[page 228]
IN the turmoil and anxieties of the first weeks of the war,
few people observed that France had lost upon the battle-field one of the greatest of her modern poets; a fearless and
original thinker, a constructive mystic, who exercised a
unique influence over the young writers and thinkers of his
world. Yet the death in action of Charles Péguy, who was
killed on September 5, 1914, at the age of forty-one, removed
a striking figure from contemporary literature, and was
among the chief intellectual losses sustained by France in
the war.
Born in Orleans in 1873, of peasant stock, Péguy had
many of the fundamental qualities of the French peasant;
the sturdy independence, the frugal tastes, the untiring
industry, the close kinship with the soil. His father was
a cabinet-maker; his mother that familiar figure of the
cathedrals, the woman who lets the chairs. The great friend
of his boyhood was an old republican carpenter with whom
he used to talk, and to whose conversation he owed his first
political ideas. This heredity and these influences gave to
his thought and attitude a character which he never lost.
In his mature work we see side by side the result of those
two compensating elements in his childish environment;
the mingled mystery and homeliness of that medieval and
intensely national Catholicism which finds in the French
cathedrals its living symbols, the keen sense of social justice,
of the need for social salvation, which inspired the popular
[page 229]
republicanism of the years following the Franco-German
war. These characteristics, which afterwards, in a sublimated form, came to dominate his mysticism and gave to
it its special colour, its mingling of antique tradition with
forward-looking hope, can be traced back to the blend of
Christian and of democratic impressions which he received
as a child. Perhaps only the son of French peasants could
understand and reinterpret as he had done the figure of St.
Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who saved France; and whose
longing to mend and redeem, at once so practical and so
transcendental, linked up the objectives of social endeavour
and of faith.
Brought up within the atmosphere of provincial piety,
Péguy rose from the elementary school to the lycee; and at
nineteen, through his own efforts and his mother's sacrifices,
passed from Orleans to the University of Paris. There his
vigorous mind and positive character soon made him the
centre of a group of students, over whom he quickly obtained
influence. There, too, he made the transition almost inevitable for an ardent young man of his world from Catholic
orthodoxy to humanitarian socialism: the first stage in his
spiritual pilgrimage, and the first attempt to answer that
question which underlies all his thought and act, his poetry
and controversy — "Comment faut-il sauver?" These words,
which Péguy puts into the mouth of St. Joan of Arc, and
shows to us as the mainspring of her actions, define too
the secret impulse of his own career. His mysticism was
not that of the contemplative, the solitary and God-intoxicated devotee: it was that of a strong-willed man of action,
who sees far off the "mighty beauty" and longs to actualize
it within the common life. He saw that common life with
the eyes of a poet who was also a child of the people; discerning beneath its surface the dignity and the beauty of
its antique and simple types — the spinner and the tiller,
the housewife, the mother and the child.
[page 230]
"Les armes de Jesus, c'est la pauvre famille
Les freres et la sceur, les garcons et la fille,
Le fuseau lourd de laine et la savante aiguille."
But he found in the French socialism of the 'nineties a dry
and materialistic spirit; which could not satisfy his passionate idealism, his instinct for a completed life, a universal
redemption, that should harmonize soul and body and fulfil
their needs. Hence, by a process too gradual to be called a
conversion, he grew from humanitarianism into a somewhat
anti-clerical, original, yet mediæval and mystical Catholicism;
in which those ideals and demands which had dominated his
humanitarian period — the sense of the rights and dignity of
mankind, the longing to save, "de porter remède au mal
universel humain" — reappear in a spiritualized form. In
Christianity he saw condensed the saving power of Spirit;
never letting man alone, but redeeming him even in defiance
of his own will, contriving its victories by or in spite of the
evils and disharmonies of life. The belief which he achieved
— doubtless fed by childish memories — was absolute and
literal, and most easily expressed itself in medieval forms.
Modernism filled him with horror; he desired no attenuation
of the supernatural, no reinterpretation of dogma. The
faith which fought the crusades and built the cathedrals was
that in which he felt at home, and which he believed himself
destined to bring back to the soul of France: "Au fond,
c'est une renaissance Catholique qui se fait par moi."
Yet his inner life was full of difficulty and unhappiness.
