PART II

CONSTRUCTIVE FORCES

LES CAMPAGNES HALLUCINÉES--LES VILLAGES ILLUSOIRES --LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES--LES DRAMES

1893-1900

CONTEMPORARY FEELING

J'étais le carrefour où tout se rencontrait.--É.V., 'Le Mont.'

Verhaeren's deliverance from the stifling clasp of his crisis was a flight to realities. He saved himself by no longer fixing his gaze rigidly on himself and deeply probing every feeling of joy and torment, but by turning to the world of phenomena and flinging himself on its problems. He has no longer to stand in solitude facing the world; his desire is to multiply himself, to realise himself in everything that is alive, in everything that expresses a will, an idea, a form, anything at all animated. His poetic aim now is, not so much to analyse himself to himself, as to analyse himself in the whole world.

To realities, and particularly to the realities of our day, lyric poets had previously felt themselves alien. It had long been a commonplace to speak of the danger to art of industrialism, of democracy, of this age of machinery which makes pur life uniform, kills individuality, and drowns romance in actualities. All these poets have looked upon the new creations, machines, railways, monster cities, the telegraph, the telephone, all the triumphs of engineering, as a drag on the soaring of poetry. Ruskin preached that workshops should be demolished and chimneys razed to the ground; Tolstoy pointed to primitive man, who produces all his requirements from his own resources independently of any community, and saw in him the moral and æsthetic ideal of the future. In poetry, the past had gradually come to be identified with the poetical. People were enamoured of the glory that was Greece, of mail-coaches and narrow, crooked streets; they were filled with enthusiasm for all foreign cultures, and decried that of our own time as a phase of degeneration. Democracy, levelling all ranks and confining even the poet to the middle-class profession of author, seemed, as a social order, to be the correlation of machinery which, by the constructive skill of workshops, renders all manual dexterity unnecessary. All the poets, who were glad to avail themselves of the practical advantages provided by technical science, who had no objection to covering immense distances in the minimum time, who accepted the comfort of the modern house, the luxury of modern conditions of life, increased pecuniary rewards and social independence, refused obstinately to discover in these advantages a single poetic motive, a single object of inspiration, the least stimulus or ecstasy. Poetry had by degrees come to be something which was the very opposite of what-, ever is useful; all evolution seemed to these poets to be, from the point of view of culture, retrogression.

Now it is Verhaeren's great exploit that he effected a transmutation poetic values. He discovered the sublime in the far-spread serried ranks of democracy; beauty he found not only where it adapts itself to traditional ideas, but also where, still hidden by the cotyledon of the new, it is just beginning to unfold. By rejecting no phenomenon, in so far as an inward sense and a necessity dwelt in it, he infinitely extended the boundaries of the lyric art. He found a fruitful soil in the very places where all other poets despaired of poetic seed. He and he alone, who had for so long been eating his heart out in fierce isolation, feels the strength and fulness of society, the poetical element in the massed strength of great cities and in great inventions. _His deepest longing, his most sublime exploit is the lyric discovery of the new beauty in new things._

The only way to this feat lay for him through the conviction that beauty does not express anything absolute, but something that changes with circumstances and with men; that beauty, like everything that is subject to evolution, is constantly changing. Yesterday's beauty is not to-day's beauty. Beauty is no more opposed than anything else to that tendency to spiritualisation which is the most characteristic symptom ind result of all culture. Physiologists have proved that the physical strength of modern man is inferior to that of his ancestors, but that his nervous system is more developed, so that strength is more and more concentrated in the intellect. The Hellenic hero was the wrestler, the expression of a body harmoniously developed in every limb, the perfection of strength and skill; the hero of our time is the thinker, the ideal of intellectual strength and suppleness. And since our only way of estimating the perfection of things is by the ideal of our personal feeling, the form of beauty likewise has been transformed and become intellectual. And even when we seek it in the body, as, for instance, in the ideal woman's figure, we have grown accustomed to seeing perfection not so much in robustness and plumpness as in a noble, slender play of lines which mysteriously expresses the soul. Beauty is turning away more and more from the outer surface, from the physical, to the interior aspects, to the psychic. In proportion as motive forces hide themselves and as harmony becomes less obvious, beauty intellectualises itself. It is becoming for us not so much a beauty of appearance as a beauty of; aim. If we are to admire the telegraph or the telephone, we shall not be satisfied with considering the exterior forms, the network of wires, the keys, the receivers; we shall be impressed rather by the ideal beauty, by the idea of a vibrating spark leaping over countries and whole continents. A machine is not wonderful on, account of its rattling, rusty, iron framework, but by the idea, deep-seated in its body, which is the principle of its magical activity. A modern idea of beauty must be adapted not only to the idea of beauty of the past, but also to that of the future. And the future of æsthetics is a kind of ideology, or, as Renan expresses it, an identity with the sciences. We shall lose the habit of understanding things only by our senses, of seeing their harmony only on their exterior surface, and we shall have to learn how to conceive their intellectual aims, their inner form, their psychic organisation, as beauty.

For these new things are only ugly when they are regarded with the eyes of a past century, when our contemporaries, jealously guarding a reverent over-estimation, valuing the rust and not the gold, despise modern works of art, and pay a thousand times too dear for the indifferent productions of a past age. Only in this state of feeling is it possible to esteem mail-coaches poetical and locomotives ugly; only thus is it possible for poets, who have not learned to see with emancipated and independent eyes, to assume such a hostile attitude, or at the best an indifferent attitude, to our realities. Let us remember Nietzsche's beautiful words: 'My formula for grandeur in man is _amor fati_: that a man should ask for nothing else, either in the past or in the future, in all eternity. We must not only endure what is necessary, still less conceal it--all idealism is lying in necessity's face--but we must _love_ it.'[1] And in this sense some few in our days have loved what is new, first as a necessity, and then as beauty. A generation ago now, Carlyle was the first to preach the heroism of everyday life, and exhorted the poets of his day not to describe the greatness they found in mouldy chronicles, but to look for it where it was nearest to them, in the realities around them. Constantin Meunier has found the idea of a new sculpture in democracy, Whistler and Monet have discovered in the smoky breath of this age of machinery a new tone of colour which is not less beautiful than Italy's eternal azure and the halcyon sky of Greece. It is only from the vast agglomerations, the immense dimensions of the new world that Walt Whitman has derived the strength and power of his voice. The whole difficulty which thus far has permitted only a few to serve the new beauty in the new things lies in the fact that our age is not yet a period of decided conviction, but only one of transition. The victory of machinery is not yet complete; handiwork still subsists, little towns still flourish, it is still possible to take refuge in an idyll, to find the old beauty in some sequestered corner. Not till the poet is shut off from all flight to inherited ideals will he be forced to change himself into a new man. For the new things have not yet organically developed their beauty. Every new thing on its first appearance is blended with something repellent, brutal, and ugly; it is only gradually that its inherent form shapes itself æsthetically. The first steamers, the first locomotives, the first automobiles, were ugly. But the slender, agile torpedo-boats of to-day, the bright-coloured, noiselessly--gliding automobiles with their hidden mechanism, the great, broad-chested Pacific Railway engines of to-day, are impressive by their outward form alone. Our huge shops, such as those which Messel built in Berlin, display a beauty in iron and glass which is hardly less than that of the cathedrals and palaces of old time. Certain great things, such as the Eiffel Tower, the Forth Bridge, modern men-of-war, furnaces belching flame, the Paris boulevards, have a new beauty beyond anything which past ages had to show. These new things compel a new enhancement of value, on the one hand by the idea that moves them, on the other hand by their democratic grandeur and their vast dimensions--equalled by none but the very greatest works of antiquity. But whatever is beautiful must, sooner or later, be conceived of as poetry. And thus, it is quite sure, Verhaeren has only been one of the first to build bridges from the old to the new time; others will come who will celebrate the new beauties in the new things--gigantic cities, engines, industrialism, democracy, this fiery striving for new standards of greatness--and they will not only be compelled to find the new beauties, they will also have to establish new laws for this new order, a different morality, a different religion, a different synthesis for this new conditionality. the poetic transmutation of the beautiful is only a first beginning of the poetic transmutation of the feeling of life.

But a poet never finds anything in things save his own temperament. If he is melancholy, the world in his books is void of sense, all lights are extinguished, laughter dies; if he is passionate, all feelings seethe in a fiery froth as though in a cauldron, and foam up in angry happenings. Whereas the real world is manifold, and contains the elixirs of pleasure and pain, confidence and despair, love and hate, only as elements so to speak, the world of great poets is the world of one single feeling. And so Verhaeren too sees all things in their new beauty with the feelings of his own life only, only with energy. In these the fiery years of his prime it is not harmony that he seeks, but energy, power. For him a thing is the more beautiful the more purpose, will, power, energy it contains. And since the whole world of to-day is over-heated with effort and energy; since our great towns are nothing but centres of multiplied energy; since machinery expresses nothing save force tanied and organised; since innumerable crowds are yoked in harmonious action--to him the world is full of beauty. He loves the new age because it does not isolate effort but condenses it, because it is not scattered but concentrated for action. And of a sudden everything he sees appears to be filled with soul. All that has will, all that has an aim in view--man, machine, crowd, city, money; all that vibrates, works, hammers, travels, exults; all that propagates itself and is multiplied, all that strives to be creation; all that bears in itself fire, impulse, electricity, feeling--all this rings again in his verse. All that of old had acted upon him as being cold and dead and hostile is now inspired with will and energy, and lives its minute; in this multiple gear there is nothing that is merely dust or useless ornamentation; everything is creation, everything is working its way towards the future. The town, this piled-up Babylon of stones and men, is of a sudden a living being, a vampire sucking the strength of the land; the factories, that had seemed to him nothing but an unsightly mass of masonry, now become the creators of a thousand things, which in their turn create new things out of themselves. All at once Verhaeren is the socialist poet, the poet of the age of machinery, of democracy, and of the European race. And energy fills his poetry too: it is strength let loose, enthusiasm, paroxysm, ecstasy, whatever you like to call it; but always active, glowing, moving strength; never rest, always

## activity. His poem is no longer declamation, no longer the marmoreal

monument of a mood, but a crying aloud, a fight, a convulsive starting, a stooping down and a springing up again; it is a battle materialised. For him all values have been transmuted. It is just what had repelled him most--London, monster cities, railway stations, Exchanges, which now lure him most of all as poetic problems. The more a thing seems to resist beauty--the more he has first to discover its beauty by fighting it and wrestling with it in torment--with so much the greater ecstasy does he now extol it. The strength which had murderously raged against itself now, in creative ecstasy, breaks into the world. To tear down resistance, to snatch beauty from its most hidden corner, is now for him a tenfold strength and joy of creation. _Verhaeren now creates the poem of the great city in the dionysiac sense_; the hymn to our own time, to Europe; creates ecstasy, renewed and renewed again, in life.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Ecce Homo!_

TOWNS ('LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES')

Le siècle et son horreur se condensent en elles Mais leur âme contient la minute éternelle. É.V., 'Les Villes.'

When a man just recovered from illness steps for the first time with arms outspread, and as though climbing up from a dungeon, into the light of day, he is filled with a bliss beyond measure by the open air caressing him on all sides, by the orgies of the sunlight, the cataracts of deafening din: with a cry of infinite exultation he takes into himself the symphony of life. And from this first moment of his recovery Verhaeren was seized by a limitless thirst for the intoxication of life, as though with one single leap he would make good the lost years of his loneliness, of his illness, and of his crisis. His eyes, his ears, his nerves, all his senses, which had been a-hungered, now pounce on things with a pleasure that is almost murderous, and snatch everything to themselves in a frenzy of greed. At this time Verhaeren travelled from country to country, as though he would take possession of all Europe. He was in Germany, in Berlin, in Vienna, and in Prague; always a lonely wanderer; quite alone; ignorant of the language, and listening only to the voice of the town itself, to the strange, sombre murmuring, to the surge of the European metropolises. In Bayreuth he paid his devotions at the tomb of Wagner, whose music of ecstasy and passion he absorbed in Munich; in Colmar he learned to understand his beloved painter Mathias Grünewald; he saw and loved the tragic landscapes of northern Spain, those gloomy, treeless mountains, whose threatening silhouettes afterwards became the background of the fiery happenings in his drama of _Philip II._; in Hamburg he was an excited spectator, day by day, of the stupendous traffic, the coming and going of the ships, the unloading and the loading of cargoes. Everywhere where life was intensive, expressive, and animated with a new energy, he passionately loved it. It is characteristic of his temperament that the harmonious beauty of peaceful and empty, of sleeping and dreaming cities appealed to him less than modern cities in their pall of soot and smoke. Almost intentionally his affection turns from the traditional ideal to one yet unknown. Florence, for many centuries the symbol of all poets, disappointed him: the Italian air was too mild, these contours were too meagre, too dreamy the streets. But London, this piled-up conglomeration of dwellings and workshops; this town that might have been cast in bronze; this teeming labyrinth of dingy streets; this ever-beating, restless heart of the world's trade with its smoke of toil threatening to eclipse the sun; this was to him a revelation. Just the industrial towns, which had thus far tempted no poet; those towns which roll up the vault of their leaden sky with their own fog and smoke, which confine their inhabitants in leagues and leagues of congested masonry, these attract him. He, who revels in colour, grew fond of Paris, to which, since then, he has returned every year for the winter months. Just what is restless and busy, confused and breathless, hunted, eager, feverish, hot with an ardour as of rut, all this Babylonian medley lures him. He loves this pell-mell multiplicity and its strange music. Often he would travel for hours on the top of heavy omnibuses, to have a bird's-eye view of the bustling throng, and here he would close his eyes the better to feel the dull rumour, this surging sound which, in its ceaselessness, is not unlike the rustling of a forest, beating against his body. No longer as in his earlier books does he follow the existence of simple callings; he loves the ascension of handiwork to mechanical labour, in which the aim is invisible, and only the grandiose organisation is revealed. And gradually this interest became the motive interest of his life. Socialism, which in those years was becoming strong and active, fell like a red drop into the morbid paleness of his poetic work. Vandervelde, the leader of the Labour Party, became his friend. And when, at this stage, the party founded the Maison du Peuple at Brussels, he readily helped, gave lectures at the Université Libre, took part in all the projects, and afterwards, wards, in the most beautiful vision of his poetical work, lifted them far above the political and actual into the great events of all humanity. His life, now inwardly established, henceforth beats with a strong and regular rhythm. He had in the meantime, by his marriage, attained a personal appeasement, a counterpoise for his unbridled restlessness. Now his wild ecstasies have their fixed point, from which they can survey the fiery vortex of the new phenomena. The morbid pictures, the feverish hallucinations, now become clear visions; not by flashes of lightning, but in a steady, beaming light are the horizons of our time now illuminated for him.

