Breton

“ Yes, Brittany is a land of menhirs, of legends and superstitions, but all this but makes a roundabout journey the more enjoyable, and one must really cross and recross it to its uttermost confines in order to realize its great variation of manners and customs, to say nothing of speech, for, even though the Breton tongue is dying out as a universal language, one still buys his post-card with a queer legend on its face, which looks like Dutch at first glance, but really is Breton. ”

“ Morvan, chief of Léon, so celebrated in the history of the ninth century as one of the upholders of Breton independence, and known to tradition as ‘the Prop of Brittany,’ is the subject of a remarkable series of ballads or hero-tales in the Barzaz-Breiz which together constitute what is almost an epic. These tell of his life, death, adventures, travels, and the marvellous feats of derring-do he accomplished. In some measure he is to Breton legend what Arthur is to British or Holger to that of Denmark. ”

“ The Breton line went backwards and the Breton tale went on.
"Her father had sailed across the sea from the harbour of Africa,
When all the slaves took up their tools for the bidding of Barbara;
She smote the bare wall with her hand, and bade them smite again,
She poured them wealth of wine and meat to stay them in their pain,
And cried through the lifted thunder of thronging hammer and hod:
'Throw open the third window in the third name of God!'
Then the hearts failed and the tools fell; and far towards the foam
Men saw a shadow on the sands; and her father coming home." ”

“ It was fitting that, according to her wish, her heart should be buried in Brittany, while the body rested in Saint-Denis; for that heart had been unwaveringly Breton. To Louis she was ma Bretonne; and Breton she was in the most marked traits of her character; a woman of more than usual intellect and ability, with appreciation for art and literature, with a high sense of domestic virtue, and yet always hard, cold, shrewd, and narrow-minded. ”

“ The Château de Mereac stood on the outskirts of the forest of Arteze, not many leagues distant from the little Breton town of Martigue. The country on this side of Rennes had from time immemorial been the debatable land between Brittany and her overweening sister France; countless feuds raged constantly between the peoples, such as were fought in the Middle Ages, and even later, along our own Scottish border, and every Breton eyed his French neighbour as a natural and implacable enemy. ”

“ The Brezonek, the Brythonic tongue of Brittany, is undoubtedly the language of those Celtic immigrants who fled from Britain the Greater to Britain the Less to escape the rule of the Saxon invaders, and who gave the name of the country which they had left to that Armorica in which they settled. In the earliest stages of development it is difficult to distinguish Breton from Welsh. From the ninth to the eleventh centuries the Breton language is described as ‘Old Breton.’ ‘Middle Breton’ flourished from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries, since when ‘Modern Breton’ has been in use. ”

“ All the sad history of the Breton race was written in every minor note; all the mystery, the gentleness, the faith of the lost people of Armorica.
And now the singer was intoning the “Gwerz Ar Baradoz”—the “Complaint of Paradise”—a slow, thrilling miséréré, scarcely dominating the velvet whir of the spinning-wheel.
Suddenly the melody ceased, and a young Bretonne girl appeared in the doorway, courtesying to me and saying in perfect English: “How do you do, Mr. Scarlett; and how do you like my spinning songs, if you please?” ”

“ Then the old eyes grew keen and intent. She put out a hand and answered me in a flood of kindly Breton, whose sound only was familiar to me. For some minutes we stood there in the middle of the Borgo St. Angelo, shaking hands, looking intently at each other, first one, then the other repeating the word “Quimper!” To her it meant home; to me, the one thing dearer! Then with a last tightening of the hands we parted. We recognized other of the Breton costumes, from St.-Pol-de-Leon, Douarnenez, the Morbihan, we remembered having seen some of them at the great pardon of Ploërmel. ”

“ Their fund is inexhaustible; they can rail most viciously at one another, foam with vituperations, then part as friendly as they met.
So once more the Breton, in the half stupor of his terrible sorrow, was forced to listen to lascivious and brutal jests hurled so relentlessly upon one perhaps as beautiful and—and——
The crowd forced the Breton against the wall. Flaring torches and swaying lanterns could now be seen winding toward them. The head of the procession came by—an old man bearing a large gold-brocaded umbrella, which he held over the bride as she entered and left the sedan. ”

