Chapter VIII: Part III: Completing Forces (1)

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.