Mirèio

all slavish literary tradition⁠—as Mistral and his first associates undoubtedly were; there are sticklers for antiquity and a direct descent from the Latin, who maintain the derivation qui facit libros. Howbeit the felibre began to publish at Avignon in the speech of the district, a periodical, which still, I think, appears at irregular intervals. They constructed a small grammar on the lines of the existing grammars of the ancient Langue d’oc, especially of Raynouard’s Résumé de la Grammaire Romaine, and they began the compilation of an extensive dictionary, which has never even approached completion. They also revived the institution of an annual poetic tournament with floral prizes⁠—a silver lily, a golden violet⁠—where the native bards recited their verses, and received their rewards, after the supposed manner of the olden time. These jousts were usually held in the late summer or the early autumn. There were others appointed for the yet more appropriate month of May, which received the name of the feast of the Santo Estello, or Holy Star⁠—memourativo de la reneissenço dou Gai-Sabe⁠—to commemorate the renaissance of the Gay Science. Once in seven years this feast was to be celebrated with extraordinary splendour, “in honour” (I continue to quote from the address of Mistral at the Floral Games held at Hyères in 1885) “of the seven rays of that mysterious star which leads, whithersoever God will, our bark with its orange-freight.” That is to say, which determines, after the manner of the Star of Bethlehem, the place where our society shall assemble and listen to the pieces entered for competition.

Were it possible for a new language to be created, or a decaying one revived, of determinate purpose, by native genius, fiery enthusiasm and unstinted devotion to the cause, that miracle would surely have been wrought by the felibre of the Bouches-du-Rhône. But the triumph of a language, like that of the kingdom of heaven, is among the things which do not come by observation. It is determined by causes as vast as those which shape the continents, and quite as independent of the theories of individual men. The order of the Holy Star, was after all only a kind of idealized mutual admiration society, and of all its members during a full quarter of a century, three names only have advanced from local renown to anything like general recognition. They are the three names already cited of Roumanille, Aubanel, and Mistral.

The two former have already passed away, leaving behind them many charming lyrics, but no work of universal and lasting interest. Mistral is gloriously young at sixty, able, and let us hope willing, to give us in that rich and flowing idiom, which no one else has ever managed with such mastery as he, many more historical and narrative poems, vivid with local colour, and teeming with local tradition, like Calendau⁠—a romance of the last century, which appeared in 1873 and Nerto⁠—a tale of the time of the Popes at Avignon, published in 1884. But it is safe to prophesy that neither Mistral nor any other felibre will ever give us another Mirèio⁠—so spontaneous, artless, and impassioned, so dewy with the memories of the poet’s own childhood on a Provençal farm, or mas, so gay with the laughter and moving with the tears of simple folk, reflecting in so flawless a mirror every change of the seasons, every aspect of the free, primitive, bucolic life of the Mediterranean shore.

The success of Aubanel was perhaps frustrated by the very extravagance of his own aims. When we find him at the fêtes of Forcalquier in 1875 apostrophizing the arbiters of literary renown in France in terms like these: “Sachez que nous sommes un grand peuple, et qu’il n’est plus temps de nous mépriser. Trente départements parlent notre langue, d’une mer à l’autre mer, des Pyrénées jusqu’aux Alpes, de Crau à Limousin; le même amour fait battre notre poitrine, l’amour de la terre natale et de la langue maternelle.⁠ ⁠… Sachez que vous serez tombés longtemps alors que le Provençal, toujours jeune, parlera encore de vous avec pitié”⁠—we can then understand that Saint-René Tallandier, the original sponsor of Mirèio, should have made haste to express his grave apprehensions for the sanity of the revivalist movement, and to repudiate in the name of the great Review all countenance of so vast a pretension on behalf of an “idiom which had vanished for six hundred years from the battlefield of ideas.”

One is reminded of the lament of the late William Barnes that the dialect of Dorset had not prevailed in England over the tongue of Shakespeare. Yet William Barnes, like the felibre, wrote poems in the local patois, far more beautiful and pathetic than any which he ever produced in proper English.

Mistral himself, with the profounder instincts and wiser judgment of a really large mind, has grown more modest from year to year in his hopes concerning the final harvest of that generous enterprise to which his life and powers have been consecrated. He was not quite able to extend a hearty welcome to Alphonse Daudet, when that most humane and sympathetic of realists appeared upon the scene with Numa Roumestan and the Lettres de mon Moulin, describing in the most pellucid French and with a fidelity equal to his own, the prose aspect of the life of the South, and all the rustic scenes which Mistral had so affectionately poetized. All the felibre, indeed, looked askance at Daudet as an intruder, and this is one more sign, if not of the limitations of their leader’s genius, at least of the narrow and ephemeral character of their collective ideal. However, in an address delivered before the previously-mentioned assembly at Hyères in 1885⁠—ten years after Aubanel had hurled his fierce defiance at the French Academy⁠—Mistral might have been heard pleading, with much