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Introduction
In mediaeval Europe contacts between language groups were frequent and comparatively easy and a profound spiritual unity prevailed throughout the continent. Everywhere the cultured European lived in a nearly identical atmosphere of religious ardor and was surrounded by similar social institutions and concepts. Of necessity he responded in approximately the same manner to any spiritual or emotional stimulus. Certain literary themes seemed to spring up almost simultaneously in far removed places.
At present universal motives which provoke religious or moral emotion are restricted in numbers; symbols have been differentiated. For instance, Protestant and Catholic literary imagery differ widely, but in the Middle Ages, when every idea radiated from or reverted to the Catholic metaphysical conception of the world, such a universality was possible and effective for many centuries.
The elegant sentimentality of Lancelot and Blanchefleur appealed as much to the Italian as to the British nobility; the dire warnings and admonitions contained in Everyman were as good a lesson to the Flemings as to the
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Germans; and the cynical individualism of Reynard the Fox found as favorable an audience in France as in the Netherlands.
Since the authors of the Middle Ages were possessed of little personal vanity, most of their works remained anonymous. Their later copyists had even less the fetishism of authorship and they often generously enlarged the texts with interpolations of sometimes doubtful value.
It is extremely difficult to trace the origin of the most popular mediaeval themes. Ardent philologists, who are most of the time equally ardent nationalists, are wont to claim for their respective countries the real authorship of various literary creations, but everything considered, these energetic efforts, seldom unbiased, are only a jeu de l'esprit, an expression of competitive nationalist spirit.
From the literary standpoint, it is far more interesting to establish which version of a certain universal theme surpasses and outshines all the other versions. It is worth while to find out which people in Europe, by passing the grain of a popular tale through the sieve of their sensitivity, have gathered the purest flour. From time to time a tale that was passed from one nation to another in skeleton form is taken up by an artist and handled in such a way as to give it a definite and final shape that helps it over the barriers the centuries keep building up between a work of art and an evolving world.
In doing so, the artist was as little indebted to the original version as a sculptor to his stone: on the contrary, out of an often ludicrous mass, he made a work of art
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with a message. It gained power and impetus from the genius of one man and through him from the character of a whole nation. In that manner it crystallized the achievements of an entire country, its philosophy of life, its forms of devotion, its prejudices and its prides. Thus in the great Salt Lake, people dip a cross made of two thin steel wires and take it out a few hours later, transformed into a beautifully shaped white emblem.
The story of Beatrice the vergeress, in its oldest form, is to be found in Caesarius von Heisterbach's Dialogus Miraculorum, written about 1222. It takes the author only a few paragraphs to tell this ‘miracle’ which he does not pretend to have invented or embellished. It belongs to an impressive compendium of miraculous happenings that Caesarius had compiled in different lands.
In his version, Beatrice, a nun very devoted to the Virgin, is unable to resist the entreaties of a monk; she leaves her convent where she was vergeress, and leads a worldly life with her paramour. After a while he abandons her and she is forced through poverty to become a whore, but she remains devoted to the Virgin and prays to her every day. Years pass and she is moved to go back to her convent. There she discovers that Mary has taken her place to hide her from shame. She resumes her duties, leaving her children to the care of a charitable woman.
This legend belongs to the impressive cycle of tales through which the Church in the thirteenth century tried to foster devotion to the Virgin. Pious tales of this kind were invented and circulated by the hundreds, and the authors cared as little as the public for strict veracity and
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scientific historical certainty. The important thing was not that the story had a foundation in reality, but the effect it produced on the listener or the reader. It did not have to be true, but it had to be credible. From the religious point of view it was credible as soon as it impressed on the people's minds the manifold ways in which the intercession of the Virgin could operate in favor of even the most hardened sinners, for pardon was refused only to those who did not want to ask for it.
