become a sort of intellectual and moral Jeanne d'Arc to the latest generation in France. They find in her exactly the qualities which adorn and protect the virility of the French nation to-day. Her courage, her faith, her reverence, her intensity of love for the fatherland, her passion for domesticity, and her sense of the dignity of a rural round of duties, point her out as a guardian saint of France. No one has with a more tender generosity insisted upon the sublimity of those whom the world despises, and upon the genuine confraternity of souls.

There may seem to be something fantastic in passing from the shadowy figure of Eugénie de Guérin to the solid and violent presence of Charles Péguy, but no one who examines the signs of the times will be shocked at the transition. Every great national crisis produces, or should produce, a symbol or legend which sums up the sentiment of the circumstances. A man who has walked on a level with his compeers, exciting the affection of some, the hatred of others, and the complete indifference of the vast majority, suddenly becomes, for no very apparent reason, the centre of an almost superstitious attention. He is what gamblers call a luck-piece; his existence seems to be bound up with the universal weal; nay, even his death may be the sign of his redoubled importance. Such a mascot France has discovered in the person of Péguy, who was killed during the battle of the Ourcq, at the village of Plessis-l'Evêque, near Meaux, on the 5th of September 1914. To a far greater extent than the loss of any other man of intellect or art, the death of Péguy has affected the spirit of France. A legend has grown up around his name, a legend which illuminates it like the skin-lika in Bulwer's famous story, accompanying the human form and transfiguring it with a supernatural luminosity. It is necessary that we should try to discover why Péguy has become a part of the Unity of France.

He was of peasant race, and his forebears were vine-growers in the Beauce. But they fell into great poverty, and while his grandmother, who could neither read nor write, earned a few pence by taking a farmer's cows to grass, his mother lived by mending old chairs and hiring them out to worshippers in the cathedral of Orleans. Personne mieux que Péguy n'a 'pratiqué la pauvreté,' says his biographer; but he was not

content to endure its disadvantages. Early he showed remarkable aptitude for study, and his career in the École Normale was so brilliant, that he seemed destined for the chair of a professor. But, when he was seven years old, while his mother was mending her chairs in the cathedral, the boy was already dreaming of Jeanne d'Arc, and secretly in his heart he never ceased to nourish the romantic ambition of fighting for France, not with a bayonet, for he was an antimilitarist socialist, but with his brain and his will. He took 'to writing,' as we say, not, I think, because he had a very strong vocation, but because this was the simplest way in which a young man without material advantages could indent his character and his conscience upon contemporary opinion. From an obscure and unimpressive journalist, and a poet who rarely did justice to his own emotion, Péguy has become one of the heroes of French tradition, and the centre of a legend. It is worth while to investigate the reason.

In 1896, when he was five-and-twenty years of age, he published his first book, 'Le mystère de la charité de Jeanne d'Arc.' He used to say that he should go on writing about Jeanne d'Arc if he lived to be a hundred. In this first volume, which attracted but a limited attention, but is now revived or discovered in a somewhat unthinking enthusiasm, Péguy exhibits a personal sentiment which is widely characteristic of France to-day, but is with great difficulty comprehended by an English mind. He was what we should call a complete sceptic, that is to say he had no belief in any of the traditions or dogmas of revealed religion. As he grew older, he became more of a believer, but always an heretical one. He protested that heresy was the life-blood of religion, and that faith died in the arms of orthodoxy. He was a secular mystic, and there was only one point upon which he coincided with the rest of the religious world, but this happened to be of the very essence of Gallic faith. He believed, without a shadow of incredulity, in the divine mission of France as the elder daughter of God and sublime mother of the nations, and in the indissoluble unity of Frenchmen. His design was to carry out in the twentieth century the sacred labour of Jeanne d'Arc.

In February 1900 Péguy began to publish, in a very modest way, a sort of periodical miscellany, called 'Les Cahiers de 'la Quinzaine.' In this magazine he printed not merely his

own lucubrations but those of others with whom he found himself in more or less close sympathy. One among these friends was destined to immediate celebrity-M. Romain Rolland, whose Jean Christophe' began to appear in the 'Cahiers.' By a curious revolution of the kaleidoscope, while one of these friends has become the symbol of patriotism, the other, tormented by the oddities of individualism, has lost the confidence of all Frenchmen, and is fain to live in exile. The contrast is remarkable; while M. Rolland, distracted by the ingenuities of a too-subtle imagination, has lost his hold on reality, Péguy owes his transcendent fame to the fact that, more decidedly than perhaps any other man, he determined to go straight for general political truth, without the smallest concession to amour-propre, and understood that, in the hugest contingencies, but one thing is needful.'

