Francis Jammes is the poet of Orthez, as closely associated with that little village in the mountains as Wordsworth with Grasmere or Robert Frost with his "North-of-Boston". He has always in his view the cold peaks of the Pyrenees, yellow and threatening on the approach of winter, and in the rainy spring showing their blue veins, which make them more luminous than glass. Every year, in the season of love, he may witness the departure of "the great severe shepherds" for their cabins by the lakes of Barèges, where they shall see the jonquils, the prairies,—"where the water silvers, froths, and leaps, and laughs." Along the slopes are the woods where he hunts the wild duck; lower down is the mountain stream, the "gave", overflowing its banks in spring; "between the shining woods and the racing stream are the wheat, the corn, and the twisted vines." And here are "the black door-sills where the blue smoke hovers." Orthez, "humble village, of rude and sibilant sound", is so characterized by the poet, Charles Guérin, in his account of a visit to the home of his friend; and he goes on to describe the house in which Francis Jammes was living with his mother, a one-story, cedar-shaded, ivy-grown farmhouse, with the grass pushing up between the stones of the courtyard about the laurel and the well of blue water. Here it is, in his "Elegy" addressed to the poet Samain, that Jammes invited his dead friend to make him a visit as in the old days:—

Viens encore. C'est Orthez oà tu es. Bonheur est
     là.
  Pose donc ton chapeau sur la chaise qui est là.
  Tu as soif? Voici de l'eau de puits bleue et du vin.
  Ma mère va descendre et te dire: 'Samain…'
  Et ma chienne appuyer son museau sur ta main.

Here it is that he has been content to pass the unambitious days of life, overseeing the work of the farm, "assisting" at the vintage, driving to market on a Tuesday.

I.

This rural poet seems to have little of the traditional appetite for literary glory. His dog, his pipe, his grain-fields, and his little church in the fields, limit his outlook and content him. He prays in his poems to be of as little account as a donkey or a poor beggarman. But the humble shall be exalted, and the poet of Orthez is celebrated far beyond the bounds of his own land. He has been translated into Spanish by the Mexican poet, Enrique Martinez; a chapter was devoted to him in his Frank Poesi by Christian Rimestad, the Dane, and one by Miss Lowell in her pioneering study, Six French Poets. His latest biography, by the Flemish poet, Jan van Nylen, was recently published in Holland. He had been the subject of laudatory articles in various countries, and in France he is acknowledged as one of the purest talents of the "modern school". He has had a great influence on the later developments in French poetry; and in Belgium there is a distinct school of Christian poets à la Jammes.

It is, at first blush, the more surprising to find him thus promoted to literary kingship, inasmuch as he has never undertaken to produce 'literature'. And yet this is a familiar phenomenon,—this turning back from 'literature' to poetry. Literature is forever tending to become a polished and pleasing rhetoric, the creation of a sensitive intelligence and a strong will-to-art rather than of simple unsophisticated feeling. Hardly a greater effort is conceivable for a poet than the effort to erase all secondhand impressions from his mind, to contemplate life again in its original simplicity. To do this is to discover his 'originality'; and such an achievement is welcomed sooner or later by a world of readers weary of echoes. His verse is dewy with that mysterious beauty of freshness which is wanting in so many poets of far greater technical perfection. He gives us candidly his impressions of his daily life, with little concern to please the public or the critics, without torturing his words to fit the forms prescribed by theorists. "I could have imitated the style of Flaubert or of Leconte de Lisle," he says in the preface to his early Vers, "and I could have repeated like others a stamped pattern. I have written irregular verses, disdaining, or nearly so, all rules of form and metre. My style stammers, but I have spoken according to my own truth."

