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 Jésus." 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