COMPLETING FORCES
LES VISAGES DE LA VIE--LES FORCES TUMULTUEUSES--LA MULTIPLE
SPLENDEUR--TOUTE LA FLANDRE--LES HEURES CLAIRES --LES HEURES
D'APRÈS-MIDI--LES HEURES DU SOIR--LES RYTHMES SOUVERAINS
--LES BLÉS MOUVANTS
1900-1914
COSMIC POETRY
... Les vols
Vers la beauté toujours plus claire et plus certaine.
É.V., 'Les Spectacles.'
The poetic conquest of life represents, as it were, a process of
combustion. Every poet feeds the flame of his inner being, his artistic
passion, with the things of the world around him, transmutes them into
flame, and himself shoots on high and dies down with them. The more the
flame cools with the feebler circulation of the blood, the weaker grows
this fire, and gradually the pure crystals, the residue from this battle
of the inner flame with the things of reality, are separated from this
process of combustion. Verhaeren's work was in his youth and prime a
flame exceedingly hot, lawless, free, and flaring like the very years of
his youth and prime. Now, however, in the work of his fifties, now that
passion has cooled, the yearning is revealed to find the goal of this
passion, the inherent lawfulness of this unrest. Enthusiasm for the
present, poetic consumption of the world in visions without the residue
of philosophy and logical knowledge, no longer suffice him. For all
deeper contemplation of the present is unthinkable without an exceeding
of its limits: all that is, is at the same time something that has been
and something that will be. Nothing is so entirely the present that it
is not intimately connected with the past and the future. The eternal
and the permanent is the inward side of all phenomena. And the more the
poet turns his visions from the exterior, from the pictorial, to the
inner world, to psychology, the more he descends from external phenomena
to the roots of forces, the more he must apprehend the permanent behind
the transitoriness of things. No perception of a contemporary state is
fertile unless it is impregnated with the perception of laws that are
independent of time, unless the changing phenomena are recognised as
transformations of the unchangeable primordial phenomenon. This
transition from maturity to age, from contemplation to knowledge,
corresponds to a new artistic transition in the incomparably organic
development of this poet. A transition: no longer a re-formation, but a
formation which moves both forwards and backwards, which is at the same
time an evolution and a retrogression, just as the poetic form of
Verhaeren's poetry no longer undergoes a transformation, but is
petrified. What a man has acquired in the years of his prime is an
inalienable possession; its value can be further increased only by
knowledge, by the appraising of the possession. It may be said that a
man who has passed his prime experiences nothing new: the static
equilibrium is realised; what has been experienced is only the better
understood. The experience is no longer a struggle, no longer a state of
unrest, something that slips away; it is a possession. What passion has
fought for and won with a leap is now set in order and appraised at its
true value, by calm. This transition from youth to age is in Verhaeren,
to use Nietzsche's phrase, a transition from the Dionysiac to the
Apollinarian, from a plethora to harmony. His yearning is now _vivre
ardent et clair_, to live passionately, but at the same time clearly to
preserve his inner fire, but at the same time to lose his unrest.
Verhaeren's books in these years grow more and more crystalline; the
fire in them no longer blazes openly like a flaring pyre, but glitters
and sparkles as with the thousand facets of a precious stone. The smoke
and the unrest of the fire die down, and now the pure residues are
clarified. Visions have become ideas, the wrestling earthly energies are
now eternal immutable laws.
The will of these last years, of these last works, is the will to
realise a cosmic poem. In the trilogy of the cities Verhaeren had laid
hold on the universe as it lies around us to-day; he had snatched it to
him and overcome it. In passionate visions he had shaped its image,
achieved its form, and now it stood beside the actual world as his own.
But a poet who would create the whole world for himself, the whole
infinite vista of its possibilities by the side of its actualities, must
give it everything: not only its form, not only its face, but its soul
as well, its organism, its origin, and its evolution. He must not merely
apprehend its pictorial aspect and its mechanical energy, he must give
it an encyclopædic form. He must create a mythology for it, a new
morality, a new history, a new system of dynamics, a new system of
ethics. Above it or in it he must place a God who acts and transforms.
He must fashion it in his poetry not only as something that is, not only
as something in the present, but as something that has been and is
becoming, something that is part and parcel of the past and of the
future too. It must ring out the old and ring in the new. And this will
to create a cosmic poem is to be found in Verhaeren's new and most
precious books--_Les Visages de la Vie, Les Forces Tumultueuses, La
Multiple Splendeur, Les Rythmes Souverains_---books which by their mere
title announce the effort to include the dome of heaven in their vast
embrace. They are the pillars of a mighty structure, the great stanzas
of the cosmic poem. They are no longer a conversation of the poet with
himself and contemporary feeling; they are a pronouncement addressed to
all the ages. _S'élancer vers l'avenir_ is the longing they express: a
turning away from all the pasts to speak to the future. The lyric
element in them steps beyond the boundary-line of poetry. It kindles the
neighbouring domains of philosophy and religion, kindles them to new
possibilities. For not only æsthetically would Verhaeren come to an
understanding with realities; not by poetry only would he overcome the
new possibilities; he would fain master them morally and religiously as
well. The task of these last and most important books of verse is no
longer to apprehend the universe in individual phenomena, but to impress
its new form on a new law. In _Les Visages de la Vie_ Verhaeren has in
individual poems glorified the eternal forces, gentleness, joy,
strength, activity, enthusiasm; in _Les Forces Tumultueuses_ the
mysterious dynamics of union shining through all forms of the real; in
_La Multiple Splendeur_ the ethics of admiration, the joyous
relationship of man with things and with himself; and in _Les Rythmes
Souverains_ he has celebrated the most illustrious heroes of his ideals.
For life has long since ceased to be for him mere gazing and
contemplation:
Car vivre, c'est prendre et donner avec liesse
...................avide et haletant
Devant la vie intense et sa rouge sagesse![1]
Description, poetic analysis, has gradually grown into a hymn, into
'laudi del cielo, del mare, del mondo,' into songs of the whole world
and of the ego, and of the harmony of the world's beauty in its union
with the ego. The lyrical has here become cosmic feeling, knowledge has
become ecstasy. Over and above the knowledge that there cannot be
anything isolated, that everything is arranged and obeys the last
uniform law of the universe, over and above this knowledge rises
something still higher--over the contemplation of the world rises faith
in the feeling of the world. The glorious optimism of these works ends
in the religious confidence that all contrasts will be harmonised; that
man will more and more be conscious of the earth; that every individual
must discover his own law of the world in himself, the law that makes it
possible for him to apprehend everything lyrically, with enthusiasm,
with joy.
Here Verhaeren's poetry far exceeds the boundary-line of literature; it
becomes philosophy and it becomes religion. Verhaeren was from the very
first an eminently religious man. In his childhood Catholicism was the
deepest feeling of his life, but this Catholicism had perished in the
crises of his adolescence, his religious feeling had given way to the
rapt contemplation of all new things, to ecstasy inspired by the aspect
of life. But now, when Verhaeren returns to the metaphysical, the old
yearning is reawakened. The old gods are dead for him; Pan is dead, and
Christ too. Now he feels the need of finding a new faith, a new
certainty, a new God for the new sensation, this identity of I and
world. The new conflicts have created a longing in him for a new
equilibrium; his stormily religious feeling, determined to believe,
needs new cognition. The image of the world would be incomplete without
the God who rules it. All his yearning goes out to this God, and it
finds its fulfilment. And this knowledge gives him the highest joy life
can have, the loftiest pride life can bestow:
Voici l'heure qui bout de sang et de jeunesse.
* * * * *
Un vaste espoir, venu de l'inconnu, déplace
L'équilibre ancien dont les âmes sont lasses;
La nature paraît sculpter
Un visage nouveau à son éternité.[2]
To chisel this new face of God is the aim of his last and most mature
works, in which the obstinate 'no' of his youth has become the loud
exulting 'yes' of life, in which the great possibilities of old have
become an unsuspected opulent reality.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'Un Soir' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
[2] 'La Foule' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
THE LYRIC UNIVERSE
Il faut aimer, pour découvrir avec génie.
É.V., 'Un Soir.'
