When one speaks of a poet as "well loved" or as a "favorite bard of simple things and homely virtues," one is not always seeking to condone a particular type of mediocrity which happens to appeal to him. Despite the thriving, if modest, school of Robert Frost, we have somewhat lost sight, in this day of neurotic exacerbations, of the proved truth that verse does not have to be tormented to be beautiful. The idyllic scenes of Whittier have in them more of pure loveliness than many of the most rapturous clamors of the sadistic school of English poetry; and there are also the classic examples of Hesiod's Works and Days and the Georgics of Vergil, which contain more essential poetry than the Æ neid or the Eclogues. So we have no need to apologize for Francis Jammes when we say that, in our discordant age, there is no voice as sweet and tender, as utterly homely as his has been.

"Let us give to men, to be their judges, Irony and Pity," says Anatole France, in Le Lys Rouge. These are the judges that Jammes gives, not to men alone, but to all the creatures of the earth—to the infinite advantage of the latter. He loves the skies and the waters, the asses and the dogs, the kingfishers, the periwinkles, and the long tresses of the fields, better than any poet since the Greeks has loved them. They have rewarded him, as only love can reward a poetaster, by making him a poet. An indifferent student, a botanist, zoölogist, and ornithologist with more enthusiasm than learning, Jammes has become, so to speak, the Thoreau of France. "My style stammers, but I have told my truth," he says, in the dedication of his first volume of Vers, published privately in 1893, at Orthez, the little village in the Basses-Pyrénées which is still his home. That is the important thing; and despite the faults of his style, this simple quality of expressiveness of his particular truth has made Francis Jammes a poet certain to be remembered beyond his generation: an original, and an originator.

Jammes's intense sensitiveness to every feature of pastoral life, his profound apprehension of visible Nature, his spiritual and physical perceptions, his healthy sensuousness, his deep contentment with his lot, the simplicity of all his emotional responses, and his extraordinary faculty of objective and ironical, yet sympathetic, observation, brought this more or less untutored French provincial, from his first scribblings, to an attitude of mind and spirit perfectly designed for the utterance of poetic truth. If the sentiment of love finds its most sublime utterance in poetry, every line that Jammes has written is filled with love—with the love of life, the love of every tree and flower and blade of grass, the love of every animal, the love of every man, except, perhaps, the apothecaries of Orthez. These sentiments he feels spontaneously; and he records them spontaneously, without affectation, without obedience to, or revolt from, the precept of any existing school—although the perfect naturalness of his verse was the last blow to the Neo-Parnassian revival of 1895, and although the benefits of his influence are clearly perceived in such dissimilar productions as Le Coeur Solitaire and Le Semeur de Cendres of Charles Guérin and Le Cocur Innombrable of Madame de Noailles. In his rich, playful humor, Jammes has had neither inheritors nor predecessors. The French have had wit in plenty, but they have never before produced humor as delicious and earthy as his.

Jammes has told much of himself in his books—in Un Jour, La Naissance du Poète and La Mort du Poète, in the volume De l'Angélus de l'Aube a l'Angélus du Soir; in Le Poète et sa Femme, in Clairières dans le Ciel, and in scores of his shorter poems. But he has not explained his genealogy as an artist. There is no need to do that, for he is a natural singer; and it was clearly the irrepressibility of his gift alone that transformed the young solicitor's clerk of Orthez into the beloved sexagenarian of French poetry. Jammes was born, on the 2d of December 1868, at Tournay, in the Hautes-Pyrénées, of a substantial bourgeois family of that region. His great-grandfather had been a notary in the town of Albi; his grandfather, a physician, had migrated to the West Indies, where he had married a Creole woman of good family, and was eventually ruined by the earthquake of La Pointe-á-Pitre. Jammes has inscribed a poem to this ancestor, whose far wanderings beckoned the poet toward the enchanting course made luminous and delectable by the imaginary peregrinations of his great similar, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre:

Tu écrivais que tu chassais des ramiers
    dans les bois de la Goyave,
  et le médecin qui te soignait écrivait,
   peu avant ta mort, sur ta vie grave.

