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The truth, the defeated truth, that Peguy represented had two parts,
the mystique of the French Revolution and the mystique of Christianity,
the schoolmaster and the prie t of the 19th century genre comedies. As
for Michelet, the Revolution was for Peguy not merely a social program
but a religion, a martyrdom of fraternity. In this volume as in the
previous
Basic Verities
he pities those who cynically scoff at the cut-and–
dried elections and do not understand that martyrs died for this freedom.
And by Christianity he always meant not only a religion but a social
program of decent laborious poverty, the continuity of the peasant on
his soil, etc. These truths which he represented he admitted had been
defeated, but with them also he, in gentle simple terms, threatened the
century.
Now in general it is correct for a poet and a man of letters, a man
of learning and sensibility, to advance precisely by espousing the old
values that have been defeated and are being forgotten. So Homer and
Shakespeare did. And as Eliot once pointed out, such men as Matthew
Arnold fought not to win but to keep the issues alive for us still to fight.
But with regard to the modern defeat, there is a distinction that
Peguy himself drew and that makes his passive and non-revolutionary
espousal of the old values quite disastrous and even, it must be said,
treasonable to his brothers and to the truths he represented. For, said
Peguy, we have not merely been defeated, we have been drubbed.
History has never seen anything comparable. In the dissolution and
degTadation of ancient societies and ideals, there were, in the very
crimes and vices, great resources: "This putrefaction was full of seeds."
But before
us
we have-"the promise of sterility." "The French Revolu–
tion is literally annihilated under the blows, under the weight of uni–
versal barbarism. Not only nothing remains of it, but no traces of any–
thing, no traces of promises even, nor of any fruitfulness to come."
Was it not shameful, then, for him nevertheless to advocate con–
tinuing the old laborious Christian labor in a system and under circum–
stances where that labor, whatever the subjective motive for it, was in
fact solidifying the "weight of universal barbarism"; and climactically,
to agree to fight as a Frenchman in the first World War-even though
there was no trace of a promise of anything fruitful to come? Yet it
was not necessary for Peguy to urge some other way of life than the old
ways he approved of (e.g. he was not a Marxist revolutionary) ; on the
contrary! just to urge the old ways intransigeantly, with full conscious–
ness, and under pure conditions: thus, to try to live laboriously and
simply but refuse to be mechanically exploited; to defend one's home
but not in "their" army; etc.
ull
faut que France continue-France must
go on/'
said Peguy, and explained that the continuation of France is
the peasant struggling for his children; but it was treason to language
to act as if this meant fighting for Clemenceau (or De Gaulle).
As to the half dozen long poems in this collection, including the
