ÉMILE VERHAEREN
BY
STEFAN ZWEIG
LONDON
CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD
1914
Émile Verhaeren from an unpublished photograph by Charles Bernier, 1914.
PREFACE
Four years have passed since the present volume appeared simultaneously in German and French. In the meantime Verhaeren's fame has been spreading; but in English-speaking countries he is still not so well known as he deserves to be.
Something of his philosophy—if it may be called philosophy rather than a poet's inspired visualising of the world—has passed into the public consciousness in a grotesquely distorted form in what is known as 'futurism.' So long as futurism is associated with those who have acquired a facile notoriety by polluting the pure idea, it would be an insult to Verhaeren to suggest that he is to be classed with the futurists commonly so-called; but the whole purpose of the present volume will prove that the gospel of a very serious and reasoned futurism is to be found in Verhaeren's writings.
Of the writer of the book it may be said that there was no one more fitted than he to write the authentic exposition of the teaching which he has hailed as a new religion. His relations to the Master are not only those of a fervent disciple, but of an apostle whose labour of love has in German-speaking lands and beyond been crowned with signal success. Himself a lyrist of distinction, Stefan Zweig has accomplished the difficult feat, which in this country still waits to be done, of translating the great mass of Verhaeren's poems into actual and enduring verse. Another book of his on Verlaine is already known in an English rendering; so that he bids fair to become known in this country as one of the most gifted of the writers of Young-Vienna.
As to the translation, I have endeavoured to be faithful to my text, which is the expression of a personality. Whatever divergences there are have been necessitated by the lapse of time. For help in reading the proofs I have to thank Mr. M.T.H. Sadler and Mr. Fritz Voigt.
J. BITHELL.
HAMMERFIELD,
Nr. HEMEL HEMPSTEAD,
14th July 1914.
CONTENTS
PART I
[THE NEW AGE]
[THE NEW BELGIUM]
[YOUTH IN FLANDERS]
['LES FLAMANDES']
[THE MONKS]
[THE BREAK-DOWN]
[FLIGHT INTO THE WORLD]
PART II
[CONTEMPORARY FEELING]
[TOWNS ('LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES')]
[THE MULTITUDE]
[THE RHYTHM OF LIFE]
[THE NEW PATHOS]
[VERHAEREN'S POETIC METHOD]
[VERHAEREN'S DRAMA]
PART III
[COSMIC POETRY]
[THE LYRIC UNIVERSE]
[SYNTHESES]
[THE ETHICS OF FERVOUR]
[LOVE]
[THE ART OF VERHAEREN'S LIFE]
[THE EUROPEAN IMPORTANCE OF HIS WORK]
[BIBLIOGRAPHY]
[INDEX]
PART I
DECIDING FORCES
LES FLAMANDES—LES MOINES—LES SOIRS—LES
DÉBÂCLES—LES FLAMBEAUX NOIRS—AU BORD DE
LA ROUTE—LES APPARUS DANS MES CHEMINS
1883-1893
Son tempérament, son caractère, sa vie, tout conspire à nous montrer son art tel que nous avons essayé de le définir. Une profonde unité les scelle. Et n'est-ce pas vers la découverte de cette unité-là, qui groupe en un faisceau solide les gestes, les pensées et les travaux d'un génie sur la terre, que la critique, revenue enfin de tant d'erreurs, devait tendre uniquement?
THE NEW AGE
Tout bouge—et l'on dirait les horizons en marche.
É.V., 'La Foule.'
The feeling of this age of ours, of this our moment in eternity, is different in its conception of life from that of our ancestors. Only eternal earth has changed not nor grown older, that field, gloomed by the Unknown, on which the monotonous light of the seasons divides, in a rhythmic round, the time of blossoms and of their withering; changeless only are the action of the elements and the restless alternation of night and day. But the aspect of earth's spirit has changed, all that is subjected to the toil of man. Has changed, to change again. The evolution of the phenomena of culture seems to proceed with ever greater rapidity: never was the span of a hundred years as rich, as replete as that which stretches to the threshold of our own days. Cities have shot up which are as huge and bewildering, as impenetrable and as endless, as nothing else has been save those virgin forests now fast receding before the onward march of the tilled land. More and more the work of man achieves the grandiose and elementary character that was once Nature's secret. The lightning is in his hands, and protection from the weather's sudden onslaughts; lands that once yawned far apart are now forged together by the iron hoop with which of old only the narrow strait was arched; oceans are united that have sought each other for thousands of years; and now in the very air man is building a new road from country to country. All has changed.
Tout a changé: les ténèbres et les flambeaux.
Les droits et les devoirs out fait d'autres faisceaux,
Du sol jusqu'au soleil, une neuve énergie
Diverge un sang torride, en la vie élargie;
Des usines de fonte ouvrent, sous le ciel bleu,
Des cratères en flamme et des fleuves en feu;
De rapides vaisseaux, sans rameurs et sans voiles,
La nuit, sur les flots bleus, étonnent les étoiles;
Tout peuple réveillé se forge une autre loi;
Autre est le crime, autre est l'orgueil, autre est l'exploit.[1]
Changed, too, is the relation of individual to individual, of the individual to the whole; at once more onerous and less burdensome is the network of social laws, at once more onerous and less burdensome our whole life.
But a still greater thing has happened. Not only the real forms, the transitory facts of life have changed, not only do we live in other cities, other houses, not only are we dressed in different clothes, but the infinite above us too, that which seemed unshakable, has changed from what it was for our fathers and forefathers. Where the actual changes, the relative changes also. The most elementary forms of our conception, space and time, have been displaced. Space has become other than it was, for we measure it with new velocities. Roads that took our forefathers days to traverse can now be covered in one short hour; one flying night transports us to warm and luxuriant lands that were once separated from us by the hardships of a long journey. The perilous forests of the tropics with their strange constellations, to see which cost those of old a year of their lives, are of a sudden near to us and easy of access. We measure differently with these different velocities of life. Time is more and more the victor of space. The eye, too, has learned other distances, and in cold constellations is startled to perceive the forms of primeval landscapes petrified; and the human voice seems to have grown a thousand times stronger since it has learned to carry on a friendly conversation a hundred miles away. In this new relationship of forces we have a different perception of the spanning round of the earth, and the rhythm of life, beating more brightly and swiftly, is likewise becoming new for us. The distance from springtime to springtime is greater now and yet less, greater and yet less is the individual hour, greater and less our whole life.
And therefore is it with new feelings that we must comprehend this new age. For we all feel that we must not measure the new with the old measures our forefathers used, that we must not live through the new with feelings outworn, that we must discover a new sense of distance, a new sense of time, a new sense of space, that we must find a new music for this nervous, feverish rhythm around us. This new-born human conditionality calls for a new morality; this new union of equals a new beauty; this new topsy-turvydom a new system of ethics. And this new confrontation with another and still newer world, with another Unknown, demands a new religion, a new God. A new sense of the universe is, with a muffled rumour, welling up in the hearts of all of us.
New things, however, must be coined into new words. A new age calls for new poets, poets whose conceptions have been nurtured by their environment, poets who, in the expression they give to this new environment, themselves vibrate with the feverish rotation of life. But so many of our poets are pusillanimous. They feel that their voices are out of harmony with reality; they feel that they are not incorporated with the new organism and a necessary part of it; they have a dull foreboding that they do not speak the language of our contemporary life. In our great cities they are like strangers stranded. The great roaring streams of our new sensations are to them terrific and inconceivable. They are ready to accept all the comfort and luxury of modern life; they are quick to take advantage of the facilities afforded by technical science and organisation; but for their poetry they reject these phenomena, because they cannot master them. They recoil from the task of transmuting poetical values, of sensing whatever is poetically new in these new things. And so they stand aside. They flee from the real, the contemporary, to the immutable; they take refuge in whatsoever the eternal evolution has left untouched; they sing the stars, the springtime, the babbling of springs which is now as it ever was, the myth of love; they hide behind the old symbols; they nestle to the old gods. Not from the moment, from the molten flowing ore, do they seize and mould the eternal—no, as ever of old they dig the symbols of the eternal out of the cold clay of the past, like old Greek statues. They are not on that account insignificant; but at best they produce something important, never anything necessary.
For only that poet can be necessary to our time who himself feels that everything in this time is necessary, and therefore beautiful. He must be one whose whole endeavour as poet and man it is to make his own sensations vibrate in unison with contemporary sensations; who makes the rhythm of his poem nothing else than the echoed rhythm of living things; who adjusts the beat of his verse to the beat of our own days, and takes into his quivering veins the streaming blood of our time. He must not on this account, when seeking to create new ideals, be a stranger to the ideals of old; for all true progress is based on the deepest understanding of the past. Progress must be for him as Guyau interprets it: 'Le pouvoir, lorsqu'on est arrivé à un état supérieur, d'éprouver des émotions et des sensations nouvelles, sans cesser d'être encore accessible à ce que contenaient de grand ou de beau ses précédantes émotions.'[2] A poet of our time can only be great when he conceives this time as great. The preoccupations of his time must be his also; its social problem must be his personal concern. In such a poet succeeding generations would see how man has fought a way to them from the past, how in every moment as it passed he has wrestled to identify the feeling of his own mind with that of the cosmos. And even though the great works of such a poet should be soon disintegrated and his poems obsolete, though his images should have paled, there would yet remain imperishably vivid that which is of greater moment, the invisible motives of his inspiration, the melody, the breath, the rhythm of his time. Such poets, besides pointing the way to the coming generation, are in a deeper sense the incarnation of their own period. Hence the time has come to speak of Émile Verhaeren, the greatest of modern poets, and perhaps the only one who has been conscious of what is poetical in contemporary feeling, the only one who has shaped that feeling in verse, the first poet who, with skill incomparably inspired, has chiselled our epoch into a mighty monument of rhyme.
In Verhaeren's work our age is mirrored. The new landscapes are in it; the sinister silhouettes of the great cities; the seething masses of a militant democracy; the subterranean shafts of mines; the last heavy shadows of silent, dying cloisters. All the intellectual forces of our time, our time's ideology, have here become a poem; the new social ideas, the struggle of industrialism with agrarianism, the vampire force which lures the rural population from the health-giving fields to the burning quarries of the great city, the tragic fate of emigrants, financial crises, the dazzling conquests of science, the syntheses of philosophy, the triumphs of engineering, the new colours of the impressionists. All the manifestations of the new age are here reflected in a poet's soul in their action—first confused, then understood, then joyfully acclaimed—on the sensations of a New European. How this work came into being, out of what resistance and crises a poet has here conquered the consciousness of the necessity and then of the beauty of the new cosmic phase, it shall be our task to show. If the time has indeed come to class Verhaeren, it is not so much with the poets that his place will be found. He does not so much stand with or above the verse-smiths or actual artists in verse, with the musicians, or painters, as rather with the great organisers, those who have forced the new social currents to flow between dikes; with the legislators who prevent the clashing of flamboyant energies; with the philosophers, who aim at co-ordinating and unifying all these vastly complicated tendencies in one brilliant synthesis. His poetry is a created poet's world; it is a resolute shaping of phases, a considered new æstheticism, and a conscious new inspiration. He is not only the poet, he is at the same time the preacher of our time. He was the first to conceive of it as beautiful, but not like those who, in their zeal for embellishment, tone down the dark colours and bring out the bright ones; he has conceived of it—we shall have to show with what a painful and intensive effort—after his first most obstinate rejection of it, as a necessity, and he has then transformed this conception of its necessity, of its purpose, into beauty. Ceasing to look backwards, he has looked forwards. He feels, quite in the spirit of evolution, in the spirit of Nietzsche, that our generation is raised high above all the past, that it is the summit of all that is past, and the turning-point towards the future. This will perhaps seem too much to many people, who are inclined to call our generation wretched and paltry, as though they had some inner knowledge of the magnificence or the paltriness of generations gone. For every generation only becomes great by the men who do not despair of it, only becomes great by its poets who conceive of it as great, by its charioteers of state who have confidence in its power of greatness. Of Shakespeare and Hugo Verhaeren says: 'Ils grandissaient leur siècle.'[3] They did not depict it with the perspective of others, but out of the heart of their own greatness. Of such geniuses as Rembrandt he says: 'Si plus tard, dans l'éloignement des siècles, ils semblent traduire mieux que personne leur temps, c'est qu'ils l'ont recréé d'après leur cerveau, et qu'ils l'ont imposé non pas tel qu'il était, mais tel qu'ils l'ont déformé.'[4] But by magnifying their century, by raising even ephemeral events of their own days into a vast perspective, they themselves became great. While those who of set purpose diminish, and while those by nature indifferent, are themselves diminished and disregarded as the centuries recede, poets such as these we honour tell, like illumined belfry clocks, the hour of the time to generations yet to come. If the others bequeath some slight possession, a poem or so, aphorisms, a book maybe, these survive more mightily: they survive in some great conception, some great idea of an age, in that music of life to which the faint-hearted and the ungifted of following epochs will listen as it sounds from the past, because they in their turn are unable to understand the rhythm of their own time. By this manner of inspired vision Verhaeren has come to be the great poet of our time, by approving of it as well as by depicting it, by the fact that he did not see the new things as they actually are, but celebrated them as a new beauty. He has approved of all that is in our epoch; of everything, to the very resistance to it which he has conceived of as only a welcome augmentation of the fighting force of our vitality. The whole atmosphere of our time seems compressed in the organ music of his work; and whether he touches the bright keys or the dark, whether he rolls out a lofty diapason or strikes a gentle concord, it is always the onward-rushing force of our time that vibrates in his poems. While other poets have grown ever more lifeless and languid, ever more secluded and disheartened, Verhaeren's voice has grown ever more resonant and vigorous, like an organ indeed, full of reverence and the mystical power of sublime prayer. A spirit positively religious, not of despondency, however, but of confidence and joy, breathes from this music of his, freshening and quickening the blood, till the world takes on brighter and more animated and more generous colours, and our vitality, fired by the fever of his verse, flashes with a richer and younger and more virile flame.
But the fact that life, to-day of all days, needs nothing so urgently as the freshening and quickening of our vitality, is good reason why—quite apart from all literary admiration—we must read his books, is good reason why this poet must be discussed with all that glad enthusiasm which we have first learned for our lives from his work.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'Aujourd'hui'(Les Héros).
[2] Guyau, L'Esthétique Contemporaine.
[3] 'L'Art' (Les Forces Tumultueuses).
[4] Rembrandt.
THE NEW BELGIUM
Entre la France ardente et la grave Allemagne.
É.V., 'Charles le Téméraire.'
In Belgium the roads of Europe meet. A few hours transport one from Brussels, the heart of its iron arteries, to Germany, France, Holland, and England; and from Belgian ports all countries and all races are accessible across the pathless sea. The area of the land being small, it provides a miniature but infinitely varied synthesis of the life of Europe. All contrasts stand face to face concisely and sharply outlined. The train roars through the land: now past coal-mines, past furnaces and retorts that write the fiery script of toil on an ashen sky; now through golden fields or green pastures where sleek, brindled cows are grazing; now through great cities that point to heaven with their multitudinous chimneys; and lastly to the sea, the Rialto of the north, where mountains of cargoes are shipped and unshipped, and trade traffics with a thousand hands. Belgium is an agricultural land and an industrial land; it is at the same time conservative and socialistic, Roman Catholic and free-thinking; at once wealthy and wretched. There are colossal fortunes heaped up in the monster cities; and two hours thence the bitterest poverty sweats for the dole of a living in mines and barns. And again in the cities still greater forces wrestle with one another: life and death, the past and the future. Towns monkishly secluded, girt with ponderous mediæval walls, towns on whose swart and sedgy canals lonely swans glide like milky gondolas, towns like a dream, strengthless, prisoned in sleep eternal. At no great distance glitter the modern residential cities; Brussels with its glaring boulevards, where electric inscriptions dart coruscating up and down the fronts of buildings, where motor-cars whiz along, where the streets rumble, and modern life twitches with feverish nerves. Contrast on contrast. From the right the Teutonic tide dashes in, the Protestant faith; from the left, sumptuous and rigidly orthodox, Roman Catholicism. And the race itself is the restlessly struggling product of two races, the Flemish and the Walloon. Naked, clear, and direct are the contrasts which here defy each other; and the whole battle can be surveyed at a glance.
