Geologically speaking, Brittany may be regarded as a prolongation of our English mountains, to which, like all the north-west coast of France, they were anciently united. In some remote era a vast convulsion opened in the solid land a chasm through which the oceans poured their meeting waters, and separated our beloved island from the European continent; the sole condition under which, perhaps, it was possible for the English people to have accomplished their destiny. Anchored amid the protecting seas, we are able to regard from afar, like a watchman from a tower, the convulsions that sweep across the face of Europe. Like the watchman, we cannot refuse to be moved by the spectacle, by the stir and the tumult; but it is only considerations of duty that can induce us to descend from our security, and mingle in the fray.
Brittany belongs to what geologists call the primitive and intermediary formations. It is divided into three belts or longitudinal trenches: those of the north and south consist of primitive rocks, granite and porphyry; the central appertains to a more recent formation, to the group of intermediary or secondary rocks, composed in the main of schists and mica-schists, quartz, and gneiss. Schist prevails over a considerable area, and is prolonged to the very extremity of the peninsula. These hard, compact, impervious rocks, are entirely bare in many places; elsewhere, and over a great extent, they are covered but by a thin layer of clayey and sandy earth, where the sudden slopes of the soil do not allow the rains to settle.
Here are the plains, often of considerable dimensions, which, bristling with rocks, and broken up by ravines, water-courses, and marshes, constitute the Landes of Brittany. True deserts these, relieved at distant points by an isolated hut, or by a wandering herd of swine, lean cows, and meagre-looking horses, which obtain a scanty subsistence from the heathery soil, sown here and there with tufts of furze, broom, and fern.
Under a sky of almost continual sombreness, like that which impends over the pottery districts of England, these landes present a sufficiently sinister and uninviting aspect. The traveller, as he crosses their sepulchral wastes, will hardly marvel that they were anciently a chosen seat of Druidical worship. Like Dartmoor, they would seem to have offered a peculiarly fitting arena for the rites and ceremonies of a creed which we know to have been mysterious in character and sanguinary in spirit. They are covered with its gray memorials: the masses of granite of different shapes known as Maen hirs, or “long stones,” and peulvens, which appear to have been employed as sepulchral monuments; dolmens, or “table-stones;” and cromlechs (crom, bowed or bending, and lech, a stone), which antiquaries are now agreed to regard as the remains of the ancient cemeteries or burial places. At Camae, near Quiberon Bay, may be seen a truly remarkable example of the Parallelitha, or avenues of upright stones, forming five parallel rows, which extend for miles over the dreary moorland. What were their uses it is impossible to determine, for there seems little ground to believe, as some writers would have us believe, that they were “serpent temples,” where the old Ophite worship was celebrated. We can only gaze at them in wonder: mile upon mile of gray lichen-stained stones, some twenty feet high, laboriously fashioned and raised in their present places by the hand of man some twenty centuries agone.[5]
On these very dolmens, where the priests of the Tentates were wont to immolate their human victims to their unknown god, the mediæval sorcerers and sorceresses celebrated the Black Mass, or Mass of Satan, in terrible burlesque of the Roman Catholic sacrament, concocted their abominable philtres, and performed their dreary incantations. Alas for human nature! In every age it is a prey to the wildest credulity. Even in the present day more than one superstition hovers around the monuments of the Celtic epoch. The Bretons believe them haunted by demons called poulpiquets, who love to make sport of the passing stranger, but will sometimes give both counsel and encouragement to those who know how to address them in the prescribed formulas; who, like the Ladye in the “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” at their bidding can bow
“The viewless forms of air.”
For, in the Breton mind, the superstitions of Druidism have not been wholly uprooted by the teachings of Christianity, still less by those of science and reason. Many a dark and dismal legend flourishes in the lonely recesses of the landes.[6]
Brittany, like England, has its Cornouaille, or Cornwall, and it is here, particularly in North Cornwall, that we see it under its most desolate aspect, with its chains of black treeless hills covered with heath and furze; with its deserts of broom and fern, its ruins scattered along the winding roads, its attenuated herds wandering at their will across the moors, and its savage, ignorant, and scanty population. The Bretons of Cornwall, according to a French writer, are elevated but a little above the true savage life. Those who dwell upon the coast live on the products of their fishing, except when the fortunate occurrence of a wreck provides them with temporary abundance. At bottom, they possess the qualities and defects of characters strongly tempered, but absolutely uncultivated. They are as hard and bare as their own granite rocks. Persevering, courageous, resolute, they make excellent sailors, the best which France can find; the sea is for them a second country. Progress, which they do not understand, inspires them with a sort of terror, a gloomy mistrust. When the railway surveyors first intruded upon their solitudes, these rigid conservatives assailed them with volleys of stones, and when the railroads were laid down flung beams across the lines to overthrow the hissing, whirring trains which threatened to disturb their prescriptive barbarism. They asked but to be let alone—to be suffered to live as their forefathers lived—to be spared the ingenuities, successes, vices, and virtues of the New World. But modern civilization, like Thor’s hammer, or Siegfried’s magic sword Balmung, will break down the last barriers raised by ignorance and superstition. It will shed its light upon the wilds and wastes of Brittany, and compel their inhabitants in the course of years to acknowledge its value and accept its benefits.