Francis Jammes is a Faun who has turned Franciscan Friar. As we read his early poems, his delicious rustic prose, we seem to see him sitting prick-eared, in some green circle of the Pyrenees, with brown hands holding to his mouth a boxwood flute, from which he draws a brief, sweet music, as pure as the long-drawn note of the musical frog, as shrill as the plaintive cry of some mountain bird who feels above its nest the shadow of the falcon.

And then he met Paul Claudel and was converted.

After all, little was changed, for his innocent paganism had been tinged with natural piety, and in his religion he might say, like the Almighty, in the Roman de Lièvre,—

J'aime la terre d'un profond amour. J'aime la terre des hommes, des bêtes, des plantes et des pierres.

Only henceforth we see him, in our imagination, like Saint Francis, with a monk's hood drawn over his brow, sandals on his feet, his brown gown cinctured with a knotted cord, a couple of doves hovering over his shoulders, and, at his side, fawning and faithful, a converted wolf.…

I met M. Jammes at Madame Daudet's house one winter, and, in fact, his appearance was not wholly unlike this fancy portrait. The gown was a brown woollen suit, but just the Franciscan colour. Above the ruddy, jocund, rustic face, a crown of grizzling curls, behind which Nature had provided the tonsure. Neither dove nor wolf, but, in their stead, all the young Catholic poets of Paris, pressed in serried ranks to meet the Master who, for a few days, had consented to quit his belovéd solitude of Orthez.

We can remember a different Francis Jammes. The poet has said of himself, 'My soul is half the soul of a Faun, and half the soul of a young girl.' But let me quote an admirable strophe from his 'Le Poète et sa Femme':—

Il est de ceux qui voient les parfums et il sent
          Les couleurs. Et il s'intéresse
  Au scarabée cornu, au hérisson piquant,
          Et aux plantes des doctoresses.
  Mais le voici, avec sa figure camuse
          Et son sourire de Sylvain,
  Fatigué par l'amour bien plus que par les muses
          Qui aiment son cœur incertain …
  Lui-même est un Silène, on le voit au jardin
          Veiller au légume, à la treille.…

This gentle Francis Jammes recalls sometimes the charming La Fontaine, and also Verlaine. A La Fontaine bereft of his philosophy, his deep knowledge of human nature; a Verlaine from whom the taint of corruption has been washed and therewith his terrible sincerity. And if we can imagine these two great poets mulcted so utterly in their essential substance, the residue in them, too, might remind us of a Faun and a young girl—a mischievous, experienced rustic maid, yet holding in her arms a bunch of lilies. The first prose study of our poet—which still remains one of his most exquisite pages—is the story of a young girl, Clara d'Ellébeuse. What a delightful book! It is the sort of little story one can read a dozen times in a dozen years, and find it as affecting the last time as the first.

If any attentive student should feel inclined, having read these pages, to fill a shelf with some selected volumes of these modern French writers—with Colette Baudoche, for example, from among the novels of Barrés, and Antoinette from Romain Rolland; with La Jeune Fille Violaine from Paul Claudel; with La Porte Etroite from André Gide; to which he might add La Jeune Fille Bien Elevée from the works of René Boylesve; L'Ombre de l'Amour by Madame Tinayre; Marie-Claire by Marguerite Audoux; and the young girls of Francis Jammes, especially Clara d'Ellébeuse,—what an idea, what an admirable, unconventional idea such a reader would get of the young French girl! What a gift, at once instructive and delightful, he could make to some young English girl on, say, her five-and-twentieth birthday!

Francis Jammes has spent nearly all his life in or near that little town of Orthez (in the department of the Lower Pyrenees), where he was born about 1869. In that part of France, almost as much as in Ireland, Protestants and Catholics divide society pretty equally. Our poet was born and baptized a Catholic, but many of his nearest relations were Huguenots, and, seeing so much of both sides, he does not seem to have taken either very seriously. He showed no particular precocity and, though he began to write poetry, like most people, in his twentieth year, he made his real debut only in 1898, with a volume called De l'Angelus de l'Aube, à l'Angelus du soir.

