Les frères et la sœur, les garçons 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 mediæval 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 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 combined the 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. Il 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 is needed; 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. He 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, naïveté, 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 cœur de bazar.” In this perversion of life and cultivation of the second-best he saw the “universal 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 not only 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 cathédrales, 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 modernist theology, 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 Charité de Jeanne d’Arc (1910), Le Porche du Mystère de la Deuxième Vertu (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 Geneviève 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