If one is to understand Verhaeren's lyric work as a work of art, it must
be kept in mind that he is a lyric poet, and a lyric poet only. A lyric
poet only, not, however, in the limited sense of one who confines
himself to the writing of lyric poems, but of one who, in a lofty and
more extensive meaning of the term, transforms everything into emotion,
who stands in a lyric relationship with all things, with the whole
world. And since the innermost constitution of a man's talent
unconsciously acts as the driving tendency, the direction of the aim of
his life, his very fate and his conception of the world, since all this
is so, the lyric poet that Verhaeren is must of necessity have a lyrical
conception of the world, his cosmic feeling _must_ be lyrical. To say
that he has confined himself to the lyric style would be to diminish his
stature. It is true that in all Verhaeren's imaginative work--and it is
of considerable volume--there is no prose. A very thin volume of short
stories did indeed appear many years ago and has long been out of print;
but how tentative and provisional it was in scope may be seen from the
fact that Verhaeren later on turned one of the stories, that of the
bell-ringer in the burning tower, into a poem. And I might mention a
whole series of poems which at bottom are nothing but short stories, and
others again which are saturated with dramatic excitement, quite
unlyrical problems, but all of them lyrically conceived. And even in his
criticism of art and in that penetrating and beautiful book of his on
Rembrandt, in which he represents the organic connection of the artist
with his native province almost as a personal experience, the
outstanding passages live by their lyric enthusiasm. Many of the poems
again are spiritualised theories of art. The origin of language or the
sociological problem of emigration, the economic contrast of agrarianism
and industrialism: in an essay such things might be calmly treated,
coldly passed in review. But this is characteristic of Verhaeren, that
he is unable to take a cold, faint interest in anything: consciously or
unconsciously he must be carried away by enthusiasm for the things he
contemplates. The ecstasy of his excitement involuntarily whips him out
of a slow trot into lyric fervour. Poetry is to him, like his
philosophy, like his ethics, a lyrical soaring. It is characteristic of
the great lyric poets, of Walt Whitman, Dehmel, Carducci, Rilke, Stefan
George, that at a certain height of their artistry they renounce all
other than lyric forms. Here, as elsewhere, great things only seem
possible of attainment by concentration, only by the poet's freeing
himself from the trammels of all other experiments. Great lyric poetry
as the art of a life only accrues from the renunciation of all other
forms of poetry.
Infinite enthusiasm, _le lyrisme universel_, a rapt visionary sensation
of the earth rolling as it were in an eternal vibration through the
cosmos, is the aim of Verhaeren's work. Not to describe the world in
isolated poems, not to break it up in impressions, but to feel it as
itself a flaring, flaming poem, _not to be one who contemplates the
world, but one who feels it_, this is his highest yearning. A lyric art
can only grow to such intentions as these from emotions not felt by
other lyrists. It is not, as with most poets, from gentle crepuscular
feelings, from vague states of melancholy, that such an impulse is
crystallised to lyrical expression; here it is an overflowing fulness of
feeling, a bright joy in life, that engenders his poem; an explosion
which in the days of his debility was a paroxysm, which as time went on
changed to a pure enthusiasm, but which was always an eruption of
strength. Lyric art is here a discharge of the whole feeling of life.
With Verhaeren the excitement does not sting the individual nerve; it
spreads electrically, inflames the blood, contracts the muscles,
produces an immense pressure, and then discharges the whole energy of a
body saturated with health and strength. _The will to discharge strength
is the basic form of Verhaeren's lyric emotion_. His aim is to instil
inspiration--first of all into himself (since inspiration always
represents a higher state of ecstasy), and then into others. His lyric
art is above all a launching of himself into exaltation, 'le pouvoir
magique de s'hypnotiser soi-même.'[1] He talks himself into passion,
gives himself that impulsion which then bears others along with him. It
is not a lack, a privation, not a complaint or a wish that his work
expresses; it is a plethora, a superfluity of riches, a pressure. It is
not a warding off of life but an eternal leaping at it. His poetry has
not the modest longing of music to lure to reveries; it does not, like
painting, seek to represent something: it would act like fiery wine; it
would make all feelings strong and glowing, sink all hindrances, produce
that sensation of lightness, of blessedness, that quivering intoxication
which conquers all the heaviness of earth. His intention is to produce
this state of drunkenness, 'non seulement la glorification de la nature
mais la glorification même d'une vision intérieure.' And his attitude is
not plaintive or defensive, it is the great spirited attitude of a hand
raised and pointing out, 'regardez!' the adjuring attitude, 'dites!' or
one that fires and animates, 'en avant!' but it is always a gesture from
the poet's self towards something, always a swinging of his arms away
from himself into the universe, always a pressing forward, a snatching
away of himself from matter. And any one who really feels these poems
feels, when the last line is read, that his blood is beating faster,
feels that his body calls for exercise, feels the inspiration impelling
him to action. _And this is the highest intention of Verhaeren's lyrical
poetry, to animate, to quicken the blood, to fire the heart, to
intensify vitality, to increase tenfold the sensation of life_.
But not only in this basic emotion is Verhaeren sundered from all those
other poets who fashion their verses from sadness, sickly longing,
amorousness, and melancholy. Verhaeren's lyric poetry breathes in other
realms, in another atmosphere. Verhaeren is what I should like to call a
poet of the daylight, of the open air. If you peruse the lyric works of
contemporary poets you will find that their moods mostly arise from
states of dusk and darkness. Since they have only the power of
reproducing blurred outlines, they are fond of landscapes softened by
twilight; of night, when there is no hardness in things, when what they
see meets them half-way, already shaping itself into verse. Like
Tristan, they hate the day as the destroyer of poetry, and swathe
themselves in the trembling chiaroscuro of twilight. But the really
great lyric poets have always been poets of the daylight; poets of the
day and of the light, as the Greeks were, to whom all things that were
bathed in sun spoke of beauty and cheerfulness; poets of the day, as
Walt Whitman was, the American; as all strong men have been who were
filled with the zest of life. In Germany we have Dehmel to love, one of
the few who have the courage to look right into the shining face of
things without the fear of being blinded. But Verhaeren loves things the
more the more intensive and decided they are, the more dazzling they
are, the more their glaring colours clash. He does not surprise things
when they are asleep, when they are resting and are helpless and at the
mercy of poetry; he pounces on them when they are wideawake and can
defend themselves with all their hardness from the attacks of their
lyric lover. He loves the day, which places things side by side in harsh
contrast; he loves the light, because it stimulates the blood; the rain
that lashes the body; the wind that whips the skin; cold, noise, he
loves everything that really and vehemently forces in upon him,
everything that forces him to fight. He loves hard things more than soft
and rounded things; loves that characteristic, black, and gloomy city
Toledo more than golden, dreamy Florence; he loves the wind and the
weather of frowning, tragic landscapes; he even loves noisy and
thunderous cities pregnant with smoke and choking air. His nerves are
not so morbidly sensitive that they respond to the least suggestion, the
feeblest touch, and then stand impotent, fainting, when they are faced
by the impetuous stimulants of robust life; his nerves are--not dull,
but healthy. They respond strongly to whatever lays hold of them
strongly. If the other poets are like supersensitive beings who are
excited by every trifle and lose their self-control when really great
demands are made upon them, Verhaeren is like one who is hard to
irritate, but who, if he is really stung, strikes out with his fists.
_And Verhaeren does not love the poetical things that come to meet one
already clothed in beauty; he loves those that have first to be wrestled
with and overcome. Herein lies the exceeding masculinity of his art_. No
one could ever surmise, in reading a poem of Verhaeren's, that it was
the work of a woman. And as a matter of fact Verhaeren has not yet found
an audience among women. For he is not one who moans and begs for pity;
he is no passive poet, but a fighter, one who wrestles with all strong,
wild, and living things until they yield up to him their innermost
beauty.
And this struggle for the lyric mastery of individual sensations
gradually becomes a struggle for all things, for the whole world. For
Verhaeren does not wish to conceive of anything as unlyrical; does not
wish to blow lyric fragments off the immense mass of reality; he wishes
to sculpture it into a new shape; wishes to chisel the whole world into
a lyric. And this is the secret of his lyric work; _this_ is his work,
his task. Of a sudden we feel the distance between him and the majority
of lyric poets. _They_ have the feelings of people who receive gifts;
they regard the sensations which come fluttering towards them as so many
gay butterflies, capture them, and pin them down. Verhaeren, however, is
the fighter, the worker, who is constrained to conquer everything, to
shape the whole world anew, to rebuild it nearer to his heart's
enthusiasm. He is the lyric poet pictured by Carducci in an imperishable
poem--not the idler gazing into empty space; not the gardener decking
the paths that his lady's feet must tread, and gathering frail violets
for her bosom.
Il poeta è un grande artiere,
Che al mestiere
Fece i muscoli d'acciaio,
Capo ha fier, collo robusto,
Nudo il busto,
Duro il braccio, e l'occhio gaio.
