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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 35387 ***
+
+EMILE VERHAEREN
+
+BY
+
+STEFAN ZWEIG
+
+LONDON
+
+CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD
+
+1914
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Émile Verhaeren from an unpublished photograph by
+Charles Bernier, 1914.]
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+Four years have passed since the present volume appeared simultaneously
+in German and French. In the meantime Verhaeren's fame has been
+spreading; but in English-speaking countries he is still not so well
+known as he deserves to be.
+
+Something of his philosophy--if it may be called philosophy rather than
+a poet's inspired visualising of the world--has passed into the public
+consciousness in a grotesquely distorted form in what is known as
+'futurism.' So long as futurism is associated with those who have
+acquired a facile notoriety by polluting the pure idea, it would be an
+insult to Verhaeren to suggest that he is to be classed with the
+futurists commonly so-called; but the whole purpose of the present
+volume will prove that the gospel of a very serious and reasoned
+futurism is to be found in Verhaeren's writings.
+
+Of the writer of the book it may be said that there was no one more
+fitted than he to write the authentic exposition of the teaching which
+he has hailed as a new religion. His relations to the Master are not
+only those of a fervent disciple, but of an apostle whose labour of
+love has in German-speaking lands and beyond been crowned with signal
+success. Himself a lyrist of distinction, Stefan Zweig has accomplished
+the difficult feat, which in this country still waits to be done, of
+translating the great mass of Verhaeren's poems into actual and enduring
+verse. Another book of his on Verlaine is already known in an English
+rendering; so that he bids fair to become known in this country as one
+of the most gifted of the writers of Young-Vienna.
+
+As to the translation, I have endeavoured to be faithful to my text,
+which is the expression of a personality. Whatever divergences there are
+have been necessitated by the lapse of time. For help in reading the
+proofs I have to thank Mr. M.T.H. Sadler and Mr. Fritz Voigt.
+
+                                               J. BITHELL.
+
+  HAMMERFIELD,
+_Nr_. HEMEL HEMPSTEAD,
+  14_th July_ 1914.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PART I
+
+THE NEW AGE
+THE NEW BELGIUM
+YOUTH IN FLANDERS
+'LES FLAMANDES'
+THE MONKS
+THE BREAK-DOWN
+FLIGHT INTO THE WORLD
+
+PART II
+
+TOWNS ('LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES')
+THE MULTITUDE
+THE RHYTHM OF LIFE
+THE NEW PATHOS
+VERHAEREN'S POETIC METHOD
+VERHAEREN'S DRAMA
+
+PART III
+
+COSMIC POETRY
+THE LYRIC UNIVERSE
+SYNTHESES
+THE ETHICS OF FERVOUR
+LOVE
+THE ART OF VERHAEREN'S LIFE
+THE EUROPEAN IMPORTANCE OF HIS WORK
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+INDEX
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+DECIDING FORCES
+
+
+LES FLAMANDES--LES MOINES--LES SOIRS--LES
+DÉBâCLES--LES FLAMBEAUX NOIRS--AU BORD DE
+LA ROUTE--LES APPARUS DANS MES CHEMINS
+
+1883-1893
+
+
+
+     Son tempérament, son caractère, sa vie, tout conspire à nous
+     montrer son art tel que nous avons essayé de le définir. Une
+     profonde unité les scelle. Et n'est-ce pas vers la découverte de
+     cette unité-là, qui groupe en un faisceau solide les gestes, les
+     pensées et les travaux d'un génie sur la terre, que la critique,
+     revenue enfin de tant d'erreurs, devait tendre uniquement?
+
+                                 VERHAEREN, _Rembrandt._
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW AGE
+
+     Tout bouge--et l'on dirait les horizons en marche.
+                                        É.V., 'La Foule.'
+
+
+The feeling of this age of ours, of this our moment in eternity, is
+different in its conception of life from that of our ancestors. Only
+eternal earth has changed not nor grown older, that field, gloomed by
+the Unknown, on which the monotonous light of the seasons divides, in a
+rhythmic round, the time of blossoms and of their withering; changeless
+only are the action of the elements and the restless alternation of
+night and day. But the aspect of earth's spirit has changed, all that is
+subjected to the toil of man. Has changed, to change again. The
+evolution of the phenomena of culture seems to proceed with ever greater
+rapidity: never was the span of a hundred years as rich, as replete as
+that which stretches to the threshold of our own days. Cities have shot
+up which are as huge and bewildering, as impenetrable and as endless, as
+nothing else has been save those virgin forests now fast receding before
+the onward march of the tilled land. More and more the work of man
+achieves the grandiose and elementary character that was once Nature's
+secret. The lightning is in his hands, and protection from the
+weather's sudden onslaughts; lands that once yawned far apart are now
+forged together by the iron hoop with which of old only the narrow
+strait was arched; oceans are united that have sought each other for
+thousands of years; and now in the very air man is building a new road
+from country to country. All has changed.
+
+     Tout a changé: les ténèbres et les flambeaux.
+     Les droits et les devoirs out fait d'autres faisceaux,
+     Du sol jusqu'au soleil, une neuve énergie
+     Diverge un sang torride, en la vie élargie;
+     Des usines de fonte ouvrent, sous le ciel bleu,
+     Des cratères en flamme et des fleuves en feu;
+     De rapides vaisseaux, sans rameurs et sans voiles,
+     La nuit, sur les flots bleus, étonnent les étoiles;
+     Tout peuple réveillé se forge une autre loi;
+     Autre est le crime, autre est l'orgueil, autre est l'exploit.[1]
+
+Changed, too, is the relation of individual to individual, of the
+individual to the whole; at once more onerous and less burdensome is the
+network of social laws, at once more onerous and less burdensome our
+whole life.
+
+But a still greater thing has happened. Not only the real forms, the
+transitory facts of life have changed, not only do we live in other
+cities, other houses, not only are we dressed in different clothes, but
+the infinite above us too, that which seemed unshakable, has changed
+from what it was for our fathers and forefathers. Where the actual
+changes, the relative changes also. The most elementary forms of our
+conception, space and time, have been displaced. Space has become other
+than it was, for we measure it with new velocities. Roads that took our
+forefathers days to traverse can now be covered in one short hour; one
+flying night transports us to warm and luxuriant lands that were once
+separated from us by the hardships of a long journey. The perilous
+forests of the tropics with Jheir strange constellations, to see which
+cost those of old a year of their lives, are of a sudden near to us and
+easy of access. We measure differently with these different velocities
+of life. Time is more and more the victor of space. The eye, too, has
+learned other distances, and in cold constellations is startled to
+perceive the forms of primeval landscapes petrified; and the human voice
+seems to have grown a thousand times stronger since it has learned to
+carry on a friendly conversation a hundred miles away. In this new
+relationship of forces we have a different perception of the spanning
+round of the earth, and the rhythm of life, beating more brightly and
+swiftly, is likewise becoming new for us. The distance from springtime
+to springtime is greater now and yet less, greater and yet less is the
+individual hour, greater and less our whole life.
+
+And therefore is it with new feelings that we must comprehend this new
+age. For we all feel that we must not measure the new with the old
+measures our forefathers used, that we must not live through the new
+with feelings outworn, that we must discover a new sense of distance, a
+new sense of time, a new sense of space, that we must find a new music
+for this nervous, feverish rhythm around us. This new-born human
+conditionality calls for a new morality; this new union of equals a new
+beauty; this new topsy-turvydom a new system of ethics. And this new
+confrontation with another and still newer world, with another Unknown,
+demands a new religion, a new God. A new sense of the universe is, with
+a muffled rumour, welling up in the hearts of all of us.
+
+New things, however, must be coined into new words. A new age calls for
+new poets, poets whose conceptions have been nurtured by their
+environment, poets who, in the expression they give to this new
+environment, themselves vibrate with the feverish rotation of life. But
+so many of our poets are pusillanimous. They feel that their voices are
+out of harmony with reality; they feel that they are not incorporated
+with the new organism and a necessary part of it; they have a dull
+foreboding that they do not speak the language of our contemporary life.
+In our great cities they are like strangers stranded. The great roaring
+streams of our new sensations are to them terrific and inconceivable.
+They are ready to accept all the comfort and luxury of modern life; they
+are quick to take advantage of the facilities afforded by technical
+science and organisation; but for their poetry they reject these
+phenomena, because they cannot master them. They recoil from the task
+of transmuting poetical values, of sensing whatever is poetically new in
+these new things. And so they stand aside. They flee from the real, the
+contemporary, to the immutable; they take refuge in whatsoever the
+eternal evolution has left untouched; they sing the stars, the
+springtime, the babbling of springs which is now as it ever was, the
+myth of love; they hide behind the old symbols; they nestle to the old
+gods. Not from the moment, from the molten flowing ore, do they seize
+and mould the eternal--no, as ever of old they dig the symbols of the
+eternal out of the cold clay of the past, like old Greek statues. They
+are not on that account insignificant; but at best they produce
+something important, never anything necessary.
+
+For only that poet can be necessary to our time who himself feels that
+everything in this time is necessary, and therefore beautiful. He must
+be one whose whole endeavour as poet and man it is to make his own
+sensations vibrate in unison with contemporary sensations; who makes the
+rhythm of his poem nothing else than the echoed rhythm of living things;
+who adjusts the beat of his verse to the beat of our own days, and takes
+into his quivering veins the streaming blood of our time. He must not on
+this account, when seeking to create new ideals, be a stranger to the
+ideals of old; for all true progress is based on the deepest
+understanding of the past. Progress must be for him as Guyau interprets
+it: 'Le pouvoir, lorsqu'on est arrivé à un état supérieur, d'éprouver
+des émotions et des sensations nouvelles, sans cesser d'être encore
+accessible à ce que contenaient de grand ou de beau ses précédantes
+émotions.'[2] A poet of our time can only be great when he conceives
+this time as great. The preoccupations of his time must be his also; its
+social problem must be his personal concern. In such a poet succeeding
+generations would see how man has fought a way to them from the past,
+how in every moment as it passed he has wrestled to identify the feeling
+of his own mind with that of the cosmos. And even though the great works
+of such a poet should be soon disintegrated and his poems obsolete,
+though his images should have paled, there would yet remain imperishably
+vivid that which is of greater moment, the invisible motives of his
+inspiration, the melody, the breath, the rhythm of his time. Such poets,
+besides pointing the way to the coming generation, are in a deeper sense
+the incarnation of their own period. Hence the time has come to speak of
+Émile Verhaeren, the greatest of modern poets, and perhaps the only one
+who has been conscious of what is poetical in contemporary feeling, the
+only one who has shaped that feeling in verse, the first poet who, with
+skill incomparably inspired, has chiselled our epoch into a mighty
+monument of rhyme.
+
+In Verhaeren's work our age is mirrored. The new landscapes are in it;
+the sinister silhouettes of the great cities; the seething masses of a
+militant democracy; the subterranean shafts of mines; the last heavy
+shadows of silent, dying cloisters. All the intellectual forces of our
+time, our time's ideology, have here become a poem; the new social
+ideas, the struggle of industrialism with agrarianism, the vampire force
+which lures the rural population from the health-giving fields to the
+burning quarries of the great city, the tragic fate of emigrants,
+financial crises, the dazzling conquests of science, the syntheses of
+philosophy, the triumphs of engineering, the new colours of the
+impressionists. All the manifestations of the new age are here reflected
+in a poet's soul in their action--first confused, then understood, then
+joyfully acclaimed--on the sensations of a New European. How this work
+came into being, out of what resistance and crises a poet has here
+conquered the consciousness of the necessity and then of the beauty of
+the new cosmic phase, it shall be our task to show. If the time has
+indeed come to class Verhaeren, it is not so much with the poets that
+his place will be found. He does not so much stand with or above the
+verse-smiths or actual artists in verse, with the musicians, or
+painters, as rather with the great organisers, those who have forced the
+new social currents to flow between dikes; with the legislators who
+prevent the clashing of flamboyant energies; with the philosophers, who
+aim at co-ordinating and unifying all these vastly complicated
+tendencies in one brilliant synthesis. His poetry is a created poet's
+world; it is a resolute shaping of phases, a considered new æstheticism,
+and a conscious new inspiration. He is not only the poet, he is at the
+same time the preacher of our time. He was the first to conceive of it
+as _beautiful_, but not like those who, in their zeal for embellishment,
+tone down the dark colours and bring out the bright ones; he has
+conceived of it--we shall have to show with what a painful and intensive
+effort--after his first most obstinate rejection of it, as a necessity,
+and he has then transformed this conception of its necessity, of its
+purpose, into beauty. Ceasing to look backwards, he has looked forwards.
+He feels, quite in the spirit of evolution, in the spirit of Nietzsche,
+that our generation is raised high above all the past, that it is the
+summit of all that is past, and the turning-point towards the future.
+This will perhaps seem too much to many people, who are inclined to call
+our generation wretched and paltry, as though they had some inner
+knowledge of the magnificence or the paltriness of generations gone. For
+every generation only becomes great by the men who do not despair of it,
+only becomes great by its poets who conceive of it as great, by its
+charioteers of state who have confidence in its power of greatness. Of
+Shakespeare and Hugo Verhaeren says: 'Ils grandissaient leur
+siècle.'[3] They did not depict it with the perspective of others, but
+out of the heart of their own greatness. Of such geniuses as Rembrandt
+he says: 'Si plus tard, dans l'éloignement des siècles, ils semblent
+traduire mieux que personne leur temps, c'est qu'ils l'ont recréé
+d'après leur cerveau, et qu'ils l'ont imposé non pas tel qu'il était,
+mais tel qu'ils l'ont déformé.'[4] But by magnifying their century, by
+raising even ephemeral events of their own days into a vast perspective,
+they themselves became great. While those who of set purpose diminish,
+and while those by nature indifferent, are themselves diminished and
+disregarded as the centuries recede, poets such as these we honour tell,
+like illumined belfry clocks, the hour of the time to generations yet to
+come. If the others bequeath some slight possession, a poem or so,
+aphorisms, a book maybe, these survive more mightily: they survive in
+some great conception, some great idea of an age, in that music of life
+to which the faint-hearted and the ungifted of following epochs will
+listen as it sounds from the past, because they in their turn are unable
+to understand the rhythm of their own time. By this manner of inspired
+vision Verhaeren has come to be the great poet of our time, by approving
+of it as well as by depicting it, by the fact that he did not see the
+new things as they actually are, but celebrated them as a new beauty.
+He has approved of all that is in our epoch; of everything, to the very
+resistance to it which he has conceived of as only a welcome
+augmentation of the fighting force of our vitality. The whole atmosphere
+of our time seems compressed in the organ music of his work; and whether
+he touches the bright keys or the dark, whether he rolls out a lofty
+diapason or strikes a gentle concord, it is always the onward-rushing
+force of our time that vibrates in his poems. While other poets have
+grown ever more lifeless and languid, ever more secluded and
+disheartened, Verhaeren's voice has grown ever more resonant and
+vigorous, like an organ indeed, full of reverence and the mystical power
+of sublime prayer. A spirit positively religious, not of despondency,
+however, but of confidence and joy, breathes from this music of his,
+freshening and quickening the blood, till the world takes on brighter
+and more animated and more generous colours, and our vitality, fired by
+the fever of his verse, flashes with a richer and younger and more
+virile flame.
+
+But the fact that life, to-day of all days, needs nothing so urgently as
+the freshening and quickening of our vitality, is good reason why--quite
+apart from all literary admiration--we must read his books, is good
+reason why this poet must be discussed with all that glad enthusiasm
+which we have first learned for our lives from his work.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'Aujourd'hui'(_Les Héros_).
+
+[2] Guyau, _L'Esthétique Contemporaine._
+
+[3] 'L'Art' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[4] _Rembrandt_.
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW BELGIUM
+
+     Entre la France ardente et la grave Allemagne.
+             _É.V._, 'Charles le Téméraire.'
+
+
+In Belgium the roads of Europe meet. A few hours transport one from
+Brussels, the heart of its iron arteries, to Germany, France, Holland,
+and England; and from Belgian ports all countries and all races are
+accessible across the pathless sea. The area of the land being small, it
+provides a miniature but infinitely varied synthesis of the life of
+Europe. All contrasts stand face to face concisely and sharply outlined.
+The train roars through the land: now past coal-mines, past furnaces and
+retorts that write the fiery script of toil on an ashen sky; now through
+golden fields or green pastures where sleek, brindled cows are grazing;
+now through great cities that point to heaven with their multitudinous
+chimneys; and lastly to the sea, the Rialto of the north, where
+mountains of cargoes are shipped and unshipped, and trade traffics with
+a thousand hands. Belgium is an agricultural land and an industrial
+land; it is at the same time conservative and socialistic, Roman
+Catholic and free-thinking; at once wealthy and wretched. There are
+colossal fortunes heaped up in the monster cities; and two hours thence
+the bitterest poverty sweats for the dole of a living in mines and
+barns. And again in the cities still greater forces wrestle with one
+another: life and death, the past and the future. Towns monkishly
+secluded, girt with ponderous mediæval walls, towns on whose swart and
+sedgy canals lonely swans glide like milky gondolas, towns like a dream,
+strengthless, prisoned in sleep eternal. At no great distance glitter
+the modern residential cities; Brussels with its glaring boulevards,
+where electric inscriptions dart coruscating up and down the fronts of
+buildings, where motor-cars whiz along, where the streets rumble, and
+modern life twitches with feverish nerves. Contrast on contrast. From
+the right the Teutonic tide dashes in, the Protestant faith; from the
+left, sumptuous and rigidly orthodox, Roman Catholicism. And the race
+itself is the restlessly struggling product of two races, the Flemish
+and the Walloon. Naked, clear, and direct are the contrasts which here
+defy each other; and the whole battle can be surveyed at a glance.
+
+But so strong, so persistent is the inexorable pressure of the two
+neighbouring races, that this blend has already become a new ferment, a
+new race. Elements once contrary are now unrecognisably mixed in a new
+and growing product. Teutons speak French, people of Romance stock are
+Flemish in feeling. Pol de Mont, in spite of his Gallic name, is a
+Flemish poet; Verhaeren, Maeterlinck, and van Lerberghe, though no
+Frenchman can pronounce their names rightly, are French poets. And this
+new Belgian race is a strong race, one of the most capable in Europe.
+Contact with so many foreign cultures, the vicinity of such
+contradictory nations, has fertilised them; healthy rural labour has
+steeled their limbs; the near sea has opened their eyes to the great
+distances. Their consciousness of themselves is of no long date: it can
+only be reckoned from the time when their country became independent,
+hardly a hundred years ago. A nation younger than America, they are in
+their adolescence now, and rejoicing in their new, unsought strength.
+And just as in America, the blend of races here, together with the
+fruitful, healthy fields, has procreated robust men. For the Belgian
+race is a race pulsing with vitality. Nowhere in Europe is life so
+intensely, so merrily enjoyed as in Flanders, nowhere else is sensuality
+and pleasure in excess so much the measure of strength. They must be
+seen particularly in their sensual life; it must be seen how the Flemish
+enjoy; with what greediness, with what a conscious pleasure and robust
+endurance. It is among them that Jordaens found the models for his
+gluttonous orgies; and they could be found still at every kermesse, at
+every wake. Statistics prove that in the consumption of alcohol Belgium
+stands to-day at the head of Europe. Every second house is an inn, an
+_estaminet_; every town, every village has its brewery; and the brewers
+are the wealthiest men in the country. Nowhere else are festivals so
+loud, boisterous, and unbridled; nowhere else is life loved and lived
+with such a superabundant zest and glow. Belgium is the land of
+excessive vitality, and ever was so. They have fought for this plenitude
+of life, for this enjoyment full to satiety. Their most heroic exploit,
+their great war with the Spaniards, was only a struggle not so much for
+religion as for sensual freedom. These desperate revolts, this immense
+effort was in reality not directed against Roman Catholicism, but
+against the morality, the asceticism it enforced; not so much against
+Spain as against the sinister malignity of the Inquisition; against the
+taciturn, bitter, and insidious Puritanism which sought to curtail
+enjoyment; against the morose reserve of Philip II. All that they wanted
+at that time was to preserve their bright and laughing life, their free,
+dionysiac enjoyment, the imperious avidity of their senses; they were
+determined not to be limited by any measure short of excess. And with
+them life conquered. Health, strength, and fecundity is to this very day
+the mark of the Belgian people in town and country. Poverty itself is
+not hollow-cheeked and stunted here. Chubby, red-cheeked children play
+in the streets; the peasants working in the fields are straight and
+sturdy; even the artisans are as muscular and strong as they are in
+Constantin Meunier's bronzes; the women are moulded to bear children
+easily; the unbroken vigour of the old men persists in a secure defiance
+of age. Constantin Meunier was fifty when he began his life-work here;
+at sixty Verhaeren is at the zenith of his creative power. Insatiable
+seems the strength of this race, whose deepest feeling has been
+chiselled by Verhaeren in proud stanzas:
+
+    Je suis le fils de cette race,
+    Dont les cerveaux plus que les dents
+    Sont solides et sont ardents
+    Et sont voraces.
+    Je suis le fils de cette race
+    Tenace,
+    Qui veut, après avoir voulu
+    Encore, encore et encore plus![1]
+
+This tremendous exertion has not been in vain. To-day Belgium is
+relatively the richest country in Europe. Its colony of the Congo is ten
+times as extensive as the mother-land. The Belgians hardly know where to
+place their capital: Belgian money is invested in Russia, in China, in
+Japan; they are concerned in all enterprises; their financiers control
+trusts in all countries. The middle classes, too, are healthy, strong,
+and contented.
+
+Such rich and healthy blood is more likely than any other to produce
+good art, and, above all, art full of the zest of life. For it is in
+countries with few possibilities of expansion that the desire for
+artistic activity is keenest. The imagination of great nations is for
+the most part absorbed by the practical demands of their development.
+The best strength of a great nation is claimed by politics, by
+administration, by the army and navy; but where political life is of
+necessity poor, where the problems of administration are forcibly
+restricted, men of genius almost exclusively seek their conquests in the
+domains of art. Scandinavia is one example, Belgium another, of
+countries in which the aristocracy of intellect have with the happiest
+results been forced back on art and science. In such young races the
+vital instinct must _a priori_ make all artistic activity strong and
+healthy; and even when they produce a decadence, this reaction, this
+contradiction, is so decided and consequent, that strength lies in its
+very weakness. For only a strong light can cast strong shadows; only a
+strong, sensual race can bring forth the really great and earnest
+mystics; because a decided reaction which is conscious of its aim
+requires as much energy as positive creation.
+
+The towering structure of Belgian art rests on a broad foundation. The
+preparation, the growing under the sod, took fifty years; and then in
+another fifty years it was reared aloft by the youth of one single
+generation. For every healthy evolution is slow, most of all in the
+Teutonic races, which are not so quick, supple, and dexterous as the
+Latin races, who learn by life itself rather than by studious
+application. This literature has grown ring by ring like a tree, with
+its roots deep in a healthy soil nourished by the unyielding
+perseverance of centuries. Like every confession of faith, this
+literature has its saints, its martyrs, and its disciples. The first of
+the creators, the forerunner, was Charles de Coster; and his great epic
+_Thyl Ulenspiegel_ is the gospel of this new literature. His fate is
+sad, like that of all pioneers. In him the native blend of races is more
+plastically visualised than in all later writers. Of Teutonic
+extraction, he was born in Munich, wrote in French, and was the first
+man to feel as a Belgian. He earned his living painfully as a teacher at
+the Military School. And when his great romance appeared, it was
+difficult to find a publisher, and still more difficult to find
+appreciation, or even notice. And yet this work, with its wonderful
+confrontation of Ulenspiegel as the deliverer of Flanders with Philip
+II. as Antichrist, is to this day the most beautiful symbol of the
+struggle of light with darkness, of vitality with renunciation; an
+enduring monument in the world's literature, because it is the epic of a
+whole nation. With such a work of wide import did Belgian literature
+begin, a work that with its heroic battles stands like the Iliad as the
+proud and primitive beginning of a more delicate, but in its advanced
+culture more complex, literature. The place of this writer, who died
+prematurely, was taken by Camille Lemonnier, who accepted the hard task
+and the melancholy inheritance of pioneers--ingratitude and
+disillusion. Of this proud and noble character also one must speak as of
+a hero. For more than forty years he fought indefatigably for Belgium, a
+soldier leading the onset from first to last, launching book after book,
+creating, writing, calling to the fray and marshalling the new forces;
+and never resting till the adjective 'Belgian' ceased in Paris and
+Europe to be spoken with the contempt that attaches to 'provincial';
+till, like once the name of the Gueux, what was originally a disgrace
+became a title of honour. Fearlessly, not to be discouraged by any
+failure, this superb writer sung his native land--fields, mines, towns,
+and men; the angry, fiery blood of youths and maidens; and over all the
+ardent yearning for a brighter, freer, greater religion, for rapt
+communion with the sublimity of Nature. With the ecstatic revelling in
+colour of his illustrious ancestor Rubens, who gathered all the things
+of life together in a glad festival of the senses, he, like a second
+voluptuary at the feast, has lavished colours, had his joy of all that
+is glowing, and glaring, and satiated, and, like every genuine artist,
+conceived of art as an intensifying of life, as life in intoxication.
+For more than forty years he created in this sense, and miraculously,
+just like the men of his country, like the peasants he painted, he
+waxed in vigour from year to year, from harvest to harvest, his books
+growing ever more fiery, ever more drunken with the zest and glow of
+life, his faith in life ever brighter and more confident. He was the
+first to feel the strength of his young country with conscious pride,
+and his voice rang out its loud appeal for new fighters till he no
+longer stood alone, till a company of other artists were ranged around
+him. Each of these he supported and firmly established, with a strong
+grip placing them at their vantage for the battle; and without envy, nay
+with joy, he saw his own work triumphantly overshadowed by the acclaimed
+creations of his juniors. With joy, because he probably considered not
+his own novels, but this creation of a literature his greatest and most
+lasting work. For it seemed as though in these years the whole land had
+become alive; as though every town, every profession, every class had
+sent forth a poet or a painter to immortalise them; as though this whole
+Belgium were eager to be symbolised in individual phases in works of
+art, until he should come who was destined to transform all towns and
+classes in a poem, enshrining in it the harmonised soul of the land. Are
+not the ancient Teutonic cities of Bruges, Courtrai, and Ypres
+spiritualised in the stanzas of Rodenbach, in the pastels of Fernand
+Khnopff, in the mystic statues of Georges Minne? Have not the sowers of
+corn and the workers in mines become stone in the busts of Constantin
+Meunier? Does not a great drunkenness glow in Georges Eekhoud's
+descriptions? The mystic art of Maeterlinck and Huysmans drinks its
+deepest strength from old cloisters and _béguinages_; the sun of the
+fields of Flanders glows in the pictures of Théo van Rysselberghe and
+Claus. The delicate walking of maidens and the singing of belfries have
+been made music in the stanzas of the gentle Charles van Lerberghe; the
+vehement sensuality of a savage race has been spiritualised in the
+refined eroticism of Félicien Rops. The Walloons have their
+representative in Albert Mockel; and how many others might still be
+named of the great creators: the sculptor van der Stappen; the painters
+Heymans, Stevens; the writers des Ombiaux, Demolder, Glesener,
+Crommelynck; who have all in their confident and irresistible advance
+conquered the esteem of France and the admiration of Europe. For they,
+and just they, were gifted with a sense of the great complex European
+feeling which in their work is glimpsed in its birth and growth; for
+they did not in their idea of a native land stop at the boundaries of
+Belgium, but included all the neighbouring countries, because they were
+at the same time patriots and cosmopolitans: Belgium was to them not
+only the place where all roads meet, but also that whence all roads
+start.
+
+Each of these had shaped his native land from his own angle of vision; a
+whole phalanx of artists had added picture to picture. Till then this
+great one came, Verhaeren, who saw, felt, and loved everything in
+Flanders, 'toute la Flandre.' Only in his work did it become a unity;
+for he has sung everything, land and sea, towns and workshops, cities
+dead and cities at their birth. He has not conceived of this Flanders of
+his as a separate phase, as a province, but as the heart of Europe, with
+the strength of its blood pulsing inwards from outside and outside from
+inwards; he has opened out horizons beyond the frontiers, and heightened
+and connected them; and with the same inspiration he has molten and
+welded the individual together with the whole until out of his work a
+life-work grew--the lyric epic of Flanders. What de Coster half a
+century before had not dared to fashion from the present, in which he
+despaired of finding pride, power, and the heroism of life, Verhaeren
+has realised; and thus he has become the 'carillonneur de la Flandre,'
+the bell-ringer who, as in olden days from the watch-tower, has summoned
+the whole land to the defence of its will to live, and the nation to the
+pride and consciousness of its power.
+
+This Verhaeren could only do, because he in himself represents all the
+contrasts, all the advantages of the Belgian race. He too is a ferment
+of contrasts, a new man made of split and divergent forces now
+victoriously harmonised. From the French he has his language and his
+form; from the Germans his instinctive seeking of God, his earnestness,
+his gravity, his need of metaphysics, and his impulse to pantheism.
+Political instincts, religious instincts, Catholicism and socialism,
+have struggled in him; he is at once a dweller in great cities and a
+cottager in the open country; and the deepest impulse of his people,
+their lack of moderation and their greed of life, is in the last
+instance the maxim of his poetic art. Only that their pleasure in
+intoxication has in him become joy in a noble drunkenness, in ecstasy;
+only that their carnal joy has become a delight in colour; that their
+mad raging is now in him a pleasure in a rhythm that roars and thunders
+and bursts in foam. The deepest thing in his race, an inflexible
+vitality which is not to be shaken by crises or catastrophes, has in him
+become universal law, a conscious, intensified zest in life. For when a
+country has become strong and rejoices in its strength, it needs, like
+every plethora, a cry, an exultation. Just as Walt Whitman was the
+exultation of America in its new strength, Verhaeren is the triumph of
+the Belgian race, and of the European race too. For this glad confession
+of life is so strong, so glowing, so virile that it cannot be thought of
+as breaking forth from the heart of one individual, but is evidently the
+delight of a fresh young nation in its beautiful and yet unfathomed
+power.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'Ma Race' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+
+
+
+YOUTH IN FLANDERS
+
+        Seize, dix-sept et dix-huit ans!
+     O ce désir d'être avant l'âge et le vrai temps
+                        Celui
+                 Dont chacun dit
+     Il boit à larges brocs et met à mal les filles!
+                                    É.V., _Les Tendresses Premières_.
+
+The history of modern Belgian literature begins, by a whim of chance, in
+one and the same house. In Ghent, the favourite city of the Emperor
+Charles V., in the old, heavy Flemish town that is still girdled with
+ramparts, lies, remote from the noisy streets, the grey Jesuit college
+of Sainte-Barbe. A cloister with thick, cold, frowning walls, mute
+corridors, silent refectories, reminding one somewhat of the beautiful
+colleges in Oxford, save that here there is no ivy softening the walls,
+and no flowers to lay their variegated carpet over the green courts.
+Here, in the seventies, two strange pairs of boys meet on the
+school-benches; here among thousands of names are four which are
+destined in later days to be the pride of their country. First, Georges
+Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren, then Maeterlinck and Charles van
+Lerberghe--two pairs of friendships, both of which are now torn asunder
+by death. The weaker, the more delicate of the four, Georges Rodenbach
+and Charles van Lerberghe, have died; Emile Verhaeren and Maeterlinck,
+the two heroes of Flanders, are still growing and not yet at the zenith
+of their fame. But all four began their course in the old college. The
+Jesuit fathers taught them their humanities, and even to write poems--in
+Latin, it is true, to begin with; and in this exercise, strange to say,
+Maeterlinck was excelled by van Lerberghe with his more instinctive
+sense of form, and Verhaeren by the more supple Georges Rodenbach. With
+rigorous earnestness the fathers trained them to respect the past, to
+have faith in conventional things, to think in old grooves, and to hate
+innovations. The aim was not only to keep them Catholics, but to win
+them for the priesthood: these cloister walls were to protect them from
+the hostile breath of the new world, from the freshening wind which, in
+Flanders as everywhere else, was assailing the growing generation.
+
+But in these four pupils the aim was not realised, least of all in
+Verhaeren, perhaps for the very reason that he, as the scion of a
+strictly orthodox family, was the most fitted to be a priest; because
+his mind did not absorb conviction mechanically, but achieved it by
+vital processes; because his inmost being was self-surrender and a
+glowing devotion to great ideas. However, the call of the open country,
+in which he had grown up, was too strong in him; the voice of life was
+too loud in his blood for so early a renunciation of all; his mind was
+too tameless to be satisfied with the established and the traditional.
+The impressions of his childhood were more vivid than the teaching of
+his masters. For Verhaeren was born in the country, at St. Amand on the
+Scheldt (on the 21st of May 1855), where the landscape rolls to the vast
+horizons of the heath and the sea. Here in the happiest manner kindly
+circumstances wove the garland of his earlier years. His parents were
+well-to-do people who had retired from the din of the town to this
+little corner of Flanders; here they had a cottage of their own, with a
+front garden ablaze with flowers of all colours. And immediately behind
+the house began the great golden fields, the tangle of flowering
+hedgerows; and close by was the river with its slow waves hasting no
+longer, feeling the nearness of their goal, the infinite ocean. Of the
+untrammelled days of his boyhood the ageing poet has told us in his
+wonderful book _Les Tendresses Premières_. He has told us of the boy he
+was when he ran across country; clambered into the corn-loft where the
+glittering grain was heaped; climbed steeples; watched the peasants at
+their sowing and reaping; and listened to the maids at the washing-tub
+singing old Flemish songs. He watched all trades; he rummaged in every
+corner. He would sit with the watch-maker, marvelling at the humming
+little wheels that fashioned the hour; and no less to see the glowing
+maw of the oven in the bakery swallowing the corn which only the day
+before had glided through his fingers in rustling ears, and was now
+already bread, golden, warm, and odorous. At games he would watch in
+astonishment the glad strength of the young fellows tumbling the reeling
+skittles over; and he would wander with the playing band from village to
+village, from fair to fair. And, sitting on the bank of the Scheldt, he
+would watch the ships, with their coloured streamers, come and go, and
+in his dreams follow them to the vast distances, which he only knew from
+sailors' yarns and pictures in old books. All this, this daily physical
+familiarity with the things of Nature, this lived insight into the
+thousand activities of the working-day, became his inalienable
+possession. Inalienable, too, was the humane feeling he acquired that he
+was one at heart with the people of his village. From them he learned
+the names of all these thousand things, and the intelligence of the
+mysterious mechanism in all skilled handiwork, and all the petty cares
+and perplexities of these many scattered little souls of life which,
+combined, are the soul of a whole land. And therefore Verhaeren is the
+only one among modern poets in the French tongue who is really popular
+with his countrymen of all ranks. He still goes in and out among them as
+their equal, sits in their circle even now, when fame has long since
+shown him his place among the best and noblest, chats with the peasants
+in the village inn, and loves to hear them discussing the weather and
+the harvest and the thousand little things of their narrow world. He
+belongs to them, and they belong to him. He loves their life, their
+cares, their labour, loves this whole land with its tempests raging from
+the north, with its hail and snow, its thundering sea and lowering
+clouds. It is with pride that he claims kindred with his race and land;
+and indeed there is often in his gait and in his gestures something of
+the peasant trampling with heavy steps and hard knee after his plough;
+and his eyes 'are grey as his native sea, his hair is yellow like the
+corn of his fields.' These elemental forces are in his whole being and
+production. You feel that he has never lost touch with Nature, that he
+is still organically connected with the fields, the sea, the open air;
+he to whom spring is physically painful, who is depressed by relaxing
+air, who loves the weather of his home-land, its vehemence, and its
+savage, tameless strength.
+
+For this very reason he has in later years felt, what was natively
+uncongenial to him--the great cities--differently and far more intensely
+than poets brought up in them. What to the latter appeared self-evident
+was to him astonishment, abomination, terror, admiration, and love. For
+him the atmosphere we breathe in cities was heavy, stifling, poisoned;
+the streets between the massed houses were too narrow, too congested;
+hourly, at first in pain and then with admiration, he has felt the
+beautiful fearfulness of the vast dimensions, the strangeness of the new
+forms of life. Just as we walk through mountain ravines dumbfounded and
+terrified by their sublimity, he has walked through streets of cities,
+first slowly accustoming himself to them; thus he has explored them,
+described them, celebrated them, and in the deepest sense lived them.
+Their fever has streamed into his blood; their revolts have reared in
+him like wild horses; their haste and unrest has whipped his nerves for
+half the span of a man's life. But then he has returned home again. In
+his fifties he has taken refuge once more in his fields, under the
+lonely sky of Flanders. He lives in a lonely cottage somewhere in
+Belgium, where the railway does not reach, enjoying himself among
+cheerful and simple people who fill their days with plain labour, like
+the friends and companions of his boyhood. With a joy intensified he
+goes eagerly year by year to the sea, as though his lungs and his heart
+needed it to breathe strongly again, to feel life with more jubilant
+enthusiasm. In the man of sixty there is a wonderful return of his
+healthy, happy childhood; and to the Flanders that inspired his first
+verses his last have been dedicated.
+
+Against this atavism, against this bright and inalienable joy in life,
+the _patres_ of Sainte-Barbe could do nothing. They could only deflect
+his great hunger of life from material things, and turn it in the
+direction of science, of art. The priest they sought to make of him he
+has really become, only he has preached everything that they proscribed,
+and fought against everything that they praised. At the time Verhaeren
+leaves school, he is already filled with that noble yet feverish greed
+of life, that tameless yearning for intensive enjoyments heightened to
+the degree of pain which is so characteristic of him. The priesthood was
+repugnant to him. Nor was he more allured by the prospect, held out to
+him, of directing his uncle's workshop. It is not yet definitely the
+poetic vocation which appeals to him, but he does desire a free active
+calling with unlimited possibilities. To gain time for his final
+decision, he studies jurisprudence, and becomes a barrister. In these
+student years in Louvain Verhaeren gave free rein to his untameable zest
+in life; as a true Fleming he eschewed moderation and launched into
+intemperance. To this very day he is fond of telling of his liking for.
+good Belgian beer, and of how the students got drunk, danced at all the
+kermesses, caroused and feasted, when the fury came over them, and got
+into all kinds, of mischief, which often enough brought them into
+conflict with the police. Uncertainty was never a feature of his
+character, and so his Roman Catholicism was in those years no silent and
+impersonal faith, but a militant orthodoxy. A handful of hotspurs--the
+publisher Deman was one of them, and another was the tenor van Dyck--set
+a newspaper going, in which they lashed away mercilessly at the
+corruption of the modern world, and did not forget to blow their own
+trumpets. The university was not slow to veto these immature
+manifestations; but ere long they started a second periodical, which
+was, however, more in harmony with the great contemporary movements.
+Betweenwhiles verses were written. And still more passionate is the
+young poet's activity when, in the year 1881, he is called to the bar in
+Brussels. Here he makes friends with men of great vitality: he is
+welcomed by a circle of painters and artists, and a cénacle of young
+talents is formed who have the authentic enthusiasm for art, and who
+feel that they are violently opposed to the conservative bourgeoisie of
+Brussels. Verhaeren, who at this time greedily adopts all fashionable
+freakishness as something new, and struts about in fantastic apparel,
+promptly acquires notoriety by his vehement passionateness and his first
+literary attempts. He had begun to write verse in his school-days.
+Lamartine had been his model, then Victor Hugo, who bewitches young
+people, that lord of magnificent gestures, that undisputed master of
+words. These juvenilia of Verhaeren have never been published, and
+probably they have little interest, for in them his tameless vitality
+attempted expression in immaculate Alexandrines. More and more, as his
+artistic insight grew, he felt that his vocation was to be a poet; the
+meagre success he achieved as a barrister confirmed him in this
+conviction, and so in the end, following the advice of Edmond Picard, he
+discarded the barrister's gown, which now seemed to him as narrow and
+stifling as he had once thought the priest's cassock to be.
+
+And then came the hour, the first decisive hour. Lemonnier was as fond
+of relating it as is Verhaeren; both would speak of it with their
+fervent, proud joy in a friendship of over thirty years; both with
+heartfelt admiration, the one for the other. Once, it was a rainy day,
+Verhaeren burst in on Lemonnier, whom he did not know, trampling into
+the elder man's lodging with his heavy peasant's tread, hailing him with
+his hearty gesture, and blurting out: 'Je veux vous lire des vers!' It
+was the manuscript of his first book _Les Flamandes_; and now he
+recited, while the rain poured down outside, with his hard voice and
+sharp scansion, his great enthusiasm and his compelling gestures, those
+pictures, palpitating with life, of Flanders, that first free confession
+of patriotism and foaming vitality. And Lemonnier encouraged him,
+congratulated him, helped him, and suggested alterations, and soon the
+book appeared, to the terror of Verhaeren's strictly orthodox family, to
+the horror of the critics, who were helpless in the face of such an
+explosion of strength. Execrated and lauded, it immediately compelled
+interest. In Belgium, it is true, it was less acclaimed than declaimed
+against; but nevertheless it everywhere excited a commotion, and that
+grumbling unrest which always heralds the advent of a new force.
+
+
+
+
+'LES FLAMANDES'
+
+     Je suis le fils de cette race
+     Tenace,
+     Qui veut, après avoir voulu
+     Encore, encore et encore plus.
+                               É.V., _Ma Race_.
+
+The life-work of great artists contains not only a single, but a
+threefold work of art. The actual creation is only the first, and not
+always the most important; the second must be the life of the artists
+themselves; the third must be the harmoniously finished, organically
+connected relationship between the act of creating and the thing
+created, between poetry and life. To survey how inner growth is
+connected with external formation, how crises of physical reality are
+connected with artistic decadence, how development and completion
+interpenetrate as much in personal experience as in the artistic
+creation, must be an equal artistic rapture, must disengage as pure a
+line of beauty as the individual work. In Verhaeren these conditions of
+the threefold work of art are accomplished in full. Harsh and abrupt as
+the contrasts in his books seem to be, the totality of his development
+is yet rounded off to a clear line, to the figure of a circle. In the
+beginning the end was contained, and in the end the beginning: the bold
+curve returns to itself. Like one who travels round the world and
+circles the vast circumference of the globe, he comes back in the end to
+his starting-point. Beginning and end touch in the motive of his work.
+To the country to which his youth belonged his old age returns: Flanders
+inspired his first book, and to Flanders his last books are dedicated.
+
+True it is, between these two books _Les Flamandes_ and _Les Blés
+Mouvants_, between the work of the man of five-and-twenty and that of
+the man of sixty, lies the world of an evolution with, all its points of
+view and achievements. Only now, when the line that was at first so
+capricious has returned to itself, can its form be surveyed and its
+harmony perceived. A purely external observation has become penetration:
+the eye no longer exclusively regards the external phenomena of things,
+but all has been seized in his soul from within and imaged in accordance
+with its reality. Now nothing is seen isolated, from the point of view
+of curiosity or passing interest, but everything is looked upon as
+something that is, that has grown, and that is still growing. The motive
+is the same in the first and in the last books; only, in the first book
+we have isolated contemplation, while in the great creations of the last
+period the vast horizons of the modern world are set behind the scenes,
+with the shadows of the past on the one side, and, as well, with fiery
+presentiments of the future shedding a new light over the landscape.
+The painter, who only portrayed the outer surface, the patina, has
+developed into the poet, he who in a musical vibration vivifies the
+psychic and the inconceivable. These two works stand in the same
+relation to each other as Wagner's first operas, _Rienzi_ and
+_Tannhäuser_, do to his later creations, to the _Ring_ and _Parsifal_:
+what was at first only intuitive becomes consciously creative. And as in
+Wagner's case, so too with Verhaeren there are to this very day people
+who prefer the works that are still prisoned in the traditional form to
+those which were created later, and who are thus, in reality, greater
+strangers to the poet than those who, from principle, assume a hostile
+attitude to his artistic work.
+
+_Les Flamandes_, Verhaeren's first work, appeared in a period of
+literary commotion. Zola's realistic novels had just become the object
+of discussion; and they had stirred up, not France only, but the
+adjacent countries as well. In Belgium Camille Lemonnier was the
+interpreter of this new naturalism, which regarded absolute truth as
+more important than beauty, and which saw the sole aim of imaginative
+literature in photography, in the exact, scientifically accurate
+reproduction of reality. To-day, now that excessive naturalism has been
+overcome, we know that this theory only brings us half-way along the
+road; that beauty may live by the side of truth; that on the other hand
+truth is not identical with art, but that it was only necessary to
+establish a transmutation of the value of beauty; that it was in the
+actual, in realities, that beauty was to be sought. Every new theory, if
+it is to succeed, needs a strong dose of exaggeration. And the idea of
+realising reality in poetry seduced young Verhaeren into carefully
+avoiding, in the description of his native province, all that is
+sentimental and romantic, and deluded him with the hope of expressing in
+his verse only what is coarse, primitive, and savage. Something external
+and something internal, nature and intention, combined to cause this
+effect. For the hatred of all that is soft and weak, rounded off and in
+repose, is in Verhaeren's blood. His temperament was from the first
+fiery, and loved to respond to strong provocation with a violent blow.
+There was ever in him a love of the brutal, the hard, the rough, the
+angular; he had always a liking for what is glaring and intensive, loud
+and noisy. It is only in his latest books that, thanks to his cooler
+blood, he has attained classical perfection and purity. In those days,
+moreover, his hatred of sentimental idealisation, the hatred that in
+Germany fulminated against Defregger's drawing-room Tyrolese, Auerbach's
+scented peasants, and the spruce mythology of poetical pictures, led him
+deliberately to emphasise what is brutal, unæsthetic, and, as it was
+then felt, unpoetical; led him, as it were, to trample with heavy shoes
+in the tedious footsteps of French poets. Barbarian: this was the word
+they tried to kill him with, not so much on account of the harshness and
+coarseness of his diction, which often reminds one of the guttural
+sounds of German, as because of the savage selection of his instinct,
+which always preferred what is ringingly resonant and ferociously alive,
+which never fed on nectar and ambrosia, but tore red and steaming shreds
+of flesh from the body of life. And genuinely barbarous, savage with
+Teutonic strength, is this his inroad into French literature, reminding
+one of those migrations of the Teutons into the Latin lands, where they
+rushed ponderously to battle with wild and raucous cries, to learn,
+after a time, a higher culture and the finer instincts of life from
+those they had conquered. Verhaeren in this book does not describe what
+is amiable and dreamy in Flanders, not idylls, but 'les fureurs
+d'estomac, de ventre et de débauche,'[1] ail the explosions of the lust
+of life, the orgies of peasants, and even of the animal world. Before
+him, his old schoolfellow Rodenbach had described Flanders to the French
+in poems that sounded gently with a silvery note, like the peal of
+belfries hovering over roofs; he had reminded them of that unforgettable
+melancholy of the evening over the canals of Bruges, of the magic of the
+moonlight over fields framed with dikes and hedges of willows. But
+Verhaeren closes his ears to hints of death; he describes life at its
+maddest, 'le décor monstrueux des grasses kermesses,'[2] popular
+festivals, in which intoxication and sensual pleasure sting the
+unbridled strength of the crowd, in which the demands of the body and
+the greed of money come into conflict, and the bestial nature of man
+overthrows the painfully learned lessons of morality. And even in these
+descriptions, which often teem with the exuberance of Rabelais, one
+feels that even this explosive life is not mad enough for him, that he
+yearns to intensify life out and beyond reality: 'jadis les gars avaient
+les reins plus fermes et les garces plus beau téton.'[3] These young
+fellows are too weak for him, the wenches too gentle; he cries for the
+Flanders of olden time, as it lives in the glowing pictures of Rubens
+and Jordaens and Breughel. These are his true masters, they, the
+revellers, who created their masterpieces between two orgies, whose
+laughter and feasting ring into the motives of their pictures. Some of
+the poems in _Les Flamandes_ are direct imitations of certain interiors
+and sensual genre-pictures: lads afire with lust forcing wenches under
+the hedges; peasants in their drunken jubilation dancing round the inn
+table. His desire is to sing that superabundance of vitality which
+relieves itself by excess, excess flung into excess, even in sensual
+pleasures. And his own colours and words, which are laid on with lavish
+profusion and flow along in liquid fire, are themselves a debauch, a
+'rut' (a favourite word of his). This vaunting display of seething
+pictures is nothing less than an orgy. A terrific sensuality rages to
+exhaustion as much in the execution as in the motive, a delight in these
+creatures who have the madness of rutting stallions, who root about in
+odorous meats and in the flowering flesh of women, who of set purpose
+gorge themselves with beer and wine, and then in the dance and in
+embraces discharge all the fire they have swallowed. Now and again a
+reposeful picture alternates, firmly fixed in the dark frame of a
+sonnet. But the hot wave streams over these breathing-spaces, and again
+the mood is that of Rubens and of Jordaens, those mighty revellers.
+
+But naturalistic art is pictorial, not poetic. And it is the great
+defect of this book that it was written by an inspired painter only, not
+yet by a poet. The words are coloured, but they are not free; they do
+not yet rock themselves in their own rhythm; they do not yet storm along
+to soar aloft with the inspiration; they are wild horses regularly
+trotting along in the shafts of the Alexandrine. There is a disparity
+between the inner intractability and the external regularity of these
+poems. The ore has not yet been molten long enough in the crucible of
+life to burst the hereditary mould. You feel that the avidity of life
+which is the substance of the work has really been seen 'à travers un
+tempérament,' that here a strong personality is in revolt against all
+tradition, a strong personality whose ponderous onslaught was bound to
+strike terror into the cautious and the short-sighted. But the strength
+and the art are not yet emancipated. Verhaeren is already a passionate
+onlooker, but he is still only an onlooker, one who stands without and
+not within the vortex, who watches everything with inspired sympathy,
+but who has not yet experienced it. This land of Flanders has not yet
+become a part of the poet's sensibility; the new point of view and the
+new form for it are not yet achieved; there is yet wanting that final
+smelting of the artistic excitement which is bound to burst all bonds
+and restrictions, to flame along in its own free feeling in an
+enraptured intoxication.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'Les Vieux Maîtres' (_Les Flamandes_).
+
+[2] 'Les Vieux Maîtres' (_Les Flamandes_).
+
+[3] 'Truandailles' (_Ibid._).
+
+
+
+
+THE MONKS
+
+     Moines venus vers nous des horizons gothiques,
+     Mais dont l'âme, mais dont l'esprit meurt de demain....
+     Mes vers vous bâtiront de mystiques autels.
+                                       É.V., 'Aux Moines.'
+
+
+Rubens, that lavish reveller, is the genius of the Flemish zest in
+living; but zest in living is only the temperament and not the soul of
+Flanders. Before him there were the earnest masters of the cloisters,
+the primitives, the van Eycks, Memling, Gerhard David, Roger van der
+Weyden; and after them came Rembrandt, the meditative visionary, the
+restless seeker after new values. Belgium is something else beside the
+merry land of kermesses; the healthy, sensual people are not the soul of
+Flanders. Glaring lights cast strong shadows. All vitality that is
+strongly conscious of itself produces its counterpart, seclusion and
+asceticism; it is just the healthiest, the elemental races--the Russians
+of to-day for instance--who among their strong have the weak, among
+their gluttons of life those who avert their faces from it, among those
+who assent some who deny. By the side of the ambitious, teeming Belgium
+we have spoken of, there is a sequestered Belgium which is falling into
+ruins. Art exclusively in Rubens's sense could take no account of all
+those solitary cities, Bruges, Ypres, Dixmude, through whose noiseless
+streets the monks hasten like flocks of ravens in long processions, in
+whose canals the dumb white shadows of gliding nuns are mirrored. There,
+mid life's raging river, are broad islands of dream where men find
+refuge from realities. Even in the great Belgian cities there are such
+sequestered haunts of silence, the _béguinages,_ those little towns in
+the town, whither ageing men and women have retired, renouncing the
+world for the peace of the cloister. Quite as much as the passion of
+life, the Roman Catholic faith and monkish renunciation are nowhere so
+deeply and firmly rooted as in this Belgium, where sensual pleasure is
+so noisy in its excess. Here again an extreme of contrasts is revealed:
+frowning in the face of the materialistic view of life stands the
+spiritual view. While the masses in the exuberance of their health and
+strength proclaim life aloud and pounce on its eternal pleasures, aside
+and cut off from them stand another, far lesser company to whom life is
+only a waiting for death, whose silence is as persistent as the
+exultation of the others. Everywhere here austere faith has its black
+roots in the vigorous, fruitful soil. For religious feeling always
+remains alive among a people that has once, although centuries may have
+passed since, fought with every fibre of its being for its faith. This
+is a subterranean Belgium that works in secret and that easily escapes
+the cursory glance, for it lives in shadows and silence. From this
+silence, however, from this averted earnestness, Belgian art has derived
+that mystical nourishment which has lent its baffling strength to the
+works of Maeterlinck, the pictures of Fernand Khnopff and Georges Minne.
+Verhaeren, too, did not turn aside from this sombre region. He, as the
+painter of Belgian life, saw these shadows of a vanishing past, and, in
+1886, added to his first book _Les Flamandes_ a second, _Les Moines_. It
+almost seems as though he had first of all been obliged to exhaust both
+the historical styles of his native land before he could reach his own,
+the modern style. For this book is essentially a throw-back, a
+confession of faith in Gothic art.
+
+Monks are for Verhaeren heroic symbols of I mighty periods in the past.
+In his boyhood he I was familiar with their grave aspect. Near the
+cheerful house where his youth was passed, there was at Bornhem a
+Bernhardine monastery, whither the boy had often accompanied his father
+to confession, and in whose cold corridors he had often waited in
+astonishment and with a child's timidity, listening to the majestic
+chant of the liturgy married to the organ's earnest notes. And here, one
+day of days, he received, with a thrill of pious terror, his first
+communion. Since that day the monks had been to him, as he trod the
+beaten track of custom, beings in a strange world apart, the incarnation
+of the beautiful and the supersensual, the unearthly on his child's
+earth. And when, in the course of years, he sought to create in verse a
+vision of Flanders in all her luminous and burning colours, he could not
+forgo this mysterious chiaroscuro, this earnest tone. For three weeks he
+withdrew to the hospitable monastery of Forges, near Chimay, taking part
+in all the ceremonies and rites of the monks, who, in the hope of
+winning a priest, afforded him full insight into their life. But
+Verhaeren's attitude towards Roman Catholicism was by this time anything
+but religious, it was rather an æsthetic and poetic admiration for the
+noble romanticism of the ceremonial, a moral piety for the things of the
+past. He remained three weeks. Then he fled, oppressed by the nightmare
+of the ponderous walls, and, as a souvenir for himself, chiselled the
+image of the monastery in verse.
+
+This book too, no doubt, had no other aim than to be pictorial,
+descriptive. In rounded sonnets, as though etched by Rembrandt's needle,
+he fixed the chiaroscuro of the cloister's corridors, the hours of
+prayer, the earnest meetings of the monks, the silence in the intervals
+of the liturgy. The evenings over the landscape were described, in a
+ritual language, with the images of faith: the sun as it sets in crimson
+flaming like the wine in the chalice; steeples like luminous crosses in
+a silent sky; the rustling corn bowing when the bell rings to evensong.
+The poetry of devotion and repose was here revived: the harmony of the
+organ; the beauty of corridors garlanded with ivy; the touching idyll of
+the lonely cemetery; the peaceful dying of the prior; the visiting of
+the sick, and the I comfort it brings. Nothing was allowed in the deep
+light of the colours, in the grave repose of the theme, save what could
+be fitted into the strictly religious frame of the picture.
+
+But here the pictorial method proved to be I insufficient for the poetic
+effect. The problem of religious feeling is too close to the heart to be
+reached by outward, even by plastic manifestations. A thing which is so
+eminently hostile to the sensuous, nay, which is the very symbol of I
+all that is contrary to sensuousness, cannot be reached by a picturesque
+appeal to the senses; the description of an intellectual problem must
+cease to be descriptive and become psychology. And so, thus early in his
+career, Verhaeren is forced away from the picturesque. First, however,
+he attempts the plastic method: he gives us sombre statues of monks; but
+even as statues they are only types of an inner life, symbols of the
+ways to God. Verhaeren develops in his monks the difference of their
+characters, which are still effective even under the soutane; and by his
+delicate characterisation he shows the I manifold possibilities of
+religious feeling. The I feudal monk, a noble of ancient lineage, would
+make a conquest of God, as once his ancestors conquered castle and
+forest lands with spur and sword. The _moine flambeau_, he that is
+burning with fervour, would possess Him with his passion like a woman.
+The savage monk, he that has come from the heart of a forest, can only
+comprehend Him in heathen wise, only fear Him as the wielder of thunder
+and lightning, while the gentle monk, he that loves the Virgin with a
+troubadour's timid tenderness, flees from the fear of Him. One monk
+would fathom Him by the learning of books and by logic; another does not
+understand Him, cannot lay hold on Him, and yet finds Him everywhere, in
+all things, in all he experiences. Thus all the characters of life, the
+harshest contrasts, are jostled together, quelled only by the monastery
+rules. But they are only in juxtaposition, just as the painter loves all
+his colours and things equally, just as he places things in
+juxtaposition, without estimating them according to their value. So far
+there is nothing that binds them together inwardly, there is no conflict
+of forces, no great idea. Neither are the verses as yet free; they too
+have the effect of being bound by the strict discipline of the monks.
+'Il s'environne d'une sorte de froide lumière parnassienne qui en fait
+une œuvre plus anonyme, malgré la marque du poète poinçonnée à
+maintes places sur le métal poli,'[1] says Albert Mockel, the most
+subtle of æsthetic critics, of the book. Verhaeren must himself have
+felt this insufficiency, for, conscious of not having solved his
+problems in terms of poetry, he has remoulded both aspects of the
+country, renewed both books in another form after many years: _Les
+Moines_ in the tragedy _Le Cloître, Les Flamandes_ in the great
+pentalogy _Toute la Flandre._
+
+_Les Moines_ was the last of Verhaeren's descriptive books, the last in
+which he stood on the outer side of things contemplating them
+dispassionately. But already here there is too much temperament in him
+to allow him to look at things as altogether unconnected and
+undisciplined; the joy of magnifying and intensifying by feeling already
+stirs in him. At the end of the book he no longer sees the monks as
+isolated individuals, but gathers them all together in a great synthesis
+in his finale. Behind them the poet sees order, a secret law, a great
+force of life. They, these hermits who have renounced, who are scattered
+over the world in a thousand monasteries, are to the poet the last
+remnants of a great departed beauty, and they are so much the more
+grandiose as they have lost all feeling for our own time. They are the
+last ruins of moribund Christianity in a new world, projecting, in
+tragic loneliness, into our own days. 'Seuls vous survivez grands au
+monde chrétien mort!'[2] he hails them in admiration, for they have
+built the great House of God, and for many generations sacrificed their
+blood for the Host eternally white. In admiration he hails them. Not in
+faith and love, but in admiration for their fearless energy, and above
+all because they go on fighting undaunted for something that is dead and
+lost; because their beauty serves none other than itself; because they
+project into our own time like the ancient belfries of the land, which
+no longer call to prayer. In a land where everything else serves a
+purpose, pleasure and gold, they stand lonely; and they die without a
+cry and without a moan, fighting against an invisible enemy, they, the
+last defenders of beauty. For at that time, at that early stage of his
+career, beauty for Verhaeren was still identical with the past, because
+he had not yet discovered beauty for himself in the new things; in the
+monks he celebrates the last romanticists, because he had not yet found
+poetry in the things of reality, not yet found the new romance, the
+heroism of the working-day. He loves the monks as great dreamers, as the
+_chercheurs de chimères sublimes_, but he cannot help them, cannot
+defend what they possess, for behind them already stand their heirs.
