Only henceforth we see him, in our imagination, like Saint Francis, with a monk’s hood drawn over his brow, sandals on his feet, his brown gown cinctured with a knotted cord, a couple of doves hovering over his shoulders, and, at his side, fawning and faithful, a converted wolf....
I met M. Jammes at Madame Daudet’s house one winter, and, in fact, his appearance was not wholly unlike this fancy portrait. The gown was a brown woollen suit, but just the Franciscan colour. Above the ruddy, jocund, rustic face, a crown of grizzling curls, behind which Nature had provided the tonsure. Neither dove nor wolf, but, in their stead, all the young Catholic poets of Paris, pressed in serried ranks to meet the Master who, for a few days, had consented to quit his beloved solitude of Orthez.
We can remember a different Francis Jammes. The poet has said of himself, ‘My soul is half the soul of a Faun, and half the soul of a young girl.’ But let me quote an admirable strophe from his Le Poète et sa Femme:—
‘Il est de ceux qui voient les parfums et il sent
Les couleurs. Et il s’intéresse
Au scarabée cornu, au hérisson piquant,
Et aux plantes des doctoresses.
Mais le voici, avec sa figure camuse
Et son sourire de Sylvain,
Fatigué par l’amour bien plus que par les muses
Qui aiment son cœur incertain ...
Lui-même est un Silène, on le voit au jardin
Veiller au légume, à la treille....’
This gentle Francis Jammes recalls sometimes the charming La Fontaine, and also Verlaine. A La Fontaine bereft of his philosophy, his deep knowledge of human nature; a Verlaine from whom the taint of corruption has been washed and therewith his terrible sincerity. And if we can imagine these two great poets mulcted so utterly in their essential substance, the residue in them, too, might remind us of a Faun and a young girl—a mischievous, experienced rustic maid, yet holding in her arms a bunch of lilies. The first prose study of our poet—which still remains one of his most exquisite pages—is the story of a young girl, Clara d’Ellébeuse. What a delightful book! It is the sort of little story one can read a dozen times in a dozen years, and find it as affecting the last time as the first.
If any attentive student should feel inclined, having read these pages, to fill a shelf with some selected volumes of these modern French writers—with Colette Baudoche, for example, from among the novels of Barrès, and Antoinette from Romain Rolland; with La Jeune Fille Violaine from Paul Claudel; with La Porte Étroite from André Gide; to which he might add La Jeune Fille Bien Élevée from the works of René Boylesve; L’Ombre de l’Amour by Madame Tinayre; Marie-Claire by Marguerite Audoux; and the young girls of Francis Jammes, especially Clara d’Ellébeuse,—what an idea, what an admirable, unconventional idea such a reader would get of the young French girl! What a gift, at once instructive and delightful, he could make to some young English girl on, say, her five-and-twentieth birthday!
Francis Jammes has spent nearly all his life in or near that little town of Orthez (in the department of the Lower Pyrenees), where he was born about 1869. In that part of France, almost as much as in Ireland, Protestants and Catholics divide society pretty equally. Our poet was born and baptized a Catholic, but many of his nearest relations were Huguenots, and, seeing so much of both sides, he does not seem to have taken either very seriously. He showed no particular precocity and, though he began to write poetry, like most people, in his twentieth year, he made his real debut only in 1898, with a volume called De l’Angelus de l’Aube, à l’Angelus du soir.
A certain languor mixed with fervour ran in his blood. He had inherited Creole traditions. His grandfather, the doctor, and his grand-uncle had emigrated from Béarn to Guadeloupe, and had settled there, had died there; his father was sent back to France to be educated at seven years of age; his dim memories of the Antilles, his stories of the cousins in Martinique, and the little chair in rare colonial wood that the child had used on the passage, were, a generation later, to set a-dreaming another child, our poet, whose first heroine will belong, like him, to a family dispersed among the Atlantic Islands and the Pyrenees.
I suppose that a doctor would describe Clara d’Ellébeuse as a victim of the maladie du scrupule. She is a girl of sixteen; a dear little old-fashioned girl, living in a dear little old-fashioned manor, sheltered among the foothills of the Pyrenees, towards 1848. She has that dread of sin, of impurity, as a sort of quagmire into which one may fall unawares and be lost for ever, which the practice of confession may exaggerate, or palliate, according to the wisdom of the confessor. (Our poet Cowper was no Catholic.) Poor Clara d’Ellébeuse, because one day the young poet she secretly adored had wiped away her nervous tears and laid upon her bowed nape a pitiful, respectful hand, imagines that she has fallen into the sin of unchastity and that she is with child! (And we think of Renan who, in his twelfth year, I think, accused himself in confession of ‘the sin of simony.’)
The mischief with Clara is that she does not confess; she tells no kind elder of her secret fear; she lets concealment feed, like a worm in the bud, upon her damask cheek. And we know how that ends. Clara does not pine away. One day in March, overcome by horror and remorse for her imaginary crime, she drinks a dose of laudanum and quits this unkind world.