Jacques Jasmin

I.

IT is a little singular that the band of enthusiasts who style themselves exclusively the Provencals, and are formally devoted to the adventure of restoring the Langued’oc to its place in literature, should appear almost unconscious of the fact that they were preceded by about twenty-five years in the self-same fascinating path which they have chosen, by one of the most careful artists as well as truest poets of this century. Jacques Jasmin, the barber of Agen, in

Gascony, published his first volume of dialect poems in 1835, when Frédéric Mistral was a child of four, hardly old enough to prey upon the mulberries and olives of his father’s mas, before he had come even under the mild restraints of Master Roumanille’s school. This earliest volume of Jasmin’s — called, with a mixture of gayety and simplicity quite peculiar to himself, Papillotos or Curl Papers — was followed at intervals of several years by two others. These, like their predecessor, contained hosts of those little personal and occasional lyrics, Tributes, Dedications, Thanks for testimonials, Hymns for festivals, which M. Sainte - Beuve rather impatiently characterizes as “ improvisations obligées ” and “ compliments en madrigaux,” and of which Jasmin himself says, with something as near an apology as his complete naïveté, will allow him, “ One can only pay a poetical debt by means of impromptus; and impromptus may be very good money of the heart, but they are almost always bad money of the head.” But among these comparatively trivial though always musical and pleasing pieces, there were a halfdozen poems of another and higher order: romantic tales in verse of two or three or more paouzos (pauses or cantos), noble in conception, abounding in action, and wrought out with very patient care; instinct with the author’s own gentle vivacity, and at the same time impressive by the dignity of simple, natural passion.

The rustic dialect from which Jasmin never departed lie lifted to the level of these more serious themes as easily, as triumphantly, as Mr. Lowell adapted his extraordinary Yankee speech to the tones of keenest pathos in No. X. of the second series of The Biglow Papers; and more cannot he said. All the magnates in criticism of Jasmin’s generation came forward, soon or late, and surrounded him with their applause. Cities and royal personages had medals struck in his honor. His works were collected in a cheap popular edition of one volume in 1860, a few months only after the Parisian world was first electrified by the publication of Mirèio. Eight years before this, at a public meeting of the French Academy, August 20, 1852, an extraordinary prize of five thousand francs had been awarded to the Gascon poet, and M. Yillemain, in a stately address, had declared it to be the purpose of that august body also to have a medal struck in his honor: “ La médaille du poète moral et populate. ” Earlier yet, Charles Nodier had subdued his amazement at the incongruity between Jasmin’s calling and his genius, and had begged him, with an air of impulsive patronage at once amiable and amusing, not to intermit the manufacture of periwigs, “for this,” says the lively Gaul, ever intent on his epigram, “is an honest trade, while verse-making is but a frivolous distraction.” M. Léonce de Lavergne dwelt with an enthusiasm rather generous in a true Provençal on the onomatopoetic beauties of the Gascon patois. M. de Pontmartin classed Jasmin with Theocritus, Horace, and La Fontaine, and paid him the singular tribute of saying that he had made good as attractive as other Frenchmen had made evil. Finally, M. SainteBeuve (salat à son âme) warmly yet carefully appreciated him. “ Away on your snow-white paper wings,” cries Jasmin merrily to his verses, when he dedicates to the king of critics a new edition of his first volume, “for now you know that an angel protects you! He has even dressed you up in fine French robes and put you in the Deux Mondles!”

It is to the Causeries that the reader must go for a complete analysis of Jacques Jasmin’s literary qualities, and a guide to the more recondite beauties of his speech. Here, preceding some experiments in translation, an attempt is made merely to show some of the points in which his works resemble, and some in which they differ from, those of that younger school of singers in Southern France, a few of whose productions have already been reviewed in these pages.

And first, notwithstanding that local “ jealousy between Gascon and Provençal” which M. de Lavergne frankly allows in his admirable notice of Jasmin’s masterpiece, Françonette, there seems to be nothing deliberately disingenuous in the silence of the Provençals about Jasmin; no reason to suppose that their inspiration is in any way borrowed from him. These men of Southern France were born, one and all of them, in the native land of modern poetry, and have breathed none but its native air. The echoes of all its varied measures, nay, of the very rhymes which are its distinguishing characteristic, perpetually haunt their every-day talk. They tread its ruins under foot. Its seeds lie dormant in all their soil. One such seed germinated at Agen in the first quarter of our century; a handful more about Avignon, twenty-five years later. The rich wild flowers which they have borne are of the same family, indeed, and have certain fundamental resemblances, but they are quite distinct in color, shape, and even fragrance. Here is no miracle; still less, good ground for a charge of plagiarism.

