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M. de la Villemarque is also too ready to suppose that the people repeats for centuries songs that it only half understands. When a song ceases to be intelligible, it is nearly always altered by the people, with the end of approximating it to the sounds farmliar and significant to their ears.
The opposition between bardism and Christianity reveals itself in the pieces translated by M. de la Villemarque by many features of original and pathetic interest. The strife which rent the soul of the old poets, their antipathy to the grey men of the monastery, their sad and painful conversion, are to be found in their songs.
Thence we have that charming shamefastness, that veiled and exquisite sobriety, equally far removed from the sentimental rhetoric too familiar to the Latin races, and the reflective simplicity of Germany, which are so admirably displayed in the ballads published by M. de la Villemarque.
One of the best and most delightful friends he has ever had, M. de la Villemarque, has seen clearly enough that often the alleged antiquity of his documents cannot be proved, that it can be even disproved, and that he must rely on other supports than this to establish what he wants; yet one finds him saying: 'I open the collection of Welsh bards from the sixth to the tenth century.
Does it not suffice to cite M. de la Villemarque, whose name will be henceforth associated among us with these studies, and whose services are so incontestable, that criticism need have no fear of depreciating him in the eyes of a public which has accepted him with so much warmth and sympathy? Never has a human family lived more apart from the world, and been purer from all alien admixture.
We believe that when M. de la Villemarque comments on the fragments which, to his eternal honour, he has been the first to bring to light, his criticism is far from being proof against all reproach, and that several of the historical allusions which he considers that he finds in them are hypotheses more ingenious than solid.
And then, besides, to our knowledge of the Celtic genius, Mr. Norris has brought us from Cornwall, M. de la Villemarque from Brittany, contributions, insignificant indeed in quantity, if one compares them with the mass of the Irish materials extant, but far from insignificant in value. We want to know what all this mass of documents really tells us about the Celt.
Such is the literature of which M. de la Villemarque has attempted to unite the most ancient and authentic monuments in his "Breton Bards of the Sixth Century." Wales has recognised the service that our learned compatriot has thus rendered to Celtic studies. We confess, however, to much preferring to the "Bards" the "Popular Songs of Brittany."
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