ART. II. 1. Las Papillotas de Jacques Jasmin. Paris, 1860. 2. Mireille (Mirèio). Pouèmo Provençan de F. Mistral. Avignon. 3. Calendau: Pouèmo Nouvèau. Par FREDERI MISTRAL. gnon, 1867. Avi 4. Un Liame de Rasin. Countenant Lis Oubreto di Castil-Blaze, Adoufe Dumas, Jan Reboul, Glaup, e T. Poussel. Reculido e publicado per J. Roumanille e F. Mistral. Avignon, 1867. 5. Lis Oubreto en Vers de Roumanille. Avignon. 6. Li Nouvé de Roumanille. Avignon. 7. La Miougrano Entreduberto (la Granade entreouverte) de Téodor Aubanel. Avignon. IN the spring of 1842 a poet came to Paris, whose grade was humble, whose birthplace was remote, and whose native dialect had for upwards of three centuries been obsolete in literature, though it is still the living language of the people of Southern France. Jasmin, the barber of Agen, had come to meet the wisest and wittiest of his countrymen, to visit that great city which both nurses and devours so many of the children of genius; a provincial, and a man of the people, he had come to await the verdict of the Parisians and of the Academy. To one-third of France he was already known, the rest had yet to make his acquaintance, and that was only to be done by showing himself, and by publishing a prose translation of the poems he had written in the Gascon tongue. Jasmin's visit was completely successful; his popularity increased steadily till the close of his life, and his death, when it occurred in 1864, was lamented as a national loss. In England he is but little known, and that little chiefly through Longfellow's translation of the Blind Girl of Castèl-Cuillè,' one of the more plaintive and less dramatic of his works. It is our object to do a tardy justice to this modern troubadour, and, if possible, to render it in such a shape as may make both Jasmin and his compeers interesting to English readers. What is the language in which Jacques Jasmin wrote? One answers vaguely, That of the south of France; and for once a vague answer does not come amiss; for his dialect is not strictly Gascon in contradistinction to Provençal, though it is to be identified with his native district of the Lower Languedoc. Assuredly this was not always an unknown tongue in England. In the beginning of the eleventh century, and when Provençal poetry had both a fixed value and a written literature, England passed under the rule of the Dukes of Normandy, when French laws and culture were grafted on our Saxon stem. It was true that the language thus imparted was langue d'oil, not langue d'oc; still these were allied, if rival tongues, and the second dynasty of our kings identified us still more closely with France, and especially with France south of Loire. The Plantagenets were only Counts of Anjou, but Henry II. had for his queen Eleanor of Guienne, the heiress of Aquitaine. The wife whom Henry Plantagenet married for her beauty and her dowery, after King Louis had denounced and divorced her, must have lisped in this tongue, in the doux parler of the south. Her grandfather, William, Count of Poitou,1 was one of the first as well as the most nobly born of the troubadours; poets like Bertrand de Ventadour were her companions; and when she undertook her journey to the Holy Land, it is said that she beguiled the tedium of the voyage with the songs of the troubadours. To her passionate spirit, love, power, and music were essentials, and she chose that strains, of which her beauty was the theme, should mingle with the winds that wafted her over the Cretan and Peloponnesian seas. Perhaps, if the stone effigy of her face, which still shows its rare loveliness in the porch of Newstead, could speak, it would be in that native and southern speech. At the French court the same accents were in vogue, and the name of the Pré Catalan (in the Bois de Boulogne) still preserves the memory of a sweet singer of Provence, who found such favour in the eyes of Philippe le Bel, that his jealous rivals (possibly trouvères, speaking in langue d'oil) surprised and murdered him. The dialect presents at first sight such a strange mixture of Latin, Teutonic, Greek, and Arabic words, that it tempts a casual reader to pronounce it a debased and mongrel Latin. Yet it was not so esteemed when in use among the troubadours, but was rather recognised as that of the best and largest part of France. Unlike French, Italian, and Spanish, its sister derivatives from the old source, this, the eldest daughter of Latin, has diminished while they increased, and it is now only preserved in old romances, and represented, with alterations, by the spoken 1 We refer our readers to the Parnasse Occitanien, published at Toulouse in 1819, where a poem by this coms de Peitiens' is to be found. It is extracted from the Mss. (7226 and 7698) in the Bibliothèque Nationale. A notice of the Count from the same source says that he was uns dels majors cortes del mon, e del majors trichadors de domnas. E saup ben trobar et cantar et accet lonc temps per lo mon per inganar las domnas.' His greatgrandson, Richard Cœur de Lion, was also a poet. One of his sirventes' appears in the Parnasse; it is written in old French, and is addressed to the Dauphin of Auvergne, and as the Dauphin's answer is also extant and preserved in the same мs. folios, it seems as if Crescimbeni had been right in the dispute with Horace Walpole as to the Ms. 3204. In Venere Anchises, in Luna Latmius heros, Omnia perversas possunt corrumpere mentes : The influence of philosophy as a corrective of these evils in the Roman social system was hardly appreciable. We have already spoken in high praise of Dr. Döllinger's review of the Greek philosophy. His account of the Greek schools as they found a home at Rome, is perhaps even a more favourable specimen of his learning and critical ability, but, like his summary of the Greek philosophy, it is too vast to permit our entering regularly into the subject. We must be content with summing up the results in their bearing upon what alone interests us in the present inquiry,-the value which may be assigned to the Roman schools of philosophy as an instrument of the religious and moral regeneration of human nature. And as a compendious commentary on this part of the subject, we are glad to avail ourselves of Mr. Allies's Formation of Christendom, a work of remarkable brilliancy and power, composed, it is true, like Dr. Döllinger's, from the Roman Catholic point of view, but in a spirit which will command the sympathies of every cultivated religious mind. In Mr. Allies's summary, the history of Roman philosophy begins practically with Cicero, and for our present purpose we may confine ourselves to the three schools which prevailed at Rome in Cicero's time, the Stoic, the