Jasmin is Gascon; not, in the present restricted application of the term, Provençal; and his dialect, though closely allied to that of the Bouches-du-Rhône, must, it seems to me, be pronounced slightly inferior to the latter in the melody of its terminations, and hence in its rhythmic capabilities. But the two sustain the same relation to the classic Romance, that lovely but short - lived eldest daughter of the Latin. The Gascon poet is at once more conventional in his imagery and less enterprising in the matter of metre than his young neighbors. He uses freely the most obvious and trite comparisons. Lips are cherry-red, teeth snow-white, etc., whereas the metaphors of his juniors are often too quaint to be spontaneous, and we know that they know the beaten paths by their sedulous avoidance of them. Jasmin clings also to the measures most approved in legal French poetry, especially to Alexandrines and iambic tetrameters, and to their irregular association in a sort of ballad metre, which in English has been best handled by Robert Browning in Hervé Riel, and indeed most happily chosen for that essentially French poem. Mistral seized these same irregular iambics and speedily molded them into the ornate verse which became so astonishing a vehicle of varied expression in Mirèio and Calendau, and upon which his followers, in their turn, executed all sorts of variations. But Mistral and his felibres seem never for a moment free from a sense of their high commission to repudiate or reform all that is distinctively French, and set up in its stead that which is distinctively Provençal. They may justly claim, most of them, to have made deliberate choice of a humble and rustic form of expression, when a more literate one was equally at their command, while Jasmin, in all probability, could never have written in learned French, and did but sing because he must. Both Jasmin and the Provençals have the self - confidence of real power, but they are self-confident with a difference. When some one told Jasmin that he had revived the traditions of the Troubadours, “ Troubadours!” he cried, —one can imagine with what a lusty peal of laughter, — “ why, I am a great deal better poet than any of the Troubadours! Not one of them could have composed a long poem of sustained interest like my Françonette! ” which is perfectly true, but a man to say it of himself must have a conspicuous absence of small vanity and a considerable sense of humor. While the Provençals, though they have doubtless a fine audacity and fervid faith with regard to the future, speak always with due humility of Homer, and are almost preternatural in their gravity.

Sainte-Beuve quotes with keen enjoyment the demure yet decided terms in which Jasmin refused, in 1849, the challenge of one Peyrottes, who had summoned him to contend with himself in one of those poetical tournaments revived from the Middle Ages, in which Mistral and his colleagues afterwards engaged with enthusiasm and won many laurels. “ I dare not,” wrote Jasmin, quaintly, “ enter the lists with you. The courser who drags his chariot with difficulty, albeit he arrives at the goal, cannot contend against the fiery locomotive of the railway. The art which produces verses one by one cannot compete with manufacture. My muse declares herself vanquished in advance, and I hereby authorize you to record the declaration.” And then, as if sensible and repentant of a lurking arrogance in his refusal, he adds in a postscript, “ I love glory, but the success of another never troubles my sleep.” And though Jasmin’s declamations and readings of his own poems are said to have been in the highest degree dramatic and affecting, the spirit of that reply was undoubtedly sincere, and his methods of composition were such as he describes, assiduous, quiet, slow. I have learned,” he once said, “that in moments of heat and emotion we are all eloquent and laconic, alike in speech and action, unconscious poets, in fact; and I have also learned that it is possible for a muse to become all this wittingly, and by dint of patient toil.”

Sainte-Beuve, whose judgments constantly recur, sums up all his eloquent praise of the Gascon poet by saying that he is invariably sober. No doubt the Provençals proper, even Mistral, their greatest poet,—rarely in Mirèio, but oftener in Calendau,—are apt to be temporarily the worse for the wine of what they are pleased to consider their ethnic inspiration. But their interesting careers were hardly begun at a time when Jasmin’s was rounding to its close, and when he was already declared better to have fulfilled his promises than any other poet of his generation. If they can but imitate his simple and conscientious devotion to art, and grow as he grew even to old age, they will shed an equal lustre on that historic land of song which aliens will always regard as their common country.

In no poem of Jasmin’s are the most characteristic qualities of his mind — his candor, his pathos, and his humor — more abundantly shown than in that which he has entitled My Souvenirs, and from which some extracts will now be made. He begins the unique story of his life, as he is very apt to begin a story, confidentially and colloquially: —

His father, it, seems, was a village poet, a spinner of doggerel for these charivari, and this was the humble seed which, being mysteriously fructified, produced genius in the son. He goes on to assure us that, in his coarse and mended swaddling-clothes and sleeping on a little bed stuffed with larks’ feathers, he grew, if somewhat lean and angular, as fast as any king’s son, until he was seven years old; and then —

He goes on to describe with extreme zest, and a wonderful richness of local coloring, the impromptu fêtes in which he thus bore a part; the raids upon cherry and plum-orchards, — “I should need a hundred trumpets,” he says, “ to celebrate all my victories,” —and then the dances around bonfires, and other fantastic ceremonies of St. John’s Eve. Then he tells, in words of exquisite softness, how the first light shadow fell upon his baby spirit: —

So after fair-time came vintage, with all its manifold joys, and then suddenly the winter, when, in the dearth of firewood, the child was fain to sun himself in sheltered nooks while the daylight lasted. But “ how fair is the nightfall of the grim winter day! ” At that hour, a score or more of women with their younger children used to assemble in a large room, lighted by a single antique lamp suspended from the ceiling. The women had distaffs and heavy spindles, on which they spun a kind of coarse pack-thread, which the children wound, sitting upon stools at their feet. And all the while one old dame or another would be telling ogreish stories of Blue Beard, Sorcerer, or Loup-yarou, to fascinate the ears and trouble the dreams of her young auditory.