Now that he steps boldly into life, his first problem is to come to an understanding with the world around him, with his fellow-men, with the city itself. But it is not the city he lives in which interests him in a provincial sense, but the ideal, modern city, the monster city in general, this strange and uncanny thing that like a vampire has snatched to herself all the strength of the soil and of men to form a new residuum of power. She crowds together the contrasts of life; grades, in unexpected layers, immense riches over the most wretched poverty; strengthens opposing forces, and goads them to hostility, goads them to that desperate battle in which Verhaeren loves to see all things involved. The grandeur of this new organism is beyond the æsthetics of the past; and new and strange before Nature stand men also, with another rhythm, a hotter breath, quicker movements, wilder desires than were known to any association of men, to any calling or caste, of a previous time. It is a new outlook which not only sweeps the distance, but has also to reckon with height, with the piled tiers of houses, with new velocities and new conditions of space. A new blood, money, feeds these cities, a new energy fires them; they are driven to procreate a new faith, a new God, and a new art. Their dimensions, terrific, and of a beauty hitherto unknown, defy measurement; the order that rules is hidden in the earth behind a pathless wilderness.

Quel océan, ses cœurs? ... Quels nœuds de volonté serrés en son mystère![1]

cries out the poet in wonderment as he strides through the city and is overpowered by her grandeur:

Toujours en son triomphe ou ses défaites, Elle apparaît géante, et son cri sonne et son nom luit.[2]

He feels that an enormous energy proceeds from her; he is conscious that her atmosphere rests with a new pressure on his body, that his blood quickens to keep pace with her rhythm. Merely to be near her starts the thrill of a new delight.

En ces villes ... * * * * * Je sens grandir et s'exalter en moi, Et fermenter, soudain, mon cœur multiplié.[3]

Involuntarily he feels himself becoming dependent on her, feels this grandiose coupling of energy producing a similar concentration of all his forces in himself too, feels his fever becoming infectious like her own, and feels--with an intensity unknown to any other poet of our days--the identity of his personality with the soul of the city. He knows she is dangerous, knows she will fill him with all restlessness, overheat him and excite him, confuse him with her hostile contrasts.

Voici la ville en or des rouges alchimies, Où te fondre le cœur en un creuset nouveau Et t'affoler d'un orage d'antinomies Si fort qu'il foudroiera tes nerfs jusqu'au cerveau.[4]

But he knows that she will impregnate him as well, give him power from her strength. There will never be a great man again who will pass her by, who will not be thrilled by her sensation, who will not live with her, and by her grow. Henceforth all new and strong men will stand in reciprocal action with her.

This great recognition of a fact is, as we have seen, not spontaneous, but painfully acquired. For in the sense of the old beauty the aspect of a modern city is frightful. She is a sleepless, an ever wakeful woman; she does not, like Nature, sometimes rest; she is never silent. Restlessly she sucks men into her whirlpool; ceaselessly she pricks their nerves; day and night her life pulses. By day she is as grey as lead; a sultry shuttle of passions; a dark mine in which men, buried in the mines of her streets, are forced to unresting toil. How dense are these virgin forests of bronze and stone; and of all these thousands of streets 'à poumons lourds et haletants, vers on ne sait quels buts inquiétants,'[5] not one seems to lead into the open, into the light of day. Monotonous, like dull eyes, glare the millions of windows; and the darksome caverns in which men, themselves like machines, sit by machines, thunder in the unseizable rhythm of petrified exertion. Not a ray is reflected on them from the eternal; hostile, repulsive, and grey the town pants in the puffed smoke of her daily labour. But night, softening all harsh lines, fierily welds the lumbering limbs together into something new. By night the town is turned into one great seduction. Passion, fettered in the day-time, breaks its chains:

... Pourtant, lorsque les soirs Sculptent le firmament de leurs marteaux d'ébène, La ville au loin s'étale et domine la plaine Comme unnocturne et colossal espoir; Elle surgit: désir, splendeur, hantise; Sa clarté se projette en lueurs jusqu'aux cieux, Son gaz myriadaire en buissons d'or s'attise, Ses rails sont des chemins audacieux Vers le bonheur fallacieux Que la fortune et la force accompagnent; Ses murs se dessinent pareils à une armée Et ce qui vient d'elle encor de brume et de fumée Arrive en appels clairs vers les campagnes.[6]

These fiery eruptions Verhaeren shapes in grandiose visions. There is the vision of the music halls: wheels of fire revolve round a house, blazing letters climb up façades and lure the crowds to sit in front of the brilliant footlights. I Here the people's hunger for sensation is fed full, and art is cruelly murdered day by day. Here tedium is tamed for an hour or so, and whipped up with colour, flame, and music for another pleasure that is waiting outside, as soon as the illusion here sinks into the night:

Et minuit sonne et la foule s'écoule --Le hall fermé--parmi les trottoirs noirs; Et sous les lanternes qui pendent, Rouges, dans la brume, ainsi que des viandes, Ce sont les filles qui attendent....[7]

they the harlots, 'les promeneuses,' 'les veuves d'elles-mêmes,'[8] who live on the sensual hunger of the masses. For sensual pleasure too is organised in cities, is guided into canals, like all instincts. But the primordial instinct is the same. The hunger which out in the fields and in the country was still pleasure in healthy food, in frothing beer, has here been converted into the idea of money. Money is what everybody hungers for here; money is the meaning of the town. 'Boire et manger de l'or'[9] is the hot dream of the crowd. Everything is expressed by money, 'tout se définit par des monnaies';[10] all values are subordinate to this new value, monetary value. Superb is the vision of the bazaar, where, on all the counters, in the many stories, everything is sold, not only as in reality objects in common use, but, in a loftier symbolism, ethical values as well: convictions and opinions, fame and name, honour and power, all the laws of life. But all this fiery blood of money flows together in the great heart of the city, flows into the Exchange, that greedy maw that swallows all the gold and spits it out again, which smelts all this hectic fever and then pours it flaming into all the veins of the city. Everything can be bought, even pleasure: in back streets, in _l'étal_, in the haunts where debauch lies in wait, women sell themselves as goods are sold in the bazaar. But this energy is not always regulated, not always made to flow between dikes. Here too, as in Nature, there are sudden catastrophes. Sometimes revolt is kindled, flashes up instantaneously, and this stream of money blazes itself a new trail. The masses pour out of their dismal caverns, greed takes possession of men, and the myriad-headed monster fights and bleeds for this one thing, this red-burning, relucent gold.

But the great and powerful thing in these towns is not passion; it is the hidden strength behind these passions, the noble order that keeps them in their proper limits, and holds them in check. This rumbling chaos, this inundation of things doomed to die, is dominated in the _Villes Tentaculaires_ by three or four figures standing like statues--the tamers of passions. They are what kings and priests were of old, they who have the power of bridling ebullient energies and turning them to use. With hands of iron they hold down this wild and dangerous animal, they, the new rulers, statesmen, generals, demagogues, organisers. For the town is an animal in its movements, a beast in its passions, a brute in its instincts, a monster in its strength. It is ugly, like all rut. It cannot be contemplated with a pure pleasure, like a landscape gently and harmoniously fading in forest verdure; it rather evokes, at first, loathing, hatred, caution, and hostility. But that is the great thing in Verhaeren, that he always overcomes whatever is hostile, pain and torment, by a great vista, that in this panting steam of the unæsthetic he already sees the flame of the new beauty. Here for the first time is, seen the beauty of factories, _les usines rectangulaires,_ the fascination of a railway station, the new beauty in the new things. If the town is indeed ugly in its denseness, ugly in the sense of all classical ideals; if the picture of it is indeed I cruel and frightful; it is yet not unfertile. 'Le siècle et son horreur se condensent en elle, mais son âme contient la minute éternelle.' And this I feeling, that in her the minute of eternity is contained, that she is the new thing risen above all the pasts, a new thing that one must perforce come to terms with, this feeling makes her momentous and beautiful to the poet. If her form is loathsome, grey, and sombre, her idea, her organisation, are grandiose and admirable. And here, as always, where admiration finds a pivot, it can give the whole world the swing from negation to assent.

But Verhaeren is by this time too little of an artist, too much interested in all the problems of life, to be able to contemplate the idea of the modern city from the æsthetic side alone. It is for him a still more important symbol for the expression of contemporary feeling.

Not only the problem of the new social stratification is poetically digested in his trilogy, but also one of the most burning and pressing questions of political economy as of politics, the struggle between the centrifugal and the centripetal power, the struggle between agrarianism and industrialism. Town and country purchase their prosperity, the one by the impoverishment of the other. Production and trade, however much one is the condition of the other, at their extreme points are hostile forces. And how, in our days in Europe, the victory between town and country is being decided in favour of the town; how, gradually, the town is absorbing the best strength of the provinces--the problem of the _déracinés_--this has for the first time in poetry been described by Verhaeren in his magnificent vision of _Les Villes Tentaculaires_. The cities have sprung up like mushrooms. Millions have conglomerated. But where have they come from? From what sources have these immense masses suddenly streamed into the mighty reservoirs? The answer is quick to come. The heart of the city is fed with the oozing blood of the country. The country is impoverished. As though they were hallucinated, the peasants migrate to where gold is minted, to the town that in the evenings flames across the horizon; to where alone riches lies, and power. They march away with their carts, to sell their last stick of furniture, their last rags; they march away with their daughter, to deliver her up to lust; they march away with their son, to let him perish in the factories; they march away to dip their hands, they also, in this roaring river of gold. The fields are deserted. Only the fantastic figures of idiots stagger along lonely paths; the abandoned flour-mills are empty, and only turn when the wind smites against them. Fever rises from the marshes, where the water, no longer gathered into dikes, spreads putrefaction and pestilence. Beggars drag themselves from door to door, with the country's barrenness reflected in their eyes; to the last lingering cultivators come, sinuously, their worst enemies, _les donneurs de mauvais conseils_. The emigration agent entices them to wander to the lands of gold, and they squander what they have inherited from their ancestors, to seek a far-distant hope:

Avec leur chat, avec leur chien, Avec, pour vivre, quel moyen? S'en vont, le soir, par la grand'route.[11]

And they who are not enticed away by emigration are evicted from hearth and home by usurers. Villages in which the dance of the kermesse has long been silent are of a sudden cut in two by a network of railways. There is no fairness in the fight. The country is conquered because the blood of its inhabitants has been sucked out of it. 'La plaine est morte et ne se défend plus.'[12] Everything streams to Oppidomagnum. This is the name given by Verhaeren in his symbolical drama _Les Aubes_--which, with the _Campagnes Hallucinées_ and the _Villes Tentaculaires_ forms the trilogy of the social revolution--to the monster city. This, with its arms as of a polypus, pitilessly sucks all the strength of the district round it. From all sides strength streams in upon it. 'Tous les chemins se rythment vers elle.' Not only from the country does she drink the strength of men, all the ocean seems to be pouring its waters only to her port. 'Toute la mer va vers la ville.'[13] The whole sea streams to the city; all the rolling waves seem only to exist that they may bring to her this wandering forest of ships. And she absorbs everything, digests it in the 'noire immensité des usines rectangulaires,'[14] greedily devours it, to spit it out again as gold.

But this immense social struggle between the country and the town expresses, like the other new phases, something yet higher. It is only a momentary symbol of an eternal schism. The country is the symbol of the Conservatives. In the country the forms of labour are petrified, calm, and regular; there life is without haste, and only regulated by the rotation of the seasons. All sensations, all forms are pure and simple. These men stand nearer to the freaks of chance: a flash of lightning, a hailstorm can destroy their labour; and so they fear God, and do not dare to doubt in Him. The town, however, symbolises progress. In the thunder of the streets of to-day no Madonna's voice is heard; the life of the individual is protected from chance by prearranged order; the fever of the new creates also a yearning for new conditions of life, new circumstances, for a new God.

