# Quote — Robertson Davies, The Cornish Trilogy

> She called it the Bear Chant; it was the music Gypsy bear-leaders played or sang to their animals, but I think it was something older than that; to those gypsies so long ago the bear was not only a valuable possession and money-spinner, but a companion and perhaps an object of reverence. Is it unbelievable? Notice how some people talk to their dogs and cats nowadays; the talk is usually the sentimentality they think appropriate to a not very dangerous animal. But how would one talk to a bear which could kill? How would one ask it for friendship? How would one invite its wisdom, which is so unlike the wisdom of a man, but not impenetrable by a man? This was what the Bear Chant seemed to be — music that moved slowly, with long interrogative pauses, and unusual demands on that low, guttural voice of the fiddle, which is so rarely heard in the kind of music I understand and enjoy.

- Author: [Robertson Davies](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robertson-davies.md)
- Book: [The Cornish Trilogy](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robertson-davies/the-cornish-trilogy.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cornish_Trilogy#The_Rebel_Angels) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/robertson-davies/the-cornish-trilogy/she-called-it-the

## More from this book

> There are no great performances without great audiences, and this is the barrier that film and television, by their utmost efforts, cannot cross, for there can be no interaction between what is done, and those to whom it is done. Great theatre, great music-drama, is created again and again on both sides of the footlights.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robertson-davies/the-cornish-trilogy/there-are-no-great.md)

> Catholicism has begotten much great art; Protestantism none at all – not a single painting. But Catholicism has fostered art in the very teeth of Christianity. The Kingdom of Christ, if it ever comes, will contain no art; Christ never showed the least concern with it. His church has inspired much but not because of anything the Master said. Who then was the inspirer? The much-maligned Devil, one supposes. It is he who understands and ministers to man's carnal and intellectual self, and art is carnal and intellectual.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robertson-davies/the-cornish-trilogy/catholicism-has-begotten.md)

> Whoever lives in the finest house in a small Canadian town dwells in a House of Atreus, about which a part of the community harbours the darkest mythical suspicions...In lesser houses there may be fighting, covert abortions, children "touched up" with a hot flat-iron to make them obedient, every imaginable aspect of parsimony, incest, and simple, persistent cruelty, but these are nothing to whatever seems amiss at the Big House.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robertson-davies/the-cornish-trilogy/whoever-lives-in-the.md)