Morlaix[375] is a good center from which to visit many of the notable revered places. Close by, in the village of Plougonven, is the oldest Calvary extant (1554). A few miles away is that of St. Thégonnec (1610), a shrine invoked for the cure of beasts, where beneath a statue of Our Lady is inscribed: “We beg you, Madame Vièrge, to accept our first bull.” Near the church is one of the isolated chapels called ossuaries in which were gathered the bones of the past generations when they had had their turn in the churchyard’s consecrated ground. The chapel bears an inscription from Maccabees: “It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from their sins.” Bedrock in the Breton is his instinct to join his progenitors and his descendants in a permanence of spiritual emotion.[376] No other people of the earth risk life more freely than these frequenters of the deep-sea fisheries; nowhere is the cult of the dead more tenacious, because it is considered that they who have fallen asleep with Godliness have great grace laid up for them.
Near St. Thégonnec, at Guimiliau, is another Calvary (1581), and another ossuary and triumphal arch. The capacious church porch is lined with statues of the apostles. At Carhaix, Pleyben (1650), Cronan, and Penmarc’h, are Calvaries, and that at Lampaul is united in the same composition with the graveyard’s triumphal arch. Brittany’s most imposing Calvaire, and the most wonderful wayside shrine ever made, comprising over two hundred images in all, is at Plougastel-Daoulas, a memorial of the epidemic of 1598. The greenish Kersanton granite of which it is made is quarried close by in the harbor of Brest, and acquires with time the endurance and appearance of bronze. Breton peasants are represented playing on Breton pipes in the Entry-into-Jerusalem scene. Late comers these rough-hewn sculptures may be in the national art, but in so far as character goes they might easily belong to the XII or XIII century.
The theorist may say that the racial exclusiveness of Brittany is one of the reasons why it has not excelled in architecture and the kindred arts. That may be so. The chief concern of the Celt has ever been to save his soul. The architectural purist is prone to carp at Breton Gothic, and some even dare say that the Kreisker itself errs, in that its shaft is not sufficiently welded with its spire. Without a doubt the absence of symmetry in many churches of the ancient province is at first disturbing, but soon one comprehends that one travels in Brittany not for its architecture, but for the unconquerable soul of a people who, while devoted to tradition, have ever stood up uncowed, unswerving in their antagonism to despotism. The sensitive traveler—that is, the man with kindly, plain loyalties—will let himself grow attached to the mediocre, irregular churches of this individual land.
Some of those irregularities are startling enough. The pilgrimage church of Guingamp has a curious two-storied triforium, and flying buttresses inside the choir over the aisles. Its nave is an amalgam, one wall Gothic and its vis-à-vis a fluted-pilastered Renaissance affair. The sculptor gave his initiative full scope in the apostle’s porch—a revered spot on the days of Guingamp’s famous pardon, that precedes the first Sunday of July. At Dinan, in the church of St. Sauveur—in whose transept is treasured the heart of Duguesclin, born not far away—a Romanesque wall faces a Flamboyant Gothic one. In the corsair stronghold of St. Malo,[377] breeder of strong men, the cathedral’s walls make no pretense to be parallel.
The Breton has been too engrossed in keeping warm in his churches the spirit of devotion to bother about such details as symmetry. Eagerly he added chapel to chapel, aisle to aisle, regardless how difficult it might be for a stranger to orient himself on entering. The wise traveler will accept Brittany as she is, for if he does not, Brittany, like Spain, will exasperate him by her tranquil indifference to his criticisms. On a mediæval tower of the castle at St. Malo was inscribed:
Grumble who will.
So shall it be
As pleases me.[378]
THE CATHEDRAL AT DOL-EN-BRETAGNE[379]
Bretagne, ô mon pays, garde ta foi naïve,
Car Dieu se plaît surtout dans la simplicité;
C’est comme le miroir d’une source d’eau vive,
Où vient se réfléchir, l’astre de vérité.
—Joseph Rousse, Poésies bretonnes.
Brittany may be a land of shrines more than of churches; nevertheless, some five of its former nine bishoprics are of interest in the Gothic story—Dol, Nantes, Quimper, St. Pol-de-Léon, and Tréguier.
The hardy outpost of Dol, in the north, has stood many a siege, fought many a battle, and its church walls are crenelated where they face the city ramparts. The tutelary of the ci-devant cathedral is St. Samson, whose name keeps alive the memory of the arrival of the harassed Celts of Britain who poured “like a torrent” into Armorica during the dark centuries of the Middle Ages when the migrations of the Barbarians had wiped out Rome’s civilization in England. In Dol’s great eastern window, St. Samson and some monk companions are shown crossing the Channel.