L'esprit des campagnes était l'esprit de Dieu; Il eut la peur de la recherche et des révoltes, Il chut; et le voici qui meurt, sous les essieux Et sous les chars en feu des récoltes.[15]

If the country was the past, the town is the future. The country only seeks to keep what it has, to preserve: its character, its beauty, its God. But the town must first of all create, must make itself the new beauty, the new faith, and the new God.

Le rêve ancien est mort et le nouveau se forge. Il est fumant dans la pensée et la sueur Des bras fiers de travail, des fronts fiers de lueurs, Et la ville l'entend monter du fond des gorges De ceux qui le portent en eux Et le veulent crier et sangloter aux cieux.[16]

But we, Verhaeren thinks, must not belong to this world of the past, this moribund world; no, we who live in towns must think with them, must live with the new age, create in league with it, and find a new language for its dumb yearning. A return to nature is no longer possible for us: evolution cannot be screwed back again. If we have lost great values, we must replace them by new; if our religious feeling for the old God is cold and dead, we must create new ideals. We must find new aims that our ancestors knew not of; in the new forms of the city we must find a new beauty, in her noises a new rhythm, in her confusion an order, in her energy an object, in her stammering a language.

If the towns have destroyed much, they will perhaps create still more. In their melting-pot professions, races, religions, nations, languages are blended:

...les Babels enfin réalisées Et les peuples fondus et la cité commune Et les langues se dissolvant en une.[17]

'The old order changeth, giving place to new'; and we must not ask whether the new is better than the old; we must trust that it is so. The feverish convulsions of the great cities, this unrest, this screaming torment, cannot be in vain. For they, these pains and convulsions, are only the birth-throes of the new. But he who has been the first to feel, with a glad presentiment, this pain of the masses, this fermentation, as joy, this unrest as hope, must himself be an authentic new man, one of those who are called to give a poetic answer to all the complaints and questions of our time.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] 'L'Âme de la Ville' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).

[2] Ibid. (_Ibid._).

[3] 'La Foule' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).

[4] 'Les Villes' (_Les Flambeaux Noirs_).

[5] 'L'Âme de la Ville' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).

[6] 'La Ville' (_Les Campagnes Hallucinées_).

[7] 'Les Spectacles' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).

[8] 'Les Promeneuses' (_Ibid_.).

[9] 'La Bourse' (_Ibid._).

[10] 'Le Bazar' (_Ibid._).

[11] 'Le Départ' (_Les Campagnes Hallucinées_).

[12] 'La Plaine' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).

[13] 'Le Port' (_Ibid._).

[14] 'La Plaine' (_Ibid._).

[15] 'Vers le Futur' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).

[16] 'L'Âme de la Ville' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).

[17] 'Le Port'(_Ibid._).

THE MULTITUDE

Mets en accord ta force avec les destinées Que la foule, sans le savoir, Promulgue, en cette nuit d'angoisse illuminée. É.V., 'La Foule.'

That great event which is the modern city was at bottom only possible by the organisation of the mighty multitudes of the people and the distribution of their forces. To organise is to weld unlike forces economically into an organism, to imitate something that has life and soul, in which nothing is superfluous and everything is necessary; it is to give a material its uniform strength, to give an idea the flesh and bones of its shape and of its possibility. Now the town has smelted the scattered forces of the country into a new material--into the multitude; it has converted much that used to be individually active force into mechanical force; it has humbled man to the condition of a handle, a rolling wheel; it has everywhere tied up the individuality of the single man in order to produce a new individuality, that of the crowd. For the multitude as a fact is a new thing. For centuries it was only a symbol, an idea. The inhabitants of whole countries were logically epitomised in a number, but with no suggestion of thus comprehending their immediate unity. Of course, in times past great armies have been known, hordes of fighting men and nomad tribes; but these only represented a volatile concentration, too unsettled, too inconstant to procreate an individuality, an æsthetic and moral value. And even those armies whose legendary greatness echoes down the centuries, the hordes of Tamerlaine, the hosts of the Persians, the legions of Rome, how poor is their number in comparison with the masses of human beings daily herded together in New York or London or Paris! Only in our own days, only in Oppidomagnum, has the multitude been welded together finally and for all time, been hooked together with bands of steel like the wheels of an immense machine; only recently has the crowd become a living being that grows and multiplies like a forest. Democracy has given it new intellectual forms, set a brain in the body, by making the multitude determinate, subject only to itself. It is a creation of the nineteenth century; it is a new value in our lives, and one that we must come to terms with; no less a value for our evolution than the highest values of the past. Walt Whitman, to whom one must constantly refer in dealing with Verhaeren's work, although--let it be expressly stated here--Verhaeren quite independently and unconsciously arrived at the same goal from the same starting-point, once said: 'Modern science and democracy seemed to be throwing out their challenge to poetry to put them in its statements in contradistinction to the songs and myths of the past.'[1] And every modern poet will have to come to terms with the masses of democracy, will have to contemplate them synthetically as an individual living being, as a man, or as a God. In his Utopian drama _Les Aubes_ Verhaeren has ranged them among the dramatis personæ, and, to express his inner vision, he has added this stage direction: 'Les groupes agissent comme un seul personnage à faces multiples et antinomiques.' For, like the images of Indian gods, they have a hundred arms, but their cry is in unison; their will is simple; their energy is uniform; one and the same is their heart, 'le cœur myriadaire et rouge de la foule.'[2] A hundred years of life in communion, a hundred years of distress in common, of hope in common, have welded them together into one unity, into one new feeling. Sleepless and restless like a dangerous animal lies the multitude in the monster cities; all the passions of individual man are hers, vanity, hunger, anger; she has all vices and crimes in common with her smallest member, man; only, everything in her is intensified to unknown magnitudes. Everything in her passions is stupendously superdimensional, beyond calculation, and, in a new sense, divine. For just as the gods of old were formed after the image of man, save that they represented man's strength and intelligence magnified to the hundredth degree, the multitude is the synthesis of individual forces, the most prolific accumulation of passion.

With the multitude the individual comes into being, and without her he perishes. Consciously or unconsciously, every man is subject to her power. For the modern man is no longer free from the influence of others, as the tiller of the fields was in olden days, or the shepherd, or the hunter, each of whom was dependent only on the anger of heaven, the whims of the earth, on weather and hailstorms, on chance, which he clad in the august image of his god. The modern man is in all his feelings determined by the world around him, set in his place in the ranks, and moved with the ranks like a shuttle to and fro; he is a dependent in his instincts. We all feel socially; we cannot think away the others who are round us and in front of us any more than we can think away the air that nourishes us. We can flee from them, but we cannot flee away from what has penetrated us from them. For the multitude rules us like a force of nature, nourishes us with its feelings. The unsocial man is a fiction. Just as little as in a great city one can shut off one's room entirely from the noise, the rhythm of the street, just so little can one think isolatedly, just so little can the soul keep itself at a distance from the great intellectual excitements of the multitude. Verhaeren himself made the attempt in the days when he wrote the verses:

Mon rêve, enfermons-nous dans ces choses lointaines Comme en de tragiques tombeaux.[3]

But the life of reality claimed him again; for society destroys him who turns away from her, as one is destroyed who shuts himself out from the fresh air. The poet, too, must involuntarily think with the multitude and of the multitude. For to the same extent as democracy has exercised its levelling influence, to the same extent as it has limited individualities, enrolled the poet among the class of citizens, diminished the contrasts of chance, it has at the same time matured new forces in their multiplicity. In democracy the modern poet can find everything for which the ancients felt constrained to discover gods, those incalculable forces which bind the individual like enchantment. The town, the multitude feeds his energy with its exhaustless abundance; it multiplies his own strength. For everything the individual has lost is stored in it, great heroism and ecstatic enthusiasm. It is the great source of the unexpected and the incalculable in our days, the new thing concerning which no one knows how great it will grow. To have seen in it an enrichment, instead of a restriction, of the poetic instinct, is one of the great merits of Verhaeren. For while the majority of contemporary poets still maintain the fiction of the recluse in his wistful loneliness, while they recoil from before the multitude as though from men stricken with the plague, while they create for themselves an artificial seclusion, and heedlessly go their way past locomotives and telegraphs, banks and workshops, Verhaeren drinks greedily from these sources of new strength.

Comme une vague en des fleuves perdue, Comme une aile effacée, au fond de l'étendue, Engouffre-toi, Mon cœur, en ces foules battant les capitales! Réunis tous ces courants Et prends Si large part à ces brusques métamorphoses D'hommes et de choses, Que tu sentes l'obscure et formidable loi Qui les domine et les opprime Soudainement, à coups d'éclairs, s'inscrire en toi.[4]

For she, 'la foule,' the multitude, is the great transposer of values in our day. She takes into her bosom and transforms the men who come to her from the country, from the four winds of heaven; none of us escapes her levelling power. The most distant races are blended in the city's huge melting-pot, are adapted to one another, and forthwith become a new thing, a different thing, a new race, the new race of contemporary man, who has made his peace with the atmosphere of the great city, who not only painfully feels the depression of her walls and his divorce from Nature, but creates himself a new strength and a new feeling of the universe in this manifold human presence. The great feat of the multitude is that it accelerates the process of changing values. The individual elements perish in favour of this individuality of a new community. Old communities lose their unity, new communities must arise. America is the first example: here, in a hundred years, one single great brotherhood, a new type, has been developed from the forces of a thousand peoples; and in our capitals, in Paris, Berlin, and London, people are already growing up who are not Frenchmen and not Germans, but in the first place only Parisians and Berliners, who have a different accent, a different way of thinking, whose native land is the great city, the multitude. The inhabitant of the great city, the democratic man of the multitude, is a sharply defined character. If he is a poet, his poetry must be social; if he is a thinker, the intelligence of the masses, the instinct of the many, must be his also. To have attempted the psychology of this multitude for the first time in poetry is one of the great feats of audacity for which we must be grateful to Verhaeren.

But these individual accumulations of men into a multitude, these combinations of millions into towns, are not isolated. One bond holds them all together: modern traffic. The distances of reality have disappeared, and with them national divisions as well. By the side of the problem of individual conglomerations which only slowly are transformed into organisms, by the side of the individual races, the individual masses, now arises a greater synthesis, the synthesis of the European race. For the men of our continent are no longer so distant, so strange to one another as they formerly were. Social democracy with its organisation encompasses the masses from one end of Europe to the other. To-day the same desires fire the men of Paris, London, St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Rome. And already one common formula directs their exertions: money.

Races des vieux pays, forces désaccordées, Vous nouez vos destins épars, depuis le temps Que l'or met sous vos fronts le même espoir battant.[5]

Independently of the frontiers of countries, on a broad-based foundation, a unified race, a new community, the European, is in process of formation. Here desire and reality are near touching. Verhaeren sees Europe already united by one great common energy. Europe is for him the land of consciousness. While other continents, distant as though in a dream, are still living a vegetative life, while Africa and India are still dreaming as they dreamt in the darkness of primitive times, Europe is 'la forge où se frappe l'idée,'[6] the great smithy in which all differences, all individual observations, all results, are hammered and moulded into a new intellectuality, into _European consciousness_. The union is not yet inwardly complete; states are still hostile and ignorant of their community; but already 'le monde entier est repensé par leurs cervelles.'[7] Already they are working at the transvaluation of all feeling in the European sense. For a new system of ethics, a new system of æsthetics, will be required by the European, who, rich by the past, strong in the feeling of the multitude, is now conscious of drawing his strength from new masses. Here it is that Verhaeren's work sings over into Utopia; and in _Les Aubes_, the epilogue to _Les Villes Tentaculaires,_ this glittering rainbow rises over the visions of reality to the new ideal; the prophetic dream of a better future rises over the still struggling present.

This yearning for the European has been expressed for the first time in poetry by Verhaeren, almost contemporaneously with Walt Whitman's hailing of the American and Friedrich Nietzsche's prophecy of the superman. It would be a tempting task, and full of interest, to set up the Pan-European in antithesis to the Pan-American. But to say that Verhaeren was the first of lyric poets to feel as consciously European as Walt Whitman felt American, is to establish his rank among the most considerable men of our time. Verhaeren is possibly the only lyric poet who has felt in accordance with contemporary feeling. That epitomises his whole claim to gratitude, for it sufficiently expresses the fact that he has taken to his heart the problem of the multitude; the energy of social innovations; the æsthetics of organisation; the grandeur of mechanical production; in a word, the poetry of material things. It is our own time, the new age, that speaks in his verse; and it speaks in its new language. This rhythm which he has discovered is no literary abstraction, but beats in perfect unison with the heart-beat of the crowd; it is an echo of the panting of our monster cities, of the clanking of trains, of the cry of the people; his language is new, because it is no longer the voice of one man, but unites in itself the many voices of the multitude. He has penetrated deeper than any other man into the feeling of the masses, and their surf echoes more strongly in his verse. The hollow rumbling, the bestial and tameless strength of their voice, the surf of the multitude, has here become shape and music, the highest identity. With pride one can say of Verhaeren what he himself vaunts in his 'Captain': 'Il est la foule,'[8] he himself is the multitude.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _A Backward Glance O'er Travelled Roads._

[2] 'La Conquête (_La Multiple Splendeur_).

