Francis Jammes

The French Poet of Naiveté

ARTHUR SYMONS

AS I passed the village I heard the thud-thud of the two flails, threshing com, and I saw through the barn door the two men standing on the yellow carpet. From another barn came a rumbling sound, as of wood turning on wood; and a cloud of pale gold-dust, every grain distinct in the sunlight, floated out from the door. Here in the precipitous wood, where I am lying among the ferns, whose fronds, scorched to a sullen orange, crumble into dust between my fingers, the sun trickles delicately through the leaves, and the air is at once cool and warm. I have brought a book with me, a book of verses telling of the country and of village life. De I'Angelus et de l'Aube a I'Angelus du Soir, of Francis Jammes, and though the writer has written of the Pyrenees, and my village and wood are among the mountains of Auvergne, I seem to pass unconsciously from the one to the other, as I turn the leaves, or hold a leaf half-turned, while I listen to the occasional cry of a bird, or watch an immense bee steaming loudly between the trees.

In Clermont-Ferrand the mountainous soul of Pascal seems to become less obscure. This little dry town, built of lava, and set in the midst of a plain rimmed by volcanic hills; sombre, provincial, not interestingly old or new; without beauty, but looking out, through all the gaps and alleys of its streets, upon the rough, peasant slopes of the Puy de Dome, and the circle of green and brown hillsides; a hard, actual portion of the rich, yet not friendly, soil of Auvergne; Clermont-Ferrand has something of what is bare, rigid, and unexpansive in the genius of the one really great man whom it has produced. The Auvergnats are Kelts in whom all the subtle, unworldly qualities of the race have hardened and turned to stone. In Pascal, it is what is Keltic that bursts through rock and stone like a volcanic fire.

I REMEMBER the first time that I found myself in Clermont, during the heat of an unparalleled August. I had had a sleepless night in the train, coming from Paris, and when I got down in the Place de Jaude, and set one foot beyond the little rim of shadow, the heat seemed to envelop me from head to foot in an intolerable caress. It pressed on my forehead, burnt into my eyes, dried and scorched my lips, and poured like wet fire all over my body. I crossed the road, and waited for a moment in a faint, hot shadow, which I followed up a winding street, losing and finding it again as I went. Seeing a little dry garden in two tiny terraces, sunk below the level of the upper road, I went into it, hoping for at least the shadow of a tree. But there was no shadow; the thin, straight trees were themselves -scorched in their stiff rows, and the harsh savour of the dry earth rose up to make the heat thirstier. I went back to the upper road, and climbed slowly, passing a vast bookshop, where I saw Bourget's last novel, only just out, side by side with old books of medicine and theology; together with many jewellers' shops, all with their old and new silver-work, and their trinkets of Auvergne enamel and Auvergne amethyst and topaz. Passing beyond the shops, I wandered for sometime in narrow and narrower streets, one of them a Rue des Petites Tueries. Hardy, coarse-featured, ruddy and olive, the Auvergnats went solidly about their business; and the women, so decided, honest, somewhat too precise, but not uncomely, passed with the same earnest sense of direction. Except for the bookshop, you would have forgotten that Paris existed. These people, their rough dialect, their heavy energy, the whole aspect of the place gave almost a new shade, certainly a new emphasis, to the meaning of the word "provincial." Heavy carriages .each with its crest on the door, passed as if going to a wedding, and as I looked out drowsily from under the awning of a cafe, where I had found shade but not coolness, I saw, under those carriage-roofs, and in the enveloping sunlight of the streets, the whole monotony of an existence shut in upon itself, and consumed little by little, in the mere passing of days like every other day.

I REMEMBER Hubert Crackenthorp sending me a tiny, privately printed book of verses, dedicated to himself, which he wished me to read. I have it before me. Vers. Francis Jammes. Mai, 1893; it is the fourth of the fifty copies printed; it has thirty-five pages. In his dedication he says: "J'aurais pu imiter le style de Flaubert ou celui de Leconte de Lisle, et faire, comme un autre, un poncif. Mon style balbutie, mais j'ai dit une verite; et, du moins, je ne cherche pas a prouver que j'ai du genie, en crigant en doctrine moderne les defauts grossiers d'une langue." The name was unknown to me, and the verses were of so unparalleled a naivete that I imagined, for a moment, some mystification; so I was not tempted to read any more of his books until I received this volume of verses. Reading them in the country idly, among the scenes in which they pass, I find that they have a genuine flavour of the soil, and that it ir possible to find an almost illicit pleasure in these baiting lines, their deliberate air of being improvised. A tired soul, for which happiness is to be found only in the fields, in rest, seems to me to speak out of these pages with an almost pathetic outspokenness. They give one a particular sensation of the country, of its tranquil pleasure, its limited lives, the solace of it: grass and space and leisure. All its colours and sounds and odours are known by heart, like friends; there is not a page which does not call up some definite picture or mood, the mood being always indeed implicit in the picture. The word picture gives too formal a notion of these accidental meditations, in which there is nothing of the painter, but a good deal of the peasant; of what the peasant would be, that is, if he had the faculty of reading and of feeling sharp sensations. And, in the form of the verses, so languid, so incorrect, often so childish, there is something of that revolt against mere "literature" which is being so generally divined as one of the present necessities of art.

Nothing, in our time, is so artificial as naivete, however sincere, and I find these verses about "Le pauvre chien" entirely artificial. And yet I find more artificial the notion that one is so very simple, so very conscientious, that sometimes one forgets to count one's syllables, or put the rhymes in their places. But in this writer, an elaboration of humility and the negative virtues comes, really, to a result which is far from being as elaborate as it professes. I find an individuality behind these confessions, these fragments of reverie or speech, overheard or noted down at hazard. I find much of the visible forces of the French countryside in these precise and wavering lines; certainly something of the spirit of poetry; and the book, taken up under a prejudice, and read with a mixture of amusement and respect, becomes seductive, at least in summer, and among the fenis.