His grape preserve was a sensitive point with the Superior; it was a sin against his most reverend stomach; there was no relenting after this unpardonable offence; the thing cried aloud for vengeance: Jasmin slunk away cassockless and accurst from those holy portals, and became a barber. This in the mind of the monks was but the culmination of a downward career-soap and razors after Glorias and Tantum ergos! Never was there such a by-word and hissing among men. The ecclesiastical fowls cackled over it months long. Saucy glancings at a girl, stealing the Prior's good things, bespattering that saintly carcase with its own confiture, becoming a barber, and going to the devil - what was all that but one and the same thing, a logical chain handed down after the straitest sect of ancient logicians? Never had such edifying discourses been delivered within the purlieus of the sanctuary as in the outraged monastery on this occasion. The Prior fairly pranced with fervor in describing to his audience of tonsured crowns the moment when his apostolic eye first encountered that child of Satan as he stood gorging himself with canonical goodies :— - Hé Dieu! en escrivant cette parolle But in good time it fell out that men became more afraid of this barber than the tyrant Dionysius was of his. He grew wise and potent, developed a poetical turn, sang and improvised astonishingly as he seized his customers by the nose and drew the razor daintily over their faces, got to be the town talk, and soon rose into one of the celebrities of Agen. He was as musical, as witty, as nimble as the Barber of Seville. A silver streamlet, he says, began to flow into his humble shop. Men were interested and touched by this picture of genius and poverty, by this eloquent and yet humble scene, by this delicate muse that shed a mystery and a perfume over one of the coarsest of the professions. It was something unique altogether in its kind. Poets had been barbers before, fiddlers, printers, artisans, beggars; but there had almost always been an ambition to rise and forget, to ignore, or sometimes to hide, the shame of obscure beginnings. Here, however, was the true spirit of the Gascon king, the monarch of the Pont-Neuf, the good and fearless Harry of Navarre, which made men stop and admire, which went abroad through the land and recalled another singer in the North whose fearlessness and honesty were as great - Béranger. The dialect that the Agenais spoke, too, was almost as mellow as the Tuscan, rich in vowelelements, liquids, trills, elisions, with the old Latin heart beating afar within its consciousness, still a-tremble with the vibrations of the troubadours, still haunted by Gothic and Saracenic reminiscences, still clothing its hills and skies in metaphors, as is the impulse with semi-tropic languages, within which, so to speak, still flourish the date and the palm. The vocabulary had been suffered to run wild in the mouths of the peasantry, unkempt and unpruned; but it had acquired a ripeness and a number that men wondered at when they saw it in type, set before them in elegantly printed volumes, embellished with every grace of typography, engraving and illustration. Of all contrasts between gift and profession, of all Apollos tending the flocks of Admetus, this was surely the most striking. There was a rhyming baker somewhere else in France who marvellously imitated the elegies of Lamartine, so that even good judges were deceived; but here was an idyllic muse that in the lingua rustica brought forth imperishable poems, uttered things that were immortal with a Gascon accent, composed works that unconsciously put in practice the great principles of pagan art, works athwart which the antique world passed like the transit of Venus athwart the sun's disk, about which hovered something redolent of the Portico, through which peeped the gardens of Epicurus, the shipwreck of the Cyprian merchant Zeno. There was no material here for heavy tragedies, vast epopées. There was too much heart for that; too much idyllic tenderness, too little ambition. No work perhaps was ever so remote from theatrical envelope, from sensational effect. It was a scene of perfect nature; it is St. Augustine pouring out his confessions; it is Montaigne in one of his priceless chapters. For him who seeks there is scarcely the exquisite mosaic on which, as in Wieland's romance, Aspasia and her ladies enact the wonderful myth of Daphne; but there is the ivied battlement, the oriel window, the sunny domain, the minstrel-haunted hall of wassail of an ancient provincial château, such as that which Sire de Joinville describes when he left it under the holy King Louis for the Paynim wars. The minstrelsy of Provence has toned down into lyrics and elegies which the language in which they are written permit to be sung, or even to be danced, by strophe and antistrophe. Not so varied or so sublime as Béranger, who is the poet of unrest, of republicanism, of advanced theories, of intellectual stir, of an era busy with rationalism: there is in Jasmin cordial concurrence with the established order of things, a preference for monarchical perspectives, an absence of tumult, skepticism, irony; a faith in the mother-church that is at once lovely and moving. He is not a bard; he is a simple being to whom life and events present themselves musically, attuned to an inner rhythm, rhythmic without arbitrary choice, full of the occult quality which the ancients deified and made into the nine sisters, full of the mystical glory that dwelt on Mount Parnassus and floated down to Homer when he uttered the first line of the Iliad. There