[3] 'Sous les Prétoriens' (_Au Bord de la Route_).

[4] 'La Foule' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).

[5] 'La Conquête' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).

[6] _Ibid. (Ibid.)._

[7] 'La Conquête' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).

[8] 'Le Capitaine' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).

THE RHYTHM OF LIFE

Dites, les rythmes sourds dans l'univers entier! En définir la marche et la passante image En un soudain langage; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prendre et capter cet infini en un cerveau, Pour lui donner ainsi sa plus haute existence. É.V., 'Le Verbe'.

The rhythm of modern life is a rhythm of excitement. The city with its multitudes is never completely at rest: even in its repose, in its silence, there is a secret bubbling as of lava in the bowels of a volcano, a waiting and watching, a nervous tension tinged with fever. For the idea of energy in the myriad-headed monster city is so concentrated, so intensified, that it never loses its rumbling activity. Rest, a polar feeling, would be the inner negation, the annihilation, of this new element. True, the city with her teeming masses is not always in the fever-throes of those great eruptions of passion when through the arteries of her streets the blood streams suddenly; when all her muscles seem to contract; when cries and enthusiasm blaze up like a flame; but always something seems to be expecting this fiery second, just as in modern man there is always the whipped unrest that is avid of new things, new experiences. Modern cities are in perpetual vibration; and so is the multitude from man to man. Even if the individual is not excited, if his nerves are not always stirring with his own vibration, they are yet always vibrating in harmony with the obscure resonance of the universe. The great city's rhythm beats in our very sleep; the new rhythm, the rhythm of our life, is no longer the regular alternation of relaxation and repose, it is the steady vibration of an unintermitted

## activity.

Now, a modern poet who wishes to create in real harmony with contemporary feeling must himself have something of the perpetual excitement, the unremitting watchfulness, the restless and nervous sensitiveness of our time; his heart must unconsciously beat in tact with the rhythm of the world around him. But not only unrest must flicker in him, not only must that excessive delicacy of feeling which is almost morbid be in him, this neurasthenic sleeplessness--not only the negative element of our epoch, but the grandiose as well, the superdimensional, the spontaneity of the sudden discharge of forces held in reserve, the overwhelming force of the great eruption. Like the masses of our towns, he must be so fashioned that a trifle will stimulate him to the greatest passion, must be so fashioned that he cannot help being carried away by the intoxication of his own strength. Just as the masses have, so to speak, organised themselves as a body, so that there is no individual excitement in them, no irritation and inflammation of any single part, but so that a reaction of the whole body responds to every separate irritation, just in the same manner must the excitement of a modern, a contemporary poet, a poet of a great town, never be the excitement of a single sense, but, if it is to be strong, it must quiver through the whole body like an electric shock. His poetic rhythm must therefore be physically vital; it must envelop all his feeling and thinking; it must respond to every individual irritation, to every individual sensation, with the massed weight of feeling of all his vital forces: the need of a rhythm strained to the full must be, as Nietzsche has so wonderfully demonstrated in his _Ecce Homo_! a measure for the strength of the inspiration, a sort of balancing, as it were, of the pressure and tension of the inspiration. For the poet of to-day, if he does not wish to remain the poet of the eternal yesterday, must, as a microcosm, imitate in his passion the macrocosm of the multitude, wherein also the excitement of the individual is trivial and aimless, and only the ebullition of the whole fermenting mass is irresistible and momentous.

Then, in such poems, the _rhythm of modern life_ will break through. At this moment we must remember what rhythm really means. The rhythm of a being is in the last instance nothing but its breathing. Everything that is alive, every organism, has breath, the interchange and resting-space between giving and taking. And so breathes a poem too; and it is worthless if it is not a living thing, if it is not an organism, a body with a soul. Only in its rhythm does it become alive, as man does in his breathing. But the diversity, the originality of the rhythm only arises from the alternation of these drawn breaths. Breathing is different in those who are calm, excited, joyous, nervous, oppressed, ecstatic. Every sensation produces its corresponding rhythm. And since every poet in his individuality represents a new form of inner passion, his poem too must have this rhythm of his own, the rhythm which expresses his personal poetic peculiarity just as characteristically as his speaking expresses an individual accent and dialect. To understand Verhaeren's rhythm we must remember this basic form of the poetic feeling at the heart of him; we must compare it with the feeling at the heart of those who have gone before him. In Victor Hugo there was the earnest, great, soaring rhythm of the loud speaker, of the preacher who never addresses individuals but always the whole nation; in Baudelaire there was the regular hymnic rhythm of the priest of art; in Verlaine the irregular, sweet, and gentle melody of one speaking in dreams. In Verhaeren, now, there is the rhythm of a man hurrying, rushing, running; of a restless, passionate man; the rhythm of the modern, of the Americanised man. It is often irregular; you hear in it the panting of one who is hunted, who is hurrying to his goal; you hear his impact with the obstacles he stumbles against, the sudden standstill of intemperate effort exhausted. But with him the rhythmic energy is never intellectual, never verbal, never musical; it is purely emotional, physical. Not only the end of the nerve vibrates and sounds; not only does the language shake the air; but out of the whole organism, as though all the nerve-strings had suddenly begun to sound the alarm, burst the terror and the ecstasy of fever. His poem is never a state of repose--no more than the multitude is ever quite repose--it is in a true sense rhythm, passion set in motion. You feel the excitement of the man in it, motion, the covering of a distance, activity; never contemplation comfortably resting, or dream girt with sleep. And as a matter of fact, it is from motion in the physical sense that nearly all his poems have arisen: Verhaeren has never composed poetry at his writing-table, but while wandering over the fields with a rhythmically moved body whose accelerated pace pulses to the very heart of the poem, or while rushing along through the din and bustle of streets in great cities. In these poems is that quicker rolling of the blood that comes from exercise, that jerk of unrest and passion tearing themselves away from repose. You feel that in this man feeling is too strong, that he would fain free himself from it, run away from it in his own body. The feeling is so strong that it turns to pain, or rather pressure, and the poem is nothing else than the erection that precedes relief, the throes that bring forth out of pregnancy. Just as the multitude in revolt bursts the bonds of its excitement and launches of a sudden all the passion dammed back for centuries, so springs from the poet like a geyser the passionate assault of words bursting from too long silence. These cries are a physical relief. These 'élans captifs dans le muscle et la chair '[1] are the relief of a convulsion, the easy breathing after oppression. As a passionate man is forced to relieve himself by gestures, or in a fit of rage, or in cries, or in weeping, or in some other state opposed to rest, the poet discharges his feeling in rhythmic words: 'L'homme à vous prononcer respirait plus à l'aise'[2] he has said of the man who was the first to force the excess of his feeling into speech.

_It is, then, a force positively physical which produces Verhaeren's rhythm._ It is difficult to prove such an assertion, for the state of creation is unconscious and unapproachable, although it may intuitively be detected in those moments of recreation, in that second of a new birth when a poet recites his work, when he feels, as it were, the pressure of the feeling weighing upon him artificially in recollection, when by the force of his imagination he relieves himself again as at the birth of the poem. And any one who has once heard Verhaeren reciting poetry will know how much with him the rhythm of body and poem is one and indivisible, how the excitement that becomes rhythmical in the vibrating word is at the same time converted into the identical gesture. The calm eyes grow keen, they seem to pierce the near paper; the arm is raised commandingly, and every finger of the hand is stretched out to mark the cæsura as though with an electric shock; to hammer the verses; and with the voice to eject the hurrying and almost screaming words into the room. In his movements there is then that terrific effort of one who would fain tear himself away from himself, that sublimest gesture of the poet striving away from the earth, striving away from himself, from the heavy gait of words to winged passion. Man coalesces with Nature in one second of the most wonderful identity:

Les os, le sang, les nerfs font alliance Avec on ne sait quoi de frémissant Dans l'air et dans le vent; On s'éprouve léger et clair dans l'espace, On est heureux à crier grâce, Les faits, les principes, les lois, on comprend tout; Le cœur tremble d'amour et l'esprit semble fou De l'ivresse de ses idées.[3]

Every time that Verhaeren reads his poetry, this re-birth of the first creative state is renewed. _It is in the first place a deliverance from pain, and in the second place it is pleasure_. Again and again the word darts along like a beast let loose; in the wildest rhythm; in a rhythm that begins slowly, cautiously; quickens; then grows wilder and wilder; grows to an intoxicating monotony, an ever-increasing speed, a rattling din that reminds one of an express whizzing along at full speed. Like a locomotive--for in Verhaeren's case one has to think in images of this kind, and not in outworn tropes as of Pegasus--the poem rushes on, driven only by a measure which reminds one of the short explosions of an automobile. And as a matter of fact the scansion of the locomotive, its restless rattling, has often been the cause of the rhythmic velocity of his verses. Verhaeren himself is fond of relating that he has often, and with delight, written poems on railway journeys, and that the cadence of his verse has then been fired by the regular rattle of the train. He describes wonderfully the rapture of the speed poured into his blood by the whizzing past of trains. The whistling of the wind in moaning trees, the dashing of the foaming sea along the shore, the echo a thousand times repeated of thunder in the mountains, all these strong sounds have become rhythm in his poems; all noisy things, all violent, swift emotions have made it brusque, angry, and excited:

Oh! les rythmes fougueux de la nature entière Et les sentir et les darder à travers soi! Vivre les mouvements répandus dans les bois, Le sol, les vents, la mer et les tonnerres; Vouloir qu'en son cerveau tressaille l'univers; Et pour en condenser les frissons clairs En ardentes images, Aimer, aimer, surtout la foudre et les éclairs Dont les dévorateurs de l'espace et de l'air Incendient leur passage![4]

But this is the new thing in Verhaeren, that he has transformed into rhythm not only the voice of Nature, but also the new noises, the grumbling of the multitude, the raging of cities, the rumbling of workshops. Often in his rhythm can be heard the beat of hammers; the hard, edged, regular whizzing of wheels; the whirring of looms; the hissing of locomotives; often the wild, restless tumult of streets; the humming and rumbling of dense masses of the people. Poets before him imitated in the harmony of their verse the monotony of sources and the babbling of water over pebbles, or the soughing voice of the wind. But he makes the voice of the new things speak; makes the rhythm of the city, this rhythm of fever and of unrest, this nervous moving of the crowd, this unquiet billowing of a new ocean, flow over into his new poem. Hence this up and down in his verses; this suddenness and unexpectedness; this incalculable element. _The new, the industrial noises have here become the music of poetry_. Since he does not seek to express his own individual sensation of life, but would himself only be a voice for the multitude, the rhythm is more roaring and restless than that of any individual being. Like the first poets, those of old time, before whom there were no outworn and exhausted words; like the poets whose feeling burst into flame at every word, every cry; who discovered themselves 'en exaltant la souffrance, le mal, le plaisir, le bien'; like them when they

... confrontaient à chaque instant Leur âme étonnée et profonde Avec le monde,[5]

poets who would be modern must compare their own soul with that of their time, must always regulate their rhythm according to the mutation of their time. Their deepest yearning must be to find not only their own personal expression, but over and above it the poetic and musical representation of the highest identity between themselves and their time. For poets are the inheritors of a great patrimony:

... En eux seuls survit, ample, intacte et profonde, L'ardeur Dont s'enivrait, devant la terre et sa splendeur, L'homme naïf et clair aux premiers temps du monde; C'est que le rythme universel traverse encor Comme aux temps primitifs leur corps.[6]

They must, in these days, only express themselves when they have first adapted the rhythm of their own feeling to that of the universe, to the rhythm of the cities they live in, to the rhythm of the multitude from which they have grown, to the rhythm of temporal as of eternal things. They must, like a vein in the heart of the world, reproduce every beat of the great hammer, every excitement, quickening of pace and obstruction of the feeling rolled round in the whole organism; they must learn from life the rhythm which shall again achieve the great harmony that was lost between the world and the work of art.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] 'Le Verbe' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).

[2] _Ibid._ (_Ibid._).

[3] 'Les Heures où l'on crée' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).

[4] 'L'En-Avant' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).

[5] 'Le Verbe' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).

[6] _Ibid._ (_Ibid._).

THE NEW PATHOS

Lassé des mots, lassé des livres. . . . . . . . . . Je cherche, en ma fierté, L'acte qui sauve et qui délivre. É.V., 'L'Action.'

The primitive poem, that which came into being long before writing or print, was nothing but a modulated cry that was hardly language, a cry won from joy or pain, mourning or despair, recollection or passionate entreaty, but always from fulness of feeling. It was pathetic, because it was produced by passion; pathetic, because its intention was to produce passion. The poem of those great and distant men who were the first to find word and speech in the darted cry of feeling, was an invocation of the crowd; an exhortation; a fiery incitement; an ecstasy; a direct electric discharge of feeling to feeling. The poet spoke to the others, an individual to a circle. The auditors stood before him in expectation--somewhat as Max Klinger in his new picture has gathered them together in front of blind Homer--they waited, watched, listened, surrendered themselves, let themselves be carried away; or they resisted. That poem and the delivery of it were not something finished and presented for approval; no vessel or ornament already hammered into shape and perfectly chiselled; they were something in the process of creation, something newly growing at that moment, a struggle with the hearer, a wrestling with him for his passion.

