Chapter IX: Part III: Completing Forces (2)

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.

How beautiful these poems are! When you read them, they take you softly by the hand and lead you into a garden. Here you see no more the murky horizon of the city, the workshops; you do not hear the din of streets, nor that resonant rhythm that raged along in cataract on cataract; you hear a gentle music as of a playing fountain. Passion does not project you here to the great ecstasies of humanity and the sky; it has no will to make you wild and fervid; it soothes you to tenderness and devotion. The strident voice has grown soft, these colours are of transparent crystal, this song seems to express the vast silence from which those great passions drew their force. But these poems are not artificial. They too are of one woof with the elements of Nature; but not with the great, wild, and heart-moving world, not with the fiery sky, not with thunder and tempests: it is only a garden that you surmise here, a peaceful cottage, with birds singing about it, where there are sweet-scented flowers and silence hanging between trees in blossom. The adventures are insignificant in feature. You breathe the poetry of everyday life, but not that of open and wildly surging roads--only the poetry of closed walls, softly spoken dialogues about little things, the tenderest secrets of home. These are the experiences of personal existence, this is the ordinary day between the great ecstasies. The lamp burns softly in the room, the silence is full of wonderful tenderness:

Et l'on se dit les simples choses:
Le fruit qu'on a cueilli dans le jardin;
La fleur qui s'est ouverte,
D'entre les mousses vertes,
Et la pensée éclose, en des émois soudains,
Au souvenir d'un mot de tendresse fanée
Surpris au fond d'un vieux tiroir,
Sur un billet de l'autre année.[3]

Here you have the deepest feeling, thanks and devotion, not in ecstasy to God and the world, but addressed to one single being. For Verhaeren is one who is ever receiving gifts, who always feels that he is being heaped with favours, who has always to give thanks for life and all its miracles. Without measure, with that zest, with that incessantly renewed joy which is the deepest secret of his art, he here again and again expresses love and gratitude. As Orpheus rises to Euridice from the nether world, here the sick lover ascends to the lady who has saved him from the dark. And again and again he thanks her for the good hours of quietness; again and again he reminds her of their first meeting, of the sunny happiness of these present days:

Avec mes sens, avec mon cœur et mon cerveau,
Avec mon être entier tendu comme un flambeau
Vers ta bonté et vers ta charité,
Je t'aime et te louange et je te remercie
D'être venue, un jour, si simplement,
Par les chemins du dévouement,
Prendre en tes mains bienfaisantes, ma vie.[4]

These verses are genuflexions, folded hands, love that by humility becomes religion.

But still more beautiful and significant, perhaps, is the second volume of the trilogy _Les Heures d'Après-midi_; for here again a new thing has been discovered, a moral beauty exceeding erotic sensation, a greatness of feeling such as can only be conferred by the noblest experience of life. It is a book after fifteen years of wedlock. But in this time love has not grown poorer. _The deepest secret of Verhaeren's life, never to let his feelings grow cold and sink to a dead level, but unceasingly to enhance them, has denied a state of rest to his love also, and raised even this to something eternally animated and intensified_. And so his love has been able to celebrate the highest triumph, _vaincre l'habitude_, to conquer monotony and the dearth of feeling. Perpetual ecstasy has made it strong. Only he who renews his passion really lives it. When love pauses, it passes. 'Je te regarde, et tous les jours je te découvre.[5] Every day has here renewed the feeling and made it independent of its beginning, independent of sensual pleasure. As in Verhaeren's whole work, passion has here been spiritualised, ecstasy soars beyond individual experience. It is no longer an external appearance that the now ageing couple love in each other. Lips have paled, the body has lost its freshness, the flesh its gloss and colour; the years of union have written their charactery in the face. Only love has not withered: it has grown stronger than the physical attraction; it has defied change, because it has itself changed and incessantly been intensified. It is now unshakeable and inalienable:

Puisque je sais que rien au monde
Ne troublera jamais notre être exalté
Et que notre âme est trop profonde
Pour que l'amour dépende encor de la beauté.[6]

The temporal has here been overcome, and even the future, even death have no longer any terrors. Without fear of losing himself--for 'qui vit d'amour vit d'éternité'--the lover can think of him who stands at the end of all ways. No fear can touch him more, for he knows he is loved, and Verhaeren has given wonderful expression to this feeling in a poem:

