Frédéric Mistral

“ Mistral's life is a successful life; he has revived a language, created a literature, inspired a people. So potent is art to-day in the old land of the Troubadours. All the charm and beauty of that sunny land, all that is enchanting in its past, all the best, in the ideal sense, that may be hoped for in its future, is expressed in his musical, limpid, lovely verse. Such a poet and such a leader of men is rare in the annals of literature. Such complete oneness of purpose and of achievement is rare among men. ”

“ WHEN violets are blue in the blue shadows
Of the o’erhanging trees,
The youth who stray in pairs about the meadows
Are glad to gather these.
When peace descends upon the troubled Ocean,
And he his wrath forgets,
Flock from Martigue the boats with wing-like motion,
The fishes fill their nets.
And when the girls of Crau bloom into beauty
(And fairer earth knows not) ,
Aye are there suitors ready for their duty
In castle and in cot.
Thus to Mirèio’s home came seeking her
A trio notable,—a horse-tamer,
A herdsman, and a shepherd. ”

“ Good God! the blows of Vincen fall like hail.
Yet ah! what club-like hits the herdsman deals!
And, as their crushing weight the weaver feels,
He whirls as whirls a sling about his foe,
And backward bends to deal his fiercest blow.
"Look your last, villain!" Ere the word said he,
The mighty herdsman seized him bodily,
And flung him o'er his shoulder far away,
As a Provençal shovels wheat. He lay
A moment on his side, not sorely hurt.
"Pick up, O worm!" cried Ourrias,—"pick the dirt
"You have displaced, and eat it, if you will!" ”

“ Nine following eves the beasts take up their station,
And seem to mourn after their speechless fashion;
The sea, the plain, the winds, thereover blowing,
Echo nine days with melancholy lowing,—
"Poor Master Ambroi!" Vincen wandered on,
"Thou wilt weep heavy tears over thy son!
And now, good Santen, one last wish is mine,—
Bury me with my love, below the brine;
Scoop in the oozy sand a crib for two:
Tears for so great a mourning will not do. ”

“ Saying, "Shake hands! Why, Holy Cross, look here!
What heaps of sheaves, good master, will this year
Cumber your treading-floor!"—"Mayhap," said he:
"We cannot alway judge by what we see.
"Till all is trod, the truth will not be known.
I have known years that promised," he went on,
"Eighty full bushels to the acre fairly,
And yielded in their stead a dozen barely.
Yet let us be content!" And, with a smile,
He shook their hands all round in friendly style,
And gossiped with old Ambroi affably. ”

“ I love you, Vincen, love you!—That is all!”
The river-banks, the close-pruned willows hoary,
Green grass and ambient air, hearing this story,
Were full of glee. But the poor basket-weaver,
“Princess, that thou who art so fair and clever,
Shouldst have a tongue given to wicked lying!
Why, it confounds me! It is stupefying!
“What! thou in love with me? Mirèio,
My poor life is yet happy. Do not go
And make a jest thereof! I might believe
Just for one moment, and thereafter grieve
My soul to death. Ah, no! my pretty maid,
Laugh no more at me in this wise!” he said. ”

“ And whets his tusks upon the mountain oaks.
And now young Vincen with his comely looks
Must needs have chosen the herdsman’s very path,
And meets him squarely, boiling o’er with wrath.{82}
Whereas the simple dreamer wandered smiling,
His memory with a sweet tale beguiling,
That he had heard a fond girl whispering
Beneath a mulberry-tree one morn in spring.
Straight is he as a cane from the Durance;
And love, peace, joy, beam from his countenance.
The soft air swells his loose, unbottoned shirt:
His firm, bare feet are by the stones unhurt,
And light as lizard slips he o’er the way. ”

“ Mirèio gathered leaves among the rest.
It chanced, moreover, on that same May morning,
The little gypsy, for her own adorning,
Had cherries in her ears, for rings, suspended,
Just as our Vincen's footsteps thither tended.
Like Latin seaside people everywhere,
He wore a red cap on his raven hair,
With a cock's feather gayly set therein;
And, prancing onward, with a stick made spin
The flints from wayside stone-heaps, and set flying
The lazy adders in his pathway lying.
When suddenly, from the straight, leafy alley,
"Whither away so fast?" a voice comes gayly,
Mirèio's. ”