+These heirs are the poets--a curious echo of David Strauss's idea about
+religion--who will have to be, what religion with its faithful was to
+the past, the guardians and eternal promoters of beauty. They it will
+be--here rings strangely the deepest intention of Verhaeren's later
+work--who will wave their new faith over the world like a banner, they,
+'les poètes venus trop tard pour être prêtres,'[3] who shall be the
+priests of a new fervour. All religions, all dogmas, are brittle and
+transitory, Christ dies as Pan dies; and even this poetic faith, the
+last and highest conquest of the mind, must in its time pass away.
+
+     Car il ne reste rien que l'art sur cette terre
+     Pour tenter un cerveau puissant et solitaire
+     Et le griser de rouge et tonique liqueur.
+
+In this great hymn to the future Verhaeren first turns away from the
+past and seeks the path to the future. For the poetic idea is here
+understood with new and greater feelings than in the beginning of his
+career. Poetry is for Verhaeren a confession not only as applied to an
+individual in Goethe's phrase, but in a religious sense as well: as the
+highest moral confession.
+
+Much as these two books are marked by the effort to describe Flanders as
+it actually is, stronger than this effort is the yearning at the heart
+of them to escape from the present to the past. Every temperament
+exceeds reality. Flanders was here described in the sense of an ideal;
+but the ideal in both cases was projected on the past. Beauty young
+Verhaeren had sought in the monks, the symbols of the past; strength and
+the fire of life he had sought in the old Flemish masters. He still
+needed the costume of the past to discover the heroic and the beautiful
+in the present, just like many of our poets, who, when they would paint
+strong men, must perforce place their dramas in the Florentine
+renaissance, and who, if they would fashion beauty, deck their
+characters with Greek costumes. To find strength and beauty, or in one
+word poetry, in the real things that surround us, is here still denied
+to Verhaeren; and therefore he has disowned his second book as well as
+his first. In the distance between the old and the new works the long
+road may be seen, and seen with pride, which leads from the traditional
+poet to the truly contemporary poet.
+
+Though not yet divided with a master hand, though not yet in the light
+of reality, the inner contrast of the country, the conflict between body
+and soul, between the joy of life and the longing for death, between
+pleasure and renunciation, the alternative between 'yes' and 'no,' was
+yet already contained in the contrast of these two books. And in a
+really emotional poet this contrast could not remain one that was purely
+external; it was bound to condense to an inner problem, to a personal
+decision between past and present. Two conceptions of the world, both
+inherited and in the blood, have here attained consciousness in one man;
+and though in life they may act independently in juxtaposition, in the
+individual the conflict must be fought out, the victory of the one or
+the other must be decided by force, or else by something higher, by an
+internal reconciliation. This conflict for a conception of the world
+pierces through the constant contrast between the acceptance and the
+denial of life in the poet, a conflict that for ten long years
+undermined his artistic and human experiences with terrific crises, and
+brought him to the verge of annihilation. The hostility which divides
+his country into two camps seems to have taken refuge in his soul to
+fight it out in a desperate and mortal duel: past and future seem to be
+fighting for a new synthesis. But only from such crises, from such
+pitiless struggles with the forces of one's own soul, do the vast
+conceptions of the universe and their new creative reconciliation grow.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Albert Mockel, _Émile Verhaeren_.
+
+[2] 'Aux Moines.'
+
+[3] 'Aux Moines.'
+
+
+
+
+THE BREAK-DOWN
+
+     Nous sommes tous des Christs qui embrassons nos croix.
+                                             É. V.,'La Joie,'
+
+Every feeling, every sensation is, in the last instance, the
+transformation of pain. Everything that in vibration or by contact
+touches the epithelium affects it as pain. As pain, which then, by the
+secret chemistry of the nerves, transmitted from centre to centre, is
+transformed into impressions, colours, sounds, and conceptions. The
+poet, whose last secret really is that he is more sensitive than others,
+that he purifies these pains of contact into feeling with a still more
+delicate filter, must have finer nerves than anybody else. Where others
+only receive a vague impression, he must have a clear perception, to
+which his feeling must respond, and the value of which he must be able
+to estimate. In Verhaeren's very first books a particular kind of
+reaction to every incitement was perceptible. His feeling really
+responds only to strong, intensive, sharp irritation; its delicacy was
+not abnormal, only the energy of the reaction was remarkable. His first
+artistic incitement; however, that of Flemish landscapes, was only one
+of the retina, glaring colours, pictorial charm; only in _Les Moines_
+had for the first time more delicate psychic shades been crystallised.
+In the meantime a transformation had taken place in his exterior life.
+Verhaeren had turned aside from the contemplation of Nature to
+concentrate his strength on the cultivation of his mind. He had
+travelled extensively, had been in Paris and London, in Spain and
+Germany; with impetuous haste he had assimilated all great ideas, all
+new phases, all the manifold theories of existence. Without a pause,
+incessantly, experiences assail him and tire him out. A thousand
+impressions accost him, each demanding an answer; great, sombre cities
+discharge their electric fire upon him, and fill his nerves with leaping
+flame. The sky above him is obscured by the clouds of cities; in London
+he wanders about as though wildered in a forest. This grey, misty city,
+that seems as though it were built of steel, casts its whole melancholy
+over the soul of him who lives there in loneliness, ignorant of the
+language, and who is so much the more lonely, as all these
+manifestations of the new life in great cities are still unintelligible
+to him. He is still unable to capture the poetry that is in them, and so
+they leap at him and penetrate him with a confused, unintelligible pain.
+And in this novel atmosphere the intense refinement of his nerves
+proceeds at such a pace that already the slightest contact with the
+outer world produces a quivering reaction. Every noise, every colour,
+every thought presses in upon him as though with sharp needles; his
+healthy sensibility becomes hypertrophied; that fineness of hearing, of
+which one is conscious, say in sea-sickness, which perceives every
+noise, even the slightest sound, as though it were the blow of a hammer,
+undermines his whole organism; every rapidly-passing smell corrodes him
+like an acid; every ray of light pricks him like a red-hot needle. The
+process is aggravated by a purely physical illness, which corresponds to
+his psychic ailment. Just at that time Verhaeren was attacked by a
+nervous affection of the stomach, one of those repercussions of the
+psychic on the physical system in which it is hard to say whether the
+ailing stomach causes the neurasthenic condition, or the weakness of the
+nerves the stagnation of the digestive functions. Both ailments are
+inwardly co-ordinated, both are a rejection of the outer impression, an
+impotent refusal of the chemical conversion. Just as the stomach feels
+all food as pain, as a foreign body, so the ear repels every sound as an
+intrusion, so the eye rejects every impression as pain. This nervous
+rejection of the outer world was already then, in Verhaeren's life,
+pathological. The bell on the door had to be removed, because it shocked
+his nerves; those who lived in the house had to wear felt slippers
+instead of shoes; the windows were closed to the noise of the street.
+These years in Verhaeren's life are the lowest depth, the crisis of his
+vitality. It is in such periods of depression that invalids shut
+themselves off from the world, from their fellow-men, from the light of
+day, from the din of existence, from books, from all contact with the
+outer world, because they instinctively feel that everything can be a
+renewal of their pain, and nothing an enrichment of their life. They
+seek to soften the world, to tone its colours down; they bury themselves
+in the monotony of solitude. This 'soudaine lassitude'[1] then impinges
+on to the moral nature; the will, losing the sense of life, is
+paralysed; all standards of value collapse; ideals founder in the most
+frightful Nihilism. The earth becomes a chaos, the sky an empty space;
+everything is reduced to nothingness, to an absolute negation. Such
+crises in the life of a poet are almost always sterile. And it is
+therefore of incalculable value that here a poet should have observed
+himself and given us a clear picture of himself in this state, that,
+without fear of the ugliness, the confusion of his ego, he should have
+described, in terms of art, the history of a psychic crisis. In
+Verhaeren's trilogy, _Les Soirs, Les Débâcles, Les Flambeaux Noirs_, we
+have a document that must be priceless to pathologists as to
+psychologists. For here a deep-seated will to extract the last
+consequence from every phase of life has reproduced the stadium of a
+mental illness right to the verge of madness; here a poet has with the
+persistence of a physician pursued the symptoms of his suffering
+through every stage of lacerating pain, and immortalised in poems the
+process of the inflammation of his nerves.
+
+The landscape of this book is no longer that of his native province;
+indeed, it can hardly be called one of earth. It is a grandiose
+landscape of dreams, horizons as though on some other planet, as though
+in one of those worlds which have cooled into moons, where the warmth of
+the earth has died out and an icy calm chills the vast far-seen spaces
+deserted of man. Already in the book of the monks, Rubens's merry
+landscape had been clouded over; and in the next, _Au Bord de la Route_,
+the grey hand of a cloud had eclipsed the sun. But here all the colours
+of life are burnt out, not a star shines down from this steel-grey
+metallic sky; only a cruel, freezing moon glides across it from time to
+time like a sardonic smile. These are books of pallid nights, with the
+immense wings of clouds closing the sky, over a narrowed world, in which
+the hours cling to things like heavy and clammy chains. They are works
+filled with a glacial cold. 'Il gèle ...'[2] one poem begins, and this
+shuddering tone pierces like the howling of dogs ever and ever again
+over an illimitable plain. The sun is dead, dead are the flowers, the
+trees; the very marshes are frozen in these white midnights:
+
+     Et la crainte saisit d'un immortel hiver
+     Et d'un grand Dieu soudain, glacial et splendide.[3]
+
+In his fever the poet is for ever dreaming of this cold, as though in a
+secret yearning for its cooling breath. No one speaks to him, only the
+winds howl senselessly through the streets like dogs round a house.
+Often dreams come, but they are _fleurs du mal_; they dart out of the
+ice burning, yellow, poisonous. More and more monotonous grow the days,
+more and more fearful; they fall down like drops, heavy and black.
+
+     Mes jours toujours plus lourds s'en vont roulant leur cours![4]
+
+In thought and sound these verses express ail the frightful horror of
+this desolation. Impotently the ticking of the clock hammers this
+endless void, and measures a barren time. Darker, and darker grows the
+world, more and more oppressive; the concave mirror of solitude distorts
+the poet's dreams into frightful grimaces, and spirits whisper evil
+thoughts in his restless heart.
+
+And like a fog, like a heavy, stifling cloud, fatigue sinks down on his
+soul. First pleasure in things had died, and then the very will to
+pleasure. The soul craves nothing now. The nerves have withdrawn their
+antennæ from the outer world; they are afraid of every impression; they
+are spent. Whatever chances to drift against them no longer becomes
+colour, sound, impression; the senses are too feeble for the chemical
+conversion of impressions: and so everything remains at the stage of
+pain, a dull, gnawing pain. Feeling, which the nerves are now powerless
+to feed, starves; desire is sunk in sleep. Autumn has come; all the
+flowers have withered; and winter comes apace.
+
+     Il fait novembre en mon âme.
+     Et c'est le vent du nord qui clame
+     Comme une bête dans mon âme.[5]
+
+Slowly, but irresistible as a swelling tide, emerges an evil thought:
+the idea of the senselessness of life, the thought of death. As the last
+of yearnings soars up the prayer:
+
+     Mourir! comme des fleurs trop énormes, mourir![6]
+
+For the poet's whole body is, as it were, sore from this contact with
+the outer world, from these little gnawing pains. Not a single great
+feeling can stand erect: everything is eaten away by this little,
+gnawing, twitching pain. But now the man in his torture springs up, as a
+beast, tormented by the stings of insects, tears its chains asunder and
+rushes madly and blindly along. The patient would fain flee from his bed
+of torture, but he cannot retrace his steps. No man can 'se recommencer
+enfant, avec calcul.'[7] Travels, dreams, do nothing but deaden the
+pain; and then the torment of the awakening sets in again with redoubled
+strength. Only one way is open: the road which leads forward, the road
+to annihilation. Out of a thousand petty pains, the will longs for one
+single pain that shall end all: the body that is being burnt piecemeal
+cries for the lightning. The sick man desires--as fever-patients will
+tear their wounds open--to make this pain, which tortures without
+destroying, so great and murderous that it will kill outright: to save
+his pride, he would fain be himself the cause of his destruction. Pain,
+he says to himself, shall not continue to be a series of pin-pricks; he
+refuses to 'pourrir, immensément emmailloté d'ennui';[8] he asks to be
+destroyed by a vast, fiery, savage pain; he demands a beautiful and
+tragic death. _The will to experience becomes here the will to suffer
+pain_ and even death. He will be glad to suffer any torture, but not
+this one low little thing; he can no longer endure to feel himself so
+contemptible, so wretched.
+
+     N'entendre plus se taire, en sa maison d'ébène,
+     Qu'un silence total dont auraient peur les morts.[9]
+
+And with a flagellant's pleasure the patient nurses this fire of fever,
+till it flames up in a bright blaze. The deepest secret of Verhaeren's
+art was from the first his joy in intemperance, the strength of his
+exaggeration. And so, too, he snatches up this pain, this neurasthenia
+to a wonderful, fiery, and grandiose ecstasy. A cry, a pleasure breaks
+out of this idea of liberation. For the first time the word 'joy' blazes
+again in the cry:
+
+     Le joie enfin me vient, de souffrir par moi-même,
+     Parce que je lé veux.[10]
+
+True, only a perverse joy, a sophism, the false triumph over life of the
+suicide, who believes he has conquered fate when, truth to tell, it has
+conquered him. But this self-deception is already sublime.
+
+By this sudden interference of the will the physical torture of the
+nerves becomes a psychic event; the illness of the body encroaches upon
+the intellect; the neurasthenia becomes a 'déformation morale'; the
+suffering schism of the poet's ego is of itself subdivided, so to speak,
+into two elements, one that excites pain and one that suffers pain. The
+psychic would fain tear itself free from the physical, the soul would
+fain withdraw from the tortured body:
+
+     Pour s'en aller vers les lointains et se défaire
+     De soi et des autres, un jour,
+     En un voyage ardent et mol comme l'amour
+     Et légendaire ainsi qu'un départ de galère![11]
+
+But the two are relentlessly bound up with each other, no flight is
+possible, however much disgust drives the poet to rescue at least a part
+of himself by snatching it into a purer, calmer, and higher state.
+Never, I believe, has the aversion of a sick man to himself, the will to
+health of a living man, been more cruel and more grandiose than in this
+book of a poet's diabolical revolt against himself. His suffering soul
+is torn into two parts. In a fearful personification the hangman and the
+condemned criminal wrestle for the mastery. 'Se cravacher dans sa
+pensée et dans son sang!'[12] and finally, in a paroxysm of fury, 'me
+cracher moi-même,'[13] these are the horribly shrilling cries of
+self-hatred and self-disgust. With all the strings of her whipped
+strength the soul tears to free herself from the rotting and tormented
+body, and her deepest torture is that this separation is impossible. In
+this distraction flickers already the first flame of madness.
+
+Never--if we except Dostoieffsky--has a poet's scalpel probed the wound
+of his ego so cruelly and so deeply, never has it gone so dangerously
+near to the nerve of life. And never perhaps, except in Nietzsche's
+_Ecce Homo!_ has a poet stepped so close to the edge of the precipice
+that juts above the abyss of existence, with so clear a consciousness of
+its vicinity, to feast on the feeling of dizziness and on the danger of
+death. The fire in Verhaeren's nerves has slowly inflamed his brain. But
+the other being, the poet in him, had remained watchful, observing the
+eye of madness slowly, inevitably, and as though magnetically attracted,
+coming nearer and nearer. 'L'absurdité grandit en moi comme une fleur
+fatale.'[14] In gentle fear, but at the same time with a secret
+voluptuous pleasure, he felt the dreaded thing approaching. For long
+already he had been conscious that this rending of himself had hunted
+his thinking from the circle of clarity. And in one grandiose poem, in
+which he sees the corpse of his reason floating down the grey Thames,
+the sick man describes that tragic foundering:
+
+     Elle est morte de trop savoir,
+     De trop vouloir sculpter la cause,
+     ---------------------------------
+     Elle est morte, atrocement,
+     D'un savant empoisonnement,
+     Elle est morte aussi d'un délire
+     Vers un absurde et rouge empire.[15]
+
+But no fear takes him at this thought. Verhaeren is a poet who loves
+paroxysm. And just as in his physical illness he had called out in the
+deepest joy for the intoxication of illness, for its exasperation, for
+death, so now his psychic illness demands its intoxication, the
+dissolution of all order, its most glorious foundering: madness. Here,
+too, the pleasure in the quest of pain is intensified to the highest
+superlative, to a voluptuous joy in self-destruction. And as sick men
+amid their torments scream of a sudden for death, this tortured man
+screams in grim yearning for madness:
+
+     Aurai-je enfin l'atroce joie
+     De voir, nerfs par nerfs, comme une proie,
+     La démence attaquer mon cerveau?[16]
+
+He has measured all the deeps of the spirit, but all the words of
+religion and science, all the elixirs of life, have been powerless to
+save him from this torment. He knows all sensations, and there was no
+greatness in any of them; all have goaded him, none have exalted him or
+raised him above himself. And now his heart yearns ardently for this
+last sensation of all. He is tired of waiting for it, he will go out to
+meet it: 'Je veux marcher vers la folie et ses soleils.'[17] He hails
+madness as though it were a saint, as though it were his saviour; he
+forces himself to 'croire à la démence ainsi qu'en une foi.'[18] It is a
+magnificent picture reminding one of the legend of Hercules, who,
+tortured by the fiery robe of Nessus, hurls himself on the pyre to be
+consumed by one great flame instead of being wretchedly burnt to death
+by a thousand slow and petty torments.
+
+Here the highest state of despair is reached; the black banner of death
+and the red one of madness are furled together. With unprecedented logic
+Verhaeren, despairing of an interpretation of life, has exalted
+senselessness as the sense of the universe. But it is just in this
+complete inversion that victory already lies. Johannes Schlaf, in his
+masterly study, has with great eloquence demonstrated that it is just at
+the moment when the sick man cries out like one being crucified, 'Je
+suis l'immensément perdu,'[19] just when he feels he is being drawn into
+the bosom of the infinite, that he is redeemed and delivered. Just this
+idea, which here had whipped the little pain to the verge of madness,
+
+     À chaque heure, violenter sa maladie;
+     L'aimer, et la maudire,[20]
+
+is already the deepest leitmotiv of Verhaeren's work, the key to unlock
+the gates of it. For the idea is nothing else than the idea of his life,
+to master all resistance by a boundless love, 'aimer le sort jusqu'en
+ses rages';[21] never to shun a thing, but to take everything and
+enhance it till it becomes creative, ecstatic pleasure; to welcome every
+suffering with fresh readiness. Even this cry for madness, no doubt the
+extreme document of human despair, is an immense yearning for clearness;
+in this tortured disgust with illness cries a joy in life perhaps else
+unknown in our days; and the whole conflict, which seems to be a flight
+from life, is in the last instance an immense heroism for which there is
+no name. Nietzsche's great saying is here fulfilled: 'For a dionysiac
+task a hammer's hardness, _the pleasure in destruction itself_, is most
+decidedly one of the preliminary conditions.'[22] And what at this
+period of Verhaeren's work appears still to be negative is in the higher
+sense a preparation for the positive, for the decisive consummation, of
+the later books.
+
+For that reason this crisis and the shaping of it in verse remain an
+imperishable monument of our contemporary literature, for it is at the
+same time an eternal monument to the conquest of human suffering by the
+power of art. Verhaeren's crisis--his exposition, for the sake of the
+value of life, of his inward struggle--has gone deeper than that of any
+other poet of our time. To this very day the sufferings of that time are
+graven, as though by iron wedges, in the furrows of his lofty brow; the
+recovery of his health and his subsequent robustness have been powerless
+to efface them. This crisis was a fire without parallel, a flame of
+passion. Not a single acquisition from the earlier days was rescued from
+it. Verhaeren's whole former relation to the world has broken down: his
+Catholic faith, his religion, his feeling for his native province, for
+the world, for life itself, all is destroyed. And when he builds up his
+work now, it must perforce be an entirely different one, with a
+different artistic expression, with different feelings, different
+knowledge, and different harmonies. This tempest has changed the
+landscape of his soul, where once the peace of a modest existence had
+prevailed, into a pathless desert. But this desert with its solitude has
+space and liberty for the building up of a new, a richer, an infinitely
+nobler world.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'L'Heure Mauvaise' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[2] 'La Barque' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[3] 'Le Gel' (_Les Soirs_).
+
+[4] 'L'Heure Mauvaise' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[5] 'Vers' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[6] 'Mourir' (_Les Soirs_).
+
+[7] 'S'amoindrir' (_Les Débâcles_).
+
+[8] 'Si Morne' (_Les Débâcles_)
+
+[9] 'Le Roc' (_Les Flambeaux Noirs_).
+
+[10] 'Insatiablement' (_Les Soirs_).
+
+[11] 'Là-bas' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[12] 'Vers le Cloître' (_Les Débâcles_).
+
+[13] 'Un Soir' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[14] 'Fleur Fatale' (_Les Débâcles_).
+
+[15] 'La Morte' (_Les Flambeaux Noirs_).
+
+[16] 'Le Roc' (_Ibid._).
+
+[17] 'Fleur Fatale' (_Les Débâcles_).
+
+[18] 'Le Roc' (_Les Flambeaux Noirs_).
+
+[19] 'Les Nombres' (_Ibid._).
+
+[20] 'Celui de la Fatigue' (_Les Apparus dans mes Chemins_).
+
+[21] 'La Joie' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[22] _Ecce Homo!_
+
+
+
+
+FLIGHT INTO THE WORLD
+
+     On boit sa soif, on mange sa faim.--É.V., 'L'Amour.'
+
+In this crisis the negation was driven to the last possible limits. The
+sick man had denied not only the outer world, but himself as well.
+Nothing had remained but vexation, disgust, and torment.
+
+     La vie en lui ne se prouvait
+     Que par l'horreur qu'il en avait.[1]
+
+He had arrived at the last possibility, at that possibility which means
+destruction or transformation. The at first purely physical pain of the
+supersensitive organs of the senses had become a moral depression; the
+depression had become psychic suffering; and this again had gradually
+turned in a grandiose progression not only to pain in the individual
+thing but to suffering in the all: to _cosmic pain_. For Him, however,
+who in His loneliness took the suffering of the whole world upon His
+shoulders, who was strong enough to bear it for all the centuries,
+humanity has invented the symbol of 'God.' He who is born of earth and
+lives to die must perforce break down under so gigantic a burden. Into
+the last corner of his ego revengeful life had here driven the man who
+denied it, had driven him to the point where now he stood shivering
+before the abyss in his own breast, face to face with death and madness.
+The physical and poetic organism of Verhaeren was overheated to the most
+dangerous and extreme degree. This fever-heat--that of a flagellant
+--had brought his blood to the boiling-point; it was filling the chamber
+of his breast with pictures of such overwhelming horror that the
+explosion of self-destruction could only be prevented by opening the
+valve.
+
+There were only two means of flight from this destruction: flight into
+the past--or flight into a new world. Many, Verlaine for instance, had
+in such catastrophes, wherein the whole structure of their lives tumbled
+to the ground, fled into the cathedrals of Catholicism rather than stand
+in solitude under the threatening sky. Verhaeren, however, though an
+inspired faith is one of the most living sources of his poetical power,
+was more afraid of the past than of the Unknown. _He freed himself from
+the immense pressure upon him by fleeing into the world_. He who in his
+pride had conceived the whole process of the world as a personal affair,
+he who had tried to solve the eternal discord, the undying 'yes' and
+'no' of life in his own lonely self, now rushes into the very midst of
+things and involves himself in their process. He who previously had felt
+everything only subjectively, only in isolation, now objectifies
+himself; he who previously had shut himself off from reality, now lets
+his veins pulse in harmony with the breathing organism of life. He
+relinquishes his attitude of pride; he surrenders himself; lavishes
+himself joyously on everything; exchanges the pride of being alone for
+the immense pleasure of being everywhere. _He no longer looks at all
+things in himself, but at himself in all things_. But the poet in him
+frees himself, quite in Goethe's sense, by symbols. Verhaeren drives his
+superabundance out of himself into the whole world, just as Christ in
+the legend drove the devils out of the madman into the swine. The heat,
+the fever of his feeling--which, concentrated in his too narrow chest,
+were near bursting it--now animate with their fire the whole world
+around him, which of old had been to him congealed with ice. All the
+evil powers, which had slunk around him in the trappings of nightmares,
+he now transforms to shapes of life. He hammers away at them and shapes
+them anew; he is himself the smith of that noble poem of his, the smith
+of whom he says:
+
+     Dans son brasier, il a jeté
+     Les cris d'opiniâtreté,
+     La rage sourde et séculaire;
+     Dans son brasier d'or exalté,
+     Maître de soi, il a jeté
+     Révoltes, deuils, violences, colères,
+     Pour leur donner la trempe et la clarté
+     Du fer et de l'éclair.[2]
+
+He objectifies his personality in the work of art, hammering out of the
+cold blocks, that weighed upon him with the weight of iron, monuments
+and statues of pain. All the feelings which of old weighed down upon him
+like dull fog, formless and prisoned in dream like nightmares, now
+become clear statues, symbols in stone of his soul's experiences. The
+poet has torn his fear, his burning, moaning, horrible fear, out of
+himself, and poured it into his bell-ringer, who is consumed in his
+blazing belfry. He has turned the monotony of his days to music in his
+poem of the rain; his mad fight against the elements, which in the end
+break his strength, he has shaped into the image of the ferryman
+struggling against the current that shatters his oars one after the
+other. His cruel probing of his own pain he has visualised in the idea
+of his fishermen, who with their nets all in holes go on fishing up
+nothing but suffering on suffering out of the sombre stream; his evil
+and red lusts he has spiritualised in his _Aventurier_, in the
+adventurer who returns home from a far land to celebrate his wedding
+feast with his dead love. Here his feelings are shaped no longer in
+moods, in the fluid material of dreams, but in the infinitely mobile
+form of human beings. Here there is symbolism in the highest sense, in
+Goethe's sense of liberation. For every feeling that has achieved
+artistic shape is as it were conjured away out of the breast. And thus
+the too heavy pressure slowly disappears from the poet's being, and the
+morbid fever from his work. Now and now only does he recognise the
+suicidal cowardice behind the visor of the pride that forced him to fly
+from the world, now and now only does he understand that fatal egoism
+which had taken refuge beyond the pale of the world:
+
+     J'ai été lâche et je me suis enfui
+     Du monde, en mon orgueil futile,[3]
+
+This confession is the last liberating word of the crisis.
+
+Now his despair--a despair like that of Faust--is overcome. The mood of
+Easter morning begins to sound the exulting cry, 'Earth has me
+again!'[4] with the anthems of the resurrection. Verhaeren has described
+this deliverance, this ascent from illness to health, from the most
+despairing 'no' to the most exultant 'yes,' in many symbols, most
+beautifully in that magnificent poem wherein St. George the
+dragon-slayer bows down to him with his shining lance; and again in that
+other poem in which the four gentle sisters approach him and announce
+his deliverance:
+
+     L'une est le bleu pardon, l'autre la bonté blanche,
+     La troisième l'amour pensif, la dernière le don
+     D'être, même pour les méchants, le sacrifice.[5]
+
+Goodness and love call to him now from where of old there were only
+hatred and despair. And in their approach already he feels the hope of
+recovery, the hope of a natural, artistic strength.
+
+     Et quand elles auront, dans ma maison,
+     Mis de l'ordre à mes torts, plié tous mes remords
+     Et refermé, sur mes péchés, toute cloison,
+     En leur pays d'or immobile, où le bonheur
+     Descend, sur des rives de fleurs entr'accordées,
+     Elles dresseront les hautes idées,
+     En sainte-table, pour mon cœur.[6]
+
+This feeling of recovery grows more and more secure, more and more the
+mist parts before the approaching sun of health. Now the poet knows that
+he has been wandering in the dark galleries of mines, that he has been
+hammering a labyrinth through the hard rock of hatred instead of walking
+the same path as his fellow-men in the light. And at last, bright and
+exultant, high above the shy voices of hope and prayer, the sudden
+triumph of certainty rings out. For the first time Verhaeren finds the
+form of the poem of the future--the dithyramb. Where of old, confused
+and lonely, _le carillon noir_ of pain sounded, now all the strings of
+the heart vibrate and sing.
+
+     Sonnez toutes mes voix d'espoir!
+     Sonnez en moi; sonnez, sous les rameaux,
+     En des routes claires et du soleil![7]
+
+And now the path proceeds in light 'vers les claires métamorphoses.'[8]
+
+This flight into the world was the great liberation. Not only has the
+body grown strong again and rejoices in the wandering and the way, but
+the soul too has become cheerful, the will has grown new wings that are
+stronger than the old, and the poet's art is filled with a fresh blood
+red with life. The deliverance is perceptible even in Verhaeren's verse,
+which with its delicate nerves reproduces all the phases of his soul.
+For his poetry, which at first in the indifference of its picturesque
+description preserved the cold form of the Alexandrine, and then, in the
+grim monotony of the crisis, tried to represent the void waste of
+feeling by a terrifying, gruesomely beautiful uniformity of rhythm, this
+poem of a sudden, as though out of a dream, starts into life, awakens
+like an animal from sleep, rears, prances, curvets; imitates all
+movements, threatens, exults, falls into ecstasy: in other words, all of
+a sudden, and independently of all influences and theories, he has won
+his way to the _vers libre,_ free verse. Just as the poet no longer
+shuts the I world up in himself, but bestows himself on the world, the
+poem too no longer seeks to lock the world up obstinately in its
+four-cornered prison, but surrenders itself to every feeling, every
+rhythm, every melody; it adapts itself, distends; with its foaming
+voluptuous joy it can fold in its embrace the illimitable length and
+breadth of cities, can contract to pick up the loveliness of one fallen
+blossom, can imitate the thundering voice of the street, the hammering
+of machines, and the whispering of lovers in a garden of spring. _The
+poem can now speak in all the languages of feeling, with all the voices
+of men; for the tortured, moaning cry of an individual has become the
+voice of the universe._
+
+But together with this new delight the poet feels the debt which he has
+withheld from his age. He beholds the lost years in which he lived only
+for himself, for his own little feeling, instead of listening to the
+voice of his time. With a remarkable concordance of genius Verhaeren's
+work here expresses what Dehmel--in the same year perhaps--fashioned
+with such grandeur in 'The Mountain Psalm,' the poem in which, looking
+down from the heights of solitude to the cities in their pall of smoke,
+he cries in ecstasy:
+
+     Was weinst du, Sturm?--Hinab, Erinnerungen!
+     dort pulst im Dunst der Weltstadt zitternd Herz!
+     Es grollt ein Schrei von Millionen Zungen
+     nach Glück und Frieden: Wurm, was will dein Schmerz!
+     Nicht sickert einsam mehr von Brust zu Brüsten,
+     wie einst die Sehnsucht, als ein stiller Quell;
+     heut stöhnt ein _Volk_ nach Klarheit, wild und gell,
+     und du schwelgst noch in Wehmutslüsten?
+
+     Siehst du den Qualm mit dicken Fäusten drohn
+     dort überm Wald der Schlote und der Essen?
+     Auf deine Reinheitsträume fällt der Hohn
+     der Arbeit! fühl's: sie ringt, von Schmutz zerfressen.
+     Du hast mit deiner Sehnsucht bloss gebuhlt,
+     in trüber Glut dich selber nur genossen;
+     schütte die Kraft aus, die dir zugeflossen,
+     und du wirst frei vom Druck der Schuld![9]
+
+Pour out the power that has flowed in upon thee! Surrender thyself! That
+too is Verhaeren's ecstatic cry at this hour. Opposites touch. _Supreme
+solitude is turned to supreme fellowship_. The poet feels that
+self-surrender is more than self-preservation. All at once he sees
+behind him the frightful danger of this self-seeking pain.
+
+     Et tout à coup je m'apparais celui
+     Qui s'est, hors de soi-même, enfui
+     Vers le sauvage appel des forces unanimes.[10]
+
+And he who in days gone by had fled from this appeal into cold solitude,
+now casts himself ecstatically into the arms of the world, with the I
+deepest yearning
+
+         De n'être plus qu'un tourbillon
+     Qui se disperse au vent mystérieux des choses.[11]
+
+He feels that in order to live to the full all the greatness and beauty
+of this fiery world, he must multiply himself, be a thousandfold and ten
+thousandfold what he is. 'Multiplie-toi!' Be manifold. Surrender
+thyself! For the first time this cry bursts up like a flame. Be
+manifold!
+
+     Multiplie et livre-toi! Défais
+     Ton être en des millions d'êtres;
+     Et sens l'immensité filtrer et transparaître.[12]
+
+Only from this brotherhood with all things accrue the possibilities of
+being a modern poet. Only by self-surrender to everything that is could
+Verhaeren attain to so grandiose a conception of contemporary
+manifestations, only thus could he become the poet of the democracy of
+cities, of industrialism, of science, the poet of Europe, the poet of
+our age. Only such a pantheistic feeling could create this intimate
+relationship between the world of self and the world surrounding self,
+the relationship which subsequently ends in an unparalleled identity:
+only so despairing a 'no' could be transformed to so enraptured a 'yes,'
+only one who had fled from the world could possess it with such passion.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'Un Soir' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[2] 'Le Forgeron' (_Les Villages Illusoires_).
+
+[3] 'Saint Georges' (_Les Apparus dans mes Chemins_).
+
+[4] Goethe's _Faust_, 1. 784.
+
+[5] 'Les Saintes' (_Les Apparus dans mes Chemins_).
+
+[6] 'Les Saintes' (_Les Apparus dans mes Chemins_).
+
+[7] 'Saint Georges' (_Ibid_).
+
+[8] 'Le Forgeron' (_Les Villages Illusoires_).
+
+[9] 'Why weepest thou, O storm?--Down, memories! Yonder in the smoke
+pulses the great city's trembling heart! A million grumbling tongues are
+crying for peace and happiness: worm, what would thy pain! Yearning no
+longer trickles lonely from breast to breasts, a quiet source and no
+more: to-day a _nation_ groans, and with wild, shrill voices demands
+clearness--and thou still revellest in the joys of melancholy?
+
+'Seest thou the reek and smoke threatening yonder over the forest of
+flues and chimneys? Upon thy dreams of purity falls the scorn of labour!
+Feel it: labour is struggling, eaten up with dirt! Thou hast but
+wantoned with thy yearning, thou hast but enjoyed thyself in turbid
+heat; pour out the power that has flowed in upon thee, and thou shalt be
+free from the burden of guilt!'--'Bergpsalm' (_Aber die Liebe_).
+
+[10] 'La Foule' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[11] 'Celui du Savoir' (_Les Apparus dans mes Chemins_).
+
+[12] 'La Forêt' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+CONSTRUCTIVE FORCES
+
+
+LES CAMPAGNES HALLUCINÉES--LES VILLAGES ILLUSOIRES
+--LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES--LES DRAMES
+
+1893-1900
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTEMPORARY FEELING
+
+      J'étais le carrefour où tout se rencontrait.--É.V., 'Le Mont.'
+
+
+Verhaeren's deliverance from the stifling clasp of his crisis was a
+flight to realities. He saved himself by no longer fixing his gaze
+rigidly on himself and deeply probing every feeling of joy and torment,
+but by turning to the world of phenomena and flinging himself on its
+problems. He has no longer to stand in solitude facing the world; his
+desire is to multiply himself, to realise himself in everything that is
+alive, in everything that expresses a will, an idea, a form, anything at
+all animated. His poetic aim now is, not so much to analyse himself to
+himself, as to analyse himself in the whole world.
+
+To realities, and particularly to the realities of our day, lyric poets
+had previously felt themselves alien. It had long been a commonplace to
+speak of the danger to art of industrialism, of democracy, of this age
+of machinery which makes pur life uniform, kills individuality, and
+drowns romance in actualities. All these poets have looked upon the new
+creations, machines, railways, monster cities, the telegraph, the
+telephone, all the triumphs of engineering, as a drag on the soaring of
+poetry. Ruskin preached that workshops should be demolished and chimneys
+razed to the ground; Tolstoy pointed to primitive man, who produces all
+his requirements from his own resources independently of any community,
+and saw in him the moral and æsthetic ideal of the future. In poetry,
+the past had gradually come to be identified with the poetical. People
+were enamoured of the glory that was Greece, of mail-coaches and narrow,
+crooked streets; they were filled with enthusiasm for all foreign
+cultures, and decried that of our own time as a phase of degeneration.
+Democracy, levelling all ranks and confining even the poet to the
+middle-class profession of author, seemed, as a social order, to be the
+correlation of machinery which, by the constructive skill of workshops,
+renders all manual dexterity unnecessary. All the poets, who were glad
+to avail themselves of the practical advantages provided by technical
+science, who had no objection to covering immense distances in the
+minimum time, who accepted the comfort of the modern house, the luxury
+of modern conditions of life, increased pecuniary rewards and social
+independence, refused obstinately to discover in these advantages a
+single poetic motive, a single object of inspiration, the least stimulus
+or ecstasy. Poetry had by degrees come to be something which was the
+very opposite of what-, ever is useful; all evolution seemed to these
+poets to be, from the point of view of culture, retrogression.
+
+Now it is Verhaeren's great exploit that he effected a transmutation
+poetic values. He discovered the sublime in the far-spread serried ranks
+of democracy; beauty he found not only where it adapts itself to
+traditional ideas, but also where, still hidden by the cotyledon of the
+new, it is just beginning to unfold. By rejecting no phenomenon, in so
+far as an inward sense and a necessity dwelt in it, he infinitely
+extended the boundaries of the lyric art. He found a fruitful soil in
+the very places where all other poets despaired of poetic seed. He and
+he alone, who had for so long been eating his heart out in fierce
+isolation, feels the strength and fulness of society, the poetical
+element in the massed strength of great cities and in great inventions.
+_His deepest longing, his most sublime exploit is the lyric discovery of
+the new beauty in new things._
+
+The only way to this feat lay for him through the conviction that beauty
+does not express anything absolute, but something that changes with
+circumstances and with men; that beauty, like everything that is subject
+to evolution, is constantly changing. Yesterday's beauty is not to-day's
+beauty. Beauty is no more opposed than anything else to that tendency to
+spiritualisation which is the most characteristic symptom ind result of
+all culture. Physiologists have proved that the physical strength of
+modern man is inferior to that of his ancestors, but that his nervous
+system is more developed, so that strength is more and more concentrated
+in the intellect. The Hellenic hero was the wrestler, the expression of
+a body harmoniously developed in every limb, the perfection of strength
+and skill; the hero of our time is the thinker, the ideal of
+intellectual strength and suppleness. And since our only way of
+estimating the perfection of things is by the ideal of our personal
+feeling, the form of beauty likewise has been transformed and become
+intellectual. And even when we seek it in the body, as, for instance, in
+the ideal woman's figure, we have grown accustomed to seeing perfection
+not so much in robustness and plumpness as in a noble, slender play of
+lines which mysteriously expresses the soul. Beauty is turning away more
+and more from the outer surface, from the physical, to the interior
+aspects, to the psychic. In proportion as motive forces hide themselves
+and as harmony becomes less obvious, beauty intellectualises itself. It
+is becoming for us not so much a beauty of appearance as a beauty of;
+aim. If we are to admire the telegraph or the telephone, we shall not be
+satisfied with considering the exterior forms, the network of wires, the
+keys, the receivers; we shall be impressed rather by the ideal beauty,
+by the idea of a vibrating spark leaping over countries and whole
+continents. A machine is not wonderful on, account of its rattling,
+rusty, iron framework, but by the idea, deep-seated in its body, which
+is the principle of its magical activity. A modern idea of beauty must
+be adapted not only to the idea of beauty of the past, but also to that
+of the future. And the future of æsthetics is a kind of ideology, or, as
+Renan expresses it, an identity with the sciences. We shall lose the
+habit of understanding things only by our senses, of seeing their
+harmony only on their exterior surface, and we shall have to learn how
+to conceive their intellectual aims, their inner form, their psychic
+organisation, as beauty.
+
+For these new things are only ugly when they are regarded with the eyes
+of a past century, when our contemporaries, jealously guarding a
+reverent over-estimation, valuing the rust and not the gold, despise
+modern works of art, and pay a thousand times too dear for the
+indifferent productions of a past age. Only in this state of feeling is
+it possible to esteem mail-coaches poetical and locomotives ugly; only
+thus is it possible for poets, who have not learned to see with
+emancipated and independent eyes, to assume such a hostile attitude, or
+at the best an indifferent attitude, to our realities. Let us remember
+Nietzsche's beautiful words: 'My formula for grandeur in man is _amor
+fati_: that a man should ask for nothing else, either in the past or in
+the future, in all eternity. We must not only endure what is necessary,
+still less conceal it--all idealism is lying in necessity's face--but
+we must _love_ it.'[1] And in this sense some few in our days have loved
+what is new, first as a necessity, and then as beauty. A generation ago
+now, Carlyle was the first to preach the heroism of everyday life, and
+exhorted the poets of his day not to describe the greatness they found
+in mouldy chronicles, but to look for it where it was nearest to them,
+in the realities around them. Constantin Meunier has found the idea of a
+new sculpture in democracy, Whistler and Monet have discovered in the
+smoky breath of this age of machinery a new tone of colour which is not
+less beautiful than Italy's eternal azure and the halcyon sky of Greece.
+It is only from the vast agglomerations, the immense dimensions of the
+new world that Walt Whitman has derived the strength and power of his
+voice. The whole difficulty which thus far has permitted only a few to
+serve the new beauty in the new things lies in the fact that our age is
+not yet a period of decided conviction, but only one of transition. The
+victory of machinery is not yet complete; handiwork still subsists,
+little towns still flourish, it is still possible to take refuge in an
+idyll, to find the old beauty in some sequestered corner. Not till the
+poet is shut off from all flight to inherited ideals will he be forced
+to change himself into a new man. For the new things have not yet
+organically developed their beauty. Every new thing on its first
+appearance is blended with something repellent, brutal, and ugly; it is
+only gradually that its inherent form shapes itself æsthetically. The
+first steamers, the first locomotives, the first automobiles, were ugly.
+But the slender, agile torpedo-boats of to-day, the bright-coloured,
+noiselessly--gliding automobiles with their hidden mechanism, the great,
+broad-chested Pacific Railway engines of to-day, are impressive by their
+outward form alone. Our huge shops, such as those which Messel built in
+Berlin, display a beauty in iron and glass which is hardly less than
+that of the cathedrals and palaces of old time. Certain great things,
+such as the Eiffel Tower, the Forth Bridge, modern men-of-war, furnaces
+belching flame, the Paris boulevards, have a new beauty beyond anything
+which past ages had to show. These new things compel a new enhancement
+of value, on the one hand by the idea that moves them, on the other hand
+by their democratic grandeur and their vast dimensions--equalled by none
+but the very greatest works of antiquity. But whatever is beautiful
+must, sooner or later, be conceived of as poetry. And thus, it is quite
+sure, Verhaeren has only been one of the first to build bridges from the
+old to the new time; others will come who will celebrate the new
+beauties in the new things--gigantic cities, engines, industrialism,
+democracy, this fiery striving for new standards of greatness--and they
+will not only be compelled to find the new beauties, they will also
+have to establish new laws for this new order, a different morality, a
+different religion, a different synthesis for this new conditionality.
+the poetic transmutation of the beautiful is only a first beginning of
+the poetic transmutation of the feeling of life.
+
+But a poet never finds anything in things save his own temperament. If
+he is melancholy, the world in his books is void of sense, all lights
+are extinguished, laughter dies; if he is passionate, all feelings
+seethe in a fiery froth as though in a cauldron, and foam up in angry
+happenings. Whereas the real world is manifold, and contains the elixirs
+of pleasure and pain, confidence and despair, love and hate, only as
+elements so to speak, the world of great poets is the world of one
+single feeling. And so Verhaeren too sees all things in their new beauty
+with the feelings of his own life only, only with energy. In these the
+fiery years of his prime it is not harmony that he seeks, but energy,
+power. For him a thing is the more beautiful the more purpose, will,
+power, energy it contains. And since the whole world of to-day is
+over-heated with effort and energy; since our great towns are nothing
+but centres of multiplied energy; since machinery expresses nothing save
+force tanied and organised; since innumerable crowds are yoked in
+harmonious action--to him the world is full of beauty. He loves the new
+age because it does not isolate effort but condenses it, because it is
+not scattered but concentrated for action. And of a sudden everything
+he sees appears to be filled with soul. All that has will, all that has
+an aim in view--man, machine, crowd, city, money; all that vibrates,
+works, hammers, travels, exults; all that propagates itself and is
+multiplied, all that strives to be creation; all that bears in itself
+fire, impulse, electricity, feeling--all this rings again in his verse.
+All that of old had acted upon him as being cold and dead and hostile is
+now inspired with will and energy, and lives its minute; in this
+multiple gear there is nothing that is merely dust or useless
+ornamentation; everything is creation, everything is working its way
+towards the future. The town, this piled-up Babylon of stones and men,
+is of a sudden a living being, a vampire sucking the strength of the
+land; the factories, that had seemed to him nothing but an unsightly
+mass of masonry, now become the creators of a thousand things, which in
+their turn create new things out of themselves. All at once Verhaeren is
+the socialist poet, the poet of the age of machinery, of democracy, and
+of the European race. And energy fills his poetry too: it is strength
+let loose, enthusiasm, paroxysm, ecstasy, whatever you like to call it;
+but always active, glowing, moving strength; never rest, always
+activity. His poem is no longer declamation, no longer the marmoreal
+monument of a mood, but a crying aloud, a fight, a convulsive starting,
+a stooping down and a springing up again; it is a battle materialised.
+For him all values have been transmuted. It is just what had repelled
+him most--London, monster cities, railway stations, Exchanges, which now
+lure him most of all as poetic problems. The more a thing seems to
+resist beauty--the more he has first to discover its beauty by fighting
+it and wrestling with it in torment--with so much the greater ecstasy
+does he now extol it. The strength which had murderously raged against
+itself now, in creative ecstasy, breaks into the world. To tear down
+resistance, to snatch beauty from its most hidden corner, is now for him
+a tenfold strength and joy of creation. _Verhaeren now creates the poem
+of the great city in the dionysiac sense_; the hymn to our own time, to
+Europe; creates ecstasy, renewed and renewed again, in life.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] _Ecce Homo!_
+
+
+
+
+TOWNS ('LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES')
+
+     Le siècle et son horreur se condensent en elles
+     Mais leur âme contient la minute éternelle.
+                                       É.V., 'Les Villes.'
+
+
+When a man just recovered from illness steps for the first time with
+arms outspread, and as though climbing up from a dungeon, into the light
+of day, he is filled with a bliss beyond measure by the open air
+caressing him on all sides, by the orgies of the sunlight, the cataracts
+of deafening din: with a cry of infinite exultation he takes into
+himself the symphony of life. And from this first moment of his recovery
+Verhaeren was seized by a limitless thirst for the intoxication of life,
+as though with one single leap he would make good the lost years of his
+loneliness, of his illness, and of his crisis. His eyes, his ears, his
+nerves, all his senses, which had been a-hungered, now pounce on things
+with a pleasure that is almost murderous, and snatch everything to
+themselves in a frenzy of greed. At this time Verhaeren travelled from
+country to country, as though he would take possession of all Europe. He
+was in Germany, in Berlin, in Vienna, and in Prague; always a lonely
+wanderer; quite alone; ignorant of the language, and listening only to
+the voice of the town itself, to the strange, sombre murmuring, to the
+surge of the European metropolises. In Bayreuth he paid his devotions at
+the tomb of Wagner, whose music of ecstasy and passion he absorbed in
+Munich; in Colmar he learned to understand his beloved painter Mathias
+Grünewald; he saw and loved the tragic landscapes of northern Spain,
+those gloomy, treeless mountains, whose threatening silhouettes
+afterwards became the background of the fiery happenings in his drama of
+_Philip II._; in Hamburg he was an excited spectator, day by day, of the
+stupendous traffic, the coming and going of the ships, the unloading and
+the loading of cargoes. Everywhere where life was intensive, expressive,
+and animated with a new energy, he passionately loved it. It is
+characteristic of his temperament that the harmonious beauty of peaceful
+and empty, of sleeping and dreaming cities appealed to him less than
+modern cities in their pall of soot and smoke. Almost intentionally his
+affection turns from the traditional ideal to one yet unknown. Florence,
+for many centuries the symbol of all poets, disappointed him: the
+Italian air was too mild, these contours were too meagre, too dreamy the
+streets. But London, this piled-up conglomeration of dwellings and
+workshops; this town that might have been cast in bronze; this teeming
+labyrinth of dingy streets; this ever-beating, restless heart of the
+world's trade with its smoke of toil threatening to eclipse the sun;
+this was to him a revelation. Just the industrial towns, which had thus
+far tempted no poet; those towns which roll up the vault of their leaden
+sky with their own fog and smoke, which confine their inhabitants in
+leagues and leagues of congested masonry, these attract him. He, who
+revels in colour, grew fond of Paris, to which, since then, he has
+returned every year for the winter months. Just what is restless and
+busy, confused and breathless, hunted, eager, feverish, hot with an
+ardour as of rut, all this Babylonian medley lures him. He loves this
+pell-mell multiplicity and its strange music. Often he would travel for
+hours on the top of heavy omnibuses, to have a bird's-eye view of the
+bustling throng, and here he would close his eyes the better to feel the
+dull rumour, this surging sound which, in its ceaselessness, is not
+unlike the rustling of a forest, beating against his body. No longer as
+in his earlier books does he follow the existence of simple callings; he
+loves the ascension of handiwork to mechanical labour, in which the aim
+is invisible, and only the grandiose organisation is revealed. And
+gradually this interest became the motive interest of his life.
+Socialism, which in those years was becoming strong and active, fell
+like a red drop into the morbid paleness of his poetic work.
+Vandervelde, the leader of the Labour Party, became his friend. And
+when, at this stage, the party founded the Maison du Peuple at Brussels,
+he readily helped, gave lectures at the Université Libre, took part in
+all the projects, and afterwards, wards, in the most beautiful vision
+of his poetical work, lifted them far above the political and actual
+into the great events of all humanity. His life, now inwardly
+established, henceforth beats with a strong and regular rhythm. He had
+in the meantime, by his marriage, attained a personal appeasement, a
+counterpoise for his unbridled restlessness. Now his wild ecstasies have
+their fixed point, from which they can survey the fiery vortex of the
+new phenomena. The morbid pictures, the feverish hallucinations, now
+become clear visions; not by flashes of lightning, but in a steady,
+beaming light are the horizons of our time now illuminated for him.
+
+Now that he steps boldly into life, his first problem is to come to an
+understanding with the world around him, with his fellow-men, with the
+city itself. But it is not the city he lives in which interests him in a
+provincial sense, but the ideal, modern city, the monster city in
+general, this strange and uncanny thing that like a vampire has snatched
+to herself all the strength of the soil and of men to form a new
+residuum of power. She crowds together the contrasts of life; grades, in
+unexpected layers, immense riches over the most wretched poverty;
+strengthens opposing forces, and goads them to hostility, goads them to
+that desperate battle in which Verhaeren loves to see all things
+involved. The grandeur of this new organism is beyond the æsthetics of
+the past; and new and strange before Nature stand men also, with
+another rhythm, a hotter breath, quicker movements, wilder desires than
+were known to any association of men, to any calling or caste, of a
+previous time. It is a new outlook which not only sweeps the distance,
+but has also to reckon with height, with the piled tiers of houses, with
+new velocities and new conditions of space. A new blood, money, feeds
+these cities, a new energy fires them; they are driven to procreate a
+new faith, a new God, and a new art. Their dimensions, terrific, and of
+a beauty hitherto unknown, defy measurement; the order that rules is
+hidden in the earth behind a pathless wilderness.
+
+     Quel océan, ses cœurs? ...
+     Quels nœuds de volonté serrés en son mystère![1]
+
+cries out the poet in wonderment as he strides through the city and is
+overpowered by her grandeur:
+
+     Toujours en son triomphe ou ses défaites,
+     Elle apparaît géante, et son cri sonne et son nom luit.[2]
+
+He feels that an enormous energy proceeds from her; he is conscious that
+her atmosphere rests with a new pressure on his body, that his blood
+quickens to keep pace with her rhythm. Merely to be near her starts the
+thrill of a new delight.
+
+     En ces villes ...
+            *       *       *       *       *
+     Je sens grandir et s'exalter en moi,
+     Et fermenter, soudain, mon cœur multiplié.[3]
+
+Involuntarily he feels himself becoming dependent on her, feels this
+grandiose coupling of energy producing a similar concentration of all
+his forces in himself too, feels his fever becoming infectious like her
+own, and feels--with an intensity unknown to any other poet of our
+days--the identity of his personality with the soul of the city. He
+knows she is dangerous, knows she will fill him with all restlessness,
+overheat him and excite him, confuse him with her hostile contrasts.
+
+     Voici la ville en or des rouges alchimies,
+     Où te fondre le cœur en un creuset nouveau
+     Et t'affoler d'un orage d'antinomies
+     Si fort qu'il foudroiera tes nerfs jusqu'au cerveau.[4]
+
+But he knows that she will impregnate him as well, give him power from
+her strength. There will never be a great man again who will pass her
+by, who will not be thrilled by her sensation, who will not live with
+her, and by her grow. Henceforth all new and strong men will stand in
+reciprocal action with her.
+
+This great recognition of a fact is, as we have seen, not spontaneous,
+but painfully acquired. For in the sense of the old beauty the aspect of
+a modern city is frightful. She is a sleepless, an ever wakeful woman;
+she does not, like Nature, sometimes rest; she is never silent.
+Restlessly she sucks men into her whirlpool; ceaselessly she pricks
+their nerves; day and night her life pulses. By day she is as grey as
+lead; a sultry shuttle of passions; a dark mine in which men, buried in
+the mines of her streets, are forced to unresting toil. How dense are
+these virgin forests of bronze and stone; and of all these thousands of
+streets 'à poumons lourds et haletants, vers on ne sait quels buts
+inquiétants,'[5] not one seems to lead into the open, into the light of
+day. Monotonous, like dull eyes, glare the millions of windows; and the
+darksome caverns in which men, themselves like machines, sit by
+machines, thunder in the unseizable rhythm of petrified exertion. Not a
+ray is reflected on them from the eternal; hostile, repulsive, and grey
+the town pants in the puffed smoke of her daily labour. But night,
+softening all harsh lines, fierily welds the lumbering limbs together
+into something new. By night the town is turned into one great
+seduction. Passion, fettered in the day-time, breaks its chains:
+
+      ... Pourtant, lorsque les soirs
+     Sculptent le firmament de leurs marteaux d'ébène,
+     La ville au loin s'étale et domine la plaine
+     Comme unnocturne et colossal espoir;
+     Elle surgit: désir, splendeur, hantise;
+     Sa clarté se projette en lueurs jusqu'aux cieux,
+     Son gaz myriadaire en buissons d'or s'attise,
+     Ses rails sont des chemins audacieux
+     Vers le bonheur fallacieux
+     Que la fortune et la force accompagnent;
+     Ses murs se dessinent pareils à une armée
+     Et ce qui vient d'elle encor de brume et de fumée
+     Arrive en appels clairs vers les campagnes.[6]
+
+These fiery eruptions Verhaeren shapes in grandiose visions. There is
+the vision of the music halls: wheels of fire revolve round a house,
+blazing letters climb up façades and lure the crowds to sit in front of
+the brilliant footlights. I Here the people's hunger for sensation is
+fed full, and art is cruelly murdered day by day. Here tedium is tamed
+for an hour or so, and whipped up with colour, flame, and music for
+another pleasure that is waiting outside, as soon as the illusion here
+sinks into the night:
+
+     Et minuit sonne et la foule s'écoule
+     --Le hall fermé--parmi les trottoirs noirs;
+     Et sous les lanternes qui pendent,
+     Rouges, dans la brume, ainsi que des viandes,
+     Ce sont les filles qui attendent....[7]
+
+they the harlots, 'les promeneuses,' 'les veuves d'elles-mêmes,'[8] who
+live on the sensual hunger of the masses. For sensual pleasure too is
+organised in cities, is guided into canals, like all instincts. But the
+primordial instinct is the same. The hunger which out in the fields and
+in the country was still pleasure in healthy food, in frothing beer, has
+here been converted into the idea of money. Money is what everybody
+hungers for here; money is the meaning of the town. 'Boire et manger de
+l'or'[9] is the hot dream of the crowd. Everything is expressed by
+money, 'tout se définit par des monnaies';[10] all values are
+subordinate to this new value, monetary value. Superb is the vision of
+the bazaar, where, on all the counters, in the many stories, everything
+is sold, not only as in reality objects in common use, but, in a loftier
+symbolism, ethical values as well: convictions and opinions, fame and
+name, honour and power, all the laws of life. But all this fiery blood
+of money flows together in the great heart of the city, flows into the
+Exchange, that greedy maw that swallows all the gold and spits it out
+again, which smelts all this hectic fever and then pours it flaming into
+all the veins of the city. Everything can be bought, even pleasure: in
+back streets, in _l'étal_, in the haunts where debauch lies in wait,
+women sell themselves as goods are sold in the bazaar. But this energy
+is not always regulated, not always made to flow between dikes. Here
+too, as in Nature, there are sudden catastrophes. Sometimes revolt is
+kindled, flashes up instantaneously, and this stream of money blazes
+itself a new trail. The masses pour out of their dismal caverns, greed
+takes possession of men, and the myriad-headed monster fights and bleeds
+for this one thing, this red-burning, relucent gold.
