And she breaks down weeping.  The page, the people, the pilgrim, and the astrologer again sing in a sort of operatic ensemble their various emotions.  The Pope absolves the Queen, the pilgrim denounces the verdict furiously, and is put to death by Galeas of Mantua.  So ends the play.

La Reino Jano is a pageant rather than a tragedy.  It is full of song and sunshine, glow and glitter.  The characters all talk in the exaggerated and exuberant style of Mistral, who is not dramatist enough to create independent being, living before us.  The central personage is in no sense a tragic character.  The fanatical Fra Rupert and the low, vile-tongued Catanaise are not tragic characters.  The psychology throughout is decidedly upon the surface.

The author in his introduction warns us that to judge this play we must place ourselves at the point of view of the Provencals, in whom many an expression or allusion that leaves the ordinary reader or spectator untouched, will possibly awaken, as he hopes, some particular emotion.  This is true of all his literature; the Provencal language, the traditions, the memories of Provence, are the web and woof of it all.

It is interesting to note the impression made by the language upon a Frenchman and a critic of the rank of Jules Lemaitre.  He says in concluding his review of this play:—­

“The language is too gay, it has too much sing-song, it is too harmonious.  It does not possess the rough gravity of the Spanish, and has too few of the i’s and e’s that soften the sonority of the Italian.  I may venture to say it is too expressive, too full of onomatopoeia.  Imagine a language, in which to say, “He bursts out laughing,” one must use the word s’escacalasso!  There are too many on’s and oun’s and too much ts and dz in the pronunciation.  So that the Provencal language, in spite of everything, keeps a certain patois vulgarity.  It forces the poet, so to say, to perpetual song-making.  It must be very difficult, in that language, to have an individual style, still more difficult to express abstract ideas.  But it is a merry language.”

The play has never yet been performed, and until a trial is made, one is inclined to think it would not be effective, except as a spectacle.  It is curious that the Troubadours produced no dramatic literature whatever, and that the same lack is found in the modern revival.

Aubanel’s Lou Pan dou Pecat (The Bread of Sin), written in 1863, and performed in 1878 at Montpellier, seems to have been successful, and was played at Paris at the Theatre Libre in 1888, in the verse-translation made by Paul Arene.  Aubanel wrote two other plays, Lou Pastre, which is lost, and Lou Raubaton, a work that must be considered unfinished.  Two plays, therefore, constitute the entire dramatic production in the new language.

PART THIRD