EMILE VERHAEREN
BY
STEFAN ZWEIG
LONDON
CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD
1914
[Illustration: Émile Verhaeren from an unpublished photograph by
Charles Bernier, 1914.]
PREFACE
Four years have passed since the present volume appeared simultaneously
in German and French. In the meantime Verhaeren's fame has been
spreading; but in English-speaking countries he is still not so well
known as he deserves to be.
Something of his philosophy--if it may be called philosophy rather than
a poet's inspired visualising of the world--has passed into the public
consciousness in a grotesquely distorted form in what is known as
'futurism.' So long as futurism is associated with those who have
acquired a facile notoriety by polluting the pure idea, it would be an
insult to Verhaeren to suggest that he is to be classed with the
futurists commonly so-called; but the whole purpose of the present
volume will prove that the gospel of a very serious and reasoned
futurism is to be found in Verhaeren's writings.
Of the writer of the book it may be said that there was no one more
fitted than he to write the authentic exposition of the teaching which
he has hailed as a new religion. His relations to the Master are not
only those of a fervent disciple, but of an apostle whose labour of
love has in German-speaking lands and beyond been crowned with signal
success. Himself a lyrist of distinction, Stefan Zweig has accomplished
the difficult feat, which in this country still waits to be done, of
translating the great mass of Verhaeren's poems into actual and enduring
verse. Another book of his on Verlaine is already known in an English
rendering; so that he bids fair to become known in this country as one
of the most gifted of the writers of Young-Vienna.
As to the translation, I have endeavoured to be faithful to my text,
which is the expression of a personality. Whatever divergences there are
have been necessitated by the lapse of time. For help in reading the
proofs I have to thank Mr. M.T.H. Sadler and Mr. Fritz Voigt.
J. BITHELL.
HAMMERFIELD,
_Nr_. HEMEL HEMPSTEAD,
14_th July_ 1914.
CONTENTS
PART I
THE NEW AGE
THE NEW BELGIUM
YOUTH IN FLANDERS
'LES FLAMANDES'
THE MONKS
THE BREAK-DOWN
FLIGHT INTO THE WORLD
PART II
TOWNS ('LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES')
THE MULTITUDE
THE RHYTHM OF LIFE
THE NEW PATHOS
VERHAEREN'S POETIC METHOD
VERHAEREN'S DRAMA
PART III
COSMIC POETRY
THE LYRIC UNIVERSE
SYNTHESES
THE ETHICS OF FERVOUR
LOVE
THE ART OF VERHAEREN'S LIFE
THE EUROPEAN IMPORTANCE OF HIS WORK
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
PART I
DECIDING FORCES
LES FLAMANDES--LES MOINES--LES SOIRS--LES
DÉBâCLES--LES FLAMBEAUX NOIRS--AU BORD DE
LA ROUTE--LES APPARUS DANS MES CHEMINS
1883-1893
Son tempérament, son caractère, sa vie, tout conspire à nous
montrer son art tel que nous avons essayé de le définir. Une
profonde unité les scelle. Et n'est-ce pas vers la découverte de
cette unité-là, qui groupe en un faisceau solide les gestes, les
pensées et les travaux d'un génie sur la terre, que la critique,
revenue enfin de tant d'erreurs, devait tendre uniquement?
VERHAEREN, _Rembrandt._
THE NEW AGE
Tout bouge--et l'on dirait les horizons en marche.
É.V., 'La Foule.'
The feeling of this age of ours, of this our moment in eternity, is
different in its conception of life from that of our ancestors. Only
eternal earth has changed not nor grown older, that field, gloomed by
the Unknown, on which the monotonous light of the seasons divides, in a
rhythmic round, the time of blossoms and of their withering; changeless
only are the action of the elements and the restless alternation of
night and day. But the aspect of earth's spirit has changed, all that is
subjected to the toil of man. Has changed, to change again. The
evolution of the phenomena of culture seems to proceed with ever greater
rapidity: never was the span of a hundred years as rich, as replete as
that which stretches to the threshold of our own days. Cities have shot
up which are as huge and bewildering, as impenetrable and as endless, as
nothing else has been save those virgin forests now fast receding before
the onward march of the tilled land. More and more the work of man
achieves the grandiose and elementary character that was once Nature's
secret. The lightning is in his hands, and protection from the
weather's sudden onslaughts; lands that once yawned far apart are now
forged together by the iron hoop with which of old only the narrow
strait was arched; oceans are united that have sought each other for
thousands of years; and now in the very air man is building a new road
from country to country. All has changed.
Tout a changé: les ténèbres et les flambeaux.
Les droits et les devoirs out fait d'autres faisceaux,
Du sol jusqu'au soleil, une neuve énergie
Diverge un sang torride, en la vie élargie;
Des usines de fonte ouvrent, sous le ciel bleu,
Des cratères en flamme et des fleuves en feu;
De rapides vaisseaux, sans rameurs et sans voiles,
La nuit, sur les flots bleus, étonnent les étoiles;
Tout peuple réveillé se forge une autre loi;
Autre est le crime, autre est l'orgueil, autre est l'exploit.[1]
Changed, too, is the relation of individual to individual, of the
individual to the whole; at once more onerous and less burdensome is the
network of social laws, at once more onerous and less burdensome our
whole life.
But a still greater thing has happened. Not only the real forms, the
transitory facts of life have changed, not only do we live in other
cities, other houses, not only are we dressed in different clothes, but
the infinite above us too, that which seemed unshakable, has changed
from what it was for our fathers and forefathers. Where the actual
changes, the relative changes also. The most elementary forms of our
conception, space and time, have been displaced. Space has become other
than it was, for we measure it with new velocities. Roads that took our
forefathers days to traverse can now be covered in one short hour; one
flying night transports us to warm and luxuriant lands that were once
separated from us by the hardships of a long journey. The perilous
forests of the tropics with Jheir strange constellations, to see which
cost those of old a year of their lives, are of a sudden near to us and
easy of access. We measure differently with these different velocities
of life. Time is more and more the victor of space. The eye, too, has
learned other distances, and in cold constellations is startled to
perceive the forms of primeval landscapes petrified; and the human voice
seems to have grown a thousand times stronger since it has learned to
carry on a friendly conversation a hundred miles away. In this new
relationship of forces we have a different perception of the spanning
round of the earth, and the rhythm of life, beating more brightly and
swiftly, is likewise becoming new for us. The distance from springtime
to springtime is greater now and yet less, greater and yet less is the
individual hour, greater and less our whole life.
And therefore is it with new feelings that we must comprehend this new
age. For we all feel that we must not measure the new with the old
measures our forefathers used, that we must not live through the new
with feelings outworn, that we must discover a new sense of distance, a
new sense of time, a new sense of space, that we must find a new music
for this nervous, feverish rhythm around us. This new-born human
conditionality calls for a new morality; this new union of equals a new
beauty; this new topsy-turvydom a new system of ethics. And this new
confrontation with another and still newer world, with another Unknown,
demands a new religion, a new God. A new sense of the universe is, with
a muffled rumour, welling up in the hearts of all of us.
New things, however, must be coined into new words. A new age calls for
new poets, poets whose conceptions have been nurtured by their
environment, poets who, in the expression they give to this new
environment, themselves vibrate with the feverish rotation of life. But
so many of our poets are pusillanimous. They feel that their voices are
out of harmony with reality; they feel that they are not incorporated
with the new organism and a necessary part of it; they have a dull
foreboding that they do not speak the language of our contemporary life.
In our great cities they are like strangers stranded. The great roaring
streams of our new sensations are to them terrific and inconceivable.
They are ready to accept all the comfort and luxury of modern life; they
are quick to take advantage of the facilities afforded by technical
science and organisation; but for their poetry they reject these
phenomena, because they cannot master them. They recoil from the task
of transmuting poetical values, of sensing whatever is poetically new in
these new things. And so they stand aside. They flee from the real, the
contemporary, to the immutable; they take refuge in whatsoever the
eternal evolution has left untouched; they sing the stars, the
springtime, the babbling of springs which is now as it ever was, the
myth of love; they hide behind the old symbols; they nestle to the old
gods. Not from the moment, from the molten flowing ore, do they seize
and mould the eternal--no, as ever of old they dig the symbols of the
eternal out of the cold clay of the past, like old Greek statues. They
are not on that account insignificant; but at best they produce
something important, never anything necessary.
For only that poet can be necessary to our time who himself feels that
everything in this time is necessary, and therefore beautiful. He must
be one whose whole endeavour as poet and man it is to make his own
sensations vibrate in unison with contemporary sensations; who makes the
rhythm of his poem nothing else than the echoed rhythm of living things;
who adjusts the beat of his verse to the beat of our own days, and takes
into his quivering veins the streaming blood of our time. He must not on
this account, when seeking to create new ideals, be a stranger to the
ideals of old; for all true progress is based on the deepest
understanding of the past. Progress must be for him as Guyau interprets
it: 'Le pouvoir, lorsqu'on est arrivé à un état supérieur, d'éprouver
des émotions et des sensations nouvelles, sans cesser d'être encore
accessible à ce que contenaient de grand ou de beau ses précédantes
émotions.'[2] A poet of our time can only be great when he conceives
this time as great. The preoccupations of his time must be his also; its
social problem must be his personal concern. In such a poet succeeding
generations would see how man has fought a way to them from the past,
how in every moment as it passed he has wrestled to identify the feeling
of his own mind with that of the cosmos. And even though the great works
of such a poet should be soon disintegrated and his poems obsolete,
though his images should have paled, there would yet remain imperishably
vivid that which is of greater moment, the invisible motives of his
inspiration, the melody, the breath, the rhythm of his time. Such poets,
besides pointing the way to the coming generation, are in a deeper sense
the incarnation of their own period. Hence the time has come to speak of
Émile Verhaeren, the greatest of modern poets, and perhaps the only one
who has been conscious of what is poetical in contemporary feeling, the
only one who has shaped that feeling in verse, the first poet who, with
skill incomparably inspired, has chiselled our epoch into a mighty
monument of rhyme.
In Verhaeren's work our age is mirrored. The new landscapes are in it;
the sinister silhouettes of the great cities; the seething masses of a
militant democracy; the subterranean shafts of mines; the last heavy
shadows of silent, dying cloisters. All the intellectual forces of our
time, our time's ideology, have here become a poem; the new social
ideas, the struggle of industrialism with agrarianism, the vampire force
which lures the rural population from the health-giving fields to the
burning quarries of the great city, the tragic fate of emigrants,
financial crises, the dazzling conquests of science, the syntheses of
philosophy, the triumphs of engineering, the new colours of the
impressionists. All the manifestations of the new age are here reflected
in a poet's soul in their action--first confused, then understood, then
joyfully acclaimed--on the sensations of a New European. How this work
came into being, out of what resistance and crises a poet has here
conquered the consciousness of the necessity and then of the beauty of
the new cosmic phase, it shall be our task to show. If the time has
indeed come to class Verhaeren, it is not so much with the poets that
his place will be found. He does not so much stand with or above the
verse-smiths or actual artists in verse, with the musicians, or
painters, as rather with the great organisers, those who have forced the
new social currents to flow between dikes; with the legislators who
prevent the clashing of flamboyant energies; with the philosophers, who
aim at co-ordinating and unifying all these vastly complicated
tendencies in one brilliant synthesis. His poetry is a created poet's
world; it is a resolute shaping of phases, a considered new æstheticism,
and a conscious new inspiration. He is not only the poet, he is at the
same time the preacher of our time. He was the first to conceive of it
as _beautiful_, but not like those who, in their zeal for embellishment,
tone down the dark colours and bring out the bright ones; he has
conceived of it--we shall have to show with what a painful and intensive
effort--after his first most obstinate rejection of it, as a necessity,
and he has then transformed this conception of its necessity, of its
purpose, into beauty. Ceasing to look backwards, he has looked forwards.