The fact that most of these legends resorted to miracles as elements of demonstration excluded discussion or doubt. Even if one could question a specific case of divine intervention, one could not, from the standpoint of strict orthodoxy, object to the tale being told. At that time the moral implication of the story was indeed far more important than its location in time and space. The atmosphere of the Middle Ages was impregnated with the idea of continuity and eternity; it was not fragmented as our life is now. It took Christian Europe three more centuries before Erasmus in his Eulogy of Folly could openly react against ‘that kind of men, ... who love to hear or tell feigned Miracles and strange lies, and are never weary of any tale, though never so long, so it be of Ghosts, Spirits, Goblins, Devils or the like.’
Since Caesarius first wrote it down, the story of Beatrice the nun has spread all over Europe. The catalogue made by Robert Guiette of Flemish, Dutch, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Icelandic and oriental versions comprises 200 odd numbers from 1222 to 1935. Lope de Vega treated it, Max Reinhardt took it to the stage in
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a famous pantomime, Maeterlinck rewrote it in Soeur Béatrice, it was filmed twice, it was arranged for the theater in a dozen different ways, it was rewritten in prose and in verse. In an age which looks askance at the idea of miraculous interventions, it was treated by notoriously unbelieving authors: a clear proof that it contained in its naive essence enough human value and charm to carry it to any incredulous or skeptical audience.
Of all these versions, none is superior, none is more rounded and more moving than the version written in Flanders, probably about the end of the thirteenth or the first quarter of the fourteenth century. The only copy extant is a manuscript in the Royal Library at The Hague which was published for the first time in 1841.
When the anonymous poet, who has been tentatively identiiied as Willem van Assenede, wrote the Sproke van Beatrijs, the Netherlandish dialect which was considered the most elegant and the most refined was Flemish. It was only after the separation of the Northern Lowlands and the Southern Belgian provinces in the sixteenth century that the dialect of Holland proper became dominant. Although there are slight differences of vocabulary between Flemish and Dutch, the languages are really identical, and the entire Mediaeval Dutch literature is strictly Flemish. Therefore Beatrice belongs to the common heritage of Flemings and Hollanders. It is undoubtedly the gem of Mediaeval Netherlands letters; it is probably the most charming legend of Our Lady known in Western Europe.
In the Flemish version the poet has introduced a number of small changes which show infinite literary skill and
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deep psychological insight. The nun Beatrice has been in love with a young knight from early childhood. When she is tempted to renounce her vows, the tempter is logically this man. Neither fasts nor prayers have availed against the call of her blood: she summons the young man and tells him that in a week she will come out to the garden and go away with him. He prepares everything, buys clothes, furs and jewelry (the best that money could buy) and is prompt at the rendez-vous. They leave on horseback, and when day breaks the lover exhibits an untimely ardor. Beatrice rebukes him, remembers with remorse her convent duties, but feels that her love for the knight is mightier than all. They spend seven years in a town and have two very beautiful children. A famine breaks out, the money is gone and the man leaves Beatrice. She does not know any craft and, to keep her children alive, she becomes a prostitute. However, after another seven years she drifts back to her nunnery, desiring to hear from a widow who lives close by how people feel about the vergeress who eloped. To her astonishment she learns that nobody has noticed her absence, and she understands that the Virgin has taken the place she deserted. After many a hesitation and with the encouragement of a heavenly messenger, she finally goes back to her former duties and finds everything exactly as she left it. When a visiting abbot comes to the nunnery, she confesses and tells him the story of the miracle. He is greatly edified and, under veiled circumstances, proclaims to the convent the miracle the Virgin Mary has wrought. He also takes care of the two boys, who are raised in a convent and become ‘two
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good men.’
The beauty of the Flemish version is not in the miraculous element of the story; it lies in its human significance, in its unerring charm and limpid simplicity. The way in which the struggle of the young woman is described has nothing of the vulgar or commonplace; it evokes sympathy and compassion. The lovers converse from time to time through the latticed window of the convent, but they are unable even to kiss each other once for old friendship's sake. The nun does not rush into her worldly adventure; she resists, but feels that ‘she must give up her conventual garb,’ that she belongs to the world. The forces that drive one to his final destiny are at work in her, and although she fully realizes her sinfulness, she obeys and ‘serves’ the world rather than the Lord. There is nothing Dionysian in her lust; she is reluctant but resigned to what fate seems to expect from her.
