Verhaeren was one of those men who feel all their life long “l’envie”
(to use his own admirably expressive phrase), “l’envie de tailler en
drapeaux l’étoffe de la vie.” The stuff of life can be put to worse
uses. To cut it into flags is, on the whole, more admirable than to cut
it, shall we say, into cerecloths, or money-bags, or Parisian
underclothing. A flag is a brave, a cheerful and a noble object. These
are qualities for which we are prepared to forgive the flag its
over-emphasis, its lack of subtlety, its touch of childishness. One can
think of a number of writers who have marched through literary history
like an army with banners. There was Victor Hugo, for example—one of
Verhaeren’s admired masters. There was Balzac, to whose views of life
Verhaeren’s was, in some points, curiously akin. Among the minor makers
of oriflammes there is our own Mr. Chesterton, with his heroic air of
being for ever on the point of setting out on a crusade, glorious with
bunting and mounted on a rocking-horse.
The flag-maker is a man of energy and strong vitality. He likes to
imagine that all that surrounds him is as large, as full of sap and as
vigorous as he feels himself to be. He pictures the world as a place
where the colours are strong and brightly contrasted, where a vigorous
chiaroscuro leaves no doubt as to the true nature of light and darkness,
and where all life pulsates, quivering and taut, like a banner in the
wind. From the first we find in Verhaeren all the characteristics of the
tailor of banners. In his earliest book of verse, _Les Flamands_, we see
him already delighting in such lines as
Leurs deux poings monstrueux pataugeaient dans la pâte.
Already too we find him making copious use—or was it abuse?—as Victor
Hugo had done before him, of words like “vaste,” “énorme,” “infini,”
“infiniment,” “infinité,” “univers.” Thus, in “L’Ame de la Ville,” he
talks of an “énorme” viaduct, an “immense” train, a “monstrueux” sun,
even of the “énorme” atmosphere. For Verhaeren all roads lead to the
infinite, wherever and whatever that may be.
Les grand’routes tracent des croix
A l’infini, à travers bois;
Les grand’routes tracent des croix lointaines
A l’infini, à travers plaines.
Infinity is one of those notions which are not to be lightly played
with. The makers of flags like it because it can be contrasted so
effectively with the microscopic finitude of man. Writers like Hugo and
Verhaeren talk so often and so easily about infinity that the idea
ceases in their poetry to have any meaning at all.
I have said that, in certain respects, Verhaeren, in his view of life,
is not unlike Balzac. This resemblance is most marked in some of the
poems of his middle period, especially those in which he deals with
aspects of contemporary life. _Les Villes tentaculaires_ contains poems
which are wholly Balzacian in conception. Take, for example, Verhaeren’s
rhapsody on the Stock Exchange:
Une fureur réenflammée
Au mirage du moindre espoir
Monte soudain de l’entonnoir
De bruit et de fumée,
Où l’on se bat, à coups de vols, en bas.
Langues sèches, regards aigus, gestes inverses,
Et cervelles, qu’en tourbillons les millions traversent,
Echangent là leur peur et leur terreur ...
Aux fins de mois, quand les débâcles se décident
La mort les paraphe de suicides,
Mais au jour même aux heures blêmes,
Les volontés dans la fièvre revivent,
L’acharnement sournois
Reprend comme autrefois.
One cannot read these lines without thinking of Balzac’s feverish
money-makers, of the Baron de Nucingen, Du Tillet, the Kellers and all
the lesser misers and usurers, and all their victims. With their
worked-up and rather melodramatic excitement, they breathe the very
spirit of Balzac’s prodigious film-scenario version of life.
Verhaeren’s flag-making instinct led him to take special delight in all
that is more than ordinarily large and strenuous. He extols and
magnifies the gross violence of the Flemish peasantry, their almost
infinite capacity for taking food and drink, their industry, their
animalism. In true Rooseveltian style, he admired energy for its own
sake. All his romping rhythms were dictated to him by the need to
express this passion for the strenuous. His curious assonances and
alliterations—