"Mais les plus exaltés se dirent dans leur cœur,
'Partons quand même avec notre âme inassouvie
Puisque la force et que la vie
Sont au delà des vérités et des erreurs.'"
"Vivre c'est prendre et donner avec liesse.
Toute la vie est dans l'essor."
The above principles, prefixed to the _Forces Tumultueuses_ of Émile
Verhaeren, are well fitted to supply the key to a man who both in
thought and in technique is indisputably the most modern and the
most massive force in the whole of contemporary European poetry.
For Verhaeren is no narrow specialist with an outlook limited to
some particular sphere. He is the singer of the whole fulness of
modern European life as a whole, with its clashes, its complexities,
its agonies and its tensions, its deserted country-sides and its
pullulating metropoles, its armaments and its Armageddons, its
brothels, cathedrals, laboratories and Stock Exchanges, its sciences
and its sensualities, its arts, philosophies and aspirations. His muse
is no serene nymph piping delicately on some Parnassian slope, but
an extremely tumultuous Amazon, at once primeval, and ultra-modern,
chanting the pæan of battle, steeped in the wine of victory, and
suckling the supermen of the future on her universal breasts. No muse
in the whole of literature is more highly charged with vitality, and
no reader is qualified to enjoy her unless he, too, is charged to the
maximum with "the red tonic liquor of a harsh and formidable reality."
Let us then glance first at the early _milieu_ of a man who
combines the exultant fury of the lyric with the wide outlook of the
cosmopolitan sociologist, and who can incidentally beat both Baudelaire
and Wordsworth at their own respective game.
Verhaeren was born on the 21st May 1855 at St. Amand in Belgium, one
of the most strenuous countries in the modern world, which, it is
interesting to remember, holds the European record for sensualism,
alcoholism, and clericalism. St. Amand is situated on the broad plains
of the Scheldt, and it is not unimportant to lay some stress on the
Flemish ancestry and environment of a man who, though he wrote in the
French language, is more Germanic than Gallic in his temperament, and
who represents in the sphere of verse perhaps the nearest analogue
to the crass majesty and red sensuality of Rubens. His early country
upbringing, moreover, is responsible for that _joie de vivre_ in
the fields, and, above all, the wind, the symbolisation of fury and
rebellion which was to inspire those nature lyrics, many of which are
nearly as great, though by no means as interesting, as his cosmic and
metropolitan poems.
Verhaeren was originally intended for the priest-hood, and was
educated at the Jesuit school of St. Barbe in Ghent, where he had
for his schoolfellows such men as Maeterlinck, Van Lenbergh, and
Rodenbach. Leaving school, he went to Brussels, where he felt "his
multiplied heart grow and become exalted" with the roaring intensity
of metropolitan life. All thoughts of a holy life were now abandoned,
and in 1881 the poet was called to the Bar. His chief interests,
however, were literature, Socialism, and Brussels life. Joining the
Young Belgian group under the leadership of Edmond Picard, he became
a frequent contributor to _L'Art Moderne_ and _La Jeune Belgique_.
Politically he was a Socialist, associated himself with the Socialist
leader Vandervelde, and was one of the founders of the philanthropic
_Maison des Peuples_.
But it was in the poetic representation of "the monstrous scenery of
the crass Flemish Kermesses" (_Les Flamands_, 1883) that Verhaeren gave
the first vent to his violent virility. In this work a Rubensesque and
Rabelaisian subject-matter is treated with poetic exaltation by a man
who found in the great national festivals of past and present Flanders,
with
"Des chocs de corps, des heurts de chair et des bourrades,
Des lèchements subis dans un etreignement,"
the same patriotic inspiration which Mr. G. K. Chesterton has
discovered in that beer; into which he has, as it were, so successfully
transubstantiated the whole national spirit of our English
body-politic. Thus our poet wallows defiantly in the black roughness of
his Flemish peasants:
"Les voici noirs, grossiers, bestiaux--ils sont tels,"
or casts regretful glances towards the healthier grossness of the
artists of old Flanders:
"Vos pinceaux ignoraient le fard,
Les indécences, les malices,
Et les sous-entendus de vice
Qui clignent l'œil dans notre art,
Vos femmes suaient la santé,
Rouge de sang blanche de graisse,
Elles menaient les ruts en laisse
Avec des airs de royauté."
