THE TOURIST IN NORTH-WEST FRANCE, WE have coupled together the
two volumes before us mainly for the practical reason that English tourists commonly include the two adjacent provinces of north-western France in one trip. This naturally arises from the facilities open to hurried, change-seeking tourists for arranging a line of route that shall include the pro- minent places of interest in each ; but for travellers with more leisure, " with eyes that bring with them the means of seeing" more than it is given to the mere follower of the guide-book ritual to behold, we are inclined to believe such a course to be a great mistake. Mr. Blackburn confines himself strictly within the limits of the old province of Normandy, and Mrs. Bury Palliser only included in her travels that part of Normandy lying on the direct route from Cherbourg to the Breton frontier. And we would advise all who can to follow their respective examples. Normandy and Brittany are about as different in scenery, race, language, and manners as it is possible for two countries so small in extent and so
• Normandy Picturesque. By Henry Blackburn. Illustrated. London: Sampson Low. 1869.
Brittany and its Byways: Nuns Account of its Inhabitants and Antiquities during a Residence in that Country. By Mrs. Bury Palliser. Illustrated. London: Murray. 1869.
closely connected to be. The traditionary past of each country is widely removed from that of the other. That of Normandy is essentially feudal and ecclesiastical, and in it we have to seek the origin of English institutions which eight centuries have modified, but not destroyed. That of Brittany is pre-feudal and pagan. The Breton seigneur of the middle ages was always half a Celtic chieftain, and to this day a stratum of sheer paganism underlies Breton religious observances. The legendary atmosphere of Nor- mandy is Christian and orthodox, clinging closely round the towers of her abbeys and cathedrals ; while the miraculous element in it always appertains to the conflict between saintly thaumaturgists on the one side, and the one evil spirit, according to the orthodox conception of medimval Christianity, on the other. That of Brittany, on the other hand, is essentially pagan, peopled with all the weird and uncanny imaginings of a Celtic race, while even her saints resemble closely in all but their beneficence the host of evil magicians and tricky fairies whom they superseded in popular tradition. Our cousinship with the Norman was maintained as a close relationship for generations ; to trace affinity with the Breton we have to go back to King Arthur. The scenery of the two countries is as different as the manners and ideas of the inhabi- tants. To understand either country, an entirely different course of reading is necessary, and widely opposite frames of mind are required for their true enjoyment. Rushing hastily through both is a violation of all aesthetic canons of travelling. It is like hear- ing alternate scenes of Robert le Diable and Le Pardon de Ploermel on the same evening,—the exquisite couleur locale of Meyerbeer's music supplies us with the best illustration we can think of.
To those of our readers, however, who may meditate a tour in either Normandy or Brittany—or, despite our advice, both—we can cordially recommend the two works before us. They are very - different in character, but have this in common,—that whoever reads either of them will'be strongly tempted to follow in the writer's footsteps, while every tourist will find them useful and entertaining companions on the road. We will first take Mr. Blackburn's beautifully got-up .volume, with type that it is a pleasure to read, paper that is a pleasure to turn over, and illus- trations that really illustrate. It is no way a guide-book, or even a narrative of a complete Norman tour ; it is more a record of the impressions made by a Norman tour, with thoughts on all sorts of things and quaint bits of art criticism just strung together as they suggest themselves to the author in association with whatever be is describing at the moment. And first of all, we thank Mr. Blackburn for the earnestness with which he warns every Norman tourist to "have nothing to do with Paris." He will meet with temp- tations at every turn, Paris is thrust upon him at every railway junction and every hotel, and even if he harden himself against the magnetic fascination of Paris, he must guard against the danger, while travelling by rail, of finding himself and baggage '" whisked off to the capital" through the sheer impossibility of making any Frenchman believe that a tourist can be going any- where else. Once in Paris, the " integrity" of the tour, as Mr. Blackburn says, is gone—it is even more than that—the spell is broken. Avoid Trouville-Deauville as if it were plague-stricken, listen not to tales of the fatal beauty of the roches noirs, be cau- tious even at Dieppe, and, above all, 0, Norman tourist ! listen to Mr. Blackburn's words of warning, " tread cautiously ou the fil defer at Lisieux," that connects " beautiful Paris, evil-hearted Paris," with her suburbs on the sea. There is nothing in all Normandy, as Mr. Blackburn justly says, to exceed Lisieux in interest. To transcribe the quotation with which Mr. Blackburn 'heads his charming essay on the infinite beauties of this untouched gem of the Middle Ages :- "Oh! the pleasant days, when men built houses after their own minds, -and wrote their own devices on the walls, and none laughed at them ; when little wooden knights and saints peeped out from the angles of -gable-ended houses, and every street displayed a store of imaginative wealth ! "—La Belle France.
And you may dream that you live in them, even now, at Lisieux. Yet one false step, one weak moment at the station, and you are off a grande ritesse for Paris ; one glance at the dazzling eccen- tricity of the travelling dresses whose wearers are changing from the down express to the branch train, and you wake from your dream at Trouville. But Mr. Blackburn at once points out the danger and furnishes a safeguard. Let the weak brother in Normandy who feels the insidious and deadly fascination stealing over him seek a prophylactic in Mr. Blackburn's pages, and he is safe.
