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.