.
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 that of Ernest Renan.
Renan also divided his hero's pity from his hero's pugnacity.
Renan even represented the righteous anger at Jerusalem as a mere
nervous breakdown after the idyllic expectations of Galilee.
As if there were any inconsistency between having a love for
humanity and having a hatred for inhumanity! Altruists, with thin,
weak voices, denounce Christ as an egoist. Egoists (with
even thinner and weaker voices) denounce Him as an altruist.
In our present atmosphere such cavils are comprehensible enough.
The love of a hero is more terrible than the hatred of a tyrant.
The hatred of a hero is more generous than the love of a philanthropist.
There is a huge and heroic sanity of which moderns can only collect
the fragments. There is a giant of whom we see only the lopped
arms and legs walking about. They have torn the soul of Christ
into silly strips, labelled egoism and altruism, and they are
equally puzzled by His insane magnificence and His insane meekness.
They have parted His garments among them, and for His vesture they
have cast lots; though the coat was without seam woven from the top
throughout.

IV THE ETHICS OF ELFLAND

When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it
is commonly in some such speech as this: "Ah, yes, when one is young,
one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air;
but in middle age they all break up lik