+
+But the great and powerful thing in these towns is not passion; it is
+the hidden strength behind these passions, the noble order that keeps
+them in their proper limits, and holds them in check. This rumbling
+chaos, this inundation of things doomed to die, is dominated in the
+_Villes Tentaculaires_ by three or four figures standing like
+statues--the tamers of passions. They are what kings and priests were of
+old, they who have the power of bridling ebullient energies and turning
+them to use. With hands of iron they hold down this wild and dangerous
+animal, they, the new rulers, statesmen, generals, demagogues,
+organisers. For the town is an animal in its movements, a beast in its
+passions, a brute in its instincts, a monster in its strength. It is
+ugly, like all rut. It cannot be contemplated with a pure pleasure, like
+a landscape gently and harmoniously fading in forest verdure; it rather
+evokes, at first, loathing, hatred, caution, and hostility. But that is
+the great thing in Verhaeren, that he always overcomes whatever is
+hostile, pain and torment, by a great vista, that in this panting steam
+of the unæsthetic he already sees the flame of the new beauty. Here for
+the first time is, seen the beauty of factories, _les usines
+rectangulaires,_ the fascination of a railway station, the new beauty in
+the new things. If the town is indeed ugly in its denseness, ugly in the
+sense of all classical ideals; if the picture of it is indeed I cruel
+and frightful; it is yet not unfertile. 'Le siècle et son horreur se
+condensent en elle, mais son âme contient la minute éternelle.' And this
+I feeling, that in her the minute of eternity is contained, that she is
+the new thing risen above all the pasts, a new thing that one must
+perforce come to terms with, this feeling makes her momentous and
+beautiful to the poet. If her form is loathsome, grey, and sombre, her
+idea, her organisation, are grandiose and admirable. And here, as
+always, where admiration finds a pivot, it can give the whole world the
+swing from negation to assent.
+
+But Verhaeren is by this time too little of an artist, too much
+interested in all the problems of life, to be able to contemplate the
+idea of the modern city from the æsthetic side alone. It is for him a
+still more important symbol for the expression of contemporary feeling.
+
+Not only the problem of the new social stratification is poetically
+digested in his trilogy, but also one of the most burning and pressing
+questions of political economy as of politics, the struggle between the
+centrifugal and the centripetal power, the struggle between agrarianism
+and industrialism. Town and country purchase their prosperity, the one
+by the impoverishment of the other. Production and trade, however much
+one is the condition of the other, at their extreme points are hostile
+forces. And how, in our days in Europe, the victory between town and
+country is being decided in favour of the town; how, gradually, the town
+is absorbing the best strength of the provinces--the problem of the
+_déracinés_--this has for the first time in poetry been described by
+Verhaeren in his magnificent vision of _Les Villes Tentaculaires_. The
+cities have sprung up like mushrooms. Millions have conglomerated. But
+where have they come from? From what sources have these immense masses
+suddenly streamed into the mighty reservoirs? The answer is quick to
+come. The heart of the city is fed with the oozing blood of the country.
+The country is impoverished. As though they were hallucinated, the
+peasants migrate to where gold is minted, to the town that in the
+evenings flames across the horizon; to where alone riches lies, and
+power. They march away with their carts, to sell their last stick of
+furniture, their last rags; they march away with their daughter, to
+deliver her up to lust; they march away with their son, to let him
+perish in the factories; they march away to dip their hands, they also,
+in this roaring river of gold. The fields are deserted. Only the
+fantastic figures of idiots stagger along lonely paths; the abandoned
+flour-mills are empty, and only turn when the wind smites against them.
+Fever rises from the marshes, where the water, no longer gathered into
+dikes, spreads putrefaction and pestilence. Beggars drag themselves from
+door to door, with the country's barrenness reflected in their eyes; to
+the last lingering cultivators come, sinuously, their worst enemies,
+_les donneurs de mauvais conseils_. The emigration agent entices them to
+wander to the lands of gold, and they squander what they have inherited
+from their ancestors, to seek a far-distant hope:
+
+     Avec leur chat, avec leur chien,
+     Avec, pour vivre, quel moyen?
+     S'en vont, le soir, par la grand'route.[11]
+
+And they who are not enticed away by emigration are evicted from hearth
+and home by usurers. Villages in which the dance of the kermesse has
+long been silent are of a sudden cut in two by a network of railways.
+There is no fairness in the fight. The country is conquered because the
+blood of its inhabitants has been sucked out of it. 'La plaine est morte
+et ne se défend plus.'[12] Everything streams to Oppidomagnum. This is
+the name given by Verhaeren in his symbolical drama _Les Aubes_--which,
+with the _Campagnes Hallucinées_ and the _Villes Tentaculaires_ forms
+the trilogy of the social revolution--to the monster city. This, with
+its arms as of a polypus, pitilessly sucks all the strength of the
+district round it. From all sides strength streams in upon it. 'Tous les
+chemins se rythment vers elle.' Not only from the country does she drink
+the strength of men, all the ocean seems to be pouring its waters only
+to her port. 'Toute la mer va vers la ville.'[13] The whole sea streams
+to the city; all the rolling waves seem only to exist that they may
+bring to her this wandering forest of ships. And she absorbs everything,
+digests it in the 'noire immensité des usines rectangulaires,'[14]
+greedily devours it, to spit it out again as gold.
+
+But this immense social struggle between the country and the town
+expresses, like the other new phases, something yet higher. It is only a
+momentary symbol of an eternal schism. The country is the symbol of the
+Conservatives. In the country the forms of labour are petrified, calm,
+and regular; there life is without haste, and only regulated by the
+rotation of the seasons. All sensations, all forms are pure and simple.
+These men stand nearer to the freaks of chance: a flash of lightning, a
+hailstorm can destroy their labour; and so they fear God, and do not
+dare to doubt in Him. The town, however, symbolises progress. In the
+thunder of the streets of to-day no Madonna's voice is heard; the life
+of the individual is protected from chance by prearranged order; the
+fever of the new creates also a yearning for new conditions of life, new
+circumstances, for a new God.
+
+     L'esprit des campagnes était l'esprit de Dieu;
+     Il eut la peur de la recherche et des révoltes,
+     Il chut; et le voici qui meurt, sous les essieux
+     Et sous les chars en feu des récoltes.[15]
+
+If the country was the past, the town is the future. The country only
+seeks to keep what it has, to preserve: its character, its beauty, its
+God. But the town must first of all create, must make itself the new
+beauty, the new faith, and the new God.
+
+     Le rêve ancien est mort et le nouveau se forge.
+     Il est fumant dans la pensée et la sueur
+     Des bras fiers de travail, des fronts fiers de lueurs,
+     Et la ville l'entend monter du fond des gorges
+     De ceux qui le portent en eux
+     Et le veulent crier et sangloter aux cieux.[16]
+
+But we, Verhaeren thinks, must not belong to this world of the past,
+this moribund world; no, we who live in towns must think with them, must
+live with the new age, create in league with it, and find a new language
+for its dumb yearning. A return to nature is no longer possible for us:
+evolution cannot be screwed back again. If we have lost great values, we
+must replace them by new; if our religious feeling for the old God is
+cold and dead, we must create new ideals. We must find new aims that our
+ancestors knew not of; in the new forms of the city we must find a new
+beauty, in her noises a new rhythm, in her confusion an order, in her
+energy an object, in her stammering a language.
+
+If the towns have destroyed much, they will perhaps create still more.
+In their melting-pot professions, races, religions, nations, languages
+are blended:
+
+      ...les Babels enfin réalisées
+     Et les peuples fondus et la cité commune
+     Et les langues se dissolvant en une.[17]
+
+'The old order changeth, giving place to new'; and we must not ask
+whether the new is better than the old; we must trust that it is so.
+The feverish convulsions of the great cities, this unrest, this
+screaming torment, cannot be in vain. For they, these pains and
+convulsions, are only the birth-throes of the new. But he who has been
+the first to feel, with a glad presentiment, this pain of the masses,
+this fermentation, as joy, this unrest as hope, must himself be an
+authentic new man, one of those who are called to give a poetic answer
+to all the complaints and questions of our time.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'L'Âme de la Ville' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[2] Ibid. (_Ibid._).
+
+[3] 'La Foule' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[4] 'Les Villes' (_Les Flambeaux Noirs_).
+
+[5] 'L'Âme de la Ville' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[6] 'La Ville' (_Les Campagnes Hallucinées_).
+
+[7] 'Les Spectacles' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[8] 'Les Promeneuses' (_Ibid_.).
+
+[9] 'La Bourse' (_Ibid._).
+
+[10] 'Le Bazar' (_Ibid._).
+
+[11] 'Le Départ' (_Les Campagnes Hallucinées_).
+
+[12] 'La Plaine' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[13] 'Le Port' (_Ibid._).
+
+[14] 'La Plaine' (_Ibid._).
+
+[15] 'Vers le Futur' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[16] 'L'Âme de la Ville' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[17] 'Le Port'(_Ibid._).
+
+
+
+
+THE MULTITUDE
+
+     Mets en accord ta force avec les destinées
+     Que la foule, sans le savoir,
+     Promulgue, en cette nuit d'angoisse illuminée.
+                                     É.V., 'La Foule.'
+
+
+That great event which is the modern city was at bottom only possible by
+the organisation of the mighty multitudes of the people and the
+distribution of their forces. To organise is to weld unlike forces
+economically into an organism, to imitate something that has life and
+soul, in which nothing is superfluous and everything is necessary; it is
+to give a material its uniform strength, to give an idea the flesh and
+bones of its shape and of its possibility. Now the town has smelted the
+scattered forces of the country into a new material--into the multitude;
+it has converted much that used to be individually active force into
+mechanical force; it has humbled man to the condition of a handle, a
+rolling wheel; it has everywhere tied up the individuality of the single
+man in order to produce a new individuality, that of the crowd. For the
+multitude as a fact is a new thing. For centuries it was only a symbol,
+an idea. The inhabitants of whole countries were logically epitomised in
+a number, but with no suggestion of thus comprehending their immediate
+unity. Of course, in times past great armies have been known, hordes of
+fighting men and nomad tribes; but these only represented a volatile
+concentration, too unsettled, too inconstant to procreate an
+individuality, an æsthetic and moral value. And even those armies whose
+legendary greatness echoes down the centuries, the hordes of Tamerlaine,
+the hosts of the Persians, the legions of Rome, how poor is their number
+in comparison with the masses of human beings daily herded together in
+New York or London or Paris! Only in our own days, only in Oppidomagnum,
+has the multitude been welded together finally and for all time, been
+hooked together with bands of steel like the wheels of an immense
+machine; only recently has the crowd become a living being that grows
+and multiplies like a forest. Democracy has given it new intellectual
+forms, set a brain in the body, by making the multitude determinate,
+subject only to itself. It is a creation of the nineteenth century; it
+is a new value in our lives, and one that we must come to terms with; no
+less a value for our evolution than the highest values of the past. Walt
+Whitman, to whom one must constantly refer in dealing with Verhaeren's
+work, although--let it be expressly stated here--Verhaeren quite
+independently and unconsciously arrived at the same goal from the same
+starting-point, once said: 'Modern science and democracy seemed to be
+throwing out their challenge to poetry to put them in its statements in
+contradistinction to the songs and myths of the past.'[1] And every
+modern poet will have to come to terms with the masses of democracy,
+will have to contemplate them synthetically as an individual living
+being, as a man, or as a God. In his Utopian drama _Les Aubes_ Verhaeren
+has ranged them among the dramatis personæ, and, to express his inner
+vision, he has added this stage direction: 'Les groupes agissent comme
+un seul personnage à faces multiples et antinomiques.' For, like the
+images of Indian gods, they have a hundred arms, but their cry is in
+unison; their will is simple; their energy is uniform; one and the same
+is their heart, 'le cœur myriadaire et rouge de la foule.'[2] A
+hundred years of life in communion, a hundred years of distress in
+common, of hope in common, have welded them together into one unity,
+into one new feeling. Sleepless and restless like a dangerous animal
+lies the multitude in the monster cities; all the passions of individual
+man are hers, vanity, hunger, anger; she has all vices and crimes in
+common with her smallest member, man; only, everything in her is
+intensified to unknown magnitudes. Everything in her passions is
+stupendously superdimensional, beyond calculation, and, in a new sense,
+divine. For just as the gods of old were formed after the image of man,
+save that they represented man's strength and intelligence magnified to
+the hundredth degree, the multitude is the synthesis of individual
+forces, the most prolific accumulation of passion.
+
+With the multitude the individual comes into being, and without her he
+perishes. Consciously or unconsciously, every man is subject to her
+power. For the modern man is no longer free from the influence of
+others, as the tiller of the fields was in olden days, or the shepherd,
+or the hunter, each of whom was dependent only on the anger of heaven,
+the whims of the earth, on weather and hailstorms, on chance, which he
+clad in the august image of his god. The modern man is in all his
+feelings determined by the world around him, set in his place in the
+ranks, and moved with the ranks like a shuttle to and fro; he is a
+dependent in his instincts. We all feel socially; we cannot think away
+the others who are round us and in front of us any more than we can
+think away the air that nourishes us. We can flee from them, but we
+cannot flee away from what has penetrated us from them. For the
+multitude rules us like a force of nature, nourishes us with its
+feelings. The unsocial man is a fiction. Just as little as in a great
+city one can shut off one's room entirely from the noise, the rhythm of
+the street, just so little can one think isolatedly, just so little can
+the soul keep itself at a distance from the great intellectual
+excitements of the multitude. Verhaeren himself made the attempt in the
+days when he wrote the verses:
+
+     Mon rêve, enfermons-nous dans ces choses lointaines
+     Comme en de tragiques tombeaux.[3]
+
+But the life of reality claimed him again; for society destroys him who
+turns away from her, as one is destroyed who shuts himself out from the
+fresh air. The poet, too, must involuntarily think with the multitude
+and of the multitude. For to the same extent as democracy has exercised
+its levelling influence, to the same extent as it has limited
+individualities, enrolled the poet among the class of citizens,
+diminished the contrasts of chance, it has at the same time matured new
+forces in their multiplicity. In democracy the modern poet can find
+everything for which the ancients felt constrained to discover gods,
+those incalculable forces which bind the individual like enchantment.
+The town, the multitude feeds his energy with its exhaustless abundance;
+it multiplies his own strength. For everything the individual has lost
+is stored in it, great heroism and ecstatic enthusiasm. It is the great
+source of the unexpected and the incalculable in our days, the new thing
+concerning which no one knows how great it will grow. To have seen in it
+an enrichment, instead of a restriction, of the poetic instinct, is one
+of the great merits of Verhaeren. For while the majority of
+contemporary poets still maintain the fiction of the recluse in his
+wistful loneliness, while they recoil from before the multitude as
+though from men stricken with the plague, while they create for
+themselves an artificial seclusion, and heedlessly go their way past
+locomotives and telegraphs, banks and workshops, Verhaeren drinks
+greedily from these sources of new strength.
+
+       Comme une vague en des fleuves perdue,
+       Comme une aile effacée, au fond de l'étendue,
+       Engouffre-toi,
+       Mon cœur, en ces foules battant les capitales!
+       Réunis tous ces courants
+       Et prends
+       Si large part à ces brusques métamorphoses
+       D'hommes et de choses,
+       Que tu sentes l'obscure et formidable loi
+       Qui les domine et les opprime
+     Soudainement, à coups d'éclairs, s'inscrire en toi.[4]
+
+For she, 'la foule,' the multitude, is the great transposer of values in
+our day. She takes into her bosom and transforms the men who come to her
+from the country, from the four winds of heaven; none of us escapes her
+levelling power. The most distant races are blended in the city's huge
+melting-pot, are adapted to one another, and forthwith become a new
+thing, a different thing, a new race, the new race of contemporary man,
+who has made his peace with the atmosphere of the great city, who not
+only painfully feels the depression of her walls and his divorce from
+Nature, but creates himself a new strength and a new feeling of the
+universe in this manifold human presence. The great feat of the
+multitude is that it accelerates the process of changing values. The
+individual elements perish in favour of this individuality of a new
+community. Old communities lose their unity, new communities must arise.
+America is the first example: here, in a hundred years, one single great
+brotherhood, a new type, has been developed from the forces of a
+thousand peoples; and in our capitals, in Paris, Berlin, and London,
+people are already growing up who are not Frenchmen and not Germans, but
+in the first place only Parisians and Berliners, who have a different
+accent, a different way of thinking, whose native land is the great
+city, the multitude. The inhabitant of the great city, the democratic
+man of the multitude, is a sharply defined character. If he is a poet,
+his poetry must be social; if he is a thinker, the intelligence of the
+masses, the instinct of the many, must be his also. To have attempted
+the psychology of this multitude for the first time in poetry is one of
+the great feats of audacity for which we must be grateful to Verhaeren.
+
+But these individual accumulations of men into a multitude, these
+combinations of millions into towns, are not isolated. One bond holds
+them all together: modern traffic. The distances of reality have
+disappeared, and with them national divisions as well. By the side of
+the problem of individual conglomerations which only slowly are
+transformed into organisms, by the side of the individual races, the
+individual masses, now arises a greater synthesis, the synthesis of the
+European race. For the men of our continent are no longer so distant, so
+strange to one another as they formerly were. Social democracy with its
+organisation encompasses the masses from one end of Europe to the other.
+To-day the same desires fire the men of Paris, London, St. Petersburg,
+Vienna, and Rome. And already one common formula directs their
+exertions: money.
+
+     Races des vieux pays, forces désaccordées,
+     Vous nouez vos destins épars, depuis le temps
+     Que l'or met sous vos fronts le même espoir battant.[5]
+
+Independently of the frontiers of countries, on a broad-based
+foundation, a unified race, a new community, the European, is in process
+of formation. Here desire and reality are near touching. Verhaeren sees
+Europe already united by one great common energy. Europe is for him the
+land of consciousness. While other continents, distant as though in a
+dream, are still living a vegetative life, while Africa and India are
+still dreaming as they dreamt in the darkness of primitive times, Europe
+is 'la forge où se frappe l'idée,'[6] the great smithy in which all
+differences, all individual observations, all results, are hammered and
+moulded into a new intellectuality, into _European consciousness_. The
+union is not yet inwardly complete; states are still hostile and
+ignorant of their community; but already 'le monde entier est repensé
+par leurs cervelles.'[7] Already they are working at the transvaluation
+of all feeling in the European sense. For a new system of ethics, a new
+system of æsthetics, will be required by the European, who, rich by the
+past, strong in the feeling of the multitude, is now conscious of
+drawing his strength from new masses. Here it is that Verhaeren's work
+sings over into Utopia; and in _Les Aubes_, the epilogue to _Les Villes
+Tentaculaires,_ this glittering rainbow rises over the visions of
+reality to the new ideal; the prophetic dream of a better future rises
+over the still struggling present.
+
+This yearning for the European has been expressed for the first time in
+poetry by Verhaeren, almost contemporaneously with Walt Whitman's
+hailing of the American and Friedrich Nietzsche's prophecy of the
+superman. It would be a tempting task, and full of interest, to set up
+the Pan-European in antithesis to the Pan-American. But to say that
+Verhaeren was the first of lyric poets to feel as consciously European
+as Walt Whitman felt American, is to establish his rank among the most
+considerable men of our time. Verhaeren is possibly the only lyric poet
+who has felt in accordance with contemporary feeling. That epitomises
+his whole claim to gratitude, for it sufficiently expresses the fact
+that he has taken to his heart the problem of the multitude; the energy
+of social innovations; the æsthetics of organisation; the grandeur of
+mechanical production; in a word, the poetry of material things. It is
+our own time, the new age, that speaks in his verse; and it speaks in
+its new language. This rhythm which he has discovered is no literary
+abstraction, but beats in perfect unison with the heart-beat of the
+crowd; it is an echo of the panting of our monster cities, of the
+clanking of trains, of the cry of the people; his language is new,
+because it is no longer the voice of one man, but unites in itself the
+many voices of the multitude. He has penetrated deeper than any other
+man into the feeling of the masses, and their surf echoes more strongly
+in his verse. The hollow rumbling, the bestial and tameless strength of
+their voice, the surf of the multitude, has here become shape and music,
+the highest identity. With pride one can say of Verhaeren what he
+himself vaunts in his 'Captain': 'Il est la foule,'[8] he himself is the
+multitude.
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] _A Backward Glance O'er Travelled Roads._
+
+[2] 'La Conquête (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[3] 'Sous les Prétoriens' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[4] 'La Foule' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[5] 'La Conquête' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[6] _Ibid. (Ibid.)._
+
+[7] 'La Conquête' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[8] 'Le Capitaine' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+
+
+
+THE RHYTHM OF LIFE
+
+     Dites, les rythmes sourds dans l'univers entier!
+     En définir la marche et la passante image
+     En un soudain langage;
+       .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
+     Prendre et capter cet infini en un cerveau,
+     Pour lui donner ainsi sa plus haute existence.
+                                          É.V., 'Le Verbe'.
+
+
+The rhythm of modern life is a rhythm of excitement. The city with its
+multitudes is never completely at rest: even in its repose, in its
+silence, there is a secret bubbling as of lava in the bowels of a
+volcano, a waiting and watching, a nervous tension tinged with fever.
+For the idea of energy in the myriad-headed monster city is so
+concentrated, so intensified, that it never loses its rumbling activity.
+Rest, a polar feeling, would be the inner negation, the annihilation, of
+this new element. True, the city with her teeming masses is not always
+in the fever-throes of those great eruptions of passion when through the
+arteries of her streets the blood streams suddenly; when all her muscles
+seem to contract; when cries and enthusiasm blaze up like a flame; but
+always something seems to be expecting this fiery second, just as in
+modern man there is always the whipped unrest that is avid of new
+things, new experiences. Modern cities are in perpetual vibration; and
+so is the multitude from man to man. Even if the individual is not
+excited, if his nerves are not always stirring with his own vibration,
+they are yet always vibrating in harmony with the obscure resonance of
+the universe. The great city's rhythm beats in our very sleep; the new
+rhythm, the rhythm of our life, is no longer the regular alternation of
+relaxation and repose, it is the steady vibration of an unintermitted
+activity.
+
+Now, a modern poet who wishes to create in real harmony with
+contemporary feeling must himself have something of the perpetual
+excitement, the unremitting watchfulness, the restless and nervous
+sensitiveness of our time; his heart must unconsciously beat in tact
+with the rhythm of the world around him. But not only unrest must
+flicker in him, not only must that excessive delicacy of feeling which
+is almost morbid be in him, this neurasthenic sleeplessness--not only
+the negative element of our epoch, but the grandiose as well, the
+superdimensional, the spontaneity of the sudden discharge of forces held
+in reserve, the overwhelming force of the great eruption. Like the
+masses of our towns, he must be so fashioned that a trifle will
+stimulate him to the greatest passion, must be so fashioned that he
+cannot help being carried away by the intoxication of his own strength.
+Just as the masses have, so to speak, organised themselves as a body,
+so that there is no individual excitement in them, no irritation and
+inflammation of any single part, but so that a reaction of the whole
+body responds to every separate irritation, just in the same manner must
+the excitement of a modern, a contemporary poet, a poet of a great town,
+never be the excitement of a single sense, but, if it is to be strong,
+it must quiver through the whole body like an electric shock. His poetic
+rhythm must therefore be physically vital; it must envelop all his
+feeling and thinking; it must respond to every individual irritation, to
+every individual sensation, with the massed weight of feeling of all his
+vital forces: the need of a rhythm strained to the full must be, as
+Nietzsche has so wonderfully demonstrated in his _Ecce Homo_! a measure
+for the strength of the inspiration, a sort of balancing, as it were, of
+the pressure and tension of the inspiration. For the poet of to-day, if
+he does not wish to remain the poet of the eternal yesterday, must, as a
+microcosm, imitate in his passion the macrocosm of the multitude,
+wherein also the excitement of the individual is trivial and aimless,
+and only the ebullition of the whole fermenting mass is irresistible and
+momentous.
+
+Then, in such poems, the _rhythm of modern life_ will break through. At
+this moment we must remember what rhythm really means. The rhythm of a
+being is in the last instance nothing but its breathing. Everything that
+is alive, every organism, has breath, the interchange and resting-space
+between giving and taking. And so breathes a poem too; and it is
+worthless if it is not a living thing, if it is not an organism, a body
+with a soul. Only in its rhythm does it become alive, as man does in his
+breathing. But the diversity, the originality of the rhythm only arises
+from the alternation of these drawn breaths. Breathing is different in
+those who are calm, excited, joyous, nervous, oppressed, ecstatic. Every
+sensation produces its corresponding rhythm. And since every poet in his
+individuality represents a new form of inner passion, his poem too must
+have this rhythm of his own, the rhythm which expresses his personal
+poetic peculiarity just as characteristically as his speaking expresses
+an individual accent and dialect. To understand Verhaeren's rhythm we
+must remember this basic form of the poetic feeling at the heart of him;
+we must compare it with the feeling at the heart of those who have gone
+before him. In Victor Hugo there was the earnest, great, soaring rhythm
+of the loud speaker, of the preacher who never addresses individuals but
+always the whole nation; in Baudelaire there was the regular hymnic
+rhythm of the priest of art; in Verlaine the irregular, sweet, and
+gentle melody of one speaking in dreams. In Verhaeren, now, there is the
+rhythm of a man hurrying, rushing, running; of a restless, passionate
+man; the rhythm of the modern, of the Americanised man. It is often
+irregular; you hear in it the panting of one who is hunted, who is
+hurrying to his goal; you hear his impact with the obstacles he stumbles
+against, the sudden standstill of intemperate effort exhausted. But with
+him the rhythmic energy is never intellectual, never verbal, never
+musical; it is purely emotional, physical. Not only the end of the nerve
+vibrates and sounds; not only does the language shake the air; but out
+of the whole organism, as though all the nerve-strings had suddenly
+begun to sound the alarm, burst the terror and the ecstasy of fever. His
+poem is never a state of repose--no more than the multitude is ever
+quite repose--it is in a true sense rhythm, passion set in motion. You
+feel the excitement of the man in it, motion, the covering of a
+distance, activity; never contemplation comfortably resting, or dream
+girt with sleep. And as a matter of fact, it is from motion in the
+physical sense that nearly all his poems have arisen: Verhaeren has
+never composed poetry at his writing-table, but while wandering over the
+fields with a rhythmically moved body whose accelerated pace pulses to
+the very heart of the poem, or while rushing along through the din and
+bustle of streets in great cities. In these poems is that quicker
+rolling of the blood that comes from exercise, that jerk of unrest and
+passion tearing themselves away from repose. You feel that in this man
+feeling is too strong, that he would fain free himself from it, run away
+from it in his own body. The feeling is so strong that it turns to
+pain, or rather pressure, and the poem is nothing else than the erection
+that precedes relief, the throes that bring forth out of pregnancy. Just
+as the multitude in revolt bursts the bonds of its excitement and
+launches of a sudden all the passion dammed back for centuries, so
+springs from the poet like a geyser the passionate assault of words
+bursting from too long silence. These cries are a physical relief. These
+'élans captifs dans le muscle et la chair '[1] are the relief of a
+convulsion, the easy breathing after oppression. As a passionate man is
+forced to relieve himself by gestures, or in a fit of rage, or in cries,
+or in weeping, or in some other state opposed to rest, the poet
+discharges his feeling in rhythmic words: 'L'homme à vous prononcer
+respirait plus à l'aise'[2] he has said of the man who was the first to
+force the excess of his feeling into speech.
+
+_It is, then, a force positively physical which produces Verhaeren's
+rhythm._ It is difficult to prove such an assertion, for the state of
+creation is unconscious and unapproachable, although it may intuitively
+be detected in those moments of recreation, in that second of a new
+birth when a poet recites his work, when he feels, as it were, the
+pressure of the feeling weighing upon him artificially in recollection,
+when by the force of his imagination he relieves himself again as at the
+birth of the poem. And any one who has once heard Verhaeren reciting
+poetry will know how much with him the rhythm of body and poem is one
+and indivisible, how the excitement that becomes rhythmical in the
+vibrating word is at the same time converted into the identical gesture.
+The calm eyes grow keen, they seem to pierce the near paper; the arm is
+raised commandingly, and every finger of the hand is stretched out to
+mark the cæsura as though with an electric shock; to hammer the verses;
+and with the voice to eject the hurrying and almost screaming words into
+the room. In his movements there is then that terrific effort of one who
+would fain tear himself away from himself, that sublimest gesture of the
+poet striving away from the earth, striving away from himself, from the
+heavy gait of words to winged passion. Man coalesces with Nature in one
+second of the most wonderful identity:
+
+     Les os, le sang, les nerfs font alliance
+     Avec on ne sait quoi de frémissant
+     Dans l'air et dans le vent;
+     On s'éprouve léger et clair dans l'espace,
+     On est heureux à crier grâce,
+     Les faits, les principes, les lois, on comprend tout;
+     Le cœur tremble d'amour et l'esprit semble fou
+     De l'ivresse de ses idées.[3]
+
+Every time that Verhaeren reads his poetry, this re-birth of the first
+creative state is renewed. _It is in the first place a deliverance from
+pain, and in the second place it is pleasure_. Again and again the word
+darts along like a beast let loose; in the wildest rhythm; in a rhythm
+that begins slowly, cautiously; quickens; then grows wilder and wilder;
+grows to an intoxicating monotony, an ever-increasing speed, a rattling
+din that reminds one of an express whizzing along at full speed. Like a
+locomotive--for in Verhaeren's case one has to think in images of this
+kind, and not in outworn tropes as of Pegasus--the poem rushes on,
+driven only by a measure which reminds one of the short explosions of an
+automobile. And as a matter of fact the scansion of the locomotive, its
+restless rattling, has often been the cause of the rhythmic velocity of
+his verses. Verhaeren himself is fond of relating that he has often, and
+with delight, written poems on railway journeys, and that the cadence of
+his verse has then been fired by the regular rattle of the train. He
+describes wonderfully the rapture of the speed poured into his blood by
+the whizzing past of trains. The whistling of the wind in moaning trees,
+the dashing of the foaming sea along the shore, the echo a thousand
+times repeated of thunder in the mountains, all these strong sounds have
+become rhythm in his poems; all noisy things, all violent, swift
+emotions have made it brusque, angry, and excited:
+
+     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;
+     Et pour en condenser les frissons clairs
+     En ardentes images,
+     Aimer, aimer, surtout la foudre et les éclairs
+     Dont les dévorateurs de l'espace et de l'air
+     Incendient leur passage![4]
+
+But this is the new thing in Verhaeren, that he has transformed into
+rhythm not only the voice of Nature, but also the new noises, the
+grumbling of the multitude, the raging of cities, the rumbling of
+workshops. Often in his rhythm can be heard the beat of hammers; the
+hard, edged, regular whizzing of wheels; the whirring of looms; the
+hissing of locomotives; often the wild, restless tumult of streets; the
+humming and rumbling of dense masses of the people. Poets before him
+imitated in the harmony of their verse the monotony of sources and the
+babbling of water over pebbles, or the soughing voice of the wind. But
+he makes the voice of the new things speak; makes the rhythm of the
+city, this rhythm of fever and of unrest, this nervous moving of the
+crowd, this unquiet billowing of a new ocean, flow over into his new
+poem. Hence this up and down in his verses; this suddenness and
+unexpectedness; this incalculable element. _The new, the industrial
+noises have here become the music of poetry_. Since he does not seek to
+express his own individual sensation of life, but would himself only be
+a voice for the multitude, the rhythm is more roaring and restless than
+that of any individual being. Like the first poets, those of old time,
+before whom there were no outworn and exhausted words; like the poets
+whose feeling burst into flame at every word, every cry; who discovered
+themselves 'en exaltant la souffrance, le mal, le plaisir, le bien';
+like them when they
+
+      ... confrontaient à chaque instant
+     Leur âme étonnée et profonde
+     Avec le monde,[5]
+
+poets who would be modern must compare their own soul with that of their
+time, must always regulate their rhythm according to the mutation of
+their time. Their deepest yearning must be to find not only their own
+personal expression, but over and above it the poetic and musical
+representation of the highest identity between themselves and their
+time. For poets are the inheritors of a great patrimony:
+
+      ... En eux seuls survit, ample, intacte et profonde,
+     L'ardeur
+     Dont s'enivrait, devant la terre et sa splendeur,
+     L'homme naïf et clair aux premiers temps du monde;
+     C'est que le rythme universel traverse encor
+     Comme aux temps primitifs leur corps.[6]
+
+They must, in these days, only express themselves when they have first
+adapted the rhythm of their own feeling to that of the universe, to the
+rhythm of the cities they live in, to the rhythm of the multitude from
+which they have grown, to the rhythm of temporal as of eternal things.
+They must, like a vein in the heart of the world, reproduce every beat
+of the great hammer, every excitement, quickening of pace and
+obstruction of the feeling rolled round in the whole organism; they must
+learn from life the rhythm which shall again achieve the great harmony
+that was lost between the world and the work of art.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'Le Verbe' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[2] _Ibid._ (_Ibid._).
+
+[3] 'Les Heures où l'on crée' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[4] 'L'En-Avant' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[5] 'Le Verbe' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[6] _Ibid._ (_Ibid._).
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW PATHOS
+
+     Lassé des mots, lassé des livres.
+       .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
+     Je cherche, en ma fierté,
+     L'acte qui sauve et qui délivre.
+                      É.V., 'L'Action.'
+
+The primitive poem, that which came into being long before writing or
+print, was nothing but a modulated cry that was hardly language, a cry
+won from joy or pain, mourning or despair, recollection or passionate
+entreaty, but always from fulness of feeling. It was pathetic, because
+it was produced by passion; pathetic, because its intention was to
+produce passion. The poem of those great and distant men who were the
+first to find word and speech in the darted cry of feeling, was an
+invocation of the crowd; an exhortation; a fiery incitement; an ecstasy;
+a direct electric discharge of feeling to feeling. The poet spoke to the
+others, an individual to a circle. The auditors stood before him in
+expectation--somewhat as Max Klinger in his new picture has gathered
+them together in front of blind Homer--they waited, watched, listened,
+surrendered themselves, let themselves be carried away; or they
+resisted. That poem and the delivery of it were not something finished
+and presented for approval; no vessel or ornament already hammered into
+shape and perfectly chiselled; they were something in the process of
+creation, something newly growing at that moment, a struggle with the
+hearer, a wrestling with him for his passion.
+
+Poets lost this close, glowing contact with the masses when writing was
+invented. What the dissemination of the written word, and still more, in
+after days, the infinite multiplication of printing, dowered them with;
+all the new influence over spaces hitherto closed; the fact that their
+words were henceforth alive in countries which they had never visited;
+that men drew strength and inspiration and vital courage from their
+words long after their own bodies had fallen into dust--this vast and
+mighty effect had only been obtained by relinquishing that other and
+perhaps not lesser effect--dialogue, that standing face to face with the
+multitude. By slow degrees poets became something imaginary to the
+public. When they spoke, they really only listened to themselves; more
+and more their poem became a lonely colloquy with themselves; the
+harangue became a monologue, more and more lyrical in a new sense and
+less and less moving. More and more their poem travelled away from
+speech; more and more it lost that mysterious, passionate fire that is
+only fed by the moment, by standing face to face with an excited crowd,
+by the magical influx of tension and stimulation out of the heart of
+the hearer into the poet's own words. For, with his expectation, with
+his eager eyes, his excitement, and his intractable impatience, every
+listener does something for the speaker: he goads him; he forces
+something of his expectant restlessness into the response that has not
+yet been made. But the moment the poet no longer spoke to the crowd, no
+longer to a circle, but fashioned his words for print and writing, a new
+and peculiar sensation was developed in him. He accustomed himself to
+speaking only for himself; to conceiving his own feeling as important,
+irrespective of effect and force; to holding a conversation with none
+but himself and silence. And his poem changed more and more. Now that
+the poet no longer had the panting roar of the response, the cry of
+passion, the exultation of enthusiasm, as the finale of his poetry--the
+last accord, as it were, belonging to his own music--he sought to
+complete the harmony in the verse by means of itself. He rounded his
+poem with an artist's care, as though it were an earthenware vessel;
+illumined it with colours like a picture; rilled it with music; more and
+more he relinquished the idea of persuading, of convincing,.of
+inspiring. He was content that the poem should have no feeling for other
+men, and gave it only the life and the mood of his own world. In that
+period of transition, we may suppose, 'poetic' diction first came into
+being, that language by the side of the living language which petrified
+more and more as time went on into a dialect hostile to the world, into
+bloodless marble. Of old, the poetic language was not one that existed
+side by side with the real language; it was only the last
+intensification of the real language. By the rhythm of higher passion,
+by the fire of harangue, it became a sacred fire, a blest intoxication,
+a festivity in the work-a-day world. Thus, as intensified vitality,
+language could be different without ever being unintelligible, could
+remain with and yet above the people, while the lyric poetry of to-day
+has become, for the most part, strange and worthless to active men who
+live in the midst of realities, to the artisan and the toiler.
+
+Nevertheless in our own days there seem to be signs of a return to this
+primitive close contact between the poet and his audience; a new pathos
+is at its birth. The stage was the first bridge between the poet and the
+multitude. But here the actor was still the intermediary of the spoken
+word; the purely lyrical emotion was not an aim in itself, but only, for
+three or four hours, a help in the illusion. However, the time of the
+isolation of the poet from the crowd, which was formerly rendered
+necessary by the great distances between nation and nation, seems now to
+have been overcome by the shortening of space and by the
+industrialisation of cities. To-day poets once again recite their verse
+in lecture-halls, in the popular universities of America; nay, in
+churches Walt Whitman's lines ring out into the American consciousness,
+and what used to be created only by the seething seconds of political
+crises--one might instance Petöfi declaiming his national anthem 'Talpra
+Magyar' from the steps of the university to the revolutionary
+crowd--occurs almost every day. Now again as of old the lyric poet seems
+entitled to be, if not the intellectual leader of the time, at least he
+who must excite and quell the passions of the time; the rhapsodist who
+hails, kindles, and fans that holy fire, energy. The world seems to be
+waiting for Him who shall concentrate all life in a flash of lightning
+to light up all the deeps of darkness:
+
+     Il monte--et l'on croirait que le monde l'attend,
+     Si large est la clameur des cœurs battant
+     À l'unisson de ses paroles souveraines.
+     Il est effroi, danger, affre, fureur et haine;
+     Il est ordre, silence, amour et volonté;
+     Il scelle en lui toutes les violences lyriques.[1]
+
+Certainly the poem which would speak to the multitude must be different
+to the kind of poem that pleased our fathers. Above all, it must itself
+be a will, an aim, an energy, an evocation. All the technical
+excellence, the sweet music, the craft of vibrating rhythms, suppleness
+and flexibility of language, must, in the new poem, no longer be an aim
+in themselves, but only a means to kindle enthusiasm. Such a poem must
+no longer be a sentimental dialogue between a hermit and some other
+hermit, a stranger somewhere far away; it must no longer be the short,
+hurriedly trembling voice which is silenced ere the word's flame has
+blazed up in it; no, this new poem must be strongly exulting, richly
+inspired, with a far horizon for its goal, and rushing on with
+irresistible impetuosity. It is not written for gentle moods, but for
+loud, resonant words. He who would quell the crowd must have the rhythm
+of their own new and restless life in him; he who speaks to the crowd
+must be inspired by the new pathos. And this new pathos, this 'pathos
+which most of all accepts the world as it is' (in Nietzsche's sense),
+is, above all, zest, is the strength and the will to create ecstasy.
+This poem must not be sensitive and woebegone; it must not express a
+personal grief that seeks to enlist the sympathies of others; no, it
+must be inspired by a fulness of joy, by the will to create from joy
+itself passion that cannot be held down. Only great feelings bear the
+message to the crowd; small feelings, which can only in silence, as in
+motionless air, rise above the ground, are dashed down again. _The new
+pathos must contain the will, not to set souls in vibration, not to
+provide a delicate, æsthetic sense of pleasure, but to fire to a deed._
+It must carry the hearer along with it; it must once again collect in
+itself the scattered forces of the poet of old time; it must in the poet
+recreate, for an hour, the demagogue, the musician, the actor, the
+orator; it must snatch the word again off the paper into the air; it
+must carefully entrust feeling as a secret treasure to the individual;
+it must hurl this treasure into the surf of a multitude. Poems with such
+a new pathos cannot be created by feeble, passive men, whose mood can be
+changed at any minute by the world around them, but only by fighting
+natures, who are governed by an idea, by the thought of a duty; who seek
+to force their feeling on others; who elevate their inspiration to the
+inspiration of the whole world.
+
+This new lyric pathos is in our days growing lustily into life again.
+For centuries rhetoricians have been mocked at. The change of estimation
+in Schiller's case from worship to sufferance is a lasting proof. And
+let us remember that Nietzsche, the only German who in recent years has
+influenced the world, was only able to do so by creating a new
+rhetorical style--'I am the inventor of the dithyramb'--only by making
+his _Zarathustra_ a preacher's book which insistently requires a loud,
+resonant voice. In France it was Victor Hugo who first recognised the
+necessity of direct address. But he, who, as it happens, stands on that
+narrowest boundary-line which separates genius from talent, he of whom
+one can say that he was either the least of the eternal, monumental
+poets or the greatest of the minor, the derivative poets, he confined
+himself to France, he never thought of any but the French nation--as
+Walt Whitman never thought of any but the American nation--and, above
+all, he had not the high place whence to speak to his nation. He would
+have been greater if he had really had the tribune whence his thunder
+and lightning might have reached the multitude, instead of being always
+only a sinister grumbling from the background of exile. Of all the
+hundred volumes of his work perhaps nothing will remain except that
+commanding gesture of an orator which Rodin has perpetuated in his
+statue, and which is nothing else than the will to move to passion. He
+has created this will to pathos, but not the pathos itself; still, even
+the effort is a great and memorable achievement.
+
+Victor Hugo's inheritance, which was ill administered by chatterers and
+chauvinists, by Déroulède and such poets with their big drums and their
+trumpet-flourishes, has been taken over in France by Verhaeren. And he
+is the first whose voice again reaches the crowd, the first French
+realisation of a pathos which has absolutely the effect of art and
+poetry. He more than any other, he whose deepest delight it is to quell
+a grandiose resistance, he the _évocateur prodigieux_, as Bersaucourt[2]
+has called him, was entitled to the mastery of the living word. Whenever
+I read a poem by Verhaeren, I am time after time astonished to find
+myself, when I have begun by reading it to myself, suddenly forced to
+read the words aloud; surprised to find myself reading them louder and
+louder; surprised to find in my hand, in my whole body, the urgent need
+awakening of the gesture that hails and kindles an audience. For so
+strong is the passionateness of the original feeling, the inner cry and
+appeal in the words, that it forces its way through the reproduction,
+rings out loudly even from the dead letters. _All the great poems of
+Verhaeren are filled with the yearning to be spoken aloud, vehemently,
+in the zest and glow of passion_. If they are recited softly, they seem
+to be quite without melody; if they are read calmly and stolidly, they
+often seem hard, uneven, and abrupt. Many images recur with a certain
+regularity, many adjectives are repeated as petrified ideas--the trick
+of an orator who emphasises what is important by standing
+expressions--but the moment the poem is read aloud it is all alive
+again, the repetitions are suddenly revealed as superb instances of
+excitement reaching its mark, the recurring images take their place as
+regular milestones along a road rushing along wildly to the infinite.
+Verhaeren's poetry is the communication of an ecstasy, communication not
+in the sense of a secret to an individual, but of fire cast to kindle a
+crowd. His poems never seem to be quite completed, but to have been
+first created while being read, just as every good and fiery speech
+gives the impression of being improvised; they are always the unfolding
+of a state, a passionate analysis that acts like a discovery. They are
+moving, not harmonious. Just as an orator does not shock his audience at
+the very first with the conclusion of his reasoning, but pays out the
+chain of his arguments slowly and logically, Verhaeren builds his poems
+from visions, first in repose, then in the excitement that intensifies,
+and then with burning horizons foaming over more and more wildly in
+images. And these images again are rhetorical; they are not similes
+which can only be understood in their totality by the roundabout way of
+reflection; they are glaring flashes of lightning. A poem that would
+move those who hear it has need of metaphors which not only hit the mark
+of feeling, but which hit it immediately with deadly effect. They must
+be glaring, because they have to force the whole feeling in the
+expression of one second as quick as lightning. In this way the pathetic
+poem produces a new form of sensuous expression, and in this way too it
+creates itself a new rhythm of intensification. First of all, with the
+lightnings of his metaphors Verhaeren illuminates the vast landscape of
+visions; then, by a certain monotony of rhythm, he intensifies the
+astonishment and excitement to the highest ecstasy. Repeatedly, at the
+breathing-spaces of his great poems, you think you have reached the
+summit, only to be whipped to a higher leap, to a higher outlook. 'Il
+faut en tes élans te dépasser sans cesse';[3] this, his moral
+commandment, is for him the highest poetical law as well. The deepest
+will of his pathetic poem is to whip up, to set running, to snatch his
+hearer along with him. 'Dites!' this summons which is like a gesture,
+the urgent 'encore, encore!' are appeals which in his poems are
+petrified into cries, just as every horseman has certain words to lure
+the last strength from his horse. _Such words are nothing but transposed
+oratorical gestures_. The hollow 'oh!' is the gesture of appeal; the
+short 'qu'importe!' the gesture as of one who casts away a burden grown
+too heavy; the slow, curving, far-sweeping 'immensément' is the heaping
+up of all infinity. These poems are lashed into fever heat. For not only
+do they themselves seek to fly like those other, the harmonious, the
+really lyric poems, which with wings outspread seem to hover near the
+clouds, they also seek to snatch up by force the whole heavy mass of the
+audience. This is the explanation of the constant repetitions in the
+poems, which are often very long, as though some last doubter were yet
+to be convinced, as though fire were to be darted into the blood of some
+last one yet immune. Everything strives forwards, forwards, dragging the
+resister along with ecstatic power.
+
+And here are seen the dangers of pathos. The first danger, that into
+which, for instance, Victor Hugo fell, was the emptiness, the hollowness
+of the feeling, the covering over of a void by a mighty gesture;
+enthusiasm resulting from a deliberate method, and not forced by inner
+feeling. Empty phrasing is and remains the first danger of the pathetic
+poem. The triteness of words 'plus sonores que solides'[4] is the
+second. Here, however, in this new pathos, there is another and a new
+peril, that of the over-heating of feeling, that of excessive, unhealthy
+exaltation, which must then of necessity yield to exhaustion. No man can
+be in a constant fever of excitement, in an unremitting state of
+exaltation. And in these poems there is the will to unceasing ecstasy.
+By the pathos, too, the purely lyrical values of the poem often fall
+into danger. The will to be clear often forces the poet to a triteness
+of wording; the terseness necessitates frequent repetition; the impulse
+to build up an organic ecstasy often leads to excessive length. Owing to
+its glaring, clear colours the language loses that mystical element of
+lyric verse--the incommensurable, as Goethe called it--that magic hint
+of a secret thing fleeing from the crowd and the light of day. But at
+the same time this pathos signifies an immense enrichment of lyric
+resources, a transvaluation of the word, by the very fact that it is not
+exclusively intended for print but for declamation as well. The pathetic
+poem is not, like the lyric poem, a crystallised impression; it is not
+at the same time question and answer to itself; it is the expectation of
+an answer. The great pathos, therefore, grows with success, and
+involuntarily mingles in the poem the craving and the answer of the
+poet's time. The voice of the poet is always as strong as the call that
+goes out to him. Verhaeren found this new pathos in the course of his
+development, because he no longer felt the voice of the crowd, of
+cities, and of all the new things as a hindrance to his lyric poetry,
+but as a challenge, as a rhetorical exhortation. And the more the world
+around us becomes ponderous, grandiose, and passionate--the more it
+becomes heroic in the concentration of its strength (heroic in that new
+strength that Emerson preached)--so much the more, too, must lyric
+poetry in the new sense, perhaps in Verhaeren's sense, be pathetic.
+Gigantic impressions cannot be forced into petty impressions; vast
+conceptions cannot be split up into mean fragments; a loud appeal needs
+a loud answer. All art is more dependent than we are aware on its epoch.
+The same secret dependence between demand and production seems to exist
+in the sphere of art as exists in commerce. Laws that escape our
+knowledge and cannot be prisoned in formulae can sometimes be glimpsed,
+hazy as a presentiment, in fugitive intuition.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'Le Tribun' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[2] Albert de Bersaucourt, _Conférence sur Emile Verhaeren._
+
+[3] 'L'Impossible' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[4] Albert Mockel, _Émile Verhaeren._
+
+
+
+
+VERHAEREN'S POETIC METHOD
+
+     Je suis celle des surprises fécondes.
+                          É.V., 'Celle des Voyages.'
+
+
+A real poem must not exhibit an artificial structure of parts, a
+mechanism; it must, like man himself, be organic, an indissoluble union
+of soul and body. It must have a living body of flesh, the substance of
+the word, the colour of the metaphors, the mechanism of the motion, the
+skeleton of the thought; but over and above all that it must possess
+that inexpressible something, the soul, which alone makes it organic;
+the breath, the rhythm, that inseparable essence which is no longer
+perceptible to intelligence, but only to feeling. It is not first in
+this transcendental element, however, that the poet's personality is
+revealed: the poetry of a great poet must be characteristic in its very
+physis, in its very material. Side by side with that magic vibration,
+that intangible element of feeling, the materiality too, the weaving of
+the word, that net of expression in which the fugitive feeling is caught
+in the waters of the hidden life and lifted into the light, these too
+must be alone of their kind if they are to characterise the poet's race,
+environment, and personality. This purely material organism of the poet
+too is, like every living thing, subject to growth, to the change of
+maturity and age. The structure of the poem, like every human face, must
+gradually, in the revolution of the years, work its way to character
+from the shifting features of childhood and the indistinctness of the
+general type, must in its sensuous externals, in the physiognomy of the
+material, show all psychic changes to the last acquisition of
+personality. In a real poet the technical aspect, the handicraft, the
+external element has a development that runs parallel to the
+intellectual and poetic contents. In form, too, the poem must at first
+represent a tradition, something that has been taken over; only in the
+revolt of youth will it achieve a personal form, and this itself will
+later, as it gradually grows cold and petrifies, represent an immutable
+type.
+
+Verhaeren's poetry has its evolution and its history in this purely
+formal sense. Even this poetry of Verhaeren's, which to-day looms so
+immensely isolated and so victoriously characteristic in French
+literature that a connoisseur can, without a shadow of doubt, recognise
+the creator from a single stanza, has grown from a tradition, is the
+climax of a certain culture, and is at the same time related to a
+contemporary movement. When Verhaeren began to write, Victor Hugo, the
+crowned king of French lyric poetry, was dead; Baudelaire was forgotten;
+Paul Verlaine was still almost unknown. Victor Hugo's heirs, who
+divided his kingdom as once the diadochi divided the kingdom of
+Alexander the Great, were only able to preserve the trappings of the
+glory gone, and the grandiloquence of their words contrasted ill with
+their thin voices and artificial feelings. Against this circle, against
+François Coppée, Catulle Mendès, Théodore de Banville and the rest of
+them, rose up a new school of young men who called themselves 'decadents
+and symbolists.' Here I must frankly admit that I am really unable to
+explain this idea, perhaps for the very reason that I have read so many
+varying definitions of it. The only thing that is certain is, that at
+that time a group of young writers rose up in concert against a
+tradition, and, in the most diverse experiments, sought a new lyrical
+expression. What this new thing consisted in would be hard to say. The
+truth is perhaps that all these poets were not French; that each of them
+brought some new element from his own country, his own race, his own
+past; that none of them felt that respect for the French tradition which
+was in the blood of the native poets as an inward barrier, and thus were
+able unconsciously to get nearer to their own artistic instinct. One
+only needs to look at the names, which often at the first glance betray
+the foreigner, the Americans Vielé-Griffin and Stuart Merrill, the
+Belgians Verhaeren, Maeterlinck, and Mockel, or which, as in the case of
+Jean Moréas, cover a complicated Greek name with a French pseudonym.
+The only indisputable exploit of this group really was that about 1885
+they quickened the pace of French lyric poetry with a new unrest.
+Mallarmé plunged his verses into a secret darkness of symbols, until the
+words with their subterranean meaning almost became unintelligible,
+while Verlaine gave his lines the dream-rapt lightsomeness of a music
+never heard before. Gustave Kalm and Jules Laforgue were the first who
+did away, the one with rhyme and the other with the Alexandrine, and
+introduced the apparent irregularities of the _vers libre._ Each one did
+his best on his own account to find something new, and all of them had
+in common the same fiery eagerness to attack the idols of a derivative
+poetry, the same ardent longing for a new form of expression. True,
+their talent was soon choked up with sand, but that was because they
+over-estimated the technical side of the innovations they introduced and
+spent themselves in the investigation of theories, instead of developing
+their own personalities. As time went on their paths diverged widely.
+Many of them foundered in the sea of journalism; others are still, after
+a lapse of twenty years, walking round in a circle in the footsteps of
+their youth; and of the symbolists and decadents nothing is left but a
+page or so of literary history, a faded sign-board marking an empty
+shop. Verhaeren too was classed with them, although in my view he was
+never essentially influenced by this school. A man of such sturdy
+originality could not be more than stimulated by others, could not be
+more than confirmed in his natural tendency to revolt. His attitude with
+regard to the _vers libre_ was by no means due to this influence. For it
+was not by suggestion from others, not by the instinct of imitation, but
+by inward necessity, that he discovered his new form. It was not the
+example of others that freed him from the fetters of tradition; he was
+forced to free himself from them of his own accord. This inner
+compulsion is alone of importance; for it is a matter of complete
+indifference whether a poet writes by chance in regular verse or in
+_vers libres_; the phenomenon can only be significant when a poet is of
+necessity and by inner pressure forced to free himself from tradition
+and to achieve a personal form.
+
+It was as a Parnassian that Verhaeren began. His first poetical
+attempts, which he has never published, the verses he wrote at school
+and in his first years at the university, showed him hypnotised by the
+style of Lamartine and Victor Hugo. And even in the first two books he
+published, in _Les Flamandes_ and _Les Moines_, there is not a single
+poem in which Verhaeren has gone beyond his models. His poem is indeed
+somewhat more mobile than the strict pattern of school exercises; it
+already shows slight traces of the cracks which at a later day will
+break the vessel to pieces. But this hint of insubordination was at
+that time necessitated more by the harshness and rebelliousness of the
+subject itself, by some stiffness or other in the turn of the phrase,
+which can only be explained by the fact of the poet's alien race. Even a
+foreigner can recognise that the verse is not rounded off, that the
+rhythm is not balanced with the natural inevitable sense of form that a
+man of Latin race would have, but that here a forceful will is with
+difficulty constraining a barbaric temperament to harmony. Through his
+French one can hear the massive language of his race, something of the
+unwieldy strength we have in our old German ballads. And what his name
+at the first glance betrayed--the foreigner--was to the finer ear of a
+native easily perceptible from his French alone.
+
+The farther Verhaeren proceeded in his development--the nearer he got to
+his real nature--the more the inheritance of his race in him revolted
+against the shackles of tradition--so much the more intensive became the
+impression of the Teutonic element in his verse. After all, development
+is in most cases nothing more than the awakening in us of our buried
+past. The highest demand of the Parnassian school, _impassibilité,_ an
+immovableness as of bronze, is the antithesis of his stormy temperament,
+which drives him along to a wild rhythm, not to harmony. Deep, guttural
+notes vibrate in his verses, and make the song of his vowels rough; the
+angularity, the masculinity, abruptness, and hardness of his peasant's
+nature peer through everywhere. In addition to this, there is now the
+inner transformation. So long as Verhaeren's poetic tendency was merely
+pictorial, one that calmly and without excitement aimed at painting the
+passion of the Flemish people, the earnestness of monasteries, just so
+long did the Alexandrine best serve to divide the rhythmic waves of his
+inspiration and roll them along. But when his personal sympathy began to
+confuse the inner indifference of his first work, his verse became
+uneasy. The cracks in the Alexandrine became more and more perceptible;
+greater and greater in the poet grew his impatience of it and his desire
+to smash it. He is no longer satisfied with the _vers ternaire_, the
+verse of the Romanticists with its two cæsuras dividing the line into
+three parts of perfectly equal rhythm and weight; he takes the free
+Alexandrine introduced by Victor Hugo and develops it still further,
+makes it still more irregular. He gives the syllables a different
+quantity, a different sonority; they no longer rest, they rock to and
+fro. And gradually the earnest, immovable uniformity of accentuation is
+changed into a more billowing, rhythmic fluidity. But ere long this
+concession too becomes too trivial for him. A temperament so impetuous
+as his will endure no outward fetter whatever. For it is not repose that
+this fiery singer would describe, but his own excited state--the
+quivering and vibrating of his emotion, his febrile unrest. His great
+manifold feeling, which is nothing else than a modulated cry, cannot
+storm itself out in regular verse; it needs unquiet gestures, motion,
+freedom, the _vers libre_. The fact that at this time other poets in
+France were using the free verse, the fact that it was at that
+time--several dispute the priority--'invented' for poets, is of no
+consequence to us here. Such contemporaneous incidences never express a
+chance, but always a latent necessity. Free verse was nothing else than
+the inevitable reflex action of modern feeling, the poetic breaking free
+of the unrest which lay in the time. Whether or not Verhaeren at that
+time had models is of no importance. What has been taken over can never
+become organic, only what comes from personal experience is a real gain.
+And at that time it lay quite in the line of his development that by
+inner necessity he was forced to break his old instrument and create
+himself a new one. For the nervous unrest, the passionate agitation of
+Verhaeren's later poems is unthinkable in regular verse. If verse is to
+describe in its own inner passion the immense multiplicity of modern
+impressions--their haste, their fire, their precipitous revulsion, their
+unexpectedness, their gloomy melancholy, and the overwhelming vastness
+of their dimensions--it must be strong and yet flexible, like a rapier.
+Such poems must be emancipated from rules: they must stride along like a
+real crowd, noisily seething; they must not walk in step, like soldiers
+on the march. And if they are to be spoken, they must not be recited in
+the stiff, cold, pathetically vibrating, self-conscious declamation of
+the Comédie Française; they must be spoken as though to a crowd; they
+must cry out, they must hail; and this-whipping up of an audience cannot
+be harmonious. These poems must be spontaneous and impulsive.
+
+Manifold is the diversity which Verhaeren's poetry has achieved by its
+deliverance from the monotony of the Alexandrine. Now and now only can
+the verse reproduce the plastic side of an impression and the inward
+agitation of it; not only by a pictorial description, but in a purely
+external manner too; by the sound, by the music of the rhythm. The
+lines, sometimes darting far beyond the margin, sometimes, like an
+arrow, sharpened to a single word, have the whole key-board of feeling.
+They can pace with a grave step like long black funeral processions, if
+haply they would express the monotony of solitude, 'Mes jours toujours
+plus lourds s'en vont roulant leur cours';[1] they can dart up like a
+falcon, white and glittering, soaring to the exulting cry 'la joie,'
+swift and as high as heaven over all the sad heaviness of earth. All the
+voices of day and night can now be represented onomato-poetically: all
+that is brusque and sudden by brevity; all that is ponderous and
+grandiose by a vast sweep of fulness; an unexpected thing by sudden
+harshness; haste in a feverishly accelerated movement; savagery by a
+precipitous change of velocity. Every line can now express the feeling
+by its rhythm alone. And one might without knowing French recognise the
+poetical intention of many of these poems merely by listening to their
+consonantal music, nay, often by looking at their typographical
+arrangement.
