Chapter VII: Part 7

And then, as they look and look, they fall into an hypnotic trance and the clock of the world goes back some five hundred years. Pauline has become Paola, and Leonhardt, Lionardo, while the racy Viennese idiom is turned to classical blank verse. It is early dawn in the studio of the Master Remigio, and Remigio is away on his travels. Lionardo arrogates the claims of love on the strength of the favours which he has just enjoyed. Paola spurns him as the mere mechanical toy of her passion. She loves and has always loved her husband. That this is no mere pose is apparent from the fact that on the sudden entrance of the husband she immediately elucidates the situation. Remigio, however, with a sublime tolerance, perhaps more typical of the husband in Mr. Shaw's _Irrational Knot_ than of a hot-blooded Italian, pardons Paola on the general principles of twentieth-century philosophy. Lionardo, however, piqued and insulted as being regarded as

"The glass, the poor mean glass
From which a child drank a forbidden draught,
The merest pitiful tool of a chance and fate,"

vows vengeance on Remigio. Paola anticipates this vengeance by killing Lionardo on the spot with a dagger, thus exemplifying the pose of the picture. Remigio rises to the occasion and seizes on this splendidly tragic attitude to complete an unfinished portrait of this loyalest of wives.

And then they awaken from their trance. But the magnet of destiny draws them inexorably. Pauline grants the assignation, with an air, however, of mystic fatality, which shows only too well with what precision the present must once again mirror the past.

But perhaps the most sustained and elaborated specimen of our author's method is the ironic tragedy of the French Revolution, _The Green Cockatoo._ The "Green Cockatoo" is an underground tavern where brilliant, if disreputable, actors give, for the edification of their aristocratic audiences, impromptu representations of crime and vice.

Henri, the star-man, moreover, has just married the actress Léocadie, not for the sake of paradox, but in all seriousness. When his turn comes, he rushes on to the stage shouting out that he found his wife, Léocadie, with her lover the duke, and killed her. Such a calamity being not apparently _primâ facie_ improbable, even the manager is almost as alarmed as the audience, till he realises that the whole thing is but an histrionic _tour de force_. And then, as the play progresses, the atmosphere becomes more and more lurid with impending gloom. Jest and reality intermingle in the subtlest of ironies. It is part of the entertainment that the ragamuffins should lavish on their patrons the freest of insults. But is there not a paradox within the paradox, when one remembers that the Bastille has fallen that very day? The various types, moreover, of an aristocracy exhibiting the levity of people who are shortly going to be hanged are delightfully portrayed--the _viveur_, "for whom every day is lost in which he has not captured a woman or killed a man," the pretty young noble whose corrupt flirtation is so deftly adumbrated, and the lascivious _grande dame_, who, in spite of her husband's anxiety, is very far from shocked at these spectacular novelties. And then Henri snaps up the truth from the demeanour of the manager and his colleagues. The Duke comes on to the stage and the actor then gives yet another representation of the avenging husband--and this time he surpasses himself, for he is but acting the truth.

Less sensational, but of equal psychological grimness, is the play _The Mate_, which is in the same series as the _Green Cockatoo_. The theme is the pathetic irony of the illusion of a middle-aged professor, who gives an almost paternal benediction to what he fondly imagines to be the grand passion of his young and temperamental wife. When, consequently, his wife dies suddenly, the husband is prepared quite honestly to condole with the lover, for after all has he not a right to be pitied even more than himself? When, therefore, he learns from his young colleague that he has just become engaged to another girl with whom he has been in love for some time his righteous indignation is unbounded.

"I would have raised you from the ground if you had
been broken by grief. I would have gone with you to her
grave, if the woman who is lying over there had been
your love; but you have turned her into your wanton,
and you have filled this house with lies and foulness
right up to the roof till it makes me sick--and that's
why--that's why, yes, that's why I'm going to kick you
out."

But there is an anti-climax within an anti-climax, for the man learns from a mutual woman friend of the dead woman and of himself, that the imagined _grande passion_ had been even from the standpoint of the lady nothing more or less than a miserable trumpery adventure.

Reverting now to Schnitzler's longer plays, some mention should be made of _Komtesse Mizzi_, _Der Junge Medardus_, and, above all, _Das Weites Land_.

_Komtesse Mizzi_, entitled, appropriately enough, "A Family Day" is in form a one-acter, though of sufficient length and substance to have obtained separate publication. There is little, if any, action. The play is based on character, dialogue, and situation. Yet it possesses distinct psychological titillation in its presentation of a daughter who takes a filial interest in her father's "actress-mistress," and who is sensible enough, aristocrat though she is, to meet the lady herself with all friendliness, and chat with her as woman to woman without the slightest affectation. This feminine freemasonry, however, is perhaps explained by the fact that the countess herself has lived her own life, to such good effect that she is the mother of a grown-up boy by her father's best friend, Prince Egon. When, consequently, the prince introduces the boy as his own natural child by an unknown mother, the atmosphere becomes somewhat rare. At first highly irritated, she treats with frigid indifference the frank exuberant youth, who divines the truth with instinctive intuition, only, however, shortly afterwards to consent to marry the prince, and thus become the official stepmother of her own long-lost child. The racy worldly optimism of this play is particularly characteristic of the essentially benevolent malice of the Schnitzlerian cynicism.

