I had been for some time past, as has been said, trying my hand,
not without success, at a great variety of articles in all sorts of
reviews, magazines, and newspapers. I already considered myself a
member of the guild of professional writers. I had done much business
with publishers on behalf of my mother, and some for other persons,
and talked glibly of copyrights, editions, and tokens.
(I fancy, by the by, that the latter term has somewhat fallen out of
use in these latter days, whether from any change of the methods used
by printers or publishers I do not know. But it strikes me that many
youngsters, even of the scribbling tribe, may not know that the phrase
"a token" had no connection whatever with signs and wonders of any
sort, but simply meant two hundred and fifty copies.)
And being thus equipped, I began to think that it was time that I
should attempt _a book_. During a previous hurried scamper in Normandy
I had just a glimpse of Brittany, which greatly excited my desire to
see more of it. So I pitched on a tour in Brittany as the subject of
my first attempt.
Those were happy days, when all the habitable globe had not been
run over by thousands of tourists, hundreds of whom are desirous of
describing their doings in print--not but that the notion, whether
a publisher's or writer's notion, that new ground is needed for the
production of a good and amusing book of travels, is other than a
great mistake. I forget what proposing author it was, who in answer
to a publisher urging the fact that "a dozen writers have told us all
about so and so," replied, "But _I_ have not told you what _I_ have
seen and thought about it." But if I had been the publisher I should
at once have asked to see his MS. The days when a capital book may be
written on a _voyage autour de ma chambre_ are as present as ever they
were. And "A Summer Afternoon's Walk to Highgate" might be the subject
of a delightful book if only the writer were the right man.
Brittany, however, really was in those days to a great extent fresh
ground, and the strangely secluded circumstances of its population
offered much tempting material to the book-making tourist. All this is
now at an end; not so much because the country has been the subject of
sundry good books of travel, as because the people and their mode of
life, the country and its specialties have all been utterly changed by
the pleasant, convenient, indispensable, abominable railway, which in
its merciless irresistible tramp across the world crushes into a
dead level of uninteresting monotony so many varieties of character,
manners, and peculiarities. And thus "the individual withers, and the
world is more and more!" But _is_ the world more and more in any sense
that can be admitted to be desirable, in view of the eternity of that
same Individual?
As for the Bretons, the individual has withered to that extent that
he now wears trousers instead of breeches, while his world has become
more and more assimilated to that of the Faubourg St. Antoine, with
the result of losing all those really very notable and stiff and
sturdy virtues which differentiated the Breton peasant, when I first
knew him, while it would be difficult indeed to say what it has
gained. At all events the progress which can be stated is mainly to be
stated in negatives. The Breton, as I first knew him, believed in all
sorts of superstitious rubbish. He now believes in nothing at all.
He was disposed to honour and respect God, and his priest, and his
seigneur perhaps somewhat too indiscriminately. Now he neither honours
nor respects any earthly or heavenly thing. These at least were the
observations which a second, or rather third visit to the country a
few years ago suggested to me, mainly, it is true, as regards the
urban population. And without going into any of the deeper matters
which such changes suggest to one's consideration, there can be no
possible doubt as to the fact that the country and its people are
infinitely less interesting than they were.
My plans were soon made, and I hastened to lay them before Mr.
Colburn, who was at that time publishing for my mother. The trip was
my main object, and I should have been perfectly contented with terms
that paid all the expenses of it. _Dî auctius fecerunt_, and I came
home from my ramble with a good round sum in my pocket.
I was not greedy of money in those days, and had no unscriptural
hankerings after laying up treasure upon earth. All I wanted was a
sufficient supply for my unceasing expenditure in locomotion and inn
bills--the latter, be it observed, always on a most economical scale.
I was not a profitable customer; I took nothing "for the good of the
house." I had a Gargantuesque appetite, and needed food of some sort
in proportion to its demands. I neither took, or cared to take, any
wine with my dinner, and never wanted any description of "nightcap."
As for accommodation for the night, anything sufficed me that gave me
a clean bed and a sufficient window-opening on fresh air, under such
conditions as made it possible for me to have it open all night. To
the present day I cannot sleep to my liking in a closed chamber; and
before now, on the top of the Righi, have had my bed clothes blown off
my bed, and snow deposited where they should have been.
But _quo musa tendis?_ I was talking about my travels in Brittany.
I do not think my book was a bad _coup d'essai_. I remember old John
Murray coming out to me into the front office in Albemarle Street,
where I was on some business of my mother's, with a broad good-natured
smile on his face, and putting into my hands the _Times_ of that
morning, with a favourable notice of the book, saying as he did so,
"There, so _you_ have waked this morning to find yourself famous!"
