Some Breton Folk-Songs

A SIMPLE, kindly, honest people are the Breton folk. Not French at all, but very far from it, although they nowadays choose deputies to the legislative body in Paris, and their rugged granite country is districted into “ departments ” with French names only a century old, and is painted of the same color with France on the map of Europe. So far are they from being French that for almost a thousand years they were resisting French invasions, as their cousins, the Highland Gaels and Cambrian Welsh, in their stronger mountain refuges, were repelling Saxon and English invasions. With such success did they resist that, of all the provinces which went to make up the French monarchy, Brittany was the last to become incorporated in it, as contiguous Normandy was the first.

Not French in race, they are not even cognate with the French, except by a remote and roundabout relation of the half-blood ; for while the very name of French, or Frank, is German, no German strain can be traced in Breton blood, except as in these later centuries it has oozed over from Frankish and Norman regions to the east. The true Breton is a true Celt; and although Kelt and Gaul are one in ultimate origin, the Breton folk are not a remnant of the Gauls whom Cæsar subdued, and whom, after him, German and Scandinavian hordes — Franks or Freemen, Normans or Northmen — overran and settled down upon and mingled with, as conquering races with conquered. Under this process of confusion, the Gauls of Cæsar’s Gaul ceased long ago to exist. The French who are in their place are certainly not more than half Gaulish, or Gallic, and for the rest German and Romanic : and even their language contains, in its German and Latin mass, but slight traces of the aboriginal speech of two thousand years ago.

This name of “ Gaul ” and “ Celt ” remains, indeed, to this day, in infinite variety of form, over much of Europe, and even in western Asia. The “ foolish Galatians ” of Paul’s epistle are cousins, so far away as Asia Minor, of the western Gauls, and are charged by him with a certain light-mindedness which is not seldom imputed even now to men of that race. Galicia in Poland and Galicia in Spain, separated though they are by the breadth of Europe, owe their common name to identity of origin. The Gael of the Scottish Highlands, the Irish Celt, the mountaineer of Wales (which in its French form is “ Galles ”), declare their kindred by their names.

Kindred indeed, but by collateral and not direct descent, is the Celt of Brittany to the Gaul of Cæsar’s time. Gauls enough there were in the Armorican peninsula, in those days; but it was not until the Celtic population of the Britain north of the Channel began to flee before the Saxon invasion of the fifth century that a great movement in mass from the island to the peninsula of the mainland gave it a new population, and the new name which that population brought with it. From that time the island from which they came was rather England — the land of the Angles — than even the Great Britain which it became necessary to call it, by way of distinction from the new Brittany of the opposite shore.

Thus established in the peninsula, the ancient Celtic type has endured with a rare and strong persistency. It can be plainly discerned in face and form, and even in moral qualities; while in language, though the type is steadily passing away, it seems likely to be here the last survivor of all Celtic tongues. In Ireland, the Erse is rapidly disappearing, even in the remotest districts; and although in the Scottish Highlands the Gaelic, and in the mountains of Cambria the Welsh, are still spoken languages, yet in Cornwall, which is closest of all to Brittany in situation, in kin, and in speech, it is now a hundred years since the last man died to whom the language was native with which he could have communicated, if need were, with his neighbors on the south side of the Channel.

These two peninsulas, indeed, the Cornish and the Breton, have more in common than identity of speech and race. Both are thrust forward against the Atlantic storms, hard, granite, rocky, unfertile, swept by tempests, drenched with fogs, yet each resting at its base upon a country behind it of prodigious fertility and of soft and gentle beauty. Upon the map of each the common language has set its mark in hundreds of common name-forms. If, as the inquisitive innkeeper in Kenilworth quoted to Liessdian,

so in France the same prefixes belong as surely to Breton names. The Cornish town of Saint Ives owes its name to a Breton saint, patron of lawyers. The Mont-Saint-Michel, which rears its rocky pyramid out of the southern margin of the Channel, just at the edge of Brittany, has its counterpart in the smaller Saint Michael’s Mount, near the opposite Cornish shore ; and even the name itself of Cornwall belongs in an almost identical form to a district (Cornouaille) of the French peninsula.