Of a totally different order is _Der Junge Medardus_, a long play of historical patriotism, specially written for the respectable and official Burg Theater of Vienna. It might seem indeed at first sight that Schnitzler, the refined, ultra-modern analyst, would be somewhat out of his element amid all the blood and thunder of the Napoleonic campaigns, which _primâ facie_ offer but small scope for psychological subtleties. The _tour de force_ consequently becomes all the more creditable when the author, in spite of all his trappings of patriotic melodrama, manages successfully to execute his own favourite tricks. The canvas on which this drama is portrayed is so vast as to render any synopsis necessarily inadequate. The idyll, however, and double suicide of the young French prince Franz and the bourgeois girl Agatha, is one of the purest and sweetest love episodes which Schnitzler has ever written. But it is Agatha's brother, the young, brave, and picturesque Medardus, who provides the most precious examples of recherche psychology. The suicide of the dead couple, Agatha and Franz, had been occasioned by the refusal of Franz's family to consent to the marriage. When, consequently, Franz's sister, Helene (a character somewhat analogous to Mathilde de la Môle in Stendhal's _Le Rouge et le Noir_) wishes to put flowers on the graves of the dead pair, Medardus refuses to allow her. Helene has him challenged by her suitor, but Medardus emerges triumphantly from the duel. Anxious to carry the war into the enemy's camp, and to redress the balance of the family account, he succeeds, by the dashing conquest of the most perilous difficulties, in becoming the lover of Helene, with the eventual object of rousing the whole household and flaunting to her own family the haughty girl's dishonour. Helene, however, is erratic in her favours. Medardus, like Julien, is scorched by his own fire. The ending, moreover, of the play, though extremely effective theatrically, strikes us from the psychological standpoint as distinctly false. Helene and Medardus both plot to assassinate Napoleon. Hearing that Helene is Napoleon's mistress, Medardus kills her instead of Napoleon. So far, so good. But when our quixotic hero, when offered a free pardon on the sole condition that he undertakes to make no further attempt against Napoleon's life, obstinately refuses to give the required word, one can only say that he is observing the etiquette neither of melodrama nor even of life, but solely of patriotic tragedy.

But of all the longer plays of Schnitzler, the best and most distinctive in that erotic "General Post" entitled _Das Weite Land_ (The Wide Country). This drama, which is the only full-dress drawing-room comedy which Schnitzler has written, belongs to what we have already designated as the "slice of life" school. It depends for its convincingness neither on any particularly drastic situation nor on the disproportionate merit of any individual act. The author simply takes a group of representative modern people, rich, intellectual, and energetic, and shows the respective crossings and intertwinings of their various lives. The complexity of the intrigue is overwhelming, not to say bewildering, for practically every character, from the prolific Aigon to the virginal Erna, and from the active business man Friedrich to his polyandrous wife Genia, is subject to one or more erotic moods, with whose more or less simultaneous conjugation in the past, present, and future tenses the play specifically deals. Though, too, all the characters lead emotional lives, they deserve credit in that they none of them wear their souls upon their sleeves, or carry their temperaments in their pockets with the ostentatious affectation of those Sudermannic personages who never for a moment lose the consciousness that they are living in an atmosphere of "high problem." For the people with whom we have now to deal are so occupied with the concrete acts of their actual lives that they have little time to waste in mere airy generalities. When consequently they do philosophise, shortly, crisply, and in the light of personal experience, they are for that very reason all the more convincing. The whole _motif_ of this play, where the spirits of Congreve and Henry James seem to amalgamate in so strange but yet so harmonious a compound, is well crystallised in the following quotation: "Love and deception--faithfulness and unfaithfulness--adoration for one woman and desire for another woman or several others, yes, my good Hofreiter, the soul is a wide country."

As can be seen from these tolerant words, which have all the greater force in that the man who speaks them is at any rate temporarily more or less in love with his friend's wife, the mood in which the problem of promiscuity is treated is less one of indignant satire than of an ironic charity, which, while finding the complications at once comic and tragic, yet assigns to every phase of love from the kiss Friedrich gave to Erna three thousand metres above the sea, to Otto's nocturnal escalades of Genia's room, its own specific emotional value, even though the final verdict is to be found in the words of the middle-aged Friedrich, refusing to elope with the twenty-year-old Erna: "Everything's an illusion!"

From the point of view, also, of concentrated crispness of dialogue and characterisation, Schnitzler has never achieved anything better than this play. How telling in particular is the dialogue between the mutually unfaithful spouses, Genia and Friedrich. The husband is interrogating his wife about a young Russian virtuoso who had just blown out his brains.

GENIA. He was not my lover. I'm sorry to say he was not
my lover. Is that enough for you!

Or take again the passage between Friedrich and Genia after Friedrich has just fought a fatal duel with the twenty-five year old naval officer, Otto.

GENIA. But why? If you cared the least bit about
me--if it had been a case of hate--if it had been
jealousy--love--

FRED. No--I feel at any rate damned little of all that.
But no man likes to be made an ass of.

In his new asexual play, _Professor Bernhardi_, Schnitzler strikes out an entirely new line, leaves that light, airy sphere which he had made so peculiarly his own, and embarks into the grim realms of pure problem. The play is an avowed and deliberate tract in the manner of Granville Barker, Galsworthy, or Brieux. Yet however devoid it may be of those qualities which one is accustomed to label Schnitzlerian, it is the most earnest, the most ethical, the most convincing of all his plays.

