Frédéric Mistral / Poet and Leader in Provence

by Charles Alfred Downer

Vincèn and Mirèio are charming in their naïveté, they are unspoiled and unreflecting. They are children, and lacking in well-defined personality. They have no knowledge of anything beyond the customs and superstitions of the simple folk about them. Their religion, which is so continually before us, furnishing the very mainspring of the fatal dénouement, is of the most superficial sort, if it can be called religion at all. Whether you are bitten by a dog, a wolf, or a snake, or lose your eyesight, or are in danger of losing your lover, you run to the shrine of some saint for help. The religious feeling really runs no deeper. In his outburst of grief upon seeing Mirèio prone upon the floor of the chapel, the unhappy boy asks what he has done to merit such a blow. "Has he lit his pipe in a church at the lamp? or dragged the crucifix among thistles, like the Jews?" Of the deeper, nobler consolations of religion, of the problems of human destiny, of the relations of religious conviction to human conduct, there is no inkling.

All the characters are equally on the surface. They are types rather than individuals. They have in common the gift of eloquence. They have no thought-life, no meditation. They are eminently sociable, frequently loquacious. They make you think of Daudet's statement concerning the man of the south, "When he is not talking, he is not thinking." But they talk well, and have to an eminent degree the gift of narrative. Vincèn's stories of what he knows and has seen are told most beautifully, and the poet never forgets himself by making the boy utter thoughts he could not have conceived. The boy is merely a child of his race. In any rustic gathering in southern France you may hear a man of the people speak dramatically and thrillingly, with resonant voice and vivid gestures, with a marvellous power of mimicry, and the faces of the listeners reflect all the emotions of the speaker. The numerous scenes, therefore, wherein a group of listeners follow with keenest interest a tale that is told, are eminently true to life. The supreme merit of Mirèio lies in this power of narration that its author possesses. It is all action from beginning to end, and even the digressions and episodes, which occasionally arrest the flow of the narrative, are in themselves admirable pieces of narrative. Most critics have found fault with these episodes and the frequent insertion of legends. In defence of the author, it may be said, that he must have feared while writing Mirèio that it might be his last and only opportunity to address his countrymen in their own dialect, and in his desire to bring them back to a love of the traditions of Provence, he yielded to the temptation to crowd his poem rather more than he would otherwise have done.

Mirèio, then, is a lovely poem, an idyll, a charming, vivid picture of life in the rural parts of the Rhone region. It is singularly original. Local color is its very essence. Its thought and action are strictly circumscribed within the boundaries of the Crau and the Camargue, and its originality consists in this limitation, in the fact that a poet of this century has written a work that comes within the definition of an epic, with all the primitive simplicity of Biblical or Classic writers, without any agitation of the problems of modern life, without any new thought or feeling concerning love or death, or man's relation to the universe, using a dialect unknown at the time beyond the region described. Its success could scarcely have been attained without the poet's masterly prose translation, and yet it is evident that the poem could not have been conceived and carried out in French verse. The freshness, the artlessness, the lack of modernity, would have suffered if the poet had bent his inspiration to the official language. Using a new idiom, wherein he practically had no predecessor, he was free to create expression as he went along, and was not compelled to cast his thought in existing moulds.

The poem cannot place its author among the very great poets of the world, if only because of this limitation. It lacks the breadth and depth, the everlasting interest. But it is a work of great beauty, of wonderful purity, a sweet story, told in lovely, limpid language, and will cause many eyes to turn awhile from other lands to the sunny landscapes of southern France.

II. CALENDAU. (CALENDAL.)

Mistral spent seven years in elaborating his second epic, as he did in writing his first. The poem had not a popular success, and the reason is not far to seek. The most striking limitation of the poet is his failure to create beings of flesh and blood. Even in Mirèio this lack of well-defined individuality in the characters begins to be apparent, but, in general, the action of the earlier poem is confined to the world of realities, whereas in Calendau the poet has given free play to a brilliant and vivid imagination, launching forth into the heroic and incredible, yet without abandoning the world of real time and real places. Allegory and symbolism are the web and woof of Calendau. The poem, again, is overburdened with minute historic details and descriptions, which are greatly magnified in the eye of his imagination. A poet, of course, must be pardoned for this want of a sense of proportion, but even a Provençal reader cannot be kept in constant illusion as to the greatness of little places that can scarcely be found upon the map, or dazzled by the magnificence of achievements that really have left little or no impress upon the history of the world. As we follow the poet's work in its chronological development, we find this trait growing more and more pronounced. He sees his beloved Provence, its past and present, and its future, too, in a magnifying mirror that embellishes all it reflects with splendid, glowing colors, and exalts little figures to colossal proportions. The reader falls easily under the spell of this exuberant enthusiasm and is charmed by the poetic power evinced. The wealth of words, the beauty of the imagery with which, for example, the humble, well-nigh unknown little port of Cassis and its fishing industry are described, carry us along and hold us in momentary illusion. We see them in the poet's magic mirror for the time. To the traveller or the sober historian all these things appear very, very different.

