Let me repeat that, for the nation as with the individual, these high
moments must rest on something else. They are the high mountain peaks
of the moral life; but detached mountain peaks are impossible,--except
as a mirage. They must rest upon the granite foundation of the hills
and plateaus below. So these high virtues of non-resistance, magnanimity
and self-sacrifice must always rest upon the granite foundation of the
masculine virtues of self-affirmation, endurance, heroism, strong
conflict with evil. It takes strength to make magnanimity and
self-sacrifice possible, if their lesson is not lost. A weak man
cannot be magnanimous, since his generosity is mistaken for servile
cowardice. After all, the best time to forgive your enemy, for his good
and yours, is not when he has his foot on your neck: he is apt to
misunderstand and think you are afraid. It is often better to wait
until you can get on your feet and face him, man to man, and then if you
can forgive him, it is so much the better for you, for him and for all
concerned.

Thus there are two opposite lines of error in the moral life. The
philosophy of the one is given by Nietzsche, while Tolstoy, in certain
extremes of his teaching, represents the other. Nietzsche, I suppose,
should be regarded as a symptom, rather than a cause of anything
important; but the ancestors of Nietzsche were Goethe and Ibsen, with
their splendid gospel of self-realization. Nietzsche, on the contrary,
with his contempt for the morality of Christianity as the morality of
slaves and weaklings, with his eulogy of the blond brute striding over
forgotten multitudes of his weaker fellows to a stultifying isolation
apart--Nietzsche is self-realization in the mad-house. It has always
seemed to me not without significance that his own life ended there.