This disdain of theories and schools is the more pleasing when one recalls how modern French poetry has gone on producing, by a process of fission, an ever-increasing number of "cénacles". One historian of recent literature has listed seriously—or was it with extreme irony?—no fewer than sixty or seventy of them, the mushroom growth of twenty-five years, each with its obscure-illustrious leader. Each one of them has announced, with wide exorcising gestures for all that went before, the advent of the only great Art—and each has joined its predecessors and competitors in the graveyard of oblivion: naturism, impulsionism, futurism, unanism, synthetism, intensism, paroxysm, and all the other banners in the motley pageant of late French literature. To the earlier ambition of the seventeen-year-old French youth—to write an historical tragedy in alexandrines and in six acts—has succeeded the ambition, it would seem, of founding a new literary school. The faith and energy of these restless founders is touching, indeed, but why "toujours penser en bande"? Why substitute for the tenets and narrowing rules of an older school an equally narrowing set of new rules? Jammes claims the right to complete freedom of personal feeling, to originality of vision and of diction.

Among modern French poets Jammes is remarkable for his simplicity. Since the time of Mallarmé and Rimbaud, many poets of intellectual distinction (Jules Laforgue, René Ghil) have indulged in a kind of grandiose and apocalyptic obscurity of thought, and a tortuousness of expression, which largely exclude the non-initiated from the enjoyment of their refined art. The super-subtlety of many symbolists, their generally abstruse mysticism (Edouard Schuré), their artificiality, their hair-splitting acuteness in self-analysis, stamp their work as exceptional and individualistic, the art of intellectuals, and largely for intellectuals. They stand aloof from the multitude, even from humanity itself. But Jammes disdains the pride of the intellect. He is no analyst of the ego in its fluctuations, its impalpable shades of thought and feeling, noting in rare and jewelled verse, like de Gourmont in his Litanies, all the subtle, wavering changes of his delicate 'soul'. He is even a little proud, it seems, of his intellectural naàveté: "and I, I do not know what my thoughts think"—

Et moi, je ne sais pas ce que mes pensées pensent.

He might be a disciple of Thoreau. He has freed himself from the non-essentials of existence in order to live life for its own sake, to be simply man. He has cast off all the burdens of fashion, wealth, pride, even of thought, doubt and learning—all that makes our lives so nervously tense and distracting, and turned to the things which are essential, vital, primitive. A sharpening of enjoyment results from such a finely tempered asceticism. The fullest life lies in simplicity.

II.

Poetry, for such an one, is not invested with the sacerdotal glamor and awe of the symbolists. It is humble work, humble as a stonemason's, to which, indeed, Jammes compares it. It is a patient transcription of nature, like that of the old masters in painting, who, he tells us, spent a long while on the eyes, and on the lips, and the cheeks and the ears, of those who were happy enough to be their subjects. His is the humility, or the proud democracy, of nature herself. Nature, he thinks, may be presented with no adornment but her own, and without the apology of elaborate personification, Horatian epithet and classic allusion.

It is of the essence of his religious sentiment to feel that nothing is too humble for art, there being none of God's creatures which he must not approach with reverential wonder. He mentions in verse plants, animals, and objects in general, humble, forgotten things, or things despised, which seemed forever excluded from the language of poetry, although Chaucer and Villon might serve as reminders of an earlier, pre-Victorian order of things. We were still under the spell—not long since—of the neoclassics, still bowing more or less to their injunction not to mention in verse any 'base' objects, such as animals of the lower kind, and in any case to prefer the general to the particular, as more refined. We still prefer 'fish' to 'herring', and the democratic 'bloater' is altogether excluded. Jammes has undertaken in French poetry what Wordsworth undertook, with considerable success in English,—to do away with the tradition of 'poetical' subjects. As with Wordsworth, too, this breadth in the choice of subject-matter is associated with, is perhaps rooted in, a religious mysticism; but in both cases it shows itself in many observations little connected with religious feeling, and in his claim to freedom in this matter the modern poet makes no appeal to other principles than those of poetic naturalism. This poet writes of fish and fishing with distinctions as precise as those of Izaak Walton himself. In "Jean de Noarrieu," it was a delightful invention of the story-teller to have the infidelity of the girl revealed to her lover by the mountain flowers she carries,—gentians and edelweiss and pale pink laurel. They had been sent her by the shepherd from his airy cabin; but she says they are a present from a girl friend, who gathered them on the near-by hillside. Jean de Noarrieu knows better, and he replies in a voice low and dry: "Lucie, these flowers are mountain flowers."

