a master juggler with all the intricacies of French syntax. And the
nation which produced Agrippa d’Aubigné, Pascal, Voltaire, has always
loved the prose of a brisk polemic. The prose works of Péguy are due
to polemics. And he lays into his enemy with a dexterity, a surety, a
variety of attack unrivalled--here a shower of swift and sudden blows,
there a slow and paralysing envelopment of the adversary. Péguy is an
incomparable wrestler.
For the rest, shall we say that Péguy was the Walt Whitman of France?
Shall we translate him into English under the name of Carlyle--or even
W. E. Henley? There was something of all of them in the irascible,
quizzical, and lovable idealist whose life was one long struggle
against conventional standards and a conventional style; against
middle-class prosperity, modern commodities (generally ‘tout le confort
moderne’); against the preferences of a well-to-do democracy; against
also, and no less, Parliamentary ideals; documentary historical methods
and culture; and, compendiously and inclusively, all that is political
as opposed to mystical, all that is temporal as opposed to spiritual,
all that is matter as opposed to soul, all that is personal as opposed
to general, and, one may add by extension, all that is rich as opposed
to all that is honourably, contentedly, and modestly poor.
With these dispositions it is natural that Péguy should have begun
life as a Socialist. Born of humble stock in 1874 (on those prosperous
banks of Loire where the humblest have all things pleasant and comely
about them, and are themselves men of a slow, wise wit and kindly
culture) Péguy rose from class to class, from board school to training
college, until at twenty he found himself at the University of Paris,
one of the future glories of the École Normale. In the old house of
the Rue d’Ulm he wrote his first poem, _Jeanne d’Arc_ (for already
this son of Orleans was possessed by the memory of the Maid), of which
the singular dedication reflects not only his young ideas of fraternal
democracy, but that extraordinary tide-like style, creeping on inch by
inch, wave by wave, until it submerge the whole ground of the matter,
which Paris, in later days, was so often to admire, to praise, or to
deride:--
‘À toutes celles et à tous ceux qui auront vécu,
À tout celles et à tous ceux qui seront morts pour tâcher de porter
remède au mal universel;
En particulier,
‘À toutes celles et à tous ceux qui auront vécu leur vie humaine,
À toutes celles et à tous ceux qui seront morts de leur mort
humaine, pour tâcher de porter remède au mal universel humain.
‘Parmi eux,
À toutes celles et à tous ceux qui auront vécu leur vie humaine,
À toutes celles et à tous ceux qui seront mort de leur mort humaine
pour l’établissement de la République Socialiste universelle,
ce poème est dédié.
Prenne à présent sa part de la dédicace qui voudra!’
‘Tâcher de porter remède au mal universel humain’: To attempt to
ease the universal disease of humanity! All Péguy is there! As time
went on, he ceased to believe in the establishment of the universal
Socialist Republic; and, indeed, although ineradicably attached to the
Republican ideal, he became increasingly anti-radical, anti-democratic,
almost tending towards the military, and aristocratic theory of a
State strongly constituted in definite classes, each respectable,
respected, and informed with the same sense of national honour and
personal self-sacrifice. But Péguy went back on no word of that
early dedication. He simply made over, so to speak, his stock in the
universal Socialist Republic to the credit of the Catholic Church. For
before Claudel, before Francis Jammes, after Brunetière (or we should
rather say along with him) Péguy suffered a conversion to the faith of
his fathers.
Yet such was his respect for the individual conscience, that he
continued, in the eyes of the Church, to live in sin. His wife, the
daughter of a Socialist, was a Free-thinker; she had never been
baptized; she had married Péguy before the Mayor of her Commune
and not before the priest of her parish; she had not followed him
in his conversion and still maintained her rights. Péguy, that
arch-persuader, could not shake her. And, since the indissolubility of
the marriage-tie was the very cornerstone of Péguy’s social doctrine,
he continued to live with this free-souled woman, who shared his life
but not his faith, in an unblessed union, that the Church condemned;
his children were not baptized. Rome bade him bring them into her
fold. Péguy, in his pride of _pater-familias_, upheld his claim to
consider the convictions of their mother. Deprived of the sacraments,
he ceased to go to Church, while still continuing to believe and
pray.... Anti-clerical and ardently Catholic; tenderly preoccupied
with his children’s welfare and yet accepting for them that which
his new-found creed must have made him conceive as the most dreadful
risk of all--such was the stubborn and irascible convert whom the
Church honours in his death, but whom in his lifetime she covered with
reprimands and ardent reproaches.
