is always with this old implication. Right is
right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is
wrong about it.

THE MAID OF ORLEANS

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 f