While awaiting the production of Queen Joan at the Roman Theatre of Orange, restored by the Félibres, Mistral continued the active side of his work.
The spreading of the movement on all sides called for more influential organs than either the Almanac or the annual publication. After having contributed for forty years to the Armana and having presided at the inauguration of the Félibréen Review in 1885, he became principal editor in 1890 of a Provençal paper in Avignon, L’Aioli, which under his auspices became the quarterly monitor of Félibrige.
While still retaining the leadership of the movement, Mistral published here and there sundry chapters of his Memoirs, also exhortations to his people, lectures, poems, and chronicles.
In 1897 he published another poem, like the former seven years in the making, Le Poème du Rhône. It is the most delicate and most ingenuously epic of his productions. Above all, he showed in this work his profound symbolism, revealed not only in the depth and breadth of his thought, but in the originality of his versification. Taking the traditions of the country, he has woven them into the winding silk cord of the living, glistening, eternal Rhône, this poem of the river’s course. He has inspired his people to restore the honour of these traditions by the radiant example and fruitful labour of his own life.
The Memoirs best reveal the deep roots of his patriotism. In describing his harmonious existence, the master relates his experience both as a celebrated writer and as a Provençal farmer. Portraits of great men and of great peasants stand out in his record. One can judge of him as a prose writer by the Tales and Addresses appearing here and there during a period of forty years, pages which often equalled in beauty the finest songs of the poet. His letters also, which sowed unceasingly the good grain of the Renaissance, will, when published one day, show even better than the translation of his verse what a great writer the French have in Mistral.
His life after all has been his finest poem. In order to bring about the realisation of his ideal, the raising of his country, he has in turn shown himself poet, orator, philologist, and, above all, patriot. The “new life” that his work has infused into the body of Félibrige has not only regenerated his own Provence by erecting a social ideal, it has also promoted the diffusion of a patriotic sentiment which has become general throughout France, and which may be defined as federalism or simply decentralisation. The ideas of Mistral on this subject of local centres permitting the free expansion of individual energies are well known. It can only be accomplished, according to his theory, by a new constituency, the electors of the existing system being too taken up organising the redivision of the departments to enter into other questions. But he has always refused to become the leader of a political movement. “He who possesses his language holds the key which shall free him from his chains,” Mistral has always said, meaning thereby that in the language dwells the soul of a people. Thus restricting himself to the leadership of a linguistic movement he desired to remain always a poet. It is the purity of his fame which has given such power to his position. By the charm of his personality he won large crowds, just as by his writings he charmed the lettered and the educated. For he was always possessed by a profound belief in the vitality of his language and faith in a renewal of its glory, and absolutely opposed in this respect to Jasmin, who invariably proclaimed himself as the last of the poets of the Oc tongue. If Mistral is not the only worker in the Provençal Renaissance, it is at all events owing to his genius that the movement took wing and lived. Before he arose the ancient and illustrious Oc language was in the same deplorable condition as were the Arenas of Nîmes and of Arles at the beginning of the century. Degraded, unsteady, enveloped by parasite hovels, their pure outline was being obliterated by the disfiguring leprosy. One day came reform, and, taking control, swept away the hovels and rubbish, restoring to their bygone splendour these amphitheatres of the old Romans.
Even so, barbarous jargons had defaced the idiom of Provence. Then with his following of brilliant and ardent patriots Mistral came and dispersed the degenerating patois, restoring to its former beauty the Greek purity of form belonging to the edifice of our ancestors and fitting it for present use.
Paul Marieton.
Every year in May, on the Feast of Sainte-Estelle, the four branches of Félibrige are convoked to important assizes at some place on Provençal soil. At the end of the banquet which follows the floral sports, and after the address of the chief, the latter raises high the Grail of the poetic mysteries, and intones the Song of the Cup. The hymn of the faith and cause of the race is taken up gravely