Yet, whatever may be the qualities of likeness between the various regions, remote and barren, which served as the final refuges of the Celtic race, in no other of them is there to-day the historic and human interest which belongs to Lower Brittany. It is in Basse Bretagne, or “la Bretagne bretonnante” (for by nothing less than an invented word could their French neighbors express the intensity of the national feeling which they found there), that, furthest from the stress of modern life, persistence in the life of the Middle Ages has been most stubborn and most successful. There antique faith seems still to maintain her strongest hold. In that wild land, covered with the unstoried monuments of a religion without written record, the pagan faith, which within three centuries was still extant there, seems even now to live in the absolute devotion of the peasant to that form of Christianity which superseded it, or even adopted and assimilated it. The traveler may see across a stretch of untilled moor the druidic menhir still pointing its solitary finger to heaven, but it is dominated by the cross. The massive unhewn stones of the dolmen, “ an altar of whole stones, over which no man hath lift up any iron " (Joshua viii. 31), if the Armorican deities have abandoned them, are still the nightly haunt of the fairies, who are to the Breton mind as true and as potent daimons as those whom they have supplanted. The noble churches and cathedrals, constructed with infinite toil from the hard granite of the country, remain untouched by the destroying hand of revolutionary atheism, and overflow with worshiping thousands on the Sundays and saints’ days. Submissive at last to the French domination, which they resisted long after it had established itself all over France, the Bretons repel the name of Frenchmen for themselves; and the foot-traveler asking his way in French will often be answered that the native whom he accosts does not understand that language. Subject at last to the French monarch, they became in time “ more royalist than the king,’’ as they have always been (almost) more Catholic than the Pope. But it was not merely loyalty, or religion, or race, or all together, which inspired their furious resistance to the Revolution. There was the further reason that, content with their own institutions, upon which, as upon the clan system of the Scottish Highlands, feudalism had never impressed the cruelties under which most of western Europe was groaning, they alone in what is now France, as has been said by M. Thiers, “had nothing to gain by the Revolution.”

It was from the very time, it seems, of the great British migration across the Channel, a movement which must have abounded in perils and exploits, at once demanding commemoration and stimulating to the imagination, that Breton history and Breton literature began. The history, indeed, was oral tradition ; the literature was legend and folk-song. Nor were the bards of pagan times divested of their functions by the intrusion, when that occurred, of the priests of a new religion. The bards were still, for Breton common folk, their holy men, their soothsayers, even their sorcerers ; and when the last of them had yielded to the hostility of an alien hierarchy, the wandering minstrels continued their service to a period within living memory.

This literature, in great part preserved hitherto only by delivery from parent to child, by the recital of the minstrel, and by the village chorus, must soon have disappeared with the extinction of the Breton tongue, — an extinction approaching with a speed accelerated by the new compulsory education in French. It is a Breton nobleman de vieille souche, the Viscount de la Villemarqué, who has rendered the great service to his native land and to the world of letters and learning of fixing for all time some part of this evanescent treasure. With affectionate and enthusiastic faithfulness, he has brought together a collection of the popular songs of his native province, not one of which, it seems, had ever, before the appearance of his book a few years ago, been committed to printed paper. His mother, to whom he dedicates his work with filial reverence, had begun before him to take down in her household receipt book, from the lips of those who recited or sang them, many of the songs which the son has now preserved. Not one, it is said, of the persons from whom they were received had ever read them, or would have been able to read if he had seen them. Yet the sciences of archæology and philology concur in the judgment that in the earliest of these compositions the thoughts, and the words even, of the sixth century have been preserved by oral tradition to the nineteenth. No wonder, then, if it has been thought that nowhere is the power of poetry greater than in Brittany. They have a proverb that “ poetry is stronger than the three strongest things, — pestilence, fire, and storm.” Their language, indeed, is poor. It is the narrow instrument of a simple people, aloof from modern civilization, having simple wants and simple ideas. Yet the language, very poor though it be, is the vehicle of an elevated poetry ; and there may, perhaps, be reason for the suggestion that the language has not always been so bare, and that its rags sometimes show the glimmer of a splendor which is past. This, at all events, is true: that if the Breton idiom in which these songs appear is rustic, it is never coarse, and that one who hears or reads must feel that they have come to him through the lips of mothers. The enlightened modern French criticism, therefore, has been right in admitting, as a worthy subject of its study and its pride, not merely the provincial legends and folk-songs of the narrower France, in their broad and rich variety, but those of this conquered and alien subject. “ As she has received with pride,” says M. de la Villemarqué, “ the lyric palms of the Provençal troubadour and the epic laurels of the French trouvère, she accepts graciously the branch of flowering birch, coronal of the old bards, which the Breton Muse, long fugitive and proscribed, comes in her turn to offer.”

