The poetry of Emile Verhaeren, more than that of any other modern poet,
is made directly out of the complaining voices of the nerves. Other
writers, certainly, have been indirectly indebted to the effect of
nerves on temperament, but Verhaeren seems to express only so much of a
temperament as finds its expression through their immediate medium. In
his early books _Les Flamandes, Les Moines_ (reprinted, with _Les Bords
de la Route_, containing earlier and later work, in the first of his two
volumes of collected poems), he began by a solid, heavily colored,
exterior manner of painting genre pictures in the Flemish style. Such
poems as "Les Paysans," with its fury of description, are like a Teniers
in verse; not Breughel has painted a kermesse with hotter colors, a more
complete abandonment to the sunlight, wine and gross passions of those
Flemish feasts. This first book, _Les Flamandes_, belongs to the
Naturalistic movement; but it has already as in the similar
commencements of Huysmans so ardent a love of color for its own sake,
color becoming lyrical, that one realizes how soon this absorption in
the daily life of farms, kitchens, stables, will give place to another
kind of interest. And in _Les Moines_, while there is still for the most
part the painting of exteriorities, a new sentiment, by no means the
religious sentiment, but an artistic interest in what is less material,
less assertive in things, finds for itself an entirely new scheme of
color. Here, for instance, was "Cuisson de Pain," in the first book:
_Dehors, les grands fournils chauffaient leurs braises
rouges,
Et deux par deux, du bout d'une planche, les gouges
Dans le ventre des fours engouffraient les pains mous.
Et les flammes, par les gueules s'ouvrant passage,
Comme une meute énorme et chaude de chiens roux,
Sautaient en rugissant leur mordre le visage._
But it is not until _Les Soirs_ that we find what was to be the really
individual style developing itself. It develops itself at first with a
certain heaviness. Here is a poet who writes in images: good; but the
images are larger than the ideas. Wishing to say that the hour was
struck, he says:
"_Seul un beffroi,
Immensément vêtu de nuit, cassait les heures._"
And, indeed, everything must be done _immensément._ The word is
repeated on every page, sometimes twice in a stanza. The effect of
monotony in rhythm, the significant, chiming recurrence of words, the
recoil of a line upon itself, the dwindling away or the heaping up of
sound in line after line, the shock of an unexpected cæsura, the delay
and the hastened speed of syllables: all these arts of a very conscious
technique are elaborated with somewhat too obvious an intention. There
is splendor, opulence, and, for the first time, "such stuff as dreams
are made of." Description is no longer made for its own sake; it becomes
metaphor. And this metaphor is entirely new. It may be called
exaggerated, affected even; but it is new, and it is expressive.
"_Les chiens du désespoir, les chiens du vent d'automne,
Mordent de leurs abois les échos noirs des soirs,
Et l'ombre, immensément, dans le vide, tâtonne
Vers la lune, mirée au clair des abreuvoirs._"
In _Les Débâcles_, a year later, this art of writing in colored and
audible metaphor, and on increasingly abstract and psychological
subjects, the sensations externalized, has become more master of itself,
and at the same time more immediately the servant of a more and more
feverish nervous organization.
"_Tu seras le fiévreux ployé, sur les fenêtres.
D'où l'on peut voir bondir la vie et ses chars d'or._"
And the contemplation of this _fiévreux_ is turned more and more in
upon itself, finding in its vision of the outer world only a mirrored
image of its own disasters. The sick man, looking down on his thin
fingers, can think of them only in this morbid, monastic way:
"_Mes doigts, touchez mon front et cherchez, là,
Les vers qui rongeront, un jour, de leur morsure,
Mes chairs; touchez mon front, mes maigres doigts,
voilà
Que mes veines déjà, comme une meurtrissure
Bleuâtre, étrangement, en font la tour, mes las
Et pauvres doigts--et que vos longs ongles malades
Battent, sinistrement, sur mes tempes, un glas,
Un pauvre glas, mes lents et mornes doigts!_"
Two years later, with _Les Flambeaux Noirs_, what was nervous has become
almost a sort of very conscious madness: the hand on one's own pulse,
the eyes watching themselves in the glass with an unswerving fixity, but
a breaking and twisting of the links of things, a doubling and division
of the mind's sight, which might be met with, less picturesquely, in
actual madness. There are two poems, "Le Roc" and "Les Livres," which
give, in a really terrifying way, the very movement of idea falling
apart from idea, sensation dragging after it sensation down the
crumbling staircase of the brain, which are the symptoms of the brain's
loss of self-control:
_C'est là que j'ai bâti mon âme,
--Dites, serai-je seul avec mon âme?--
Mon âme hélas! maison d'ébène,
Où s'est fendu, sans bruit, un soir,
Le grand miroir de mon espoir._
_Dites, serai-je seul avec mon âme,
En ce nocturne et angoissant domaine?