He feels, quite in the spirit of evolution, in the spirit of Nietzsche,
that our generation is raised high above all the past, that it is the
summit of all that is past, and the turning-point towards the future.
This will perhaps seem too much to many people, who are inclined to call
our generation wretched and paltry, as though they had some inner
knowledge of the magnificence or the paltriness of generations gone. For
every generation only becomes great by the men who do not despair of it,
only becomes great by its poets who conceive of it as great, by its
charioteers of state who have confidence in its power of greatness. Of
Shakespeare and Hugo Verhaeren says: 'Ils grandissaient leur
siècle.'[3] They did not depict it with the perspective of others, but
out of the heart of their own greatness. Of such geniuses as Rembrandt
he says: 'Si plus tard, dans l'éloignement des siècles, ils semblent
traduire mieux que personne leur temps, c'est qu'ils l'ont recréé
d'après leur cerveau, et qu'ils l'ont imposé non pas tel qu'il était,
mais tel qu'ils l'ont déformé.'[4] But by magnifying their century, by
raising even ephemeral events of their own days into a vast perspective,
they themselves became great. While those who of set purpose diminish,
and while those by nature indifferent, are themselves diminished and
disregarded as the centuries recede, poets such as these we honour tell,
like illumined belfry clocks, the hour of the time to generations yet to
come. If the others bequeath some slight possession, a poem or so,
aphorisms, a book maybe, these survive more mightily: they survive in
some great conception, some great idea of an age, in that music of life
to which the faint-hearted and the ungifted of following epochs will
listen as it sounds from the past, because they in their turn are unable
to understand the rhythm of their own time. By this manner of inspired
vision Verhaeren has come to be the great poet of our time, by approving
of it as well as by depicting it, by the fact that he did not see the
new things as they actually are, but celebrated them as a new beauty.
He has approved of all that is in our epoch; of everything, to the very
resistance to it which he has conceived of as only a welcome
augmentation of the fighting force of our vitality. The whole atmosphere
of our time seems compressed in the organ music of his work; and whether
he touches the bright keys or the dark, whether he rolls out a lofty
diapason or strikes a gentle concord, it is always the onward-rushing
force of our time that vibrates in his poems. While other poets have
grown ever more lifeless and languid, ever more secluded and
disheartened, Verhaeren's voice has grown ever more resonant and
vigorous, like an organ indeed, full of reverence and the mystical power
of sublime prayer. A spirit positively religious, not of despondency,
however, but of confidence and joy, breathes from this music of his,
freshening and quickening the blood, till the world takes on brighter
and more animated and more generous colours, and our vitality, fired by
the fever of his verse, flashes with a richer and younger and more
virile flame.
But the fact that life, to-day of all days, needs nothing so urgently as
the freshening and quickening of our vitality, is good reason why--quite
apart from all literary admiration--we must read his books, is good
reason why this poet must be discussed with all that glad enthusiasm
which we have first learned for our lives from his work.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'Aujourd'hui'(_Les Héros_).
[2] Guyau, _L'Esthétique Contemporaine._
[3] 'L'Art' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
[4] _Rembrandt_.
THE NEW BELGIUM
Entre la France ardente et la grave Allemagne.
_É.V._, 'Charles le Téméraire.'
In Belgium the roads of Europe meet. A few hours transport one from
Brussels, the heart of its iron arteries, to Germany, France, Holland,
and England; and from Belgian ports all countries and all races are
accessible across the pathless sea. The area of the land being small, it
provides a miniature but infinitely varied synthesis of the life of
Europe. All contrasts stand face to face concisely and sharply outlined.
The train roars through the land: now past coal-mines, past furnaces and
retorts that write the fiery script of toil on an ashen sky; now through
golden fields or green pastures where sleek, brindled cows are grazing;
now through great cities that point to heaven with their multitudinous
chimneys; and lastly to the sea, the Rialto of the north, where
mountains of cargoes are shipped and unshipped, and trade traffics with
a thousand hands. Belgium is an agricultural land and an industrial
land; it is at the same time conservative and socialistic, Roman
Catholic and free-thinking; at once wealthy and wretched. There are
colossal fortunes heaped up in the monster cities; and two hours thence
the bitterest poverty sweats for the dole of a living in mines and
barns. And again in the cities still greater forces wrestle with one
another: life and death, the past and the future. Towns monkishly
secluded, girt with ponderous mediæval walls, towns on whose swart and
sedgy canals lonely swans glide like milky gondolas, towns like a dream,
strengthless, prisoned in sleep eternal. At no great distance glitter
the modern residential cities; Brussels with its glaring boulevards,
where electric inscriptions dart coruscating up and down the fronts of
buildings, where motor-cars whiz along, where the streets rumble, and
modern life twitches with feverish nerves. Contrast on contrast. From
the right the Teutonic tide dashes in, the Protestant faith; from the
left, sumptuous and rigidly orthodox, Roman Catholicism. And the race
itself is the restlessly struggling product of two races, the Flemish
and the Walloon. Naked, clear, and direct are the contrasts which here
defy each other; and the whole battle can be surveyed at a glance.
But so strong, so persistent is the inexorable pressure of the two
neighbouring races, that this blend has already become a new ferment, a
new race. Elements once contrary are now unrecognisably mixed in a new
and growing product. Teutons speak French, people of Romance stock are
Flemish in feeling. Pol de Mont, in spite of his Gallic name, is a
Flemish poet; Verhaeren, Maeterlinck, and van Lerberghe, though no
Frenchman can pronounce their names rightly, are French poets. And this
new Belgian race is a strong race, one of the most capable in Europe.
Contact with so many foreign cultures, the vicinity of such
contradictory nations, has fertilised them; healthy rural labour has
steeled their limbs; the near sea has opened their eyes to the great
distances. Their consciousness of themselves is of no long date: it can
only be reckoned from the time when their country became independent,
hardly a hundred years ago. A nation younger than America, they are in
their adolescence now, and rejoicing in their new, unsought strength.
And just as in America, the blend of races here, together with the
fruitful, healthy fields, has procreated robust men. For the Belgian
race is a race pulsing with vitality. Nowhere in Europe is life so
intensely, so merrily enjoyed as in Flanders, nowhere else is sensuality
and pleasure in excess so much the measure of strength. They must be
seen particularly in their sensual life; it must be seen how the Flemish
enjoy; with what greediness, with what a conscious pleasure and robust
endurance. It is among them that Jordaens found the models for his
gluttonous orgies; and they could be found still at every kermesse, at
every wake. Statistics prove that in the consumption of alcohol Belgium
stands to-day at the head of Europe. Every second house is an inn, an
_estaminet_; every town, every village has its brewery; and the brewers
are the wealthiest men in the country. Nowhere else are festivals so
loud, boisterous, and unbridled; nowhere else is life loved and lived
with such a superabundant zest and glow. Belgium is the land of
excessive vitality, and ever was so. They have fought for this plenitude
of life, for this enjoyment full to satiety. Their most heroic exploit,
their great war with the Spaniards, was only a struggle not so much for
religion as for sensual freedom. These desperate revolts, this immense
effort was in reality not directed against Roman Catholicism, but
against the morality, the asceticism it enforced; not so much against
Spain as against the sinister malignity of the Inquisition; against the
taciturn, bitter, and insidious Puritanism which sought to curtail
enjoyment; against the morose reserve of Philip II. All that they wanted
at that time was to preserve their bright and laughing life, their free,
dionysiac enjoyment, the imperious avidity of their senses; they were
determined not to be limited by any measure short of excess. And with
them life conquered. Health, strength, and fecundity is to this very day
the mark of the Belgian people in town and country. Poverty itself is
not hollow-cheeked and stunted here. Chubby, red-cheeked children play
in the streets; the peasants working in the fields are straight and
sturdy; even the artisans are as muscular and strong as they are in
Constantin Meunier's bronzes; the women are moulded to bear children
easily; the unbroken vigour of the old men persists in a secure defiance
of age. Constantin Meunier was fifty when he began his life-work here;
at sixty Verhaeren is at the zenith of his creative power. Insatiable
seems the strength of this race, whose deepest feeling has been
chiselled by Verhaeren in proud stanzas:
Je suis le fils de cette race,
Dont les cerveaux plus que les dents
Sont solides et sont ardents
Et sont voraces.
Je suis le fils de cette race
Tenace,
Qui veut, après avoir voulu
Encore, encore et encore plus![1]
This tremendous exertion has not been in vain. To-day Belgium is
relatively the richest country in Europe. Its colony of the Congo is ten
times as extensive as the mother-land. The Belgians hardly know where to
place their capital: Belgian money is invested in Russia, in China, in
Japan; they are concerned in all enterprises; their financiers control
trusts in all countries. The middle classes, too, are healthy, strong,
and contented.
Such rich and healthy blood is more likely than any other to produce
good art, and, above all, art full of the zest of life. For it is in
countries with few possibilities of expansion that the desire for
artistic activity is keenest. The imagination of great nations is for
the most part absorbed by the practical demands of their development.
The best strength of a great nation is claimed by politics, by
administration, by the army and navy; but where political life is of
necessity poor, where the problems of administration are forcibly
restricted, men of genius almost exclusively seek their conquests in the
domains of art. Scandinavia is one example, Belgium another, of
countries in which the aristocracy of intellect have with the happiest
results been forced back on art and science. In such young races the
vital instinct must _a priori_ make all artistic activity strong and
healthy; and even when they produce a decadence, this reaction, this
contradiction, is so decided and consequent, that strength lies in its
very weakness. For only a strong light can cast strong shadows; only a
strong, sensual race can bring forth the really great and earnest
mystics; because a decided reaction which is conscious of its aim
requires as much energy as positive creation.