It is under the Breton title Barzaz Breiz, and its French equivalent Chants Populaires de la Bretagne, that the folksongs thus collected are preserved in their Breton form, with parallel literal translations into French. Rude though their rhythm may seem, they are not without prosodic system. That system is founded on metre and rhyme. The lines are arranged so as to form, usually, distichs or quatrains, generally of equal measure. They are of three, five, six, seven, eight, nine, twelve, and even in some cases thirteen and fifteen syllables. Every hemistich, every line, every strophe, should have a complete signification, which should never lap over upon the following one. The rhymes never cross one another, as in written poetry. In general they satisfy the ear ; sometimes they present nothing more than a simple assonance ; and it has been observed that the remoter the epoch to which the subject of the song belongs, the richer are the rhymes. Besides the rhyme, alliteration is employed ; that is, the accord of consonants in the same line. Besides distichs and quatrains, there are tercets ; but these are regarded as artificial forms, essentially opposed to the genius of true popular poetry, and received by Breton prosody from the ancient bards.

Of this variety of rhythm, out of the whole range of popular poetry through war, crime, passion, mythology, religion, and the gentler affections, over a period from the British migration to the Chouan war of the last century, M. de la Villemarque has brought together almost a hundred examples. His translations into French are, fortunately, literal, and not metrical; and it is simply a retranslation from the French which is essayed in the selections that follow. That those who choose may test the accuracy of this double process, the entire first strophe of The Prophecy of Gwenc’hlan is given in its original Cornouaille dialect.

From pagan times, this savage song, like an Apache war-song, has come to ns with all its pagan fury, breathing the spirit, and conveying almost the very words, of the fifth century. A foreign prince had seized the bard, put out his eyes, and cast him into a dungeon, where he was left to die. But the invader himself, not long afterward, fell in battle under the blows of the Bretons, a victim of the prophetic imprecation of the poet. This is the Breton song, and its meaning follows.

DIOUGAN GWENC’HLAN.

I.

[This triple death is that of the limited metempsychosis of the bardic religion.]

II.

III.

Of what age is the strongly contrasted ballad which follows does not so clearly appear. The useful trade which it satirizes seems to have been especially the object of ridicule in Celtic countries, although in all warlike nations men’s agitated and wandering lives accorded ill with the quiet household existence of the tailors. In Lower Brittany, as well as elsewhere, they have still the proverb that “it takes nine tailors to make one man ; ” and there, as not elsewhere, one who speaks the word lifts his hat and adds, “ Saving your presence.” The Très-Ancienne Coutume of the province classes them with “ rascal trades, like flayers of horses and of vile animals, vagabonds, hangmen, tavern - waiters, winepeddlers, fishmongers, those who meddle in the selling of bad wares, and minstrels or venders of wind.”

THE DWARFS.

