[128] Charles Maurras, _Action Française_, tome iv, page 596. One thinks of Nietzsche’s exclamation: ‘Humanity! Was there ever a more horrible old woman among all horrible old women!’ and the German master adds, always in agreement with many a French master as we shall see later, ‘unless perhaps it is truth.’ [129] Their harshness has obviously nothing in common with the harshness implied by these fine words: ‘The man of justice subordinates passion to reason, which seems regrettable if his heart is cold, but will appear sublime if he is capable of love’ (Renouvier). [130] This is the opinion of Machiavelli (chap. xviii) who, there again, does not therefore consider cruelty as a proof of a high state of culture. [131] I find this from the pen of a hero of the First Empire: ‘I was afraid of feeling _pleasure_’ (the author himself underlines the word) ‘in killing with my own hand some of these scoundrels’ (he is speaking of some Germans who murdered French prisoners after the battle of Leipzic). ‘I therefore sheathed my sabre and left the extermination of these assassins to the troopers.’ (_Memoirs of General Marbot_, tome iii, page 344.) There is a condemnation of the joy of killing which would be scorned by many a contemporary writer. In France the glorification of warlike instincts is much less common among the soldiers than among the authors. Marbot is far less bloody-minded than Barrès. [132] ‘And the honour of virtue consists in contending, not in winning’ (Montaigne). [133] _La Ruine du monde antique_, page 76. See also in _Les Illusions du progrès_ (page 259) Sorel’s derisive amusement at a thinker who said that the preponderance of intellectual emotions is the sign of superior societies. We may take up Sainte-Beuve’s famous distinction and say that modern thinkers extol _sword-intelligence_ at the expense of _mirror-intelligence_. On their own showing it is the former they admire in Nietzsche, Sorel, Péguy, and Maurras. (See R. Gillouin, _Esquisses littéraires et morales_, page 52.) Let me observe that contempt for ‘mirror-intelligence’ implies contempt for Aristotle, Spinoza, Bacon, Goethe, and Renan. Nor does it seem to me that M. Paul Valéry is exactly a ‘sword-intelligence’. [134] _Victor Marie, Comte Hugo_, towards the end. See Note O at the end of this volume.