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FLEMISH LEGENDS
FLEMISH LEGENDS
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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 Félicien 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 mediæval state papers. After publishing another book, Contes brabançons, likewise based on the folk-lore of his country, he seems to have withdrawn into himself and led the life of a dreamer, wandering about among the peasants and burying himself in the wide countryside of Flanders, until he had completed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.
• Illustrated book
• Images has been resized and optimized for your device
• Table of contents with working links to chapters is included
• The book has been corrected for spelling and grammatical errors
•
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 Félicien 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 mediæval state papers. After publishing another book, Contes brabançons, 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.
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