De Nieuwe Gids. Jaargang 43

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The novel in the Netherlands:
a comparative study by J.A. Russell, m.a., Ph.D., University of Glasgow.
(Vervolg van blz. 277.)

V. Belgian realists and symbolists.

About the middle of the nineteenth century, as has been seen, the legacy of Scott to Europe was definitely challenged, and though he was never dispossessed, other novelistic aims began to make themselves felt, especially the portrayal of contemporary manners. If the new species of novel-writers were not realists according to present standards, it can be said that their efforts made for realism. It was the age of Science, the age of material things, the age of what we must call ‘progress’; and soon even words, with that facile elasticity that is in them, came to perform miracles in the exact reproduction of everything that visibly existed, exactly as it existed. Yet, only in the case of a Dickens was the product of the new artistic principles, to begin with, of the first grade. In Holland at this period the renaissance of feeling, as expressed in the humanitarian novel of Dickens continuing the aims of Richardson, was apparent chiefly in the modifications wrought on the historical mould by meliorist writers like Mev. Bosboom-Toussaint. In Belgium in the '50's, however, there occurred a definite breakaway from the narrative literature of passionate romance as written by Conscience; and realists and humorists like Thackeray and Dickens became the great protagonists for the interpretation of daily life with fidelity.

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But Belgian writers did not know as yet at all precisely how to study their social milieu, and no one can say that the first attempts at writing the roman de moeurs were conspicuously successful. The new English novel, with its philanthropic motive, was in any case, the result of specifically English conditions, bearing the impress of specifically English ideas; it was little comprehended by the foreigner, and its complete importation to Belgian soil was not possible. Yet, as a counter-move to Conscience's puerile conception of literature, the work of D. Sleeckx, R. Snieders, and Emile Greyson was of importance. Sleeckx in particular may be said to have initiated there the novel compounded of descriptive sketches, which Belgian, and to a lesser extent Dutch, writers have never outgrown; but the group - in the main, optimistic, realistic writers - can hardly be said to have acclimatised what was to be the true novel of manners of their country; a more extraordinary circumstance was necessary to annex that, and this was supplied by the spreading Naturalism of France.

A rapid change undoubtedly came upon the Belgian novel when the aid of French Realism, or Naturalism, as it came to be known in its later stages, was invoked; it was as though a spring had been released for the photographic reproduction of ordinary things. Until this time Belgian literature had been but a tributary of French; but though the development of the novel in Belgium was now determined by the course of literary evants in France, it became at once, paradoxically enough, distinctively national. For one thing, the note of the new realism never deteriorated into a mere reproduction of fact; it was pre-eminently a case of observation a travers un temperament. For another thing, there was less preference for the disagreeable; the Belgian novel has never been in the same sense as its neighbour of France ‘the fruit of maturity addressed to maturity’,¹⁾ perhaps because it had not the morals of the Second Empire to draw upon, and certainly because it retained the vivid, pictorial energy of the race.

This profoundly national character disengaged itself only gradually, but since 1880 it has been strikingly evident. It had

1) Winifred Stephens, ‘French Novelists of to-day’, First Series, Preface.

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been contended that Belgian writers ought to take their direction from Paris and so keep their French free from all provincial disfiguration, but against this view - which would have denationalised literature in Belgium - there was opposed the creed of ‘La Jeune Belgique’, expressing sympathy with the Latin genius but declaring that language in itself mattered little if the writing but smacked of the soil. Because of their selection of the French language for their expression, the founders of ‘La Jeune Belgique’ were somewhat unfairly attacked by ‘L'Art Moderne’, the supporters of which, through their social theories, held that art should be national, that a Belgian should think as a Belgian, and write as a Belgian. How little irreconcilable the doctrines of the rival forces were is shown by the fact that it is these same writers, no matter in what camp enlisted, who have given to their small country a remarkable place in the recent literature of Europe. And the fact that all the great writers of this time of re-birth wrote in French and steadily advanced to the production of an undeniable national literature seems to make little of the contention that French inevitably denationalises a Belgian.

