Religion is like music, one must have an ear for it; some people have none
at all; but given the ear it is all significant and wonderful, from the old
plain-song to a rhapsodic of Brahms. The form changes with our shifting
emotions and ideas; here and there a tune gets lost, or goes out of
fashion.
"Melodies die out like the Pipe of Pan with the ears that love
them and listen for them."[Adam Bede]
I do not know what has happened to the Pipe of
Pan, but the trees are taller than the reeds; the birds' song is sweeter
than any pipe; the birds are divine; the tree is immortal, they do not die.
Paganism and the medieval Christianity grafted on to it is dying hard in
Celtic Brittany; but no one who
within the last ten years has seen only the
fires on St John's Eve at
Guingamp will say that it is dead. The bonfires
at each corner of the triangular place, lit by the priests without
enthusiasm, are built around high poles, each crowned with a garland of
flowers. In the glare, as the flames mount and spread, the old houses
round, losing actuality and substance, look like painted scenery, and the
pilgrims below, who have come from all parts of the countryside, for the
Fête of Notre Dame de Bon Secours, like a stage crowd.
Ten years ago
one or two of them snatched a tison from the fire;
later I did not see this done. These were treasured, says
Souvestre (in
1854) as charms against thunder, and the scorched garlands as talismans
against sickness and sorrow (peines de
l'âme). The fires are relics of sun-worship, but the masts and
garlands
distinctly suggest the tree.
The Celts, whatever sea divides them, have the same eyes and see the same
visions, touching hands on the land of dreams; and in parts of Ireland,
some thirty years ago, it was a custom to plant a May-tree on the dunghill
by the farmhouse door, and to throw it upon the bonfire on the 'Day of the
Fire Tree', in May, at the great Solar festival; in Brittany and elsewhere
held on Midsummer Day.
Canon Mahé, writing of Morbihan, in
1825, says in that district
trees may be seen trimmed and bent to form niches, in which crosses or
images of saints are placed; and he also mentions as the seat of two famous
pilgrimages our Lady of the Oak in Anjou, and our Lady of the Oak near
Orthe, in Maine. In Maine, too, says an historian, there
are chapels of oaks, where the trunks are enshrined in the walls beside the
altar. Among many allusions to sacred trees in ancient Irish literature
there is one which suggests that each church may once have had its tree:
"The tree of the church is seen from the open country, and when
one goes to look for it in the oak-wood it is not found; and the sound is
heard there of the bell and of the psalm-chanting, and the church itself is
not found."
Infinitely older than the church, everywhere, as Thomas a Kempis says of
the Cross, you shall find the hallowed tree, standing for centuries against
the attack first made on it in Europe by the early Christian missionaries.
It is only twenty years since Professor
Anatole Le Braz published his
collection of Breton legends, taken down from the lips of the peasants
gathered round his fire; and the picture he gives of them seated in the
circle of the lamplight, with bent heads and tense faces, their voices
coming from every corner of the room, claiming their turn to speak, is as
striking as any of the stories they are there to tell.
Loveliest of these is the 'Deux Vieux Arbres', in which two peasants,
Maharit and Jelvestr, husband and wife, who have passed at death into
venerable beeches [hêtres], perished with the cold on the hillside,
come back one
night to their old home to warm themselves by the familiar fire. The young
people have gone to bed, and towards eleven o'clock the son hears a slight
noise outside, a rustle of trailing branches and shivering leaves:
"
Puis, peu à peu le bruit grandit, devint une rumeur pareille a celle
des bois agités par la brise, et l'homme aperçut
distinctement les grands ombres mouvants des deux hêtres qui
s'avançaient vers la maison. Ils marchaient aussi pres que possible
l'un de l'autre, sur le meme rang; on
dit que la terre les portait, on voyait, á la lumière la
lune,
briller leurs troncs argentes sous leurs feuillages immenses.
Ils traversèrent enfin le courtil.
Frou-ou-ou-gémissaient leurs vastes ramures. L'homme sous ses draps
claquait des dents. Ils vont renverser la maison, se disait-il. II
entendait le frôlement des grosses branches contre les murs et sur le
chaume du toit. Par trois fois, les deux hêtres firent le tour du
logis, sans doute cherchant la porte. Brusquement, elle s'ouvrit. Et voici
ce qu'il vit: son père et sa mère étaient assis, de
chaque côte du foyer, non plus sous leur forme d'arbres, mats tels
qu'ils étaient de leur vivant. La vieille avait relevé sa
jupe-
Le vieux lui demandait:
-Sens-tu un peu la chaleur?
-Oui, répondait elle."
The time passes.
"Dans l'âtre, le vieux disait a la vieille.
-Etes vous asset rechauffée, Maharit? Et la vieille disait au vieux:
-Oui, je n'ai plus si froid, Jelvestr.
Sur ce, l'horloge tinta le premier coup de minuit. Les deux vieillards se
levèrent, disparurent. Et alors la grande rumeur de feuillage
recommença le long de la maison.