Et elle dit: 'Il y en a aussi
  sur le coteau oà est la métairie
  dedans laquelle habite mon amie.'
  Et en mentant, encore elle rougit
  —'Ce sont des fleurs de montagne, te dis-jel
  Elles ne mentent jamais à leur pays.'

Jammes writes, then, with his eye on the object, as Wordsworth prescribed; and he writes with a Words-worthian joy in the unvarnished facts of nature. Every hour of the day and night, every change of the seasons is recorded, is literally sung, with lingering tenderness, with the joy of fresh discovery, with brooding melancholy, or with positive rapture, according to the mood of the poet. His naturalism is not incompatible with the most graceful action of the fancy. What could be more 'poetic' than the description of the song of the nightingale—

ses trois appels suivis d'un rire en pleurs de source?

The love of nature as she is in literal truth does not prevent the poet from suggesting those intimate and haunting correspondences between the material and the spiritual fact. In his mood of prayerful and humble resignation to the divine order, he finds the most touching analogies for his spirit in the aspect of nature.

Je me laisse aller comme la courbe des collines.

He does not even disdain the use of language of much more symbolistic flavor. In the thirteenth of his Elegies, which is in the symbolist manner throughout, he tells his mystical fiancée that he has prepared for her the green freshness of his dreams, where lambs sleep, and he invites her to the cell of his contemplations, "whence one can hear running the living water under the mints which the white sun consumes"—

d'oà l'on entend courir l'eau vive sous les
     menthes
     que le soleil blanc consume.

III.

More direct and obvious is the reading of nature in religious terms, once more after the fashion of Wordsworth, but with a greater naàveté of anthropomorphic realism. The sense of natural objects as living in the breath of God is present throughout all his work, even the most secular. In the love-chronicle of Jean de Noarrieu, in the moonlit night of love, "the garden prays; one feels the heart-beat of the peaches in the silence of God." Over and over again, in the Fourteen Prayers, one returns to this pantheistic feeling of the immanence of God and the divine joy in the most insignificant of creatures. The fields and pastures "lie there like a great ocean of goodness over which fall light and serenity, and, to feel their sap in the sunlight bright with joy, the leaves sing as they stir in the woods."

It is in this ocean of divine goodness that the poet would plunge his sick soul to find oblivion of self. He would like to "come back down into his simplicity," to watch the wasps work in the sand, to be wise like them, and accomplish without pride the work God has given him to do. He has not always lived the life of simple piety which is his ideal. He has thought himself a genius, has desired fame; he has craved love and sought for happiness; he has indulged in himself "the learned reason that makes mad." But now he has had enough of the "complicated and learned life." He will no longer set himself apart from other men, or from the meaner creatures of God. He will let himself go, as readily compliant to the will of God as a butterfly to the breath of the wind. Sorrow will make him as gentle as the laborer patiently following the plough in the midst of the horned cattle.

Most of this has a natural enough sound to an English ear, even when falling in the cadences and among the associations of poetry. Rather more surprising, in its somewhat conscious naàveté, and most charming and original in conception, is the "Prayer" "to go to heaven with the donkeys." He says he will choose a day and a way to suit himself, and then—"I will take my stick and on the highroad I will go, and I will say to my friends the donkeys: 'I am Francis Jammes and I'm going to Paradise, for there is no hell in the land of the Good-God.' I will say to them: 'Come along, sweet friends of the blue sky, poor dear beasts who, with a brisk movement of the ear, drive away flies, blows and bees.'.… O God, grant that I may appear before you in the midst of these beasts whom I love so much because they lower their heads gently, and in stopping join their little feet in a way so sweet and pitiful. I shall arrive followed by their thousands of ears, followed by those who used to carry baskets at their sides," etc., etc. "Grant that, resting in this sojourn of souls, by your divine waters, I may be like the asses who shall mirror their sweet and humble poverty in the limpidity of the eternal love."

