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Show By EDMUND GOSSE THE BELGIAN POETs ONE by one, like the apparitions that rose and pointed at Macbeth, the arts and sciences, the amenities and the pieties of Belgium defile in a bloodboltered line, and accuse their murderer of foul and treacherous offences. To a single phantom I would speak to-day. While others call for vengeance on Germany for other wickedness, I would speak in anger and pity of a murdered literature. Incredible as it sounds, a literature, the articulate imagination of a people, may be destroyed. After the battle of the White Mountain, the flourishing and genial literature of Bohemia was annihilated by the Austrians, and it lay in ashes for one hundred and fifty years. Such, if Germany had her brutal will, would be the fate of poetry and prose in the Low Countries to-day, and although the inevitable hour of reckoning and restitution cannot for ever be delayed, at the present moment her enemies have succeeded in silencing the written voice of Belgium. If they have not silenced it, at least they have dispersed it on the wings of the wind. It has no longer an abiding-place within its own borders ; it sounds, so far u . H. "mum- mum as it still sounds at all, in the piteous murmurs of an exile. Modern literature in Belgium is a creation of our own times. It dates from 1880, when a generation of young men started it under the leadership of a youth who lived but nine years more to witness the progress of his work, Max Waller, whose name will always demand the honour due to precursors. Waller founded a review, La j‘ezme Belgz'que, in which his most brilliant contemporaries, tired of the nullity of the intellectual life of their forbears, developed ideas and forms of expression which translated for the first time the peculiar emotions and graces of the Flemish temperament. They chose the French language for their expression, and they all were in sympathy with the Latin genius, although they were careful never to denationa- lise themselves, and never to abandon the vehement or mystical attributes proper to the country of their birth. In less than thirty-five years, Belgium has placed herself in the forefront of the creative literary nations of Europe. This is not the place, nor mine the hand, to analyse or describe the achievements of Belgian literature. But it is manifest to every one that it is in poetry that its success has been most eminent. In the few words which I am privileged to say here, I will attempt no more than to bend in affection and homage towards our admirable and stricken brethren, the poets of Belgium. Two of them, through a merciful Providence, have been spared by an early death from drinking the bitter cup. We name in honour the harbinger of the brilliant company, the ecstatic CHARLES VAN LEERBERGHE, whose pen was dipped in moonlit dew, whose ethereal genius translated into verse all that was most delicately in harmony with the spirit of the old Flemish illuminators, whose pictures of Paradise seem painted by an inspired monk on the vellum fly-leaves of a missal. We name GEORGES RODENBACH, in whom the melancholy of Flanders, above all the grey beauty of Bruges, found so tender an interpreter. 57 |