Vous m'avez dit, tel soir, des paroles si belles
Que sans doute les fleurs, qui se penchaient vers nous,
Soudain nous out aimés et que l'une d'entre elles,
Pour nous toucher tous deux, tomba sur nos genoux.
Vous me parliez des temps prochains où nos années,
Comme des fruits trop mûrs, se laisseraient cueillir;
Comment éclaterait le glas des destinées,
Et comme on s'aimerait en se sentant vieillir.
Votre voix m'enlaçait comme une chère étreinte,
Et votre cœur brûlait si tranquillement beau
Qu'en ce moment j'aurais pu voir s'ouvrir sans crainte
Les tortueux chemins qui vont vers le tombeau.[7]

The third volume, _Les Heures du Soir_, has wonderfully closed the peaceful cycle with a series of poems, which no doubt have old age for their motive, but which show no trace of lassitude in the artist. Summer has turned to autumn, but how opulent and ripe this autumn is: the golden fruits of memory hang down and glow in the reflection of the sun that has been so well loved. Once again love passes with bright images: he is changed and purified, but as masterful and as strong as on the first day.

I love these little poems of Verhaeren's with a different and no less a love than that I do his great and important lyric works. I have never been able to understand why these poems--for as far as the iconoclastic work is concerned, respect for tradition and fear of innovations may have scared many people away--have not enjoyed a widespread popularity. For never since the tenderly vibrating music of Verlaine's _La Bonne Chanson_, never since the letters of the Brownings, has wedded happiness been so marvellously celebrated as in these stanzas. Nowhere else has love been spiritualised so nobly, with such crystal purity, nowhere else has the synthesis of love and wedlock been more intrinsically fashioned. It is with a quite especial love that I love these _poèmes francs et doux_, for here behind the savage, ecstatic poet, the passionate and strong poet of _Les Villes Tentaculaires_, another poet appears, the simple, quiet, and modest poet, the gentle and kind poet, as we know him in life. Here, on the other side of the poetic ecstasy, we have the noble personality of Verhaeren, in whom we revere, not only a poetic force, but a human perfection as well. By the luminous gate of these frail poems goes the path to his own life.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] 'Le Paradis' (_Les Rythmes Souverains_).

[2] 'Hommage' (_Au Bord de la Route_).

[3] 'C'est la bonne heure où la lampe s'allume' (_Les Heures d'Après-midi_).

[4] 'Avec mes sens, avec mon cœur et mon cerveau'. (_Les Heures d'Après-midi_).

[5] 'Voici quinze ans déjà' (_Les Heures d'Après-midi_).

[6] 'Les baisers morts des défuntes années' (_Ibid._)

[7] 'Vous m'avez dit, tel soir' (_Les Heures d'Après-midi_).

THE ART OF VERHAEREN'S LIFE

Je suis d'accord avec moi-même
Et c'est assez.
É.V.

Camille Lemonnier, the master of Verhaeren's youth, the friend of his prime, at the banquet offered by Belgium to the poet of _Toute la Flandre,_ spoke of their thirty years' friendship, and in a powerful speech expressed a striking idea. 'The time will come,' he said, 'when a man, if he is to appear with any credit before his fellow-men, will have to prove that he has been a man himself'; and then he praised Verhaeren, showing how completely his friend fulfilled this demand of the future, how wholly he had been a man, with the perfection of a great work of art. For whoever would create a great work of art, must himself be a work of art. Whoever would influence his contemporaries, not only as an artist, but morally as well, whoever would shape and raise our life to his own pattern, gives us the right to ask what manner of life his own has been, what the art of his life has been.

In Verhaeren's case, there stands behind the poetic work of art the incomparable masterpiece of a great life, a wonderful, victorious battle for this art. For only a living humanity that had achieved harmony, not supple, ingenious intellectuality, could have arrived at such insight into knowledge. Verhaeren was not intrinsically a harmonious nature; he had, therefore, to make a double effort to transform the chaos of his feeling into a world. He was a restless and an intemperate man who had to tame himself; all the germs of dissipation and debauch were in his nature, all the possibilities of prodigality and self-destruction. Only a life secure in its aims, supported on a strong foundation, could force harmony from the conflicting inclinations he possessed; only a great humanity could compress such heterogeneous forces to one force. At the end and at the beginning of Verhaeren's works, at the end and at the beginning of his life, stands the same great soundness of health. The boy grew out of the healthy Flemish fields and was from his birth gifted with all the advantages of a robust race--and above all with passion. In the years of his youth he gave free rein to this passion for intemperance; he raged himself out in all directions; was intemperate in study, in drinking, in company, in his sexual life--he was intemperate in his art. He strained his strength to its uttermost limit, but he pulled himself together at the last moment, and returned to himself and the health that was his birthright. His harmony of to-day is not a gift of fate, but a prize won from life. At the critical moment Verhaeren had the power to turn round, in order, like Antæus, to recover his strength in the well of rejuvenescence of his native province and in the calm of family life.

