第48章 JASMIN AND HIS ENGLISH CRITICS.(5)

'No,no,'my Troubadour continued,'to write poetry,you must get the language of a rural people--a language talked among fields,and trees,and by rivers and mountains--a language never minced or disfigured by academies and dictionary-makers,and journalists;you must have a language like that which your own Burns,whom I read of in Chateaubriand,used;or like the brave,old,mellow tongue--unchanged for centuries--stuffed with the strangest,quaintest,richest,raciest idioms and odd solemn words,full of shifting meanings and associations,at once pathetic and familiar,homely and graceful--the language which I write in,and which has never yet been defiled by calculating men of science or jack-a-dandy litterateurs.'"The above sentences may be taken as a specimen of the ideas with which Jasmin seemed to be actually overflowing from every pore in his body--so rapid,vehement,and loud was his enunciation of them.Warming more and more as he went on,he began to sketch the outlines of his favourite pieces.Every now and then plunging into recitation,jumping from French into patois,and from patois into French,and sometimes spluttering them out,mixed up pell-mell together.Hardly pausing to take breath,he rushed about the shop as he discoursed,lugging out,from old chests and drawers,piles of old newspapers and reviews,pointing out a passage here in which the estimate of the writer pleased him,a passage there which showed how perfectly the critic had mistaken the scope of his poetic philosophy,and exclaiming,with the most perfect naivete,how mortifying it was for men of original and profound genius to be misconceived and misrepresented by pigmy whipper-snapper scamps of journalists.

"There was one review of his works,published in a London 'Recueil,'as he called it,to which Jasmin referred with great pleasure.A portion of it had been translated,he said,in the preface to a French edition of his works;and he had most of the highly complimentary phrases by heart.The English critic,he said,wrote in the Tintinum,and he looked dubiously at me when I confessed that I had never heard of the organ in question.

'Pourtant,'he said,'je vous le ferai voir,'and I soon perceived that Jasmin's Tintinum was no other than the Athenaeum!

"In the little back drawing-room behind the shop,to which the poet speedily introduced me,his sister [it must have been his wife],a meek,smiling woman,whose eyes never left him,following as he moved with a beautiful expression of love and pride in his glory,received me with simple cordiality.The walls were covered with testimonials,presentations,and trophies,awarded by critics and distinguished persons,literary and political,to the modern Troubadour.Not a few of these are of a nature to make any man most legitimately proud.Jasmin possesses gold and silver vases,laurel branches,snuff-boxes,medals of honour,and a whole museum of similar gifts,inscribed with such characteristic and laconiclegends as 'Au Poete,Les Jeunes filles de Toulouse reconnaissantes!'&c.

"The number of garlands of immortelles,wreaths of ivy-jasmin (punning upon the name),laurel,and so forth,utterly astonished me.Jasmin preserved a perfect shrubbery of such tokens;and each symbol had,of course,its pleasant associative remembrance.One was given by the ladies of such a town;another was the gift of the prefect's wife of such a department.

A handsome full-length portrait had been presented to the poet by the municipal authorities of Agen;and a letter from M.