DOI Kapitel:
Chapter III: Genius
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.62482#0116
44 REMINISCENCES OF G. F. WATTS
remote corner of the world ;—Matthew Arnold, Tennyson,
Wagner, Burne-Jones, have brought these romances back
and made them live afresh in our modern minds ; but they
are not in tune with what we really found in this land of the
Celts. Pierre Loti flavours his book, “ Pecheurs d’Islande,”
with the deep passion and melancholy of the Celt, in a lan-
guage in which a French writer of genius can explain them ;
but the very fact of explaining the temperament of the Celt
in such telling words, which carry with them definite mean-
ing, removes it in a certain degree from the real thing.
The deepest tragedy lies dumb at the root of the nature ;
you catch a reflection of it at times in the hopeless glance
of the eye of a Breton peasant, gazing from out its large
orbit,—a glance that has in it pathos like that of an animal
that looks at you, knowing it cannot explain itself to your
human breed, feeling all the time a something you cannot
feel. As you travel along the lonely roads in the remote
country you meet peasants who look at you like that, and
the look haunts you as if it had come from another world.
And assuredly the real genius of the Bretons is a thing
apart and separate from our modern world,—our modern
ways? With them religion has stagnated into superstition,
habits and prejudices have become stereotyped into inevi-
table courses, as unalterable in their eyes as are the laws of
Nature herself, and in which pagan rites are still echoed
as continuing customs. On the eve of St. John’s Day,
when driving over the widespread bare hill-sides, where in
that lonely world glow-worms still gleam out from the banks
along the roads, you come on a few hovels studded near each
other, which form a little hamlet. There you see crouching
round bonfires (bons feux) groups of peasants enacting a rite
of semi-Christian, semi-pagan origin—the remnant, partly,
of a fire-worshipping creed. Again, at times, in the evening
remote corner of the world ;—Matthew Arnold, Tennyson,
Wagner, Burne-Jones, have brought these romances back
and made them live afresh in our modern minds ; but they
are not in tune with what we really found in this land of the
Celts. Pierre Loti flavours his book, “ Pecheurs d’Islande,”
with the deep passion and melancholy of the Celt, in a lan-
guage in which a French writer of genius can explain them ;
but the very fact of explaining the temperament of the Celt
in such telling words, which carry with them definite mean-
ing, removes it in a certain degree from the real thing.
The deepest tragedy lies dumb at the root of the nature ;
you catch a reflection of it at times in the hopeless glance
of the eye of a Breton peasant, gazing from out its large
orbit,—a glance that has in it pathos like that of an animal
that looks at you, knowing it cannot explain itself to your
human breed, feeling all the time a something you cannot
feel. As you travel along the lonely roads in the remote
country you meet peasants who look at you like that, and
the look haunts you as if it had come from another world.
And assuredly the real genius of the Bretons is a thing
apart and separate from our modern world,—our modern
ways? With them religion has stagnated into superstition,
habits and prejudices have become stereotyped into inevi-
table courses, as unalterable in their eyes as are the laws of
Nature herself, and in which pagan rites are still echoed
as continuing customs. On the eve of St. John’s Day,
when driving over the widespread bare hill-sides, where in
that lonely world glow-worms still gleam out from the banks
along the roads, you come on a few hovels studded near each
other, which form a little hamlet. There you see crouching
round bonfires (bons feux) groups of peasants enacting a rite
of semi-Christian, semi-pagan origin—the remnant, partly,
of a fire-worshipping creed. Again, at times, in the evening