But these poems are far more than mere erotic or gastronomic
diversions. Somewhat turgid, no doubt, with red health, they yet
possess the same sweep and the same impetus with which Aristophanes
himself once gave expression to the riotous fecundity of the earth and
the Dionysian forces of nature.
In _Les Moines_ (_The Monks_, 1886), Verhaeren treats a subject-matter
which _primâ facie_ would seem to denote the abandonment of the cult of
the flesh for the cult of the spirit. Yet such veneration as the poet
may ever have possessed for the Catholic creed was æsthetic rather than
religious. He penetrates, it is true, into the "enormous shrine where
the Middle Ages slumber," but it is less to worship than to describe
in a rigid, but majestic prosody "the grand survivors of the Christian
world"--the
"Moines venus vers nous des horizons gothiques
Mais dont l'âme mais dont l'esprit meurt de demain."
Psychologically the interesting feature of this work is that, so far
from being in any way obsessed by any Chestertonian nostalgia for a
dead and mediæval past, the poet anticipates with all apparent serenity
the day when "the final blasphemy will have transpierced God like to
an immense sword." Even, moreover, in these, as it were, antiquarian
descriptions the poet emphasizes the contrast between the visionary
life of the cloister (a life, albeit, where occasionally
"Un repas colossal souffle fourneaux béants
Éructant vers l'azur sa flamme et sa fumée")
and the real life of the outside world, and seems by no means
unsympathetic to the rebellious monk who requires
"Le ciel torride et le désert et l'air des monts
Et les tentations en rut des vieux demons
Agaçant de leurs doigts la chair enflée des gouges
En lui brûlant la lèvre avec de grands seins rouges."
Yet both _Les Flamands_ and _Les Moines_ seem quite innocent and
playful in comparison with the great black trinity of _Les Soirs, Les
Débâcles_, and _Les Flambeaux Noirs_ (1887-1891), in which Verhaeren
gave expression to the mental and physical crisis which for a time
seemed to imperil both his life and his reason. In these poems, many of
which were written in London and its
"Gares de suie et de fumée ou du gaz pleure
Ses spleens d'argent lointain vers des chemins d'éclair,
Où des bêtes d'ennui baillent à l'heure
Dolente immensément qui tinte à Westminster,"
Verhaeren leaves the objective mood of his earlier poems to clothe his
soul in the Nessian shirt of the most poisonous subjectivity. But true
tragic dignity stalks in the very extremity of his agony. Compared,
indeed, with the gigantic bass of this unhappiness, black, definite,
drastic, what is the grey wistfulness of Verlaine but the hysterical
falsetto of a whining child? Verhaeren, on the other hand, with the
ecstatic defiance of a kind of Nietzschean Prometheus sets himself to
plumb the lowest abysses of despair, and himself eggs on the eagles
of torment to devour every shred of his own soul. With "brutal teeth
of fire and madness he bites and outrages his own heart within him,"
lashes himself in his thought and in his blood, in his effort, in his
hope, in his blasphemy:
"Et quand lève le soir son calice de lie
Je me le verse à boire insatiablement."
Or take again the sinister gusto of the passage:
"Aurai-j'enfin l'atroce joie
De voir nuits après nuits comme une proie
La démence attaquer mon cerveau,
Et détraque, malade, sorti de la prison
Et des travaux forcés de sa raison
D'appareiller vers un lointain nouveau?"
