who prefer the works that are still prisoned in the traditional form to those which were created later, and who are thus, in reality, greater strangers to the poet than those who, from principle, assume a hostile attitude to his artistic work. _Les Flamandes_, Verhaeren's first work, appeared in a period of literary commotion. Zola's realistic novels had just become the object of discussion; and they had stirred up, not France only, but the adjacent countries as well. In Belgium Camille Lemonnier was the interpreter of this new naturalism, which regarded absolute truth as more important than beauty, and which saw the sole aim of imaginative literature in photography, in the exact, scientifically accurate reproduction of reality. To-day, now that excessive naturalism has been overcome, we know that this theory only brings us half-way along the road; that beauty may live by the side of truth; that on the other hand truth is not identical with art, but that it was only necessary to establish a transmutation of the value of beauty; that it was in the actual, in realities, that beauty was to be sought. Every new theory, if it is to succeed, needs a strong dose of exaggeration. And the idea of realising reality in poetry seduced young Verhaeren into carefully avoiding, in the description of his native province, all that is sentimental and romantic, and deluded him with the hope of expressing in his verse only what is coarse, primitive, and savage. Something external and something internal, nature and intention, combined to cause this effect. For the hatred of all that is soft and weak, rounded off and in repose, is in Verhaeren's blood. His temperament was from the first fiery, and loved to respond to strong provocation with a violent blow. There was ever in him a love of the brutal, the hard, the rough, the angular; he had always a liking for what is glaring and intensive, loud and noisy. It is only in his latest books that, thanks to his cooler blood, he has attained classical perfection and purity. In those days, moreover, his hatred of sentimental idealisation, the hatred that in Germany fulminated against Defregger's drawing-room Tyrolese, Auerbach's scented peasants, and the spruce mythology of poetical pictures, led him deliberately to emphasise what is brutal, unæsthetic, and, as it was then felt, unpoetical; led him, as it were, to trample with heavy shoes in the tedious footsteps of French poets. Barbarian: this was the word they tried to kill him with, not so much on account of the harshness and coarseness of his diction, which often reminds one of the guttural sounds of German, as because of the savage selection of his instinct, which always preferred what is ringingly resonant and ferociously alive, which never fed on nectar and ambrosia, but tore red and steaming shreds of flesh from the body of life. And genuinely barbarous, savage with Teutonic strength, is this his inroad into French literature, reminding