The critics, who had been quite thrown off their guard by the strangeness and the sweetness, the innocent ardor and frank garrulity of the earlier poem, were far more wary in their reception of its successor. Their verdict was unanimously and even emphatically favorable, but it was still a verdict, not a startled cry of admiration.
Calendau won priceless praise, but it created comparatively no excitement, was not long talked about, and never, we believe, translated. It is proposed to give some account of this riper and more formal production of M. Nothing, indeed, is in the nature of things more unlikely than that we shall be twice surprised by the same person, in the same way. In the first place the lovers in Calendau are not children. They are young, indeed, to judge by our slow northern standards, but they are, to all intents, man and woman, and the lady at least has lived and suffered much when we see her first.
In the dark and desperate times which preceded the outbreak of the first great revolution in France, rapine and bloodshed, flight, treachery, and siege were matters of frequent occurrence, and the wildest incidents were unhappily probable. Moreover, the shadows of even one century are sufficient to confuse the wavering line between nature and the supernatural, and thus to afford all needful latitude to an imagination which, although capable, as we know, of a most winning playfulness, does yet appear to be essentially sombre.
The work seems, whether the author intended it or no, almost to bridge the strange chasm between the old Provencal poetry and the new, and to give an effect of continuity to the unique and brilliant literature of Southern France.
He opens his poem conventionally with an allusion to his earlier effort, and in the same metre. There follows an invocation to the spirit of Provence, as illustrated in the famous past, and then the opening scene of the story, which is characterized by a suppressed fervor, a kind of silent intensity of light and color and emotion, hardly to be paralleled in English verse.
