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?

VERHAEREN, _Rembrandt._

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 Jheir 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 I 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 lé 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_).

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