A certain langour mixed with fervour ran in his blood. He had inherited Creole traditions. His grandfather, the doctor, and his grand-uncle had emigrated from Béarn to Guadeloupe, and had settled there, had died there; his father was sent back to France to be educated at seven years of age; his dim memories of the Antilles, his stories of the cousins in Martinique, and the little chair in rare colonial wood that the child had used on the passage, were, a generation later, to set a-dreaming another child, our poet, whose first heroine will belong, like him, to a family dispersed among the Atlantic Islands and the Pyrenees.

I suppose that a doctor would describe Clara d'Ellébeuse as a victim of the maladie du scrupule. She is a girl of sixteen; a dear little old-fashioned girl, living in a dear little old-fashioned manor, sheltered among the foothills of the Pyrenees, towards 1848. She has that dread of sin, of impurity, as a sort of quagmire into which one may fall unawares and be lost for ever, which the practice of confession may exaggerate, or palliate, according to the wisdom of the confessor. (Our poet Cowper was no Catholic.) Poor Clara d'Ellébeuse, because one day the young poet she secretly adored had wiped away her nervous tears and laid upon her bowed nape a pitiful, respectful hand, imagines that she has fallen into the sin of unchastity and that she is with child! (And we think of Renan who, in his twelfth year, I think, accused himself in confession of 'the sin of simony.')

The mischief with Clara is that she does not confess; she tells no kind elder of her secret fear; she lets concealment feed, like a worm in the bud, upon her damask cheek. And we know how that ends. Clara does not pine away. One day in March, overcome by horror and remorse for her imaginary crime, she drinks a dose of laudanum and quits this unkind world.

In telling the pathetic history of Clara d'Ellébeuse, Francis Jammes left unhampered that half of his soul which is that of a young girl; but in narrating the fate of Almaàde d'Etremont, jeune fille passionnée, that other half (which belongs to a Faun) shows the cloven foot. More tenderly does he commemorate the sad life of Pomme d'anis, jeune fille infirme.

But it is not to be supposed that a poet who, by his own showing, partakes so largely of the nature of Silenus and his Sylvans, should frequent exclusively the society of virgins. Some of his earlier poems betray an ardent sensuality. One cannot read either these or the Notes printed in the volume called Le Roman du Lièvre (or even, perhaps, that most touching idyll of a play: La Brebis Egarée) without feeling that the poet's experience has lain also among the lost sheep … among the lost sheep, and perhaps among the swine; for there was a moment when he was even as the Prodigal Son!

In 1913, making a general confession of those past errors (oddly enough) to a reporter of Le Temps, Francis Jammes recalled their bitterness. Nothing except a love story is so interesting as the true history of a conversion—I give this one therefore without apology, though it appeared for the first time in a newspaper (November 3, 1913).

'Je me suis converti le 7 juillet, 1905, commence M. Francis Jammes lorsque je lui demande s'il n'est pas indiscret que je cherche à savoir comment sa pensée évolua de l'indifférence à la ferveur.'

'Vous n'étiez pas catholique?'

'De baptême? Si. Mais pas davantage, avec des sympathies pour les beaux motifs littéraires du catholicisme, avec beaucoup de dédain pour ce que j'appelais, pour ce que je n'appelle plus le catholicisme des vieilles femmes. J'étais un paàen, un véritable faune. Les fleurs, les bois, les femmes! J'avais la passion de tout ce qui existait; il n'y avait pas dans toute la nature de gamin plus déchaàé; j'aimais tellement la vie que la seule pensée de la quitter un jour me paraissait un épouvantable blasphème.'

'Et vous ne l'aimez plus?'

'Plus de la même manière.'

'Ce fut un coup de la gràce?'