Such was Péguy in his life--an enigmatic being; nor was he less
difficult to appreciate in his art, which attempts to enlarge our
sensibility and quicken our moral vision much in the same way as
instantaneous photography has increased and instructed our sense of
sight. I am the first to concede that this art of his (which proceeds,
perhaps, rather from Dostoievski than from any great French tradition)
appears, in its disconcerting diversity, as one of the most interesting
phenomena of a new age. It is full of audacity, interest, genius,
adventure. But is it an art? Let us open any page of Péguy and take at
random a charming page, where the book opens, p. 63 of the _Porche de
la Deuxième Vertu_:--
‘Et pourtant on est si fier d’avoir des enfants!
(Mais les hommes ne sont pas jaloux):
Et de les voir manger, et de les voir grandir.
Et le soir de les voir dormir comme des anges.
Et de les embrasser le matin et le soir et à midi.
Juste au milieu des cheveux.
Quand ils baissent innocemment la tête comme un poulain qui baisse
le tête.
Aussi souples comme un poulain, se jouant comme un poulain.
Aussi souples du cou et de la nuque. Et de tout le corps, et du dos.
Comme une tige bien souple et bien montante d’une plante vigoureuse.
D’une jeune plante.
Comme la tige même de la montante espérance!
Ils courbent le dos en riant comme un jeune, comme un beau poulain,
et le cou, et la nuque, et toute la tête.
Pour présenter au père, au baiser du père, juste le milieu de la
tête.
Le milieu de la tête, la naissance, l’origine, le point d’origine
des cheveux.
Ce point, juste au milieu de la tête, ce centre, d’où tous les
cheveux partent en tournant, en rond, en spirale.
Ça les amuse ainsi.
Ils s’amusent tout le temps.’
The volume, the sensitiveness, the stammering reiteration, the
precision, the tenderness, the subtlety of Péguy are all in this
passage. One would say an artist of genius, afflicted with general
paralysis, attempting to describe a miraculous vision. And he is
telling us that a father kisses his small boy on the crown of
his cropped little pate. And this passage of Péguy’s is no more
extraordinary than any other passage of Péguy’s on any other possible
subject. Imagine Walt Whitman turned a Christian mystic and endowed
with ten thousand times his original flux of words.
And now, having relieved my soul, having put the accent on this
intolerable defect of our poet’s--and it is almost, to my thinking, a
redhibitory vice--let me turn to his bright side and discover what it
is that attracts to him so many and such distinguished admirers.
It is, first of all, a touch on the canvas, a liquid and a living
palette, an animation and abundance of composition which, in his too
rare happy moments, suggest some large and brilliant sketch of the
school of Rubens. Take the opening quatrains of the poem to which I
have referred; let us open _Eve_:--
‘Ô mère ensevelie hors du premier jardin
Vous n’avez plus connu ce climat de la grâce,
Et la vasque et la source et la haute terrasse,
Et le premier soleil sur le premier matin.
‘Et les bondissements de la biche et du daim
Nouant et dénouant leur course fraternelle,
Et courant et sautant et s’arrêtant soudain
Pour mieux commémorer leur vigueur éternelle.’
There is, in Péguy at his best, something not so much antique as
unchanged since ancient times, like the pronunciation of certain
peasants; and this something makes us understand how there once was in
France a people of artists, the unknown, unnamed, immortal builders of
the great Gothic cathedrals; we almost believe there might still be
such in reading his verse.
There is also in Péguy at his best a peculiar humanity which makes me
often remember those lines of Mrs Browning concerning her favourite
Greek poet:--
‘Our Euripides the Human
With his droppings of warm tears,’
and an imagination so naturally and naïvely religious that it would
enchant me but for its familiarity. No Baptist minister over his tea
and muffins, is on more intimate terms with the Eternal.