For this happy consummation Belgium owes most to the labours of Camille Lemonnier, who, though he had written a number of novels prior to 1880, really belongs to the period beginning then. Though no one was ever more opposed to the French traditions of sobriety and restraint in matter and style, Flaubert and Baudelaire were his first exemplars. Zola came later when the Naturalist school was at the height of its power in Paris. Of none of them, however, was he a complete disciple, but in his mystico-sensual leanings, in his pious materialism, with its tendency towards pantheism, in his Rubens-like fertility and love of colour, dash and force, emphatically Flemish. And though he may rightly be accounted a realist, his realism was not French, but Belgian. He belonged, by temperament and manner, as closely as Zola to the romanticists, but even in his one literary period where the influence of the high priest of Realism was at work, he never really wedded the romantic style to the realistic matter as he did, but was by turns and unitedly naturalist, lyrist, and symbolist.

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The complaint is often made that while everyone notes the historical precedence of ‘Germinal’ (1885) over ‘Happe-Chair’ 1886), no one is concerned to point out the long start ‘Les Charniers’ (1881) has over ‘La Débâcle’ (1892). Such captiousness proceeds from a complete misunderstanding of the work of the greatest of French and Belgian realists, from the belief that they had everything in common, and that even their faults proceeded from an analogous source. It is unlikely that ‘Les Charniers’ made any difference to Zola when he came to write his version of Sedan, but it can be said that ‘Happe-Chair’ would prehaps not have been written at all if Zola's epic of the coal-mine had not been present as a model for that of the rolling-mill. Recognizing this, we can at once arrive at the salient difference in the characteristic of the work of each.

In ‘Les Charniers’ - an immature but typical novel - where Zola's guidance was scarcely available, we have not impressions of the great investment noted with the exactitude of an analyst, as in ‘La Débâcle’: no interest in points of Von Moltke's and Macmahon's strategy, in documentary evidence, in the topographical features of Bazeilles, Le Calvaire d'Illy or the peninsula of Illy, but simply a threnode of overwhelming pity for the victims of the colossal carnage. In Zola there is as much implied tenderness and regret for their frightful sacrifice, but never unrelated to the political and social implications of warfare, nor to recorded history. In a word, then, Lemonnier's is not the descriptive novel, as Zola's is; science is not his ignis fatuus as it is Zola's. He inclines to the sensitivists, for like them he paints his imagination in the form of ever-sensitive emotions; he is too overladen with emotion to see things steadily and in their scientific whole; reflection is displaced by a disarray of confused feelings.

Though just as little as the much-misunderstood Zola is he a mere pornographer, he does not, like that reforming zealot, preach a precise social evangel for all the major ailments of mankind. His ideas are akin, not to the logical conclusions of a systematic thinker, but to the imaginative speculations of a visionary, for whom the larger problems and movements of his time have become genuine sources of inspiration. The result is

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a vast lyricism but an incapacity to apply abstract principles, the absence from his work of doctrines and metaphysics and the abnegation of all critical outlook. Yet, in this, Lemonnier is seemingy true to racial type, for this inferiority in the logic of action characterizes all Belgians.

Lemonnier has been admirably described as a ‘terrien conscient’; as in the work of all his countrymen we find a love of life rather than a love of form, a love of nature than a love of man; nature is his great theme, and plunging into fantasies of art, he reformulates from a naïve and superficial naturalism the theories of Rousseau. He is one of the first of the painter-poets who so largely fill the record of fiction in Belgium and Holland: in seeking to blend the real and the ideal the poet gains the day. Can Lemonnier, then, be described as a realist? Except in one or two of his thirty novels, in a Zolaesque sense, no! Work mellowed by such poetry as we have in ‘Un Mâle’ and ‘Le Vent dans les Moulins’ is not even the modified realism that is found in Arnold Bennett, George Moore and Louis Couperus. But it probably comes as near to realism as the Belgian mind can approach. It is not the stark, unsparing collation of the Balzac of the Second Empire, but how far advanced from the trite romanticisation of Conscience! Plenty of Frank, Flemish sensuality, but not the rigorous, logically-pursued, reformatory zeal of ‘L'Asommoir’, or the temperance-tract moralising of ‘De Plaag der Dorpen’: only the vehement and mystical tendencies proper to a Belgian of the Belgians, ever aware thats man is far more likely to be moved by a sentiment than by a formula.

