plot. The curiosity of the
reader is kept roused as in a well-constructed romance. Mistral's poem
has, after all, scarcely any more real local color; the rustic life of
the two poems is similar, allowing for geographical differences, and we
carry away quite as real a picture of Hermann's home and the fields
about it as of the Mas of Meste Ramoun. Mistral's idyll terminates
tragically in that Mireio dies of sunstroke, leaving her lover to mourn,
but the tenor of the German poem is more serious and moves us more
deeply; the background of war contributes to this, but the source of
our emotion is in the deep seriousness of the characters themselves.

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