is more of the Frankish spice in Béranger: Jasmin is the poet of Aquitania. Strangely distinct to this day are the nations whom Cæsar found in Gaul, ruggedly independent despite the attrition of ages, perpetuating themselves in quaint customs, traditions, individualisations. With Jasmin a curious problem has come into being, whether there are to be two literary languages in France. The popularity of his writings at once evoked a throng of rural poets who sang in the same or kindred dialects, and busily propagated them through the land. Metropolitan French is hardly intelligible to the Agenais; to the Parisian a translation is necessary to understand the Gascon tongue. Jasmin's works, instead of being the swan-song of a dying language, are wet with the very dew of the morning; instead of the last blossom of an effete system, they embody the efflorescence of a language for the first time genuinely alive. In Rembrandt's picture we see Lazarus coming forth from the shadows which the poet has made so lustrous, alive and strong; in Jasmin we see emerging from twilight a young and beautiful language, not infirm because a written language ages ago, not degenerate for having been rusticating among the Gascon peasantry, not a whit inferior in high and genial memories to the other dialect, the dialect patronised by Messieurs les Académiciens. This language is spoken by a large rural population, a population of merchants and manufacturers, vine-dressers and cultivators of silk, beings full of the thrift and the impressionableness of the South; and after the preservation of so many centuries, it is imposible that it should not continue to be perpetuated. It was remembered that Montesquieu and Montaigne, Mirabeau and Massillon, Henri IV. and Massena, were men of the South; from there came the Marseillaise, and the brilliant throngs with which it teems spring not from a province of Italy, but from a continuation of Italy itself as Pliny says, quoted by M. Villemain. The Secrétaire Perpétuel of the Academy crowned at once Jasmin and his patois when he said that in the luxury of great commercial cities as in the châteaux, in the villages as in the drawingroom, from Lyons to Marseilles and from Toulouse to Bordeaux, the poet-pilgrim found a welcome. It was his habit to journey from town to town like his predecessors in the thirteenth century, everywhere greeted with ovations: a branch of gold from the city of Toulouse for his poem Françonnette; a golden cup from Auch; a ring and pin set with diamonds and pearls from the Duchess of Orléans; a seal enriched with rubies and emeralds from Villeneuve; a medal from Bergerac; a crown of gold from his native town; a medal and the prix extraordinaire at the sitting of the Academy in Paris. These demonstrations of enthusiasm bring back the crowning of Petrarch at Rome in 1341. He was as celebrated for his powers of pantomime and recitation as for his poems. He produced a sensation in Paris at a literary soirée given by the élite of the town. There was a grand entertainment, and then recitations in the original from his writings. The crystal of Parisian cynicism melted and bubbled over in tears and eulogies, as we see by M. de Pontmartin's account in the Union next day. He had hardly been listened to five minutes, says an eyewitness, when they were completely won, and that, not only because the Agenais poet was overflowingly endowed with all the Southern qualities, expansiveness, vivacity, warmth, exuberance, éclat, power of glance and gesture, but for reasons more serious and profound, because in Jasmin a supreme art had combined all, and produced such accord between idea and expression that the hearer seized them both at once, divining the one by the other. It is the ploughman Burns. amazing the wits of Edinburgh. Another peculiarity remarked of Jasmin by this critic, was his sobriety, his self-restraint amid the tempting richness of a Romance imagination. So much was said in so little ; unceasing seemed the toil for conciseness; there is something almost austere in the simplicity of the lines and forms which he chooses; something ascetic in the figures he has immortalised; something antique and hence musical as of highest art in the virginal serenity that is enthroned upon all his female characters. He recovered the secret of the old ballada something that is indefinable, artlessness, pathos, sweetness, strength call it what you will all pervaded, all sublimated by the same master-tone. It is the sweetness of an ascetic face not strong in the sufficiency of the world, but strangely sweet by reason of self-abnegation, quick of scent for what is spiritual, seizing facts and making them grand and mellow for all times to come. No instinct was ever happier in selecting its facts. The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. The battling of the weak is noble; the race of the slow-footed is sure; both have their day of reckoning and compensation. So there is more pathos in The Blind Girl of Castelcuille (L'Abuglo de Castel-Cuille), who follows her faithless lover to the church and there hears him wedded to another while her heart breaks and kills her, than in many a volume of "tragedies " over which the world has snivelled. There is no frenzy there but that of the most piercing human grief, no background save that of the awe-struck congregation gathered to the nuptials- no beauty of perspective save, that which the village church offers with its timehonored stalls, its simple crucifix, its image of solemn death, its bridalveil rent in twain. People know this legend by heart who perhaps never heard