CONSTRUCTIVE FORCES
LES CAMPAGNES HALLUCINÉES--LES VILLAGES ILLUSOIRES
--LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES--LES DRAMES
1893-1900
CONTEMPORARY FEELING
J'étais le carrefour où tout se rencontrait.--É.V., 'Le Mont.'
Verhaeren's deliverance from the stifling clasp of his crisis was a
flight to realities. He saved himself by no longer fixing his gaze
rigidly on himself and deeply probing every feeling of joy and torment,
but by turning to the world of phenomena and flinging himself on its
problems. He has no longer to stand in solitude facing the world; his
desire is to multiply himself, to realise himself in everything that is
alive, in everything that expresses a will, an idea, a form, anything at
all animated. His poetic aim now is, not so much to analyse himself to
himself, as to analyse himself in the whole world.
To realities, and particularly to the realities of our day, lyric poets
had previously felt themselves alien. It had long been a commonplace to
speak of the danger to art of industrialism, of democracy, of this age
of machinery which makes pur life uniform, kills individuality, and
drowns romance in actualities. All these poets have looked upon the new
creations, machines, railways, monster cities, the telegraph, the
telephone, all the triumphs of engineering, as a drag on the soaring of
poetry. Ruskin preached that workshops should be demolished and chimneys
razed to the ground; Tolstoy pointed to primitive man, who produces all
his requirements from his own resources independently of any community,
and saw in him the moral and æsthetic ideal of the future. In poetry,
the past had gradually come to be identified with the poetical. People
were enamoured of the glory that was Greece, of mail-coaches and narrow,
crooked streets; they were filled with enthusiasm for all foreign
cultures, and decried that of our own time as a phase of degeneration.
Democracy, levelling all ranks and confining even the poet to the
middle-class profession of author, seemed, as a social order, to be the
correlation of machinery which, by the constructive skill of workshops,
renders all manual dexterity unnecessary. All the poets, who were glad
to avail themselves of the practical advantages provided by technical
science, who had no objection to covering immense distances in the
minimum time, who accepted the comfort of the modern house, the luxury
of modern conditions of life, increased pecuniary rewards and social
independence, refused obstinately to discover in these advantages a
single poetic motive, a single object of inspiration, the least stimulus
or ecstasy. Poetry had by degrees come to be something which was the
very opposite of what-, ever is useful; all evolution seemed to these
poets to be, from the point of view of culture, retrogression.
Now it is Verhaeren's great exploit that he effected a transmutation
poetic values. He discovered the sublime in the far-spread serried ranks
of democracy; beauty he found not only where it adapts itself to
traditional ideas, but also where, still hidden by the cotyledon of the
new, it is just beginning to unfold. By rejecting no phenomenon, in so
far as an inward sense and a necessity dwelt in it, he infinitely
extended the boundaries of the lyric art. He found a fruitful soil in
the very places where all other poets despaired of poetic seed. He and
he alone, who had for so long been eating his heart out in fierce
isolation, feels the strength and fulness of society, the poetical
element in the massed strength of great cities and in great inventions.
_His deepest longing, his most sublime exploit is the lyric discovery of
the new beauty in new things._
The only way to this feat lay for him through the conviction that beauty
does not express anything absolute, but something that changes with
circumstances and with men; that beauty, like everything that is subject
to evolution, is constantly changing. Yesterday's beauty is not to-day's
beauty. Beauty is no more opposed than anything else to that tendency to
spiritualisation which is the most characteristic symptom ind result of
all culture. Physiologists have proved that the physical strength of
modern man is inferior to that of his ancestors, but that his nervous
system is more developed, so that strength is more and more concentrated
in the intellect. The Hellenic hero was the wrestler, the expression of
a body harmoniously developed in every limb, the perfection of strength
and skill; the hero of our time is the thinker, the ideal of
intellectual strength and suppleness. And since our only way of
estimating the perfection of things is by the ideal of our personal
feeling, the form of beauty likewise has been transformed and become
intellectual. And even when we seek it in the body, as, for instance, in
the ideal woman's figure, we have grown accustomed to seeing perfection
not so much in robustness and plumpness as in a noble, slender play of
lines which mysteriously expresses the soul. Beauty is turning away more
and more from the outer surface, from the physical, to the interior
aspects, to the psychic. In proportion as motive forces hide themselves
and as harmony becomes less obvious, beauty intellectualises itself. It
is becoming for us not so much a beauty of appearance as a beauty of;
aim. If we are to admire the telegraph or the telephone, we shall not be
satisfied with considering the exterior forms, the network of wires, the
keys, the receivers; we shall be impressed rather by the ideal beauty,
by the idea of a vibrating spark leaping over countries and whole
continents. A machine is not wonderful on, account of its rattling,
rusty, iron framework, but by the idea, deep-seated in its body, which
is the principle of its magical activity. A modern idea of beauty must
be adapted not only to the idea of beauty of the past, but also to that
of the future. And the future of æsthetics is a kind of ideology, or, as
Renan expresses it, an identity with the sciences. We shall lose the
habit of understanding things only by our senses, of seeing their
harmony only on their exterior surface, and we shall have to learn how
to conceive their intellectual aims, their inner form, their psychic
organisation, as beauty.
For these new things are only ugly when they are regarded with the eyes
of a past century, when our contemporaries, jealously guarding a
reverent over-estimation, valuing the rust and not the gold, despise
modern works of art, and pay a thousand times too dear for the
indifferent productions of a past age. Only in this state of feeling is
it possible to esteem mail-coaches poetical and locomotives ugly; only
thus is it possible for poets, who have not learned to see with
emancipated and independent eyes, to assume such a hostile attitude, or
at the best an indifferent attitude, to our realities. Let us remember
Nietzsche's beautiful words: 'My formula for grandeur in man is _amor
fati_: that a man should ask for nothing else, either in the past or in
the future, in all eternity. We must not only endure what is necessary,
still less conceal it--all idealism is lying in necessity's face--but
we must _love_ it.'[1] And in this sense some few in our days have loved
what is new, first as a necessity, and then as beauty. A generation ago
now, Carlyle was the first to preach the heroism of everyday life, and
exhorted the poets of his day not to describe the greatness they found
in mouldy chronicles, but to look for it where it was nearest to them,
in the realities around them. Constantin Meunier has found the idea of a
new sculpture in democracy, Whistler and Monet have discovered in the
smoky breath of this age of machinery a new tone of colour which is not
less beautiful than Italy's eternal azure and the halcyon sky of Greece.
