[Footnote 23: At Locmariquer there are not only coffins with heads, but miniature ones enclosing all the bones, piled one above the other like bales of goods, in the place apportioned them.]
Here and there on the cornice, exposed to the air, are skulls of the dead, poor creatures once without friends or family to give them burial, painted green, their eyes filled with sand and blades of grass projecting from them, often leaning against each other; here, one supported perhaps by him who was his bitter enemy.
Passing there double rows of coffins, we enter the church, and this is but a repetition of all the Breton churches; everything here—an elegant font, sculptured mouldings, pulpit of choice wood and of marvellous workmanship—chef-d'oeuvre of the end of the Renaissance, and one of the finest pulpits in Brittany—pictures on wood, chisel paintings, ever perpetuating the patriarchs, the kings, and prophets of the Old Testament mounting from earth to heaven; even to the Blessed Virgin; vault of gold and azure fairly sparkling in its complete beauty; the choir, the altar, and the side chapels filled with statues, wreathed columns, heads of angels, flowers, garlands, gilded and painted in every color, a perfect stream of gold, verdure, brilliant crimson, and azure.
From this refulgent and living whole, a single door rises on the side, high and naked; no sculpture, no ornament; the stones sweat their dampness; the bricks, that have assumed a blackened tint, separated by their white cement, present a lugubrious aspect; a great mourning veil seems spread before the eyes—this is the gate of death. You open, and you pause enchanted. Before you lies the cemetery. At your right, at your left, monument upon monument breaks upon your gaze. Under the porch where you stand are the statues in line of the twelve apostles; and opposite you, a large gate with three arches, the gate of the cemetery, in its imposing style, an arch of triumph, as if the Bretons, passing under it the perishable body, had typified the life eternal, the glory and the joy of the imperishable soul. At the right, a mortuary chapel of the style of the Louvre of Henry IV. is erected, its sculpture from the bottom to the top, an immense châsse pictured in granite; at your left is the calvary, one of those complicated calvaries, found only in Brittany, a whole people of statues; eighty or a hundred personages in the most natural and simple attitudes—disciples, prophets, holy women, thieves on their crosses, guards on horseback, and, towering over all this crowd, the tree of the cross, colossal in its structure, of several stones, cross upon cross, and holding on its branches statues of the Virgin, Saint John, the guards, and others, and, in immensity of size and above all, the Christ himself, with his arms extended over the world, and his eyes uplifted to heaven. Angels are there, too, suspended in the air, and collecting in their chalices the precious blood from his hands. [Footnote 24]
[Footnote 24: The calvaries of Plougastel and Pleyben—towns so remarkable for their beautiful churches are more complicated and grand, perhaps, but not so striking, as this one.]
And this is not all: enter the crypt of the mortuary chapel, and there you will find yourself face to face with another chef-d'oeuvre—the entombing of Christ, the scene which has ever inspired the greatest artists, and in colossal proportions. These are painted statues, and the painting adds to the impression, giving to the deeply moved personages the appearance of life. You hear them cry, you see their tears course down their pallid faces; the Virgin-Mother with her pressed lips on the livid feet of her divine Son, the Magdalen overwhelmed with grief and still beautiful in the midst of her sorrow. Can you fail to become an actor in this impassioned scene? You are rooted to the spot; the terrible blow that made them surfer becomes your reality, and, grieved to the depths of your soul, you feel your own tears flow; the lapse of ages is forgotten, and you are living in that Calvary scene.
And when we think that these works of religious art are spread all over Brittany with the same profusion; that in towns apparently the most remote from any road or centre, at Saint-Herbot in the Black Mountains, at Saint-Fiacre, which is only a little village of Laouet, and even less than a village, a miserable hamlet of five or six houses, in the chapel of Rozegrand near Quimperlé, a modest manor which hardly merits the name of a castle—we find in all these places galleries of sculptured wood, painted, gilded, and figured with fifty or more persons, rivalling the most costly churches; works so admirably reproducing the history, the miracles, and the mysteries of religion, while they preserve among the people and reanimate and increase their ardor and faith, we cannot but ask, What is the cause of such a multitude of works of art appearing everywhere on the surface of the country, and what has been the inspiration which has produced such fruit—richness of invention, truth of gesture, expression of physiognomy, a true and deep sentiment of everything divine in scenery and action? In all these monuments of the middle ages, there is to be found the same truth, the same power of imagination, while the artist never repeats himself and never tires you. He leads you on like the musician, scarcely giving you time to recover from one melody ere you are soul-entranced with another still more beautiful.
But this creative power has a cause; this society—as a man arrived at maturity with all his work accomplished for the end he would attain—had been prepared by previous ages. Disengaged from the swaddling-clothes of antiquity, its tongue was formed, its religious ideas fixed, and with its new-formed Christianity, it was logically constituted—it became a unity. Still in possession of such power, this people struggles only to create; never led by contrary tastes or carried away by disorderly and unregulated motives, so justly named in our day caprice, they cling to what preceding ages have sought for, gathered, and inculcated. The materials are ready to their hands, they seize them, and, with the genius of the age, reproduce, in a thousand forms, new beauties; the well-filled vase has only to diffuse itself and overflow with treasures. Thus, imagination bursts out everywhere lively and colored; the same mind, in literature as in art, reproduces the varied ornaments of churches, invents fables and legends, and finds at every moment new images to represent manners, ideas, opinions; and this imagination, far from exhausting itself, grows and increases, not as the forced plant of the hot-house, but the natural flower of their own spring. Ages train on, and the last one bears the crown.