III - THE SUICIDE OF THOUGHT
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 outstripping 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 simpleminded 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 crossroads, 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
Jesus." 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.
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