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INTRODUCTION
simple and perfectly comprehensible reason that they are works of art, wrought with infinite patience and chiselled with admirable dexterity. That is equivalent to asserting that George Eekhoud is no penny-a-liner throwing off, with feverish haste, a conglomeration of ill-digested conceptions couched in rag-and bobtail terms. On the contrary, his compositions bear traces of exquisite artistry; every line he has written gives evidence of painstaking care; his books are the outcome of sleepless nights and toil-filled days. They abound with patient wisdom and a large experience of human life, human sorrows, and human failings, all of this being permeated with a sentiment of the infinite pathos of death and a profound commiseration therewith.
We shall make no attempt in this preface to give an outline of the dolorous tale before us. Why should we do so? He who is too lazy to read the whole dramatic story for himself will also be too lazy to glance at anything we may write down. Why seek to refine fine gold? Be it enough to shadow forth the saintly character of Blandine, the familiar rascality of Landrillon, the pusillanimous nature, mens fæmina in corpore virile, of the Count of Kehlmark, prenatally damned to the possession of a fatalistic hankering after
