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 même partout! Va voir le peuple!”

H. T.