The interminable poem of _Eve_ (as long--but not as beautiful!
as the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ united) fulminates against the
Intellectuals of France in an outburst of rhetoric which too often
degenerates into mere violence. Péguy is more really poetic in his
prose. The description of rural life on the banks of the Loire, in
_Victor-Marie_, _Comte Hugo_; the death of Bernard Lazare in _Notre
Jeunesse_; above all, the long but the inspired elevations and
prayers of Jeannette--especially the conversation with her little
fourteen-year-old friend Hanorette (which we keep in our remembrance
along with the dialogue of Antigone and Ismene, and with the scene in
the Gospel of Martha and Mary, as a perfect characterisation of the
two great types of Charity and Piety)--are to our thinking far more
interpretative of Péguy’s true genius than the mighty jog-trot of his
later muse. Still there is a power and an eloquence in that. So far
as the meaning goes, all his voluminous outpourings have the same.
There is but one thing needful, and that is to be a hero or a saint.
Preferably, perhaps, a hero!
‘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.’
The saints that Péguy sang were patriot saints: Geneviève, who
preserved the city of Paris from the Huns of Attila; Jeanne, who hunted
the English out of France. Of all glories, of all honours, that dearest
to this poet was military glory and national honour--
‘Il n’y a rien à faire à cela, et il n’y a rien à dire. Le soldat
mesure la quantité de terre où on parle une langue, où règnent des
mœurs, un esprit, une âme, un culte, une race. Le soldat mesure la
quantité de terre où une âme peut respirer. Le soldat mesure la
quantité de terre où un peuple ne meurt pas.
This was Péguy’s firm conviction: no duty so important as the military
duty! When the war broke out, man of forty as he was and father of
a struggling family--man, too, much engrossed and overworked by his
triple occupation as poet, prose-writer, and publisher--he changed from
the Territorials into a regiment sent on active service to the front.
‘No man hath greater love than this....’
Thanks to the recital of one of his soldiers, Victor Bondon, we can
witness the fall--or rather I would say the assumption--of the poet and
brother of Joan of Arc. For he too fell in driving the invader out of
France! There is an extraordinary breath of heroism in this page of an
unknown private soldier relating the end of a great man. I cannot do
better than translate it here, with some abridgments and suppressions:--
‘On the 5th September in the morning, the 55th division of the army
of Paris was ranged on the left of the forces which had received
the general order, “Die where you stand, rather than retreat.”
In front of us, on the wooded hills that reach from Dammartin to
Meaux, von Klück and his Boches, who had followed us step by step
from Roye during our terrible retreat, lay in wait for us, hidden
in their trenches, like beasts of prey.
‘The heat was tropical; the battalion halted a moment at the pretty
village of Nantouillet. I see again, with the mind’s eye, our dear
Lieutenant Péguy, seated on a stone, white with dust (as indeed
we all were), covered with sweat, his beard rough and shaggy, his
eyes shining behind his pince-nez. Such he was, as we had seen
him in Lorraine during the retreat, impervious to fatigue, brave
under a storm of shells, going from one to another of his men
with a cheering word for each throughout the whole length of our
company (the 19th), sharing our rations (and we eat as a rule one
day in three), never complaining despite his forty years, as young
as the youngest, knowing just the right way to take the Parisians
that we were, heartening the discouraged with a word, satirical
enough sometimes, but more often a friendly quizzical quip, always
brave, always an example; ah, yes! I see again our dear lieutenant,
bidding us fight in hope, raising our flagging spirits in an hour
when many were near despairing, with the assurance of his own
absolute confidence in our final victory.’
‘At last the sun began to slope towards evening; it was five
o’clock. After four hours’ incessant fire, our 75’s had silenced
the Prussian batteries on the ridge, and the infantry were ordered
to attack their entrenchments. The black troops from Morocco, in
what had seemed an invincible rush, had tried once, and failed. Now
Péguy’s company starts in skirmishing order; the German batteries
are quiet, but when our men reach the ridge they are greeted by a
storm of bullets. The ground is covered with tangled, down-trodden
oats that catch the feet; and in front, just on a level with
their heads, that burst of fire. Péguy’s voice, ringing and glad,
commands the assault: “Feu! En avant!...”
‘Ah! cette fois c’est fini de rire. Escaladant le talus et
rasant le sol, courbés en deux, pour offrir moins de prise aux
balles, nous courons à l’assaut.... Le capitaine Guérin, M. de la
Cornillière, sont tués raides, “Couchez-vous (hurle Péguy) et feu
à volonté!” mais lui-même reste debout, la lorgnette à la main,
dirigeant notre tir, héroïque dans l’enfer.