[This is the favorite fairy song. The singers dance about their fountains, as they recite it, but never venture to add the “ Saturday,” for that is the Virgin’s day, nor to begin with “ Sunday,” for it is the Lord’s day. It is said that a traveler who listened, unobserved, to their singing, finding the refrain monotonous, and adding himself the words “ Saturday, Sunday,” brought on such an explosion of disorder and threats that the poor man almost died of terror; but the assurance is given that if he had immediately added, “ and now the week is ended,” the long penitence to which the dwarfs are condemned would have ended with the song.]

The Submersion of Is preserves a legend of the earliest centuries of the Christian era. The town of Is seems to be quite unknown to history, but according to the legend it was the capital of King Gradlon, protected against the invasion of the sea by an immense basin made to receive the highest tides. This basin had a secure gate, of which the king alone kept the key, and which he opened and closed as might be needed. One night, as he slept, the Princess Dabut, his daughter, wishing to crown worthily the follies of a banquet given to her lover, stole from her father the fatal key, opened the gate, and submerged the city.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

It is a different motive which inspires The Wine of the Gauls and the Dance of the Sword. This, it is thought from internal proofs, comes quite from the sixth century, if not, in part at least, from a still earlier date. At that time, as down to quite recent times in the Scottish borderlands, the Bretons used often to make raids upon the territory of their neighbors subject to the domination of the Franks, to whom, ignoring the ethnic facts which are better known now, they misapplied the name of Gauls. The cattle, which were the object of the Highland incursions, were only a part, and perhaps a minor part, of the booty sought by their Breton cousins. There was no wine in Brittany unless it came from abroad, and there was no commerce to bring it. So in the autumn, says Gregory of Tours (A. D. 540-594), they set out with wagons, and provided with implements both of war and of husbandry, for their armed vintage. If the grapes were still on the vines, they gathered them ; if the wine was made, they carried it with them; if they were too hard pressed or surprised by the Franks, they drank it on the spot, and then, leading captive the vintagers, joyously regained their forests and marshes.

Of the piece which follows, the first part is believed to have been composed upon the return from such an expedition. It is still sung, glass in hand, by tavern-roisterers in the parish of Coray; “ more for the air,”it is said, “ than for the words, of which, thank God, they have ceased to comprehend the original spirit.” The second part, however, is thought to have only an accidental connection with the first, and to be a battlesong in honor of the sun, — a fragment of the Round of the Sword of the ancient Bretons, executed by the young men leaping in a measured circular movement, throwing their swords in the air and receiving them again in the hand. The earlier piece is regularly alliterated from beginning to end; and how well the refrain must have recalled to the ear the clash of arms may be better appreciated from the original, which is: —

I.

[Each strophe is followed by the same refrain.]

II.

If the savage passions which inspired The Wine of the Gauls have been outlived by the words, now only dimly appreciated, of that lyric, not so with the nobler sentiment which has kept The March of Arthur for twelve hundred years alive in Breton hearts and on Breton lips. From the sixth century, whenever war approached, there was sent as its forerunner the army of Arthur, defiling at dawn on the summit of the Black Mountains ; and at the close of the eighteenth this song was heard again from the rustic levies of Cadoudal and La Rochejaquelein, armed in defense of altar and fireside against the Revolution.

THE MARCH OF ARTHUR.

Here is another war-song, which seems to have come, not, like the last, from the sixth century, but from the tenth, and was first taken down in writing, as was also The March of Arthur, from the lips of an old peasant who had been a soldier of George Cadoudal in the war of “ the Blues ” against “ the Whites.” It celebrates the patriotic exploits of a national hero, to whose Celtic name Alan, as Scottish as it is Breton, history has added the surname of " the Twisted Beard,” and tradition that of “ the Bearded ” or ” the Fox.”

ALAN THE FOX.

