"His wife drew me aside, and asked my opinion as to how much money it would cost to pay Jasmin's expenses, if he undertook a journey to England. 'However,' she added, 'I dare say he need be at no charge, for of course your Queen has read that article in his favour, and knows his merit. She probably will send for him, pay all the expenses of his journey, and give him great fetes in London!" Miss Costello, knowing the difficulty of obtaining Royal recognition of literary merit in England, unless it appears in forma pauperis, advised the barber-poet to wait till he was sent for—a very good advice, for then it would be never! She concludes her recollections with this remark: "I left the happy pair, promising to let them know the effect that the translation of Jasmin's poetry produced in the Royal mind. Indeed, their earnest simplicity was really entertaining."
A contributor to the Westminster Review{5} also gave a very favourable notice of Jasmin and his poetry, which, he said, was less known in England than it deserved to be; nor was it well known in France since he wrote in a patois. Yet he had been well received by some of the most illustrious men in the capital, where unaided genius, to be successful, must be genius indeed; and there the Gascon bard had acquired for himself a fame of which any man might well be proud.
The reviewer said that the Gascon patois was peculiarly expressive and heart-touching, and in the South it was held in universal honour. Jasmin, he continued, is what Burns was to the Scottish peasantry; only he received his honours in his lifetime. The comparison with Burns, however, was not appropriate. Burns had more pith, vigour, variety, and passion, than Jasmin who was more of a descriptive writer. In some respects Jasmin resembled Allan Ramsay, a barber and periwig-maker, like himself, whose Gentle Shepherd met with as great a success as Jasmin's Franconnette. Jasmin, however, was the greater poet of the two.
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.'"