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:—