And that 'picchia, picchia,' that rhythm of Carducci's, that beat of the
bronze hammer of toil, rings in the measure of his verses. All his poems
have been toiled for, fought for; they are a trophy, a meed of victory;
nothing is a lucky gift. Verhaeren's manuscripts look like a
battlefield. For he is not a poet who, in Goethe's sense, composes poems
for particular occasions; he is never overpowered by a sudden chance
idea: he transforms a problem of life, an actuality, or an intellectual
phase into a lyric mood. After he has molten the poetic idea in his
passion to a white heat, he hammers it into a poem by his rhythm. His
works are complexes: individual ideas attract him; he sets a hedge round
their poetical field, ploughs it, scatters the seed in it, and never
returns to the scene. What he has once achieved has no longer any
attraction for him. To him poetry is always a fight, always work, always
a plan. The layman who would fain look upon a lyric poem as a gift
fallen from heaven will perhaps have no liking for this conscious
method; an artist, on the other hand, will recognise in it the strength
of a wise restraint, concentration on one aim, the will to compose not a
lyric poem but a lyric work. A poetic work like that of Verhaeren, the
work of a life, is not created by chance feeling alone, and not by
enthusiasm. Such a work of art has, like a drama, its intellectual laws,
the conquering and distributing powers of the intelligence, instinct,
and above all that unifying will which suffers no dead points, no gaps,
no stains in the work. And it is from such a vast lyric will that this
work has arisen. Verhaeren is no favoured child of fortune, dowered with
art in his cradle; his blood is heavy, Teutonic blood; and, fortunately,
that ease and suppleness of the artisan which in all departments of
labour produces a ready mediocrity was as much wanting in him as all
physical skill. Verhaeren's poetic work, his form, his rhythm, his idea,
his philosophy, his architectonics, all this is something he has
acquired by labour, something he has painfully produced by passion and
an obstinate will; but for that very reason it is something organic.
For Verhaeren is one of those who learn slowly, persistently, and
surely, only from their own experience and never from others, but who
never forget and lose what they have once acquired; one of those who
grow as the things of Nature do, as trees grow into their strength ring
by ring, and rise year by year higher above the earth to gaze farther
and farther out beyond the horizons and nearer and nearer into the
heavens.
And just for this reason, because this evolution was so persistent,
because it was so wholly based upon experience, is the ascending line in
his work so harmonious and so organic. No other lyric work of our days
is so much a symbol of the seasons, so much a mirror of human
periodicity. The revolt of spring, the sultriness of summer, the
fruitage of autumn, and the cool clearness of winter gently merge in it,
the one into the other. In his first books, at an age when many
precocious poets have finished their development, he was still wrestling
for his new form, for his expression. Nor did he at that time soon
arrive at the heart of things; he remained for a long time absorbed in
the purely picturesque contemplation of their external aspects. Then he
attempted experiments, and freed himself in revolution. But in his
beginnings he was always a student, an experimenter. In his second
period, having really penetrated below the surface, he found his own
form, like every master, and subdued the internal with the external. But
now that material is conquered, he that was a student and is now a
master will of necessity be a teacher, and feel impelled to deduce
forces from phenomena, laws from forces, the eternal from the earthly.
From vacant contemplation he had risen to passionate creation, to active
creation of art. The supreme creation of art has ever been the
converting of the unconscious into consciousness, the recognition and
knowledge of the laws of art; from the real the path proceeds to that
which transcends reality, to faith and to religion. Like every really
organic poet, Verhaeren has had to repeat the ascent of universal
history in his own evolution.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Albert Mockel, _Emile Verhaeren_.
SYNTHESES
Réunir notre esprit et le monde
Dans les deux mains d'une très simple loi profonde.
É.V., 'L'Attente.'
After the great visions of the cities, after the wonderful
interpretations of democracy, there was a moment of appeasement in
Verhaeren's work--a lyrical intermezzo of little books: an almanac of
the months unfolding in short poems, the cosy happiness of wedded love
enshrined in grateful song, the legends of Flanders told in richly
coloured pictures, and then, in the great pentalogy _Toute la Flandre_,
the cities, coasts, heroes, and great men of his native province
compressed in one single picture. But after that Verhaeren takes up once
again his old path across the earth; passes again through the roaring
cities, the pregnant fields; wanders along the sea-shore; once again
through the landscapes of _Les Flamandes_ and _Les Moines_, of _Les
Villes Tentaculaires_ and _Les Campagnes Hallucinées_. It is now the
return of the spiral in Goethe's sense of evolution; the return to the
same point, but on a higher level, with a loftier outlook, in a narrower
circle, and for that reason nearer to the last, the highest point. Once
again Verhaeren surveys the modern world: now, however, with different
eyes, which no longer remain resting on the aspect of the world, but
press farther to the cause of all. What he had formerly seen sensuously,
the things whose values he had æsthetically estimated and transmuted, he
now looks at from the intellectual side, that he may estimate their
value morally. He no longer sees each thing separately, no longer adds
picture to picture, vision to vision, like a game of coloured cards: he
now unites them in one living chain. He no longer searches through
individual and detached phenomena; he now sees them together against the
background of his lofty intention to weld them into one single picture.
Now he composes, not individual poems, but fragments of his world-poem.
For, from the time that Verhaeren began to look at things with conscious
enthusiasm, they assumed different forms. The straining of his epoch no
longer seems to him to be a solitary manifestation of energy, but only a
Protean form of the eternal discharge of vigour; the will to life no
longer seems to him to be the deed of individual men, but the vitalised
primitive will of all humanity. And so, just as of old he attempted in
his vision a synthesis of energies, he now sees laws flowing into one
supreme and highest thing, into a cosmic law.
Lyric exaltation now arches the dream of its laws over reality. But it
is no longer the mere dream of a youth in expectancy of life--the
anæmic, vague, dark, restless dream--but a man's longing to get behind
life and follow it to its earthly limit. It is a Utopia enhancing
realities beyond themselves; it is the dream of Godhead in things. In
the whole world Verhaeren sees a cosmic effort. 'Le monde est trépidant
de trains et de navires.'[1] The whole world is excited with human
activity and effort; manifestations of the feeling of life flame
everywhere; everywhere humanity is fighting for something invisible and
perhaps unattainable. But whereas of old the poet estimated the value of
every separate energy, now he comprehends all energies as one uniform
manifestation, recognises behind the unconscious activity of the
individual the sway of something greater--the bourne of all humanity.
All who work in the material of the temporal only symbolise eternal
forces--intoxication, energy, conquest, joy, error, expectation, Utopia.
And it is to these forces, or rather to these forms of the force at the
root of all things, that his poems are addressed. In _Les Visages de la
Vie_ he seeks to describe yearning in all its forms and aims; its
distribution in human labour, its restlessness, its vigour, and, above
all, its beauty. But not only human manifestations now appear to him in
a closer cohesion, the synthesis of realism and metaphysics now makes
his relationship to elementary things richer and more heroic. Now, when
he treats some motive he had already treated in the first books, and
these poems of the first and last periods are compared, it is with
astonishment and admiration that you trace the silent growth of these
last years. I will mention one example. He had already sung a song to
the wind. But the wind at that time was to him the evil storm that
tousles cottages, shakes chimneys, forces its way into rooms, rages
across country, and brings the winter. It was a senseless power,
beautiful in its senselessness, but aimless, an incomprehensible
element, a detached phenomenon of Nature. Now, however, the poet in his
maturity looks upon it as the wanderer over the undying world, one that
has seen all countries, that drives ships over seas, that has sated
itself with the perfume of strange flowers and brings it from far away,
that penetrates our chest like an aroma and steels and expands it. Now
he loves the wind as one of the thousand things of the earth which
contribute to the intensification of his vital feeling.
Si j'aime, admire et chante avec folie,
Le vent,
* * * * *
C'est qu'il grandit mon être entier et c'est qu'avant
De s'infiltrer, par mes poumons et par mes pores,
Jusques au sang dont vit mon corps,
Avec sa force rude ou sa douceur profonde,
Immensément, il a étreint le monde.[2]
So, too, a tree becomes to him the image of the eternal renewal of
strength, of resistance to the hardness of winter and of fate, of the
will to new beauty in the spring. A mountain no longer appears to him as
a chance raising of the landscape, but a great and mighty thing in whose
keeps secrets lie, ores, and the source of springs, from whose summit,
however, our eyes can sweep the world. The forest interprets itself to
him as the labyrinth of a thousand paths, and as the many-voiced anthem
of life: everything in nature becomes a freshening and a vivifying of
this vitality. _An absolute transmutation of values has taken place from
the time that he has comprehended things as parts of the world's entity,
and as themselves an entity_. Travel, formerly a flight from reality,
now becomes to him the opening out of new distances, of new
possibilities; dream appears to him no longer as an illusion, but as the
capacity of intensifying the real from its present to a future state.