Poets lost this close, glowing contact with the masses when writing was invented. What the dissemination of the written word, and still more, in after days, the infinite multiplication of printing, dowered them with; all the new influence over spaces hitherto closed; the fact that their words were henceforth alive in countries which they had never visited; that men drew strength and inspiration and vital courage from their words long after their own bodies had fallen into dust--this vast and mighty effect had only been obtained by relinquishing that other and perhaps not lesser effect--dialogue, that standing face to face with the multitude. By slow degrees poets became something imaginary to the public. When they spoke, they really only listened to themselves; more and more their poem became a lonely colloquy with themselves; the harangue became a monologue, more and more lyrical in a new sense and less and less moving. More and more their poem travelled away from speech; more and more it lost that mysterious, passionate fire that is only fed by the moment, by standing face to face with an excited crowd, by the magical influx of tension and stimulation out of the heart of the hearer into the poet's own words. For, with his expectation, with his eager eyes, his excitement, and his intractable impatience, every listener does something for the speaker: he goads him; he forces something of his expectant restlessness into the response that has not yet been made. But the moment the poet no longer spoke to the crowd, no longer to a circle, but fashioned his words for print and writing, a new and peculiar sensation was developed in him. He accustomed himself to speaking only for himself; to conceiving his own feeling as important, irrespective of effect and force; to holding a conversation with none but himself and silence. And his poem changed more and more. Now that the poet no longer had the panting roar of the response, the cry of passion, the exultation of enthusiasm, as the finale of his poetry--the last accord, as it were, belonging to his own music--he sought to complete the harmony in the verse by means of itself. He rounded his poem with an artist's care, as though it were an earthenware vessel; illumined it with colours like a picture; rilled it with music; more and more he relinquished the idea of persuading, of convincing,.of inspiring. He was content that the poem should have no feeling for other men, and gave it only the life and the mood of his own world. In that period of transition, we may suppose, 'poetic' diction first came into being, that language by the side of the living language which petrified more and more as time went on into a dialect hostile to the world, into bloodless marble. Of old, the poetic language was not one that existed side by side with the real language; it was only the last intensification of the real language. By the rhythm of higher passion, by the fire of harangue, it became a sacred fire, a blest intoxication, a festivity in the work-a-day world. Thus, as intensified vitality, language could be different without ever being unintelligible, could remain with and yet above the people, while the lyric poetry of to-day has become, for the most part, strange and worthless to active men who live in the midst of realities, to the artisan and the toiler.

Nevertheless in our own days there seem to be signs of a return to this primitive close contact between the poet and his audience; a new pathos is at its birth. The stage was the first bridge between the poet and the multitude. But here the actor was still the intermediary of the spoken word; the purely lyrical emotion was not an aim in itself, but only, for three or four hours, a help in the illusion. However, the time of the isolation of the poet from the crowd, which was formerly rendered necessary by the great distances between nation and nation, seems now to have been overcome by the shortening of space and by the industrialisation of cities. To-day poets once again recite their verse in lecture-halls, in the popular universities of America; nay, in churches Walt Whitman's lines ring out into the American consciousness, and what used to be created only by the seething seconds of political crises--one might instance Petöfi declaiming his national anthem 'Talpra Magyar' from the steps of the university to the revolutionary crowd--occurs almost every day. Now again as of old the lyric poet seems entitled to be, if not the intellectual leader of the time, at least he who must excite and quell the passions of the time; the rhapsodist who hails, kindles, and fans that holy fire, energy. The world seems to be waiting for Him who shall concentrate all life in a flash of lightning to light up all the deeps of darkness:

Il monte--et l'on croirait que le monde l'attend, Si large est la clameur des cœurs battant À l'unisson de ses paroles souveraines. Il est effroi, danger, affre, fureur et haine; Il est ordre, silence, amour et volonté; Il scelle en lui toutes les violences lyriques.[1]

Certainly the poem which would speak to the multitude must be different to the kind of poem that pleased our fathers. Above all, it must itself be a will, an aim, an energy, an evocation. All the technical excellence, the sweet music, the craft of vibrating rhythms, suppleness and flexibility of language, must, in the new poem, no longer be an aim in themselves, but only a means to kindle enthusiasm. Such a poem must no longer be a sentimental dialogue between a hermit and some other hermit, a stranger somewhere far away; it must no longer be the short, hurriedly trembling voice which is silenced ere the word's flame has blazed up in it; no, this new poem must be strongly exulting, richly inspired, with a far horizon for its goal, and rushing on with irresistible impetuosity. It is not written for gentle moods, but for loud, resonant words. He who would quell the crowd must have the rhythm of their own new and restless life in him; he who speaks to the crowd must be inspired by the new pathos. And this new pathos, this 'pathos which most of all accepts the world as it is' (in Nietzsche's sense), is, above all, zest, is the strength and the will to create ecstasy. This poem must not be sensitive and woebegone; it must not express a personal grief that seeks to enlist the sympathies of others; no, it must be inspired by a fulness of joy, by the will to create from joy itself passion that cannot be held down. Only great feelings bear the message to the crowd; small feelings, which can only in silence, as in motionless air, rise above the ground, are dashed down again. _The new pathos must contain the will, not to set souls in vibration, not to provide a delicate, æsthetic sense of pleasure, but to fire to a deed._ It must carry the hearer along with it; it must once again collect in itself the scattered forces of the poet of old time; it must in the poet recreate, for an hour, the demagogue, the musician, the actor, the orator; it must snatch the word again off the paper into the air; it must carefully entrust feeling as a secret treasure to the individual; it must hurl this treasure into the surf of a multitude. Poems with such a new pathos cannot be created by feeble, passive men, whose mood can be changed at any minute by the world around them, but only by fighting natures, who are governed by an idea, by the thought of a duty; who seek to force their feeling on others; who elevate their inspiration to the inspiration of the whole world.

This new lyric pathos is in our days growing lustily into life again. For centuries rhetoricians have been mocked at. The change of estimation in Schiller's case from worship to sufferance is a lasting proof. And let us remember that Nietzsche, the only German who in recent years has influenced the world, was only able to do so by creating a new rhetorical style--'I am the inventor of the dithyramb'--only by making his _Zarathustra_ a preacher's book which insistently requires a loud, resonant voice. In France it was Victor Hugo who first recognised the necessity of direct address. But he, who, as it happens, stands on that narrowest boundary-line which separates genius from talent, he of whom one can say that he was either the least of the eternal, monumental poets or the greatest of the minor, the derivative poets, he confined himself to France, he never thought of any but the French nation--as Walt Whitman never thought of any but the American nation--and, above all, he had not the high place whence to speak to his nation. He would have been greater if he had really had the tribune whence his thunder and lightning might have reached the multitude, instead of being always only a sinister grumbling from the background of exile. Of all the hundred volumes of his work perhaps nothing will remain except that commanding gesture of an orator which Rodin has perpetuated in his statue, and which is nothing else than the will to move to passion. He has created this will to pathos, but not the pathos itself; still, even the effort is a great and memorable achievement.

Victor Hugo's inheritance, which was ill administered by chatterers and chauvinists, by Déroulède and such poets with their big drums and their trumpet-flourishes, has been taken over in France by Verhaeren. And he is the first whose voice again reaches the crowd, the first French realisation of a pathos which has absolutely the effect of art and poetry. He more than any other, he whose deepest delight it is to quell a grandiose resistance, he the _évocateur prodigieux_, as Bersaucourt[2] has called him, was entitled to the mastery of the living word. Whenever I read a poem by Verhaeren, I am time after time astonished to find myself, when I have begun by reading it to myself, suddenly forced to read the words aloud; surprised to find myself reading them louder and louder; surprised to find in my hand, in my whole body, the urgent need awakening of the gesture that hails and kindles an audience. For so strong is the passionateness of the original feeling, the inner cry and appeal in the words, that it forces its way through the reproduction, rings out loudly even from the dead letters. _All the great poems of Verhaeren are filled with the yearning to be spoken aloud, vehemently, in the zest and glow of passion_. If they are recited softly, they seem to be quite without melody; if they are read calmly and stolidly, they often seem hard, uneven, and abrupt. Many images recur with a certain regularity, many adjectives are repeated as petrified ideas--the trick of an orator who emphasises what is important by standing expressions--but the moment the poem is read aloud it is all alive again, the repetitions are suddenly revealed as superb instances of excitement reaching its mark, the recurring images take their place as regular milestones along a road rushing along wildly to the infinite. Verhaeren's poetry is the communication of an ecstasy, communication not in the sense of a secret to an individual, but of fire cast to kindle a crowd. His poems never seem to be quite completed, but to have been first created while being read, just as every good and fiery speech gives the impression of being improvised; they are always the unfolding of a state, a passionate analysis that acts like a discovery. They are moving, not harmonious. Just as an orator does not shock his audience at the very first with the conclusion of his reasoning, but pays out the chain of his arguments slowly and logically, Verhaeren builds his poems from visions, first in repose, then in the excitement that intensifies, and then with burning horizons foaming over more and more wildly in images. And these images again are rhetorical; they are not similes which can only be understood in their totality by the roundabout way of reflection; they are glaring flashes of lightning. A poem that would move those who hear it has need of metaphors which not only hit the mark of feeling, but which hit it immediately with deadly effect. They must be glaring, because they have to force the whole feeling in the expression of one second as quick as lightning. In this way the pathetic poem produces a new form of sensuous expression, and in this way too it creates itself a new rhythm of intensification. First of all, with the lightnings of his metaphors Verhaeren illuminates the vast landscape of visions; then, by a certain monotony of rhythm, he intensifies the astonishment and excitement to the highest ecstasy. Repeatedly, at the breathing-spaces of his great poems, you think you have reached the summit, only to be whipped to a higher leap, to a higher outlook. 'Il faut en tes élans te dépasser sans cesse';[3] this, his moral commandment, is for him the highest poetical law as well. The deepest will of his pathetic poem is to whip up, to set running, to snatch his hearer along with him. 'Dites!' this summons which is like a gesture, the urgent 'encore, encore!' are appeals which in his poems are petrified into cries, just as every horseman has certain words to lure the last strength from his horse. _Such words are nothing but transposed oratorical gestures_. The hollow 'oh!' is the gesture of appeal; the short 'qu'importe!' the gesture as of one who casts away a burden grown too heavy; the slow, curving, far-sweeping 'immensément' is the heaping up of all infinity. These poems are lashed into fever heat. For not only do they themselves seek to fly like those other, the harmonious, the really lyric poems, which with wings outspread seem to hover near the clouds, they also seek to snatch up by force the whole heavy mass of the audience. This is the explanation of the constant repetitions in the poems, which are often very long, as though some last doubter were yet to be convinced, as though fire were to be darted into the blood of some last one yet immune. Everything strives forwards, forwards, dragging the resister along with ecstatic power.

And here are seen the dangers of pathos. The first danger, that into which, for instance, Victor Hugo fell, was the emptiness, the hollowness of the feeling, the covering over of a void by a mighty gesture; enthusiasm resulting from a deliberate method, and not forced by inner feeling. Empty phrasing is and remains the first danger of the pathetic poem. The triteness of words 'plus sonores que solides'[4] is the second. Here, however, in this new pathos, there is another and a new peril, that of the over-heating of feeling, that of excessive, unhealthy exaltation, which must then of necessity yield to exhaustion. No man can be in a constant fever of excitement, in an unremitting state of exaltation. And in these poems there is the will to unceasing ecstasy. By the pathos, too, the purely lyrical values of the poem often fall into danger. The will to be clear often forces the poet to a triteness of wording; the terseness necessitates frequent repetition; the impulse to build up an organic ecstasy often leads to excessive length. Owing to its glaring, clear colours the language loses that mystical element of lyric verse--the incommensurable, as Goethe called it--that magic hint of a secret thing fleeing from the crowd and the light of day. But at the same time this pathos signifies an immense enrichment of lyric resources, a transvaluation of the word, by the very fact that it is not exclusively intended for print but for declamation as well. The pathetic poem is not, like the lyric poem, a crystallised impression; it is not at the same time question and answer to itself; it is the expectation of an answer. The great pathos, therefore, grows with success, and involuntarily mingles in the poem the craving and the answer of the poet's time. The voice of the poet is always as strong as the call that goes out to him. Verhaeren found this new pathos in the course of his development, because he no longer felt the voice of the crowd, of cities, and of all the new things as a hindrance to his lyric poetry, but as a challenge, as a rhetorical exhortation. And the more the world around us becomes ponderous, grandiose, and passionate--the more it becomes heroic in the concentration of its strength (heroic in that new strength that Emerson preached)--so much the more, too, must lyric poetry in the new sense, perhaps in Verhaeren's sense, be pathetic. Gigantic impressions cannot be forced into petty impressions; vast conceptions cannot be split up into mean fragments; a loud appeal needs a loud answer. All art is more dependent than we are aware on its epoch. The same secret dependence between demand and production seems to exist in the sphere of art as exists in commerce. Laws that escape our knowledge and cannot be prisoned in formulae can sometimes be glimpsed, hazy as a presentiment, in fugitive intuition.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] 'Le Tribun' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).