There were in him two strains, two warring impulses, to
which we must attribute many of the griefs and disappointments of his life: for his great accomplishment both as poet
and as founder of the Cahiers de la Quinzaine brought
him little personal joy. On one side of his nature he was
proud, vehement, combative; full of a destructive energy, an
obstinate fanaticism, which found vent in his violent political
pamphlets, often expressing with the uncouth vigour of the
CHARLES Péguy 231
peasant his uncompromising hates and loves. Though so
ardent a Christian, he was neither meek nor gentle. He
could never resist giving blow for blow, and by his impatience
and intolerance alienated by turns his socialist and Catholic
friends. About 1910, having thus quarrelled with most of
his associates, he withdrew into a voluntary retirement, in
which the spiritual side of his divided temperament seems at
last to have had some opportunity of growth. His mystical
poems — all composed between 1910 and 1913 — show to us
the love and exaltation of which he now became capable;
the purity of that vision which had inspired his vigorous
guerilla warfare against the shams and sordidness of modern
life, and which now became the chief factor in his consciousness. Writing in 1912 to his old friend Joseph Lotte, he says," Mon vieux, j'ai beaucoup changé depuis deux ans; je suis
devenu un homme nouveau. J'ai tant souffert et tant prié.
Tu ne peux pas savoir." The secret of this inner conflict,
of the terrible months during which, as he afterwards confessed, he was unable to say "Thy will be done," he revealed
to none; but hints of the way by which he had passed may
be found in his poems. The mystical certitude which inspires
their most beautiful passages seems never to have obtained
complete control of his psychic being. The life of prayer
and the life of personal struggle persisted side by side, not
fully harmonized; and it is doubtful whether he ever achieved
that complete surrender to the divine action "in which alone
we do not surrender our true selves," which is characteristic
of the developed mystic life. "Celui qui s'abandonne ne
s'abandonne pas, et il est le seul qui ne s'abandonne pas."
It was surely to himself that Péguy addressed this observation, and it represents his own central need. Those profound
readjustments of character, that unselfing of the moral nature,
which must precede spiritual unification, and so are the only
foundations of inner peace, had never been accomplished in
him. Like his patroness and heroine St. Joan, he combined
[page 232
the temperaments of fighter and dreamer, but he never
succeeded in fusing them in one.
We know, too, something of the outward circumstances
which added to his difficulties. Married during his agnostic
period to a freethinker, his intense respect for human freedom forbade him to force on his wife his own convictions,
or even to bring his adored children to baptism against
their mother's will. For this refusal he was himself denied
access to the sacraments; and hence this impassioned Catholic,
for conscience' sake, lived and died out of communion with
the official Church. No one will really understand Péguy's
position or the meaning of his poems, unless this paradoxical
situation, and this constant element of frustration and incompleteness in his experience, be kept in mind. He was in
one sense an exile, ever gazing at the beloved country which
he knew and understood so much better than many of its
citizens. Deeply religious, he lived at odds with his religious
world. Capable of the strangest inconsistencies and refusals,
though sparing himself nothing of the anguish they involved,
he could make on foot a pilgrimage to Chartres to pray for
the life of his sick child; yet would not face the struggle
necessary to make those children members of the Church in
which he believed. "Je ne peux pas m'occuper de tout.
Je n'ai pas une vie ordinaire. Nul n'est prophète en son
pays. Mes petits ne sont pas baptisés. A la sainte Vierge
de s'en occuper!"
Himself, he felt called upon to devote his powers, without
distraction, to that missionary propaganda in which the
mystical and combative sides of his nature found creative
expression, and to which his poetry and much of his prose
is consecrated. "Il y a tant de manque. II y a tant à
demander," says St. Joan to the patient nun who seeks to
teach her resignation: and here she expresses Péguy's deepest
conviction. There is so much lacking that men might obtain
of joy and peace and love. Action no less than prayer is
[page 233]
needed; every soul must take its share in meeting the world's
need, for we are the accomplices of ill if we do nothing to
prevent it. There was never any place in Péguy's eager and
restless heart for that "other-worldly" mysticism which
achieves the love of God at the expense of love of home and
fellow-men; for religion in his view was an affair of flesh and
blood, not of pure spirit — not merely transcendental, but
concrete, national, fraternal, even revolutionary. On this
side his mysticism represents the spiritualization of that
activist philosophy which was coming into prominence in
the formative years of his life, and could not fail to exert a
powerful influence on him.