Mr. Blackburn wisely recommends the tourist to take his first impressions of Normandy from Pont Audemer, to be reached by steamer from Havre to Honfleur, and thence by diligence. "I am not enthusiastic about gables and gutters, and object to a population composed exclusively of old women," says the author of Miss Carew, but Mr. Blackburn thinks even she could not have seen Pout Audemer, " with its quaint old gables, its tottering houses, its Gothic ' bits,' its pro- jecting windows, carved oak galleries, and streets of time- worn buildiugs,—centuries old. Old dwellings, old customs, old caps, old tanneries, set in a landscape of bright green hills." Thence to Lisieux, Caen, Bayeux, Cherbourg, St. Lo. Coutances, Granville, Avranches, Mont St. Michael, Vire, Mortain, Falaise, Rouen, and back by the valley of the Seine,—that, at least, should be the skeleton outline of a Norman tour, not merely for the architect or art student, who makes it an art pilgrimage, but for the tourist who sees beauty in soft scenery, beauty in quaint cus- toms, as well as beauty in art, and who finds enjoyment in a glorious atmosphere, exercise, and country life of a totally new kind. We cannot understand, by the way, what it is that has set Mr. Blackburn so violently against pedestrianism, or why he should go out of his way to tell an extraordinary story of a tourist who walked from Lisieux to Caen—only twenty-six miles—and was so exhausted that he saw a " spectral dog, the result of excessive fatigue." Mr. Blackburn evidently does not like walking, and is not quite free from that peculiar malignant feeling towards walkers to which non-walkers are so oddly subject. We don't recommend
people to walk up to the point of subjective dogs, but we are convinced that walking, with occasional lifts by train and diligence, is the way to traverse Normandy above all other places,— beautiful scenery, not too hilly, good and safe roads, short distances between resting-places, and delicious fare at the quietest village taverns, where, as Mr. Blackburn says, madame has hard work on her slate to make raddition for supper, bed, and breakfast more than five francs. But wherever and however the tourist travels in Normandy, he will find Mr. Blackburn an enter- taining companion, an instructive tutor, a refined art critic, and a pleasant narrator. Nor can he have a better memorial of his tour for after-years than this beautiful volume, with its score or so of well selected and well executed illustrations, those of Joan of Arc's house and the gorgeous facade of Rouen Cathedral being especially remarkable for combined softness and clearness of outline ; while two charming little sketches by Mr. S. P. Hall, one of a Granville fisher-girl, an " Aphrodite piscatrix," as Mr. Blackburn calls her, and another of a group of market women, cannot be passed over in silence. Before quitting Normandy, we ought to mention that Mr. Blackburn, philo-Norman as he is, protests, and rightly, we think, against the folly of our countrymen who reside in Normandy for the sake of economy in living and educating their children. They could live just as cheaply at home if they could only bring themselves to live as simply and unpre- tentiously as they do at Caen or Avranches ; the boys come home innocent of cricket and football, and as to the girls, " who knows the impression left for life on young hearts by the dead walls and silent trees of a French pension?" And we have one hint to the tourist that Mr. Blackburn has strangely omitted. In travelling down the valley of the Seine, let him avail himself as much as possible of the tiny little steamboat that runs between Rouen and Havre, or better still, do the valley both by road and river. In any case, let him visit the church at Caudebec, a miracle of flamboyant architecture, view the gloomy towers of Jurnieges from the river, and glide down with the tide till the ruins of the château of Tancarville, as romantic as anything on the Rhine, and as dis- tinctly Norman in character and scenic surroundings as Rheinfels is German, meet his eye. The whole trip by river from Rouen to Havre takes only about six hours.
Mrs. Bury Palliser's Brittany and its Byways, though equally meritorious in its way, is a book of a very different character. It is more of a very superior kind of guide-book than anything else; small, compact, neatly and judiciously illustrated, full of con- scientiously accurate description and carefully verified historical anecdote, interspersed with appropriate poetical quotations, and garnished with a due amount of wild Armorican legends. Mrs. Palliser has travelled throughout Brittany very systematically, and has evidently read a great deal of medimval history bearing upon Brittany and Bretons, and has made the most of her reading. Whether discoursing of Abelard or Chateaubriand, the exploits of Du Gueaclin or the charity of " The Lady of La Garaye," of the wars of Plantagenet dukes or of La Vendee and the Chouans, of pre-historic remains or medimval art, she always gives proof of close observation and careful study. And she is specially careful not to venture upon profitless speculations on subjects that belong to a different class of writers,—the ethnolo- gical problems connected with Brittany, and the origin of the
dolmens and mentier of Carnac and Locmariaker, with their hieroglyphic inscriptions, now for ever undecipherable,-
" D'un passti sans memoire ineertaines reliques, Mysteres d'un vieux monde en mysteres derits."
If Mr. Blackburn may be not unfairly charged with being a trifle too dreamy and wandering in thought sometimes, Mrs. Palliser may be said to fail to a corresponding extent in being a trifle too matter of fact and precise. She has written a pleasant and an interesting book for the general reader, and an admirable guide for the tourist, but she has not succeeded in achieving the task so essential to an absolutely perfect work on a subject such as Brittany and its Byways,—that of inspiring a guide-book with a soul.
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