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THIRTY odd years have come and gone since the curious litterateurs of Paris were excited and charmed by the apparition of Frédéric Mistral’s “Mirèio.” A pastoral poem in twelve cantos, composed in the dialect of the Bouches du Rhône, and first issued by an obscure bookseller at Avignon, it was produced before the great literary world with a parallel French version of the author’s own, very singular and rather sauvage as French, but exceedingly bold, picturesque, and poetic, and the poem had the further advantage of a most eloquent and sympathetic introduction in the Revue des Deux Mondes, of September 15, 1859, by Saint-René Taillandier.

The employment of a rustic southern dialect for the purposes of poetic narrative was by no means so unheard-of a thing, even to the men of that generation, as was indirectly assumed by the first reviewer of “Mirèio.” Had not Jacques Jasmin, the immortal barber of Agen, written, in his own local patois, “Françonette,” and “The Blind Girl of Castel Cuillé,” and the inimitable “Papillotes”? But the work of Mistral, along with that of the school which he claimed to represent, and of which he was easily chief, was heralded by a certain fanfare—it came with a specific and impressive claim of ancient Provençal traditions to be revived, and a vast future inaugurated: pretensions which would have seemed almost droll to the Gascon Jasmin, with his exquisite humour and his adorable simplicity.

I can do no more than glance in this place at the history of the self-styled Provençal Revival, the most ambitious and by far the most romantic literary adventure of our day. It is an inviting subject, and will one day form an interesting chapter in the long annals of poesy; but the time is not yet fully come for estimating its results, and still less, with its greatest champion yet living, for writing its obituary.

Joseph Roumanille, a schoolmaster of St. Remy, near Tarascon, was the father of the movement. He first wrote poems in modern Provençal, so the pleasant legend says, because his old mother could not understand him when he essayed to read her those which he had written in French. Delighted, and, as it would seem, a little amazed at his own success, he came forward as the rightful heir to the long-lapsed inheritance of the Troubadours, assumed that the language, whose literary capacities he had re-discovered, was essentially the same as theirs, and contrived thoroughly to imbue with his own faith in its future a band of clever and ardent pupils, among whom, by the will of Heaven, there was one rare genius—Frédéric Mistral, and one wild enthusiast, who was, at the same time, an affluent and pathetic versifier—Théodore Aubanel. Animated by a mystical assurance, hardly less profound than that of Loyola and his companions upon Montmartre, these knights of song bound themselves by a sort of vow, to write in the effete language of the French Academy no more. They constituted themselves a poetic order, and proceeded to adopt an elaborate and somewhat fantastic organization. The almost religious earnestness which animated them may be judged by the fact that when one of the original band, Eugène Garcin—formally saluted by name, along with some half-dozen others, in the sixth canto of “Mirèio”—cooled in his ardour a little, and attempted to point out the factitious and impracticable side of the movement, he was solemnly denounced by Mistral as “the Judas of our little church.” It was a defection of no serious moment, and the revival went its fervid way without Garcin.

The Provençal poets agreed to call themselves felibre, nobody knows to this day exactly why. There are those who say that the word means homme de foi libre, that is, emancipated from all slavish literary tradition—as Mistral and his first associates undoubtedly were; there are sticklers for antiquity and a direct descent from the Latin, who maintain the derivation qui facit libros. Howbeit the felibre began to publish at Avignon in the speech of the district, a periodical, which still, I think, appears at irregular intervals. They constructed a small grammar on the lines of the existing grammars of the ancient “Langue d’oc,” especially of Raynouard’s “Résumé de la Grammaire Romaine,” and they began the compilation of an extensive dictionary, which has never even approached completion. They also revived the institution of an annual poetic tournament with floral prizes—a silver lily, a golden violet—where the native bards recited their verses, and received their rewards, after the supposed manner of the olden time. These jousts were usually held in the late summer or the early autumn. There were others appointed for the yet more appropriate month of May, which received the name of the feast of the Santo Estello, or Holy Star—memourativo de la reneissenço dou Gai-Sabe—to commemorate the renascence of the Gay Science. Once in seven years this feast was to be celebrated with extraordinary splendour, “in honour” (I continue to quote from the address of Mistral at the Floral Games held at Hyères in 1885) “of the seven rays of that mysterious star which leads, whithersoever God will, our bark with its orange-freight.” That is to say, which determines, after the manner of the Star of Bethlehem, the place where our society shall assemble and listen to the pieces entered for competition.

