The appalling disaster that has befallen the Belgian people is sure to stamp their national character with indelible marks; so that it is safe to predict that never again will the type of civilization which before the war reigned in the basins of the Meuse and the Scheldt reëstablish itself in its full peculiarity and distinctiveness which was the result of a unique coagency of Germanic and Romanic ingredients of culture. Yet in the amalgam of the two heterogeneous elements a certain competitive antithesis had survived, and manifested itself, in the individual as in the national life at large, in a number of unreconciled temperamental contrasts, and in the fundamental unlikeness exhibited in the material and the spiritual activities. Witness the contrast between the bustling aggressiveness in the province of practical affairs and the metaphysical drift of modern Flemish art. To any one familiar with the visible materialism of the population in its external mode of living it may have seemed strange to notice how sedulously a numerous set among the younger artists of the land were facing away from their concrete environment, as though to their over-sensitive nervous system it were irremediably offensive. The vigorous solidity of Constantin Meunier, the great plastic interpreter of the "Black Country" of Belgium, found but few wholehearted imitators among the sculptors, while among the painters that robust terrestrialism of which the work of a Rubens or Teniers and their countless disciples was the artistic upshot, was almost totally relinquished, and linear firmness and colorful vitality yielded the day to pallid, discarnately decorative artistry even, in a measure, in the "applied art" products of a Henri van de Velde. It is in the field of literature, naturally enough, that the contrast is resolved and integrated into a characteristic unity. Very recently Professor A. J. Carnoy has definitely pointed out(4) the striking commixture of the realistic and imaginative elements in the work of the Flemish symbolists. "The vision of the Flemings"--quoting from his own _précis_ of his paper--"is very concrete, very exact in all details and gives a durable, real, and almost corporeal presence to the creations of the imagination. All these traits are exhibited in the reveries of the Flemish mystics, ancient and modern. One finds them also no less plainly in the poetic work of Belgian writers of the last generation: Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, Rodenbach, Van Lerberghe, Le Roy, Elskamp, etc." (4) In a paper read by title before the Modern Language Association of America at Yale University, December 29, 1917.