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.

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, a