To use the dialect Shaw loves and uses so well, he is ‘as cute as a pet fox,’ and I for one believe him when he says that many Catholics approved of his treatment of Saint Joan. What I refuse to believe is that a man of his cool judgment on so many matters could go ‘blind and bald-headed’ into that intricate subject, Amazing, truly, in the trial scene of his play is the elaborate care with which he states the case for the established order. Yet lo! the snare spread in full sight of the bird, and the birds of the less experienced order have been caught—with chaff. Shaw’s chaff in this case is an error in a matter of fact and a misreading of even the fact under his eyes. He dismisses in a word the whole rehabilitation of Saint Joan, he whitewashes Cauchon thick as plaster of Paris, and he muddles the end of the trial to justify his view of Cauchon.

In a recent article in Blackfriars it was well and truly shown how the Dominicans befriended the Maid as much as the said Cauchon would let them, which was very little indeed. It is all very fine for Shaw to ignore everything in the Rehabilitation, which was commanded by the Pope to be reopened after it had failed twice over. It is all finer still for him to ignore the pulverization administered by Andrew Lang to Anatole France’s (whatever his real name was) two-volume sneer at everyone of Joan’s century, but the man who says that all men are liars even on oath in a ‘superstitious’ age, cannot himself escape being thought a somewhat excessive liar. All this Shaw gladly risks, at the expense of ruining the best dramatic points in the muddled trial scene of his play, in order to get at the Church, and not the Church of those days, but of all time.