[2] Albert de Bersaucourt, _Conférence sur Emile Verhaeren._

[3] 'L'Impossible' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).

[4] Albert Mockel, _Émile Verhaeren._

VERHAEREN'S POETIC METHOD

Je suis celle des surprises fécondes. É.V., 'Celle des Voyages.'

A real poem must not exhibit an artificial structure of parts, a mechanism; it must, like man himself, be organic, an indissoluble union of soul and body. It must have a living body of flesh, the substance of the word, the colour of the metaphors, the mechanism of the motion, the skeleton of the thought; but over and above all that it must possess that inexpressible something, the soul, which alone makes it organic; the breath, the rhythm, that inseparable essence which is no longer perceptible to intelligence, but only to feeling. It is not first in this transcendental element, however, that the poet's personality is revealed: the poetry of a great poet must be characteristic in its very physis, in its very material. Side by side with that magic vibration, that intangible element of feeling, the materiality too, the weaving of the word, that net of expression in which the fugitive feeling is caught in the waters of the hidden life and lifted into the light, these too must be alone of their kind if they are to characterise the poet's race, environment, and personality. This purely material organism of the poet too is, like every living thing, subject to growth, to the change of maturity and age. The structure of the poem, like every human face, must gradually, in the revolution of the years, work its way to character from the shifting features of childhood and the indistinctness of the general type, must in its sensuous externals, in the physiognomy of the material, show all psychic changes to the last acquisition of personality. In a real poet the technical aspect, the handicraft, the external element has a development that runs parallel to the intellectual and poetic contents. In form, too, the poem must at first represent a tradition, something that has been taken over; only in the revolt of youth will it achieve a personal form, and this itself will later, as it gradually grows cold and petrifies, represent an immutable type.

Verhaeren's poetry has its evolution and its history in this purely formal sense. Even this poetry of Verhaeren's, which to-day looms so immensely isolated and so victoriously characteristic in French literature that a connoisseur can, without a shadow of doubt, recognise the creator from a single stanza, has grown from a tradition, is the climax of a certain culture, and is at the same time related to a contemporary movement. When Verhaeren began to write, Victor Hugo, the crowned king of French lyric poetry, was dead; Baudelaire was forgotten; Paul Verlaine was still almost unknown. Victor Hugo's heirs, who divided his kingdom as once the diadochi divided the kingdom of Alexander the Great, were only able to preserve the trappings of the glory gone, and the grandiloquence of their words contrasted ill with their thin voices and artificial feelings. Against this circle, against François Coppée, Catulle Mendès, Théodore de Banville and the rest of them, rose up a new school of young men who called themselves 'decadents and symbolists.' Here I must frankly admit that I am really unable to explain this idea, perhaps for the very reason that I have read so many varying definitions of it. The only thing that is certain is, that at that time a group of young writers rose up in concert against a tradition, and, in the most diverse experiments, sought a new lyrical expression. What this new thing consisted in would be hard to say. The truth is perhaps that all these poets were not French; that each of them brought some new element from his own country, his own race, his own past; that none of them felt that respect for the French tradition which was in the blood of the native poets as an inward barrier, and thus were able unconsciously to get nearer to their own artistic instinct. One only needs to look at the names, which often at the first glance betray the foreigner, the Americans Vielé-Griffin and Stuart Merrill, the Belgians Verhaeren, Maeterlinck, and Mockel, or which, as in the case of Jean Moréas, cover a complicated Greek name with a French pseudonym. The only indisputable exploit of this group really was that about 1885 they quickened the pace of French lyric poetry with a new unrest. Mallarmé plunged his verses into a secret darkness of symbols, until the words with their subterranean meaning almost became unintelligible, while Verlaine gave his lines the dream-rapt lightsomeness of a music never heard before. Gustave Kalm and Jules Laforgue were the first who did away, the one with rhyme and the other with the Alexandrine, and introduced the apparent irregularities of the _vers libre._ Each one did his best on his own account to find something new, and all of them had in common the same fiery eagerness to attack the idols of a derivative poetry, the same ardent longing for a new form of expression. True, their talent was soon choked up with sand, but that was because they over-estimated the technical side of the innovations they introduced and spent themselves in the investigation of theories, instead of developing their own personalities. As time went on their paths diverged widely. Many of them foundered in the sea of journalism; others are still, after a lapse of twenty years, walking round in a circle in the footsteps of their youth; and of the symbolists and decadents nothing is left but a page or so of literary history, a faded sign-board marking an empty shop. Verhaeren too was classed with them, although in my view he was never essentially influenced by this school. A man of such sturdy originality could not be more than stimulated by others, could not be more than confirmed in his natural tendency to revolt. His attitude with regard to the _vers libre_ was by no means due to this influence. For it was not by suggestion from others, not by the instinct of imitation, but by inward necessity, that he discovered his new form. It was not the example of others that freed him from the fetters of tradition; he was forced to free himself from them of his own accord. This inner compulsion is alone of importance; for it is a matter of complete indifference whether a poet writes by chance in regular verse or in _vers libres_; the phenomenon can only be significant when a poet is of necessity and by inner pressure forced to free himself from tradition and to achieve a personal form.

It was as a Parnassian that Verhaeren began. His first poetical attempts, which he has never published, the verses he wrote at school and in his first years at the university, showed him hypnotised by the style of Lamartine and Victor Hugo. And even in the first two books he published, in _Les Flamandes_ and _Les Moines_, there is not a single poem in which Verhaeren has gone beyond his models. His poem is indeed somewhat more mobile than the strict pattern of school exercises; it already shows slight traces of the cracks which at a later day will break the vessel to pieces. But this hint of insubordination was at that time necessitated more by the harshness and rebelliousness of the subject itself, by some stiffness or other in the turn of the phrase, which can only be explained by the fact of the poet's alien race. Even a foreigner can recognise that the verse is not rounded off, that the rhythm is not balanced with the natural inevitable sense of form that a man of Latin race would have, but that here a forceful will is with difficulty constraining a barbaric temperament to harmony. Through his French one can hear the massive language of his race, something of the unwieldy strength we have in our old German ballads. And what his name at the first glance betrayed--the foreigner--was to the finer ear of a native easily perceptible from his French alone.

The farther Verhaeren proceeded in his development--the nearer he got to his real nature--the more the inheritance of his race in him revolted against the shackles of tradition--so much the more intensive became the impression of the Teutonic element in his verse. After all, development is in most cases nothing more than the awakening in us of our buried past. The highest demand of the Parnassian school, _impassibilité,_ an immovableness as of bronze, is the antithesis of his stormy temperament, which drives him along to a wild rhythm, not to harmony. Deep, guttural notes vibrate in his verses, and make the song of his vowels rough; the angularity, the masculinity, abruptness, and hardness of his peasant's nature peer through everywhere. In addition to this, there is now the inner transformation. So long as Verhaeren's poetic tendency was merely pictorial, one that calmly and without excitement aimed at painting the passion of the Flemish people, the earnestness of monasteries, just so long did the Alexandrine best serve to divide the rhythmic waves of his inspiration and roll them along. But when his personal sympathy began to confuse the inner indifference of his first work, his verse became uneasy. The cracks in the Alexandrine became more and more perceptible; greater and greater in the poet grew his impatience of it and his desire to smash it. He is no longer satisfied with the _vers ternaire_, the verse of the Romanticists with its two cæsuras dividing the line into three parts of perfectly equal rhythm and weight; he takes the free Alexandrine introduced by Victor Hugo and develops it still further, makes it still more irregular. He gives the syllables a different quantity, a different sonority; they no longer rest, they rock to and fro. And gradually the earnest, immovable uniformity of accentuation is changed into a more billowing, rhythmic fluidity. But ere long this concession too becomes too trivial for him. A temperament so impetuous as his will endure no outward fetter whatever. For it is not repose that this fiery singer would describe, but his own excited state--the quivering and vibrating of his emotion, his febrile unrest. His great manifold feeling, which is nothing else than a modulated cry, cannot storm itself out in regular verse; it needs unquiet gestures, motion, freedom, the _vers libre_. The fact that at this time other poets in France were using the free verse, the fact that it was at that time--several dispute the priority--'invented' for poets, is of no consequence to us here. Such contemporaneous incidences never express a chance, but always a latent necessity. Free verse was nothing else than the inevitable reflex action of modern feeling, the poetic breaking free of the unrest which lay in the time. Whether or not Verhaeren at that time had models is of no importance. What has been taken over can never become organic, only what comes from personal experience is a real gain. And at that time it lay quite in the line of his development that by inner necessity he was forced to break his old instrument and create himself a new one. For the nervous unrest, the passionate agitation of Verhaeren's later poems is unthinkable in regular verse. If verse is to describe in its own inner passion the immense multiplicity of modern impressions--their haste, their fire, their precipitous revulsion, their unexpectedness, their gloomy melancholy, and the overwhelming vastness of their dimensions--it must be strong and yet flexible, like a rapier. Such poems must be emancipated from rules: they must stride along like a real crowd, noisily seething; they must not walk in step, like soldiers on the march. And if they are to be spoken, they must not be recited in the stiff, cold, pathetically vibrating, self-conscious declamation of the Comédie Française; they must be spoken as though to a crowd; they must cry out, they must hail; and this-whipping up of an audience cannot be harmonious. These poems must be spontaneous and impulsive.

Manifold is the diversity which Verhaeren's poetry has achieved by its deliverance from the monotony of the Alexandrine. Now and now only can the verse reproduce the plastic side of an impression and the inward agitation of it; not only by a pictorial description, but in a purely external manner too; by the sound, by the music of the rhythm. The lines, sometimes darting far beyond the margin, sometimes, like an arrow, sharpened to a single word, have the whole key-board of feeling. They can pace with a grave step like long black funeral processions, if haply they would express the monotony of solitude, 'Mes jours toujours plus lourds s'en vont roulant leur cours';[1] they can dart up like a falcon, white and glittering, soaring to the exulting cry 'la joie,' swift and as high as heaven over all the sad heaviness of earth. All the voices of day and night can now be represented onomato-poetically: all that is brusque and sudden by brevity; all that is ponderous and grandiose by a vast sweep of fulness; an unexpected thing by sudden harshness; haste in a feverishly accelerated movement; savagery by a precipitous change of velocity. Every line can now express the feeling by its rhythm alone. And one might without knowing French recognise the poetical intention of many of these poems merely by listening to their consonantal music, nay, often by looking at their typographical arrangement.

For this reason I should be tempted to call these poems with their vast range _symphonic_ poems. They seem to have been conceived for an orchestra. They are not, like the poetry of a past generation, chamber music; they are not solitary violin _soli_; they are an inspired blending of all instruments; they are graded in individual sections which have a different _tempo_ and the pauses of the transitions. In Verhaeren's poetry the lyric exceeds the bounds of its domain and impinges on the dramatic and the epic. For his poem seeks not only to describe a mood, like a purely lyrical poem, it describes at the same time the birth of this mood. And this first part of the construction is epic; it is descriptive; it leads up from a lowly beginning to a great discharge of force. And, in the second place, the transitions are dramatic, those bursts of temperament from section to section, those precipitous falls and steep ascents which only at the end lead to a harmonious solution. From a purely external point of view Verhaeren's poem is more extensive, longer, of a greater range than any other contemporary poetry; it shoots out farther beyond the limit of lyric poetry; and, careless of the boundary-line of æsthetics, it derives strength and nourishment from neighbouring domains. It comes nearer to rhetoric, nearer to epic poetry, nearer to the drama, nearer to philosophy than any other poetry of our day; it is more independent of set rules than poetry had been hitherto. And independent of rules--or obeying only a new inner rule--is Verhaeren's form. Now, since the page no longer holds the fettered lines together in equal columns, the poet can write out his wild, overflowing feelings in their own wild, boldly curving lines. Verhaeren's poem at this time--and that which is achieved in the years of maturity remains inalienable--has its own inner architectonics. But it can hardly be compared to a piece of architecture, a structure built with hands; it is rather like a manifestation of nature. It is elementary like every feeling; it discharges itself like a storm. First a vision moves up like a cloud; more and more densely it compresses itself; more and more sultrily, more and more oppressively it weighs on the feeling; higher and higher, hotter and hotter grows the inner tension, until at last in the lightning of the images, in the rolling of the rhythm, all the garnered strength discharges itself rhythmically. The andante always grows to a furioso; and only the last section shows again the clear, cleansed sky of calm, in an intellectual synthesis of the state of chaos. This structure of Verhaeren's poem is almost invariable. It may be seen, for instance, in two parallel examples: in the poems 'La Foule' and 'Vers la Mer' in the book _Les Visages de la Vie_. Both set in with an adjuration, a vision. Here the crowd, its confusion, its strength; there a sensitive picture of the morning sea whose transparent tones remind one of Turner. Now the poet fires this still vision with his own passionateness. You see the crowd moving more and more restlessly, the waves surging more and more passionately; and ecstasy breaks out the moment the poet surrenders himself to these things, places himself among the crowd, sinks his feeling, his body in the sea. Then in the finale bursts forth the great cry of identity, in the one case the yearning to be all the crowd, in both that ecstatic gesture of the individual yearning for infinity. The first picture, which was only sensuously seen, grows at the end of the poem into a great ethic inspiration; from the vision is unfolded an unconquerable moral and metaphysical need. This form of intensification from individual feeling to universal feeling is the basic form of Verhaeren's poem. It might be best, in order to convey a clear idea of its form, to use a geometrical term and say that these poems are, to a certain extent, _poems in the form of a parabola._ While the lyric in the current sense mostly represents a symmetrical and harmonious form, a return to itself, a circle, Verhaeren's poem has the form of a parabola, apparently irregular but really equally governed by a law. His poems soar in a swift sustained flight, soar from the earth up into the clouds, from the real to the unreal, and then from a sudden zenith fling themselves back to the earth. The inspiration drives the feeling away from the pictorial, from passionless contemplation to this utmost height of possibility, far away from all sensuous perceptions high into the metaphysical, in order then, suddenly and unexpectedly, to bring it back to the _terra firma_ of reality. And indeed, in the music of these poems there is something as of a darting upwards, something of the hissing and whizzing of a stone well thrown and of its sudden falling down. In their rhythm too is this increasing velocity, this catching of the breath and this return to the starting-point, this bethinking itself of gravity when it returns to the earth.

