Part 21

Both as mystic and as patriot, he had the reformer’s passion: a measure, too, of the reformer’s violence and intolerant zeal. He 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, naïveté, 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 cœur de bazar.” In this perversion of life and cultivation of the second-best he saw the “universal 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 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 cathédrales, 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 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 Charité de Jeanne d’Arc_ (1910), _Le Porche du Mystère de la Deuxième Vertu_ (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 Geneviève 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 perpétuelle.”

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.

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 à 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 l’arbre de la grâce 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 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 naïve 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 profound 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, æsthetic 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 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’école, dit Dieu. Je pense que c’est pour oublier le peu qu’ils savent. On ferait mieux d’envoyer les parents à l’école. C’est eux qui en ont besoin Mais naturellement il 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 petite espérance Est celle qui toujours commence”—

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 affrontés 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 fastidious sensualist Durtal, driven at last to seek reconciliation by his overwhelming sense of sin. It is the “once-born” 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—

“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, il n’est que de beaux jours, Dans une belle vie il 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, dans 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.

“Peuple, les peuples de la terre te dirent léger Parce que tu 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’espérance, 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, aïeule 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 _Mystères_ 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 à 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 à 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:

“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 familles....

“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 général et ce chef triomphant Rassemblera sa troupe aux pieds de notre maître.”

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: 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 the 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 Deuxième Vertu_, the solemn yet ardent celebration of “les armes de Jésus”—suffering, poverty, failure, death—in _La Tapisserie de Sainte Geneviève_; and Eve, with its alternate notes of irony and exaltation, its exquisite concluding rhapsody on St. Geneviève 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 may 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 poussière.

“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....

“Mère, voici vos fils et leur immense armée. Qu’ils ne soient pas jugés sur leur seule misère. Que Dieu mette avec eux un peu de cette terre Qui les a tant perdus et qu’ils ont tant aimée.”

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LTD., BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E. 1, AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

● Transcriber’s Notes: ○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_). ○ Footnotes have been moved to follow the sections in which they are referenced.