2. T. AUBANEL. _La Miougrano Entreduberto._ Avec Traduction littérale en
regard. Avignon: J. Roumanille. 1860. 12mo.
3. _Mirèio._ Pouèmo Prouvençau de FREDERI MISTRAL. Avec la Traduction
littérale en regard. Avignon: J. Roumanille. 1859. 8vo.
4. _Las Papillôtos_ de JACQUES JASMIN, de l'Académie d'Agen, Maître ès
Jeux-Floraux, Grand Prix de l'Académie Française. Édition populaire,
avec le Français en regard, et ornée d'un Portrait. De 1822 à 1858.
Paris: Firmin Didot, Frères & Cie. 1860. 12mo.
5. _Lés Piaoulats d'un Reïpetit._ Recueil de Poésies Patoises. Par J.B.
Veyre, Instituteur à Saint-Simon (Cantal). Aurillac: Imprimerie de L.
Bonnet-Picut. 1860. 8vo.
Few persons, when they consider the present greatness and prosperity of
the French Empire, bear in mind the heterogeneous elements of which it
is composed. For us, Paris is France, and the literature of the realm
is comprised in the words, "Paris publications." We think not of the
millions of Frenchmen to whom the language of the capital is a sealed
letter,--of the Germans of Alsatia, the Flemings of the extreme
North-East, the Bretons of the peninsula of Finisterre, the Basques, the
Catalans of the mountains of Roussillon, and, more numerous than all
these, the fourteen millions of the thirty-seven departments south of
the Loire. These speak, to this day, with fewer modifications than have
taken place in any other of the European languages during the same lapse
of time, the very tongue in which wrote Bertran de Born and Pierre
Vidal, the idiom in which Dante and Petrarca found some of their
happiest inspirations, and which, we are told, Tasso envied for its
poetic capabilities.
True, the Provinces of Gascony, Provence, Auvergne may be traversed by
the stranger almost without his suspecting that other than the French,
more or less badly spoken, is in common use. In hotels and shops he will
hear nothing else.
The larger towns in direct communication with the capital, and all that
is purely exterior in the people, are becoming more and more French
every day. But in the family interior, far from the noise of affairs,
the bustle of towns, in hamlets, among the vine-growers and tenders of
the silk-worm, in the mountains and retired valleys, the home-tongue is
again at ease. Simple, ingenuous, amber-like in its sunny tints, it is a
reflection of that ardent poetical imagination which made the courts of
the Counts of Toulouse the nurseries of modern poesy, when the rest of
Europe was little else than one wrangling battle-field. Neither the
exterminating crusade against the Albigenses, after which the idiom
of Provence was wellnigh stigmatized as heretical, nor the civil and
religious wars of the seventeenth century, nor even the _dragonnades_ of
Louis XIV., have been able to outroot it. The levelling edicts of the
first French Revolution were powerless against it. The Provençal, or
Langue d'Oc, if you will, the Gascon, the Auvergnat, are spoken to this
day in their respective provinces, universally spoken by the people, who
in many instances do not understand French at all. They must be preached
to in their own dialect. They have their songs, their theatre even.
Nor must this be understood as referring only to the lower strata
of society. The better classes, even, retain a fondness for their
mother-tongue which years of residence in Paris will not obliterate. In
their very French, they still retain the inflections, the tones of the
South,--a measured cadence in the phrase, which the Parisian uniformly
styles _gasconner_. They feel ill at ease in what they call the
cold-mannered speech of the _Franchiman_. In the words of one of their
poets, Mistral, who has proved that he was no less a master of the
academic forms and rules than of the riches and power of his own
Avignonais:--"Those who have not lived at the South, and especially
in the midst of our rural population, can have no idea of the
incompatibility, the insufficiency, the poverty of the language of the
North in regard to our manners, our needs, our organization. The French
language, transplanted to Provence, seems like the cast-off clothes of a
Parisian dandy adapted to the robust shoulders of a harvester bronzed by
the Southern sun."
The Provençal, in its two principal divisions, the Gascon and Langue
d'Oc, is the current idiom south of the Loire. The South-West Provinces
had, in the seventeenth century, no mean poet in Godelin; and in our
own day, Jasmin has found a host of followers. The inhabitants of the
South-East, however, the more immediate retainers of the language of
the Troubadours, save in a few drinking-songs and Christmas carols, had
forgotten the strains that once resounded beyond the limits of Provence
and had first awaked the poetic emulation of Spain and Italy. The
princess of song, stung by the envious spirit of persecution in the
Albigensian wars, had slept for centuries, and the thick hedge of
forgetfulness had grown rank about the language and its treasures. What
Raynouard, Diez, Mahn, Fauriel, and others have done to bring to light
again the unedited texts was little better than an autopsy. A living,
breathing poet was wanting to reanimate by his touch the poesy that had
slept so long. That poet was Roumanille.
