time, but unnecessary and artificially created racial and political troubles, the result of so many millions having been kept in undue subjection in Central and Eastern Europe when they were ripe for freedom long ago. When they emerge to the light of liberty, two generations too late, they will not be reasonable, in Austria and Germany, any more than in Russia. It is impossible to postpone emancipation unnaturally long and then expect the same easy results when liberation is offered late as would have been attained if it had been offered in time. Even England has to-day one reason bitterly to rue that truth. But, if we are entering upon a terrible and dangerous epoch, properly ushered in by the most destructive war in history, the bold adventure is better than the continuance of the rule of military despotism in half the civilised countries of the world, and the prevalence of Bismarckian ideas in all international relations. If, as Macaulay said about the break-up of the Roman Empire, it was worth while to have a thousand years of barbarism to save Europe from the fate of China, it is worth a hundred years of revolution to save Europe from the fate of Prussia. If the state of things that has lasted since 1870 had continued, Europe would have acquiesced in military despotism as its final form of government. In these circumstances the British and American peoples, long nurtured in liberty and devoted to peace, will be the chief hope of mankind. President Wilson and our own statesmen understand our full common responsibility, the utter impossibility of further isolation, and the sure vengeance that will follow continued egoistic action among the nations constituting the Commonwealth of the World. G. M. TREVELYAN, Art. 5.-CHARLES PÉGUY. 1. Euvres Complètes de Charles Péguy. Tomes I et II. Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française, 1917. 2. Jeanne d'Arc. Émile-Paul. Paris, 1897. 1915. Nouvelle Revue Française, 5. Euvres choisies, 1900-1910. Paris: Grasset, 1911. 6. Morceaux choisis des œuvres poétiques de Charles Péguy, 1912-1913. Paris: Ollendorff, 1914. 7. Avec Charles Péguy, de la Lorraine à la Marne. Par Victor Boudon. Paris: Hachette, 1916. 8. Charles Péguy. Par Paul Seippel. Paris: Payot, 1916. To a chosen few men it is given to work out perfect lives. They may have known little happiness and much sorrow; they may have been long absent from felicity, and yet their lives, which we are forced to judge by some more ultimate standard of their own, are perfect. The deep congruity of their achievement, the indissoluble harmony of their life and their work, the unfaltering rhythm of their mortal progress, the unmistakable sense that they are inscribing themselves as with a sculptor's chisel upon the perdurable rock-such are the qualities which invest them with the significance of an artistic whole. Although we may have thought that something yet remained to be done, when they die, suddenly striding into the darkness as travellers along a familiar road, we also suddenly understand how their lives have been perpetually complete. So calmly and magnificently, 'his wages taken and the long day done,' did Charles Péguy stride the ultimate stage along a great road when he died for France on Sept. 5, 1914. It is not that his death was braver or more heroic than the innumerable brave and heroic deaths of this war. It is different from those, perhaps, only in that it contained a greater measure of conscious and deliberate sacrifice, and of certainty that the sacrifice The whole of Péguy's work appeared in these Cahiers, which he published himself. would not be unavailing. The glory of the others is great and cannot be diminished; they also died for their country. But there is a sense in which it is given only to a chosen few, a band of brothers,' to die for their country. They alone have brought the unconscious idealism of their countrymen to consciousness; they alone know exactly for what high end they have faced death. They give up their lives for that which is eternal in their country, with open eyes, for the vision and the dream which is the reality. In this profounder sense they alone die for their country who are spiritually prepared. Péguy's life was a long and unremitting spiritual preparation for his death. His work as a writer was essentially the slow and laborious tempering of an instinctive patriotism, the untiring effort to apprehend France 'sub specie æternitatis,' and to be sure in consciousness, as he was by instinct, that there was that in France for which all that he had and was might be justly sacrificed. And more than this. He strove and fought to make his country true to her high calling. At every stage in his own discovery of France, France must subdue herself to the ideal purposes which he disclosed in her. In cahier after cahier, with the hammer-beat of the strong prose which, in his hand, slowly forges the expression into a final fidelity to the real, he strove to fashion France and himself after their common truth. Thus it is that his death becomes incorporated with his life in one complete achievement. It is seen at last to be as truly his own work