The phrases of the street are not only forcible but subtle: for a figure
of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition. Phrases
like "put out" or "off colour" might have been coined by Mr. Henry James
in an agony of verbal precision. And there is no more subtle truth than
that of the everyday phrase about a man having "his heart in the right
place." It involves the idea of normal proportion; not only does a
certain function exist, but it is rightly related to other functions.
Indeed, the negation of this phrase would describe with peculiar
accuracy the somewhat morbid mercy and perverse tenderness of the most
representative moderns. If, for instance, I had to describe with
fairness the character of Mr. Bernard Shaw, I could not express myself
more exactly than by saying that he has a heroically large and generous
heart; but not a heart in the right place. And this is so of the typical
society of our time.
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too
good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is
shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not
merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose,
and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and
the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage.
The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The
virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other
and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their
truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their
pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful. For example, Mr.
Blatchford attacks Christianity because he is mad on one Christian
virtue: the merely mystical and almost irrational virtue of charity. He
has a strange idea that he will make it easier to forgive sins by saying
that there are no sins to forgive. Mr. Blatchford is not only an early
Christian, he is the only early Christian who ought really to have been
eaten by lions. For in his case the pagan accusation is really true: his
mercy would mean mere anarchy. He really is the enemy of the human
race--because he is so human. As the other extreme, we may take the
acrid realist, who has deliberately killed in himself all human pleasure
in happy tales or in the healing of the heart. Torquemada tortured
people physically for the sake of moral truth. Zola tortured people
morally for the sake of physical truth. But in Torquemada's time there
was at least a system that could to some extent make righteousness and
peace kiss each other. Now they do not even bow. But a much stronger
case than these two of truth and pity can be found in the remarkable
case of the dislocation of humility.
It is only with one aspect of humility that we are here concerned.
Humility was largely meant as a restraint upon the arrogance and
infinity of the appetite of man. He was always out-stripping his mercies
with his own newly invented needs. His very power of enjoyment destroyed
half his joys. By asking for pleasure, he lost the chief pleasure; for
the chief pleasure is surprise. Hence it became evident that if a man
would make his world large, he must be always making himself small. Even
the haughty visions, the tall cities, and the toppling pinnacles are the
creations of humility. Giants that tread down forests like grass are the
creations of humility. Towers that vanish upwards above the loneliest
star are the creations of humility. For towers are not tall unless we
look up at them; and giants are not giants unless they are larger than
we. All this gigantesque imagination, which is, perhaps, the mightiest
of the pleasures of man, is at bottom entirely humble. It is impossible
without humility to enjoy anything--even pride.
But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty
has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ
of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be
doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been
exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is
exactly the part he ought not to assert--himself. The part he doubts is
exactly the part he ought not to doubt--the Divine Reason. Huxley
preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is
so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. Thus we should be wrong
if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time.
The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it
so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the
wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was a spur that
prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him
from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his
efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a
man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working
altogether.
At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and
blasphemous statement that he may be wrong. Every day one comes across
somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one. Of
course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view. We are on
the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in
the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who
doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own. Scoffers of
old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be
convinced. The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are
too meek even to claim their inheritance. It is exactly this
intellectual helplessness which is our second problem.
The last chapter has been concerned only with a fact of observation:
that what peril of morbidity there is for man comes rather from his
reason than his imagination. It was not meant to attack the authority of
reason; rather it is the ultimate purpose to defend it. For it needs
defence. The whole modern world is at war with reason; and the tower
already reels.
The sages, it is often said, can see no answer to the riddle of
religion. But the trouble with our sages is not that they cannot see the
answer; it is that they cannot even see the riddle. They are like
children so stupid as to notice nothing paradoxical in the playful
assertion that a door is not a door. The modern latitudinarians speak,
for instance, about authority in religion not only as if there were no
reason in it, but as if there had never been any reason for it. Apart
from seeing its philosophical basis, they cannot even see its historical
cause. Religious authority has often, doubtless, been oppressive or
unreasonable; just as every legal system (and especially our present
one) has been callous and full of a cruel apathy. It is rational to
attack the police; nay, it is glorious. But the modern critics of
religious authority are like men who should attack the police without
ever having heard of burglars. For there is a great and possible peril
to the human mind: a peril as practical as burglary. Against it
religious authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier. And
against it something certainly must be reared as a barrier, if our race
is to avoid ruin.
