y Anatole France. I
have only glanced at it, but a glance was enough to remind me of Renan's
"Vie de Jesus." It has the same strange method of the reverent sceptic.
It discredits supernatural stories that have some foundation, simply by
telling natural stories that have no foundation. Because we cannot
believe in what a saint did, we are to pretend that we know exactly what
he felt. But I do not mention either book in order to criticise it, but
because the accidental combination of the names called up two startling
images of sanity which blasted all the books before me. Joan of Arc was
not stuck at the cross-roads, either by rejecting all the paths like
Tolstoy, or by accepting them all like Nietzsche. She chose a path, and
went down it like a thunderbolt. Yet Joan, when I came to think of her,
had in her all that was true either in Tolstoy or Nietzsche, all that
was even tolerable in either of them. I thought of all that is noble in
Tolstoy, the pleasure in plain things, especially in plain pity, the
actualities of the earth, the reverence for the poor, the dignity of the
bowed back. Joan of Arc had all that and with this great addition, that
she endured poverty as well as admiring it; whereas Tolstoy is only a
typical aristocrat trying to find out its secret. And then I thought of
all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche, and his
mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time. I thought of his
cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of
great horses, his cry to arms. Well, Joan of Arc had all that, and again
with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but fought. We
_know_ that she was not afraid of an army, while Nietzsche, for all we
know, was afraid of a cow. Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was
the peasant. Nietzsche only praised the warrior; she was the warrior.
She beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle
than the one, more violent than the other. Yet she was a perfectly
practical person who did something, while they are wild speculators who
do nothing. It was impossible that the thought should not cross my mind
that she and her faith had perhaps some secret of moral unity and
utility that has been lost. And with that thought came a larger one, and
the colossal figure of her Master had also crossed the theatre of my
thoughts. The same modern difficulty which darkened the subject-matter
of Anatole France also darkened