But so strong, so persistent is the inexorable pressure of the two neighbouring races, that this blend has already become a new ferment, a new race. Elements once contrary are now unrecognisably mixed in a new and growing product. Teutons speak French, people of Romance stock are Flemish in feeling. Pol de Mont, in spite of his Gallic name, is a Flemish poet; Verhaeren, Maeterlinck, and van Lerberghe, though no Frenchman can pronounce their names rightly, are French poets. And this new Belgian race is a strong race, one of the most capable in Europe. Contact with so many foreign cultures, the vicinity of such contradictory nations, has fertilised them; healthy rural labour has steeled their limbs; the near sea has opened their eyes to the great distances. Their consciousness of themselves is of no long date: it can only be reckoned from the time when their country became independent, hardly a hundred years ago. A nation younger than America, they are in their adolescence now, and rejoicing in their new, unsought strength. And just as in America, the blend of races here, together with the fruitful, healthy fields, has procreated robust men. For the Belgian race is a race pulsing with vitality. Nowhere in Europe is life so intensely, so merrily enjoyed as in Flanders, nowhere else is sensuality and pleasure in excess so much the measure of strength. They must be seen particularly in their sensual life; it must be seen how the Flemish enjoy; with what greediness, with what a conscious pleasure and robust endurance. It is among them that Jordaens found the models for his gluttonous orgies; and they could be found still at every kermesse, at every wake. Statistics prove that in the consumption of alcohol Belgium stands to-day at the head of Europe. Every second house is an inn, an estaminet; every town, every village has its brewery; and the brewers are the wealthiest men in the country. Nowhere else are festivals so loud, boisterous, and unbridled; nowhere else is life loved and lived with such a superabundant zest and glow. Belgium is the land of excessive vitality, and ever was so. They have fought for this plenitude of life, for this enjoyment full to satiety. Their most heroic exploit, their great war with the Spaniards, was only a struggle not so much for religion as for sensual freedom. These desperate revolts, this immense effort was in reality not directed against Roman Catholicism, but against the morality, the asceticism it enforced; not so much against Spain as against the sinister malignity of the Inquisition; against the taciturn, bitter, and insidious Puritanism which sought to curtail enjoyment; against the morose reserve of Philip II. All that they wanted at that time was to preserve their bright and laughing life, their free, dionysiac enjoyment, the imperious avidity of their senses; they were determined not to be limited by any measure short of excess. And with them life conquered. Health, strength, and fecundity is to this very day the mark of the Belgian people in town and country. Poverty itself is not hollow-cheeked and stunted here. Chubby, red-cheeked children play in the streets; the peasants working in the fields are straight and sturdy; even the artisans are as muscular and strong as they are in Constantin Meunier's bronzes; the women are moulded to bear children easily; the unbroken vigour of the old men persists in a secure defiance of age. Constantin Meunier was fifty when he began his life-work here; at sixty Verhaeren is at the zenith of his creative power. Insatiable seems the strength of this race, whose deepest feeling has been chiselled by Verhaeren in proud stanzas:
Je suis le fils de cette race,
Dont les cerveaux plus que les dents
Sont solides et sont ardents
Et sont voraces.
Je suis le fils de cette race
Tenace,
Qui veut, après avoir voulu
Encore, encore et encore plus![1]
This tremendous exertion has not been in vain. To-day Belgium is relatively the richest country in Europe. Its colony of the Congo is ten times as extensive as the mother-land. The Belgians hardly know where to place their capital: Belgian money is invested in Russia, in China, in Japan; they are concerned in all enterprises; their financiers control trusts in all countries. The middle classes, too, are healthy, strong, and contented.
Such rich and healthy blood is more likely than any other to produce good art, and, above all, art full of the zest of life. For it is in countries with few possibilities of expansion that the desire for artistic activity is keenest. The imagination of great nations is for the most part absorbed by the practical demands of their development. The best strength of a great nation is claimed by politics, by administration, by the army and navy; but where political life is of necessity poor, where the problems of administration are forcibly restricted, men of genius almost exclusively seek their conquests in the domains of art. Scandinavia is one example, Belgium another, of countries in which the aristocracy of intellect have with the happiest results been forced back on art and science. In such young races the vital instinct must a priori make all artistic activity strong and healthy; and even when they produce a decadence, this reaction, this contradiction, is so decided and consequent, that strength lies in its very weakness. For only a strong light can cast strong shadows; only a strong, sensual race can bring forth the really great and earnest mystics; because a decided reaction which is conscious of its aim requires as much energy as positive creation.
The towering structure of Belgian art rests on a broad foundation. The preparation, the growing under the sod, took fifty years; and then in another fifty years it was reared aloft by the youth of one single generation. For every healthy evolution is slow, most of all in the Teutonic races, which are not so quick, supple, and dexterous as the Latin races, who learn by life itself rather than by studious application. This literature has grown ring by ring like a tree, with its roots deep in a healthy soil nourished by the unyielding perseverance of centuries. Like every confession of faith, this literature has its saints, its martyrs, and its disciples. The first of the creators, the forerunner, was Charles de Coster; and his great epic Thyl Ulenspiegel is the gospel of this new literature. His fate is sad, like that of all pioneers. In him the native blend of races is more plastically visualised than in all later writers. Of Teutonic extraction, he was born in Munich, wrote in French, and was the first man to feel as a Belgian. He earned his living painfully as a teacher at the Military School. And when his great romance appeared, it was difficult to find a publisher, and still more difficult to find appreciation, or even notice. And yet this work, with its wonderful confrontation of Ulenspiegel as the deliverer of Flanders with Philip II. as Antichrist, is to this day the most beautiful symbol of the struggle of light with darkness, of vitality with renunciation; an enduring monument in the world's literature, because it is the epic of a whole nation. With such a work of wide import did Belgian literature begin, a work that with its heroic battles stands like the Iliad as the proud and primitive beginning of a more delicate, but in its advanced culture more complex, literature. The place of this writer, who died prematurely, was taken by Camille Lemonnier, who accepted the hard task and the melancholy inheritance of pioneers—ingratitude and disillusion. Of this proud and noble character also one must speak as of a hero. For more than forty years he fought indefatigably for Belgium, a soldier leading the onset from first to last, launching book after book, creating, writing, calling to the fray and marshalling the new forces; and never resting till the adjective 'Belgian' ceased in Paris and Europe to be spoken with the contempt that attaches to 'provincial'; till, like once the name of the Gueux, what was originally a disgrace became a title of honour. Fearlessly, not to be discouraged by any failure, this superb writer sung his native land—fields, mines, towns, and men; the angry, fiery blood of youths and maidens; and over all the ardent yearning for a brighter, freer, greater religion, for rapt communion with the sublimity of Nature. With the ecstatic revelling in colour of his illustrious ancestor Rubens, who gathered all the things of life together in a glad festival of the senses, he, like a second voluptuary at the feast, has lavished colours, had his joy of all that is glowing, and glaring, and satiated, and, like every genuine artist, conceived of art as an intensifying of life, as life in intoxication. For more than forty years he created in this sense, and miraculously, just like the men of his country, like the peasants he painted, he waxed in vigour from year to year, from harvest to harvest, his books growing ever more fiery, ever more drunken with the zest and glow of life, his faith in life ever brighter and more confident. He was the first to feel the strength of his young country with conscious pride, and his voice rang out its loud appeal for new fighters till he no longer stood alone, till a company of other artists were ranged around him. Each of these he supported and firmly established, with a strong grip placing them at their vantage for the battle; and without envy, nay with joy, he saw his own work triumphantly overshadowed by the acclaimed creations of his juniors. With joy, because he probably considered not his own novels, but this creation of a literature his greatest and most lasting work. For it seemed as though in these years the whole land had become alive; as though every town, every profession, every class had sent forth a poet or a painter to immortalise them; as though this whole Belgium were eager to be symbolised in individual phases in works of art, until he should come who was destined to transform all towns and classes in a poem, enshrining in it the harmonised soul of the land. Are not the ancient Teutonic cities of Bruges, Courtrai, and Ypres spiritualised in the stanzas of Rodenbach, in the pastels of Fernand Khnopff, in the mystic statues of Georges Minne? Have not the sowers of corn and the workers in mines become stone in the busts of Constantin Meunier? Does not a great drunkenness glow in Georges Eekhoud's descriptions? The mystic art of Maeterlinck and Huysmans drinks its deepest strength from old cloisters and béguinages; the sun of the fields of Flanders glows in the pictures of Théo van Rysselberghe and Claus. The delicate walking of maidens and the singing of belfries have been made music in the stanzas of the gentle Charles van Lerberghe; the vehement sensuality of a savage race has been spiritualised in the refined eroticism of Félicien Rops. The Walloons have their representative in Albert Mockel; and how many others might still be named of the great creators: the sculptor van der Stappen; the painters Heymans, Stevens; the writers des Ombiaux, Demolder, Glesener, Crommelynck; who have all in their confident and irresistible advance conquered the esteem of France and the admiration of Europe. For they, and just they, were gifted with a sense of the great complex European feeling which in their work is glimpsed in its birth and growth; for they did not in their idea of a native land stop at the boundaries of Belgium, but included all the neighbouring countries, because they were at the same time patriots and cosmopolitans: Belgium was to them not only the place where all roads meet, but also that whence all roads start.
Each of these had shaped his native land from his own angle of vision; a whole phalanx of artists had added picture to picture. Till then this great one came, Verhaeren, who saw, felt, and loved everything in Flanders, 'toute la Flandre.' Only in his work did it become a unity; for he has sung everything, land and sea, towns and workshops, cities dead and cities at their birth. He has not conceived of this Flanders of his as a separate phase, as a province, but as the heart of Europe, with the strength of its blood pulsing inwards from outside and outside from inwards; he has opened out horizons beyond the frontiers, and heightened and connected them; and with the same inspiration he has molten and welded the individual together with the whole until out of his work a life-work grew—the lyric epic of Flanders. What de Coster half a century before had not dared to fashion from the present, in which he despaired of finding pride, power, and the heroism of life, Verhaeren has realised; and thus he has become the 'carillonneur de la Flandre,' the bell-ringer who, as in olden days from the watch-tower, has summoned the whole land to the defence of its will to live, and the nation to the pride and consciousness of its power.
This Verhaeren could only do, because he in himself represents all the contrasts, all the advantages of the Belgian race. He too is a ferment of contrasts, a new man made of split and divergent forces now victoriously harmonised. From the French he has his language and his form; from the Germans his instinctive seeking of God, his earnestness, his gravity, his need of metaphysics, and his impulse to pantheism. Political instincts, religious instincts, Catholicism and socialism, have struggled in him; he is at once a dweller in great cities and a cottager in the open country; and the deepest impulse of his people, their lack of moderation and their greed of life, is in the last instance the maxim of his poetic art. Only that their pleasure in intoxication has in him become joy in a noble drunkenness, in ecstasy; only that their carnal joy has become a delight in colour; that their mad raging is now in him a pleasure in a rhythm that roars and thunders and bursts in foam. The deepest thing in his race, an inflexible vitality which is not to be shaken by crises or catastrophes, has in him become universal law, a conscious, intensified zest in life. For when a country has become strong and rejoices in its strength, it needs, like every plethora, a cry, an exultation. Just as Walt Whitman was the exultation of America in its new strength, Verhaeren is the triumph of the Belgian race, and of the European race too. For this glad confession of life is so strong, so glowing, so virile that it cannot be thought of as breaking forth from the heart of one individual, but is evidently the delight of a fresh young nation in its beautiful and yet unfathomed power.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'Ma Race' (Les Forces Tumultueuses).
YOUTH IN FLANDERS
Seize, dix-sept et dix-huit ans!
O ce désir d'être avant l'âge et le vrai temps
Celui
Dont chacun dit
Il boit à larges brocs et met à mal les filles!
É.V., Les Tendresses Premières.
The history of modern Belgian literature begins, by a whim of chance, in one and the same house. In Ghent, the favourite city of the Emperor Charles V., in the old, heavy Flemish town that is still girdled with ramparts, lies, remote from the noisy streets, the grey Jesuit college of Sainte-Barbe. A cloister with thick, cold, frowning walls, mute corridors, silent refectories, reminding one somewhat of the beautiful colleges in Oxford, save that here there is no ivy softening the walls, and no flowers to lay their variegated carpet over the green courts. Here, in the seventies, two strange pairs of boys meet on the school-benches; here among thousands of names are four which are destined in later days to be the pride of their country. First, Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren, then Maeterlinck and Charles van Lerberghe—two pairs of friendships, both of which are now torn asunder by death. The weaker, the more delicate of the four, Georges Rodenbach and Charles van Lerberghe, have died; Emile Verhaeren and Maeterlinck, the two heroes of Flanders, are still growing and not yet at the zenith of their fame. But all four began their course in the old college. The Jesuit fathers taught them their humanities, and even to write poems—in Latin, it is true, to begin with; and in this exercise, strange to say, Maeterlinck was excelled by van Lerberghe with his more instinctive sense of form, and Verhaeren by the more supple Georges Rodenbach. With rigorous earnestness the fathers trained them to respect the past, to have faith in conventional things, to think in old grooves, and to hate innovations. The aim was not only to keep them Catholics, but to win them for the priesthood: these cloister walls were to protect them from the hostile breath of the new world, from the freshening wind which, in Flanders as everywhere else, was assailing the growing generation.
But in these four pupils the aim was not realised, least of all in Verhaeren, perhaps for the very reason that he, as the scion of a strictly orthodox family, was the most fitted to be a priest; because his mind did not absorb conviction mechanically, but achieved it by vital processes; because his inmost being was self-surrender and a glowing devotion to great ideas. However, the call of the open country, in which he had grown up, was too strong in him; the voice of life was too loud in his blood for so early a renunciation of all; his mind was too tameless to be satisfied with the established and the traditional. The impressions of his childhood were more vivid than the teaching of his masters. For Verhaeren was born in the country, at St. Amand on the Scheldt (on the 21st of May 1855), where the landscape rolls to the vast horizons of the heath and the sea. Here in the happiest manner kindly circumstances wove the garland of his earlier years. His parents were well-to-do people who had retired from the din of the town to this little corner of Flanders; here they had a cottage of their own, with a front garden ablaze with flowers of all colours. And immediately behind the house began the great golden fields, the tangle of flowering hedgerows; and close by was the river with its slow waves hasting no longer, feeling the nearness of their goal, the infinite ocean. Of the untrammelled days of his boyhood the ageing poet has told us in his wonderful book Les Tendresses Premières. He has told us of the boy he was when he ran across country; clambered into the corn-loft where the glittering grain was heaped; climbed steeples; watched the peasants at their sowing and reaping; and listened to the maids at the washing-tub singing old Flemish songs. He watched all trades; he rummaged in every corner. He would sit with the watch-maker, marvelling at the humming little wheels that fashioned the hour; and no less to see the glowing maw of the oven in the bakery swallowing the corn which only the day before had glided through his fingers in rustling ears, and was now already bread, golden, warm, and odorous. At games he would watch in astonishment the glad strength of the young fellows tumbling the reeling skittles over; and he would wander with the playing band from village to village, from fair to fair. And, sitting on the bank of the Scheldt, he would watch the ships, with their coloured streamers, come and go, and in his dreams follow them to the vast distances, which he only knew from sailors' yarns and pictures in old books. All this, this daily physical familiarity with the things of Nature, this lived insight into the thousand activities of the working-day, became his inalienable possession. Inalienable, too, was the humane feeling he acquired that he was one at heart with the people of his village. From them he learned the names of all these thousand things, and the intelligence of the mysterious mechanism in all skilled handiwork, and all the petty cares and perplexities of these many scattered little souls of life which, combined, are the soul of a whole land. And therefore Verhaeren is the only one among modern poets in the French tongue who is really popular with his countrymen of all ranks. He still goes in and out among them as their equal, sits in their circle even now, when fame has long since shown him his place among the best and noblest, chats with the peasants in the village inn, and loves to hear them discussing the weather and the harvest and the thousand little things of their narrow world. He belongs to them, and they belong to him. He loves their life, their cares, their labour, loves this whole land with its tempests raging from the north, with its hail and snow, its thundering sea and lowering clouds. It is with pride that he claims kindred with his race and land; and indeed there is often in his gait and in his gestures something of the peasant trampling with heavy steps and hard knee after his plough; and his eyes 'are grey as his native sea, his hair is yellow like the corn of his fields.' These elemental forces are in his whole being and production. You feel that he has never lost touch with Nature, that he is still organically connected with the fields, the sea, the open air; he to whom spring is physically painful, who is depressed by relaxing air, who loves the weather of his home-land, its vehemence, and its savage, tameless strength.
For this very reason he has in later years felt, what was natively uncongenial to him—the great cities—differently and far more intensely than poets brought up in them. What to the latter appeared self-evident was to him astonishment, abomination, terror, admiration, and love. For him the atmosphere we breathe in cities was heavy, stifling, poisoned; the streets between the massed houses were too narrow, too congested; hourly, at first in pain and then with admiration, he has felt the beautiful fearfulness of the vast dimensions, the strangeness of the new forms of life. Just as we walk through mountain ravines dumbfounded and terrified by their sublimity, he has walked through streets of cities, first slowly accustoming himself to them; thus he has explored them, described them, celebrated them, and in the deepest sense lived them. Their fever has streamed into his blood; their revolts have reared in him like wild horses; their haste and unrest has whipped his nerves for half the span of a man's life. But then he has returned home again. In his fifties he has taken refuge once more in his fields, under the lonely sky of Flanders. He lives in a lonely cottage somewhere in Belgium, where the railway does not reach, enjoying himself among cheerful and simple people who fill their days with plain labour, like the friends and companions of his boyhood. With a joy intensified he goes eagerly year by year to the sea, as though his lungs and his heart needed it to breathe strongly again, to feel life with more jubilant enthusiasm. In the man of sixty there is a wonderful return of his healthy, happy childhood; and to the Flanders that inspired his first verses his last have been dedicated.