Put shortly, the piece deals with an "affaire Dreyfus" in the medical profession. Professor Bernhardi, a great Jewish doctor, has in the face of numerous obstacles succeeded in building up the prosperity of a new hospital, the Elisabethinum, treating mainly Catholic patients, but supported mainly by Jewish funds. A substantial percentage of the staff are Jewish, and it is instructive to observe how almost instinctively the Jews and Catholics range themselves into two camps. In the first act a Catholic girl is dying of septic poisoning as the result of some outside doctor's clumsy attempt to help her to escape the consequences of her own indiscretion. The patient herself, however, in a state of blissful delirium, confident of recovery, and expecting the speedy advent of her lover, is deriving the maximum of enjoyment out of the few minutes she has yet to live. Under these circumstances there arrives a Catholic priest, sent for, not by the girl but by a nurse, with the object of administering the last sacrament. Out of sheer humanity and medical conscientiousness, Professor Bernhardi is reluctant to have his patient's last hours marred by the realisation of her death and the shattering of her happy dream. The Catholic priest is insistent. The Professor is politely firm. There is an animated dialogue in the course of which the Professor touches the priest very lightly on the shoulder, though there is nothing in the nature of an assault. In the meanwhile the patient dies comfortably. The Clerical and Anti-semitic parties exploit the incident with inaccurate though artistic journalistic embellishments. There is a tremendous uproar. The Governors of the hospital threaten to resign. Under pressure from his friends, the Professor is willing to tender, not indeed an abject apology, but a polite explanation. The Clerical party thereupon blackmail him by threatening to raise the question in Parliament, if he does not secure the election to a vacant post on the hospital staff of a Catholic candidate who is on the one hand the protégé of the cousin of their leader, and on the other hand incompetent. Refusing to be a party to the job, Bernhardi secures the election to the post of a man who is both competent and a Jew. Bernhardi, moreover, relies on the personal assurance of Flint, the Minister for Education and Public Worship, that he will help him by his support in Parliament. When, however, matters came to a head, Flint, scenting in the middle of his speech with the divine flair of the true politician the actual state of public opinion, throws Bernhardi to the wolves and himself suggests a prosecution for sacrilege. The Executive Board of the hospital are divided as to what course they shall pursue. Shall they pass a vote of confidence in their chief, or, on the other hand, suspend him until the determination of the proceedings. By a fine stroke of irony Bernhardi realises that he will be in a minority through the vote of the very Jew through the conscientious insistence on whose election to the Board he had lost the proffered opportunity of bribing the Clericals and squaring the whole matter. He consequently resigns from the Board. The trial takes place. The priest himself denies that there was any assault. Bernhardi, however, is defended by a converted Jew, who, sinking the advocate in the Catholic, conducts the case so lukewarmly that Bernhardi is convicted on the perjured evidence of a vindictive colleague and a hysterical lay sister. During the trial the priest is convinced that Bernhardi was morally right in the course which he adopted, but, as he feels subsequently driven as a matter of conscience to inform him, refrained out of sheer religious duty from telling the truth. Bernhardi serves his term and becomes, much to his disgust, a political hero and a popular martyr. The hysterical lay sister eventually confesses her perjury and Bernhardi is finally righted, though the final note in the play is that Bernhardi was really rather a fool to have involved himself in such grave consequences for the mere sake of a quixotic principle. Some portion possibly of the effect produced by this play depends on the full appreciation of its personal allusions and some knowledge of the circumstances on which it was substantially founded. Nevertheless, present symptoms would appear to indicate that this play will have especial interest, not only to Jews and Anti-Semites, but to impartial students of ethics and sociology. Though, moreover, "pure problem" and studded with long didactical speeches, the dramatic interest is well sustained, at any rate up to the fourth Act, while the different characters are distinguished with the sharpest precision. We would refer in particular to Flint, that delightfully bland opportunist, that benevolently unscrupulous politician, that perfectly conscientious hypocrite who honestly believes that there is a higher and larger duty both in politics and in life than the observance of one's own principles and the keeping of one's given word.

Schnitzler, moreover, is not only a dramatist, but a writer of short stories and novels, which stand on practically as high a level as his plays. Like De Maupassant, Schnitzler has only one real _motif_. Unlike De Maupassant, however, it is the psychological complications in which he is chiefly interested. In further contrast, his short stories lack that inevitable precision of climax which is the chief mark of the French author. Yet perhaps it is for this very reason that, with their picturesque atmosphere and pathetic simplicity, they obtain an added reality. In the almost clinical minuteness of his psychology, explicable from the fact that he was once a doctor, he is reminiscent of Mr. Henry James, of a Mr. James, however, who writes without preciosity about individuals linked with ordinary human beings by very much more than just some shred of normality. Among his earlier short stories we would mention in particular _Die Frau der Weisen, Das neue Lied_, and the hypnotic fantasia at the beginning of _Dämmerseelen_.

The more recent series, _Masken und Wunder_, also possesses a well-merited claim to recognition for its series of studies, some modern, some symbolical, yet all written with that almost intangible softness, combined at the same time with a certain neat strength, which is the essential mark of Schnitzler's literary style. One of the most striking is the telepathic romance, _Redegonda's Diary_; but in our view the best short story in the whole book is that Maupassantian _Death of the Bachelor_ where the three intimate friends of a dead man are summoned to his bedside, only to find their friend dead and to read in a letter addressed to them all, of the three separate yet identical domestic reasons which were responsible for their participation in this superb piece of posthumous buffoonery.

