3. Charles Péguy

228IN 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 popular229republicanism 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.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 combined232the 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 is233needed; 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 not234only 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 modernist235theology, 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.236The 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 capable237of 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 human238beings 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 " — 239the 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 and240fastidious 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 — 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.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:243Ce 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: 244carrying 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.'245"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."