“ Oh, stay! Life’s in thine eyes.
Ah, if thou couldst do something,” the lad cries,
“For him,—the poor old basket-weaver there,—
My father, worn with toil!” In her despair,
Mirèio bathes the wound, while some bring lint,
And some run to the hills for healing mint.
Then the maid’s mother spake: “Let four men rally,
And to the Fairies’ Cavern, in the valley
They call Enfer, bear up this wounded man.
The deadlier the hurt, the sooner can
The old witch heal. Scale first the cliffs of Baux,
And circling vultures the cave’s mouth will show.” ”

“ Even then the worthy charioteer would have continued his reminiscences had it not been that, as the rays of the awakening sun lit up the wide stretches of the great plains of the Camargue lying between the delta of the two Rhônes, we arrived at the Bridge of Forks.
In our eyes, even a more beautiful sight than the rising sun (we were both about five and twenty) was the awakening maiden who, as I have mentioned already, had been packed in just behind us with her mother. Shaking off the hood of her cloak, she emerged all smiling and fresh, like a goddess of youth. ”

“ One day, either in the near or the far future, I told myself, I should meet her, my fate, in that same land of Arles, a superb country maiden, wearing the Arlesian costume like a queen, galloping on her steed across the plains of the Crau, a trident in her hand; after a long and ardent wooing, one fine day my song of love would win her, and in triumph I should conduct her to our farm, where, like my mother before her, she should reign over her pastoral subjects. ”

“ Mirèio hasted no less anxiously
Than Magalouno in the days gone by,
Who searched the wood with sad, inquiring glance
For her lost lover, Pèire of Provence,
When cruel waves divorced him from her side,
And left her lone and wretched. Soon espied
The maid, upon the boundary of the lea,
Folds where her sire’s own shepherds could she see
Already milking. Some the sheep compelled,
Against the pen-side by the muzzle held,
To suckle quietly their tawny lambs.
Always arose the bleat of certain dams;
While other childless ones the shepherds guide
Toward the milker. ”

“ Father and I, and only hear the Rhone
Rush headlong o’er the shingle, ’tis most drear!
Not in the pleasant season of the year,
For then upon our travels we are bound,
And trudge from farm to farm the country round.
“But when the holly-berries have turned red,
And winter comes, and nights are long,” he said,
“And sitting by the dying fire we catch
Whistle or mew of goblin at the latch;
And I must wait till bed-time there with him,
Speaking but seldom, and the room so dim,”—
Broke in the happy girl, unthinkingly,
“Ah! but your mother, Vincen, where is she?”
“Mother is dead.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Until the mulberry-tree is bare of leaves,
And these the ready sack at once receives,
At whose distended mouth—ah, youth is sweet!—
Mirèio's pretty taper hand will meet
In strange entanglement that somehow lingers
That Vincen's, with its brown and burning fingers.
Both started. In their cheeks the flush rose higher:
They felt the heat of some mysterious fire.
They dropped the mulberry-leaves as if afraid,
And, tremulous with passion, the boy said,—
"What aileth thee, my lady? answer me! ”

“ When later he writes of Provence in the Middle Age, of the days of the Troubadours, his manner does not change; his work offers no analogies here with the French Romantic school.
No poet, it would seem, was ever so in love with his own language; no artist ever so loved the mere material he was using. Mistral loves the words he uses, he loves their sound, he loves to hear them from the lips of those about him; he loves the intonations and the cadences of his verse; his love is for the speech itself aside from any meaning it conveys. A beautiful instrument it is indeed. ”

“ Waved o'er them waiting, and, from time to time,
Humming some fragment of the weaver's rhyme.
Mirèio tarried, but not quite alone.
A social spirit had the little one,
And she and Vincen chatted happily.
'Twas a fair sight, the two young heads to see
Meeting and parting, coming still and going
Like aster-flowers10 when merry winds are blowing.
"Now tell me, Vincen," thus Mirèio,
"If oftentimes as you and Ambroi go
Bearing your burdens the wild country over,
Some haunted castle you do not discover,
Or joyous fête, or shining palace meet,
While we in the home-nest for ever sit?" ”

