第47章 JASMIN AND HIS ENGLISH CRITICS.(4)

There is a feature,however,about these recitations which is still more extraordinary than the uncontrollable fits of popular enthusiasm which they produce.His last entertainment before Isaw him was given in one of the Pyrenean cities,and produced 2,000francs.Every sous of this went to the public charities;Jasmin will not accept a stiver of money so earned.With a species of perhaps overstrained,but certainly exalted,chivalric feeling,he declines to appear before an audience to exhibit for money the gifts with which nature has endowed him.

"After,perhaps,a brilliant tour through the South of France,delighting vast audiences in every city,and flinging many thousands of francs into every poor-box which he passes,the poet contentedly returns to his humble occupation,and to the little shop where he earns his daily bread by his daily toil as a barber and hair-dresser.It will be generally admitted that the man capable of self-denial of so truly heroic a nature as this,is no ordinary poetaster.

"One would be puzzled to find a similar instance of perfect and absolute disinterestedness in the roll of minstrels,from Homer downwards;and,to tell the truth,there does seem a spice of Quixotism mingled with and tinging the pure fervour of the enthusiast.Certain it is,that the Troubadours of yore,upon whose model Jasmin professes to found his poetry,were by no means so scrupulous.'Largesse'was a very prominent word in their vocabulary;and it really seems difficult to assign any satisfactory reason for a man refusing to live upon the exercise of the finer gifts of his intellect,and throwing himself for his bread upon the daily performance of mere mechanical drudgery.

"Jasmin,as may be imagined,is well known in Agen.I was speedily directed to his abode,near the open Place of the town,and within earshot of the rush of the Garonne;and in a few moments I found myself pausing before the lintel of the modest shop inscribed Jasmin,Perruquier,Coiffeur des jeunes Gens.

A little brass basin dangled above the threshold;and looking through the glass I saw the master of the establishment shaving a fat-faced neighbour.Now I had come to see and pay my compliments to a poet,and there did appear to me to be something strangely awkward and irresistibly ludicrous in having to address,to some extent,in a literary and complimentary vein,an individual actually engaged in so excessively prosaic and unelevated a species of performance.

"I retreated,uncertain what to do,and waited outside until the shop was clear.Three words explained the nature of my visit,and Jasmin received me with a species of warm courtesy,which was very peculiar and very charming;dashing at once,with the most clattering volubility and fiery speed of tongue,into a sort of rhapsodical discourse upon poetry in general,and the patois of it,spoken in Languedoc,Provence,and Gascony in particular.

"Jasmin is a well-built and strongly limbed man of about fifty,with a large,massive head,and a broad pile of forehead,overhanging two piercingly bright black-eyes,and features which would be heavy,were they allowed a moment's repose from the continual play of the facial muscles,sending a never-ending series of varying expressions across the dark,swarthy visage.

Two sentences of his conversation were quite sufficient to stamp his individuality.

"The first thing which struck me was the utter absence of all the mock-modesty,and the pretended self-underrating,conventionally assumed by persons expecting to be complimented upon their sayings or doings.Jasmin seemed thoroughly to despise all such flimsy hypocrisy.'God only made four Frenchmen poets,'he burst out with,'and their names are,Corneille,Lafontaine,Beranger,and Jasmin!'

"Talking with the most impassioned vehemence,and the most redundant energy of gesture,he went on to declaim against the influences of civilisation upon language and manners as being fatal to all real poetry.If the true inspiration yet existed upon earth,it burned in the hearts and brains of men far removed from cities,salons,and the clash and din of social influences.Your only true poets were the unlettered peasants,who poured forth their hearts in song,not because they wished to make poetry,but because they were joyous and true.

"Colleges,academies,schools of learning,schools of literature,and all such institutions,Jasmin denounced as the curse and the bane of true poetry.They had spoiled,he said,the very French language.You could no more write poetry in French now than you could in arithmetical figures.The language had been licked and kneaded,and tricked out,and plumed,and dandified,and scented,and minced,and ruled square,and chipped--(I am trying to give an idea of the strange flood of epithets he used)--and pranked out,and polished,and muscadined--until,for all honest purposes of true high poetry,it was mere unavailable and contemptible jargon.

"It might do for cheating agents de change on the Bourse--for squabbling politicians in the Chambers--for mincing dandies in the salons--for the sarcasm of Scribe-ish comedies,or the coarse drolleries of Palais Royal farces,but for poetry the French language was extinct.All modern poets who used it were faiseurs de phrase--thinking about words and not feelings.