he believes that this can be
preserved or attained only by a following of tradition. There must be no
breaking with the past. Daudet, late in life, adhered to this doctrine.
His son quotes him as saying:--

"I am following, with gladness, the results of the impulse Mistral has
given. Return to tradition! that is our salvation in the present going
to pieces. I have always felt this instinctively. It came to me clearly
only a few years ago. It is a bad thing to become wholly loosened from
the soil, to forget the village church spire. Curiously enough poetry
attaches only to objects that have come down to us, that have had long
use. What is called _progress_, a vague and very doubtful term, rouses
the lower parts of our intelligence. The higher parts vibrate the better
for what has moved and inspired a long series of imaginative minds,
inheriting each from a predecessor, strengthened by the sight of the
same landscapes, by the same perfumes, by the touch of the same
furniture, polished by wear. Very ancient impressions sink into the
depth of that obscure memory which we may call the _race-memory_, out of
which is woven the mass of individual memories."

Mistral is truly the poet of the Midi. One can best see how superior he
is as an artist in words by comparing him with the foremost of his
fellow-poets. He is a master of language. He has the eloquence, the
enthusiasm, the optimism of his race. His poetic earnestness saves his
tendency to exaggerate. His style, in all its superiority, is a southern
style, full of interjections, full of long, sonorous words. His thought,
his expressions, are ever lucid. His art is almost wholly objective. His
work has extraordinary unity, and therefore does not escape the monotony
that was unavoidable when the poet voluntarily limited himself to a
single purpose in life, and to treatment of the themes thereunto
pertaining. Believers in material progress, those who look for great
changes in political and social conditions, will turn from Mistral with
indifference. His contentment with present things, and his love of the
past, are likely to irritate them. Those who seek in a poet consolation
in the personal trials of life, a new message concerning human destiny,
a new note in the everlasting themes that the great poets have sung,
will be disappointed.

A word must be said of him as a writer of French. In the earlier years
he felt the weight of the Academy. He did not feel that French would