Europe is no longer to him a group of nations, a geographical idea, but
the great symbol of conquest, money, gold, he no longer regards
contemptuously as a materialising of life, but as a new spur for new
ambition. And the sea, which in every succeeding work of his sings its
unquiet rhythm, is no longer the murderous power that eats into the
land, but the holy tide, the symbol of constant strength in eternal
unrest; it is to him 'la mer nue et pure, comme une idée.'[3] Since
everything coheres, he feels related to all in a touching brotherhood
with things; he no longer feels the presence of things, he loves them
like a piece of himself; he feels the sea physically in himself
Ma peau, mes mains et mes cheveux
Sentent la mer
Et sa couleur est dans mes yeux.[4]
And so, just as his vital feeling is renewed every time he comes into
contact with the waves, he believes in a physical resurrection of the
body out of the sea, believes that his rising from the water is a
_nouveau moment de conscience_. Verhaeren has returned to the great
cohesion: in Nature and in man there is no longer for him any phenomenon
which might not become a symbol for him, a symbol of the great vital
instinct, to stimulate and fire his vitality.
And since he now responds to all things with this one feeling, a uniform
conception of the world must involuntarily result from this unity of
feeling. _To the unity of enthusiasm corresponds the unity of the world,
the monistic feeling_. Just as he himself derives nothing but an
intensification and exaltation of his feelings from all things, nothing
but the very sensation of life, all phenomena and activities must be a
synthesis, all forces must flow into one single force as rivers flow
into the ocean, all laws must merge in one single law
Toute la vie, avec ses lois, avec ses formes,
--Multiples doigts noueux de quelque main énorme--
S'entr'ouvre et se referme en un poing: l'unité.[5]
And thus, this straining of all humanity, discharged in a thousand
forms, must be something in common, a fight against something lying
outside of itself, against a resistance which still makes life seem
hard, dull, and turbid. This fight of humanity cannot be other than
directed against something that impedes the sensation of life. And this,
the only thing which struggles against humanity, is in Verhaeren's eyes
the supremacy of Nature, the mystery of divine intervention, the
subjection of man to fate--in short, all divinity that does not reside
in man. As soon as man is dependent on nobody except himself and his own
strength, he too will attain the great joyousness of all the things of
Nature.
_This fight of man to become God, this fight for his independence, his
freedom from chance and the supernatural--this is the great metaphysical
idea of Verhaeren's work_. His last books seek to represent nothing else
than this one highest battle of man, this struggle to be free from all
that is laid upon him, not by himself, but by Nature, from all that
impedes his will to become a thing of Nature, an elementary force,
himself. This struggle is the highest and purest effort, for
Rien n'est plus haut, malgré l'angoisse et le tourment,
Que la bataille avec l'énigme et les ténèbres.[6]
Man in this battle defends himself against darkness, against what is
unknown, against Heaven, against all laws that restrict his expansion;
the whole aim of man, the aim he has unconsciously been following for a
thousand years, is independence, is to become a law unto himself:
L'homme dans l'univers n'a qu'un maître, lui-même,
Et l'univers entier est ce maître, dans lui.[7]
To-day he is still counteracted by chance, or, as many conceive it, by
divinity. Wholly to conquer this, to substitute the determination of
one's own destiny for chance, will be the great task of the future. Much
has been taken from chance already. Lightning, the most dangerous power
of heaven, is conquered; distances are bridged over; the forms of Nature
are changed; social communities have by common action diverted the
iniquity of the weather; diseases are from year to year being fathomed
and checked; more and more every incalculable element is being brought
within the range of calculation and fore-sight. But all that is unknown
must more and more be the booty of man, whose highest will is 'fouiller
l'inconnu.'[8] More and more his eyes penetrate the subterranean and
mysterious workings of Nature.
Or aujourd'hui c'est la réalité
Secrète encor, mais néanmoins enclose
Au cours perpétuel et rythmique des choses,
Qu'on veut, avec ténacité,
Saisir, pour ordonner la vie et sa beauté
Selon les causes.[9]
For this battle everybody is a soldier in man's war of liberation, all
of us stand invisibly ranked together. Everybody who wrests from Nature
in increment to knowledge, who does something never done before,
everybody who by poetry fires others to action, tears off a piece of the
veil. With every step forward that man takes against the dark, with
every foot of ground he conquers, divinity loses strength to him; and
this will go on until at length nothing remains of the God of old, until
the identity of the two ideas humanity and divinity is unconsciously
accomplished.
Héros, savant, artiste, apôtre, aventurier,
Chacun troue à son tour le mur noir des mystères
Et, grâce à ces labeurs groupés et solitaires,
L'être nouveau se sent l'univers tout entier.
Seen from this height, professions assume a new poetic value. In the
front rank of fighting men Verhaeren sees those the effort of whose life
it is to acquire knowledge--the men of science. Verhaeren is perhaps the
only one among modern poets who has conceived of science as of perfectly
equal value with poetry, _who has discovered new moral and religious
values in science, just as he had already discovered new æsthetic values
in industrialism and democracy_. Most poets had hitherto looked upon
science as a hindrance, because they were afraid of clear things as they
were afraid of real things. They looked upon science as the destroyer of
myths, the negation of every noble superstition which in their eyes was
indissolubly connected with the poetical. But just as machinery seemed
to them to be ugly, because in the machines they saw beauty had
retreated from the outer to the interior form, here too the new ethical
value is hidden not in the method but in the aim. Verhaeren esteems
science as the great fighter for the new conception of the world: 'Le
monde entier est repensé par leurs cervelles.'[10] He knows that the
little increments to knowledge which are continually being made in our
days in thousands of places, in sanatoria and lecture-rooms,
observatories and studies, with microscopes and chemical analyses,
weighing and calculation, with measures and numbers, that these little
additions to knowledge may, by comparison and reproduction, grow into
great creative discoveries which will immensely enrich our vital
feeling. And this hymn to science is at the same time a hymn to our
epoch; for no epoch before ours has so consciously bought for the
advancement of knowledge, none has been so replete with the longing for
new knowledge and the transmutation of values:
L'acharnement à tout peser, à tout savoir
Fouille la forêt drue et mouvante des êtres.[11]
In inspired words Verhaeren celebrates science as the highest effort of
our age as of the past; for he knows that what to us to-day is
presupposed and self-evident was a thousand years-ago the goal of the
most ardent effort, that the road we pace indolently to-day is soaked
with the blood of martyrs.
Dites! quels temps versés au gouffre des années,
Et quelle angoisse ou quel espoir des destinées,
Et quels cerveaux chargés de noble lassitude
A-t-il fallu pour faire un peu de certitude?
* * * * *
Dites! les feux et les bûchers; dites! les claies;
Les regards fous, en des visages d'effroi blanc;
Dites! les corps martyrisés, dites! les plaies
Criant la vérité, avec leur bouche en sang.[12]
But he knows equally well that the acquisitions of to-day are again only
hypotheses for the new truths of to-morrow. Error is inevitable, but
even error opens out new ways. In the beautiful idea of Brezina, the
Czech poet, all ideal aims are floating islands that recede as we
approach them. The highest aim is in effort itself, in the life which
effort intensifies. Verhaeren's optimism here guards his marches against
banality, for he is sufficient of a mystic to know that it is the
unknowable and the inaccessible that lend all things their impenetrable
beauty. But the knowledge of this must not scare enthusiasm away:
Partons quand même, avec notre âme inassouvie,
Puisque la force et que la vie
Sont au delà des vérités et des erreurs.[13]
What if a few last things remain eternally inscrutable: 'plutôt que d'en
peupler les coins par des chimères, nous préférons ne point savoir.'[14]
Rather a world without gods than one with false gods, rather incomplete
knowledge than false knowledge.