The towering structure of Belgian art rests on a broad foundation. The
preparation, the growing under the sod, took fifty years; and then in
another fifty years it was reared aloft by the youth of one single
generation. For every healthy evolution is slow, most of all in the
Teutonic races, which are not so quick, supple, and dexterous as the
Latin races, who learn by life itself rather than by studious
application. This literature has grown ring by ring like a tree, with
its roots deep in a healthy soil nourished by the unyielding
perseverance of centuries. Like every confession of faith, this
literature has its saints, its martyrs, and its disciples. The first of
the creators, the forerunner, was Charles de Coster; and his great epic
_Thyl Ulenspiegel_ is the gospel of this new literature. His fate is
sad, like that of all pioneers. In him the native blend of races is more
plastically visualised than in all later writers. Of Teutonic
extraction, he was born in Munich, wrote in French, and was the first
man to feel as a Belgian. He earned his living painfully as a teacher at
the Military School. And when his great romance appeared, it was
difficult to find a publisher, and still more difficult to find
appreciation, or even notice. And yet this work, with its wonderful
confrontation of Ulenspiegel as the deliverer of Flanders with Philip
II. as Antichrist, is to this day the most beautiful symbol of the
struggle of light with darkness, of vitality with renunciation; an
enduring monument in the world's literature, because it is the epic of a
whole nation. With such a work of wide import did Belgian literature
begin, a work that with its heroic battles stands like the Iliad as the
proud and primitive beginning of a more delicate, but in its advanced
culture more complex, literature. The place of this writer, who died
prematurely, was taken by Camille Lemonnier, who accepted the hard task
and the melancholy inheritance of pioneers--ingratitude and
disillusion. Of this proud and noble character also one must speak as of
a hero. For more than forty years he fought indefatigably for Belgium, a
soldier leading the onset from first to last, launching book after book,
creating, writing, calling to the fray and marshalling the new forces;
and never resting till the adjective 'Belgian' ceased in Paris and
Europe to be spoken with the contempt that attaches to 'provincial';
till, like once the name of the Gueux, what was originally a disgrace
became a title of honour. Fearlessly, not to be discouraged by any
failure, this superb writer sung his native land--fields, mines, towns,
and men; the angry, fiery blood of youths and maidens; and over all the
ardent yearning for a brighter, freer, greater religion, for rapt
communion with the sublimity of Nature. With the ecstatic revelling in
colour of his illustrious ancestor Rubens, who gathered all the things
of life together in a glad festival of the senses, he, like a second
voluptuary at the feast, has lavished colours, had his joy of all that
is glowing, and glaring, and satiated, and, like every genuine artist,
conceived of art as an intensifying of life, as life in intoxication.
For more than forty years he created in this sense, and miraculously,
just like the men of his country, like the peasants he painted, he
waxed in vigour from year to year, from harvest to harvest, his books
growing ever more fiery, ever more drunken with the zest and glow of
life, his faith in life ever brighter and more confident. He was the
first to feel the strength of his young country with conscious pride,
and his voice rang out its loud appeal for new fighters till he no
longer stood alone, till a company of other artists were ranged around
him. Each of these he supported and firmly established, with a strong
grip placing them at their vantage for the battle; and without envy, nay
with joy, he saw his own work triumphantly overshadowed by the acclaimed
creations of his juniors. With joy, because he probably considered not
his own novels, but this creation of a literature his greatest and most
lasting work. For it seemed as though in these years the whole land had
become alive; as though every town, every profession, every class had
sent forth a poet or a painter to immortalise them; as though this whole
Belgium were eager to be symbolised in individual phases in works of
art, until he should come who was destined to transform all towns and
classes in a poem, enshrining in it the harmonised soul of the land. Are
not the ancient Teutonic cities of Bruges, Courtrai, and Ypres
spiritualised in the stanzas of Rodenbach, in the pastels of Fernand
Khnopff, in the mystic statues of Georges Minne? Have not the sowers of
corn and the workers in mines become stone in the busts of Constantin
Meunier? Does not a great drunkenness glow in Georges Eekhoud's
descriptions? The mystic art of Maeterlinck and Huysmans drinks its
deepest strength from old cloisters and _béguinages_; the sun of the
fields of Flanders glows in the pictures of Théo van Rysselberghe and
Claus. The delicate walking of maidens and the singing of belfries have
been made music in the stanzas of the gentle Charles van Lerberghe; the
vehement sensuality of a savage race has been spiritualised in the
refined eroticism of Félicien Rops. The Walloons have their
representative in Albert Mockel; and how many others might still be
named of the great creators: the sculptor van der Stappen; the painters
Heymans, Stevens; the writers des Ombiaux, Demolder, Glesener,
Crommelynck; who have all in their confident and irresistible advance
conquered the esteem of France and the admiration of Europe. For they,
and just they, were gifted with a sense of the great complex European
feeling which in their work is glimpsed in its birth and growth; for
they did not in their idea of a native land stop at the boundaries of
Belgium, but included all the neighbouring countries, because they were
at the same time patriots and cosmopolitans: Belgium was to them not
only the place where all roads meet, but also that whence all roads
start.
Each of these had shaped his native land from his own angle of vision; a
whole phalanx of artists had added picture to picture. Till then this
great one came, Verhaeren, who saw, felt, and loved everything in
Flanders, 'toute la Flandre.' Only in his work did it become a unity;
for he has sung everything, land and sea, towns and workshops, cities
dead and cities at their birth. He has not conceived of this Flanders of
his as a separate phase, as a province, but as the heart of Europe, with
the strength of its blood pulsing inwards from outside and outside from
inwards; he has opened out horizons beyond the frontiers, and heightened
and connected them; and with the same inspiration he has molten and
welded the individual together with the whole until out of his work a
life-work grew--the lyric epic of Flanders. What de Coster half a
century before had not dared to fashion from the present, in which he
despaired of finding pride, power, and the heroism of life, Verhaeren
has realised; and thus he has become the 'carillonneur de la Flandre,'
the bell-ringer who, as in olden days from the watch-tower, has summoned
the whole land to the defence of its will to live, and the nation to the
pride and consciousness of its power.
This Verhaeren could only do, because he in himself represents all the
contrasts, all the advantages of the Belgian race. He too is a ferment
of contrasts, a new man made of split and divergent forces now
victoriously harmonised. From the French he has his language and his
form; from the Germans his instinctive seeking of God, his earnestness,
his gravity, his need of metaphysics, and his impulse to pantheism.
Political instincts, religious instincts, Catholicism and socialism,
have struggled in him; he is at once a dweller in great cities and a
cottager in the open country; and the deepest impulse of his people,
their lack of moderation and their greed of life, is in the last
instance the maxim of his poetic art. Only that their pleasure in
intoxication has in him become joy in a noble drunkenness, in ecstasy;
only that their carnal joy has become a delight in colour; that their
mad raging is now in him a pleasure in a rhythm that roars and thunders
and bursts in foam. The deepest thing in his race, an inflexible
vitality which is not to be shaken by crises or catastrophes, has in him
become universal law, a conscious, intensified zest in life. For when a
country has become strong and rejoices in its strength, it needs, like
every plethora, a cry, an exultation. Just as Walt Whitman was the
exultation of America in its new strength, Verhaeren is the triumph of
the Belgian race, and of the European race too. For this glad confession
of life is so strong, so glowing, so virile that it cannot be thought of
as breaking forth from the heart of one individual, but is evidently the
delight of a fresh young nation in its beautiful and yet unfathomed
power.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'Ma Race' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
YOUTH IN FLANDERS
Seize, dix-sept et dix-huit ans!
O ce désir d'être avant l'âge et le vrai temps
Celui
Dont chacun dit
Il boit à larges brocs et met à mal les filles!
É.V., _Les Tendresses Premières_.
The history of modern Belgian literature begins, by a whim of chance, in
one and the same house. In Ghent, the favourite city of the Emperor
Charles V., in the old, heavy Flemish town that is still girdled with
ramparts, lies, remote from the noisy streets, the grey Jesuit college
of Sainte-Barbe. A cloister with thick, cold, frowning walls, mute
corridors, silent refectories, reminding one somewhat of the beautiful
colleges in Oxford, save that here there is no ivy softening the walls,
and no flowers to lay their variegated carpet over the green courts.
Here, in the seventies, two strange pairs of boys meet on the
school-benches; here among thousands of names are four which are
destined in later days to be the pride of their country. First, Georges
Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren, then Maeterlinck and Charles van
Lerberghe--two pairs of friendships, both of which are now torn asunder
by death. The weaker, the more delicate of the four, Georges Rodenbach
and Charles van Lerberghe, have died; Emile Verhaeren and Maeterlinck,
the two heroes of Flanders, are still growing and not yet at the zenith
of their fame. But all four began their course in the old college. The
Jesuit fathers taught them their humanities, and even to write poems--in
Latin, it is true, to begin with; and in this exercise, strange to say,
Maeterlinck was excelled by van Lerberghe with his more instinctive
sense of form, and Verhaeren by the more supple Georges Rodenbach. With
rigorous earnestness the fathers trained them to respect the past, to
have faith in conventional things, to think in old grooves, and to hate
innovations. The aim was not only to keep them Catholics, but to win
them for the priesthood: these cloister walls were to protect them from
the hostile breath of the new world, from the freshening wind which, in
Flanders as everywhere else, was assailing the growing generation.
But in these four pupils the aim was not realised, least of all in
Verhaeren, perhaps for the very reason that he, as the scion of a
strictly orthodox family, was the most fitted to be a priest; because
his mind did not absorb conviction mechanically, but achieved it by
vital processes; because his inmost being was self-surrender and a
glowing devotion to great ideas. However, the call of the open country,
in which he had grown up, was too strong in him; the voice of life was
too loud in his blood for so early a renunciation of all; his mind was
too tameless to be satisfied with the established and the traditional.
The impressions of his childhood were more vivid than the teaching of
his masters. For Verhaeren was born in the country, at St. Amand on the
Scheldt (on the 21st of May 1855), where the landscape rolls to the vast
horizons of the heath and the sea. Here in the happiest manner kindly
circumstances wove the garland of his earlier years. His parents were
well-to-do people who had retired from the din of the town to this
little corner of Flanders; here they had a cottage of their own, with a
front garden ablaze with flowers of all colours. And immediately behind
the house began the great golden fields, the tangle of flowering
hedgerows; and close by was the river with its slow waves hasting no
longer, feeling the nearness of their goal, the infinite ocean. Of the
untrammelled days of his boyhood the ageing poet has told us in his
wonderful book _Les Tendresses Premières_. He has told us of the boy he
was when he ran across country; clambered into the corn-loft where the
glittering grain was heaped; climbed steeples; watched the peasants at
their sowing and reaping; and listened to the maids at the washing-tub
singing old Flemish songs. He watched all trades; he rummaged in every
corner. He would sit with the watch-maker, marvelling at the humming
little wheels that fashioned the hour; and no less to see the glowing
maw of the oven in the bakery swallowing the corn which only the day
before had glided through his fingers in rustling ears, and was now
already bread, golden, warm, and odorous. At games he would watch in
astonishment the glad strength of the young fellows tumbling the reeling
skittles over; and he would wander with the playing band from village to
village, from fair to fair. And, sitting on the bank of the Scheldt, he
would watch the ships, with their coloured streamers, come and go, and
in his dreams follow them to the vast distances, which he only knew from
sailors' yarns and pictures in old books. All this, this daily physical
familiarity with the things of Nature, this lived insight into the
thousand activities of the working-day, became his inalienable
possession. Inalienable, too, was the humane feeling he acquired that he
was one at heart with the people of his village. From them he learned
the names of all these thousand things, and the intelligence of the
mysterious mechanism in all skilled handiwork, and all the petty cares
and perplexities of these many scattered little souls of life which,
combined, are the soul of a whole land. And therefore Verhaeren is the
only one among modern poets in the French tongue who is really popular
with his countrymen of all ranks. He still goes in and out among them as
their equal, sits in their circle even now, when fame has long since
shown him his place among the best and noblest, chats with the peasants
in the village inn, and loves to hear them discussing the weather and
the harvest and the thousand little things of their narrow world. He
belongs to them, and they belong to him. He loves their life, their
cares, their labour, loves this whole land with its tempests raging from
the north, with its hail and snow, its thundering sea and lowering
clouds. It is with pride that he claims kindred with his race and land;
and indeed there is often in his gait and in his gestures something of
the peasant trampling with heavy steps and hard knee after his plough;
and his eyes 'are grey as his native sea, his hair is yellow like the
corn of his fields.' These elemental forces are in his whole being and
production. You feel that he has never lost touch with Nature, that he
is still organically connected with the fields, the sea, the open air;
he to whom spring is physically painful, who is depressed by relaxing
air, who loves the weather of his home-land, its vehemence, and its
savage, tameless strength.