‘Nous tirons comme des enragés, noirs de poudre, le fusil nous
brûlant les doigts.... Péguy est toujours debout, malgré nos cris
de “Couchez-vous,” glorieux fou dans sa bravoure. Le plupart
d’entre nous n’ont plus de sac, perdu lors de la retraite, et le
sac, en ce moment, est un précieux abri. Et la voix du lieutenant
crie toujours: “Tirez! Tirez! Nom de Dieu!” D’aucuns se plaignent:
“Nous n’avons plus de sac, mon lieutenant, nous allons tous y
passer!” “Ça ne fait rien! (crie Péguy dans la tempête qui siffle).
Moi non plus! Je n’en ai pas, vous voyez. Tirez toujours!” Et il
se dresse comme un défi à la mitraille, semblant appeler cette
mort qu’il glorifiait dans ses vers. Au même instant, une balle
meurtrière fracasse la tête de ce héros, brise ce front généreux
et noble. Il est tombé, sans un cri, ayant eu l’ultime vision de
la victoire proche; et quand, cent mètres plus loin, bondissant
comme un forcené, je jette derrière moi un rapide coup d’œil
alarmé, j’aperçois là-bas, comme une tache noire au milieu de tant
d’autres, le corps de ce brave, de notre cher lieutenant.’
And here for a threnody let me quote that noble psalm, now familiar to
the soldiers of France, which, until Péguy’s death, lay hidden in that
vast storehouse of lumber and treasure, the poem of _Eve_. Be sure it
will remain for ever among the ultimate residue--the pure regulus--of
all that has been written on the war. And these stanzas were written
before the battle was declared, since Péguy (and therein lies his true
grandeur) was a prophet rather than a poet.
‘Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour la terre charnelle,
Mais pourvu que ce fut dans une juste guerre;
Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour quatre coins de terre,
Heureux ceux qui sont morts d’une mort solennelle.
‘Heureux ceux qui sont morts dans les grandes batailles,
Couchés dessus le sol à la face de Dieu;
Heureux ceux qui sont morts sur un dernier haut lieu
Parmi tout l’appareil des grandes funérailles.
‘Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour des cités charnelles.
Car elles sont le corps de la cité de Dieu;
Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour leur âtre et leur feu
Et les pauvres honneurs des maisons paternelles.
‘Heureux ceux qui sont morts, car ils sont retournés
Dans la première argile et la première terre;
Heureux ceux qui sont morts dans une juste guerre;
Heureux les épis mûrs et les blés moissonnés!’
‘Qui 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 qui se sont tant battus!
Qu’ils ne soient pas pesés comme Dieu pèse un ange:
Que Dieu mette avec eux un peu de cette fange
Qu’ils étaient en principe et sont redevenus....’
And, as we say a collect after singing an anthem, let us conclude, in
memory of all those heroic comrades that fell with Péguy in the battle,
with a noble passage from his _Mystery of the Holy Innocents_:--
‘Une génération d’hommes (dit Dieu).
‘Une promotion, c’est comme une belle longue vague qui s’avance
d’un bout à l’autre sur un même front et qui d’un seul coup d’un
bout à l’autre.
‘Toute ensemble déferle sur le rivage de la mer.
‘Ainsi une génération, une promotion, est une vague d’hommes.
‘Tout ensemble elle s’avance sur un même front.
‘Et toute ensemble elle s’écroule comme une muraille d’eau quand
elle touche au rivage éternel.’
Thus Péguy died with the generation that he led to victory.[1]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] I refer those of my readers, who wish to learn more of Péguy, to
my friend Daniel Halévy’s volume: _Charles Péguy et les Cahiers de la
Quinzaine_, Payot et Cie, Paris, 1919.
ERNEST PSICHARI
I think that Péguy never learned the death of his young friend, Ernest
Psichari; for the retreat of Charleroi was, after all, such a little
while before the battle of the Marne, and news in those difficult days
travelled so slowly.... One of Péguy’s last preoccupations was the hope
of meeting Ernest on the road to battle, and in fact they must have
been in Lorraine together, but no chance encounter by road or rail set
the two friends face to face. They both started for the front in the
same mood of heroic exaltation:--
‘Si je tombe (said Péguy), ne me pleurez pas. Ce que je vais faire vaut
trente ans de travail.’
