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.