Un Revenant.
177
tistic to a degree bordering upon the grotesque, and
nothing resembling art is anywhere visible. Millions
of francs must have been consumed in these creations,
which have the rudeness of mediaevalism without its
emotional sincerity, and which—amid the loveliness of
tropic nature, the grace of palms, the many-colored fire
of liana blossoms—jar on the œsthetic sense with an al-
most brutal violence. Yet there is a veiled poetry in
these silent populations of plaster and wood and stone.
They represent something older than the Middle Ages,
older than Christianity,—something strangely distorted
and transformed, it is true, but recognizably conserved
by the Latin race from those antique years when every
home had its beloved ghosts, when every wood or hill
or spring had its gracious divinity, and the boundaries
of all fields were marked and guarded by statues of
gods.
Instances of iconoclasm are of course highly rare in
a country of which no native—rich or poor, white or
half-breed—fails to doff his hat before every shrine,
cross, or image he may happen to pass. Those mer-
chants of St. Pierre or of Fort-de-France living only a
few miles out of the city must certainly perform a vast
number of reverences on their way to or from busi-
ness ;—I saw one old gentleman uncover his white head
about twenty times in the course of a fifteen minutes'
walk. I never heard of but one image-breaker in Mar-
tinique ; and his act was the result of superstition, not
of any hostility to popular faith or custom : it was
prompted by the same childish feeling which moves
Italian fishermen sometimes to curse St. Antony or to
give his image a ducking in bad weather. This Mar-
tinique iconoclast was a negro cattle-driver who one day,
feeling badly in need of a glass of tafia, perhaps, left the
animals intrusted to him in care of a plaster image of
the Virgin, with this menace (the phrase is on record) :—