It is only from the vast agglomerations, the immense dimensions of the
new world that Walt Whitman has derived the strength and power of his
voice. The whole difficulty which thus far has permitted only a few to
serve the new beauty in the new things lies in the fact that our age is
not yet a period of decided conviction, but only one of transition. The
victory of machinery is not yet complete; handiwork still subsists,
little towns still flourish, it is still possible to take refuge in an
idyll, to find the old beauty in some sequestered corner. Not till the
poet is shut off from all flight to inherited ideals will he be forced
to change himself into a new man. For the new things have not yet
organically developed their beauty. Every new thing on its first
appearance is blended with something repellent, brutal, and ugly; it is
only gradually that its inherent form shapes itself æsthetically. The
first steamers, the first locomotives, the first automobiles, were ugly.
But the slender, agile torpedo-boats of to-day, the bright-coloured,
noiselessly--gliding automobiles with their hidden mechanism, the great,
broad-chested Pacific Railway engines of to-day, are impressive by their
outward form alone. Our huge shops, such as those which Messel built in
Berlin, display a beauty in iron and glass which is hardly less than
that of the cathedrals and palaces of old time. Certain great things,
such as the Eiffel Tower, the Forth Bridge, modern men-of-war, furnaces
belching flame, the Paris boulevards, have a new beauty beyond anything
which past ages had to show. These new things compel a new enhancement
of value, on the one hand by the idea that moves them, on the other hand
by their democratic grandeur and their vast dimensions--equalled by none
but the very greatest works of antiquity. But whatever is beautiful
must, sooner or later, be conceived of as poetry. And thus, it is quite
sure, Verhaeren has only been one of the first to build bridges from the
old to the new time; others will come who will celebrate the new
beauties in the new things--gigantic cities, engines, industrialism,
democracy, this fiery striving for new standards of greatness--and they
will not only be compelled to find the new beauties, they will also
have to establish new laws for this new order, a different morality, a
different religion, a different synthesis for this new conditionality.
the poetic transmutation of the beautiful is only a first beginning of
the poetic transmutation of the feeling of life.
But a poet never finds anything in things save his own temperament. If
he is melancholy, the world in his books is void of sense, all lights
are extinguished, laughter dies; if he is passionate, all feelings
seethe in a fiery froth as though in a cauldron, and foam up in angry
happenings. Whereas the real world is manifold, and contains the elixirs
of pleasure and pain, confidence and despair, love and hate, only as
elements so to speak, the world of great poets is the world of one
single feeling. And so Verhaeren too sees all things in their new beauty
with the feelings of his own life only, only with energy. In these the
fiery years of his prime it is not harmony that he seeks, but energy,
power. For him a thing is the more beautiful the more purpose, will,
power, energy it contains. And since the whole world of to-day is
over-heated with effort and energy; since our great towns are nothing
but centres of multiplied energy; since machinery expresses nothing save
force tanied and organised; since innumerable crowds are yoked in
harmonious action--to him the world is full of beauty. He loves the new
age because it does not isolate effort but condenses it, because it is
not scattered but concentrated for action. And of a sudden everything
he sees appears to be filled with soul. All that has will, all that has
an aim in view--man, machine, crowd, city, money; all that vibrates,
works, hammers, travels, exults; all that propagates itself and is
multiplied, all that strives to be creation; all that bears in itself
fire, impulse, electricity, feeling--all this rings again in his verse.
All that of old had acted upon him as being cold and dead and hostile is
now inspired with will and energy, and lives its minute; in this
multiple gear there is nothing that is merely dust or useless
ornamentation; everything is creation, everything is working its way
towards the future. The town, this piled-up Babylon of stones and men,
is of a sudden a living being, a vampire sucking the strength of the
land; the factories, that had seemed to him nothing but an unsightly
mass of masonry, now become the creators of a thousand things, which in
their turn create new things out of themselves. All at once Verhaeren is
the socialist poet, the poet of the age of machinery, of democracy, and
of the European race. And energy fills his poetry too: it is strength
let loose, enthusiasm, paroxysm, ecstasy, whatever you like to call it;
but always active, glowing, moving strength; never rest, always
activity. His poem is no longer declamation, no longer the marmoreal
monument of a mood, but a crying aloud, a fight, a convulsive starting,
a stooping down and a springing up again; it is a battle materialised.
For him all values have been transmuted. It is just what had repelled
him most--London, monster cities, railway stations, Exchanges, which now
lure him most of all as poetic problems. The more a thing seems to
resist beauty--the more he has first to discover its beauty by fighting
it and wrestling with it in torment--with so much the greater ecstasy
does he now extol it. The strength which had murderously raged against
itself now, in creative ecstasy, breaks into the world. To tear down
resistance, to snatch beauty from its most hidden corner, is now for him
a tenfold strength and joy of creation. _Verhaeren now creates the poem
of the great city in the dionysiac sense_; the hymn to our own time, to
Europe; creates ecstasy, renewed and renewed again, in life.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Ecce Homo!_
TOWNS ('LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES')
Le siècle et son horreur se condensent en elles
Mais leur âme contient la minute éternelle.
É.V., 'Les Villes.'
When a man just recovered from illness steps for the first time with
arms outspread, and as though climbing up from a dungeon, into the light
of day, he is filled with a bliss beyond measure by the open air
caressing him on all sides, by the orgies of the sunlight, the cataracts
of deafening din: with a cry of infinite exultation he takes into
himself the symphony of life. And from this first moment of his recovery
Verhaeren was seized by a limitless thirst for the intoxication of life,
as though with one single leap he would make good the lost years of his
loneliness, of his illness, and of his crisis. His eyes, his ears, his
nerves, all his senses, which had been a-hungered, now pounce on things
with a pleasure that is almost murderous, and snatch everything to
themselves in a frenzy of greed. At this time Verhaeren travelled from
country to country, as though he would take possession of all Europe. He
was in Germany, in Berlin, in Vienna, and in Prague; always a lonely
wanderer; quite alone; ignorant of the language, and listening only to
the voice of the town itself, to the strange, sombre murmuring, to the
surge of the European metropolises. In Bayreuth he paid his devotions at
the tomb of Wagner, whose music of ecstasy and passion he absorbed in
Munich; in Colmar he learned to understand his beloved painter Mathias
Grünewald; he saw and loved the tragic landscapes of northern Spain,
those gloomy, treeless mountains, whose threatening silhouettes
afterwards became the background of the fiery happenings in his drama of
_Philip II._; in Hamburg he was an excited spectator, day by day, of the
stupendous traffic, the coming and going of the ships, the unloading and
the loading of cargoes. Everywhere where life was intensive, expressive,
and animated with a new energy, he passionately loved it. It is
characteristic of his temperament that the harmonious beauty of peaceful
and empty, of sleeping and dreaming cities appealed to him less than
modern cities in their pall of soot and smoke. Almost intentionally his
affection turns from the traditional ideal to one yet unknown. Florence,
for many centuries the symbol of all poets, disappointed him: the
Italian air was too mild, these contours were too meagre, too dreamy the
streets. But London, this piled-up conglomeration of dwellings and
workshops; this town that might have been cast in bronze; this teeming
labyrinth of dingy streets; this ever-beating, restless heart of the
world's trade with its smoke of toil threatening to eclipse the sun;
this was to him a revelation. Just the industrial towns, which had thus
far tempted no poet; those towns which roll up the vault of their leaden
sky with their own fog and smoke, which confine their inhabitants in
leagues and leagues of congested masonry, these attract him. He, who
revels in colour, grew fond of Paris, to which, since then, he has
returned every year for the winter months. Just what is restless and
busy, confused and breathless, hunted, eager, feverish, hot with an
ardour as of rut, all this Babylonian medley lures him. He loves this
pell-mell multiplicity and its strange music. Often he would travel for
hours on the top of heavy omnibuses, to have a bird's-eye view of the
bustling throng, and here he would close his eyes the better to feel the
dull rumour, this surging sound which, in its ceaselessness, is not
unlike the rustling of a forest, beating against his body. No longer as
in his earlier books does he follow the existence of simple callings; he
loves the ascension of handiwork to mechanical labour, in which the aim
is invisible, and only the grandiose organisation is revealed. And
gradually this interest became the motive interest of his life.