That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just
as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next
generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one
set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching
the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It
is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is
itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our
thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a
sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should
_anything_ go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good
logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the
brain of a bewildered ape?" The young sceptic says, "I have a right to
think for myself." But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, "I
have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all."
There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that
ought to be stopped. That is the ultimate evil against which all
religious authority was aimed. It only appears at the end of decadent
ages like our own: and already Mr. H.G. Wells has raised its ruinous
banner; he has written a delicate piece of scepticism called "Doubts of
the Instrument." In this he questions the brain itself, and endeavours
to remove all reality from all his own assertions, past, present, and to
come. But it was against this remote ruin that all the military systems
in religion were originally ranked and ruled. The creeds and the
crusades, the hierarchies and the horrible persecutions were not
organized, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason. They
were organized for the difficult defence of reason. Man, by a blind
instinct, knew that if once things were wildly questioned, reason could
be questioned first. The authority of priests to absolve, the authority
of popes to define the authority, even of inquisitors to terrify: these
were all only dark defences erected round one central authority, more
undemonstrable, more supernatural than all--the authority of a man to
think. We know now that this is so; we have no excuse for not knowing
it. For we can hear scepticism crashing through the old ring of
authorities, and at the same moment we can see reason swaying upon her
throne. In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are
both of the same primary and authoritative kind. They are both methods
of proof which cannot themselves be proved. And in the act of
destroying the idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed the
idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum. With a
long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre off
pontifical man; and his head has come off with it.
Lest this should be called loose assertion, it is perhaps desirable,
though dull, to run rapidly through the chief modern fashions of thought
which have this effect of stopping thought itself. Materialism and the
view of everything as a personal illusion have some such effect; for if
the mind is mechanical, thought cannot be very exciting, and if the
cosmos is unreal, there is nothing to think about. But in these cases
the effect is indirect and doubtful. In some cases it is direct and
clear; notably in the case of what is generally called evolution.
Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it
destroys anything, destroys itself. Evolution is either an innocent
scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if
it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself. If
evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but
rationalism. If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an
ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is
stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well
do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he
were outside time. But if it means anything more, it means that there is
no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to
change into. It means that there is no such thing as a thing. At best,
there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything.
This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot
think if there are no things to think about. You cannot think if you are
not separate from the subject of thought. Descartes said, "I think;
therefore I am." The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the
epigram. He says, "I am not; therefore I cannot think."
Then there is the opposite attack on thought: that urged by Mr. H.G.
Wells when he insists that every separate thing is "unique," and there
are no categories at all. This also is merely destructive. Thinking
means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected. It need
hardly be said that this scepticism forbidding thought necessarily
forbids speech; a man cannot open his mouth without contradicting it.
Thus when Mr. Wells says (as he did somewhere), "All chairs are quite
different," he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in
terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them "all
chairs."
Akin to these is the false theory of progress, which maintains that we
alter the test instead of trying to pass the test. We often hear it
said, for instance, "What is right in one age is wrong in another." This
is quite reasonable, if it means that there is a fixed aim, and that
certain methods attain at certain times and not at other times. If
women, say, desire to be elegant, it may be that they are improved at
one time by growing fatter and at another time by growing thinner. But
you cannot say that they are improved by ceasing to wish to be elegant
and beginning to wish to be oblong. If the standard changes, how can
there be improvement, which implies a standard? Nietzsche started a
nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil;
if it were so, we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of
them. How can you overtake Jones if you walk in the other direction? You
cannot discuss whether one people has succeeded more in being miserable
than another succeeded in being happy. It would be like discussing
whether Milton was more puritanical than a pig is fat.