Earth called him back, and his native province. Poetically and humanly, his return to Belgium signifies his deliverance, the triumph of the art of his life. Like the ship that he sings in _La Guirlande des Dunes_, the ship that has crossed all the seas of the world, and, though half dashed to pieces, ever comes sailing home again to Flanders, he himself has anchored again in the harbour whence he set sail. His poetry has ended where it began. In his last work he has celebrated the Flanders he sang as a youth, no longer, however, as a provincial poet, but as a national poet. Now he has ranged the past and the future along with the present, now he has sung Flanders too, not in individual poems, but as an entity in one poem. 'Verhaeren élargit de son propre souffle l'horizon de la petite patrie, et, comme le fit Balzac de son ingrate et douce Touraine, il annexe aux plaines flamandes le beau royaume humain de son idéalité et de son art.'[1] He has returned to his own race, to the bosom of Nature, to the eternal resources of health and life.

And now he lives at Caillou-qui-bique, a little hamlet in the Walloon district. Three or four houses stand there, far away from the railway, sequestered in the wood, and yet near the fields; and of these little houses the smallest, with few rooms and a quiet garden, is his. Here he leads the peaceful existence which is necessary for the growth of great work; here he holds solitary communion with Nature, undistracted by the voices of men and the hubbub of great towns; here he dreams his cosmic visions. He has the same healthy and simple food as the country people around him; he goes for early morning walks across the fields, talks to the peasants and the tradesmen of the village as though they were his equals; they tell him of their cares and petty transactions, and he listens to them with that unfeigned interest which he has for every form and variety of life. As he strides across the fields his great poems come into being, his step as it grows quicker and quicker gives them their rhythm, the wind gives them their melody, the distance their outlook. Any one who has been his guest there will recognise many features of the landscape in his poems, many a cottage, many a corner, many people, the little arts of the artisan. But how fugitive, how small everything appears there, everything that in the poem, thanks to the fire of the vision, is glowing, strong, and radiant with the promise of eternity! Verhaeren lives in his Walloon home in the autumn, but in spring and early summer he flees from his illness to the sea--flees from hay-fever. This illness of Verhaeren's has always seemed to me symbolical of his art and of his vital feeling, for it is, if I may say so, an elemental illness that, when pollen flies along the breeze, when spring lies out in sultry heat across the fields, a man's eyes should be filled with tears, his senses irritated, and his head oppressed. This suffering with Nature, this feeling in oneself of the pain which goes before the spring, this torment of the breaking forth of sap, of pressure in the air, has always appeared to me a symbol of the elemental and physical way that Verhaeren feels Nature. For it is as though Nature, which gives him all ecstasies, all its own dark secrets, gives him its own pain as well, as though its web reached into his blood, his nerves, as though the identity between the poet and the world had here attained a higher degree than in other men. In these painful first days of spring he flees to the sea, whose singing winds and sounding waves he loves. There he works rarely, for the restlessness of the sea makes him restless himself; it gives him only dreams, no works.

But Verhaeren is no longer a primitive spirit. He is attached by too many bonds to his contemporaries, too much in contact with all modern striving and creation, to be able to confine himself wholly to a rural existence. There is in him that wonderful double harmony of modern men which lives in brotherly communion with Nature and yet clings to Nature's supreme flower of culture. During the winter Verhaeren lives in Paris, the most alive of all cities; for, though quiet is an inner need of his, he looks on the unrest and noise of great cities as a precious stimulant. Here he receives those impressions of noisy life which, remembered in tranquillity, become poems. He loves to drift in the many-voiced confusion of teeming streets, to receive inspiration from pictures, books, and men. For years, in intimate cohesion with all that is coming into existence and growing in strength, he has followed the most delicate stirrings of the evolution of art, here too in the happiest manner combining detachment with sympathy. For he does not live really in Paris itself, but in Saint-Cloud, in a little flat which is full of pictures and books, and usually of good friends as well. For friendship, living, cheerful comradeship, has always been a necessity of life to him, to him who has the faculty of giving himself so whole-heartedly in friendship; and there is hardly one among the poets of to-day who has so many friends, and so many of the best. Rodin, Maeterlinck, Gide, Mockel, Vielé-Griffin, Signac, Rysselberghe, Rilke, Romain Rolland, all these, who have done great things for our time, are his close friends. With associates of this stamp he passes his life at Paris, carefully avoiding what is called society, aloof from the salons where fame is cultured and the transactions of art are negotiated. His innermost being is simplicity. And all his life long this modesty has made him indifferent to financial success, because he has never desired to rise above the primitive necessities of his life, never known the longing to dazzle and to be envied. While others, goaded by the success of their acquaintances, have been thrown off their balance and have worked themselves to death in fever, he has gone on his way calm and unheeding. He has worked, and let his work grow slowly and organically. And thus fame, which slowly but with irresistible sureness has grown to his stature, has not disturbed him. It is a pleasure to see how he has stood this last and greatest test, how he shoulders his fame stoutly, with joy but without pride. To-day Belgium celebrates in him her greatest poet. In France, where he was held an alien, he has forced esteem. The greatest good has been done, however, by the fact that from foreign races, from the whole of Europe and beyond it, from America, an answer has come to his great reputation, that the little enmities of the nations have called a halt before his work, and above all that it is the younger generation who are to-day enlisted under the banner of his enthusiasm. Inexhaustible has been his interest in young men; perhaps he has welcomed and encouraged every beginner with only too much kindness. For his delight in the art of others is inexhaustible; his infinite feeling of identity makes him in the highest sense impartial and enthusiastic, and it is a delight to see him stand in front of great works and to learn enthusiasm from him.

