painters of the human face set out with no other intention than that of showing their vigor of touch, and of producing an elegant picture. The result is a total want of likeness to the subject. Indeed, likeness to the subject is not a thing to which they attach any importance. From this craving to display vigor and to produce elegant pictures there results a neglect of details. Pictures are dashed off so sketchily that not only is there no likeness to the face of the person painted, but wise and noble men are represented with an expression of countenance befitting none but rustics of the lowest degree. This is worthy of the gravest censure. If the real features of a personage of antiquity are unknown, it should be the artist's endeavor to represent such a personage in a manner appropriate to his rank or virtues. The man of great rank should be represented as having a dignified air, so that he may appear to have been really great. The virtuous man, again, should be painted so as to look really virtuous. But far from conforming to this principle, the artists of modern times, occupied as they are with nothing but the desire of displaying their vigor of touch, represent the noble and virtuous alike as if they had been rustics or idiots.

The same ever-present desire for mere technical display makes our artists turn beautiful women's faces into ugly ones. It will perhaps be alleged that a too elegant representation of mere beauty of feature may result in a less valuable work of art; but when it does so the fault must lie with the artist. His business is to paint the beautiful face, and at the same time not to produce a picture artistically inferior. In any case, fear for his own reputation as an artist is a wretched excuse for turning a beautiful face into an ugly one. On the contrary, a beautiful woman should be painted as beautiful as possible; for ugliness repels the beholder. At the same time it often happens in such pictures as those which are sold in the Yedo shops, that the strained effort to make the faces beautiful ends in excessive ugliness and vulgarity, to say nothing of artistic degradation.

Our warlike paintings (that is, representations of fierce warriors fighting) have nothing human about the countenances. The immense round eyes, the angry nose, the great mouth, remind one of demons. Now, will any one assert that this unnatural, demoniacal fashion is the proper way to give an idea of the very fiercest warrior's look? No! The warrior's fierceness should indeed be depicted, but he should at the same time be recognized

as a simple human being. It is doubtless to such portraits of warriors that a Chinese author alludes, when, speaking of Japanese paintings, he says that the figures in them are like those of the anthropophagous demons of Buddhist lore. As his countrymen do not ever actually meet living Japanese, such of them as read his book will receive the impression that all our countrymen resemble demons in appearance. For though the Japanese, through constant reading of Chinese books, are well acquainted with Chinese matters, - the Chinese, who never read our literature, are completely ignorant on our score, and there can be little doubt that the few stray allusions to us that do occur are implicitly believed in. This belief of foreigners in our portraits as an actual representation of our people will have the effect of making them imagine - when they see our great men painted like rustics and our beautiful women like frights-that the Japanese men are really contemptible in appearance and all the Japanese women hideous. Neither is it foreigners alone who will be thus misled. Our own very countrymen will not be able to resist the impression that the portraits they see of the unknown heroes of antiquity do really represent those heroes' faces.

JACQUES JASMIN

(1798-1864)

BY HARRIET WATERS PRESTON

ACQUES JASMIN, the barber-poet of Gascony, and the legitimate father of modern Provençal song, was born at Agen, in the Department of Lot-et-Garonne, March 6th, 1798. He wrote with charming ease and vivacity in his native Languedocian dialect; which is closely allied to that of the Bouches-du-Rhône, made famous not long afterward by the more formal efforts of Frédéric Mistral and the self-styled Félibres. The humble parents of Jasmin,. after a signally unsuccessful effort to prepare him for the priesthood, apprenticed the boy to a barber; and he gayly gave to his first volume of verses, which appeared in 1825, the appropriate name of 'Papillotos,' or Curl-Papers. These naïve compositions consisted mainly of such occasional pieces as are always in request from the local poet of a provincial neighborhood: hymns for celebrations, birthday odes, dedications, and elegies: "improvisations obligées," as Sainte-Beuve impatiently called them, which, while they showed the musical capacities of the Gascon patois, and its great richness in onomatopoeic words and phrases, were far from revealing the full range of the singer's power. "One can only pay a poetical debt by means of an impromptu," was Jasmin's own quaint apology, in after years, for the conventionality of his youthful efforts; "but impromptus, though very good money of the heart, are almost always bad money of the head."