With the Félibres the success of the poem was much greater; it is a kind of patriotic hymn, a glorification of the past of Provence, and a song of hope for its future. Its allegory, its learned literary allusions, its delving into obscure historic events, preclude any hope of popular success.

Like Mirèio, the poem is divided into twelve cantos, and the form of stanza employed is the same. The heroic tone of the poem might be thought to have required verse of greater stateliness; the recurrence of the three feminine rhymes in the shorter verses often seems too pretty. Like Mirèio, the poem has the outward marks of an epic. Unlike Mirèio, it reminds us frequently of the Chansons de geste, and we see that the author has been living in the world of the Old Provençal poets. This is apparent not merely in the constant allusions, in the reproductions of episodes, but in the manner in which the narrative moves along. Lamartine would not have been reminded of the ancient Greek poets had Calendau preceded Mirèio. The conception of courtly love, the guiding, elevating inspiration of Beatrice, leading Dante on to greater, higher, more spiritual things, are the sources of the chief ideas contained in Calendau. Vincèn and Mirèio remain throughout the simple youth and maiden they were, but Calendau, "the simple fisherman of Cassis," develops into a great hero, performing Herculean tasks, like a knight of the days of chivalry, and rises higher and higher until he wins "the empire of pure love"—his lady's hand.

Very beautiful is the invocation addressed to the "soul of his country that radiates, manifest in its language and in its history—that through the greatness of its memories saves hope for him." It is the spirit that inspired the sweet Troubadours, and set the voice of Mirabeau thundering like the mistral. The poet proclaims his belief in his race. "For the waves of the ages and their storms and horrors mingle the nations and wipe out frontiers in vain. Mother Earth, Nature, ever feeds her sons with the same milk, her hard breast will ever give the fine oil to the olive; Spirit, ever springing into life, joyous, proud, and living spirit that neighest in the noise of the Rhone and in the wind thereof! spirit of the harmonious woods, and of the sunny bays, pious soul of the fatherland, I call thee! be incarnate in my Provençal verse!"

We are plunged in orthodox fashion in medias res. The young fisherman is seated upon the rocky heights above the sea before the beautiful woman he loves. He does not know who she is; he has performed almost superhuman exploits to win her; but there is an obstacle to their union. She relates that she is the last of the family of the Princes des Baux, who had their castle and city hewn out of the solid rock in the strange mountains that overlook the plain of Arles. She tells the marvellous history of the family, evoking a vision of the days of courtly love when the Troubadours sang at the feet of the fair princesses. A panorama of the life of those days of poetry and song moves before us. The princess even describes and defines in poetic language the forms of verse in vogue in the ancient days, the Tenson, the Pastoral, the Ballad, the Sirventés, the Romance, the Congé, the Aubade, the Solace of Love. She relates her marriage with the Count Sévéran, who fascinated her by some mysterious power. At the wedding-feast she learns that he is a mere bandit, leader of a band of robbers that infests the country. She fled away through the mountains and found the grotto where she now lives. The fishermen, seeing her appear and vanish among the cliffs, take her to be the fairy Esterello, who is a sort of Loreley. Calendau determines that either Sévéran or he shall die, and seeks him out. His splendid physical appearance and bold, defiant manner arouse in the bandit a desire to get Calendau to join his company, and the women of the band are charmed with him. They ask to hear the story of his life, and the great body of the poem consists of the narrative by Calendau of his exploits. After the last one Calendau has risen to the loftiest conception of pure love through the guidance of Esterello, like Dante inspired by Beatrice. Then the Count holds an orgy and tries to tempt the virtue of the hero. Calendau, after witnessing the lascivious dances, challenges the Count to mortal combat. The latter knows now who he is, and that Esterello is none other than the bride who fled after the marriage-feast. Calendau is overpowered and imprisoned, and the Count and his men set off in search of Esterello. But Calendau is freed by Fourtuneto, one of the women, and journeys by sea from Cannes to Cassis to defend the Princess. Here a great combat takes place with the Count, who fires the pine-woods and perishes miserably, uttering blasphemous imprecations. The Cassidians fight the fire, and Calendau and the blond Princess are saved.