+
+For this reason I should be tempted to call these poems with their vast
+range _symphonic_ poems. They seem to have been conceived for an
+orchestra. They are not, like the poetry of a past generation, chamber
+music; they are not solitary violin _soli_; they are an inspired
+blending of all instruments; they are graded in individual sections
+which have a different _tempo_ and the pauses of the transitions. In
+Verhaeren's poetry the lyric exceeds the bounds of its domain and
+impinges on the dramatic and the epic. For his poem seeks not only to
+describe a mood, like a purely lyrical poem, it describes at the same
+time the birth of this mood. And this first part of the construction is
+epic; it is descriptive; it leads up from a lowly beginning to a great
+discharge of force. And, in the second place, the transitions are
+dramatic, those bursts of temperament from section to section, those
+precipitous falls and steep ascents which only at the end lead to a
+harmonious solution. From a purely external point of view Verhaeren's
+poem is more extensive, longer, of a greater range than any other
+contemporary poetry; it shoots out farther beyond the limit of lyric
+poetry; and, careless of the boundary-line of æsthetics, it derives
+strength and nourishment from neighbouring domains. It comes nearer to
+rhetoric, nearer to epic poetry, nearer to the drama, nearer to
+philosophy than any other poetry of our day; it is more independent of
+set rules than poetry had been hitherto. And independent of rules--or
+obeying only a new inner rule--is Verhaeren's form. Now, since the page
+no longer holds the fettered lines together in equal columns, the poet
+can write out his wild, overflowing feelings in their own wild, boldly
+curving lines. Verhaeren's poem at this time--and that which is achieved
+in the years of maturity remains inalienable--has its own inner
+architectonics. But it can hardly be compared to a piece of
+architecture, a structure built with hands; it is rather like a
+manifestation of nature. It is elementary like every feeling; it
+discharges itself like a storm. First a vision moves up like a cloud;
+more and more densely it compresses itself; more and more sultrily, more
+and more oppressively it weighs on the feeling; higher and higher,
+hotter and hotter grows the inner tension, until at last in the
+lightning of the images, in the rolling of the rhythm, all the garnered
+strength discharges itself rhythmically. The andante always grows to a
+furioso; and only the last section shows again the clear, cleansed sky
+of calm, in an intellectual synthesis of the state of chaos. This
+structure of Verhaeren's poem is almost invariable. It may be seen, for
+instance, in two parallel examples: in the poems 'La Foule' and 'Vers la
+Mer' in the book _Les Visages de la Vie_. Both set in with an
+adjuration, a vision. Here the crowd, its confusion, its strength; there
+a sensitive picture of the morning sea whose transparent tones remind
+one of Turner. Now the poet fires this still vision with his own
+passionateness. You see the crowd moving more and more restlessly, the
+waves surging more and more passionately; and ecstasy breaks out the
+moment the poet surrenders himself to these things, places himself among
+the crowd, sinks his feeling, his body in the sea. Then in the finale
+bursts forth the great cry of identity, in the one case the yearning to
+be all the crowd, in both that ecstatic gesture of the individual
+yearning for infinity. The first picture, which was only sensuously
+seen, grows at the end of the poem into a great ethic inspiration; from
+the vision is unfolded an unconquerable moral and metaphysical need.
+This form of intensification from individual feeling to universal
+feeling is the basic form of Verhaeren's poem. It might be best, in
+order to convey a clear idea of its form, to use a geometrical term and
+say that these poems are, to a certain extent, _poems in the form of a
+parabola._ While the lyric in the current sense mostly represents a
+symmetrical and harmonious form, a return to itself, a circle,
+Verhaeren's poem has the form of a parabola, apparently irregular but
+really equally governed by a law. His poems soar in a swift sustained
+flight, soar from the earth up into the clouds, from the real to the
+unreal, and then from a sudden zenith fling themselves back to the
+earth. The inspiration drives the feeling away from the pictorial, from
+passionless contemplation to this utmost height of possibility, far away
+from all sensuous perceptions high into the metaphysical, in order then,
+suddenly and unexpectedly, to bring it back to the _terra firma_ of
+reality. And indeed, in the music of these poems there is something as
+of a darting upwards, something of the hissing and whizzing of a stone
+well thrown and of its sudden falling down. In their rhythm too is this
+increasing velocity, this catching of the breath and this return to the
+starting-point, this bethinking itself of gravity when it returns to the
+earth.
+
+Something may now be said as to the means with which Verhaeren attains
+his vision, with which he seeks to represent the inner passionateness of
+things, with which he evokes enthusiasm. Let us first of all try to
+establish whether Verhaeren is what is called a master of language.
+Verhaeren's command of language is not by any means unlimited. Both in
+his words and in his rhymes there is constant repetition which sometimes
+borders on monotony; but on the other hand there is a strangeness, a
+newness, an unexpectedness of wording which is almost unexampled in
+French lyric poetry. An enrichment of the language, however, does not
+proceed from neologisms alone; a word may become alive by the
+unexpectedness of a new application, by a transposition of the meaning,
+as Rainer Maria Rilke, for instance, has often done in the German lyric.
+To redeem 'die armen Worte, die im Alltag darben,'[2] and consecrate
+them anew to poetry, is perhaps a higher merit than creating new words.
+Now Verhaeren has above all, by the Flemish sense of language which he
+inherited, imported a certain Belgian timbre into French lyric poetry.
+Personally, it is true, he is almost ignorant of Flemish; nevertheless,
+by the vague music familiar to him from his childhood's days, by a
+certain guttural tone, he has imported a nuance which is perhaps less?
+perceptible to the foreigner than to a Frenchman. At this point I should
+like to call Maurice Gauchez as a witness and borrow the most salient
+examples from his extraordinarily interesting monograph. Among the
+neologisms for which Gauchez suggests a foreign origin he quotes the
+following: les baisers rouges, les plumes majuscules, les malades
+hiératiques, la statue textuelle, les automnes prismatiques, le soir
+tourbillonaire, les solitudes océans, le ciel dédalien, le cœur
+myriadaire de la foule, les automnes apostumes, les vents vermeils, les
+navires cavalcadeurs, les gloires médusaires. And he rightly points out
+how much certain of Verhaeren's verbs might enrich the French language:
+enturquoiser, rauquer, vacarmer, béquiller, s'enténébrer, se futiliser,
+se mesquiniser, larmer. But I for my part cannot look upon the
+enrichment here accruing from racial instinct as the essential thing in
+his verbal art: it only gives it a local colour, without really
+explaining what is astonishingly modern in his diction. Verhaeren has
+been a great creator of new things for the French lyric, above all by
+his extension of its range of subjects, by his renewal of poetic
+reality, by recruiting new forces for poetry in the domain of technical
+science. _The great part of the new blood for his language came not so
+much from Flemish as from science_. A man who writes poems on the
+Exchange, on the theatre, on science, who sings factories and railway
+stations, cannot ignore their terminology. He must borrow certain
+technical expressions from the vocabulary of science, certain
+pathological terms from medicine; he must extend the glossary of the
+poetic by the extension of the poetic itself. There are geographical
+surprises of rhyme to be found in Verhaeren: Berlin and Sakhalin,
+Moscow, the Balearic and other distant islands whose names have never
+previously lived in rhyme. And since science is by its own progress
+compelled to invent new names every day, since new machines demand new
+words for their necessities, here for the first time an inexhaustible
+source has been discovered for replenishing the French language.
+
+This immense wealth, on the other hand, is jeopardised by something that
+might be called not so much poverty or restriction as fascination. Every
+one-sidedness of feeling produces, with its advantages, certain defects,
+and thus the constant passionateness which brought Verhaeren's poetry
+near to oratory, to preaching, is at the same time responsible for a
+certain monotony of the metaphors. Verhaeren is hallucinated by certain
+words, images, adjectives, phrases. He repeats them incessantly through
+all his work. All things in which a many-headed passion is united he
+compares with a 'brasier'; 'carrefour' is his symbol for indecision;
+'l'essor' is for him the last straining of effort; many cries and words
+by which he hails his audience are repeated almost from page to page.
+The adjectives too are often monotonous; often indeed, with the cold
+'iques' at the end of them, they are schematic; and even in the
+metaphors that phenomenon is unmistakable which in science is called
+pseudoanæsthesia, that is, the memory of a fixed feeling from the domain
+of some other sense is always individually associated with a certain
+colour or sound. For him 'red' expresses all that is passionate; 'gold'
+all greatness and pomp; 'white' all that is gentle; 'black' all enmity.
+His images have thus something abrupt and absolute; there is always in
+them, as Albert Mockel has demonstrated in his masterly study, the
+decisive, the sudden excitement, which overwhelms our astonishment. His
+images are as violent as his colours, as his rhythm. They have the
+suddenness of a cannon-ball which darts through space and is only
+perceptible to our vision when it reaches its aim and smashes the
+target. Possibly the inmost reason of this lies in the fact that these
+poems are intended to be spoken. A placard that is to have effect at
+some distance must be in glaring colours; pathos calls for images that
+hallucinate. Such images have indeed been found by Verhaeren, and by
+Verhaeren only. He hardly seems to know nuances. With the brutal
+instinct of a strong man he loves all that is glaring, all that is
+untrammelled. 'La couleur, elle est dans ses Å“uvres une surprise de
+métaux et d'images.'[3] But in this material they blaze, and with their
+lightnings they light up even the most distant horizon. I will only
+remind the reader of his 'beffrois immensément vêtus de nuit' or 'la
+façade paraît pleurer des lettres d'or,' or his 'les gestes de lumière
+des phares.' By the intensity of such images Verhaeren attains to quite
+an incomparable clearness of the feeling. 'Personne, je crois, ne
+possède à l'égal de Verhaeren le don des lumières et des ombres, non
+point fondues, mais enchevêtrées, des noirs absolus coupés de blanches
+clartés.'[4]
+
+One-sidedness of temperament here produces a one-sided advantage with
+all its artistic restrictions. So that Verhaeren is not a verbal artist
+in the unrestricted sense of one who always hits upon the only, the
+inevitable comparison for a thing; of one who flashes a bold word on the
+attention once and never retails it till it palls, who seems to use
+every word for the first time. His poetic vocabulary is rich, but by no
+means infinite; his sensibility is strong, but it has its restrictions.
+For, as is the case with every passionate poet, certain feelings at the
+last white-heat of excitement appear to him identical, seem to him to be
+capable of comparison only with the quite elementary things of Nature,
+with fire, the sea, the wind, thunder and lightning. To make the point
+clear, Verhaeren is not a verbal artist in Goethe's sense, but rather in
+Schiller's sense. With the latter, too, he has the gift in common of
+definitely expressing certain perceptions in one lyric line. He has
+discovered essences of the lyric feeling of life, lines that are now
+household words, or which at all events will be so. It will be
+sufficient to mention word formations such as 'les villes
+tentaculaires,' which in France have already become common-places, or
+such maxims as 'La vie est à monter et non à descendre,' or 'Toute la
+vie est dans l'essor.' In lines like these the lyric ecstasy is
+compressed as in a coin, and perpetuated in the current riches of the
+language.
+
+This hardness and brutality, these abrupt transitions, constitute the
+individuality of Verhaeren's poetry. At bottom it is nothing else than
+an accentuated masculinity. The voice, the music, is guttural, deep,
+raucous, masculine; the body of his poem has, like a man's body, the
+beautiful movement of strength, but in repose gestures that are often
+hard and which only in passion regain their compelling beauty. Whereas
+French lyric poetry, so to speak, had imitated the female body, the
+delicate grace of its soft yielding lines; whereas its first concern was
+harmony; Verhaeren's poem strove only for the rhythm of movement, only
+for the proud and vigorously ringing stride of a man, his leaping and
+running, the fighting display of his strength. This is not the only
+reason why the French have so long repudiated him. For where we delight
+in an echo from the German in his language, they feel the harshness of
+the Teutonic undertone; where we find a consonance with the German
+ballad, a re-birth of the German ballad as though it were awakening from
+the dreams of childhood, they see an opposition to the native tradition.
+And in fact, the farther Verhaeren has proceeded in his development,
+both in his personality and in his verse, the more the French varnish
+has peeled off his Teutonic perception. It was only in the time of his
+first dependence on tradition that his poetry was hardly to be
+distinguished from that of other writers in French. The farther he
+receded from the French standpoint, the more he unconsciously approached
+German art. To-day, perhaps, a return to classicism is perceptible in
+his poetry. The neologisms are not so audacious; the images are more
+schematic; the whole poem is calmer and more clarified. This, however,
+is by no means a cowardly compromise with a shattered tradition, no
+repentant return to the fold; it is the same phenomenon we meet in a
+similar manner in the late poems of Goethe, Schiller, Hugo, and
+Swinburne; the effect of the cooling of the blood in age; the yielding
+of sensuous perception to intellectual ideas. The victor has lost the
+fighter's brutality; the man in his maturity no longer needs revolt but
+a conception of the world--harmony. Here, as in Verhaeren's whole
+evolution, his verse is the most delicately sensitive indicator of the
+psychic revulsion, the perfect proof of a poetic and organic development
+which is really inward and dependent only on the laws of his blood.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'L'Heure Mauvaise' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[2] 'Poor words a-hungered in the working day.'--Rainer Maria Rilke,
+_Mir sur Feier._
+
+[3] Albert Mockel, _Émile Verhaeren_.
+
+[4] _Ibid._ (_Ibid._).
+
+
+
+
+VERHAEREN'S DRAMA
+
+     Toute la vie est dans l'essor.
+                      É.V., _Les Forces Tumultueuses._
+
+Émile Verhaeren's dramas seem to stand outside his work. Verhaeren is
+essentially a lyric poet. His whole feeling springs from lyric
+enthusiasm, and all neighbouring domains are merely sources whose
+strength flows into and feeds this one vital instinct. Verhaeren has
+almost always used the dramatic and the epic only as a means, never as
+an end in themselves: from the epic he has taken over into the vast
+sweep of his dithyrambic poems its broad, calm development, and from the
+drama the swift, abrupt contrast of transitions. The dramatic and the
+epic only serve him as a tonic, as a means to strengthen the blood of
+his lyric art. Although Verhaeren beside his lyric work has written
+dramas--four up to the present--these, in the edifice of his complete
+production, must be appreciated from a different point of view: from an
+architectural point of view. For the dramas are to him, in a certain
+sense, only a survey, a concentration of individual lyric crises, a
+synopsis of certain ideal complexes which have occupied some moment of
+his past; they are final settlements; the last point in lines of
+development; milestones of individual epochs. All that in the lyric
+poems, which never systematically bounded a domain, fell apart, is here
+made to converge to the focus of a programme. The lyric juxtaposition is
+fused into an inner relationship, the circle of ideas is co-ordinated
+like a picture in the frame of a play. Verhaeren's four tragedies
+represent four spheres of a conception of the universe: the religious,
+the social, the national, and the ethical. _Le Cloître_ is a re-creation
+of the book of verse _Les Moines_, is the tragedy of Catholicism; _Les
+Aubes_ is a condensation of the sociological trilogy _Les Villes
+Tentaculaires, Les Campagnes Hallucinées, Les Villages Illusoires.
+Philip II._ shapes the tragedy of the Antichrist, the contrast of Spain
+and Belgium, of sensuality and asceticism. And _Hélène de Sparte_, which
+in its outward form manifests a return to classicism, handles purely
+moral, eternal problems. As far as their contents are concerned,
+Verhaeren's dramas show no deviation, no change of the inner centre of
+gravity, and his new dramatic style is in perfect harmony with his new
+lyric style. For just as on the one hand he has used the dramatic
+element as a substance of his lyric work, here in his dramas he has
+transmuted the lyric element to a dramatic element. Here, too, we have
+nothing but visions intensified into exaltation. Here, as everywhere
+else, Verhaeren can only create by enthusiasm. What goads him on is the
+lyric moment in his enthusiasm, that second of the highest tension when
+passion, if it is not to shatter the frame of its generator, must have
+explosive words. The characters of his dramas are never anything but
+symbols of great passions, the bridge for this ascension of the
+exaltation. To him the action is no more than the way to the crises, to
+those seconds when some mighty force seizes on these characters and
+forces them to cry out. Whole scenes seem to be only awaiting for the
+moment when some one shall rise and turn to the crowd, wrestle with it
+and overthrow it, or be himself dashed to pieces.
+
+The style of Verhaeren's dramas is purely lyrical; the pace is
+throughout passionate and feverish; and this method, which runs counter
+to all dramatic canons, was bound organically to create a new technique.
+The French drama had hitherto known only the rhymed Alexandrine or
+prose. In Verhaeren's dramas--for the first time to my knowledge--prose
+and verse (verse which is 'free' both as regards rhythm and rhyme) are
+throughout promiscuously mixed. Mixed, but not as in Shakespeare, in
+whose plays verse and prose alternate in individual scenes and
+establish, so to speak, a social stratification, serving-men speaking in
+prose and their masters in verse: in Verhaeren the prose passages are
+the broad, resting foundations of the action; the curved bowls, so to
+speak, from which the holy fire of the exaltation flames. His
+characters express their calm in prose, pass from calm to excitement,
+and in this intensification speak a language which imperceptibly merges
+into a poem. Not till their passion breaks out do they speak in verse,
+in those seconds, as it were, when their soul begins to vibrate; and in
+these passages one cannot help thinking of an aeroplane which is first
+driven along the ground and moves with ever greater speed till suddenly
+it soars aloft. In Verhaeren's drama the characters speak an ever purer
+language the more poetical they become; music breaks with their passion
+from their souls; just as many people who behave coarsely and awkwardly
+in ordinary life, in great moments suddenly achieve a bearing of heroic
+beauty. This embodies the idea that in enthusiasm a man discovers in
+himself another and a purer language; that passion and the yearning to
+free oneself from an immeasurable and intolerable earthly burden make a
+poet of any man. This idea is in harmony with Verhaeren's whole
+conception of the universe, his idea that the man swept away by passion
+and enthusiasm is on a higher plane than the critic with his lack of hot
+feeling; that receptivity for great sensations constitutes, so to speak,
+a scale of moral values. And the stage performances have shown that this
+new style is justified, that the transition from prose to verse,
+occurring as it does contemporaneously with the ascension from calm to
+passion, passes practically unnoticed by the audience, which is
+equivalent to saying that when put to the test the method was recognised
+as necessary.
+
+And it is by passion, this innermost flame of Verhaeren's poetry, that
+his dramas live too. Their qualities are those of the lyrics; they have,
+above all, that vast power of vision which sets _Philip II_. against the
+tragic landscape of Spain; over the drama of Helen arches the heaven of
+Greece, blue, and mild, and open like a flower; and behind the tragedy
+of modern cities unrolls the inflamed scenery of the sky with the black
+arms of chimneys. And then the immense fervour of the ecstasy which, not
+in a slow, regular progression, but in savage, convulsive thrusts,
+whirls the action onward to the moments of the solution.
+
+Thus Verhaeren's first drama derives its strength from the lyric source
+of a man's accusation of himself. _Le Cloître_ is a paraphrase of _Les
+Moines_, the book of the monks. Here again all the characters are
+gathered together in the cool corridors of a monastery--the gentle, the
+wild, the feudal, the wrathful, the childlike, the learned monk; here,
+however, they do not act in isolation, but with all their strength the
+one against the other. They fight for the prior's chair, which is really
+the symbol of something higher. For just as in _Les Moines_ every
+individual monk expressed symbolically some virtue of Catholicism and a
+distinct idea of God, here the prior's chair decides the question who is
+the most deserving of God. For his successor the old prior has
+designated Balthasar, a nobleman whom the monastery has sheltered for
+years. But he had only taken refuge there because he had killed his own
+father, thus escaping secular justice, and now he feels the
+consciousness of his guilt burning, feels the exasperated struggle
+between his own conscience and the lighter conscience of the others, who
+have long since forgiven him. And he cannot feel himself free before he
+has made his confession before the assembled monks, and even then only
+when he has repeated the confession, against the will of the monastery,
+to the people, and surrendered himself to the secular judges. The Roman
+Catholic idea of confession is here wonderfully in agreement with
+Dostoieffsky's conception of salvation by confession, of deliverance by
+suffering self-imposed. In three climaxes of equal force at the end of
+each of the three acts the tragic confession bursts into flame--first
+born of fear, then of a sense of justice, and at the last positively
+conceived as a pleasure; and here in these superb lyric ecstasies rest
+the strong pinions which bear the tragedy.
+
+In the second, the social tragedy _Les Aubes,_ the scenario is the
+present time. It has the purple scenery of _Les Villes Tentaculaires_,
+of the cities with the arms of polypi, which drain the blood of the poor
+dying country. Beggars, paupers, those who are starving, those who have
+been evicted, march to Oppidomagnum, the modern industrial city, and
+besiege it. It is the past once again storming the future. In the
+lyrical trilogy this struggle had been shaped in a hundred visionary
+instances; here, however, the bright sky of reconciliation is arched
+above the battle-field, over the realities hovers the dream. For here
+the future joins hands with the present. The great tribune, Hérénien,
+breaks the backbone of this battle and shows himself the hero of a new
+morality by secretly admitting the enemy into the city--in the old sense
+the action of a traitor--by yielding and thus transforming the struggle
+into a reconciliation. He is the tragic bearer of the moral idea that
+enmity may be overcome by goodness, and he falls as the first martyr of
+his faith. Verhaeren's social conception, his superb description of
+realities, here merge slowly in a Utopia; the dawns of the new days
+begin to shine above the pasts that are dead; the din of rebellion fades
+away in harmony. This drama, like the others, is far remote from the
+possibilities of the majority of theatres, because of the fact that here
+too an ethical idea is expressed with all the glow and ecstasy which as
+a rule in modern dramas is only found in the utterance of erotic desire.
+
+The third tragedy, _Philip II_., is a national drama, although its scene
+is not laid in Flanders. Much as Charles de Coster in his _Thyl
+Ulenspiegel_ had, with a Fleming's deadly hatred, seen in Philip II. the
+hereditary enemy of liberty, Verhaeren, who with the lyric poetry of
+his _Toute la Flandre_ became the representative singer of his native
+land, painted this gloomy figure with hatred. Philip II. is here, as in
+_Thyl Ulenspiegel,_ the hard, inflexible king who would fain put life
+out because it burns too red for him, who wishes to have the world as
+cool and marble-like as the chambers of the Escorial. Here of a sudden
+the reverse side of Roman Catholicism, whose passion was immortalised in
+_Le Cloître_, is rent open; its pitilessness and asceticism; its
+obstinate effort to overthrow the irrefragable joy of life. Don Carlos,
+however, is the fervent friend of the people, the friend of Flanders; he
+is the will to enjoyment, to merry moods, to passion. And this struggle
+between the 'yes' and the 'no' of life, this fight of Verhaeren's own
+lyric crisis, this fight between the denial and the passionate approval
+of enjoyment--at bottom, toe, the deepest cause of the war between Spain
+and the Netherlands--is here symbolised in characters. Of course, any
+comparison with Schiller's _Don Carlos_ must tell against Verhaeren, for
+the German drama is far more dramatic and conceived on a scale of
+greater magnificence; but Verhaeren did not aim at a complete rounding
+off, at a plenitude of characters; all that he wanted was to show these
+two feelings in their struggle with each other, the enthusiasm of life
+and its suppression by force. A comparison with Schiller's drama best
+shows Verhaeren's disregard of dramatic canons, and at the same time
+the immense new lyric power of the play. For Spain is here seen with a
+strength and intensity of vision which is probably without a parallel in
+tragedy. The cold, hypocritical atmosphere can be felt; and better than
+from words the character of Philip can be perceived in that one silent
+scene in which he suddenly appears stealthily creeping to watch his son
+in the arms of the countess, and then, without a gleam in his rigid
+eyes, without the slightest movement of anger, vanishes again into the
+dark. Behind him, however, behind the spy and the eavesdropper, glides
+another shadow, the monk of the Inquisition: the eavesdropper is himself
+shadowed, the ruler is himself ruled. Visions like these, with the
+ecstasy of certain scenes, are the strongest motive power in Verhaeren's
+poetic construction. His dramatic art, like the art of his lyrics, does
+not rise in a steady ascent, but in sudden wild leaps and starts.
+
+Only in his last drama, _Hélène de Sparte_, has Verhaeren come nearer to
+the accepted conception of the dramatic. That is characteristic of his
+organic development. For now that he is in the years when passion of
+necessity cools, harmony grows dear to him; and he who through all the
+years of his youth and prime was a revolutionary, now recognises the
+necessity of inner laws. By its mere intellectual substance this tragedy
+expresses the veering round: it is nothing else than the longing from
+passion to harmony, Helen's flight from adventures to repose. And the
+return is to be found again in the verse, for Verhaeren here for the
+first time takes up the traditional French metre; his form, though yet
+free, approaches the Alexandrine. The tragedy of Helen is the tragedy of
+beauty. Helen is one of those antique characters who in Greek literature
+were only sketched in fleeting lines, characters whom a modern poet is
+now entitled to fill in with his own fate. For from the Greek sources we
+really knew nothing about her personal fate; we only knew the effect she
+exercised, only the reflection of her personality on others, not that of
+others on her. She was the queen who inflamed all men; who was the cause
+of great wars; the woman for whose sake murder on murder was committed;
+who was snatched from one bed to another; for love of whom Achilles
+arose from the dead; who passed her life circled by disastrous passion.
+But whether she herself shared these passions, whether she grew by them
+or suffered by them, the poets tell us nothing. Verhaeren in his drama
+has now attempted to depict the tragedy of the woman who endures fearful
+suffering because she is always desired in lust and no more; who is
+consumed by the torture of being ever robbed from lover by lover; of
+never knowing the look of pure eyes, calm converse, quiet breathing; who
+is cursed always to stand at the pyre of passion, with the flames of
+men always blazing round her. Whoever looks at her at once desires her,
+snatches her; none waits and asks whether he serves her will; she is
+robbed like a chattel; she glides from hand to hand. In Verhaeren's
+drama Helen has returned home, a woman tired, tired of all unrest, of
+all her triumphs, tired of love; a woman hating her own beauty because
+it creates unrest, longing for nothing but old age, when none shall
+desire her more and her days shall be calm. Menelaus has brought her
+home, rescued her from all that stifling steam of criminal passion; now
+she would breathe quietly, live calm days, and be faithful to him. She
+desires no more than this. No passion can tempt her more. 'I have seen
+the flaring of so many flames that now I love only the hearth's glow and
+the lamp' is the expression of her poignant resignation. But fate will
+not yet let her go. Verhaeren has here seized on the great idea of the
+Greeks that everything that is superhuman on earth, every excessive
+gift, even that of beauty, is pursued as a hybrid by the envy of the
+gods, and must be paid for with pain. Too great beauty is no profit, but
+a tragic gift. And hardly has Helen returned, to rest and be happy, to
+be like everybody else, than new clouds roll themselves up above her
+head. Her own brother desires her; her enemy Electra desires her; her
+husband is murdered for her sake; and the old fearful battle threatens
+to break out anew for the possession of her body. Now she flees, away
+from men, out into nature. And here again, with the vision of genius,
+Verhaeren approaches Greek feeling. The forest is not dead to him, but
+animate; life does not stop at human beings; fauns emerge from the
+bushes, naiads from the rivers, bacchantes from the mountains, and all
+swarm round Helen in her despair, luring her to their lust, till she
+flees to Zeus in death.
+
+It is characteristic of Verhaeren that he has made even this tragedy,
+the tragedy of Helen, anerotic, or better anti-erotic. Perhaps the
+slight interest which has hitherto been manifested in Verhaeren's
+dramas, and indeed partly in his whole work, may be ascribed to the fact
+that, in comparison with the other poets of his day, he has held himself
+aloof from erotic subjects, that the problem of love has only recently,
+in the years of his maturity, begun to interest him as a theme for his
+art. From the first Verhaeren concentrated all the passion which others
+lavished on the erotic in purely intellectual things, in enthusiasm, in
+admiration. In his dramas woman plays an almost subordinate rôle, and
+_Le Cloître_ is perhaps the only important drama of our days which does
+not show a single woman among its characters and in its inner circle of
+problems. By this fact alone his dramatic aim strays too far from the
+interests of our public. For it is from a purely intellectual conflict
+that Verhaeren seeks to disengage that height and heat of passion which
+hitherto was known only in erotic themes; and therefore the exaltation
+strikes the majority of an audience as strange, and leaves them unmoved.
+All our contemporaries who seek art only in the theatre are too
+indifferent and timid to be snatched up, for a purely ethical problem,
+into an ecstasy so burning, so persistently lit with convulsive
+lightnings. This is the only explanation I can find for the opposition
+to Verhaeren's dramas, which are so full of beauty and of living,
+dramatic, passionate situations, and which, above all, contain something
+new, a new dramatic style. This very kindling of prose to verse was a
+revelation. But the whole dramatic aim is different in Verhaeren to that
+which obtains on the stage of to-day. His aim is not to excite interest,
+not to produce fear and compassion, but enthusiasm. He does not wish to
+occupy the minds of his audience, but to carry them away into his
+rhythm. He wishes to make them drunk with his great excitement, because
+only he who gazes in enthusiasm is capable of recognising these supreme
+passions; he wishes to make the spectators as feverish as the characters
+they see before them on the stage; he wishes to make their blood fiery;
+wishes to raise them above all cool, calm, and critical contemplation.
+His whole temperament, which drives along in the direction of
+superabundance; his art, which only fulfils its purpose in ecstasy;
+require impassioned actors and an impassioned audience. To create the
+ideal atmosphere which Verhaeren demands for his dramas would require an
+actor of kindred genius who should have no fear of being called
+emotional, and who would hurl the verses down like cataracts,
+emphasising like a demagogue and at the same time unfolding all the
+magnificence of the rhythm. For the poet asks for nothing save a feeling
+of enthusiasm corresponding to that which first created the poem in him.
+His intention is not to convince by logic, not to dazzle by pictures,
+but to whip up and carry along with him into that ultimate dizzy feeling
+which to him is alone identical with the highest form of the feeling of
+life--into passion.
+
+In Germany _Le Cloître_,[1] as staged by Max Reinhardt, and again in the
+Deutsches Volkstheater in Vienna, has conquered the interest of a
+literary public and triumphed unreservedly over the obstacle of its own
+strangeness. There has been an exemplary production of _Philip II._ in
+the Munich Künstlertheater; _Hélène de Sparte_ on the other hand has not
+yet found the setting it demands. As bodied forth in Paris by Ida
+Rubinstein, with decorations of a grandiose barbarism by Bakst, with a
+ground-colouring of music, it was effective more by the external
+magnificence of this somewhat sensationally advertised _mise en scène_
+than by its poetic qualities, smothered as they were by the
+accessories. A production which shall do justice to the play, leaving
+its pure lyric line unbedizened with glaring arabesques, is still
+waiting as a task for some actor-manager of genius who possesses that
+highest and rarest quality of being able to subordinate himself to the
+utterance, who is anxious not to ruin a noble simplicity by a spurious
+plenitude.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] A version of _Le Cloître_, by Mr. Osman Edwards, was successfully
+produced by Miss Horniman at the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester in 1910.
+
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+COMPLETING FORCES
+
+
+LES VISAGES DE LA VIE--LES FORCES TUMULTUEUSES--LA MULTIPLE
+SPLENDEUR--TOUTE LA FLANDRE--LES HEURES CLAIRES --LES HEURES
+D'APRÈS-MIDI--LES HEURES DU SOIR--LES RYTHMES SOUVERAINS
+--LES BLÉS MOUVANTS
+
+1900-1914
+
+
+
+
+COSMIC POETRY
+
+                     ... Les vols
+     Vers la beauté toujours plus claire et plus certaine.
+                                        É.V., 'Les Spectacles.'
+
+The poetic conquest of life represents, as it were, a process of
+combustion. Every poet feeds the flame of his inner being, his artistic
+passion, with the things of the world around him, transmutes them into
+flame, and himself shoots on high and dies down with them. The more the
+flame cools with the feebler circulation of the blood, the weaker grows
+this fire, and gradually the pure crystals, the residue from this battle
+of the inner flame with the things of reality, are separated from this
+process of combustion. Verhaeren's work was in his youth and prime a
+flame exceedingly hot, lawless, free, and flaring like the very years of
+his youth and prime. Now, however, in the work of his fifties, now that
+passion has cooled, the yearning is revealed to find the goal of this
+passion, the inherent lawfulness of this unrest. Enthusiasm for the
+present, poetic consumption of the world in visions without the residue
+of philosophy and logical knowledge, no longer suffice him. For all
+deeper contemplation of the present is unthinkable without an exceeding
+of its limits: all that is, is at the same time something that has been
+and something that will be. Nothing is so entirely the present that it
+is not intimately connected with the past and the future. The eternal
+and the permanent is the inward side of all phenomena. And the more the
+poet turns his visions from the exterior, from the pictorial, to the
+inner world, to psychology, the more he descends from external phenomena
+to the roots of forces, the more he must apprehend the permanent behind
+the transitoriness of things. No perception of a contemporary state is
+fertile unless it is impregnated with the perception of laws that are
+independent of time, unless the changing phenomena are recognised as
+transformations of the unchangeable primordial phenomenon. This
+transition from maturity to age, from contemplation to knowledge,
+corresponds to a new artistic transition in the incomparably organic
+development of this poet. A transition: no longer a re-formation, but a
+formation which moves both forwards and backwards, which is at the same
+time an evolution and a retrogression, just as the poetic form of
+Verhaeren's poetry no longer undergoes a transformation, but is
+petrified. What a man has acquired in the years of his prime is an
+inalienable possession; its value can be further increased only by
+knowledge, by the appraising of the possession. It may be said that a
+man who has passed his prime experiences nothing new: the static
+equilibrium is realised; what has been experienced is only the better
+understood. The experience is no longer a struggle, no longer a state of
+unrest, something that slips away; it is a possession. What passion has
+fought for and won with a leap is now set in order and appraised at its
+true value, by calm. This transition from youth to age is in Verhaeren,
+to use Nietzsche's phrase, a transition from the Dionysiac to the
+Apollinarian, from a plethora to harmony. His yearning is now _vivre
+ardent et clair_, to live passionately, but at the same time clearly to
+preserve his inner fire, but at the same time to lose his unrest.
+Verhaeren's books in these years grow more and more crystalline; the
+fire in them no longer blazes openly like a flaring pyre, but glitters
+and sparkles as with the thousand facets of a precious stone. The smoke
+and the unrest of the fire die down, and now the pure residues are
+clarified. Visions have become ideas, the wrestling earthly energies are
+now eternal immutable laws.
+
+The will of these last years, of these last works, is the will to
+realise a cosmic poem. In the trilogy of the cities Verhaeren had laid
+hold on the universe as it lies around us to-day; he had snatched it to
+him and overcome it. In passionate visions he had shaped its image,
+achieved its form, and now it stood beside the actual world as his own.
+But a poet who would create the whole world for himself, the whole
+infinite vista of its possibilities by the side of its actualities, must
+give it everything: not only its form, not only its face, but its soul
+as well, its organism, its origin, and its evolution. He must not merely
+apprehend its pictorial aspect and its mechanical energy, he must give
+it an encyclopædic form. He must create a mythology for it, a new
+morality, a new history, a new system of dynamics, a new system of
+ethics. Above it or in it he must place a God who acts and transforms.
+He must fashion it in his poetry not only as something that is, not only
+as something in the present, but as something that has been and is
+becoming, something that is part and parcel of the past and of the
+future too. It must ring out the old and ring in the new. And this will
+to create a cosmic poem is to be found in Verhaeren's new and most
+precious books--_Les Visages de la Vie, Les Forces Tumultueuses, La
+Multiple Splendeur, Les Rythmes Souverains_---books which by their mere
+title announce the effort to include the dome of heaven in their vast
+embrace. They are the pillars of a mighty structure, the great stanzas
+of the cosmic poem. They are no longer a conversation of the poet with
+himself and contemporary feeling; they are a pronouncement addressed to
+all the ages. _S'élancer vers l'avenir_ is the longing they express: a
+turning away from all the pasts to speak to the future. The lyric
+element in them steps beyond the boundary-line of poetry. It kindles the
+neighbouring domains of philosophy and religion, kindles them to new
+possibilities. For not only æsthetically would Verhaeren come to an
+understanding with realities; not by poetry only would he overcome the
+new possibilities; he would fain master them morally and religiously as
+well. The task of these last and most important books of verse is no
+longer to apprehend the universe in individual phenomena, but to impress
+its new form on a new law. In _Les Visages de la Vie_ Verhaeren has in
+individual poems glorified the eternal forces, gentleness, joy,
+strength, activity, enthusiasm; in _Les Forces Tumultueuses_ the
+mysterious dynamics of union shining through all forms of the real; in
+_La Multiple Splendeur_ the ethics of admiration, the joyous
+relationship of man with things and with himself; and in _Les Rythmes
+Souverains_ he has celebrated the most illustrious heroes of his ideals.
+For life has long since ceased to be for him mere gazing and
+contemplation:
+
+     Car vivre, c'est prendre et donner avec liesse
+     ...................avide et haletant
+     Devant la vie intense et sa rouge sagesse![1]
+
+Description, poetic analysis, has gradually grown into a hymn, into
+'laudi del cielo, del mare, del mondo,' into songs of the whole world
+and of the ego, and of the harmony of the world's beauty in its union
+with the ego. The lyrical has here become cosmic feeling, knowledge has
+become ecstasy. Over and above the knowledge that there cannot be
+anything isolated, that everything is arranged and obeys the last
+uniform law of the universe, over and above this knowledge rises
+something still higher--over the contemplation of the world rises faith
+in the feeling of the world. The glorious optimism of these works ends
+in the religious confidence that all contrasts will be harmonised; that
+man will more and more be conscious of the earth; that every individual
+must discover his own law of the world in himself, the law that makes it
+possible for him to apprehend everything lyrically, with enthusiasm,
+with joy.
+
+Here Verhaeren's poetry far exceeds the boundary-line of literature; it
+becomes philosophy and it becomes religion. Verhaeren was from the very
+first an eminently religious man. In his childhood Catholicism was the
+deepest feeling of his life, but this Catholicism had perished in the
+crises of his adolescence, his religious feeling had given way to the
+rapt contemplation of all new things, to ecstasy inspired by the aspect
+of life. But now, when Verhaeren returns to the metaphysical, the old
+yearning is reawakened. The old gods are dead for him; Pan is dead, and
+Christ too. Now he feels the need of finding a new faith, a new
+certainty, a new God for the new sensation, this identity of I and
+world. The new conflicts have created a longing in him for a new
+equilibrium; his stormily religious feeling, determined to believe,
+needs new cognition. The image of the world would be incomplete without
+the God who rules it. All his yearning goes out to this God, and it
+finds its fulfilment. And this knowledge gives him the highest joy life
+can have, the loftiest pride life can bestow:
+
+      Voici l'heure qui bout de sang et de jeunesse.
+             *       *       *       *       *
+      Un vaste espoir, venu de l'inconnu, déplace
+      L'équilibre ancien dont les âmes sont lasses;
+             La nature paraît sculpter
+           Un visage nouveau à son éternité.[2]
+
+To chisel this new face of God is the aim of his last and most mature
+works, in which the obstinate 'no' of his youth has become the loud
+exulting 'yes' of life, in which the great possibilities of old have
+become an unsuspected opulent reality.
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'Un Soir' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[2] 'La Foule' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+
+
+
+THE LYRIC UNIVERSE
+
+     Il faut aimer, pour découvrir avec génie.
+                                        É.V., 'Un Soir.'
+
+
+If one is to understand Verhaeren's lyric work as a work of art, it must
+be kept in mind that he is a lyric poet, and a lyric poet only. A lyric
+poet only, not, however, in the limited sense of one who confines
+himself to the writing of lyric poems, but of one who, in a lofty and
+more extensive meaning of the term, transforms everything into emotion,
+who stands in a lyric relationship with all things, with the whole
+world. And since the innermost constitution of a man's talent
+unconsciously acts as the driving tendency, the direction of the aim of
+his life, his very fate and his conception of the world, since all this
+is so, the lyric poet that Verhaeren is must of necessity have a lyrical
+conception of the world, his cosmic feeling _must_ be lyrical. To say
+that he has confined himself to the lyric style would be to diminish his
+stature. It is true that in all Verhaeren's imaginative work--and it is
+of considerable volume--there is no prose. A very thin volume of short
+stories did indeed appear many years ago and has long been out of print;
+but how tentative and provisional it was in scope may be seen from the
+fact that Verhaeren later on turned one of the stories, that of the
+bell-ringer in the burning tower, into a poem. And I might mention a
+whole series of poems which at bottom are nothing but short stories, and
+others again which are saturated with dramatic excitement, quite
+unlyrical problems, but all of them lyrically conceived. And even in his
+criticism of art and in that penetrating and beautiful book of his on
+Rembrandt, in which he represents the organic connection of the artist
+with his native province almost as a personal experience, the
+outstanding passages live by their lyric enthusiasm. Many of the poems
+again are spiritualised theories of art. The origin of language or the
+sociological problem of emigration, the economic contrast of agrarianism
+and industrialism: in an essay such things might be calmly treated,
+coldly passed in review. But this is characteristic of Verhaeren, that
+he is unable to take a cold, faint interest in anything: consciously or
+unconsciously he must be carried away by enthusiasm for the things he
+contemplates. The ecstasy of his excitement involuntarily whips him out
+of a slow trot into lyric fervour. Poetry is to him, like his
+philosophy, like his ethics, a lyrical soaring. It is characteristic of
+the great lyric poets, of Walt Whitman, Dehmel, Carducci, Rilke, Stefan
+George, that at a certain height of their artistry they renounce all
+other than lyric forms. Here, as elsewhere, great things only seem
+possible of attainment by concentration, only by the poet's freeing
+himself from the trammels of all other experiments. Great lyric poetry
+as the art of a life only accrues from the renunciation of all other
+forms of poetry.
+
+Infinite enthusiasm, _le lyrisme universel_, a rapt visionary sensation
+of the earth rolling as it were in an eternal vibration through the
+cosmos, is the aim of Verhaeren's work. Not to describe the world in
+isolated poems, not to break it up in impressions, but to feel it as
+itself a flaring, flaming poem, _not to be one who contemplates the
+world, but one who feels it_, this is his highest yearning. A lyric art
+can only grow to such intentions as these from emotions not felt by
+other lyrists. It is not, as with most poets, from gentle crepuscular
+feelings, from vague states of melancholy, that such an impulse is
+crystallised to lyrical expression; here it is an overflowing fulness of
+feeling, a bright joy in life, that engenders his poem; an explosion
+which in the days of his debility was a paroxysm, which as time went on
+changed to a pure enthusiasm, but which was always an eruption of
+strength. Lyric art is here a discharge of the whole feeling of life.
+With Verhaeren the excitement does not sting the individual nerve; it
+spreads electrically, inflames the blood, contracts the muscles,
+produces an immense pressure, and then discharges the whole energy of a
+body saturated with health and strength. _The will to discharge strength
+is the basic form of Verhaeren's lyric emotion_. His aim is to instil
+inspiration--first of all into himself (since inspiration always
+represents a higher state of ecstasy), and then into others. His lyric
+art is above all a launching of himself into exaltation, 'le pouvoir
+magique de s'hypnotiser soi-même.'[1] He talks himself into passion,
+gives himself that impulsion which then bears others along with him. It
+is not a lack, a privation, not a complaint or a wish that his work
+expresses; it is a plethora, a superfluity of riches, a pressure. It is
+not a warding off of life but an eternal leaping at it. His poetry has
+not the modest longing of music to lure to reveries; it does not, like
+painting, seek to represent something: it would act like fiery wine; it
+would make all feelings strong and glowing, sink all hindrances, produce
+that sensation of lightness, of blessedness, that quivering intoxication
+which conquers all the heaviness of earth. His intention is to produce
+this state of drunkenness, 'non seulement la glorification de la nature
+mais la glorification même d'une vision intérieure.' And his attitude is
+not plaintive or defensive, it is the great spirited attitude of a hand
+raised and pointing out, 'regardez!' the adjuring attitude, 'dites!' or
+one that fires and animates, 'en avant!' but it is always a gesture from
+the poet's self towards something, always a swinging of his arms away
+from himself into the universe, always a pressing forward, a snatching
+away of himself from matter. And any one who really feels these poems
+feels, when the last line is read, that his blood is beating faster,
+feels that his body calls for exercise, feels the inspiration impelling
+him to action. _And this is the highest intention of Verhaeren's lyrical
+poetry, to animate, to quicken the blood, to fire the heart, to
+intensify vitality, to increase tenfold the sensation of life_.
+
+But not only in this basic emotion is Verhaeren sundered from all those
+other poets who fashion their verses from sadness, sickly longing,
+amorousness, and melancholy. Verhaeren's lyric poetry breathes in other
+realms, in another atmosphere. Verhaeren is what I should like to call a
+poet of the daylight, of the open air. If you peruse the lyric works of
+contemporary poets you will find that their moods mostly arise from
+states of dusk and darkness. Since they have only the power of
+reproducing blurred outlines, they are fond of landscapes softened by
+twilight; of night, when there is no hardness in things, when what they
+see meets them half-way, already shaping itself into verse. Like
+Tristan, they hate the day as the destroyer of poetry, and swathe
+themselves in the trembling chiaroscuro of twilight. But the really
+great lyric poets have always been poets of the daylight; poets of the
+day and of the light, as the Greeks were, to whom all things that were
+bathed in sun spoke of beauty and cheerfulness; poets of the day, as
+Walt Whitman was, the American; as all strong men have been who were
+filled with the zest of life. In Germany we have Dehmel to love, one of
+the few who have the courage to look right into the shining face of
+things without the fear of being blinded. But Verhaeren loves things the
+more the more intensive and decided they are, the more dazzling they
+are, the more their glaring colours clash. He does not surprise things
+when they are asleep, when they are resting and are helpless and at the
+mercy of poetry; he pounces on them when they are wideawake and can
+defend themselves with all their hardness from the attacks of their
+lyric lover. He loves the day, which places things side by side in harsh
+contrast; he loves the light, because it stimulates the blood; the rain
+that lashes the body; the wind that whips the skin; cold, noise, he
+loves everything that really and vehemently forces in upon him,
+everything that forces him to fight. He loves hard things more than soft
+and rounded things; loves that characteristic, black, and gloomy city
+Toledo more than golden, dreamy Florence; he loves the wind and the
+weather of frowning, tragic landscapes; he even loves noisy and
+thunderous cities pregnant with smoke and choking air. His nerves are
+not so morbidly sensitive that they respond to the least suggestion, the
+feeblest touch, and then stand impotent, fainting, when they are faced
+by the impetuous stimulants of robust life; his nerves are--not dull,
+but healthy. They respond strongly to whatever lays hold of them
+strongly. If the other poets are like supersensitive beings who are
+excited by every trifle and lose their self-control when really great
+demands are made upon them, Verhaeren is like one who is hard to
+irritate, but who, if he is really stung, strikes out with his fists.
+_And Verhaeren does not love the poetical things that come to meet one
+already clothed in beauty; he loves those that have first to be wrestled
+with and overcome. Herein lies the exceeding masculinity of his art_. No
+one could ever surmise, in reading a poem of Verhaeren's, that it was
+the work of a woman. And as a matter of fact Verhaeren has not yet found
+an audience among women. For he is not one who moans and begs for pity;
+he is no passive poet, but a fighter, one who wrestles with all strong,
+wild, and living things until they yield up to him their innermost
+beauty.
+
+And this struggle for the lyric mastery of individual sensations
+gradually becomes a struggle for all things, for the whole world. For
+Verhaeren does not wish to conceive of anything as unlyrical; does not
+wish to blow lyric fragments off the immense mass of reality; he wishes
+to sculpture it into a new shape; wishes to chisel the whole world into
+a lyric. And this is the secret of his lyric work; _this_ is his work,
+his task. Of a sudden we feel the distance between him and the majority
+of lyric poets. _They_ have the feelings of people who receive gifts;
+they regard the sensations which come fluttering towards them as so many
+gay butterflies, capture them, and pin them down. Verhaeren, however, is
+the fighter, the worker, who is constrained to conquer everything, to
+shape the whole world anew, to rebuild it nearer to his heart's
+enthusiasm. He is the lyric poet pictured by Carducci in an imperishable
+poem--not the idler gazing into empty space; not the gardener decking
+the paths that his lady's feet must tread, and gathering frail violets
+for her bosom.
+
+     Il poeta è un grande artiere,
+     Che al mestiere
+     Fece i muscoli d'acciaio,
+     Capo ha fier, collo robusto,
+     Nudo il busto,
+     Duro il braccio, e l'occhio gaio.
+
+And that 'picchia, picchia,' that rhythm of Carducci's, that beat of the
+bronze hammer of toil, rings in the measure of his verses. All his poems
+have been toiled for, fought for; they are a trophy, a meed of victory;
+nothing is a lucky gift. Verhaeren's manuscripts look like a
+battlefield. For he is not a poet who, in Goethe's sense, composes poems
+for particular occasions; he is never overpowered by a sudden chance
+idea: he transforms a problem of life, an actuality, or an intellectual
+phase into a lyric mood. After he has molten the poetic idea in his
+passion to a white heat, he hammers it into a poem by his rhythm. His
+works are complexes: individual ideas attract him; he sets a hedge round
+their poetical field, ploughs it, scatters the seed in it, and never
+returns to the scene. What he has once achieved has no longer any
+attraction for him. To him poetry is always a fight, always work, always
+a plan. The layman who would fain look upon a lyric poem as a gift
+fallen from heaven will perhaps have no liking for this conscious
+method; an artist, on the other hand, will recognise in it the strength
+of a wise restraint, concentration on one aim, the will to compose not a
+lyric poem but a lyric work. A poetic work like that of Verhaeren, the
+work of a life, is not created by chance feeling alone, and not by
+enthusiasm. Such a work of art has, like a drama, its intellectual laws,
+the conquering and distributing powers of the intelligence, instinct,
+and above all that unifying will which suffers no dead points, no gaps,
+no stains in the work. And it is from such a vast lyric will that this
+work has arisen. Verhaeren is no favoured child of fortune, dowered with
+art in his cradle; his blood is heavy, Teutonic blood; and, fortunately,
+that ease and suppleness of the artisan which in all departments of
+labour produces a ready mediocrity was as much wanting in him as all
+physical skill. Verhaeren's poetic work, his form, his rhythm, his idea,
+his philosophy, his architectonics, all this is something he has
+acquired by labour, something he has painfully produced by passion and
+an obstinate will; but for that very reason it is something organic.
+For Verhaeren is one of those who learn slowly, persistently, and
+surely, only from their own experience and never from others, but who
+never forget and lose what they have once acquired; one of those who
+grow as the things of Nature do, as trees grow into their strength ring
+by ring, and rise year by year higher above the earth to gaze farther
+and farther out beyond the horizons and nearer and nearer into the
+heavens.
+
+And just for this reason, because this evolution was so persistent,
+because it was so wholly based upon experience, is the ascending line in
+his work so harmonious and so organic. No other lyric work of our days
+is so much a symbol of the seasons, so much a mirror of human
+periodicity. The revolt of spring, the sultriness of summer, the
+fruitage of autumn, and the cool clearness of winter gently merge in it,
+the one into the other. In his first books, at an age when many
+precocious poets have finished their development, he was still wrestling
+for his new form, for his expression. Nor did he at that time soon
+arrive at the heart of things; he remained for a long time absorbed in
+the purely picturesque contemplation of their external aspects. Then he
+attempted experiments, and freed himself in revolution. But in his
+beginnings he was always a student, an experimenter. In his second
+period, having really penetrated below the surface, he found his own
+form, like every master, and subdued the internal with the external. But
+now that material is conquered, he that was a student and is now a
+master will of necessity be a teacher, and feel impelled to deduce
+forces from phenomena, laws from forces, the eternal from the earthly.
+From vacant contemplation he had risen to passionate creation, to active
+creation of art. The supreme creation of art has ever been the
+converting of the unconscious into consciousness, the recognition and
+knowledge of the laws of art; from the real the path proceeds to that
+which transcends reality, to faith and to religion. Like every really
+organic poet, Verhaeren has had to repeat the ascent of universal
+history in his own evolution.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Albert Mockel, _Emile Verhaeren_.
+
+
+
+
+SYNTHESES
+
+     Réunir notre esprit et le monde
+     Dans les deux mains d'une très simple loi profonde.
+                                       É.V., 'L'Attente.'
+
+
+After the great visions of the cities, after the wonderful
+interpretations of democracy, there was a moment of appeasement in
+Verhaeren's work--a lyrical intermezzo of little books: an almanac of
+the months unfolding in short poems, the cosy happiness of wedded love
+enshrined in grateful song, the legends of Flanders told in richly
+coloured pictures, and then, in the great pentalogy _Toute la Flandre_,
+the cities, coasts, heroes, and great men of his native province
+compressed in one single picture. But after that Verhaeren takes up once
+again his old path across the earth; passes again through the roaring
+cities, the pregnant fields; wanders along the sea-shore; once again
+through the landscapes of _Les Flamandes_ and _Les Moines_, of _Les
+Villes Tentaculaires_ and _Les Campagnes Hallucinées_. It is now the
+return of the spiral in Goethe's sense of evolution; the return to the
+same point, but on a higher level, with a loftier outlook, in a narrower
+circle, and for that reason nearer to the last, the highest point. Once
+again Verhaeren surveys the modern world: now, however, with different
+eyes, which no longer remain resting on the aspect of the world, but
+press farther to the cause of all. What he had formerly seen sensuously,
+the things whose values he had æsthetically estimated and transmuted, he
+now looks at from the intellectual side, that he may estimate their
+value morally. He no longer sees each thing separately, no longer adds
+picture to picture, vision to vision, like a game of coloured cards: he
+now unites them in one living chain. He no longer searches through
+individual and detached phenomena; he now sees them together against the
+background of his lofty intention to weld them into one single picture.
+Now he composes, not individual poems, but fragments of his world-poem.
+For, from the time that Verhaeren began to look at things with conscious
+enthusiasm, they assumed different forms. The straining of his epoch no
+longer seems to him to be a solitary manifestation of energy, but only a
+Protean form of the eternal discharge of vigour; the will to life no
+longer seems to him to be the deed of individual men, but the vitalised
+primitive will of all humanity. And so, just as of old he attempted in
+his vision a synthesis of energies, he now sees laws flowing into one
+supreme and highest thing, into a cosmic law.
+
+Lyric exaltation now arches the dream of its laws over reality. But it
+is no longer the mere dream of a youth in expectancy of life--the
+anæmic, vague, dark, restless dream--but a man's longing to get behind
+life and follow it to its earthly limit. It is a Utopia enhancing
+realities beyond themselves; it is the dream of Godhead in things. In
+the whole world Verhaeren sees a cosmic effort. 'Le monde est trépidant
+de trains et de navires.'[1] The whole world is excited with human
+activity and effort; manifestations of the feeling of life flame
+everywhere; everywhere humanity is fighting for something invisible and
+perhaps unattainable. But whereas of old the poet estimated the value of
+every separate energy, now he comprehends all energies as one uniform
+manifestation, recognises behind the unconscious activity of the
+individual the sway of something greater--the bourne of all humanity.
+All who work in the material of the temporal only symbolise eternal
+forces--intoxication, energy, conquest, joy, error, expectation, Utopia.
+And it is to these forces, or rather to these forms of the force at the
+root of all things, that his poems are addressed. In _Les Visages de la
+Vie_ he seeks to describe yearning in all its forms and aims; its
+distribution in human labour, its restlessness, its vigour, and, above
+all, its beauty. But not only human manifestations now appear to him in
+a closer cohesion, the synthesis of realism and metaphysics now makes
+his relationship to elementary things richer and more heroic. Now, when
+he treats some motive he had already treated in the first books, and
+these poems of the first and last periods are compared, it is with
+astonishment and admiration that you trace the silent growth of these
+last years. I will mention one example. He had already sung a song to
+the wind. But the wind at that time was to him the evil storm that
+tousles cottages, shakes chimneys, forces its way into rooms, rages
+across country, and brings the winter. It was a senseless power,
+beautiful in its senselessness, but aimless, an incomprehensible
+element, a detached phenomenon of Nature. Now, however, the poet in his
+maturity looks upon it as the wanderer over the undying world, one that
+has seen all countries, that drives ships over seas, that has sated
+itself with the perfume of strange flowers and brings it from far away,
+that penetrates our chest like an aroma and steels and expands it. Now
+he loves the wind as one of the thousand things of the earth which
+contribute to the intensification of his vital feeling.
+
+     Si j'aime, admire et chante avec folie,
+     Le vent,
+            *       *       *       *       *
+     C'est qu'il grandit mon être entier et c'est qu'avant
+     De s'infiltrer, par mes poumons et par mes pores,
+     Jusques au sang dont vit mon corps,
+     Avec sa force rude ou sa douceur profonde,
+     Immensément, il a étreint le monde.[2]
+
+So, too, a tree becomes to him the image of the eternal renewal of
+strength, of resistance to the hardness of winter and of fate, of the
+will to new beauty in the spring. A mountain no longer appears to him as
+a chance raising of the landscape, but a great and mighty thing in whose
+keeps secrets lie, ores, and the source of springs, from whose summit,
+however, our eyes can sweep the world. The forest interprets itself to
+him as the labyrinth of a thousand paths, and as the many-voiced anthem
+of life: everything in nature becomes a freshening and a vivifying of
+this vitality. _An absolute transmutation of values has taken place from
+the time that he has comprehended things as parts of the world's entity,
+and as themselves an entity_. Travel, formerly a flight from reality,
+now becomes to him the opening out of new distances, of new
+possibilities; dream appears to him no longer as an illusion, but as the
+capacity of intensifying the real from its present to a future state.
+Europe is no longer to him a group of nations, a geographical idea, but
+the great symbol of conquest, money, gold, he no longer regards
+contemptuously as a materialising of life, but as a new spur for new
+ambition. And the sea, which in every succeeding work of his sings its
+unquiet rhythm, is no longer the murderous power that eats into the
+land, but the holy tide, the symbol of constant strength in eternal
+unrest; it is to him 'la mer nue et pure, comme une idée.'[3] Since
+everything coheres, he feels related to all in a touching brotherhood
+with things; he no longer feels the presence of things, he loves them
+like a piece of himself; he feels the sea physically in himself
+
+     Ma peau, mes mains et mes cheveux
+     Sentent la mer
+     Et sa couleur est dans mes yeux.[4]
+
+And so, just as his vital feeling is renewed every time he comes into
+contact with the waves, he believes in a physical resurrection of the
+body out of the sea, believes that his rising from the water is a
+_nouveau moment de conscience_. Verhaeren has returned to the great
+cohesion: in Nature and in man there is no longer for him any phenomenon
+which might not become a symbol for him, a symbol of the great vital
+instinct, to stimulate and fire his vitality.
