I have derived from it a kind of habit of looking below the
surface and hearing sounds which other ears do not catch. The essence
of criticism is to be able to realise conditions different from those
under which we are now living. I have been in actual contact with
the primitive ages. The most remote past was still in existence
in Brittany up to 1830. The world of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries passed daily before the eyes of those who lived in the
towns. The epoch of the Welsh emigration (the fifth and the sixth
centuries) was plainly visible in the country to the practised eye.
Paganism was still to be detected beneath a layer, often so thin as
to be transparent, of Christianity, and with the former were mixed
up traces of a still more ancient world which I afterwards came
upon again among the Laplanders. When visiting in 1870, with Prince
Napoleon, the huts of a Laplander encampment near Tromsoe, I felt some
of my earliest recollections live again in the features of several
women and children and in certain customs and traits of character. It
occurred to me that in ancient times there might have been admixtures
between the lost branches of the Celtic race and races like the
Laplanders which covered the soil upon their arrival. My ethnical
position would in this case be: "A Celt crossed with Gascon with a
slight infusion of Laplander blood." Such a condition of things
ought, if I am not mistaken, according to the theories of the
anthropologists, to represent the maximum of idiocy and imbecility;
but the decrees of anthropology are only relative: what it treats as
stupidity among the ancient races of men is often neither more nor
less than an extraordinary force of enthusiasm and intuition.
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