And, what was more to the purpose, my publisher was content with the
result, as was evidenced by his offering me similar terms for another
book of the same description--of which, more anon.
As my volumes on Brittany, published in 1840, are little likely to
come under the eye of any reader at the present day, and as the
passage I am about to quote indicates accurately enough the main point
of difference between what the traveller at that day saw and what the
traveller of the present day may see, I think I may be pardoned for
giving it.
"We had observed that at Broons a style of _coiffure_ which was new
to us prevailed; and my companion wished to add a sketch of it to his
fast-increasing collection of Breton costumes. With this view, he had
begun making love to the maid a little, to induce her to do so much
violence to her maiden modesty, as to sit to him for a few minutes,
when a far better opportunity of achieving his object presented
itself.
"The landlady's daughter, a very pretty little girl about fourteen
years old, was going to be confirmed, and had just come down stairs
to her mother, who was sitting knitting in the _salle à manger_, for
inspection and approval before she started. Of course, upon such an
occasion, the art of the _blanchisseuse_ was taxed to the utmost. Lace
was not spared; and the most _recherché coiffure_ was adopted, that
the rigorous immutability of village modes would permit.
"It would seem that the fickleness of fashion exercises in constant
local variations that mutability which is utterly denied to it in
Brittany with regard to time. Every district, almost every commune
has its own peculiar 'mode' (for both sexes) which changes not from
generation to generation. As the mothers dress, so do their daughters,
so did their grandmothers, and so will their grand-daughters." [But I
reckoned when writing thus without the railroad and its consequences.]
"If a woman of one parish marries, or takes service, or for any other
cause resides in another, she still retains the mode of her native
village; and thus carries about her a mark, which is to those, among
whom she is a sojourner, a well-recognised indication of the place
whence she comes, and to herself a cherished souvenir of the home
which she never ceases to consider her own country.
"But though the form of the dress is invariable, and every inhabitant
of the commune, from the wealthy farmer's wife to the poorest cottager
who earns her black bread by labour in the fields, would as soon think
of adopting male attire as of innovating on the immemorial _mode du
pays_, yet the quality of the materials allows scope for wealth and
female coquetry to show themselves. Thus the invariable _mode de
Broons_, with its trifling difference in form, which in the eye of the
inhabitants made it as different as light from darkness from the _mode
de St. Jouan_,' was equally observable in the coarse linen _coiffe_ of
the maid, and the richly-laced and beautifully 'got up' head-dress of
the daughter of the house.
"A very slight observation of human nature under a few only of its
various phases may suffice to show that the instinct which prompts a
woman to adorn her person to the best possible advantage is not the
hot-house growth of cities, but a genuine wild flower of nature. No
high-born beauty ever more repeatedly or anxiously consulted her
wax-lit _psyché_ on every faultless point of hair, face, neck, feet,
and figure, before descending to the carriage for her first ball, than
did our young Bretonne again and again recur to the mirror, which
occupied the pier between the two windows of the _salle à manger_,
before sallying forth on the great occasion of her confirmation.
"The dear object of girlish ambition was the same to both; but the
simplicity of the little _paysanne_ showed itself in the utter absence
of any wish to conceal her anxiety upon the subject. Though delighted
with our compliments on her appearance, our presence by no means
prevented her from springing upon a chair every other minute to obtain
fuller view of the _tout ensemble_ of her figure. Again and again the
modest kerchief was arranged and rearranged to show a hair's breadth
more or a hair's breadth less of her brown but round and taper throat.
Repeatedly, before it could be finally adjusted to her satisfaction,
was the delicate fabric of her _coiffure_ moved with cautious care and
dainty touch a _leetle_ backwarder or a _leetle_ forwarder over her
sun-browned brow.
"Many were the pokings and pinchings of frock and apron, the
smoothings down before and twitchings down behind of the not less
anxious mother. Often did she retreat to examine more correctly the
general effect of the _coup d'oeil_, and as often return to rectify
some injudicious pin or remodel some rebellious fold. When all was at
length completed, and the well-pleased parent had received from the
servants, called in for the express purpose, the expected tribute of
admiration, the little beauty took _L'Imitation de la Vierge_ in her
hand, and tripped across to a convent of _Soeurs Grises_ on the other
side of the way to receive their last instructions and admonitions
respecting her behaviour when she should be presented to the bishop,
while her mother screamed after her not to forget to pull up her frock
when she kneeled down.