Je prendrai mon bâton et sur la grande route
  j'irai, et je dirai aux ànes, mes amis:
  Je suis Francis Jammes et je vais au Paradis,
  car il n'y a d'enfer au pays du Bon-Dieu.
  Je leur dirai: Venez, doux amis du ciel bleu,
  pauvres bêtes cheríes qui, d'un brusque
     mouvement d'oreille
  chasses les mouches plates, les coups et les
     abeilles.…

Que je vous apparaisse au milieu de ces bêtes
  que j'aime tant parce qu'elles baissent la tête
  doucement, et s'arrêtent en joignant leurs petite
     pieds
  d'un facon bien douce et qui yous fait pitié.
  J'arriverai suivi de leurs milliers d'oreilles,
  suivi de ceux qui portèrent au fianc des
     corbeilles.…

et faites que, penché dans ce séjour des àmes,
  sur vos divines eaux, je sois pareil aux ànes
  qui mireront leur humble et douce pauvreté
  à la limpidité de l'amour eternel.

This may seem to smack rather of simplesse than of simplicité, as Arnold distinguishes them,—this religious democracy à la St. Francis. But the suggestion of artifice lies in the dramatic presentation, in the somewhat fanciful picture of the poet, with his walking-stick, arriving in Paradise with his nimbus of asses' ears; and there is no reason to question the genuineness of feeling that underlies the poem. His work overflows with unaffected sympathy and brotherly feeling for the lower animals,—for lambs, dogs, sparrows, as well as for beggar-men and the unfortunate and despised of our species. And there is a medicinal virtue for him in the exercise of putting himself on a level with these fellow-charges of Providence. We all know the feeling: and we unconsciously assume an attitude of humility, a lower stature, that shall make us a less shining mark for the arrows of fortune, and bring us under the indulgence of Him who notes the fall of a sparrow. The sensitive heart of the poet, having experienced the "irony of love," hopeless of happiness and tired of self-dissection, longs to return to the state of the brute, of the patient wretch so low in the scale of fortune that he has neither hope nor fear, nor even the direction of his own course. He loves particularly to rest the tired eyes of his soul with the thought of night, figuring a mental darkness. "I feel the night upon me as it is upon the fields when the sun goes out like a lamp in the evening. I see no longer within myself. I am like the evening that hides from sight the gleaners of azure across the prairies of the thoughts of my soul."

Such is the meditation to which he summons himself in his prayer; the concentration of mind, or recueillement, which shall simplify his spirit. It is not a matter of enlarging his thought; it is partly, indeed, an inhibition of thought in its logical ranges. It is very much a matter of sensation, and very much a matter of sentiment. It is, in short, revery, dream.

Je songe. J'ai souffert. Je ne sais plus. Je songe.

In such a state the dreamer lets himself float luxuriously upon the stream of sensation, of feeling only pleasantly tinged with thought, of thought guided by feeling. Thought and effort divorce one from that common life of things with which it is the desire of the mystic to identify himself. In the ecstasy of love, worldly or spiritual, he cries: "I can no longer think. I am nought but things."

It is a return to the great undifferentiated conscious-ness—a descent into the subliminal. This is what the poet means when he bids himself "come back down into thy simplicity."

Redescends, redescends dans ta simplicité.

IV.

If he reminds us of St. Francis, he reminds us quite as much of that more sophisticated "fratello," Jean Jacques. With St. Francis he shares the humble renunciation, the mystical love of all created things. But his mysticism is not visionary and ecstatic like that of St. Francis; it is tempered with a sensuousness, even a naïve sensuality, and sounds a pastoral note more like Rousseau's wistful cornet than the jubilant cry of the friar of Assisi. In his renunciation Jammes is not ascetic; he loves all that makes his simple life joyful,—his pipe, his glass of wine, the dancing maids on the village green; it is even to enjoy them more relishingly that he has renounced the heart-poisoning ambition for 'success'. His solitude is filled, like Rousseau's, with a thousand simple but stirring emotions. He has Rosseau's sense of the soul in things. There is the old sideboard smelling of candle-grease and jam, a faithful servitor that will not steal. There is the old linen-chest, "which has heard the voice of my grand-aunts, which has heard the voice of my grandfather, which has heard the voice of my father, and is faithful to these memories. It is wrong to think that it knows only how to be silent, for I talk with it." Jammes loves to dream over in Arcadian revery the days of his early childhood, making much of the grandfather who went to the West Indies, and dwelling upon certain female figures in the tenderest manner of the great Doctor of Sentiment. His favorite author is Rousseau; and his favorite book is the Reveries, "whose sweetness blends with the sad quiet charm of the prairies, of river-banks haunted by the angelica, of deep woods where the oaks decay and mushrooms flourish.…"