+
+And since he now responds to all things with this one feeling, a uniform
+conception of the world must involuntarily result from this unity of
+feeling. _To the unity of enthusiasm corresponds the unity of the world,
+the monistic feeling_. Just as he himself derives nothing but an
+intensification and exaltation of his feelings from all things, nothing
+but the very sensation of life, all phenomena and activities must be a
+synthesis, all forces must flow into one single force as rivers flow
+into the ocean, all laws must merge in one single law
+
+     Toute la vie, avec ses lois, avec ses formes,
+     --Multiples doigts noueux de quelque main énorme--
+     S'entr'ouvre et se referme en un poing: l'unité.[5]
+
+And thus, this straining of all humanity, discharged in a thousand
+forms, must be something in common, a fight against something lying
+outside of itself, against a resistance which still makes life seem
+hard, dull, and turbid. This fight of humanity cannot be other than
+directed against something that impedes the sensation of life. And this,
+the only thing which struggles against humanity, is in Verhaeren's eyes
+the supremacy of Nature, the mystery of divine intervention, the
+subjection of man to fate--in short, all divinity that does not reside
+in man. As soon as man is dependent on nobody except himself and his own
+strength, he too will attain the great joyousness of all the things of
+Nature.
+
+_This fight of man to become God, this fight for his independence, his
+freedom from chance and the supernatural--this is the great metaphysical
+idea of Verhaeren's work_. His last books seek to represent nothing else
+than this one highest battle of man, this struggle to be free from all
+that is laid upon him, not by himself, but by Nature, from all that
+impedes his will to become a thing of Nature, an elementary force,
+himself. This struggle is the highest and purest effort, for
+
+     Rien n'est plus haut, malgré l'angoisse et le tourment,
+     Que la bataille avec l'énigme et les ténèbres.[6]
+
+Man in this battle defends himself against darkness, against what is
+unknown, against Heaven, against all laws that restrict his expansion;
+the whole aim of man, the aim he has unconsciously been following for a
+thousand years, is independence, is to become a law unto himself:
+
+     L'homme dans l'univers n'a qu'un maître, lui-même,
+     Et l'univers entier est ce maître, dans lui.[7]
+
+To-day he is still counteracted by chance, or, as many conceive it, by
+divinity. Wholly to conquer this, to substitute the determination of
+one's own destiny for chance, will be the great task of the future. Much
+has been taken from chance already. Lightning, the most dangerous power
+of heaven, is conquered; distances are bridged over; the forms of Nature
+are changed; social communities have by common action diverted the
+iniquity of the weather; diseases are from year to year being fathomed
+and checked; more and more every incalculable element is being brought
+within the range of calculation and fore-sight. But all that is unknown
+must more and more be the booty of man, whose highest will is 'fouiller
+l'inconnu.'[8] More and more his eyes penetrate the subterranean and
+mysterious workings of Nature.
+
+     Or aujourd'hui c'est la réalité
+     Secrète encor, mais néanmoins enclose
+     Au cours perpétuel et rythmique des choses,
+
+     Qu'on veut, avec ténacité,
+     Saisir, pour ordonner la vie et sa beauté
+     Selon les causes.[9]
+
+For this battle everybody is a soldier in man's war of liberation, all
+of us stand invisibly ranked together. Everybody who wrests from Nature
+in increment to knowledge, who does something never done before,
+everybody who by poetry fires others to action, tears off a piece of the
+veil. With every step forward that man takes against the dark, with
+every foot of ground he conquers, divinity loses strength to him; and
+this will go on until at length nothing remains of the God of old, until
+the identity of the two ideas humanity and divinity is unconsciously
+accomplished.
+
+     Héros, savant, artiste, apôtre, aventurier,
+     Chacun troue à son tour le mur noir des mystères
+     Et, grâce à ces labeurs groupés et solitaires,
+     L'être nouveau se sent l'univers tout entier.
+
+Seen from this height, professions assume a new poetic value. In the
+front rank of fighting men Verhaeren sees those the effort of whose life
+it is to acquire knowledge--the men of science. Verhaeren is perhaps the
+only one among modern poets who has conceived of science as of perfectly
+equal value with poetry, _who has discovered new moral and religious
+values in science, just as he had already discovered new æsthetic values
+in industrialism and democracy_. Most poets had hitherto looked upon
+science as a hindrance, because they were afraid of clear things as they
+were afraid of real things. They looked upon science as the destroyer of
+myths, the negation of every noble superstition which in their eyes was
+indissolubly connected with the poetical. But just as machinery seemed
+to them to be ugly, because in the machines they saw beauty had
+retreated from the outer to the interior form, here too the new ethical
+value is hidden not in the method but in the aim. Verhaeren esteems
+science as the great fighter for the new conception of the world: 'Le
+monde entier est repensé par leurs cervelles.'[10] He knows that the
+little increments to knowledge which are continually being made in our
+days in thousands of places, in sanatoria and lecture-rooms,
+observatories and studies, with microscopes and chemical analyses,
+weighing and calculation, with measures and numbers, that these little
+additions to knowledge may, by comparison and reproduction, grow into
+great creative discoveries which will immensely enrich our vital
+feeling. And this hymn to science is at the same time a hymn to our
+epoch; for no epoch before ours has so consciously bought for the
+advancement of knowledge, none has been so replete with the longing for
+new knowledge and the transmutation of values:
+
+     L'acharnement à tout peser, à tout savoir
+     Fouille la forêt drue et mouvante des êtres.[11]
+
+In inspired words Verhaeren celebrates science as the highest effort of
+our age as of the past; for he knows that what to us to-day is
+presupposed and self-evident was a thousand years-ago the goal of the
+most ardent effort, that the road we pace indolently to-day is soaked
+with the blood of martyrs.
+
+     Dites! quels temps versés au gouffre des années,
+     Et quelle angoisse ou quel espoir des destinées,
+     Et quels cerveaux chargés de noble lassitude
+     A-t-il fallu pour faire un peu de certitude?
+            *       *       *       *       *
+     Dites! les feux et les bûchers; dites! les claies;
+     Les regards fous, en des visages d'effroi blanc;
+     Dites! les corps martyrisés, dites! les plaies
+     Criant la vérité, avec leur bouche en sang.[12]
+
+But he knows equally well that the acquisitions of to-day are again only
+hypotheses for the new truths of to-morrow. Error is inevitable, but
+even error opens out new ways. In the beautiful idea of Brezina, the
+Czech poet, all ideal aims are floating islands that recede as we
+approach them. The highest aim is in effort itself, in the life which
+effort intensifies. Verhaeren's optimism here guards his marches against
+banality, for he is sufficient of a mystic to know that it is the
+unknowable and the inaccessible that lend all things their impenetrable
+beauty. But the knowledge of this must not scare enthusiasm away:
+
+     Partons quand même, avec notre âme inassouvie,
+     Puisque la force et que la vie
+     Sont au delà des vérités et des erreurs.[13]
+
+What if a few last things remain eternally inscrutable: 'plutôt que d'en
+peupler les coins par des chimères, nous préférons ne point savoir.'[14]
+Rather a world without gods than one with false gods, rather incomplete
+knowledge than false knowledge.
+
+Here, where the heroes of science reach the limits of what is possible
+to them, a new group must stand by their side and help them in their
+work. These are the poets, who preach faith where knowledge ends. They
+must find the synthesis between science and religion, between the
+earthly and the divine, the new synthesis--_religious confidence in
+science_. Their optimism must force their fellow-men to have faith in
+science, as in earlier days they had faith in gods: though proofs fail
+them, they must demand from this new religion what the early fathers
+demanded for the old religion. And he himself, Verhaeren, he who
+once--here again a bitter 'no' is turned into an exulting 'yes'--said in
+his beginnings
+
+     Toute science enferme au fond d'elle le doute,
+     Comme une mère enceinte étreint un enfant mort,[15]
+
+he himself is to-day the first of confident enthusiasts. Where
+individual minds are still at war--
+
+     'Oh! ces luttes là-haut entre ces dieux humains![16]--
+
+where their knowledge has not yet found a bridge, poets must with
+enthusiasm and confidence surmise a path. They must link law with
+perception; and in the same measure as the scientists have by knowledge
+fed their enthusiasm, they in their turn must feed knowledge by their
+confidence. If they have no proofs of actualities, their faith dowers
+them with the confidence to say, 'nous croyons déjà ce que les autres
+sauront.'[17] They scent and surmise new things before they are born;
+they trust hypotheses before they are proved. Already,
+
+     Pendant que disputent et s'embrouillent encor,
+     À coups de textes morts
+     Et de dogmes, les sages,[18]
+
+they hear the hovering wings of the new truth. They already believe in
+what later generations will know; they derive vital joy from what their
+descendants will be the first to possess. They doubt in nothing; not
+that man will conquer the air, quell disease, make life cheerful and
+easier; they do not despair in progress, and in their ecstasy they leap
+over all obstacles. 'Le cri de Faust n'est plus le nôtre';[19] the
+question as to 'yes' and 'no' has long since been joyfully answered in
+the affirmative, exults the poet; we no longer hesitate between the
+possibility and the impossibility of knowledge, we believe in it, and
+faith and confidence is already the highest knowledge of life. In this
+optimism of poets other discoverers of knowledge must now fulfil their
+growth, from these dreams they must derive strength for their activity;
+all men must in this way complete one another, that it may be possible
+for them to beleaguer darkness, perfect the conquest of God, and
+
+     Emprisonner quand même, un jour, l'éternité,
+     Dans le gel blanc d'une immobile vérité.[20]
+
+For this new truth, the Man-God whom they are to discover, poets and
+scholars are the new saints; and his servants are all those whose brows
+are fiery with the fever of work, whose hands are scorched with
+experiments, whose nerves are strained by constant effort, whose eyes
+are fatigued by books. To all of these Verhaeren's hymn is addressed:
+
+     Qu'ils soient sacrés par les foules, ces hommes
+     Qui scrutèrent les faits pour en tirer les lois.[21]
+
+But still farther reaches Verhaeren's enthusiasm for those who help in
+the new work, for the 'saccageurs d'infini.'[22] Not only the thinker
+and the poet extend the horizon of life, but each one also who creates
+and is in any way at work. Only the man who creates is really alive and
+really a man--'seul existe qui crée.'[23] And so his hymn is likewise
+addressed to those who toil with their hands, to those who, without
+knowing the aim, toil stolidly day by day in mines and fields; for they
+too build the face of the earth, create mountains where there were none,
+rear lights by the sea's marge, construct machines and the huge
+telescopes that pry on the heavens: all of them forge the tools of
+knowledge and prepare the new era. Merchants who send across the ocean
+ships that spin threads from farthest shore to shore, they too weave the
+net of the great unity; traders who spread gold, who quicken the
+circulation of the world's blood, they too co-operate in the battle
+waged with the dark. It is their league and union which, first of all,
+gives humanity its great strength; they all prepare the hour, the
+moment, which must inevitably come.
+
+     Il viendra l'instant, où tant d'efforts savants et ingénus,
+     Tant de génie et de cerveaux tendus vers l'inconnu,
+     Quand même, auront bâti sur des bases profondes
+     Et jaillissant au ciel, la synthèse du monde![24]
+
+Here in fiery dawns glimmer the days of the future. Tens of thousands
+will struggle, will prepare, until at last the one man comes who shall
+lay the last stone of the edifice, 'le tranquille rebelle,'[25] the
+Christ of this new religion.
+
+     C'est que celui qu'on attendait n'est point venu,
+     Celui que la nature entière
+     Suscitera un jour, âme et rose trémière,
+     Sous les soleils puissants non encore connus;
+     C'est que la race ardente et fine,
+     Dont il sera la fleur,
+     N'a point multiplié ses milliers de racines
+     Jusqu'au tréfonds des profondeurs.[26]
+
+For here in Verhaeren's work this vision arises fervent and glowing.
+Incessantly man proceeds on the path of his destiny. Once his whole
+world was replete with divinity, 'jadis tout l'inconnu était peuplé de
+dieux';[27] then one single God took right and might into His hand; but
+now, by means of his strength and passion, man has wrested, year by
+year, one secret after the other from this Unknown Power. More and more
+he has conquered chance by laws, faith by knowledge, fear by safety;
+more and more the power of the gods glides insensibly into his hands,
+more and more he determines his own life; and the process will continue
+till he is in every respect the captain of his fate; he is less and less
+subject to laws he has not himself established; more and more Nature's
+slave becomes her lord.
+
+     Races, régnez: puisque par vous la volonté du sort
+     Devient de plus en plus la volonté humaine.[28]
+
+Gods will become men; exterior fate will return into their bosom; the
+saints will henceforth be only their brothers; and Paradise will be the
+earth itself. Most beautifully Verhaeren has expressed this idea in one
+of his latest books,[29] in the symbol of Adam and Eve. Eve, expelled
+from the Garden of Eden, one day finds its doors open again. But she
+does not re-enter it, for her highest joy, her Paradise, is now in
+activity and the pleasure of the earth. Zest in existence, in life, joy
+of the earth, has never been more strongly and burningly exalted than in
+this symbol; never has the hymn of humanity been sung with greater
+fervour than by this poet--perhaps because he had denied life more
+wildly and more obstinately than any other. Here all contrasts sing
+together in a harmony without a flaw; the last enmity between man and
+Nature here becomes the ecstatic feeling of man's godhead.
+
+And strange to say, here the circle of life returns to itself. The books
+of the poet's old age return to the days of his youth, to the school
+benches in Ghent where Maeterlinck also sat, the other great Fleming.
+Both, who lost themselves there, have found themselves again on the
+heights of life in their conception of the world, for Maeterlinck's
+highest teaching also (in his book _Wisdom and Destiny_) is, that all
+fate is locked up in man himself, that it is man's highest evolution,
+his highest duty, to conquer fate, all that lies outside him, God. This
+profound thought, which has thus twice in our days blossomed forth from
+Flemish soil, has been achieved on different paths. Maeterlinck has
+found it by listening to the mysticism of silence, Verhaeren by
+listening to the noise of life. He has found his new God not in the
+darkness of dreams but in the light of streets, in all places where men
+bestir themselves, and where from heavy hours the trembling flower of
+joy is born.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'La Conquête' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[2] 'À la Gloire du Vent' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[3] 'L'Eau' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[4] 'Au Bord du Quai' (_Ibid._)
+
+[5] 'La Conquête' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_)
+
+[6] 'Les Cultes' (_Ibid._)
+
+[7] 'Les Villes' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[8] 'La Ferreur' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[9] 'Vers le Futur' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[10] 'La Conquête' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[11] 'Vers le Futur' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[12] 'La Recherche' (_Ibid._).
+
+[13] 'L'Erreur' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[14] 'La Ferveur' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[15] 'Méditation' (_Les Moines_).
+
+[16] 'Les Penseurs' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[17] 'La Science' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[18] 'L'Action' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[19] 'La Science' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[20] 'Les Penseurs' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[21] 'La Science' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[22] 'Les Penseurs' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[23] 'La Mort' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[24] 'La Recherche' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[25] 'L'Attente' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[26] 'L'Attente' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[27] 'La Folie' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[28] (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[29] _Les Rythmes Souverains._
+
+
+
+
+THE ETHICS OF FERVOUR
+
+     La vie est à monter et non pas à descendre.
+                                  É.V., 'Les Rêves,'
+
+     Il faut admirer tout pour s'exalter soi-même
+     Et se dresser plus haut que ceux qui out vécu.
+                                  É.V., 'La Vie.'
+
+The metaphysical ideal crystallised by Verhaeren from his contemplation
+of life, which was at first wildly passionate, but then more and more
+synoptical and logical, has been called unity. He has himself recently,
+in answer to a question submitted to various men of letters, confirmed
+this conception as part of his programme. 'It seems to me,' he says,
+'that poetry is bound ere long to be merged in a very clear Pantheism.
+More and more the unity of the world is admitted by upright and healthy
+minds. That old dualism between the soul and the body, between God and
+the universe, is becoming effaced. Man is a fragment of the architecture
+of the world. He understands and is conscious of the entity of which he
+is a part.... He feels that he is encompassed and dominated, while at
+the same time he himself encompasses and dominates. By reason of his own
+miracles he is becoming, in some sort, that personal God that his
+ancestors believed in. Now I ask, is it possible that lyric exaltation
+should long remain indifferent to such an unchaining of human power,
+should hesitate to celebrate such a vast spectacle of grandeur? The poet
+of to-day has only to surrender himself to what he sees, hears,
+imagines, conjectures, for works to be born of his heart and brain that
+are young, vibrating, and new.'[1] But he who would build up the whole
+image must not make a halt at this stage of knowledge: over against the
+logical ordering of external things he must set another of inward
+things; against the knowledge of life he must set the feeling of life.
+He must set up an ethical ideal as well as a metaphysical ideal, a
+commandment of life corresponding to his law of life.
+
+But great poets never discover a standard of life, a moral precept,
+which is not a reflex of the law of their own inner nature. Many
+possibilities of contemplation are open to the thinker, to the quiet
+observer; to the poet however, to the lyrist, only a poetic philosophy
+of life is possible, a contemplation lyrically exalted. Whereas the
+philosopher can attain the knowledge of unity by measurement and
+calculation, by a perception and calm computation of forces, a poet can
+discover the evolution of things in the direction of harmony and unity
+only in his ecstasy, only in an exalted state of enthusiasm. He will
+perforce recognise a commandment for the whole world in his own
+enthusiasm, and in his lyric ecstasy a moral demand of life. 'Toute la
+vie est dans l'essor,' for the poet all life is in ecstasy. And just as
+Verhaeren never described things in a state of rest, so too his
+comprehension of the universe is never conceivable except in the
+permanently exalted state of the unrest of joy and motion.
+
+Verhaeren's relationship to the world around him was ever passionate. He
+has always approached things feverishly, as a lover approaches the woman
+he desires. Only what he has won by fighting has the value to him of a
+possession. Things do not belong to us as long as we pass them by, as
+long as we only look at them with unfeeling and cold eyes as though they
+were a scene in a play, a walking picture. To feel the connection
+between them and us, between the world and the poet, between man and
+man, to pass over from the purely contemplative state to the assessment
+of values, we must enter into some personal relationship of sympathy or
+antipathy. Verhaeren's first crisis had taught him that negation is
+sterile, and his recovery had then shown him that only assent,
+acceptance, affection, and enthusiasm can place us in a real
+relationship with things.
+
+     Pour vivre clair, ferme et juste,
+     Avec mon cœur, j'admire tout
+     Ce qui vibre, travaille et bout
+     Dans la tendresse humaine et sur la terre auguste.[2]
+
+A thing only belongs to us when it is felt--not so much for us
+personally--as beautiful, necessary, and vivid: only when we have said
+'yes' to it. _And therefore our whole evolution can only be to admire as
+much as possible, to understand as much as possible, to let our feeling
+have intercourse with as many things as possible_. To contemplate is too
+little; to understand is too little. Only when we have confirmed a thing
+from its very roots, confirmed it as necessary, does it really belong to
+us. 'II faut aimer pour découvrir avec génie.' And so our whole effort
+must be to overcome what is negative in ourselves, to reject nothing, to
+kill the critical spirit in ourselves, to strengthen what is positive in
+us, to assent as much as possible. Here again Verhaeren is in agreement
+with Nietzsche's last ideals: 'Warding things off, keeping things down,
+is a waste of energy, a squandering of strength on negative
+purposes.'[3] Criticism is sterile. Verhaeren is here as ever a
+relativist of values, for he knows that they are incessantly occupied in
+a process of transformation in favour of their highest value, and
+therefore he holds enthusiasm (the symbol of over-estimation) to be more
+important, in the sense of a higher justice, than what is apparently
+absolute justice itself.
+
+For this is the essential: if in our estimation we often over-estimate
+things which in any case would preserve their inner value independently
+of our 'yes' or 'no,' that is not so great a danger as it is a profit
+that our own souls should grow by means of our admiration. 'Admirer,
+c'est se grandir.'[4] For if we admire more, and more intensively, than
+others, we shall ourselves grow richer than those timid ones who content
+themselves with choice morsels of life instead of grasping life in its
+entirety, who restrict themselves because they only place themselves in
+relationship with a part of the world and not with the whole cosmos. The
+more a man admires, the more he possesses:
+
+     Il faut admirer tout pour s'exalter soi-même
+     Et se dresser plus haut que ceux qui out vécu
+     De coupables souffrances et de désirs vaincus.[5]
+
+For admiration means, in the highest sense, subordinating oneself to
+other things. _The more a man suppresses his own personal pride, the
+higher he stands in the moral sense_. For to accentuate oneself and to
+deny what is not oneself needs less strength than to suppress oneself
+and to surrender oneself in admiration to all else. Here Verhaeren sees
+the rise of a new ethical problem. A whole ladder of values is revealed
+to him in the moral standard of freedom and frankness with which a man
+can meet his fellows in his admiration; a ladder on whose topmost rung
+the man stands who rejects nothing whatever, who meets every
+manifestation of life with ecstasy. To be able to admire more means to
+grow more oneself:
+
+     Oh! vivre et vivre et se sentir meilleur
+     À mesure que bout plus fervemment le cœur;
+     Vivre plus clair, dès qu'on marche en conquête;
+     Vivre plus haut encor, dès que le sort s'entête
+     À dessécher la force et l'audace des bras.[6]
+
+And so strong must this restless enthusiasm grow, this incessant
+enthusiasm for things, that the height of the ascent suddenly surprises
+one with a rapt feeling of dizziness. The lyrical commandment of the
+highest ecstasy is here an ethical standard:
+
+     Il faut en tes élans te dépasser sans cesse,
+     Être ton propre étonnement.[7]
+
+In this idea of restless enthusiasm, the principles of which have also
+been expounded by Verhaeren in his essay _Cosmic Enthusiasm_
+(_Insel-Almanach,_ 1913), he has established a poetic equivalent to his
+other great impulse of humanity, set an ethical ideal by the side of the
+metaphysical ideal. For if of old the yearning for knowledge, that
+superb struggle for the conquest of the unknown, was the only thing that
+placed man in an eternally living relationship to the new things, what
+is possibly a still more valuable instinct is discovered in this
+incessantly intensified ecstatic admiration. Admiring is more than
+estimating and knowing. To surrender oneself in love to all things is
+higher than the curiosity to know everything. 'Tout affronter vaut mieux
+que tout comprendre.'[8] For in all knowledge there is still a residue
+of selfishness, of the pride of personal acquisition, while admiration
+of things contains nothing but humility--that great humility, however,
+which is an infinite enrichment of life, because it signifies a
+dissolution in the all. Whereas knowledge is brought to a sudden
+standstill before many things and finds the road blocked with darkness,
+in admiration, in ecstasy, there is no limit set to the ego. _Though
+many values lock themselves up from knowledge, none denies itself wholly
+to admiration_. Even the smallest thing becomes great when it is
+penetrated with love, and the greater we let things grow--the more we
+enrich the substance of our own life--the more infinite we make our ego.
+It is the highest ethical task of a great man to find the highest value
+in every phenomenon, and to free this value from the thick and often
+stifling rind of antipathy and strangeness. Not to let oneself be
+repelled by resistance is the perfection of a noble enthusiasm. If
+anything whatsoever is void of beauty, it will have a power which by its
+energy expresses beauty. If anything seems strange and ugly in the
+traditional sense, it will set the wonderful task of finding out the new
+sense in which it is beautiful. _And to have found this new beauty in
+the new things was the active greatness of the poetic work, the
+greatness which was unconscious and now becomes conscious, which was
+knowledge and now becomes law_. While all others considered our great
+cities frightful and ugly, Verhaeren praised their magnificence; while
+all others abhorred science as an obstacle to poetry, Verhaeren
+celebrated it as the purest form of life. For he knows that everything
+changes, that 'ce qui fut hier le but est l'obstacle demain,'[9] and
+_vice versa_ that the obstacle of to-day may perhaps be the goal of the
+next generation. He had already recognised in his poetry what the
+architectural movement in the great cities in the last few years has
+realised, that huge shops, as emporia of intellectual life, as new
+centres of force, provide tasks for art as stupendous as the cathedrals
+of old; that in the reek and smoke of teeming cities new tones of colour
+were waiting for painters, new problems for philosophers; that all that
+in our own time looms bulky and unseemly will to the next generation be
+well-proportioned and have to be called beautiful. Verhaeren's
+enthusiasm for what is new overcomes the resistance of reverence for
+tradition. Verhaeren has rendered signal service to our time by being
+the first to recognise and proclaim the great impressionists and all
+innovators in art and poetry. For to reject nothing new, to be hostile
+to nothing the world can offer, this only is what he understands by
+knowing the world as it is and truly loving it. His ladder of values
+ends on high in this absolute ideal of admiration of the whole world,
+not only of that which is but of that which shall be, of the identity of
+every ego with the time and its forms:
+
+     L'homme n'est suprême et clair que si sa volonté
+     Est d'être lui en même temps qu'il est monde.
+
+And since this boundless admiration turns selfishness to
+dust--selfishness, the eternal obstacle to all purely human
+relations--since, in a word, it produces a kind of brotherly
+relationship to all things, it also opens out the possibility of
+levelling the relationship between man and man. The book _La Multiple
+Splendeur_, which has given definite expression to these ethical ideas,
+was originally intended to be called _Admirez-vous les Uns les Autres_.
+In this book self-surrender is considered as the highest ideal, the gift
+of oneself to the whole world, the distribution of oneself among all
+people. No longer, as in the earlier books, are energy, strength, and
+conquest by strength, the quelling of resistance, the ultimate sense of
+life, but goodness, scattering oneself broadcast, becoming the all by
+surrender to the all. Greatness in this new sense can only arise by
+ecstatic admiration. 'Il faut aimer pour découvrir avec génie.'
+Admiration and love are the strongest forces of the world. Love will be
+the highest form of the new relations--it will regulate all earthly
+relationships; love shall be the social levelling.
+
+     L'amour dont la puissance encore est inconnue,
+     Dans sa profondeur douce et sa charité nue,
+     Ira porter la joie égale aux résignés;
+     Les sacs ventrus de l'or seront saignés
+     Un soir d'ardente et large équité rouge;
+     Disparaîtront palais, banques, comptoirs et bouges;
+     Tout sera simple et clair, quand l'orgueil sera mort,
+     Quand l'homme, au lieu de croire à l'égoïste effort,
+     Qui s'éterniserait, en une âme immortelle,
+     Dispensera vers tous sa vie accidentelle;
+     Des paroles, qu'aucun livre ne fait prévoir,
+     Débrouilleront ce qui paraît complexe et noir;
+     Le faible aura sa part dans l'existence entière,
+     Il aimera son sort--et la matière
+     Confessera peut-être, alors, ce qui fut Dieu.[10]
+
+And in still greater, still more monumental expression, in stone tables
+of the law as it were, Verhaeren has compressed his new moral idea in a
+single poem:
+
+     Si nous nous admirons vraiment les uns les autres,
+     Du fond même de notre ardeur et notre foi,
+     Vous les penseurs, vous les savants, vous les apôtres,
+     Pour les temps qui viendront vous extrairez la loi.
+
+     Nous apportons, ivres du monde et de nous-mêmes,
+     Des cœurs d'hommes nouveaux dans le vieil univers.
+     Les Dieux sont loin et leur louange et leur blasphème;
+     Notre force est en nous et nous avons souffert.
+
+     Nous admirons nos mains, nos yeux et nos pensées,
+     Même notre douleur qui devient notre orgueil;
+     Toute recherche est fermement organisée
+     Pour fouiller l'inconnu dont nous cassons le seuil.
+
+     S'il est encor là-bas des caves de mystère
+     Où tout flambeau s'éteint ou recule effaré,
+     Plutôt que d'en peupler les coins par des chimères
+     Nous préférons ne point savoir que nous leurrer.
+
+     Un infini plus sain nous cerne et nous pénètre;
+     Notre raison monte plus haut; notre cœur bout;
+     Et nous nous exaltons si bellement des êtres
+     Que nous changeons le sens que nous avons de tout.
+
+     Cerveau, tu règnes seul sur nos actes lucides;
+     Aimer, c'est asservir; admirer, se grandir;
+     O tel profond vitrail, dans l'ombre des absides,
+     Qui reflète la vie et la fait resplendir!
+
+     Aubes, matins, midis et soirs, toute lumière
+     Est aussitôt muée en or et en beauté,
+     Il exalte l'espace et le ciel et la terre
+     Et transforme le monde à travers sa clarté.[11]
+
+_This sensation of recognising oneself in all things by enthusiasm_, of
+living with everything that has existence and a visible form, is
+pantheism, is a Teutonic conception of the universe. But in Verhaeren
+pantheism finds its very last intensification. Identity is to him not
+only cerebral knowledge, but experience; identity is not the sensation
+of being similar to things in body and soul, but an indissoluble unity.
+Whosoever admires a thing so wholly that he goes down to the roots of
+his feeling, that he dissolves and denies himself in order to be wholly
+this other thing, is at this moment of ecstasy identical with it.
+Ecstasy is no longer what it means in the Greek derivation, the fact of
+stepping out of oneself, of losing oneself; it signifies, in addition
+to that, the finding of oneself in the other thing. And with this
+Verhaeren's cosmic conception goes beyond pantheism. He not only senses
+things as though he were their brother; not only does he sense himself
+in them, he himself lives them. Not only does he feel his blood pouring
+into other beings, he no longer feels any blood of his own at all; he
+only feels this strange, glowing sap of the world in his veins. I know
+of no more fiery eruption than those moments of Verhaeren when he is no
+longer able to distinguish the world from his ego, this unique cosmic
+intoxication:
+
+     Je ne distingue plus le monde de moi-même,
+     Je suis l'ample feuillage et les rameaux flottants,
+     Je suis le sol dont je foule les cailloux pâles
+     Et l'herbe des fossés où soudain je m'affale
+     Ivre et fervent, hagard, heureux et sanglotant.[12]
+
+All the forms of the elements are a personal experience to him:
+'J'existe en tout ce qui m'entoure et me pénètre.'[13] All that has
+happened becomes to him a manifestation of his own body; he feels all
+cosmic happenings as personal experiences:
+
+     Oh! les rythmes fougueux de la nature entière
+     Et les sentir et les darder à travers soi!
+     Vivre les mouvements répandus dans les bois,
+     Le sol, les vents, la mer et les tonnerres;
+     Vouloir qu'en son cerveau tressaille l'univers.[14]
+
+Here the billows of enthusiasm dash higher and higher, this call to
+union by enthusiasm grows to an ever more passionate command:
+
+     Exaltez-vous encore et comprenez-vous mieux,
+     Reconnaissez-vous donc et magnifiez-vous
+     Dans l'ample et myriadaire splendeur des choses![15]
+
+For if men hitherto have arrived at no clear and harmonious relationship
+with one another, that was because, so Verhaeren thinks, they had not
+admiration sufficient, because they were too suspicious of one another,
+because they had too little faith. 'Magnifiez-vous donc et
+comprenez-vous mieux!'[16] he calls out to them, 'admirez-vous les uns
+les autres!' and here, in the last phase of his knowledge, he is again
+in agreement with the great American, who, in his poem _Starting from
+Paumanok_, preaches:
+
+     I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough,
+     None has ever yet adored or worshipped half enough,
+     None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and
+         how certain the future is.
+
+For the highest pleasure is only in this highest ecstasy. And therefore
+these ideals of Verhaeren are not cold, sober commandments, but a
+passionate hymn.
+
+     Aimer avec ferveur soi-même en tous les autres
+     Qui s'exaltent de même en de mêmes combats
+     Vers le même avenir dont on entend le pas;
+     Aimer leur cœur et leur cerveau pareils aux vôtres
+     Parce qu'ils ont souffert, en des jours noirs et fous,
+     Même angoisse, même affre et même deuil que vous.
+
+     Et s'énivrer si fort de l'humaine bataille
+     --Pâle et flottant reflet des monstrueux assauts
+     Ou des groupements d'or des étoiles, là-haut--
+     Qu'on vit en tout ce qui agit, lutte ou tressaille
+     Et qu'on accepte avidement, le cœur ouvert,
+     L'âpre et terrible loi qui régit l'univers.[17]
+
+_To raise these mystic moments of ecstasy, these seconds of identity,
+which every one in his life experiences in quite rare and strange
+moments, to permanency, to a constant, unconquerable feeling of
+life--this is Verhaeren's highest aim_. His cosmic conception is
+concentrated in this supreme ideal of an incessantly felt identity of
+the ego with its environment, of an identity ever fired anew by passion.
+
+For not till nothing more is contemplation and everything is experience,
+not till this vast enrichment is accomplished, does life cease to be
+vegetative, indifferent, and somnolent, not till then does it turn to
+pure delight. Not to feel individual feelings of pleasure, but to feel
+life itself in all its forms as supreme pleasure, is the last goal of
+Verhaeren's art. What he says of Juliers, the hero of Flanders, 'son
+existence était sa volupté,'[18] _the fact of life itself was his
+pleasure_, is also his own highest longing. He does not want life that;
+he may fill out the span that is allotted to every mortal, but that he
+may consciously enjoy, and to the full, every minute of life as a
+delight and as; happiness. And in such a moment of ecstasy he says,
+
+     Il me semble jusqu'à ce jour n'avoir vécu
+     Que pour mourir et non pour vivre,[19]
+
+lines that seem to me unforgettable, as the highest ecstasy of vitality.
+
+And, wonderful to say, here too the circle is closed, here too the end
+of Verhaeren's know-ledge--as we have seen in so many things with
+him--is a return to the beginning. Here too there is nothing save an
+inherited instinct which has become a rapt consciousness. His first book
+and his last ones, _Les Flamandes_, as well as _Les Rythmes Souverains_
+and _Les Blés Mouvants,_ celebrate life--the first, it is true, only
+life's outer form, the dull enjoyment of the senses: the last books,
+however, celebrate the conscious, intensified, sublimated feeling of
+life. Verhaeren's whole evolution--here again in harmony with the great
+poets of our nation, with Nietzsche and Dehmel--is not suppression, but
+a conscious intensification of original instincts. Just as in--his first
+books he described his native province, and again in his last, save that
+now the land is bounded by the horizons of the whole world, here again
+the feeling of life returns as the sense of life, but it is now enriched
+with all the knowledge he has acquired, with all the victories he has
+won. Passion, which was in his first book a chaotic revolt, has here
+become a law; the instinctive sensation of pleasure in health has been
+transformed into a deliberate and conscious pleasure in life and in all
+its forms. Now again Verhaeren feels the great pride of a strong man:
+
+     Je marche avec l'orgueil d'aimer l'air et la terre,
+     D'être immense et d'être fou
+     Et de mêler le monde et tout
+     À cet enivrement de vie élémentaire.[20]
+
+The health of the strong race he once celebrated in the lads and lasses
+of his native province, he now sings in himself. And so strong is the
+identity between his ego and the world that he, desiring to sing the
+beauty of the whole world, is now compelled to include himself and to
+celebrate his own body. He who of old hated his body as a prison out of
+which he could not escape to flee from himself, he who wished to 'spit
+himself out,' now fits into the hymn of the world a stanza in
+celebration of his own ego:
+
+     J'aime mes yeux, mes bras, mes mains, ma chair,
+         mon torse
+     Et mes cheveux amples et blonds,
+     Et je voudrais, par mes poumons,
+     Boire l'espace entier pour en gonfler ma force.[21]
+
+The feeling of identity has given him absolute identity in regard to
+himself.
+
+It is not in vanity that he celebrates himself, but in gratitude. For
+the body is to him only a means of sensing the beauty, power, and
+beneficence of the world, is to him a wonderful possibility of enjoying
+things by strength in strong passion. And wonderful are these thanks of
+an ageing man to his eyes and ears and chest for still permitting him to
+feel earth's beauty with all the fervour of old:
+
+     Soyez remerciés, mes yeux,
+     D'être restés si clairs, sous mon front déjà vieux,
+     Pour voir au loin bouger et vibrer la lumière;
+     Et vous, mes mains, de tressaillir dans le soleil;
+     Et vous, mes doigts, de vous dorer aux fruits vermeils
+     Pendus au long du mur, près des roses trémières.
+
+     Soyez remercié, mon corps,
+     D'être ferme, rapide, et frémissant encor
+     Au toucher des vents prompts ou des brises profondes;
+     Et vous, mon torse clair et mes larges poumons,
+     De respirer au long des mers ou sur les monts,
+     L'air radieux et vif qui baigne et mord les mondes.[22]
+
+Thus, too, he now celebrates all things to which he is related--his
+body; the race and the ancestors to whom he owes his being; the country
+fields that have given him youth; the cities that have given him his
+vast outlook: he celebrates Europe and America, the past and the future.
+_And just as he feels himself to be strong and healthy, so too his
+feeling conceives of the whole world as healthy and great_. That is the
+incomparable and, probably, the unparalleled thing in Verhaeren's
+verses, what makes him so exceedingly dear to many as to me, that here
+cheerfulness, worldly pleasure, joy, and ecstasy are sensed not only
+intellectually as pride, but that this pleasure is felt positively _in
+the body_, with all the fibres of the blood, with all the muscles and
+nerves of the man. His stanzas are really, as Bazalgette so beautifully
+says, 'une décharge d'électricité humaine,'[23] a discharge of human, of
+physical electricity. Joy here becomes a physical excess, an
+intoxication, a superabundance without parallel:
+
+     Nous apportons, ivres du monde et de nous-mêmes,
+     Des cœurs d'hommes nouveaux dans le vieil univers.[24]
+
+There is now no disharmony between the individual poems; they are one
+single bubbling up of enthusiasm, 'un enivrement de soi-même'; over the
+many convulsive, quivering, irregular ecstasies of old now flames the
+ecstasy of the whole feeling of life. This ecstasy stands in our days
+like a figure proud, strong, and erect, exultingly flourishing the torch
+of passion aloft to greet the future, 'vers la joie'!
+
+Here ends Verhaeren's ethic work. And I believe that no exaltation, no
+knowledge can again change this last pure form, or make it still more
+beautiful. A vast expenditure of force, the effort of one of our
+strongest and most incomparable men, has here reached its goal. Once
+force seemed to him to be the strength of the world; now, however, in
+his purer knowledge, he sees it in goodness, in admiration, in that
+force which, with the same intensity as turned it outwards of old, is
+now directed inwards; which no longer constrains to conquest, but to
+self-surrender, to a boundless humility. Over the immense savagery and
+apparent chaos of the first works this knowledge now arches this rainbow
+of reconciliation, over _Les Forcés Tumultueuses_ shines _La Multiple
+Splendeur_. And to himself may be applied the words he dedicated to his
+hymn of all humanity--'La joie et la bonté sont les fleurs de sa
+force.'[25]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] G. Le Cardonnel et Ch. Vellay, _La Littérature Contemporaine._
+
+[2] 'Autour de ma Maison' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[3] _Ecce Homo!_.
+
+[4] 'La Ferveur' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[5] 'La Vie' (_Ibid._).
+
+[6] 'L'Action' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[7] 'L'Impossible' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[8] 'Les Rêves' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[9] 'L'Impossible' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[10] 'Un Soir' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[11] 'La Ferveur' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[12] 'Autour de ma Maison' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[13] 'La Joie' (_Ibid_.).
+
+[14] 'L'En-avant' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[15] 'La Louange du Corps Humain' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[16] _Ibid. (Ibid.)_
+
+[17] 'La Vie' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[18] 'Guillaume de Juliers' (_Les Héros_).
+
+[19] 'Un Matin' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[20] 'Un Matin' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[21] _Ibid. (Ibid.)_.
+
+[22] 'La Joie' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[23] 'Léon Bazalgette', _Émile Verhaeren_.
+
+[24] 'La Ferveur' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[25] 'Les Mages' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+
+
+
+LOVE
+
+     Ceux qui vivent d'amour vivent d'éternité.
+                               E.V., _Les Heures d'après-midi._
+
+
+Filled with contemporary spirit as Verhaeren's work is, there is one
+point in which it appears to stray from our epoch, to be remote from the
+artistic preoccupations of other poets. Verhaeren's poetry is almost
+entirely free from eroticism. The problem of love is with him far from
+being, as it is with most poets, the feeling at the root of all
+feelings; it is hardly ever a motive force in his work; it remains a
+little arabesque delicately curved above his massive architecture.
+Verhaeren's enthusiasms spring from other sources. Love is for him
+almost without a sexual shade of meaning, perfectly identical with
+enthusiasm, self-surrender, ecstasy; and the difference between the
+sexes does not seem to be an essential, but only an incidental form
+among the thousandfold militant forms of life. The love of woman, sexual
+necessity, is scarcely a force greater than any other in the circle of
+forces, never the most important or actually the root-force, as it is
+(for instance) to Dehmel, who derives the consciousness of all great
+cosmic phases of knowledge from the experience of love. Verhaeren's
+horizons are illuminated, not by the flame of the erotic, but by the
+passionate fire of purely intellectual impulses. His first books, those
+lyric volumes which are nearly always a poet's confessions of love, were
+devoted to landscapes and then to social phenomena, to monks, and to men
+who toil with their hands. The strength of his drama pulses in conflicts
+exclusively masculine. Thus his work, already vastly removed from that
+of the other lyrists of our time, is seen to be still more isolated. To
+Verhaeren love is only a single page, not the first and not the last, in
+the book of the world: this poet has lavished too much glowing passion
+and ecstatic feeling on all individual things and the universe for the
+cry of the desire of woman to ring higher than all other voices.
+
+This lack of accentuation of eroticism in Verhaeren's work does not by
+any means strike me as a weakness, a missing nerve in his artistic
+organism. It may read like a paradox, but it must be said: just this
+apparent artistic deficiency indicates personal strength. Verhaeren's
+masculinity is so pronounced and strong that woman could never become
+the root-problem of his passion, or shake him in the foundations of his
+fate. To a really strong man, love, sexual love, is a matter of course;
+a sterling man does not feel it as an obstacle and not as a vital
+conflict, but as a necessity, like nourishment, air, and liberty. But a
+thing that is a matter of course is never conceived by an artist as a
+problem. In his youth Verhaeren was never perplexed by love, for the
+simple reason that he did not attach sufficient importance to it,
+because his poetic interests were in the first place directed to a
+mightier possession, a philosophy of life. A sterling man, as Verhaeren
+conceives him, does not spend his strength in sexual love. For such a
+man the metaphysical instinct, the longing for knowledge, the need of
+finding his inner statics in the cosmos, goes before love. 'Eve voulait
+aimer, Adam voulait connaître.'[1] Only to woman is love the sense pf
+life; to man, in Verhaeren's idea, the sense of life is knowledge. He
+expressed this sound idea still more clearly in an early poem:
+
+     Les forts montent la vie ainsi qu'un escalier,
+     Sans voir d'abord que les femmes sur leurs passages
+     Tendent vers eux leurs seins, leurs fronts et leur visages.[2]
+
+Paying no heed to the seductions of love, the strong men, the really
+great, ascend to the skies, to spiritual knowledge; they gather the
+fruits of stars and comets; and then, only then, when they are
+returning, tired by their lonely wandering, do they observe women, and
+lay down in their hands the knowledge of the great worlds. _Not in the
+beginning, in the vehement days of youth, but only when manhood is
+established, only in the time of inner maturity, can woman become a
+great experience for Verhaeren_. He must first of all have acquired a
+firm footing, must know his place in the world, before he can yield
+himself up to love. It is strange that the sonnet I have quoted should
+have been written in youth, because, like a presentiment, it relates the
+fate of his own life in advance. For the images of women never stopped
+his path nor turned him aside from it; love, if I may say so, only
+occupied his senses and never absorbed his soul. Not till later, till
+the years when the crisis was undermining his body, when his nerves were
+giving way under the terrible strain, when solitude reared itself before
+his face like an inseparable foe, did a woman enter his life. Then, and
+not till then, did love and marriage--the personal symbol of eternal,
+exterior order--give him inward rest. And to this woman the only
+love-poems he ever wrote are addressed. In Verhaeren's work, which is
+graded like a trilogy--in this symphony that is often brutal--there is a
+quiet, soft andante, a trilogy in the trilogy, one of love. From the
+point of view of art, these three books, _Les Heures Claires, Les Heures
+d'Après-midi,_ and _Les Heures du Soir_, are not less in value than his
+great works, but they are more gentle. From this savage and passionate
+man one might have expected visionary, seething ecstasies, a tempestuous
+discharge of erotic feeling; but these books are a wonderful
+disappointment. They are not spoken to the crowd, but to one woman only,
+and for that reason they are not spoken loudly, but with a voice
+subdued. Religious consciousness--for with Verhaeren all that is poetic
+is religious in a new sense--finds a new form here. _Here Verhaeren does
+not preach, he prays_. These little pages are the privacy of his
+personal life, the confession of a passion which is great indeed, but
+veiled as it were with a delicate shame. 'Oh! la tendresse des forts!'
+is Bazalgette's inspired comment. And in truth, it is impossible to
+imagine anything more touching than the sight of this mighty fighter
+here lowering his resonant voice to the soft breathings of devotion.
+These verses are quite simple, spoken low, as though wild and too
+passionate words might imperil so noble a feeling, as though a strong
+man, a brutal man, who is afraid of hurting a delicate woman with a
+touch accustomed to bronze, should lay his hand on hers only softly,
+most cautiously.
+
+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.
+
+Now, of all the poets of our day Verhaeren is the one who has felt this
+feeling of responsibility most strongly. To write poetry is for him to
+express not himself only, but the striving and straining of the whole
+period as well, the fearful torment and the happiness that are in the
+birth of the new things. Just because his work comprises all the present
+and aims at expressing it in its entity, he feels himself responsible to
+the future. For him a true poet must visualise the whole psychic care of
+his time. For when later generations--in the same manner as they will
+question monuments concerning our art, pictures concerning our painters,
+social forms concerning our philosophers--ask of the verses and the
+works of our contemporaries the question, What was your hope, your
+feeling, the sum of your interpretation? how did you feel cities and
+men, things and gods?--shall we be able to answer them? This is the
+inner question of Verhaeren's artistic responsibility. _And this
+feeling of responsibility has made his work great_. Most of the poets of
+our day have been unconcerned with reality. Some of them strike up a
+dancing measure, rouse and amuse people lounging in theatres; others
+again tell of their own sorrow, ask for pity and compassion, they who
+have never felt for others. Verhaeren, however, heedless of the approval
+or disapproval of our time, turns his face towards the generations to
+be:
+
+     Celui qui me lira dans les siècles, un soir,
+     Troublant mes vers, sous leur sommeil ou sous leur cendre,
+     Et ranimant leur sens lointain pour mieux comprendre
+     Comment ceux d'aujourd'hui s'étaient armés d'espoir,
+     Qu'il sache, avec quel violent élan, ma joie
+     S'est, à travers les cris, les révoltes, les pleurs,
+     Ruée au combat fier et mâle des douleurs,
+     Pour en tirer l'amour, comme on conquiert sa proie.[1]
+
+It was, in the last instance, this magnificent feeling of responsibility
+which did not permit him to pass by any manifestation of our present
+time without observing and appreciating it, for he knows that later
+generations will ask the question how we sensed the new thing, which to
+them is a possession and a matter of course, when it was still strange
+and almost hostile. His work is the answer. The true poet of to-day, in
+Verhaeren's eyes, must show forth the torment and the trouble of the
+whole psychic transition, the painful discovery of the new beauty in the
+new things, the revolt, the crisis, the struggles it costs to
+understand all this, to adapt ourselves to it, and in the end to love
+it. Verhaeren has attempted to express our whole time in its earthly,
+its material, its psychic form. His verses lyrically represent Europe at
+the turning of the century, us and our time; they consciously
+contemplate the whole circuit of the things of life: _they write a lyric
+encyclopædia of our time, the intellectual atmosphere of Europe at the
+turning of the twentieth century._
+
+The whole of Europe speaks with his voice, speaks with a voice that
+reaches beyond our time; and already from the whole of Europe comes the
+answer. In Belgium Verhaeren is above all the national poet, the poet of
+heaths, cities, dunes, and of the Flemish past, the great renewer of the
+national pride. But he stands too near his fellow-countrymen to be
+measured at his full height there. And in France, too, very few
+appreciate him at his true value. Most people regard him there in his
+literary aspect only and as a symbolist and decadent, an innovator of
+verse, an audacious and gifted revolutionary. But very few perceive the
+new and important work that is built up in his verses, very few
+comprehend the entity and the logical character of his cosmic
+philosophy. Nevertheless, his influence is already tangible. The new
+rhythm he has created can be recognised in many poets; and such a gifted
+disciple as Jules Romains has even brought his idea of the feeling of
+cities to new impressiveness. Best of all, however, he is understood by
+those Frenchmen who stand in a mystic communion with all that is great
+and urgent abroad; who feel an ethical need, a longing for an inner
+transmutation of values, for a re-moulding of races, for cosmopolitanism
+and a union of the nations; so, above all, Léon Bazalgette, who revealed
+Walt Whitman, the prophet of all strong and conscious reality in art, to
+France. Most joyfully of all, however, the answer rings from those
+countries which are themselves involved in deep-seated social and
+ethical crises, those countries where the need of religion is a vital
+instinct, which are eternally hungry for God, above all from Russia and
+Germany. In Russia the poet of _Les Villes Tentaculaires_ is celebrated
+as he is nowhere else. As the poet of social innovations he is read in
+the Russian universities, and in the circles of the intellectuals he is
+regarded as the spiritual pioneer of our time. Brjussow, the
+distinguished young poet, has translated him, and afforded him the
+possibility of popularity. In other Slavonic countries, too, his work is
+beginning to spread.
+
+Verhaeren's success, one may well say triumph, has been strongest and
+most impressive in Germany; here it has been unexpectedly intensive even
+to us who have worked for it. A few years have sufficed to make him as
+popular here I as any native poet, and the most beautiful feature of
+his success is this, that people are already forgetting to look upon him
+as a foreigner. Verhaeren is to-day part and parcel of German culture;
+and much of our contemporary lyric poetry, its welcome turning to
+optimism for example, would be unthinkable but for his work and
+influence. Countless are the essays devoted to him, the recitations in
+which our best elocutionists--Kainz, Moissi, Kayssler, Heine, Wiecke,
+Durieux, Rosen, Gregori--have taken part; none of these interpreters,
+however, were as enthusiastically applauded as was Verhaeren himself on
+his _tournée_ in Germany, which was a great experience no less for him
+than for our public, because he gladly felt that his work was now rooted
+for ever in German soil. In Scandinavia, where Johannes V. Jensen in his
+essays unconsciously transcribed Verhaeren's lyric work, Ellen Key, the
+inspired prophetess of the feeling of life, has hailed him as she has
+hailed no other, and Georg Brandes, who crowns poets, has welcomed him
+with loud acclaim. Incessantly, in an irresistible, sure ascent,
+Verhaeren's fame grows. And above all, his poetry is no longer regarded
+as an individual thing, but as a work, as a cosmic philosophy, as an
+answer to the questions of our time, as the strongest and most beautiful
+enrichment of our vital feeling. Wherever people are tired of pessimism,
+tired of confused mysticism, and tired of monistic shallowness; wherever
+a longing stirs for a pure idealistic form of contemplation, for a new
+reconciliation between our new realities and the old reverence for
+eternal secrets, for the secularisation of the divine, his name stands
+in the front rank. An answer comes from every direction, not because his
+work was a question, but because it was in itself an answer to the
+unconscious demand for a new community, a demand which is being made by
+men of all nations everywhere to-day.
+
+But all this is only a beginning. Works like his, which are not
+paradoxical enough, not dazzling enough, to produce sudden ecstasies and
+literary fashions; which, by the mere fact that they have themselves
+grown organically into existence, can only grow organically, but for
+that reason irresistibly, in their influence; only lay hold of the
+masses slowly. Only later generations will enjoy the fruit which we,
+with renewed admiration, have seen ripening from the most modest of
+blossoms. But already a ring of men of all nations are joining hands, a
+ring of men who perceive a new centre of spirituality in Verhaeren. And
+we, the few who have wholly surrendered ourselves to his work, must
+appreciate it with that feeling only which he himself has taught us as
+the highest feeling of life--with enthusiasm, with gratitude ever
+renewed, and with joyful admiration. For to whom in our days should one
+offer more abundantly and stormily this new vital doctrine of enthusiasm
+as the happiest feeling than to Verhaeren, to him who was the first to
+wrest it in the bitterest struggles from the depths of our time, who was
+the first to shape it in the material of art, the first to raise it to
+the eternal law of life?
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'Un Soir' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+
+I. LES FLAMANDES, poèmes. Bruxelles, Hochsteyn, 1883. LES CONTES DE
+MINUIT, prose. Bruxelles (Collection de la 'Jeune Belgique'), Franck,
+1885.
+
+JOSEPH HEYMANS, PEINTRE, critique. Bruxelles (_Société Nouvelle_), 1885.
+
+II. LES MOINES, poèmes. Paris, Lemerre, 1886.
+
+FERNAND KHNOPFF, critique. Bruxelles (_Société Nouvelle_), 1886.
+
+III. Au BORD DE LA ROUTE, poèmes. Liège (_La Wallonie_), 1891.
+
+IV. LES SOIRS, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman, 1887.
+
+V. LES DÉBÂCLES, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman, 1888.
+
+VI. LES FLAMBEAUX NOIRS, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman, 1890.
+
+VII. LES VILLAGES ILLUSOIRES, poèmes, illustrés par Georges Minne.
+Bruxelles, Deman, 1895.
+
+VIII. LES APPARUS DANS MES CHEMINS, poèmes. Bruxelles, Lacomblez, 1891.
+
+LES CAMPAGNES HALLUCINÉES, poèmes, ornementés par T. van Rysselberghe.
+Bruxelles, Deman, 1893.
+
+ALMANACH, poèmes, illustrés par T. van Rysselberghe. Bruxelles,
+Dietrich, 1895.
+
+POÈMES (1e série, i., ii., iii.). Paris, Mercure de France, 1895.
+
+LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES, poèmes, couverture et ornementation par T. van
+Rysselberghe. Bruxelles, Deman, 1896.
+
+POÈMES (2e série, iv., v., vi.). Paris, Mercure de France, 1896.
+
+LES HEURES CLAIRES, poèmes, ornementés par T. van Rysselberghe.
+Bruxelles, Deman, 1896.
+
+ÉMILE VERHAEREN, 1883-1896, portrait par T. van Rysselberghe.
+[Bruxelles, Deman, 1896.] (An anthology, 'pour les amis du poète,')
+
+LES AUBES, drame lyrique en 4 actes, ornementé par T. van Rysselberghe.
+Bruxelles, Deman, 1898.
+
+ESPAÇA NEGRA, NOTAS DE VIAJE. Barcelona, Pedro Ortega, 1899.
+
+LES VISAGES DE LA VIE, poèmes, ornementés par T. van Rysselberghe.
+Bruxelles, Deman, 1899.
+
+POÈMES (3e série, vii., viii., _Les Vignes de ma Muraille_). Paris,
+Mercure de France, 1899.
+
+LE CLOÎTRE, drame en 4 actes, prose et vers, ornementé par T. van
+Rysselberghe. Bruxelles, Deman, 1900.
+
+PETITES LÉGENDES, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman, 1900.
+
+LES PETITS VIEUX. London, Hacon & Ricketts, 1901.
+
+PHILIPPE H., tragédie en 3 actes, vers et prose. Paris, Mercure de
+France, 1901.
+
+LES FORCES TUMULTUEUSES, poèmes. Paris, Mercure de France, 1902.
+
+LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES, précédées des _Campagnes Hallucinées,_ poèmes.
+Paris, Mercure de France, 1904.
+
+TOUTE LA FLANDRE: _Les Tendresses Premières_, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman,
+1904.
+
+LES HEURES D'APRÈS-MIDI, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman, 1905.
+
+REMBRANDT, étude. Paris, Henri Laurens [1905].
+
+IMAGES JAPONAISES, texte d'É. V ..., illustrations de Kwassou. Tokio,
+1906.
+
+LA MULTIPLE SPLENDEUR, poèmes. Paris, Mercure de France, 1906.
+
+TOUTE LA FLANDRE: _La Guirlande des Dunes_, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman,
+1907.
+
+LES LETTRES FRANÇAISES EN BELGIQUE. Bruxelles, Lamertin, 1907.
+
+LES VISAGES DE LA VIE (_Les Visages de la Vie, Les douze Mois_), poèmes,
+nouvelle édition. Paris, Mercure de France, 1908.
+
+TOUTE LA FLANDRE: _Les Héros_. Bruxelles, Deman, 1908.
+
+JAMES ENSOR, étude. Bruxelles, E. van Oest, 1908.
+
+TOUTE LA FLANDRE: _Les Villes à Pignons_. Bruxelles, Deman, 1909.
+
+HELENAS HEIMKEHR. Leipzig, Insel-Verlag, 1909. (Translation by Stefan
+Zweig of _Hélène de Sparte_.)
+
+DEUX DRAMES: LE CLOÃŽTRE, PHILIPPE II. Paris, Mercure de France, 1909.
+
+LES RYTHMES SOUVERAINS, poèmes. Paris, Mercure de France, 1910.
+
+PIERRE-PAUL RUBENS. Brussels, G. van Oest & Cie., 1910.
+
+LES HEURES DU SOIR. Leipzig, Insel-Verlag, 1911.
+
+HÉLÈNE DE SPARTE, tragédie en 4 actes. Paris, 'Nouvelle Revue
+Française,' 1912.
+
+TOUTE LA FLANDRE: _Les Plaines_. Bruxelles, Deman, 1911.
+
+LES BLÉS MOUVANTS, poèmes. Paris, Crès, 1912.
+
+LES VILLAGES ILLUSOIRES, avec 15 gravures à l'eau forte par Henry Ramah.
+Leipzig, Insel-Verlag, 1913.
+
+RUBENS. Leipzig, Insel-Verlag, 1913.
+
+LES BLÉS MOUVANTS, poèmes. Paris, Mercure de France, 1913.
+
+ŒUVRES D'ÉMILE VERHAEREN (IV., V., VI., VII., VIII., _Les Vignes de
+ma Muraille_). Paris, Mercure de France, 1914.
+
+
+
+TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH
+
+THE DAWN (_Les Aubes_), by Émile Verhaeren, translated by Arthur Symons.
+London, Duckworth, 1898.
+
+POEMS BY ÉMILE VERHAEREN, selected and rendered into English by Alma
+Strettel. London, John Lane, 1899.
+
+CONTEMPORARY BELGIAN POETRY, selected and translated by Jethro Bithell.
+('Canterbury Poets' series.) London, Walter Scott, 1911. (60 pp. are
+translations of Verhaeren's poems.)
+
+
+
+CRITICISMS
+
+
+BOOKS
+
+Bazalgette, Léon: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Paris, Sansot, 1907. (One of the
+series 'Les Célébrités d'aujourd'hui.')
+
+Beaunier, André: LA POÉSIE NOUVELLE. Paris, Mercure de France, 1902.
+
+Bersaucourt, Albert de: CONFÉRENCE SUR ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Paris, Jouve,
+1908.
+
+Bever, Ad. van, et Paul Léautaud: POÈTES D'AUJOURD'HUI, nouvelle
+édition, tome 2. Paris, Mercure de France, 1909.