Serai-je seul avec mon orgueil noir,
Assis en un fauteuil de haine?
Serai-je seul, avec ma pâle hyperdulie,
Pour Notre-Dame, la Folie?_
In these poems of self-analysis, which is self-torture, there is
something lacerating, and at the same time bewildering, which conveys to
one the sense of all that is most solitary, picturesque and poignant in
the transformation of an intensely active and keen-sighted reason into
a thing of conflicting visionary moods. At times, as in the remarkable
study of London called "Les Villes," this fever of the brain looks
around it, and becomes a flame of angry and tumultuous epithet, licking
up and devouring what is most solid in exterior space. Again, as in "Les
Lois" and "Les Nombres," it becomes metaphysical, abstract, and law
towers up into a visible palace, number flowers into a forest:
_Je suis l'halluciné de la forêt des Nombres._
That art of presenting a thought like a picture, of which Verhaeren is
so accomplished a master, has become more subtle than ever; and
_ces tours de ronde de l'infini, le soir
Et ces courbes, et ces spirales,_
of for the most part menacing speculations in the void, take visible
form before us, with a kind of hallucination, communicated to us from
that (how far deliberate?) hallucination which has created them.
Gradually, in "Les Apparus dans mes Chemins," in "Les Campagnes
Hallucinées," in "Les Villages Illusoires," in "Les Villes
Tentaculaires," the hallucinations become entirely external: it is now
the country, the village, the town, that is to say, the whole organized
world, that agonizes among cloudy phantoms, and no longer a mere
individual, abnormal brain. And so he has at once gained a certain
relief from what had been felt to be too intimately a part of himself,
and has also surrendered to a more profound, because a more extended,
consciousness of human misery. Effacing himself, as he does, behind the
great spectacle of the world, as he sees it, with his visionary eyes, in
his own violent and lethargic country, he becomes a more hopeless part
of that conspiracy of the earth against what man has built out of the
earth, of what man has built out of the earth against the earth, which
he sees developing silently among the grass and bricks. All these books
are a sort of philosophy in symbols, symbols becoming more and more
definite: "Le Donneur de Mauvais Conseils," who drives up to the farm
gate:
_La vieille carriole en bois vert-pomine
Qui l'emmena, on ne sait d'où,
Une folle la garda avec son homme
Aux carrefours des chemins mous.
Le cheval paît l'herbe d'automne,
Près d'une mare monotone,
Dont l'eau malade réverbère
Le soir de pluie et de misère
Qui tombe en loques sur la terre_;
"Les Cordiers," the old man spinning his rope against the sky,
weaving the past into the future:
_Sur la route muette et régulière,
Les yeux fixés vers la lumière
Qui frôle en se couchant les clos et les maisons,
Le blanc cordier visionnaire,
Du fond du soir auréolaire,
Attire à lui les horizons_;
and, finally, the many-tentacled towns, drawing to themselves all the
strength and sap of the earth: "Les Spectacles, La Bourse, Le Bazar,"
the monstrous and material soul of towns.
Contrast these poems with those early poems, so brutal, so Flemish, if
you would see at a glance all the difference between the naturalistic
and the symbolistic treatment. The subject-matter is the same; the same
eye sees; there are the same
_vers bâtis comme une estrade
Pour la danse des mots et leurs belles parades._
But at first there is merely an eye that sees, and that takes the
visible world at its own valuation of itself. Later on, things are seen
but to be readjusted, to be set into relation with other, invisible
realities, of which they are no more than the wavering and tortured
reflection. And with this poet, in his later manner, everything becomes
symbol; the shop, the theater, the bank, no less than the old rope-maker
weaving the horizons together.