JACQUES JASMIN

At the age of thirty-two, five years after the adventurous flight of the Papillotos,' Jasmin told with fascinating simplicity and an inimitable mixture of pathos and fun, in an autobiographical poem entitled 'Soubenes' or Souvenirs, the tale of his own early struggles and privations (he came literally of a line of paupers), and his audacious conquest of a position among men of letters. The touching story of The Blind Girl of Castel-Cuillé,' admirably translated into English verse by Longfellow, appeared about 1835; 'Françonette' in 1840;

and subsequently, at intervals of several years, The Twin Brothers,' ( Simple Martha,' and 'The Son's Week.'

'Françonette,' a romantic and highly wrought narrative in verse, of religious persecution, sorcery, and passion, was held, both in Jasmin's own frank judgment and that of his ablest critics, to be the Gascon's masterpiece. It won him warm and wide recognition, not only in France but throughout literary Europe. Writers of the rank of Pontmartin and Charles Nodier, and highest of all Sainte-Beuve, proceeded to make elaborate studies of the poems and their dialect, lauded their originality, and confessed their distinction. Learned societies and foreign potentates caused medals to be struck in honor of the whilom barber's apprentice. He was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1846; in 1852 his works were crowned by the French Academy, and he received the very exceptional prize of five thousand francs. The head of the parvenu poet was not at all turned by his abrupt recognition in high quarters. Sainte-Beuve had said, with his own exquisite discrimination, that the finest of Jasmin's qualities as a writer was his intellectual sobriety. He proved that he possessed this rare quality in the moral order as well. It is the trait by which he is most distinguished from the younger school of Provençal poets, with their proposed immortalities; — their somewhat over-solemn and oppressive consciousness of descent from the Troubadours, and a mighty poetic mission to fulfill. Jasmin is never pompous, and hardly ever dithyrambic. He is above everything natural and humane; equally impulsive and spontaneous in his laughter and his tears, and always essentially clean. He wrote slowly and with untiring care; bringing out his principal poems, as we have seen, about five years apart. "I have learned,” he said on one occasion, "that in moments of heat and emotion we are all alike eloquent and laconic - prompt both in speech and action; that is to say, we are unconscious poets. And I have also learned that it is possible for a muse to become all this wittingly, and by dint of patient toil." No man was ever better pleased by the approval of high authorities than Jasmin; and he was so far reassured about his first metrical experiments by the commendation of Sainte-Beuve, that he issued a new edition of his early lyrics, including a mock-heroic poem called 'The Charivari,' which he merrily dedicated to the prince of critics. "Away on your snow-white paper wings!" is the burden of his light-hearted envoi, "for now you know that an angel protects you. He has even dressed you up in fine French robes, and put you in the Deux Mondes!" But he was also quite equal to forming an independent opinion of his own performances; and when some one congratulated him on having revived the traditions of the Troubadours, the irrepressible Gascon shouted in reply, "Troubadours indeed! Why,

I am a great deal better poet than any of the Troubadours! Not one of them has written a long poem of sustained interest like my 'Françonette'!" There is at least no petty vanity here.

Jasmin may almost be said to have introduced the fashion, in modern times, of reading or reciting his own poems in public. He had a powerful and mellow voice, and declaimed with great dramatic effect. He made none of those bold and brilliant experiments in metre which allured the younger Félibres, but clung always to the measures long approved in "legal" French poetry; especially to Alexandrines and iambic tetrameters, and to their association in that sort of irregular ballad measure of which La Fontaine had proved the flexibility in classic French, and its peculiar fitness for poetical narrative. Jasmin lived always in the South, but visited the capital occasionally in his later years, and took the lionizing which he received there as lightly as he had taken the medals and snuff-boxes of royal dilettanti, or the habitual starvation, varied by frequent floggings, of his wayward and squalid infancy. He died at Agen on the 4th of October, 1864, in the sixty-seventh year of his age.

A popular edition of his complete works, in parallel Gascon and French, was issued in Paris in 1860-one year after the first publication there of Mistral's 'Miréio.' The rather coarse wood-cut likeness which serves as a frontispiece to this volume represents a striking and very attractive face: broad, open, and massive in feature, shrewd and yet sweet in expression. It is a peasant's face in every line, but full of power; and the head is carried high, with all the unconscious fierté of old South-European race.

Full details concerning the first and most interesting period of Jasmin's remarkable career are to be found in the Souvenirs,' which begin, as the poet always preferred to begin a story, in a low and quiet key, confidentially and colloquially:

"Now will I keep my promise, and will tell
How I was born, and what my youth befell.”

Harmet Mawes Preston