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.  We shall not recover the common sense of Joan until we have recovered her mysticism.  Our wars fail, because they begin with something sensible and obvious—­such as getting to Pretoria by Christmas.  But her war succeeded—­because it began with something wild and perfect—­the saints delivering France.  She put her idealism in the right place, and her realism also in the right place:  we moderns get both displaced.  She put her dreams and her sentiment into her aims, where they ought to be; she put her practicality into her practice.  In modern Imperial wars, the case is reversed.  Our dreams, our aims are always, we insist, quite practical.  It is our practice that is dreamy.

It is not for us to explain this flaming figure in terms of our tired and querulous culture.  Rather we must try to explain ourselves by the blaze of such fixed stars.  Those who called her a witch hot from hell were much more sensible than those who depict her as a silly sentimental maiden prompted by her parish priest.  If I have to choose between the two schools of her scattered enemies, I could take my place with those subtle clerks who thought her divine mission devilish, rather than with those rustic aunts and uncles who thought it impossible.

A DEAD POET

With Francis Thompson we lose the greatest poetic energy since Browning.  His energy was of somewhat the same kind.  Browning was intellectually intricate because he was morally simple.  He was too simple to explain himself; he was too humble to suppose that other people needed any explanation.  But his real energy, and the real energy of Francis Thompson, was best expressed in the fact that both poets were at once fond of immensity and also fond of detail.  Any common Imperialist can have large ideas so long as he is not called upon to have small ideas also.  Any common scientific philosopher can have small ideas so long as he is not called upon to have large ideas as well.  But great poets use the telescope and also the microscope.  Great poets are obscure for