It is true that a man (a silly man) might make change itself his object
or ideal. But as an ideal, change itself becomes unchangeable. If the
change-worshipper wishes to estimate his own progress, he must be
sternly loyal to the ideal of change; he must not begin to flirt gaily
with the ideal of monotony. Progress itself cannot progress. It is worth
remark, in passing, that when Tennyson, in a wild and rather weak
manner, welcomed the idea of infinite alteration in society, he
instinctively took a metaphor which suggests an imprisoned tedium. He
wrote--
"Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change."
He thought of change itself as an unchangeable groove; and so it is.
Change is about the narrowest and hardest groove that a man can get
into.
The main point here, however, is that this idea of a fundamental
alteration in the standard is one of the things that make thought about
the past or future simply impossible. The theory of a complete change of
standards in human history does not merely deprive us of the pleasure
of honouring our fathers; it deprives us even of the more modern and
aristocratic pleasure of despising them.
This bald summary of the thought-destroying forces of our time would not
be complete without some reference to pragmatism; for though I have here
used and should everywhere defend the pragmatist method as a preliminary
guide to truth, there is an extreme application of it which involves the
absence of all truth whatever. My meaning can be put shortly thus. I
agree with the pragmatists that apparent objective truth is not the
whole matter; that there is an authoritative need to believe the things
that are necessary to the human mind. But I say that one of those
necessities precisely is a belief in objective truth. The pragmatist
tells a man to think what he must think and never mind the Absolute. But
precisely one of the things that he must think is the Absolute. This
philosophy, indeed, is a kind of verbal paradox. Pragmatism is a matter
of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something
more than a pragmatist. Extreme pragmatism is just as inhuman as the
determinism it so powerfully attacks. The determinist (who, to do him
justice, does not pretend to be a human being) makes nonsense of the
human sense of actual choice. The pragmatist, who professes to be
specially human, makes nonsense of the human sense of actual fact.
To sum up our contention so far, we may say that the most characteristic
current philosophies have not only a touch of mania, but a touch of
suicidal mania. The mere questioner has knocked his head against the
limits of human thought; and cracked it. This is what makes so futile
the warnings of the orthodox and the boasts of the advanced about the
dangerous boyhood of free thought. What we are looking at is not the
boyhood of free thought; it is the old age and ultimate dissolution of
free thought. It is vain for bishops and pious bigwigs to discuss what
dreadful things will happen if wild scepticism runs its course. It has
run its course. It is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great
truths that will be revealed if once we see free thought begin. We have
seen it end. It has no more questions to ask; it has questioned itself.
You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men ask
themselves if they have any selves. You cannot fancy a more sceptical
world than that in which men doubt if there is a world. It might
certainly have reached its bankruptcy more quickly and cleanly if it had
not been feebly hampered by the application of indefensible laws of
blasphemy or by the absurd pretence that modern England is Christian.
But it would have reached the bankruptcy anyhow. Militant atheists are
still unjustly persecuted; but rather because they are an old minority
than because they are a new one. Free thought has exhausted its own
freedom. It is weary of its own success. If any eager freethinker now
hails philosophic freedom as the dawn, he is only like the man in Mark
Twain who came out wrapped in blankets to see the sun rise and was just
in time to see it set. If any frightened curate still says that it will
be awful if the darkness of free thought should spread, we can only
answer him in the high and powerful words of Mr. Belloc, "Do not, I
beseech you, be troubled about the increase of forces already in
dissolution. You have mistaken the hour of the night: it is already
morning." We have no more questions left to ask. We have looked for
questions in the darkest corners and on the wildest peaks. We have found
all the questions that can be found. It is time we gave up looking for
questions and began looking for answers.