Socialism, which in those years was becoming strong and active, fell
like a red drop into the morbid paleness of his poetic work.
Vandervelde, the leader of the Labour Party, became his friend. And
when, at this stage, the party founded the Maison du Peuple at Brussels,
he readily helped, gave lectures at the Université Libre, took part in
all the projects, and afterwards, wards, in the most beautiful vision
of his poetical work, lifted them far above the political and actual
into the great events of all humanity. His life, now inwardly
established, henceforth beats with a strong and regular rhythm. He had
in the meantime, by his marriage, attained a personal appeasement, a
counterpoise for his unbridled restlessness. Now his wild ecstasies have
their fixed point, from which they can survey the fiery vortex of the
new phenomena. The morbid pictures, the feverish hallucinations, now
become clear visions; not by flashes of lightning, but in a steady,
beaming light are the horizons of our time now illuminated for him.
Now that he steps boldly into life, his first problem is to come to an
understanding with the world around him, with his fellow-men, with the
city itself. But it is not the city he lives in which interests him in a
provincial sense, but the ideal, modern city, the monster city in
general, this strange and uncanny thing that like a vampire has snatched
to herself all the strength of the soil and of men to form a new
residuum of power. She crowds together the contrasts of life; grades, in
unexpected layers, immense riches over the most wretched poverty;
strengthens opposing forces, and goads them to hostility, goads them to
that desperate battle in which Verhaeren loves to see all things
involved. The grandeur of this new organism is beyond the æsthetics of
the past; and new and strange before Nature stand men also, with
another rhythm, a hotter breath, quicker movements, wilder desires than
were known to any association of men, to any calling or caste, of a
previous time. It is a new outlook which not only sweeps the distance,
but has also to reckon with height, with the piled tiers of houses, with
new velocities and new conditions of space. A new blood, money, feeds
these cities, a new energy fires them; they are driven to procreate a
new faith, a new God, and a new art. Their dimensions, terrific, and of
a beauty hitherto unknown, defy measurement; the order that rules is
hidden in the earth behind a pathless wilderness.
Quel océan, ses cœurs? ...
Quels nœuds de volonté serrés en son mystère![1]
cries out the poet in wonderment as he strides through the city and is
overpowered by her grandeur:
Toujours en son triomphe ou ses défaites,
Elle apparaît géante, et son cri sonne et son nom luit.[2]
He feels that an enormous energy proceeds from her; he is conscious that
her atmosphere rests with a new pressure on his body, that his blood
quickens to keep pace with her rhythm. Merely to be near her starts the
thrill of a new delight.
En ces villes ...
* * * * *
Je sens grandir et s'exalter en moi,
Et fermenter, soudain, mon cœur multiplié.[3]
Involuntarily he feels himself becoming dependent on her, feels this
grandiose coupling of energy producing a similar concentration of all
his forces in himself too, feels his fever becoming infectious like her
own, and feels--with an intensity unknown to any other poet of our
days--the identity of his personality with the soul of the city. He
knows she is dangerous, knows she will fill him with all restlessness,
overheat him and excite him, confuse him with her hostile contrasts.
Voici la ville en or des rouges alchimies,
Où te fondre le cœur en un creuset nouveau
Et t'affoler d'un orage d'antinomies
Si fort qu'il foudroiera tes nerfs jusqu'au cerveau.[4]
But he knows that she will impregnate him as well, give him power from
her strength. There will never be a great man again who will pass her
by, who will not be thrilled by her sensation, who will not live with
her, and by her grow. Henceforth all new and strong men will stand in
reciprocal action with her.
This great recognition of a fact is, as we have seen, not spontaneous,
but painfully acquired. For in the sense of the old beauty the aspect of
a modern city is frightful. She is a sleepless, an ever wakeful woman;
she does not, like Nature, sometimes rest; she is never silent.