Here, where the heroes of science reach the limits of what is possible
to them, a new group must stand by their side and help them in their
work. These are the poets, who preach faith where knowledge ends. They
must find the synthesis between science and religion, between the
earthly and the divine, the new synthesis--_religious confidence in
science_. Their optimism must force their fellow-men to have faith in
science, as in earlier days they had faith in gods: though proofs fail
them, they must demand from this new religion what the early fathers
demanded for the old religion. And he himself, Verhaeren, he who
once--here again a bitter 'no' is turned into an exulting 'yes'--said in
his beginnings
Toute science enferme au fond d'elle le doute,
Comme une mère enceinte étreint un enfant mort,[15]
he himself is to-day the first of confident enthusiasts. Where
individual minds are still at war--
'Oh! ces luttes là-haut entre ces dieux humains![16]--
where their knowledge has not yet found a bridge, poets must with
enthusiasm and confidence surmise a path. They must link law with
perception; and in the same measure as the scientists have by knowledge
fed their enthusiasm, they in their turn must feed knowledge by their
confidence. If they have no proofs of actualities, their faith dowers
them with the confidence to say, 'nous croyons déjà ce que les autres
sauront.'[17] They scent and surmise new things before they are born;
they trust hypotheses before they are proved. Already,
Pendant que disputent et s'embrouillent encor,
À coups de textes morts
Et de dogmes, les sages,[18]
they hear the hovering wings of the new truth. They already believe in
what later generations will know; they derive vital joy from what their
descendants will be the first to possess. They doubt in nothing; not
that man will conquer the air, quell disease, make life cheerful and
easier; they do not despair in progress, and in their ecstasy they leap
over all obstacles. 'Le cri de Faust n'est plus le nôtre';[19] the
question as to 'yes' and 'no' has long since been joyfully answered in
the affirmative, exults the poet; we no longer hesitate between the
possibility and the impossibility of knowledge, we believe in it, and
faith and confidence is already the highest knowledge of life. In this
optimism of poets other discoverers of knowledge must now fulfil their
growth, from these dreams they must derive strength for their activity;
all men must in this way complete one another, that it may be possible
for them to beleaguer darkness, perfect the conquest of God, and
Emprisonner quand même, un jour, l'éternité,
Dans le gel blanc d'une immobile vérité.[20]
For this new truth, the Man-God whom they are to discover, poets and
scholars are the new saints; and his servants are all those whose brows
are fiery with the fever of work, whose hands are scorched with
experiments, whose nerves are strained by constant effort, whose eyes
are fatigued by books. To all of these Verhaeren's hymn is addressed:
Qu'ils soient sacrés par les foules, ces hommes
Qui scrutèrent les faits pour en tirer les lois.[21]
But still farther reaches Verhaeren's enthusiasm for those who help in
the new work, for the 'saccageurs d'infini.'[22] Not only the thinker
and the poet extend the horizon of life, but each one also who creates
and is in any way at work. Only the man who creates is really alive and
really a man--'seul existe qui crée.'[23] And so his hymn is likewise
addressed to those who toil with their hands, to those who, without
knowing the aim, toil stolidly day by day in mines and fields; for they
too build the face of the earth, create mountains where there were none,
rear lights by the sea's marge, construct machines and the huge
telescopes that pry on the heavens: all of them forge the tools of
knowledge and prepare the new era. Merchants who send across the ocean
ships that spin threads from farthest shore to shore, they too weave the
net of the great unity; traders who spread gold, who quicken the
circulation of the world's blood, they too co-operate in the battle
waged with the dark. It is their league and union which, first of all,
gives humanity its great strength; they all prepare the hour, the
moment, which must inevitably come.
Il viendra l'instant, où tant d'efforts savants et ingénus,
Tant de génie et de cerveaux tendus vers l'inconnu,
Quand même, auront bâti sur des bases profondes
Et jaillissant au ciel, la synthèse du monde![24]
Here in fiery dawns glimmer the days of the future. Tens of thousands
will struggle, will prepare, until at last the one man comes who shall
lay the last stone of the edifice, 'le tranquille rebelle,'[25] the
Christ of this new religion.
C'est que celui qu'on attendait n'est point venu,
Celui que la nature entière
Suscitera un jour, âme et rose trémière,
Sous les soleils puissants non encore connus;
C'est que la race ardente et fine,
Dont il sera la fleur,
N'a point multiplié ses milliers de racines
Jusqu'au tréfonds des profondeurs.[26]
For here in Verhaeren's work this vision arises fervent and glowing.
Incessantly man proceeds on the path of his destiny. Once his whole
world was replete with divinity, 'jadis tout l'inconnu était peuplé de
dieux';[27] then one single God took right and might into His hand; but
now, by means of his strength and passion, man has wrested, year by
year, one secret after the other from this Unknown Power. More and more
he has conquered chance by laws, faith by knowledge, fear by safety;
more and more the power of the gods glides insensibly into his hands,
more and more he determines his own life; and the process will continue
till he is in every respect the captain of his fate; he is less and less
subject to laws he has not himself established; more and more Nature's
slave becomes her lord.
Races, régnez: puisque par vous la volonté du sort
Devient de plus en plus la volonté humaine.[28]
Gods will become men; exterior fate will return into their bosom; the
saints will henceforth be only their brothers; and Paradise will be the
earth itself. Most beautifully Verhaeren has expressed this idea in one
of his latest books,[29] in the symbol of Adam and Eve. Eve, expelled
from the Garden of Eden, one day finds its doors open again. But she
does not re-enter it, for her highest joy, her Paradise, is now in
activity and the pleasure of the earth. Zest in existence, in life, joy
of the earth, has never been more strongly and burningly exalted than in
this symbol; never has the hymn of humanity been sung with greater
fervour than by this poet--perhaps because he had denied life more
wildly and more obstinately than any other. Here all contrasts sing
together in a harmony without a flaw; the last enmity between man and
Nature here becomes the ecstatic feeling of man's godhead.
And strange to say, here the circle of life returns to itself. The books
of the poet's old age return to the days of his youth, to the school
benches in Ghent where Maeterlinck also sat, the other great Fleming.
Both, who lost themselves there, have found themselves again on the
heights of life in their conception of the world, for Maeterlinck's
highest teaching also (in his book _Wisdom and Destiny_) is, that all
fate is locked up in man himself, that it is man's highest evolution,
his highest duty, to conquer fate, all that lies outside him, God. This
profound thought, which has thus twice in our days blossomed forth from
Flemish soil, has been achieved on different paths. Maeterlinck has
found it by listening to the mysticism of silence, Verhaeren by
listening to the noise of life. He has found his new God not in the
darkness of dreams but in the light of streets, in all places where men
bestir themselves, and where from heavy hours the trembling flower of
joy is born.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'La Conquête' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
[2] 'À la Gloire du Vent' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
[3] 'L'Eau' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
[4] 'Au Bord du Quai' (_Ibid._)
[5] 'La Conquête' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_)
[6] 'Les Cultes' (_Ibid._)
[7] 'Les Villes' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
[8] 'La Ferreur' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
[9] 'Vers le Futur' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
[10] 'La Conquête' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
[11] 'Vers le Futur' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
[12] 'La Recherche' (_Ibid._).
[13] 'L'Erreur' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
[14] 'La Ferveur' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
[15] 'Méditation' (_Les Moines_).
[16] 'Les Penseurs' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
[17] 'La Science' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
[18] 'L'Action' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
[19] 'La Science' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
[20] 'Les Penseurs' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
[21] 'La Science' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
[22] 'Les Penseurs' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
[23] 'La Mort' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
[24] 'La Recherche' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
[25] 'L'Attente' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
[26] 'L'Attente' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
[27] 'La Folie' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
[28] (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
[29] _Les Rythmes Souverains._
THE ETHICS OF FERVOUR
La vie est à monter et non pas à descendre.
É.V., 'Les Rêves,'
Il faut admirer tout pour s'exalter soi-même
Et se dresser plus haut que ceux qui out vécu.
É.V., 'La Vie.'
The metaphysical ideal crystallised by Verhaeren from his contemplation
of life, which was at first wildly passionate, but then more and more
synoptical and logical, has been called unity. He has himself recently,
in answer to a question submitted to various men of letters, confirmed
this conception as part of his programme. 'It seems to me,' he says,
'that poetry is bound ere long to be merged in a very clear Pantheism.
More and more the unity of the world is admitted by upright and healthy
minds. That old dualism between the soul and the body, between God and
the universe, is becoming effaced. Man is a fragment of the architecture
of the world. He understands and is conscious of the entity of which he
is a part.... He feels that he is encompassed and dominated, while at
the same time he himself encompasses and dominates. By reason of his own
miracles he is becoming, in some sort, that personal God that his
ancestors believed in. Now I ask, is it possible that lyric exaltation
should long remain indifferent to such an unchaining of human power,
should hesitate to celebrate such a vast spectacle of grandeur? The poet
of to-day has only to surrender himself to what he sees, hears,
imagines, conjectures, for works to be born of his heart and brain that
are young, vibrating, and new.'[1] But he who would build up the whole
image must not make a halt at this stage of knowledge: over against the
logical ordering of external things he must set another of inward
things; against the knowledge of life he must set the feeling of life.
He must set up an ethical ideal as well as a metaphysical ideal, a
commandment of life corresponding to his law of life.
But great poets never discover a standard of life, a moral precept,
which is not a reflex of the law of their own inner nature. Many
possibilities of contemplation are open to the thinker, to the quiet
observer; to the poet however, to the lyrist, only a poetic philosophy
of life is possible, a contemplation lyrically exalted. Whereas the
philosopher can attain the knowledge of unity by measurement and
calculation, by a perception and calm computation of forces, a poet can
discover the evolution of things in the direction of harmony and unity
only in his ecstasy, only in an exalted state of enthusiasm. He will
perforce recognise a commandment for the whole world in his own
enthusiasm, and in his lyric ecstasy a moral demand of life. 'Toute la
vie est dans l'essor,' for the poet all life is in ecstasy. And just as
Verhaeren never described things in a state of rest, so too his
comprehension of the universe is never conceivable except in the
permanently exalted state of the unrest of joy and motion.