'Non. Avant la gràce, il y eut les épreuves et il y eut Claudel.… Claudel, dont, par l'intermédiaire d'un de ses anciens camarades de classe, Marcel Schwob, je devins l'ami à l'époque faunesque oà je battais les buissons …

Claudel! Le poète prononce ce nom avec une émotion et une admiration touchantes.

'Claudel! Je n'oublierai jamais, raconte M. Francis Jammes lyrique, ma première entrevue avec lui; il était déjà grand pour quelquesuns d'entre nous. Je vois encore cette petite chambre oà l'on nous introduisit, mon camarade et moi. C'était une sorte de cellule nue; trois choses attirèrent mon regard, les seules: un chapelet, l'Appel au soldat de Barrès, et un paroissien de vieille femme. Il parut. Le marbre romain allait parler. Il avait de l'antipathie pour la personne qui m'accompagnait: j'entends le son sec et tranchant de ses brèves réponses. Le lendemain je déjeunai avec Schwob et lui. Le marbre, resté glacial la veille, s'anima: ce fut pour moi un émerveillement. Le catholicisme entrait dans ma vie.'

'Le faune avait des inquiétudes?'

'Le faune était tenace. Mais insensiblement je commenàais à me demander: oà est la vérité? Et de ne pas la connaàtre, de sentir une limite à l'homme, j'éprouvais une impression pénible, je découvrais un ver dans la pomme. Je m'apercevais qu'il y avait une force dans la vie et que cette force je ne la possédais pas.'

'J'étais dans cet état de désillusion et de doute quand je fus la victime d'une crise morale affreuse. Je tombai dans le désarroi le plus complet. J'avais demandé à un des mes amis de Bordeaux l'hospitalité et je m'abandonnai à ma détresse; c'est alors que par un bienfait de Dieu une lettre de Claudel nous parvint, une lettre admirable de consolation et d'enseignement. Je fus frappé, je réfléchis. Si cette vie que j'aime tant, me disais-je, ne me donne pas son explication, elle n'est qu'une horreur, nous sommes dans un hàpital de fous; j'allai à la cathédrale, longtemps je pleurai: le travail de la gràce s'opérait en moi.

'Je rentrai à Orthez. Ce que la lettre de Claudel avait commencé, la parole de Claudel devait le finir. J'eus bientàt le bonheur de le voir arriver; il me parla du catholicisme en grand philosophe, en savant. Ensemble nous priàmes. J'étais au fond du fossé, mourant, anéanti. Je me relevai guéri, suavé. Le 7 juillet, 1905, je me confessai, je communiai; Claudel, mon ange gardien, servait la messe. Depuis lors j'ai retrouvé tout ce qui me manquait, j'ai récupéré la joie. Après avoir traversé d'àpres solitudes, j'ai la joie de la certitude, l'explication de ma vie. Je suis catholique!'

Dans l'espace, M. Francis Jammes lance cette profession de foi comme un cri de triomphe.

'Catholique pour de bon, insistai-je, pratiquant? La foi totale, absolue, obéissante?

'La foi du dernier savetier. Je ne suis pas un néochrétien. Je pratique, comme vous dites, j'observe tous les préceptes de l'Eglise, ma mère.… Je sais: on rit, vous riez des dévotionnettes. J'en ai ri jadis moi-même. Je me les suis expliquées. L'Eglise ne les aurait peut-être pas imposées si tous les hommes étaient des Pascal et des Claudel. Mais l'humanité n'est pas composée que de Pascal et de Claudel. Ces pratiques, ces observances sont comme des nœuds au mouchoir, elles constituent, en quelque manière, un rappel à la vertu et à la piété. L'Eglise les a jugées nécessaires ou utiles. Je m'incline sans discussion. Cette attitude a déconcerté certains hommes qui n'ont rien de catholique mais qui veulent exploiter le catholicisme au profit d'un système politique. Quand on a la flamme de la foi, comme je l'ai, on trouve humiliante cette exploitation. Nous, nous sommes catholiques foncièrement, pardessus tout.