"All the time employed in this little revision of the toilet had not
been left unimproved by my companion, who at the end of it produced
and showed to the proud mother an admirable full-length sketch of her
pretty darling. The delighted astonishment of the poor woman, and her
accent, as she exclaimed, '_O, si c'était pour moi_!' and then blushed
to the temples at what she had said, were irresistible, and the
good-natured artist was fain to make her a present of the drawing."
My Breton book ("though I says it as shouldn't") is not a bad one,
especially as regards the upper or northern part of the province. That
which concerns Lower Brittany is very imperfect, mainly, I take it,
because I had already nearly filled my destined two volumes when I
reached it. I find there, however, the following notice of the sardine
fishery, which has some interest at the present day. Perhaps the
majority of the thousands of English people who nowadays have
"sardines" on their breakfast-table every morning are not aware that
the contents of a very large number of the little tin boxes which are
supposed to contain the delicacy are not sardines at all. They are
very excellent little fishes, but not sardines; for the enormously
increased demand for them has outstripped the supply. In the days when
the following sentences were written sardines might certainly be had
in London (as what might not?) at such shops as Fortnum and Mason's,
but they were costly, and by no means commonly met with.
On reaching Douarnenez in the summer of 1839 I wrote:--"The whole
population and the existence of Douarnenez depend on the sardine
fishery. This delicious little fish, which the _gourmands_ of Paris so
much delight in, when preserved in oil, and sent to their capital in
those little tin boxes whose look must be _familiar to all who have
frequented the Parisian breakfast-houses_" [but is now more familiar
to all who have entered any grocers shop throughout the length and
breadth of England], "is still more exquisite when eaten fresh on the
shores which it frequents. They are caught in immense quantities along
the whole of the southern coast of Brittany, and on the western shore
of Finisterre as far to the northward as Brest, which, I believe, is
the northern limit of the fishery. They come into season about the
middle of June, and are then sold in great quantities in all the
markets of southern Brittany at two, three, or four sous a dozen,
according to the abundance of the fishery and the distance of the
market from the coast. I was told that the commerce in sardines along
the coast from l'Orient to Brest amounted to three millions of francs
annually."
At the present day it must be enormously larger. I remember well the
exceeding plentifulness of the little fishes--none of them so large as
many of those which now fill the so-called sardine boxes--when I was
at Douarnenez in 1839. All the men, women, and children in the place
seemed to be feasting upon them all day long. Plates with heaps of
them fried and piled up crosswise, like timber in a timber-yard, were
to be seen outdoors and indoors, wherever three or four people could
be found together. All this was a thing of the past when I revisited
Douarnenez in 1866. Every fish was then needed for the tinning
business. They were to be had of course by ordering and paying for
them, but very few indeed were consumed by the population of the
place.
And this subject reminds me of another fishery which I witnessed a
few months ago--last March--at Sestri di Ponente, near Genoa. We
frequently saw nearly the whole of the fisher population of the place
engaged in dragging from the water on to the sands enormously long
nets, which had been previously carried out by boats to a distance not
more I think than three or four hundred yards from the shore. From
these nets, when at last they were landed after an hour or so of
continual dragging by a dozen or twenty men and women, were taken huge
baskets-full of silvery little fish sparkling in the sun, _exactly_
like whitebait. I had always supposed that whitebait was a specialty
of the Thames. Whether an icthyologist would have pronounced the
little Sestri fishes to be the same creatures as those which British
statesmen consume at Greenwich I cannot say; but we ate them
frequently at the hotel under the name of _gianchetti_, and could find
_no_ difference between them and the Greenwich delicacy. The season
for them did not seem to last above two or three weeks. The fishermen
continued to drag their net, but caught other fishes instead of
_giancketti_. But while it lasted the plenty of them was prodigious.
All Sestri was eating them, as all Douarnenez ate sardines in the old
days. When the net with its sparkling cargo was dragged up on the sand
and the contents were being shovelled into huge baskets to be carried
up into the town, the men would take up handfuls of them, fresh, and I
suppose still living, from the sea, and plunging their bearded mouths
in them, eat them up by hundreds. The children too, irrepressibly
thronging round the net, would pick from its meshes the fishes which
adhered to them and eat them, as more inland rising generations eat
blackberries. I did not try the experiment of eating them thus, as one
eats oysters, but I can testify that, crisply fried, and eaten with
brown bread and butter and lemon juice, they were remarkably good.
