INTRODUCTION
of the public, was charged with decadence by L'Art Moderne, the organ of the lawyer, Edmond Picard. To Waller's doctrine of "Art for art's sake," Picard opposed the ideals of an art embodying a social content, and preeminently reflecting the Flemish race consciousness as in an earlier day it had been reflected in the paintings of the Flemish masters. The conflict over the form and content of Belgian literature and the attitude of the Belgian writer produced a schism in the movement, the writers of nationalistic tendencies rallying to Picard's magazine, while the Parnassians, as they came to be called, found a haven in La Jeune Belgique. In this schism Eekhoud, with Maeterlinck and Verhaeren, gave his allegiance to the revolutionary and nationalist program. And that part of the contemporary literature of Belgium which is best known to the world outside its native land has been produced neither by the few inheritors of the Parnassian tradition who, although living in Belgium, have written as Frenchmen, nor by the writers of the Walloon, nor by the writers of the Flemish school who have written in the Flemish language, but by those writers who have created a body of literature which, in the quality of its spiritual content as a record of racial experience, is purely Flemish, though written in French.
