There never was a book which needed less of an introduction than this
one, unless it is that it should have an apology from the translator
for his handling of so beautiful an original. But since so little is
generally known of these Legends and their author a word of information
may be demanded.
Charles de Coster flourished in the middle part of the last century. He
was brought up in the court of a great dignitary of the Roman Church,
and intended for the aristocratic University of Louvain, but showed
early his independent and democratic turn of mind by preferring
the more popular University of Brussels, to which he made his own
way. Here he fell in with a group of fellow-students and artistic
enthusiasts which included Felicien Rops, with whom he was associated
in a society called Les Joyeux, and afterwards in a short-lived Review,
to which they gave the name of that traditional Belgian figure of
joyousness and high spirits, Uylenspiegel. It was in this that these
Legends first appeared, written in the years 1856 and 1857, and soon
afterwards published in book form.
Belgian literature was not at that time in a very flourishing
condition, and little general appreciation was shown of de Coster's
work, but it was hailed with enthusiasm by a few of the more
discerning critics, and won him a place on a Royal Commission which
was investigating mediaeval state papers. After publishing another book,
Contes brabancons, likewise based on the folk-lore of his country, he
seems to have withdrawn into himself and led the life of a dreamer,
wandering about among the peasants and burying himself in the wide
countryside of Flanders, until he had completed his epic of the
Spanish tyranny, Ulenspiegel, which has already been translated into
English. None of these publications brought him any material recompense
for his work, and he remained a poor man to the end of his life, in
constant revolt against what he called the horrible power of money. [1]
The primitive stuff of these Legends is to be found scattered up and
down, a piece here and a piece there, in the folk-lore of Brabant
and Flanders. De Coster, who had an intense love of this folk-lore
and at the same time, as he said, "that particular kind of madness
which is needed for such writing," set himself to give it a literary
form. He has chosen to make that form so elaborate, and has worked
his material to so fine a composition, that he must be considered
to have produced an entirely original book. But he has not been
unfaithful to his masters the people. Sir Halewyn, for instance,
follows an old song. And the Faust-story of Smetse Smee, the jovial
and ingenious smith, who gets the better of his bargain with the
devil in so wholly satisfactory a fashion, crops up in one form or
another again and again.
The Legends were written in the idiom of the sixteenth century, the
period to which the latest and longest of them roughly belongs. I
believe that no more perfect example of pastiche exists in the
language. But that is not of much interest to English readers, and
I have made no attempt to reproduce the achievement. De Coster found
modern French, with its rigidity of form, unsuitable to his subject
and inapt to his genius. He seems to have had a mind so perfectly in
tune with the Middle Ages that one may well believe that he found it
actually more natural to write in the still fluid language of Rabelais
than in that of his own day. The prose of the original is of arresting
beauty, especially in Sir Halewyn; which, with its peculiarly Flemish
tale of faery and enchantment, still beauty and glowing hearths,
and the sombreness of northern forests brooding over them, I feel
to be the high-water mark of his achievement. At times it becomes so
rhythmic that one can hardly decide whether it is prose or poetry. It
is not difficult to believe Potvin's report that de Coster spent an
immense amount of pains on his work, sometimes doing a page twenty
times over before he was content to let it go.
De Coster has been spoken of as a mouthpiece of
Protestantism. Protestant, of course, is the last word in the world to
describe him. No one can have regretted much more than he the passing
of that warm-hearted time before the Reformation. One has but to read
the story of the building of the church at Haeckendover in The Three
Sisters, or the prayer of the girl Wantje to the Virgin in the tale
of the hilarious Brotherhood to see how far this is true. It is only
in Smetse Smee, when he comes to the time of the Inquisition, that he
bursts out with that stream of invective and monstrous mockery which
made the Polish refugee Karski say of him, "Well roared, Fleming!" And
even then it is Spain rather than Catholicism which is the centre of
his attack, and Philip II who is his aiming-point.
Above all and before all de Coster loved the simple peasant-people
of his own land, with their frank interest in good things to eat
and good beer to drink, their aptitude for quarrelling and their
great hearts. All his chief portraits are painted from them. The
old homely nobility of Flanders, such as were the people of Heurne
in the tale of Halewyn, he liked well enough, but he could not bear
a rich man or a distant-mannered master of the Spanish type. A tale
is told of him and his painter friend Dillens which may well stand
as the key to his work. One day at Carnival-time they were in Ghent,
and when the evening came Dillens asked what they should do. "Voir
le peuple!" cried de Coster, "le peuple surtout! La bourgeoisie est
la meme partout! Va voir le peuple!"