Of all the poets of today, narcissi along the river, Verhaeren is the
least obliging in allowing himself to be admired. He is rude, violent,
unskillful. Busied for twenty years in forging a strange and magical
tool, he remains in a mountain cavern, hammering the reddened irons,
radiant in the fire's reflection, haloed with sparks. Thus it is we
should picture him, a forger who,
Comme s'il travaillait l'acier des âmes,
Martèle à grands coups pleins, les lames
Immenses de la patience et du silence.
(Tr. 3)
If we discover his dwelling and question him, he replies with a parable
whose every word seems scanned on the forge, and, to conclude, he
delivers a tremendous blow of his heavy hammer.
When he is not laboring at his forge, he goes forth through the fields,
head and arms bare, and the Flemish fields tell him secrets they have
not yet told anyone. He beholds miraculous things and is not astonished
at them. Singular beings pass before him, beings whom everybody jostles
without being aware, visible alone to him. He has met the November Wind:
Le vent sauvage de novembre.
Le vent,
L'avez-vous rencontré, le vent
Au carrefour des trois cents routes...?
(Tr. 4)
He has seen Death, and more than once; he has seen Fear; he has seen
Silence
S'asseoir immensément du côté de la nuit.
(Tr. 5)
The characteristic word of Verhaeren's poetry is _halluciné_. The
word leaps from page to page. An entire collection, the _Campagnes
hallucinées_ has not freed him from this obsession. Exorcism was not
possible, for it is the nature and very essence of Verhaeren to be the
hallucinated poet. "Sensations," Taine said, "are true hallucinations."
But where does truth begin or end? Who shall dare circumscribe it? The
poet, with no psychological scruples, wastes no time over troubling
himself to divide hallucinations into truths or untruths. For him
they are all true if they are sharp and strong, and he recounts them
frankly--and when the recitation is made by Verhaeren, it is very
lovely. Beauty in art is a relative result which is achieved by the
mixture of very different elements, often the most unexpected. Of these
elements, one alone is stable and permanent, and ought to be found in
all combinations: that is novelty. A work of art must be new, and we
recognize it as such quite simply by the fact that it gives a sensation
not yet experienced.
If it does not give this, a work, perfect though it be adjudged, is
everything that is contemptible. It is useless and ugly, since nothing
is more absolutely useful than beauty. With Verhaeren, beauty is made
of novelty and strength. This poet is a strong man and, since those
_Villes tentaculaires_ which surged with the violence of a telluric
upheaval, no one dares to deny him the state and glory of a great poet.
Perhaps he has not yet quite finished the magic instrument which for
twenty years he has been forging. Perhaps he is not yet master of his
language. He is unequal; he lets his most beautiful pages grow heavy
with inopportune epithets, and his finest poems become entangled in
what was once called prosaism. Nevertheless, the impression of power
and grandeur remains, and yes: he is a great poet. Listen to this
fragment from _Cathédrales_:
* * * * *
--O ces foules, ces foules
Et la misère et la détresse qui les foulent
Comme des houles!
Les ostensoirs, ornés de soie,
Vers les villes échafaudées,
En toits de verre et de cristal,
Du haut du choeur sacerdotal,
Tendent la croix des gothiques idées.
Ils s'imposent dans l'or des clairs dimanches
--Toussaint, Noël, Pâques et Pentecôtes blanches.
Ils s'imposent dans l'or et dans l'encens et dans la fête
Du grand orgue battant du vol de ses tempêtes
Les chapiteaux rouges et les voûtes vermeilles,
Ils sont une âme, en du soldi,
Qui vit de vieux décor et d'antique mystère
Autoritaire.
Pourtant, dès que s'éteignent le cantique
Et l'antienne naïve et prismatique,
Un deuil d'encens évaporé s'empreint
Sur les trépieds d'argent et les autels d'airain,
Et les vitraux, grands de siècles agenouillés
Devant le Christ, avec leurs papes immobiles
Et leurs martyrs et leurs héros, semblent trembler
Au bruit d'un train hautain que passe sur la ville.
(Tr. 6)
Verhaeren appears a direct son of Victor Hugo, especially in his
earliest works. Even after his evolution towards a poetry more freely
feverish, he still remains romantic. Here, to explain this, are four
verses evoking the days of former times.
Jadis--c'était la vie errante et somnambule,
A travers les matins et les soirs fabuleux,
Quand la droite de Dieu vers les Chanaans bleus
Traçait la route d'or au fond des crépuscules.
Jadis--c'était la vie énorme, exaspérée,
Sauvagement pendue aux crins des étalons,
Soudaine, avec de grands éclairs à ses talons
Et vers l'espace immense immensément cabrée.
Jadis--c'était la vie ardent, évocatoire;
La Croix blanche de ciel, la Croix rouge d'enfer
Marchaient, à la clarté des armures de fer,
Chacune à travers sang, vers son ciel de victoire.
Jadis--c'était la vie écumante et livide,
Vécue et morte, à coups de crime et de tocsins,
Bataille entre eux, de proscripteurs et d'assassins,
Avec, au-dessus d'eux, la mort folle et splendid.
(Tr. 7)
These verses are drawn from _Villages illusoires_, written almost
exclusively in assonant free verse, divided by means of a gasping
rhythm, but Verhaeren, master of free verse, is also master of romantic
verse, to which he can force, without being dashed to pieces, the
unbridled, terrible gallop of his thought, drunk with images, phantoms
and future visions.