Were it possible for a new language to be created, or a decaying one revived, of determinate purpose, by native genius, fiery enthusiasm and unstinted devotion to the cause, that miracle would surely have been wrought by the felibre of the Bouches du Rhône. But the triumph of a language, like that of the kingdom of heaven, is among the things which do not come by observation. It is determined by causes as vast as those which shape the continents, and quite as independent of the theories of individual men. The order of the Holy Star, was after all only a kind of idealized mutual admiration society, and of all its members during a full quarter of a century, three names only have advanced from local renown to anything like general recognition. They are the three names already cited of Roumanille, Aubanel, and Mistral.

The two former have already passed away, leaving behind them many charming lyrics, but no work of universal and lasting interest. Mistral is gloriously young at sixty, able, and let us hope willing, to give us in that rich and flowing idiom, which no one else has ever managed with such mastery as he, many more historical and narrative poems, vivid with local colour, and teeming with local tradition, like “Calendau”—a romance of the last century, which appeared in 1873 and “Nerto”—a tale of the time of the Popes at Avignon, published in 1884. But it is safe to prophesy that neither Mistral nor any other felibre will ever give us another “Mirèio”—so spontaneous, artless, and impassioned, so dewy with the memories of the poet’s own childhood on a Provençal farm, or mas, so gay with the laughter and moving with the tears of simple folk, reflecting in so flawless a mirror every change of the seasons, every aspect of the free, primitive, bucolic life of the Mediterranean shore.

The success of Aubanel was perhaps frustrated by the very extravagance of his own aims. When we find him at the fêtes of Forcalquier in 1875 apostrophizing the arbiters of literary renown in France in terms like these: “Sachez que nous sommes un grand peuple, et qu’il n’est plus temps de nous mépriser. Trente départements parlent notre langue, d’une mer à l’autre mer, des Pyrénées jusqu’aux Alpes, de Crau à Limousin; le même amour fait battre notre poitrine, l’amour de la terre natale et de la langue maternelle. … Sachez que vous serez tombés longtemps alors que le Provençal, toujours jeune, parlera encore de vous avec pitié”—we can then understand that Saint-René Tallandier, the original sponsor of Mirèio, should have made haste to express his grave apprehensions for the sanity of the revivalist movement, and to repudiate in the name of the great Review all countenance of so vast a pretension on behalf of an “idiom which had vanished for six hundred years from the battlefield of ideas.”

One is reminded of the lament of the late William Barnes that the dialect of Dorset had not prevailed in England over the tongue of Shakespeare. Yet William Barnes, like the felibre, wrote poems in the local patois, far more beautiful and pathetic than any which he ever produced in proper English.

Mistral himself, with the profounder instincts and wiser judgment of a really large mind, has grown more modest from year to year in his hopes concerning the final harvest of that generous enterprise to which his life and powers have been consecrated. He was not quite able to extend a hearty welcome to Alphonse Daudet, when that most humane and sympathetic of realists appeared upon the scene with “Numa Roumestan” and the “Lettres de mon Moulin,” describing in the most pellucid French and with a fidelity equal to his own, the prose aspect of the life of the South, and all the rustic scenes which Mistral had so affectionately poetized. All the felibre, indeed, looked askance at Daudet as an intruder, and this is one more sign, if not of the limitations of their leader’s genius, at least of the narrow and ephemeral character of their collective ideal. However, in an address delivered before the previously-mentioned assembly at Hyères in 1885—ten years after Aubanel had hurled his fierce defiance at the French Academy—Mistral might have been heard pleading, with much earnestness and good sense, that French and Provençal should be kept resolutely distinct, both in the teaching of the schools, and in the talk of the people, and that, by way of preserving the purity of both forms of speech.