Something may now be said as to the means with which Verhaeren attains his vision, with which he seeks to represent the inner passionateness of things, with which he evokes enthusiasm. Let us first of all try to establish whether Verhaeren is what is called a master of language. Verhaeren's command of language is not by any means unlimited. Both in his words and in his rhymes there is constant repetition which sometimes borders on monotony; but on the other hand there is a strangeness, a newness, an unexpectedness of wording which is almost unexampled in French lyric poetry. An enrichment of the language, however, does not proceed from neologisms alone; a word may become alive by the unexpectedness of a new application, by a transposition of the meaning, as Rainer Maria Rilke, for instance, has often done in the German lyric. To redeem 'die armen Worte, die im Alltag darben,'[2] and consecrate them anew to poetry, is perhaps a higher merit than creating new words. Now Verhaeren has above all, by the Flemish sense of language which he inherited, imported a certain Belgian timbre into French lyric poetry. Personally, it is true, he is almost ignorant of Flemish; nevertheless, by the vague music familiar to him from his childhood's days, by a certain guttural tone, he has imported a nuance which is perhaps less? perceptible to the foreigner than to a Frenchman. At this point I should like to call Maurice Gauchez as a witness and borrow the most salient examples from his extraordinarily interesting monograph. Among the neologisms for which Gauchez suggests a foreign origin he quotes the following: les baisers rouges, les plumes majuscules, les malades hiératiques, la statue textuelle, les automnes prismatiques, le soir tourbillonaire, les solitudes océans, le ciel dédalien, le cœur myriadaire de la foule, les automnes apostumes, les vents vermeils, les navires cavalcadeurs, les gloires médusaires. And he rightly points out how much certain of Verhaeren's verbs might enrich the French language: enturquoiser, rauquer, vacarmer, béquiller, s'enténébrer, se futiliser, se mesquiniser, larmer. But I for my part cannot look upon the enrichment here accruing from racial instinct as the essential thing in his verbal art: it only gives it a local colour, without really explaining what is astonishingly modern in his diction. Verhaeren has been a great creator of new things for the French lyric, above all by his extension of its range of subjects, by his renewal of poetic reality, by recruiting new forces for poetry in the domain of technical science. _The great part of the new blood for his language came not so much from Flemish as from science_. A man who writes poems on the Exchange, on the theatre, on science, who sings factories and railway stations, cannot ignore their terminology. He must borrow certain technical expressions from the vocabulary of science, certain pathological terms from medicine; he must extend the glossary of the poetic by the extension of the poetic itself. There are geographical surprises of rhyme to be found in Verhaeren: Berlin and Sakhalin, Moscow, the Balearic and other distant islands whose names have never previously lived in rhyme. And since science is by its own progress compelled to invent new names every day, since new machines demand new words for their necessities, here for the first time an inexhaustible source has been discovered for replenishing the French language.

This immense wealth, on the other hand, is jeopardised by something that might be called not so much poverty or restriction as fascination. Every one-sidedness of feeling produces, with its advantages, certain defects, and thus the constant passionateness which brought Verhaeren's poetry near to oratory, to preaching, is at the same time responsible for a certain monotony of the metaphors. Verhaeren is hallucinated by certain words, images, adjectives, phrases. He repeats them incessantly through all his work. All things in which a many-headed passion is united he compares with a 'brasier'; 'carrefour' is his symbol for indecision; 'l'essor' is for him the last straining of effort; many cries and words by which he hails his audience are repeated almost from page to page. The adjectives too are often monotonous; often indeed, with the cold 'iques' at the end of them, they are schematic; and even in the metaphors that phenomenon is unmistakable which in science is called pseudoanæsthesia, that is, the memory of a fixed feeling from the domain of some other sense is always individually associated with a certain colour or sound. For him 'red' expresses all that is passionate; 'gold' all greatness and pomp; 'white' all that is gentle; 'black' all enmity. His images have thus something abrupt and absolute; there is always in them, as Albert Mockel has demonstrated in his masterly study, the decisive, the sudden excitement, which overwhelms our astonishment. His images are as violent as his colours, as his rhythm. They have the suddenness of a cannon-ball which darts through space and is only perceptible to our vision when it reaches its aim and smashes the target. Possibly the inmost reason of this lies in the fact that these poems are intended to be spoken. A placard that is to have effect at some distance must be in glaring colours; pathos calls for images that hallucinate. Such images have indeed been found by Verhaeren, and by Verhaeren only. He hardly seems to know nuances. With the brutal instinct of a strong man he loves all that is glaring, all that is untrammelled. 'La couleur, elle est dans ses œuvres une surprise de métaux et d'images.'[3] But in this material they blaze, and with their lightnings they light up even the most distant horizon. I will only remind the reader of his 'beffrois immensément vêtus de nuit' or 'la façade paraît pleurer des lettres d'or,' or his 'les gestes de lumière des phares.' By the intensity of such images Verhaeren attains to quite an incomparable clearness of the feeling. 'Personne, je crois, ne possède à l'égal de Verhaeren le don des lumières et des ombres, non point fondues, mais enchevêtrées, des noirs absolus coupés de blanches clartés.'[4]

One-sidedness of temperament here produces a one-sided advantage with all its artistic restrictions. So that Verhaeren is not a verbal artist in the unrestricted sense of one who always hits upon the only, the inevitable comparison for a thing; of one who flashes a bold word on the attention once and never retails it till it palls, who seems to use every word for the first time. His poetic vocabulary is rich, but by no means infinite; his sensibility is strong, but it has its restrictions. For, as is the case with every passionate poet, certain feelings at the last white-heat of excitement appear to him identical, seem to him to be capable of comparison only with the quite elementary things of Nature, with fire, the sea, the wind, thunder and lightning. To make the point clear, Verhaeren is not a verbal artist in Goethe's sense, but rather in Schiller's sense. With the latter, too, he has the gift in common of definitely expressing certain perceptions in one lyric line. He has discovered essences of the lyric feeling of life, lines that are now household words, or which at all events will be so. It will be sufficient to mention word formations such as 'les villes tentaculaires,' which in France have already become common-places, or such maxims as 'La vie est à monter et non à descendre,' or 'Toute la vie est dans l'essor.' In lines like these the lyric ecstasy is compressed as in a coin, and perpetuated in the current riches of the language.

This hardness and brutality, these abrupt transitions, constitute the individuality of Verhaeren's poetry. At bottom it is nothing else than an accentuated masculinity. The voice, the music, is guttural, deep, raucous, masculine; the body of his poem has, like a man's body, the beautiful movement of strength, but in repose gestures that are often hard and which only in passion regain their compelling beauty. Whereas French lyric poetry, so to speak, had imitated the female body, the delicate grace of its soft yielding lines; whereas its first concern was harmony; Verhaeren's poem strove only for the rhythm of movement, only for the proud and vigorously ringing stride of a man, his leaping and running, the fighting display of his strength. This is not the only reason why the French have so long repudiated him. For where we delight in an echo from the German in his language, they feel the harshness of the Teutonic undertone; where we find a consonance with the German ballad, a re-birth of the German ballad as though it were awakening from the dreams of childhood, they see an opposition to the native tradition. And in fact, the farther Verhaeren has proceeded in his development, both in his personality and in his verse, the more the French varnish has peeled off his Teutonic perception. It was only in the time of his first dependence on tradition that his poetry was hardly to be distinguished from that of other writers in French. The farther he receded from the French standpoint, the more he unconsciously approached German art. To-day, perhaps, a return to classicism is perceptible in his poetry. The neologisms are not so audacious; the images are more schematic; the whole poem is calmer and more clarified. This, however, is by no means a cowardly compromise with a shattered tradition, no repentant return to the fold; it is the same phenomenon we meet in a similar manner in the late poems of Goethe, Schiller, Hugo, and Swinburne; the effect of the cooling of the blood in age; the yielding of sensuous perception to intellectual ideas. The victor has lost the fighter's brutality; the man in his maturity no longer needs revolt but a conception of the world--harmony. Here, as in Verhaeren's whole evolution, his verse is the most delicately sensitive indicator of the psychic revulsion, the perfect proof of a poetic and organic development which is really inward and dependent only on the laws of his blood.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] 'L'Heure Mauvaise' (_Au Bord de la Route_).

[2] 'Poor words a-hungered in the working day.'--Rainer Maria Rilke, _Mir sur Feier._

[3] Albert Mockel, _Émile Verhaeren_.

[4] _Ibid._ (_Ibid._).

VERHAEREN'S DRAMA

Toute la vie est dans l'essor. É.V., _Les Forces Tumultueuses._

Émile Verhaeren's dramas seem to stand outside his work. Verhaeren is essentially a lyric poet. His whole feeling springs from lyric enthusiasm, and all neighbouring domains are merely sources whose strength flows into and feeds this one vital instinct. Verhaeren has almost always used the dramatic and the epic only as a means, never as an end in themselves: from the epic he has taken over into the vast sweep of his dithyrambic poems its broad, calm development, and from the drama the swift, abrupt contrast of transitions. The dramatic and the epic only serve him as a tonic, as a means to strengthen the blood of his lyric art. Although Verhaeren beside his lyric work has written dramas--four up to the present--these, in the edifice of his complete production, must be appreciated from a different point of view: from an architectural point of view. For the dramas are to him, in a certain sense, only a survey, a concentration of individual lyric crises, a synopsis of certain ideal complexes which have occupied some moment of his past; they are final settlements; the last point in lines of development; milestones of individual epochs. All that in the lyric poems, which never systematically bounded a domain, fell apart, is here made to converge to the focus of a programme. The lyric juxtaposition is fused into an inner relationship, the circle of ideas is co-ordinated like a picture in the frame of a play. Verhaeren's four tragedies represent four spheres of a conception of the universe: the religious, the social, the national, and the ethical. _Le Cloître_ is a re-creation of the book of verse _Les Moines_, is the tragedy of Catholicism; _Les Aubes_ is a condensation of the sociological trilogy _Les Villes Tentaculaires, Les Campagnes Hallucinées, Les Villages Illusoires. Philip II._ shapes the tragedy of the Antichrist, the contrast of Spain and Belgium, of sensuality and asceticism. And _Hélène de Sparte_, which in its outward form manifests a return to classicism, handles purely moral, eternal problems. As far as their contents are concerned, Verhaeren's dramas show no deviation, no change of the inner centre of gravity, and his new dramatic style is in perfect harmony with his new lyric style. For just as on the one hand he has used the dramatic element as a substance of his lyric work, here in his dramas he has transmuted the lyric element to a dramatic element. Here, too, we have nothing but visions intensified into exaltation. Here, as everywhere else, Verhaeren can only create by enthusiasm. What goads him on is the lyric moment in his enthusiasm, that second of the highest tension when passion, if it is not to shatter the frame of its generator, must have explosive words. The characters of his dramas are never anything but symbols of great passions, the bridge for this ascension of the exaltation. To him the action is no more than the way to the crises, to those seconds when some mighty force seizes on these characters and forces them to cry out. Whole scenes seem to be only awaiting for the moment when some one shall rise and turn to the crowd, wrestle with it and overthrow it, or be himself dashed to pieces.

