Rubens, that lavish reveller, is the genius of the Flemish zest in living; but zest in living is only the temperament and not the soul of Flanders. Before him there were the earnest masters of the cloisters, the primitives, the van Eycks, Memling, Gerhard David, Roger van der Weyden; and after them came Rembrandt, the meditative visionary, the restless seeker after new values. Belgium is something else beside the merry land of kermesses; the healthy, sensual people are not the soul of Flanders. Glaring lights cast strong shadows. All vitality that is strongly conscious of itself produces its counterpart, seclusion and asceticism; it is just the healthiest, the elemental races--the Russians of to-day for instance--who among their strong have the weak, among their gluttons of life those who avert their faces from it, among those who assent some who deny. By the side of the ambitious, teeming Belgium we have spoken of, there is a sequestered Belgium which is falling into ruins. Art exclusively in Rubens's sense could take no account of all those solitary cities, Bruges, Ypres, Dixmude, through whose noiseless streets the monks hasten like flocks of ravens in long processions, in whose canals the dumb white shadows of gliding nuns are mirrored. There, mid life's raging river, are broad islands of dream where men find refuge from realities. Even in the great Belgian cities there are such sequestered haunts of silence, the _béguinages,_ those little towns in the town, whither ageing men and women have retired, renouncing the world for the peace of the cloister. Quite as much as the passion of life, the Roman Catholic faith and monkish renunciation are nowhere so deeply and firmly rooted as in this Belgium, where sensual pleasure is so noisy in its excess. Here again an extreme of contrasts is revealed: frowning in the face of the materialistic view of life stands the spiritual view. While the masses in the exuberance of their health and strength proclaim life aloud and pounce on its eternal pleasures, aside and cut off from them stand another, far lesser company to whom life is only a waiting for death, whose silence is as persistent as the exultation of the others. Everywhere here austere faith has its black roots in the vigorous, fruitful soil. For religious feeling always remains alive among a people that has once, although centuries may have passed since, fought with every fibre of its being for its faith. This is a subterranean Belgium that works in secret and that easily escapes the cursory glance, for it lives in shadows and silence. From this silence, however, from this averted earnestness, Belgian art has derived that mystical nourishment which has lent its baffling strength to the works of Maeterlinck, the pictures of Fernand Khnopff and Georges Minne. Verhaeren, too, did not turn aside from this sombre region. He, as the painter of Belgian life, saw these shadows of a vanishing past, and, in