_Sur la Ville, d'où les affres flamboient,
Règnent, sans qu'on les voie,
Mais évidentes, les idées_:
as he can write, on the last page of _Les Villes Tentaculaires_, which
points directly to _Les Aubes_, in which a sort of deliverance through
ideas is worked out.
Verhaeren's second play, _Le Cloitre_, is much finer in every way than
his first, _Les Aubes_, but it does not convince us that he is a
dramatist, in the strict sense of the word. The only French poet of the
present day who has really vivid energy, his energy is too feverish, too
spasmodic, too little under the control of a shaping intellect, to be of
precisely the quality required for the drama. The people of these brief
and fiery scenes are like little broken bits of the savage forces of the
world, working out their passionate issues under the quiet roofs of the
cloister. All their words are cries, coming out of a half-delirious
suffering; and these cries echo about the stage in an almost monotonous
conflict. It seems to us that the form which suits Verhaeren best is the
form which he has temporarily abandoned--a kind of fiery reverie, seen
finally in his last book, _Les Visages de la Vie_,
_Mon âme était anxieuse d'être elle-même
Elle s'illimitait en une âme suprême
Et violente, où l'univers se résumait;--_
as he says in one of the poems of that book; and in all these poems, "La
Foule, L'Ivresse, La Joie," and the rest, we see the poet sending his
soul into the universe and becoming a vehement voice for all that he
finds most passionate in it. It is, in its way, dramatizing of emotion,
but, if one may say so, an abstract dramatizing. It is the crowd, not
Dom Balthazar; joy itself, not some joyous human being for which he
finds words; and his merits and his defects make him a better spokesman
for disembodied than for embodied souls. Since the early period of
Flemish realism he has been, while making his language more and more
pictorial, making his interests more and more internal. He no longer
paints landscapes, but the scenery of the soul, and in the same vast and
colored images. He magnifies sensation until it becomes a sort of
hallucination of which he seems always to be the victim. Now all this is
so very personal, so clearly the vision of a not quite healthy
temperament, that his neurotic monks in the cloister, with their heated
and vehement speech, seem more like repetitions of a single type than
individual characters. But he has certainly come nearer to dramatic
characterization than in the _Shadowy Dawn_, and he has founded his play
on a more emotionally human basis; on a basis, it would seem, partly
suggested by the story which Browning tells in _Halbert and Hob._ And,
taken as a poem, it is full of vigorous, imaginative writing, in which
the religious passion finds eloquent speech. And, after all, is not this
one of the most interesting, and not even one of the least successful,
attempts at what a more extravagant imitator has lately called _La
tragédie intérieure?_ The actual tendency of art is certainly toward
an abandonment of the heroic and amusing adventures which constituted so
much of the art of the past, and a concentration upon whatever can be
surmised of that soul which these adventures must doubtless have left so
singularly indifferent. Ibsen has shown us destiny quietly at work in
suburban drawing-rooms, among people who have rarely anything
interesting to say, but whose least word becomes interesting because it
is seen to knit one more mesh in the net of destiny. Maeterlinck has
gone further, and shown us soul talking with soul, at first under almost
pseudo-romantic disguises, among Leonardo landscapes, then more and more
simply, as people who have no longer lost their crowns in a pool, but
who, in Aglavaine and Selysette, might be any of our acquaintances, if
we can imagine our acquaintances under a startling and revealing flash
of light. Verhaeren falls into the movement, trying to give a more
lyrical form to this new kind of drama, trying to give it a narrower and
fiercer intensity. What he has so far achieved is a melodrama of the
spirit, in which there is poetry, but also rhetoric. Will he finally be
able to find for himself a form in which the "inner tragedy" can be
externally presented without rhetoric? Then, perhaps, the poetry will
make its own drama.
