INTRODUCTION
sturdy race of small farmers. The Campine is a far-reaching and sandy waste that stretches over a great part of the provinces of Antwerp and Limburg. Its little towns are scattered and have infrequent communication with the outside world; it is a wasted, dreary, forbidding country of cold, stagnant pools, dull marshes, russet heather and tenacious furze, and a sky that is by turns leaden and coppery. The peasants manage only with hardship to wreak a living from the sandy soil; they are brutally sensual, ignorant, superstitious, fatalistic and almost savage. It is with the life and the customs of this region that Eekhoud's art is chiefly concerned, and his preoccupation finds its analogue in recent English literature in the novels and tales of Thomas Hardy.
