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. Vincèn'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 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 Mirèio 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 _Mirèio_
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.

Mirèio, then, is a lovely poem, an idyll, a charming, vivid picture of