Mistral

...The two poets in question were Victor Hugo and Mistral...

...That is the grave of the poet who made songs for a beautiful Provencal called Mireio...

...His poem retracing a local folklore legend recalls the time of the Great Schism and the Anti-popes which made Avignon the most corrupt and luxurious court of Europe...

...His works appeared at regular intervals throughout his life, with the harmonious recurrence of slowly ripened fruit...

...Mistral is the poet of the supernatural par excellence and his whole work is a striking challenge to those who assert that fairyland is the exclusive property of the North...

...Frequently we see the characters of his poems in familiar converse, either about their daily affairs or in moments of great emotional stress, with the friendly, or evil powers about them...

...It is not surprising if the devil figures as the central personage in such a decor...

...The poem, placed under the protection of Christ "born among shepherds," blends in a curious manner—according to the leaning of Mistral's temperament—the pastoral serenity of Homer with the cosmic lyrism of the Old Testament...

...The scenery of Mireio was the low-lying valley through which the Rhone flows from the Alpilles to the sea, amid lands, sometimes sweet-smelling like gardens, at other times barren as deserts: Crau and Camargue—lowlands of stones, mirages, salt marshes, wild animals, silent and cruel men...

...Nerto, the young heroine vowed to the devil by an ambitious father, is saved from hell by the divine intervention which changes her into a stone nun...

...It is a bunch of grapes which, with all its leaves, is being offered to you by a peasant...

...Such is the work of Mistral, a great poet, a great Christian and a great Frenchman of Provence...

...How Calendau frees Esterelle from the tyranny of the bandit, Severan, then is obliged, as a valiant troubadour, to undergo the successive trials imposed on him by his lady's ingenious cruelty, is described in the poem, in a series of cantos of unsurpassed beauty, spirit and verve...

...This legend gave Mistral scope for introducing into his poem more of that fantastic element which had already played an important part in Mireio and Calendau...

...He whom they elected King of Provence and who now only survives in the songs of the brown crickets.' " This is the "memento quia pulvis es" of a great man...

...Twenty-five years later, people were to oppose his works to those of declining Romanticism and recognize in him the only great epic poet of France since the author of the Chanson de Roland...

...Like that of the great Florentine it can be called a genuine creation...

...Lamartine prophesies that he will be immortal...

...Frederic Mistral, who was to drag the Provengal language from oblivion and give a glamor to its poetry surpassing that of the time of the troubadours, was born at Maillane on September 8, 1830...

...If Mireio is an idyll, Calendau is the real epic, the heroic chanson de geste of Provence...

...Musset was publishing the Contes d'Espagne et d'ltalie...

...Did he not express that himself with wistful geniality in those lines of the sonnet, My Grave, written shortly before death: "When people shall ask them—what is this mound...

...When he undertook its restoration, the condition of Provencal was so debased and so weak that Mistral's linguistic work is more than a revival...

...He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature, with Echegaray, in 1904 and on his death the Parliament of Hungary sent his widow an official address of condolence...

...Afar from these pioneer works, the child was reared in the little village near Aries, in a rustic house where French was not spoken...

...And all the critics heralding Mireio, his first great work, in a transport of surprise and enthusiasm, pronounce pell-mell the names of Virgil, Dante, Petrarch, Goethe and Milton...

...Mireio, a virgin sacrificed, is the Iphigenia of Aries, not less pure nor less pathetic than the Greek one...

...He died on the eve of the great war, on March 25, 1914, without having, except for a few journeys to Paris, left his native Provence...

...In 1867 Mistral's second great poem appeared, Calendau...

...It has been said of Frederic Mistral that he represented a manner of life and thought anterior to the poets of ancient Greece...

...Four epic poems, two volumes of lyrics which are among the most beautiful in European literature, not to speak of a host of other poems and political prose— this monumental achievement, and the example of the life of a just man wholly devoted to the contemplation and expression of beauty, were his legacy to his country...

...I dedicate Mireio to you," he wrote to Lamartine...

...The hero is the bravest and most athletic fisherman of Cassis, a little harbor near Marseilles...

...Nerto herself demands the sacrifice necessary to redeem her...

...the perfume of your book will not pass away within a thousand years...

...And indeed he had their unfailing simplicity, the childlike piety and candor associated with the majesty of genius...

...As in Faust, as in Freischutz, and in the Countess Kathleen of Yeats, his prey is a human soul...

...Eight years after Calendau, came Nerto...

...But let us open Mireio and we will contradict his humility...

...The supernatural world of Mistral, obedient to the traditions of his native folklore, ranges from the most primitive animism, deifying the elements, fire, the sea, the great parent Rhone, the harvest, the instruments of labor, to the effusions of Christian mysticism...

...Written in a half-dead language or, at any rate, one that was degraded to the level of a mere peasant patois, it bore witness, as well, to the author's complete indifference to fashions of the day...

...Mistral lived eighty-four years...

...The night-fishing, the water-sports of the boys of Cassis, the forest fire, Calendau's flight from the bees, are so many episodes animated by an epic breath, by the liveliness of a great fable, which has no parallel in French poetry...

...In Calendau we have the marine Provence, a land of fishermen, pirates and sirens...

...They shall reply: 'That...

...At a period of literary exoticism, when the poets were seeking throughout the ages and space heroic landscapes for their muse and strange costumes for their heroes, Mistral chose his subjects from among the humble folk of his surroundings...

...Calendau on the other hand is the Hercules of the coast...

...Before the dead girl, so beautiful, so young, so fresh and full of grace we shall say, with Lamartine: "O Poete de Maillane, tu es l'aloes de Provence...

...It was the heroic year of the Romantic movement...

...Up to the last of his long life, the great old man was venerated by his own country folks and praised by critics who are said to be the most caustic in the world but who were silenced by the haughty candor of his genius...

...Until the end his genius was prolific, devoted in turn to poetry, erudition (Mistral compiled for Provence, Lou Tresor dou Felibrige, a vast dictionary of the langue d'Oc comparable to the work of Littre for French) and social action which he pursued until his death, by means of an assiduous correspondence with the elite of Europe upon whom he exercised an influence comparable to that of Ruskin, Whitman or Tagore...

...Mireio expires in ecstatic contemplation...

...Just before his death he finished the translation of Genesis upon which he had been working for fifty years...

...His beloved is a fairy, Esterelle, an elusive spirit who personifies the capricious charms of Provence...

...Mireio is the romance of a little country girl from the delta of the Rhone, who, having fallen in love against her family's will, with a wandering basket-maker, dies of sun-stroke when running one summer's day to implore the aid of the "Saintes Maries," the patronesses of her country...

...When Mireio appeared in 1859, ;t certainly contained all that was likely to rouse opposition...

...The battle of Hernani was being waged at the Theatre Franc,ais...

...Today the Latin countries on the shores of the Mediterranean—France, Spain and Italy—are celebrating the centenary of him whom Gaston Paris has called the magnus parens of the races of langue d'Oc...

...Theophile Gautier, Poesies...

...Each of his four great poems, those just mentioned and the last of them, Lou Pouemo dou Rose (The Poem of the Rhone), a passionate ode to the great river, presents, beyond the human plane upon which the action is set, a transcendant one which surrounds the movements of the heroes with that fabulous atmosphere proper to primitive epics...

...Lamartine, Les Harmonies...

...One who for the langue d'Oc did the same as Dante for the language of Tuscany...

...le parfum de ton livre ne s'evaporera pas en mille ans" (O poet of Maillane, you are the aloe of Provence...

...It is my heart and my soul...

...Faithful to the source of his inspiration, Mistral again took his subject from Provence, but this time not from contemporary popular life...