For this very reason he has in later years felt, what was natively
uncongenial to him--the great cities--differently and far more intensely
than poets brought up in them. What to the latter appeared self-evident
was to him astonishment, abomination, terror, admiration, and love. For
him the atmosphere we breathe in cities was heavy, stifling, poisoned;
the streets between the massed houses were too narrow, too congested;
hourly, at first in pain and then with admiration, he has felt the
beautiful fearfulness of the vast dimensions, the strangeness of the new
forms of life. Just as we walk through mountain ravines dumbfounded and
terrified by their sublimity, he has walked through streets of cities,
first slowly accustoming himself to them; thus he has explored them,
described them, celebrated them, and in the deepest sense lived them.
Their fever has streamed into his blood; their revolts have reared in
him like wild horses; their haste and unrest has whipped his nerves for
half the span of a man's life. But then he has returned home again. In
his fifties he has taken refuge once more in his fields, under the
lonely sky of Flanders. He lives in a lonely cottage somewhere in
Belgium, where the railway does not reach, enjoying himself among
cheerful and simple people who fill their days with plain labour, like
the friends and companions of his boyhood. With a joy intensified he
goes eagerly year by year to the sea, as though his lungs and his heart
needed it to breathe strongly again, to feel life with more jubilant
enthusiasm. In the man of sixty there is a wonderful return of his
healthy, happy childhood; and to the Flanders that inspired his first
verses his last have been dedicated.
Against this atavism, against this bright and inalienable joy in life,
the _patres_ of Sainte-Barbe could do nothing. They could only deflect
his great hunger of life from material things, and turn it in the
direction of science, of art. The priest they sought to make of him he
has really become, only he has preached everything that they proscribed,
and fought against everything that they praised. At the time Verhaeren
leaves school, he is already filled with that noble yet feverish greed
of life, that tameless yearning for intensive enjoyments heightened to
the degree of pain which is so characteristic of him. The priesthood was
repugnant to him. Nor was he more allured by the prospect, held out to
him, of directing his uncle's workshop. It is not yet definitely the
poetic vocation which appeals to him, but he does desire a free active
calling with unlimited possibilities. To gain time for his final
decision, he studies jurisprudence, and becomes a barrister. In these
student years in Louvain Verhaeren gave free rein to his untameable zest
in life; as a true Fleming he eschewed moderation and launched into
intemperance. To this very day he is fond of telling of his liking for.
good Belgian beer, and of how the students got drunk, danced at all the
kermesses, caroused and feasted, when the fury came over them, and got
into all kinds, of mischief, which often enough brought them into
conflict with the police. Uncertainty was never a feature of his
character, and so his Roman Catholicism was in those years no silent and
impersonal faith, but a militant orthodoxy. A handful of hotspurs--the
publisher Deman was one of them, and another was the tenor van Dyck--set
a newspaper going, in which they lashed away mercilessly at the
corruption of the modern world, and did not forget to blow their own
trumpets. The university was not slow to veto these immature
manifestations; but ere long they started a second periodical, which
was, however, more in harmony with the great contemporary movements.
Betweenwhiles verses were written. And still more passionate is the
young poet's activity when, in the year 1881, he is called to the bar in
Brussels. Here he makes friends with men of great vitality: he is
welcomed by a circle of painters and artists, and a cénacle of young
talents is formed who have the authentic enthusiasm for art, and who
feel that they are violently opposed to the conservative bourgeoisie of
Brussels. Verhaeren, who at this time greedily adopts all fashionable
freakishness as something new, and struts about in fantastic apparel,
promptly acquires notoriety by his vehement passionateness and his first
literary attempts. He had begun to write verse in his school-days.
Lamartine had been his model, then Victor Hugo, who bewitches young
people, that lord of magnificent gestures, that undisputed master of
words. These juvenilia of Verhaeren have never been published, and
probably they have little interest, for in them his tameless vitality
attempted expression in immaculate Alexandrines. More and more, as his
artistic insight grew, he felt that his vocation was to be a poet; the
meagre success he achieved as a barrister confirmed him in this
conviction, and so in the end, following the advice of Edmond Picard, he
discarded the barrister's gown, which now seemed to him as narrow and
stifling as he had once thought the priest's cassock to be.
And then came the hour, the first decisive hour. Lemonnier was as fond
of relating it as is Verhaeren; both would speak of it with their
fervent, proud joy in a friendship of over thirty years; both with
heartfelt admiration, the one for the other. Once, it was a rainy day,
Verhaeren burst in on Lemonnier, whom he did not know, trampling into
the elder man's lodging with his heavy peasant's tread, hailing him with
his hearty gesture, and blurting out: 'Je veux vous lire des vers!' It
was the manuscript of his first book _Les Flamandes_; and now he
recited, while the rain poured down outside, with his hard voice and
sharp scansion, his great enthusiasm and his compelling gestures, those
pictures, palpitating with life, of Flanders, that first free confession
of patriotism and foaming vitality. And Lemonnier encouraged him,
congratulated him, helped him, and suggested alterations, and soon the
book appeared, to the terror of Verhaeren's strictly orthodox family, to
the horror of the critics, who were helpless in the face of such an
explosion of strength. Execrated and lauded, it immediately compelled
interest. In Belgium, it is true, it was less acclaimed than declaimed
against; but nevertheless it everywhere excited a commotion, and that
grumbling unrest which always heralds the advent of a new force.
'LES FLAMANDES'
Je suis le fils de cette race
Tenace,
Qui veut, après avoir voulu
Encore, encore et encore plus.
É.V., _Ma Race_.
The life-work of great artists contains not only a single, but a
threefold work of art. The actual creation is only the first, and not
always the most important; the second must be the life of the artists
themselves; the third must be the harmoniously finished, organically
connected relationship between the act of creating and the thing
created, between poetry and life. To survey how inner growth is
connected with external formation, how crises of physical reality are
connected with artistic decadence, how development and completion
interpenetrate as much in personal experience as in the artistic
creation, must be an equal artistic rapture, must disengage as pure a
line of beauty as the individual work. In Verhaeren these conditions of
the threefold work of art are accomplished in full. Harsh and abrupt as
the contrasts in his books seem to be, the totality of his development
is yet rounded off to a clear line, to the figure of a circle. In the
beginning the end was contained, and in the end the beginning: the bold
curve returns to itself. Like one who travels round the world and
circles the vast circumference of the globe, he comes back in the end to
his starting-point. Beginning and end touch in the motive of his work.
To the country to which his youth belonged his old age returns: Flanders
inspired his first book, and to Flanders his last books are dedicated.
True it is, between these two books _Les Flamandes_ and _Les Blés
Mouvants_, between the work of the man of five-and-twenty and that of
the man of sixty, lies the world of an evolution with, all its points of
view and achievements. Only now, when the line that was at first so
capricious has returned to itself, can its form be surveyed and its
harmony perceived. A purely external observation has become penetration:
the eye no longer exclusively regards the external phenomena of things,
but all has been seized in his soul from within and imaged in accordance
with its reality. Now nothing is seen isolated, from the point of view
of curiosity or passing interest, but everything is looked upon as
something that is, that has grown, and that is still growing. The motive
is the same in the first and in the last books; only, in the first book
we have isolated contemplation, while in the great creations of the last
period the vast horizons of the modern world are set behind the scenes,
with the shadows of the past on the one side, and, as well, with fiery
presentiments of the future shedding a new light over the landscape.
The painter, who only portrayed the outer surface, the patina, has
developed into the poet, he who in a musical vibration vivifies the
psychic and the inconceivable. These two works stand in the same
relation to each other as Wagner's first operas, _Rienzi_ and
_Tannhäuser_, do to his later creations, to the _Ring_ and _Parsifal_:
what was at first only intuitive becomes consciously creative. And as in
Wagner's case, so too with Verhaeren there are to this very day people
who prefer the works that are still prisoned in the traditional form to
those which were created later, and who are thus, in reality, greater
strangers to the poet than those who, from principle, assume a hostile
attitude to his artistic work.
_Les Flamandes_, Verhaeren's first work, appeared in a period of
literary commotion. Zola's realistic novels had just become the object
of discussion; and they had stirred up, not France only, but the
adjacent countries as well. In Belgium Camille Lemonnier was the
interpreter of this new naturalism, which regarded absolute truth as
more important than beauty, and which saw the sole aim of imaginative
literature in photography, in the exact, scientifically accurate
reproduction of reality. To-day, now that excessive naturalism has been
overcome, we know that this theory only brings us half-way along the
road; that beauty may live by the side of truth; that on the other hand
truth is not identical with art, but that it was only necessary to
establish a transmutation of the value of beauty; that it was in the
actual, in realities, that beauty was to be sought. Every new theory, if
it is to succeed, needs a strong dose of exaggeration. And the idea of
realising reality in poetry seduced young Verhaeren into carefully
avoiding, in the description of his native province, all that is
sentimental and romantic, and deluded him with the hope of expressing in
his verse only what is coarse, primitive, and savage. Something external
and something internal, nature and intention, combined to cause this
effect. For the hatred of all that is soft and weak, rounded off and in
repose, is in Verhaeren's blood. His temperament was from the first
fiery, and loved to respond to strong provocation with a violent blow.
There was ever in him a love of the brutal, the hard, the rough, the
angular; he had always a liking for what is glaring and intensive, loud
and noisy. It is only in his latest books that, thanks to his cooler
blood, he has attained classical perfection and purity. In those days,
moreover, his hatred of sentimental idealisation, the hatred that in
Germany fulminated against Defregger's drawing-room Tyrolese, Auerbach's
scented peasants, and the spruce mythology of poetical pictures, led him
deliberately to emphasise what is brutal, unæsthetic, and, as it was
then felt, unpoetical; led him, as it were, to trample with heavy shoes
in the tedious footsteps of French poets. Barbarian: this was the word
they tried to kill him with, not so much on account of the harshness and
coarseness of his diction, which often reminds one of the guttural
sounds of German, as because of the savage selection of his instinct,
which always preferred what is ringingly resonant and ferociously alive,
which never fed on nectar and ambrosia, but tore red and steaming shreds
of flesh from the body of life. And genuinely barbarous, savage with
Teutonic strength, is this his inroad into French literature, reminding
one of those migrations of the Teutons into the Latin lands, where they
rushed ponderously to battle with wild and raucous cries, to learn,
after a time, a higher culture and the finer instincts of life from
those they had conquered. Verhaeren in this book does not describe what
is amiable and dreamy in Flanders, not idylls, but 'les fureurs
d'estomac, de ventre et de débauche,'[1] ail the explosions of the lust
of life, the orgies of peasants, and even of the animal world. Before
him, his old schoolfellow Rodenbach had described Flanders to the French
in poems that sounded gently with a silvery note, like the peal of
belfries hovering over roofs; he had reminded them of that unforgettable
melancholy of the evening over the canals of Bruges, of the magic of the
moonlight over fields framed with dikes and hedges of willows. But
Verhaeren closes his ears to hints of death; he describes life at its
maddest, 'le décor monstrueux des grasses kermesses,'[2] popular
festivals, in which intoxication and sensual pleasure sting the
unbridled strength of the crowd, in which the demands of the body and
the greed of money come into conflict, and the bestial nature of man
overthrows the painfully learned lessons of morality. And even in these
descriptions, which often teem with the exuberance of Rabelais, one
feels that even this explosive life is not mad enough for him, that he
yearns to intensify life out and beyond reality: 'jadis les gars avaient
les reins plus fermes et les garces plus beau téton.'[3] These young
fellows are too weak for him, the wenches too gentle; he cries for the
Flanders of olden time, as it lives in the glowing pictures of Rubens
and Jordaens and Breughel. These are his true masters, they, the
revellers, who created their masterpieces between two orgies, whose
laughter and feasting ring into the motives of their pictures. Some of
the poems in _Les Flamandes_ are direct imitations of certain interiors
and sensual genre-pictures: lads afire with lust forcing wenches under
the hedges; peasants in their drunken jubilation dancing round the inn
table. His desire is to sing that superabundance of vitality which
relieves itself by excess, excess flung into excess, even in sensual
pleasures. And his own colours and words, which are laid on with lavish
profusion and flow along in liquid fire, are themselves a debauch, a
'rut' (a favourite word of his). This vaunting display of seething
pictures is nothing less than an orgy. A terrific sensuality rages to
exhaustion as much in the execution as in the motive, a delight in these
creatures who have the madness of rutting stallions, who root about in
odorous meats and in the flowering flesh of women, who of set purpose
gorge themselves with beer and wine, and then in the dance and in
embraces discharge all the fire they have swallowed. Now and again a
reposeful picture alternates, firmly fixed in the dark frame of a
sonnet. But the hot wave streams over these breathing-spaces, and again
the mood is that of Rubens and of Jordaens, those mighty revellers.
