Well, I suppose M. Férigoule has done his work as well as such work can be done; but as for art!—it is the negation of all art, this imitation of life, which is as dead as the stuff of which it is made. The more realistic such figures are the more dreadful they are. For my part I can never look at them without a shudder, and those in the Musée Arlaten took away all my pleasure in the careful and interesting furnishing of the rooms, in which they stand and sit and lie in their horrible immobility. If only they were taken out, how imagination might play about the rooms themselves, which contain every detail of the warm picturesque home-life of the past, now fading away. With them, imagination is killed. It is as if the rooms had been prepared for corpses.
But one must not let one's disgust for these mannequins, which cannot be felt by everybody, or so great a man as Mistral would not have been so pleased with them, stand for one's whole impression of this interesting museum. I spent a couple of hours in it very happily employed in gathering up the pleasure that this spring expedition in Provence had brought me. It touches on all the life and all the memories of that fascinating country, and it is especially rich in the accessories of the ancient and picturesque work of the soil, perhaps more ancient and more picturesque in Provence than in most countries. In Mistral's youth there can have been little change from the ways of centuries past. He lived to see much that made his country unlike others disappear, and gathered what he could in his museum so that it should not be forgotten. But it has not all disappeared. Except here and there, men and women have given up their old distinctive costumes, harvests are reaped by machinery, the Rhône no longer bears its freights drawn by the huge teams of horses or oxen, the festivals of the church do not see every house decked and every street strewn with green. But the queenly Arlésian women still wear their becoming coifs; and on high days and holidays some of the rich dresses, of which there is such a variety in this museum, are taken out of old coffers and presses, in the great country farmhouses the old furniture that has descended from father to son is polished and cherished, and many of the old customs are kept up. The harvest of the olives sees the girls of Provence filling their baskets as they did in the days of Mireille, and the old-fashioned mills grind out their tons of rich oil. The shepherds lead their flocks over the stony, herb-scented hills as they led them when Marius drove out the barbarians. The wild bulls and horses roam the plains of the Camargue, and the life of the men who have to do with them is not changed.
Of all these things, and many others, there is evidence in the Musée Arlaten, and walking through the country one sees it for one's self, enough at least to make one love the fair sunburnt land that holds so many memories, and to love its roads and fields and hills no less than the treasures it hoards in its ancient cities.
THE END.
APPENDIX
The Provençal Legend
Dr. M. R. James has sent me a pamphlet, "Saint Lazare et Saint Maximin," by Dom G. Morin, which, although published in Paris in 1897, he considers to be the last word on the Provençe legends of St. Lazarus, etc. I summarize its conclusions shortly.