Against this atavism, against this bright and inalienable joy in life, the patres of Sainte-Barbe could do nothing. They could only deflect his great hunger of life from material things, and turn it in the direction of science, of art. The priest they sought to make of him he has really become, only he has preached everything that they proscribed, and fought against everything that they praised. At the time Verhaeren leaves school, he is already filled with that noble yet feverish greed of life, that tameless yearning for intensive enjoyments heightened to the degree of pain which is so characteristic of him. The priesthood was repugnant to him. Nor was he more allured by the prospect, held out to him, of directing his uncle's workshop. It is not yet definitely the poetic vocation which appeals to him, but he does desire a free active calling with unlimited possibilities. To gain time for his final decision, he studies jurisprudence, and becomes a barrister. In these student years in Louvain Verhaeren gave free rein to his untameable zest in life; as a true Fleming he eschewed moderation and launched into intemperance. To this very day he is fond of telling of his liking for. good Belgian beer, and of how the students got drunk, danced at all the kermesses, caroused and feasted, when the fury came over them, and got into all kinds, of mischief, which often enough brought them into conflict with the police. Uncertainty was never a feature of his character, and so his Roman Catholicism was in those years no silent and impersonal faith, but a militant orthodoxy. A handful of hotspurs—the publisher Deman was one of them, and another was the tenor van Dyck—set a newspaper going, in which they lashed away mercilessly at the corruption of the modern world, and did not forget to blow their own trumpets. The university was not slow to veto these immature manifestations; but ere long they started a second periodical, which was, however, more in harmony with the great contemporary movements. Betweenwhiles verses were written. And still more passionate is the young poet's activity when, in the year 1881, he is called to the bar in Brussels. Here he makes friends with men of great vitality: he is welcomed by a circle of painters and artists, and a cénacle of young talents is formed who have the authentic enthusiasm for art, and who feel that they are violently opposed to the conservative bourgeoisie of Brussels. Verhaeren, who at this time greedily adopts all fashionable freakishness as something new, and struts about in fantastic apparel, promptly acquires notoriety by his vehement passionateness and his first literary attempts. He had begun to write verse in his school-days. Lamartine had been his model, then Victor Hugo, who bewitches young people, that lord of magnificent gestures, that undisputed master of words. These juvenilia of Verhaeren have never been published, and probably they have little interest, for in them his tameless vitality attempted expression in immaculate Alexandrines. More and more, as his artistic insight grew, he felt that his vocation was to be a poet; the meagre success he achieved as a barrister confirmed him in this conviction, and so in the end, following the advice of Edmond Picard, he discarded the barrister's gown, which now seemed to him as narrow and stifling as he had once thought the priest's cassock to be.
And then came the hour, the first decisive hour. Lemonnier was as fond of relating it as is Verhaeren; both would speak of it with their fervent, proud joy in a friendship of over thirty years; both with heartfelt admiration, the one for the other. Once, it was a rainy day, Verhaeren burst in on Lemonnier, whom he did not know, trampling into the elder man's lodging with his heavy peasant's tread, hailing him with his hearty gesture, and blurting out: 'Je veux vous lire des vers!' It was the manuscript of his first book Les Flamandes; and now he recited, while the rain poured down outside, with his hard voice and sharp scansion, his great enthusiasm and his compelling gestures, those pictures, palpitating with life, of Flanders, that first free confession of patriotism and foaming vitality. And Lemonnier encouraged him, congratulated him, helped him, and suggested alterations, and soon the book appeared, to the terror of Verhaeren's strictly orthodox family, to the horror of the critics, who were helpless in the face of such an explosion of strength. Execrated and lauded, it immediately compelled interest. In Belgium, it is true, it was less acclaimed than declaimed against; but nevertheless it everywhere excited a commotion, and that grumbling unrest which always heralds the advent of a new force.
'LES FLAMANDES'
Je suis le fils de cette race
Tenace,
Qui veut, après avoir voulu
Encore, encore et encore plus.
É.V., Ma Race.
The life-work of great artists contains not only a single, but a threefold work of art. The actual creation is only the first, and not always the most important; the second must be the life of the artists themselves; the third must be the harmoniously finished, organically connected relationship between the act of creating and the thing created, between poetry and life. To survey how inner growth is connected with external formation, how crises of physical reality are connected with artistic decadence, how development and completion interpenetrate as much in personal experience as in the artistic creation, must be an equal artistic rapture, must disengage as pure a line of beauty as the individual work. In Verhaeren these conditions of the threefold work of art are accomplished in full. Harsh and abrupt as the contrasts in his books seem to be, the totality of his development is yet rounded off to a clear line, to the figure of a circle. In the beginning the end was contained, and in the end the beginning: the bold curve returns to itself. Like one who travels round the world and circles the vast circumference of the globe, he comes back in the end to his starting-point. Beginning and end touch in the motive of his work. To the country to which his youth belonged his old age returns: Flanders inspired his first book, and to Flanders his last books are dedicated.
True it is, between these two books Les Flamandes and Les Blés Mouvants, between the work of the man of five-and-twenty and that of the man of sixty, lies the world of an evolution with, all its points of view and achievements. Only now, when the line that was at first so capricious has returned to itself, can its form be surveyed and its harmony perceived. A purely external observation has become penetration: the eye no longer exclusively regards the external phenomena of things, but all has been seized in his soul from within and imaged in accordance with its reality. Now nothing is seen isolated, from the point of view of curiosity or passing interest, but everything is looked upon as something that is, that has grown, and that is still growing. The motive is the same in the first and in the last books; only, in the first book we have isolated contemplation, while in the great creations of the last period the vast horizons of the modern world are set behind the scenes, with the shadows of the past on the one side, and, as well, with fiery presentiments of the future shedding a new light over the landscape. The painter, who only portrayed the outer surface, the patina, has developed into the poet, he who in a musical vibration vivifies the psychic and the inconceivable. These two works stand in the same relation to each other as Wagner's first operas, Rienzi and Tannhäuser, do to his later creations, to the Ring and Parsifal: what was at first only intuitive becomes consciously creative. And as in Wagner's case, so too with Verhaeren there are to this very day people who prefer the works that are still prisoned in the traditional form to those which were created later, and who are thus, in reality, greater strangers to the poet than those who, from principle, assume a hostile attitude to his artistic work.
Les Flamandes, Verhaeren's first work, appeared in a period of literary commotion. Zola's realistic novels had just become the object of discussion; and they had stirred up, not France only, but the adjacent countries as well. In Belgium Camille Lemonnier was the interpreter of this new naturalism, which regarded absolute truth as more important than beauty, and which saw the sole aim of imaginative literature in photography, in the exact, scientifically accurate reproduction of reality. To-day, now that excessive naturalism has been overcome, we know that this theory only brings us half-way along the road; that beauty may live by the side of truth; that on the other hand truth is not identical with art, but that it was only necessary to establish a transmutation of the value of beauty; that it was in the actual, in realities, that beauty was to be sought. Every new theory, if it is to succeed, needs a strong dose of exaggeration. And the idea of realising reality in poetry seduced young Verhaeren into carefully avoiding, in the description of his native province, all that is sentimental and romantic, and deluded him with the hope of expressing in his verse only what is coarse, primitive, and savage. Something external and something internal, nature and intention, combined to cause this effect. For the hatred of all that is soft and weak, rounded off and in repose, is in Verhaeren's blood. His temperament was from the first fiery, and loved to respond to strong provocation with a violent blow. There was ever in him a love of the brutal, the hard, the rough, the angular; he had always a liking for what is glaring and intensive, loud and noisy. It is only in his latest books that, thanks to his cooler blood, he has attained classical perfection and purity. In those days, moreover, his hatred of sentimental idealisation, the hatred that in Germany fulminated against Defregger's drawing-room Tyrolese, Auerbach's scented peasants, and the spruce mythology of poetical pictures, led him deliberately to emphasise what is brutal, unæsthetic, and, as it was then felt, unpoetical; led him, as it were, to trample with heavy shoes in the tedious footsteps of French poets. Barbarian: this was the word they tried to kill him with, not so much on account of the harshness and coarseness of his diction, which often reminds one of the guttural sounds of German, as because of the savage selection of his instinct, which always preferred what is ringingly resonant and ferociously alive, which never fed on nectar and ambrosia, but tore red and steaming shreds of flesh from the body of life. And genuinely barbarous, savage with Teutonic strength, is this his inroad into French literature, reminding one of those migrations of the Teutons into the Latin lands, where they rushed ponderously to battle with wild and raucous cries, to learn, after a time, a higher culture and the finer instincts of life from those they had conquered. Verhaeren in this book does not describe what is amiable and dreamy in Flanders, not idylls, but 'les fureurs d'estomac, de ventre et de débauche,'[1] ail the explosions of the lust of life, the orgies of peasants, and even of the animal world. Before him, his old schoolfellow Rodenbach had described Flanders to the French in poems that sounded gently with a silvery note, like the peal of belfries hovering over roofs; he had reminded them of that unforgettable melancholy of the evening over the canals of Bruges, of the magic of the moonlight over fields framed with dikes and hedges of willows. But Verhaeren closes his ears to hints of death; he describes life at its maddest, 'le décor monstrueux des grasses kermesses,'[2] popular festivals, in which intoxication and sensual pleasure sting the unbridled strength of the crowd, in which the demands of the body and the greed of money come into conflict, and the bestial nature of man overthrows the painfully learned lessons of morality. And even in these descriptions, which often teem with the exuberance of Rabelais, one feels that even this explosive life is not mad enough for him, that he yearns to intensify life out and beyond reality: 'jadis les gars avaient les reins plus fermes et les garces plus beau téton.'[3] These young fellows are too weak for him, the wenches too gentle; he cries for the Flanders of olden time, as it lives in the glowing pictures of Rubens and Jordaens and Breughel. These are his true masters, they, the revellers, who created their masterpieces between two orgies, whose laughter and feasting ring into the motives of their pictures. Some of the poems in Les Flamandes are direct imitations of certain interiors and sensual genre-pictures: lads afire with lust forcing wenches under the hedges; peasants in their drunken jubilation dancing round the inn table. His desire is to sing that superabundance of vitality which relieves itself by excess, excess flung into excess, even in sensual pleasures. And his own colours and words, which are laid on with lavish profusion and flow along in liquid fire, are themselves a debauch, a 'rut' (a favourite word of his). This vaunting display of seething pictures is nothing less than an orgy. A terrific sensuality rages to exhaustion as much in the execution as in the motive, a delight in these creatures who have the madness of rutting stallions, who root about in odorous meats and in the flowering flesh of women, who of set purpose gorge themselves with beer and wine, and then in the dance and in embraces discharge all the fire they have swallowed. Now and again a reposeful picture alternates, firmly fixed in the dark frame of a sonnet. But the hot wave streams over these breathing-spaces, and again the mood is that of Rubens and of Jordaens, those mighty revellers.
But naturalistic art is pictorial, not poetic. And it is the great defect of this book that it was written by an inspired painter only, not yet by a poet. The words are coloured, but they are not free; they do not yet rock themselves in their own rhythm; they do not yet storm along to soar aloft with the inspiration; they are wild horses regularly trotting along in the shafts of the Alexandrine. There is a disparity between the inner intractability and the external regularity of these poems. The ore has not yet been molten long enough in the crucible of life to burst the hereditary mould. You feel that the avidity of life which is the substance of the work has really been seen 'à travers un tempérament,' that here a strong personality is in revolt against all tradition, a strong personality whose ponderous onslaught was bound to strike terror into the cautious and the short-sighted. But the strength and the art are not yet emancipated. Verhaeren is already a passionate onlooker, but he is still only an onlooker, one who stands without and not within the vortex, who watches everything with inspired sympathy, but who has not yet experienced it. This land of Flanders has not yet become a part of the poet's sensibility; the new point of view and the new form for it are not yet achieved; there is yet wanting that final smelting of the artistic excitement which is bound to burst all bonds and restrictions, to flame along in its own free feeling in an enraptured intoxication.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'Les Vieux Maîtres' (Les Flamandes).
[2] 'Les Vieux Maîtres' (Les Flamandes).
[3] 'Truandailles' (Ibid.).
THE MONKS
Moines venus vers nous des horizons gothiques,
Mais dont l'âme, mais dont l'esprit meurt de demain....
Mes vers vous bâtiront de mystiques autels.
É.V., 'Aux Moines.'
Rubens, that lavish reveller, is the genius of the Flemish zest in living; but zest in living is only the temperament and not the soul of Flanders. Before him there were the earnest masters of the cloisters, the primitives, the van Eycks, Memling, Gerhard David, Roger van der Weyden; and after them came Rembrandt, the meditative visionary, the restless seeker after new values. Belgium is something else beside the merry land of kermesses; the healthy, sensual people are not the soul of Flanders. Glaring lights cast strong shadows. All vitality that is strongly conscious of itself produces its counterpart, seclusion and asceticism; it is just the healthiest, the elemental races—the Russians of to-day for instance—who among their strong have the weak, among their gluttons of life those who avert their faces from it, among those who assent some who deny. By the side of the ambitious, teeming Belgium we have spoken of, there is a sequestered Belgium which is falling into ruins. Art exclusively in Rubens's sense could take no account of all those solitary cities, Bruges, Ypres, Dixmude, through whose noiseless streets the monks hasten like flocks of ravens in long processions, in whose canals the dumb white shadows of gliding nuns are mirrored. There, mid life's raging river, are broad islands of dream where men find refuge from realities. Even in the great Belgian cities there are such sequestered haunts of silence, the béguinages, those little towns in the town, whither ageing men and women have retired, renouncing the world for the peace of the cloister. Quite as much as the passion of life, the Roman Catholic faith and monkish renunciation are nowhere so deeply and firmly rooted as in this Belgium, where sensual pleasure is so noisy in its excess. Here again an extreme of contrasts is revealed: frowning in the face of the materialistic view of life stands the spiritual view. While the masses in the exuberance of their health and strength proclaim life aloud and pounce on its eternal pleasures, aside and cut off from them stand another, far lesser company to whom life is only a waiting for death, whose silence is as persistent as the exultation of the others. Everywhere here austere faith has its black roots in the vigorous, fruitful soil. For religious feeling always remains alive among a people that has once, although centuries may have passed since, fought with every fibre of its being for its faith. This is a subterranean Belgium that works in secret and that easily escapes the cursory glance, for it lives in shadows and silence. From this silence, however, from this averted earnestness, Belgian art has derived that mystical nourishment which has lent its baffling strength to the works of Maeterlinck, the pictures of Fernand Khnopff and Georges Minne. Verhaeren, too, did not turn aside from this sombre region. He, as the painter of Belgian life, saw these shadows of a vanishing past, and, in 1886, added to his first book Les Flamandes a second, Les Moines. It almost seems as though he had first of all been obliged to exhaust both the historical styles of his native land before he could reach his own, the modern style. For this book is essentially a throw-back, a confession of faith in Gothic art.
Monks are for Verhaeren heroic symbols of I mighty periods in the past. In his boyhood he was familiar with their grave aspect. Near the cheerful house where his youth was passed, there was at Bornhem a Bernhardine monastery, whither the boy had often accompanied his father to confession, and in whose cold corridors he had often waited in astonishment and with a child's timidity, listening to the majestic chant of the liturgy married to the organ's earnest notes. And here, one day of days, he received, with a thrill of pious terror, his first communion. Since that day the monks had been to him, as he trod the beaten track of custom, beings in a strange world apart, the incarnation of the beautiful and the supersensual, the unearthly on his child's earth. And when, in the course of years, he sought to create in verse a vision of Flanders in all her luminous and burning colours, he could not forgo this mysterious chiaroscuro, this earnest tone. For three weeks he withdrew to the hospitable monastery of Forges, near Chimay, taking part in all the ceremonies and rites of the monks, who, in the hope of winning a priest, afforded him full insight into their life. But Verhaeren's attitude towards Roman Catholicism was by this time anything but religious, it was rather an æsthetic and poetic admiration for the noble romanticism of the ceremonial, a moral piety for the things of the past. He remained three weeks. Then he fled, oppressed by the nightmare of the ponderous walls, and, as a souvenir for himself, chiselled the image of the monastery in verse.
This book too, no doubt, had no other aim than to be pictorial, descriptive. In rounded sonnets, as though etched by Rembrandt's needle, he fixed the chiaroscuro of the cloister's corridors, the hours of prayer, the earnest meetings of the monks, the silence in the intervals of the liturgy. The evenings over the landscape were described, in a ritual language, with the images of faith: the sun as it sets in crimson flaming like the wine in the chalice; steeples like luminous crosses in a silent sky; the rustling corn bowing when the bell rings to evensong. The poetry of devotion and repose was here revived: the harmony of the organ; the beauty of corridors garlanded with ivy; the touching idyll of the lonely cemetery; the peaceful dying of the prior; the visiting of the sick, and the I comfort it brings. Nothing was allowed in the deep light of the colours, in the grave repose of the theme, save what could be fitted into the strictly religious frame of the picture.