Lemonnier, it need hardly be said, is not a novelist of European magnitude; only a foolhardy admirer would seriously insist that his work has the great qualities of Nietzsche, Ibsen, Tolstoi, Zola, the dominating literary quartette of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. To a sensitive and sensual love of nature, there is coupled a minimum of thought, leading to a voluptuous feeling for words that sometimes renders him unnecessarily arcane; like most other great Belgian writers he is a person of extremes (as though unbalance were part of the national heritage). Yet, in the final analysis, he must be looked on as the

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novelist of Flanders, much as Verhaeren is the poet of Flanders. With that compatriot he would have echoed:

‘Hommes de Bruges et de Courtrai, hommes de Gand,
Avec mon vouloir âpre, avec mon coeur vorace
Certes suis-je profondément de votre race.’

Within his own country he had but two precursors in literature, Conscience and de Coster. The low romantic tendencies of the former he was forced to reject, nor was he able, despite his admiration, to accept the allegorical and preternatural elements in the work of the latter. And if he turned to France for inspiration, he certainly made his acquisitions Belgian by more than mere adoption; his worship at the altar of the goddess of Science was neither so adulatory nor so regular as to make the epithet, ‘The Zola of Belgium’, one of reliable application; he could really claim, after much toil and some extravagance, that he had fashioned his own medium for the expression of his ideas, that he was ‘one of the first to cross the frontier with literature that was not contraband.’¹⁾

Keats, it will be remembered, says that poetry should ‘surprise by a fine excess’. Lemonnier, it might seem, applied this dictum to prose also, for with him even excess becomes a conscious aesthetic principle, the basis of a new dynamic force. It has led him, like Carlyle and Emerson, to perceive heroism in everyday life and employment, and to discover an aesthetic of modernity; exultantly he seems to say,

‘Le Rêve ancien est mort et le nouveau se forge.’²⁾

He too faces the ugliest and most degrading aspects of the struggle for existence in ‘the Octopus city’, with its tentacles of roads and railways; and though he lacks Verhaeren's epic solutions, he has acquired, through the insight of enthusiasm, an unphilosophical share in his apocalyptic vision of a new source of beauty in the trend of human effort.

From the death of de Coster until the revival in the early '80's, Lemonnier remained a solitary figure in Belgian letters. But he

1) C. Lemonnier, ‘La Vie Belge’, p. 261.

2) E. Verhaeren, ‘Les Villes Tentaculaires’: ‘L'Ame de la Ville’.

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had seized the flag of insurrection as it fell from de Coster's grasp, and during those years he was working away quiety but steadily, and was, in truth, the advance guard of the new writers - ‘the Awakener’ he has been well named. The ebullition at that time was due proximately to the fermentation in the minds of Max. Waller and his comrades, but this was in large measure due to Lemonnier's pioneering endeavours. Admittedly, it was in poetry that the new schood - as in Holland - made its most pronounced success, but in prose there were higher individual triumphs, if we except Verhaeren: not every Belgian man of letters went over to Baudelairism and the Parnassians of Paris. The naturalistic deities of France claimed the worship of more than Lemonnier, who was joined soon by Georges Eekhoud, though the two were not exactly in step with each other.

Like Zola, Eekhoud is a rebel, but his revolt takes neither the reasoned form of that of the father of the Rougon-Macquart nor the healthily exultant of Lemonnier's. His books teem with prurient and brutal, often revolting, images, but it is passionate admiration - not corrective hope or boundless pity - that he offers characters drawn, as they always are, from the want only depraved, the outcasts of society, and the abnormal. With such determined zeal are these patibulary types exploited that, in order to treat life artistically, it seems necessary for him to go to the criminal classes; always he abandons himself to resurgent instincts; to him ordinary life seems vulgar and flat; it is the intransigent utterance of one who is the greatest enemy of tradition and convention among the novelists of the Netherlands. But the extreme violence of this temperament, which reason so little governs, precludes us from giving ourselves up freely to the emotions of such outrageous art. Even in Zola we find the necessary equilibrium between ideas and sentiments to admit of noble idealization, and in Lemonnier, another rebel, we obtain plenteous relief from lust and blood in fragments of dream and visions of sylvan beauty. But to Eekhoud life seems wholly tragic, febrile, exterminative of weakness; possessed of hope in neither God, Nature nor Man, a pessimist he is bound to be,

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‘like every egoist, who writes his work with his own blood.’¹⁾