Monsieur André Suarès, who strikes one as more ardent than judicious, claims for Péguy that he is the Carlyle of 'France, infinitely better than the other, more true, more 'free and more human.' These parallels are sometimes unlucky, and one wonders with which of the writings of the English (or Scotch) Carlyle M. Suarès is familiar. Carlyle is at present suffering in this country from a general, and it must be said a deserved, unpopularity due in great measure to his total inability to see the trend of German Kultur. He recommends, with lamentation and invective at our blindness in not accepting it, a tendency which has at last been revealed to us in all its abominable brutality. Carlyle's writings have become unpalatable to us, because we find them running counter to our sober experience, and outrageous to our national conscience. But in the case of Péguy, it is precisely the fact that the events of the war have proved him to be more completely in harmony with the sentiment of France which has led to his universal acceptance. Moreover, whether we disapprove of Carlyle or not, he was a writer magnificent in exactly the directions where Péguy, who lacks conciseness and wanders into endless repetition, is weak. Both writers are austere, both adopt the camel's-hair clothing and the wild honey of the desert; each has the recklessness of the professional satirist. But here the parallel ceases. With the harshness of Péguy there mingles a tenderness unknown to Carlyle.

The poetry of Charles Péguy has been so little read in this country that we may be permitted to quote a sonnet, on Sainte Geneviève, as patron and guardian of Paris, in which the temper of his mysticism is seen at its best. He is rarely, it must be confessed, so concise as this:

'Comme elle avait gardé les moutons à Nanterre,
On la mit à garder un bien autre troupeau,
La plus énorme horde où le loup et l'agneau
Aient jamais confondu leur commune misère.

Et comme elle veillait tous les soirs solitaire
Dans la cour de la ferme ou sur le bord de l'eau,
Du pied du même saule et du même bouleau
Elle veille aujourd'hui sur ce monstre de pierre.

Et quand la nuit viendra qui fermera le jour,
C'est elle la caduque et l'antique bergère,
Qui, ramassant Paris et tout son alentour,

Conduira d'un pas ferme et d'une main légère
Pour la dernière fois dans la dernière cour
Le troupeau le plus vaste à la droite du père.'

The attitude of Péguy, a satirist, a spirit of anger and reproach, yet recognised in this time of extreme crisis as the very symbol of the holy unity of France, throws a light upon the whole situation. Our claim that what we see so magnificently produced before us, for the healing of the nations, is not a New France, miraculously created, but the old France welded together and passed through the fire of affliction, is not affected by the fact that there are now and again breezes in the Chamber, or that the newspapers yelp at one another, or that the inevitable tongue of pessimistic slander wags in Parisian drawing-rooms. These are accidents on the surface of manners, and they only show that time brings, in the long suspense, a certain light forgetfulness. But some movement of troops, some machination of the cunning and treacherous enemy, some reverse of one of the Allies, has but to intervene and these storms in the conversational teapot are forgotten in a moment, and all is 'union sacrée ' once more. It is very difficult for a foreigner, unaccustomed to the easy persiflage and enchanting provocation of French talk, not to be deceived into taking seriously what is no more than the traditional Gallic habit of disputation.

It is more difficult still to decide whether the harmony which now reigns through all strata of French society, and is a national strength more valid than triple walls of brass, whether this is or is not to be durable. In other words, when victory comes at last, and the forces of Teutonic crime are disarmed, will the social grades continue to live at home in unity, or shall we see break out again the guerilla warfare of royalist and republican, of intellectualist and activist, of socialist and reactionary? That, of course, it is beyond the power of any prophet to decide. Posterity has a most provoking way of settling matters in such a manner as to contradict the safest formulas of the philosophers. But we may confidently believe that the fortune which has led France through so many strident centuries will not abandon her in the twentieth. No doubt, when the danger is removed, the instinct which holds back every man from an expression of opinion which might offend his neighbour will be relaxed. Somebody has said that Frenchmen must argue with one another, to pass the time, as an alternative to playing chess. But we may be allowed to doubt whether, after this prodigious lesson, the nation will ever again repeat the levity of Boulangism or the bitterness of the Dreyfus affaire.

Some things we may vaguely see, without presuming upon prophecy. Crude anti-militarism has shown itself to be a transient folly, and it will be a very long while before that nonsense will be repeated. If mutual confidence between the nations should be resumed, new aspirations after universal peace may be developed, but they will hardly come in our time. France will doubtless feel that, for a couple of generations at least, the treacherous brute is prowling at her eastern frontier, and anti-militarism will be the last thing in the world to dream of. The fatuous love of the human race first and one's own country next has always been a will-o'-the-wisp to lead certain speculative French minds a dance over the swamps. This will be quite absent in the future, and the irritation which it caused at home will be removed. A calm military patriotism, universally accepted, will be a source of constant practical unity. The events of the present vast war must diffuse throughout French society those qualities of abnegation, discipline, and honour on which the late M. de Mun laid such stress until the very hour of his departure. VOL. 223. No. 455.

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