'Vous parlez comme si vous étiez certain de posséder la vérité.'

'Je la possède. Je suis dans la vérité puisque la sécurité oà je suis est si bonne! Il n'y a rien dans le monde à quoi je puisse comparer le bonheur que ma foi me donne. J'y tiens davantage qu'à la vie elle-même. J'ai été comme un verger oà le vent a passé, maintenant je suis un verger doré avec de beaux fruits.

'Et comme j'esquissais un discret sourire de scepticisme, M. Francis Jammes me regarda avec infiniment de générosité.

'Je vous souhaite le bonheur que j'ai.'

'I was converted on the 7th of July, 1905,' began M. Francis Jammes, when I asked him if I were not indiscreet in seeking to trace the progress of his mind from indifference to fervour.

'You were not always a Catholic?'

'I was christened a Catholic, but that was about all: that, and a sort of sympathy for the fine literary themes afforded by the Church, mixed by much disdain for what I no longer call the "churchiness" of old women. I was a Pagan, a veritable Faun! Flowers, forests, women—I was in love with all that lived! In all Nature there was not a merrier young vagabond alive. Life was so delightful in my eyes that the very idea of one day quitting all that, seemed to me a frightful blasphemy.'

'And you are no longer so much in love with Life?'

'Not in the same way.'

'You were changed by a sudden flash of grace?'

'No; there were trials before the Grace of God touched me; and there was Claudel, too, … Claudel with whom I made friends (through one of his old schoolfellows, Marcel Schwob) when I was still a Faun, haunting the thickets.

(Claudel! The poet pronounces the name with a touching admiration and emotion.)

'Claudel! I shall never forget our first interview. He was already a great writer in the eyes of a little clan. I still see the small room into which we were shown, my friend and I. It was a sort of bare cell: three things attracted my attention, a rosary, an old woman's prayer-book, and Barrès's Appel au Soldat. And then Claudel came in. It was as if a Roman bust were to move its lips and speak. He disliked the person who accompanied me, and I remember the harsh cut-and-dry tone of his short answers. But the next day I lunched with him and Schwob; and the icy marble softened into flesh and blood. I was lost in wonder, a sort of happy astonishment. Catholicism had entered into my life.…'

'The Faun began to feel anxious?'

'The Faun stood firm! But, little by little, I began to ask myself: Where lies the Truth? And the sense of my ignorance, that feeling of a limit to what man can do and be, was the canker in the fruit. I felt there was a force in Life—a force that I did not possess.

'And while in that state of doubt and disillusion, I was overtaken by a cruel moral crisis. I wallowed in the Slough of Despond. One of my friends lived at Bordeaux; I went to stay with him, and it was there that, by God's grace, I received a letter from Claudel. Such an admirable letter, full of consolation and instruction! I was struck by it. And I pondered it in my heart. "If this dear life," said I, "that I so love, remains a riddle, if there is no answer to our questions, then away with it! Life is a horror, a madhouse!" I went to the Cathedral, and for a long while I wept; the miracle of grace began to operate in my soul.

'I returned to my home at Orthez. That which Claudel's letter had begun, speech with Claudel was to effectuate. He came; he spoke to me of religion like a great philosopher, like a man of science, too; and we prayed together. I was in the bottom of the pit, dying, dejected. On the 7th of July, 1905, I went to confession, I received the Communion; Claudel, my guardian angel, served the Mass. Since then I have found all that I missed in life; I have recovered my delight. After the harshest solitudes I have come to a place of certainty: I am a Catholic!'

(And M. Jammes flings this cry forth into space, like a chant of triumph.)

'A real thorough-going Catholic?' said I; 'absolute, obedient faith?'

"The faith of a cobbler! I am no neo-Christian; I practise all the precepts of the Church I know. You smile (I used to smile) at certain observances.