But this creature of unbalance and morbid extremes is only part of Eekhoud. There is also the man who has a passionate love for his country, its customs and its ways of living, who reveres the Kempen peasant, not corrupted, but as he is, with his familiar characteristics of prudence and tenacity. And the combination is a writer, in some ways, the most fundamentally Flemish of the whole group. Even in his avowed partiality for the excesses of language and imagination in the plays of Webster, Otway, Marlowe, Fletcher, he shows himself more Flemish than English, for they, like himself, have only done in prose what Jordaens and Rubens have bacchanalised on canvas. A race which has always well liked eating and drinking can let itself go unrestainedly in this forced, exaggerated work, which has been fittingly called the kermesse of literature. Eekhoud belongs so much to this rude, plebeian race that it is known that he has sought additionally to consecrate his work to it by adopting a style harsh and heavy, that the guttural sonorities of Flemish may be reproduced in French.

The pioneer work accomplished by Lemonnier may have been sustained by Eekhoud; he has scarcely augmented it (though it must be remembered that for Lemonnier is has been claimed that the germ of all the later developments in Belgian letters may be traced in his work). In the first place, the source of his inspiration is more concentrated; he has not the crowded psychological domain of Lemonnier nor that writer's joy in his creations; and, secondly, in his greater vigour of style, he has carried his formlessness to ridiculous lengths. Yet these two have fashioned the prose of modern Belgium, a prose-form so highly coloured and so fitful as to be essentially a poetisation of pictures. Both are realists, but their realism in nearly always a dream-realism, in which filth itself ferments with poetry. There is nothing in them of the clearness and precision, proceeding from well-disciplined imagery, of the French realists. Dreamers and colourists they are, with the art of description taught to them, not by scintillation of ideas, but by painting and sculpture (that feature lingers in the Netherlands' novel, for Streuvels, Timmermans, Van

1) G. Turquet-Milnes, ‘Some Belgian Writers’, p. 109.

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Looy, and others indulge it almost as assiduously as ever). In no sense is Eekhoud a contructionist; he is, fact, like many Belgian writers, both on the Flemish and Walloon side, incapable of writing anything but short stories, so that what appear to be intended as novels are no more than collections of independent impressions. This remark applies even to his finest piece of work, ‘La Nouvelle Carthage’, which is a series of descriptive essays on modern Antwerp, leavened by autobiography. ‘Kees Doorik’ is also a curious kind of novel really a short story spun out by descriptions of festivals. Yet, this does not indicate that the novel in Belgium is in decay, for it is no mere expansion of the short story but a new impressionist form of art that is involved, an art in which the sensations are increased to the point of paroxysm, until the writer shares the frenzy of Dionysus, throbbing with the pulsations of the forest or quivering with the tender sadness of a nodding flower.

It has been observed that Realism in Belgium assumes a form different from that of France, that it is not marked by the French love of clearness and order, but shows by its mystic philosophy and its taste for the strange and horrific the other side - the Germanic - of the Belgian nature. The Belgian poets, indeed, never put the principles of Realism into practice at all, but by bringing to light all that is obscure and inexpressible in the life of their souls, created the true Symbolism, that reflects and repercusses every vision, in which, as Carlyle has said, ‘there is concealment and yet revelation.’ The prose-writers were only a shade less lyrical when, under the influence of inward or external excitement, reflection was eliminated; even the most realistic of them, Lemonnier and Eekhoud, but dabbled in objectivity, while in Georges Rodenbach the affective faculties became almost as predominant as when given free rein by the will of the poet, making it impossible to criticise his prose apart from his poetry.

Rodenbach is of course, ‘the Singer of Bruges’; his work is almost all an evocation of silence and solitude related to the calm, grey beauty of the capital of West Flanders; no other writer has apotheosized so matchlessly any city. A pre-established harmony seemed to exist between his soul and the city of his

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youth; haunted by Flemish images - of a land drowned in mists, of creeping canals with swans gliding noiselessly along, of quaint houses with red-tiled roofs he so read himself into the Stimmung of the town that he aimed at evoking it as a living being, associated with the mood of the spirit. He wanted us to believe that his soul was like this quiet city of the past, whose inner life is accessible only to those who know its secret; and he was kept Flemish to the end by this unique genius loci.