In his early Elegies Jammes has produced a peculiarly appealing and romantic type of revery,—in which love and grief, gentle faith and memory, and the dreamy contemplation of nature, blend in a kind of general solution of wistful serenity, as of a restless and suffering heart fallen into peace at the sunset hour. The note of them all is sounded in the tenth of the series, in which the poet, tortured by the very intensity of love, and the suffering which lovers cause one another, yet comforts his beloved with a view of the grave beauty of life.

Ne pleure pas, amie. La vie est belle et grave.

The first "Elegy" is addressed to his dead friend, Albert Samain. It is in no sense a lament for the departed poet. "Je ne regrette pas ta mort. Ta vie est là." The friend who remains takes pleasure in inviting the other to make him a visit in happy Orthez and in reviewing the simple joy they have shared there. He refers to his beautiful and enduring songs. And he dreams. He dreams of his friend, and of the twilight hour together at Orthez; he dreams of his native mountains, and of their walks at Versailles; he dreams of sheep and the pure void of the sky; of endless water and the clarity of fire; he dreams of his friend, he dreams of himself, and he dreams of God.

Je songe à toi. Le jour baisee comme le jour
  oà je te vis dans mon vieux salon de campagne.
  Je songe à toi. Je songe aux montagnes natales.
  Je songe à ce Versaille oà tu me promenas,
  oà nous disions des vers, tristes et pas à pas.
  Je songe à ton ami et je songe à ta mère.
  Je songe à ces moutons qui, au bord du lac bleu,
  en attendant la mort bêlaient sur leur clarines.
  Je songe à toi. Js songe au vide pur des cieux.
  Je songe à l'eau sans fin, à la clarté des feux.
  Je songe à la rosée qui brille sur les vignes.
  Je songe à toi. Je songe à moi. Je songe à Dieu.

The religion of the Elegies and the Fourteen Prayers is not very specifically Catholic, not perhaps even Christian. Their philosophy is, like that of his still earlier poems, a kind of broad and vague humanism, in the school of Rousseau and Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, whm he resembles in his naàveté, his vague goodness and loving tenderness for all of God's creatures,—his God being at that time very much the God of the "Confession de foi du vicaire savoyard." Slowly, however, he drew nearer the strict Catholic faith, partly under the influence of Charles Guérin, author of Le Coeur solitaire and L'Homme intérieur. Domestic sorrow, the betrayals and disillusionments of life, may have made him feel how little of a consoler in pain is the eloquent humanism which prays to a vague and impersonal God, omnipresent and yet elusive. In 1905, he submitted definitely to Roman Catholicism, and the immediate fruit of his conversion was a series of intimate religious poems, L'àglise habillée de feuilles, in which the orthodox note is very clearly sounded. Much is made of the church and its exercises. The poet suffers now from a "nostalgie des cieux" of which we did not hear in his earlier poems; he feels that his body separates him from God, and that he must leave this flesh to be made free. He calls upon his guardian angel, whom he had neglected in the summer of his joy, in the pride of his body, in the days of his sweet dreaming. "I have lost the art of dreaming. Take my hand in thy hand!" One is reminded of Wordsworth's Ode to Duty, in which the English religious poet acknowledged that he had no longer felt strong enough to guide his life by the sole light of nature, but must resort to some external stay.

v

Is he a modern? Is he a man of our times? Does he have something to say to us in a certain dialect, with a certain inflection, which we may recognize as ours and serving our need? Different readers will answer differently these extremely delicate questions, involving such difficulties of definition and classification. If one considers his technique, the deliberate freedom of his verse—his assonances for rhyme, his syllables left uncounted, his lines uncapitalized—one will answer at once: he must be a modern of the moderns, an innovator, a révolté. The same answer will probably be made in view of his daring naturalism, and even of the directness of his manner, his extreme informality. He is modern, and ultramodern, in his avoidance of the 'literary'.

