taught us by
well-advertised plays, and if we wish to abolish Tammany or change our
police commissioner, we enforce our desire by the object-lesson of a
play. The great new plays may not yet be here, but the public once more
is going to the theatre, as it went long ago in Athens, to be delighted
and amused, of course, but also to be instructed in national and civic
affairs, and, most important of all, to be purified by pity and terror.

XXV

A MEMORY OF FREDERIC MISTRAL

There are many signs that poetry is coming into its own again--even
here in America, which, while actually one of the most romantic and
sentimental of countries, fondly imagines itself the most prosaic.

Kipling, to name but one instance, has, by his clarion-tongued
quickening of the British Empire, shown so convincingly what dynamic
force still belongs to the right kind of singing, and the poet in
general seems to be winning back some of that serious respect from his
fellow-citizens which, under a misapprehension of his effeminacy and
general uselessness, he had lost awhile. The poet is not so much a joke
to the multitude as he was a few years ago, and the term "minor poet"
seems to have fallen into desuetude.

Still for all this, I doubt if it is in the Anglo-Saxon blood, nowadays
at all events, to make a national hero of a poet, one might say a
veritable king, such as Frederic Mistral is today in Provence. In our
time, Bjoernson in Norway was perhaps the only parallel figure, and he
held his position as actual "father of his people" for very much the
same reasons. At once a commanding and lovable personality, he and his
work were absolutely identified with his country and his countrymen. He
was simply Norway incarnate.

So, today in Provence, it is with Frederic Mistral. He is not only a
poet of Provence. He is Provence incarnate, and, apart from the noble
quality of his work, his position as the foremost representative of his
compatriots is romantically unique. No other country today, pointing to
its greatest man, would point out--a poet; whereas Mistral, were he not
as unspoiled as he is laurelled, might, with literal truth, say:

"_Provence--c'est moi!_"

We had hardly set foot in Provence this last spring, my wife and I,
before we realized, with grateful wonder, that we had come to a country
that has a poet for a king.

On arriving at Marseilles almost the first word we heard was
"Mistral"--not the bitter wind of the