But here the pictorial method proved to be I insufficient for the poetic effect. The problem of religious feeling is too close to the heart to be reached by outward, even by plastic manifestations. A thing which is so eminently hostile to the sensuous, nay, which is the very symbol of I all that is contrary to sensuousness, cannot be reached by a picturesque appeal to the senses; the description of an intellectual problem must cease to be descriptive and become psychology. And so, thus early in his career, Verhaeren is forced away from the picturesque. First, however, he attempts the plastic method: he gives us sombre statues of monks; but even as statues they are only types of an inner life, symbols of the ways to God. Verhaeren develops in his monks the difference of their characters, which are still effective even under the soutane; and by his delicate characterisation he shows the I manifold possibilities of religious feeling. The I feudal monk, a noble of ancient lineage, would make a conquest of God, as once his ancestors conquered castle and forest lands with spur and sword. The moine flambeau, he that is burning with fervour, would possess Him with his passion like a woman. The savage monk, he that has come from the heart of a forest, can only comprehend Him in heathen wise, only fear Him as the wielder of thunder and lightning, while the gentle monk, he that loves the Virgin with a troubadour's timid tenderness, flees from the fear of Him. One monk would fathom Him by the learning of books and by logic; another does not understand Him, cannot lay hold on Him, and yet finds Him everywhere, in all things, in all he experiences. Thus all the characters of life, the harshest contrasts, are jostled together, quelled only by the monastery rules. But they are only in juxtaposition, just as the painter loves all his colours and things equally, just as he places things in juxtaposition, without estimating them according to their value. So far there is nothing that binds them together inwardly, there is no conflict of forces, no great idea. Neither are the verses as yet free; they too have the effect of being bound by the strict discipline of the monks. 'Il s'environne d'une sorte de froide lumière parnassienne qui en fait une œuvre plus anonyme, malgré la marque du poète poinçonnée à maintes places sur le métal poli,'[1] says Albert Mockel, the most subtle of æsthetic critics, of the book. Verhaeren must himself have felt this insufficiency, for, conscious of not having solved his problems in terms of poetry, he has remoulded both aspects of the country, renewed both books in another form after many years: Les Moines in the tragedy Le Cloître, Les Flamandes in the great pentalogy Toute la Flandre.
Les Moines was the last of Verhaeren's descriptive books, the last in which he stood on the outer side of things contemplating them dispassionately. But already here there is too much temperament in him to allow him to look at things as altogether unconnected and undisciplined; the joy of magnifying and intensifying by feeling already stirs in him. At the end of the book he no longer sees the monks as isolated individuals, but gathers them all together in a great synthesis in his finale. Behind them the poet sees order, a secret law, a great force of life. They, these hermits who have renounced, who are scattered over the world in a thousand monasteries, are to the poet the last remnants of a great (departed beauty, and they are so much the more grandiose as they have lost all feeling for our own time. They are the last ruins of moribund Christianity in a new world, projecting, in tragic loneliness, into our own days. 'Seuls vous survivez grands au monde chrétien mort!'[2] he hails them in admiration, for they have built the great House of God, and for many generations sacrificed their blood for the Host eternally white. In admiration he hails them. Not in faith and love, but in admiration for their fearless energy, and above all because they go on fighting undaunted for something that is dead and lost; because their beauty serves none other than itself; because they project into our own time like the ancient belfries of the land, which no longer call to prayer. In a land where everything else serves a purpose, pleasure and gold, they stand lonely; and they die without a cry and without a moan, fighting against an invisible enemy, they, the last defenders of beauty. For at that time, at that early stage of his career, beauty for Verhaeren was still identical with the past, because he had not yet discovered beauty for himself in the new things; in the monks he celebrates the last romanticists, because he had not yet found poetry in the things of reality, not yet found the new romance, the heroism of the working-day. He loves the monks as great dreamers, as the chercheurs de chimères sublimes, but he cannot help them, cannot defend what they possess, for behind them already stand their heirs. These heirs are the poets—a curious echo of David Strauss's idea about religion—who will have to be, what religion with its faithful was to the past, the guardians and eternal promoters of beauty. They it will be—here rings strangely the deepest intention of Verhaeren's later work—who will wave their new faith over the world like a banner, they, 'les poètes venus trop tard pour être prêtres,'[3] who shall be the priests of a new fervour. All religions, all dogmas, are brittle and transitory, Christ dies as Pan dies; and even this poetic faith, the last and highest conquest of the mind, must in its time pass away.
Car il ne reste rien que l'art sur cette terre
Pour tenter un cerveau puissant et solitaire
Et le griser de rouge et tonique liqueur.
In this great hymn to the future Verhaeren first turns away from the past and seeks the path to the future. For the poetic idea is here understood with new and greater feelings than in the beginning of his career. Poetry is for Verhaeren a confession not only as applied to an individual in Goethe's phrase, but in a religious sense as well: as the highest moral confession.
Much as these two books are marked by the effort to describe Flanders as it actually is, stronger than this effort is the yearning at the heart of them to escape from the present to the past. Every temperament exceeds reality. Flanders was here described in the sense of an ideal; but the ideal in both cases was projected on the past. Beauty young Verhaeren had sought in the monks, the symbols of the past; strength and the fire of life he had sought in the old Flemish masters. He still needed the costume of the past to discover the heroic and the beautiful in the present, just like many of our poets, who, when they would paint strong men, must perforce place their dramas in the Florentine renaissance, and who, if they would fashion beauty, deck their characters with Greek costumes. To find strength and beauty, or in one word poetry, in the real things that surround us, is here still denied to Verhaeren; and therefore he has disowned his second book as well as his first. In the distance between the old and the new works the long road may be seen, and seen with pride, which leads from the traditional poet to the truly contemporary poet.
Though not yet divided with a master hand, though not yet in the light of reality, the inner contrast of the country, the conflict between body and soul, between the joy of life and the longing for death, between pleasure and renunciation, the alternative between 'yes' and 'no,' was yet already contained in the contrast of these two books. And in a really emotional poet this contrast could not remain one that was purely external; it was bound to condense to an inner problem, to a personal decision between past and present. Two conceptions of the world, both inherited and in the blood, have here attained consciousness in one man; and though in life they may act independently in juxtaposition, in the individual the conflict must be fought out, the victory of the one or the other must be decided by force, or else by something higher, by an internal reconciliation. This conflict for a conception of the world pierces through the constant contrast between the acceptance and the denial of life in the poet, a conflict that for ten long years undermined his artistic and human experiences with terrific crises, and brought him to the verge of annihilation. The hostility which divides his ' country into two camps seems to have taken refuge in his soul to fight it out in a desperate and mortal duel: past and future seem to be fighting for a new synthesis. But only from such crises, from such pitiless struggles with the forces of one's own soul, do the vast conceptions of the universe and their new creative reconciliation grow.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Albert Mockel, Émile Verhaeren.
[2] 'Aux Moines.'
[3] 'Aux Moines.'
THE BREAK-DOWN
Nous sommes tous des Christs qui embrassons nos croix.
É. V.,'La Joie,'
Every feeling, every sensation is, in the last instance, the transformation of pain. Everything that in vibration or by contact touches the epithelium affects it as pain. As pain, which then, by the secret chemistry of the nerves, transmitted from centre to centre, is transformed into impressions, colours, sounds, and conceptions. The poet, whose last secret really is that he is more sensitive than others, that he purifies these pains of contact into feeling with a still more delicate filter, must have finer nerves than anybody else. Where others only receive a vague impression, he must have a clear perception, to which his feeling must respond, and the value of which he must be able to estimate. In Verhaeren's very first books a particular kind of reaction to every incitement was perceptible. His feeling really responds only to strong, intensive, sharp irritation; its delicacy was not abnormal, only the energy of the reaction was remarkable. His first artistic incitement; however, that of Flemish landscapes, was only one of the retina, glaring colours, pictorial charm; only in Les Moines had for the first time more delicate psychic shades been crystallised. In the meantime a transformation had taken place in his exterior life. Verhaeren had turned aside from the contemplation of Nature to concentrate his strength on the cultivation of his mind. He had travelled extensively, had been in Paris and London, in Spain and Germany; with impetuous haste he had assimilated all great ideas, all new phases, all the manifold theories of existence. Without a pause, incessantly, experiences assail him and tire him out. A thousand impressions accost him, each demanding an answer; great, sombre cities discharge their electric fire upon him, and fill his nerves with leaping flame. The sky above him is obscured by the clouds of cities; in London he wanders about as though wildered in a forest. This grey, misty city, that seems as though it were built of steel, casts its whole melancholy over the soul of him who lives there in loneliness, ignorant of the language, and who is so much the more lonely, as all these manifestations of the new life in great cities are still unintelligible to him. He is still unable to capture the poetry that is in them, and so they leap at him and penetrate him with a confused, unintelligible pain. And in this novel atmosphere the intense refinement of his nerves proceeds at such a pace that already the slightest contact with the outer world produces a quivering reaction. Every noise, every colour, every thought presses in upon him as though with sharp needles; his healthy sensibility becomes hypertrophied; that fineness of hearing, of which one is conscious, say in sea-sickness, which perceives every noise, even the slightest sound, as though it were the blow of a hammer, undermines his whole organism; every rapidly-passing smell corrodes him like an acid; every ray of light pricks him like a red-hot needle. The process is aggravated by a purely physical illness, which corresponds to his psychic ailment. Just at that time Verhaeren was attacked by a nervous affection of the stomach, one of those repercussions of the psychic on the physical system in which it is hard to say whether the ailing stomach causes the neurasthenic condition, or the weakness of the nerves the stagnation of the digestive functions. Both ailments are inwardly co-ordinated, both are a rejection of the outer impression, an impotent refusal of the chemical conversion. Just as the stomach feels all food as pain, as a foreign body, so the ear repels every sound as an intrusion, so the eye rejects every impression as pain. This nervous rejection of the outer world was already then, in Verhaeren's life, pathological. The bell on the door had to be removed, because it shocked his nerves; those who lived in the house had to wear felt slippers instead of shoes; the windows were closed to the noise of the street. These years in Verhaeren's life are the lowest depth, the crisis of his vitality. It is in such periods of depression that invalids shut themselves off from the world, from their fellow-men, from the light of day, from the din of existence, from books, from all contact with the outer world, because they instinctively feel that everything can be a renewal of their pain, and nothing an enrichment of their life. They seek to soften the world, to tone its colours down; they bury themselves in the monotony of solitude. This 'soudaine lassitude'[1] then impinges on to the moral nature; the will, losing the sense of life, is paralysed; all standards of value collapse; ideals founder in the most frightful Nihilism. The earth becomes a chaos, the sky an empty space; everything is reduced to nothingness, to an absolute negation. Such crises in the life of a poet are almost always sterile. And it is therefore of incalculable value that here a poet should have observed himself and given us a clear picture of himself in this state, that, without fear of the ugliness, the confusion of his ego, he should have described, in terms of art, the history of a psychic crisis. In Verhaeren's trilogy, Les Soirs, Les Débâcles, Les Flambeaux Noirs, we have a document that must be priceless to pathologists as to psychologists. For here a deep-seated will to extract the last consequence from every phase of life has reproduced the stadium of a mental illness right to the verge of madness; here a poet has with the persistence of a physician pursued the symptoms of his suffering through every stage of lacerating pain, and immortalised in poems the process of the inflammation of his nerves.
The landscape of this book is no longer that of his native province; indeed, it can hardly be called one of earth. It is a grandiose landscape of dreams, horizons as though on some other planet, as though in one of those worlds which have cooled into moons, where the warmth of the earth has died out and an icy calm chills the vast far-seen spaces deserted of man. Already in the book of the monks, Rubens's merry landscape had been clouded over; and in the next, Au Bord de la Route, the grey hand of a cloud had eclipsed the sun. But here all the colours of life are burnt out, not a star shines down from this steel-grey metallic sky; only a cruel, freezing moon glides across it from time to time like a sardonic smile. These are books of pallid nights, with the immense wings of clouds closing the sky, over a narrowed world, in which the hours cling to things like heavy and clammy chains. They are works filled with a glacial cold. 'Il gèle ...'[2] one poem begins, and this shuddering tone pierces like the howling of dogs ever and ever again over an illimitable plain. The sun is dead, dead are the flowers, the trees; the very marshes are frozen in these white midnights:
Et la crainte saisit d'un immortel hiver
Et d'un grand Dieu soudain, glacial et splendide.[3]
In his fever the poet is for ever dreaming of this cold, as though in a secret yearning for its cooling breath. No one speaks to him, only the winds howl senselessly through the streets like dogs round a house. Often dreams come, but they are fleurs du mal; they dart out of the ice burning, yellow, poisonous. More and more monotonous grow the days, more and more fearful; they fall down like drops, heavy and black.
Mes jours toujours plus lourds s'en vont roulant leur cours![4]
In thought and sound these verses express ail the frightful horror of this desolation. Impotently the ticking of the clock hammers this endless void, and measures a barren time. Darker, and darker grows the world, more and more oppressive; the concave mirror of solitude distorts the poet's dreams into frightful grimaces, and spirits whisper evil thoughts in his restless heart.
And like a fog, like a heavy, stifling cloud, fatigue sinks down on his soul. First pleasure in things had died, and then the very will to pleasure. The soul craves nothing now. The nerves have withdrawn their antennæ from the outer world; they are afraid of every impression; they are spent. Whatever chances to drift against them no longer becomes colour, sound, impression; the senses are too feeble for the chemical conversion of impressions: and so everything remains at the stage of pain, a dull, gnawing pain. Feeling, which the nerves are now powerless to feed, starves; desire is sunk in sleep. Autumn has come; all the flowers have withered; and winter comes apace.
Il fait novembre en mon âme.
Et c'est le vent du nord qui clame
Comme une bête dans mon âme.[5]
Slowly, but irresistible as a swelling tide, emerges an evil thought: the idea of the senselessness of life, the thought of death. As the last of yearnings soars up the prayer:
Mourir! comme des fleurs trop énormes, mourir![6]
For the poet's whole body is, as it were, sore from this contact with the outer world, from these little gnawing pains. Not a single great feeling can stand erect: everything is eaten away by this little, gnawing, twitching pain. But now the man in his torture springs up, as a beast, tormented by the stings of insects, tears its chains asunder and rushes madly and blindly along. The patient would fain flee from his bed of torture, but he cannot retrace his steps. No man can 'se recommencer enfant, avec calcul.'[7] Travels, dreams, do nothing but deaden the pain; and then the torment of the awakening sets in again with redoubled strength. Only one way is open: the road which leads forward, the road to annihilation. Out of a thousand petty pains, the will longs for one single pain that shall end all: the body that is being burnt piecemeal cries for the lightning. The sick man desires—as fever-patients will tear their wounds open—to make this pain, which tortures without destroying, so great and murderous that it will kill outright: to save his pride, he would fain be himself the cause of his destruction. Pain, he says to himself, shall not continue to be a series of pin-pricks; he refuses to 'pourrir, immensément emmailloté d'ennui';[8] he asks to be destroyed by a vast, fiery, savage pain; he demands a beautiful and tragic death. The will to experience becomes here the will to suffer pain and even death. He will be glad to suffer any torture, but not this one low little thing; he can no longer endure to feel himself so contemptible, so wretched.
N'entendre plus se taire, en sa maison d'ébène,
Qu'un silence total dont auraient peur les morts.[9]
And with a flagellant's pleasure the patient nurses this fire of fever, till it flames up in a bright blaze. The deepest secret of Verhaeren's art was from the first his joy in intemperance, the strength of his exaggeration. And so, too, he snatches up this pain, this neurasthenia to a wonderful, fiery, and grandiose ecstasy. A cry, a pleasure breaks out of this idea of liberation. For the first time the word 'joy' blazes again in the cry:
Le joie enfin me vient, de souffrir par moi-même,
Parce que je le veux.[10]
True, only a perverse joy, a sophism, the false triumph over life of the suicide, who believes he has conquered fate when, truth to tell, it has conquered him. But this self-deception is already sublime.
By this sudden interference of the will the physical torture of the nerves becomes a psychic event; the illness of the body encroaches upon the intellect; the neurasthenia becomes a 'déformation morale'; the suffering schism of the poet's ego is of itself subdivided, so to speak, into two elements, one that excites pain and one that suffers pain. The psychic would fain tear itself free from the physical, the soul would fain withdraw from the tortured body:
Pour s'en aller vers les lointains et se défaire
De soi et des autres, un jour,
En un voyage ardent et mol comme l'amour
Et légendaire ainsi qu'un départ de galère![11]
But the two are relentlessly bound up with each other, no flight is possible, however much disgust drives the poet to rescue at least a part of himself by snatching it into a purer, calmer, and higher state. Never, I believe, has the aversion of a sick man to himself, the will to health of a living man, been more cruel and more grandiose than in this book of a poet's diabolical revolt against himself. His suffering soul is torn into two parts. In a fearful personification the hangman and the condemned criminal wrestle for the mastery. 'Se cravacher dans sa pensée et dans son sang!'[12] and finally, in a paroxysm of fury, 'me cracher moi-même,'[13] these are the horribly shrilling cries of self-hatred and self-disgust. With all the strings of her whipped strength the soul tears to free herself from the rotting and tormented body, and her deepest torture is that this separation is impossible. In this distraction flickers already the first flame of madness.