Far more significant than any of his short stories is Schnitzler's comparatively recent novel, _Der Weg ins Freie_ (The Road to the Open), a novel which both by its actual success and its intrinsic merit, stands out conspicuously among modern German literature. This book is an admirable example of what one can perhaps call the "slice of life" novel. Actual plot in the stereotyped sense of the term it has none. Georg von Wergenthin, a young aristocratic Viennese dilettante, has, in the course of an active emotional life, a fairly serious _liaison_ with Anna Rosner, a music-mistress belonging to a good Jewish set. The child to which Anna and Georg had both been looking forward, though in somewhat varying degrees, dies. Georg accepts a post of conductor in a German town. Anna reassumes the normal tenor of her spinster life. Finis. Neither conventional marriage nor even more conventional suicide, but just life, a slice of sheer probable real convincing life. But the book is far more than the history of Anna, and far more than the history of Georg, even though it would appear at first sight that the enumeration of Georg's emotions tends somewhat to swamp the four hundred and sixty pages of this novel which yet reads so shortly. For Georg's soul is a mirror which reflects not only itself but a considerable number of the more interesting characters of a specific modern Viennese set. And the lives of Anna and Georg touch the lives of numerous other persons, persons too who, at any rate, give the impression of being no mere characters in novels, but of having been honourably plagiarised, and without suffering either caricature or idealisation in the process, from the pages of the book of life itself. And all these various lives are followed up and adumbrated and described at greater or lesser detail. Of course they have nothing to do with the story of Georg von Wergenthin. But they play an important part in the life of Georg von Wergenthin, just as he plays a more or less important part in their existence. And though of course Georg is the nominal hero of the book, it is the modern Jewish set with, of course, its Gentile appanages which constitutes the real subject-matter. And how vivid and interesting on their merits are all these characters--old Ehrenberg, the Jewish millionaire, with his delightful habit of talking Yiddish before smart company, specially to annoy his snobbish son Oskar; Oskar himself, who, on being caught by his father in the flagrant act of posing as a Catholic in front of a church and given a box on the ears by way of reproof, makes an abortive attempt to commit hara-kiri with a revolver; Else Ehrenberg, the temperamental, but unmarried sister of Oskar; Heinrich Bermann, the brilliant self-centred author, with his grand passion for his faithless actress in the foreign town; Leo Golowski, the enthusiastic Zionist; Therese Golowski, the Socialist agitatress, with her temporary trip with that fascinating hussar-officer, Demeter Stanzides; Winternitz, the poet, with his not very _soigné_ hands and his naïf mania for reciting his own erotic verses; Dr. Stauber, the benevolent modern of the last generation; Anna herself, with her soft wistfulness and her essential dignity; Sissy Wyner, with her high wanton spirits and pretty English accent; and of course Georg himself, Georg the aristocrat, Georg the _grand amoureux_, Georg the composer, Georg the dilettante, Georg the drifter, Georg the ineffectual.

In the technique of this novel Schnitzler marks what we suggest to be a new departure, by the insertion of substantial slabs of past life into the analysis of his hero's thoughts, a process which by a tremendous economy of space and time thus describes simultaneously the inner workings of Georg's mind, and simultaneously narrates important pieces of antecedent history which have no place in the official action of the novel.

Some tribute, also, must be paid to the style, which is at times soft and sweet, at times light and crisp, yet always lucid, always individual, and always possessed of that gracefulness which is so rare a quality in German prose literature.

To revert to Schnitzler the dramatist, what are his chief claims, his chief excellences, his chief defects? It seems to us that the essence of his merit lies in the fact that, speaking broadly, he handles problems neither as ends in themselves, as do the more advanced of our own dramatists, nor yet, like Sudermann, as mere pegs on which to hang violently theatrical stage effects. Some problem may constitute the centre of most of his plays; yet, with a few exceptions, this problem is not presented too nakedly or without sufficient relief. Each problem is bathed in an artistic atmosphere, and each character in the picture limned with the most subtle psychology. It is true that, as has already been pointed out, many of the acts in his early longer dramas exhibit too strong a tendency to form self-independent pictures; yet it is this defect which forms the chief charm of his one-acters. It is true that nearly all his characters are Bohemian--artists, flâneurs, actresses, journalists, doctors, painters--yet each author creates, as of right, the population of his own individual world; and is it not rather a claim to glory to have attained such heights of dramatic celebrity without having written more than one single play specifically devoted to fashionable life? It is true that the ethics of these plays, with their chronic and inevitable intrigues, may strike the English mind as somewhat unusual; yet Schnitzler enjoys the reputation of being the most brilliant and accurate portrayer of contemporary Viennese life. It is, moreover, in the nature of all problem plays that they should be pieces of special pleading, where the other side is allowed just so much of a hearing as will not permit of its convincing. After all, from the standpoint of dramatic art, that which counts is not the ethics, but the presentation of the problem.

Yet, with all his subtlety and all his problems, he is never heavy. Vienna stands intellectually nearer to Paris than to Berlin, so that the Teutonic introspection and sentimentalism are touched with a Gallic sprightliness and a Gallic grace. No dramatist has written tragedy with so light a hand, or comedy with so ironically pathetic a smile, as has Arthur Schnitzler.

[Footnote 1: "Der Freiwild" (sic); correct title is "Freiwild"--transcriber's note (M.D.)]

[Footnote 2: "Rohring" is "Rönning" in the original play--transcriber's note (M.D.)]

ÉMILE VERHAEREN

"Mais les plus exaltés se dirent dans leur cœur,
'Partons quand même avec notre âme inassouvie
Puisque la force et que la vie
Sont au delà des vérités et des erreurs.'"

"Vivre c'est prendre et donner avec liesse.
Toute la vie est dans l'essor."

The above principles, prefixed to the _Forces Tumultueuses_ of Émile Verhaeren, are well fitted to supply the key to a man who both in thought and in technique is indisputably the most modern and the most massive force in the whole of contemporary European poetry. For Verhaeren is no narrow specialist with an outlook limited to some particular sphere. He is the singer of the whole fulness of modern European life as a whole, with its clashes, its complexities, its agonies and its tensions, its deserted country-sides and its pullulating metropoles, its armaments and its Armageddons, its brothels, cathedrals, laboratories and Stock Exchanges, its sciences and its sensualities, its arts, philosophies and aspirations. His muse is no serene nymph piping delicately on some Parnassian slope, but an extremely tumultuous Amazon, at once primeval, and ultra-modern, chanting the pæan of battle, steeped in the wine of victory, and suckling the supermen of the future on her universal breasts. No muse in the whole of literature is more highly charged with vitality, and no reader is qualified to enjoy her unless he, too, is charged to the maximum with "the red tonic liquor of a harsh and formidable reality."

Let us then glance first at the early _milieu_ of a man who combines the exultant fury of the lyric with the wide outlook of the cosmopolitan sociologist, and who can incidentally beat both Baudelaire and Wordsworth at their own respective game.

