M. MAETERLINCK’S INTRODUCTION TO HIS TRANSLATION OF “THE ADORNMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL MARRIAGE.” (continued 2)

“From this death there arises a super-essential life—that is to say, a life of contemplation—and here the gift of intelligence begins. For God, who without ceasing contemplates the very essence which He enjoys, and who grants the impatience of love to those whom He makes like unto Himself, gives also rest and enjoyment to those who are united with Him. But where there is union of being and complete immersion, there is no more giving or receiving. And because He grants an enlightened reason to those whom He makes like unto Himself, He also gives a boundless splendour to those who are united to Him. That boundless splendour is the image of the Father. We are created in this image, and we are capable of being united to it in a grandeur more lofty than thrones, if we only contemplate, above our own human weakness, the glorious face of the Father—in other words, the sublime nature of deity. Now this unfathomed splendour is a common gift to all spirits who rejoice in grace and in glory. It thus streams forth for all like the splendour of the sun, and yet those who receive it are not all equally enlightened. The sun shines more clearly through glass than through stone, more clearly through crystal than through glass, and each precious stone shines and shows its beauty and its power and its colour in the light of the sun. Even so is each man enlightened both in grace and in glory, according as he is capable of receiving so sublime a gift; but he who is most enlightened in grace yet has less than he who is least enlightened in glory. Nevertheless the light of glory is not an intermediary between the soul and this unlimited splendour, but our spiritual condition, our earthly state, and our inconstancy disturb us, and so we have to gain merits, which those who dwell in glory have no need to gain.

“This sublime splendour is the simple contemplation of the Father, and of all those who behold and rejoice, and look fixedly in one direction by means of an incomprehensible light, each one according as the light is bestowed upon him. For that measureless light shines ceaselessly into all our thoughts; but the man who lives here, in this earthly state, is often overwhelmed with images, so that he does not always actively and steadily behold the super-essence of God by means of this light. But in receiving this gift he virtually possesses it, and he can contemplate whenever he wills. Since the light by which we contemplate is unlimited, and that which we contemplate of an unfathomed depth, the one can never reach the other; but this fixed gaze of our contemplation remains eternally turned towards the infinite, in the joyful presence of the sublime Majesty, where the Father, by His eternal wisdom, gazes fixedly into the depths of His own infinite being.”

A great part of this book on The Kingdom of Lovers is written in singular verses. The three-lined and breathlessly monotonous rhythm is rather like that of the Stabat Mater, only that the third line of every strophe reproduces the same rhyme throughout the entire work, and rests on an abstract idea from which the two preceding lines rise, like twin flowers of obscurity and restlessness. We can imagine this hollow music floating through the spiritual dreams of the maids of Memlinck, while their secret senses, their faces, and their little hands all unite in ecstasy; but unhappily a translation cannot reproduce its taste of darkness and of bread soaked in the night, nor catch the image of the tear-brightened gloom, of ice mingled with fire, of oppression without hope, which we feel throughout the work. I shall therefore translate only one of these dark poems, the subject of which is the “Gift of Intelligence.”

I should have liked to translate many other passages from this remarkable volume; but I shall close with a translation of the chapter entitled “Of the gift of sweet-savoured wisdom”:—

“The seventh divine gift is that of sweet-savoured wisdom. It is granted on the highest peak of introversion, and it penetrates the intelligence and the will according as they are turned towards the absolute. This savour is without source and without measure, and it flows from within outwards, and drinks in the body and the soul (in proportion to their respective capacity for its reception) even to the inmost sense—that is to say, even to a physical sensation. The other senses, like sight and hearing, take their pleasure outside, in the marvels which God has created for His own glory and for the needs of men. This incomprehensible savour, above the mind and in the vast breadth of the soul, is without measure, and it is the Holy Spirit, the incomprehensible love of God. In lower regions than the spirit, sensation is limited. But as its powers are inherent, they overwhelm everything. Now, the eternal Father has adorned the contemplative spirit with joy in unity, and with active and passive comprehension in which the self is lost, and the spirit thus becomes the throne and the rest of God; and the Son, the eternal Truth, has adorned the contemplative intelligence with His own brightness, so that it may behold the face of joy. And now the Holy Spirit desires to adorn the contemplative will, and the inherent unity of its powers, so that the soul may taste, know, and feel how great God is. This savour is so vast that the soul imagines that heaven, earth, and all that is in them must dissolve and sink in nothingness before its unbounded sweetness. These delights are above and beneath, within and without, and have entirely enveloped and saturated the kingdom of the soul. Then the intellect beholds the pure source from which all these delights flow forth. This awakes the attention of the enlightened reason. It knows well, however, that it is incapable of knowing these unimaginable delights, for it observes by means of a created light, while this joy is entirely without measure. Therefore the reason fails in its attention; but the intellect, which is transformed by this illimitable splendour, beholds without ceasing the incomprehensible joy of beatitude.”

It remains now to say a word about the different translations of Ruysbroeck’s work. Twenty years ago, Ernest Hello, who, with Villiers de l’Isle Adam and Stéphane Mallarmé, is the greatest French mystic of our time, published a brief volume in which he collected under headings, chosen mostly as his fancy dictated, various passages of our author, translated from a Latin translation written in the sixteenth century by Laurentius Surius, a Carthusian monk of Cologne. This translation of Surius, noble and subtle in its Latinity, gives with strict and admirable care the sense of the original; but with its over-anxiety, its prolixity, and its weakness, it resembles, when we contrast with it the crude colours of the original Flemish, some distant image seen through sullied panes. When his author uses one word, Surius generally employs two or three, and even then, still dissatisfied, he very often paraphrases once more that which he has already translated in full. The hermit utters cries of love so passionate that they are sometimes almost like blasphemies; Surius is frightened as he reads them and sets down something different. There are times when the old hermit looks outside himself, and in speaking of God searches for images drawn from the garden, the kitchen, or from the stars. Surius does not always venture to follow these flights, and he tries to weaken the meaning or flatters himself that he is ennobling it.

“He escapes me like a truant,”

says one of the Flemish Beguines in speaking of Jesus, and others add:—

Elsewhere God says to man:—

The translator is terrified and changes these astonishing flights into pale circumlocutions. The wild and simple air, the vast and savage love of the original work, most frequently disappear in a wise, correct, copious, and monotonous conventual phraseology; the fidelity to the meaning remaining all the while exact. It was fragments of this translation which Ernest Hello translated in his turn, or rather, he gathered together in chapters arranged by himself, phrases taken from different portions of the work, and disfigured by a double translation. He thus formed a kind of anthology, admirable in its way, almost entirely consecutive; but in which, in spite of careful searching, I have been unable to find more than three or four passages reproduced in their entirety.

As for the present translation, its one merit is its literal exactitude. I might perhaps have been able to make it, if not more elegant, at least more readable, and to improve the work a little from the point of view of theological and metaphysical terminology. But it seemed to me less dangerous and more loyal to confine myself to an almost blind word-for-word translation. I have also resisted the inevitable temptation to introduce unfaithful splendours, for the mind of the old monk is constantly touching upon strange beauties, which his discretion does not awake, and all his paths are peopled with lovely sleeping dreams, whose slumber his humility does not venture to disturb.