And here the first section of Jasmin’s memories, which he began to rehearse so gayly, closes as with a sob. When he resumes, he seems half abashed at the homeliness of the tale which he has undertaken to tell. Shall he soften it? he pauses to query. Shall he dress it up with false lights and colors? for these are days when falsehood in silk and gold seems always acceptable, and the “naked, new-born truth” unwelcome. But he repudiates the thought: —

That death of his grandfather, he goes on to say, sank like a plummet into his heart, and seemed for the first time to reveal to him the utter squalor of his surroundings. He describes in a minute fashion, at once droll and exceedingly pathetic, the exposure of their tenement to the four winds of heaven, the ragged bed - curtains, the cracked pottery and worn wooden vessels off which they ate and drank, the smoky, frameless mirror, the rickety chairs. “ My mother explained it all,” he says.

However, there was a happy change at hand; and here, unhappily for his translator, the poet abandons his flowing pentameters, but one must, if possible, keep step with him: —

The outcries of the maid soon brought all the holy household to the spot. “ Fillo aymo a fa sabé lons pecats que fay fa,” remarks Jasmin, in a quaint parenthesis, which, by the way, illustrates very well the conciseness of expression of which his dialect is capable. It means, “ A girl always likes to have the sins known which she has caused others to commit. ’’ The result of her railing accusation is a terrific reprimand for poor Jacques, and a sentence of imprisonment for the remainder of the carnival. In default of a dungeon they locked him into a dismal little chamber, where he remained until the next day, very angry and very hungry, until chance enabled him to fill up the measure of his iniquities by breaking into a high cupboard, to which he climbed with the help of table and chair, and feasting upon sundry pots of the delicious convent preserves, which he found hidden there.

The result must be told in his own words: —

Once more the poet breaks off his narrative abruptly, but when he resumes it for the third and last chapter of his Souvenirs his tone expresses relief, nay, even a kind of modest triumph. One year later behold him apprenticed to a hair dresser, an artisio-en-piels, with whom he works faithfully all day, hut requests us to observe how the leaves of the tall elm outside the barber’s back attic window shine at midnight. Thanks to his convent schooling he could read; the remnant of daylight after work was done became all insufficient; his savings went to the oil-merchant, and the best pleasure of his life was born.

Those three painful images were not quite exorcised, and all his life long returned at gloomy intervals to haunt him, but he had freed himself from their malign spell. Soon came first love, still further to beautify existence. “ It was for her sake,” says Jasmin, “ that I first tried to make verses in the sweet patois which she talked so well, verses Wherein I asked her in lofty and mysterious phrases to be my guardian angel.” A little farther on he thus describes what is always an era in the life of a poet: —

By the time he was eighteen, Jasmin had sown his modest crop of wild oats and opened a barber’s shop of his own, and the maiden who had inspired his first verses had promised to marry him. “ Two angels took up their abode with me then,” he says. His wife was one, and the other was his rustic muse, the angel of homely, pastoral poetry,—

A few words are given to his wedding, and then he adds, —

No wonder that, after such an experience, he retorts with spirit and scorn, when he reads in a journal the malicious remark that “ Pegasus is a beast who carries poets to the almshouse.” On the contrary, he says, Pegasus conveyed him to a notary’s place, and it is owing to that friendly steed alone that he figures first of his family on the tax-gatherer’s list; albeit he admits that the last-named honor has its disadvantages. He also confesses frankly that his house is yet unfinished, but assures us that his wife, who at first rather deprecated his versemaking, now sees a joist in every stanza and a tile in every rhyme, and hands him his pens quite officiously. And the homely reminiscences which have fluctuated so fast between laughter and tears close with a droll story of the wrath and amazement in his father’s household, when they learned that he had been described in the public print as a " son of Apollo:” —

I have been thus copious in illustrating Jasmin’s Souvenirs because the poem gives the actual outlines of his extraordinary life, and reflects without reserve the humor, the sensibility, and the extreme simple-heartedness of the man. In order to understand the real scope of his genius, its depth and strength, his fertility in romantic and picturesque incident, his shrewdness in reading character and his dramatic skill in representing it, in what divine innocence of established canons the greater part of his work is done and in what implicit obedience to the few which he knows the remainder, we must study his graver and what might be called his more ambitious pieces, if he did not always impress one as too spontaneous for ambition. Of one of these, The Blind Girl of CastèlCuillè, we are fortunate in possessing Mr. Longfellow’s complete and very close and beautiful version. There are at least two other poems of Jasmin’s, Françonette and Marthe La Folle, which fully deserve to rank with The Blind Girl in dignity of theme and treatment, and some illustrations of one of these will be given in a future article.

Harriet W. Preston.