What clings to our recollections of Brittany? Some things that are not beautiful, and which by no stretch of fancy can be described en couleur de rose. The public exhibition of disease and human deformities permitted by the church are sights to which English eyes are unaccustomed, and of which the young and untravelled part of our community have happily little knowledge. But no wise determination to see only the “bright side” of things, no infusion of otto of roses amongst these leaves, can take away the stain that clings to many things in Brittany.
It would seem a consideration of some consequence to the numerous English residents abroad, though we seldom hear it touched upon, that their children must of necessity be brought in contact with so much that is cruel and repulsive. Some may think it salutary and right to see these things; at any rate it is part of the bargain with those who live abroad, and the habits of the people can scarcely be interfered with; but it is a source of wonder to visitors to the principal towns that the residents cannot persuade the authorities to keep more decently their streets and public ways.
We will not dwell upon the cruelty to animals, upon the sights to be witnessed in every market-town, such as tortured calves and half suffocated pigs, because cruelty is everywhere, and we as strangers are helpless in a land where it is not considered a sin to inflict suffering upon animals. It is true that any very flagrant acts can be dealt with by law, but the law is seldom enforced.
What does it matter about les animaux? asks the kindest-hearted, most motherly of Breton women, whose children drag live birds through the dust as playthings, and whose husband, if he be of a scientific turn, may perchance keep a grasshopper with a pin through his head, living, for days in a glass case!
But our lasting impressions of Brittany are of a people and of a country, interesting for their isolation from the rest of Europe: of a people who are, as has been well said, “dwelling in an heroic past that possibly never existed, consoling the failures of their destiny by beautiful fancies, and throwing a grace over their hard, unhopeful lives with romantic dreams and traditions”; of a people who invest every road and fountain with a holy name—for wherever two roads meet, there is a cross or a sign, and wherever three streams meet, they are called La Trinité;—of a land that stands alone in Western Europe, its rocks unmoved by the shocks of tempest from without, and its manners unpolished by advancing civilisation from within; of a land where men look to the sea as well as to the earth for their harvest, where the plough comes down to the water’s edge and the nets of the fishermen are dried upon fig-trees, where laden orchards drop their fruit over weather-worn walls on to the sands, and fish, leaping from the sea, alight sometimes in a field of corn; of a land brightened for a few weeks in summer with the flower of buckwheat, and coloured with the coral of its stems, where the wind sweeps over waves of grass and grain, and scatters the harvest over the sea.
