The first evening I passed at Capel House, the discussion just missed becoming tempestuous. But this time I joined the chorus with him. Miss Tobin would not allow herself to praise Georges Ohnet to the skies? We protested. She remained obstinate, defending her man with arguments that appeared to us absurd, monstrous, speaking of “the temperate outburst,” the “dull richness,” of his paintings. Conrad became more and more excited up to the moment when Miss Tobin called Walter Pater to her aid and we suddenly understood that it was a question, not of the author of the too celebrated Mâitre de Forges, (Master of the Forge), but indeed of Giorgione, whose name she pronounced in Italian, in such a way as to permit the misunderstanding. It had lasted almost an hour. Conrad was as amused by it as a child.
Nothing was more cordial, more forthright, more manly than his laugh, his expression and his voice. But, like the sea during a lull, you felt him capable of violent passions, of storms. However great his curiosity might be for the secret retreats of the human soul, he hated everything sly, underhanded or vile of which man was capable. And I think what I liked most in him, was a sort of native nobility, harsh, disdainful, and somewhat despairing, which he lends to Lord Jim and which makes the book one of the most beautiful I know, one of the saddest also, and, at the same time, one of the most uplifting.
Others than I will speak of the teaching that can be derived from his work, since for that matter it is the style to-day to look for lessons everywhere. I think Conrad’s is most profitable in an era when, on the one hand, the study of man tends to distract novelists from life, and on the other, the love of life tends to discredit literature. No one had lived more brutally than Conrad; no one, afterwards, had submitted life to so patient, conscientious and learned a transmutation of art.
8 FRANCIS JAMMES
I MYSELF am too near the tomb “by affliction and years” to be able to grieve much over his death. This success of the Good God that Jammes was, fully completed his task and, for many years past, his slipping toward Paradise was only too perceptible in his work and in his life. Should I say even that this affliction brings me one satisfaction: that of being able to let him figure in the anthology of French poets which I am preparing (and where no living men are to figure) with an abundant choice from his work.
Francis Jammes had full consciousness of his importance; in the contemporary literary movement, it is considerable and can justify his pride. I think he needed this pride to permit him to assert himself, and from his very first poems, with such an unyielding originality. Jammes made a clean break with the schools and poetic tradition. His work is not a continuation of anything; it starts anew and from the ground up; it is a spring where the thirsty, or “the pure in heart” come to drink. Jammes is delightfully genuine. And what makes it more surprising is that, for songs so new, he used the old alexandrine; but he used it with such determined lack of skill, that the old instrument, put out of tune by him, made the sounds unrecognizable.
Le pauvre pion doux, si sale, m’a dit: j’ai
Bien mal aux yeux et le bras droit paralysé …
Il économise pour se faire soigner.…1
Anyone can try new harmonies; the special property of Jammes was to bring his novelty to perfection immediately. For that matter, this novelty was not artificially obtained; it was so as not to put his voice out of tune that he put the instrument out of tune; that was all that counted with him: that his voice should be true. That of Francis Jammes did not recall any other; as genuine as the human voice can be. Now we are accustomed to it, it does not surprise us any more; when the first poems of the man who called himself a faun appeared, that voice at first seemed discord to the ears of the cultivated city folk; but soon, the exact pitch of that voice triumphed and, alongside of it, it was the voice of his contemporaries that appeared artificial, borrowed.
Jammes did not have to search. The first letters I received from him show him, from 1893, still young, already fully conscious of his savor, his virility, his gifts, with all his charming faults, his resolute obtuseness, his pride and fantasy, his irreplaceable qualities. I thought that, more than my commentaries, some of his letters from years long gone by, would deservedly interest the readers of the N. R. F. in spite of the oddities of the dithyrambs. I am adding to them some personal recollections, written a few years ago. I give them without adding anything. I should like to be able to make felt, through certain reserves, the affection that bound us and which holds such a great place in my life.
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I had already been in correspondence with him for a long time, when he came to join us at Biskra where we, my wife and I, were completing our wedding trip. He let himself be brought there by a mutual friend, Eugène Rouart, eager to introduce us to each other and to make him see the country; for he had never yet left Orthez. In our letters, we used the tu form; but when I saw getting out of the train that sprightly little being, bearded, with a ringing voice and a gimlet eye, I found him so little like what I had imagined him to be, that the tu at first gave place to vous; which seemed to have such an effect on him that the tu was taken up again.
He had taken me by the arm, very affectionately, as soon as we had found ourselves alone, on the terrace of the hotel, but I was not a little surprised by the protecting and even contemptuous tone that he assumed on speaking to me of Eugène Rouart, for whom I had much more affection than he seemed to think, and with whom I was more intimate than I could ever be with Jammes. Convinced that, no more than he, could I doubt for an instant the immense superiority of both of us over our mutual friend, he gave me to understand at once he feared that superiority would soon get our poor friend into a most painful situation.
“We should,” he said to me, “watch our remarks carefully, and say nothing too subtle in front of him, so as not to mortify him.”
The attention was, most assuredly, delicate, but showed such a lack of understanding of others, that I was embarrassed, to such a degree I did not know what to say to him. As apparent as that great fault was, yet one did not suffer too much because of it, for Jammes was a charming fellow and, at that time, did not pontificate at all. His good spirits were extraordinary. It was one continuous outburst of anecdotes about the bourgeoisie of Pau and Orthez. He narrated delightfully and with such art that one never tired of listening to him. He had parading before you a surprising quantity of puppets with preposterous gestures and droll comments, that appeared to him (and that he showed) all the more extravagant since he saw, in those he painted, only the outside.
When, the next summer, he came to pass some time with us at La Roque, my old Aunt Demarest, who did not unbend easily, was sometimes ill with laughter. But first I come back to, Biskra; in addition to his talent as a story-teller, Jammes had the gift of analogies, a gift that he often confused with poetic genius. His nerves always tingling seemed like the cords of a lute that would reverberate at the approach of every harmony; he amused himself with it; he asked, pointing to an object, when we were out for a walk: