We read and reflect that such a friend as this was just what was lacking to Alissa Bucolin. She would doubtless have been happier as a Roman Catholic (only even then she might have chanced on a Pascal, who would have exasperated her qualities, instead of on a Fénelon, who would have tempered and allayed them to a milder perfection). A spiritual director would have turned her energies into courses of work and prayer, would have drawn her mind from the attraction of the abyss, would, perhaps, have married her (like Juliette) or, more happily, have fulfilled her vocation in some great active religious order, where an Alissa may succour and inspire a multitude of lesser natures. Or, had the bent to contemplation proved too strong, he would have let her enter the contemplative life, but not alone. A soul, scarred by what Sainte-Beuve has described as la griffe de l’archange, may be seized with a vertigo, on attaining the summits of the inner world, if on these giddy heights no staying, guiding, protecting hand be near. Vae soli!
But in that case Alissa would not tragically have died, leaving behind a long train of sterile regret and hopeless memories, and M. Gide would not have composed the frail and spiritual story, which, in its purity and charm, reminds us sometimes of Dominique.
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.”’