of the Cid or Zaire; to whom Corneille and Racine are empty names. It is one of the legends of Gascony torn from the recollections of those who knew the circumstances, transformed by these melting sympathies into a rare masterpiece, breathed through by a pity and a gentleness that gather into an anthem in the concluding verse. More moving even than this is the story of Martha, another legend from the memories of the people preciously embalmed for us in myrrh and spikenard, to-day one of the classics of French literature: Martha, the poor idiot, who for thirty years begged her bread through the streets of Agen, whom everybody loved without knowing why; whose tragical story nobody knew until Jasmin learned it, never to be forgotten, on a pilgrimage through the lanes and vineyards of his neighborhood. Like the other, it was a story of love, desertion, the coming of a great shock, and life setting in insanity and darkness. The author never perhaps so fascinated his reader as in this little work, so rich in tears, so impassioned in conception. There rings through it a litany of silver voices that weep and cry pardon to all the world. The exquisite picture of the two girls trying their fortunes by the cards for their lovers who are to be drawn in the conscrip tion; Martha's hope when the cards queen of hearts, knave of clubs and all-came out for her brilliantly, until the dark queen of spades, the last in the pack, emerges like a spectre and dashes it; the conscript off for the wars, swearing eternal fidelity; the resolve on Martha's part to sell all she has inherited and redeem Jacques by putting a substitute in his place; the country priest whose kindness to her is so great; the poor girl's rapture when Jacques has been found, delivered, is hurrying home to throw himself at the feet of his unknown benefactor; Jacques' return with a strange woman at his side as they all stand breathless in bridal array at the church-door, awaiting him to unite Martha to her lover forever; the one supreme glance in which Martha understands all; the gaiety that awfully breaks from her lips and seals the doom of her reason; the tender light which all this throws over Martha's fear and flight whenever after wards, in begging from door to door, the boys in the street cry "Martha, a soldier, a soldier!"-how thrillingly, how lovingly is all that told! It is a brimming river that sweeps onward to the sea, not waiting for its shores to grow lovely with verdure, not lingering for embellishment, but all that and more under the tender stars! It is an idyll sweet as Ruth or Esther, almost Scriptural in its austerity, almost Christ-like in its sadness. The poem is worthy of Goldsmith in his best mood, the mood of the Deserted Village. The author himself tells how he used to run and cry with the others "Martha, a soldier! a soldier!" until her story flamed through him like a sword and gushed forth in this noble expiation. Seldom has there been a recital that so wounded the tenderest fibres of the heart and at the same time healed the wound with such balm. It is the oil and wine of the Good Samaritan beneficently at work within. A recitation of this poem in public must have been what he said of another: It was Corneille; it was Talma. It bruises the heart with exceeding sweetness. In Françonnette there is more lightness; but it too in the successive pauses as the cantos are called soon grows dim with shadows, wild with storm. The author has an indescribable touch; all the chords that ever smiled or wept come crowding beneath his fingers and roll onward at the faintest pressure: it is the children of the captivity remembering Zion; it is a waltz of Strauss. Like the wedding-party in Tell, quick upon the joy comes the arrow that flies to Gessler's heart: in Françonnette the charm, the sprightliness of the flirt fade into the distance at the whisper that her father was a Huguenot and she is sold to the Evil One. The South of France is a nest of superstitions. This was one. The elements of the story promise to be more tragic than either of the others; for a long time the thunder mutters along the clouds; but the close comes in a burst of sunshine that laves the senses like the dew of summer. There is reconciliation delightful as the singing of a harvest-home after the garnering of the sheaves, delightful as voices from over the water happy with the burden of their own joy. The smile with which we close this little drama is a smile that has the richness of something deeper, it penetrates to the region of tears. Jasmin may not be a perfect artist; there is little of the marble calm that shines so sovereignly in the creations of the Greeks; we are haunted by what we have read not as by a vision of great restful Ionic temples with their lordly serenity, but as by a spot overgrown with human lives as with mosses, twined about with loves and hates, quickened every inch of it by human ashes. Goethe may look upward to the heights and see calm; but beneath, the valleys and the floods skip and clap their hands. There are moods in which it pleases us not to be dealing with impersonalities. One Thersites can put to rout Ossian and all his shadows. Everywhere, through the poem to Liszt and through Mes Souvenirs, Mon Voyage de Paris, La Semaine d'un Fils, Les deux Frères Fumeaux, there is the same frank individuality. One of the best known poems was that written for the purpose of collecting funds to rebuild a ruined church in Périgord Le Prêtre sans Eglise. In company with the curate he travelled all through the southern provinces, working and gathering and reciting with such success that |