Verhaeren's relationship to the world around him was ever passionate. He
has always approached things feverishly, as a lover approaches the woman
he desires. Only what he has won by fighting has the value to him of a
possession. Things do not belong to us as long as we pass them by, as
long as we only look at them with unfeeling and cold eyes as though they
were a scene in a play, a walking picture. To feel the connection
between them and us, between the world and the poet, between man and
man, to pass over from the purely contemplative state to the assessment
of values, we must enter into some personal relationship of sympathy or
antipathy. Verhaeren's first crisis had taught him that negation is
sterile, and his recovery had then shown him that only assent,
acceptance, affection, and enthusiasm can place us in a real
relationship with things.
Pour vivre clair, ferme et juste,
Avec mon cœur, j'admire tout
Ce qui vibre, travaille et bout
Dans la tendresse humaine et sur la terre auguste.[2]
A thing only belongs to us when it is felt--not so much for us
personally--as beautiful, necessary, and vivid: only when we have said
'yes' to it. _And therefore our whole evolution can only be to admire as
much as possible, to understand as much as possible, to let our feeling
have intercourse with as many things as possible_. To contemplate is too
little; to understand is too little. Only when we have confirmed a thing
from its very roots, confirmed it as necessary, does it really belong to
us. 'II faut aimer pour découvrir avec génie.' And so our whole effort
must be to overcome what is negative in ourselves, to reject nothing, to
kill the critical spirit in ourselves, to strengthen what is positive in
us, to assent as much as possible. Here again Verhaeren is in agreement
with Nietzsche's last ideals: 'Warding things off, keeping things down,
is a waste of energy, a squandering of strength on negative
purposes.'[3] Criticism is sterile. Verhaeren is here as ever a
relativist of values, for he knows that they are incessantly occupied in
a process of transformation in favour of their highest value, and
therefore he holds enthusiasm (the symbol of over-estimation) to be more
important, in the sense of a higher justice, than what is apparently
absolute justice itself.
For this is the essential: if in our estimation we often over-estimate
things which in any case would preserve their inner value independently
of our 'yes' or 'no,' that is not so great a danger as it is a profit
that our own souls should grow by means of our admiration. 'Admirer,
c'est se grandir.'[4] For if we admire more, and more intensively, than
others, we shall ourselves grow richer than those timid ones who content
themselves with choice morsels of life instead of grasping life in its
entirety, who restrict themselves because they only place themselves in
relationship with a part of the world and not with the whole cosmos. The
more a man admires, the more he possesses:
Il faut admirer tout pour s'exalter soi-même
Et se dresser plus haut que ceux qui out vécu
De coupables souffrances et de désirs vaincus.[5]
For admiration means, in the highest sense, subordinating oneself to
other things. _The more a man suppresses his own personal pride, the
higher he stands in the moral sense_. For to accentuate oneself and to
deny what is not oneself needs less strength than to suppress oneself
and to surrender oneself in admiration to all else. Here Verhaeren sees
the rise of a new ethical problem. A whole ladder of values is revealed
to him in the moral standard of freedom and frankness with which a man
can meet his fellows in his admiration; a ladder on whose topmost rung
the man stands who rejects nothing whatever, who meets every
manifestation of life with ecstasy. To be able to admire more means to
grow more oneself:
Oh! vivre et vivre et se sentir meilleur
À mesure que bout plus fervemment le cœur;
Vivre plus clair, dès qu'on marche en conquête;
Vivre plus haut encor, dès que le sort s'entête
À dessécher la force et l'audace des bras.[6]
And so strong must this restless enthusiasm grow, this incessant
enthusiasm for things, that the height of the ascent suddenly surprises
one with a rapt feeling of dizziness. The lyrical commandment of the
highest ecstasy is here an ethical standard:
Il faut en tes élans te dépasser sans cesse,
Être ton propre étonnement.[7]
In this idea of restless enthusiasm, the principles of which have also
been expounded by Verhaeren in his essay _Cosmic Enthusiasm_
(_Insel-Almanach,_ 1913), he has established a poetic equivalent to his
other great impulse of humanity, set an ethical ideal by the side of the
metaphysical ideal. For if of old the yearning for knowledge, that
superb struggle for the conquest of the unknown, was the only thing that
placed man in an eternally living relationship to the new things, what
is possibly a still more valuable instinct is discovered in this
incessantly intensified ecstatic admiration. Admiring is more than
estimating and knowing. To surrender oneself in love to all things is
higher than the curiosity to know everything. 'Tout affronter vaut mieux
que tout comprendre.'[8] For in all knowledge there is still a residue
of selfishness, of the pride of personal acquisition, while admiration
of things contains nothing but humility--that great humility, however,
which is an infinite enrichment of life, because it signifies a
dissolution in the all. Whereas knowledge is brought to a sudden
standstill before many things and finds the road blocked with darkness,
in admiration, in ecstasy, there is no limit set to the ego. _Though
many values lock themselves up from knowledge, none denies itself wholly
to admiration_. Even the smallest thing becomes great when it is
penetrated with love, and the greater we let things grow--the more we
enrich the substance of our own life--the more infinite we make our ego.
It is the highest ethical task of a great man to find the highest value
in every phenomenon, and to free this value from the thick and often
stifling rind of antipathy and strangeness. Not to let oneself be
repelled by resistance is the perfection of a noble enthusiasm. If
anything whatsoever is void of beauty, it will have a power which by its
energy expresses beauty. If anything seems strange and ugly in the
traditional sense, it will set the wonderful task of finding out the new
sense in which it is beautiful. _And to have found this new beauty in
the new things was the active greatness of the poetic work, the
greatness which was unconscious and now becomes conscious, which was
knowledge and now becomes law_. While all others considered our great
cities frightful and ugly, Verhaeren praised their magnificence; while
all others abhorred science as an obstacle to poetry, Verhaeren
celebrated it as the purest form of life. For he knows that everything
changes, that 'ce qui fut hier le but est l'obstacle demain,'[9] and
_vice versa_ that the obstacle of to-day may perhaps be the goal of the
next generation. He had already recognised in his poetry what the
architectural movement in the great cities in the last few years has
realised, that huge shops, as emporia of intellectual life, as new
centres of force, provide tasks for art as stupendous as the cathedrals
of old; that in the reek and smoke of teeming cities new tones of colour
were waiting for painters, new problems for philosophers; that all that
in our own time looms bulky and unseemly will to the next generation be
well-proportioned and have to be called beautiful. Verhaeren's
enthusiasm for what is new overcomes the resistance of reverence for
tradition. Verhaeren has rendered signal service to our time by being
the first to recognise and proclaim the great impressionists and all
innovators in art and poetry. For to reject nothing new, to be hostile
to nothing the world can offer, this only is what he understands by
knowing the world as it is and truly loving it. His ladder of values
ends on high in this absolute ideal of admiration of the whole world,
not only of that which is but of that which shall be, of the identity of
every ego with the time and its forms:
L'homme n'est suprême et clair que si sa volonté
Est d'être lui en même temps qu'il est monde.
And since this boundless admiration turns selfishness to
dust--selfishness, the eternal obstacle to all purely human
relations--since, in a word, it produces a kind of brotherly
relationship to all things, it also opens out the possibility of
levelling the relationship between man and man. The book _La Multiple
Splendeur_, which has given definite expression to these ethical ideas,
was originally intended to be called _Admirez-vous les Uns les Autres_.
In this book self-surrender is considered as the highest ideal, the gift
of oneself to the whole world, the distribution of oneself among all
people. No longer, as in the earlier books, are energy, strength, and
conquest by strength, the quelling of resistance, the ultimate sense of
life, but goodness, scattering oneself broadcast, becoming the all by
surrender to the all. Greatness in this new sense can only arise by
ecstatic admiration. 'Il faut aimer pour découvrir avec génie.'
Admiration and love are the strongest forces of the world. Love will be
the highest form of the new relations--it will regulate all earthly
relationships; love shall be the social levelling.
L'amour dont la puissance encore est inconnue,
Dans sa profondeur douce et sa charité nue,
Ira porter la joie égale aux résignés;
Les sacs ventrus de l'or seront saignés
Un soir d'ardente et large équité rouge;
Disparaîtront palais, banques, comptoirs et bouges;
Tout sera simple et clair, quand l'orgueil sera mort,
Quand l'homme, au lieu de croire à l'égoïste effort,
Qui s'éterniserait, en une âme immortelle,
Dispensera vers tous sa vie accidentelle;
Des paroles, qu'aucun livre ne fait prévoir,
Débrouilleront ce qui paraît complexe et noir;
Le faible aura sa part dans l'existence entière,
Il aimera son sort--et la matière
Confessera peut-être, alors, ce qui fut Dieu.[10]
And in still greater, still more monumental expression, in stone tables
of the law as it were, Verhaeren has compressed his new moral idea in a
single poem:
Si nous nous admirons vraiment les uns les autres,
Du fond même de notre ardeur et notre foi,
Vous les penseurs, vous les savants, vous les apôtres,
Pour les temps qui viendront vous extrairez la loi.
