Some years ago, a magazine undertook to ask a number of writers in
what chosen spot they would like to pass a few beautiful hours. Emile
Verhaeren answered:
“In a certain corner of the harbor of Hamburg.”
Verhaeren is among those who have revealed to us the mournful grandeur
of city views, of factory towns, those places that seem accursed and
from which one might think that happiness was forever exiled.
The aspirations of our souls are so plentiful, so tenacious, so fertile
that we find something to console us, satisfy us, exalt us in those
very spots where suffering rules tyrannically, where the valley of
Gehenna is most precipitous.
I visited the docks of Liverpool with a sort of horror. There were tall
brick buildings, their roofs lost in the smoke, windows covered with
grime, their interiors nothing but monstrous heaps of cotton bales.
Men were climbing about there like flies. Everything smelt of fog and
mould. Narrow pavements, slimy with rain, ran along by the dry-docks
where the steamers, like immense corpses, were being assailed by the
frantic crowd. The workers toiled amid a bombardment of hammers, a
whirl of sparks. The drills snarled like whipped cats. A hideous
light, smothered by the smoke and the mist of the Mersey, drowned
everything in its fetid flood.
And yet, since then, I have often dreamed of that terrible spot and
felt the need of living there.
For two years I attended the wounded of the First Army Corps, all of
them men from the north, stained by the coal on face and chest, men
from the factories or the mines. I walked with them through the smiling
landscapes of the Aisne, the Vesle, the Marne, when those lovely
valleys had not yet been too much disfigured by the war. Certainly
they all enjoyed the slopes with their gracious groves of trees, the
beautiful cultivated fields, draped like many-colored shawls over the
shoulders of the little hills, but they all thought most, with love and
regret, of cylinders, mine shafts, machines, and a smoky horizon.
I can understand it: one’s native soil, one’s own habitude, the
familiar human landscape, moulded upon the other and transfiguring
it. Above everything we have to recognize that the soul is sensitive
to many infinitely varied and often contradictory things. Grace of
lines, rustic charm are qualities that attach us to a country; fierce
and desolate grandeur is another such, and this indeed has almost the
strongest nostalgic power of all.
When beauty seems to have abandoned the world, we must realize that it
has first deserted our own hearts.
X
Between your five senses, open like the dazzling portholes on the side
of a ship, do you really believe there is nothing, nothing but the
void, the night, the dumb wall?