Il vit, disait-il, en Caraàbe, dans ses bois.
    Tu es le père de mon père.
  Ta vieille correspondance est dans mon tiroir
   et ta vie est amère.

Tu partis d'Orthez comme docteur-médecin,
    pour faire fortune là-bas.
  On recevait de tes lettres par un marin,
   par le capitaine Folat.

Tu fus ruiné par les tremblements de terre
    dans ce pays oà l'on buvait
  l'eau de pluie des cuves, lourde, malsaine, amère …
    Et tout cela, tu l'écrivais.

Et tu avais acheté une pharmacie.
    Tu écrivais: "La Métropole
  n'en a pas de pareille." Et tu disais: "Ma vie
    m'a rendu comme un vrai créole."

Tu es enterré, là-bas, je crois, à la Goyave.
    Et moi j'écris oà tu es né:
  ta vieille correspondance est très triste et grave.
    Elle est dans ma commode, à clef.

Upon the death of his mother and father, the son of this man, then a child of five years, was sent to Orthez, to be cared for by his aunts. This was the father of Francis Jammes, who married a good woman of the province and removed to Tournay, where he earned a modest livelihood as a notary until his appointment as Keeper of Records at Bordeaux made it possible for him to go to that city, where his son might enjoy the advantages of the University. But Francis Jammes proved only a languid scholar, and, instead of studying his Roman Code, he haunted the wharves and picked up odd bits of botanical lore at the public parks. When his father died, young Jammes forgot the legal career that had been planned for him and returned, with his mother, for whom he cherished a tender sentiment, to the ancestral cottage at Orthez, which Charles Guérin has celebrated in his poem:

O Jammes, ta maison ressemble à ton visage.
  Une barbe de lierre y grimpe, un pin l'ombrage
  Eternellement jeune et dru comme ton coeur …

There he has remained ever since, anxiously preserving himself from the contaminations of the city. He was married about 1906, and his poems to his wife and to his young daughter are inexpressibly tender. His prose record of this daughter's daily life, Ma Fille Bernadette, is one of the most charming modern contributions to the literature of childhood.

The literary accomplishment of Francis Jammes is divided sharply into two periods by his reconciliation with the Roman Catholic Church, which occurred about 1902, a short time after the return of Paul Claudel from his sojourn in the Orient. With his second conversion, Jammes began to mistrust the healthy sensuousness and the whimsicality which had made his earlier work particularly cherishable and unique. In curbing these native impulses, and in turning his quest from the love of life and visible beauty to the love of God, he lost an element of natural vigor and a robust earthy tang which his work has not compensated in the contemplation of higher excellences. This is the false note which renders insipid Les Géorgiques Chrétiennes, the work which he, as the only poet of contemporary France competent to essay such a theme, ought to have made his masterpiece.

We may not pause here to discuss Jammes's contribution to the Neo-Catholic revival in France, but we may observe, with some abstract justice, that the poet's early devotion to Rousseau—whose Confessions he formerly called "son livre ami"—was a more invigorating influence in his art than his later devotion to the doctrines of Catholicism. What Jammes lost in vitality, however, he more than gained in spiritual beauty; and if one would seek for a Saint Francis of Assisi in the modern world, one would find the humble counterpart of the saint in his French name-son. One cannot read the poems collected in Clairières dans le Ciel, for example, without being aware of the moral greatness of their author; but where has vanished the simplicity and the humanity of Quatorze Prières? We cannot resist the temptation to translate one of them, the "Prière pour Aller au Paradis avec les Anes":

When my time comes, O God, to go to thee,
  Upon a festal day then let it be,
  When fields are filled with dust; I wish to go
  By any road I please, as I go here,
  To Paradise, where stars shine all day long.
  Taking my stick, I'll seek the broad highway,
  And to my friends, the asses, I shall say:
  My name is Jammes; I go to Paradise,
  Because there is no hell in God's good land.
  I'll say: Come, gentle friends of azure skies,
  Poor, precious beasts, whose twitching ears brush
      off
  The silver flies, the bees, the cruel blows …

