So great was was the perseverance, exactitude, and zeal of François-Marie Luzel, as a seeker out and collector of the scattered remains of the native folklore and the oral tradition, that he was known as the "Wandering Jew of Brittany "; but the disciple has outstripped the master in his pious pilgrimages to the shrines of his country's past. To the collaboration of the two is due the Gwerziou Breiz-Izel, Popular Songs of Brittany. One can appreciate the poignant interest of the little dramatic pieces that form this collection, even without referring to the Breton originals, from the tragic story of Tryphina Keranglaz. The episode of this poem could not but have been suggested by Brizeux' Marie; it is distinctively Breton, and, in spite of the French language, to which the theme is foreign, Le Braz has succeeded to a remarkable degree in preserving the quaintness tinged with melancholy that characterizes this class of popular songs. In the preface to Tryphina Kerang las he says: Il me plaît de vivre au vieux temps. Brittany is, more than any other, the land of the past, and many of its legends live as fresh in the memory of the Breton of to-day as when they first took form in the minds of his distant ancestors. To my mind, the great value of Le Braz' work lies in this, that he has taken his inspiration from the Breton soul and is moved by sympathy for the people and the customs of his native land. Ici se songe encore le songe des vieux ages, he sings, and it has been his privilege to save the greatest number of these souvenirs from the wreckage of his country's heritage, and to express them with absolute sincerity. These pictures form an album of photographs of the Breton Celt, with his deep-set blue-gray eyes and far away look; the strong nose, the pensive smile on the thin, set lips. Scarcely a phase of life in la Bretagne bretonnante, except the Morbihan, whose dialects are not so familiar to Le Braz, that has escaped his observation and that does not find a place in this collection. Who has told so exquisitely and touchingly the wealth of sentiment attached to one of the most interesting survivals of medieval Europe-the pardons—those half- religious, halffestive observances which are the greatest events chronicled in the simple calendar of a Breton village. It is not to the pardon of Sainte Anne at Auray, best known to tourists who follow the beaten track, that Au Pays des pardons is devoted, but to the patrons of countless chapels and wayside Calvaries hidden among the valleys and mountains. In it Le Braz brings out the religious lore and the depth and delicacy of that form of worship which, only the other day, a Cornishman declared to be the most beautiful of ail religions-Breton Catholicism. A stratum of paganism, into which Christianity did not filter down, still remains deep in the Breton heart; the fountains and the standing stones are still regarded with a certain awe and veneration. Fatalism, a strong belief in dreams, curious superstitions and practices in regard to the dead, and familiar conversation with those beyond the tomb are so imbedded in the Breton nature that some would regard as strikingly symbolic the menhir which the early missionaries, far from casting down, surmounted with a cross. This uncanny preoccupation with the idea of death, and its curious personification Ankou, is the constant theme of La Legende de la mort chez les Bretons Armoricains. These weird tales and the gwerziou, the soniou,† and the lives of saints are the staple of entertainment of the long winter evenings in a Breton cottage. Les Noces noires de Guernaham introduces us to several of these solemn meetings, which begin as soon as the night prayers have been said in common as in the old patriarchal times. "They are the charm of the rustic life in Brittany," says Le Braz, "these veillées, and perhaps the most significant manifestation of the old clan spirit. Every farmhouse of any importance becomes the traditional rendezvous of the less fortunate peasants of the neighborhood. They arrive in bands from every side. The men carry the hemp to be combed, the women come carrying their distaff fastened by a ribbon under the arm. Each one takes a place The gwerziou comprise historical, legendary, fantastic, and narrative songs. The soniou comprise love songs, comic or satirical songs, and marriage songs-in a word, 1 yric poetry. where he finds it, and all who come are welcome, not excepting even the beggars in search of a bed, nor the itinerant singers and chapmen and the vagrant pedlars of images. The housewife receives them all with the time-honored greeting: 'Take a stool and come near the fire."" Then, at the word from the man of the house, enthroned in his armchair of massive oak, and while the warm cider is passed around in yellow earthen ladles, each one speaks in turn. And, through the night, behind the crucifix carved in the panels of the great lit clos, they dream over the spectres they had just shuddered at or of the eyes whose secrets they had tried to read. Le Braz draws on his recollections of childhood for the truth of these scenes. He has taken the legends and traditions from the lips of their latest guardians. If it be true, as the Breton and the Irish proverbs have it, that it takes nine tailors to make a man, it may be retorted, without gainsay, that it takes nine men to make as good a story-teller. Curiously enough, many of the sayings and adventures that have the tailor as hero are common to Ireland and Brittany, and doubtless are derived from a common source. In the one land as in the other the country snip revolves in a fixed orbit. His advent and stay at a farmer's house, perchance to accoutre