“ Vincen's dear name so lightly uttered was.
There 's mystery here! Mirèio, we are jealous!
Lasted the picking long that day? Pray, tell us!
When two friends meet, the hour is winged with pleasure;
And, for a lover, one has always leisure!"
"Oh, fie!" Mirèio said. "Enough of joking!
Mind your work now, and be not so provoking!
You would make swear the very saints! But I
Promise you one and all, most faithfully,
I'll seek a convent while my years are tender,
Sooner than e'er my maiden heart surrender!"
Then brake the damsels into merry chorus:
"Have we not pretty Magali before us? ”

“ And “Have you seen Mirèio?” is their cry.
While Ramoun and his wife by the fireside
Are sitting, lost in grief, and swollen-eyed,
And at their hearts the bitterness of death.
“Doubtless,” they said, “her reason wandereth.
Oh, what a mad and wretched maid it is!
Oh, what a heavy, cruel downfall this!
“Oh, dire disgrace! Our beauty and our hope
So with the last of trampers to elope!
Fled with a gypsy! And who shall discover
The secret hole of this kidnapping lover,
Where he the shameless one concealèd hath?”
And, as they spake, they knit their brows in wrath. ”

“ Some of the Félibres about him are somewhat discouraged, many of them have never set their aspirations as high as he has done, and some look upon his dreams as Utopian. Whatever be the future of the movement he has founded, Mistral's life in its simple oneness, and in its astonishing success, is indeed most remarkable. Provence, the land that first gave the world a literature after the decay of the classic tongues, has awakened again under his magic touch to an active mental life. A second literature is in active being on the soil of France, a second literary language is there a reality. ”

“ If she to Arles should fare,
All other maids would hide them in despair;
For, after her, I think the mould was broken.
And what say to the words herself hath spoken,
“‘You I will have!’”—“Why, naught, poor fool! say I:
Let poverty and riches make reply!”
“O father!” Vincen cried, “go, I implore thee,
To Lotus Farm, and tell them all the story!
Tell them to look for virtue, not for gain!
Tell them that I can plough a stony plain,
“Or harrow, or prune vines with any man! ”

“ His wrath leaped high
As leaps a fiery rocket to the sky.
"Is it your pleasure that I strangle you,
Base churl," he said, "or double you in two?"
And faced him with a look he well might dread,
As when a starving leopard turns her head.
His face was purple, quivered all his frame.
"Oh, better try!" the mocking answer came.
"You 'll roll headfirst upon the gravel, neighbor!
Bah, puny hands! meet for no better labor
Than to twist osiers when they 're supple made;
Or to rob hen-roosts, lurking in the shade!" ”

“ Where men have stoned the very saints of God.
“And if, Mirèio, thou couldst see before thee,
As we from empyrean heights of glory,
This world; and what a sad and foolish thing
Is all its passion for the perishing,
Its churchyard terrors,—then, O lambkin sweet,
Mayhap thou wouldst for death and pardon bleat!
“But, ere the wheat-ear hath its feathery birth,
Ferments the grain within the darksome earth,—{158}
Such ever is the law; and even we,
Before we wore our crowns of majesty,
Drank bitter draughts. Therefore, thy soul to stay,
We’ll tell the pains and perils of our way.” ”

“ Mirèio dear, no gems I’d tender you,
But a carved box-wood cup,—mine own work too!”
Therewith he brought to light a goblet fair,
Wrapped like some sacred relic with all care,
And carven of box-wood green. It was his pleasure
Such things to fashion in his hours of leisure;
And, sitting rapt upon some wayside stone,
He wrought divinely with a knife alone.
He carved him castanets with fingers light,
So that his flock would follow him at night
Through the dark fields, obedient to their tones. ”

“ We talk sometimes about the girls of Crau.
“And thy Mirèio they have all portrayed
So charmingly, that, if thou wilt,” he said,
“And if thou like me, I would gladly be
Thy son-in-law!” “God grant me this to see!”
Said Ramoun. “The brave scion of my friend
To me and mine can only honour lend.”
Then did he fold his hands and them upraise
In saint-like gratitude. “And yet,” he says,
“The child must like you too, O Veranet!
The only one will alway be a pet!
Meanwhile, in earnest of the dower I’ll give her,
The blessing of the saints be yours for ever!” ”