But one more word must be added. At the beginning of this preliminary
negative sketch I said that our mental ruin has been wrought by wild
reason, not by wild imagination. A man does not go mad because he makes
a statue a mile high, but he may go mad by thinking it out in square
inches. Now, one school of thinkers has seen this and jumped at it as a
way of renewing the pagan health of the world. They see that reason
destroys; but Will, they say, creates. The ultimate authority, they say,
is in will, not in reason. The supreme point is not why a man demands a
thing, but the fact that he does demand it. I have no space to trace or
expound this philosophy of Will. It came, I suppose, through Nietzsche,
who preached something that is called egoism. That, indeed, was
simple-minded enough; for Nietzsche denied egoism simply by preaching
it. To preach anything is to give it away. First, the egoist calls life
a war without mercy, and then he takes the greatest possible trouble to
drill his enemies in war. To preach egoism is to practise altruism. But
however it began, the view is common enough in current literature. The
main defence of these thinkers is that they are not thinkers; they are
makers. They say that choice is itself the divine thing. Thus Mr.
Bernard Shaw has attacked the old idea that men's acts are to be judged
by the standard of the desire of happiness. He says that a man does not
act for his happiness, but from his will. He does not say, "Jam will
make me happy," but "I want jam." And in all this others follow him with
yet greater enthusiasm. Mr. John Davidson, a remarkable poet, is so
passionately excited about it that he is obliged to write prose. He
publishes a short play with several long prefaces. This is natural
enough in Mr. Shaw, for all his plays are prefaces: Mr. Shaw is (I
suspect) the only man on earth who has never written any poetry. But
that Mr. Davidson (who can write excellent poetry) should write instead
laborious metaphysics in defence of this doctrine of will, does show
that the doctrine of will has taken hold of men. Even Mr. H.G. Wells has
half spoken in its language; saying that one should test acts not like a
thinker, but like an artist, saying, "I _feel_ this curve is right," or
"that line _shall_ go thus." They are all excited; and well they may be.
For by this doctrine of the divine authority of will, they think they
can break out of the doomed fortress of rationalism. They think they can
escape.
But they cannot escape. This pure praise of volition ends in the same
break up and blank as the mere pursuit of logic. Exactly as complete
free thought involves the doubting of thought itself, so the acceptation
of mere "willing" really paralyzes the will. Mr. Bernard Shaw has not
perceived the real difference between the old utilitarian test of
pleasure (clumsy, of course, and easily misstated) and that which he
propounds. The real difference between the test of happiness and the
test of will is simply that the test of happiness is a test and the
other isn't. You can discuss whether a man's act in jumping over a cliff
was directed towards happiness; you cannot discuss whether it was
derived from will. Of course it was. You can praise an action by saying
that it is calculated to bring pleasure or pain to discover truth or to
save the soul. But you cannot praise an action because it shows will;
for to say that is merely to say that it is an action. By this praise of
will you cannot really choose one course as better than another. And yet
choosing one course as better than another is the very definition of the
will you are praising.
The worship of will is the negation of will. To admire mere choice is to
refuse to choose. If Mr. Bernard Shaw comes up to me and says, "Will
something," that is tantamount to saying, "I do not mind what you
will," and that is tantamount to saying, "I have no will in the matter."
You cannot admire will in general, because the essence of will is that
it is particular. A brilliant anarchist like Mr. John Davidson feels an
irritation against ordinary morality, and therefore he invokes
will--will to anything. He only wants humanity to want something. But
humanity does want something. It wants ordinary morality. He rebels
against the law and tells us to will something or anything. But we have
willed something. We have willed the law against which he rebels.
All the will-worshippers, from Nietzsche to Mr. Davidson, are really
quite empty of volition. They cannot will, they can hardly wish. And if
any one wants a proof of this, it can be found quite easily. It can be
found in this fact: that they always talk of will as something that
expands and breaks out. But it is quite the opposite. Every act of will
is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation.
