BOOKS.
MIREIO A PROVENcAL POEM.*
MORE than a quarter of a century has passed since Saint- Rene Taillandier, in the pages of the Revue des Deux Mendes, first introduced to the notice of the French public the Mireio of Frederic Mistral. It is possible that, had it ntit been for the warm and sympathetic praise that the great littgrateur then accorded to it, the poem would never have been known outside the neighbourhood of its own birthplace at Avignon, and the company of the Felihre, to whom Mistral belonged, would never have charmed the outer world with their artless songs, or amused it with their pretensions. For they had pretensions, these Provencal poets, which were quite in keeping with the rich, mMdionale imagination, that was the chief source of their strength. The dialect in which they wrote, the dialect of the Bouches du Rhone, was to them no mere local patois, but the remnant of a once great and historical language, the language of old Pro- vence, of the Troubadours, of all the chivalry and romance of Europe ; they believed that by their united efforts they could not only keep this language alive, but breathe into it a new life, making it-once more the mother-tongue of their country ; and they dreamt of a time when the warm, glowing, idiom of the South should take the place of the cold language of the French Academy that had usurped the seat of authority. Roumanille, the father of the movement, and Aubanel, its most enthusiastic supporter, are both now dead. Though their hopes of reviving a language that had practically been lifeless for more than five centuries, were not destined to be realised, they at least enjoyed the satisfaction of hearing its beauties acknowledged, and knowing that their own songs and poems would go far to arrest its further decay. But the greatest of the Felibre still lives : for the greatest of them all was un- doubtedly Frederic Mistral, and the greatest of his works was the Mireio, which we are now considering. To those who find the difficulties of the original dialect insuperable, and who do not care for the French rendering that Mistral has himself given of his work, we would certainly recommend Miss Preston's translation in English verse, first published, we believe, some twenty years ago, and lately reproduced in a new and slightly altered edition, If she has not succeeded in preserving the music Of the original lines—an impossible task, when we consider the extreme flexibility and the wealth of rhyming syllables that belong to the language in which they were written—she has at least succeeded in giving us the spirit-- of the whole poem, and in conveying some idea of its wild.
freshness and spontaneity. With regard, however, to the' difficulty of finding appropriate rhymes, we cannot but regret- that the author has departed from her earlier theory, that laeld imperfect rhymes to be admissible, and has been at such pains in this edition to make use only of rhymes in which both. consonant and vowel sounds correspond exactly. Had she allowed herself a little more license in this respect, she might
• miaiai Provenfat roem. By Fr6ddrio Mistral. Translated b Harriet. Waters Preston. Loudon i T. Fisher Unwin.
have added immensely to the musical rhythm and picturesque- ness of her English version, or at least she might have avoided such stanzas as the following :— " Wondering, and charmed to find by such quick chance A man whereon to wreak his vengeance. Wait !' said the herdsman be not over-hot ! First let me have a pipe, young idiot !' And brought to light a buckskin pouch, and set Between his teeth a broken calumet."
Strictly speaking, no doubt, she has preserved both the correct sense and the correct rhyme ; but the verse is none the less doggrel.
. To understand and appreciate the poetry of Mistral and his fellow Felibre, one should know the country of which they wrote. It is not a fertile country, the Lower Languedoc, nor is it a beautiful one in the generally accepted sense of the word ; but even though its vineyards be failing, and its olive- orchards poor, it is rich in relics and legends of the past, and its wild and rather desolate aspect demands a more romantic in- terpretation than either the tamer loveliness of the North, or the bolder beauties of mountain scenery. Nature at the mouth of the sluggish Rhone is neither beautiful nor grand. It is some- times cruel, and nearly always melancholy. The Camargue itself, the actual delta of the Rhone, is the very picture of utter desolation,—a weary waste of reed-beds, alternating with stagnant, brackish lagoons and barren stretches of salt plains. The Cram, that stretches far inland from the western Rhone bank, is a mere stony desert, most melancholy in its flat monotony. Upon them both the Southern sun beats down pitilessly, and both are swept for days together by the blast of the merciless mistral. The traveller who enters that region leaves France behind him, and finds himself in Africa. Strange birds have their home there, the pelican, the ibis, and the flamingo ; and the still stranger mirage, so often seen upon the African plains, deceives the eye, changing the dull plains into sheets of glittering water, and hanging in mid-air the
walls of a distant town. Even the inhabitants are strange, not only in speech but in appearance, and the dark Arab blood shows itself under their swarthy skins. But every desert has its oasis, and there, too, the industry of man has triumphed over the sterility of Nature ; at rare intervals the maa, or farm, is surrounded with its thick groves of almond-trees or mulberries, the straggling vines climb up some favoured elope, or even corn stands thick in the field which man has laboriously freed front stones and, irrigated. It is little wonder that the exuberant fancy of the South should have peopled such a land with giants and witches, or should have loved to dilate upon the beauties that had been wrested from the niggard hand 'of Nature, Iffireio is the love-story of two children of La Crau,—
Vineen, the son of a tramping basket-weaver, and Mira°, the daughter of a rich farmer :— " Not quite fifteen was this same fair Mireio. Al me ! the purple coast of Font Vi6lo, The hills of Baux, the desolate Crau plain, A shape like hers will hardly see again. Child of the merry sun, her dimpled face Bloomed into laughter with ingenuous grace.
Eyes had she limpid as the drops of dew; And, when she fixed their tender gaze on you, Sorrow was not. Stars in a summer night Are not more softly, innocently bright : And beauteous hair, all waves and rings of jot ; And breasts, a double peach, scarce ripened yet."
Child as she was, she was yet all woman ; and Vincen, the pretty boy whose delicate fingers know no harder work than the deft weaving of osier-baskets, whose clever tongue charmed her ears with old legends of witch and hero, who sighed for
her, fought for her, and fell sick for want of her, soon suc- ceeded in winning her love, though he could not win the con- sent of her angry father. The story of their love and of their death is as old as human nature, and yet the charm lies in the freshness of it, and the freshness in the manner of its telling : in any other words but Mistral's it would be old and stale enough. In the tale, the reader is introduced to all the daily labours of the peasant life ; he witnesses the first love- making in the intervals of leaf-picking under the mulberry- trees ; he may listen to the chatter of the maidens over the cocooning, and the song of Magali—which, by-the-way, is
admirably rendered by Miss Preston— and may obtain a life- like picture of quaint customs and old-world superstitions To Miroio there come wealthy suitors,—Alari, the owner of countless sheep; Veran, whose troops of wild horses crop the reeds of the Camargue until they are caught and tames to the labour of treading corn upon the primitive threshing- floors ; and Ourrias, the keeper and brander of wild cattle, himself more wild and savage than his bulls. But Mir6io will have none of them, but only Vincen, and Vincen her parents will not let her have. And so Mir6io wanders away to her death, and the bright comedy ends in saddest tragedy, in the midst of visions and saintly apparitions. Of all rustic idylls, this poem of Mistral's is one of the most charming that we know ; and we should be ungrateful indeed, if we did not express our thanks to Miss Preston for the painstaking and intelligent manner in which she has performed the office of translator.
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