One of my friends, who is Professor of Rhetoric (Modern Literature) in a High School, tells me that the enthusiasm of her scholars for Francis Jammes is a thing touching to behold—for we of a bygone generation can never quite attain their diapason. Michelet and Renan leave them cold; Claudel and Francis Jammes fire their imagination. If I were a teacher, certainly I should profit by the experience; by all means let the young learn from the young!
Les Géorgiques Chrétiennes is full of the most delightful episodes of country life told in beautiful (if rather free-and-easy) French. There is no particular tale in it. It is rather a series of pictures; the daily life of a family of husbandmen on a farm. It is a sort of rural Christian Year. But what candid and happy pictures! What a sense of rustic cheer and frugal abundance! What primitive poetry in the labourer’s account of the creation of his daily bread; the chestnut, the maize, the vine! And the betrothal of the little farm servant! And the vocation of the farmer’s daughter who takes the veil.
There is but one thing in the whole volume which I find displeasing. It is the short certificate of orthodoxy which the poet delivers to himself on the first page and on the last. He is at great pains to assure us that he is not a reformer, a philosopher, a modernist, or a free-thinker. We should never have suspected this gifted and ingenuous singer of being any kind of thinker! He is a poet, a most indubitable poet, and that is enough.
RENÉ BOYLESVE
René Boylesve reminds me of some twy-faced Roman statue, some bust of Janus, turning a different mask to opposite points of the horizon. One of these visages (but that regards the Nineteenth Century) has the libertine grace, the refined scepticism, the voluptuous detachment of an Anatole France or a Henri de Régnier, with less philosophy than the one and less poetry than the other; but these are the qualities which distinguished our Republic yesterday: Non ragionam di lor. The second face looks at the new Renaissance of our time, and is that of an inhabitant of the province of Touraine, poet and gentleman-farmer, a man pleasantly occupied with the affairs of his neighbourhood, in which he finds the diversity, the unexpected developments, the food for thought, which animate, in any place, if sufficiently observed, the innumerable acts of the Human Comedy.
In addition to a mind of the subtlest moral delicacy and a more than feminine refinement, M. Boylesve possesses a literary style of transparent ease and charm; just the style to suit the landscape he describes, the moderate classic harmonies and Attic graces of Touraine. He is the historian of the charming gros bourgs that surround Loches or Azay. He describes their neat, white houses built of freestone, topped with slate, their raised stone perrons (or stoops, as they say in America) and handsome ornamented windows; and we see the trellised vine up the front, and the flowers in the gardens, and the fruit trees everywhere. The villages of Touraine have brought prosperity to the very brink of poetry!
These little farms where every sunny slope all round is planted with the vine; these old gray manors and priories nestling under some cliff lightly planted with slender oak-woods (so unlike ours!), in which the gray-blue periwinkle and the gray-pink cyclamen grow wild; these prosperous rural properties, with their air of solid comfort, their teeming vats of wine; their kitchen-gardens, full of melons, cucumbers, asparagus, artichokes, cardoons, green peas, egg-plants, tomatoes, salsify, and scarlet-runners; their great barns; their stone stables where the cattle spend so much of their time (for the land is too fertile and too valuable to lay down in pasture); all this dignified, delightful, indolent country of Touraine has found its prophet in René Boylesve. Except Balzac in his Lys dans la Vallée, no one has described it half so well—the land and the dwellers on the land.... ‘Molles Turones,’ said Cæsar, and Tacitus calls them ‘imbelles,’ and Tasso thought the peasant here was like his field, which is ‘molle, lieta e dillettosa.’ And, in fact, these adjectives serve very well to describe the lazy, charming art of René Boylesve.
I find in him the moral features of his race: measure and tact, delicacy of sentiment, love of ease, something at once noble and voluptuous, something humorous and nonchalant, and yet, at the same time, something precise and positive, despite his softness. And often, when I read a novel of M. Boylesve’s, the book slips from my hands, and I see the Plain of Touraine under its customary sky of sunny gray—its great wide rivers, its rocky cavernous cliffs, its forests of Loches and Amboise, its rambling lanes sunk deep between two rows of pollard windows, the great straight white high-roads that the aspens fleck with shadow, and all the pleasant sequence of woods and fields, which seem to be reasonably deduced the one from the other, like the different parts of a discourse. Did M. Boylesve know, he would be charmed; for the object of his art is, not to hurry the reader along on a current of breathless events, but to foster in him this habit of reverie, of reminiscence ‘chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy.’
René Boylesve was born in 1867 at La-Haye Descartes, in Touraine, and his first book, Les Bains de Baden, was published in 1896; but this belongs to the Boylesve whom we renounce. In 1899, with Mademoiselle Cloque, he opened that series of ‘Scènes de la vie de province’ (as Balzac would say), which have made his reputation. Mlle Cloque is an old maid of narrow means; just one of those ‘churchy’ old maids for whom Francis Jammes has expressed a respectful tenderness. But Francis Jammes was still a ‘Faun’ when his contemporary, Boylesve, delineated this delightful lady.
Mlle Cloque’s affections are divided between two absorbing objects, her pretty young niece and her church. That church is the basilica of Saint Martin, fallen into ruin; and the dearest aim of this devoted worshipper is to restore and repair the great sanctuary of Tours. For to her Tours is still that Jerusalem of the West that our forefathers called it, in memory of the first confessor of the Latin Church, Saint Martin, once the honour and glory of France, neglected now in his own diocese.