+
+Boer, Julius de: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. [1907.] (One of the series 'Mannen en
+Vrouwen van beteekenis in onze dagen.')
+
+Bosch, Firmin van den: IMPRESSIONS DE LITTÉRATURE CONTEMPORAINE.
+Bruxelles, Vromant et Cie., 1905.
+
+Buisseret, Georges: L'ÉVOLUTION IDÉOLOGIQUE D'ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Paris,
+Mercure de France, 1910. (One of the series 'Les Hommes et les Idées.')
+
+Casier, Jean: LES 'MOINES' D'ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Gand, Leliaert et Siffer,
+1887.
+
+Crawford, Virginia M.: STUDIES IN FOREIGN LITERATURE. London, Duckworth,
+1899.
+
+Florian-Parmentier: TOUTES LES LYRES. Anthologie Critique ornée de
+dessins et de portraits, nouvelle série. Paris, Gastein-Serge, [1911].
+
+Gauchez, Maurice: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Bruxelles, éditions du 'Thyrse,'
+1908.
+
+Gilbert, Eugène: FRANCE ET BELGIQUE. Paris, Pion, Nourrit et Cie, 1905.
+
+Gosse, Edmund: FRENCH PROFILES. London, Heinemann, 1905.
+
+Gourmont, Remy de: LE LIVRE DES MASQUES. Paris, Mercure de France, 1896.
+
+Gourmont, Remy de: PROMENADES LITTÉRAIRES. Paris, Mercure de France,
+1904.
+
+Guilbeaux, Henri: É. VERHAEREN. Verviers, Wauthy, 1908.
+
+Hamel, A. G. van: HET LETTERKUNDIG LEVEN VAN FRANKRIJK. Amsterdam, van
+Kampen & Zoon [1907].
+
+Hauser, Otto: DIE BELGISCHE LYRIK VON 1880-1900. Grossenhain, Baumert
+und Ronge, 1902.
+
+Heumann, Albert: LE MOUVEMENT LITTÉRAIRE BELGE D'EXPRESSION FRANÇAISE
+DEPUIS 1880. Paris, Mercure de France, 1913.
+
+Horrent, Désiré: ÉCRIVAINS BELGES D'AUJOURD'HUI. Bruxelles, Lacomblez,
+1904.
+
+Key, Ellen: SEELEN UND WERKE. Berlin, S. Fischer, 1911.
+
+Kinon, Victor: PORTRAITS D'AUTEURS. Bruxelles, Dechenne, 1910.
+
+Le Cardonnel, Georges, et Charles Vellay: LA LITTÉRATURE CONTEMPORAINE,
+1905. Paris, Mercure de France, 1906.
+
+Lemonnier, Camille: LA VIE BELGE. Paris, Fasquelle, 1905.
+
+Mercereau, Alexandre: LA LITTÉRATURE ET LES IDÉES NOUVELLES. Paris,
+Figuière, and London, Stephen Swift, 1912.
+
+Mockel, Albert: ÉMILE VERHAEREN, avec une note biographique par F.
+Vielé-Griffin. Paris, Mercure de France, 1895.
+
+Nouhuys, W.G. van: VAN OVER DE GRENSEN, STUDIËN EN CRITIEKEN. Baarn,
+Hollandia Drukkerij, 1906.
+
+Oppeln-Bronikowski, F. von: DAS JUNGE FRANKREICH. Berlin, Oesterheld und
+Co., 1908.
+
+Ramaekers, Georges: É. VERHAEREN. Bruxelles, éditions de 'La Lutte,'
+1900.
+
+Rency, Georges: PHYSIONOMIES LITTÉRAIRES. Bruxelles, Dechenne et Cie,
+1907.
+
+Rimestad, Christian: FRANSK POESI I DET NITTENDE AARHUNDREDE.
+Kjøbenhavn, Det Schubotheske, 1906.
+
+Schellenberg, E.A.: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Leipzig, Xenien-Verlag, 1911.
+
+Schlaf, Johannes: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Berlin, Schuster und Loeffler,
+[1905].
+
+Smet, Abbé Jos. de: ÉMILE VERHAEREN, SA VIE ET SES ŒUVRES. Malines,
+1909.
+
+Tellier, Jules: Nos POÈTES. Paris, Despret, 1888.
+
+Thompson, Vance: FRENCH PORTRAITS. Boston, Badger & Co., 1900.
+
+Vigié-Lecoq, E.: LA POÉSIE CONTEMPORAINE, 1884-1896. Paris, Mercure de
+France, 1897.
+
+Visan, Tancrède de: L'ATTITUDE DU LYRISME CONTEMPORAIN. Paris, Mercure
+de France, 1911.
+
+Zweig, Stefan: PREFACE TO ÉMILE VERHAERENS AUSGEWÄHLTE GEDICHTE IN
+NACHDICHTUNG. Berlin, Schuster und Loeffler, 1903.
+
+
+PERIODICALS
+
+Brandes, Georg: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _Politiken_, Copenhagen, 8th June 1903.
+
+Brandes, Georg: ÉMILE VERHAEREN ALS DRAMATIKER. _Die Schaubühne_,
+Berlin, 5th April 1906.
+
+Edwards, Osman: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _The Savoy_, November 1897.
+
+Fontainas, André: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _L'Art Moderne_, Brussels, 23rd
+February 1902.
+
+Fresnois, André du: LETTRE DE PARIS, HÉLÈNE DE SPARTE. _La Vie
+Intellectuelle_, Brussels, May 1912.
+
+Gosse, Edmund: M. VERHAEREN'S NEW POEMS (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+_Daily Chronicle_, 17th February 1902.
+
+Gosse, Edmund: M. VERHAEREN'S NEW POEMS (_Les Blés Mouvants_). _New
+Weekly_,18th April 1914.
+
+Gourmont, Jean de: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _Les Marges_, Paris, March 1914.
+
+Krains, Hubert: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _Société Nouvelle_, Brussels, June
+1895.
+
+Mauclair, Camille: TROIS POÈTES. _Revue Encyclopédique_, Paris, 25th
+April 1896.
+
+Maurras, Charles: LITTÉRATURE. _Revue Encyclopédique_, Paris, 23rd
+January 1897.
+
+Polak, Emile: ÉMILE VERHAEREN EN RUSSIE. _La Vie Intellectuelle,_
+Brussels, January 1914.
+
+Reboul, Jacques: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _L'Olivier_, Paris, 15th February
+1914.
+
+Régnier, Henri de: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _Revue Blanche_, Paris, March 1895.
+
+Rodrigue, G.M.: HÉLÈNE DE SPARTE. _Le Thyrse_, Brussels, July 1912.
+
+Sadler, Michael T.H.: ÉMILE VERHAEREN: AN APPRECIATION. _Poetry and
+Drama_, June 1913.
+
+Sautreau, Georges: L'ŒUVRE LYRIQUE D'ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _Revue
+Scandinave_, Paris, December 1911--January 1912.
+
+Speth, William: L'INSPIRATION DE VERHAEREN ET LES COLORISTES FLAMANDS.
+_La Vie des Lettres_, Paris, January 1914.
+
+Vielé-Griffin, Francis: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _La Plume_, Paris,
+
+25th April 1896. Vielé-Griffin, Francis: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _Mercure de
+France_, Paris, 15th March 1914.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+    ACTORS, 131, 133, 174-175.
+    Admiration, 12, 29, 30, 46, 50,
+      101, 172, 183, 217 ff., 259.
+    Aeroplanes, 4, 164, 209.
+    Æsthetics, 10, 85, 94, 115, 116,
+      151, 205.
+    Africa, 114.
+    Agrarianism, 9, 101, 187.
+    'À la Gloire du Vent,' 200.
+    Alcohol, 15.
+    Alexandrine, the, 32, 41, 48, 74,
+      144, 147 ff., 163, 170.
+    _Almanack_, 197.
+    _Also Sprach Zarathustra_,134.
+    America, 15, 24, 108, 113, 115,
+     120, 131-132, 135, 231, 250.
+    Artisans, 16, 131, 194, 211, 235,
+     247.
+    Asceticism, 16, 43, 162, 168.
+    _Au Bord de la Route_, 57-60, 62,
+     63, 68, 111, 149, 236.
+    'Au Bord du Quai,' 202.
+    Auerbach, Berthold, 38.
+    'Aujourd'hui,' 4.
+    'Autour de ma Maison,' 217, 226.
+    'Aux Moines,' 43, 49, 51.
+
+    BAKST, LÉON, 174.
+    Ballads, old German, 146, 159.
+    Balzac, Honoré de, 246.
+    Banville, Théodore de, 143.
+    Baudelaire, Charles, 59, 120, 142.
+    Bayreuth, 92.
+    Bazalgette, Léon, 232, 238, 257.
+    Beauty, 37-38, 45, 49-52, 83,
+     96 ff., 104, 199, 206, 207, 221,
+     230, 231, 240.
+    --, the new, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 83,
+     96 ff., 100, 104, 105, 170-172,
+     222, 255.
+    _Béguinages_, 22, 44.
+    Belfries, 39, 50, 157.
+    Belgian art, 21-22, 45.
+    --life, 45.
+    --literature, 19, 25-26, 37-38.
+    --race, the, 17 ff., 23-24.
+    Belgium, 13 ff., 256.
+    Berlin, 87, 91, 113.
+    Bersaucourt, Albert de, 135.
+    Bornhem, 45.
+    Brandes, Georg, 258.
+    Breughel, 40.
+    Brezina, Otokar, 207.
+    Brjussow, Valerius, 257.
+    Brownings, the, 243.
+    Bruges, 21, 39, 43.
+    Brussels, 14, 32, 93.
+
+    CAILLOU-QUI-BIQUE, 30, 246.
+    Carducci, Giosuè, 187, 193.
+    Carlyle, Thomas, 86.
+    'Celle des Voyages,' 141.
+    'Celui de la Fatigue,' 66.
+    'Celui du Savoir,' 76.
+    Chance, 104, 110, 111, 204, 212.
+    'Charles le Téméraire,' 13.
+    Charles v., 25.
+    Chiaroscuro, 46, 190.
+    Chimay, 46.
+    Christ, 68, 70, 184, 211.
+    Christianity, 49, 51.
+    Cities, 3, 4, 6, 9, 13-14, 29-30,
+      55, 75-77, 83, 89 ff., 94 ff.,
+      101 ff., 107, 109, 111-113, 116-118,
+      125-126, 131, 140, 165-167,
+      181, 191, 197, 222, 231, 238,
+      247, 249, 257.
+    Classicism, 7, 52, 82, 84, 100,
+    160, 162, 172, 190.
+    Claus, Émile, 22.
+    Cloisters, 9, 22, 25, 26, 43-46, 147,
+      165-166.
+    Colmar, 92.
+    Comédie Française, the, 149.
+    Concentration, 188, 194.
+    Congo, the, 17.
+    Conservatives, the, 104.
+    Contemporary feeling, 5 ff., 81-90,
+      101 ff., 112, 115, 118, 148,
+      182, 234, 248, 254 ff.
+    Coppée, François, 143.
+    _Cosmic Enthusiasm_, 220.
+    Cosmic feeling, 8, 69-70, 74-75,
+      81 ff., 112-113, 126, 134, 152,
+      179-185, 186, 188, 192, 198 ff.,
+      219, 226, 228, 231, 256, 258.
+    --law, 198, 202-203.
+    --pain, 68.
+    Cosmopolitanism, 22, 257.
+    Cosmos, the, 8.
+    Coster, Charles de, 19, 23, 167,
+      168.
+    Country, the, 9, 15, 26, 29, 30,
+      101 ff., 107, 245, 247, 248.
+    Courtrai, 21.
+    Criticism, 33-34, 187, 218.
+    Crommelynck, Fernand, 22.
+    Crowd, the, 104 ff., 117, 118, 121,
+      122, 125-127, 129, 130, 132,
+      134-136, 139, 140, 148, 152.
+
+    DAVID, GERHARD, 43.
+    Death, 60, 61, 63, 65, 69, 242.
+    Decadence, 18.
+    Decadents, the, 143, 256.
+    Declamation (_see_ Recitation).
+    Defregger, Franz, 38.
+    Dehmel, Richard, 75-76, 187, 191,
+      229, 234.
+    Deman, Edmond, 32.
+    Democracy, 9, 77, 81 ff., 108, 109,
+      111, 114, 197, 206.
+    Demolder, Eugène, 22.
+    Déroulède, Paul, 135.
+    Deutsches Volkstheater, Vienna, 174.
+    Dialogue, 129.
+
+    Disease, 55 ff., 102, 204, 209.
+    Dithyramb, the, 73, 161.
+    Divinity (_see_ God).
+    Dixmude, 44.
+    Dostoieffsky, F.M., 63, 166.
+    Drama, the, 150, 151, 161 ff.,
+      194, 235.
+    Dyck, Ernest van, 32.
+
+    _Ecce Homo!_ 63, 66, 85-86, 119,
+      218.
+
+    Ecstasy, 24, 61, 66, 75, 76, 82,
+      89, 90, 92, 94, 121, 128, 133,
+      136, 137, 139, 152, 165-167,
+      169, 173, 183, 184, 187, 189,
+      209, 213, 216, 217, 220, 221,
+      223, 225-229, 231, 232, 234,
+      235, 237-239, 241, 243, 248,
+      251, 259.
+    Edwards, Osman, 174.
+    Eekhoud, Georges, 22.
+    Egoism (_see_ Selfishness).
+    Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 140.
+    Emigrants, 9, 102-103, 187.
+    Energy, 50, 88 ff., 92, 95, 96, 99,
+      105, 111, 114, 116, 117, 121,
+      132, 182, 198, 199, 218, 221,
+      223.
+    Engineering, 4, 5, 9, 82.
+    England, 13, 55, 63, 64, 90, 92,
+      108, 113, 114.
+    Enthusiasm, 12, 30, 89, 111, 132,
+      138, 153, 161-164, 168, 172-174,
+      179, 183, 184, 187, 188, 193,
+      194, 198, 207, 209, 210, 215 ff,
+      220-222, 225-227, 232, 234,
+      250, 252, 259.
+    Epic, the, 19, 23, 150, 151, 161.
+    Eroticism, 167,172-173, 234, 235,
+      237, 240.
+    Ethics, 6, 115, 182, 183, 187,
+      206, 215 ff., 216.
+    Europe, 9, 13, 20, 23, 101, 114,
+      201, 231, 250, 253 ff.
+    European consciousness, 114.
+    --feeling, 22.
+    --race, the, 114-115.
+    --the New, 9.
+    Evolution, 3 ff., 10, 82, 105, 142,
+      180, 195-197, 213, 216, 218,
+      229, 249.
+    Excess, 15, 16, 24, 31, 40-41, 44,
+      61, 121, 139, 232, 245.
+    Exchanges, 90, 98, 99, 155.
+    Exultation, 24, 44, 91, 130, 133.
+    Eycks, van, the, 43.
+
+    FACTORIES, 89, 97, 100, 102, 155.
+    Faith, 31, 44, 46, 50, 67, 69, 95,
+      104, 167, 184, 196, 208-210,
+      212, 227.
+    Fate, 62, 203, 212, 213.
+    Faust, 72, 209.
+    Fellowship, 73, 76, 94, 223, 227, 249.
+    Fervour (_see_ Enthusiasm).
+    Flanders, 15, 19, 22, 23, 27, 30,
+      33, 36, 39, 40, 43, 44, 46, 51,
+      168, 197, 246, 246, 256.
+    Flemings, the, 14, 15, 43.
+    Flemish language, the, 154, 155.
+    'Fleur Fatale,' 63, 65.
+    Florence, 52, 92, 191.
+    Force, 232, 253.
+    Forth Bridge, the, 87.
+    France, 13, 22, 134, 250, 256.
+    Future, the, 8, 10, 14, 36, 51, 53,
+      89, 104, 115, 167, 180, 182, 201,
+      204, 211, 227, 231, 232, 244,
+      246, 253-255.
+
+    GAIETY THEATRE, Manchester, 174.
+    Gauchez, Maurice, 154.
+    Genius, men of, 18.
+    Genre-pictures, 40.
+    George, Stefan, 187.
+    Germany, 19, 55, 91, 92, 174, 257, 258.
+    Ghent, 25, 213.
+    Gide, Andre', 249.
+    Glesener, Edmond, 22.
+    God, 6, 7, 47-48, 68, 95, 104, 105,
+      109-111, 165, 182, 184, 185,
+      199, 203-205, 208, 210, 212-215,
+      222, 259.
+    Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 70,
+      71, 72,139, 158, 160, 193, 197,
+      254.
+    Goodness, 72, 251.
+    Gothic art, 45.
+    Greece, 82, 86, 165.
+    Greeks, the, 52, 84, 172, 190.
+    Grünewald, Mathias, 92.
+    Gueux, the, 20,
+    'Guillaume de Juliers,' 228.
+    Guyau, Jean-Marie, 8.
+
+    HAMBURG, 92.
+    Handiwork, 28, 82, 86, 93, 211.
+    Harmony, 23, 36, 70, 84, 85, 118,
+      125, 127, 130, 146, 149, 160,
+      167, 169, 170, 181, 183, 184,
+      213, 216, 245, 254.
+    Hay fever, 29, 247-248.
+    Health, 16-18, 67, 72, 73, 231,
+      245, 246, 251.
+    _Hélène de Sparte_,162, 165, 169-172,
+      174-175.
+    Heymans, Joseph, 22.
+    Holland, 13.
+    Homer, 128.
+    'Hommage,' 236.
+    Horniman, Miss, 174.
+    Hugo, Victor, 10-11, 32, 120, 134-135,
+      138, 142-143, 145, 147, 160.
+
+    Humility, 221, 233, 240.
+    Huysmans, Joris Karl, 22.
+
+    IDENTITY, 8, 77, 96, 126, 184, 205,
+      223, 225, 228, 230, 248, 250.
+    Iliad, the, 19.
+    Impressionists, the, 9, 86, 222, 249.
+    India, 109, 114.
+    Individual, the, 110, 111, 118.
+    Industrialism, 9, 77, 81 ff., 101,
+      125, 131, 187, 205-206.
+    Inquisition, the, 16, 169.
+    'Insatiablement,' 61.
+    Instinct, 98, 100, 113, 229, 236.
+    Intemperance (_see_ Excess).
+    Intensification, 20, 24, 30, 49, 64,
+      66, 131, 137, 152, 162, 164, 190,
+      200-202, 207, 220, 225, 229,
+      241, 252, 254.
+    Intoxication, 20, 22, 24, 64, 91,
+      189, 199, 232.
+    Italy, 13, 86, 92, 108, 114, 191.
+
+    JENSEN, JOHANNES V., 258.
+    Jesuits, the, 25-26.
+    Jesus, 68, 70.
+    Jordaens, Jakob, 15, 40, 41.
+    Joy, 61, 66, 74, 106, 133, 184, 214,
+      217, 228, 230-233, 240.
+
+    KAHN, GUSTAVE, 144.
+    Kainz, Josef, 258.
+    Kermesses, 15, 31, 40, 43.
+    Key, Ellen, 258.
+    Khnopff, Fernand, 21, 45.
+    Klinger, Max, 128.
+    Knowledge, 179, 180, 216, 220-222,
+      225, 227, 229, 232-234, 236, 245.
+    Künstlertheater, Munich, 174.
+
+    'LA BARQUE,' 58.
+    'Là-has,' 62.
+    Labour Party, Belgian, 93.
+    'La Bourse,' 98.
+    'La Conquête' (_La Multiple Splendeur_),
+      109, 114, 199.
+    'La Conquête' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_),
+      115, 203, 206.
+    'L'Action,' 128, 209, 220.
+    'La Ferveur,' 204, 208, 219, 224-225, 232.
+    'La Folie,' 212.
+    'La Forêt,' 77.
+    Laforgue, Jules, 144.
+    'La Foule,' 3, 76, 95, 107, 112,
+      152, 185.
+    _La Guirlande des Dunes_, 246.
+    'La Joie,' 55, 66, 226, 231.
+    'La Louange du Corps humain,' 227.
+    Lamartine, A.M.L. de, 32, 145.
+    'L'Âme de la Ville,' 95, 97, 105.
+    'La Mort,' 211.
+    'La Morte,' 64.
+    'L'Amour,' 68.
+    _La Multiple Splendeur_, 109, 114,
+      122, 126, 182, 183, 199, 200,
+      204, 208, 209, 210, 211, 217,
+      219, 221, 223, 224-225, 226,
+      227, 228, 231, 232, 233.
+    'La Plaine,' 103.
+    'La Pluie,' 71.
+    'La Prière,' 253.
+    'La Recherche,' 207, 211.
+    'L'Art,' 11.
+    'La Science,' 209, 210.
+    Latin races, the, 19.
+    'L'Attente,' 197, 211, 212.
+    'L'Aventurier,' 71.
+    'La Vie,' 215, 219, 228.
+    'La Ville,' 97.
+    'L'Eau,' 201-202.
+    'Le Bazar,' 98, 99.
+    'Le Capitaine,' 116.
+    Le Cardonnel, Georges, 215-216.
+    _Le Cloître_, 49, 162, 165-166, 168,
+      172, 174.
+    'Le Départ,' 103.
+    'Le Forgeron,' 70, 73.
+    'Le Gel,' 58.
+    Lemonnier, Camille, 20-21, 33, 37, 244.
+    'Le Mont,' 81.
+    'L'En-Avant,' 125, 226.
+    'Le Paradis,' 213, 236.
+    'Le Passeur d'Eau,' 71.
+    'Le Port,' 103.
+    Lerberghe, Charles van, 15, 22, 25, 26.
+    'Le Roc,' 61, 64, 65.
+    'L'Erreur,' 208.
+    _Les Apparus dans mes Chemins_, 66, 72, 73, 76.
+    _Les Aubes_, 103, 109, 115, 162, 166-167.
+    _Les Blés Mouvants_, 36, 229.
+    'Les Cultes,' 203.
+    _Les Débâcles_, 57, 60, 61, 63, 65.
+    _Les Campagnes Hallucinées_, 97,
+      101 ff., 162, 197.
+    _Les Flamandes_, 33, 36 ff., 49, 45,
+      197, 229.
+    _Les Flambeaux Noirs_, 67, 61, 64, 65.
+    _Les Forces Tumultueuses_, 11, 17,
+      115, 116, 123, 125, 132, 137,
+      161, 182, 183, 186, 203, 204,
+      206, 208, 209, 210, 212, 220,
+      222, 226, 229, 233, 255.
+    _Les Héros_, 4, 228.
+    _Les Heures Claires_, 237.
+    _Les Heures d'Après-midi_, 234, 237,
+      239, 240, 241, 241, 242.
+    _Les Heures du Soir_, 237, 242.
+    'Les Heures où l'on crée,' 123.
+    'Les Mages,' 233.
+    _Les Moines_, 43 ff., 55, 58, 145,
+      162, 165, 197, 208.
+    'Les Nombres,' 65.
+    'Le Sonneur,' 71, 187.
+    'Les Pêcheurs,' 71.
+    'Les Penseurs,' 209, 210.
+    _Les Petites Légendes_, 197.
+    'Les Promeneuses,' 98.
+    'Les Rêves,' 215, 221.
+    _Les Rythmes Souverains_, 182, 183,
+      213, 229, 236, 253.
+    'Les Saintes,' 72, 73.
+    _Les Soirs_,57, 58, 60, 61.
+    'Les Spectacles,' 98, 179.
+    _Les Tendresses Premières_, 4, 25, 27.
+    _Les Vignes de ma Muraille_, 141.
+    'Les Vieux Maîtres,' 39.
+    _Les Villages Illusoires_, 70-71, 73, 162, 187.
+    'Les Villes,' 91, 204.
+    _Les Villes Tentaculaires_, 91 ff.,
+      103, 104, 105, 115, 158, 162,
+      166, 197, 205, 207, 211, 257.
+    _Les Visages de la Vie_ ,3, 55, 66,
+      76, 77, 95, 107, 112, 152, 182,
+      183, 185, 199, 201-202, 209,
+      211, 212, 220.
+    'L'Étal,' 99.
+    'Le Tribun,' 132.
+    'Le Verbe,' 117, 122, 126.
+    'L'Heure Mauvaise,' 57, 59, 149.
+    'L'Impossible,' 137, 220, 222.
+    Locomotives, 124, 125.
+    London, 55, 63, 90, 92, 108, 113, 114.
+    Louvain, 31.
+    Love, 7, 29, 66, 72, 86, 170-173,
+      197, 221, 223-224, 230, 234 ff.
+
+    MACHINERY, 74, 81-82, 84 ff.,
+      155, 206, 211.
+    Madness, 57, 63 ff., 69, 102.
+    Maeterlinck, Maurice, 15, 22, 25,
+      26, 45, 143, 213, 249.
+    _Maison du Peuple, La_, 93.
+    Mallarmé, Stéphane, 144.
+    Manchester, 174.
+    'Ma Race,' 17, 35.
+    Marriage, 94, 197, 237 ff., 243.
+    Martyrs, 19, 207.
+    'Méditation,' 208.
+    Mendès, Catulle, 143.
+    Merrill, Stuart, 143.
+    Messel, Alfred, 87.
+    Metaphors, 46, 136, 137, 141,
+      156, 157, 160.
+    Metaphysics, 24, 184, 199, 203,
+      215, 216, 220, 236.
+    Meunier, Constantin, 17, 22, 86.
+    Minne, Georges, 21, 45.
+    Mockel, Albert, 22, 48, 139, 143,
+    157, 189, 246, 249.
+    Monasteries (_see_ Cloisters).
+    Monastery of Bornhem, 45.
+    --of Forges, 46.
+    Monet, Claude, 86.
+    Money, 95, 98-99, 102, 103, 114 201.
+    Monistic philosophy, 202, 258.
+    Monks, 44, 45 ff., 235.
+    Mont, Pol de, 14.
+    Morality, 6, 16, 40, 51, 88, 167,
+      182, 205, 216, 217, 219, 224.
+    Moréas, Jean, 143.
+    Motion, 121, 141, 217.
+    Motor-cars, 14, 87, 124.
+    'Mourir,' 60.
+    Multitude (_see_ Crowd).
+    Munich, 19, 92, 174.
+    Music halls, 98.
+    Mysticism, 214, 258.
+    Mystics, the, 18, 207.
+    Mythology, 51, 172, 182, 184.
+
+    NATURALISM, 37-38, 41.
+    Nature, 3, 20, 28, 29, 55, 94, 96,
+      99, 105, 112, 123, 125, 158, 172,
+      195, 200-205, 212, 213, 239,
+      246, 247, 248.
+    Necessary, the, is the beautiful,
+      7, 9, 10, 86, 218.
+    Neologisms, 154, 160.
+    Neurasthenia, 56 ff., 118.
+    New age, the, 3 ff., 105, 206-207, 211.
+    --European, the, 9.
+    New York, 108.
+    Nietzsche, Friedrich, 10, 68, 66,
+      85-86, 115, 119, 133, 134, 181,
+      218, 229, 251.
+
+    OMBIAUX, MAURICE DES, 22.
+    Onomatopœia, 149.
+    Oppidomagnum, 103, 108, 166-167,
+    Optimism, 184, 207, 208, 210, 258.
+    Organisation, 6, 88, 93, 98, 101,
+      107, 114, 116, 118-119.
+    Orgies, 15, 39, 40, 41.
+    Oxford, 25.
+
+    PAN, 51, 184.
+    Pan-American, the, 115.
+    Pan-European, the, 115.
+    Pantheism, 24, 77, 215, 225, 226.
+    Paradise, 212-213.
+    Paris, 55, 87, 93, 108, 113, 114,
+      174, 248-249.
+    Parnassian poetry, 48, 145, 146.
+    Paroxysm, 63, 64, 89, 188.
+    _Parsival_,37.
+    Passion, 48, 67, 77, 92, 97, 99,
+      109, 110, 117, 118, 120-123,
+      128-131, 133, 135, 136, 147,
+      159, 163-165, 168-170, 173, 174,
+      179, 181, 189, 194, 212, 215,
+      217, 227-229, 231, 232, 235,
+      238, 241, 245, 251, 252.
+    Past, the, 7, 10, 14, 26, 36, 46,
+      50-53, 69, 82, 85 ff., 94, 100,
+      104, 105, 109, 167, 180, 182,
+      207, 231, 246.
+    Peasants, 16, 20-21, 29, 102-103,
+      146-147, 247, 251.
+    Pessimism, 43, 68, 258.
+    Petöfi, Alexander, 132.
+    Philip II., 16, 19,167-169.
+    _Philippe II._, 92,162, 165, 167-169, 174.
+    Philosophy, 9, 10, 151, 179, 182,
+      184, 187, 194, 216, 236, 256, 258.
+    Picard, Edmond, 33.
+    Poetry, the new, 6, 7, 8, 73, 77,
+      83 ff., 109, 111-113, 116, 119,
+      126, 132, 133, 137, 139, 155,
+      205-206, 216, 222.
+    Poets, the, 50-51, 82, 208-209.
+    --of the old school, 6, 7, 12,
+      51-52, 81 ff., 109, 111-112, 125,
+      129-131, 188, 190, 192, 193,
+      206, 255.
+    Pol de Mont, 14.
+    Poverty, 14, 16, 94, 102-103.
+    Prague, 91.
+    Present, the, 3 ff., 10, 51, 52,
+      105, 115, 167, 179-180, 182,
+      201, 246, 254, 255, 256.
+    Pride, 23, 70, 72, 219, 221, 224,
+      230, 231, 256.
+    Progress, 3-5, 7, 104, 209.
+    Prostitutes, 98, 99, 102.
+    Protestantism, 14.
+    Pseudoanæsthesia, 156.
+    Psychology, 47, 113, 180.
+    Puritanism, 16.
+
+    RABELAIS, FRANÇOIS, 40.
+    Realism, 37-38, 199.
+    Reality, 6, 7, 37-38, 50-52, 70,
+      81, 85-86, 111, 114, 115, 131,
+      153, 155, 167, 179, 183, 185,
+      192, 196, 198, 199, 201, 204,
+      206, 255, 259.
+    Recitation, 122-123, 128 ff., 136,
+      139, 149, 157.
+    Reinhardt, Max, 174.
+    Religion, 6, 9, 24, 44, 47, 50, 64,
+      67,  105,  182-184, 196, 205, 208,
+      211, 238, 240, 257.
+    --, a new, 6, 20, 50, 88, 104.
+    Rembrandt, 11, 43, 46, 187.
+    _Rembrandt_, 2, 11.
+    Renan, Ernest, 85.
+    Renunciation, 19, 27, 44, 52.
+    Responsibility, 253 ff.
+    Revolt, 16, 30, 42, 62, 99, 117,
+      122, 142-146, 160, 169, 195,
+      229, 256.
+    Rhapsodists, 128 ff.
+    Rhetoricians, 134.
+    Rhyme, 144, 153, 155.
+    Rhythm, 24, 41, 74, 94, 95, 97,
+      105, 116, 118 ff., 137, 141,
+      146 ff., 153, 157, 163, 173, 174,
+      193, 194, 201, 238, 247, 251, 256.
+    --of life, the, 5, 7, 8, 11, 117 ff.
+    Rilke, Rainer Maria, 154, 187, 249.
+    _Ring, The_, 37.
+    Rodenbach, Georges, 21, 25, 26, 39.
+    Rodin, Auguste, 135, 249.
+    Rolland, Romain, 249,
+    Romains, Jules, 256-257.
+    Roman Catholicism, 14, 16, 24,
+      26, 31, 44, 46, 67, 69, 162, 165-166,
+      168-169, 184.
+    Romanticism, 46.
+    Romanticists, the, 50, 147.
+    Rome, 108, 114.
+    Rops, Félicien, 22.
+    Rubens, Peter Paul, 20, 40, 41,
+      43, 58.
+    Rubinstein, Ida, 174.
+    Ruskin, John, 82.
+    Russia, 257.
+    Russians, the, 43.
+    Rysselberghe, Théo van, 22, 249.
+
+    ST. AMAND, 27-
+    Saint-Cloud, 249.
+    'Saint Georges,' 72, 73.
+    Sainte-Barbe, College of, 25-26, 30, 213.
+    St. Petersburg, 114.
+    Saints, 19, 210, 212.
+    'S'amoindrir,' 60.
+    Scandinavia, 18, 258.
+    Scheldt, the, 27, 28.
+    Schiller, Friedrich, 134,158, 160, 168.
+    Schlaf, Johannes, 65.
+    Scholars, 209, 210.
+    Science, 6, 9, 18, 64, 77, 82, 85,
+      108, 155, 205-209, 222.
+    Sea, the, 13, 15, 30, 103, 201,
+      202, 247, 248.
+    Selfishness, 72, 223.
+    Sensations, 6-9, 65,104, 120, 125,
+      130, 164, 188, 189, 190, 192,
+      202, 203, 225, 240.
+    Sensuality, 15, 16, 24, 40, 41, 44,
+      98, 162, 170-172, 241, 245.
+    Sex, 234 ff.
+    Shakespeare, William, 10, 163.
+    Signac, Paul, 249.
+    Silence, 44-46, 117, 122, 130, 214, 239
+    'Si Morne,' 61.
+    Social feeling, 83, 110.
+    --problem, the, 8, 9, 101 ff., 187.
+    Socialism, 9, 24, 89, 93, 224.
+    Society, 249.
+    Solitude, 44, 55, 57, 69, 70, 76,
+      81, 83, 86, 91, 112, 237.
+    Sonnets, 41, 46.
+    Soul, 43, 89, 141, 182, 225, 237.
+    'Sous les Prétoriens,' 111.
+    Spain, 16, 55, 92, 162, 165, 191.
+    Spaniards, the, 16.
+    Stappen, van der, 22.
+    Stevens, Alfred, 22.
+    Strauss, David, 50.
+    Suicide, 62, 64, 65.
+    Superman, the, 115.
+    Symbolism, 71, 99, 143 ff.
+    Symbolists, the, 143 ff., 256.
+    Symbols, 7, 19,21, 45, 47, 51, 70,
+      71, 72, 92, 104, 107, 144, 163,
+      165, 168, 195, 201, 202, 213,
+      218, 237, 247, 248.
+    Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 160.
+
+    TAMERLAINE, 108.
+    _Tannhäuser_,37.
+    Teutonic elements, 14, 18, 24, 39,
+      146, 159, 194, 225.
+    Thames, the, 64.
+    _Thyl Ulenspiegel_, 19, 167, 168.
+    Toledo, 191.
+    Tolstoy, Leo, 82.
+    Torpedo-boats, 87.
+    _Toute la Flandre_, 4, 23, 25, 27,
+      168, 197, 244, 246.
+    Town (_see_ City).
+    Tradition, 26, 27, 85, 92, 145, 146, 243.
+    Travel, 55, 91-92, 124, 201.
+    'Truandailies,' 40.
+    Truth, 37-38.
+    Turner, J.M.W., 152.
+
+    UNITY, 23, 108, 113, 114, 199,
+      202, 203, 211, 215 ff., 225, 252.
+    Université Libre, Brussels, 93.
+    Unknown, the, 3, 6, 69, 204, 207,
+      212, 220, 224.
+    'Un Matin,' 229.
+    'Un Soir ' (_Au Bord de la Route_), 63, 68.
+    'Un Soir' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_), 183, 186, 255.
+    Utopia, 109, 115, 167, 199.
+
+    VANDERVELDE, EMIL, 93.
+    Vellay, Charles, 215-216.
+    Venice, 13.
+
+    Verhaeren, Émile, born at St. Amand on the
+    Scheldt, 1855, 27; his boyhood, 27-28; educated at
+    the College of Sainte-Barbe in Ghent, 25-26;
+    studies jurisprudence at Louvain, 31; called to the
+    bar in Brussels, 32; his first verses, 32, 33, 145
+    ff.; publication of _Les Flamandes,_ 33 ff.;
+    resides for three weeks in the monastery of
+    Forges, 46; publication of _Les Moines_, 45 ff.;
+    his health breaks down, 55 ff., 237; his illness
+    is described in _Les Soirs, Les Débâcles, Les
+    Flambeaux Noirs,_ and _Au Bord de la Route_, 57
+    ff.; his travels, 55, 91-92, 124; he is obsessed
+    by the atmosphere of London, 55; his recovery is
+    symbolised in some of the poems of _Les Villages
+    Illusoires_, 70-71; his marriage, 94, 237 ff., 243;
+    his connection with the Labour Party and
+    Socialism, 89, 93-94; the Flemish element in his
+    style, 154-155; his technique, 141 ff.; stage
+    performances of his dramas, 164, 174-175; how he
+    recites his poetry, 122-123; he resides at
+    Caillou-qui-bique and Saint-Cloud, 30, 93, 246,
+    248-249; his personal appearance, 67, 251; his
+    personality, 244 ff.
+
+    Verlaine, Paul, 69, 120, 142, 144, 243.
+    'Vers,' 60.
+    'Vers la Mer,' 152.
+    'Vers le Cloître,' 63.
+    'Vers le Futur,' 104, 205, 207.
+    _Vers libre_, the, 74, 144 ff., 163.
+    _Vers ternaire, le_, 147.
+    Vielé-Griffin, Francis, 143, 246, 249.
+    Vienna, 91, 114, 174.
+    Vitality, 12, 15, 16, 19, 24, 32,
+      33, 40, 43, 119, 131, 190, 200-202,
+      206, 229, 248, 258.
+
+    WAGNER, RICHARD, 37, 92.
+    Walloons, the, 14, 22.
+    Weyden, Roger van der, 43.
+    Whistler, J. M'Neill, 86.
+    Whitman, Walt, 24, 86, 108-109,
+      115, 132, 134, 187, 190-191,
+      227 257.
+    Will, the, 23, 60-62, 73-74, 133,
+      181, 194-195, 198, 203, 212,
+      223.
+    _Wisdom and Destiny_, 213.
+    Woman, 172-173, 192, 234 ff.
+    Women, Belgian, 17.
+
+    YPRES, 21, 43.
+
+    ZOLA, ÉMILE, 37.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 35387 ***
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Émile Verhaeren, by Stefan Zweig.
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+<body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 35387 ***</div>
+
+<h1>ÉMILE VERHAEREN</h1>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>STEFAN ZWEIG</h2>
+
+<h5>LONDON</h5>
+
+<h5>CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD</h5>
+
+<h5>1914</h5>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 283px;">
+<img src="images/verhaeren.png" width="283" alt="Émile Verhaeren from an unpublished photograph by
+Charles Bernier, 1914." title="" />
+<span class="caption">Émile Verhaeren from an unpublished photograph by
+Charles Bernier, 1914.</span>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE"></a>PREFACE</h3>
+
+
+<p>Four years have passed since the present volume appeared simultaneously
+in German and French. In the meantime Verhaeren's fame has been
+spreading; but in English-speaking countries he is still not so well
+known as he deserves to be.</p>
+
+<p>Something of his philosophy&mdash;if it may be called philosophy rather than
+a poet's inspired visualising of the world&mdash;has passed into the public
+consciousness in a grotesquely distorted form in what is known as
+'futurism.' So long as futurism is associated with those who have
+acquired a facile notoriety by polluting the pure idea, it would be an
+insult to Verhaeren to suggest that he is to be classed with the
+futurists commonly so-called; but the whole purpose of the present
+volume will prove that the gospel of a very serious and reasoned
+futurism is to be found in Verhaeren's writings.</p>
+
+<p>Of the writer of the book it may be said that there was no one more
+fitted than he to write the authentic exposition of the teaching which
+he has hailed as a new religion. His relations to the Master are not
+only those of a fervent disciple,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</a></span> but of an apostle whose labour of
+love has in German-speaking lands and beyond been crowned with signal
+success. Himself a lyrist of distinction, Stefan Zweig has accomplished
+the difficult feat, which in this country still waits to be done, of
+translating the great mass of Verhaeren's poems into actual and enduring
+verse. Another book of his on Verlaine is already known in an English
+rendering; so that he bids fair to become known in this country as one
+of the most gifted of the writers of Young-Vienna.</p>
+
+<p>As to the translation, I have endeavoured to be faithful to my text,
+which is the expression of a personality. Whatever divergences there are
+have been necessitated by the lapse of time. For help in reading the
+proofs I have to thank Mr. M.T.H. Sadler and Mr. Fritz Voigt.</p>
+
+<p class="content">
+<span style="margin-left: 23.5em;">J. BITHELL.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">HAMMERFIELD,</span><br />
+<i>Nr</i>. HEMEL HEMPSTEAD,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">14<i>th July</i> 1914.</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+
+<p class="caption">
+CONTENTS</p>
+<p class="content">
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">PART I</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_NEW_AGE">THE NEW AGE</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_NEW_BELGIUM">THE NEW BELGIUM</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#YOUTH_IN_FLANDERS">YOUTH IN FLANDERS</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#LES_FLAMANDES">'LES FLAMANDES'</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_MONKS">THE MONKS</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_BREAK-DOWN">THE BREAK-DOWN</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#FLIGHT_INTO_THE_WORLD">FLIGHT INTO THE WORLD</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">PART II</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#CONTEMPORARY_FEELING">CONTEMPORARY FEELING</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#TOWNS_LES_VILLES_TENTACULAIRES">TOWNS ('LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES')</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_MULTITUDE">THE MULTITUDE</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_RHYTHM_OF_LIFE">THE RHYTHM OF LIFE</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_NEW_PATHOS">THE NEW PATHOS</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#VERHAERENS_POETIC_METHOD">VERHAEREN'S POETIC METHOD</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#VERHAERENS_DRAMA">VERHAEREN'S DRAMA</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">PART III</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#COSMIC_POETRY">COSMIC POETRY</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_LYRIC_UNIVERSE">THE LYRIC UNIVERSE</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#SYNTHESES">SYNTHESES</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_ETHICS_OF_FERVOUR">THE ETHICS OF FERVOUR</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#LOVE">LOVE</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_ART_OF_VERHAERENS_LIFE">THE ART OF VERHAEREN'S LIFE</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_EUROPEAN_IMPORTANCE_OF_HIS_WORK">THE EUROPEAN IMPORTANCE OF HIS WORK</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#BIBLIOGRAPHY">BIBLIOGRAPHY</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#INDEX">INDEX</a></span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3>PART I</h3>
+
+<h3>DECIDING FORCES</h3>
+
+<h4>LES FLAMANDES&mdash;LES MOINES&mdash;LES SOIRS&mdash;LES</h4>
+
+<h4>DÉBÂCLES&mdash;LES FLAMBEAUX NOIRS&mdash;AU BORD DE</h4>
+
+<h4>LA ROUTE&mdash;LES APPARUS DANS MES CHEMINS</h4>
+
+<h4>1883-1893</h4>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<blockquote><p>Son tempérament, son caractère, sa vie, tout conspire à nous montrer son
+art tel que nous avons essayé de le définir. Une profonde unité les
+scelle. Et n'est-ce pas vers la découverte de cette unité-là, qui groupe
+en un faisceau solide les gestes, les pensées et les travaux d'un génie
+sur la terre, que la critique, revenue enfin de tant d'erreurs, devait
+tendre uniquement?</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 22.5em;">VERHAEREN, <i>Rembrandt.</i></span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_NEW_AGE" id="THE_NEW_AGE"></a>THE NEW AGE</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Tout bouge&mdash;et l'on dirait les horizons en marche.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 20em;">É.V., 'La Foule.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p>The feeling of this age of ours, of this our moment in eternity, is
+different in its conception of life from that of our ancestors. Only
+eternal earth has changed not nor grown older, that field, gloomed by
+the Unknown, on which the monotonous light of the seasons divides, in a
+rhythmic round, the time of blossoms and of their withering; changeless
+only are the action of the elements and the restless alternation of
+night and day. But the aspect of earth's spirit has changed, all that is
+subjected to the toil of man. Has changed, to change again. The
+evolution of the phenomena of culture seems to proceed with ever greater
+rapidity: never was the span of a hundred years as rich, as replete as
+that which stretches to the threshold of our own days. Cities have shot
+up which are as huge and bewildering, as impenetrable and as endless, as
+nothing else has been save those virgin forests now fast receding before
+the onward march of the tilled land. More and more the work of man
+achieves the grandiose and elementary character that was once Nature's
+secret. The lightning is in his hands, and protection from the
+weather's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> sudden onslaughts; lands that once yawned far apart are now
+forged together by the iron hoop with which of old only the narrow
+strait was arched; oceans are united that have sought each other for
+thousands of years; and now in the very air man is building a new road
+from country to country. All has changed.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Tout a changé: les ténèbres et les flambeaux.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Les droits et les devoirs out fait d'autres faisceaux,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Du sol jusqu'au soleil, une neuve énergie</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Diverge un sang torride, en la vie élargie;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Des usines de fonte ouvrent, sous le ciel bleu,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Des cratères en flamme et des fleuves en feu;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">De rapides vaisseaux, sans rameurs et sans voiles,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">La nuit, sur les flots bleus, étonnent les étoiles;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Tout peuple réveillé se forge une autre loi;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Autre est le crime, autre est l'orgueil, autre est l'exploit.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Changed, too, is the relation of individual to individual, of the
+individual to the whole; at once more onerous and less burdensome is the
+network of social laws, at once more onerous and less burdensome our
+whole life.</p>
+
+<p>But a still greater thing has happened. Not only the real forms, the
+transitory facts of life have changed, not only do we live in other
+cities, other houses, not only are we dressed in different clothes, but
+the infinite above us too, that which seemed unshakable, has changed
+from what it was for our fathers and forefathers. Where the actual
+changes, the relative changes also. The most elementary forms of our
+conception, space<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> and time, have been displaced. Space has become other
+than it was, for we measure it with new velocities. Roads that took our
+forefathers days to traverse can now be covered in one short hour; one
+flying night transports us to warm and luxuriant lands that were once
+separated from us by the hardships of a long journey. The perilous
+forests of the tropics with their strange constellations, to see which
+cost those of old a year of their lives, are of a sudden near to us and
+easy of access. We measure differently with these different velocities
+of life. Time is more and more the victor of space. The eye, too, has
+learned other distances, and in cold constellations is startled to
+perceive the forms of primeval landscapes petrified; and the human voice
+seems to have grown a thousand times stronger since it has learned to
+carry on a friendly conversation a hundred miles away. In this new
+relationship of forces we have a different perception of the spanning
+round of the earth, and the rhythm of life, beating more brightly and
+swiftly, is likewise becoming new for us. The distance from springtime
+to springtime is greater now and yet less, greater and yet less is the
+individual hour, greater and less our whole life.</p>
+
+<p>And therefore is it with new feelings that we must comprehend this new
+age. For we all feel that we must not measure the new with the old
+measures our forefathers used, that we must not live through the new
+with feelings outworn, that we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> must discover a new sense of distance, a
+new sense of time, a new sense of space, that we must find a new music
+for this nervous, feverish rhythm around us. This new-born human
+conditionality calls for a new morality; this new union of equals a new
+beauty; this new topsy-turvydom a new system of ethics. And this new
+confrontation with another and still newer world, with another Unknown,
+demands a new religion, a new God. A new sense of the universe is, with
+a muffled rumour, welling up in the hearts of all of us.</p>
+
+<p>New things, however, must be coined into new words. A new age calls for
+new poets, poets whose conceptions have been nurtured by their
+environment, poets who, in the expression they give to this new
+environment, themselves vibrate with the feverish rotation of life. But
+so many of our poets are pusillanimous. They feel that their voices are
+out of harmony with reality; they feel that they are not incorporated
+with the new organism and a necessary part of it; they have a dull
+foreboding that they do not speak the language of our contemporary life.
+In our great cities they are like strangers stranded. The great roaring
+streams of our new sensations are to them terrific and inconceivable.
+They are ready to accept all the comfort and luxury of modern life; they
+are quick to take advantage of the facilities afforded by technical
+science and organisation; but for their poetry they reject these
+phenomena, because they cannot master<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> them. They recoil from the task
+of transmuting poetical values, of sensing whatever is poetically new in
+these new things. And so they stand aside. They flee from the real, the
+contemporary, to the immutable; they take refuge in whatsoever the
+eternal evolution has left untouched; they sing the stars, the
+springtime, the babbling of springs which is now as it ever was, the
+myth of love; they hide behind the old symbols; they nestle to the old
+gods. Not from the moment, from the molten flowing ore, do they seize
+and mould the eternal&mdash;no, as ever of old they dig the symbols of the
+eternal out of the cold clay of the past, like old Greek statues. They
+are not on that account insignificant; but at best they produce
+something important, never anything necessary.</p>
+
+<p>For only that poet can be necessary to our time who himself feels that
+everything in this time is necessary, and therefore beautiful. He must
+be one whose whole endeavour as poet and man it is to make his own
+sensations vibrate in unison with contemporary sensations; who makes the
+rhythm of his poem nothing else than the echoed rhythm of living things;
+who adjusts the beat of his verse to the beat of our own days, and takes
+into his quivering veins the streaming blood of our time. He must not on
+this account, when seeking to create new ideals, be a stranger to the
+ideals of old; for all true progress is based on the deepest
+understanding of the past. Progress<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> must be for him as Guyau interprets
+it: 'Le pouvoir, lorsqu'on est arrivé à un état supérieur, d'éprouver
+des émotions et des sensations nouvelles, sans cesser d'être encore
+accessible à ce que contenaient de grand ou de beau ses précédantes
+émotions.'<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> A poet of our time can only be great when he conceives
+this time as great. The preoccupations of his time must be his also; its
+social problem must be his personal concern. In such a poet succeeding
+generations would see how man has fought a way to them from the past,
+how in every moment as it passed he has wrestled to identify the feeling
+of his own mind with that of the cosmos. And even though the great works
+of such a poet should be soon disintegrated and his poems obsolete,
+though his images should have paled, there would yet remain imperishably
+vivid that which is of greater moment, the invisible motives of his
+inspiration, the melody, the breath, the rhythm of his time. Such poets,
+besides pointing the way to the coming generation, are in a deeper sense
+the incarnation of their own period. Hence the time has come to speak of
+Émile Verhaeren, the greatest of modern poets, and perhaps the only one
+who has been conscious of what is poetical in contemporary feeling, the
+only one who has shaped that feeling in verse, the first poet who, with
+skill incomparably inspired, has chiselled our epoch into a mighty
+monument of rhyme.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In Verhaeren's work our age is mirrored. The new landscapes are in it;
+the sinister silhouettes of the great cities; the seething masses of a
+militant democracy; the subterranean shafts of mines; the last heavy
+shadows of silent, dying cloisters. All the intellectual forces of our
+time, our time's ideology, have here become a poem; the new social
+ideas, the struggle of industrialism with agrarianism, the vampire force
+which lures the rural population from the health-giving fields to the
+burning quarries of the great city, the tragic fate of emigrants,
+financial crises, the dazzling conquests of science, the syntheses of
+philosophy, the triumphs of engineering, the new colours of the
+impressionists. All the manifestations of the new age are here reflected
+in a poet's soul in their action&mdash;first confused, then understood, then
+joyfully acclaimed&mdash;on the sensations of a New European. How this work
+came into being, out of what resistance and crises a poet has here
+conquered the consciousness of the necessity and then of the beauty of
+the new cosmic phase, it shall be our task to show. If the time has
+indeed come to class Verhaeren, it is not so much with the poets that
+his place will be found. He does not so much stand with or above the
+verse-smiths or actual artists in verse, with the musicians, or
+painters, as rather with the great organisers, those who have forced the
+new social currents to flow between dikes; with the legislators who
+prevent the clashing of flamboyant<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> energies; with the philosophers, who
+aim at co-ordinating and unifying all these vastly complicated
+tendencies in one brilliant synthesis. His poetry is a created poet's
+world; it is a resolute shaping of phases, a considered new æstheticism,
+and a conscious new inspiration. He is not only the poet, he is at the
+same time the preacher of our time. He was the first to conceive of it
+as <i>beautiful</i>, but not like those who, in their zeal for embellishment,
+tone down the dark colours and bring out the bright ones; he has
+conceived of it&mdash;we shall have to show with what a painful and intensive
+effort&mdash;after his first most obstinate rejection of it, as a necessity,
+and he has then transformed this conception of its necessity, of its
+purpose, into beauty. Ceasing to look backwards, he has looked forwards.
+He feels, quite in the spirit of evolution, in the spirit of Nietzsche,
+that our generation is raised high above all the past, that it is the
+summit of all that is past, and the turning-point towards the future.
+This will perhaps seem too much to many people, who are inclined to call
+our generation wretched and paltry, as though they had some inner
+knowledge of the magnificence or the paltriness of generations gone. For
+every generation only becomes great by the men who do not despair of it,
+only becomes great by its poets who conceive of it as great, by its
+charioteers of state who have confidence in its power of greatness. Of
+Shakespeare and Hugo<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> Verhaeren says: 'Ils grandissaient leur
+siècle.'<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> They did not depict it with the perspective of others, but
+out of the heart of their own greatness. Of such geniuses as Rembrandt
+he says: 'Si plus tard, dans l'éloignement des siècles, ils semblent
+traduire mieux que personne leur temps, c'est qu'ils l'ont recréé
+d'après leur cerveau, et qu'ils l'ont imposé non pas tel qu'il était,
+mais tel qu'ils l'ont déformé.'<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> But by magnifying their century, by
+raising even ephemeral events of their own days into a vast perspective,
+they themselves became great. While those who of set purpose diminish,
+and while those by nature indifferent, are themselves diminished and
+disregarded as the centuries recede, poets such as these we honour tell,
+like illumined belfry clocks, the hour of the time to generations yet to
+come. If the others bequeath some slight possession, a poem or so,
+aphorisms, a book maybe, these survive more mightily: they survive in
+some great conception, some great idea of an age, in that music of life
+to which the faint-hearted and the ungifted of following epochs will
+listen as it sounds from the past, because they in their turn are unable
+to understand the rhythm of their own time. By this manner of inspired
+vision Verhaeren has come to be the great poet of our time, by approving
+of it as well as by depicting it, by the fact that he did not see the
+new things as they actually are, but celebrated them<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> as a new beauty.
+He has approved of all that is in our epoch; of everything, to the very
+resistance to it which he has conceived of as only a welcome
+augmentation of the fighting force of our vitality. The whole atmosphere
+of our time seems compressed in the organ music of his work; and whether
+he touches the bright keys or the dark, whether he rolls out a lofty
+diapason or strikes a gentle concord, it is always the onward-rushing
+force of our time that vibrates in his poems. While other poets have
+grown ever more lifeless and languid, ever more secluded and
+disheartened, Verhaeren's voice has grown ever more resonant and
+vigorous, like an organ indeed, full of reverence and the mystical power
+of sublime prayer. A spirit positively religious, not of despondency,
+however, but of confidence and joy, breathes from this music of his,
+freshening and quickening the blood, till the world takes on brighter
+and more animated and more generous colours, and our vitality, fired by
+the fever of his verse, flashes with a richer and younger and more
+virile flame.</p>
+
+<p>But the fact that life, to-day of all days, needs nothing so urgently as
+the freshening and quickening of our vitality, is good reason why&mdash;quite
+apart from all literary admiration&mdash;we must read his books, is good
+reason why this poet must be discussed with all that glad enthusiasm
+which we have first learned for our lives from his work.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'Aujourd'hui'(<i>Les Héros</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Guyau, <i>L'Esthétique Contemporaine.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 'L'Art' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> <i>Rembrandt</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_NEW_BELGIUM" id="THE_NEW_BELGIUM"></a>THE NEW BELGIUM</h3>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Entre la France ardente et la grave Allemagne.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 17.5em;"><i>É.V.</i>, 'Charles le Téméraire.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p>In Belgium the roads of Europe meet. A few hours transport one from
+Brussels, the heart of its iron arteries, to Germany, France, Holland,
+and England; and from Belgian ports all countries and all races are
+accessible across the pathless sea. The area of the land being small, it
+provides a miniature but infinitely varied synthesis of the life of
+Europe. All contrasts stand face to face concisely and sharply outlined.
+The train roars through the land: now past coal-mines, past furnaces and
+retorts that write the fiery script of toil on an ashen sky; now through
+golden fields or green pastures where sleek, brindled cows are grazing;
+now through great cities that point to heaven with their multitudinous
+chimneys; and lastly to the sea, the Rialto of the north, where
+mountains of cargoes are shipped and unshipped, and trade traffics with
+a thousand hands. Belgium is an agricultural land and an industrial
+land; it is at the same time conservative and socialistic, Roman
+Catholic and free-thinking; at once wealthy and wretched. There are
+colossal fortunes heaped up<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> in the monster cities; and two hours thence
+the bitterest poverty sweats for the dole of a living in mines and
+barns. And again in the cities still greater forces wrestle with one
+another: life and death, the past and the future. Towns monkishly
+secluded, girt with ponderous mediæval walls, towns on whose swart and
+sedgy canals lonely swans glide like milky gondolas, towns like a dream,
+strengthless, prisoned in sleep eternal. At no great distance glitter
+the modern residential cities; Brussels with its glaring boulevards,
+where electric inscriptions dart coruscating up and down the fronts of
+buildings, where motor-cars whiz along, where the streets rumble, and
+modern life twitches with feverish nerves. Contrast on contrast. From
+the right the Teutonic tide dashes in, the Protestant faith; from the
+left, sumptuous and rigidly orthodox, Roman Catholicism. And the race
+itself is the restlessly struggling product of two races, the Flemish
+and the Walloon. Naked, clear, and direct are the contrasts which here
+defy each other; and the whole battle can be surveyed at a glance.</p>
+
+<p>But so strong, so persistent is the inexorable pressure of the two
+neighbouring races, that this blend has already become a new ferment, a
+new race. Elements once contrary are now unrecognisably mixed in a new
+and growing product. Teutons speak French, people of Romance stock are
+Flemish in feeling. Pol de Mont, in spite of his Gallic name, is a
+Flemish poet; Verhaeren,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> Maeterlinck, and van Lerberghe, though no
+Frenchman can pronounce their names rightly, are French poets. And this
+new Belgian race is a strong race, one of the most capable in Europe.
+Contact with so many foreign cultures, the vicinity of such
+contradictory nations, has fertilised them; healthy rural labour has
+steeled their limbs; the near sea has opened their eyes to the great
+distances. Their consciousness of themselves is of no long date: it can
+only be reckoned from the time when their country became independent,
+hardly a hundred years ago. A nation younger than America, they are in
+their adolescence now, and rejoicing in their new, unsought strength.
