Book: Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861




"Gentle Bride, no longer wear,
In thy night-black, odorous hair,
Such a spoil! It is not fit
That a tender soul should sit
Under such accursed gem!
What need'st _thou_ a diadem,--
Thou, within whose Eastern eyes
Thought (a starry Genius) lies,--
Thou, whom Beauty has arrayed,--
Thou, whom Love and Truth have made
Beautiful,--in whom we trace
Woman's softness, angel's grace,
All we hope for, all that streams
Upon us in our haunted dreams?

"O sweet Lady! cast aside,
With a gentle, noble pride,
All to sin or pain allied!
Let the wild-eyed conqueror wear
The bloody laurel in his hair!
Let the black and snaky vine
Round the drinker's temples twine!
Let the slave-begotten gold
Weigh on bosoms hard and cold!
But be THOU forever known
By thy natural light alone!"

One of the best judges of pearls that ever lived, out of the regular
trade, was no less a person than Caesar. He was a great connoisseur, and
could tell at once, when he took a pearl in his hand, its weight and
value. He gave one away worth a quarter of a million dollars. Servilia,
the mother of Brutus, was the lady to whom he made the regal present.

Caligula, not satisfied with building ships of cedar with sterns inlaid
with gems, had a pearl-collar made for a favorite horse! Pliny grows
indignant as he chronicles the luxury of this Emperor.

"I have seen," says he, "Lollia Paulina, who was the wife of the
Emperor Caligula,--and this not on the occasion of a solemn festival or
ceremony, but merely at a supper of ordinary betrothals,--I have seen
Lollia Paulina covered with emeralds and pearls, arranged alternately,
so as to give each other additional brilliancy, on her head, neck, arms,
hands, and girdle, to the amount of forty thousand sesterces, [L336,000
sterling,] the which value she was prepared to prove on the instant by
producing the receipts. And these pearls came, not from the prodigal
generosity of an imperial husband, but from treasures which had been the
spoils of provinces. Marcus Lollius, her grandfather, was dishonored
in all the East on account of the gifts he had extorted from kings,
disgraced by Tiberius, and obliged to poison himself, that his
grand-daughter might exhibit herself by the light of the _lucernae_
blazing with jewels."

Nero offered to Jupiter Capitolinus the first trimmings of his beard in
a magnificent vase enriched with the costliest pearls.

Catherine de Medicis and Diane de Poitiers almost floated in pearls,
their dresses being literally covered with them. The wedding-robe of
Anne of Cleves was a rich cloth-of-gold, thickly embroidered with
great flowers of large Orient pearls. Poor Mary, Queen of Scots, had a
wonderful lot of pearls among her jewels; and the sneaking manner in
which Elizabeth got possession of them we will leave Miss Strickland,
the biographer of Queens, to relate.

"If anything farther than the letters of Drury and Throgmorton be
required to prove the confederacy between the English Government and the
Earl of Moray, it will only be necessary to expose the disgraceful
fact of the traffic of Queen Mary's costly _parure_ of pearls, her own
personal property, which she had brought with her from France. A few
days before she effected her escape from Lochleven Castle, the righteous
Regent sent these, with a choice collection of her jewels, very secretly
to London, by his trusty agent, Sir Nicholas Elphinstone, who undertook
to negotiate their sale, with the assistance of Throgmorton, to whom he
was directed for that purpose. As these pearls were considered the most
magnificent in Europe, Queen Elizabeth was complimented with the first
offer of them. 'She saw them yesterday, May 2nd,' writes Bodutel La
Forrest, the French ambassador at the Court of England, 'in the presence
of the Earls of Pembroke and Leicester, and pronounced them to be of
unparalleled beauty.' He thus describes them: 'There are six cordons
of large pearls, strung as paternosters; but there are five-and-twenty
separate from the rest, much finer and larger than those which are
strung; these are for the most part like black _muscades_. They had not
been here more than three days, when they were appraised by various
merchants; this Queen wishing to have them at the sum named by the
jeweller, who could have made his profit by selling them again. They
were at first shown to three or four working jewellers and lapidaries,
by whom they were estimated at three thousand pounds sterling, (about
ten thousand crowns,) and who offered to give that sum for them. Several
Italian merchants came after them, who valued them at twelve thousand
crowns, which is the price, as I am told, this Queen Elizabeth will take
them at. There is a Genoese who saw them after the others, and said they
were worth sixteen thousand crowns; but I think they will allow her to
have them for twelve thousand.' 'In the mean time,' continues he, in his
letter to Catherine of Medicis, 'I have not delayed giving your Majesty
timely notice of what was going on, though I doubt she will not allow
them to escape her. The rest of the jewels are not near so valuable as
the pearls. The only thing I have heard particularly described is
a piece of unicorn richly carved and decorated.' Mary's royal
mother-in-law of France, no whit more scrupulous than her good cousin of
England, was eager to compete with the latter for the purchase of the
pearls, knowing that they were worth nearly double the sum at which they
had been valued in London. Some of them she had herself presented to
Mary, and especially wished to recover; but the ambassador wrote to her
in reply, that 'he had found it impossible to accomplish her desire of
obtaining the Queen of Scots' pearls, for, as he had told her from the
first, they were intended for the gratification of the Queen of England,
who had been allowed to purchase them at her own price, and they were
now in her hands.'