Restlessly she sucks men into her whirlpool; ceaselessly she pricks
their nerves; day and night her life pulses. By day she is as grey as
lead; a sultry shuttle of passions; a dark mine in which men, buried in
the mines of her streets, are forced to unresting toil. How dense are
these virgin forests of bronze and stone; and of all these thousands of
streets 'à poumons lourds et haletants, vers on ne sait quels buts
inquiétants,'[5] not one seems to lead into the open, into the light of
day. Monotonous, like dull eyes, glare the millions of windows; and the
darksome caverns in which men, themselves like machines, sit by
machines, thunder in the unseizable rhythm of petrified exertion. Not a
ray is reflected on them from the eternal; hostile, repulsive, and grey
the town pants in the puffed smoke of her daily labour. But night,
softening all harsh lines, fierily welds the lumbering limbs together
into something new. By night the town is turned into one great
seduction. Passion, fettered in the day-time, breaks its chains:
... Pourtant, lorsque les soirs
Sculptent le firmament de leurs marteaux d'ébène,
La ville au loin s'étale et domine la plaine
Comme unnocturne et colossal espoir;
Elle surgit: désir, splendeur, hantise;
Sa clarté se projette en lueurs jusqu'aux cieux,
Son gaz myriadaire en buissons d'or s'attise,
Ses rails sont des chemins audacieux
Vers le bonheur fallacieux
Que la fortune et la force accompagnent;
Ses murs se dessinent pareils à une armée
Et ce qui vient d'elle encor de brume et de fumée
Arrive en appels clairs vers les campagnes.[6]
These fiery eruptions Verhaeren shapes in grandiose visions. There is
the vision of the music halls: wheels of fire revolve round a house,
blazing letters climb up façades and lure the crowds to sit in front of
the brilliant footlights. I Here the people's hunger for sensation is
fed full, and art is cruelly murdered day by day. Here tedium is tamed
for an hour or so, and whipped up with colour, flame, and music for
another pleasure that is waiting outside, as soon as the illusion here
sinks into the night:
Et minuit sonne et la foule s'écoule
--Le hall fermé--parmi les trottoirs noirs;
Et sous les lanternes qui pendent,
Rouges, dans la brume, ainsi que des viandes,
Ce sont les filles qui attendent....[7]
they the harlots, 'les promeneuses,' 'les veuves d'elles-mêmes,'[8] who
live on the sensual hunger of the masses. For sensual pleasure too is
organised in cities, is guided into canals, like all instincts. But the
primordial instinct is the same. The hunger which out in the fields and
in the country was still pleasure in healthy food, in frothing beer, has
here been converted into the idea of money. Money is what everybody
hungers for here; money is the meaning of the town. 'Boire et manger de
l'or'[9] is the hot dream of the crowd. Everything is expressed by
money, 'tout se définit par des monnaies';[10] all values are
subordinate to this new value, monetary value. Superb is the vision of
the bazaar, where, on all the counters, in the many stories, everything
is sold, not only as in reality objects in common use, but, in a loftier
symbolism, ethical values as well: convictions and opinions, fame and
name, honour and power, all the laws of life. But all this fiery blood
of money flows together in the great heart of the city, flows into the
Exchange, that greedy maw that swallows all the gold and spits it out
again, which smelts all this hectic fever and then pours it flaming into
all the veins of the city. Everything can be bought, even pleasure: in
back streets, in _l'étal_, in the haunts where debauch lies in wait,
women sell themselves as goods are sold in the bazaar. But this energy
is not always regulated, not always made to flow between dikes. Here
too, as in Nature, there are sudden catastrophes. Sometimes revolt is
kindled, flashes up instantaneously, and this stream of money blazes
itself a new trail. The masses pour out of their dismal caverns, greed
takes possession of men, and the myriad-headed monster fights and bleeds
for this one thing, this red-burning, relucent gold.
But the great and powerful thing in these towns is not passion; it is
the hidden strength behind these passions, the noble order that keeps
them in their proper limits, and holds them in check. This rumbling
chaos, this inundation of things doomed to die, is dominated in the
_Villes Tentaculaires_ by three or four figures standing like
statues--the tamers of passions. They are what kings and priests were of
old, they who have the power of bridling ebullient energies and turning
them to use. With hands of iron they hold down this wild and dangerous
animal, they, the new rulers, statesmen, generals, demagogues,
organisers. For the town is an animal in its movements, a beast in its
passions, a brute in its instincts, a monster in its strength. It is
ugly, like all rut. It cannot be contemplated with a pure pleasure, like
a landscape gently and harmoniously fading in forest verdure; it rather
evokes, at first, loathing, hatred, caution, and hostility. But that is
the great thing in Verhaeren, that he always overcomes whatever is
hostile, pain and torment, by a great vista, that in this panting steam
of the unæsthetic he already sees the flame of the new beauty. Here for
the first time is, seen the beauty of factories, _les usines
rectangulaires,_ the fascination of a railway station, the new beauty in
the new things. If the town is indeed ugly in its denseness, ugly in the
sense of all classical ideals; if the picture of it is indeed I cruel
and frightful; it is yet not unfertile. 'Le siècle et son horreur se
condensent en elle, mais son âme contient la minute éternelle.' And this
I feeling, that in her the minute of eternity is contained, that she is
the new thing risen above all the pasts, a new thing that one must
perforce come to terms with, this feeling makes her momentous and
beautiful to the poet. If her form is loathsome, grey, and sombre, her
idea, her organisation, are grandiose and admirable. And here, as
always, where admiration finds a pivot, it can give the whole world the
swing from negation to assent.
But Verhaeren is by this time too little of an artist, too much
interested in all the problems of life, to be able to contemplate the
idea of the modern city from the æsthetic side alone. It is for him a
still more important symbol for the expression of contemporary feeling.
Not only the problem of the new social stratification is poetically
digested in his trilogy, but also one of the most burning and pressing
questions of political economy as of politics, the struggle between the
centrifugal and the centripetal power, the struggle between agrarianism
and industrialism. Town and country purchase their prosperity, the one
by the impoverishment of the other. Production and trade, however much
one is the condition of the other, at their extreme points are hostile
forces. And how, in our days in Europe, the victory between town and
country is being decided in favour of the town; how, gradually, the town
is absorbing the best strength of the provinces--the problem of the
_déracinés_--this has for the first time in poetry been described by
Verhaeren in his magnificent vision of _Les Villes Tentaculaires_. The
cities have sprung up like mushrooms. Millions have conglomerated. But
where have they come from? From what sources have these immense masses
suddenly streamed into the mighty reservoirs? The answer is quick to
come. The heart of the city is fed with the oozing blood of the country.
The country is impoverished. As though they were hallucinated, the
peasants migrate to where gold is minted, to the town that in the
evenings flames across the horizon; to where alone riches lies, and
power. They march away with their carts, to sell their last stick of
furniture, their last rags; they march away with their daughter, to
deliver her up to lust; they march away with their son, to let him
perish in the factories; they march away to dip their hands, they also,
in this roaring river of gold. The fields are deserted. Only the
fantastic figures of idiots stagger along lonely paths; the abandoned
flour-mills are empty, and only turn when the wind smites against them.
Fever rises from the marshes, where the water, no longer gathered into
dikes, spreads putrefaction and pestilence. Beggars drag themselves from
door to door, with the country's barrenness reflected in their eyes; to
the last lingering cultivators come, sinuously, their worst enemies,
_les donneurs de mauvais conseils_. The emigration agent entices them to
wander to the lands of gold, and they squander what they have inherited
from their ancestors, to seek a far-distant hope:
Avec leur chat, avec leur chien,
Avec, pour vivre, quel moyen?
S'en vont, le soir, par la grand'route.[11]
And they who are not enticed away by emigration are evicted from hearth
and home by usurers. Villages in which the dance of the kermesse has
long been silent are of a sudden cut in two by a network of railways.
