The book here offered in English to the English-speaking public has
long been known and admired by students as the first and perhaps
the most notable example of modern Belgian literature. Its author
was born of obscure parentage in 1827, and, after a life passed
in not much less obscurity, died in 1879. The ten years which were
devoted to the composition of "The Legend of Tyl Ulenspiegel" were
devoted to what proved, for de Coster, little more than a labour of
love. Recognition came to him but from the few, and it was not till
some thirty years after his death that an official monument was raised
at Brussels to his memory, and an official oration delivered in his
praise by Camille Lemonnier.
To the undiscerning among his contemporaries de Coster may have
appeared little else than a rather eccentric journalist with
archaeological tastes. For a time, indeed, he held a post on the
Royal Commission which was appointed in 1860 to investigate and
publish old Flemish laws. And towards the end of his life he became
a Professor of History and French Literature at the Military School
in Brussels. Never, certainly, has a work of imagination, planned
on an epic scale, been composed with a closer regard for historical
detail than this Legend. But if our present age is less likely to be
held by this than by those other qualities in the book of vitality
and passion, it can only be that de Coster poured into his work not
merely the knowledge and accuracy of an historian, but the love as
well and the ardour of a poet and a patriot.
The objection--if it be an objection--that de Coster borrowed
unblushingly from his predecessors need never be disputed. His style
is frankly Rabelaisian. The stage whereon his actors play their parts
is set, scene almost for scene, from the generally available documents
that served such a writer as Thomas Motley for his "History of the
Rise of the Dutch Republic." Even the name, the very lineaments
of Ulenspiegel, are borrowed from that familiar figure of the
sixteenth-century chap-books [1] whose jolly pranks and schoolboy
frolics have been crystallized in the French word espieglerie,
and in our own day set to music in one of the symphonic poems of
Richard Strauss.
Yet from such well-worn ingredients de Coster's genius has mixed a
potion most individually his own. The style of Rabelais is tempered
with a finish, a neatness, and a wit that are as truly the product
of the modern spirit as was the flamboyant jollity of Rabelais
the product of his own Renaissance age; the sensible, historical
foreground of a Motley becomes the coloured background to a romantic
drama of human vice and virtue, linked in its turn to a conception
of the cosmic process which has no other home, surely, than in the
author's brain. While Ulenspiegel himself is now not simply the type
of young high spirits and animal good humour, but a being as complex,
as many-sided almost as humanity--all brightness of intellect, all
warmth of heart, all honour, and all dream--the immortal Spirit of
Flanders that knows not what it is to be beaten, whose last song must
for ever remain unsung.
What shall we say of those other homely personages who fill the
scene--symbols no less of Flemish character at its finest and of the
enduringly domestic springs of Flemish national life? Claes the trusty
fatherhood, Soetkin the valiant motherhood of Flanders, Nele her true
heart, Lamme Goedzak her great belly that hungers always for more and
yet more good things to eat and is never satisfied? Or what, again,
of the tragic Katheline, half witch, half martyr, and the centre of
that dark intrigue which seems to throb like a shuttle through the
mazy pattern of the plot, threading it all into unity?
From yet another standpoint: as an envisagement of the horrors of the
Spanish Inquisition, de Coster's work is probably without parallel
in an already well-tilled field. The sinister figure of the King of
Spain broods over it all like a Kaiser, and the episodes of stake and
torture are recorded with a realism which might appear exaggerated
had not modern Belgium--though in terms of "scientific warfare"--an
even more devilish tale to tell. The fact is that de Coster's trick of
stating horror and leaving it to make its full effect without a touch
of the rhetoric of indignation, proves the deadliest of all corrosive
weapons; and it is hardly surprising that the book had been hailed
in some quarters as a Protestant tract. But de Coster himself was in
no sense a theological partisan, and his sympathy with the Beggarmen
sprang from his enthusiasm for national liberty far more than from
any bias towards the Protestant cause as such. That Catholicism has
ever been identified with tyranny the best Catholic will most deplore,
nor will de Coster's "traditional" irreverence blind such a reader's
eyes to the spiritual generosity which permeates the whole work,
and is, indeed, its most essential characteristic.
It remains to add that, in the interests of war-time publishing,
the present version represents a curtailment of the Legend as it left
the author's hands. Here and there also, to maintain the continuity of
incident, the translator has permitted himself some slight modification
of the original text. By this means it is hoped that the proportions
of the whole have been fairly maintained, and that no vital aspect
of plot or atmosphere has been altogether suppressed or allowed an
undue prominence.