Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/25

Rh 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