Verhaeren was born on the 21st May 1855 at St. Amand in Belgium, one of the most strenuous countries in the modern world, which, it is interesting to remember, holds the European record for sensualism, alcoholism, and clericalism. St. Amand is situated on the broad plains of the Scheldt, and it is not unimportant to lay some stress on the Flemish ancestry and environment of a man who, though he wrote in the French language, is more Germanic than Gallic in his temperament, and who represents in the sphere of verse perhaps the nearest analogue to the crass majesty and red sensuality of Rubens. His early country upbringing, moreover, is responsible for that _joie de vivre_ in the fields, and, above all, the wind, the symbolisation of fury and rebellion which was to inspire those nature lyrics, many of which are nearly as great, though by no means as interesting, as his cosmic and metropolitan poems.

Verhaeren was originally intended for the priest-hood, and was educated at the Jesuit school of St. Barbe in Ghent, where he had for his schoolfellows such men as Maeterlinck, Van Lenbergh, and Rodenbach. Leaving school, he went to Brussels, where he felt "his multiplied heart grow and become exalted" with the roaring intensity of metropolitan life. All thoughts of a holy life were now abandoned, and in 1881 the poet was called to the Bar. His chief interests, however, were literature, Socialism, and Brussels life. Joining the Young Belgian group under the leadership of Edmond Picard, he became a frequent contributor to _L'Art Moderne_ and _La Jeune Belgique_. Politically he was a Socialist, associated himself with the Socialist leader Vandervelde, and was one of the founders of the philanthropic _Maison des Peuples_.

But it was in the poetic representation of "the monstrous scenery of the crass Flemish Kermesses" (_Les Flamands_, 1883) that Verhaeren gave the first vent to his violent virility. In this work a Rubensesque and Rabelaisian subject-matter is treated with poetic exaltation by a man who found in the great national festivals of past and present Flanders, with

"Des chocs de corps, des heurts de chair et des bourrades,
Des lèchements subis dans un etreignement,"

the same patriotic inspiration which Mr. G. K. Chesterton has discovered in that beer; into which he has, as it were, so successfully transubstantiated the whole national spirit of our English body-politic. Thus our poet wallows defiantly in the black roughness of his Flemish peasants:

"Les voici noirs, grossiers, bestiaux--ils sont tels,"

or casts regretful glances towards the healthier grossness of the artists of old Flanders:

"Vos pinceaux ignoraient le fard,
Les indécences, les malices,
Et les sous-entendus de vice
Qui clignent l'œil dans notre art,
Vos femmes suaient la santé,
Rouge de sang blanche de graisse,
Elles menaient les ruts en laisse
Avec des airs de royauté."

But these poems are far more than mere erotic or gastronomic diversions. Somewhat turgid, no doubt, with red health, they yet possess the same sweep and the same impetus with which Aristophanes himself once gave expression to the riotous fecundity of the earth and the Dionysian forces of nature.

In _Les Moines_ (_The Monks_, 1886), Verhaeren treats a subject-matter which _primâ facie_ would seem to denote the abandonment of the cult of the flesh for the cult of the spirit. Yet such veneration as the poet may ever have possessed for the Catholic creed was æsthetic rather than religious. He penetrates, it is true, into the "enormous shrine where the Middle Ages slumber," but it is less to worship than to describe in a rigid, but majestic prosody "the grand survivors of the Christian world"--the

"Moines venus vers nous des horizons gothiques
Mais dont l'âme mais dont l'esprit meurt de demain."

Psychologically the interesting feature of this work is that, so far from being in any way obsessed by any Chestertonian nostalgia for a dead and mediæval past, the poet anticipates with all apparent serenity the day when "the final blasphemy will have transpierced God like to an immense sword." Even, moreover, in these, as it were, antiquarian descriptions the poet emphasizes the contrast between the visionary life of the cloister (a life, albeit, where occasionally

"Un repas colossal souffle fourneaux béants
Éructant vers l'azur sa flamme et sa fumée")

and the real life of the outside world, and seems by no means unsympathetic to the rebellious monk who requires

"Le ciel torride et le désert et l'air des monts
Et les tentations en rut des vieux demons
Agaçant de leurs doigts la chair enflée des gouges
En lui brûlant la lèvre avec de grands seins rouges."

Yet both _Les Flamands_ and _Les Moines_ seem quite innocent and playful in comparison with the great black trinity of _Les Soirs, Les Débâcles_, and _Les Flambeaux Noirs_ (1887-1891), in which Verhaeren gave expression to the mental and physical crisis which for a time seemed to imperil both his life and his reason. In these poems, many of which were written in London and its

"Gares de suie et de fumée ou du gaz pleure
Ses spleens d'argent lointain vers des chemins d'éclair,
Où des bêtes d'ennui baillent à l'heure
Dolente immensément qui tinte à Westminster,"

Verhaeren leaves the objective mood of his earlier poems to clothe his soul in the Nessian shirt of the most poisonous subjectivity. But true tragic dignity stalks in the very extremity of his agony. Compared, indeed, with the gigantic bass of this unhappiness, black, definite, drastic, what is the grey wistfulness of Verlaine but the hysterical falsetto of a whining child? Verhaeren, on the other hand, with the ecstatic defiance of a kind of Nietzschean Prometheus sets himself to plumb the lowest abysses of despair, and himself eggs on the eagles of torment to devour every shred of his own soul. With "brutal teeth of fire and madness he bites and outrages his own heart within him," lashes himself in his thought and in his blood, in his effort, in his hope, in his blasphemy:

"Et quand lève le soir son calice de lie
Je me le verse à boire insatiablement."

Or take again the sinister gusto of the passage:

"Aurai-j'enfin l'atroce joie
De voir nuits après nuits comme une proie
La démence attaquer mon cerveau,
Et détraque, malade, sorti de la prison
Et des travaux forcés de sa raison
D'appareiller vers un lointain nouveau?"