There is no fairness in the fight. The country is conquered because the
blood of its inhabitants has been sucked out of it. 'La plaine est morte
et ne se défend plus.'[12] Everything streams to Oppidomagnum. This is
the name given by Verhaeren in his symbolical drama _Les Aubes_--which,
with the _Campagnes Hallucinées_ and the _Villes Tentaculaires_ forms
the trilogy of the social revolution--to the monster city. This, with
its arms as of a polypus, pitilessly sucks all the strength of the
district round it. From all sides strength streams in upon it. 'Tous les
chemins se rythment vers elle.' Not only from the country does she drink
the strength of men, all the ocean seems to be pouring its waters only
to her port. 'Toute la mer va vers la ville.'[13] The whole sea streams
to the city; all the rolling waves seem only to exist that they may
bring to her this wandering forest of ships. And she absorbs everything,
digests it in the 'noire immensité des usines rectangulaires,'[14]
greedily devours it, to spit it out again as gold.
But this immense social struggle between the country and the town
expresses, like the other new phases, something yet higher. It is only a
momentary symbol of an eternal schism. The country is the symbol of the
Conservatives. In the country the forms of labour are petrified, calm,
and regular; there life is without haste, and only regulated by the
rotation of the seasons. All sensations, all forms are pure and simple.
These men stand nearer to the freaks of chance: a flash of lightning, a
hailstorm can destroy their labour; and so they fear God, and do not
dare to doubt in Him. The town, however, symbolises progress. In the
thunder of the streets of to-day no Madonna's voice is heard; the life
of the individual is protected from chance by prearranged order; the
fever of the new creates also a yearning for new conditions of life, new
circumstances, for a new God.
L'esprit des campagnes était l'esprit de Dieu;
Il eut la peur de la recherche et des révoltes,
Il chut; et le voici qui meurt, sous les essieux
Et sous les chars en feu des récoltes.[15]
If the country was the past, the town is the future. The country only
seeks to keep what it has, to preserve: its character, its beauty, its
God. But the town must first of all create, must make itself the new
beauty, the new faith, and the new God.
Le rêve ancien est mort et le nouveau se forge.
Il est fumant dans la pensée et la sueur
Des bras fiers de travail, des fronts fiers de lueurs,
Et la ville l'entend monter du fond des gorges
De ceux qui le portent en eux
Et le veulent crier et sangloter aux cieux.[16]
But we, Verhaeren thinks, must not belong to this world of the past,
this moribund world; no, we who live in towns must think with them, must
live with the new age, create in league with it, and find a new language
for its dumb yearning. A return to nature is no longer possible for us:
evolution cannot be screwed back again. If we have lost great values, we
must replace them by new; if our religious feeling for the old God is
cold and dead, we must create new ideals. We must find new aims that our
ancestors knew not of; in the new forms of the city we must find a new
beauty, in her noises a new rhythm, in her confusion an order, in her
energy an object, in her stammering a language.
If the towns have destroyed much, they will perhaps create still more.
In their melting-pot professions, races, religions, nations, languages
are blended:
...les Babels enfin réalisées
Et les peuples fondus et la cité commune
Et les langues se dissolvant en une.[17]
'The old order changeth, giving place to new'; and we must not ask
whether the new is better than the old; we must trust that it is so.
The feverish convulsions of the great cities, this unrest, this
screaming torment, cannot be in vain. For they, these pains and
convulsions, are only the birth-throes of the new. But he who has been
the first to feel, with a glad presentiment, this pain of the masses,
this fermentation, as joy, this unrest as hope, must himself be an
authentic new man, one of those who are called to give a poetic answer
to all the complaints and questions of our time.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'L'Âme de la Ville' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
[2] Ibid. (_Ibid._).
[3] 'La Foule' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
[4] 'Les Villes' (_Les Flambeaux Noirs_).
[5] 'L'Âme de la Ville' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
[6] 'La Ville' (_Les Campagnes Hallucinées_).
[7] 'Les Spectacles' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
[8] 'Les Promeneuses' (_Ibid_.).
[9] 'La Bourse' (_Ibid._).
[10] 'Le Bazar' (_Ibid._).
[11] 'Le Départ' (_Les Campagnes Hallucinées_).
[12] 'La Plaine' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
[13] 'Le Port' (_Ibid._).
[14] 'La Plaine' (_Ibid._).
[15] 'Vers le Futur' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
[16] 'L'Âme de la Ville' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
[17] 'Le Port'(_Ibid._).
THE MULTITUDE
Mets en accord ta force avec les destinées
Que la foule, sans le savoir,
Promulgue, en cette nuit d'angoisse illuminée.
É.V., 'La Foule.'
That great event which is the modern city was at bottom only possible by
the organisation of the mighty multitudes of the people and the
distribution of their forces. To organise is to weld unlike forces
economically into an organism, to imitate something that has life and
soul, in which nothing is superfluous and everything is necessary; it is
to give a material its uniform strength, to give an idea the flesh and
bones of its shape and of its possibility. Now the town has smelted the
scattered forces of the country into a new material--into the multitude;
it has converted much that used to be individually active force into
mechanical force; it has humbled man to the condition of a handle, a
rolling wheel; it has everywhere tied up the individuality of the single
man in order to produce a new individuality, that of the crowd. For the
multitude as a fact is a new thing. For centuries it was only a symbol,
an idea. The inhabitants of whole countries were logically epitomised in
a number, but with no suggestion of thus comprehending their immediate
unity. Of course, in times past great armies have been known, hordes of
fighting men and nomad tribes; but these only represented a volatile
concentration, too unsettled, too inconstant to procreate an
individuality, an æsthetic and moral value. And even those armies whose
legendary greatness echoes down the centuries, the hordes of Tamerlaine,
the hosts of the Persians, the legions of Rome, how poor is their number
in comparison with the masses of human beings daily herded together in
New York or London or Paris! Only in our own days, only in Oppidomagnum,
has the multitude been welded together finally and for all time, been
hooked together with bands of steel like the wheels of an immense
machine; only recently has the crowd become a living being that grows
and multiplies like a forest. Democracy has given it new intellectual
forms, set a brain in the body, by making the multitude determinate,
subject only to itself. It is a creation of the nineteenth century; it
is a new value in our lives, and one that we must come to terms with; no
less a value for our evolution than the highest values of the past. Walt
Whitman, to whom one must constantly refer in dealing with Verhaeren's
work, although--let it be expressly stated here--Verhaeren quite
independently and unconsciously arrived at the same goal from the same
starting-point, once said: 'Modern science and democracy seemed to be
throwing out their challenge to poetry to put them in its statements in
contradistinction to the songs and myths of the past.'[1] And every
modern poet will have to come to terms with the masses of democracy,
will have to contemplate them synthetically as an individual living
being, as a man, or as a God. In his Utopian drama _Les Aubes_ Verhaeren
has ranged them among the dramatis personæ, and, to express his inner
vision, he has added this stage direction: 'Les groupes agissent comme
un seul personnage à faces multiples et antinomiques.' For, like the
images of Indian gods, they have a hundred arms, but their cry is in
unison; their will is simple; their energy is uniform; one and the same
is their heart, 'le cœur myriadaire et rouge de la foule.'[2] A
hundred years of life in communion, a hundred years of distress in
common, of hope in common, have welded them together into one unity,
into one new feeling. Sleepless and restless like a dangerous animal
lies the multitude in the monster cities; all the passions of individual
man are hers, vanity, hunger, anger; she has all vices and crimes in
common with her smallest member, man; only, everything in her is
intensified to unknown magnitudes. Everything in her passions is
stupendously superdimensional, beyond calculation, and, in a new sense,
divine. For just as the gods of old were formed after the image of man,
save that they represented man's strength and intelligence magnified to
the hundredth degree, the multitude is the synthesis of individual
forces, the most prolific accumulation of passion.
