“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 allow full freedom.  He was scrupulous and timid.  He soon shook off this timidity and became a really remarkable wielder of the French tongue.  His translations of his own works have doubtless reached a far wider public than the works themselves, and are certainly characterized by great boldness, clearness, and an astonishingly large vocabulary.

His earlier work is clearly inspired by his love of Greek literature, and those qualities in Latin literature wherein the Greek genius shines through, possibly also by some mysterious affinity with the Greek spirit resulting from climate or atavism.  This never entirely left him.  When later he writes of Provence in the Middle Age, of the days of the Troubadours, his manner does not change; his work offers no analogies here with the French Romantic school.