Prenne à présent sa part de la dédicace qui voudra!’ ‘Tâcher de porter remède au mal universel humain’: To attempt to ease the universal disease of humanity! All Péguy is there! As time went on, he ceased to believe in the establishment of the universal Socialist Republic; and, indeed, although ineradicably attached to the Republican ideal, he became increasingly anti-radical, anti-democratic, almost tending towards the military, and aristocratic theory of a State strongly constituted in definite classes, each respectable, respected, and informed with the same sense of national honour and personal self-sacrifice. But Péguy went back on no word of that early dedication. He simply made over, so to speak, his stock in the universal Socialist Republic to the credit of the Catholic Church. For before Claudel, before Francis Jammes, after Brunetière (or we should rather say along with him) Péguy suffered a conversion to the faith of his fathers. Yet such was his respect for the individual conscience, that he continued, in the eyes of the Church, to live in sin. His wife, the daughter of a Socialist, was a Free-thinker; she had never been baptized; she had married Péguy before the Mayor of her Commune and not before the priest of her parish; she had not followed him in his conversion and still maintained her rights. Péguy, that arch-persuader, could not shake her. And, since the indissolubility of the marriage-tie was the very cornerstone of Péguy’s social doctrine, he continued to live with this free-souled woman, who shared his life but not his faith, in an unblessed union, that the Church condemned; his children were not baptized. Rome bade him bring them into her fold. Péguy, in his pride of _pater-familias_, upheld his claim to consider the convictions of their mother. Deprived of the sacraments, he ceased to go to Church, while still continuing to believe and pray.... Anti-clerical and ardently Catholic; tenderly preoccupied with his children’s welfare and yet accepting for them that which his new-found creed must have made him conceive as the most dreadful risk of all--such was the stubborn and irascible convert whom the Church honours in his death, but whom in his lifetime she covered with reprimands and ardent reproaches. Such was Péguy in his life--an enigmatic being; nor was he less difficult to appreciate in his art, which attempts to enlarge our sensibility and quicken our moral vision much in the same way as instantaneous photography has increased and instructed our sense of sight. I am the first to concede that this art of his (which proceeds, perhaps, rather from Dostoievski than from any great French tradition) appears, in its disconcerting diversity, as one of the most interesting phenomena of a new age. It is full of audacity, interest, genius, adventure. But is it an art? Let us open any page of Péguy and take at random a charming page, where the book opens, p. 63 of the _Porche de la Deuxième Vertu_:--