the gallants for a wedding, is an event long to be remembered. The old women, who pass the time winding flax as they sit on a grass-covered mound while they watch the cows, are also faithful depositories of the old traditions; or, again, the shepherd boy, the bugel, the Irish buachaill, who dreams on a lonely height under the stars and sings his song to the sheep and the neighboring hills. The strolling makers of wooden shoes accumulate a stock of stories as they trudge from place to place, but no one has had better opportunities in this respect than the old women who are engaged by those who are unable themselves to make the tro Breiz, the visit to the seven principal shrines of Brittany, which is still, to some extent, believed by every Breton to be essential to the salvation of his soul. Smugglers, charcoal burners, cordwainers, are the story-tellers of the Contes du soleil et de la brume, which, if not so thrilling as some of Le Braz' other works, yet show his fine sensibility for the imaginative beauty and simplicity of the tales by which the native soul is enchanted. It must not be overlooked, however, that not a little of the charm of these pictures is due to the picturesqueness, strangeness, and antiquity of the frame in which they are set. O Breiz-izel, ô kaera vro! Koat enn he c'hreis, mor enn he zro! O Brittany, my own dear land, The woods in thy heart and the sea round about! are lines from some Breton poet. This customary division of Brittany into Argoat (the wooded land) and Armor (on the sea) is observed by Le Braz, and both parts are described with inimitable skill. We follow him through the religious silence of the Forest of Paimpont where, at Brocéliandre, Viviane still holds Merlin under an invisible charm, across the moors, waving with the yellow ajoncs toward the rose-colored spires of embroidered stone, whence rises the thin, faint sound of bells tolling the Angelus from village to village as darkness falls on the little Breton communities. I know not whether the poetic spirit of the race lingers with greater delight upon these fragments of Arcadia or upon the needles of granite that gird the "Bay of the Dead." The gentle melancholy that pervades the Breton landscape is unmistakable here as there; it is undoubtedly more penetrating in Armor under the clouds that rush in troops across the wind-swept sky. It is an indelible impression of desolation and abandonment that we receive on the dismal days that mark the beginning of winter on these granite slopes; the colorless sand-banks on the strand, the weather-beaten Calvaries extending their gray arms against the grayer horizon and the blackened, misty cliffs that face the sea. The remark that M. Gaston Deschamps attributes to the mistress of a Parisian salon, in calling the attention of her guests to Le Braz' Le Sang de la Sirène, then running in the Revue de Paris, that "il a le sens de la mer," expresses best that quality in which he is unsurpassed. There is scarcely a page of his work that does not carry a whiff of the salt air. It is not always the monotonous, icy, inert mass that we had learned to know from Loti's Pêcheur d'Islande. Le Braz shows the sea in all its moods, at once fierce and caressing, half woman, half beast, faithless yet ever trusted again, and with a fatal sway that cannot be escaped. Now he discloses her calm awakening, her face unruffled by a ripple, or again, dimpled with a thousand mysterious smiles, displaying herself voluptuously and alluring with an irresistible seduction; "the eternal siren, nurse and slayer of men, source of how many delights, of how many tears, incessantly cursed, unswervingly loved." It is at Paimpol, where the harbor bristles with the masts of a thousand fishing-smacks, that we meet the hardy gars d'Islande; there they make their home for the half of the year, when they are not off the fiords of Iceland. And all who have gone out do not return, and then the snow-white coiffe of the Paimpolaise droops its wing like a wounded gull. Directly across the peninsula lies the Gulf of Morbihan dotted with islands that sparkle "like emeralds enchased in fluid gold"; and there is an isle, it is said, for each day in the year. Le Braz gives us only a glimpse of that delightful spot. He lays his scenes by preference about the wild and stormy Pointe du Raz, the most western point of continental France. To Ouessant and Ile de Sein, the sacred Sena of the druidesses, he brings us in Le Sang de la Sirène. There the Raz spreads over a city of the dead. There, in the bay, lies Is, which once outrivaled Paris in splendor and revelry, until that awful night when the princess, Ahéz, or Dahut, as she is called by some, perished for her wickedness under the waves. At certain times the turrets of the sunken city and its brilliant halls are to be seen, and the shades of those who were shipwrecked on the rocks stalk the beach at night wailing and crying for remembrance and burial. On one of the chain of islands, that extend from this bleak point into the Atlantic, was once enacted the most atrocious drama which the tragic annals of the Raz record. Le Gardien du Feu, the autobiography of the keeper of the light of Gorlebella, shows wonderful power of construction and description and, perhaps, some signs of the influence of Pierre Loti; it is the story of an insensate, violent passion, of faithlessness and diabolic vengeance. Some of the choicest of the Chansons de la Bretagne have been set to Breton melodies by M. Bourgault-Ducoudray, of the Conservatoire. On a memorable occasion at the Lycée of Rennes, the spell of which still holds those who had the good fortune to be present, the charm of song was united to the |