Frou-ou-ou! Frou-ou-ou!
Puis le bruit s'éloigna, à mesure que s'éloignait
aussi l'ombre des deux
arbres sous la lune."
In the classic story of Philemon and Baucis, the old people are turned into
trees as a reward for their hospitality to Zeus, but the Breton peasants
are working out a long penitence in the homely purgatory of their race, not
far from the friends and haunts of life. The charm of their story may owe
something to the absence of the Curè who is often introduced into
these legends, originally mythological, to neutralise or modify their
naturalism. Nature and the ecclesiastic have never been fast friends, but
in Brittany it is no use trying to throw the moon over the cliff, however
much you may dislike her, and the clergy have had to take over the old
superstitions as they have had to take over the old saints, of whom, says
Charles Le Goffic, 'il n'y a guère trois dont les papiers soient
complètement en regle'.
Yet the idea of pain and purgatory on the tree might very well, it would
seem, have come from purely Christian sources. At the taking of Jerusalem
by Titus an immense quantity of trees was cut down, on which the Jews were
crucified in such numbers that
"'room was wanting for the crosses and crosses wanting for the
bodies".
And sometime, somewhere in Palestine, a tree was planted which was carried
to Calvary and replanted there.
There are legends enough of the True Cross, for the most part elaborate and
artificial; but one of the eighth century, carved in runes on a cross in
Ruthwell churchyard in Scotland, is of singular beauty and simplicity. The
quaintness of the original, in which Christ figures as a medieval Lord or
Knight and the Apostles as his vassals, cannot be suggested by a very free
and condensed version of a literal rendering of the old text. In this
Dream of the Rood it is the tree itself which, sighing, speaks:
It is long since, yet I have not forgotten how I was torn up and hewn down
in the wood. Strong men carried me on their shoulders until they set me on
a hill. Then saw I the Lord of all men, hasting with zeal, for He would
mount on me; but He forbidding it I durst
not bow nor break. I could have felled the foeman, yet stood I fast. I
trembled as He embraced me. A rood was I raised up; I bare the King but
might not bow. They pierced and mocked us together, blood covered us,
fearful was my fate upon that hill. I lowered myself to the hands of His
friends. They laid Him down, the Weary One, to rest after His mighty
strife. They made him a tomb, and singing, there they left Him, alone in
the even-tide. But we [The Three Crosses?] grieving, stood yet awhile.
Sir John Maundeville, the fourteenth-century traveller, points to a 'fayre
church' in Jerusalem 'toward the Weast', as the spot where the tree grew of
which the Cross was made; and in the neighbourhood of Mount Zion is the
'Tree of Eldre that Judas henge himself upon for despeyr'.
On the Mount of Mamre
there is the tree oke - that men call the dry tree. And they say that it
hath been from the beginning of the worlde, and was sometimes grene and
bare leaves until the tyme that our Lorde dyed and so did all the trees in
the worlde, or else they fayled in their hearts or else they faded, and yet
is there many of those in the world.
There are all sorts of stains on them, and all sorts of garlands; some of
the stains are fresh, but not the garlands, and we are not likely to weave
any more. They belong to the old gods, and for the old gods, as for the old
people in the London streets, it is 'sauve qui peut'. We really have no use
for them. We have not much use for anything but machinery and science and
democracy, the three-headed monster who has kicked the effete trio of the
troupe, the sisters Wonder and Beauty and Stillness, out of the show.
The Renaissance revered the ancient world, the nineteenth century was moved
and lit by the Renaissance; we have no patience even with the nineteenth
century. The past is a stupid corpse. The inspiration of the woods, the
forest voices, the
fairy dancers, the mystery of things that stand against
the sky-these are 'of old time'. The steeples are hidden, but not by the
elms; and when the newspapers or the publishers will pay you something for
a good one and quite handsomely for a bad, most secrets are for sale. We
must not speak in the marketplace of what happens to us in the forest, says
Hawthorne - I think it is in The Scarlet Letter. Who was Hawthorne?
There are no scarlet letters. Everything happens in the market-place. Where
else? But the market-place is not real: the real things are happening in
the forest still.
Near Jeanne d'Arc's home at Domremy there was a wood in which stood a
beech-tree called the Ladies' Tree, or the Fairies' Tree, famous
throughout the countryside. As a child, Jeanne used to hang on its branches
garlands of leaves and flowers, and dance under it with the other children.
A great deal was made of this by her inquisitors-dark things were said, the
garlands vanished during the night, the birds in the oak-wood fed from her
lap, the wolves there would not hurt Jeanne's sheep. There was always the
mystery of the Voices, to which, when they had stupefied the child of
another world and burned a saint, they were no nearer.
In the course of her long trial they asked her if she still heard her
Voices. Worn out with questions and learned subtleties, "Menez-moi dans
un bois," she said, "et je les entendrai bien."