Both as mystic and as patriot, he had the reformer's passion:
a measure, too, of the reformer's violence and intolerant zeal.
Ile worked for a sweeter and a saner world, a restoration to
man of his lost inheritance. The modern France, he felt,
was wrong. It had lost its hold upon realities; mistaken its
professors and scientists for apostles, its codes and systems
for truth, its political institutions for liberty, the "triumphs
of civilization" for perdurable goods. It had lost freshness, naivete, hope: had sacrificed beauty and joy for an
imaginary progress and comfort. In the place of the ancient
types of human worth, the primitive yet august figures of
parent and child, craftsman and tiller of the soil, it had
produced the bemused victim of modern education "avec
sa tête de carton et son coeur de bazar." In this perversion
of life and cultivation of the second-best he saw the "unversal evil," which poisons the sources of human happiness.
Yet behind and within it Péguy, visionary and optimist,
discerned the possible restoration of good; mankind brought
back into contact with the real and eternal world. He saw
his beloved France ceasing to be "un peuple qui dit non,"
and becoming, by intensity and harmony of action and vision, "une race affirmative." He looked past shams, pretences,
and bad workmanship to a heaven that should contain not
[page 234]
only people but things: "Dans le paradis tel que je le montrerai, il n'y aura pas seulement des âmes; il y aura des
choses. Tout ce qui existe et qui est réussi. Les cathedrales,
par exemple. Notre Dame, Chartres, je les y mettrai."
It was such a restoration of humanity to the wholesome and
beautiful life for which it was made, that he had at first sought
in socialism; and the earlier numbers of the Cahiers de la
Quinzaine, of which he was the founder and editor, reflect
this faith. He saw socialism then in its ideal aspect, as a
triumph of justice and love: a reasonable career offered to
the whole race. For this triumph, this reordering of the
common life, he never ceased to work; but a deeper experience taught him that it could not be effected by any change
imposed on society from without, or any readjustment between man and man. The readjustment needed was that
between man and God; a change of heart, a rearrangement
of the values of life effected from within, which should make
possible the complete spiritualization of existence. Therefore
it was that Péguy became, in his last and most creative period,
a Christian mystic of an original type; an ardent missionary,
who opposed the intellectualism, materialism, and individualism which France of the early twentieth century mistook for
progress, by a propaganda which was anti-intellectual,
nationalist, and profoundly Catholic. It is to this period
that his poetry and much of his most vehement prose belongs.
All is didactic in intention; but is saved by its author's wit,
sincerity, and remarkable imaginative genius from the usual
fate of those who try to turn art to the purposes of edification. The prose is largely controversial, and inevitably
suffers to some extent from this: for Péguy was violent and
sometimes unjust when attacking the errors and follies of
the time, and had at his disposal an astonishing power of
mockery, irony, and scorn. Yet even here, his instinct for
beauty constantly asserted itself: and in the midst of some
biting attack upon "progressive" politics or modernist
[page 235]
theology, we get an abrupt invasion of loveliness which transports us to the atmosphere of his poems. These poems fall
into two groups: first, the three Mystères which he wrote
for the 500th anniversary of the birth of Jeanne d'Arc, "la
sainte la plus grande après Sainte Marie," and which deal
with her spiritual preparation for the saving of France; La
Charite de Jeanne d'Arc (1910), Le Porche du Mystere de la
Deuxieme Virtu (1911), Les Saints Innocents (1912). These
are all written in unrhymed irregular verse; a verse so indefinite in construction that it is often indistinguishable from
rhythmic prose. They consist chiefly in long meditative
discourses, alternating between the extremes of homeliness
and sublimity, and put into the mouths of Jeanne and of
Madame Gervaise, a Franciscan nun to whom she tells her
problems and her dreams — an apt device for the conveyance
of Péguy's own religious and patriotic gospel. They were
followed by three volumes in rhymed duodecasyllabic verse,
which he called Tapisseries: Sainte Genevieve et Jeanne
d'Arc (1912), Notre Dame (1913), and Eve (1914), perhaps his
finest and most sustained single work.