A NEGLECTED GENIUS: SIR RICHARD
BURTON
I
One hundred years ago, on March 19th, 1821, Sir Richard Burton was born;
he died at Trieste on October 19th, 1890, in his seventieth year. He was
superstitious; the fact that he was born and that he died on the
nineteenth has its significance. On the night when he expired, as his
wife was saying prayers to him, a dog began that dreadful howl which the
superstitious say denotes a death. It was an evil omen; I have heard
long after midnight dogs howl in the streets of Constantinople; their
howling is only broken by the tapping of the bekjé's iron staff; it
sounds like loud wind or water far off, waning and waxing, and at times,
as it comes across the water from Stamboul, it is like a sound of
strings, plucked and scraped savagely by an orchestra of stringed
instruments.
In every age there have been I know not how many neglected men of
genius, undiscovered, misunderstood, mocked at in the fashion Jesus
Christ was mocked by the Jews, scorned as Dante was scorned when he was
exiled from Florence, called a madman as Blake used to be called,
censured as Swinburne was in 1866, for being "an unclean fiery imp of
the pit" and "the libidinous Laureate of a pack of satyrs;" so the
greatest as the least--the greatest whose names are always remembered
and the least whose names are invariably forgotten--have endured the
same prejudices; have been lapidated by the same stones; such stones as
Burton refers to when he writes in Mecca:
On the great festival day we stoned the Devil, each man with seven
stones washed in seven waters, and we said, while throwing the stones,
"In the name of Allah--and Allah is Almighty--I do this in hatred of the
Devil, and to his shame."
Burton was a great man, a great traveler and adventurer, who practically
led to the discovery of the sources of the Nile; a wonderful linguist,
he was acquainted with twenty-nine languages: he was a man of genius;
only, the fact is, he is not a great writer. Continually thwarted by the
English Government, he was debarred from some of the most famous
expeditions by the folly of his inferiors, who ignorantly supposed they
were his superiors; and, as Sir H. H. Johnston says in some of his
notes, not only was Burton treated unjustly, but his famous pilgrimage
to Mecca won him no explicit recognition from the Indian Government; his
great discoveries in Africa, Brazil, Syria and Trieste were never
appreciated; and, worst of all, he was refused the post of British
Minister in Morocco; it was persistently denied him. He adds: "Had he
gone there we might long since have known--what we do not know--the
realities of Morocco."
Still, when Burton went to India, I do not imagine he was likely to
suffer from any hostility on the part of the natives nor of the rulers.
Lord Clive, who, in Browning's words, "gave England India," which was
the result of his incredible victory in 1751 over the Nabob's army of
60,000 men, was never literally "loved" by the races of India; no more
than Sir Warren Hastings. Still, Clive had genius, which he showed in
the face of a bully he caught cheating at cards and in his mere shout at
him: "You did cheat, go to Hell!" Impeached for the splendid service he
had done in India he was acquitted in 1773; next year, having taken to
opium, his own hand dealt himself his own doom. So he revenged himself
on his country's ingratitude. So did Burton revenge himself--not in
deeds, but in words, words, if I may say so, that are stupendous. "I
struggled for forty-seven years, I distinguished myself honourably in
every way I possibly could. I never had a compliment nor a 'Thank you,'
nor a single farthing. I translated a doubtful book in my old age, and I
immediately made sixteen thousand guineas. Now that I know the tastes of
England, we need never be without money."
Burton first met Swinburne in 1861 at Lord Houghton's house, who, having
given him _The Queen Mother_, said: "I bring you this book because the
author is coming here this evening, so that you may not quote him as an
absurdity to himself." In the summer of 1865 Swinburne saw a great deal
of Burton. These two men, externally so dissimilar, had taken (as
Swinburne said to me) a curious fancy, an absolute fascination, for each
other. Virile and a mysterious adventurer, Burton was Swinburne's senior
by sixteen years; one of those things that linked them together was
certainly their passionate love of literature. Burton had also--which
Swinburne might perhaps have envied--an almost unsurpassable gift for
translation, which he shows in his wonderful version of _The Arabian
Nights._ He used to say:
I have not only preserved the spirit of the original, but the
_mécanique._ I don't care a button about being prosecuted, and if the
matter comes to a fight, I will walk into court with my Bible and my
Shakespeare and my Rabelais under my arm, and prove to them that before
they condemn me, they must cut half of _them_ out, and not allow them to
be circulated to the public.
