rempailler des chaises exactement du même esprit et du même cœur, et de la même main, que ce même peuple avait taillé ses cathédrales.

'Que reste-t-il aujourd'hui de tout cela? Comment a-t-on fait, du peuple le plus laborieux de la terre, et peut-être du seul peuple laborieux de la terre, du seul peuple peut-être qui aimait le travail pour le travail, et pour l'honneur, et pour travailler, ce peuple de saboteurs? comment a-t-on pu en faire ce peuple qui sur un chantier met tout son étude à ne pas en fiche le coup? Ce sera dans l'histoire une des plus grandes victoires et sans doute la seule, de la démagogie bourgeoise intellectuelle. Mais il faut avouer qu'elle compte, cette victoire.'

On leaving the Ecole Normale Péguy married the daughter of a Socialist, who brought to him as dowry some 16007. For the first and the last time in his life he had a moderately large sum of money at his disposal. With the consent and at the desire of his wife and her family he spent it in establishing a Socialist publishing bookshop in Paris. The venture failed. Péguy had to learn bitterly that professed Socialists treat a commercial rival just as a professed bourgeois does, and that they are as inexorable as the capitalists towards the man who seeks to advance the cause of humanity by other ways than they themselves prescribe. The Socialist politicians boycotted his bookshop; the Socialist press smothered his publications in a conspiracy of silence. To these his early play, Jeanne d'Arc' (1897), glorifying a national heroine and a canonised saint, was proof positive of heresy both to atheism and the Internationale. He sold, he tells us, but one single copy of it; no doubt he would not, under any circumstances, have sold many copies, for it was a book of 752 pages, published under name of Pierre Baudouin (a pseudonym which he was subsequently to use in brilliant dialogues with himself in the earlier Cahiers de la Quinzaine '), and weighing about three pounds. He sought, however, not commercial success, but the assurance of sympathy and the honesty of a candid judge. Both these were denied him. His virtual outlawry served only to confirm him in his resolution to persevere in the way he had chosen.

At the outset of his career Péguy had been plunged into the Affaire Dreyfus. Herein he came into a contact

with his contemporaries, with his country, with himself, which was decisive. He tested and was tested, and he emerged from the conflict a lonelier, but a proven man. The rest of his life and work was the inevitable development of the ideas, the convictions and the personality which he then essentially formed. The attitude which he adopted in the contest gives the figure of the man. For him the vital question at issue was not whether Dreyfus was or was not innocent (though indeed he believed in his innocence), and far less whether it was or was not in the interest of France that the verdict of the Military Courts should be maintained. It was whether or not, if Dreyfus was innocent, France would have the courage of what he implicitly believed to be her destiny, to be the champion of justice in the world; whether his country would have the greatness to humiliate herself before her own ideal; whether, in a word, France was ready to lose the whole world to gain her own soul. But, when the Dreyfusards had won the day, he saw that their victory contained for France no less of peril than defeat. Out of the majority that had triumphed over what Péguy felt to be the lie in the soul of the French army, there was evolved a political majority that would cast down the army itself. Out of the just opposition to clericalism there grew a fanatical hatred of the Catholic faith. The noble impulse of justice was denatured to its opposite. Under the old banner of truth, sabotage marched to the defeat not of what was evil in France but of what was eternal in her. He turned upon Jaurès, whom he had valiantly helped in the heat of the struggle; Hervé's plan of military sabotage, the anti-Catholic policy of M. Combes, were in his sight crimes against France. 'Il m'a fallu (he said) remonter tous les courants de basse demagogie politicienne qui sortaient de partout pour corrompre le dreyfusisme, pour profiter de l'affaire Dreyfus.'

He had learned a bitter lesson, which was henceforward to become one of the chief themes of his writing the irreconcilable opposition between la mystique and la politique, that is to say, the corruption of the ideal in the practical life. Now he saw that the ideals of the great Revolution had been corrupted, that the mystical virtue of the Republic itself had been used

to hallow the indescribable rogueries of servile politicians. But, though he saw these things and fought against them hardily, of him, no less than of the great Roman, it is true that he never despaired of the Republic. He would have no dealings with the radical politicians; he demanded true republicans; he would have no dealings with the Clericals, he demanded true Christians.

'On nous parle toujours de la dégradation républicaine. Quand on voit ce que la politique cléricale a fait de la mystique chrétienne, comment s'étonner de ce que la politique radicale a fait de la mystique républicaine? Quand on voit ce que les clercs ont fait généralement des saints, comment s'étonner de ce que nos parlementaires ont fait des héros? Quand on voit ce que les réactionnaires ont fait de la sainteté, comment s'étonner de ce que les révolutionnaires ont fait de l'héroïsme?'

He would exchange false for true, not one false for another. Therefore he had enemies in every camp.