Epicurean, and the Academic. Now, taking the account which Cicero himself has left us of their teaching upon the very foundations of belief and of morality, we shall see how worse than worthless they must be regarded, as means for the preservation of a sound moral tone, much less as instruments for the regeneration of a society corrupted to its very core. Assume that, amid their endless contradictions and incongruities, it is possible to recognise a belief in one God, the Supreme Ruler and Orderer of things, yet the idea of God which they present is either directly material or some vague form of pantheism; and among the twenty-seven names which Cicero makes Velleius enumerate, in the dialogue De Natura Deorum, and which comprise every name of note from Thales downwards, there is not one in whom we can discover the notion of a personal immaterial Being. Still less did those among them whose views regarding the soul of man seem the most promising, succeed in realizing the notion of its enduring personal existence after death. The majority, it is well known, believed the soul to perish at death; and the very highest conception enter 1 Tristia, lii. 287-302. tained regarding it was as 'something of fiery, aerial, or ethereal nature, or like the harmony of a musical instrument, or a portion of the universal world-soul, which after death is dissolved again into that from which it had sprung, as a flask filled with water in the sea, when broken, returns the severed portion to the surrounding element." A necessary consequence of the obscuration of the idea of God was the failure of all correct conception of the nature of good and evil. The supreme good once lost, the moral horizon was limited by the visible world. Now in the visible world the intermixture of good and evil, and indeed the seeming predominance of the latter, had led, as well in philosophy as in common life, to the notion of the co-eternity of evil with good, and thus to the same moral consequences which flowed from the direct dualistic system of the Oriental religions,-the denial of all freedom of will, of all distinction of merit and demerit, and, in a word, of all personal or individual responsibility. Mr. Allies illustrates very strikingly, in the example of Cicero, the utter absence of the religious element as a principle of moral action : Cicero, without being himself a philosopher, was yet perhaps "Rome's least mortal mind;" and it was his purpose, after studying the whole field of Grecian thought, to present to his countrymen what he found most worthy of value. He was an eclectic who, with a vast treasure-house at command, selects a picture here, a statue there, a rich mosaic, a costly table, an inlaid couch, the work of men long passed away, for his own intellectual museum; and as he died in the last half century before the Christian period, his writings serve to show us what Grecian and Roman antiquity was as to morals and religion. 'In his work Upon Duties, he passes with short mention over the duties of man towards the Godhead, though he does indeed assign them the first rank before all others; in what they consist we do not learn. Nowhere is theology brought into an inward connexion with morality, nor are moral commands and duties rested on the authority, the will, the model of the Godhead. His motives are always drawn from the beauty and excellence of the honestum, from the evil and shamefulness of crime. If, when a witness is to give testimony on oath, he reminds him to reflect that the presence of God has been invoked, this God changes at once into his own soul, as the most Godlike thing which the Godhead has given to man. The idea of a retribution after death was not merely strange to him, as to so many of his contemporaries, but he openly declares it in one of his speeches to be an absurd fable, which every man, as he adds, takes it for. Dost thou hold me for so crazed as to believe such things? he makes a listener exclaim at the mention of judgment under the earth after death; and as to the condition after death, Cicero knows but one alternative, either cessation of existence or a state of happiness.' 1 The Formation of Christendom, by T. W. Allies, p. 81. In Venere Anchises, in Luna Latmius heros, Omnia perversas possunt corrumpere mentes: The influence of philosophy as a corrective of these evils in the Roman social system was hardly appreciable. We have already spoken in high praise of Dr. Döllinger's review of the Greek philosophy. His account of the Greek schools as they found a home at Rome, is perhaps even a more favourable specimen of his learning and critical ability, but, like his summary of the Greek philosophy, it is too vast to permit our entering regularly into the subject. We must be content with summing up the results in their bearing upon what alone interests us in the present inquiry, the value which may be assigned to the Roman schools of philosophy as an instrument of the religious and moral regeneration of human nature. And as a compendious commentary on this part of the subject, we are glad to avail ourselves of Mr. Allies's Formation of Christendom, a work of remarkable brilliancy and power, composed, it is true, like Dr. Döllinger's, from the Roman Catholic point of view, but in a spirit which will command the sympathies of every cultivated religious mind. In Mr. Allies's summary, the history of Roman philosophy begins practically with Cicero, and for our present purpose we may confine ourselves to the three schools which prevailed at Rome in Cicero's time, the Stoic, the Epicurean, and the Academic. Now, taking the account which Cicero himself has left us of their teaching upon the very foundations of belief and of morality, we shall see how worse than worthless they must be regarded, as means for the preservation of a sound moral tone, much less as instruments for the regeneration of a society corrupted to its very core. Assume that, amid their endless contradictions and incongruities, it is possible to recognise a belief in one God, the Supreme Ruler and Orderer of things, yet the idea of God which they present is either directly material or some vague form of pantheism; and among the twenty-seven names which Cicero makes Velleius enumerate, in the dialogue De Natura Deorum, and which comprise every name of note from Thales downwards, there is not one in whom we can discover the notion of a personal immaterial Being. Still less did those among them whose views regarding the soul of man seem the most promising, succeed in realizing the notion of its enduring personal existence after death. The majority, it is well known, believed the soul to perish at death; and the very highest conception enterTristia, lii. 287-302. 1 |