But naturalistic art is pictorial, not poetic. And it is the great
defect of this book that it was written by an inspired painter only, not
yet by a poet. The words are coloured, but they are not free; they do
not yet rock themselves in their own rhythm; they do not yet storm along
to soar aloft with the inspiration; they are wild horses regularly
trotting along in the shafts of the Alexandrine. There is a disparity
between the inner intractability and the external regularity of these
poems. The ore has not yet been molten long enough in the crucible of
life to burst the hereditary mould. You feel that the avidity of life
which is the substance of the work has really been seen 'à travers un
tempérament,' that here a strong personality is in revolt against all
tradition, a strong personality whose ponderous onslaught was bound to
strike terror into the cautious and the short-sighted. But the strength
and the art are not yet emancipated. Verhaeren is already a passionate
onlooker, but he is still only an onlooker, one who stands without and
not within the vortex, who watches everything with inspired sympathy,
but who has not yet experienced it. This land of Flanders has not yet
become a part of the poet's sensibility; the new point of view and the
new form for it are not yet achieved; there is yet wanting that final
smelting of the artistic excitement which is bound to burst all bonds
and restrictions, to flame along in its own free feeling in an
enraptured intoxication.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'Les Vieux Maîtres' (_Les Flamandes_).
[2] 'Les Vieux Maîtres' (_Les Flamandes_).
[3] 'Truandailles' (_Ibid._).
THE MONKS
Moines venus vers nous des horizons gothiques,
Mais dont l'âme, mais dont l'esprit meurt de demain....
Mes vers vous bâtiront de mystiques autels.
É.V., 'Aux Moines.'
Rubens, that lavish reveller, is the genius of the Flemish zest in
living; but zest in living is only the temperament and not the soul of
Flanders. Before him there were the earnest masters of the cloisters,
the primitives, the van Eycks, Memling, Gerhard David, Roger van der
Weyden; and after them came Rembrandt, the meditative visionary, the
restless seeker after new values. Belgium is something else beside the
merry land of kermesses; the healthy, sensual people are not the soul of
Flanders. Glaring lights cast strong shadows. All vitality that is
strongly conscious of itself produces its counterpart, seclusion and
asceticism; it is just the healthiest, the elemental races--the Russians
of to-day for instance--who among their strong have the weak, among
their gluttons of life those who avert their faces from it, among those
who assent some who deny. By the side of the ambitious, teeming Belgium
we have spoken of, there is a sequestered Belgium which is falling into
ruins. Art exclusively in Rubens's sense could take no account of all
those solitary cities, Bruges, Ypres, Dixmude, through whose noiseless
streets the monks hasten like flocks of ravens in long processions, in
whose canals the dumb white shadows of gliding nuns are mirrored. There,
mid life's raging river, are broad islands of dream where men find
refuge from realities. Even in the great Belgian cities there are such
sequestered haunts of silence, the _béguinages,_ those little towns in
the town, whither ageing men and women have retired, renouncing the
world for the peace of the cloister. Quite as much as the passion of
life, the Roman Catholic faith and monkish renunciation are nowhere so
deeply and firmly rooted as in this Belgium, where sensual pleasure is
so noisy in its excess. Here again an extreme of contrasts is revealed:
frowning in the face of the materialistic view of life stands the
spiritual view. While the masses in the exuberance of their health and
strength proclaim life aloud and pounce on its eternal pleasures, aside
and cut off from them stand another, far lesser company to whom life is
only a waiting for death, whose silence is as persistent as the
exultation of the others. Everywhere here austere faith has its black
roots in the vigorous, fruitful soil. For religious feeling always
remains alive among a people that has once, although centuries may have
passed since, fought with every fibre of its being for its faith. This
is a subterranean Belgium that works in secret and that easily escapes
the cursory glance, for it lives in shadows and silence. From this
silence, however, from this averted earnestness, Belgian art has derived
that mystical nourishment which has lent its baffling strength to the
works of Maeterlinck, the pictures of Fernand Khnopff and Georges Minne.
Verhaeren, too, did not turn aside from this sombre region. He, as the
painter of Belgian life, saw these shadows of a vanishing past, and, in
1886, added to his first book _Les Flamandes_ a second, _Les Moines_. It
almost seems as though he had first of all been obliged to exhaust both
the historical styles of his native land before he could reach his own,
the modern style. For this book is essentially a throw-back, a
confession of faith in Gothic art.
Monks are for Verhaeren heroic symbols of I mighty periods in the past.
In his boyhood he I was familiar with their grave aspect. Near the
cheerful house where his youth was passed, there was at Bornhem a
Bernhardine monastery, whither the boy had often accompanied his father
to confession, and in whose cold corridors he had often waited in
astonishment and with a child's timidity, listening to the majestic
chant of the liturgy married to the organ's earnest notes. And here, one
day of days, he received, with a thrill of pious terror, his first
communion. Since that day the monks had been to him, as he trod the
beaten track of custom, beings in a strange world apart, the incarnation
of the beautiful and the supersensual, the unearthly on his child's
earth. And when, in the course of years, he sought to create in verse a
vision of Flanders in all her luminous and burning colours, he could not
forgo this mysterious chiaroscuro, this earnest tone. For three weeks he
withdrew to the hospitable monastery of Forges, near Chimay, taking part
in all the ceremonies and rites of the monks, who, in the hope of
winning a priest, afforded him full insight into their life. But
Verhaeren's attitude towards Roman Catholicism was by this time anything
but religious, it was rather an æsthetic and poetic admiration for the
noble romanticism of the ceremonial, a moral piety for the things of the
past. He remained three weeks. Then he fled, oppressed by the nightmare
of the ponderous walls, and, as a souvenir for himself, chiselled the
image of the monastery in verse.
This book too, no doubt, had no other aim than to be pictorial,
descriptive. In rounded sonnets, as though etched by Rembrandt's needle,
he fixed the chiaroscuro of the cloister's corridors, the hours of
prayer, the earnest meetings of the monks, the silence in the intervals
of the liturgy. The evenings over the landscape were described, in a
ritual language, with the images of faith: the sun as it sets in crimson
flaming like the wine in the chalice; steeples like luminous crosses in
a silent sky; the rustling corn bowing when the bell rings to evensong.
The poetry of devotion and repose was here revived: the harmony of the
organ; the beauty of corridors garlanded with ivy; the touching idyll of
the lonely cemetery; the peaceful dying of the prior; the visiting of
the sick, and the I comfort it brings. Nothing was allowed in the deep
light of the colours, in the grave repose of the theme, save what could
be fitted into the strictly religious frame of the picture.
But here the pictorial method proved to be I insufficient for the poetic
effect. The problem of religious feeling is too close to the heart to be
reached by outward, even by plastic manifestations. A thing which is so
eminently hostile to the sensuous, nay, which is the very symbol of I
all that is contrary to sensuousness, cannot be reached by a picturesque
appeal to the senses; the description of an intellectual problem must
cease to be descriptive and become psychology. And so, thus early in his
career, Verhaeren is forced away from the picturesque. First, however,
he attempts the plastic method: he gives us sombre statues of monks; but
even as statues they are only types of an inner life, symbols of the
ways to God. Verhaeren develops in his monks the difference of their
characters, which are still effective even under the soutane; and by his
delicate characterisation he shows the I manifold possibilities of
religious feeling. The I feudal monk, a noble of ancient lineage, would
make a conquest of God, as once his ancestors conquered castle and
forest lands with spur and sword. The _moine flambeau_, he that is
burning with fervour, would possess Him with his passion like a woman.
The savage monk, he that has come from the heart of a forest, can only
comprehend Him in heathen wise, only fear Him as the wielder of thunder
and lightning, while the gentle monk, he that loves the Virgin with a
troubadour's timid tenderness, flees from the fear of Him. One monk
would fathom Him by the learning of books and by logic; another does not
understand Him, cannot lay hold on Him, and yet finds Him everywhere, in
all things, in all he experiences. Thus all the characters of life, the
harshest contrasts, are jostled together, quelled only by the monastery
rules. But they are only in juxtaposition, just as the painter loves all
his colours and things equally, just as he places things in
juxtaposition, without estimating them according to their value. So far
there is nothing that binds them together inwardly, there is no conflict
of forces, no great idea. Neither are the verses as yet free; they too
have the effect of being bound by the strict discipline of the monks.
'Il s'environne d'une sorte de froide lumière parnassienne qui en fait
une œuvre plus anonyme, malgré la marque du poète poinçonnée à
maintes places sur le métal poli,'[1] says Albert Mockel, the most
subtle of æsthetic critics, of the book. Verhaeren must himself have
felt this insufficiency, for, conscious of not having solved his
problems in terms of poetry, he has remoulded both aspects of the
country, renewed both books in another form after many years: _Les
Moines_ in the tragedy _Le Cloître, Les Flamandes_ in the great
pentalogy _Toute la Flandre._
_Les Moines_ was the last of Verhaeren's descriptive books, the last in
which he stood on the outer side of things contemplating them
dispassionately. But already here there is too much temperament in him
to allow him to look at things as altogether unconnected and
undisciplined; the joy of magnifying and intensifying by feeling already
stirs in him. At the end of the book he no longer sees the monks as
isolated individuals, but gathers them all together in a great synthesis
in his finale. Behind them the poet sees order, a secret law, a great
force of life. They, these hermits who have renounced, who are scattered
over the world in a thousand monasteries, are to the poet the last
remnants of a great departed beauty, and they are so much the more
grandiose as they have lost all feeling for our own time. They are the
last ruins of moribund Christianity in a new world, projecting, in
tragic loneliness, into our own days. 'Seuls vous survivez grands au
monde chrétien mort!'[2] he hails them in admiration, for they have
built the great House of God, and for many generations sacrificed their
blood for the Host eternally white. In admiration he hails them. Not in
faith and love, but in admiration for their fearless energy, and above
all because they go on fighting undaunted for something that is dead and
lost; because their beauty serves none other than itself; because they
project into our own time like the ancient belfries of the land, which
no longer call to prayer. In a land where everything else serves a
purpose, pleasure and gold, they stand lonely; and they die without a
cry and without a moan, fighting against an invisible enemy, they, the
last defenders of beauty. For at that time, at that early stage of his
career, beauty for Verhaeren was still identical with the past, because
he had not yet discovered beauty for himself in the new things; in the
monks he celebrates the last romanticists, because he had not yet found
poetry in the things of reality, not yet found the new romance, the
heroism of the working-day. He loves the monks as great dreamers, as the
_chercheurs de chimères sublimes_, but he cannot help them, cannot
defend what they possess, for behind them already stand their heirs.