Her delicate psychology contrasts with the primitive attitude of the lover. He answers her call, he loads her with gifts and gives her command of the money he took along on the trip, but he is impatient and abrupt, wanting to satisfy his desire at the very first moment of their solitude. The dialogue between the lover and Beatrice, one of the- few amorous dialogues in Mediaeval Flemish literature, is one of the most graceful and poetical pages that have come out of the so wrongly called dark ages. Beatrice is indignant at the young mans rash proposition. She calls him a boor for ignoring the gentle art of love and wanting to reduce it to a mere instant satisfaction of lust. A woman and therefore by instinct conservative,
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she builds around the demonstration of her affection the protective barrier of a dignified and cozy intimacy. The lover has no other excuse but to blame ‘Vrouwe Venus,’ the symbol of earthly love. Even in her sin, Beatrice remains a Christian.
Many are the emotional and poetical highlights of this poem, even in the final pages which obviously are not the work of the original author. Every detail is indispensable and charming, every action of Beatrice is psychologically justified and credible. All the time she occupies the foreground. The man remains without a name throughout the poem, but he is not altogether a shadow; he is a weakling, unfaithful and vain, irresponsible and hard, but not a conventional character. Only in the apocryphal conclusion of the poem is Beatrice named; the narrator who completes the story tactlessly breaks the discretion which had protected the nun's secret.
Willem van Assenede, if he wrote this poem, was a very great poet: he loved his subject; he felt that the writer has only one subject, man, which often means woman; he had an eye for nature but he was not overpowered by it. In talking about the lovely scenery of the forest clearing his vocabulary is meager, - the air is ‘beautiful and fine,’ the trees are ‘upright and tall.’ The scenery is only a setting for that never exhausted subject: man and his behavior.
Of course he is a devout believer in the Virgin, but he is not didactic about it. The interpolator and finisher of his poem has added some more or less pedantic remarks of his own to tell the reader how the Virgin's
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intercession really operates. In the basic text these digressions did probably not appear.
The Flemish Beatrijs has been translated into several languages. Robert Guiette produced an exquisite French version in 1930. In English, Harold De Wolf Fuller published a translation in 1910 at the Harvard Cooperative Society, under the title Beatrice, A Legend of Our Lady. Couched in archaic, Chaucerian language with a profusion of ‘whysom's,’ ‘hear ye's,’ and ‘eftsoon's,’ it scarcely does justice to the original. Furthermore the translator has purged the text in an excess of modesty which the author would certainly not have understood.
In 1927 Professor Geyl published a translation in London, The Tale of Beatrice. It is a good, intelligent job, accurate, but as the translator himself avows in the introduction, a little ‘drier or harsher’ than his rendering of Lancelot of Denmark.
This present edition presents the translation made by a great friend of Belgium and of Flemish letters, Professor Adriaan Barnouw of Columbia University. As far as I know, Professor Barnouw is a unique phenomenon; his Dutch translation of the Canterbury Tales is a masterpiece of scientific accuracy and literary elegance, but he is no less proficient in English, and the translations he has made of old and modern Dutch and Flemish poetry are extraordinary achievements as well. He has surpassed himself in this rendering of Beatrice; it appears so fluent and readable in English that one would scarcely suspect it of being a translation. I am exceedingly grateful to Professor Barnouw for his permission to print his text.
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In my opinion, it may be regarded as the definitive English version.
I hope it will be found that Beatrice is a valuable document for the study of life in the Middle Ages, but far more important is the possibility that through this translation the reader may receive the poetical message of a writer of seven centuries ago, who proclaimed with profound knowledge of the human soul that we all need strength and forgiveness and that mercy will be granted us if we ask for it humbly and with a contrite heart.
JAN-ALBERT GORIS
New York, August 23, 1944.
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