Mistral

I started early on Monday morning to walk to Saint-Remy. It was fine and sunny again, but there was a touch of the mistral. The road winds up through the limestone crags to a col from which there is a view even more magnificent than that from Les Baux to the south. The undulating plain, all silver and delicate green and indigo and deep purple, stretches away on either hand, and very far away rise the snow peaks of the Pyrenees, like mountains in a dream. The RhÔne and the Durance are at about equal distances to the right and left, the Durance flowing on one side of the Alpilles to join her sister at Avignon, and both these together passing the other side on their way to the sea. Beyond Avignon are the heights of the Cevennes and the Basses-Alpes to close in the picture, of which the foreground is the very heart of the rich and picturesque ProvenÇal country.

The life of the soil, as it existed for hundreds of years, and exists still though shorn of some of its character since the days of steam, has been immortalized by Mistral, who was born in the village of Maillane a few miles off the road I was taking that day, spent all his life there, and was to die two days later. All its sweet charm is summed up in the great epic of "MirÈio," or "Mireille" published when he was twenty-five and instantly hailed by no less a critic than Lamartine as a work of genius. I had been reading it at Les Baux, in a version in which a French rendering—prepared, I am told, by Mistral himself—is printed parallel to the ProvenÇal. It was possible to get an idea of the swing and mastery of the original verse. With some knowledge of Latin and French, with a few simple rules of pronunciation, which were given in the Introduction, and with the ear attuned somewhat to the sounds—for I had constantly heard ProvenÇal spoken—I could take a stanza here and there and make it out. But one was carried along by the translation, even though it was in prose, and I could not put it down until I had finished its twelve books.

The story is of the innocent burning loves of a youth, the son of a wandering basket-maker, and of a young girl, the daughter of a rich farmer. The earliest books are full of simple and beautiful feeling for the common episodes of country life, as they unrolled themselves before the poet's own eyes at the time he was writing of them. We see the basket-maker and his son joining the master of the farm, his family, and his numerous dependents, at their meal on the long stone table under the vine-trellis in front of the house, and hear the stories they tell; we see the girls picking the mulberry leaves from the trees, and winding the silk from the cocoons, their hands and tongues alike busy; and hear wise talk of seasons and crops, and of all the active pastoral and agricultural life of the country.

There come three rich suitors for the hand of the fair Mireille; a man of mighty flocks, who brings his sheep and goats down from the high Alps to winter on the Crau; the owner of troops of horses running wild on the windy marshes of the Camarque; and the strong tamer of bulls, tales of whose strength and prowess ring through the country, who fights a Homeric battle with the young lover, is defeated by him, but by a stroke of malevolent cunning leaves him for dead before he goes to his own death in the flooded river.

The after scenes have immortalized the Grotto des FÉes in the Val d'Enfer of Les Baux, and the pilgrimage church of Saintes-Maries, in which Mireille dies, after hearing from the saints themselves the story of their miraculous voyage and their landing in Provence. All the scenes of the poem are laid within a few miles of Mistral's home, and neither in this poem nor in any other has he drawn inspiration except from the life and legends of his own Provence.

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He has told the story of his own life in a charming book. His father was of the old peasant aristocracy of the country of Arles, and married his second wife, Mistral's mother, when he was already fifty-five.

"One year, on St. John's day, the master, FranÇois Mistral, was in his cornfields, which the harvesters were cutting with their sickles. A crowd of women followed the reapers to pick up the grain which escaped the rake. Soon my father noticed a pretty girl who hung behind them as if she were afraid to glean like the others. He approached her and said:

"'Where do you come from, little one? What is your name?'

"'I am the daughter of Etienne Poulinet, Mayor of Maillane,' she replied. 'My name is DÉlaÏde.'

"'What!' said my father, 'the daughter of Poulinet, Mayor of Maillane, coming out to glean!'

"'Master,' she replied, 'we are a large family, six girls and two boys, and our father, although he is fairly well-off, when we ask him for pin-money, says, "My dears, if you want money to make yourselves smart go and earn it." So that is why I have come to glean.'

"Six months after this meeting, which reminds one of the old story of Ruth and Boaz the gallant yeoman asked Master Poulinet for his daughter, and I was born of this marriage.

"Well, then, my arrival in the world having taken place on September 8, 1830, in the afternoon, the happy mother sent for my father, who was at that time, as usual, in his fields.

"As soon as the running messenger came within hearing, he called out: 'Come, master, for the mistress has just been delivered.'

"'How many?' asked my father.

"'One—a fine boy.'

"'A son! May the bon Dieu make him strong and wise!'

"And without more, as if nothing had happened, the good man finished his work and returned deliberately to the farm. This showed no lack of tenderness, but, brought up, and indoctrinated, like the old ProvenÇals, in the Roman tradition, his manner showed the surface roughness of the ancient pater familias."[11]

The child narrowly escaped being christened Nostradamus, but was called FrÉdÉric instead, in memory of a poor little urchin who had carried love-letters between Mistral's parents during their courtship and had died shortly afterwards.