With the multitude the individual comes into being, and without her he
perishes. Consciously or unconsciously, every man is subject to her
power. For the modern man is no longer free from the influence of
others, as the tiller of the fields was in olden days, or the shepherd,
or the hunter, each of whom was dependent only on the anger of heaven,
the whims of the earth, on weather and hailstorms, on chance, which he
clad in the august image of his god. The modern man is in all his
feelings determined by the world around him, set in his place in the
ranks, and moved with the ranks like a shuttle to and fro; he is a
dependent in his instincts. We all feel socially; we cannot think away
the others who are round us and in front of us any more than we can
think away the air that nourishes us. We can flee from them, but we
cannot flee away from what has penetrated us from them. For the
multitude rules us like a force of nature, nourishes us with its
feelings. The unsocial man is a fiction. Just as little as in a great
city one can shut off one's room entirely from the noise, the rhythm of
the street, just so little can one think isolatedly, just so little can
the soul keep itself at a distance from the great intellectual
excitements of the multitude. Verhaeren himself made the attempt in the
days when he wrote the verses:
Mon rêve, enfermons-nous dans ces choses lointaines
Comme en de tragiques tombeaux.[3]
But the life of reality claimed him again; for society destroys him who
turns away from her, as one is destroyed who shuts himself out from the
fresh air. The poet, too, must involuntarily think with the multitude
and of the multitude. For to the same extent as democracy has exercised
its levelling influence, to the same extent as it has limited
individualities, enrolled the poet among the class of citizens,
diminished the contrasts of chance, it has at the same time matured new
forces in their multiplicity. In democracy the modern poet can find
everything for which the ancients felt constrained to discover gods,
those incalculable forces which bind the individual like enchantment.
The town, the multitude feeds his energy with its exhaustless abundance;
it multiplies his own strength. For everything the individual has lost
is stored in it, great heroism and ecstatic enthusiasm. It is the great
source of the unexpected and the incalculable in our days, the new thing
concerning which no one knows how great it will grow. To have seen in it
an enrichment, instead of a restriction, of the poetic instinct, is one
of the great merits of Verhaeren. For while the majority of
contemporary poets still maintain the fiction of the recluse in his
wistful loneliness, while they recoil from before the multitude as
though from men stricken with the plague, while they create for
themselves an artificial seclusion, and heedlessly go their way past
locomotives and telegraphs, banks and workshops, Verhaeren drinks
greedily from these sources of new strength.
Comme une vague en des fleuves perdue,
Comme une aile effacée, au fond de l'étendue,
Engouffre-toi,
Mon cœur, en ces foules battant les capitales!
Réunis tous ces courants
Et prends
Si large part à ces brusques métamorphoses
D'hommes et de choses,
Que tu sentes l'obscure et formidable loi
Qui les domine et les opprime
Soudainement, à coups d'éclairs, s'inscrire en toi.[4]
For she, 'la foule,' the multitude, is the great transposer of values in
our day. She takes into her bosom and transforms the men who come to her
from the country, from the four winds of heaven; none of us escapes her
levelling power. The most distant races are blended in the city's huge
melting-pot, are adapted to one another, and forthwith become a new
thing, a different thing, a new race, the new race of contemporary man,
who has made his peace with the atmosphere of the great city, who not
only painfully feels the depression of her walls and his divorce from
Nature, but creates himself a new strength and a new feeling of the
universe in this manifold human presence. The great feat of the
multitude is that it accelerates the process of changing values. The
individual elements perish in favour of this individuality of a new
community. Old communities lose their unity, new communities must arise.
America is the first example: here, in a hundred years, one single great
brotherhood, a new type, has been developed from the forces of a
thousand peoples; and in our capitals, in Paris, Berlin, and London,
people are already growing up who are not Frenchmen and not Germans, but
in the first place only Parisians and Berliners, who have a different
accent, a different way of thinking, whose native land is the great
city, the multitude. The inhabitant of the great city, the democratic
man of the multitude, is a sharply defined character. If he is a poet,
his poetry must be social; if he is a thinker, the intelligence of the
masses, the instinct of the many, must be his also. To have attempted
the psychology of this multitude for the first time in poetry is one of
the great feats of audacity for which we must be grateful to Verhaeren.
But these individual accumulations of men into a multitude, these
combinations of millions into towns, are not isolated. One bond holds
them all together: modern traffic. The distances of reality have
disappeared, and with them national divisions as well. By the side of
the problem of individual conglomerations which only slowly are
transformed into organisms, by the side of the individual races, the
individual masses, now arises a greater synthesis, the synthesis of the
European race. For the men of our continent are no longer so distant, so
strange to one another as they formerly were. Social democracy with its
organisation encompasses the masses from one end of Europe to the other.
To-day the same desires fire the men of Paris, London, St. Petersburg,
Vienna, and Rome. And already one common formula directs their
exertions: money.
Races des vieux pays, forces désaccordées,
Vous nouez vos destins épars, depuis le temps
Que l'or met sous vos fronts le même espoir battant.[5]
Independently of the frontiers of countries, on a broad-based
foundation, a unified race, a new community, the European, is in process
of formation. Here desire and reality are near touching. Verhaeren sees
Europe already united by one great common energy. Europe is for him the
land of consciousness. While other continents, distant as though in a
dream, are still living a vegetative life, while Africa and India are
still dreaming as they dreamt in the darkness of primitive times, Europe
is 'la forge où se frappe l'idée,'[6] the great smithy in which all
differences, all individual observations, all results, are hammered and
moulded into a new intellectuality, into _European consciousness_. The
union is not yet inwardly complete; states are still hostile and
ignorant of their community; but already 'le monde entier est repensé
par leurs cervelles.'[7] Already they are working at the transvaluation
of all feeling in the European sense. For a new system of ethics, a new
system of æsthetics, will be required by the European, who, rich by the
past, strong in the feeling of the multitude, is now conscious of
drawing his strength from new masses. Here it is that Verhaeren's work
sings over into Utopia; and in _Les Aubes_, the epilogue to _Les Villes
Tentaculaires,_ this glittering rainbow rises over the visions of
reality to the new ideal; the prophetic dream of a better future rises
over the still struggling present.