+And just as in America, the blend of races here, together with the
+fruitful, healthy fields, has procreated robust men. For the Belgian
+race is a race pulsing with vitality. Nowhere in Europe is life so
+intensely, so merrily enjoyed as in Flanders, nowhere else is sensuality
+and pleasure in excess so much the measure of strength. They must be
+seen particularly in their sensual life; it must be seen how the Flemish
+enjoy; with what greediness, with what a conscious pleasure and robust
+endurance. It is among them that Jordaens found the models for his
+gluttonous orgies; and they could be found still at every kermesse, at
+every wake. Statistics prove that in the consumption of alcohol Belgium
+stands to-day at the head of Europe. Every second house is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> an inn, an
+<i>estaminet</i>; every town, every village has its brewery; and the brewers
+are the wealthiest men in the country. Nowhere else are festivals so
+loud, boisterous, and unbridled; nowhere else is life loved and lived
+with such a superabundant zest and glow. Belgium is the land of
+excessive vitality, and ever was so. They have fought for this plenitude
+of life, for this enjoyment full to satiety. Their most heroic exploit,
+their great war with the Spaniards, was only a struggle not so much for
+religion as for sensual freedom. These desperate revolts, this immense
+effort was in reality not directed against Roman Catholicism, but
+against the morality, the asceticism it enforced; not so much against
+Spain as against the sinister malignity of the Inquisition; against the
+taciturn, bitter, and insidious Puritanism which sought to curtail
+enjoyment; against the morose reserve of Philip II. All that they wanted
+at that time was to preserve their bright and laughing life, their free,
+dionysiac enjoyment, the imperious avidity of their senses; they were
+determined not to be limited by any measure short of excess. And with
+them life conquered. Health, strength, and fecundity is to this very day
+the mark of the Belgian people in town and country. Poverty itself is
+not hollow-cheeked and stunted here. Chubby, red-cheeked children play
+in the streets; the peasants working in the fields are straight and
+sturdy; even the artisans are as muscular<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> and strong as they are in
+Constantin Meunier's bronzes; the women are moulded to bear children
+easily; the unbroken vigour of the old men persists in a secure defiance
+of age. Constantin Meunier was fifty when he began his life-work here;
+at sixty Verhaeren is at the zenith of his creative power. Insatiable
+seems the strength of this race, whose deepest feeling has been
+chiselled by Verhaeren in proud stanzas:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Je suis le fils de cette race,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Dont les cerveaux plus que les dents</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Sont solides et sont ardents</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Et sont voraces.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Je suis le fils de cette race</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Tenace,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Qui veut, après avoir voulu</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Encore, encore et encore plus!<a name="FNanchor_1_5" id="FNanchor_1_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_5" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>This tremendous exertion has not been in vain. To-day Belgium is
+relatively the richest country in Europe. Its colony of the Congo is ten
+times as extensive as the mother-land. The Belgians hardly know where to
+place their capital: Belgian money is invested in Russia, in China, in
+Japan; they are concerned in all enterprises; their financiers control
+trusts in all countries. The middle classes, too, are healthy, strong,
+and contented.</p>
+
+<p>Such rich and healthy blood is more likely than any other to produce
+good art, and, above all, art full of the zest of life. For it is in
+countries<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> with few possibilities of expansion that the desire for
+artistic activity is keenest. The imagination of great nations is for
+the most part absorbed by the practical demands of their development.
+The best strength of a great nation is claimed by politics, by
+administration, by the army and navy; but where political life is of
+necessity poor, where the problems of administration are forcibly
+restricted, men of genius almost exclusively seek their conquests in the
+domains of art. Scandinavia is one example, Belgium another, of
+countries in which the aristocracy of intellect have with the happiest
+results been forced back on art and science. In such young races the
+vital instinct must <i>a priori</i> make all artistic activity strong and
+healthy; and even when they produce a decadence, this reaction, this
+contradiction, is so decided and consequent, that strength lies in its
+very weakness. For only a strong light can cast strong shadows; only a
+strong, sensual race can bring forth the really great and earnest
+mystics; because a decided reaction which is conscious of its aim
+requires as much energy as positive creation.</p>
+
+<p>The towering structure of Belgian art rests on a broad foundation. The
+preparation, the growing under the sod, took fifty years; and then in
+another fifty years it was reared aloft by the youth of one single
+generation. For every healthy evolution is slow, most of all in the
+Teutonic races, which are not so quick, supple, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> dexterous as the
+Latin races, who learn by life itself rather than by studious
+application. This literature has grown ring by ring like a tree, with
+its roots deep in a healthy soil nourished by the unyielding
+perseverance of centuries. Like every confession of faith, this
+literature has its saints, its martyrs, and its disciples. The first of
+the creators, the forerunner, was Charles de Coster; and his great epic
+<i>Thyl Ulenspiegel</i> is the gospel of this new literature. His fate is
+sad, like that of all pioneers. In him the native blend of races is more
+plastically visualised than in all later writers. Of Teutonic
+extraction, he was born in Munich, wrote in French, and was the first
+man to feel as a Belgian. He earned his living painfully as a teacher at
+the Military School. And when his great romance appeared, it was
+difficult to find a publisher, and still more difficult to find
+appreciation, or even notice. And yet this work, with its wonderful
+confrontation of Ulenspiegel as the deliverer of Flanders with Philip
+II. as Antichrist, is to this day the most beautiful symbol of the
+struggle of light with darkness, of vitality with renunciation; an
+enduring monument in the world's literature, because it is the epic of a
+whole nation. With such a work of wide import did Belgian literature
+begin, a work that with its heroic battles stands like the Iliad as the
+proud and primitive beginning of a more delicate, but in its advanced
+culture more complex, literature. The place of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> this writer, who died
+prematurely, was taken by Camille Lemonnier, who accepted the hard task
+and the melancholy inheritance of pioneers&mdash;ingratitude and
+disillusion. Of this proud and noble character also one must speak as of
+a hero. For more than forty years he fought indefatigably for Belgium, a
+soldier leading the onset from first to last, launching book after book,
+creating, writing, calling to the fray and marshalling the new forces;
+and never resting till the adjective 'Belgian' ceased in Paris and
+Europe to be spoken with the contempt that attaches to 'provincial';
+till, like once the name of the Gueux, what was originally a disgrace
+became a title of honour. Fearlessly, not to be discouraged by any
+failure, this superb writer sung his native land&mdash;fields, mines, towns,
+and men; the angry, fiery blood of youths and maidens; and over all the
+ardent yearning for a brighter, freer, greater religion, for rapt
+communion with the sublimity of Nature. With the ecstatic revelling in
+colour of his illustrious ancestor Rubens, who gathered all the things
+of life together in a glad festival of the senses, he, like a second
+voluptuary at the feast, has lavished colours, had his joy of all that
+is glowing, and glaring, and satiated, and, like every genuine artist,
+conceived of art as an intensifying of life, as life in intoxication.
+For more than forty years he created in this sense, and miraculously,
+just like the men of his country, like the peasants<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> he painted, he
+waxed in vigour from year to year, from harvest to harvest, his books
+growing ever more fiery, ever more drunken with the zest and glow of
+life, his faith in life ever brighter and more confident. He was the
+first to feel the strength of his young country with conscious pride,
+and his voice rang out its loud appeal for new fighters till he no
+longer stood alone, till a company of other artists were ranged around
+him. Each of these he supported and firmly established, with a strong
+grip placing them at their vantage for the battle; and without envy, nay
+with joy, he saw his own work triumphantly overshadowed by the acclaimed
+creations of his juniors. With joy, because he probably considered not
+his own novels, but this creation of a literature his greatest and most
+lasting work. For it seemed as though in these years the whole land had
+become alive; as though every town, every profession, every class had
+sent forth a poet or a painter to immortalise them; as though this whole
+Belgium were eager to be symbolised in individual phases in works of
+art, until he should come who was destined to transform all towns and
+classes in a poem, enshrining in it the harmonised soul of the land. Are
+not the ancient Teutonic cities of Bruges, Courtrai, and Ypres
+spiritualised in the stanzas of Rodenbach, in the pastels of Fernand
+Khnopff, in the mystic statues of Georges Minne? Have not the sowers of
+corn and the workers in mines become<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> stone in the busts of Constantin
+Meunier? Does not a great drunkenness glow in Georges Eekhoud's
+descriptions? The mystic art of Maeterlinck and Huysmans drinks its
+deepest strength from old cloisters and <i>béguinages</i>; the sun of the
+fields of Flanders glows in the pictures of Théo van Rysselberghe and
+Claus. The delicate walking of maidens and the singing of belfries have
+been made music in the stanzas of the gentle Charles van Lerberghe; the
+vehement sensuality of a savage race has been spiritualised in the
+refined eroticism of Félicien Rops. The Walloons have their
+representative in Albert Mockel; and how many others might still be
+named of the great creators: the sculptor van der Stappen; the painters
+Heymans, Stevens; the writers des Ombiaux, Demolder, Glesener,
+Crommelynck; who have all in their confident and irresistible advance
+conquered the esteem of France and the admiration of Europe. For they,
+and just they, were gifted with a sense of the great complex European
+feeling which in their work is glimpsed in its birth and growth; for
+they did not in their idea of a native land stop at the boundaries of
+Belgium, but included all the neighbouring countries, because they were
+at the same time patriots and cosmopolitans: Belgium was to them not
+only the place where all roads meet, but also that whence all roads
+start.</p>
+
+<p>Each of these had shaped his native land from his own angle of vision; a
+whole phalanx of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> artists had added picture to picture. Till then this
+great one came, Verhaeren, who saw, felt, and loved everything in
+Flanders, 'toute la Flandre.' Only in his work did it become a unity;
+for he has sung everything, land and sea, towns and workshops, cities
+dead and cities at their birth. He has not conceived of this Flanders of
+his as a separate phase, as a province, but as the heart of Europe, with
+the strength of its blood pulsing inwards from outside and outside from
+inwards; he has opened out horizons beyond the frontiers, and heightened
+and connected them; and with the same inspiration he has molten and
+welded the individual together with the whole until out of his work a
+life-work grew&mdash;the lyric epic of Flanders. What de Coster half a
+century before had not dared to fashion from the present, in which he
+despaired of finding pride, power, and the heroism of life, Verhaeren
+has realised; and thus he has become the 'carillonneur de la Flandre,'
+the bell-ringer who, as in olden days from the watch-tower, has summoned
+the whole land to the defence of its will to live, and the nation to the
+pride and consciousness of its power.</p>
+
+<p>This Verhaeren could only do, because he in himself represents all the
+contrasts, all the advantages of the Belgian race. He too is a ferment
+of contrasts, a new man made of split and divergent forces now
+victoriously harmonised. From the French he has his language and his
+form;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> from the Germans his instinctive seeking of God, his earnestness,
+his gravity, his need of metaphysics, and his impulse to pantheism.
+Political instincts, religious instincts, Catholicism and socialism,
+have struggled in him; he is at once a dweller in great cities and a
+cottager in the open country; and the deepest impulse of his people,
+their lack of moderation and their greed of life, is in the last
+instance the maxim of his poetic art. Only that their pleasure in
+intoxication has in him become joy in a noble drunkenness, in ecstasy;
+only that their carnal joy has become a delight in colour; that their
+mad raging is now in him a pleasure in a rhythm that roars and thunders
+and bursts in foam. The deepest thing in his race, an inflexible
+vitality which is not to be shaken by crises or catastrophes, has in him
+become universal law, a conscious, intensified zest in life. For when a
+country has become strong and rejoices in its strength, it needs, like
+every plethora, a cry, an exultation. Just as Walt Whitman was the
+exultation of America in its new strength, Verhaeren is the triumph of
+the Belgian race, and of the European race too. For this glad confession
+of life is so strong, so glowing, so virile that it cannot be thought of
+as breaking forth from the heart of one individual, but is evidently the
+delight of a fresh young nation in its beautiful and yet unfathomed
+power.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_5" id="Footnote_1_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_5"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'Ma Race' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="YOUTH_IN_FLANDERS" id="YOUTH_IN_FLANDERS"></a>YOUTH IN FLANDERS</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">Seize, dix-sept et dix-huit ans!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">O ce désir d'être avant l'âge et le vrai temps</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">Celui</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8.5em;">Dont chacun dit</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il boit à larges brocs et met à mal les filles!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 18em;">É.V., <i>Les Tendresses Premières</i>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The history of modern Belgian literature begins, by a whim of chance, in
+one and the same house. In Ghent, the favourite city of the Emperor
+Charles V., in the old, heavy Flemish town that is still girdled with
+ramparts, lies, remote from the noisy streets, the grey Jesuit college
+of Sainte-Barbe. A cloister with thick, cold, frowning walls, mute
+corridors, silent refectories, reminding one somewhat of the beautiful
+colleges in Oxford, save that here there is no ivy softening the walls,
+and no flowers to lay their variegated carpet over the green courts.
+Here, in the seventies, two strange pairs of boys meet on the
+school-benches; here among thousands of names are four which are
+destined in later days to be the pride of their country. First, Georges
+Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren, then Maeterlinck and Charles van
+Lerberghe&mdash;two pairs of friendships, both of which are now torn asunder
+by death. The weaker, the more delicate of the four,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> Georges Rodenbach
+and Charles van Lerberghe, have died; Emile Verhaeren and Maeterlinck,
+the two heroes of Flanders, are still growing and not yet at the zenith
+of their fame. But all four began their course in the old college. The
+Jesuit fathers taught them their humanities, and even to write poems&mdash;in
+Latin, it is true, to begin with; and in this exercise, strange to say,
+Maeterlinck was excelled by van Lerberghe with his more instinctive
+sense of form, and Verhaeren by the more supple Georges Rodenbach. With
+rigorous earnestness the fathers trained them to respect the past, to
+have faith in conventional things, to think in old grooves, and to hate
+innovations. The aim was not only to keep them Catholics, but to win
+them for the priesthood: these cloister walls were to protect them from
+the hostile breath of the new world, from the freshening wind which, in
+Flanders as everywhere else, was assailing the growing generation.</p>
+
+<p>But in these four pupils the aim was not realised, least of all in
+Verhaeren, perhaps for the very reason that he, as the scion of a
+strictly orthodox family, was the most fitted to be a priest; because
+his mind did not absorb conviction mechanically, but achieved it by
+vital processes; because his inmost being was self-surrender and a
+glowing devotion to great ideas. However, the call of the open country,
+in which he had grown up, was too strong in him; the voice of life was
+too loud in his blood for so early<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> a renunciation of all; his mind was
+too tameless to be satisfied with the established and the traditional.
+The impressions of his childhood were more vivid than the teaching of
+his masters. For Verhaeren was born in the country, at St. Amand on the
+Scheldt (on the 21st of May 1855), where the landscape rolls to the vast
+horizons of the heath and the sea. Here in the happiest manner kindly
+circumstances wove the garland of his earlier years. His parents were
+well-to-do people who had retired from the din of the town to this
+little corner of Flanders; here they had a cottage of their own, with a
+front garden ablaze with flowers of all colours. And immediately behind
+the house began the great golden fields, the tangle of flowering
+hedgerows; and close by was the river with its slow waves hasting no
+longer, feeling the nearness of their goal, the infinite ocean. Of the
+untrammelled days of his boyhood the ageing poet has told us in his
+wonderful book <i>Les Tendresses Premières</i>. He has told us of the boy he
+was when he ran across country; clambered into the corn-loft where the
+glittering grain was heaped; climbed steeples; watched the peasants at
+their sowing and reaping; and listened to the maids at the washing-tub
+singing old Flemish songs. He watched all trades; he rummaged in every
+corner. He would sit with the watch-maker, marvelling at the humming
+little wheels that fashioned the hour; and no less to see the glowing
+maw of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> oven in the bakery swallowing the corn which only the day
+before had glided through his fingers in rustling ears, and was now
+already bread, golden, warm, and odorous. At games he would watch in
+astonishment the glad strength of the young fellows tumbling the reeling
+skittles over; and he would wander with the playing band from village to
+village, from fair to fair. And, sitting on the bank of the Scheldt, he
+would watch the ships, with their coloured streamers, come and go, and
+in his dreams follow them to the vast distances, which he only knew from
+sailors' yarns and pictures in old books. All this, this daily physical
+familiarity with the things of Nature, this lived insight into the
+thousand activities of the working-day, became his inalienable
+possession. Inalienable, too, was the humane feeling he acquired that he
+was one at heart with the people of his village. From them he learned
+the names of all these thousand things, and the intelligence of the
+mysterious mechanism in all skilled handiwork, and all the petty cares
+and perplexities of these many scattered little souls of life which,
+combined, are the soul of a whole land. And therefore Verhaeren is the
+only one among modern poets in the French tongue who is really popular
+with his countrymen of all ranks. He still goes in and out among them as
+their equal, sits in their circle even now, when fame has long since
+shown him his place among the best and noblest, chats with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> the peasants
+in the village inn, and loves to hear them discussing the weather and
+the harvest and the thousand little things of their narrow world. He
+belongs to them, and they belong to him. He loves their life, their
+cares, their labour, loves this whole land with its tempests raging from
+the north, with its hail and snow, its thundering sea and lowering
+clouds. It is with pride that he claims kindred with his race and land;
+and indeed there is often in his gait and in his gestures something of
+the peasant trampling with heavy steps and hard knee after his plough;
+and his eyes 'are grey as his native sea, his hair is yellow like the
+corn of his fields.' These elemental forces are in his whole being and
+production. You feel that he has never lost touch with Nature, that he
+is still organically connected with the fields, the sea, the open air;
+he to whom spring is physically painful, who is depressed by relaxing
+air, who loves the weather of his home-land, its vehemence, and its
+savage, tameless strength.</p>
+
+<p>For this very reason he has in later years felt, what was natively
+uncongenial to him&mdash;the great cities&mdash;differently and far more intensely
+than poets brought up in them. What to the latter appeared self-evident
+was to him astonishment, abomination, terror, admiration, and love. For
+him the atmosphere we breathe in cities was heavy, stifling, poisoned;
+the streets between the massed houses were too narrow, too<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> congested;
+hourly, at first in pain and then with admiration, he has felt the
+beautiful fearfulness of the vast dimensions, the strangeness of the new
+forms of life. Just as we walk through mountain ravines dumbfounded and
+terrified by their sublimity, he has walked through streets of cities,
+first slowly accustoming himself to them; thus he has explored them,
+described them, celebrated them, and in the deepest sense lived them.
+Their fever has streamed into his blood; their revolts have reared in
+him like wild horses; their haste and unrest has whipped his nerves for
+half the span of a man's life. But then he has returned home again. In
+his fifties he has taken refuge once more in his fields, under the
+lonely sky of Flanders. He lives in a lonely cottage somewhere in
+Belgium, where the railway does not reach, enjoying himself among
+cheerful and simple people who fill their days with plain labour, like
+the friends and companions of his boyhood. With a joy intensified he
+goes eagerly year by year to the sea, as though his lungs and his heart
+needed it to breathe strongly again, to feel life with more jubilant
+enthusiasm. In the man of sixty there is a wonderful return of his
+healthy, happy childhood; and to the Flanders that inspired his first
+verses his last have been dedicated.</p>
+
+<p>Against this atavism, against this bright and inalienable joy in life,
+the <i>patres</i> of Sainte-Barbe could do nothing. They could only deflect
+his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> great hunger of life from material things, and turn it in the
+direction of science, of art. The priest they sought to make of him he
+has really become, only he has preached everything that they proscribed,
+and fought against everything that they praised. At the time Verhaeren
+leaves school, he is already filled with that noble yet feverish greed
+of life, that tameless yearning for intensive enjoyments heightened to
+the degree of pain which is so characteristic of him. The priesthood was
+repugnant to him. Nor was he more allured by the prospect, held out to
+him, of directing his uncle's workshop. It is not yet definitely the
+poetic vocation which appeals to him, but he does desire a free active
+calling with unlimited possibilities. To gain time for his final
+decision, he studies jurisprudence, and becomes a barrister. In these
+student years in Louvain Verhaeren gave free rein to his untameable zest
+in life; as a true Fleming he eschewed moderation and launched into
+intemperance. To this very day he is fond of telling of his liking for.
+good Belgian beer, and of how the students got drunk, danced at all the
+kermesses, caroused and feasted, when the fury came over them, and got
+into all kinds, of mischief, which often enough brought them into
+conflict with the police. Uncertainty was never a feature of his
+character, and so his Roman Catholicism was in those years no silent and
+impersonal faith, but a militant orthodoxy. A handful of hotspurs&mdash;the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>
+publisher Deman was one of them, and another was the tenor van Dyck&mdash;set
+a newspaper going, in which they lashed away mercilessly at the
+corruption of the modern world, and did not forget to blow their own
+trumpets. The university was not slow to veto these immature
+manifestations; but ere long they started a second periodical, which
+was, however, more in harmony with the great contemporary movements.
+Betweenwhiles verses were written. And still more passionate is the
+young poet's activity when, in the year 1881, he is called to the bar in
+Brussels. Here he makes friends with men of great vitality: he is
+welcomed by a circle of painters and artists, and a cénacle of young
+talents is formed who have the authentic enthusiasm for art, and who
+feel that they are violently opposed to the conservative bourgeoisie of
+Brussels. Verhaeren, who at this time greedily adopts all fashionable
+freakishness as something new, and struts about in fantastic apparel,
+promptly acquires notoriety by his vehement passionateness and his first
+literary attempts. He had begun to write verse in his school-days.
+Lamartine had been his model, then Victor Hugo, who bewitches young
+people, that lord of magnificent gestures, that undisputed master of
+words. These juvenilia of Verhaeren have never been published, and
+probably they have little interest, for in them his tameless vitality
+attempted expression in immaculate Alexandrines. More<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> and more, as his
+artistic insight grew, he felt that his vocation was to be a poet; the
+meagre success he achieved as a barrister confirmed him in this
+conviction, and so in the end, following the advice of Edmond Picard, he
+discarded the barrister's gown, which now seemed to him as narrow and
+stifling as he had once thought the priest's cassock to be.</p>
+
+<p>And then came the hour, the first decisive hour. Lemonnier was as fond
+of relating it as is Verhaeren; both would speak of it with their
+fervent, proud joy in a friendship of over thirty years; both with
+heartfelt admiration, the one for the other. Once, it was a rainy day,
+Verhaeren burst in on Lemonnier, whom he did not know, trampling into
+the elder man's lodging with his heavy peasant's tread, hailing him with
+his hearty gesture, and blurting out: 'Je veux vous lire des vers!' It
+was the manuscript of his first book <i>Les Flamandes</i>; and now he
+recited, while the rain poured down outside, with his hard voice and
+sharp scansion, his great enthusiasm and his compelling gestures, those
+pictures, palpitating with life, of Flanders, that first free confession
+of patriotism and foaming vitality. And Lemonnier encouraged him,
+congratulated him, helped him, and suggested alterations, and soon the
+book appeared, to the terror of Verhaeren's strictly orthodox family, to
+the horror of the critics, who were helpless in the face of such an
+explosion of strength. Execrated<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> and lauded, it immediately compelled
+interest. In Belgium, it is true, it was less acclaimed than declaimed
+against; but nevertheless it everywhere excited a commotion, and that
+grumbling unrest which always heralds the advent of a new force.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="LES_FLAMANDES" id="LES_FLAMANDES"></a>'LES FLAMANDES'</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Je suis le fils de cette race</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Tenace,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qui veut, après avoir voulu</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Encore, encore et encore plus.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15.5em;">É.V., <i>Ma Race</i>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The life-work of great artists contains not only a single, but a
+threefold work of art. The actual creation is only the first, and not
+always the most important; the second must be the life of the artists
+themselves; the third must be the harmoniously finished, organically
+connected relationship between the act of creating and the thing
+created, between poetry and life. To survey how inner growth is
+connected with external formation, how crises of physical reality are
+connected with artistic decadence, how development and completion
+interpenetrate as much in personal experience as in the artistic
+creation, must be an equal artistic rapture, must disengage as pure a
+line of beauty as the individual work. In Verhaeren these conditions of
+the threefold work of art are accomplished in full. Harsh and abrupt as
+the contrasts in his books seem to be, the totality of his development
+is yet rounded off to a clear line, to the figure of a circle. In the
+beginning the end was contained, and in the end<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> the beginning: the bold
+curve returns to itself. Like one who travels round the world and
+circles the vast circumference of the globe, he comes back in the end to
+his starting-point. Beginning and end touch in the motive of his work.
+To the country to which his youth belonged his old age returns: Flanders
+inspired his first book, and to Flanders his last books are dedicated.</p>
+
+<p>True it is, between these two books <i>Les Flamandes</i> and <i>Les Blés
+Mouvants</i>, between the work of the man of five-and-twenty and that of
+the man of sixty, lies the world of an evolution with, all its points of
+view and achievements. Only now, when the line that was at first so
+capricious has returned to itself, can its form be surveyed and its
+harmony perceived. A purely external observation has become penetration:
+the eye no longer exclusively regards the external phenomena of things,
+but all has been seized in his soul from within and imaged in accordance
+with its reality. Now nothing is seen isolated, from the point of view
+of curiosity or passing interest, but everything is looked upon as
+something that is, that has grown, and that is still growing. The motive
+is the same in the first and in the last books; only, in the first book
+we have isolated contemplation, while in the great creations of the last
+period the vast horizons of the modern world are set behind the scenes,
+with the shadows of the past on the one side, and, as well, with fiery
+presentiments of the future<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> shedding a new light over the landscape.
+The painter, who only portrayed the outer surface, the patina, has
+developed into the poet, he who in a musical vibration vivifies the
+psychic and the inconceivable. These two works stand in the same
+relation to each other as Wagner's first operas, <i>Rienzi</i> and
+<i>Tannhäuser</i>, do to his later creations, to the <i>Ring</i> and <i>Parsifal</i>:
+what was at first only intuitive becomes consciously creative. And as in
+Wagner's case, so too with Verhaeren there are to this very day people
+who prefer the works that are still prisoned in the traditional form to
+those which were created later, and who are thus, in reality, greater
+strangers to the poet than those who, from principle, assume a hostile
+attitude to his artistic work.</p>
+
+<p><i>Les Flamandes</i>, Verhaeren's first work, appeared in a period of
+literary commotion. Zola's realistic novels had just become the object
+of discussion; and they had stirred up, not France only, but the
+adjacent countries as well. In Belgium Camille Lemonnier was the
+interpreter of this new naturalism, which regarded absolute truth as
+more important than beauty, and which saw the sole aim of imaginative
+literature in photography, in the exact, scientifically accurate
+reproduction of reality. To-day, now that excessive naturalism has been
+overcome, we know that this theory only brings us half-way along the
+road; that beauty may live by the side of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> truth; that on the other hand
+truth is not identical with art, but that it was only necessary to
+establish a transmutation of the value of beauty; that it was in the
+actual, in realities, that beauty was to be sought. Every new theory, if
+it is to succeed, needs a strong dose of exaggeration. And the idea of
+realising reality in poetry seduced young Verhaeren into carefully
+avoiding, in the description of his native province, all that is
+sentimental and romantic, and deluded him with the hope of expressing in
+his verse only what is coarse, primitive, and savage. Something external
+and something internal, nature and intention, combined to cause this
+effect. For the hatred of all that is soft and weak, rounded off and in
+repose, is in Verhaeren's blood. His temperament was from the first
+fiery, and loved to respond to strong provocation with a violent blow.
+There was ever in him a love of the brutal, the hard, the rough, the
+angular; he had always a liking for what is glaring and intensive, loud
+and noisy. It is only in his latest books that, thanks to his cooler
+blood, he has attained classical perfection and purity. In those days,
+moreover, his hatred of sentimental idealisation, the hatred that in
+Germany fulminated against Defregger's drawing-room Tyrolese, Auerbach's
+scented peasants, and the spruce mythology of poetical pictures, led him
+deliberately to emphasise what is brutal, unæsthetic, and, as it was
+then felt, unpoetical;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> led him, as it were, to trample with heavy shoes
+in the tedious footsteps of French poets. Barbarian: this was the word
+they tried to kill him with, not so much on account of the harshness and
+coarseness of his diction, which often reminds one of the guttural
+sounds of German, as because of the savage selection of his instinct,
+which always preferred what is ringingly resonant and ferociously alive,
+which never fed on nectar and ambrosia, but tore red and steaming shreds
+of flesh from the body of life. And genuinely barbarous, savage with
+Teutonic strength, is this his inroad into French literature, reminding
+one of those migrations of the Teutons into the Latin lands, where they
+rushed ponderously to battle with wild and raucous cries, to learn,
+after a time, a higher culture and the finer instincts of life from
+those they had conquered. Verhaeren in this book does not describe what
+is amiable and dreamy in Flanders, not idylls, but 'les fureurs
+d'estomac, de ventre et de débauche,'<a name="FNanchor_1_6" id="FNanchor_1_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_6" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> ail the explosions of the lust
+of life, the orgies of peasants, and even of the animal world. Before
+him, his old schoolfellow Rodenbach had described Flanders to the French
+in poems that sounded gently with a silvery note, like the peal of
+belfries hovering over roofs; he had reminded them of that unforgettable
+melancholy of the evening over the canals of Bruges, of the magic of the
+moonlight over fields framed with dikes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> and hedges of willows. But
+Verhaeren closes his ears to hints of death; he describes life at its
+maddest, 'le décor monstrueux des grasses kermesses,'<a name="FNanchor_2_7" id="FNanchor_2_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_7" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> popular
+festivals, in which intoxication and sensual pleasure sting the
+unbridled strength of the crowd, in which the demands of the body and
+the greed of money come into conflict, and the bestial nature of man
+overthrows the painfully learned lessons of morality. And even in these
+descriptions, which often teem with the exuberance of Rabelais, one
+feels that even this explosive life is not mad enough for him, that he
+yearns to intensify life out and beyond reality: 'jadis les gars avaient
+les reins plus fermes et les garces plus beau téton.'<a name="FNanchor_3_8" id="FNanchor_3_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_8" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> These young
+fellows are too weak for him, the wenches too gentle; he cries for the
+Flanders of olden time, as it lives in the glowing pictures of Rubens
+and Jordaens and Breughel. These are his true masters, they, the
+revellers, who created their masterpieces between two orgies, whose
+laughter and feasting ring into the motives of their pictures. Some of
+the poems in <i>Les Flamandes</i> are direct imitations of certain interiors
+and sensual genre-pictures: lads afire with lust forcing wenches under
+the hedges; peasants in their drunken jubilation dancing round the inn
+table. His desire is to sing that superabundance of vitality which
+relieves itself by excess,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> excess flung into excess, even in sensual
+pleasures. And his own colours and words, which are laid on with lavish
+profusion and flow along in liquid fire, are themselves a debauch, a
+'rut' (a favourite word of his). This vaunting display of seething
+pictures is nothing less than an orgy. A terrific sensuality rages to
+exhaustion as much in the execution as in the motive, a delight in these
+creatures who have the madness of rutting stallions, who root about in
+odorous meats and in the flowering flesh of women, who of set purpose
+gorge themselves with beer and wine, and then in the dance and in
+embraces discharge all the fire they have swallowed. Now and again a
+reposeful picture alternates, firmly fixed in the dark frame of a
+sonnet. But the hot wave streams over these breathing-spaces, and again
+the mood is that of Rubens and of Jordaens, those mighty revellers.</p>
+
+<p>But naturalistic art is pictorial, not poetic. And it is the great
+defect of this book that it was written by an inspired painter only, not
+yet by a poet. The words are coloured, but they are not free; they do
+not yet rock themselves in their own rhythm; they do not yet storm along
+to soar aloft with the inspiration; they are wild horses regularly
+trotting along in the shafts of the Alexandrine. There is a disparity
+between the inner intractability and the external regularity of these
+poems. The ore has not yet been molten long enough in the crucible of
+life to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> burst the hereditary mould. You feel that the avidity of life
+which is the substance of the work has really been seen 'à travers un
+tempérament,' that here a strong personality is in revolt against all
+tradition, a strong personality whose ponderous onslaught was bound to
+strike terror into the cautious and the short-sighted. But the strength
+and the art are not yet emancipated. Verhaeren is already a passionate
+onlooker, but he is still only an onlooker, one who stands without and
+not within the vortex, who watches everything with inspired sympathy,
+but who has not yet experienced it. This land of Flanders has not yet
+become a part of the poet's sensibility; the new point of view and the
+new form for it are not yet achieved; there is yet wanting that final
+smelting of the artistic excitement which is bound to burst all bonds
+and restrictions, to flame along in its own free feeling in an
+enraptured intoxication.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_6" id="Footnote_1_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_6"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'Les Vieux Maîtres' (<i>Les Flamandes</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_7" id="Footnote_2_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_7"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 'Les Vieux Maîtres' (<i>Les Flamandes</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_8" id="Footnote_3_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_8"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 'Truandailles' (<i>Ibid.</i>).<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_MONKS" id="THE_MONKS"></a>THE MONKS</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Moines venus vers nous des horizons gothiques,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Mais dont l'âme, mais dont l'esprit meurt de demain....</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Mes vers vous bâtiront de mystiques autels.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 19.5em;">É.V., 'Aux Moines.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p>Rubens, that lavish reveller, is the genius of the Flemish zest in
+living; but zest in living is only the temperament and not the soul of
+Flanders. Before him there were the earnest masters of the cloisters,
+the primitives, the van Eycks, Memling, Gerhard David, Roger van der
+Weyden; and after them came Rembrandt, the meditative visionary, the
+restless seeker after new values. Belgium is something else beside the
+merry land of kermesses; the healthy, sensual people are not the soul of
+Flanders. Glaring lights cast strong shadows. All vitality that is
+strongly conscious of itself produces its counterpart, seclusion and
+asceticism; it is just the healthiest, the elemental races&mdash;the Russians
+of to-day for instance&mdash;who among their strong have the weak, among
+their gluttons of life those who avert their faces from it, among those
+who assent some who deny. By the side of the ambitious, teeming Belgium
+we have spoken of, there is a sequestered Belgium which is falling into
+ruins. Art exclusively in Rubens's sense could take no account of all
+those solitary cities, Bruges, Ypres,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> Dixmude, through whose noiseless
+streets the monks hasten like flocks of ravens in long processions, in
+whose canals the dumb white shadows of gliding nuns are mirrored. There,
+mid life's raging river, are broad islands of dream where men find
+refuge from realities. Even in the great Belgian cities there are such
+sequestered haunts of silence, the <i>béguinages,</i> those little towns in
+the town, whither ageing men and women have retired, renouncing the
+world for the peace of the cloister. Quite as much as the passion of
+life, the Roman Catholic faith and monkish renunciation are nowhere so
+deeply and firmly rooted as in this Belgium, where sensual pleasure is
+so noisy in its excess. Here again an extreme of contrasts is revealed:
+frowning in the face of the materialistic view of life stands the
+spiritual view. While the masses in the exuberance of their health and
+strength proclaim life aloud and pounce on its eternal pleasures, aside
+and cut off from them stand another, far lesser company to whom life is
+only a waiting for death, whose silence is as persistent as the
+exultation of the others. Everywhere here austere faith has its black
+roots in the vigorous, fruitful soil. For religious feeling always
+remains alive among a people that has once, although centuries may have
+passed since, fought with every fibre of its being for its faith. This
+is a subterranean Belgium that works in secret and that easily escapes
+the cursory glance, for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> it lives in shadows and silence. From this
+silence, however, from this averted earnestness, Belgian art has derived
+that mystical nourishment which has lent its baffling strength to the
+works of Maeterlinck, the pictures of Fernand Khnopff and Georges Minne.
+Verhaeren, too, did not turn aside from this sombre region. He, as the
+painter of Belgian life, saw these shadows of a vanishing past, and, in
+1886, added to his first book <i>Les Flamandes</i> a second, <i>Les Moines</i>. It
+almost seems as though he had first of all been obliged to exhaust both
+the historical styles of his native land before he could reach his own,
+the modern style. For this book is essentially a throw-back, a
+confession of faith in Gothic art.</p>
+
+<p>Monks are for Verhaeren heroic symbols of I mighty periods in the past.
+In his boyhood he was familiar with their grave aspect. Near the
+cheerful house where his youth was passed, there was at Bornhem a
+Bernhardine monastery, whither the boy had often accompanied his father
+to confession, and in whose cold corridors he had often waited in
+astonishment and with a child's timidity, listening to the majestic
+chant of the liturgy married to the organ's earnest notes. And here, one
+day of days, he received, with a thrill of pious terror, his first
+communion. Since that day the monks had been to him, as he trod the
+beaten track of custom, beings in a strange world apart, the incarnation
+of the beautiful<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> and the supersensual, the unearthly on his child's
+earth. And when, in the course of years, he sought to create in verse a
+vision of Flanders in all her luminous and burning colours, he could not
+forgo this mysterious chiaroscuro, this earnest tone. For three weeks he
+withdrew to the hospitable monastery of Forges, near Chimay, taking part
+in all the ceremonies and rites of the monks, who, in the hope of
+winning a priest, afforded him full insight into their life. But
+Verhaeren's attitude towards Roman Catholicism was by this time anything
+but religious, it was rather an æsthetic and poetic admiration for the
+noble romanticism of the ceremonial, a moral piety for the things of the
+past. He remained three weeks. Then he fled, oppressed by the nightmare
+of the ponderous walls, and, as a souvenir for himself, chiselled the
+image of the monastery in verse.</p>
+
+<p>This book too, no doubt, had no other aim than to be pictorial,
+descriptive. In rounded sonnets, as though etched by Rembrandt's needle,
+he fixed the chiaroscuro of the cloister's corridors, the hours of
+prayer, the earnest meetings of the monks, the silence in the intervals
+of the liturgy. The evenings over the landscape were described, in a
+ritual language, with the images of faith: the sun as it sets in crimson
+flaming like the wine in the chalice; steeples like luminous crosses in
+a silent sky; the rustling corn bowing when the bell rings to evensong.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>
+The poetry of devotion and repose was here revived: the harmony of the
+organ; the beauty of corridors garlanded with ivy; the touching idyll of
+the lonely cemetery; the peaceful dying of the prior; the visiting of
+the sick, and the I comfort it brings. Nothing was allowed in the deep
+light of the colours, in the grave repose of the theme, save what could
+be fitted into the strictly religious frame of the picture.</p>
+
+<p>But here the pictorial method proved to be I insufficient for the poetic
+effect. The problem of religious feeling is too close to the heart to be
+reached by outward, even by plastic manifestations. A thing which is so
+eminently hostile to the sensuous, nay, which is the very symbol of I
+all that is contrary to sensuousness, cannot be reached by a picturesque
+appeal to the senses; the description of an intellectual problem must
+cease to be descriptive and become psychology. And so, thus early in his
+career, Verhaeren is forced away from the picturesque. First, however,
+he attempts the plastic method: he gives us sombre statues of monks; but
+even as statues they are only types of an inner life, symbols of the
+ways to God. Verhaeren develops in his monks the difference of their
+characters, which are still effective even under the soutane; and by his
+delicate characterisation he shows the I manifold possibilities of
+religious feeling. The I feudal monk, a noble of ancient lineage, would
+make a conquest of God, as once his ancestors<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> conquered castle and
+forest lands with spur and sword. The <i>moine flambeau</i>, he that is
+burning with fervour, would possess Him with his passion like a woman.
+The savage monk, he that has come from the heart of a forest, can only
+comprehend Him in heathen wise, only fear Him as the wielder of thunder
+and lightning, while the gentle monk, he that loves the Virgin with a
+troubadour's timid tenderness, flees from the fear of Him. One monk
+would fathom Him by the learning of books and by logic; another does not
+understand Him, cannot lay hold on Him, and yet finds Him everywhere, in
+all things, in all he experiences. Thus all the characters of life, the
+harshest contrasts, are jostled together, quelled only by the monastery
+rules. But they are only in juxtaposition, just as the painter loves all
+his colours and things equally, just as he places things in
+juxtaposition, without estimating them according to their value. So far
+there is nothing that binds them together inwardly, there is no conflict
+of forces, no great idea. Neither are the verses as yet free; they too
+have the effect of being bound by the strict discipline of the monks.
+'Il s'environne d'une sorte de froide lumière parnassienne qui en fait
+une œuvre plus anonyme, malgré la marque du poète poinçonnée à
+maintes places sur le métal poli,'<a name="FNanchor_1_9" id="FNanchor_1_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_9" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> says Albert Mockel, the most
+subtle of æsthetic critics, of the book. Verhaeren must himself<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> have
+felt this insufficiency, for, conscious of not having solved his
+problems in terms of poetry, he has remoulded both aspects of the
+country, renewed both books in another form after many years: <i>Les
+Moines</i> in the tragedy <i>Le Cloître, Les Flamandes</i> in the great
+pentalogy <i>Toute la Flandre.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Les Moines</i> was the last of Verhaeren's descriptive books, the last in
+which he stood on the outer side of things contemplating them
+dispassionately. But already here there is too much temperament in him
+to allow him to look at things as altogether unconnected and
+undisciplined; the joy of magnifying and intensifying by feeling already
+stirs in him. At the end of the book he no longer sees the monks as
+isolated individuals, but gathers them all together in a great synthesis
+in his finale. Behind them the poet sees order, a secret law, a great
+force of life. They, these hermits who have renounced, who are scattered
+over the world in a thousand monasteries, are to the poet the last
+remnants of a great (departed beauty, and they are so much the more
+grandiose as they have lost all feeling for our own time. They are the
+last ruins of moribund Christianity in a new world, projecting, in
+tragic loneliness, into our own days. 'Seuls vous survivez grands au
+monde chrétien mort!'<a name="FNanchor_2_10" id="FNanchor_2_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_10" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> he hails them in admiration, for they have
+built the great House of God, and for many generations sacrificed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> their
+blood for the Host eternally white. In admiration he hails them. Not in
+faith and love, but in admiration for their fearless energy, and above
+all because they go on fighting undaunted for something that is dead and
+lost; because their beauty serves none other than itself; because they
+project into our own time like the ancient belfries of the land, which
+no longer call to prayer. In a land where everything else serves a
+purpose, pleasure and gold, they stand lonely; and they die without a
+cry and without a moan, fighting against an invisible enemy, they, the
+last defenders of beauty. For at that time, at that early stage of his
+career, beauty for Verhaeren was still identical with the past, because
+he had not yet discovered beauty for himself in the new things; in the
+monks he celebrates the last romanticists, because he had not yet found
+poetry in the things of reality, not yet found the new romance, the
+heroism of the working-day. He loves the monks as great dreamers, as the
+<i>chercheurs de chimères sublimes</i>, but he cannot help them, cannot
+defend what they possess, for behind them already stand their heirs.
+These heirs are the poets&mdash;a curious echo of David Strauss's idea about
+religion&mdash;who will have to be, what religion with its faithful was to
+the past, the guardians and eternal promoters of beauty. They it will
+be&mdash;here rings strangely the deepest intention of Verhaeren's later
+work&mdash;who will wave their new faith over the world like a banner, they,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>
+'les poètes venus trop tard pour être prêtres,'<a name="FNanchor_3_11" id="FNanchor_3_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_11" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> who shall be the
+priests of a new fervour. All religions, all dogmas, are brittle and
+transitory, Christ dies as Pan dies; and even this poetic faith, the
+last and highest conquest of the mind, must in its time pass away.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Car il ne reste rien que l'art sur cette terre</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pour tenter un cerveau puissant et solitaire</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et le griser de rouge et tonique liqueur.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>In this great hymn to the future Verhaeren first turns away from the
+past and seeks the path to the future. For the poetic idea is here
+understood with new and greater feelings than in the beginning of his
+career. Poetry is for Verhaeren a confession not only as applied to an
+individual in Goethe's phrase, but in a religious sense as well: as the
+highest moral confession.</p>
+
+<p>Much as these two books are marked by the effort to describe Flanders as
+it actually is, stronger than this effort is the yearning at the heart
+of them to escape from the present to the past. Every temperament
+exceeds reality. Flanders was here described in the sense of an ideal;
+but the ideal in both cases was projected on the past. Beauty young
+Verhaeren had sought in the monks, the symbols of the past; strength and
+the fire of life he had sought in the old Flemish masters. He still
+needed the costume of the past to discover the heroic and the beautiful
+in the present, just like many of our<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> poets, who, when they would paint
+strong men, must perforce place their dramas in the Florentine
+renaissance, and who, if they would fashion beauty, deck their
+characters with Greek costumes. To find strength and beauty, or in one
+word poetry, in the real things that surround us, is here still denied
+to Verhaeren; and therefore he has disowned his second book as well as
+his first. In the distance between the old and the new works the long
+road may be seen, and seen with pride, which leads from the traditional
+poet to the truly contemporary poet.</p>
+
+<p>Though not yet divided with a master hand, though not yet in the light
+of reality, the inner contrast of the country, the conflict between body
+and soul, between the joy of life and the longing for death, between
+pleasure and renunciation, the alternative between 'yes' and 'no,' was
+yet already contained in the contrast of these two books. And in a
+really emotional poet this contrast could not remain one that was purely
+external; it was bound to condense to an inner problem, to a personal
+decision between past and present. Two conceptions of the world, both
+inherited and in the blood, have here attained consciousness in one man;
+and though in life they may act independently in juxtaposition, in the
+individual the conflict must be fought out, the victory of the one or
+the other must be decided by force, or else by something higher, by an
+internal reconciliation. This conflict for a conception of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> the world
+pierces through the constant contrast between the acceptance and the
+denial of life in the poet, a conflict that for ten long years
+undermined his artistic and human experiences with terrific crises, and
+brought him to the verge of annihilation. The hostility which divides
+his ' country into two camps seems to have taken refuge in his soul to
+fight it out in a desperate and mortal duel: past and future seem to be
+fighting for a new synthesis. But only from such crises, from such
+pitiless struggles with the forces of one's own soul, do the vast
+conceptions of the universe and their new creative reconciliation grow.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_9" id="Footnote_1_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_9"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Albert Mockel, <i>Émile Verhaeren</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_10" id="Footnote_2_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_10"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 'Aux Moines.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_11" id="Footnote_3_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_11"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 'Aux Moines.'<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_BREAK-DOWN" id="THE_BREAK-DOWN"></a>THE BREAK-DOWN</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Nous sommes tous des Christs qui embrassons nos croix.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 22.5em;">É. V.,'La Joie,'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Every feeling, every sensation is, in the last instance, the
+transformation of pain. Everything that in vibration or by contact
+touches the epithelium affects it as pain. As pain, which then, by the
+secret chemistry of the nerves, transmitted from centre to centre, is
+transformed into impressions, colours, sounds, and conceptions. The
+poet, whose last secret really is that he is more sensitive than others,
+that he purifies these pains of contact into feeling with a still more
+delicate filter, must have finer nerves than anybody else. Where others
+only receive a vague impression, he must have a clear perception, to
+which his feeling must respond, and the value of which he must be able
+to estimate. In Verhaeren's very first books a particular kind of
+reaction to every incitement was perceptible. His feeling really
+responds only to strong, intensive, sharp irritation; its delicacy was
+not abnormal, only the energy of the reaction was remarkable. His first
+artistic incitement; however, that of Flemish landscapes, was only one
+of the retina, glaring colours, pictorial charm;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> only in <i>Les Moines</i>
+had for the first time more delicate psychic shades been crystallised.
+In the meantime a transformation had taken place in his exterior life.
+Verhaeren had turned aside from the contemplation of Nature to
+concentrate his strength on the cultivation of his mind. He had
+travelled extensively, had been in Paris and London, in Spain and
+Germany; with impetuous haste he had assimilated all great ideas, all
+new phases, all the manifold theories of existence. Without a pause,
+incessantly, experiences assail him and tire him out. A thousand
+impressions accost him, each demanding an answer; great, sombre cities
+discharge their electric fire upon him, and fill his nerves with leaping
+flame. The sky above him is obscured by the clouds of cities; in London
+he wanders about as though wildered in a forest. This grey, misty city,
+that seems as though it were built of steel, casts its whole melancholy
+over the soul of him who lives there in loneliness, ignorant of the
+language, and who is so much the more lonely, as all these
+manifestations of the new life in great cities are still unintelligible
+to him. He is still unable to capture the poetry that is in them, and so
+they leap at him and penetrate him with a confused, unintelligible pain.
+And in this novel atmosphere the intense refinement of his nerves
+proceeds at such a pace that already the slightest contact with the
+outer world produces a quivering reaction. Every noise, every colour,
+every thought<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> presses in upon him as though with sharp needles; his
+healthy sensibility becomes hypertrophied; that fineness of hearing, of
+which one is conscious, say in sea-sickness, which perceives every
+noise, even the slightest sound, as though it were the blow of a hammer,
+undermines his whole organism; every rapidly-passing smell corrodes him
+like an acid; every ray of light pricks him like a red-hot needle. The
+process is aggravated by a purely physical illness, which corresponds to
+his psychic ailment. Just at that time Verhaeren was attacked by a
+nervous affection of the stomach, one of those repercussions of the
+psychic on the physical system in which it is hard to say whether the
+ailing stomach causes the neurasthenic condition, or the weakness of the
+nerves the stagnation of the digestive functions. Both ailments are
+inwardly co-ordinated, both are a rejection of the outer impression, an
+impotent refusal of the chemical conversion. Just as the stomach feels
+all food as pain, as a foreign body, so the ear repels every sound as an
+intrusion, so the eye rejects every impression as pain. This nervous
+rejection of the outer world was already then, in Verhaeren's life,
+pathological. The bell on the door had to be removed, because it shocked
+his nerves; those who lived in the house had to wear felt slippers
+instead of shoes; the windows were closed to the noise of the street.
+These years in Verhaeren's life are the lowest depth, the crisis of his
+vitality. It is in such periods of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> depression that invalids shut
+themselves off from the world, from their fellow-men, from the light of
+day, from the din of existence, from books, from all contact with the
+outer world, because they instinctively feel that everything can be a
+renewal of their pain, and nothing an enrichment of their life. They
+seek to soften the world, to tone its colours down; they bury themselves
+in the monotony of solitude. This 'soudaine lassitude'<a name="FNanchor_1_12" id="FNanchor_1_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_12" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> then impinges
+on to the moral nature; the will, losing the sense of life, is
+paralysed; all standards of value collapse; ideals founder in the most
+frightful Nihilism. The earth becomes a chaos, the sky an empty space;
+everything is reduced to nothingness, to an absolute negation. Such
+crises in the life of a poet are almost always sterile. And it is
+therefore of incalculable value that here a poet should have observed
+himself and given us a clear picture of himself in this state, that,
+without fear of the ugliness, the confusion of his ego, he should have
+described, in terms of art, the history of a psychic crisis. In
+Verhaeren's trilogy, <i>Les Soirs, Les Débâcles, Les Flambeaux Noirs</i>, we
+have a document that must be priceless to pathologists as to
+psychologists. For here a deep-seated will to extract the last
+consequence from every phase of life has reproduced the stadium of a
+mental illness right to the verge of madness; here a poet has with the
+persistence of a physician pursued<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> the symptoms of his suffering
+through every stage of lacerating pain, and immortalised in poems the
+process of the inflammation of his nerves.</p>
+
+<p>The landscape of this book is no longer that of his native province;
+indeed, it can hardly be called one of earth. It is a grandiose
+landscape of dreams, horizons as though on some other planet, as though
+in one of those worlds which have cooled into moons, where the warmth of
+the earth has died out and an icy calm chills the vast far-seen spaces
+deserted of man. Already in the book of the monks, Rubens's merry
+landscape had been clouded over; and in the next, <i>Au Bord de la Route</i>,
+the grey hand of a cloud had eclipsed the sun. But here all the colours
+of life are burnt out, not a star shines down from this steel-grey
+metallic sky; only a cruel, freezing moon glides across it from time to
+time like a sardonic smile. These are books of pallid nights, with the
+immense wings of clouds closing the sky, over a narrowed world, in which
+the hours cling to things like heavy and clammy chains. They are works
+filled with a glacial cold. 'Il gèle ...'<a name="FNanchor_2_13" id="FNanchor_2_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_13" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> one poem begins, and this
+shuddering tone pierces like the howling of dogs ever and ever again
+over an illimitable plain. The sun is dead, dead are the flowers, the
+trees; the very marshes are frozen in these white midnights:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et la crainte saisit d'un immortel hiver</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et d'un grand Dieu soudain, glacial et splendide.<a name="FNanchor_3_14" id="FNanchor_3_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_14" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In his fever the poet is for ever dreaming of this cold, as though in a
+secret yearning for its cooling breath. No one speaks to him, only the
+winds howl senselessly through the streets like dogs round a house.
+Often dreams come, but they are <i>fleurs du mal</i>; they dart out of the
+ice burning, yellow, poisonous. More and more monotonous grow the days,
+more and more fearful; they fall down like drops, heavy and black.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Mes jours toujours plus lourds s'en vont roulant leur cours!<a name="FNanchor_4_15" id="FNanchor_4_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_15" class="fnanchor">[4]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>In thought and sound these verses express ail the frightful horror of
+this desolation. Impotently the ticking of the clock hammers this
+endless void, and measures a barren time. Darker, and darker grows the
+world, more and more oppressive; the concave mirror of solitude distorts
+the poet's dreams into frightful grimaces, and spirits whisper evil
+thoughts in his restless heart.</p>
+
+<p>And like a fog, like a heavy, stifling cloud, fatigue sinks down on his
+soul. First pleasure in things had died, and then the very will to
+pleasure. The soul craves nothing now. The nerves have withdrawn their
+antennæ from the outer world; they are afraid of every impression; they
+are spent. Whatever chances to drift against them no longer becomes
+colour, sound, impression; the senses are too feeble for the chemical
+conversion of impressions: and so everything remains at the stage of
+pain, a dull, gnawing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> pain. Feeling, which the nerves are now powerless
+to feed, starves; desire is sunk in sleep. Autumn has come; all the
+flowers have withered; and winter comes apace.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il fait novembre en mon âme.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et c'est le vent du nord qui clame</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Comme une bête dans mon âme.<a name="FNanchor_5_16" id="FNanchor_5_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_16" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Slowly, but irresistible as a swelling tide, emerges an evil thought:
+the idea of the senselessness of life, the thought of death. As the last
+of yearnings soars up the prayer:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Mourir! comme des fleurs trop énormes, mourir!<a name="FNanchor_6_17" id="FNanchor_6_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_17" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>For the poet's whole body is, as it were, sore from this contact with
+the outer world, from these little gnawing pains. Not a single great
+feeling can stand erect: everything is eaten away by this little,
+gnawing, twitching pain. But now the man in his torture springs up, as a
+beast, tormented by the stings of insects, tears its chains asunder and
+rushes madly and blindly along. The patient would fain flee from his bed
+of torture, but he cannot retrace his steps. No man can 'se recommencer
+enfant, avec calcul.'<a name="FNanchor_7_18" id="FNanchor_7_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_18" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> Travels, dreams, do nothing but deaden the
+pain; and then the torment of the awakening sets in again with redoubled
+strength. Only one way is open: the road which leads forward, the road
+to annihilation. Out of a thousand petty pains, the will longs for one
+single pain that shall<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> end all: the body that is being burnt piecemeal
+cries for the lightning. The sick man desires&mdash;as fever-patients will
+tear their wounds open&mdash;to make this pain, which tortures without
+destroying, so great and murderous that it will kill outright: to save
+his pride, he would fain be himself the cause of his destruction. Pain,
+he says to himself, shall not continue to be a series of pin-pricks; he
+refuses to 'pourrir, immensément emmailloté d'ennui';<a name="FNanchor_8_19" id="FNanchor_8_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_19" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> he asks to be
+destroyed by a vast, fiery, savage pain; he demands a beautiful and
+tragic death. <i>The will to experience becomes here the will to suffer
+pain</i> and even death. He will be glad to suffer any torture, but not
+this one low little thing; he can no longer endure to feel himself so
+contemptible, so wretched.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">N'entendre plus se taire, en sa maison d'ébène,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qu'un silence total dont auraient peur les morts.<a name="FNanchor_9_20" id="FNanchor_9_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_20" class="fnanchor">[9]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>And with a flagellant's pleasure the patient nurses this fire of fever,
+till it flames up in a bright blaze. The deepest secret of Verhaeren's
+art was from the first his joy in intemperance, the strength of his
+exaggeration. And so, too, he snatches up this pain, this neurasthenia
+to a wonderful, fiery, and grandiose ecstasy. A cry, a pleasure breaks
+out of this idea of liberation. For the first time the word 'joy' blazes
+again in the cry:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Le joie enfin me vient, de souffrir par moi-même,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Parce que je le veux.<a name="FNanchor_10_21" id="FNanchor_10_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_21" class="fnanchor">[10]</a></span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>True, only a perverse joy, a sophism, the false triumph over life of the
+suicide, who believes he has conquered fate when, truth to tell, it has
+conquered him. But this self-deception is already sublime.</p>
+
+<p>By this sudden interference of the will the physical torture of the
+nerves becomes a psychic event; the illness of the body encroaches upon
+the intellect; the neurasthenia becomes a 'déformation morale'; the
+suffering schism of the poet's ego is of itself subdivided, so to speak,
+into two elements, one that excites pain and one that suffers pain. The
+psychic would fain tear itself free from the physical, the soul would
+fain withdraw from the tortured body:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pour s'en aller vers les lointains et se défaire</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">De soi et des autres, un jour,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">En un voyage ardent et mol comme l'amour</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et légendaire ainsi qu'un départ de galère!<a name="FNanchor_11_22" id="FNanchor_11_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_22" class="fnanchor">[11]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>But the two are relentlessly bound up with each other, no flight is
+possible, however much disgust drives the poet to rescue at least a part
+of himself by snatching it into a purer, calmer, and higher state.