His childhood was spent in soaking in the details of the large simple life in and about his home, and all the lore of the past that was stored up by the country people. He went to the University of Avignon, and to Aix to study law, and there gradually formed in him the purpose to devote his life to the literary revival of the national tongue, which had sunk from its proud estate as a language of high poetry to little more than a peasant dialect. He was not alone in his love for it. Other names were honoured throughout Provence of the joyous, high-mettled band that formed themselves into a society to advance their object, and made such an immense pleasure of their lives as they worked towards their end. There were sweet singers among them—Aubanel, Roumanille, FÉlix Gras, and others—although none whose names will live as Mistral's will; for he long outlived them all, and his fame has spread everywhere. They called themselves the "FÉlibres," and their movement the "FÉlibrige," using a word that Mistral had found in an old legend to designate the seven Doctors of the Law with whom Christ disputed in the Temple; and no one who has visited Provence needs telling how much alive the movement is. Besides his poems, and some charming stories, Mistral has produced an exhaustive Dictionary of the ProvenÇal language, and if his fame had not been established half a century ago on the publication of "Mireille," his museum at Arles, in which he sought to gather up all the story of ProvenÇal life, so that what has passed or is passing away should never be forgotten, would keep his memory green. It is a noble gift in itself, this museum housed in one of the ancient buildings of Arles. In 1906 Mistral was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, and dedicated it to this purpose. He wanted nothing for himself that money could buy. For eighty-four years he lived among his own people the common life of the land, and came to be supremely honoured by them all. They called him the Emperor of the South; there was no one whose name carried more weight.

For the gift that he brought to his people, his grand old father of whom he draws such a delightful portrait in his Memoirs, must be accorded some of the thanks. As in the case of Ruskin and of Browning, a parent who had no connection with literature himself fostered the early studies of the son and left him to follow his bent, while relieving him of the necessities which often smother talent, though never perhaps genius. But then Mistral's father was himself an inspiration to the work his son set himself to do when he returned to the large liberty of his home.

"The Judge's farm was at this time a true home of pure poetry, biblical and idyllic. Did it not live and sing around me, this poem of Provence with its blue depths framed by the Alpilles? One had only to go out to be dazzled by it. Did I not see Mireille passing, not only in my young dreams, but even in person, sometimes in one of those pretty young girls of Maillane, who came to pick mulberry leaves for their silkworms, sometimes in the grace of those who came and went with bare throats and white coifs among the corn and the hay, in the olive-gardens and among the vines?

"Did not the actors in my drama, the labourers, harvesters, herdsmen and shepherds, come and go before my eyes from dawn till dusk? Could you have a finer old man, more patriarchal, more worthy to be the prototype of my Master Ramon, than old FranÇois Mistral, whom no one, not even my mother, ever called anything but the Master? My poor father—sometimes when the work was pressing and he wanted help, either to get in the hay or to draw up the water from the well, he would call out: 'Where is FrÉdÉric?' Although at that moment I might be stretched under a willow idly pursuing some fugitive rhyme, my dear mother would reply: 'He is writing.' And immediately the rough voice of the good man would soften as he said: 'Don't disturb him.' For to him, who had never read anything in his youth but the Bible and Don Quixote, writing was almost a holy office."

As a young man Mistral's father had been requisitioned to carry corn to Paris during the Reign of Terror, and was struck with horror at the execution of the king.[12]

"He was profoundly religious. Every evening, summer as well as winter, kneeling at his chair, head uncovered, hands to his forehead, with his hair in a queue tied by a silk ribbon, he would pray for us aloud; and when the evenings lengthened in the autumn he would read the Gospels to his children and his servants....

"Although he would pick up a fagot on the road and carry it home; although he would content himself for his ordinary fare with vegetables and brown bread; although, in the midst of plenty, he was always abstemious, and would mix water with his wine, yet his table was always open, as well as his hand and his purse, to any poor wayfarer. Then, if there was talk of any one, he would ask first: 'Is he a good worker?' and if the answer was, yes, he would say: 'Ah, he's a good man; I'm his friend.'"[13]

This charming book of Mistral's and his poems, give more of flavour of Provence than anything I have read, and the link between our times and his was not even snapped by his death on the day I walked through the country that he more particularly wrote of.

He was never for long away from Provence during the eighty-four years of life, but was much lionized when he did venture as far as Paris. I very much wish that I had seen him, for his personality counted for a great deal in the movement he spent his life in fostering, and he was the last survivor of the original FÉlibres. It now remains to be seen whether the revival will continue of itself. I have heard it compared with other national revivals, fostered by intellectuals, but taking no great hold of the people, and prophecies of its decay. But I think it has life in it. Mistral would certainly not have called himself an intellectual, and he never behaved like one. He was one of the people himself, and they are fortunate to have found such an interpreter.