which may not interest my reader,
but which, at any rate, interests me. In front of me, as I close
this page, is a pile of modern books that I have been turning
over for the purpose--a pile of ingenuity, a pile of futility.
By the accident of my present detachment, I can see the inevitable smash
of the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Shaw,
as clearly as an inevitable railway smash could be seen from
a balloon. They are all on the road to the emptiness of the asylum.
For madness may be defined as using mental activity so as to reach
mental helplessness; and they have nearly reached it. He who
thinks he is made of glass, thinks to the destruction of thought;
for glass cannot think. So he who wills to reject nothing,
wills the destruction of will; for will is not only the choice
of something, but the rejection of almost everything. And as I
turn and tumble over the clever, wonderful, tiresome, and useless
modern books, the title of one of them rivets my eye. It is called
"Jeanne d'Arc," by 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