Never—if we except Dostoieffsky—has a poet's scalpel probed the wound of his ego so cruelly and so deeply, never has it gone so dangerously near to the nerve of life. And never perhaps, except in Nietzsche's Ecce Homo! has a poet stepped so close to the edge of the precipice that juts above the abyss of existence, with so clear a consciousness of its vicinity, to feast on the feeling of dizziness and on the danger of death. The fire in Verhaeren's nerves has slowly inflamed his brain. But the other being, the poet in him, had remained watchful, observing the eye of madness slowly, inevitably, and as though magnetically attracted, coming nearer and nearer. 'L'absurdité grandit en moi comme une fleur fatale.'[14] In gentle fear, but at the same time with a secret voluptuous pleasure, he felt the dreaded thing approaching. For long already he had been conscious that this rending of himself had hunted his thinking from the circle of clarity. And in one grandiose poem, in which he sees the corpse of his reason floating down the grey Thames, the sick man describes that tragic foundering:
Elle est morte de trop savoir,
De trop vouloir sculpter la cause,
————————————————-
Elle est morte, atrocement,
D'un savant empoisonnement,
Elle est morte aussi d'un délire
Vers un absurde et rouge empire.[15]
But no fear takes him at this thought. Verhaeren is a poet who loves paroxysm. And just as in his physical illness he had called out in the deepest joy for the intoxication of illness, for its exasperation, for death, so now his psychic illness demands its intoxication, the dissolution of all order, its most glorious foundering: madness. Here, too, the pleasure in the quest of pain is intensified to the highest superlative, to a voluptuous joy in self-destruction. And as sick men amid their torments scream of a sudden for death, this tortured man screams in grim yearning for madness:
Aurai-je enfin l'atroce joie
De voir, nerfs par nerfs, comme une proie,
La démence attaquer mon cerveau?[16]
He has measured all the deeps of the spirit, but all the words of religion and science, all the elixirs of life, have been powerless to save him from this torment. He knows all sensations, and there was no greatness in any of them; all have goaded him, none have exalted him or raised him above himself. And now his heart yearns ardently for this last sensation of all. He is tired of waiting for it, he will go out to meet it: 'Je veux marcher vers la folie et ses soleils.'[17] He hails madness as though it were a saint, as though it were his saviour; he forces himself to 'croire à la démence ainsi qu'en une foi.'[18] It is a magnificent picture reminding one of the legend of Hercules, who, tortured by the fiery robe of Nessus, hurls himself on the pyre to be consumed by one great flame instead of being wretchedly burnt to death by a thousand slow and petty torments.
Here the highest state of despair is reached; the black banner of death and the red one of madness are furled together. With unprecedented logic Verhaeren, despairing of an interpretation of life, has exalted senselessness as the sense of the universe. But it is just in this complete inversion that victory already lies. Johannes Schlaf, in his masterly study, has with great eloquence demonstrated that it is just at the moment when the sick man cries out like one being crucified, 'Je suis l'immensément perdu,'[19] just when he feels he is being drawn into the bosom of the infinite, that he is redeemed and delivered. Just this idea, which here had whipped the little pain to the verge of madness,
À chaque heure, violenter sa maladie;
L'aimer, et la maudire,[20]
is already the deepest leitmotiv of Verhaeren's work, the key to unlock the gates of it. For the idea is nothing else than the idea of his life, to master all resistance by a boundless love, 'aimer le sort jusqu'en ses rages';[21] never to shun a thing, but to take everything and enhance it till it becomes creative, ecstatic pleasure; to welcome every suffering with fresh readiness. Even this cry for madness, no doubt the extreme document of human despair, is an immense yearning for clearness; in this tortured disgust with illness cries a joy in life perhaps else unknown in our days; and the whole conflict, which seems to be a flight from life, is in the last instance an immense heroism for which there is no name. Nietzsche's great saying is here fulfilled: 'For a dionysiac task a hammer's hardness, the pleasure in destruction itself, is most decidedly one of the preliminary conditions.'[22] And what at this period of Verhaeren's work appears still to be negative is in the higher sense a preparation for the positive, for the decisive consummation, of the later books.
For that reason this crisis and the shaping of it in verse remain an imperishable monument of our contemporary literature, for it is at the same time an eternal monument to the conquest of human suffering by the power of art. Verhaeren's crisis—his exposition, for the sake of the value of life, of his inward struggle—has gone deeper than that of any other poet of our time. To this very day the sufferings of that time are graven, as though by iron wedges, in the furrows of his lofty brow; the recovery of his health and his subsequent robustness have been powerless to efface them. This crisis was a fire without parallel, a flame of passion. Not a single acquisition from the earlier days was rescued from it. Verhaeren's whole former relation to the world has broken down: his Catholic faith, his religion, his feeling for his native province, for the world, for life itself, all is destroyed. And when he builds up his work now, it must perforce be an entirely different one, with a different artistic expression, with different feelings, different knowledge, and different harmonies. This tempest has changed the landscape of his soul, where once the peace of a modest existence had prevailed, into a pathless desert. But this desert with its solitude has space and liberty for the building up of a new, a richer, an infinitely nobler world.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'L'Heure Mauvaise' (Au Bord de la Route).
[2] 'La Barque' (Au Bord de la Route).
[3] 'Le Gel' (Les Soirs).
[4] 'L'Heure Mauvaise' (Au Bord de la Route).
[5] 'Vers' (Au Bord de la Route).
[6] 'Mourir' (Les Soirs).
[7] 'S'amoindrir' (Les Débâcles).
[8] 'Si Morne' (Les Débâcles)
[9] 'Le Roc' (Les Flambeaux Noirs).
[10] 'Insatiablement' (Les Soirs).
[11] 'Là-bas' (Au Bord de la Route).
[12] 'Vers le Cloître' (Les Débâcles).
[13] 'Un Soir' (Au Bord de la Route).
[14] 'Fleur Fatale' (Les Débâcles).
[15] 'La Morte' (Les Flambeaux Noirs).
[16] 'Le Roc' (Ibid.).
[17] 'Fleur Fatale' (Les Débâcles).
[18] 'Le Roc' (Les Flambeaux Noirs).
[19] 'Les Nombres' (Ibid.).
[20] 'Celui de la Fatigue' (Les Apparus dans mes Chemins).
[21] 'La Joie' (Les Visages de la Vie).
[22] Ecce Homo!
FLIGHT INTO THE WORLD
On boit sa soif, on mange sa faim.—É.V., 'L'Amour.'
In this crisis the negation was driven to the last possible limits. The sick man had denied not only the outer world, but himself as well. Nothing had remained but vexation, disgust, and torment.
La vie en lui ne se prouvait
Que par l'horreur qu'il en avait.[1]
He had arrived at the last possibility, at that possibility which means destruction or transformation. The at first purely physical pain of the supersensitive organs of the senses had become a moral depression; the depression had become psychic suffering; and this again had gradually turned in a grandiose progression not only to pain in the individual thing but to suffering in the all: to cosmic pain. For Him, however, who in His loneliness took the suffering of the whole world upon His shoulders, who was strong enough to bear it for all the centuries, humanity has invented the symbol of 'God.' He who is born of earth and lives to die must perforce break down under so gigantic a burden. Into the last corner of his ego revengeful life had here driven the man who denied it, had driven him to the point where now he stood shivering before the abyss in his own breast, face to face with death and madness. The physical and poetic organism of Verhaeren was overheated to the most dangerous and extreme degree. This fever-heat—that of a flagellant —had brought his blood to the boiling-point; it was filling the chamber of his breast with pictures of such overwhelming horror that the explosion of self-destruction could only be prevented by opening the valve.
There were only two means of flight from this destruction: flight into the past—or flight into a new world. Many, Verlaine for instance, had in such catastrophes, wherein the whole structure of their lives tumbled to the ground, fled into the cathedrals of Catholicism rather than stand in solitude under the threatening sky. Verhaeren, however, though an inspired faith is one of the most living sources of his poetical power, was more afraid of the past than of the Unknown. He freed himself from the immense pressure upon him by fleeing into the world. He who in his pride had conceived the whole process of the world as a personal affair, he who had tried to solve the eternal discord, the undying 'yes' and 'no' of life in his own lonely self, now rushes into the very midst of things and involves himself in their process. He who previously had felt everything only subjectively, only in isolation, now objectifies himself; he who previously had shut himself off from reality, now lets his veins pulse in harmony with the breathing organism of life. He relinquishes his attitude of pride; he surrenders himself; lavishes himself joyously on everything; exchanges the pride of being alone for the immense pleasure of being everywhere. He no longer looks at all things in himself, but at himself in all things. But the poet in him frees himself, quite in Goethe's sense, by symbols. Verhaeren drives his superabundance out of himself into the whole world, just as Christ in the legend drove the devils out of the madman into the swine. The heat, the fever of his feeling—which, concentrated in his too narrow chest, were near bursting it—now animate with their fire the whole world around him, which of old had been to him congealed with ice. All the evil powers, which had slunk around him in the trappings of nightmares, he now transforms to shapes of life. He hammers away at them and shapes them anew; he is himself the smith of that noble poem of his, the smith of whom he says:
Dans son brasier, il a jeté
Les cris d'opiniâtreté,
La rage sourde et séculaire;
Dans son brasier d'or exalté,
Maître de soi, il a jeté
Révoltes, deuils, violences, colères,
Pour leur donner la trempe et la clarté
Du fer et de l'éclair.[2]
He objectifies his personality in the work of art, hammering out of the cold blocks, that weighed upon him with the weight of iron, monuments and statues of pain. All the feelings which of old weighed down upon him like dull fog, formless and prisoned in dream like nightmares, now become clear statues, symbols in stone of his soul's experiences. The poet has torn his fear, his burning, moaning, horrible fear, out of himself, and poured it into his bell-ringer, who is consumed in his blazing belfry. He has turned the monotony of his days to music in his poem of the rain; his mad fight against the elements, which in the end break his strength, he has shaped into the image of the ferryman struggling against the current that shatters his oars one after the other. His cruel probing of his own pain he has visualised in the idea of his fishermen, who with their nets all in holes go on fishing up nothing but suffering on suffering out of the sombre stream; his evil and red lusts he has spiritualised in his Aventurier, in the adventurer who returns home from a far land to celebrate his wedding feast with his dead love. Here his feelings are shaped no longer in moods, in the fluid material of dreams, but in the infinitely mobile form of human beings. Here there is symbolism in the highest sense, in Goethe's sense of liberation. For every feeling that has achieved artistic shape is as it were conjured away out of the breast. And thus the too heavy pressure slowly disappears from the poet's being, and the morbid fever from his work. Now and now only does he recognise the suicidal cowardice behind the visor of the pride that forced him to fly from the world, now and now only does he understand that fatal egoism which had taken refuge beyond the pale of the world:
J'ai été lâche et je me suis enfui
Du monde, en mon orgueil futile,[3]
This confession is the last liberating word of the crisis.
Now his despair—a despair like that of Faust—is overcome. The mood of Easter morning begins to sound the exulting cry, 'Earth has me again!'[4] with the anthems of the resurrection. Verhaeren has described this deliverance, this ascent from illness to health, from the most despairing 'no' to the most exultant 'yes,' in many symbols, most beautifully in that magnificent poem wherein St. George the dragon-slayer bows down to him with his shining lance; and again in that other poem in which the four gentle sisters approach him and announce his deliverance:
L'une est le bleu pardon, l'autre la bonté blanche,
La troisième l'amour pensif, la dernière le don
D'être, même pour les méchants, le sacrifice.[5]
Goodness and love call to him now from where of old there were only hatred and despair. And in their approach already he feels the hope of recovery, the hope of a natural, artistic strength.
Et quand elles auront, dans ma maison,
Mis de l'ordre à mes torts, plié tous mes remords
Et refermé, sur mes péchés, toute cloison,
En leur pays d'or immobile, où le bonheur
Descend, sur des rives de fleurs entr'accordées,
Elles dresseront les hautes idées,
En sainte-table, pour mon cœur.[6]
This feeling of recovery grows more and more secure, more and more the mist parts before the approaching sun of health. Now the poet knows that he has been wandering in the dark galleries of mines, that he has been hammering a labyrinth through the hard rock of hatred instead of walking the same path as his fellow-men in the light. And at last, bright and exultant, high above the shy voices of hope and prayer, the sudden triumph of certainty rings out. For the first time Verhaeren finds the form of the poem of the future—the dithyramb. Where of old, confused and lonely, le carillon noir of pain sounded, now all the strings of the heart vibrate and sing.
Sonnez toutes mes voix d'espoir!
Sonnez en moi; sonnez, sous les rameaux,
En des routes claires et du soleil![7]
And now the path proceeds in light 'vers les claires métamorphoses.'[8]
This flight into the world was the great liberation. Not only has the body grown strong again and rejoices in the wandering and the way, but the soul too has become cheerful, the will has grown new wings that are stronger than the old, and the poet's art is filled with a fresh blood red with life. The deliverance is perceptible even in Verhaeren's verse, which with its delicate nerves reproduces all the phases of his soul. For his poetry, which at first in the indifference of its picturesque description preserved the cold form of the Alexandrine, and then, in the grim monotony of the crisis, tried to represent the void waste of feeling by a terrifying, gruesomely beautiful uniformity of rhythm, this poem of a sudden, as though out of a dream, starts into life, awakens like an animal from sleep, rears, prances, curvets; imitates all movements, threatens, exults, falls into ecstasy: in other words, all of a sudden, and independently of all influences and theories, he has won his way to the vers libre, free verse. Just as the poet no longer shuts the I world up in himself, but bestows himself on the world, the poem too no longer seeks to lock the world up obstinately in its four-cornered prison, but surrenders itself to every feeling, every rhythm, every melody; it adapts itself, distends; with its foaming voluptuous joy it can fold in its embrace the illimitable length and breadth of cities, can contract to pick up the loveliness of one fallen blossom, can imitate the thundering voice of the street, the hammering of machines, and the whispering of lovers in a garden of spring. The poem can now speak in all the languages of feeling, with all the voices of men; for the tortured, moaning cry of an individual has become the voice of the universe.
But together with this new delight the poet feels the debt which he has withheld from his age. He beholds the lost years in which he lived only for himself, for his own little feeling, instead of listening to the voice of his time. With a remarkable concordance of genius Verhaeren's work here expresses what Dehmel—in the same year perhaps—fashioned with such grandeur in 'The Mountain Psalm,' the poem in which, looking down from the heights of solitude to the cities in their pall of smoke, he cries in ecstasy:
Was weinst du, Sturm?—Hinab, Erinnerungen!
dort pulst im Dunst der Weltstadt zitternd Herz!
Es grollt ein Schrei von Millionen Zungen
nach Glück und Frieden: Wurm, was will dein Schmerz!
Nicht sickert einsam mehr von Brust zu Brüsten,
wie einst die Sehnsucht, als ein stiller Quell;
heut stöhnt ein Volk nach Klarheit, wild und gell,
und du schwelgst noch in Wehmutslüsten?
Siehst du den Qualm mit dicken Fäusten drohn
dort überm Wald der Schlote und der Essen?
Auf deine Reinheitsträume fällt der Hohn
der Arbeit! fühl's: sie ringt, von Schmutz zerfressen.
Du hast mit deiner Sehnsucht bloss gebuhlt,
in trüber Glut dich selber nur genossen;
schütte die Kraft aus, die dir zugeflossen,
und du wirst frei vom Druck der Schuld![9]
Pour out the power that has flowed in upon thee! Surrender thyself! That too is Verhaeren's ecstatic cry at this hour. Opposites touch. Supreme solitude is turned to supreme fellowship. The poet feels that self-surrender is more than self-preservation. All at once he sees behind him the frightful danger of this self-seeking pain.
Et tout à coup je m'apparais celui
Qui s'est, hors de soi-même, enfui
Vers le sauvage appel des forces unanimes.[10]
And he who in days gone by had fled from this appeal into cold solitude, now casts himself ecstatically into the arms of the world, with the I deepest yearning
De n'être plus qu'un tourbillon
Qui se disperse au vent mystérieux des choses.[11]
He feels that in order to live to the full all the greatness and beauty of this fiery world, he must multiply himself, be a thousandfold and ten thousandfold what he is. 'Multiplie-toi!' Be manifold. Surrender thyself! For the first time this cry bursts up like a flame. Be manifold!
Multiplie et livre-toi! Défais
Ton être en des millions d'êtres;
Et sens l'immensité filtrer et transparaître.[12]
Only from this brotherhood with all things accrue the possibilities of being a modern poet. Only by self-surrender to everything that is could Verhaeren attain to so grandiose a conception of contemporary manifestations, only thus could he become the poet of the democracy of cities, of industrialism, of science, the poet of Europe, the poet of our age. Only such a pantheistic feeling could create this intimate relationship between the world of self and the world surrounding self, the relationship which subsequently ends in an unparalleled identity: only so despairing a 'no' could be transformed to so enraptured a 'yes,' only one who had fled from the world could possess it with such passion.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'Un Soir' (Au Bord de la Route).
[2] 'Le Forgeron' (Les Villages Illusoires).
[3] 'Saint Georges' (Les Apparus dans mes Chemins).
[4] Goethe's Faust, 1. 784.
[5] 'Les Saintes' (Les Apparus dans mes Chemins).
[6] 'Les Saintes' (Les Apparus dans mes Chemins).
[7] 'Saint Georges' (Ibid).
[8] 'Le Forgeron' (Les Villages Illusoires).
[9] 'Why weepest thou, O storm?—Down, memories! Yonder in the smoke pulses the great city's trembling heart! A million grumbling tongues are crying for peace and happiness: worm, what would thy pain! Yearning no longer trickles lonely from breast to breasts, a quiet source and no more: to-day a nation groans, and with wild, shrill voices demands clearness—and thou still revellest in the joys of melancholy?
'Seest thou the reek and smoke threatening yonder over the forest of flues and chimneys? Upon thy dreams of purity falls the scorn of labour! Feel it: labour is struggling, eaten up with dirt! Thou hast but wantoned with thy yearning, thou hast but enjoyed thyself in turbid heat; pour out the power that has flowed in upon thee, and thou shalt be free from the burden of guilt!'—'Bergpsalm' (Aber die Liebe).