His remarks had an especial appropriateness then and there, because the prose work crowned upon that occasion was a series of naïve and highly dramatic dialogues, entitled “Scènes de la Vie Provençale,” by M. C. Sénès, of Toulon, officially known as La Sinse. French of the most barbaric, and Provençal of the most pliant, are mixed up in these delightfully comic dialogues exactly as they are upon the lips of the common folk. It is the most amusing, perhaps the only distinctly amusing work which the school of the felibre has ever produced, and anybody who reads French may read and have a hearty laugh over it. And I may add, from my own experience, that a very short residence in the ancient Provincia is enough to show that the local idiom is much more intelligible phonetically than it looks at first sight upon paper.

I may be mistaken, but I take the truth to be that modern Provençal is, after all, a dialect only, and not, as was so long and passionately claimed by the confederate poets, a language. As a matter of fact, it resembles the plastic idiom of the ancient Troubadours very little more than it resembles modern French, and certainly no more than it resembles Gascon, Catalan, or the Italian of the Western Riviera. All the Romance dialects, however fallen from literary honour, or untamed by literary law, are closely akin, and bear marks, even in their utmost degradation, of the same illustrious pedigree. They are like certain wild flowers, the pimpernel, the anemone, whose species can never be mistaken, but whose colours present, and that spontaneously, an almost infinite variety.

The poem of “Mirèio,” in parallel French and Provençal, first fell in my way in the summer of 1871; and I admire my own audacity in immediately attempting to turn it into English verse,[1] almost as much as I do that of the men who first preached the Provençal crusade against the language of Racine and Molière. Of course I knew no more of the idiom in which it was originally composed than could be gathered from a close comparison of the same with Mistral’s own French, aided by a smattering of old Provençal. I may plead in extenuation of my effrontery that there was virtually no more to be known at that time, for even the grammar already mentioned had not then been published. There is not very much more to be known even now.

[1] Boston, U.S.A., Roberts Bros., 1872.

The scheme of the Provençal verse, though elaborate, and seemingly very artificial, was easily enough intelligible to an English ear; more so, I should fancy, than to a Parisian one, on account of its obvious jingle—or, to speak by the book, the exuberance of its rhymes, and the strength of its tonic accents. The same remark, as is well known, applies in a general way to the songs of the Troubadours. Mistral’s stanza consists of five eight-syllabled iambic lines with feminine rhymes, in groups of two and three, and two twelve-syllabled iambic lines, with masculine rhymes. The Quaker poet Whittier had fallen upon a somewhat similar verse, in one of the finest of his earlier poems—“Lines written at Hampton Beach”:—

“So when Time’s veil shall fall asunder,

The soul may know

No sudden change, no curious wonder,

Nor sink the weight of mystery under,

But with the upward rise, and with the vastness grow.”

But this is far simpler than Mistral’s.

I did actually make an attempt to transfer this florid measure to our own sober English tongue, and that eminent American poet and very distinguished connoisseur in poetic metres, the late Mr. Longfellow, once told me that he greatly wished I had persevered, and that he thought it would have been quite possible to render the whole poem in the same way. Perhaps it would have been, to a master of versification, like himself; and for his sake, and out of respect for his opinion, I subjoin the opening stanzas of the poem in Provençal, and my own attempt to imitate their metre, premising, for the benefit of the unskilled, that in Provençal every letter sounds, the vowels as in French, while of the consonants g and j before e and i are pronounced like ds, and ch always like ts. A final vowel is elided, in scanning, before another vowel; and the tonic accent is strongly marked:—

“Cante uno chato de Prouvènço,

Dins lis amour de la jouvènço,

A travès da la Crau, vers la mar, dins li bla,

Umble escoulan d’ou grand Oumero,

Iéu la vole segui. Coume èro

Rèn qu’uno chato de Prouvènço,

En foro de la Crau se n’es gaire parla.