When we examine these poems in order, we find that we
can trace in them the development of a consistent philosophy
of life: for, like most of the convinced opponents of intellectualism, Péguy was a profound thinker, relying to a far
greater extent than he would ever have confessed on the
ungodly processes of a singularly acute mind. The deliberate
simplicity of diction, the assumed ingenuousness of attitude
are deceptive, and conceal a deeply reasoned view of the
universe.
"Je n'aime pas, dit Dieu, celui qui pense
Et qui se tourmente et qui se soucie
Et qui roule une migraine perpetuelle."
This is not the doctrine of the charcoal-burner; it is the
doctrine of the experienced philosopher, bitterly conscious
of the limitations of the brain.
[page 236]
The foundation of his creed is the essentially mystical
belief, so beautifully expressed in Eve, in the solidarity of
the Universe. As humanity is one and indivisible, so too the
human and the divine cannot be separated. "Nous sommes
solidaires des damnés éternels," he said when he was twenty:
and in his posthumous work Clio, he reiterates the same truth. "Jésus est du même monde que le dernier des pécheurs;
et le dernier des pécheurs est du même monde que Jésus.
C'est une communion. C'est même proprement cela qui
est une communion. Et à parler vrai ou plutôt a parler
réel il n'y a point d'autre communion que d'être du même
monde." The spiritual and eternal world, then, is not something set over against the natural order; but is closely entwined with it, the neglected element of reality, which alone
can make human existence dignified and sweet.
"Car le surnaturel est lui-même charnel
Et l'arbre de la grâce est raciné profond
Et plonge dans le sol et cherche jusqu' au fond
Et l'arbre de la race est lui-même éternel.
Et l'éternité même est dans le temporel
Et 1'arbre de la grace est raciné profond
Et plonge dans le sol et touche jusqu' au fond
Et le temps est lui-même un temps intemporel."
What he realizes and points out, therefore, is not some distant
transcendental life and reality, divorced from our normal,
flowing, changing life and reality. Rather he insists on the
beauty and nobility, the deep spiritual quality of this immediate life; the supernatural character of nature itself,
when seen from the angle of Christian idealism. The Blessed
Virgin is herself:
"Infiniment céleste
Parce qu'aussi elle est infiniment terrestre."
In Christianity, with its incarnational philosophy, its
balanced cultivation of the active and the mystic life, its
sacramental touch upon all common things, he sees the only
perfect expression of this principle; the only power capable
[page 237]
of embracing and spiritualizing the whole of the rich complex
of existence. Determined to bring home to his fellow-countrymen, on the one hand, the concrete and objective
nature of this Christian life, on the other, the simplicity of
soul necessary to those who would understand it, he rejects
all attempts at religious philosophizing or symbolic interpretation. His treatment of theology is characterized by a
deliberate homely literalness, a naive use of tradition, which
was intensely exasperating to his agnostic and Modernist
critics; and which may be found distasteful by some religious
minds, unable to realize the intimate connection between gaiety
and faith. To others it will seem that, alone amongst modern
writers, he has recaptured the mediæval secret of familiarity
combined with adoration: of a love, awe, and vision, a pro
found earnestness, which yet leave room for laughter. His
picture of God is shamelessly anthropomorphic. ("Je suis
honnête homme, dit Dieu; droit comme un Français.")
Yet it is full of grave beauty, of the sense of fatherhood,
the mystical consciousness of the Divine desire. Revealed
religion is God's Word, and therefore means what it says. "Jésus n'est pas venu pour nous dire des amusettes," says
Madame Gervaise to Joan of Arc.
The faith which Péguy wished to restore to France was not
the religious rationalism of the modernist: still less the
morbid, aesthetic fervour of Huysmans. It was the homely
everyday faith of the past, the humble yet assured relation
with the supernatural order, the courage and hope which is
rooted in tradition and is wholly independent of intellectual
subtleties. "La foi est toute naturelle, toute allante, tout
simple, toute venante" — the great and simple affirmation.
The perfect type of this faith is not the world-weary convert,
but the healthy unselfconscious child; and the child, for
Péguy, is the most holy and most significant figure in the
human group. "C'est l'enfant qui est plein et l'homme qui
est vide." Only in the child and in those untarnished human
[page 238]
beings who retain their childlike simplicity of heart do we
see unspoilt humanity: only in the child do we see incarnate
hope. "J'éclate tellement dans ma création," says God, "et surtout dans les enfants."
