The Tale of Beatrice

[p. I]

Introduction

The Tale of Beatrice, like nearly all Dutch literature of the Middle Ages, is the work of a Fleming. It is preserved in one manuscript, now in the Royal Library at The Hague, and was most probably written in the first half of the fourteenth century.

The veneration of Mary, characteristic of the religion of the period, gave rise to hundreds of miracle stories in which she appears as the benefactress of mankind. Few of these have achieved so great a popularity as the one that forms the subject of our poem. It is a story of surprising depths, which many modern poets have been tempted to plumb. Maeterlinck's Soeur Béatrice has perhaps done most to make it known to the European public; Reinhardt's ‘wordless spectacle’ The Miracle was

[p. II]

based on this French version. In Dutch there is the Dutchman Boutens' poem Beatrijs and the Fleming Teirlinck's play Ik dien.

The mediaeval poet himself, as he explains on his first page, only retold what he had heard from ‘brother Ghisbert’, who for his part, had found the story ‘in the books he read’. Modern erudition has identified these monkish works, The dry bones of the legend are to be found in the Dialogus Miraculorum of Caesarius of Heisterbach, which was completed towards the year 1225, and in a still older work by Alanus de Rupe. But no more than the dry bones. All the warmth and tenderness, all the life and truth, which make the Tale of Beatrice, unpretentious as it is, one of the great works of Dutch literature, are due to the unknown Fleming, who ‘won little gain’ by his poetry, but who, in spite of

[p. III]

his friends' worldly-wise advice, could not help ‘labouring’ over rhythm and rhyme to the greater glory of our Lady.

For those who can read mediaeval Dutch, neither Maeterlinck's lyrical and high-flown romanticism, nor Boutens' chastened and attenuated gracefulness, or Teirlinck's vehement and palpitating realism, can stand a comparison with the simplicity and directness of the mediaeval poet. It is his utter absence of pose and his unqualified belief in the facts as well as in the deep significance of the legend which make the little work so refreshing and which touch the imagination even of the modern reader so much more intimately than all the art and ingeniousness of our too self-conscious and sophisticated contemporaries.

As in my translation of Lancelot of Denmark, I

[p. IV]

have done my best to follow the original as closely as my knowledge of the English language and the exigencies of rhyme and metre would permit, I may perhaps observe that in the original there are great differences of style between the ‘able plays’ of Lancelot of Denmark and of Esinoreit, and the Tale of Beatrice. The knights and damsels of the able plays move in a conventional world on softly flowing rhythm and amid sweet poetic imagery, Beatrice lives in the poet's own workaday world, and the language in which her story is told occasionally assumes the sober plainness of her surroundings. If the verse of my translation is of a somewhat drier or harsher quality than that of Lancelot of Denmark, I can only assure the English or American reader that, to the best of my belief, it truthfully reflects a difference in the original.

[p. V]

Such as it is, this little book, like its predecessor, owes a very great deal to the suggestions of my friend R.C. Trevelyan, whom I cannot sufficiently thank for his inexhaustible patience and resourcefulness.

P. Geyl.

London, May, 1927.