Emai soun front noun lusiguèsse

Que de jouinesso; emai n’agùesse

Ni diadèmo d’or ni mantèu de Damas,

Vole qu’en glòri fugue aussado

Coune uno rèino, e caressado

Pèr nosto lengo mespresado

Car cantan que pèr vautre, o pastre e gènt di mas!”

Or thus:—

“A maiden of Provence I sing:

I tell the love-tale of her spring,

Across La Crau’s wide wheat-fields follow her to the sea.

Mine be the daring aspiration

To sing of her in Homer’s fashion,

My lady of the lowly station,

Unknown beyond the prairies of lone La Crau was she.

What though her brow was never crowned

Save with the youth that rayed it round?

What though she bore no golden crown and wore no damask cloak?

Yet I would have her raised in glory

As a queen is, and set before me

In our poor speech to tell her story,

Because I sing for you alone, shepherds and farmer-folk!”

To me the thought of keeping this up for twelve cantos was simply appalling. Even in my trial stanzas, as will be seen, I had sacrificed many of the feminine rhymes; and I am now inclined to think, though I speak under correction, that Mistral himself and his followers availed themselves pretty liberally of the license which the classic Troubadours are well known to have employed, of manipulating their final syllables more or less in order to make them rhyme.

The measure finally adopted—ten-syllabled iambic lines with consecutive rhymes, usually masculine but sometimes feminine—was essentially the same as that employed by William Morris in the “Earthly Paradise.” That beautiful work was then new, and very popular in America, and it seemed, and I own that to me it seems still, to present almost the ideal of English narrative poetry. But I broke my version into stanzas of six lines, by way, I suppose, of making it look more like the original.

In those comparatively early days, I also held, and rather doated on, a theory of my own about what are called imperfect rhymes. I was persuaded that rhymes where the consonant sounds correspond while the vowel sounds merely approximate—like wreck and make, gone and son—are the counterpart on the one hand of assonances upon the other, in which the vowels correspond but not the consonants; that their relation to perfect rhymes is exactly that of minor to major harmonies, and that they relieve the ear in a long-rhymed poem, no less than the latter in a musical composition. Though very naturally censured for the freedom with which I exercised this caprice in my version of “Mirèio,” I still clung to it tenaciously as late as 1880, when I made a version of the Georgics of Vergil. I am by no means certain even now that there is not sound musical justification for the idea, but I have grown conservative with years, as we are all apt to do, and I cherish an ever-increasing respect for law—literary and other. In the present edition of my “Mirèio,” I have therefore reformed and, so to speak, ranged some scores of these licentious rhymes, aiming always, at the same time, at coming closer to the meaning of the original, as I now understand it, even if need be, at the sacrifice of some picturesqueness in the English line.

I had always beside me when I first made my version, the English prose translation of “Mirèio,” by Mr. C. H. Grant, to which I feel myself to have been not a little indebted. In artlessness of narrative, in vigour and felicity of expression, I have never hoped to surpass this unrhymed and unmeasured version, which needed, as it seemed to me, only a rhythmic form to render it worthy of the essentially musical original.

A second English translation, by H. Crichton, with which I became acquainted subsequently, had been published by Macmillan and Co., London, in 1868. This version was a metrical one, and fairly close, but it failed, I think, in catching, not the music merely, but the rural freshness and fragrance, the genuinely bucolic spirit of the Provençal. It is because, I venture to hope, that my version, with all its faults, does reflect something of all this, that a new edition of it is offered to the public after so long a time.

HARRIET WATERS PRESTON.

Brussels,

April, 1890.