The technique of these poems is worthy of some study. Having little use
for the orthodox alexandrine (except in a few instances like _Le Gel_,
where the icy massiveness of the blocked couplets faithfully mirrors
the polar desolation of his own soul), he fashions his own metres to
incarnate his own moods. Such a refrain as "Ce minuit dallé d'ennui"
will boom out again and again the dull monotonous clank of his own
weary spirit. At other times the grinding engines of a disorganised
mind whirr and jar with spasmodic feverishness:
"C'est l'heure où les hallucinés,
Les gueux, et les déracinés
Dressent leur orgueil dans la vie."
Note, too, the ghastly effectiveness of the internal rhymes. Is not,
for instance, such a line as
"Les chiens du noir espoir out aboyé ce soir"
a triple series, as it were, of metrical mirrors, where the bitten mind
barks savagely back at its own mad image. Or listen to the Titanic thud
of such a line as
"La Mer choque ses blocs de flots contre les rocs,"
or the silent smash of
"Dites suis-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?"
At times transcending the blank negativity of despair, the poet will
coquet positively with his own madness, as he wanders "hallucinated
in the forest of numbers," or wishes to march towards "madness and
her suns, her white suns of moonlight in the great weird noon, and
her distant echoes bitten by dins and barkings and full of vermilion
hounds." Or abandoning the more specific formulation of his own
emotions, he will give vent to his feelings by letting his brain dance
upon the lurid boards of some _macabre_ theme. The little poem, _La
Tête_, is dank with all the smooth bloodiness of the guillotine,
while the _Dame en Noir_, with the ghastly rhymes and assurances of
its refrain, is swathed in a black pathos, in comparison with which
the most lurid horrors of Baudelaire appear the mere artificial
extravagances of a perverse mind.
As we have already seen, the blackness of the trilogy which we have
just considered was no mere dabbling in morbidity, but the genuine
expression of a genuine unhappiness. In, however, _Les Apparus dans
Mes Chemins, Les Vignes de Ma Muraille_ the storm gradually exhausts
itself, and is replaced by a more serene and confident mood. Contrast,
for instance, with the drastic violence of _Les Débâcles_ the jaded
weariness of such a lyric as _Celui de la Fatigue_, where the poet
sings of an "ardour broken on the whirling staircase of the infinite,"
or of such a passage as
"Je m'habille des loques de mes jours
Et le bâton de mon orgueil il plie,
Mes pieds dites comme ils sont lourds
De me porter de me trainer toujours
Au long de siècle de ma vie."
And as a complete antithesis, again, to the black bloodiness of such
poems as _La Tête_ or _Un Meurtre,_ take the white suavity of _St.
Georges_:
"Il vient un bel ambassadeur
Du pays blanc illuminé de marbres
Où dans les pares au bords des mers sur l'arbre
De la bonté suavement croit la douceur."
But this serenity marked rather a respite in Verhaeren's development
than a real abatement of his poetic fury. With the furnaces of his mind
recharged to their maximum capacity with blazing health, he starts to
race his muse over the main lines of the modern civilisation, which
lead from _The Hallucinated Country-sides_ to _The Tentacular Towns_.
Though written at different times, these two sets of poems constitute
the contrasting halves of a complete whole, and were published together
in 1895 with two prologues, _La Ville_ and _La Plaine_. The prologues,
in particular, well illustrate the new rushing irregular prosody,
specially forged for the purpose of hammering out that white-hot
steel of the modern civilisation which enmeshes in its fabric all the
helpless flotsam of the agricultural economy. The academic harmony
of the alexandrine is here abandoned. The rhymes crash out at lesser
and greater intervals as they march along on feet that range from the
quick spasm of some dissyllabic line to the spondaic emphasis of a
full-length alexandrine.
In _Les Campagnes Hallucinés_ itself the prosody is no doubt simpler,
as the poet describes the ruined and pestilential country with its
fevers, its sins, its beggars, its pilgrims, its diseases, insanities
and débauchés, and the immense monotony of its interminable plains.
