Mirèio, a Provençal Poem. Frédéric Mistral

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      THIRTY odd years have come and gone since the curious litterateurs of Paris were excited and charmed by the apparition of Frédéric Mistral’s “Mirèio.” A pastoral poem in twelve cantos, composed in the dialect of the Bouches du Rhône, and first issued by an obscure bookseller at Avignon, it was produced before the great literary world with a parallel French version of the author’s own, very singular and rather sauvage as French, but exceedingly bold, picturesque, and poetic, and the poem had the further advantage of a most eloquent and sympathetic introduction in the Revue des Deux Mondes, of September 15, 1859, by Saint-René Taillandier.

      The employment of a rustic southern dialect for the purposes of poetic narrative was by no means so unheard-of a thing, even to the men of that generation, as was indirectly assumed by the first reviewer of “Mirèio.” Had not Jacques Jasmin, the immortal barber of Agen, written, in his own local patois, “Françonette,” and “The Blind Girl of Castel Cuillé,” and the inimitable “Papillotes”? But the work of Mistral, along with that of the school which he claimed to represent, and of which he was easily chief, was heralded by a certain fanfare—it came with a specific and impressive claim of ancient Provençal traditions to be revived, and a vast future inaugurated: pretensions which would have seemed almost droll to the Gascon Jasmin, with his exquisite humour and his adorable simplicity.

      I can do no more than glance in this place at the history of the self-styled Provençal Revival, the most ambitious and by far the most romantic literary adventure of our day. It is an inviting subject, and will one day form an interesting chapter in the long annals of poesy; but the time is not yet fully come for estimating its results, and still less, with its greatest champion yet living, for writing its obituary.

      Joseph Roumanille, a schoolmaster of St. Remy, near Tarascon, was the father of the movement. He first wrote poems in modern Provençal, so the pleasant legend says, because his old mother could not understand him when he essayed to read her those which he had written in French. Delighted, and, as it would seem, a little amazed at his own success, he came forward as the rightful heir to the long-lapsed inheritance of the Troubadours, assumed that the language, whose literary capacities he had re-discovered, was essentially the same as theirs, and contrived thoroughly to imbue with his own faith in its future a band of clever and ardent pupils, among whom, by the will of Heaven, there was one rare genius—Frédéric Mistral, and one wild enthusiast, who was, at the same time, an affluent and pathetic versifier—Théodore Aubanel. Animated by a mystical assurance, hardly less profound than that of Loyola and his companions upon Montmartre, these knights of song bound themselves by a sort of vow, to write in the effete language of the French Academy no more. They constituted themselves a poetic order, and proceeded to adopt an elaborate and somewhat fantastic organization. The almost religious earnestness which animated them may be judged by the fact that when one of the original band, Eugène Garcin—formally saluted by name, along with some half-dozen others, in the sixth canto of “Mirèio”—cooled in his ardour a little, and attempted to point out the factitious and impracticable side of the movement, he was solemnly denounced by Mistral as “the Judas of our little church.” It was a defection of no serious moment, and the revival went its fervid way without Garcin.

      The Provençal poets agreed to call themselves felibre, nobody knows to this day exactly why. There are those who say that the word means homme de foi libre, that is, emancipated from 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 renascence 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.

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