Grant I may come to thee among these beasts
  That I so love, because they hang their heads
  Gently and, halting, put their little feet
  Together thus, so pitiful and sweet.
  Let me approach amid their million ears,
  Followed by those with baskets on their flanks,
  By those who draw the carts of acrobats,
  Or bear a huckster's truck upon their backs;
  She-asses, full as gourds, with halting steps,
  And those who wear quaint breeches, made to
      stanch
  The ooze of blue sores bit by stubborn flies.
  Grant that these asses come with me, my God,
  Grant that in peace the angels may conduct
  Both me and them to tufted streams where trees
  Tremble like laughing flesh of tender maids;
  And grant that, as I then shall bend above
  The heavenly waters of that place of souls,
  I may become as these same patient beasts,
  Who mirror humble, gentle poverty
  In the clear waters of eternal love.

Yet, the spirit of his later poems is as noble and admirable in the consciousness of a destiny. In the dedication of a late edition of the most personal of his books, De l'Angélus de l'Aube a l'Angélus du Soir, the poet writes: "My God, you have called me among men. Here I am. I suffer and I love. I have spoken with the voice which you have given me. I have written with the words that you taught my father and mother, and which they have transmitted to me. I pass upon the road like a laden ass at whom the children laugh, and who lowers his head. I will go where you will, when you will." For Jammes has two magnificent gifts, which nothing can take away from him. These are courage and, above all, love.

It is a common observation that most superior poets are deprived of the gift of writing fine prose, but that the occasional exceptions to this rule produce prose of exceptional beauty and power. While the prose of Francis Jammes is by no means to be compared with that of the English poets, some observation of this nature may certainly be made of it, for Jammes has carried into his prose many of the finest qualities of his exceedingly orderly and provocative verse. Jammes had been occupied with the idea of metrical romance since his first appearance as a poet, and his early self-revealing narratives had been somewhat in this character. In 1899, he wrote La Jeune Fille Nue, and the two long narrative poems in La Triomphe de la Vie, "Jean de Noarrieu" and "Existences," record his finest development of this genre. He early began to write prose, and his first prose romance, Clara d'Ellébeuse ou l'Histoire d'une Ancienne Jeune Fille, first appeared in 1899, to be followed, two years later, by Almaïde d'Etremont ou l'Histoire d'une Jeune Fille Passionnée, both of which were later republished, with additional stories and with Jammes's sensitive essay on Rousseau, in the volume entitled Le Roman du Lièvre. This series of romances was completed in 1904 by the publication of Pomme d'Anis ou l'Histoire d'une Jeune Fille Infirme, which was reissued in 1913, in the volume in which the poet's best prose is to be found, Feuilles dans le Vent. Most of Jammes's writings, as age has come upon him and as he has drifted out of the current of his times and closer to the sheltering bosom of the Church, have been in prose; and his achievements in what may be termed lyrical fiction constitute, in a sense, a third and final phase of his work.

The recent work of Francis Jammes has declined lamentably. The reticences of strict religious obedience, the disturbances of the war, and the sad ravages of advancing age, have combined to relegate this once renowned poet to the limbo of those anachronistic reputations respected but unread. Jammes, having given the coup de grâce to a school of pernicious artificiality, having written better bucolic poetry than any Frenchman except Mistral, having influenced the art of scores of poets, one (Madame de Noailles) even greater than himself, and having been proclaimed the inspirer of a group with which he had nothing in common, has fallen upon the same misfortune as many other French poets of his generation—he has become religious, and religion has confined his spirit, diluted his style, and taken the poetry out of him. He is happier in his desuetude, perhaps, although he was happy before, when his God lived for him in the smile of the skies and the blue of the periwinkles; but he is less readable, and he is no longer Jammes. And, since we loved that very human Francis Jammes, our brother and friend, we may be forgiven if we refuse commerce with his pious shadow.