The technique of these poems is worthy of some study. Having little use for the orthodox alexandrine (except in a few instances like _Le Gel_, where the icy massiveness of the blocked couplets faithfully mirrors the polar desolation of his own soul), he fashions his own metres to incarnate his own moods. Such a refrain as "Ce minuit dallé d'ennui" will boom out again and again the dull monotonous clank of his own weary spirit. At other times the grinding engines of a disorganised mind whirr and jar with spasmodic feverishness:

"C'est l'heure où les hallucinés,
Les gueux, et les déracinés
Dressent leur orgueil dans la vie."

Note, too, the ghastly effectiveness of the internal rhymes. Is not, for instance, such a line as

"Les chiens du noir espoir out aboyé ce soir"

a triple series, as it were, of metrical mirrors, where the bitten mind barks savagely back at its own mad image. Or listen to the Titanic thud of such a line as

"La Mer choque ses blocs de flots contre les rocs,"

or the silent smash of

"Dites suis-je seul avec mon âme,
Mon âme hélas maison d'ébène
Où s'est fendu sans bruit un soir
Le grand miroir de mon espoir?"

At times transcending the blank negativity of despair, the poet will coquet positively with his own madness, as he wanders "hallucinated in the forest of numbers," or wishes to march towards "madness and her suns, her white suns of moonlight in the great weird noon, and her distant echoes bitten by dins and barkings and full of vermilion hounds." Or abandoning the more specific formulation of his own emotions, he will give vent to his feelings by letting his brain dance upon the lurid boards of some _macabre_ theme. The little poem, _La Tête_, is dank with all the smooth bloodiness of the guillotine, while the _Dame en Noir_, with the ghastly rhymes and assurances of its refrain, is swathed in a black pathos, in comparison with which the most lurid horrors of Baudelaire appear the mere artificial extravagances of a perverse mind.

As we have already seen, the blackness of the trilogy which we have just considered was no mere dabbling in morbidity, but the genuine expression of a genuine unhappiness. In, however, _Les Apparus dans Mes Chemins, Les Vignes de Ma Muraille_ the storm gradually exhausts itself, and is replaced by a more serene and confident mood. Contrast, for instance, with the drastic violence of _Les Débâcles_ the jaded weariness of such a lyric as _Celui de la Fatigue_, where the poet sings of an "ardour broken on the whirling staircase of the infinite," or of such a passage as

"Je m'habille des loques de mes jours
Et le bâton de mon orgueil il plie,
Mes pieds dites comme ils sont lourds
De me porter de me trainer toujours
Au long de siècle de ma vie."

And as a complete antithesis, again, to the black bloodiness of such poems as _La Tête_ or _Un Meurtre,_ take the white suavity of _St. Georges_:

"Il vient un bel ambassadeur
Du pays blanc illuminé de marbres
Où dans les pares au bords des mers sur l'arbre
De la bonté suavement croit la douceur."

But this serenity marked rather a respite in Verhaeren's development than a real abatement of his poetic fury. With the furnaces of his mind recharged to their maximum capacity with blazing health, he starts to race his muse over the main lines of the modern civilisation, which lead from _The Hallucinated Country-sides_ to _The Tentacular Towns_. Though written at different times, these two sets of poems constitute the contrasting halves of a complete whole, and were published together in 1895 with two prologues, _La Ville_ and _La Plaine_. The prologues, in particular, well illustrate the new rushing irregular prosody, specially forged for the purpose of hammering out that white-hot steel of the modern civilisation which enmeshes in its fabric all the helpless flotsam of the agricultural economy. The academic harmony of the alexandrine is here abandoned. The rhymes crash out at lesser and greater intervals as they march along on feet that range from the quick spasm of some dissyllabic line to the spondaic emphasis of a full-length alexandrine.

In _Les Campagnes Hallucinés_ itself the prosody is no doubt simpler, as the poet describes the ruined and pestilential country with its fevers, its sins, its beggars, its pilgrims, its diseases, insanities and débauchés, and the immense monotony of its interminable plains.

"C'est la plaine, la plaine blême
Interminablement toujours la même,
Par au-dessus, souvent
Rage si forte le vent,
Que l'on dirait le ciel fendu
Au coup de boxe
De l'équinoxe;
Novembre hurle ainsi qu'un loup
Lamentable par le soir fou."

Perhaps, however, the most sinister poems in _Les Campagnes_ are the _Chansons de Fou_, with their naïf absurdities and their intuitive reason, where the rhymes laugh and clatter like rows of grinning teeth, and the almost Dureresque _Le Fléau_, from its exordium,

"La Mort a bu du sang
Au cabaret des Trois Cercueils
La Mort a mis sur le comptoir
Un écu noir,
'C'est pour les cierges, pour les deuils,'"

down to its ghastly climax,

"Et les foules suivaient vers n'importent où,
Le grand squelette aimable et soûl
Qui trimballait sur son cheval bonhomme
L'épouvante de sa personne,
Jusqu'aux lointains de peur et de panique,
Sans éprouver l'horreur de son odeur,
Ni voir danser, sous un repli de sa tunique,
Le trousseau de vers blancs qui lui têtaient le cœur."

The final significance of _Les Campagnes_ lies in its last poem, _Le Départ_, describing the desertion by the whole country-side of that dead mournful plain which is being eaten up by the town.

"Tandis qu'au loin là-bas
Sous les cieux lourds fuligineux et gras,
Avec son front comme un Thabor,
Avec ses sugoirs noirs et ses rouges haleines
Hallucinant et attirant les gens des plaines,
C'est la ville que le jour plombe et que la nuit éclaire
La ville en plâtre, en stuc, en bois, en marbre, en fer, en or--
Tentaculaire."