An outlaw has no force in politics, where success belongs to him who can control the existing mechanism to his purposes; and it would be untrue to say that Péguy and the Cahiers de la Quinzaine' (which he founded in 1900 and in which his whole effort centred until his death) were ever a political force in France. Péguy himself was not deceived. In 1910, when he had passed through a crisis of disillusionment, and had reached security, at the beginning of the year in which his literary achievement reached its individual perfection, he confessed in 'Notre Jeunesse' the outward failure of his generation, condemned after so long a struggle to earn its bread in poverty.

'Mais dans cette misère même, et à cause de cette misère même, nous voulons avoir été grands, nous voulons avoir été très grands. Justement parceque nous n'aurons jamais une inscription historique. Si nous avions, comme tant d'autres, une inscription historique. assez mesurée à notre effort, à notre intention, à ce que nous fûmes en realité, alors nous saurions payer le prix, alors nous aurions mauvaise grâce à insister sur la considération qui nous est due.'

'Nous voulons avoir été très grands.' Péguy, his life long, was not afraid to insist upon the grandeur of the Vol. 229.-No. 454.

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cause for which he fought, and of those who fought for it. He had been, he knew, the embodiment of what was eternal in the mighty political struggle which shaped him. The Dreyfus affair was no mere event in time, but an elemental upheaval of ideal forces. In it France strove against the falsity of her material limitations. Though her champions were obscure in history and the march of events had, it seemed, trampled them underfoot, they were not wholly beaten. They could not be. Another generation would arise.

Quand nous disons aux vieux républicains: Faites attention, après nous il n'y a personne, ils haussent les épaules. Ils croient qu'il y en aura toujours. Et quand nous disons aux jeunes gens: Faites attention, ne parlez point si légèrement de la République, elle n'a pas toujours été un amas de politiciens, elle a derrière elle une mystique, elle a en elle une mystique, elle a derrière elle tout un passé de gloire, tout un passé d'honneur, et ce qui est peut-être plus important encore, plus près de l'essence, tout un passé de race, d'héroïsme, peutêtre de sainteté quand nous disons cela aux jeunes gens, ils nous méprisent doucement et déjà nous traiteraient de vieilles barbes.

'Ils nous prendraient pour des maniaques.

'Je répète que je ne dis point que c'est pour toujours. Les raisons les plus profondes, les indices les plus graves nous font croire au contraire, nous forcent à penser que la génération suivante, la génération qui vient après celle qui vient immédiatement après nous, et qui bientôt sera la génération de nos enfants, va être enfin une génération mystique. Cette race a trop de sang dans les veines pour demeurer l'espace de plus d'une génération dans les cendres et dans les moisissures de la critique. Elle est trop vivante pour ne pas réintégrer, au bout d'une génération, dans l'organique. Tout fait croire que les deux mystiques vont refleurir à la fois, la républicaine et la chrétienne.'

'Réintégrer dans l'organique.' It will be recognised for a conception taken from the philosophy of M. Bergson, or rather as an adaptation of that philosophy to the conduct of life. Not that Péguy in any way derived from M. Bergson, but in the new philosophy he recognised immediately an exact description of his own evolution and the forces at work within him.

It

described (not explained) the evil with which he wrestled. The opposition which it posited between the organic movement of life and the mechanical framework of intellectualism in which men sought, in vain, to contain it, was no other than the opposition which Péguy detected between la mystique and la politique. Péguy had done, exactly, that which M. Bergson demanded of those who would understand' life. He had lived organically. With a lift of the eyebrow the metaphysicians assure us that M. Bergson's philosophy is no philosophy at all. Indeed it may not be. But it does take count of the profoundest movements of the soul. It allows for and reveres them, and if in so doing it forfeits its right to be called philosophy, that is because it will not confound a method (though it be the only method) of attaining truth with the truth itself.

And here is the very essence of Péguy's thought, the source of his inward conflicts, the occasion of his outward struggles. He attacked the Sorbonne for making this confusion of kinds. The Sorbonne made, he said, of an intellectual method a compulsory creed; the machinery of the State was employed to impose this tyranny upon the people. He attacked the politicians who, he said, had erected a method of assuring the common weal into the common weal itself. The impulse was lost in the machinery of its own creation, the truth in the detail of its own explication, the faith in the Church, patriotism in militarism. Only at moments of destiny could the living reality burst through the fetters, and then only to be lost again. The Dreyfus affair was such a moment; and to the truth which was then revealed, though it was quickly covered again with false phrase and its driving force diverted to unnatural ends, a little band remained faithful. Two-thirds of the subscribers to his 'Cahiers,' he was to confess in 1910, were even then those who had supported him in the Affair. Another moment was the crisis of 1905, when M. Delcassé was forced by Germany to retire, and the sudden knowledge that they were French, that an elect nation had been humiliated, penetrated the hearts of the people. Péguy then gave the sense of this sudden humiliation and sudden awakening an immortal expression in 'Notre Patrie.' To keep the flame of this instinctive knowledge alive, to maintain