"On envoie les enfants à l'ecole, dit Dieu.
Je pense que c'est pour oublier le peu qu'ils savent.
On ferait mieux d'envoyer les parents a l'école.
C'est eux qui en ont besoin
Mais naturellement it faudrait une école de moi
Et non pas une école d'hommes."
The tenderness and charm of those passages in which he
celebrates the importance and sanctity of childhood, its
innocence, its capacity for growth, its virginal outlook, its
freshness and power of response, place him in the front rank
of the poets who have treated this most difficult subject, and
constantly remind us of Blake:
"Comme leur jeune regard a une promesse, une secrète assurance
intérieure, et leur front, et toute leur personne.
Leur petite, leur auguste, leur si révérente et révérende personne. . . .
Heureuse enfance. Tout leur petit corps, toute leur petite personne,
tous leurs petits gestes, est pleine, ruisselle, regorge d'une espérance.
Resplendit, regorge d'une innocence
Qui est l'innocence même de l'espérance."
This hope, the childhood of the heart, is to Péguy the most
precious of human qualities, and the one in which man draws
nearest to an understanding of the Divine Idea. Jesus is "the man who has hoped," and the Christian assault, which
is the assault of hope, can alone make a breach in the defences
of eternity. It is "the faith that God loves best"; the
beginning of liberty, the growing point of the eager spirit
of life. Faith beholds that which is: Charity loves that
which is: Hope alone beholds and loves that which shall
be. Faith is static; hope dynamic. Faith is a great tree;
hope is the rising sap, the little, swelling bud upon the spray.
"La peite espérance
Est celle qui toujours commence " —
[page 239]
the persistent element in all effort and all change. She deceives us twenty times running; yet she is the only one of
our leaders who never deceives us in the end. She gives
significance to human toil, beauty and meaning to human
suffering, reality to human joy. In one of his most beautiful
verses, he describes the crowning of humanity with this
living, budding diadem of hope.
"Comme une mère fait un diadème de ses doigts allongés, des doigts
conjoints et affronts de ses deux mains fraîches
Autour du front brûlant de son enfant
Pour apaiser ce front brûlant, cette fièvre,
Ainsi une couronne éternelle a été tressée pour apaiser le front brûlant.
Et c'était une couronne de verdure.
Une couronne de feuillage."
Moreover, "cette curieuse enfant Espérance " is the motive-power of the spiritual order too. God Himself hopes for and
in man: has placed His eternal hope in man's hands, and
given to him, along with the gift of liberty, the terrible
power of frustrating or achieving the purposes of Divine
Love.
"Le plus infirme des pécheurs peut découronner, peut couronner
Une espérance de Dieu."
Such a freedom is the very condition of spirituality; for
faith, hope, and charity are not servile virtues, but heavenward-tending impulses of the free soul, activities of the will.
Here lies their value; since only in true love, voluntary
service, deliberate choice, can the possibilities of human
nature be fulfilled:
"Toutes les soumissions d'esclaves du monde, ne valent pas un beau
regard d'homme libre."
Therefore, for the author of this gospel of freedom and
hope, the course of salvation takes an exactly opposite course
to that described by Huysmans and his school. The typical
soul for Péguy is not the "twice-born" exhausted and
[page 240]
fastidious sensualist Durtal, driven at last to seek reconciliation by his overwhelming sense of sin. It is the "onceborn" simple and ardent peasant child, Joan of Arc; brought
straight from the sheepfold to serve the heroic purposes of
God.
"Tenant tout un royaume en sa ténacité
Vivant en plein mystère avec sagacité
Mourant en plein martyre avec vivacité
La fille de Lorraine à nulle autre pareille."
The typical experience is an experience of growth, freshness, novelty; action rightly directed, and a vision which
perceives beauty and dignity in the antique and homely
labours of the race. The cultivator of the earth and the
rearer of children, the faithful priest, the strong and loyal
soldier — of these is the kingdom of heaven. Of these and
by these the old France was built up; and through these
ideals and virtues, and the national saints in whom they
are expressed, the new France may be saved. With Huysmans in our mystical moments we are usually inside a church,
assisted by incense and plain-chant of the best quality: with
Péguy, we are in the open air, in the market garden, or in
the nursery. There his poetry, in Francis Thompson's
beautiful image, "plays at the foot of the Cross." Even the
Holy Innocents in heaven are playing at bowling hoops with
their palms and crowns. "At least, I think so," says God, "for they never asked My permission."