The Minnesingers have found heirs and continuators in the modern writers
of Germany. Side by side with the increasing tendency to unity in all
national literature is working the force of races confounded under one
political banner, to assert their existence as such. Congresses have
shaped new kingdoms; but they have not reached or removed the limits
of nationalities that have each their expression in song, whether in
Moldavia or among the Czechs of Bohemia. The regeneration of local
idioms, which is fast working its way from the Bosphorus to the
Atlantic, was first undertaken in Provence, at the instigation of
Roumanille. The son of a gardener of St. Remy, he was first struck with
the insufficiency of French literature for his immediate countrymen,
when, on his return from college, seeking to recite some of his earlier
poems in the language of Racine to his aged mother, she failed to
understand them. For her he translated, and found that his own Provençal
was richer, more copious and melodious than the French itself, and, if
less finical and restrained by grammatical forms, more pliant for the
poet, and better answering the exigencies of primitive, spontaneous
expression of feeling. From that moment his efforts were unceasingly
directed towards the reintegration of his mother-tongue, which had so
long played but the part of a Cinderella among the Romanic nations.
His poems, collected in 1847, under the title of "Margarideto,"
(Daisies,) were hailed by his countrymen with their habitual national
enthusiasm. Nor did he remain inactive during the Revolution of 1848,
addressing the people in home-phrase in several small volumes of prose.
In 1852, he sent forth a call to his brother-writers, the _felibre_, who
had joined with him in his efforts. The result was the publication of
"Li Prouvençalo," a charming selection from those modern Troubadours
who in all ranks of society sing, because sing they must, in bright and
sunny Provence, and who in very deed find poetry
"In the forge's dust and ashes, in the tissues
of the loom."
The call of Roumanille was the signal for a revival. Since that time, he
himself, now a publisher in Avignon, has steadily watched and
fostered the movement. The new literature has rapidly gone beyond its
home-limits. Within the present year, Paris has republished several of
the most noted works.
The volume which has called forth these remarks, "Lis Oubreto,"
comprises the poems of M. Roumanille,--"Li Margarideto," "Li Nouvè,"
"Li Sounjarello," "La Part de Dieu," "Li Flour de Sauvi." They are
characterized by an elevation in the thoughts and a religious purity
of sentiment, qualities which, it has been urged, and justly too, were
lacking in many of the former productions in various dialects of France.
We call the poetry of Roumanille elevated, yet it always addresses
itself to the people of Provence, and borrows its images from the
many-colored life of those to whom it speaks; religious, but simple and
ingenuous, with a tinge of mysticism,--not the mysticism that seeks the
good in dreamy inaction, as in some of the Spanish authors, nor has it
the obscure tinge of the transcendental English school. The religion
of Roumanille is active, not dogmatic; he incites to _do_, rather than
discuss or dream the good. There is a health, a vigor, an earnestness,
in this spontaneous poesy of an idiom which six centuries ago was the
language of courts, and now sings the song of toil. Side by side with
the over-cultured language of the Parisian, it seems so free and frank!
Where the one is hampered for fear of sinning, the other, buoyant and
elastic, treads freely and fears not to be too ingenuous.
Roumanille's poems have not been translated; it is hardly likely they
ever will be,--at least, the greater number. They were not made for
Paris. They are not at ease in a French garb,--nor, for that matter,
in any other than their own diaphanous, sun-tinted, vowelly Provençal,
unless they could find their expression in some _folk-speech_, as the
Germans say, that could utter things of daily life without euphuistic
windings, without fear of ridicule for things of home expressed in
home-words.
As characterizing the nature and tendency of the new poetry, we subjoin
a translation of "Li Crecho," (The Infant Asylums,) of which M.
Sainte-Beuve, of the French Academy, one whose judgment as literary
critic could be little biased in favor of the _naïve_ graces of the
original, said,--"The piece is worthy of the ancient Troubadours. The
angel of the asylums and of little children in his celestial sadness
could not be disavowed by the angels of Klopstock, nor by that of Alfred
de Vigny."
"Li Crecho" was recited by the author at the inauguration of the Infant
Asylum of Avignon, the 20th of November, 1851, and forms part of the
sheaf of poems entitled "Li Flour de Sauvi."