"Inadequate though the sum for which her pearls were sold was to their
real value, it assisted to turn the scale against their real owner.

"In one of her letters to Elizabeth, supplicating her to procure some
amelioration of the rigorous confinement of her captive friends, Mary
alludes to her stolen jewels:--'I beg also,' says she, 'that you will
prohibit the sale of the rest of my jewels, which the rebels have
ordered in their Parliament, for you have promised that nothing should
be done in it to my prejudice. I should be very glad, if they were in
safer custody, for they are not meat proper for traitors. Between you
and me it would make little difference, and I should be rejoiced, if any
of them happened to be to your taste, that you would accept them from me
as offerings of my good-will.'

"From this frank offer it is apparent that Mary was not aware of the
base part Elizabeth had acted, in purchasing her magnificent _parure_ of
pearls of Moray, for a third part of their value."

One of the most famous pearls yet discovered (there may be shells down
below that hide a finer specimen) is the beautiful _Peregrina_. It was
fished up by a little negro boy in 1560, who obtained his liberty by
opening an oyster. The modest bivalve was so small that the boy in
disgust was about to pitch it back into the sea. But he thought better
of his rash determination, pulled the shells asunder, and, lo, the
rarest of priceless pearls! [_Moral._ Don't despise little oysters.] La
Peregrina is shaped like a pear, and is of the size of a pigeon's egg.
It was presented to Philip II. by the finder's master, and is still in
Spain. No sum has ever determined its value. The King's jeweller named
five hundred thousand dollars, but that paltry amount was scouted as
ridiculously small.

There is a Rabbinical story which aptly shows the high estimate of
pearls in early ages, only one object in Nature being held worthy to be
placed above them:--

"On approaching Egypt, Abraham locked Sarah in a chest, that none might
behold her dangerous beauty. But when he was come to the place of paying
custom, the collectors said, 'Pay us the custom': and he said, 'I will
pay the custom.' They said to him, 'Thou carriest clothes': and he said,
'I will pay for clothes.' Then they said to him, 'Thou carriest gold':
and he answered them, 'I will pay for my gold.' On this they further
said to him, 'Surely thou bearest the finest silk': he replied, 'I will
pay custom for the finest silk.' Then said they, 'Surely it must be
pearls that thou takest with thee': and he only answered, 'I will pay
for pearls.' Seeing that they could name nothing of value for which the
patriarch was not willing to pay custom, they said, 'It cannot be but
thou open the box, and let us see what is within.' So they opened the
box, and the whole land of Egypt was illumined by the lustre of Sarah's
beauty,--far exceeding even that of pearls."

Shakspeare, who loved all things beautiful, and embalmed them so that
their lustre could lose nothing at his hands, was never tired of
introducing the diamond and the pearl. They were his favorite ornaments;
and we intended to point out some of the splendid passages in which he
has used them. But we have room now for only one of those priceless
sentences in which he has set the diamond and the pearl as they were
never set before. No kingly diadem can boast such jewels as glow along
these lines from "Lear":--

"You have seen
Sunshine and rain at one: her smiles and tears
Were like a better day: Those happy smiles
That played on her ripe lip seemed not to know
What guests were in her eyes; which parted thence,
_As pearls from diamonds dropp'd._"




REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.


1. _Lis Oubreto_ de ROUMANILLE. Avignon. 1860. 12mo.

2. T. AUBANEL. _La Miougrano Entreduberto._ Avec Traduction litterale en
regard. Avignon: J. Roumanille. 1860. 12mo.

3. _Mireio._ Pouemo Prouvencau de FREDERI MISTRAL. Avec la Traduction
litterale en regard. Avignon: J. Roumanille. 1859. 8vo.

4. _Las Papillotos_ de JACQUES JASMIN, de l'Academie d'Agen, Maitre es
Jeux-Floraux, Grand Prix de l'Academie Francaise. Edition populaire,
avec le Francais en regard, et ornee d'un Portrait. De 1822 a 1858.
Paris: Firmin Didot, Freres & Cie. 1860. 12mo.

5. _Les Piaoulats d'un Reipetit._ Recueil de Poesies Patoises. Par J.B.
Veyre, Instituteur a 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 Provencal, 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 Provencal, 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 Provencal
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 Prouvencalo," 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 Nouve,"
"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 Provencal,
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 _naive_ 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."

I.

"Among the choirs of Seraphim, whom God has created to sing eternally,
transported with love, 'Glory, glory to the Father!'--among the joys of
Paradise, one oftentimes, far from the happy singers, went thoughtful
away.