"Tel est mon paradis . . . Mon paradis est tout ce qu'il y a de plus
simple."
Side by side with Péguy's spiritual gospel, or rather entwined with it, goes his practical and patriotic gospel. Since
for him the whole of life was crammed with spiritual significance, he saw in the patriotic passion a sacrament of heavenly
love, and in earthly cities symbols of the City of God. Hence
nationalism was to him, as to Dostoevsky, essentially religious,
and Joan of Arc —
[page 241]
"Une humble enfant perdue en deux amours,
L'amour de son pays parmi l'amour de Dieu"
was the perfect saint, fusing the two halves of human experience in one whole. These two aspects of love he could not
separate, for they seemed to him equally the flowers of a
completed life. Even God, he thought, would find it difficult
to decide between them.
"Dans une belle vie, it nest que de beaux fours,
Dans une belle vie it fait toujours beau temps.
Dieu la déroule toute et regarde longtemps
Quel amour est plus cher entre tous les amours.
Ainsi Dieu ne sait pas, ainsi le divin Maître
Ne sait quel retenir et placer hors du lieu
Et pour lequel tenir, et s'il faut vraiment mettre
L'amour de la patrie après l'amour de Dieu."
This mystical patriotism was his great gift to the mind of
France; and it was to her regeneration that his work was
really consecrated. It was the ideal France, the "eldest
daughter of God," which claimed his devotion and inspired
his finest verse. She is the creative nation, planter of gardens
and sower of seeds, the nation which turns all things to the
purposes of more abundant life:
Ici, dit Dieu, clans cette douce France, ma plus noble création,
Dans cette saine Lorraine,
Ici ils sont bons jardiniers. .
Toutes les sauvageries du monde ne valent pas un beau jardin français.
Honnête, modeste, ordonné.
C'est là que j'ai cueilli mes plus belles âmes."
Péguy saw France in the laborious and heroic past, with
her ancient traditions of culture, liberty, and order: patient,
scrupulous, diligent, tending her seedbeds and weeding her
fields — for good work was always in his eyes the earnest of
a healthy soul. He hoped for her in the future: a future to
be conditioned, not by the progressive character of her
political institutions, but by her freshness, her eternal youth;
above all, by her spirit of hope.
[page 242]
"Peuple, les peuples de la terre te dirent léger
Parce que to es un peuple prompt. . . .
Mais moi, je t'ai pesé, dit Dieu, et je ne t'ai point trouvé léger
O peuple inventeur de la cathédrale, je ne t'ai point trouvé léger
en foi.
O peuple inventeur de la croisade, je ne t'ai point trouvé léger en
charité.
Quant à l'esperance, il vaut mieux ne pas en parler, il n'en a que
pour eux."
Owing everything to the love and industry of his mother
and grandmother — for his father died before his birth — it
was natural that Péguy should find in faithful and laborious
womanhood the ultimate types of human truth and goodness. Two such types appear again and again in his poems,
as living symbols of the national soul: St. Geneviève, "vigilante bergère, aieule et paroissienne," whose prayer and
fortitude saved Paris, and, above all, St. Joan of Arc, "enfant échappée à de pauvres familles," in whom the dual
love of God and man, carried into vigorous action, availed to
change the history of France. In the three Mvstères which
he wrote in her honour, he extols the three qualities in which
he found the secret of St. Joan's holiness, significance, and
power; her ardent charity, her unquenchable hope, the childlike innocence of her soul. Charity, the passionate longing
to help and save, urged her to rescue France from its miseries. "Il y a tant de manque, il y a tant a demander." In this
profound sense of ill to be mended, her mission, and in Péguy's
view the mission of all Christians, takes its rise. Hope, the
ever-renewed belief in a possible perfection, "invisible et
immortelle et impossible a éteindre," gave her courage to
obey her Voices and strength to perform apparently impossible acts. Because she was a child at heart, with a
child's unsullied outlook, simplicity and zest its entire
aloofness from the unreal complications of adult existence —
she had an assurance, a freshness, a power of initiative, which
carried her through and past the superhuman difficulties of
her task:
page 243
Ce grand général qui prenait des bastilles
Ainsi qu'on prend le ciel, c'est en sautant dedans,
N'était devant la herse et parmi les redans
Qu'une enfant échappée à de pauvres families. . . .
