CHARLES PÉGUY
When war broke out between Austro-Germany and the Allies, Charles Péguy went to the front as a lieutenant in the reserves of the line and was struck by a ball, or a fragment of shell, on the forehead as he was leading his men into action at the Battle of the Marne. This heroic death fitly crowns a career devoted to the love of country and the gospel of fraternal self-sacrifice.
In its light, I re-read the trivial pages, the feeble half-affectionate pleasantries with which I had saluted the poet and teacher who, no doubt, occasionally abused the privilege which genius sometimes claims to alloy the sublime with the ridiculous—or the merely ultra-lyrical and wearisome. Is it possible that I did not appreciate, in his lifetime, the prophet, the hero, the poet, whom France reveres to-day? I examine my conscience. It is clear that I was not drawn to Péguy in his habit, as he lived.... I see him still. An odd little man with the look of a small farmer from the Loire—a farmer, a village schoolmaster, a country doctor, a curé even—there was something of all that in the refined and yet rather common little man with the bent shoulders, the charming hands, the square jowl, and the deep-set blue eyes whose glance was at once so keen and so gentle, often so quizzical, sometimes so mystically tender, and sometimes so irritable and angry.
‘Un petit homme barbu (said Barrès) un paysan, sobre, poli, circonspect, défiant et doué du sens de l’amitié, bien campé sur la terre, et toujours prêt à partir en plein ciel. C’était un petit homme terne et lent, de qui se dégageait un merveilleux rayonnement.’
He seemed to me like some preaching friar of the Middle Ages, vowed to Dame Poverty; and, for himself, content with a crust in his wallet,—a wretched living picked up as he went along the roads, yet, where his Order was concerned, insatiable, a relentless beggar for the Love of God. Pitiless to any human hobby or pursuit of yours which did not square with that sublimer hobby and pursuit of his; himself disinterested, and yet in his ardent piety as dauntless an intriguer as any Jesuit of Eugène Sue’s; cordial and frank by fits and starts, with that engaging air of rustic simplicity and popular plain-dealing, yet, on the morrow, infinitely wily, full of craft, subtlety, and innocent guile. I thought him (notwithstanding the mysterious, irradiating kindness which beamed from that wonderful glance of his) on the whole a crotchety creature, ‘difficile à vivre,’ with a temper full of sudden twists and turns and unsuspected asperities.
Admirable he was, nevertheless. Patient as a peasant and courageous as an apostle, wise and witty, bitter and gay, Péguy was full of sense and of charity—was almost that rarest of geniuses, a saint—and failed there (remaining merely a poet and a hero) chiefly, perhaps, because of that insatiable vanity of his. He hungered and thirsted not only after righteousness, but after praise. And in his lifetime he never had his due share of it. That meed so scantily meted I might in some small degree have swelled, and now regret my suspended judgment; but Péguy roughed me up in every fibre, and I disapproved of him almost as much as I admired him. There was something of Rousseau in the fiery little autodidact with his penetrating delicacy of sentiment, and that sore vanity of his as touchy as a gouty foot which always fears the man across the way may stumble on it. When that aching place was hurt, the poet, so exquisite in his sense of friendship, so abundant in his recognition of encouragement, would surprise those most who knew him best by certain restive or morbid quarrels—the blemishes of a too sensitive temperament.
Despite this temperament, which was not great, there was something really great and grand in Péguy. There was in him the most generous passion of rescue—the desire at all risks to rush in and save. The grandeur and misery of Man and his need of salvation was the idea which dominated all his life. Péguy was a mystic; Time was nothing to him, and he was sincere in saying that an act of rescue such as that which cost him his life was worth a career of thirty years. Yes, Péguy was a mystic, and one of the real, the greater race, no romantic idealist, not at all vague or dreamy, but positive and practical and intensely alive to every detail, because every fact in nature (and indeed all the best things in industry and in art) appeared to him, in Meister Eckhart’s phrase, ‘the words of God,’ and therefore infinitely precious and important. One day that his friend and mine, Daniel Halévy, that subtle and yet substantial critic, found him reading Dante’s Paradiso, in view of a certain Mystery he meant to write: Le Propre de l’Espérance (and the part, the lot, of Hope is Paradise), M. Halévy asked the audacious poet if those whirling worlds of Dante’s and all those whorls of singing aureoled angels did not inspire him with at least a certain vertigo? ‘Not at all,’ replied Péguy. ‘My Paradise will be quite different.’
‘“Il y aura dans mon Paradis des choses réelles.... Toutes les cathédrales.” ... Et il faisait avec les deux mains le geste d’y poser quelque chose. “Je les y mettrai.”’
And in fact (continues M. Halévy in the letter from which I am quoting) Péguy would have admitted to his Paradise, not only the great Cathedrals, but anything perfect in its own peculiar sphere. For instance, he adduces:—
‘this ink with which I am writing to you, which indeed was Péguy’s ink, made of the oak, coal-black, indelible; and his pens—they too would have gone into his Paradise, certainly, all his pens! You have understood I am sure; Péguy extends the future life, not only to souls and sentiments, but to all that has achieved existence; a resurrection not only of the flesh but of the things made, cherished, and perfected by man on earth.’
It was more or less Swedenborg’s Paradise. In Péguy’s eyes the soul vivified and transfigured and made alive all that it touched. Hence his utter incomprehension of all attempts to examine matter that the soul had not transfigured, his withering contempt for science and scientists, the scorn he would pour on those miserable insects, the ‘puissants millepieds’ of the University, in their laboratories and archives:—
‘Et ce ne sera pas ces distingués cloportes
Qui viendront nous chercher dans notre enterrement....
Et ce ne sera pas par leur usage externe
Que nous nous lèverons de notre pourriture;
Mais la Foi qui nous sauve et seule nous discerne
Saura nous retrouver dans la fange et l’ordure.’
(Eve.)
What discussions I have had with Daniel Halévy concerning the final value of this poem of Eve, whose mighty jog-trot extends interminably over a length which exceeds the Odyssey and the Iliad together! My friend, to whose opinion I attach the greatest weight, insists on ranking Péguy with Victor Hugo for poetry and with Rabelais for prose! And no doubt he emphasises his expressions in order to spur my tranquil spirit to the fray. Indeed the incitement never yet failed of its effect; I rush to the encounter; sometimes, at the point of the bayonet, M. Halévy recedes from his position as regards Victor Hugo; but he maintains unshaken that comparison with the creator of Pantagruel.
Well, all that is vain; Péguy now will never fill his measure. His monument is a broken column, like those we see in cemeteries. In these brief passages of recollection, I may not even stay to point out the extraordinary design and intention of that monument; nor to quote that prose, surely unlike any other prose, which creeps up, wave after wave, with infinite repetitions and over-lappings, until, like the tide on the strand, it has submerged and sucked in all the subject it meant to cover. How, in two words, could I give an idea of that style?
Péguy is a great prose writer, a wonderful wielder of image and trope, 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.