"C'est la plaine, la plaine blême
Interminablement toujours la même,
Par au-dessus, souvent
Rage si forte le vent,
Que l'on dirait le ciel fendu
Au coup de boxe
De l'équinoxe;
Novembre hurle ainsi qu'un loup
Lamentable par le soir fou."
Perhaps, however, the most sinister poems in _Les Campagnes_ are the
_Chansons de Fou_, with their naïf absurdities and their intuitive
reason, where the rhymes laugh and clatter like rows of grinning teeth,
and the almost Dureresque _Le Fléau_, from its exordium,
"La Mort a bu du sang
Au cabaret des Trois Cercueils
La Mort a mis sur le comptoir
Un écu noir,
'C'est pour les cierges, pour les deuils,'"
down to its ghastly climax,
"Et les foules suivaient vers n'importent où,
Le grand squelette aimable et soûl
Qui trimballait sur son cheval bonhomme
L'épouvante de sa personne,
Jusqu'aux lointains de peur et de panique,
Sans éprouver l'horreur de son odeur,
Ni voir danser, sous un repli de sa tunique,
Le trousseau de vers blancs qui lui têtaient le cœur."
The final significance of _Les Campagnes_ lies in its last poem, _Le
Départ_, describing the desertion by the whole country-side of that
dead mournful plain which is being eaten up by the town.
"Tandis qu'au loin là-bas
Sous les cieux lourds fuligineux et gras,
Avec son front comme un Thabor,
Avec ses sugoirs noirs et ses rouges haleines
Hallucinant et attirant les gens des plaines,
C'est la ville que le jour plombe et que la nuit éclaire
La ville en plâtre, en stuc, en bois, en marbre, en fer, en or--
Tentaculaire."
It is, however, in _Les Villes Tentaculaires_, where the fever and
indefatigable aspiration of the town are described with a Zolaesque
exaltation, that the originality of the departure initiated by
Verhaeren is more specifically manifested. For he now boldly stalks
forward as the pioneer realist in European poetry. Disregarding alike
the orthodox subject-matter and the orthodox terminology of official
poesy, he seeks and finds his inspiration in the vast forces at work
in actual modern life. The realism of Verhaeren, in somewhat pointed
contrast to the realism of some of our own patriotic or fashionable
poets, even though such expressions as "cabs" and "steamers" are to be
found in his work in the original English, depends for its æsthetic
value neither on the swing of its slang nor the egregiousness of
its expletives. The hot blast of his sincerity sweeps away at once
any impeachment of mere dabbling in the ultra-modern. His diction
is frequently brusque, and even red, if we may borrow his favourite
colour, if not his favourite adjective; yet it never loses the dignity
of authentic poetry. For the poet would seem to have been personally
susceptible, in the highest degree, to that peculiar multiplication of
vitality and intensification of emotion which is the essential effect
produced by big metropoles upon certain temperaments. And this cerebral
ecstasy is increased by the consciousness of being on the threshold of
a new age, "for the ancient dream is dead, and the new one is now being
forged." Thus the poet will wander into _The Cathedrals_, take pity on
the multitudinous misery of the praying hordes, and boom out again and
again the refrain:
"Ô ces foules, ces foules
Et la misère et la détresse qui les foulent."
But note the sociological symbolism of the climax:
"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 lointain qui roule sur la ville."
For refusing to bear the cross of Gothic ideas, the poet plunges
deliberately into the inferno of modern life. And each fresh circle but
kindles his ardour and inflames his Muse. For he will pass with growing
exaltation from the muscled teeming life of the port to the garish
ballet of a music hall where
"Des bataillons de chair et de cuisses en marche
Grouillent sur des rampes ou sous des arches,
Jambes, hanches, gorges, maillots, jupes, dentelles,"
and then, as midnight strikes and the crowd ebbs away, he will stalk
into the "brilliant chemical atmosphere" where
"Au long de promenoirs qui s'ouvrent sur la nuit
--Balcons de fleurs, rampes de flammes--
Des femmes en deuil de leur âme
Entrecroisent leurs pas sans bruit."