[10] 'La Foule' (Les Visages de la Vie).
[11] 'Celui du Savoir' (Les Apparus dans mes Chemins).
[12] 'La Forêt' (Les Visages de la Vie).
PART II
CONSTRUCTIVE FORCES
LES CAMPAGNES HALLUCINÉES—LES VILLAGES
ILLUSOIRES—LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES—
LES DRAMES
1893-1900
CONTEMPORARY FEELING
J'étais le carrefour où tout se rencontrait.—É.V., 'Le Mont.'
Verhaeren's deliverance from the stifling clasp of his crisis was a flight to realities. He saved himself by no longer fixing his gaze rigidly on himself and deeply probing every feeling of joy and torment, but by turning to the world of phenomena and flinging himself on its problems. He has no longer to stand in solitude facing the world; his desire is to multiply himself, to realise himself in everything that is alive, in everything that expresses a will, an idea, a form, anything at all animated. His poetic aim now is, not so much to analyse himself to himself, as to analyse himself in the whole world.
To realities, and particularly to the realities of our day, lyric poets had previously felt themselves alien. It had long been a commonplace to speak of the danger to art of industrialism, of democracy, of this age of machinery which makes pur life uniform, kills individuality, and drowns romance in actualities. All these poets have looked upon the new creations, machines, railways, monster cities, the telegraph, the telephone, all the triumphs of engineering, as a drag on the soaring of poetry. Ruskin preached that workshops should be demolished and chimneys razed to the ground; Tolstoy pointed to primitive man, who produces all his requirements from his own resources independently of any community, and saw in him the moral and æsthetic ideal of the future. In poetry, the past had gradually come to be identified with the poetical. People were enamoured of the glory that was Greece, of mail-coaches and narrow, crooked streets; they were filled with enthusiasm for all foreign cultures, and decried that of our own time as a phase of degeneration. Democracy, levelling all ranks and confining even the poet to the middle-class profession of author, seemed, as a social order, to be the correlation of machinery which, by the constructive skill of workshops, renders all manual dexterity unnecessary. All the poets, who were glad to avail themselves of the practical advantages provided by technical science, who had no objection to covering immense distances in the minimum time, who accepted the comfort of the modern house, the luxury of modern conditions of life, increased pecuniary rewards and social independence, refused obstinately to discover in these advantages a single poetic motive, a single object of inspiration, the least stimulus or ecstasy. Poetry had by degrees come to be something which was the very opposite of what-, ever is useful; all evolution seemed to these poets to be, from the point of view of culture, retrogression.
Now it is Verhaeren's great exploit that he effected a transmutation poetic values. He discovered the sublime in the far-spread serried ranks of democracy; beauty he found not only where it adapts itself to traditional ideas, but also where, still hidden by the cotyledon of the new, it is just beginning to unfold. By rejecting no phenomenon, in so far as an inward sense and a necessity dwelt in it, he infinitely extended the boundaries of the lyric art. He found a fruitful soil in the very places where all other poets despaired of poetic seed. He and he alone, who had for so long been eating his heart out in fierce isolation, feels the strength and fulness of society, the poetical element in the massed strength of great cities and in great inventions. His deepest longing, his most sublime exploit is the lyric discovery of the new beauty in new things.
The only way to this feat lay for him through the conviction that beauty does not express anything absolute, but something that changes with circumstances and with men; that beauty, like everything that is subject to evolution, is constantly changing. Yesterday's beauty is not to-day's beauty. Beauty is no more opposed than anything else to that tendency to spiritualisation which is the most characteristic symptom ind result of all culture. Physiologists have proved that the physical strength of modern man is inferior to that of his ancestors, but that his nervous system is more developed, so that strength is more and more concentrated in the intellect. The Hellenic hero was the wrestler, the expression of a body harmoniously developed in every limb, the perfection of strength and skill; the hero of our time is the thinker, the ideal of intellectual strength and suppleness. And since our only way of estimating the perfection of things is by the ideal of our personal feeling, the form of beauty likewise has been transformed and become intellectual. And even when we seek it in the body, as, for instance, in the ideal woman's figure, we have grown accustomed to seeing perfection not so much in robustness and plumpness as in a noble, slender play of lines which mysteriously expresses the soul. Beauty is turning away more and more from the outer surface, from the physical, to the interior aspects, to the psychic. In proportion as motive forces hide themselves and as harmony becomes less obvious, beauty intellectualises itself. It is becoming for us not so much a beauty of appearance as a beauty of; aim. If we are to admire the telegraph or the telephone, we shall not be satisfied with considering the exterior forms, the network of wires, the keys, the receivers; we shall be impressed rather by the ideal beauty, by the idea of a vibrating spark leaping over countries and whole continents. A machine is not wonderful on, account of its rattling, rusty, iron framework, but by the idea, deep-seated in its body, which is the principle of its magical activity. A modern idea of beauty must be adapted not only to the idea of beauty of the past, but also to that of the future. And the future of æsthetics is a kind of ideology, or, as Renan expresses it, an identity with the sciences. We shall lose the habit of understanding things only by our senses, of seeing their harmony only on their exterior surface, and we shall have to learn how to conceive their intellectual aims, their inner form, their psychic organisation, as beauty.
For these new things are only ugly when they are regarded with the eyes of a past century, when our contemporaries, jealously guarding a reverent over-estimation, valuing the rust and not the gold, despise modern works of art, and pay a thousand times too dear for the indifferent productions of a past age. Only in this state of feeling is it possible to esteem mail-coaches poetical and locomotives ugly; only thus is it possible for poets, who have not learned to see with emancipated and independent eyes, to assume such a hostile attitude, or at the best an indifferent attitude, to our realities. Let us remember Nietzsche's beautiful words: 'My formula for grandeur in man is amor fati: that a man should ask for nothing else, either in the past or in the future, in all eternity. We must not only endure what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is lying in necessity's face—but we must love it.'[1] And in this sense some few in our days have loved what is new, first as a necessity, and then as beauty. A generation ago now, Carlyle was the first to preach the heroism of everyday life, and exhorted the poets of his day not to describe the greatness they found in mouldy chronicles, but to look for it where it was nearest to them, in the realities around them. Constantin Meunier has found the idea of a new sculpture in democracy, Whistler and Monet have discovered in the smoky breath of this age of machinery a new tone of colour which is not less beautiful than Italy's eternal azure and the halcyon sky of Greece. It is only from the vast agglomerations, the immense dimensions of the new world that Walt Whitman has derived the strength and power of his voice. The whole difficulty which thus far has permitted only a few to serve the new beauty in the new things lies in the fact that our age is not yet a period of decided conviction, but only one of transition. The victory of machinery is not yet complete; handiwork still subsists, little towns still flourish, it is still possible to take refuge in an idyll, to find the old beauty in some sequestered corner. Not till the poet is shut off from all flight to inherited ideals will he be forced to change himself into a new man. For the new things have not yet organically developed their beauty. Every new thing on its first appearance is blended with something repellent, brutal, and ugly; it is only gradually that its inherent form shapes itself æsthetically. The first steamers, the first locomotives, the first automobiles, were ugly. But the slender, agile torpedo-boats of to-day, the bright-coloured, noiselessly—gliding automobiles with their hidden mechanism, the great, broad-chested Pacific Railway engines of to-day, are impressive by their outward form alone. Our huge shops, such as those which Messel built in Berlin, display a beauty in iron and glass which is hardly less than that of the cathedrals and palaces of old time. Certain great things, such as the Eiffel Tower, the Forth Bridge, modern men-of-war, furnaces belching flame, the Paris boulevards, have a new beauty beyond anything which past ages had to show. These new things compel a new enhancement of value, on the one hand by the idea that moves them, on the other hand by their democratic grandeur and their vast dimensions—equalled by none but the very greatest works of antiquity. But whatever is beautiful must, sooner or later, be conceived of as poetry. And thus, it is quite sure, Verhaeren has only been one of the first to build bridges from the old to the new time; others will come who will celebrate the new beauties in the new things—gigantic cities, engines, industrialism, democracy, this fiery striving for new standards of greatness—and they will not only be compelled to find the new beauties, they will also have to establish new laws for this new order, a different morality, a different religion, a different synthesis for this new conditionality. the poetic transmutation of the beautiful is only a first beginning of the poetic transmutation of the feeling of life.
But a poet never finds anything in things save his own temperament. If he is melancholy, the world in his books is void of sense, all lights are extinguished, laughter dies; if he is passionate, all feelings seethe in a fiery froth as though in a cauldron, and foam up in angry happenings. Whereas the real world is manifold, and contains the elixirs of pleasure and pain, confidence and despair, love and hate, only as elements so to speak, the world of great poets is the world of one single feeling. And so Verhaeren too sees all things in their new beauty with the feelings of his own life only, only with energy. In these the fiery years of his prime it is not harmony that he seeks, but energy, power. For him a thing is the more beautiful the more purpose, will, power, energy it contains. And since the whole world of to-day is over-heated with effort and energy; since our great towns are nothing but centres of multiplied energy; since machinery expresses nothing save force tanied and organised; since innumerable crowds are yoked in harmonious action—to him the world is full of beauty. He loves the new age because it does not isolate effort but condenses it, because it is not scattered but concentrated for action. And of a sudden everything he sees appears to be filled with soul. All that has will, all that has an aim in view—man, machine, crowd, city, money; all that vibrates, works, hammers, travels, exults; all that propagates itself and is multiplied, all that strives to be creation; all that bears in itself fire, impulse, electricity, feeling—all this rings again in his verse. All that of old had acted upon him as being cold and dead and hostile is now inspired with will and energy, and lives its minute; in this multiple gear there is nothing that is merely dust or useless ornamentation; everything is creation, everything is working its way towards the future. The town, this piled-up Babylon of stones and men, is of a sudden a living being, a vampire sucking the strength of the land; the factories, that had seemed to him nothing but an unsightly mass of masonry, now become the creators of a thousand things, which in their turn create new things out of themselves. All at once Verhaeren is the socialist poet, the poet of the age of machinery, of democracy, and of the European race. And energy fills his poetry too: it is strength let loose, enthusiasm, paroxysm, ecstasy, whatever you like to call it; but always active, glowing, moving strength; never rest, always activity. His poem is no longer declamation, no longer the marmoreal monument of a mood, but a crying aloud, a fight, a convulsive starting, a stooping down and a springing up again; it is a battle materialised. For him all values have been transmuted. It is just what had repelled him most—London, monster cities, railway stations, Exchanges, which now lure him most of all as poetic problems. The more a thing seems to resist beauty—the more he has first to discover its beauty by fighting it and wrestling with it in torment—with so much the greater ecstasy does he now extol it. The strength which had murderously raged against itself now, in creative ecstasy, breaks into the world. To tear down resistance, to snatch beauty from its most hidden corner, is now for him a tenfold strength and joy of creation. Verhaeren now creates the poem of the great city in the dionysiac sense; the hymn to our own time, to Europe; creates ecstasy, renewed and renewed again, in life.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Ecce Homo!
TOWNS ('LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES')
Le siècle et son horreur se condensent en elles
Mais leur âme contient la minute éternelle.
É.V., 'Les Villes.'
When a man just recovered from illness steps for the first time with arms outspread, and as though climbing up from a dungeon, into the light of day, he is filled with a bliss beyond measure by the open air caressing him on all sides, by the orgies of the sunlight, the cataracts of deafening din: with a cry of infinite exultation he takes into himself the symphony of life. And from this first moment of his recovery Verhaeren was seized by a limitless thirst for the intoxication of life, as though with one single leap he would make good the lost years of his loneliness, of his illness, and of his crisis. His eyes, his ears, his nerves, all his senses, which had been a-hungered, now pounce on things with a pleasure that is almost murderous, and snatch everything to themselves in a frenzy of greed. At this time Verhaeren travelled from country to country, as though he would take possession of all Europe. He was in Germany, in Berlin, in Vienna, and in Prague; always a lonely wanderer; quite alone; ignorant of the language, and listening only to the voice of the town itself, to the strange, sombre murmuring, to the surge of the European metropolises. In Bayreuth he paid his devotions at the tomb of Wagner, whose music of ecstasy and passion he absorbed in Munich; in Colmar he learned to understand his beloved painter Mathias Grünewald; he saw and loved the tragic landscapes of northern Spain, those gloomy, treeless mountains, whose threatening silhouettes afterwards became the background of the fiery happenings in his drama of Philip II.; in Hamburg he was an excited spectator, day by day, of the stupendous traffic, the coming and going of the ships, the unloading and the loading of cargoes. Everywhere where life was intensive, expressive, and animated with a new energy, he passionately loved it. It is characteristic of his temperament that the harmonious beauty of peaceful and empty, of sleeping and dreaming cities appealed to him less than modern cities in their pall of soot and smoke. Almost intentionally his affection turns from the traditional ideal to one yet unknown. Florence, for many centuries the symbol of all poets, disappointed him: the Italian air was too mild, these contours were too meagre, too dreamy the streets. But London, this piled-up conglomeration of dwellings and workshops; this town that might have been cast in bronze; this teeming labyrinth of dingy streets; this ever-beating, restless heart of the world's trade with its smoke of toil threatening to eclipse the sun; this was to him a revelation. Just the industrial towns, which had thus far tempted no poet; those towns which roll up the vault of their leaden sky with their own fog and smoke, which confine their inhabitants in leagues and leagues of congested masonry, these attract him. He, who revels in colour, grew fond of Paris, to which, since then, he has returned every year for the winter months. Just what is restless and busy, confused and breathless, hunted, eager, feverish, hot with an ardour as of rut, all this Babylonian medley lures him. He loves this pell-mell multiplicity and its strange music. Often he would travel for hours on the top of heavy omnibuses, to have a bird's-eye view of the bustling throng, and here he would close his eyes the better to feel the dull rumour, this surging sound which, in its ceaselessness, is not unlike the rustling of a forest, beating against his body. No longer as in his earlier books does he follow the existence of simple callings; he loves the ascension of handiwork to mechanical labour, in which the aim is invisible, and only the grandiose organisation is revealed. And gradually this interest became the motive interest of his life. Socialism, which in those years was becoming strong and active, fell like a red drop into the morbid paleness of his poetic work. Vandervelde, the leader of the Labour Party, became his friend. And when, at this stage, the party founded the Maison du Peuple at Brussels, he readily helped, gave lectures at the Université Libre, took part in all the projects, and afterwards, wards, in the most beautiful vision of his poetical work, lifted them far above the political and actual into the great events of all humanity. His life, now inwardly established, henceforth beats with a strong and regular rhythm. He had in the meantime, by his marriage, attained a personal appeasement, a counterpoise for his unbridled restlessness. Now his wild ecstasies have their fixed point, from which they can survey the fiery vortex of the new phenomena. The morbid pictures, the feverish hallucinations, now become clear visions; not by flashes of lightning, but in a steady, beaming light are the horizons of our time now illuminated for him.
Now that he steps boldly into life, his first problem is to come to an understanding with the world around him, with his fellow-men, with the city itself. But it is not the city he lives in which interests him in a provincial sense, but the ideal, modern city, the monster city in general, this strange and uncanny thing that like a vampire has snatched to herself all the strength of the soil and of men to form a new residuum of power. She crowds together the contrasts of life; grades, in unexpected layers, immense riches over the most wretched poverty; strengthens opposing forces, and goads them to hostility, goads them to that desperate battle in which Verhaeren loves to see all things involved. The grandeur of this new organism is beyond the æsthetics of the past; and new and strange before Nature stand men also, with another rhythm, a hotter breath, quicker movements, wilder desires than were known to any association of men, to any calling or caste, of a previous time. It is a new outlook which not only sweeps the distance, but has also to reckon with height, with the piled tiers of houses, with new velocities and new conditions of space. A new blood, money, feeds these cities, a new energy fires them; they are driven to procreate a new faith, a new God, and a new art. Their dimensions, terrific, and of a beauty hitherto unknown, defy measurement; the order that rules is hidden in the earth behind a pathless wilderness.
Quel océan, ses cœurs? ...
Quels nœuds de volonté serrés en son mystère![1]
cries out the poet in wonderment as he strides through the city and is overpowered by her grandeur:
Toujours en son triomphe ou ses défaites,
Elle apparaît géante, et son cri sonne et son nom luit.[2]
He feels that an enormous energy proceeds from her; he is conscious that her atmosphere rests with a new pressure on his body, that his blood quickens to keep pace with her rhythm. Merely to be near her starts the thrill of a new delight.
En ces villes ...
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Je sens grandir et s'exalter en moi,
Et fermenter, soudain, mon cœur multiplié.[3]
Involuntarily he feels himself becoming dependent on her, feels this grandiose coupling of energy producing a similar concentration of all his forces in himself too, feels his fever becoming infectious like her own, and feels—with an intensity unknown to any other poet of our days—the identity of his personality with the soul of the city. He knows she is dangerous, knows she will fill him with all restlessness, overheat him and excite him, confuse him with her hostile contrasts.
Voici la ville en or des rouges alchimies,
Où te fondre le cœur en un creuset nouveau
Et t'affoler d'un orage d'antinomies
Si fort qu'il foudroiera tes nerfs jusqu'au cerveau.[4]
But he knows that she will impregnate him as well, give him power from her strength. There will never be a great man again who will pass her by, who will not be thrilled by her sensation, who will not live with her, and by her grow. Henceforth all new and strong men will stand in reciprocal action with her.
