第46章 JASMIN AND HIS ENGLISH CRITICS.(3)

The reviewer in the Westminster,who had seen Jasmin at Agen,goes on to speak of the honours he had received in the South and at Paris--his recitations in the little room behind his shop --his personal appearance,his hearty and simple manners--and yet his disdain of the mock modesty it would be affectation to assume.The reviewer thus concludes:"From the first prepossessing,he gains upon you every moment;and when he is fairly launched into the recital of one of his poems,his rich voice does full justice to the harmonious Gascon.The animation and feeling he displays becomes contagious.Your admiration kindles,and you become involved in his ardour.You forget the little room in which he recites;you altogether forget the barber,and rise with him into a superior world,an experience in a way you will never forget,the power exercised by a true poet when pouring forth his living thoughts in his own verses.

"Such is Jasmin--lively in imagination,warm in temperament,humorous,playful,easily made happy,easily softened,enthusiastically fond of his province,of its heroes,of its scenery,of its language,and of its manners.He is every inch a Gascon,except that he has none of that consequential self-importance,or of the love of boasting and exaggeration,which,falsely or not,is said to characterise his countrymen.

"Born of the people,and following a humble trade,he is proud of both circumstances;his poems are full of allusions to his calling;and without ever uttering a word in disparagment of other classes,he everywhere sings the praises of his own.

He stands by his order.It is from it he draws his poetry;it is there he finds his romance.

"And this is his great charm,as it is his chief distinction.

He invests virtue,however lowly,with the dignity that belongs to it.He rewards merit,however obscure,with its due honour.

Whatever is true or beautiful or good,finds from him an immediate sympathy.The true is never rejected by him because it is commonplace;nor the beautiful because it is everyday;nor the good because it is not also great.He calls nothing unclean but vice and crime,He sees meanness in nothing but in the sham,the affectation,and the spangles of outward show.

"But while it is in exalting lowly excellence that Jasmin takes especial delight,he is not blind,as some are,to excellence in high places.All he seeks is the sterling and the real.

He recognises the sparkle of the diamond as well as that of the dewdrop.But he will not look upon paste.

"He is thus pre-eminently the poet of nature;not,be it understood,of inanimate nature only,but of nature also,as it exists in our thoughts,and words,and acts of nature as it is to be found living and moving in humanity.But we cannot paint him so well as he paints himself.We well remember how,in his little shop at Agen,he described to us what he believed to be characteristic of his poetry;and we find in a letter from him to M.Leonce de Lavergne the substance of what he then said to us:

"'I believe,'he said,'that I have portrayed a part of the noble sentiments which men and women may experience here below.

I believe that I have emancipated myself more than anyone has ever done from every school,and I have placed myself in more direct communication with nature.My poetry comes from my heart.

I have taken my pictures from around me in the most humble conditions of men;and I have done for my native language all that I could.'"A few years later Mr.Angus B.Reach,a well-known author,and a contributor to Punch in its earlier days,was appointed a commissioner by the Morning Chronicle to visit,for industrial purposes,the districts in the South of France.His reports appeared in the Chronicle;but in 1852,Mr.Reach published a fuller account of his journeys in a volume entitled 'Claret and Olives,from the Garonne to the Rhone.'[6]In passing through the South of France,Mr.Reach stopped at Agen."One of my objects,"he says,"was to pay a literary visit to a very remarkable man--Jasmin,the peasant-poet of Provence and Languedoc--the 'Last of the Troubadours,'as,with more truth than is generally to be found in ad captandum designations,he terms himself,and is termed by the wide circle of his admirers;for Jasmin's songs and rural epics are written in the patois of the people,and that patois is the still almost unaltered Langue d'Oc--the tongue of the chivalric minstrelsy of yore.

"But Jasmin is a Troubadour in another sense than that of merely availing himself of the tongue of the menestrels.He publishes,certainly,conforming so far to the usages of our degenerate modern times;but his great triumphs are his popular recitations of his poems.Standing bravely up before an expectant assembly of perhaps a couple of thousand persons--the hot-blooded and quick-brained children of the South--the modern Troubadour plunges over head and ears into his lays,evoking both himself and his applauding audiences into fits of enthusiasm and excitement,which,whatever may be the excellence of the poetry,an Englishman finds it difficult to conceive or account for.

"The raptures of the New Yorkers and Bostonians with Jenny Lind are weak and cold compared with the ovations which Jasmin has received.At a recitation given shortly before my visit to Auch,the ladies present actually tore the flowers and feathers out of their bonnets,wove them into extempore garlands,and flung them in showers upon the panting minstrel;while the editors of the local papers next morning assured him,in floods of flattering epigrams,that humble as he was now,future ages would acknowledge the 'divinity'of a Jasmin!