It is, however, in _Les Villes Tentaculaires_, where the fever and indefatigable aspiration of the town are described with a Zolaesque exaltation, that the originality of the departure initiated by Verhaeren is more specifically manifested. For he now boldly stalks forward as the pioneer realist in European poetry. Disregarding alike the orthodox subject-matter and the orthodox terminology of official poesy, he seeks and finds his inspiration in the vast forces at work in actual modern life. The realism of Verhaeren, in somewhat pointed contrast to the realism of some of our own patriotic or fashionable poets, even though such expressions as "cabs" and "steamers" are to be found in his work in the original English, depends for its æsthetic value neither on the swing of its slang nor the egregiousness of its expletives. The hot blast of his sincerity sweeps away at once any impeachment of mere dabbling in the ultra-modern. His diction is frequently brusque, and even red, if we may borrow his favourite colour, if not his favourite adjective; yet it never loses the dignity of authentic poetry. For the poet would seem to have been personally susceptible, in the highest degree, to that peculiar multiplication of vitality and intensification of emotion which is the essential effect produced by big metropoles upon certain temperaments. And this cerebral ecstasy is increased by the consciousness of being on the threshold of a new age, "for the ancient dream is dead, and the new one is now being forged." Thus the poet will wander into _The Cathedrals_, take pity on the multitudinous misery of the praying hordes, and boom out again and again the refrain:

"Ô ces foules, ces foules
Et la misère et la détresse qui les foulent."

But note the sociological symbolism of the climax:

"Et les vitraux grands de siècles agenouillés
Devant le Christ avec leurs papes immobiles
Et leurs martyrs et leurs héros semblent trembler
Au bruit d'un train lointain qui roule sur la ville."

For refusing to bear the cross of Gothic ideas, the poet plunges deliberately into the inferno of modern life. And each fresh circle but kindles his ardour and inflames his Muse. For he will pass with growing exaltation from the muscled teeming life of the port to the garish ballet of a music hall where

"Des bataillons de chair et de cuisses en marche
Grouillent sur des rampes ou sous des arches,
Jambes, hanches, gorges, maillots, jupes, dentelles,"

and then, as midnight strikes and the crowd ebbs away, he will stalk into the "brilliant chemical atmosphere" where

"Au long de promenoirs qui s'ouvrent sur la nuit
--Balcons de fleurs, rampes de flammes--
Des femmes en deuil de leur âme
Entrecroisent leurs pas sans bruit."

Nor does the poet disdain the grinding factories where

"Entre des murs de fer et pierre
Soudainement se lève altière
La force en rut de la matière,"

or even the Bourse itself, where he sings in feverish staccato rhythm the

"Langues sèches, regards aigus, gestes inverses,
Et cervelles qu'en tourbillons les millions traversent."

But it is typical of Verhaeren's essential optimism that after describing with Zolaesque detail both a strike and a "shop of luxury," he should find the ransom of the future in

"La maison de la science au loin dardée
Obstinément par à travers les faits jusqu'aux idées."

In _Les Heures Claires_ (1896) the drastic violence of _Les Villes Tentaculaires_ abates for the time being into a mood of resigned, but yet robust melancholy, which immortalises the sweetness, deepness, and softness of the poet's love for his wife.

In _Les Forces Tumultueuses_, however, the poet has got once again into the full swing of his drastic stride. The mood is to some extent the same as that of _Les Villes Tentaculaires_, though the Zolaesque concreteness of detail is merged in the broadness of a genuine Lucretian sweep. The book consists of a series of lyrical poems, lyrical, albeit, in the sense rather of Pindar than of Herrick, which exalt the various phases of human energy. Thus in the poem, _L'Art,_ Verhaeren soars upwards with a tremendous rush:

"D'un bond
Son pied cassant le sol profond
Son double aile dans la lumière
Le cou tendu, le feu sous les paupières
Partit, vers le soleil et vers l'extase,
Ce dévoreur d'espace et de splendeur Pégase."

In _Les Maîtres_ the poet describes the various types of superman, from "the monk" of the Middle Ages to the banker of the twentieth century, who dominates the world as he "binds sinister destiny to his bourgeois will," and sows in the distance his winged gold.

"Son or aile qui s'enivre d'espace,
Son or planant, son or rapace,
Son or vivant,
Son or dont s'éclairent et rayonnent les vents,
Son or qui boit la terre
Par les pores de son misère
Son or ardent, son or furtif, son or retors.
Morceau d'espoir et de soleil--son or!"

Some mention must also be made of the poem, _Les Femmes_, which, subdivided into _L'Éternelle, L'Amante,_ _L'Amazone_, ranks in our view as the greatest sex poem of the century. In contrast, for instance, with Swinburne, who treats sex rather as a thing of beauty and of pleasure than as an underlying world-force, and who has both the advantage and the disadvantage of the specifically classical conception of life, Verhaeren, whether he rings his changes in _L'Amante_ on the soft refrain, "Mon rêve est embarqué dans une île flottante," shows in _L'Amazone_ that the New Woman can be something considerably more poetic than a Strindbergian monstrosity, or sings in _L'Éternelle_ her "who thinks she encloses the whole world within her flesh," will boom out again and again the cosmic and universal peal. The verse throughout is as beautiful as can be desired. But it has something more than beauty; it has stature, majesty, speed, force, that exaltation of reality which is the essence of the highest poetry.

In the poems, _La Science_, _L'Erreur, La Folie_, _Les Cultes_, Verhaeren proceeds to formulate his own philosophy of life, and his prophetic enthusiasm for the new modern truths, under whose clear feet the old texts have crumbled, as he expounds

"Comment la vie est une à travers tous les êtres
Qu'ils soient matière instruit esprit ou volonté
Forêt myriadaire et rouge où s'enchevêtrent
Les débordements fous de la fécondité."