This great recognition of a fact is, as we have seen, not spontaneous, but painfully acquired. For in the sense of the old beauty the aspect of a modern city is frightful. She is a sleepless, an ever wakeful woman; she does not, like Nature, sometimes rest; she is never silent. Restlessly she sucks men into her whirlpool; ceaselessly she pricks their nerves; day and night her life pulses. By day she is as grey as lead; a sultry shuttle of passions; a dark mine in which men, buried in the mines of her streets, are forced to unresting toil. How dense are these virgin forests of bronze and stone; and of all these thousands of streets 'à poumons lourds et haletants, vers on ne sait quels buts inquiétants,'[5] not one seems to lead into the open, into the light of day. Monotonous, like dull eyes, glare the millions of windows; and the darksome caverns in which men, themselves like machines, sit by machines, thunder in the unseizable rhythm of petrified exertion. Not a ray is reflected on them from the eternal; hostile, repulsive, and grey the town pants in the puffed smoke of her daily labour. But night, softening all harsh lines, fierily welds the lumbering limbs together into something new. By night the town is turned into one great seduction. Passion, fettered in the day-time, breaks its chains:
... Pourtant, lorsque les soirs
Sculptent le firmament de leurs marteaux d'ébène,
La ville au loin s'étale et domine la plaine
Comme unnocturne et colossal espoir;
Elle surgit: désir, splendeur, hantise;
Sa clarté se projette en lueurs jusqu'aux cieux,
Son gaz myriadaire en buissons d'or s'attise,
Ses rails sont des chemins audacieux
Vers le bonheur fallacieux
Que la fortune et la force accompagnent;
Ses murs se dessinent pareils à une armée
Et ce qui vient d'elle encor de brume et de fumée
Arrive en appels clairs vers les campagnes.[6]
These fiery eruptions Verhaeren shapes in grandiose visions. There is the vision of the music halls: wheels of fire revolve round a house, blazing letters climb up façades and lure the crowds to sit in front of the brilliant footlights. I Here the people's hunger for sensation is fed full, and art is cruelly murdered day by day. Here tedium is tamed for an hour or so, and whipped up with colour, flame, and music for another pleasure that is waiting outside, as soon as the illusion here sinks into the night:
Et minuit sonne et la foule s'écoule
—Le hall fermé—parmi les trottoirs noirs;
Et sous les lanternes qui pendent,
Rouges, dans la brume, ainsi que des viandes,
Ce sont les filles qui attendent....[7]
they the harlots, 'les promeneuses,' 'les veuves d'elles-mêmes,'[8] who live on the sensual hunger of the masses. For sensual pleasure too is organised in cities, is guided into canals, like all instincts. But the primordial instinct is the same. The hunger which out in the fields and in the country was still pleasure in healthy food, in frothing beer, has here been converted into the idea of money. Money is what everybody hungers for here; money is the meaning of the town. 'Boire et manger de l'or'[9] is the hot dream of the crowd. Everything is expressed by money, 'tout se définit par des monnaies';[10] all values are subordinate to this new value, monetary value. Superb is the vision of the bazaar, where, on all the counters, in the many stories, everything is sold, not only as in reality objects in common use, but, in a loftier symbolism, ethical values as well: convictions and opinions, fame and name, honour and power, all the laws of life. But all this fiery blood of money flows together in the great heart of the city, flows into the Exchange, that greedy maw that swallows all the gold and spits it out again, which smelts all this hectic fever and then pours it flaming into all the veins of the city. Everything can be bought, even pleasure: in back streets, in l'étal, in the haunts where debauch lies in wait, women sell themselves as goods are sold in the bazaar. But this energy is not always regulated, not always made to flow between dikes. Here too, as in Nature, there are sudden catastrophes. Sometimes revolt is kindled, flashes up instantaneously, and this stream of money blazes itself a new trail. The masses pour out of their dismal caverns, greed takes possession of men, and the myriad-headed monster fights and bleeds for this one thing, this red-burning, relucent gold.
But the great and powerful thing in these towns is not passion; it is the hidden strength behind these passions, the noble order that keeps them in their proper limits, and holds them in check. This rumbling chaos, this inundation of things doomed to die, is dominated in the Villes Tentaculaires by three or four figures standing like statues—the tamers of passions. They are what kings and priests were of old, they who have the power of bridling ebullient energies and turning them to use. With hands of iron they hold down this wild and dangerous animal, they, the new rulers, statesmen, generals, demagogues, organisers. For the town is an animal in its movements, a beast in its passions, a brute in its instincts, a monster in its strength. It is ugly, like all rut. It cannot be contemplated with a pure pleasure, like a landscape gently and harmoniously fading in forest verdure; it rather evokes, at first, loathing, hatred, caution, and hostility. But that is the great thing in Verhaeren, that he always overcomes whatever is hostile, pain and torment, by a great vista, that in this panting steam of the unæsthetic he already sees the flame of the new beauty. Here for the first time is, seen the beauty of factories, les usines rectangulaires, the fascination of a railway station, the new beauty in the new things. If the town is indeed ugly in its denseness, ugly in the sense of all classical ideals; if the picture of it is indeed I cruel and frightful; it is yet not unfertile. 'Le siècle et son horreur se condensent en elle, mais son âme contient la minute éternelle.' And this I feeling, that in her the minute of eternity is contained, that she is the new thing risen above all the pasts, a new thing that one must perforce come to terms with, this feeling makes her momentous and beautiful to the poet. If her form is loathsome, grey, and sombre, her idea, her organisation, are grandiose and admirable. And here, as always, where admiration finds a pivot, it can give the whole world the swing from negation to assent.
But Verhaeren is by this time too little of an artist, too much interested in all the problems of life, to be able to contemplate the idea of the modern city from the æsthetic side alone. It is for him a still more important symbol for the expression of contemporary feeling.
Not only the problem of the new social stratification is poetically digested in his trilogy, but also one of the most burning and pressing questions of political economy as of politics, the struggle between the centrifugal and the centripetal power, the struggle between agrarianism and industrialism. Town and country purchase their prosperity, the one by the impoverishment of the other. Production and trade, however much one is the condition of the other, at their extreme points are hostile forces. And how, in our days in Europe, the victory between town and country is being decided in favour of the town; how, gradually, the town is absorbing the best strength of the provinces—the problem of the déracinés—this has for the first time in poetry been described by Verhaeren in his magnificent vision of Les Villes Tentaculaires. The cities have sprung up like mushrooms. Millions have conglomerated. But where have they come from? From what sources have these immense masses suddenly streamed into the mighty reservoirs? The answer is quick to come. The heart of the city is fed with the oozing blood of the country. The country is impoverished. As though they were hallucinated, the peasants migrate to where gold is minted, to the town that in the evenings flames across the horizon; to where alone riches lies, and power. They march away with their carts, to sell their last stick of furniture, their last rags; they march away with their daughter, to deliver her up to lust; they march away with their son, to let him perish in the factories; they march away to dip their hands, they also, in this roaring river of gold. The fields are deserted. Only the fantastic figures of idiots stagger along lonely paths; the abandoned flour-mills are empty, and only turn when the wind smites against them. Fever rises from the marshes, where the water, no longer gathered into dikes, spreads putrefaction and pestilence. Beggars drag themselves from door to door, with the country's barrenness reflected in their eyes; to the last lingering cultivators come, sinuously, their worst enemies, les donneurs de mauvais conseils. The emigration agent entices them to wander to the lands of gold, and they squander what they have inherited from their ancestors, to seek a far-distant hope:
Avec leur chat, avec leur chien,
Avec, pour vivre, quel moyen?
S'en vont, le soir, par la grand'route.[11]
And they who are not enticed away by emigration are evicted from hearth and home by usurers. Villages in which the dance of the kermesse has long been silent are of a sudden cut in two by a network of railways. There is no fairness in the fight. The country is conquered because the blood of its inhabitants has been sucked out of it. 'La plaine est morte et ne se défend plus.'[12] Everything streams to Oppidomagnum. This is the name given by Verhaeren in his symbolical drama Les Aubes—which, with the Campagnes Hallucinées and the Villes Tentaculaires forms the trilogy of the social revolution—to the monster city. This, with its arms as of a polypus, pitilessly sucks all the strength of the district round it. From all sides strength streams in upon it. 'Tous les chemins se rythment vers elle.' Not only from the country does she drink the strength of men, all the ocean seems to be pouring its waters only to her port. 'Toute la mer va vers la ville.'[13] The whole sea streams to the city; all the rolling waves seem only to exist that they may bring to her this wandering forest of ships. And she absorbs everything, digests it in the 'noire immensité des usines rectangulaires,'[14] greedily devours it, to spit it out again as gold.
But this immense social struggle between the country and the town expresses, like the other new phases, something yet higher. It is only a momentary symbol of an eternal schism. The country is the symbol of the Conservatives. In the country the forms of labour are petrified, calm, and regular; there life is without haste, and only regulated by the rotation of the seasons. All sensations, all forms are pure and simple. These men stand nearer to the freaks of chance: a flash of lightning, a hailstorm can destroy their labour; and so they fear God, and do not dare to doubt in Him. The town, however, symbolises progress. In the thunder of the streets of to-day no Madonna's voice is heard; the life of the individual is protected from chance by prearranged order; the fever of the new creates also a yearning for new conditions of life, new circumstances, for a new God.
L'esprit des campagnes était l'esprit de Dieu;
Il eut la peur de la recherche et des révoltes,
Il chut; et le voici qui meurt, sous les essieux
Et sous les chars en feu des récoltes.[15]
If the country was the past, the town is the future. The country only seeks to keep what it has, to preserve: its character, its beauty, its God. But the town must first of all create, must make itself the new beauty, the new faith, and the new God.
Le rêve ancien est mort et le nouveau se forge.
Il est fumant dans la pensée et la sueur
Des bras fiers de travail, des fronts fiers de lueurs,
Et la ville l'entend monter du fond des gorges
De ceux qui le portent en eux
Et le veulent crier et sangloter aux cieux.[16]
But we, Verhaeren thinks, must not belong to this world of the past, this moribund world; no, we who live in towns must think with them, must live with the new age, create in league with it, and find a new language for its dumb yearning. A return to nature is no longer possible for us: evolution cannot be screwed back again. If we have lost great values, we must replace them by new; if our religious feeling for the old God is cold and dead, we must create new ideals. We must find new aims that our ancestors knew not of; in the new forms of the city we must find a new beauty, in her noises a new rhythm, in her confusion an order, in her energy an object, in her stammering a language.
If the towns have destroyed much, they will perhaps create still more. In their melting-pot professions, races, religions, nations, languages are blended:
...les Babels enfin réalisées
Et les peuples fondus et la cité commune
Et les langues se dissolvant en une.[17]
'The old order changeth, giving place to new'; and we must not ask whether the new is better than the old; we must trust that it is so. The feverish convulsions of the great cities, this unrest, this screaming torment, cannot be in vain. For they, these pains and convulsions, are only the birth-throes of the new. But he who has been the first to feel, with a glad presentiment, this pain of the masses, this fermentation, as joy, this unrest as hope, must himself be an authentic new man, one of those who are called to give a poetic answer to all the complaints and questions of our time.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'L'Âme de la Ville' (Les Villes Tentaculaires).
[2] Ibid. (Ibid.).
[3] 'La Foule' (Les Visages de la Vie).
[4] 'Les Villes' (Les Flambeaux Noirs).
[5] 'L'Âme de la Ville' (Les Villes Tentaculaires).
[6] 'La Ville' (Les Campagnes Hallucinées).
[7] 'Les Spectacles' (Les Villes Tentaculaires).
[8] 'Les Promeneuses' (Ibid.).
[9] 'La Bourse' (Ibid.).
[10] 'Le Bazar' (Ibid.).
[11] 'Le Départ' (Les Campagnes Hallucinées).
[12] 'La Plaine' (Les Villes Tentaculaires).
[13] 'Le Port' (Ibid.).
[14] 'La Plaine' (Ibid.).
[15] 'Vers le Futur' (Les Villes Tentaculaires).
[16] 'L'Âme de la Ville' (Les Villes Tentaculaires).
[17] 'Le Port'(Ibid.).
THE MULTITUDE
Mets en accord ta force avec les destinées
Que la foule, sans le savoir,
Promulgue, en cette nuit d'angoisse illuminée.
É.V., 'La Foule.'
That great event which is the modern city was at bottom only possible by the organisation of the mighty multitudes of the people and the distribution of their forces. To organise is to weld unlike forces economically into an organism, to imitate something that has life and soul, in which nothing is superfluous and everything is necessary; it is to give a material its uniform strength, to give an idea the flesh and bones of its shape and of its possibility. Now the town has smelted the scattered forces of the country into a new material—into the multitude; it has converted much that used to be individually active force into mechanical force; it has humbled man to the condition of a handle, a rolling wheel; it has everywhere tied up the individuality of the single man in order to produce a new individuality, that of the crowd. For the multitude as a fact is a new thing. For centuries it was only a symbol, an idea. The inhabitants of whole countries were logically epitomised in a number, but with no suggestion of thus comprehending their immediate unity. Of course, in times past great armies have been known, hordes of fighting men and nomad tribes; but these only represented a volatile concentration, too unsettled, too inconstant to procreate an individuality, an æsthetic and moral value. And even those armies whose legendary greatness echoes down the centuries, the hordes of Tamerlaine, the hosts of the Persians, the legions of Rome, how poor is their number in comparison with the masses of human beings daily herded together in New York or London or Paris! Only in our own days, only in Oppidomagnum, has the multitude been welded together finally and for all time, been hooked together with bands of steel like the wheels of an immense machine; only recently has the crowd become a living being that grows and multiplies like a forest. Democracy has given it new intellectual forms, set a brain in the body, by making the multitude determinate, subject only to itself. It is a creation of the nineteenth century; it is a new value in our lives, and one that we must come to terms with; no less a value for our evolution than the highest values of the past. Walt Whitman, to whom one must constantly refer in dealing with Verhaeren's work, although—let it be expressly stated here—Verhaeren quite independently and unconsciously arrived at the same goal from the same starting-point, once said: 'Modern science and democracy seemed to be throwing out their challenge to poetry to put them in its statements in contradistinction to the songs and myths of the past.'[1] And every modern poet will have to come to terms with the masses of democracy, will have to contemplate them synthetically as an individual living being, as a man, or as a God. In his Utopian drama Les Aubes Verhaeren has ranged them among the dramatis personæ, and, to express his inner vision, he has added this stage direction: 'Les groupes agissent comme un seul personnage à faces multiples et antinomiques.' For, like the images of Indian gods, they have a hundred arms, but their cry is in unison; their will is simple; their energy is uniform; one and the same is their heart, 'le cœur myriadaire et rouge de la foule.'[2] A hundred years of life in communion, a hundred years of distress in common, of hope in common, have welded them together into one unity, into one new feeling. Sleepless and restless like a dangerous animal lies the multitude in the monster cities; all the passions of individual man are hers, vanity, hunger, anger; she has all vices and crimes in common with her smallest member, man; only, everything in her is intensified to unknown magnitudes. Everything in her passions is stupendously superdimensional, beyond calculation, and, in a new sense, divine. For just as the gods of old were formed after the image of man, save that they represented man's strength and intelligence magnified to the hundredth degree, the multitude is the synthesis of individual forces, the most prolific accumulation of passion.
With the multitude the individual comes into being, and without her he perishes. Consciously or unconsciously, every man is subject to her power. For the modern man is no longer free from the influence of others, as the tiller of the fields was in olden days, or the shepherd, or the hunter, each of whom was dependent only on the anger of heaven, the whims of the earth, on weather and hailstorms, on chance, which he clad in the august image of his god. The modern man is in all his feelings determined by the world around him, set in his place in the ranks, and moved with the ranks like a shuttle to and fro; he is a dependent in his instincts. We all feel socially; we cannot think away the others who are round us and in front of us any more than we can think away the air that nourishes us. We can flee from them, but we cannot flee away from what has penetrated us from them. For the multitude rules us like a force of nature, nourishes us with its feelings. The unsocial man is a fiction. Just as little as in a great city one can shut off one's room entirely from the noise, the rhythm of the street, just so little can one think isolatedly, just so little can the soul keep itself at a distance from the great intellectual excitements of the multitude. Verhaeren himself made the attempt in the days when he wrote the verses:
Mon rêve, enfermons-nous dans ces choses lointaines
Comme en de tragiques tombeaux.[3]
But the life of reality claimed him again; for society destroys him who turns away from her, as one is destroyed who shuts himself out from the fresh air. The poet, too, must involuntarily think with the multitude and of the multitude. For to the same extent as democracy has exercised its levelling influence, to the same extent as it has limited individualities, enrolled the poet among the class of citizens, diminished the contrasts of chance, it has at the same time matured new forces in their multiplicity. In democracy the modern poet can find everything for which the ancients felt constrained to discover gods, those incalculable forces which bind the individual like enchantment. The town, the multitude feeds his energy with its exhaustless abundance; it multiplies his own strength. For everything the individual has lost is stored in it, great heroism and ecstatic enthusiasm. It is the great source of the unexpected and the incalculable in our days, the new thing concerning which no one knows how great it will grow. To have seen in it an enrichment, instead of a restriction, of the poetic instinct, is one of the great merits of Verhaeren. For while the majority of contemporary poets still maintain the fiction of the recluse in his wistful loneliness, while they recoil from before the multitude as though from men stricken with the plague, while they create for themselves an artificial seclusion, and heedlessly go their way past locomotives and telegraphs, banks and workshops, Verhaeren drinks greedily from these sources of new strength.
