Vincen and Mireio are charming in their naivete, they are unspoiled and unreflecting.  They are children, and lacking in well-defined personality.  They have no knowledge of anything beyond the customs and superstitions of the simple folk about them.  Their religion, which is so continually before us, furnishing the very mainspring of the fatal denouement, is of the most superficial sort, if it can be called religion at all.  Whether you are bitten by a dog, a wolf, or a snake, or lose your eyesight, or are in danger of losing your lover, you run to the shrine of some saint for help.  The religious feeling really runs no deeper.  In his outburst of grief upon seeing Mireio prone upon the floor of the chapel, the unhappy boy asks what he has done to merit such a blow.  “Has he lit his pipe in a church at the lamp? or dragged the crucifix among thistles, like the Jews?” Of the deeper, nobler consolations of religion, of the problems of human destiny, of the relations of religious conviction to human conduct, there is no inkling.

All the characters are equally on the surface.  They are types rather than individuals.  They have in common the gift of eloquence.  They have no thought-life, no meditation.  They are eminently sociable, frequently loquacious.  They make you think of Daudet’s statement concerning the man of the south, “When he is not talking, he is not thinking.”  But they talk well, and have to an eminent degree the gift of narrative.  Vincen’s stories of what he knows and has seen are told most beautifully, and the poet never forgets himself by making the boy utter thoughts he could not have conceived.  The boy is merely a child of his race.  In any rustic gathering in southern France you may hear a man of the people speak dramatically and thrillingly, with resonant voice and vivid gestures, with a marvellous power of mimicry, and the faces of the listeners reflect all the emotions of the speaker.  The numerous scenes, therefore, wherein a group of listeners follow with keenest interest a tale that is told, are eminently true to life.  The supreme merit of Mireio lies in this power of narration that its author possesses.  It is all action from beginning to end, and even the digressions and episodes, which occasionally arrest the flow of the narrative, are in themselves admirable pieces of narrative.  Most critics have found fault with these episodes and the frequent insertion of legends.  In defence of the author, it may be said, that he must have feared while writing Mireio that it might be his last and only opportunity to address his countrymen in their own dialect, and in his desire to bring them back to a love of the traditions of Provence, he yielded to the temptation to crowd his poem rather more than he would otherwise have done.