“ The first speaker was a delicate, pale-faced, spectacled Breton; the second, a vivacious individual from Paris, who, like Henri and Jules, had had the misfortune to be in Germany when the war broke out. Their eager questions were followed by the somewhat phlegmatic and casual words of an Englishman—a red-headed, red-cheeked, healthy-looking individual, who, in spite of short commons, still looked bulky.
"Someone's lost his head," he said caustically, with a growl, sitting up and looking about him. "I'll get the reason in two guesses: someone's trying to escape, or someone has escaped." ”

“ Victor, who must have had an exceedingly bad dinner at his inn when he delivered himself of the following:
“Breton dialect is full of barbarisms, and Brittany is not even a healthy country for painters. It is a land of monasteries and dull routine; the same types and the same costumes; no men, no women, all Bretons, all of Brittany.”
As a race, the Breton may well be summed up as follows: They are the descendants of the men of a primitive epoch, from whom they inherit traits which even time has not entirely eradicated. Their intuitions are correct, and their convictions profound ”

“ As we pass out by the Porte de Brest, we meet a Breton propriétaire and his wife in a cart, whom we must not take for peasants because of the black stuff gown and white cap of the bright-faced woman, and the broad-brimmed hat and blouse of the man.
We drive through a straggling suburb of houses, where the peasants stare at us from their dark dwellings; we stop at wayside inns—unnecessarily, it would seem—and are surrounded by beggars of all ages and sizes. ”

“ Thégonnec, where the Breton costume is introduced.
Altogether we must regard the calvary of Plougastel as a curiosity rather than as a great work of art; a grotesque group which, in its dark rugged outline set against the sky, will be remembered by travellers as something peculiar to Brittany, something which, in this land of strange mediæval monuments and relics, is yet perhaps the strangest sight of all. ”

“ While military service alters, it does not create; the stolid Breton—stolid by comparison with the men of central and Southern France, remains stolid as before he went up for training, for the Army has grafted on him nothing that is new—it has merely added to his knowledge and developed, in the way of characteristics, what was already there. But the Breton is the better for his two years—without them he would be a very stolid and unimaginative person indeed, and he has learned to stir himself, to make the best of himself and the work that is his to perform. ”

“ The hardy, bright-featured women of Cornouaille, whose faces are becoming so familiar to us in these pages, have a rather sad and reckless look at Douarnenez; their homes are not too tidy as a rule; the little children play in streets which steam with refuse from the sardine factories, where their elder sisters are working in gangs, with bare feet and skirts tucked up to their knees, sifting, and sorting, and cooking sardines, and singing snatches of Breton songs the while. ”

“ In the first place, nothing on earth could make you look a perfect fright, or anything like one, Popsy dear; and in the second place, I don’t know that I’m Socialist enough myself ever to have the courage of my opinions as Le Breton has. Certainly, I should never attempt to force them unwillingly upon others. You must remember, Edie, it’s one thing for Le Breton to be so communistic as all that comes to, and quite another thing for you and me. Le Breton’s father was a general and a knight, you see; and people will never forget that his mother’s Lady Le Breton still, whatever he does. ”

“ Follow one of these streams in its windings towards the sea, where the troubled waters rest in the shade of overhanging trees, by pastures and cultivated lands, and we may see the Breton peasants at their “gathering-in,” reaping and carrying their small harvest of corn and rye, oats and buckwheat; the women with white caps and wide collars, short dark skirts, and heavy wooden sabots, the men in white woollen jackets, breeks (bragous bras) , and black gaiters, 4broad-brimmed hats and long hair streaming in the wind—leading oxen yoked to heavy carts painted blue. ”

“ There are, in the first place, not nearly so many motor-cars owned in Brittany, and accordingly there are astonishingly few shelters and repairers. Apparently, the Breton does not care for the new-fangled means of locomotion, not recognizing, perhaps, that it has come to stay. Still less does the Breton peasant’s brother, the Breton sailor or fisherman, care for the motor-boat, which ought to have a great vogue in such great inland seas as Morbihan, the Bay of Douarnenez, or the Goulet or the roadstead of Brest. ”

