Chapter X: Part 10

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, dans 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.

“Peuple, les peuples de la terre te dirent léger
Parce que tu 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’espérance, 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, aïeule 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 _Mystères_ 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 à 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 à 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:

“Ce 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 familles....

“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 général et ce chef triomphant
Rassemblera sa troupe aux pieds de notre maître.”

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: carrying 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 the 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 Deuxième Vertu_, the solemn yet ardent celebration of “les armes de Jésus”—suffering, poverty, failure, death—in _La Tapisserie de Sainte Geneviève_; and Eve, with its alternate notes of irony and exaltation, its exquisite concluding rhapsody on St. Geneviève 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 may 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 poussière.

“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....

“Mère, voici vos fils et leur immense armée.
Qu’ils ne soient pas jugés sur leur seule misère.
Que Dieu mette avec eux un peu de cette terre
Qui les a tant perdus et qu’ils ont tant aimée.”

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LTD.,
BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E. 1, AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
○ Footnotes have been moved to follow the sections in which they are
referenced.