In his Foreword to the first volume of his Translation, dated
Wanderers' Club, August 15th, 1885, he says:
This work, laborious as it may appear, has been to me a labor of love,
an unfailing source of solace and satisfaction. During my long years of
official banishment to the luxurious and deadly deserts of Western
Africa, it proved truly a charm, a talisman against ennui and
despondency. The Jinn bore me at once to the land of my predilection,
Arabia. In what is obscure in the original there are traces of Petronius
Arbiter and of Rabelais; only, subtle corruption and covert
licentiousness are wholly absent.
Therefore, in order to show the wonderful quality of his translation, I
have chosen certain of his sentences, which literally bring back to me
all that I have felt of the heat, the odor and the fascination of the
East.
So I donned my mantilla, and, taking with me the old woman and the
slave-girl, I went to the Khan of the merchants. There I knocked at the
door and out came two white slave-girls, both young, high-bosomed
virgins, as they were Moons. They were melting a perfume whose like I
had never before smelt; and so sharp and subtle was the odor that it
made my senses drunken as with strong wine. I saw there also two great
censers each big as a mazzar bowl, flaming with aloes, nard, perfumes,
ambergris and honied scents; and the place was full of their fragrance.
The next quotation is from the Tale of the Fisherman and the Jinn:
He loosened the lid from the jar, he shook the vase to pour out whatever
might be inside. He found nothing in it; whereat he marvelled with an
exceeding marvel. But presently there came forth from the jar a smoke
which spread heavenwards into ether (whereat again he marvelled with
mighty marvel) and which trailed along earth's surface till presently,
having reached its full height, the thick vapors condensed, and became
an Ifrit, huge of bulk, whose crest touched the clouds when his feet
were on the ground.
I have before me Smithers' privately printed edition (1894) of _The
Carmina of Valerius Catullus now first completely Englished into Verse
and Prose, the Metrical Part by Capt. Sir Richard Burton, and the Prose
Portion by Leonard C. Smithe._ Burton is right in saying that "the
translator of original mind who notes the innumerable shades of tone,
manner and complexion will not neglect the frequent opportunities of
enriching his mother-tongue with novel and alien ornaments which shall
justify the accounted barbarisms until formally naturalized and adopted.
He must produce an honest and faithful copy, adding nought to the sense
or abating aught of its _cachet._" He ends his Foreword: "As discovery
is mostly my mania, I have hit upon a bastard-urging to indulge it, by a
presenting to the public of certain classics in the nude Roman poetry,
like the Arab, and of the same date."
Certainly Burton leaves out nothing of the nakedness that startles one
in the verse of Catullus: a nakedness that is as honest as daylight and
as shameless as night. When the text is obscene his translation retains
its obscenity; which, on the whole, is rare: for the genius of Catullus
is elemental, primitive, nervous, passionate, decadent in the modern
sense and in the modern sense perverse. In his rhymed version of the
Attis Burton has made a prodigious attempt to achieve the impossible.
Not being a poet, he was naturally unable to follow the rhythm--the
Galliambic metre, in which Catullus obtains variety of rhythm; for, as
Robinson Ellis says:
It remains unique as a wonderful expression of abnormal feeling in a
quasi-abnormal meter. Quasi-abnormal, however, only: for no poem of
Catullus follows stricter laws, or succeeds in conveying the idea of a
wild freedom under a more carefully masked regularity.
As one must inevitably compare two translations of the same original, I
have to point out that Burton's rendering is, both metrically and
technically, inaccurate; whereas, in another rendering, the translator
has at least preserved the exact metre, the exact scansion, and the
double endings at the end of every line; not, of course, in this case,
employing the double rhymes Swinburne used in his translation from
Aristophanes. These are Burton's first lines:--
O'er high deep seas in speedy ship his voyage Atys sped
Until he trod the Phrygian grove with hurried, eager
tread,
And as the gloomy tree-shorn stead, the she-God's
home he sought,
There sorely stung with fiery ire and madman's raging
thought,
Share he with sharpened flint the freight wherewith
his frame was fraught.