The Church would not have enjoined them if all the faithful stood on the intellectual level of a Pascal or a Claudel. But humanity is not made up of Pascals and Claudels. These minor practices are just knots in our handkerchief, lest we forget! The Church thinks them necessary; I bow to her decision. I know this attitude seems disconcerting to certain persons, who really are not Catholics at all, but would like to exploit the Church in favour of a political system. But, when the flame of faith is lit in our hearts, we scorn to be the catspaw of a politician. We are just Catholics.'

'You speak as though you were sure of possessing Truth itself!'

'So I am; Truth is my heritage, since I find my security so good! Nothing in Life is comparable to the happiness which I derive from my religion; it is dearer to me than life itself! I was as an orchard harassed by the wind; and now I am an orchard golden with ripe fruit.'

So spake Francis Jammes. I smiled the slight smile of the sceptic. The poet glanced at me with an infinite generosity.

'I wish you the same happiness!' he said.

-Elie-Joseph Bois, Le Temps, Nov. 3, 1913.

But this conversion has not greatly changed the nature of the poet. His verse is still fresh with the fragrance of wild thyme newly wet with dew. He continues to sing his happy valley, with the mountain towering up behind, right into the blueness of the sky. Only, in his landscape, he gives more prominence to the village church, garlanded with yellow roses: 'L'Eglise habillée de Feuilles.'

Par cette grande paix que l'homme cherche en soi;
  Par les jours finissants aux vieux balcons de bois
  Oà le cœur noir des géraniums blancs s'attriste;
  Par l'obscure douceur des choses villageoises;
  Par les pigeons couleur d'arc-en-ciel et d'ardoise;
  Par le chien dont la tête humble nous invite
  A lui passer la main dessus; par tout cela:
  Chapelle, sois bénie à l'ombre de ton bois!

His verse has still its candour, its ingenuous freshness, its Franciscan simplicity:—

Je prendrai mon bâton et sur la grande route
  J'irai, et je dirai aux ànes, nos amis:
  Je suis Francis Jammes et je vais au Paradis.
  Car il n'y a pas d'enfer au pays du Bon Dieu.

And yet so great a change has necessarily had its repercussion in the very form of the poet's art: Francis Jammes is no longer a ver-librist. Having accepted a discipline for his soul, he may well admit one for his muse. He would no longer write:—

J'avais été assez éprouvé pour connaàtre
  Le bonheur de finir ses jours dans la retraite;

and think he had done his duty by the rhyme. He would not now content himself with the loose and lazy assonance of a verse (a beautiful verse) like the following:—

Accablé, je m'étais assis, tant les ajoncs
    àtaient impénétrables.
  Quand j'eus équilibré mon fusil contre un arbre,
   Je relevai le front.

His last charming volume of Bucolics, Les Géorgiques Chrétiennes, is written in rhymed Alexandrines, which differ only from those of classic French poetry in a few innocent and agreeable liberties—a plural and a singular being allowed to rhyme together, the mute E not counting where it is not pronounced. It is a pleasant form of verse. The picture of the harvesting angels whirling in the sky, which opens the poem, has the rich colour and the large facility of a fresco by Correggio—say, the Assumption at Parma. It is beautiful with a calm beauty:—

De temps en temps l'un de ces anges touchaient terre
Et buvait à la cruche une gorgée d'eau claire.

Sa joue était pareille à la rouge moitié
  De la pomme qui est l'honneur de compotier.

Il reprenait son vol, et d'abord sa faucille.
  Quelque autre alors foulait l'ombre qui fait
    des grilles.

Ou tous ils descendaient ensemble, ou bien encor
Ensemble reprenaient avec calme l'essor.

Chacun avait passé le bras à sa corbeille
  Dont les tresses formaient comme un essaim
    d'abeilles

Clarté fondue à la clarté, ces travailleurs
  Récoltaient du froment la plus pure des fleurs.

Ils venaient visiter sur ce coin de la Terre
  La beauté que Dieu donne à la vie ordinaire.

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.