ng fatal to all real
poetry. If the true inspiration yet existed upon earth, it burned in the
hearts and brains of men far removed from cities, salons, and the clash
and din of social influences. Your only true poets were the unlettered
peasants, who poured forth their hearts in song, not because they wished
to make poetry, but because they were joyous and true.

"Colleges, academies, schools of learning, schools of literature, and
all such institutions, Jasmin denounced as the curse and the bane of
true poetry. They had spoiled, he said, the very French language. You
could no more write poetry in French now than you could in arithmetical
figures. The language had been licked and kneaded, and tricked out, and
plumed, and dandified, and scented, and minced, and ruled square, and
chipped--(I am trying to give an idea of the strange flood of epithets
he used)--and pranked out, and polished, and muscadined--until, for
all honest purposes of true high poetry, it was mere unavailable and
contemptible jargon.

"It might do for cheating agents de change on the Bourse--for squabbling
politicians in the Chambers--for mincing dandies in the salons--for the
sarcasm of Scribe-ish comedies, or the coarse drolleries of Palais Royal
farces, but for poetry the French language was extinct. All modern
poets who used it were faiseurs de phrase--thinking about words and not
feelings. 'No, no,' my Troubadour continued, 'to write poetry, you must
get the language of a rural people--a language talked among fields,
and trees, and by rivers and mountains--a language never minced or
disfigured by academies and dictionary-makers, and journalists; you
must have a language like that which your own Burns, whom I read of in
Chateaubriand, used; or like the brave, old, mellow tongue--unchanged
for centuries--stuffed with the strangest, quaintest, richest, raciest
idioms and odd solemn words, full of shifting meanings and associations,
at once pathetic and familiar, homely and graceful--the language which
I write in, and which has never yet been defiled by calculating men of
science or jack-a-dandy litterateurs.'" The above sentences may be
taken as a specimen of the ideas with which Jasmin seemed to be actually
overflowing from every pore in his body--so rapid, vehement, and loud
was his enunciation of them. Warming more and more as he went on, he
began to sketch the outlines of his favourite pieces. Every now and
then plunging into recitation, jumpin