Admirable he was, nevertheless. Patient as a peasant and courageous as an apostle, wise and witty, bitter and gay, Péguy was full of sense and of charity--was almost that rarest of geniuses, a saint--and failed there (remaining merely a poet and a hero) chiefly, perhaps, because of that insatiable vanity of his. He hungered and thirsted not only after righteousness, but after praise. And in his lifetime he never had his due share of it. That meed so scantily meted I might in some small degree have swelled, and now regret my suspended judgment; but Péguy roughed me up in every fibre, and I disapproved of him almost as much as I admired him. There was something of Rousseau in the fiery little autodidact with his penetrating delicacy of sentiment, and that sore vanity of his as touchy as a gouty foot which always fears the man across the way may stumble on it. When that aching place was hurt, the poet, so exquisite in his sense of friendship, so abundant in his recognition of encouragement, would surprise those most who knew him best by certain restive or morbid quarrels--the blemishes of a too sensitive temperament. Despite this temperament, which was not great, there was something really great and grand in Péguy. There was in him the most generous passion of rescue--the desire at all risks to rush in and save. The grandeur and misery of Man and his need of salvation was the idea which dominated all his life. Péguy was a mystic; Time was nothing to him, and he was sincere in saying that an act of rescue such as that which cost him his life was worth a career of thirty years. Yes, Péguy was a mystic, and one of the real, the greater race, no romantic idealist, not at all vague or dreamy, but positive and practical and intensely alive to every detail, because every fact in nature (and indeed all the best things in industry and in art) appeared to him, in Meister Eckhart’s phrase, ‘the words of God,’ and therefore infinitely precious and important. One day that his friend and mine, Daniel Halévy, that subtle and yet substantial critic, found him reading Dante’s _Paradiso_, in view of a certain Mystery he meant to write: Le Propre de l’Espérance (and the part, the lot, of Hope is Paradise), M. Halévy asked the audacious poet if those whirling worlds of Dante’s and all those whorls of singing aureoled angels did not inspire him with at least a certain vertigo? ‘Not at all,’ replied Péguy. ‘My Paradise will be quite different.’ ‘“Il y aura dans mon Paradis des choses réelles.... Toutes les cathédrales.” ... Et il faisait avec les deux mains le geste d’y poser quelque chose. “Je les y mettrai.”’ And in fact (continues M. Halévy in the letter from which I am quoting) Péguy would have admitted to his Paradise, not only the great Cathedrals, but anything perfect in its own peculiar sphere. For instance, he adduces:--