Mireio, then, is a lovely poem, an idyll, a charming, vivid picture of life in the rural parts of the Rhone region.  It is singularly original.  Local color is its very essence.  Its thought and action are strictly circumscribed within the boundaries of the Crau and the Camargue, and its originality consists in this limitation, in the fact that a poet of this century has written a work that comes within the definition of an epic, with all the primitive simplicity of Biblical or Classic writers, without any agitation of the problems of modern life, without any new thought or feeling concerning love or death, or man’s relation to the universe, using a dialect unknown at the time beyond the region described.  Its success could scarcely have been attained without the poet’s masterly prose translation, and yet it is evident that the poem could not have been conceived and carried out in French verse.  The freshness, the artlessness, the lack of modernity, would have suffered if the poet had bent his inspiration to the official language.  Using a new idiom, wherein he practically had no predecessor, he was free to create expression as he went along, and was not compelled to cast his thought in existing moulds.

The poem cannot place its author among the very great poets of the world, if only because of this limitation.  It lacks the breadth and depth, the everlasting interest.  But it is a work of great beauty, of wonderful purity, a sweet story, told in lovely, limpid language, and will cause many eyes to turn awhile from other lands to the sunny landscapes of southern France.

II.  CALENDAU. (CALENDAL.)

Mistral spent seven years in elaborating his second epic, as he did in writing his first.  The poem had not a popular success, and the reason is not far to seek.  The most striking limitation of the poet is his failure to create beings of flesh and blood.  Even in Mireio this lack of well-defined individuality in the characters begins to be apparent, but, in general, the action of the earlier poem is confined to the world of realities, whereas in Calendau the poet has given free play to a brilliant and vivid imagination, launching forth into the heroic and incredible, yet without abandoning the world of real time and real places.  Allegory and symbolism are the web and woof of Calendau.  The poem, again, is overburdened with minute historic details and descriptions, which are greatly magnified in the eye of his imagination.  A poet, of course, must be pardoned for this want of a sense of proportion, but even a Provencal reader cannot be kept in constant illusion as to the greatness of little places that can scarcely be found upon the map, or dazzled by the magnificence of achievements that really have left little or no impress upon the history of the world.  As we follow the poet’s work in its chronological development, we find this trait growing more and more pronounced.  He sees