Nous apportons, ivres du monde et de nous-mêmes,
Des cœurs d'hommes nouveaux dans le vieil univers.
Les Dieux sont loin et leur louange et leur blasphème;
Notre force est en nous et nous avons souffert.
Nous admirons nos mains, nos yeux et nos pensées,
Même notre douleur qui devient notre orgueil;
Toute recherche est fermement organisée
Pour fouiller l'inconnu dont nous cassons le seuil.
S'il est encor là-bas des caves de mystère
Où tout flambeau s'éteint ou recule effaré,
Plutôt que d'en peupler les coins par des chimères
Nous préférons ne point savoir que nous leurrer.
Un infini plus sain nous cerne et nous pénètre;
Notre raison monte plus haut; notre cœur bout;
Et nous nous exaltons si bellement des êtres
Que nous changeons le sens que nous avons de tout.
Cerveau, tu règnes seul sur nos actes lucides;
Aimer, c'est asservir; admirer, se grandir;
O tel profond vitrail, dans l'ombre des absides,
Qui reflète la vie et la fait resplendir!
Aubes, matins, midis et soirs, toute lumière
Est aussitôt muée en or et en beauté,
Il exalte l'espace et le ciel et la terre
Et transforme le monde à travers sa clarté.[11]
_This sensation of recognising oneself in all things by enthusiasm_, of
living with everything that has existence and a visible form, is
pantheism, is a Teutonic conception of the universe. But in Verhaeren
pantheism finds its very last intensification. Identity is to him not
only cerebral knowledge, but experience; identity is not the sensation
of being similar to things in body and soul, but an indissoluble unity.
Whosoever admires a thing so wholly that he goes down to the roots of
his feeling, that he dissolves and denies himself in order to be wholly
this other thing, is at this moment of ecstasy identical with it.
Ecstasy is no longer what it means in the Greek derivation, the fact of
stepping out of oneself, of losing oneself; it signifies, in addition
to that, the finding of oneself in the other thing. And with this
Verhaeren's cosmic conception goes beyond pantheism. He not only senses
things as though he were their brother; not only does he sense himself
in them, he himself lives them. Not only does he feel his blood pouring
into other beings, he no longer feels any blood of his own at all; he
only feels this strange, glowing sap of the world in his veins. I know
of no more fiery eruption than those moments of Verhaeren when he is no
longer able to distinguish the world from his ego, this unique cosmic
intoxication:
Je ne distingue plus le monde de moi-même,
Je suis l'ample feuillage et les rameaux flottants,
Je suis le sol dont je foule les cailloux pâles
Et l'herbe des fossés où soudain je m'affale
Ivre et fervent, hagard, heureux et sanglotant.[12]
All the forms of the elements are a personal experience to him:
'J'existe en tout ce qui m'entoure et me pénètre.'[13] All that has
happened becomes to him a manifestation of his own body; he feels all
cosmic happenings as personal experiences:
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.[14]
Here the billows of enthusiasm dash higher and higher, this call to
union by enthusiasm grows to an ever more passionate command:
Exaltez-vous encore et comprenez-vous mieux,
Reconnaissez-vous donc et magnifiez-vous
Dans l'ample et myriadaire splendeur des choses![15]
For if men hitherto have arrived at no clear and harmonious relationship
with one another, that was because, so Verhaeren thinks, they had not
admiration sufficient, because they were too suspicious of one another,
because they had too little faith. 'Magnifiez-vous donc et
comprenez-vous mieux!'[16] he calls out to them, 'admirez-vous les uns
les autres!' and here, in the last phase of his knowledge, he is again
in agreement with the great American, who, in his poem _Starting from
Paumanok_, preaches:
I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough,
None has ever yet adored or worshipped half enough,
None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and
how certain the future is.
For the highest pleasure is only in this highest ecstasy. And therefore
these ideals of Verhaeren are not cold, sober commandments, but a
passionate hymn.
Aimer avec ferveur soi-même en tous les autres
Qui s'exaltent de même en de mêmes combats
Vers le même avenir dont on entend le pas;
Aimer leur cœur et leur cerveau pareils aux vôtres
Parce qu'ils ont souffert, en des jours noirs et fous,
Même angoisse, même affre et même deuil que vous.
Et s'énivrer si fort de l'humaine bataille
--Pâle et flottant reflet des monstrueux assauts
Ou des groupements d'or des étoiles, là-haut--
Qu'on vit en tout ce qui agit, lutte ou tressaille
Et qu'on accepte avidement, le cœur ouvert,
L'âpre et terrible loi qui régit l'univers.[17]
_To raise these mystic moments of ecstasy, these seconds of identity,
which every one in his life experiences in quite rare and strange
moments, to permanency, to a constant, unconquerable feeling of
life--this is Verhaeren's highest aim_. His cosmic conception is
concentrated in this supreme ideal of an incessantly felt identity of
the ego with its environment, of an identity ever fired anew by passion.
For not till nothing more is contemplation and everything is experience,
not till this vast enrichment is accomplished, does life cease to be
vegetative, indifferent, and somnolent, not till then does it turn to
pure delight. Not to feel individual feelings of pleasure, but to feel
life itself in all its forms as supreme pleasure, is the last goal of
Verhaeren's art. What he says of Juliers, the hero of Flanders, 'son
existence était sa volupté,'[18] _the fact of life itself was his
pleasure_, is also his own highest longing. He does not want life that;
he may fill out the span that is allotted to every mortal, but that he
may consciously enjoy, and to the full, every minute of life as a
delight and as; happiness. And in such a moment of ecstasy he says,
Il me semble jusqu'à ce jour n'avoir vécu
Que pour mourir et non pour vivre,[19]
lines that seem to me unforgettable, as the highest ecstasy of vitality.
And, wonderful to say, here too the circle is closed, here too the end
of Verhaeren's know-ledge--as we have seen in so many things with
him--is a return to the beginning. Here too there is nothing save an
inherited instinct which has become a rapt consciousness. His first book
and his last ones, _Les Flamandes_, as well as _Les Rythmes Souverains_
and _Les Blés Mouvants,_ celebrate life--the first, it is true, only
life's outer form, the dull enjoyment of the senses: the last books,
however, celebrate the conscious, intensified, sublimated feeling of
life. Verhaeren's whole evolution--here again in harmony with the great
poets of our nation, with Nietzsche and Dehmel--is not suppression, but
a conscious intensification of original instincts. Just as in--his first
books he described his native province, and again in his last, save that
now the land is bounded by the horizons of the whole world, here again
the feeling of life returns as the sense of life, but it is now enriched
with all the knowledge he has acquired, with all the victories he has
won. Passion, which was in his first book a chaotic revolt, has here
become a law; the instinctive sensation of pleasure in health has been
transformed into a deliberate and conscious pleasure in life and in all
its forms. Now again Verhaeren feels the great pride of a strong man:
Je marche avec l'orgueil d'aimer l'air et la terre,
D'être immense et d'être fou
Et de mêler le monde et tout
À cet enivrement de vie élémentaire.[20]
The health of the strong race he once celebrated in the lads and lasses
of his native province, he now sings in himself. And so strong is the
identity between his ego and the world that he, desiring to sing the
beauty of the whole world, is now compelled to include himself and to
celebrate his own body. He who of old hated his body as a prison out of
which he could not escape to flee from himself, he who wished to 'spit
himself out,' now fits into the hymn of the world a stanza in
celebration of his own ego:
J'aime mes yeux, mes bras, mes mains, ma chair,
mon torse
Et mes cheveux amples et blonds,
Et je voudrais, par mes poumons,
Boire l'espace entier pour en gonfler ma force.[21]
The feeling of identity has given him absolute identity in regard to
himself.
It is not in vanity that he celebrates himself, but in gratitude. For
the body is to him only a means of sensing the beauty, power, and
beneficence of the world, is to him a wonderful possibility of enjoying
things by strength in strong passion. And wonderful are these thanks of
an ageing man to his eyes and ears and chest for still permitting him to
feel earth's beauty with all the fervour of old:
Soyez remerciés, mes yeux,
D'être restés si clairs, sous mon front déjà vieux,
Pour voir au loin bouger et vibrer la lumière;
Et vous, mes mains, de tressaillir dans le soleil;
Et vous, mes doigts, de vous dorer aux fruits vermeils
Pendus au long du mur, près des roses trémières.