as the clear ringing prophecy of the poem in his last cahier: 'Heureux qui sont morts dans les grandes batailles. .. For he who died at the moment of agony when the spring of France, bent by the barbarian onrush almost beyond endurance, trembled between snapping and victorious recoil, had laboured his life long to make that recoil certain. As he charged at the head of his men up the height of Nantouillet, he was riding the crest of a wave of his own creation. More truly, he was himself the crest of the wave. Péguy, the pion as his men called him (in this also, as though prophetically, recognised as the educator of eternal France), said no memorable words in that final hour, but only 'Tirez toujours.' To the last, M. Boudon's story tells us, he was wholly l'homme du métier; and even at the moment when he died, the hope of victory had become a certainty in the heart of France. For other men who laboured to live the life of art and whose lives have been cut off in this war, our grief is abiding. It may be that their aspirations were transmuted under the alchemy of hours of destiny; but we who can judge them only for what they seemed to be, remember only that their aspirations, which we knew, were denied fulfilment. When we contemplate the death of Charles Péguy we are fortified by an abiding sense of consummation. The single movement of a life devoted to an ideal passes proudly into the poise of completion. Charles Péguy was born on Jan. 7, 1873, at Orléans. On both sides he descended from an old peasant stock; his father's family had been vignerons of the Val de Loire ; his mother's, woodmen of the Bourbonnais. His father died early, and his mother made a livelihood by renting out and repairing the straw-seated chairs in the cathedral of Orléans. In this peasant-workman childhood his spirit was formed. The spirit of the cathedral, and the instinctive knowledge that to work and to pray were one, accompanied him all his life. For him the divorce between art and work was never made. In the cathedral of which he was the child they were one; it was the expression of the ideal aspiration of humanity, but it was also the solid work of many men. True masons, men who worked with their hands honestly and were glad, who were good workmen before all things-such, Péguy knew as a child, were the builders of cathedrals and such the builders of the world. Before he left his home to receive another and a new education as a boursier in the great Ecole Normale of Paris, he was formed. His soul was not wax to be shaped by the fingers of his masters; it was a touchstone to try their teaching. He was already workman. We see him in vision as a boy already with a little hammer in his hand, such as one hears ringing on the wheels of a railway train when it comes after a long journey to a halt. So, with his hammer, the young Péguy tapped each doctrine put before him with an absorbed intention. The ring of soundness and the discord of the flaw were his standards; and he applied them with a steady seriousness. 'J'ai toujours tout pris au sérieux,' he was to write of his school-days afterwards. 'Ça m'a mené loin.' It led him far and by lonely ways. He embraced, as he thought, the Socialism of the day; he abandoned, as he thought, the religion of his childhood. In truth, he did neither. His Socialism took the phrases which were meant to be whittled away by a 'parliamentary' interpretation, as a literal, humane and reasonable creed, whose vital strength lay in the infinite love which a man should feel for his neighbour. It was for him not a political programme, but a religion; and, though it took him some years to understand this wholly, his new religion was identical with his old. It has been said that Péguy became a convert to the Catholic faith. Péguy was never converted; he was always a believer. The Socialist City was for him a city in which men did honourable work, loving their labour, secure from misery, and loving no less their fellow workmen, for the honourable work which they also did. Thus it was inevitable that in the 'practical' world he should be excommunicated both from above and below. The empty rhetoric of the theorists, the incessant equivocation of the grandiose and empty phrase, the unfair hostility to honest effort, drove him to abandon the career marked out for him by the Ecole Normale. He entered into Socialist politics only to be alienated by the cupidity of its demagogues and the blasphemy of its methods. Nothing less than the word 'blasphemy' could convey the indignant horror with which the doctrine and the practice of sabotage inspired him. It was to him incredible that this should have sprung from the workmen themselves. It was a bourgeois method, and its adoption was a bourgeois victory. 'Nous avons connu un honneur du travail exactement le même que celui qui au moyen âge régissait la main et le cœur. C'était le même conservé intact en dessous. Nous avons connu ce soin poussé jusqu'à la perfection, égal dans l'ensemble, égal dans le plus infime détail. Nous avons connu cette piété de l'ouvrage bien faite poussée, maintenue jusqu'à ses plus extrêmes exigences. J'ai vu toute mon enfance |