But then one begins to think of his return to the Middle Ages. After all, one says, he has nothing different to tell us from what good Catholics have always had to tell. He has renounced—in so far as he ever had it—the critical unrest of our time. Scientific facts do not disturb him. Will the flower be more beautiful because it has been classified in a system, or because we have studied the structure of its roots and leaves? Will that help us to understand the more essential question, why flowers? And philosophies? What philosophy gives peace? And social theories? What more can one demand of society than that it should give one a house, a mother, a dog, and blue water of the well? However modern in its form and manner, we say, his poetry reproduces, in spiritual content, the emotional states of an age when religion was in fullest flower. He is like one of those anonymous troubadours, with their simple canticles to the Virgin. Up they looked through all the circles of heaven, to God himself, bejewelled Emperor, in mantle of purple and gold, enthroned among all His orders of holy beings. And since the mediaeval vision of life was a mystical synthesis, well-ordered in its complexity, since heaven and earth were spiritually interwoven, they showed a naïve familiarity with all things divine: the saints and the Holy Virgin were real protectors against material enemies and the assaults of the devil, needed intercessors at the court of the Eternal. Nature was a symbol, and the objects of this world were veils through which the eternal truths were felt and seen. The mediaeval artists loved nature intensely, and pictured it minutely—witness the sculptured doorways of cathedrals or the paintings of Rogier van der Weyden—but it was a nature glorified by the mystical meaning which their piety read into it, their vision of what lay beyond. In his simple but intense mysticism, in his love for sanctified nature in all its forms, in his familiarity with things divine, Francis Jammes reminds us of some artist of the twelfth century.

But there again something pulls us up. What! we say, a twelfth-century vision of life at the end of the nineteenth, the beginning of the twentieth? What! in the twelfth century, a prayer "to be simple"! A prayer, even of St. Francis, "to go to heaven with the donkeys" ! Does it not almost smack of the satirist, Anatole France, and his court of heaven bewildered with the problem of baptized penguins? We do not have to go so far back as the Middle Ages for this cultivation of a democratic humility, this tendre for the underdog. Is it not quite recently that Vachel Lindsay of Illinois has sung the praises of the Negro and the grasshopper, and has shown us the social outcasts of our cities "entering into heaven" with General William Booth and his big bass drum?

And this mysticism of the unconscious, their escape into the subliminal, this soul-bath of revery, have we not found it in many profane writers throughout the past century, in the Journal of Amiel, in Richard Jefferies's The Story of My Heart, far enough removed from the spirit of the middle age? Is it not indeed one manifestation of the "maladie du siècle"? And, not confined to the nineteenth century, we find it in the poets characteristic of the present moment, in Carl Sandburg, who prays the mysterious "Bringers" to—

Cover me over
  In dusk and dust and dreams;

who, in words that might be straight out of the mouth of the French poet, prays the Lord:—

To-day, let me be monosyllabic.… a crony of
     old men
      who wash sunlight in their fingers and
      enjoy slow-pacing clocks.

The passion for simplifying art is but one phase of the passion for simplifying life,—which is modern enough in all conscience. We have met it in more and more striking guise in each of the successive schools of painting which have followed the Impressionists. In the very beautiful description, in "Jean de Noarrieu," of the return of the shepherd with his sheep from the mountains, one is strongly reminded, in sentiment and detail, of various Post-Impressionist pictures:—

Sous le troupeau ennuagé du ciel,
  il conduisait le troupeau de la terre.
  D'un geste large et rond il étendauit
  son long bàton, comme s'il bénissait
  les brebis donneuses de laine et de lait.

Et Jean pleura. Et les brebis boiteuses
  penchaient la tête, sous le souffle de Dieu,
  dans l'âcre automne aux rivières brumeuses.

Is it primitive art? Was Gauguin primitive in his return to Tahiti? Is Vachel Lindsay primitive in his return to the Congo? Were Matisse and Picasso really primitive?

What one recognizes in Jammes, as in these others, is the cult of the Primitive. And is not that the latest thing in all the arts?