“ Probably those vast colonies of megalithic monuments at Carnac, and their orphaned brothers and sisters scattered elsewhere throughout Brittany, did much to keep the flames aglow on pagan altars, and even to-day it is easy to perceive with what awe and veneration the simple-minded Breton peasant regards these weird survivals of other days. At any rate, Breton religion to-day is a devotion to many forms and ceremonies. ”

“ The appearance and manners of the people are French rather than Breton, and—although the strange patterns of the white caps worn by the peasants and fisherwomen, and the curiously uncouth intonation of voices which already 10greets our ears, remind us that we are very far from the capital of France—there is little here of distinctive Breton costume.
St. Malo from its position is an important maritime station. It is busy, and busier every year, with shipbuilding, for it has a large fishing population and an export trade with all parts of the world. Brittany is a food-producing land, and St. ”

“ From the far-away time when the disciples of the good St. Patrick, among whom, says the Breton legend, “he was like a nightingale among wrens, or a beech-tree among ferns,” first planted the cross in Armorica, up to that last crusade in defence of it wherein only yesterday, as it were, Lamoricière and Pimodan and their gallant comrades sacrificed themselves as chivalrously as any knight of old on the fatal field of Castelfidardo, the Breton has never wavered in his faith. Evil example has not availed to weaken it; persecution has only made it stronger ”

“ In our day, while many of the old provinces of France have suffered—if they really do “suffer”—from a decreasing population, Brittany has augmented her numbers continually. It is a well-worn saying among the political economists of France that the “fine and healthy race of Bretons is one of the greatest reserves and hopes of the republic.” Three-quarters of all those who man French ships come from the Breton peninsula. ”

“ The first is represented in Brittany by the Korigans, the second by the Teuz. The Teuz is just the same as the elf or fairy of the Scotch and Irish, aiding the labourers in their toil, and resembles the mountain spirit of Germany.
6 In Brittany they reckon by reals; the Breton real is not worth one franc eight centimes, as in Spain, but only twenty-five centimes.
[Contents]
The Spectre Laundresses.
The Bretons are born in sin, even as other men, but never have they been wanting in care for the souls of their faithful departed. ”

“ This race desires the infinite, it thirsts for it, and pursues it at all costs, beyond the tomb, beyond hell itself. The characteristic failing of the Breton peoples, the tendency to drunkenness—a failing which, according to the traditions of the sixth century, was the cause of their disasters—is due to this invincible need of illusion. Do not say that it is an appetite for gross enjoyment; never has there been a people more sober and more alien to all sensuality. No, the Bretons sought in mead what Owen, St. Brandan, and Peredur sought in their own way,—the vision of the invisible world. ”

“ THE SAINTS OF BRITTANY An important department in Breton folk-lore is the hagiology of the province—the legendary lore of its saints. This, indeed, holds almost as much of the marvellous as its folk-tales, ballads, and historical legends, and in perusing the tales of Brittany’s saintly heroes we have an opportunity of observing how the motifs of popular fiction and even of pagan belief reflect upon religious romance. ”

“ They were now attracting many listeners who had no part with Arthur or Tristan, save the love of love and adventure. Marie de France had put certain Breton lays into Old French verse. And one or two decades later, a request from the great Countess Marie de Champagne led Chrétien de Troies, as we have seen, to recast other Breton tales in a manner somewhat transformed with thoughts of courtly love. These northern poems of love and chivalry were written to please the taste of high-born dames, just as the Troubadours had sung and still were singing to please their sisters in the south. ”

“ It is couched in but few words:—The Bretons occupy a province of the Empire of the King of the Franks, and refuse to pay him tribute in homage to his sovereignty. Besides, the Breton clergy, generally infected with a leaven of old druidic idolatry, denies the supremacy of the Archbishop of Tours. Such are the consequences of that regrettable heresy, of which Lambert, Count of Nantes, wrote to King Louis the Pious as follows: 'The Breton nation is proud and indomitable; all that there is Christian about them is the name ”