voluptuary at the feast, has lavished colours, had his joy of all that is glowing, and glaring, and satiated, and, like every genuine artist, conceived of art as an intensifying of life, as life in intoxication. For more than forty years he created in this sense, and miraculously, just like the men of his country, like the peasants he painted, he waxed in vigour from year to year, from harvest to harvest, his books growing ever more fiery, ever more drunken with the zest and glow of life, his faith in life ever brighter and more confident. He was the first to feel the strength of his young country with conscious pride, and his voice rang out its loud appeal for new fighters till he no longer stood alone, till a company of other artists were ranged around him. Each of these he supported and firmly established, with a strong grip placing them at their vantage for the battle; and without envy, nay with joy, he saw his own work triumphantly overshadowed by the acclaimed creations of his juniors. With joy, because he probably considered not his own novels, but this creation of a literature his greatest and most lasting work. For it seemed as though in these years the whole land had become alive; as though every town, every profession, every class had sent forth a poet or a painter to immortalise them; as though this whole Belgium were eager to be symbolised in individual phases in works of art, until he should come who was destined to transform all towns and classes in a poem, enshrining in it the harmonised soul of the land. Are not the ancient Teutonic cities of Bruges, Courtrai, and Ypres spiritualised in the stanzas of Rodenbach, in the pastels of Fernand Khnopff, in the mystic statues of Georges Minne? Have not the sowers of corn and the workers in mines become stone in the busts of Constantin Meunier? Does not a great drunkenness glow in Georges Eekhoud's descriptions? The mystic art of Maeterlinck and Huysmans drinks its deepest strength from old cloisters and _béguinages_; the sun of the fields of Flanders glows in the pictures of Théo van Rysselberghe and Claus. The delicate walking of maidens and the singing of belfries have been made music in the stanzas of the gentle Charles van Lerberghe; the vehement sensuality of a savage race has been spiritualised in the refined eroticism of Félicien Rops. The Walloons have their representative in Albert Mockel; and how many others might still be named of the great creators: the sculptor van der Stappen; the painters Heymans, Stevens; the writers des Ombiaux, Demolder, Glesener, Crommelynck; who have all in their confident and irresistible advance conquered the esteem of France and the admiration of Europe. For they, and just they, were gifted with a sense of the great complex European feeling which in their work is glimpsed in its birth and growth; for they did not in their idea of a native land stop at the boundaries of Belgium, but included all the neighbouring countries, because they were