"And his snow-white forehead inclined towards our world, as droops a
flower that has no moisture in summer. Day by day he grew more dreamy.
If sadness, when in God's glory, could torment the heart, I should say
that this fair angel was pining with sorrow.

"Of what did he dream thus, and in secret? Why was he not of the feast?
Why, alone among angels, as one that had sinned, did he bow the head?"

II.

"Lo! he has just knelt at the feet of God. What will he say? What will
he do? To see and hear him, his brethren interrupt their song of praise."

III.

"'When Jesus, thy child, wept,--when he shivered with cold in the
manger of Bethlehem,--it was my smile that consoled him, my wings that
sheltered him, with my warm breath did I comfort him.

"'And since then, O God, when a child weeps, in my pitying heart his
voice resounds. Therefore forever now am I sick at heart,--therefore, O
Lord, am I ever thoughtful.

"'On earth, O God, I have something to do. Let me descend there. There
are so many babes, poor milk-lambs, who, shivering with cold, weep and
wail far from the breasts, far from the kisses of their mothers! In warm
rooms will I shelter them,--will cover and tend them,--will nurse and
caress them,--will lull them to rest. Instead of one mother, they shall
each have twenty that shall give them suck and soothe them to sleep.'"

IV.

"And with heart and hand did the angels applaud,--a tremor of joy shot
through the stars of heaven,--and, unfolding his pinions, with the
rapidity of lightning the angel descended. The road-side smiled with
flowers, as he passed,--and mothers trembled for joy; for infant-asylums
arose wherever the child-angel trod."

One of the first to respond to the call of Roumanille for the
composition of the selection "Li Prouvencalo" was Th. Aubanel, also of
Avignon. The "Segaire" (Mowers) and "Lou 9 Thermidor" made it plain,
that, of the thirty names, that of the young printer would soon take a
prominent place among the revivers of Southern letters. And now, eight
years later, the promise of M. Rene Taillandier, in his introduction to
the selection, has become reality.

"La Miougrano Entreduberto" (The Opened Pomegranate) is printed with an
accompanying French translation. Mistral, the brother-poet and friend of
the author, thus announces the poems:--

"The pomegranate is of its nature wilder than other trees. It loves to
grow in pebbly elevations (_clapeirolo_) in the full sun-rays, far from
man and nearer to God. There alone, in the scorching summer-beams, it
expands in secret its blood-red flowers. Love and the sun fecundate
its bloom. In the crimson chalices thousands of coral-grains germ
spontaneously, like a thousand fair sisters all under the same roof.

"The swollen pomegranate holds imprisoned as long as it can the roseate
seeds, the thousand blushing sisters. But the birds of the moor speak to
the solitary tree, saying,--'What wilt thou do with the seeds? Even now
comes the autumn, even now comes the winter, that chases us beyond the
hills, beyond the seas.....And shall it be said, O wild pomegranate,
that we have left Provence without seeing thy beautiful coral-grains,
without having a glimpse of thy thousand virgin daughters?'

"Then, to satisfy the envious birdlings of the moor, the pomegranate
slowly half-opens its fruit; the thousand vermeil seeds glitter in the
sun; the thousand timorous sisters with rosy cheeks peep through the
arched window: and the roguish birds come in flocks and feast at ease on
the beautiful coral-grains; the roguish lovers devour with kisses the
fair blushing sisters.

"Aubanel--and you will say as I do, when you have read his book--is a
wild pomegranate-tree. The Provencal public, whom his first poems had
pleased so much, was beginning to say,--'But what is our Aubanel doing,
that we no longer hear him sing?'"

Then follows an exposition of the hopeless passion of the poet,--how he
took for motto,

"Quau canto,
Soun mau encanto."

Hence the three books of poems now before us,--"The Book of Love,"
"Twilight," and "The Book of Death." "The Book of Love," "a thing
excessively rare," as we are told in the Preface, "but this one written
in good faith," opens with a couplet that is a key to the whole
volume:--

"I am sick at heart,
And _will_ not be cured."

We subjoin a literal translation of the eleventh song, line for line:--

De-la-man-d'eila de la mar,
Dins mis ouro de pantaiage,
Souventi-fes ieu fau un viage,
Ieu fau souvent un viage amar,
De-la-man-d'eila, de la mar."
etc., etc.

"Far away, beyond the seas,
In my hours of reverie,
Oftentimes I make a voyage,
I often make a bitter voyage,
Far away, beyond the seas.

"Yonder far, towards the Dardanelles,
With the ships I glide away,
Whose long masts pierce the sky;
Towards my loved one do I go,
Yonder far, towards the Dardanelles.

"With the great white clouds sailing on,
Driven by the wind, their master-shepherd,
The great clouds which before the stars
Pass onwards like white flocks,
With the clouds I go sailing on.

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