This apparent contrast between the art of his poetry and the art of his life is at first strange and surprising. For behind so passionate a poet one would never suspect so quiet and kind a man. Only his face--which has already allured so many painters and sculptors--speaks of passions and ecstasies; that brow across which, under locks growing grey, the deep lines graven by the crisis of his youth run like the furrows of a field. The pendent moustache (like that of Nietzsche) lends his face power and earnestness. The salient cheek-bones and sharply chiselled lines betray his peasant extraction, which is perhaps still more strongly accentuated by his gait, that hard, strikingly rhythmical, bowed gait which reminds one of the plougher treading in hard toil and in a bent posture over newly turned turf, his gait whose rhythm reminds one again and again of his poetry. But goodness shines in his eyes, which--_couleur de mer_--as though new-born after all the lassitude of the years of fever, are bright and fresh with life; there is goodness, too, in the hearty spontaneity of his gestures. In his face the first impression is strength; the second, that this strength is tempered with kindness. Like every noble face, it is, when translated into sculpture, the idea of his life.

Some day many people will speak of Verhaeren's art; many love it to-day already. But I believe that nobody will be able to love the poet in the same degree as many to-day love the art of his life, this unique personality, as people love something that can be lost and never restored. If one at first seems to find a discord between the modesty, gentleness, and heartiness of his humanity, and the wildness, heroism, and hardness of his art, one at last discovers their _unity in experience, in feeling_. When one closes the door after a conversation with him, or one of his books after the last page, the prevailing impression is the same: enhanced joy in life, enthusiasm, confidence in the world, an intensified feeling of pleasure which shows life in purer, kindlier, and more magnificent forms. This idealising effect of life goes out equally strong from his person and from his work; every sort of contact with him, with the poet, with the man, seems to enrich life, and teaches one to apply to him in his turn the appreciation he always so readily had for all the gifts of life--gratitude ever renewed and boundlessly intensified in passion.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Vielé-Griffin, biographical note to Mockel's _Verhaeren._

THE EUROPEAN IMPORTANCE OF HIS WORK

Futur, vous m'exaltez comme autrefois mon Dieu!
É.V., 'La Prière.'

The last force of everybody, the force which finally decides the effect, which alone and first of all is able to strain his work or his activity to the highest possibility, is the feeling of responsibility. To be responsible, and to feel that one is responsible, is equivalent to looking at one's whole life as a vast debt, which one is bound to strive with all one's strength to pay off; is equivalent to surveying one's momentary task on earth in the whole range of its significance, importance, and periphery, in order then to raise one's own inherent possibilities and capacities to their most complete mastery. For most people this earthly task is outwardly restricted in an office, in a profession, in the fixed round of some activity. With an artist, on the other hand, it is what one might call an infinite dimension which can never be attained; his task is therefore an unlimited, an eternal longing, a longing that never weakens. Since his duty can really only be to express himself with the greatest possible perfection, this responsibility coincides with the demand that he should bring his life, and with his life his talent, to the highest perfection, that he should, in Goethe's sense, 'expand his narrow existence to eternity.' The artist is responsible for his talent, because it is his task to express it. Now the higher the idea of art is understood, the more art feels its task to be the task of bringing the life of the universe into harmony, so much the more must the feeling of responsibility be intensified in a creative mind.