THE OCTOPUS CITIES
Modern civilization is a stepmother to poets; it is crowded, noisy and
ugly, and they run away and seek refuge in gardens, or monasteries, or
dreams of a happier past. But modern civilization is alive; it is the
life of hundreds of millions of human beings, forging a new future. And
there comes a new kind of poet, able to penetrate to the inner spirit of
that future.
It was fitting that such a poet should be a Belgian; for Belgium is the
center of the new industrialism in Europe. Here are great iron and steel
plants, and vast cobwebs of railroads, and harbors to which the commerce
of the world pours in. The past and the future meet here, for Belgium
has an old history and art; it is a battle-ground of Catholicism and
Protestantism, of modern science and ancient mysticism, of French
revolution and German autocracy. It is wealthy, with all the class
contrasts and antagonisms which modern capitalism brings.
Emile Verhaeren was born in 1855, of well-to-do retired parents. He
lived in the country, but in Belgium the country is close to the towns,
and the boy saw the river with the great ships, the factories and the
busy artisans, a teeming life, stimulating to the imagination. He was
educated in a Jesuit school, where they hoped to make a priest of him,
but did not succeed. He studied law, and led a wild, freakish youth. He
had been writing verses since childhood, Latin verses, and then the
classical French Alexandrines, under the spell of Victor Hugo. Then came
Zola, and young Verhaeren horrified his parents and friends by a volume
of poetry portraying the violent and brutal facts of Flemish life. They
are a gross and drunken people--we see them in the paintings of Rubens;
and it was a time when young poets were in revolt against false
idealism, and wanted to deal with reality, the more crude and hideous
the better.
From excess of animalism the Belgian people revolt to the other extreme,
asceticism; so the country is full of monks, gloomy and sober, living
apart and contemplating the past with holy awe. Verhaeren wrote a second
book, in which he portrayed strange types of these devotees. But he was
content to admire them; he did not join them.
The poet exists by virtue of the fact that he is more sensitive than the
average man; life hits him harder blows, and he flies from one extreme
to the other. Modern science took from Verhaeren his Catholic faith, and
there followed a period of pessimism, a terrible psychic crisis. Like
Dostoievski and Strindberg, he came close to the border-line of insanity
and suicide. But his restless mind would not give up to any suffering;
he was thrilled even by the adventure of pain; he loved life, even
though it held for him only the vision of death. All things are themes
for art; so he wrote a book of nightmares, a pilgrimage of neurasthenia.
The sick poet had fled from the noisy and brutal world; he found his
deliverance by coming back to it. Redemption lay in loving and
understanding mankind in its manifold new activities. Those things which
the poets generally affect to despise Verhaeren now took up with
ecstasy: industrialism, machinery, the roar of cities, the manifold
activities of crowds, in all these things he discovered a new power,
promising an infinitude of beauty.
Verhaeren wrote in French, and used a new form of rhymed free verse,
more obviously rhythmical than Whitman’s, marvelously responsive to
every throb of the poet’s imagination. It is a kind of verse to chant
aloud, an utterance of sweeping ecstasy. Verhaeren resembles Whitman in
many ways; in his identification of himself with the toiling masses, his
sense of the multitude as a new being, a thing with a life of its own.
Like Whitman he accepts the universe, he sings the chant of humanity
becoming God, conquering nature, and remaking existence in its own
image.
Walt Whitman sang “these states,” and saw them as one mighty, triumphant
land. Verhaeren also had a vision, he was the prophet of the United
States of Europe. He had lived in all its great capitals, and knew and
interpreted the forces which were bringing them together and making them
one. Terrible places they are--“the octopus cities,” he calls them in
the title of one of his volumes, and portrays them as gigantic
tentacular monsters, sucking all the life-blood from the country. No
poet has ever approached Verhaeren in the portrayal of the cruelty and
loneliness and horror of these capitalist cities. You will find in “The
Cry for Justice” a translation of one of these poems, the most frightful
picture of prostitution ever given in verse.
Verhaeren welcomed science, and proclaimed mass solidarity, the
surrender of the individual to the sweep of progress. He became a
prophet and preacher of what he called “cosmic enthusiasm.” He was, of
course, a Socialist and revolutionist. He wrote a lyrical drama called
“The Dawn,” which has been translated into English by Arthur Symonds.
Here in a mixture of prose and verse he celebrates a hero who surrenders
the citadel of capitalism to the masses, and gives his life in the
effort to abolish class conflict and build the happy future. Verhaeren
wrote other plays which have not yet been translated or produced; they
do not conform to the rules of the drama for profit, for they deal with
humanity and not with sex. But the new time is coming--and here is one
of its prophets.