Put shortly, his philosophy is a compound of those of Nietzsche and of Bergson. His soul, no doubt, swings in unison with the universal rhythm of the world, but, like Nietzsche, he finds in force and life realities transcending all errors, and after a historic survey of the more popular deities of humanity from Gog to Jehovah, and from Satan to Christ, enunciates his belief in humanity in stanzas of sublime blasphemy, far more truly religious than the ambiguous scrolls and rubrics of any antiquarian creed:

"L'homme respire et sur la terre il marche, seul.
Il vit pour s'exalter du monde et de lui-même,
Sa langue oublie et la prière et le blasphême;
Ses pieds foulent le drap de son ancien linceul.
Il est l'heureuse audace au lieu d'être la crainte;
Tout l'infini ne retentit que de ses bonds
Vers l'avenir plus doux, plus clair et plus féconds
Dont s'aggrave le chant et s'alentit la plainte.
Penser, chercher, et découvrir sont ses exploits.
Il emplit jusqu'aux bords son existence brêve;
Il n'enfle aucun espoir, il ne fausse aucun rêve,
Et s'il lui faut des Dieux encore--qu'il les soit!"

In _La Multiple Splendeur_ and _Les Visages de la Vie_ the same insatiable gusto for an infinitude of life darts again and again its red tongue. It is impossible by mere quotation to do justice to the full vastness of Verhaeren's lyric sweep. We would, however, at any rate, refer to the majesty of _Le Monde_ with its combined crash and concord of incessant life and the Cyclopean weight of the adamantine line which buttresses at either end the flaming rivers of its verse,

"Le monde est fait avec des astres et des hommes,"

or to the sublimity of _Les Penseurs_ in which the poet tells how

"Autour de la terre obsédée
Circule au fond des nuits, au cœur des jours
Toujours
L'orage amoncelé des idées,"

and how

"Descartes et Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant et Hegel"

"fixed the highest pinnacles of inaccessible problems for the goal of their silver arrows, and carried within themselves the grand obstinate dream of one day, imprisoning eternity in the white ice of immobile truth."

The very names, too, of some of the poems may possibly reflect some of the facets of their multiplied splendour: _Le Verbe, Les Vieux Empires, La Louange du Corps Humain, A la Gloire des Cieux, A la Gloire du Vent, Les Rêves, L'Europe, La Conquête, Les Souffrances, La Joie, La Ferveur, Les Idées, La Vie, L'Effort, L'Action, Plus Loin que les Gares, Le Soir_. And again and again rings out in various keys the true Nietzschean note. For "vast hopes come from the unknown" has displaced the ancient balance whereof souls are now tired. But the only reality is life:

"La vie en cris ou en silence,
La vie en lutte ou en accord
Avec la vie avec la mort
La vie âpre, la vie intense,
Elle est ici dans la fureur ou dans la haine
De l'ascendant et rouge ardeur humaine."

It is fine proof also of the vast vitality of Verhaeren that even in so recent a work as _Les Rhythmes Souveraines_ the muscled majesty of his verse, though possibly a trifle less violent, shows no abatement of its essential strength. We would mention in particular the poems _Michel Ange, Chant d'Hercule, Les Barbares_ with the swift crispness of its one-foot lines, and above all _Le Paradis_ with its almost Miltonic picture of

"L'archange endormant Ève au creux de sa grande aile."

But does not Verhaeren transcend Milton in the wideness of his humanity when he describes not with regret but with the maximum of exalted exultation how

"Ève bondit soudain hors de son aile immense,
Oh l'heureuse subite et féconde démence,
Que l'ange avec son cœur trop pur ne comprit pas."

In his latest volume, _Les Blés Mouvants_, Verhaeren sinks back no doubt to a quieter and serener mood, but who shall say that these eclogues do not simply represent the sage crouch for another leonine spring?

We do not propose to make more than a passing reference to Verhaeren's plays, for it is the lyric rather than the drama which is his true medium of expression.

_Hélène de Sparte_, with all its graceful Alexandrines, is inferior to any play by D'Annunzio, and even the socialist drama _Les Aubes_ is, notwithstanding the fine verses with which it is sown, simply stiff and heavy when compared with Hauptmann's _Weavers_. It is by his lyrics that Verhaeren lives, and will continue to live beyond his mere death whenever it comes, as the greatest and most essentially European poet of our new age. For his lyrics are equally great, both in their message and the method of their expression. Disdaining alike the cowardice and the perversity of those who, refusing to face the red realities of the present century, fly for their comfort to the pale shadows of the Middle Ages, Verhaeren has plunged boldly into the very brazier of our modern existence. He affirms, he combats, he prophesies, but he rarely, if ever, rests. He hymns every phase of life, from the human brain to the human body, and from the winds and seas of nature to the towns and marts of man. And no message is more virile, more tonic, more essentially healthy, for is not his message the phœnix of a new humanitarian faith soaring aloft on its fiery wings out of the corpses of the decomposing dogmas? And his prosody has the supreme excellence that it is not a mere æsthetic end in itself, but a drastic instrument of expression. Your pure æsthete, no doubt, may cavil at his ruggedness. For he is the Rodin of poetical rhyme, the veritable Vulcan of verse, or rather a Siegfried forging the sword of the future on the anvil of the present, as he drives in the stubborn nails of his nouns with the hissing hammers of his adjectives. His lines no doubt at times will growl, grind and boom, hit the reader in the face with all the force of a clenched fist, and palpitate with a full-bloodedness somewhat overpowering for the jaded and the anæmic. But is not this the very seal of success in a man who specifically sets himself to sing not the mere beauty of beauty, but the beauty of force, the beauty of life, "life violent, prodigious, unsatiated, the universal spasm of all things"?

THE FUTURE OF FUTURISM

"Repose-toi!... Repose-toi!... il n'est doux que dormir!..."

"Non, la vie est à brûler comme un falot de paille,
Il faut l'ingurgiter d'une lampe hardie,
Tels ces jongleurs de foire qui vont mangeant du feu
D'un coup de langue, escamotant la Mort dans l'estomac."