Fortified by the excellent example of Sir Francis Doyle, who in his
extremely amusing volume of _Reminiscences_ gives as a reason for
disregarding the claims of chronology in the composition of it, the
chances that he might forget the matter he had In his mind if he did
not book it at once, I have ventured for the same reason to do the
same thing here. But I have an older authority for the practice in
question, which Sir Francis is hardly likely to have lighted on.
That learned antiquary and portentously voluminous writer, Francesco
Cancellieri, who was well known to the Roman world in the latter years
of the last, and the earliest years of the present, century, used
to compose his innumerable works upon a similar principle. And when
attacked by the critics his cotemporaries, who Italian-like supposed
academically correct form to be the most important thing in any
literary work, he defended himself on the same ground. "If I don't
catch it _now_, I may probably forget it; and is the world to be
deprived of the information it is in my power to give it, for the sake
of the formal correctness of my work?"
There is another passage in my book on Brittany respecting which it
would be interesting to know whether recent travellers can report
that the state of things there described no longer exists. I wrote in
1839--
"Very near Treguier, on a spot appropriately selected for such a
worship--the barren top of a bleak unsheltered eminence--stands the
chapel of _Notre Dame de la Haine!_ Our Lady of HATRED! The most
fiendish of human passions is supposed to be under the protection of
Christ's religion! What is this but a fragment of pure and unmixed
Paganism, unchanged except in the appellation of its idol, which has
remained among these lineal descendants of the Armorican Druids for
more than a thousand years after Christianity has become the professed
religion of the country! Altars, professedly Christian, were raised
under the protection of the Protean Virgin, to the demon _Hatred_; and
have continued to the present day to receive an unholy worship from
blinded bigots, who hope to obtain Heaven's patronage and assistance
for thoughts and wishes which they would be ashamed to breathe to man.
Three _Aves_ repeated with devotion at this odious and melancholy
shrine are firmly believed to have the power to cause, within the
year, the certain death of the person against whom the assistance of
Our Lady of Hatred has been invoked. And it is said that even yet
occasionally, in the silence and obscurity of the evening, the figure
of some assassin worshipper at this accursed shrine may be seen
to glide rapidly from the solitary spot, where he has spoken the
unhallowed prayer whose mystic might has doomed to death the enemy he
_hates_."
I must tell one other story of my Breton recollections, which refers
to a time much subsequent to the publication of the book I have been
quoting. It was in 1866 that I revisited Brittany in company with
my present wife; and one of the objects of our little tour was the
Finisterre land's end at the extreme point of the horn-like promontory
which forms the department so named. We found some difficulty in
reaching the spot, not the least part of which was caused by the
necessity of threading our way, when in the immediate neighbourhood of
the cliffs, among enormous masses of seaweed stacked in huge heaps
and left to undergo the process of decay, which turns it into very
valuable manure. The odour which impregnated the whole surrounding
atmosphere from these heaps was decidedly the worst and most
asphyxiating I ever experienced.
We stood at last on the utmost _Finis terrae_ and looked over the
Atlantic not only from the lighthouse, which, built three hundred feet
above the sea level, is often, we were told, drenched by storm-driven
spray, but from various points of the tremendous rocks also. They are
tremendous, in truth. The scene is a much grander one than that at our
own "Land's End," which I visited a month or two ago. The cliffs are
much higher, the rocks are more varied in their forms--more cruelly
savage-looking, and the cleavages of them are on a larger scale. The
spot was one of the most profound solitude, for we were far from the
lighthouse, and the scream of the white gulls as they started from
their roosting-places on the face of the rocks, or returned to them
from their swirling flights, were the only indication of the presence
of any creature having the breath of life.
The rock ledges, among which we were clambering, were in many places
fearful spots enough--places where a stumble or a divagation of
the foot but six or eight inches from the narrow path would have
precipitated the blunderer to assured and inevitable destruction.
"Here," said I to my wife, as we stood side by side on one such ledge,
"would be the place for a husband, who wanted to get rid of his
wife, to accomplish his purpose. Done in ten seconds! With absolute
certainty! One push would suffice! No cry of any more avail than the
screams of those gulls! And no possibility of the deed being witnessed
by any mortal eye!"
I had hardly got the words out of my mouth before our ears were
startled by a voice hailing us; and after some searching of the eye
we espied a man engaged in seeking sea-fowls' eggs, who had placed
himself in a position which I should have thought it absolutely
impossible to reach, whence he had seen us, as we now saw him!
Let this then, my brethren, be a warning to you!