Comme une vague en des fleuves perdue,
Comme une aile effacée, au fond de l'étendue,
Engouffre-toi,
Mon cœur, en ces foules battant les capitales!
Réunis tous ces courants
Et prends
Si large part à ces brusques métamorphoses
D'hommes et de choses,
Que tu sentes l'obscure et formidable loi
Qui les domine et les opprime
Soudainement, à coups d'éclairs, s'inscrire en toi.[4]
For she, 'la foule,' the multitude, is the great transposer of values in our day. She takes into her bosom and transforms the men who come to her from the country, from the four winds of heaven; none of us escapes her levelling power. The most distant races are blended in the city's huge melting-pot, are adapted to one another, and forthwith become a new thing, a different thing, a new race, the new race of contemporary man, who has made his peace with the atmosphere of the great city, who not only painfully feels the depression of her walls and his divorce from Nature, but creates himself a new strength and a new feeling of the universe in this manifold human presence. The great feat of the multitude is that it accelerates the process of changing values. The individual elements perish in favour of this individuality of a new community. Old communities lose their unity, new communities must arise. America is the first example: here, in a hundred years, one single great brotherhood, a new type, has been developed from the forces of a thousand peoples; and in our capitals, in Paris, Berlin, and London, people are already growing up who are not Frenchmen and not Germans, but in the first place only Parisians and Berliners, who have a different accent, a different way of thinking, whose native land is the great city, the multitude. The inhabitant of the great city, the democratic man of the multitude, is a sharply defined character. If he is a poet, his poetry must be social; if he is a thinker, the intelligence of the masses, the instinct of the many, must be his also. To have attempted the psychology of this multitude for the first time in poetry is one of the great feats of audacity for which we must be grateful to Verhaeren.
But these individual accumulations of men into a multitude, these combinations of millions into towns, are not isolated. One bond holds them all together: modern traffic. The distances of reality have disappeared, and with them national divisions as well. By the side of the problem of individual conglomerations which only slowly are transformed into organisms, by the side of the individual races, the individual masses, now arises a greater synthesis, the synthesis of the European race. For the men of our continent are no longer so distant, so strange to one another as they formerly were. Social democracy with its organisation encompasses the masses from one end of Europe to the other. To-day the same desires fire the men of Paris, London, St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Rome. And already one common formula directs their exertions: money.
Races des vieux pays, forces désaccordées,
Vous nouez vos destins épars, depuis le temps
Que l'or met sous vos fronts le même espoir battant.[5]
Independently of the frontiers of countries, on a broad-based foundation, a unified race, a new community, the European, is in process of formation. Here desire and reality are near touching. Verhaeren sees Europe already united by one great common energy. Europe is for him the land of consciousness. While other continents, distant as though in a dream, are still living a vegetative life, while Africa and India are still dreaming as they dreamt in the darkness of primitive times, Europe is 'la forge où se frappe l'idée,'[6] the great smithy in which all differences, all individual observations, all results, are hammered and moulded into a new intellectuality, into European consciousness. The union is not yet inwardly complete; states are still hostile and ignorant of their community; but already 'le monde entier est repensé par leurs cervelles.'[7] Already they are working at the transvaluation of all feeling in the European sense. For a new system of ethics, a new system of æsthetics, will be required by the European, who, rich by the past, strong in the feeling of the multitude, is now conscious of drawing his strength from new masses. Here it is that Verhaeren's work sings over into Utopia; and in Les Aubes, the epilogue to Les Villes Tentaculaires, this glittering rainbow rises over the visions of reality to the new ideal; the prophetic dream of a better future rises over the still struggling present.
This yearning for the European has been expressed for the first time in poetry by Verhaeren, almost contemporaneously with Walt Whitman's hailing of the American and Friedrich Nietzsche's prophecy of the superman. It would be a tempting task, and full of interest, to set up the Pan-European in antithesis to the Pan-American. But to say that Verhaeren was the first of lyric poets to feel as consciously European as Walt Whitman felt American, is to establish his rank among the most considerable men of our time. Verhaeren is possibly the only lyric poet who has felt in accordance with contemporary feeling. That epitomises his whole claim to gratitude, for it sufficiently expresses the fact that he has taken to his heart the problem of the multitude; the energy of social innovations; the æsthetics of organisation; the grandeur of mechanical production; in a word, the poetry of material things. It is our own time, the new age, that speaks in his verse; and it speaks in its new language. This rhythm which he has discovered is no literary abstraction, but beats in perfect unison with the heart-beat of the crowd; it is an echo of the panting of our monster cities, of the clanking of trains, of the cry of the people; his language is new, because it is no longer the voice of one man, but unites in itself the many voices of the multitude. He has penetrated deeper than any other man into the feeling of the masses, and their surf echoes more strongly in his verse. The hollow rumbling, the bestial and tameless strength of their voice, the surf of the multitude, has here become shape and music, the highest identity. With pride one can say of Verhaeren what he himself vaunts in his 'Captain': 'Il est la foule,'[8] he himself is the multitude.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] A Backward Glance O'er Travelled Roads.
[2] 'La Conquête (La Multiple Splendeur).
[3] 'Sous les Prétoriens' (Au Bord de la Route).
[4] 'La Foule' (Les Visages de la Vie).
[5] 'La Conquête' (La Multiple Splendeur).
[6] Ibid. (Ibid.).
[7] 'La Conquête' (Les Forces Tumultueuses).
[8] 'Le Capitaine' (Les Forces Tumultueuses).
THE RHYTHM OF LIFE
Dites, les rythmes sourds dans l'univers entier!
En définir la marche et la passante image
En un soudain langage;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Prendre et capter cet infini en un cerveau,
Pour lui donner ainsi sa plus haute existence.
É.V., 'Le Verbe'.
The rhythm of modern life is a rhythm of excitement. The city with its multitudes is never completely at rest: even in its repose, in its silence, there is a secret bubbling as of lava in the bowels of a volcano, a waiting and watching, a nervous tension tinged with fever. For the idea of energy in the myriad-headed monster city is so concentrated, so intensified, that it never loses its rumbling activity. Rest, a polar feeling, would be the inner negation, the annihilation, of this new element. True, the city with her teeming masses is not always in the fever-throes of those great eruptions of passion when through the arteries of her streets the blood streams suddenly; when all her muscles seem to contract; when cries and enthusiasm blaze up like a flame; but always something seems to be expecting this fiery second, just as in modern man there is always the whipped unrest that is avid of new things, new experiences. Modern cities are in perpetual vibration; and so is the multitude from man to man. Even if the individual is not excited, if his nerves are not always stirring with his own vibration, they are yet always vibrating in harmony with the obscure resonance of the universe. The great city's rhythm beats in our very sleep; the new rhythm, the rhythm of our life, is no longer the regular alternation of relaxation and repose, it is the steady vibration of an unintermitted activity.
Now, a modern poet who wishes to create in real harmony with contemporary feeling must himself have something of the perpetual excitement, the unremitting watchfulness, the restless and nervous sensitiveness of our time; his heart must unconsciously beat in tact with the rhythm of the world around him. But not only unrest must flicker in him, not only must that excessive delicacy of feeling which is almost morbid be in him, this neurasthenic sleeplessness—not only the negative element of our epoch, but the grandiose as well, the superdimensional, the spontaneity of the sudden discharge of forces held in reserve, the overwhelming force of the great eruption. Like the masses of our towns, he must be so fashioned that a trifle will stimulate him to the greatest passion, must be so fashioned that he cannot help being carried away by the intoxication of his own strength. Just as the masses have, so to speak, organised themselves as a body, so that there is no individual excitement in them, no irritation and inflammation of any single part, but so that a reaction of the whole body responds to every separate irritation, just in the same manner must the excitement of a modern, a contemporary poet, a poet of a great town, never be the excitement of a single sense, but, if it is to be strong, it must quiver through the whole body like an electric shock. His poetic rhythm must therefore be physically vital; it must envelop all his feeling and thinking; it must respond to every individual irritation, to every individual sensation, with the massed weight of feeling of all his vital forces: the need of a rhythm strained to the full must be, as Nietzsche has so wonderfully demonstrated in his Ecce Homo! a measure for the strength of the inspiration, a sort of balancing, as it were, of the pressure and tension of the inspiration. For the poet of to-day, if he does not wish to remain the poet of the eternal yesterday, must, as a microcosm, imitate in his passion the macrocosm of the multitude, wherein also the excitement of the individual is trivial and aimless, and only the ebullition of the whole fermenting mass is irresistible and momentous.
Then, in such poems, the rhythm of modern life will break through. At this moment we must remember what rhythm really means. The rhythm of a being is in the last instance nothing but its breathing. Everything that is alive, every organism, has breath, the interchange and resting-space between giving and taking. And so breathes a poem too; and it is worthless if it is not a living thing, if it is not an organism, a body with a soul. Only in its rhythm does it become alive, as man does in his breathing. But the diversity, the originality of the rhythm only arises from the alternation of these drawn breaths. Breathing is different in those who are calm, excited, joyous, nervous, oppressed, ecstatic. Every sensation produces its corresponding rhythm. And since every poet in his individuality represents a new form of inner passion, his poem too must have this rhythm of his own, the rhythm which expresses his personal poetic peculiarity just as characteristically as his speaking expresses an individual accent and dialect. To understand Verhaeren's rhythm we must remember this basic form of the poetic feeling at the heart of him; we must compare it with the feeling at the heart of those who have gone before him. In Victor Hugo there was the earnest, great, soaring rhythm of the loud speaker, of the preacher who never addresses individuals but always the whole nation; in Baudelaire there was the regular hymnic rhythm of the priest of art; in Verlaine the irregular, sweet, and gentle melody of one speaking in dreams. In Verhaeren, now, there is the rhythm of a man hurrying, rushing, running; of a restless, passionate man; the rhythm of the modern, of the Americanised man. It is often irregular; you hear in it the panting of one who is hunted, who is hurrying to his goal; you hear his impact with the obstacles he stumbles against, the sudden standstill of intemperate effort exhausted. But with him the rhythmic energy is never intellectual, never verbal, never musical; it is purely emotional, physical. Not only the end of the nerve vibrates and sounds; not only does the language shake the air; but out of the whole organism, as though all the nerve-strings had suddenly begun to sound the alarm, burst the terror and the ecstasy of fever. His poem is never a state of repose—no more than the multitude is ever quite repose—it is in a true sense rhythm, passion set in motion. You feel the excitement of the man in it, motion, the covering of a distance, activity; never contemplation comfortably resting, or dream girt with sleep. And as a matter of fact, it is from motion in the physical sense that nearly all his poems have arisen: Verhaeren has never composed poetry at his writing-table, but while wandering over the fields with a rhythmically moved body whose accelerated pace pulses to the very heart of the poem, or while rushing along through the din and bustle of streets in great cities. In these poems is that quicker rolling of the blood that comes from exercise, that jerk of unrest and passion tearing themselves away from repose. You feel that in this man feeling is too strong, that he would fain free himself from it, run away from it in his own body. The feeling is so strong that it turns to pain, or rather pressure, and the poem is nothing else than the erection that precedes relief, the throes that bring forth out of pregnancy. Just as the multitude in revolt bursts the bonds of its excitement and launches of a sudden all the passion dammed back for centuries, so springs from the poet like a geyser the passionate assault of words bursting from too long silence. These cries are a physical relief. These 'élans captifs dans le muscle et la chair '[1] are the relief of a convulsion, the easy breathing after oppression. As a passionate man is forced to relieve himself by gestures, or in a fit of rage, or in cries, or in weeping, or in some other state opposed to rest, the poet discharges his feeling in rhythmic words: 'L'homme à vous prononcer respirait plus à l'aise'[2] he has said of the man who was the first to force the excess of his feeling into speech.
It is, then, a force positively physical which produces Verhaeren's rhythm. It is difficult to prove such an assertion, for the state of creation is unconscious and unapproachable, although it may intuitively be detected in those moments of recreation, in that second of a new birth when a poet recites his work, when he feels, as it were, the pressure of the feeling weighing upon him artificially in recollection, when by the force of his imagination he relieves himself again as at the birth of the poem. And any one who has once heard Verhaeren reciting poetry will know how much with him the rhythm of body and poem is one and indivisible, how the excitement that becomes rhythmical in the vibrating word is at the same time converted into the identical gesture. The calm eyes grow keen, they seem to pierce the near paper; the arm is raised commandingly, and every finger of the hand is stretched out to mark the cæsura as though with an electric shock; to hammer the verses; and with the voice to eject the hurrying and almost screaming words into the room. In his movements there is then that terrific effort of one who would fain tear himself away from himself, that sublimest gesture of the poet striving away from the earth, striving away from himself, from the heavy gait of words to winged passion. Man coalesces with Nature in one second of the most wonderful identity:
Les os, le sang, les nerfs font alliance
Avec on ne sait quoi de frémissant
Dans l'air et dans le vent;
On s'éprouve léger et clair dans l'espace,
On est heureux à crier grâce,
Les faits, les principes, les lois, on comprend tout;
Le cœur tremble d'amour et l'esprit semble fou
De l'ivresse de ses idées.[3]
Every time that Verhaeren reads his poetry, this re-birth of the first creative state is renewed. It is in the first place a deliverance from pain, and in the second place it is pleasure. Again and again the word darts along like a beast let loose; in the wildest rhythm; in a rhythm that begins slowly, cautiously; quickens; then grows wilder and wilder; grows to an intoxicating monotony, an ever-increasing speed, a rattling din that reminds one of an express whizzing along at full speed. Like a locomotive—for in Verhaeren's case one has to think in images of this kind, and not in outworn tropes as of Pegasus—the poem rushes on, driven only by a measure which reminds one of the short explosions of an automobile. And as a matter of fact the scansion of the locomotive, its restless rattling, has often been the cause of the rhythmic velocity of his verses. Verhaeren himself is fond of relating that he has often, and with delight, written poems on railway journeys, and that the cadence of his verse has then been fired by the regular rattle of the train. He describes wonderfully the rapture of the speed poured into his blood by the whizzing past of trains. The whistling of the wind in moaning trees, the dashing of the foaming sea along the shore, the echo a thousand times repeated of thunder in the mountains, all these strong sounds have become rhythm in his poems; all noisy things, all violent, swift emotions have made it brusque, angry, and excited:
Oh! les rythmes fougueux de la nature entière
Et les sentir et les darder à travers soi!
Vivre les mouvements répandus dans les bois,
Le sol, les vents, la mer et les tonnerres;
Vouloir qu'en son cerveau tressaille l'univers;
Et pour en condenser les frissons clairs
En ardentes images,
Aimer, aimer, surtout la foudre et les éclairs
Dont les dévorateurs de l'espace et de l'air
Incendient leur passage![4]
But this is the new thing in Verhaeren, that he has transformed into rhythm not only the voice of Nature, but also the new noises, the grumbling of the multitude, the raging of cities, the rumbling of workshops. Often in his rhythm can be heard the beat of hammers; the hard, edged, regular whizzing of wheels; the whirring of looms; the hissing of locomotives; often the wild, restless tumult of streets; the humming and rumbling of dense masses of the people. Poets before him imitated in the harmony of their verse the monotony of sources and the babbling of water over pebbles, or the soughing voice of the wind. But he makes the voice of the new things speak; makes the rhythm of the city, this rhythm of fever and of unrest, this nervous moving of the crowd, this unquiet billowing of a new ocean, flow over into his new poem. Hence this up and down in his verses; this suddenness and unexpectedness; this incalculable element. The new, the industrial noises have here become the music of poetry. Since he does not seek to express his own individual sensation of life, but would himself only be a voice for the multitude, the rhythm is more roaring and restless than that of any individual being. Like the first poets, those of old time, before whom there were no outworn and exhausted words; like the poets whose feeling burst into flame at every word, every cry; who discovered themselves 'en exaltant la souffrance, le mal, le plaisir, le bien'; like them when they
... confrontaient à chaque instant
Leur âme étonnée et profonde
Avec le monde,[5]
poets who would be modern must compare their own soul with that of their time, must always regulate their rhythm according to the mutation of their time. Their deepest yearning must be to find not only their own personal expression, but over and above it the poetic and musical representation of the highest identity between themselves and their time. For poets are the inheritors of a great patrimony:
... En eux seuls survit, ample, intacte et profonde,
L'ardeur
Dont s'enivrait, devant la terre et sa splendeur,
L'homme naïf et clair aux premiers temps du monde;
C'est que le rythme universel traverse encor
Comme aux temps primitifs leur corps.[6]
They must, in these days, only express themselves when they have first adapted the rhythm of their own feeling to that of the universe, to the rhythm of the cities they live in, to the rhythm of the multitude from which they have grown, to the rhythm of temporal as of eternal things. They must, like a vein in the heart of the world, reproduce every beat of the great hammer, every excitement, quickening of pace and obstruction of the feeling rolled round in the whole organism; they must learn from life the rhythm which shall again achieve the great harmony that was lost between the world and the work of art.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'Le Verbe' (La Multiple Splendeur).