BOOKS OF THE DAY
Gesta Dei per Francos
Peguy and Les Cahiers de in Quinzaine. By Daniel Halevy, trans- lated by Ruth Bethel'. (Denis Dobson. 12s. 6d.)
THERE are authors and men who are so deeply national that their peculiar genius and appeal is like some kinds of wine ; it doesn't travel. Yet their representative character imposes itself even on the foreigner who, with respectful interest, tries to see what it is in the symbolic figure that makes him important to his own countrymen. Dr. Johnson is such an Englishman ; Charles Peguy such a French- man. Peguy is little known in England, and it is unlikely that he will ever be well known as a writer here. A great deal of what he wrote is only intelligible in an historical context that few can be bothered to master, and what is, in some ways, his most important work, his poetry, is only occasionally exciting to the English reader. Yet Peguy is a great figure in modern French intellectual history, even if only at times a great writer. He stood for much that the French continue to value in their own tradition, even if their admira- tion for it has a marked flavour of hankering after a past now gone forever. In the darkest days of 1940 it was Peguy who, for the shattered French people, ox at any rate for many of their intellectual leaders and would-be leaders, seemed to have most that was relevant to say. For Peguy had attempted a synthesis of the two separate and conflicting streams of tradition, Christianity and " the Republic." He had protested, when the Third Republic seemed solid and secure, against "facility," against easy optimism, against the declension of "mystique " into " politique." He had both prophesied of the evil days to come and recalled a happier and nobler past, the past when the Republic was an ideal, the past of Jeanne d'Arc.
It was in the summer and autumn of 1940 that M. Daniel Halevy revised and expanded his earlier books on Peguy. He had known him well ; he had been a contributor to the Cahiers ; he had, indeed, been offered by Peguy the honour and the burden of editing them. One of his best books, Apologie pour noire Passé, had provoked, in reply, one of Peguy's best books, Notre 7eunesse. And the mark of Peguy was evident in such later books of M. Halevy's as La Republique des Comites. From the point of view of the English reader, this close association of author and subject has its drawbacks. M. Halevy is so soaked in the history of his own times, in the feuds, Flans, scandals, personalities of the Latin Quarter, so full of names, once full of meaning, now barely even names, that even a fairly competent reader finds himself held up from time to time. Some editorial assistance for the English reader was surely called for when it was a case of introducing a practically unknown figure to a new public?
But Peguy's character was too robust, too coherent and impressive for a book of this kind to be a failure, even were M. Halevy not a skilled writer—and he is a very skilled writer. For it is the character that tells and told. Peguy was a French type much commoner than we usually realise ; he was a Puritan, a righteous man who was at times a self-righteous man. He recalls Proudhon
very obviously (and must have recalled him to the author of La 7cunesse de Proudhon). Proudhon had the same moral intolerance, the same nostalgia for the simple, honest, laborious, traditional life of the working-class suburbs of Besancon as Peguy had for the working-class suburbs of Orleans. There were differences, of course. For most of his life Proudhon was a celebrity or at least a notoriety ; Peguy at most was a crank among other cranks of the Left batik. Peguy, despite his revolt against " rUniversite," was the product of the best formal education France could give ; Proudhon had some of the virtues and more of the faults of the self-educated man. But what apparently divided them was what really united them. Each had been bitterly disillusioned ; Proudhon by the Church, Peguy by the Republic. By the time Peguy came to manhood " the University" was the real established Church, but its dignitaries were successfully making the best of both worlds ; they were well-paid and comfortable martyrs. And the complacent impertinence of a " gros pribendaire " like Lavisse infuriated Peguy, as the smugness of cardinals infuriated Proudhon. Each found the self-satisfaction of the successful of this world infuriating, at any tate when it was combined with an air of moral superiority. So Peguy, like Proudhon, had more enemies on his own side than he had in the ranks of those formally opposed to him. And his famous series, Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine, was a sword never put back in the scabbard as long as there were bogus heroes, martyrs, saints to stick it into.
Of course, Peguy was often unjust. He was (on the whole) unjust to Jaures ; he was, less certainly, unjust to Romain Rolland. An anarchist, he could not accept the contagion of the world's slow stain that all active politicians have to endure. By 1914 the Cahiers were on the rocks. Had Peguy lived, he must have tried a new line of attack. But he died in the Battle of the Marne, died as a bitterly critical Republican, a highly insubordinate Catholic, and it was only years afterwards that France realised she had lost a great man. He was not always great ; sometimes he was a little too like Jules Valles ; sometimes he was too repetitive and pessimistic like Bernanos. But his posthumous fame and literary canonisation were fully deserved, as M. Halevy makes plain in this act of piety that is also an excellent literary essay. It deserved better translation, for although great pains have obviously been taken (except in the matter of spelling), the flavour of the French and even its meaning is too
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