But though the savage fierceness of the Celtic pagan lives even now, after many centuries of Christian domination, in such songs as these, and bursts forth into fire in such explosions as the exterminating Vendean war, the patient and enduring gentleness of the Breton peasantry has other ways of thinking and feeling, and other means of expression. The korrigan (little fairies) still frequent, it is true, those rare localities— oftenest a spring in the neighborhood of a dolmen — from which the holy Virgin, who is deemed their greatest enemy, has not yet driven them away ; but the Virgin Mother is herself the object of their most reverent devotion. A song of great simplicity and tenderness, seeming to be of comparatively recent composition, sets forth the toils and hardships of the life of him who tills the soil: ‘‘ a hard and painful life, without rest day or night ; wretched our lot, evil our star, our state right painful; yet let us bear all in patience, that we may merit Paradise ! ”

Nowhere, perhaps, are poverty and misfortune less a reproach and a humiliation than in the Brittany even of this day. The poor there are God’s poor. The poor man does not shrink from labor when he is young, so that he is not despised for begging when be is old and unable to work longer. No one forgets that his rags are one day to he exchanged for glorious vestments ; and he is welcomed to the fare and fireside of those whose fortune is better than his. Poor though the peasantry be, they are not a proletariat dangerous to social order, for they are patient and religious. Though elsewhere the peasant, unsustained by faith, may curse the earth on which he works and the landowner whom he must pay, the tiller of the Breton soil interrupts his labor with a prayer as he hears the Angelus ring. If his cottage is consumed by fire, he does not weep, or burst into screams or curses; he bows his head and says sadly, “ God’s will be done.” Such resignation, it has been said, goes with him to the bed of death, and he leaves without regret a miserable life which he has patiently endured in the confident hope of a better.

The day after a marriage is “ the day of the poor.” They come by hundreds, in their cleanest rags, and are given what is left from the feast of the day before. The bride herself, her skirts trussed back, serves the women, and her husband the men. After this is done, the husband gives his arm to the most decent woman, and the bride offers hers to the most respected man of the assemblage, and they lead the rest in a dance. On such an occasion there has been heard from one of the mendicant throng this delicate appeal to charity.

THE SONG OF THE POOR.

But though the Virgin and her Child have come into Lower Brittany, the fairies have not utterly fled ; and though the king of France established his dominion there hundreds of years ago, vet even now " King Arthur is not dead ” ! This ancient retrain, these songs with their simple and plaintive melodies, common to dissevered fragments of the Celtic race, still give expression to a sentiment of consanguinity which seems but to grow stronger as absorption into other dominant peoples approaches. Even in the second half of the eighteenth century, the power of such a song and melody, if the story is as authentic as it seems,1 received an extraordinary illustration. In September, 1758, an English force effected a descent upon the Breton coast, at Saint-Cast. A company of Lower Bretons, from the neighborhood of Tréguier and Saint-Pol-de-Léon, was marching against a detachment of Welsh mountaineers, which was coming briskly forward singing a national air, when all at once the Bretons of the French army stopped short in amazement. The air their enemies were singing was one which every day may be heard sounding over the heaths of Brittany. " Electrified,” says the historian, grandson himself of an eye-witness, " by accents which spoke to their hearts, they gave way to a sudden enthusiasm, and joined in the same patriotic refrain. The Welsh, in their turn, stood motionless in their ranks. On both sides officers gave the command to fire, but it was in the same language, and their soldiers stood as if petrified. This hesitation continued, however, but a moment: a common emotion was too strong for discipline ; the weapons fell from their hands, and the descendants of the ancient Celts renewed upon the battlefield the fraternal ties which had formerly united their fathers.”

So, of late, says the noble author of Barzaz Breiz, " at a family festival given to the Bretons of Armorica by their brethren of Wales, when I saw floating above my head the ancient standards of our common ancestors ; when I found again customs like ours, hearts answering to our own ; as I gave ear to voices which seemed to issue from the tomb, awakened as by miracle at the accents of Celtic harps ; as I heard a language spoken which I understood, in spite of more than a thousand years of separation, I repeated with enthusiasm the traditional refrain. To-day, when I turn to look upon this poetic land of Brittany, which remains the same when all around it is changing, may I not repeat with the Bretons of old, No! King Arthur is not dead !”

Theodore Bacon.