These heirs are the poets--a curious echo of David Strauss's idea about
religion--who will have to be, what religion with its faithful was to
the past, the guardians and eternal promoters of beauty. They it will
be--here rings strangely the deepest intention of Verhaeren's later
work--who will wave their new faith over the world like a banner, they,
'les poètes venus trop tard pour être prêtres,'[3] who shall be the
priests of a new fervour. All religions, all dogmas, are brittle and
transitory, Christ dies as Pan dies; and even this poetic faith, the
last and highest conquest of the mind, must in its time pass away.
Car il ne reste rien que l'art sur cette terre
Pour tenter un cerveau puissant et solitaire
Et le griser de rouge et tonique liqueur.
In this great hymn to the future Verhaeren first turns away from the
past and seeks the path to the future. For the poetic idea is here
understood with new and greater feelings than in the beginning of his
career. Poetry is for Verhaeren a confession not only as applied to an
individual in Goethe's phrase, but in a religious sense as well: as the
highest moral confession.
Much as these two books are marked by the effort to describe Flanders as
it actually is, stronger than this effort is the yearning at the heart
of them to escape from the present to the past. Every temperament
exceeds reality. Flanders was here described in the sense of an ideal;
but the ideal in both cases was projected on the past. Beauty young
Verhaeren had sought in the monks, the symbols of the past; strength and
the fire of life he had sought in the old Flemish masters. He still
needed the costume of the past to discover the heroic and the beautiful
in the present, just like many of our poets, who, when they would paint
strong men, must perforce place their dramas in the Florentine
renaissance, and who, if they would fashion beauty, deck their
characters with Greek costumes. To find strength and beauty, or in one
word poetry, in the real things that surround us, is here still denied
to Verhaeren; and therefore he has disowned his second book as well as
his first. In the distance between the old and the new works the long
road may be seen, and seen with pride, which leads from the traditional
poet to the truly contemporary poet.
Though not yet divided with a master hand, though not yet in the light
of reality, the inner contrast of the country, the conflict between body
and soul, between the joy of life and the longing for death, between
pleasure and renunciation, the alternative between 'yes' and 'no,' was
yet already contained in the contrast of these two books. And in a
really emotional poet this contrast could not remain one that was purely
external; it was bound to condense to an inner problem, to a personal
decision between past and present. Two conceptions of the world, both
inherited and in the blood, have here attained consciousness in one man;
and though in life they may act independently in juxtaposition, in the
individual the conflict must be fought out, the victory of the one or
the other must be decided by force, or else by something higher, by an
internal reconciliation. This conflict for a conception of the world
pierces through the constant contrast between the acceptance and the
denial of life in the poet, a conflict that for ten long years
undermined his artistic and human experiences with terrific crises, and
brought him to the verge of annihilation. The hostility which divides
his country into two camps seems to have taken refuge in his soul to
fight it out in a desperate and mortal duel: past and future seem to be
fighting for a new synthesis. But only from such crises, from such
pitiless struggles with the forces of one's own soul, do the vast
conceptions of the universe and their new creative reconciliation grow.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Albert Mockel, _Émile Verhaeren_.
[2] 'Aux Moines.'
[3] 'Aux Moines.'
THE BREAK-DOWN
Nous sommes tous des Christs qui embrassons nos croix.
É. V.,'La Joie,'
Every feeling, every sensation is, in the last instance, the
transformation of pain. Everything that in vibration or by contact
touches the epithelium affects it as pain. As pain, which then, by the
secret chemistry of the nerves, transmitted from centre to centre, is
transformed into impressions, colours, sounds, and conceptions. The
poet, whose last secret really is that he is more sensitive than others,
that he purifies these pains of contact into feeling with a still more
delicate filter, must have finer nerves than anybody else. Where others
only receive a vague impression, he must have a clear perception, to
which his feeling must respond, and the value of which he must be able
to estimate. In Verhaeren's very first books a particular kind of
reaction to every incitement was perceptible. His feeling really
responds only to strong, intensive, sharp irritation; its delicacy was
not abnormal, only the energy of the reaction was remarkable. His first
artistic incitement; however, that of Flemish landscapes, was only one
of the retina, glaring colours, pictorial charm; only in _Les Moines_
had for the first time more delicate psychic shades been crystallised.
In the meantime a transformation had taken place in his exterior life.
Verhaeren had turned aside from the contemplation of Nature to
concentrate his strength on the cultivation of his mind. He had
travelled extensively, had been in Paris and London, in Spain and
Germany; with impetuous haste he had assimilated all great ideas, all
new phases, all the manifold theories of existence. Without a pause,
incessantly, experiences assail him and tire him out. A thousand
impressions accost him, each demanding an answer; great, sombre cities
discharge their electric fire upon him, and fill his nerves with leaping
flame. The sky above him is obscured by the clouds of cities; in London
he wanders about as though wildered in a forest. This grey, misty city,
that seems as though it were built of steel, casts its whole melancholy
over the soul of him who lives there in loneliness, ignorant of the
language, and who is so much the more lonely, as all these
manifestations of the new life in great cities are still unintelligible
to him. He is still unable to capture the poetry that is in them, and so
they leap at him and penetrate him with a confused, unintelligible pain.
And in this novel atmosphere the intense refinement of his nerves
proceeds at such a pace that already the slightest contact with the
outer world produces a quivering reaction. Every noise, every colour,
every thought presses in upon him as though with sharp needles; his
healthy sensibility becomes hypertrophied; that fineness of hearing, of
which one is conscious, say in sea-sickness, which perceives every
noise, even the slightest sound, as though it were the blow of a hammer,
undermines his whole organism; every rapidly-passing smell corrodes him
like an acid; every ray of light pricks him like a red-hot needle. The
process is aggravated by a purely physical illness, which corresponds to
his psychic ailment. Just at that time Verhaeren was attacked by a
nervous affection of the stomach, one of those repercussions of the
psychic on the physical system in which it is hard to say whether the
ailing stomach causes the neurasthenic condition, or the weakness of the
nerves the stagnation of the digestive functions. Both ailments are
inwardly co-ordinated, both are a rejection of the outer impression, an
impotent refusal of the chemical conversion. Just as the stomach feels
all food as pain, as a foreign body, so the ear repels every sound as an
intrusion, so the eye rejects every impression as pain. This nervous
rejection of the outer world was already then, in Verhaeren's life,
pathological. The bell on the door had to be removed, because it shocked
his nerves; those who lived in the house had to wear felt slippers
instead of shoes; the windows were closed to the noise of the street.
These years in Verhaeren's life are the lowest depth, the crisis of his
vitality. It is in such periods of depression that invalids shut
themselves off from the world, from their fellow-men, from the light of
day, from the din of existence, from books, from all contact with the
outer world, because they instinctively feel that everything can be a
renewal of their pain, and nothing an enrichment of their life. They
seek to soften the world, to tone its colours down; they bury themselves
in the monotony of solitude. This 'soudaine lassitude'[1] then impinges
on to the moral nature; the will, losing the sense of life, is
paralysed; all standards of value collapse; ideals founder in the most
frightful Nihilism. The earth becomes a chaos, the sky an empty space;
everything is reduced to nothingness, to an absolute negation. Such
crises in the life of a poet are almost always sterile. And it is
therefore of incalculable value that here a poet should have observed
himself and given us a clear picture of himself in this state, that,
without fear of the ugliness, the confusion of his ego, he should have
described, in terms of art, the history of a psychic crisis. In
Verhaeren's trilogy, _Les Soirs, Les Débâcles, Les Flambeaux Noirs_, we
have a document that must be priceless to pathologists as to
psychologists. For here a deep-seated will to extract the last
consequence from every phase of life has reproduced the stadium of a
mental illness right to the verge of madness; here a poet has with the
persistence of a physician pursued the symptoms of his suffering
through every stage of lacerating pain, and immortalised in poems the
process of the inflammation of his nerves.
The landscape of this book is no longer that of his native province;
indeed, it can hardly be called one of earth. It is a grandiose
landscape of dreams, horizons as though on some other planet, as though
in one of those worlds which have cooled into moons, where the warmth of
the earth has died out and an icy calm chills the vast far-seen spaces
deserted of man. Already in the book of the monks, Rubens's merry
landscape had been clouded over; and in the next, _Au Bord de la Route_,
the grey hand of a cloud had eclipsed the sun. But here all the colours
of life are burnt out, not a star shines down from this steel-grey
metallic sky; only a cruel, freezing moon glides across it from time to
time like a sardonic smile. These are books of pallid nights, with the
immense wings of clouds closing the sky, over a narrowed world, in which
the hours cling to things like heavy and clammy chains. They are works
filled with a glacial cold. 'Il gèle ...'[2] one poem begins, and this
shuddering tone pierces like the howling of dogs ever and ever again
over an illimitable plain. The sun is dead, dead are the flowers, the
trees; the very marshes are frozen in these white midnights:
Et la crainte saisit d'un immortel hiver
Et d'un grand Dieu soudain, glacial et splendide.[3]
In his fever the poet is for ever dreaming of this cold, as though in a
secret yearning for its cooling breath. No one speaks to him, only the
winds howl senselessly through the streets like dogs round a house.
Often dreams come, but they are _fleurs du mal_; they dart out of the
ice burning, yellow, poisonous. More and more monotonous grow the days,
more and more fearful; they fall down like drops, heavy and black.
Mes jours toujours plus lourds s'en vont roulant leur cours![4]
In thought and sound these verses express ail the frightful horror of
this desolation. Impotently the ticking of the clock hammers this
endless void, and measures a barren time. Darker, and darker grows the
world, more and more oppressive; the concave mirror of solitude distorts
the poet's dreams into frightful grimaces, and spirits whisper evil
thoughts in his restless heart.
And like a fog, like a heavy, stifling cloud, fatigue sinks down on his
soul. First pleasure in things had died, and then the very will to
pleasure. The soul craves nothing now. The nerves have withdrawn their
antennæ from the outer world; they are afraid of every impression; they
are spent. Whatever chances to drift against them no longer becomes
colour, sound, impression; the senses are too feeble for the chemical
conversion of impressions: and so everything remains at the stage of
pain, a dull, gnawing pain. Feeling, which the nerves are now powerless
to feed, starves; desire is sunk in sleep. Autumn has come; all the
flowers have withered; and winter comes apace.
Il fait novembre en mon âme.