The style of Verhaeren's dramas is purely lyrical; the pace is throughout passionate and feverish; and this method, which runs counter to all dramatic canons, was bound organically to create a new technique. The French drama had hitherto known only the rhymed Alexandrine or prose. In Verhaeren's dramas--for the first time to my knowledge--prose and verse (verse which is 'free' both as regards rhythm and rhyme) are throughout promiscuously mixed. Mixed, but not as in Shakespeare, in whose plays verse and prose alternate in individual scenes and establish, so to speak, a social stratification, serving-men speaking in prose and their masters in verse: in Verhaeren the prose passages are the broad, resting foundations of the action; the curved bowls, so to speak, from which the holy fire of the exaltation flames. His characters express their calm in prose, pass from calm to excitement, and in this intensification speak a language which imperceptibly merges into a poem. Not till their passion breaks out do they speak in verse, in those seconds, as it were, when their soul begins to vibrate; and in these passages one cannot help thinking of an aeroplane which is first driven along the ground and moves with ever greater speed till suddenly it soars aloft. In Verhaeren's drama the characters speak an ever purer language the more poetical they become; music breaks with their passion from their souls; just as many people who behave coarsely and awkwardly in ordinary life, in great moments suddenly achieve a bearing of heroic beauty. This embodies the idea that in enthusiasm a man discovers in himself another and a purer language; that passion and the yearning to free oneself from an immeasurable and intolerable earthly burden make a poet of any man. This idea is in harmony with Verhaeren's whole conception of the universe, his idea that the man swept away by passion and enthusiasm is on a higher plane than the critic with his lack of hot feeling; that receptivity for great sensations constitutes, so to speak, a scale of moral values. And the stage performances have shown that this new style is justified, that the transition from prose to verse, occurring as it does contemporaneously with the ascension from calm to passion, passes practically unnoticed by the audience, which is equivalent to saying that when put to the test the method was recognised as necessary.

And it is by passion, this innermost flame of Verhaeren's poetry, that his dramas live too. Their qualities are those of the lyrics; they have, above all, that vast power of vision which sets _Philip II_. against the tragic landscape of Spain; over the drama of Helen arches the heaven of Greece, blue, and mild, and open like a flower; and behind the tragedy of modern cities unrolls the inflamed scenery of the sky with the black arms of chimneys. And then the immense fervour of the ecstasy which, not in a slow, regular progression, but in savage, convulsive thrusts, whirls the action onward to the moments of the solution.

Thus Verhaeren's first drama derives its strength from the lyric source of a man's accusation of himself. _Le Cloître_ is a paraphrase of _Les Moines_, the book of the monks. Here again all the characters are gathered together in the cool corridors of a monastery--the gentle, the wild, the feudal, the wrathful, the childlike, the learned monk; here, however, they do not act in isolation, but with all their strength the one against the other. They fight for the prior's chair, which is really the symbol of something higher. For just as in _Les Moines_ every individual monk expressed symbolically some virtue of Catholicism and a distinct idea of God, here the prior's chair decides the question who is the most deserving of God. For his successor the old prior has designated Balthasar, a nobleman whom the monastery has sheltered for years. But he had only taken refuge there because he had killed his own father, thus escaping secular justice, and now he feels the consciousness of his guilt burning, feels the exasperated struggle between his own conscience and the lighter conscience of the others, who have long since forgiven him. And he cannot feel himself free before he has made his confession before the assembled monks, and even then only when he has repeated the confession, against the will of the monastery, to the people, and surrendered himself to the secular judges. The Roman Catholic idea of confession is here wonderfully in agreement with Dostoieffsky's conception of salvation by confession, of deliverance by suffering self-imposed. In three climaxes of equal force at the end of each of the three acts the tragic confession bursts into flame--first born of fear, then of a sense of justice, and at the last positively conceived as a pleasure; and here in these superb lyric ecstasies rest the strong pinions which bear the tragedy.

In the second, the social tragedy _Les Aubes,_ the scenario is the present time. It has the purple scenery of _Les Villes Tentaculaires_, of the cities with the arms of polypi, which drain the blood of the poor dying country. Beggars, paupers, those who are starving, those who have been evicted, march to Oppidomagnum, the modern industrial city, and besiege it. It is the past once again storming the future. In the lyrical trilogy this struggle had been shaped in a hundred visionary instances; here, however, the bright sky of reconciliation is arched above the battle-field, over the realities hovers the dream. For here the future joins hands with the present. The great tribune, Hérénien, breaks the backbone of this battle and shows himself the hero of a new morality by secretly admitting the enemy into the city--in the old sense the action of a traitor--by yielding and thus transforming the struggle into a reconciliation. He is the tragic bearer of the moral idea that enmity may be overcome by goodness, and he falls as the first martyr of his faith. Verhaeren's social conception, his superb description of realities, here merge slowly in a Utopia; the dawns of the new days begin to shine above the pasts that are dead; the din of rebellion fades away in harmony. This drama, like the others, is far remote from the possibilities of the majority of theatres, because of the fact that here too an ethical idea is expressed with all the glow and ecstasy which as a rule in modern dramas is only found in the utterance of erotic desire.

The third tragedy, _Philip II_., is a national drama, although its scene is not laid in Flanders. Much as Charles de Coster in his _Thyl Ulenspiegel_ had, with a Fleming's deadly hatred, seen in Philip II. the hereditary enemy of liberty, Verhaeren, who with the lyric poetry of his _Toute la Flandre_ became the representative singer of his native land, painted this gloomy figure with hatred. Philip II. is here, as in _Thyl Ulenspiegel,_ the hard, inflexible king who would fain put life out because it burns too red for him, who wishes to have the world as cool and marble-like as the chambers of the Escorial. Here of a sudden the reverse side of Roman Catholicism, whose passion was immortalised in _Le Cloître_, is rent open; its pitilessness and asceticism; its obstinate effort to overthrow the irrefragable joy of life. Don Carlos, however, is the fervent friend of the people, the friend of Flanders; he is the will to enjoyment, to merry moods, to passion. And this struggle between the 'yes' and the 'no' of life, this fight of Verhaeren's own lyric crisis, this fight between the denial and the passionate approval of enjoyment--at bottom, toe, the deepest cause of the war between Spain and the Netherlands--is here symbolised in characters. Of course, any comparison with Schiller's _Don Carlos_ must tell against Verhaeren, for the German drama is far more dramatic and conceived on a scale of greater magnificence; but Verhaeren did not aim at a complete rounding off, at a plenitude of characters; all that he wanted was to show these two feelings in their struggle with each other, the enthusiasm of life and its suppression by force. A comparison with Schiller's drama best shows Verhaeren's disregard of dramatic canons, and at the same time the immense new lyric power of the play. For Spain is here seen with a strength and intensity of vision which is probably without a parallel in tragedy. The cold, hypocritical atmosphere can be felt; and better than from words the character of Philip can be perceived in that one silent

## scene in which he suddenly appears stealthily creeping to watch his son

in the arms of the countess, and then, without a gleam in his rigid eyes, without the slightest movement of anger, vanishes again into the dark. Behind him, however, behind the spy and the eavesdropper, glides another shadow, the monk of the Inquisition: the eavesdropper is himself shadowed, the ruler is himself ruled. Visions like these, with the ecstasy of certain scenes, are the strongest motive power in Verhaeren's poetic construction. His dramatic art, like the art of his lyrics, does not rise in a steady ascent, but in sudden wild leaps and starts.

Only in his last drama, _Hélène de Sparte_, has Verhaeren come nearer to the accepted conception of the dramatic. That is characteristic of his organic development. For now that he is in the years when passion of necessity cools, harmony grows dear to him; and he who through all the years of his youth and prime was a revolutionary, now recognises the necessity of inner laws. By its mere intellectual substance this tragedy expresses the veering round: it is nothing else than the longing from passion to harmony, Helen's flight from adventures to repose. And the return is to be found again in the verse, for Verhaeren here for the first time takes up the traditional French metre; his form, though yet free, approaches the Alexandrine. The tragedy of Helen is the tragedy of beauty. Helen is one of those antique characters who in Greek literature were only sketched in fleeting lines, characters whom a modern poet is now entitled to fill in with his own fate. For from the Greek sources we really knew nothing about her personal fate; we only knew the effect she exercised, only the reflection of her personality on others, not that of others on her. She was the queen who inflamed all men; who was the cause of great wars; the woman for whose sake murder on murder was committed; who was snatched from one bed to another; for love of whom Achilles arose from the dead; who passed her life circled by disastrous passion. But whether she herself shared these passions, whether she grew by them or suffered by them, the poets tell us nothing. Verhaeren in his drama has now attempted to depict the tragedy of the woman who endures fearful suffering because she is always desired in lust and no more; who is consumed by the torture of being ever robbed from lover by lover; of never knowing the look of pure eyes, calm converse, quiet breathing; who is cursed always to stand at the pyre of passion, with the flames of men always blazing round her. Whoever looks at her at once desires her, snatches her; none waits and asks whether he serves her will; she is robbed like a chattel; she glides from hand to hand. In Verhaeren's drama Helen has returned home, a woman tired, tired of all unrest, of all her triumphs, tired of love; a woman hating her own beauty because it creates unrest, longing for nothing but old age, when none shall desire her more and her days shall be calm. Menelaus has brought her home, rescued her from all that stifling steam of criminal passion; now she would breathe quietly, live calm days, and be faithful to him. She desires no more than this. No passion can tempt her more. 'I have seen the flaring of so many flames that now I love only the hearth's glow and the lamp' is the expression of her poignant resignation. But fate will not yet let her go. Verhaeren has here seized on the great idea of the Greeks that everything that is superhuman on earth, every excessive gift, even that of beauty, is pursued as a hybrid by the envy of the gods, and must be paid for with pain. Too great beauty is no profit, but a tragic gift. And hardly has Helen returned, to rest and be happy, to be like everybody else, than new clouds roll themselves up above her head. Her own brother desires her; her enemy Electra desires her; her husband is murdered for her sake; and the old fearful battle threatens to break out anew for the possession of her body. Now she flees, away from men, out into nature. And here again, with the vision of genius, Verhaeren approaches Greek feeling. The forest is not dead to him, but animate; life does not stop at human beings; fauns emerge from the bushes, naiads from the rivers, bacchantes from the mountains, and all swarm round Helen in her despair, luring her to their lust, till she flees to Zeus in death.

It is characteristic of Verhaeren that he has made even this tragedy, the tragedy of Helen, anerotic, or better anti-erotic. Perhaps the slight interest which has hitherto been manifested in Verhaeren's dramas, and indeed partly in his whole work, may be ascribed to the fact that, in comparison with the other poets of his day, he has held himself aloof from erotic subjects, that the problem of love has only recently, in the years of his maturity, begun to interest him as a theme for his art. From the first Verhaeren concentrated all the passion which others lavished on the erotic in purely intellectual things, in enthusiasm, in admiration. In his dramas woman plays an almost subordinate rôle, and _Le Cloître_ is perhaps the only important drama of our days which does not show a single woman among its characters and in its inner circle of problems. By this fact alone his dramatic aim strays too far from the interests of our public. For it is from a purely intellectual conflict that Verhaeren seeks to disengage that height and heat of passion which hitherto was known only in erotic themes; and therefore the exaltation strikes the majority of an audience as strange, and leaves them unmoved. All our contemporaries who seek art only in the theatre are too indifferent and timid to be snatched up, for a purely ethical problem, into an ecstasy so burning, so persistently lit with convulsive lightnings. This is the only explanation I can find for the opposition to Verhaeren's dramas, which are so full of beauty and of living, dramatic, passionate situations, and which, above all, contain something new, a new dramatic style. This very kindling of prose to verse was a revelation. But the whole dramatic aim is different in Verhaeren to that which obtains on the stage of to-day. His aim is not to excite interest, not to produce fear and compassion, but enthusiasm. He does not wish to occupy the minds of his audience, but to carry them away into his rhythm. He wishes to make them drunk with his great excitement, because only he who gazes in enthusiasm is capable of recognising these supreme passions; he wishes to make the spectators as feverish as the characters they see before them on the stage; he wishes to make their blood fiery; wishes to raise them above all cool, calm, and critical contemplation. His whole temperament, which drives along in the direction of superabundance; his art, which only fulfils its purpose in ecstasy; require impassioned actors and an impassioned audience. To create the ideal atmosphere which Verhaeren demands for his dramas would require an actor of kindred genius who should have no fear of being called emotional, and who would hurl the verses down like cataracts, emphasising like a demagogue and at the same time unfolding all the magnificence of the rhythm. For the poet asks for nothing save a feeling of enthusiasm corresponding to that which first created the poem in him. His intention is not to convince by logic, not to dazzle by pictures, but to whip up and carry along with him into that ultimate dizzy feeling which to him is alone identical with the highest form of the feeling of life--into passion.

In Germany _Le Cloître_,[1] as staged by Max Reinhardt, and again in the Deutsches Volkstheater in Vienna, has conquered the interest of a literary public and triumphed unreservedly over the obstacle of its own strangeness. There has been an exemplary production of _Philip II._ in the Munich Künstlertheater; _Hélène de Sparte_ on the other hand has not yet found the setting it demands. As bodied forth in Paris by Ida Rubinstein, with decorations of a grandiose barbarism by Bakst, with a ground-colouring of music, it was effective more by the external magnificence of this somewhat sensationally advertised _mise en scène_ than by its poetic qualities, smothered as they were by the accessories. A production which shall do justice to the play, leaving its pure lyric line unbedizened with glaring arabesques, is still waiting as a task for some actor-manager of genius who possesses that highest and rarest quality of being able to subordinate himself to the utterance, who is anxious not to ruin a noble simplicity by a spurious plenitude.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] A version of _Le Cloître_, by Mr. Osman Edwards, was successfully produced by Miss Horniman at the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester in 1910.

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