This yearning for the European has been expressed for the first time in
poetry by Verhaeren, almost contemporaneously with Walt Whitman's
hailing of the American and Friedrich Nietzsche's prophecy of the
superman. It would be a tempting task, and full of interest, to set up
the Pan-European in antithesis to the Pan-American. But to say that
Verhaeren was the first of lyric poets to feel as consciously European
as Walt Whitman felt American, is to establish his rank among the most
considerable men of our time. Verhaeren is possibly the only lyric poet
who has felt in accordance with contemporary feeling. That epitomises
his whole claim to gratitude, for it sufficiently expresses the fact
that he has taken to his heart the problem of the multitude; the energy
of social innovations; the æsthetics of organisation; the grandeur of
mechanical production; in a word, the poetry of material things. It is
our own time, the new age, that speaks in his verse; and it speaks in
its new language. This rhythm which he has discovered is no literary
abstraction, but beats in perfect unison with the heart-beat of the
crowd; it is an echo of the panting of our monster cities, of the
clanking of trains, of the cry of the people; his language is new,
because it is no longer the voice of one man, but unites in itself the
many voices of the multitude. He has penetrated deeper than any other
man into the feeling of the masses, and their surf echoes more strongly
in his verse. The hollow rumbling, the bestial and tameless strength of
their voice, the surf of the multitude, has here become shape and music,
the highest identity. With pride one can say of Verhaeren what he
himself vaunts in his 'Captain': 'Il est la foule,'[8] he himself is the
multitude.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _A Backward Glance O'er Travelled Roads._
[2] 'La Conquête (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
[3] 'Sous les Prétoriens' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
[4] 'La Foule' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
[5] 'La Conquête' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
[6] _Ibid. (Ibid.)._
[7] 'La Conquête' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
[8] 'Le Capitaine' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
THE RHYTHM OF LIFE
Dites, les rythmes sourds dans l'univers entier!
En définir la marche et la passante image
En un soudain langage;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Prendre et capter cet infini en un cerveau,
Pour lui donner ainsi sa plus haute existence.
É.V., 'Le Verbe'.
The rhythm of modern life is a rhythm of excitement. The city with its
multitudes is never completely at rest: even in its repose, in its
silence, there is a secret bubbling as of lava in the bowels of a
volcano, a waiting and watching, a nervous tension tinged with fever.
For the idea of energy in the myriad-headed monster city is so
concentrated, so intensified, that it never loses its rumbling activity.
Rest, a polar feeling, would be the inner negation, the annihilation, of
this new element. True, the city with her teeming masses is not always
in the fever-throes of those great eruptions of passion when through the
arteries of her streets the blood streams suddenly; when all her muscles
seem to contract; when cries and enthusiasm blaze up like a flame; but
always something seems to be expecting this fiery second, just as in
modern man there is always the whipped unrest that is avid of new
things, new experiences. Modern cities are in perpetual vibration; and
so is the multitude from man to man. Even if the individual is not
excited, if his nerves are not always stirring with his own vibration,
they are yet always vibrating in harmony with the obscure resonance of
the universe. The great city's rhythm beats in our very sleep; the new
rhythm, the rhythm of our life, is no longer the regular alternation of
relaxation and repose, it is the steady vibration of an unintermitted
activity.
Now, a modern poet who wishes to create in real harmony with
contemporary feeling must himself have something of the perpetual
excitement, the unremitting watchfulness, the restless and nervous
sensitiveness of our time; his heart must unconsciously beat in tact
with the rhythm of the world around him. But not only unrest must
flicker in him, not only must that excessive delicacy of feeling which
is almost morbid be in him, this neurasthenic sleeplessness--not only
the negative element of our epoch, but the grandiose as well, the
superdimensional, the spontaneity of the sudden discharge of forces held
in reserve, the overwhelming force of the great eruption. Like the
masses of our towns, he must be so fashioned that a trifle will
stimulate him to the greatest passion, must be so fashioned that he
cannot help being carried away by the intoxication of his own strength.
Just as the masses have, so to speak, organised themselves as a body,
so that there is no individual excitement in them, no irritation and
inflammation of any single part, but so that a reaction of the whole
body responds to every separate irritation, just in the same manner must
the excitement of a modern, a contemporary poet, a poet of a great town,
never be the excitement of a single sense, but, if it is to be strong,
it must quiver through the whole body like an electric shock. His poetic
rhythm must therefore be physically vital; it must envelop all his
feeling and thinking; it must respond to every individual irritation, to
every individual sensation, with the massed weight of feeling of all his
vital forces: the need of a rhythm strained to the full must be, as
Nietzsche has so wonderfully demonstrated in his _Ecce Homo_! a measure
for the strength of the inspiration, a sort of balancing, as it were, of
the pressure and tension of the inspiration. For the poet of to-day, if
he does not wish to remain the poet of the eternal yesterday, must, as a
microcosm, imitate in his passion the macrocosm of the multitude,
wherein also the excitement of the individual is trivial and aimless,
and only the ebullition of the whole fermenting mass is irresistible and
momentous.