Et c'est le vent du nord qui clame
Comme une bête dans mon âme.[5]
Slowly, but irresistible as a swelling tide, emerges an evil thought:
the idea of the senselessness of life, the thought of death. As the last
of yearnings soars up the prayer:
Mourir! comme des fleurs trop énormes, mourir![6]
For the poet's whole body is, as it were, sore from this contact with
the outer world, from these little gnawing pains. Not a single great
feeling can stand erect: everything is eaten away by this little,
gnawing, twitching pain. But now the man in his torture springs up, as a
beast, tormented by the stings of insects, tears its chains asunder and
rushes madly and blindly along. The patient would fain flee from his bed
of torture, but he cannot retrace his steps. No man can 'se recommencer
enfant, avec calcul.'[7] Travels, dreams, do nothing but deaden the
pain; and then the torment of the awakening sets in again with redoubled
strength. Only one way is open: the road which leads forward, the road
to annihilation. Out of a thousand petty pains, the will longs for one
single pain that shall end all: the body that is being burnt piecemeal
cries for the lightning. The sick man desires--as fever-patients will
tear their wounds open--to make this pain, which tortures without
destroying, so great and murderous that it will kill outright: to save
his pride, he would fain be himself the cause of his destruction. Pain,
he says to himself, shall not continue to be a series of pin-pricks; he
refuses to 'pourrir, immensément emmailloté d'ennui';[8] he asks to be
destroyed by a vast, fiery, savage pain; he demands a beautiful and
tragic death. _The will to experience becomes here the will to suffer
pain_ and even death. He will be glad to suffer any torture, but not
this one low little thing; he can no longer endure to feel himself so
contemptible, so wretched.
N'entendre plus se taire, en sa maison d'ébène,
Qu'un silence total dont auraient peur les morts.[9]
And with a flagellant's pleasure the patient nurses this fire of fever,
till it flames up in a bright blaze. The deepest secret of Verhaeren's
art was from the first his joy in intemperance, the strength of his
exaggeration. And so, too, he snatches up this pain, this neurasthenia
to a wonderful, fiery, and grandiose ecstasy. A cry, a pleasure breaks
out of this idea of liberation. For the first time the word 'joy' blazes
again in the cry:
Le joie enfin me vient, de souffrir par moi-même,
Parce que je lé veux.[10]
True, only a perverse joy, a sophism, the false triumph over life of the
suicide, who believes he has conquered fate when, truth to tell, it has
conquered him. But this self-deception is already sublime.
By this sudden interference of the will the physical torture of the
nerves becomes a psychic event; the illness of the body encroaches upon
the intellect; the neurasthenia becomes a 'déformation morale'; the
suffering schism of the poet's ego is of itself subdivided, so to speak,
into two elements, one that excites pain and one that suffers pain. The
psychic would fain tear itself free from the physical, the soul would
fain withdraw from the tortured body:
Pour s'en aller vers les lointains et se défaire
De soi et des autres, un jour,
En un voyage ardent et mol comme l'amour
Et légendaire ainsi qu'un départ de galère![11]
But the two are relentlessly bound up with each other, no flight is
possible, however much disgust drives the poet to rescue at least a part
of himself by snatching it into a purer, calmer, and higher state.
Never, I believe, has the aversion of a sick man to himself, the will to
health of a living man, been more cruel and more grandiose than in this
book of a poet's diabolical revolt against himself. His suffering soul
is torn into two parts. In a fearful personification the hangman and the
condemned criminal wrestle for the mastery. 'Se cravacher dans sa
pensée et dans son sang!'[12] and finally, in a paroxysm of fury, 'me
cracher moi-même,'[13] these are the horribly shrilling cries of
self-hatred and self-disgust. With all the strings of her whipped
strength the soul tears to free herself from the rotting and tormented
body, and her deepest torture is that this separation is impossible. In
this distraction flickers already the first flame of madness.
Never--if we except Dostoieffsky--has a poet's scalpel probed the wound
of his ego so cruelly and so deeply, never has it gone so dangerously
near to the nerve of life. And never perhaps, except in Nietzsche's
_Ecce Homo!_ has a poet stepped so close to the edge of the precipice
that juts above the abyss of existence, with so clear a consciousness of
its vicinity, to feast on the feeling of dizziness and on the danger of
death. The fire in Verhaeren's nerves has slowly inflamed his brain. But
the other being, the poet in him, had remained watchful, observing the
eye of madness slowly, inevitably, and as though magnetically attracted,
coming nearer and nearer. 'L'absurdité grandit en moi comme une fleur
fatale.'[14] In gentle fear, but at the same time with a secret
voluptuous pleasure, he felt the dreaded thing approaching. For long
already he had been conscious that this rending of himself had hunted
his thinking from the circle of clarity. And in one grandiose poem, in
which he sees the corpse of his reason floating down the grey Thames,
the sick man describes that tragic foundering:
Elle est morte de trop savoir,
De trop vouloir sculpter la cause,
---------------------------------
Elle est morte, atrocement,
D'un savant empoisonnement,
Elle est morte aussi d'un délire
Vers un absurde et rouge empire.[15]
But no fear takes him at this thought. Verhaeren is a poet who loves
paroxysm. And just as in his physical illness he had called out in the
deepest joy for the intoxication of illness, for its exasperation, for
death, so now his psychic illness demands its intoxication, the
dissolution of all order, its most glorious foundering: madness. Here,
too, the pleasure in the quest of pain is intensified to the highest
superlative, to a voluptuous joy in self-destruction. And as sick men
amid their torments scream of a sudden for death, this tortured man
screams in grim yearning for madness:
Aurai-je enfin l'atroce joie
De voir, nerfs par nerfs, comme une proie,
La démence attaquer mon cerveau?[16]
He has measured all the deeps of the spirit, but all the words of
religion and science, all the elixirs of life, have been powerless to
save him from this torment. He knows all sensations, and there was no
greatness in any of them; all have goaded him, none have exalted him or
raised him above himself. And now his heart yearns ardently for this
last sensation of all. He is tired of waiting for it, he will go out to
meet it: 'Je veux marcher vers la folie et ses soleils.'[17] He hails
madness as though it were a saint, as though it were his saviour; he
forces himself to 'croire à la démence ainsi qu'en une foi.'[18] It is a
magnificent picture reminding one of the legend of Hercules, who,
tortured by the fiery robe of Nessus, hurls himself on the pyre to be
consumed by one great flame instead of being wretchedly burnt to death
by a thousand slow and petty torments.
Here the highest state of despair is reached; the black banner of death
and the red one of madness are furled together. With unprecedented logic
Verhaeren, despairing of an interpretation of life, has exalted
senselessness as the sense of the universe. But it is just in this
complete inversion that victory already lies. Johannes Schlaf, in his
masterly study, has with great eloquence demonstrated that it is just at
the moment when the sick man cries out like one being crucified, 'Je
suis l'immensément perdu,'[19] just when he feels he is being drawn into
the bosom of the infinite, that he is redeemed and delivered. Just this
idea, which here had whipped the little pain to the verge of madness,
À chaque heure, violenter sa maladie;
L'aimer, et la maudire,[20]
is already the deepest leitmotiv of Verhaeren's work, the key to unlock
the gates of it. For the idea is nothing else than the idea of his life,
to master all resistance by a boundless love, 'aimer le sort jusqu'en
ses rages';[21] never to shun a thing, but to take everything and
enhance it till it becomes creative, ecstatic pleasure; to welcome every
suffering with fresh readiness. Even this cry for madness, no doubt the
extreme document of human despair, is an immense yearning for clearness;
in this tortured disgust with illness cries a joy in life perhaps else
unknown in our days; and the whole conflict, which seems to be a flight
from life, is in the last instance an immense heroism for which there is
no name. Nietzsche's great saying is here fulfilled: 'For a dionysiac
task a hammer's hardness, _the pleasure in destruction itself_, is most
decidedly one of the preliminary conditions.'[22] And what at this
period of Verhaeren's work appears still to be negative is in the higher
sense a preparation for the positive, for the decisive consummation, of
the later books.
For that reason this crisis and the shaping of it in verse remain an
imperishable monument of our contemporary literature, for it is at the
same time an eternal monument to the conquest of human suffering by the
power of art. Verhaeren's crisis--his exposition, for the sake of the
value of life, of his inward struggle--has gone deeper than that of any
other poet of our time. To this very day the sufferings of that time are
graven, as though by iron wedges, in the furrows of his lofty brow; the
recovery of his health and his subsequent robustness have been powerless
to efface them. This crisis was a fire without parallel, a flame of
passion. Not a single acquisition from the earlier days was rescued from
it. Verhaeren's whole former relation to the world has broken down: his
Catholic faith, his religion, his feeling for his native province, for
the world, for life itself, all is destroyed. And when he builds up his
work now, it must perforce be an entirely different one, with a
different artistic expression, with different feelings, different
knowledge, and different harmonies. This tempest has changed the
landscape of his soul, where once the peace of a modest existence had
prevailed, into a pathless desert. But this desert with its solitude has
space and liberty for the building up of a new, a richer, an infinitely
nobler world.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'L'Heure Mauvaise' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
[2] 'La Barque' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
[3] 'Le Gel' (_Les Soirs_).
[4] 'L'Heure Mauvaise' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
[5] 'Vers' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
[6] 'Mourir' (_Les Soirs_).
[7] 'S'amoindrir' (_Les Débâcles_).
[8] 'Si Morne' (_Les Débâcles_)
[9] 'Le Roc' (_Les Flambeaux Noirs_).
[10] 'Insatiablement' (_Les Soirs_).
[11] 'Là-bas' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
[12] 'Vers le Cloître' (_Les Débâcles_).
[13] 'Un Soir' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
[14] 'Fleur Fatale' (_Les Débâcles_).
[15] 'La Morte' (_Les Flambeaux Noirs_).
[16] 'Le Roc' (_Ibid._).
[17] 'Fleur Fatale' (_Les Débâcles_).
[18] 'Le Roc' (_Les Flambeaux Noirs_).
[19] 'Les Nombres' (_Ibid._).
[20] 'Celui de la Fatigue' (_Les Apparus dans mes Chemins_).
[21] 'La Joie' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
[22] _Ecce Homo!_
FLIGHT INTO THE WORLD
On boit sa soif, on mange sa faim.--É.V., 'L'Amour.'
In this crisis the negation was driven to the last possible limits. The
sick man had denied not only the outer world, but himself as well.
Nothing had remained but vexation, disgust, and torment.
La vie en lui ne se prouvait
Que par l'horreur qu'il en avait.[1]
He had arrived at the last possibility, at that possibility which means
destruction or transformation. The at first purely physical pain of the
supersensitive organs of the senses had become a moral depression; the
depression had become psychic suffering; and this again had gradually
turned in a grandiose progression not only to pain in the individual
thing but to suffering in the all: to _cosmic pain_. For Him, however,
who in His loneliness took the suffering of the whole world upon His
shoulders, who was strong enough to bear it for all the centuries,
humanity has invented the symbol of 'God.' He who is born of earth and
lives to die must perforce break down under so gigantic a burden. Into
the last corner of his ego revengeful life had here driven the man who
denied it, had driven him to the point where now he stood shivering
before the abyss in his own breast, face to face with death and madness.
The physical and poetic organism of Verhaeren was overheated to the most
dangerous and extreme degree. This fever-heat--that of a flagellant
--had brought his blood to the boiling-point; it was filling the chamber
of his breast with pictures of such overwhelming horror that the
explosion of self-destruction could only be prevented by opening the
valve.