In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose
anything, you reject everything else. That objection, which men of this
school used to make to the act of marriage, is really an objection to
every act. Every act is an irrevocable selection and exclusion. Just as
when you marry one woman you give up all the others, so when you take
one course of action you give up all the other courses. If you become
King of England, you give up the post of Beadle in Brompton. If you go
to Rome, you sacrifice a rich suggestive life in Wimbledon. It is the
existence of this negative or limiting side of will that makes most of
the talk of the anarchic will-worshippers little better than nonsense.
For instance, Mr. John Davidson tells us to have nothing to do with
"Thou shalt not"; but it is surely obvious that "Thou shalt not" is only
one of the necessary corollaries of "I will." "I will go to the Lord
Mayor's Show, and thou shalt not stop me." Anarchism adjures us to be
bold creative artists, and care for no laws or limits. But it is
impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits. Art is
limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a
giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative
way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you
will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you
step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can
free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of
their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but
do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of
his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as
a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their
three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes
to a lamentable end. Somebody wrote a work called "The Loves of the
Triangles"; I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever were
loved, they were loved for being triangular. This is certainly the case
with all artistic creation, which is in some ways the most decisive
example of pure will. The artist loves his limitations: they constitute
the _thing_ he is doing. The painter is glad that the canvas is flat.
The sculptor is glad that the clay is colourless.
In case the point is not clear, an historic example may illustrate it.
The French Revolution was really an heroic and decisive thing, because
the Jacobins willed something definite and limited. They desired the
freedoms of democracy, but also all the vetoes of democracy. They wished
to have votes and _not_ to have titles. Republicanism had an ascetic
side in Franklin or Robespierre as well as an expansive side in Danton
or Wilkes. Therefore they have created something with a solid substance
and shape, the square social equality and peasant wealth of France. But
since then the revolutionary or speculative mind of Europe has been
weakened by shrinking from any proposal because of the limits of that
proposal. Liberalism has been degraded into liberality. Men have tried
to turn "revolutionise" from a transitive to an intransitive verb. The
Jacobin could tell you not only the system he would rebel against, but
(what was more important) the system he would _not_ rebel against, the
system he would trust. But the new rebel is a sceptic, and will not
entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be
really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really
gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation
implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist
doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which
he denounces it. Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial
oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book
(about the sex problem) in which he insults it himself. He curses the
Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses
Mrs. Grundy because they keep it. As a politician, he will cry out that
war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is
waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing
a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that
the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a
lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a
lie. He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland
or Ireland because they take away that bauble. The man of this school
goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are
treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and
goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically
are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite
sceptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on
politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics
he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in
revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By
rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against
anything.
It may be added that the same blank and bankruptcy can be observed in
all fierce and terrible types of literature, especially in satire.
Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted
superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard.
When little boys in the street laugh at the fatness of some
distinguished journalist, they are unconsciously assuming a standard of
Greek sculpture. They are appealing to the marble Apollo. And the
curious disappearance of satire from our literature is an instance of
the fierce things fading for want of any principle to be fierce about.
Nietzsche had some natural talent for sarcasm: he could sneer, though he
could not laugh; but there is always something bodiless and without
weight in his satire, simply because it has not any mass of common
morality behind it. He is himself more preposterous than anything he
denounces. But, indeed, Nietzsche will stand very well as the type of
the whole of this failure of abstract violence. The softening of the
brain which ultimately overtook him was not a physical accident. If
Nietzsche had not ended in imbecility, Nietzscheism would end in
imbecility. Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot.
Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have
softening of the brain.
This last attempt to evade intellectualism ends in intellectualism, and
therefore in death. The sortie has failed. The wild worship of
lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void.
Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in
Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana.
They are both helpless--one because he must not grasp anything, and the
other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan's will is
frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the
Nietzscheite's will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special
actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are
special. They stand at the cross-roads, and one hates all the roads and
the other likes all the roads. The result is--well, some things are not
hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.
Here I end (thank God) the first and dullest business of this book--the
rough review of recent thought. After this I begin to sketch a view of
life 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 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
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.