The writing of Rodenbach is in no sense descriptive; he paints for us neither the moeurs nor the paysages of Flanders; the world to which he introduces us is not so much Bruges and West Flanders as abstractions of them that his horror of prosaic realism presents to the imagination; he was making a work of art out of a visionary interpretation of fact, he was creating a symbol. When it is reflected on that in this city Rodenbach saw only its silence and its mystery, we have a striking revelation on the working of a poet's mind. Actually, Bruges-la-Morte is often Bruges-la-Vivante - sometimes even Bruges-la-Bruyante, when clumsy market-carts rumble across the Grande Place; for Rodenbach it was perpetually (to use his own words) the ‘grand catéchisme du calme’; he was a poet living in a world of dreams, obsessed almost to the point of morbidity, wishing only to know his own soul.

Truth to tell, Rodenbach's work bears the taint of the decadent. His ‘wooing of sorrow as a bride’ was a primary distinction of his literary individuality, but it displaye a soul frightened of life, that consoled itself with morose dreams and nostalgias, and sterilized thought in the search for vain subtleties. Anatole France has well said of him, ‘Ce ne sont pas les choses, c'est l'âme des choses qui l'occupe et l'emeut.’ Mood and imagination often played so great a part in the perception of a thing that the picture it inspired seems to be about something strangely different from the object we know, reminiscent of it certainly, yet more than half fictitious; and the constant exercise of this arbitrary power tended to become a form of hallucination, blinding him to our more commonplace view. This want of robustness, of concreteness even, is his main defect. Even in ‘Le Carillonneur’, which of his novels is the one in which topography

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is least sentimentalized, there are portrayed the promptings to action of an environment more melancholy than that of ‘The Return of the Native’ or ‘Dr. Adriaan’: always the same ominous absorption with impending fatality.

Rodenbach belonged to no literary group, but was an independent symbolist, writing admirable poems in prose. Though he was a greater artist than Lemonnier or Eekhoud, he cannot be said to have accomplished nearly as much for the advance of the novel in the Netherlands as they did, and chiefly because he turned his eyes on death instead of on life. Nevertheless, this complete dreamer and sensitivist, dissociating himself from living, triumphant, or suffering society, is representative of a main current of Flemish literature and art.

The Belgian temperament, as interpreted in the traditional art of painting is found in dual varieties which appear, with ever more emphasis, in the new literature of the Belgian renaissance, and reveal the Flemish side of the race at least as at once the most religious and the most material of peoples. For Verhaeren it was sufficient proof that he could name together Bruges and Antwerp, Van Eyck and Rubens.¹⁾ Of no writer can it be said that he represents entirely the one aspect or the other, but it is obvious that although, as generally happens, the two characters may exist side by side in the same personality, one of them will always dominate over the other. This applies with less force to Dutch writers, who have more of the poise that Rembrandt had; but among Flemish artists there have always been pure naturalists like Jordaens, displaying their national quality in boisterous vigour, breadth and expansiveness, and pure mystics like Memlinc, evidencing an intensity of spiritual and imaginative feeling. Rodenbach's work is clearly related to that of Memlinc and Van Eyck, and in this way alone he is a thoroughly representative Fleming.

The truculent and fatalistic sides of Belgian character are found in Lemonnier's and Eekhoud's work, its reserved and found in Lemonnier's and Eekhoud's work, its reserved and mystical side in the filigree work of Rodenbach. In that of Eugene Demolder we now come to the material joie de vivre, rather coarse and unruly,

1) ‘Parmi les Cendres’, p. 36.

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which inhabits in that same character. Demolder is the last of the four great symbolists of Belgium. Like the others he is above all a painter, by far the most lavish word-painter of the four, his style from first to last consisting in a most cunning transposition of pictures. He produces not merely the outlines and colours of a picture, but the very soul of its meaning; he is truly a colorist working in verbal pigments and plastic images; he has studied the methods of the Dutch and Flemish masters and has found the secret of their art. His boisterous love of all forms of life and his special excellence in painting scenes of ripaille are remarkably reminiscent of Jan Steen and of Rubens' ‘Kermesse’; but though he tends to multiply as for pleasure descriptions of the diableries inmondes, his work as a whole is saved from vulgarity, thanks to an indescribable epic ardour and to something youthful and genial in its strength.

