INTRODUCTION
them, but they sought with eyes that had been taught to see by Rembrandt, Rubens, Teniers, Jan Steen, Ruysdael and Van Ostade. The qualities of mysticism, sensuality, love of nature and of life, and emotional enthusiasm were the first to be registered in the art of the Flemish writers, and to the service of literature they brought the sensitive feeling for form and color and the robust love of the material world which had always been characteristic of the art of their great masters. Almost as compelling was the influence of the various French schools of literature; realism, especially psychological realism, and subsequently symbolism, captivated the minds of the younger Flemish writers. Consequently the method of realism, which they soon began to apply to the life of the spirit, produced a literature that is mystic and symbolic in essential direction, but which finds its symbols in the life about it, a life in which there is a fusion of the romantic, enigmatic past and the industrial present to which the character inherited from the past is seeking to adjust itself. The most important tendency in the recent literature of Belgium is, however, the transfer of the method of painting to the subject matter of literature; the vision of the Belgian writers is the vision of their painters, taking delight in color and form, wooing the four other senses through its vivid appeal to the eye, founded upon accurate observation and delicate perception.
Georges Eekhoud found in the life of the peasantry the subject-matter for his art. He is a regional writer, and the region which he describes is the country to the north of Antwerp; the polders of the Scheldt and the wastes of the Campine. The polders of the Scheldt are rich plains, thickly inhabited by a vigorous and