But the first to fall was Ernest Psichari. I knew him root and
branch--knew his parents and grandparents before him, and the earliest
image that I preserve of him (since the first of all are forgotten)
is of a little lad between eight and nine years of age, unaware of my
presence in his grandmother’s drawing-room, as he talks to his little
brother in the twilight: ‘When I am grown up (says Ernest) I shall be
a great man! Et j’aurai ma statue sur tous les marchés de France!’ And
the little one of seven ripples with laughter at Ernest’s having so
satisfactorily ‘gone one better’: ‘Il y a du chemin à faire, mon frère!
(says he). Il y a bien de chemin à faire!’ Whereat I too laughed and
broke the spell, the two little boys informing me that, while waiting
for their violin-lesson, ‘on s’amusait à raconter des blagues.’
Even in Ernest’s fun there was a desire of greatness; that, and an
intense sensibility, a rare faculty of moral imagination, were what
I chiefly noticed in the child, of whom I saw less and less as his
studies absorbed him more and more: youths between twelve and twenty
have little time for their mother’s friends. A quiet young man, with
charming, living eyes, and in his whole aspect something ardent, firm,
and grave: that is all that Ernest Psichari was to me.
And then came a bolt from the blue. It was on the morrow of the
Dreyfus case when France was divided into two camps, and each faction
feverishly counted its men and the great families which centralised
these men on either side. As Daniel Halévy wrote, in a passage already
celebrated: ‘Paris a ses familles comme Florence eut les siennes, et
ses maisons, non couronnées de tours, n’en abritent pas moins des
factions guerrières.’ Ernest was born into one of these houses--one of
the most important to the Liberals--for those grandparents of his (both
dead before that shock of schism shook France to her foundations),
those grandparents of whom I have written, were Ernest Renan and
his wife. And his father was Jean Psichari, a Greek philologist of
most ‘advanced’ opinions. It came, therefore, almost as a defection,
an apostasy, when the rumour spread in the ruffled circles of the
Dreyfusards that Ernest Psichari had gone into the Army--that Renan’s
grandson, at nineteen, had enlisted as a volunteer in the Colonial
Artillery.
Although myself a Dreyfusard with the best of them, I could not feel
hurt by this change of front, which seemed to me just the counterpart
of Renan’s own conversion. Given a young man with a passion for
justice, the more you treat him as a partisan, the more his mind,
by some dim process of unconscious cerebration, will conjure up the
arguments for the other side. Besides Renan, although he gave his
casting vote to the Liberals, exhaled often an exquisite regret in his
vision of the other side. He finally voted for Caliban; but few writers
have set forth more nobly the arguments for the aristocratic ideal.
Renan’s mind was singularly full. Imagine a pair of scales, either
balance heaped high,--even the lighter of them was filled with more
reasons to believe, to rule, and to conquer than many a fanatic could
furnish forth; it is true the reasons for doubting turned the scale.
The man who sacrificed everything to Truth and Liberty was just the man
to understand the young apostle of Force and Faith; he too had felt
the spell of Force and Faith! Ernest Psichari--grave, straightforward,
active, patient--represented the France of to-day in its modern cult of
sacrifice and duty, even as the grandsire stood for his own generation.
The symbols are different, but the character is much the same--a like
curiosity, an equal contempt for worldly goods and mundane honours, a
conviction that life is worth living only when employed in some vast
impersonal service. The wise Merlin of the Nineteenth Century would
have smiled: ‘ah! cher enfant, combien vous avez raison!’
‘Le fils a pris le parti de ses pères contre son père’; so Ernest
himself defined the situation in his _Appel des Armes_. Just as his
Breton ancestors, curious of the vast world on the other side the seas,
most incurious of worldly advancement, would sail the world over in the
Service of the State, before the mast, seamen content with the salt air
and their duty, so this grandson of theirs spent five years with his
cannon in the Congo, a non-commissioned officer. When at twenty-four
years of age he returned to Paris, he could scarcely understand why
his friends pressed him to enter a school for officers. ‘One can serve
the country as well in the ranks; one is perhaps more useful!’ But he
yielded to his mother--to her, indeed, he always yielded.