Soyez remercié, mon corps,
D'être ferme, rapide, et frémissant encor
Au toucher des vents prompts ou des brises profondes;
Et vous, mon torse clair et mes larges poumons,
De respirer au long des mers ou sur les monts,
L'air radieux et vif qui baigne et mord les mondes.[22]
Thus, too, he now celebrates all things to which he is related--his
body; the race and the ancestors to whom he owes his being; the country
fields that have given him youth; the cities that have given him his
vast outlook: he celebrates Europe and America, the past and the future.
_And just as he feels himself to be strong and healthy, so too his
feeling conceives of the whole world as healthy and great_. That is the
incomparable and, probably, the unparalleled thing in Verhaeren's
verses, what makes him so exceedingly dear to many as to me, that here
cheerfulness, worldly pleasure, joy, and ecstasy are sensed not only
intellectually as pride, but that this pleasure is felt positively _in
the body_, with all the fibres of the blood, with all the muscles and
nerves of the man. His stanzas are really, as Bazalgette so beautifully
says, 'une décharge d'électricité humaine,'[23] a discharge of human, of
physical electricity. Joy here becomes a physical excess, an
intoxication, a superabundance without parallel:
Nous apportons, ivres du monde et de nous-mêmes,
Des cœurs d'hommes nouveaux dans le vieil univers.[24]
There is now no disharmony between the individual poems; they are one
single bubbling up of enthusiasm, 'un enivrement de soi-même'; over the
many convulsive, quivering, irregular ecstasies of old now flames the
ecstasy of the whole feeling of life. This ecstasy stands in our days
like a figure proud, strong, and erect, exultingly flourishing the torch
of passion aloft to greet the future, 'vers la joie'!
Here ends Verhaeren's ethic work. And I believe that no exaltation, no
knowledge can again change this last pure form, or make it still more
beautiful. A vast expenditure of force, the effort of one of our
strongest and most incomparable men, has here reached its goal. Once
force seemed to him to be the strength of the world; now, however, in
his purer knowledge, he sees it in goodness, in admiration, in that
force which, with the same intensity as turned it outwards of old, is
now directed inwards; which no longer constrains to conquest, but to
self-surrender, to a boundless humility. Over the immense savagery and
apparent chaos of the first works this knowledge now arches this rainbow
of reconciliation, over _Les Forcés Tumultueuses_ shines _La Multiple
Splendeur_. And to himself may be applied the words he dedicated to his
hymn of all humanity--'La joie et la bonté sont les fleurs de sa
force.'[25]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] G. Le Cardonnel et Ch. Vellay, _La Littérature Contemporaine._
[2] 'Autour de ma Maison' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
[3] _Ecce Homo!_.
[4] 'La Ferveur' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
[5] 'La Vie' (_Ibid._).
[6] 'L'Action' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
[7] 'L'Impossible' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
[8] 'Les Rêves' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
[9] 'L'Impossible' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
[10] 'Un Soir' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
[11] 'La Ferveur' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
[12] 'Autour de ma Maison' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
[13] 'La Joie' (_Ibid_.).
[14] 'L'En-avant' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
[15] 'La Louange du Corps Humain' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
[16] _Ibid. (Ibid.)_
[17] 'La Vie' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
[18] 'Guillaume de Juliers' (_Les Héros_).
[19] 'Un Matin' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
[20] 'Un Matin' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
[21] _Ibid. (Ibid.)_.
[22] 'La Joie' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
[23] 'Léon Bazalgette', _Émile Verhaeren_.
[24] 'La Ferveur' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
[25] 'Les Mages' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
LOVE
Ceux qui vivent d'amour vivent d'éternité.
E.V., _Les Heures d'après-midi._
Filled with contemporary spirit as Verhaeren's work is, there is one
point in which it appears to stray from our epoch, to be remote from the
artistic preoccupations of other poets. Verhaeren's poetry is almost
entirely free from eroticism. The problem of love is with him far from
being, as it is with most poets, the feeling at the root of all
feelings; it is hardly ever a motive force in his work; it remains a
little arabesque delicately curved above his massive architecture.
Verhaeren's enthusiasms spring from other sources. Love is for him
almost without a sexual shade of meaning, perfectly identical with
enthusiasm, self-surrender, ecstasy; and the difference between the
sexes does not seem to be an essential, but only an incidental form
among the thousandfold militant forms of life. The love of woman, sexual
necessity, is scarcely a force greater than any other in the circle of
forces, never the most important or actually the root-force, as it is
(for instance) to Dehmel, who derives the consciousness of all great
cosmic phases of knowledge from the experience of love. Verhaeren's
horizons are illuminated, not by the flame of the erotic, but by the
passionate fire of purely intellectual impulses. His first books, those
lyric volumes which are nearly always a poet's confessions of love, were
devoted to landscapes and then to social phenomena, to monks, and to men
who toil with their hands. The strength of his drama pulses in conflicts
exclusively masculine. Thus his work, already vastly removed from that
of the other lyrists of our time, is seen to be still more isolated. To
Verhaeren love is only a single page, not the first and not the last, in
the book of the world: this poet has lavished too much glowing passion
and ecstatic feeling on all individual things and the universe for the
cry of the desire of woman to ring higher than all other voices.
This lack of accentuation of eroticism in Verhaeren's work does not by
any means strike me as a weakness, a missing nerve in his artistic
organism. It may read like a paradox, but it must be said: just this
apparent artistic deficiency indicates personal strength. Verhaeren's
masculinity is so pronounced and strong that woman could never become
the root-problem of his passion, or shake him in the foundations of his
fate. To a really strong man, love, sexual love, is a matter of course;
a sterling man does not feel it as an obstacle and not as a vital
conflict, but as a necessity, like nourishment, air, and liberty. But a
thing that is a matter of course is never conceived by an artist as a
problem. In his youth Verhaeren was never perplexed by love, for the
simple reason that he did not attach sufficient importance to it,
because his poetic interests were in the first place directed to a
mightier possession, a philosophy of life. A sterling man, as Verhaeren
conceives him, does not spend his strength in sexual love. For such a
man the metaphysical instinct, the longing for knowledge, the need of
finding his inner statics in the cosmos, goes before love. 'Eve voulait
aimer, Adam voulait connaître.'[1] Only to woman is love the sense pf
life; to man, in Verhaeren's idea, the sense of life is knowledge. He
expressed this sound idea still more clearly in an early poem:
Les forts montent la vie ainsi qu'un escalier,
Sans voir d'abord que les femmes sur leurs passages
Tendent vers eux leurs seins, leurs fronts et leur visages.[2]
Paying no heed to the seductions of love, the strong men, the really
great, ascend to the skies, to spiritual knowledge; they gather the
fruits of stars and comets; and then, only then, when they are
returning, tired by their lonely wandering, do they observe women, and
lay down in their hands the knowledge of the great worlds. _Not in the
beginning, in the vehement days of youth, but only when manhood is
established, only in the time of inner maturity, can woman become a
great experience for Verhaeren_. He must first of all have acquired a
firm footing, must know his place in the world, before he can yield
himself up to love. It is strange that the sonnet I have quoted should
have been written in youth, because, like a presentiment, it relates the
fate of his own life in advance. For the images of women never stopped
his path nor turned him aside from it; love, if I may say so, only
occupied his senses and never absorbed his soul. Not till later, till
the years when the crisis was undermining his body, when his nerves were
giving way under the terrible strain, when solitude reared itself before
his face like an inseparable foe, did a woman enter his life. Then, and
not till then, did love and marriage--the personal symbol of eternal,
exterior order--give him inward rest. And to this woman the only
love-poems he ever wrote are addressed. In Verhaeren's work, which is
graded like a trilogy--in this symphony that is often brutal--there is a
quiet, soft andante, a trilogy in the trilogy, one of love. From the
point of view of art, these three books, _Les Heures Claires, Les Heures
d'Après-midi,_ and _Les Heures du Soir_, are not less in value than his
great works, but they are more gentle. From this savage and passionate
man one might have expected visionary, seething ecstasies, a tempestuous
discharge of erotic feeling; but these books are a wonderful
disappointment. They are not spoken to the crowd, but to one woman only,
and for that reason they are not spoken loudly, but with a voice
subdued. Religious consciousness--for with Verhaeren all that is poetic
is religious in a new sense--finds a new form here. _Here Verhaeren does
not preach, he prays_. These little pages are the privacy of his
personal life, the confession of a passion which is great indeed, but
veiled as it were with a delicate shame. 'Oh! la tendresse des forts!'
is Bazalgette's inspired comment. And in truth, it is impossible to
imagine anything more touching than the sight of this mighty fighter
here lowering his resonant voice to the soft breathings of devotion.
These verses are quite simple, spoken low, as though wild and too
passionate words might imperil so noble a feeling, as though a strong
man, a brutal man, who is afraid of hurting a delicate woman with a
touch accustomed to bronze, should lay his hand on hers only softly,
most cautiously.