Flemish art is full of the subtle modernisation, by means of a delicate symbolism, of the gross realism of mediaeval ignorance. Demolder, ‘the last of the Gothic Flemings’, is in literature a synthesis of this method. He is a descriptive writer par excellence, but he does not content himself by describing pictures symbolising the past; he makes them live in the present. His historical reconstructions are full of the quaintest contortions, especially in ‘La Légende d'Yperdamme’, where the events narrated in the Gospels are transferred in a series of grotesque and naïve anachronisms to an unreal, yet realistic, Flemish city. In his later reconstitutions of historical periods - that of Rembrandt's day in Holland,¹⁾ of a legendary Netherlands in ‘Les Patins de la Reine de Hollande’, of eighteenth century France in ‘Le Jardinier de la Pompadour’, he was more skiful in hiding the process of his labour, but aimed still at producing a kind of clair-obscur, in which the external appearances of life might be give with the monotony of the contemporary world veiled. There is little else in Demolder's conception of the novel than in this coupling of patriotic and religious symbolism with Rabelaisan imagination. But in making whatever his pen touched assume the aspect and colour of a Rubens' picture he was keeping alive the heart of ‘Mère Flandre’ to the glory of her greatest artists.

1) ‘La Route d'Emeraude’.

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In the work of the writers just considered we have the first completed part of the modern novel in Belgium. Of these ‘Four Wheels of the Novel Wain’ only Georges Eekhoud survives, and actively as he is of the present in some ways,¹⁾ his age and the definitive nature of his previous novels make him really a writer of the last generation. Of the four, Lemonnier is probably the greatest, but in proving the inception of a national literature - above all, in showing that the diathesis of renaissance was nation-wide - they need not be discriminated. All four happened to write in French, but that dualism of natural and spiritual tendencies which is held to be the birth-right of every true Fleming was their's in full degree; their strange mixture of sensuality and mysticism was quite foreign to modern French spirit and taste, though perhaps not unalien to that Spanish endowment of which we are reminded in Victor Hugo's couplet:

‘Noble Flandre où le nord se réchauffe engourdi
Au soleil de Castille et s'accouple au midi.’

We may go still further and apply to them all the proudets words that Lemonnier used about himself: ‘Ni Flamand, ni Wallon, toute la terre belge est ma terre.’²⁾

All the characteristics determined in the Belgian novel to date have been given it by Lemonnier, Eekhoud, Rodenbach and Demolder, even if M. Liebrecht's comprehensive description of it is taken as the basis of the test. C'est d'abord’, says this critic, ‘- et c'est cela impérieusement - un roman terrien, un roman qui vient de la nature et qui y retourne sans cesse, c'est un roman large, puissant, lourd parfois et qui se refuse aux analyses subtiles de finesse pychologique; il est pleine d'une force neuve qui fleure bon la vie et qui regorge d'une sève ardente. Roman souvent triste, done la rare gaieté se voile de mélancholie, c'est l'oeuvre d'un peuple du Nord qui a beau avoir emprunté une forme latine pour exprimer sa pensée.’¹⁾

These Belgian novelists, then, reveal towards life a serious

1) In 1923 he published ‘Le Terroir Incarné’, the first novel of a trilogy, the second and third parts of which are ‘La Patrie Ambiguë’ and ‘L'Humanité Intégrale’.

2) ‘Histoire de la Littérature belge d'expression française’, p. 269.

1) In 1923 he published ‘Le Terroir Incarné’, the first novel of a trilogy, the second and third parts of which are ‘La Patrie Ambiguë’ and ‘L'Humanité Intégrale’.

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and thorough attitude, derived from a theory of socialism based on natural culture, hostile to all ecclesiasticism, and yet relying in practice on a sort of religious fervour, with claims to be the religion of the future. They did not, like Haeckel, pin their faith to a rational solution of the riddle of the universe, nor like Zola, support themselves with the positive science of Darwin and Comte. Passing continually from one mood to another, the doctrine of individualism forbade the erection of their iconoclasm into new dogmas, in which respect they resemble their neighbours of the North Netherlands. On both sides the principle of free-thought, in addition to their common heritage of power for description and inspired sense of colour, has carried into the most modern expression of the novel, marking an attitude to life as definite as the classical or the romantic. All the resources of verbal orchestration were at their command, and if they oversounded very often, it was in attempted escape from the unloveliness, and insipidity of life in a horribly overpopulated country. But for the most part, in a century the ugliest in history, which laid a deposit on the human imagination generally, they refused to let it be thought that such deprivation of beauty is in the nature of things; and contrived there by to give to life as much adoration as the Dutch and Flemish masters.

(Wordt vervolgd.)