Then, in such poems, the _rhythm of modern life_ will break through. At
this moment we must remember what rhythm really means. The rhythm of a
being is in the last instance nothing but its breathing. Everything that
is alive, every organism, has breath, the interchange and resting-space
between giving and taking. And so breathes a poem too; and it is
worthless if it is not a living thing, if it is not an organism, a body
with a soul. Only in its rhythm does it become alive, as man does in his
breathing. But the diversity, the originality of the rhythm only arises
from the alternation of these drawn breaths. Breathing is different in
those who are calm, excited, joyous, nervous, oppressed, ecstatic. Every
sensation produces its corresponding rhythm. And since every poet in his
individuality represents a new form of inner passion, his poem too must
have this rhythm of his own, the rhythm which expresses his personal
poetic peculiarity just as characteristically as his speaking expresses
an individual accent and dialect. To understand Verhaeren's rhythm we
must remember this basic form of the poetic feeling at the heart of him;
we must compare it with the feeling at the heart of those who have gone
before him. In Victor Hugo there was the earnest, great, soaring rhythm
of the loud speaker, of the preacher who never addresses individuals but
always the whole nation; in Baudelaire there was the regular hymnic
rhythm of the priest of art; in Verlaine the irregular, sweet, and
gentle melody of one speaking in dreams. In Verhaeren, now, there is the
rhythm of a man hurrying, rushing, running; of a restless, passionate
man; the rhythm of the modern, of the Americanised man. It is often
irregular; you hear in it the panting of one who is hunted, who is
hurrying to his goal; you hear his impact with the obstacles he stumbles
against, the sudden standstill of intemperate effort exhausted. But with
him the rhythmic energy is never intellectual, never verbal, never
musical; it is purely emotional, physical. Not only the end of the nerve
vibrates and sounds; not only does the language shake the air; but out
of the whole organism, as though all the nerve-strings had suddenly
begun to sound the alarm, burst the terror and the ecstasy of fever. His
poem is never a state of repose--no more than the multitude is ever
quite repose--it is in a true sense rhythm, passion set in motion. You
feel the excitement of the man in it, motion, the covering of a
distance, activity; never contemplation comfortably resting, or dream
girt with sleep. And as a matter of fact, it is from motion in the
physical sense that nearly all his poems have arisen: Verhaeren has
never composed poetry at his writing-table, but while wandering over the
fields with a rhythmically moved body whose accelerated pace pulses to
the very heart of the poem, or while rushing along through the din and
bustle of streets in great cities. In these poems is that quicker
rolling of the blood that comes from exercise, that jerk of unrest and
passion tearing themselves away from repose. You feel that in this man
feeling is too strong, that he would fain free himself from it, run away
from it in his own body. The feeling is so strong that it turns to
pain, or rather pressure, and the poem is nothing else than the erection
that precedes relief, the throes that bring forth out of pregnancy. Just
as the multitude in revolt bursts the bonds of its excitement and
launches of a sudden all the passion dammed back for centuries, so
springs from the poet like a geyser the passionate assault of words
bursting from too long silence. These cries are a physical relief. These
'élans captifs dans le muscle et la chair '[1] are the relief of a
convulsion, the easy breathing after oppression. As a passionate man is
forced to relieve himself by gestures, or in a fit of rage, or in cries,
or in weeping, or in some other state opposed to rest, the poet
discharges his feeling in rhythmic words: 'L'homme à vous prononcer
respirait plus à l'aise'[2] he has said of the man who was the first to
force the excess of his feeling into speech.
_It is, then, a force positively physical which produces Verhaeren's
rhythm._ It is difficult to prove such an assertion, for the state of
creation is unconscious and unapproachable, although it may intuitively
be detected in those moments of recreation, in that second of a new
birth when a poet recites his work, when he feels, as it were, the
pressure of the feeling weighing upon him artificially in recollection,
when by the force of his imagination he relieves himself again as at the
birth of the poem. And any one who has once heard Verhaeren reciting
poetry will know how much with him the rhythm of body and poem is one
and indivisible, how the excitement that becomes rhythmical in the
vibrating word is at the same time converted into the identical gesture.
The calm eyes grow keen, they seem to pierce the near paper; the arm is
raised commandingly, and every finger of the hand is stretched out to
mark the cæsura as though with an electric shock; to hammer the verses;
and with the voice to eject the hurrying and almost screaming words into
the room. In his movements there is then that terrific effort of one who
would fain tear himself away from himself, that sublimest gesture of the
poet striving away from the earth, striving away from himself, from the
heavy gait of words to winged passion. Man coalesces with Nature in one
second of the most wonderful identity:
Les os, le sang, les nerfs font alliance
Avec on ne sait quoi de frémissant
Dans l'air et dans le vent;
On s'éprouve léger et clair dans l'espace,
On est heureux à crier grâce,
Les faits, les principes, les lois, on comprend tout;
Le cœur tremble d'amour et l'esprit semble fou
De l'ivresse de ses idées.[3]
Every time that Verhaeren reads his poetry, this re-birth of the first
creative state is renewed. _It is in the first place a deliverance from
pain, and in the second place it is pleasure_. Again and again the word
darts along like a beast let loose; in the wildest rhythm; in a rhythm
that begins slowly, cautiously; quickens; then grows wilder and wilder;
grows to an intoxicating monotony, an ever-increasing speed, a rattling
din that reminds one of an express whizzing along at full speed. Like a
locomotive--for in Verhaeren's case one has to think in images of this
kind, and not in outworn tropes as of Pegasus--the poem rushes on,
driven only by a measure which reminds one of the short explosions of an
automobile. And as a matter of fact the scansion of the locomotive, its
restless rattling, has often been the cause of the rhythmic velocity of
his verses. Verhaeren himself is fond of relating that he has often, and
with delight, written poems on railway journeys, and that the cadence of
his verse has then been fired by the regular rattle of the train. He
describes wonderfully the rapture of the speed poured into his blood by
the whizzing past of trains. The whistling of the wind in moaning trees,
the dashing of the foaming sea along the shore, the echo a thousand
times repeated of thunder in the mountains, all these strong sounds have
become rhythm in his poems; all noisy things, all violent, swift
emotions have made it brusque, angry, and excited:
Oh! les rythmes fougueux de la nature entière
Et les sentir et les darder à travers soi!
Vivre les mouvements répandus dans les bois,
Le sol, les vents, la mer et les tonnerres;
Vouloir qu'en son cerveau tressaille l'univers;
Et pour en condenser les frissons clairs
En ardentes images,
Aimer, aimer, surtout la foudre et les éclairs
Dont les dévorateurs de l'espace et de l'air
Incendient leur passage![4]
But this is the new thing in Verhaeren, that he has transformed into
rhythm not only the voice of Nature, but also the new noises, the
grumbling of the multitude, the raging of cities, the rumbling of
workshops. Often in his rhythm can be heard the beat of hammers; the
hard, edged, regular whizzing of wheels; the whirring of looms; the
hissing of locomotives; often the wild, restless tumult of streets; the
humming and rumbling of dense masses of the people. Poets before him
imitated in the harmony of their verse the monotony of sources and the
babbling of water over pebbles, or the soughing voice of the wind. But
he makes the voice of the new things speak; makes the rhythm of the
city, this rhythm of fever and of unrest, this nervous moving of the
crowd, this unquiet billowing of a new ocean, flow over into his new
poem. Hence this up and down in his verses; this suddenness and
unexpectedness; this incalculable element. _The new, the industrial
noises have here become the music of poetry_. Since he does not seek to
express his own individual sensation of life, but would himself only be
a voice for the multitude, the rhythm is more roaring and restless than
that of any individual being. Like the first poets, those of old time,
before whom there were no outworn and exhausted words; like the poets
whose feeling burst into flame at every word, every cry; who discovered
themselves 'en exaltant la souffrance, le mal, le plaisir, le bien';
like them when they
... confrontaient à chaque instant
Leur âme étonnée et profonde
Avec le monde,[5]