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 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