And when we think that these works of religious art are spread all over Brittany with the same profusion; that in towns apparently the most remote from any road or centre, at Saint-Herbot in the Black Mountains, at Saint-Fiacre, which is only a little village of Laouet, and even less than a village, a miserable hamlet of five or six houses, in the chapel of Rozegrand near Quimperlé, a modest manor which hardly merits the name of a castle--we find in all these places galleries of sculptured wood, painted, gilded, and figured with fifty or more persons, rivalling the most costly churches; works so admirably reproducing the history, the miracles, and the mysteries of religion, while they preserve among the people and reanimate and increase their ardor and faith, we cannot but ask, What is the cause of such a multitude of works of art appearing everywhere on the surface of the country, and what has been the inspiration which has produced such fruit--richness of invention, truth of gesture, expression of physiognomy, a true and deep sentiment of everything divine in scenery and action? In all these monuments of the middle ages, there is to be found the same truth, the same power of imagination, while the artist never repeats himself and never tires you. He leads you on like the musician, scarcely giving you time to recover from one melody ere you are soul-entranced with another still more beautiful. But this creative power has a cause; this society--as a man arrived at maturity with all his work accomplished for the end he would attain--had been prepared by previous ages. Disengaged from the swaddling-clothes of antiquity, its tongue was formed, its religious ideas fixed, and with its new-formed Christianity, it was logically constituted--it became a unity. Still in possession of such power, this people struggles only to create; never led by contrary tastes or carried away by disorderly and unregulated motives, so justly named in our day _caprice_, they cling to what preceding ages have sought for, gathered, and inculcated. The materials are ready to their hands, they seize them, and, with the genius of the age, reproduce, in a thousand forms, new beauties; the well-filled vase has only to diffuse itself and overflow with treasures. Thus, imagination bursts out everywhere lively and colored; the same mind, in literature as in art, reproduces the varied ornaments of churches, invents fables and legends, and finds at every moment new images to represent manners, ideas, opinions; and this imagination, far from exhausting itself, grows and increases, not as the forced plant of the hot-house, but the natural flower of their own spring. Ages train on, and the last one bears the crown. {126}