There were only two means of flight from this destruction: flight into
the past--or flight into a new world. Many, Verlaine for instance, had
in such catastrophes, wherein the whole structure of their lives tumbled
to the ground, fled into the cathedrals of Catholicism rather than stand
in solitude under the threatening sky. Verhaeren, however, though an
inspired faith is one of the most living sources of his poetical power,
was more afraid of the past than of the Unknown. _He freed himself from
the immense pressure upon him by fleeing into the world_. He who in his
pride had conceived the whole process of the world as a personal affair,
he who had tried to solve the eternal discord, the undying 'yes' and
'no' of life in his own lonely self, now rushes into the very midst of
things and involves himself in their process. He who previously had felt
everything only subjectively, only in isolation, now objectifies
himself; he who previously had shut himself off from reality, now lets
his veins pulse in harmony with the breathing organism of life. He
relinquishes his attitude of pride; he surrenders himself; lavishes
himself joyously on everything; exchanges the pride of being alone for
the immense pleasure of being everywhere. _He no longer looks at all
things in himself, but at himself in all things_. But the poet in him
frees himself, quite in Goethe's sense, by symbols. Verhaeren drives his
superabundance out of himself into the whole world, just as Christ in
the legend drove the devils out of the madman into the swine. The heat,
the fever of his feeling--which, concentrated in his too narrow chest,
were near bursting it--now animate with their fire the whole world
around him, which of old had been to him congealed with ice. All the
evil powers, which had slunk around him in the trappings of nightmares,
he now transforms to shapes of life. He hammers away at them and shapes
them anew; he is himself the smith of that noble poem of his, the smith
of whom he says:
Dans son brasier, il a jeté
Les cris d'opiniâtreté,
La rage sourde et séculaire;
Dans son brasier d'or exalté,
Maître de soi, il a jeté
Révoltes, deuils, violences, colères,
Pour leur donner la trempe et la clarté
Du fer et de l'éclair.[2]
He objectifies his personality in the work of art, hammering out of the
cold blocks, that weighed upon him with the weight of iron, monuments
and statues of pain. All the feelings which of old weighed down upon him
like dull fog, formless and prisoned in dream like nightmares, now
become clear statues, symbols in stone of his soul's experiences. The
poet has torn his fear, his burning, moaning, horrible fear, out of
himself, and poured it into his bell-ringer, who is consumed in his
blazing belfry. He has turned the monotony of his days to music in his
poem of the rain; his mad fight against the elements, which in the end
break his strength, he has shaped into the image of the ferryman
struggling against the current that shatters his oars one after the
other. His cruel probing of his own pain he has visualised in the idea
of his fishermen, who with their nets all in holes go on fishing up
nothing but suffering on suffering out of the sombre stream; his evil
and red lusts he has spiritualised in his _Aventurier_, in the
adventurer who returns home from a far land to celebrate his wedding
feast with his dead love. Here his feelings are shaped no longer in
moods, in the fluid material of dreams, but in the infinitely mobile
form of human beings. Here there is symbolism in the highest sense, in
Goethe's sense of liberation. For every feeling that has achieved
artistic shape is as it were conjured away out of the breast. And thus
the too heavy pressure slowly disappears from the poet's being, and the
morbid fever from his work. Now and now only does he recognise the
suicidal cowardice behind the visor of the pride that forced him to fly
from the world, now and now only does he understand that fatal egoism
which had taken refuge beyond the pale of the world:
J'ai été lâche et je me suis enfui
Du monde, en mon orgueil futile,[3]
This confession is the last liberating word of the crisis.
Now his despair--a despair like that of Faust--is overcome. The mood of
Easter morning begins to sound the exulting cry, 'Earth has me
again!'[4] with the anthems of the resurrection. Verhaeren has described
this deliverance, this ascent from illness to health, from the most
despairing 'no' to the most exultant 'yes,' in many symbols, most
beautifully in that magnificent poem wherein St. George the
dragon-slayer bows down to him with his shining lance; and again in that
other poem in which the four gentle sisters approach him and announce
his deliverance:
L'une est le bleu pardon, l'autre la bonté blanche,
La troisième l'amour pensif, la dernière le don
D'être, même pour les méchants, le sacrifice.[5]
Goodness and love call to him now from where of old there were only
hatred and despair. And in their approach already he feels the hope of
recovery, the hope of a natural, artistic strength.
Et quand elles auront, dans ma maison,
Mis de l'ordre à mes torts, plié tous mes remords
Et refermé, sur mes péchés, toute cloison,
En leur pays d'or immobile, où le bonheur
Descend, sur des rives de fleurs entr'accordées,
Elles dresseront les hautes idées,
En sainte-table, pour mon cœur.[6]
This feeling of recovery grows more and more secure, more and more the
mist parts before the approaching sun of health. Now the poet knows that
he has been wandering in the dark galleries of mines, that he has been
hammering a labyrinth through the hard rock of hatred instead of walking
the same path as his fellow-men in the light. And at last, bright and
exultant, high above the shy voices of hope and prayer, the sudden
triumph of certainty rings out. For the first time Verhaeren finds the
form of the poem of the future--the dithyramb. Where of old, confused
and lonely, _le carillon noir_ of pain sounded, now all the strings of
the heart vibrate and sing.
Sonnez toutes mes voix d'espoir!
Sonnez en moi; sonnez, sous les rameaux,
En des routes claires et du soleil![7]
And now the path proceeds in light 'vers les claires métamorphoses.'[8]
This flight into the world was the great liberation. Not only has the
body grown strong again and rejoices in the wandering and the way, but
the soul too has become cheerful, the will has grown new wings that are
stronger than the old, and the poet's art is filled with a fresh blood
red with life. The deliverance is perceptible even in Verhaeren's verse,
which with its delicate nerves reproduces all the phases of his soul.
For his poetry, which at first in the indifference of its picturesque
description preserved the cold form of the Alexandrine, and then, in the
grim monotony of the crisis, tried to represent the void waste of
feeling by a terrifying, gruesomely beautiful uniformity of rhythm, this
poem of a sudden, as though out of a dream, starts into life, awakens
like an animal from sleep, rears, prances, curvets; imitates all
movements, threatens, exults, falls into ecstasy: in other words, all of
a sudden, and independently of all influences and theories, he has won
his way to the _vers libre,_ free verse. Just as the poet no longer
shuts the I world up in himself, but bestows himself on the world, the
poem too no longer seeks to lock the world up obstinately in its
four-cornered prison, but surrenders itself to every feeling, every
rhythm, every melody; it adapts itself, distends; with its foaming
voluptuous joy it can fold in its embrace the illimitable length and
breadth of cities, can contract to pick up the loveliness of one fallen
blossom, can imitate the thundering voice of the street, the hammering
of machines, and the whispering of lovers in a garden of spring. _The
poem can now speak in all the languages of feeling, with all the voices
of men; for the tortured, moaning cry of an individual has become the
voice of the universe._
But together with this new delight the poet feels the debt which he has
withheld from his age. He beholds the lost years in which he lived only
for himself, for his own little feeling, instead of listening to the
voice of his time. With a remarkable concordance of genius Verhaeren's
work here expresses what Dehmel--in the same year perhaps--fashioned
with such grandeur in 'The Mountain Psalm,' the poem in which, looking
down from the heights of solitude to the cities in their pall of smoke,
he cries in ecstasy:
Was weinst du, Sturm?--Hinab, Erinnerungen!
dort pulst im Dunst der Weltstadt zitternd Herz!
Es grollt ein Schrei von Millionen Zungen
nach Glück und Frieden: Wurm, was will dein Schmerz!
Nicht sickert einsam mehr von Brust zu Brüsten,
wie einst die Sehnsucht, als ein stiller Quell;
heut stöhnt ein _Volk_ nach Klarheit, wild und gell,
und du schwelgst noch in Wehmutslüsten?
Siehst du den Qualm mit dicken Fäusten drohn
dort überm Wald der Schlote und der Essen?
Auf deine Reinheitsträume fällt der Hohn
der Arbeit! fühl's: sie ringt, von Schmutz zerfressen.
Du hast mit deiner Sehnsucht bloss gebuhlt,
in trüber Glut dich selber nur genossen;
schütte die Kraft aus, die dir zugeflossen,
und du wirst frei vom Druck der Schuld![9]
Pour out the power that has flowed in upon thee! Surrender thyself! That
too is Verhaeren's ecstatic cry at this hour. Opposites touch. _Supreme
solitude is turned to supreme fellowship_. The poet feels that
self-surrender is more than self-preservation. All at once he sees
behind him the frightful danger of this self-seeking pain.
Et tout à coup je m'apparais celui
Qui s'est, hors de soi-même, enfui
Vers le sauvage appel des forces unanimes.[10]
And he who in days gone by had fled from this appeal into cold solitude,
now casts himself ecstatically into the arms of the world, with the I
deepest yearning
De n'être plus qu'un tourbillon
Qui se disperse au vent mystérieux des choses.[11]
He feels that in order to live to the full all the greatness and beauty
of this fiery world, he must multiply himself, be a thousandfold and ten
thousandfold what he is. 'Multiplie-toi!' Be manifold. Surrender
thyself! For the first time this cry bursts up like a flame. Be
manifold!
Multiplie et livre-toi! Défais
Ton être en des millions d'êtres;
Et sens l'immensité filtrer et transparaître.[12]
Only from this brotherhood with all things accrue the possibilities of
being a modern poet. Only by self-surrender to everything that is could
Verhaeren attain to so grandiose a conception of contemporary
manifestations, only thus could he become the poet of the democracy of
cities, of industrialism, of science, the poet of Europe, the poet of
our age. Only such a pantheistic feeling could create this intimate
relationship between the world of self and the world surrounding self,
the relationship which subsequently ends in an unparalleled identity:
only so despairing a 'no' could be transformed to so enraptured a 'yes,'
only one who had fled from the world could possess it with such passion.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'Un Soir' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
[2] 'Le Forgeron' (_Les Villages Illusoires_).
[3] 'Saint Georges' (_Les Apparus dans mes Chemins_).
[4] Goethe's _Faust_, 1. 784.
[5] 'Les Saintes' (_Les Apparus dans mes Chemins_).
[6] 'Les Saintes' (_Les Apparus dans mes Chemins_).
[7] 'Saint Georges' (_Ibid_).
[8] 'Le Forgeron' (_Les Villages Illusoires_).
[9] 'Why weepest thou, O storm?--Down, memories! Yonder in the smoke
pulses the great city's trembling heart! A million grumbling tongues are
crying for peace and happiness: worm, what would thy pain! Yearning no
longer trickles lonely from breast to breasts, a quiet source and no
more: to-day a _nation_ groans, and with wild, shrill voices demands
clearness--and thou still revellest in the joys of melancholy?
'Seest thou the reek and smoke threatening yonder over the forest of
flues and chimneys? Upon thy dreams of purity falls the scorn of labour!
Feel it: labour is struggling, eaten up with dirt! Thou hast but
wantoned with thy yearning, thou hast but enjoyed thyself in turbid
heat; pour out the power that has flowed in upon thee, and thou shalt be
free from the burden of guilt!'--'Bergpsalm' (_Aber die Liebe_).
[10] 'La Foule' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
[11] 'Celui du Savoir' (_Les Apparus dans mes Chemins_).
[12] 'La Forêt' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).