Elle est montée au ciel ensemble jeune et sage
A peine parvenue au bord de son printemps
Au bord de sa tendresse et de son jeune temps
A peine au débarqué de son premier village."
St. Joan thus appears as the supreme example of the practical
mystic; rooted in the soil, and agent of that saving force
which will never rest until it has resolved the discords of
man's life and inducted him into the kingdom of reality.
She is for Péguy not only the redeemer and incarnate soul
of France, but also, in her spirit of prayer and her militant
vigour, the leader and patron of all those initiates of hope
who "seek to mend the universal ill."
"Heureux ceux d'entre nous qui la verront paraître
Le regard plus ouvert que d'une âme d'enfant,
Quand ce grand general et ce chef triomphant
Rassemblera sa troupe aux pieds de notre maitre."
It is easy enough to exhibit Péguy's defects, both literary
and temperamental. Among the first we must reckon his
tiresome mannerisms and apparent absence of form, his
digressions and lapses into the didactic, his exaggerated love
of repetition: the way in which his verse, in such a poem as
Eve, seems to advance by means of passionate reiterations,
stanza after stanza, like the waves of one tide, distinguished
only by the smallest verbal changes. On the temperamental
side we must acknowledge his intractable arrogance, a complete want of sympathy with his opponents' point of view,
something too of the morose distrustfulness of the peasant:
faults which persisted side by side with his real mystical
enthusiasm, for his nature never completely unified itself.
On one side a spiritual poet, on the other side he was and
remained to the last a violent and often cruel pamphleteer:
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carrying on against both private enemies and public movements a guerilla warfare in which he seemed to himself to
be like his patroness, fighting the cause of his Voices and of
right. As with most poets who are also missionaries, apostolic zeal sometimes got the better of artistic discretion. In the fury of his invective against the folly, priggishness,
cowardice, and love of comfort of the modern world he seized any image that came to hand; sometimes with disconcerting effect. No other poet, perhaps, would have dared to introduce cachets of antipyrine into his indignant catalogue of our weaknesses and crimes. Yet, as against this, what other poet of our day has achieved so wide a sweep of emotion; has
revealed to us so great and so earnest a personality?
When we consider his range, the tender simplicity of his
passages on little children, the sublime Hymn to the Virgin and Address to Night in La Deuxieme Vertu, the solemn yet ardent celebration of "les armes de Jésus" — suffering, poverty, failure, death — in La Tapisserie de Sainte Genevieve; and Eve, with its alternate notes of irony and exaltation, its
exquisite concluding rhapsody on St. Genevieve and St. Joan of Arc, the "two shepherdesses of France " — then we forget the sermons and the diatribes, and we feel that the world lost in Péguy a great Christian poet. He died, as we maiy be sure that he would have wished to do, in defence of the
country which he so passionately loved: and a strangely poignant interest attaches to those verses in his last published work which he devotes to the "poor sinners " redeemed by
this most sacred of deaths:
"Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour la terre charnelle,
Mais pourvu que ce fût dans une juste guerre.
Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour quatre coins de terre.
Heureux ceux qui sont morts d'une mort solennelle . . .
"Heureux les grands vainqueurs. Paix aux hommes de guerre.
Qu'ils soient ensevelis dans un dernier silence.
Que Dieu mette avec eux dans la juste balance
Un peu de ce terrain d'ordure et de poussiere.'
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"Que Dieu mette avec eux dans le juste plateau
Ce qu'ils ont tant aimé, quelques grammes de terre.
Un peu de cette vigne, un peu de ce coteau,
Un peu de ce ravin sauvage et solitaire. . . .
"Mere, voici vos fils et leur immense armée.
Qu'ils ne soient pas jugés sur leur seule misere.
Que Dieu mette avec eux un peu de cette terre
Qui les a tant perdus et qu'ils ont tant aimée."
END