+Never, I believe, has the aversion of a sick man to himself, the will to
+health of a living man, been more cruel and more grandiose than in this
+book of a poet's diabolical revolt against himself. His suffering soul
+is torn into two parts. In a fearful personification the hangman and the
+condemned criminal wrestle<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> for the mastery. 'Se cravacher dans sa
+pensée et dans son sang!'<a name="FNanchor_12_23" id="FNanchor_12_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_23" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> and finally, in a paroxysm of fury, 'me
+cracher moi-même,'<a name="FNanchor_13_24" id="FNanchor_13_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_24" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> these are the horribly shrilling cries of
+self-hatred and self-disgust. With all the strings of her whipped
+strength the soul tears to free herself from the rotting and tormented
+body, and her deepest torture is that this separation is impossible. In
+this distraction flickers already the first flame of madness.</p>
+
+<p>Never&mdash;if we except Dostoieffsky&mdash;has a poet's scalpel probed the wound
+of his ego so cruelly and so deeply, never has it gone so dangerously
+near to the nerve of life. And never perhaps, except in Nietzsche's
+<i>Ecce Homo!</i> has a poet stepped so close to the edge of the precipice
+that juts above the abyss of existence, with so clear a consciousness of
+its vicinity, to feast on the feeling of dizziness and on the danger of
+death. The fire in Verhaeren's nerves has slowly inflamed his brain. But
+the other being, the poet in him, had remained watchful, observing the
+eye of madness slowly, inevitably, and as though magnetically attracted,
+coming nearer and nearer. 'L'absurdité grandit en moi comme une fleur
+fatale.'<a name="FNanchor_14_25" id="FNanchor_14_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_25" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> In gentle fear, but at the same time with a secret
+voluptuous pleasure, he felt the dreaded thing approaching. For long
+already he had been conscious that this rending of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> himself had hunted
+his thinking from the circle of clarity. And in one grandiose poem, in
+which he sees the corpse of his reason floating down the grey Thames,
+the sick man describes that tragic foundering:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Elle est morte de trop savoir,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">De trop vouloir sculpter la cause,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;-</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Elle est morte, atrocement,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">D'un savant empoisonnement,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Elle est morte aussi d'un délire</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vers un absurde et rouge empire.<a name="FNanchor_15_26" id="FNanchor_15_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_26" class="fnanchor">[15]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>But no fear takes him at this thought. Verhaeren is a poet who loves
+paroxysm. And just as in his physical illness he had called out in the
+deepest joy for the intoxication of illness, for its exasperation, for
+death, so now his psychic illness demands its intoxication, the
+dissolution of all order, its most glorious foundering: madness. Here,
+too, the pleasure in the quest of pain is intensified to the highest
+superlative, to a voluptuous joy in self-destruction. And as sick men
+amid their torments scream of a sudden for death, this tortured man
+screams in grim yearning for madness:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Aurai-je enfin l'atroce joie</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">De voir, nerfs par nerfs, comme une proie,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">La démence attaquer mon cerveau?<a name="FNanchor_16_27" id="FNanchor_16_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_27" class="fnanchor">[16]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>He has measured all the deeps of the spirit, but all the words of
+religion and science, all the elixirs<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> of life, have been powerless to
+save him from this torment. He knows all sensations, and there was no
+greatness in any of them; all have goaded him, none have exalted him or
+raised him above himself. And now his heart yearns ardently for this
+last sensation of all. He is tired of waiting for it, he will go out to
+meet it: 'Je veux marcher vers la folie et ses soleils.'<a name="FNanchor_17_28" id="FNanchor_17_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_28" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> He hails
+madness as though it were a saint, as though it were his saviour; he
+forces himself to 'croire à la démence ainsi qu'en une foi.'<a name="FNanchor_18_29" id="FNanchor_18_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_29" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> It is a
+magnificent picture reminding one of the legend of Hercules, who,
+tortured by the fiery robe of Nessus, hurls himself on the pyre to be
+consumed by one great flame instead of being wretchedly burnt to death
+by a thousand slow and petty torments.</p>
+
+<p>Here the highest state of despair is reached; the black banner of death
+and the red one of madness are furled together. With unprecedented logic
+Verhaeren, despairing of an interpretation of life, has exalted
+senselessness as the sense of the universe. But it is just in this
+complete inversion that victory already lies. Johannes Schlaf, in his
+masterly study, has with great eloquence demonstrated that it is just at
+the moment when the sick man cries out like one being crucified, 'Je
+suis l'immensément perdu,'<a name="FNanchor_19_30" id="FNanchor_19_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_30" class="fnanchor">[19]</a> just when he feels he is being drawn into
+the bosom of the infinite, that he is redeemed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> and delivered. Just this
+idea, which here had whipped the little pain to the verge of madness,</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">À chaque heure, violenter sa maladie;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'aimer, et la maudire,<a name="FNanchor_20_31" id="FNanchor_20_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_31" class="fnanchor">[20]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>is already the deepest leitmotiv of Verhaeren's work, the key to unlock
+the gates of it. For the idea is nothing else than the idea of his life,
+to master all resistance by a boundless love, 'aimer le sort jusqu'en
+ses rages';<a name="FNanchor_21_32" id="FNanchor_21_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_32" class="fnanchor">[21]</a> never to shun a thing, but to take everything and
+enhance it till it becomes creative, ecstatic pleasure; to welcome every
+suffering with fresh readiness. Even this cry for madness, no doubt the
+extreme document of human despair, is an immense yearning for clearness;
+in this tortured disgust with illness cries a joy in life perhaps else
+unknown in our days; and the whole conflict, which seems to be a flight
+from life, is in the last instance an immense heroism for which there is
+no name. Nietzsche's great saying is here fulfilled: 'For a dionysiac
+task a hammer's hardness, <i>the pleasure in destruction itself</i>, is most
+decidedly one of the preliminary conditions.'<a name="FNanchor_22_33" id="FNanchor_22_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_33" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> And what at this
+period of Verhaeren's work appears still to be negative is in the higher
+sense a preparation for the positive, for the decisive consummation, of
+the later books.</p>
+
+<p>For that reason this crisis and the shaping of it in verse remain an
+imperishable monument<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> of our contemporary literature, for it is at the
+same time an eternal monument to the conquest of human suffering by the
+power of art. Verhaeren's crisis&mdash;his exposition, for the sake of the
+value of life, of his inward struggle&mdash;has gone deeper than that of any
+other poet of our time. To this very day the sufferings of that time are
+graven, as though by iron wedges, in the furrows of his lofty brow; the
+recovery of his health and his subsequent robustness have been powerless
+to efface them. This crisis was a fire without parallel, a flame of
+passion. Not a single acquisition from the earlier days was rescued from
+it. Verhaeren's whole former relation to the world has broken down: his
+Catholic faith, his religion, his feeling for his native province, for
+the world, for life itself, all is destroyed. And when he builds up his
+work now, it must perforce be an entirely different one, with a
+different artistic expression, with different feelings, different
+knowledge, and different harmonies. This tempest has changed the
+landscape of his soul, where once the peace of a modest existence had
+prevailed, into a pathless desert. But this desert with its solitude has
+space and liberty for the building up of a new, a richer, an infinitely
+nobler world.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_12" id="Footnote_1_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_12"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'L'Heure Mauvaise' (<i>Au Bord de la Route</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_13" id="Footnote_2_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_13"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 'La Barque' (<i>Au Bord de la Route</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_14" id="Footnote_3_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_14"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 'Le Gel' (<i>Les Soirs</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_15" id="Footnote_4_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_15"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> 'L'Heure Mauvaise' (<i>Au Bord de la Route</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_16" id="Footnote_5_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_16"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> 'Vers' (<i>Au Bord de la Route</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_17" id="Footnote_6_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_17"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> 'Mourir' (<i>Les Soirs</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_18" id="Footnote_7_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_18"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> 'S'amoindrir' (<i>Les Débâcles</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_19" id="Footnote_8_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_19"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> 'Si Morne' (<i>Les Débâcles</i>)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_20" id="Footnote_9_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_20"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> 'Le Roc' (<i>Les Flambeaux Noirs</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_21" id="Footnote_10_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_21"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> 'Insatiablement' (<i>Les Soirs</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_22" id="Footnote_11_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_22"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> 'Là-bas' (<i>Au Bord de la Route</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_23" id="Footnote_12_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_23"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> 'Vers le Cloître' (<i>Les Débâcles</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_24" id="Footnote_13_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_24"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> 'Un Soir' (<i>Au Bord de la Route</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_25" id="Footnote_14_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_25"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> 'Fleur Fatale' (<i>Les Débâcles</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_26" id="Footnote_15_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_26"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> 'La Morte' (<i>Les Flambeaux Noirs</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_27" id="Footnote_16_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_27"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> 'Le Roc' (<i>Ibid.</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_28" id="Footnote_17_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_28"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> 'Fleur Fatale' (<i>Les Débâcles</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_29" id="Footnote_18_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_29"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> 'Le Roc' (<i>Les Flambeaux Noirs</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_30" id="Footnote_19_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_30"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> 'Les Nombres' (<i>Ibid.</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_31" id="Footnote_20_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_31"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> 'Celui de la Fatigue' (<i>Les Apparus dans mes Chemins</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_32" id="Footnote_21_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_32"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> 'La Joie' (<i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_33" id="Footnote_22_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_33"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> <i>Ecce Homo!</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="FLIGHT_INTO_THE_WORLD" id="FLIGHT_INTO_THE_WORLD"></a>FLIGHT INTO THE WORLD</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">On boit sa soif, on mange sa faim.&mdash;É.V., 'L'Amour.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>In this crisis the negation was driven to the last possible limits. The
+sick man had denied not only the outer world, but himself as well.
+Nothing had remained but vexation, disgust, and torment.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">La vie en lui ne se prouvait</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Que par l'horreur qu'il en avait.<a name="FNanchor_1_34" id="FNanchor_1_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_34" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>He had arrived at the last possibility, at that possibility which means
+destruction or transformation. The at first purely physical pain of the
+supersensitive organs of the senses had become a moral depression; the
+depression had become psychic suffering; and this again had gradually
+turned in a grandiose progression not only to pain in the individual
+thing but to suffering in the all: to <i>cosmic pain</i>. For Him, however,
+who in His loneliness took the suffering of the whole world upon His
+shoulders, who was strong enough to bear it for all the centuries,
+humanity has invented the symbol of 'God.' He who is born of earth and
+lives to die must perforce break down under so gigantic a burden. Into
+the last corner<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> of his ego revengeful life had here driven the man who
+denied it, had driven him to the point where now he stood shivering
+before the abyss in his own breast, face to face with death and madness.
+The physical and poetic organism of Verhaeren was overheated to the most
+dangerous and extreme degree. This fever-heat&mdash;that of a flagellant
+&mdash;had brought his blood to the boiling-point; it was filling the chamber
+of his breast with pictures of such overwhelming horror that the
+explosion of self-destruction could only be prevented by opening the
+valve.</p>
+
+<p>There were only two means of flight from this destruction: flight into
+the past&mdash;or flight into a new world. Many, Verlaine for instance, had
+in such catastrophes, wherein the whole structure of their lives tumbled
+to the ground, fled into the cathedrals of Catholicism rather than stand
+in solitude under the threatening sky. Verhaeren, however, though an
+inspired faith is one of the most living sources of his poetical power,
+was more afraid of the past than of the Unknown. <i>He freed himself from
+the immense pressure upon him by fleeing into the world</i>. He who in his
+pride had conceived the whole process of the world as a personal affair,
+he who had tried to solve the eternal discord, the undying 'yes' and
+'no' of life in his own lonely self, now rushes into the very midst of
+things and involves himself in their process. He who previously had felt
+everything only subjectively, only in isolation, now objectifies<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>
+himself; he who previously had shut himself off from reality, now lets
+his veins pulse in harmony with the breathing organism of life. He
+relinquishes his attitude of pride; he surrenders himself; lavishes
+himself joyously on everything; exchanges the pride of being alone for
+the immense pleasure of being everywhere. <i>He no longer looks at all
+things in himself, but at himself in all things</i>. But the poet in him
+frees himself, quite in Goethe's sense, by symbols. Verhaeren drives his
+superabundance out of himself into the whole world, just as Christ in
+the legend drove the devils out of the madman into the swine. The heat,
+the fever of his feeling&mdash;which, concentrated in his too narrow chest,
+were near bursting it&mdash;now animate with their fire the whole world
+around him, which of old had been to him congealed with ice. All the
+evil powers, which had slunk around him in the trappings of nightmares,
+he now transforms to shapes of life. He hammers away at them and shapes
+them anew; he is himself the smith of that noble poem of his, the smith
+of whom he says:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dans son brasier, il a jeté</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Les cris d'opiniâtreté,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">La rage sourde et séculaire;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dans son brasier d'or exalté,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Maître de soi, il a jeté</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Révoltes, deuils, violences, colères,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pour leur donner la trempe et la clarté</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Du fer et de l'éclair.<a name="FNanchor_2_35" id="FNanchor_2_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_35" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He objectifies his personality in the work of art, hammering out of the
+cold blocks, that weighed upon him with the weight of iron, monuments
+and statues of pain. All the feelings which of old weighed down upon him
+like dull fog, formless and prisoned in dream like nightmares, now
+become clear statues, symbols in stone of his soul's experiences. The
+poet has torn his fear, his burning, moaning, horrible fear, out of
+himself, and poured it into his bell-ringer, who is consumed in his
+blazing belfry. He has turned the monotony of his days to music in his
+poem of the rain; his mad fight against the elements, which in the end
+break his strength, he has shaped into the image of the ferryman
+struggling against the current that shatters his oars one after the
+other. His cruel probing of his own pain he has visualised in the idea
+of his fishermen, who with their nets all in holes go on fishing up
+nothing but suffering on suffering out of the sombre stream; his evil
+and red lusts he has spiritualised in his <i>Aventurier</i>, in the
+adventurer who returns home from a far land to celebrate his wedding
+feast with his dead love. Here his feelings are shaped no longer in
+moods, in the fluid material of dreams, but in the infinitely mobile
+form of human beings. Here there is symbolism in the highest sense, in
+Goethe's sense of liberation. For every feeling that has achieved
+artistic shape is as it were conjured away out of the breast. And thus
+the too heavy pressure slowly disappears from the poet's being,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> and the
+morbid fever from his work. Now and now only does he recognise the
+suicidal cowardice behind the visor of the pride that forced him to fly
+from the world, now and now only does he understand that fatal egoism
+which had taken refuge beyond the pale of the world:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">J'ai été lâche et je me suis enfui</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Du monde, en mon orgueil futile,<a name="FNanchor_3_36" id="FNanchor_3_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_36" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>This confession is the last liberating word of the crisis.</p>
+
+<p>Now his despair&mdash;a despair like that of Faust&mdash;is overcome. The mood of
+Easter morning begins to sound the exulting cry, 'Earth has me
+again!'<a name="FNanchor_4_37" id="FNanchor_4_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_37" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> with the anthems of the resurrection. Verhaeren has described
+this deliverance, this ascent from illness to health, from the most
+despairing 'no' to the most exultant 'yes,' in many symbols, most
+beautifully in that magnificent poem wherein St. George the
+dragon-slayer bows down to him with his shining lance; and again in that
+other poem in which the four gentle sisters approach him and announce
+his deliverance:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'une est le bleu pardon, l'autre la bonté blanche,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">La troisième l'amour pensif, la dernière le don</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">D'être, même pour les méchants, le sacrifice.<a name="FNanchor_5_38" id="FNanchor_5_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_38" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Goodness and love call to him now from where of old there were only
+hatred and despair. And in their approach already he feels the hope of
+recovery, the hope of a natural, artistic strength.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et quand elles auront, dans ma maison,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Mis de l'ordre à mes torts, plié tous mes remords</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et refermé, sur mes péchés, toute cloison,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">En leur pays d'or immobile, où le bonheur</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Descend, sur des rives de fleurs entr'accordées,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Elles dresseront les hautes idées,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">En sainte-table, pour mon cœur.<a name="FNanchor_6_39" id="FNanchor_6_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_39" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>This feeling of recovery grows more and more secure, more and more the
+mist parts before the approaching sun of health. Now the poet knows that
+he has been wandering in the dark galleries of mines, that he has been
+hammering a labyrinth through the hard rock of hatred instead of walking
+the same path as his fellow-men in the light. And at last, bright and
+exultant, high above the shy voices of hope and prayer, the sudden
+triumph of certainty rings out. For the first time Verhaeren finds the
+form of the poem of the future&mdash;the dithyramb. Where of old, confused
+and lonely, <i>le carillon noir</i> of pain sounded, now all the strings of
+the heart vibrate and sing.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Sonnez toutes mes voix d'espoir!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Sonnez en moi; sonnez, sous les rameaux,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">En des routes claires et du soleil!<a name="FNanchor_7_40" id="FNanchor_7_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_40" class="fnanchor">[7]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>And now the path proceeds in light 'vers les claires métamorphoses.'<a name="FNanchor_8_41" id="FNanchor_8_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_41" class="fnanchor">[8]</a></p>
+
+<p>This flight into the world was the great liberation. Not only has the
+body grown strong again and rejoices in the wandering and the way, but
+the soul too has become cheerful, the will has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> grown new wings that are
+stronger than the old, and the poet's art is filled with a fresh blood
+red with life. The deliverance is perceptible even in Verhaeren's verse,
+which with its delicate nerves reproduces all the phases of his soul.
+For his poetry, which at first in the indifference of its picturesque
+description preserved the cold form of the Alexandrine, and then, in the
+grim monotony of the crisis, tried to represent the void waste of
+feeling by a terrifying, gruesomely beautiful uniformity of rhythm, this
+poem of a sudden, as though out of a dream, starts into life, awakens
+like an animal from sleep, rears, prances, curvets; imitates all
+movements, threatens, exults, falls into ecstasy: in other words, all of
+a sudden, and independently of all influences and theories, he has won
+his way to the <i>vers libre,</i> free verse. Just as the poet no longer
+shuts the I world up in himself, but bestows himself on the world, the
+poem too no longer seeks to lock the world up obstinately in its
+four-cornered prison, but surrenders itself to every feeling, every
+rhythm, every melody; it adapts itself, distends; with its foaming
+voluptuous joy it can fold in its embrace the illimitable length and
+breadth of cities, can contract to pick up the loveliness of one fallen
+blossom, can imitate the thundering voice of the street, the hammering
+of machines, and the whispering of lovers in a garden of spring. <i>The
+poem can now speak in all the languages of feeling, with all the voices
+of men; for the tortured,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> moaning cry of an individual has become the
+voice of the universe.</i></p>
+
+<p>But together with this new delight the poet feels the debt which he has
+withheld from his age. He beholds the lost years in which he lived only
+for himself, for his own little feeling, instead of listening to the
+voice of his time. With a remarkable concordance of genius Verhaeren's
+work here expresses what Dehmel&mdash;in the same year perhaps&mdash;fashioned
+with such grandeur in 'The Mountain Psalm,' the poem in which, looking
+down from the heights of solitude to the cities in their pall of smoke,
+he cries in ecstasy:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Was weinst du, Sturm?&mdash;Hinab, Erinnerungen!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">dort pulst im Dunst der Weltstadt zitternd Herz!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Es grollt ein Schrei von Millionen Zungen</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">nach Glück und Frieden: Wurm, was will dein Schmerz!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Nicht sickert einsam mehr von Brust zu Brüsten,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">wie einst die Sehnsucht, als ein stiller Quell;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">heut stöhnt ein <i>Volk</i> nach Klarheit, wild und gell,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">und du schwelgst noch in Wehmutslüsten?</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Siehst du den Qualm mit dicken Fäusten drohn</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">dort überm Wald der Schlote und der Essen?</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Auf deine Reinheitsträume fällt der Hohn</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">der Arbeit! fühl's: sie ringt, von Schmutz zerfressen.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Du hast mit deiner Sehnsucht bloss gebuhlt,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">in trüber Glut dich selber nur genossen;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">schütte die Kraft aus, die dir zugeflossen,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">und du wirst frei vom Druck der Schuld!<a name="FNanchor_9_42" id="FNanchor_9_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_42" class="fnanchor">[9]</a></span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Pour out the power that has flowed in upon thee! Surrender thyself! That
+too is Verhaeren's ecstatic cry at this hour. Opposites touch. <i>Supreme
+solitude is turned to supreme fellowship</i>. The poet feels that
+self-surrender is more than self-preservation. All at once he sees
+behind him the frightful danger of this self-seeking pain.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et tout à coup je m'apparais celui</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qui s'est, hors de soi-même, enfui</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vers le sauvage appel des forces unanimes.<a name="FNanchor_10_43" id="FNanchor_10_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_43" class="fnanchor">[10]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>And he who in days gone by had fled from this appeal into cold solitude,
+now casts himself ecstatically into the arms of the world, with the I
+deepest yearning</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">De n'être plus qu'un tourbillon</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qui se disperse au vent mystérieux des choses.<a name="FNanchor_11_44" id="FNanchor_11_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_44" class="fnanchor">[11]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>He feels that in order to live to the full all the greatness and beauty
+of this fiery world, he must multiply himself, be a thousandfold and ten
+thousandfold what he is. 'Multiplie-toi!' Be manifold. Surrender
+thyself! For the first time this cry bursts up like a flame. Be
+manifold!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Multiplie et livre-toi! Défais</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Ton être en des millions d'êtres;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et sens l'immensité filtrer et transparaître.<a name="FNanchor_12_45" id="FNanchor_12_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_45" class="fnanchor">[12]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Only from this brotherhood with all things accrue the possibilities of
+being a modern poet. Only by self-surrender to everything that is could
+Verhaeren attain to so grandiose a conception of contemporary
+manifestations, only thus could he become the poet of the democracy of
+cities, of industrialism, of science, the poet of Europe, the poet of
+our age. Only such a pantheistic feeling could create this intimate
+relationship between the world of self and the world surrounding self,
+the relationship which subsequently ends in an unparalleled identity:
+only so despairing a 'no' could be transformed to so enraptured a 'yes,'
+only one who had fled from the world could possess it with such passion.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_34" id="Footnote_1_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_34"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'Un Soir' (<i>Au Bord de la Route</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_35" id="Footnote_2_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_35"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 'Le Forgeron' (<i>Les Villages Illusoires</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_36" id="Footnote_3_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_36"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 'Saint Georges' (<i>Les Apparus dans mes Chemins</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_37" id="Footnote_4_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_37"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Goethe's <i>Faust</i>, 1. 784.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_38" id="Footnote_5_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_38"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> 'Les Saintes' (<i>Les Apparus dans mes Chemins</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_39" id="Footnote_6_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_39"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> 'Les Saintes' (<i>Les Apparus dans mes Chemins</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_40" id="Footnote_7_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_40"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> 'Saint Georges' (<i>Ibid</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_41" id="Footnote_8_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_41"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> 'Le Forgeron' (<i>Les Villages Illusoires</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_42" id="Footnote_9_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_42"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> 'Why weepest thou, O storm?&mdash;Down, memories! Yonder in the
+smoke pulses the great city's trembling heart! A million grumbling
+tongues are crying for peace and happiness: worm, what would thy pain!
+Yearning no longer trickles lonely from breast to breasts, a quiet
+source and no more: to-day a <i>nation</i> groans, and with wild, shrill
+voices demands clearness&mdash;and thou still revellest in the joys of
+melancholy?
+</p><p>
+'Seest thou the reek and smoke threatening yonder over the forest of
+flues and chimneys? Upon thy dreams of purity falls the scorn of labour!
+Feel it: labour is struggling, eaten up with dirt! Thou hast but
+wantoned with thy yearning, thou hast but enjoyed thyself in turbid
+heat; pour out the power that has flowed in upon thee, and thou shalt be
+free from the burden of guilt!'&mdash;'Bergpsalm' (<i>Aber die Liebe</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_43" id="Footnote_10_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_43"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> 'La Foule' (<i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_44" id="Footnote_11_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_44"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> 'Celui du Savoir' (<i>Les Apparus dans mes Chemins</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_45" id="Footnote_12_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_45"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> 'La Forêt' (<i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>).<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span></p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="PART_II" id="PART_II"></a>PART II</h3>
+
+<h3>CONSTRUCTIVE FORCES</h3>
+
+
+<h4>LES CAMPAGNES HALLUCINÉES&mdash;LES VILLAGES</h4>
+
+<h4>ILLUSOIRES&mdash;LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES&mdash;</h4>
+
+<h4>LES DRAMES</h4>
+
+<h4>1893-1900</h4>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CONTEMPORARY_FEELING" id="CONTEMPORARY_FEELING"></a>CONTEMPORARY FEELING</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">J'étais le carrefour où tout se rencontrait.&mdash;É.V., 'Le Mont.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p>Verhaeren's deliverance from the stifling clasp of his crisis was a
+flight to realities. He saved himself by no longer fixing his gaze
+rigidly on himself and deeply probing every feeling of joy and torment,
+but by turning to the world of phenomena and flinging himself on its
+problems. He has no longer to stand in solitude facing the world; his
+desire is to multiply himself, to realise himself in everything that is
+alive, in everything that expresses a will, an idea, a form, anything at
+all animated. His poetic aim now is, not so much to analyse himself to
+himself, as to analyse himself in the whole world.</p>
+
+<p>To realities, and particularly to the realities of our day, lyric poets
+had previously felt themselves alien. It had long been a commonplace to
+speak of the danger to art of industrialism, of democracy, of this age
+of machinery which makes pur life uniform, kills individuality, and
+drowns romance in actualities. All these poets have looked upon the new
+creations, machines, railways, monster cities, the telegraph, the
+telephone,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> all the triumphs of engineering, as a drag on the soaring of
+poetry. Ruskin preached that workshops should be demolished and chimneys
+razed to the ground; Tolstoy pointed to primitive man, who produces all
+his requirements from his own resources independently of any community,
+and saw in him the moral and æsthetic ideal of the future. In poetry,
+the past had gradually come to be identified with the poetical. People
+were enamoured of the glory that was Greece, of mail-coaches and narrow,
+crooked streets; they were filled with enthusiasm for all foreign
+cultures, and decried that of our own time as a phase of degeneration.
+Democracy, levelling all ranks and confining even the poet to the
+middle-class profession of author, seemed, as a social order, to be the
+correlation of machinery which, by the constructive skill of workshops,
+renders all manual dexterity unnecessary. All the poets, who were glad
+to avail themselves of the practical advantages provided by technical
+science, who had no objection to covering immense distances in the
+minimum time, who accepted the comfort of the modern house, the luxury
+of modern conditions of life, increased pecuniary rewards and social
+independence, refused obstinately to discover in these advantages a
+single poetic motive, a single object of inspiration, the least stimulus
+or ecstasy. Poetry had by degrees come to be something which was the
+very opposite of what-, ever is useful; all evolution seemed to these<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>
+poets to be, from the point of view of culture, retrogression.</p>
+
+<p>Now it is Verhaeren's great exploit that he effected a transmutation
+poetic values. He discovered the sublime in the far-spread serried ranks
+of democracy; beauty he found not only where it adapts itself to
+traditional ideas, but also where, still hidden by the cotyledon of the
+new, it is just beginning to unfold. By rejecting no phenomenon, in so
+far as an inward sense and a necessity dwelt in it, he infinitely
+extended the boundaries of the lyric art. He found a fruitful soil in
+the very places where all other poets despaired of poetic seed. He and
+he alone, who had for so long been eating his heart out in fierce
+isolation, feels the strength and fulness of society, the poetical
+element in the massed strength of great cities and in great inventions.
+<i>His deepest longing, his most sublime exploit is the lyric discovery of
+the new beauty in new things.</i></p>
+
+<p>The only way to this feat lay for him through the conviction that beauty
+does not express anything absolute, but something that changes with
+circumstances and with men; that beauty, like everything that is subject
+to evolution, is constantly changing. Yesterday's beauty is not to-day's
+beauty. Beauty is no more opposed than anything else to that tendency to
+spiritualisation which is the most characteristic symptom ind result of
+all culture. Physiologists have proved that the physical strength of
+modern man<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> is inferior to that of his ancestors, but that his nervous
+system is more developed, so that strength is more and more concentrated
+in the intellect. The Hellenic hero was the wrestler, the expression of
+a body harmoniously developed in every limb, the perfection of strength
+and skill; the hero of our time is the thinker, the ideal of
+intellectual strength and suppleness. And since our only way of
+estimating the perfection of things is by the ideal of our personal
+feeling, the form of beauty likewise has been transformed and become
+intellectual. And even when we seek it in the body, as, for instance, in
+the ideal woman's figure, we have grown accustomed to seeing perfection
+not so much in robustness and plumpness as in a noble, slender play of
+lines which mysteriously expresses the soul. Beauty is turning away more
+and more from the outer surface, from the physical, to the interior
+aspects, to the psychic. In proportion as motive forces hide themselves
+and as harmony becomes less obvious, beauty intellectualises itself. It
+is becoming for us not so much a beauty of appearance as a beauty of;
+aim. If we are to admire the telegraph or the telephone, we shall not be
+satisfied with considering the exterior forms, the network of wires, the
+keys, the receivers; we shall be impressed rather by the ideal beauty,
+by the idea of a vibrating spark leaping over countries and whole
+continents. A machine is not wonderful on, account of its rattling,
+rusty, iron framework, but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> by the idea, deep-seated in its body, which
+is the principle of its magical activity. A modern idea of beauty must
+be adapted not only to the idea of beauty of the past, but also to that
+of the future. And the future of æsthetics is a kind of ideology, or, as
+Renan expresses it, an identity with the sciences. We shall lose the
+habit of understanding things only by our senses, of seeing their
+harmony only on their exterior surface, and we shall have to learn how
+to conceive their intellectual aims, their inner form, their psychic
+organisation, as beauty.</p>
+
+<p>For these new things are only ugly when they are regarded with the eyes
+of a past century, when our contemporaries, jealously guarding a
+reverent over-estimation, valuing the rust and not the gold, despise
+modern works of art, and pay a thousand times too dear for the
+indifferent productions of a past age. Only in this state of feeling is
+it possible to esteem mail-coaches poetical and locomotives ugly; only
+thus is it possible for poets, who have not learned to see with
+emancipated and independent eyes, to assume such a hostile attitude, or
+at the best an indifferent attitude, to our realities. Let us remember
+Nietzsche's beautiful words: 'My formula for grandeur in man is <i>amor
+fati</i>: that a man should ask for nothing else, either in the past or in
+the future, in all eternity. We must not only endure what is necessary,
+still less conceal it&mdash;all idealism is lying in necessity's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> face&mdash;but
+we must <i>love</i> it.'<a name="FNanchor_1_46" id="FNanchor_1_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_46" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> And in this sense some few in our days have loved
+what is new, first as a necessity, and then as beauty. A generation ago
+now, Carlyle was the first to preach the heroism of everyday life, and
+exhorted the poets of his day not to describe the greatness they found
+in mouldy chronicles, but to look for it where it was nearest to them,
+in the realities around them. Constantin Meunier has found the idea of a
+new sculpture in democracy, Whistler and Monet have discovered in the
+smoky breath of this age of machinery a new tone of colour which is not
+less beautiful than Italy's eternal azure and the halcyon sky of Greece.
+It is only from the vast agglomerations, the immense dimensions of the
+new world that Walt Whitman has derived the strength and power of his
+voice. The whole difficulty which thus far has permitted only a few to
+serve the new beauty in the new things lies in the fact that our age is
+not yet a period of decided conviction, but only one of transition. The
+victory of machinery is not yet complete; handiwork still subsists,
+little towns still flourish, it is still possible to take refuge in an
+idyll, to find the old beauty in some sequestered corner. Not till the
+poet is shut off from all flight to inherited ideals will he be forced
+to change himself into a new man. For the new things have not yet
+organically developed their beauty. Every new thing on its first
+appearance<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> is blended with something repellent, brutal, and ugly; it is
+only gradually that its inherent form shapes itself æsthetically. The
+first steamers, the first locomotives, the first automobiles, were ugly.
+But the slender, agile torpedo-boats of to-day, the bright-coloured,
+noiselessly&mdash;gliding automobiles with their hidden mechanism, the great,
+broad-chested Pacific Railway engines of to-day, are impressive by their
+outward form alone. Our huge shops, such as those which Messel built in
+Berlin, display a beauty in iron and glass which is hardly less than
+that of the cathedrals and palaces of old time. Certain great things,
+such as the Eiffel Tower, the Forth Bridge, modern men-of-war, furnaces
+belching flame, the Paris boulevards, have a new beauty beyond anything
+which past ages had to show. These new things compel a new enhancement
+of value, on the one hand by the idea that moves them, on the other hand
+by their democratic grandeur and their vast dimensions&mdash;equalled by none
+but the very greatest works of antiquity. But whatever is beautiful
+must, sooner or later, be conceived of as poetry. And thus, it is quite
+sure, Verhaeren has only been one of the first to build bridges from the
+old to the new time; others will come who will celebrate the new
+beauties in the new things&mdash;gigantic cities, engines, industrialism,
+democracy, this fiery striving for new standards of greatness&mdash;and they
+will not only be compelled to find the new beauties,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> they will also
+have to establish new laws for this new order, a different morality, a
+different religion, a different synthesis for this new conditionality.
+the poetic transmutation of the beautiful is only a first beginning of
+the poetic transmutation of the feeling of life.</p>
+
+<p>But a poet never finds anything in things save his own temperament. If
+he is melancholy, the world in his books is void of sense, all lights
+are extinguished, laughter dies; if he is passionate, all feelings
+seethe in a fiery froth as though in a cauldron, and foam up in angry
+happenings. Whereas the real world is manifold, and contains the elixirs
+of pleasure and pain, confidence and despair, love and hate, only as
+elements so to speak, the world of great poets is the world of one
+single feeling. And so Verhaeren too sees all things in their new beauty
+with the feelings of his own life only, only with energy. In these the
+fiery years of his prime it is not harmony that he seeks, but energy,
+power. For him a thing is the more beautiful the more purpose, will,
+power, energy it contains. And since the whole world of to-day is
+over-heated with effort and energy; since our great towns are nothing
+but centres of multiplied energy; since machinery expresses nothing save
+force tanied and organised; since innumerable crowds are yoked in
+harmonious action&mdash;to him the world is full of beauty. He loves the new
+age because it does not isolate effort but condenses it, because it is
+not scattered but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> concentrated for action. And of a sudden everything
+he sees appears to be filled with soul. All that has will, all that has
+an aim in view&mdash;man, machine, crowd, city, money; all that vibrates,
+works, hammers, travels, exults; all that propagates itself and is
+multiplied, all that strives to be creation; all that bears in itself
+fire, impulse, electricity, feeling&mdash;all this rings again in his verse.
+All that of old had acted upon him as being cold and dead and hostile is
+now inspired with will and energy, and lives its minute; in this
+multiple gear there is nothing that is merely dust or useless
+ornamentation; everything is creation, everything is working its way
+towards the future. The town, this piled-up Babylon of stones and men,
+is of a sudden a living being, a vampire sucking the strength of the
+land; the factories, that had seemed to him nothing but an unsightly
+mass of masonry, now become the creators of a thousand things, which in
+their turn create new things out of themselves. All at once Verhaeren is
+the socialist poet, the poet of the age of machinery, of democracy, and
+of the European race. And energy fills his poetry too: it is strength
+let loose, enthusiasm, paroxysm, ecstasy, whatever you like to call it;
+but always active, glowing, moving strength; never rest, always
+activity. His poem is no longer declamation, no longer the marmoreal
+monument of a mood, but a crying aloud, a fight, a convulsive starting,
+a stooping down and a springing up again; it is a battle<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> materialised.
+For him all values have been transmuted. It is just what had repelled
+him most&mdash;London, monster cities, railway stations, Exchanges, which now
+lure him most of all as poetic problems. The more a thing seems to
+resist beauty&mdash;the more he has first to discover its beauty by fighting
+it and wrestling with it in torment&mdash;with so much the greater ecstasy
+does he now extol it. The strength which had murderously raged against
+itself now, in creative ecstasy, breaks into the world. To tear down
+resistance, to snatch beauty from its most hidden corner, is now for him
+a tenfold strength and joy of creation. <i>Verhaeren now creates the poem
+of the great city in the dionysiac sense</i>; the hymn to our own time, to
+Europe; creates ecstasy, renewed and renewed again, in life.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_46" id="Footnote_1_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_46"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> <i>Ecce Homo!</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="TOWNS_LES_VILLES_TENTACULAIRES" id="TOWNS_LES_VILLES_TENTACULAIRES"></a>TOWNS ('LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES')</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Le siècle et son horreur se condensent en elles</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Mais leur âme contient la minute éternelle.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 19.5em;">É.V., 'Les Villes.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p>When a man just recovered from illness steps for the first time with
+arms outspread, and as though climbing up from a dungeon, into the light
+of day, he is filled with a bliss beyond measure by the open air
+caressing him on all sides, by the orgies of the sunlight, the cataracts
+of deafening din: with a cry of infinite exultation he takes into
+himself the symphony of life. And from this first moment of his recovery
+Verhaeren was seized by a limitless thirst for the intoxication of life,
+as though with one single leap he would make good the lost years of his
+loneliness, of his illness, and of his crisis. His eyes, his ears, his
+nerves, all his senses, which had been a-hungered, now pounce on things
+with a pleasure that is almost murderous, and snatch everything to
+themselves in a frenzy of greed. At this time Verhaeren travelled from
+country to country, as though he would take possession of all Europe. He
+was in Germany, in Berlin, in Vienna, and in Prague; always a lonely
+wanderer; quite alone; ignorant of the language, and listening only to
+the voice of the town itself, to the strange, sombre murmuring,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> to the
+surge of the European metropolises. In Bayreuth he paid his devotions at
+the tomb of Wagner, whose music of ecstasy and passion he absorbed in
+Munich; in Colmar he learned to understand his beloved painter Mathias
+Grünewald; he saw and loved the tragic landscapes of northern Spain,
+those gloomy, treeless mountains, whose threatening silhouettes
+afterwards became the background of the fiery happenings in his drama of
+<i>Philip II.</i>; in Hamburg he was an excited spectator, day by day, of the
+stupendous traffic, the coming and going of the ships, the unloading and
+the loading of cargoes. Everywhere where life was intensive, expressive,
+and animated with a new energy, he passionately loved it. It is
+characteristic of his temperament that the harmonious beauty of peaceful
+and empty, of sleeping and dreaming cities appealed to him less than
+modern cities in their pall of soot and smoke. Almost intentionally his
+affection turns from the traditional ideal to one yet unknown. Florence,
+for many centuries the symbol of all poets, disappointed him: the
+Italian air was too mild, these contours were too meagre, too dreamy the
+streets. But London, this piled-up conglomeration of dwellings and
+workshops; this town that might have been cast in bronze; this teeming
+labyrinth of dingy streets; this ever-beating, restless heart of the
+world's trade with its smoke of toil threatening to eclipse the sun;
+this was to him a revelation. Just the industrial towns,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> which had thus
+far tempted no poet; those towns which roll up the vault of their leaden
+sky with their own fog and smoke, which confine their inhabitants in
+leagues and leagues of congested masonry, these attract him. He, who
+revels in colour, grew fond of Paris, to which, since then, he has
+returned every year for the winter months. Just what is restless and
+busy, confused and breathless, hunted, eager, feverish, hot with an
+ardour as of rut, all this Babylonian medley lures him. He loves this
+pell-mell multiplicity and its strange music. Often he would travel for
+hours on the top of heavy omnibuses, to have a bird's-eye view of the
+bustling throng, and here he would close his eyes the better to feel the
+dull rumour, this surging sound which, in its ceaselessness, is not
+unlike the rustling of a forest, beating against his body. No longer as
+in his earlier books does he follow the existence of simple callings; he
+loves the ascension of handiwork to mechanical labour, in which the aim
+is invisible, and only the grandiose organisation is revealed. And
+gradually this interest became the motive interest of his life.
+Socialism, which in those years was becoming strong and active, fell
+like a red drop into the morbid paleness of his poetic work.
+Vandervelde, the leader of the Labour Party, became his friend. And
+when, at this stage, the party founded the Maison du Peuple at Brussels,
+he readily helped, gave lectures at the Université Libre, took part in
+all the projects, and afterwards,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> wards, in the most beautiful vision
+of his poetical work, lifted them far above the political and actual
+into the great events of all humanity. His life, now inwardly
+established, henceforth beats with a strong and regular rhythm. He had
+in the meantime, by his marriage, attained a personal appeasement, a
+counterpoise for his unbridled restlessness. Now his wild ecstasies have
+their fixed point, from which they can survey the fiery vortex of the
+new phenomena. The morbid pictures, the feverish hallucinations, now
+become clear visions; not by flashes of lightning, but in a steady,
+beaming light are the horizons of our time now illuminated for him.</p>
+
+<p>Now that he steps boldly into life, his first problem is to come to an
+understanding with the world around him, with his fellow-men, with the
+city itself. But it is not the city he lives in which interests him in a
+provincial sense, but the ideal, modern city, the monster city in
+general, this strange and uncanny thing that like a vampire has snatched
+to herself all the strength of the soil and of men to form a new
+residuum of power. She crowds together the contrasts of life; grades, in
+unexpected layers, immense riches over the most wretched poverty;
+strengthens opposing forces, and goads them to hostility, goads them to
+that desperate battle in which Verhaeren loves to see all things
+involved. The grandeur of this new organism is beyond the æsthetics of
+the past; and new and strange before Nature stand men also,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> with
+another rhythm, a hotter breath, quicker movements, wilder desires than
+were known to any association of men, to any calling or caste, of a
+previous time. It is a new outlook which not only sweeps the distance,
+but has also to reckon with height, with the piled tiers of houses, with
+new velocities and new conditions of space. A new blood, money, feeds
+these cities, a new energy fires them; they are driven to procreate a
+new faith, a new God, and a new art. Their dimensions, terrific, and of
+a beauty hitherto unknown, defy measurement; the order that rules is
+hidden in the earth behind a pathless wilderness.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Quel océan, ses cœurs? ...</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Quels nœuds de volonté serrés en son mystère!<a name="FNanchor_1_47" id="FNanchor_1_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_47" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>cries out the poet in wonderment as he strides through the city and is
+overpowered by her grandeur:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Toujours en son triomphe ou ses défaites,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Elle apparaît géante, et son cri sonne et son nom luit.<a name="FNanchor_2_48" id="FNanchor_2_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_48" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>He feels that an enormous energy proceeds from her; he is conscious that
+her atmosphere rests with a new pressure on his body, that his blood
+quickens to keep pace with her rhythm. Merely to be near her starts the
+thrill of a new delight.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">En ces villes ...</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * </span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Je sens grandir et s'exalter en moi,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et fermenter, soudain, mon cœur multiplié.<a name="FNanchor_3_49" id="FNanchor_3_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_49" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Involuntarily he feels himself becoming dependent on her, feels this
+grandiose coupling of energy producing a similar concentration of all
+his forces in himself too, feels his fever becoming infectious like her
+own, and feels&mdash;with an intensity unknown to any other poet of our
+days&mdash;the identity of his personality with the soul of the city. He
+knows she is dangerous, knows she will fill him with all restlessness,
+overheat him and excite him, confuse him with her hostile contrasts.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Voici la ville en or des rouges alchimies,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Où te fondre le cœur en un creuset nouveau</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et t'affoler d'un orage d'antinomies</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Si fort qu'il foudroiera tes nerfs jusqu'au cerveau.<a name="FNanchor_4_50" id="FNanchor_4_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_50" class="fnanchor">[4]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>But he knows that she will impregnate him as well, give him power from
+her strength. There will never be a great man again who will pass her
+by, who will not be thrilled by her sensation, who will not live with
+her, and by her grow. Henceforth all new and strong men will stand in
+reciprocal action with her.</p>
+
+<p>This great recognition of a fact is, as we have seen, not spontaneous,
+but painfully acquired. For in the sense of the old beauty the aspect of
+a modern city is frightful. She is a sleepless, an ever wakeful woman;
+she does not, like Nature, sometimes rest; she is never silent.
+Restlessly she sucks men into her whirlpool; ceaselessly she pricks
+their nerves; day and night her life pulses. By day she is as grey as
+lead; a sultry shuttle of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> passions; a dark mine in which men, buried in
+the mines of her streets, are forced to unresting toil. How dense are
+these virgin forests of bronze and stone; and of all these thousands of
+streets 'à poumons lourds et haletants, vers on ne sait quels buts
+inquiétants,'<a name="FNanchor_5_51" id="FNanchor_5_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_51" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> not one seems to lead into the open, into the light of
+day. Monotonous, like dull eyes, glare the millions of windows; and the
+darksome caverns in which men, themselves like machines, sit by
+machines, thunder in the unseizable rhythm of petrified exertion. Not a
+ray is reflected on them from the eternal; hostile, repulsive, and grey
+the town pants in the puffed smoke of her daily labour. But night,
+softening all harsh lines, fierily welds the lumbering limbs together
+into something new. By night the town is turned into one great
+seduction. Passion, fettered in the day-time, breaks its chains:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">... Pourtant, lorsque les soirs</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Sculptent le firmament de leurs marteaux d'ébène,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">La ville au loin s'étale et domine la plaine</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Comme unnocturne et colossal espoir;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Elle surgit: désir, splendeur, hantise;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Sa clarté se projette en lueurs jusqu'aux cieux,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Son gaz myriadaire en buissons d'or s'attise,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Ses rails sont des chemins audacieux</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vers le bonheur fallacieux</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Que la fortune et la force accompagnent;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Ses murs se dessinent pareils à une armée</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et ce qui vient d'elle encor de brume et de fumée</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Arrive en appels clairs vers les campagnes.<a name="FNanchor_6_52" id="FNanchor_6_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_52" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>These fiery eruptions Verhaeren shapes in grandiose visions. There is
+the vision of the music halls: wheels of fire revolve round a house,
+blazing letters climb up façades and lure the crowds to sit in front of
+the brilliant footlights. I Here the people's hunger for sensation is
+fed full, and art is cruelly murdered day by day. Here tedium is tamed
+for an hour or so, and whipped up with colour, flame, and music for
+another pleasure that is waiting outside, as soon as the illusion here
+sinks into the night:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et minuit sonne et la foule s'écoule</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">&mdash;Le hall fermé&mdash;parmi les trottoirs noirs;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et sous les lanternes qui pendent,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Rouges, dans la brume, ainsi que des viandes,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Ce sont les filles qui attendent....<a name="FNanchor_7_53" id="FNanchor_7_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_53" class="fnanchor">[7]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>they the harlots, 'les promeneuses,' 'les veuves d'elles-mêmes,'<a name="FNanchor_8_54" id="FNanchor_8_54"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_54" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> who
+live on the sensual hunger of the masses. For sensual pleasure too is
+organised in cities, is guided into canals, like all instincts. But the
+primordial instinct is the same. The hunger which out in the fields and
+in the country was still pleasure in healthy food, in frothing beer, has
+here been converted into the idea of money. Money is what everybody
+hungers for here; money is the meaning of the town. 'Boire et manger de
+l'or'<a name="FNanchor_9_55" id="FNanchor_9_55"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_55" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> is the hot dream of the crowd. Everything is expressed by
+money, 'tout se définit par des monnaies';<a name="FNanchor_10_56" id="FNanchor_10_56"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_56" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> values are
+subordinate to this new value, monetary value. Superb is the vision of
+the bazaar, where, on all the counters, in the many stories, everything
+is sold, not only as in reality objects in common use, but, in a loftier
+symbolism, ethical values as well: convictions and opinions, fame and
+name, honour and power, all the laws of life. But all this fiery blood
+of money flows together in the great heart of the city, flows into the
+Exchange, that greedy maw that swallows all the gold and spits it out
+again, which smelts all this hectic fever and then pours it flaming into
+all the veins of the city. Everything can be bought, even pleasure: in
+back streets, in <i>l'étal</i>, in the haunts where debauch lies in wait,
+women sell themselves as goods are sold in the bazaar. But this energy
+is not always regulated, not always made to flow between dikes. Here
+too, as in Nature, there are sudden catastrophes. Sometimes revolt is
+kindled, flashes up instantaneously, and this stream of money blazes
+itself a new trail. The masses pour out of their dismal caverns, greed
+takes possession of men, and the myriad-headed monster fights and bleeds
+for this one thing, this red-burning, relucent gold.</p>
+
+<p>But the great and powerful thing in these towns is not passion; it is
+the hidden strength behind these passions, the noble order that keeps
+them in their proper limits, and holds them in check. This rumbling
+chaos, this inundation of things<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> doomed to die, is dominated in the
+<i>Villes Tentaculaires</i> by three or four figures standing like
+statues&mdash;the tamers of passions. They are what kings and priests were of
+old, they who have the power of bridling ebullient energies and turning
+them to use. With hands of iron they hold down this wild and dangerous
+animal, they, the new rulers, statesmen, generals, demagogues,
+organisers. For the town is an animal in its movements, a beast in its
+passions, a brute in its instincts, a monster in its strength. It is
+ugly, like all rut. It cannot be contemplated with a pure pleasure, like
+a landscape gently and harmoniously fading in forest verdure; it rather
+evokes, at first, loathing, hatred, caution, and hostility. But that is
+the great thing in Verhaeren, that he always overcomes whatever is
+hostile, pain and torment, by a great vista, that in this panting steam
+of the unæsthetic he already sees the flame of the new beauty. Here for
+the first time is, seen the beauty of factories, <i>les usines
+rectangulaires,</i> the fascination of a railway station, the new beauty in
+the new things. If the town is indeed ugly in its denseness, ugly in the
+sense of all classical ideals; if the picture of it is indeed I cruel
+and frightful; it is yet not unfertile. 'Le siècle et son horreur se
+condensent en elle, mais son âme contient la minute éternelle.' And this
+I feeling, that in her the minute of eternity is contained, that she is
+the new thing risen above all the pasts, a new thing that one must
+perforce<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> come to terms with, this feeling makes her momentous and
+beautiful to the poet. If her form is loathsome, grey, and sombre, her
+idea, her organisation, are grandiose and admirable. And here, as
+always, where admiration finds a pivot, it can give the whole world the
+swing from negation to assent.</p>
+
+<p>But Verhaeren is by this time too little of an artist, too much
+interested in all the problems of life, to be able to contemplate the
+idea of the modern city from the æsthetic side alone. It is for him a
+still more important symbol for the expression of contemporary feeling.</p>
+
+<p>Not only the problem of the new social stratification is poetically
+digested in his trilogy, but also one of the most burning and pressing
+questions of political economy as of politics, the struggle between the
+centrifugal and the centripetal power, the struggle between agrarianism
+and industrialism. Town and country purchase their prosperity, the one
+by the impoverishment of the other. Production and trade, however much
+one is the condition of the other, at their extreme points are hostile
+forces. And how, in our days in Europe, the victory between town and
+country is being decided in favour of the town; how, gradually, the town
+is absorbing the best strength of the provinces&mdash;the problem of the
+<i>déracinés</i>&mdash;this has for the first time in poetry been described by
+Verhaeren in his magnificent vision of <i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>. The
+cities have sprung<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> up like mushrooms. Millions have conglomerated. But
+where have they come from? From what sources have these immense masses
+suddenly streamed into the mighty reservoirs? The answer is quick to
+come. The heart of the city is fed with the oozing blood of the country.
+The country is impoverished. As though they were hallucinated, the
+peasants migrate to where gold is minted, to the town that in the
+evenings flames across the horizon; to where alone riches lies, and
+power. They march away with their carts, to sell their last stick of
+furniture, their last rags; they march away with their daughter, to
+deliver her up to lust; they march away with their son, to let him
+perish in the factories; they march away to dip their hands, they also,
+in this roaring river of gold. The fields are deserted. Only the
+fantastic figures of idiots stagger along lonely paths; the abandoned
+flour-mills are empty, and only turn when the wind smites against them.
+Fever rises from the marshes, where the water, no longer gathered into
+dikes, spreads putrefaction and pestilence. Beggars drag themselves from
+door to door, with the country's barrenness reflected in their eyes; to
+the last lingering cultivators come, sinuously, their worst enemies,
+<i>les donneurs de mauvais conseils</i>. The emigration agent entices them to
+wander to the lands of gold, and they squander what they have inherited
+from their ancestors, to seek a far-distant hope:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Avec leur chat, avec leur chien,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Avec, pour vivre, quel moyen?</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">S'en vont, le soir, par la grand'route.<a name="FNanchor_11_57" id="FNanchor_11_57"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_57" class="fnanchor">[11]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>And they who are not enticed away by emigration are evicted from hearth
+and home by usurers. Villages in which the dance of the kermesse has
+long been silent are of a sudden cut in two by a network of railways.
+There is no fairness in the fight. The country is conquered because the
+blood of its inhabitants has been sucked out of it. 'La plaine est morte
+et ne se défend plus.'<a name="FNanchor_12_58" id="FNanchor_12_58"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_58" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> Everything streams to Oppidomagnum. This is
+the name given by Verhaeren in his symbolical drama <i>Les Aubes</i>&mdash;which,
+with the <i>Campagnes Hallucinées</i> and the <i>Villes Tentaculaires</i> forms
+the trilogy of the social revolution&mdash;to the monster city. This, with
+its arms as of a polypus, pitilessly sucks all the strength of the
+district round it. From all sides strength streams in upon it. 'Tous les
+chemins se rythment vers elle.' Not only from the country does she drink
+the strength of men, all the ocean seems to be pouring its waters only
+to her port. 'Toute la mer va vers la ville.'<a name="FNanchor_13_59" id="FNanchor_13_59"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_59" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> The whole sea streams
+to the city; all the rolling waves seem only to exist that they may
+bring to her this wandering forest of ships. And she absorbs everything,
+digests it in the 'noire immensité des usines rectangulaires,'<a name="FNanchor_14_60" id="FNanchor_14_60"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_60" class="fnanchor">[14]</a>
+greedily devours it, to spit it out again as gold.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But this immense social struggle between the country and the town
+expresses, like the other new phases, something yet higher. It is only a
+momentary symbol of an eternal schism. The country is the symbol of the
+Conservatives. In the country the forms of labour are petrified, calm,
+and regular; there life is without haste, and only regulated by the
+rotation of the seasons. All sensations, all forms are pure and simple.
+These men stand nearer to the freaks of chance: a flash of lightning, a
+hailstorm can destroy their labour; and so they fear God, and do not
+dare to doubt in Him. The town, however, symbolises progress. In the
+thunder of the streets of to-day no Madonna's voice is heard; the life
+of the individual is protected from chance by prearranged order; the
+fever of the new creates also a yearning for new conditions of life, new
+circumstances, for a new God.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'esprit des campagnes était l'esprit de Dieu;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il eut la peur de la recherche et des révoltes,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il chut; et le voici qui meurt, sous les essieux</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et sous les chars en feu des récoltes.<a name="FNanchor_15_61" id="FNanchor_15_61"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_61" class="fnanchor">[15]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>If the country was the past, the town is the future. The country only
+seeks to keep what it has, to preserve: its character, its beauty, its
+God. But the town must first of all create, must make itself the new
+beauty, the new faith, and the new God.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Le rêve ancien est mort et le nouveau se forge.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il est fumant dans la pensée et la sueur</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Des bras fiers de travail, des fronts fiers de lueurs,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et la ville l'entend monter du fond des gorges</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">De ceux qui le portent en eux</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et le veulent crier et sangloter aux cieux.<a name="FNanchor_16_62" id="FNanchor_16_62"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_62" class="fnanchor">[16]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>But we, Verhaeren thinks, must not belong to this world of the past,
+this moribund world; no, we who live in towns must think with them, must
+live with the new age, create in league with it, and find a new language
+for its dumb yearning. A return to nature is no longer possible for us:
+evolution cannot be screwed back again. If we have lost great values, we
+must replace them by new; if our religious feeling for the old God is
+cold and dead, we must create new ideals. We must find new aims that our
+ancestors knew not of; in the new forms of the city we must find a new
+beauty, in her noises a new rhythm, in her confusion an order, in her
+energy an object, in her stammering a language.</p>
+
+<p>If the towns have destroyed much, they will perhaps create still more.
+In their melting-pot professions, races, religions, nations, languages
+are blended:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">...les Babels enfin réalisées</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et les peuples fondus et la cité commune</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et les langues se dissolvant en une.<a name="FNanchor_17_63" id="FNanchor_17_63"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_63" class="fnanchor">[17]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>'The old order changeth, giving place to new'; and we must not ask
+whether the new is better<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> than the old; we must trust that it is so.
+The feverish convulsions of the great cities, this unrest, this
+screaming torment, cannot be in vain. For they, these pains and
+convulsions, are only the birth-throes of the new. But he who has been
+the first to feel, with a glad presentiment, this pain of the masses,
+this fermentation, as joy, this unrest as hope, must himself be an
+authentic new man, one of those who are called to give a poetic answer
+to all the complaints and questions of our time.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_47" id="Footnote_1_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_47"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'L'Âme de la Ville' (<i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_48" id="Footnote_2_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_48"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Ibid. (<i>Ibid.</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_49" id="Footnote_3_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_49"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 'La Foule' (<i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_50" id="Footnote_4_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_50"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> 'Les Villes' (<i>Les Flambeaux Noirs</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_51" id="Footnote_5_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_51"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> 'L'Âme de la Ville' (<i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_52" id="Footnote_6_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_52"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> 'La Ville' (<i>Les Campagnes Hallucinées</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_53" id="Footnote_7_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_53"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> 'Les Spectacles' (<i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_54" id="Footnote_8_54"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_54"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> 'Les Promeneuses' (<i>Ibid</i>.).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_55" id="Footnote_9_55"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_55"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> 'La Bourse' (<i>Ibid.</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_56" id="Footnote_10_56"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_56"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> 'Le Bazar' (<i>Ibid.</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_57" id="Footnote_11_57"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_57"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> 'Le Départ' (<i>Les Campagnes Hallucinées</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_58" id="Footnote_12_58"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_58"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> 'La Plaine' (<i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_59" id="Footnote_13_59"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_59"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> 'Le Port' (<i>Ibid.</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_60" id="Footnote_14_60"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_60"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> 'La Plaine' (<i>Ibid.</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_61" id="Footnote_15_61"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_61"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> 'Vers le Futur' (<i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_62" id="Footnote_16_62"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_62"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> 'L'Âme de la Ville' (<i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_63" id="Footnote_17_63"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_63"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> 'Le Port'(<i>Ibid.</i>).<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_MULTITUDE" id="THE_MULTITUDE"></a>THE MULTITUDE</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Mets en accord ta force avec les destinées</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Que la foule, sans le savoir,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Promulgue, en cette nuit d'angoisse illuminée.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 18.5em;">É.V., 'La Foule.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p>That great event which is the modern city was at bottom only possible by
+the organisation of the mighty multitudes of the people and the
+distribution of their forces. To organise is to weld unlike forces
+economically into an organism, to imitate something that has life and
+soul, in which nothing is superfluous and everything is necessary; it is
+to give a material its uniform strength, to give an idea the flesh and
+bones of its shape and of its possibility. Now the town has smelted the
+scattered forces of the country into a new material&mdash;into the multitude;
+it has converted much that used to be individually active force into
+mechanical force; it has humbled man to the condition of a handle, a
+rolling wheel; it has everywhere tied up the individuality of the single
+man in order to produce a new individuality, that of the crowd. For the
+multitude as a fact is a new thing. For centuries it was only a symbol,
+an idea. The inhabitants of whole countries were logically epitomised in
+a number, but with no<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> suggestion of thus comprehending their immediate
+unity. Of course, in times past great armies have been known, hordes of
+fighting men and nomad tribes; but these only represented a volatile
+concentration, too unsettled, too inconstant to procreate an
+individuality, an æsthetic and moral value. And even those armies whose
+legendary greatness echoes down the centuries, the hordes of Tamerlaine,
+the hosts of the Persians, the legions of Rome, how poor is their number
+in comparison with the masses of human beings daily herded together in
+New York or London or Paris! Only in our own days, only in Oppidomagnum,
+has the multitude been welded together finally and for all time, been
+hooked together with bands of steel like the wheels of an immense
+machine; only recently has the crowd become a living being that grows
+and multiplies like a forest. Democracy has given it new intellectual
+forms, set a brain in the body, by making the multitude determinate,
+subject only to itself. It is a creation of the nineteenth century; it
+is a new value in our lives, and one that we must come to terms with; no
+less a value for our evolution than the highest values of the past. Walt
+Whitman, to whom one must constantly refer in dealing with Verhaeren's
+work, although&mdash;let it be expressly stated here&mdash;Verhaeren quite
+independently and unconsciously arrived at the same goal from the same
+starting-point, once said: 'Modern science and democracy seemed to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>
+throwing out their challenge to poetry to put them in its statements in
+contradistinction to the songs and myths of the past.'<a name="FNanchor_1_64" id="FNanchor_1_64"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_64" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> And every
+modern poet will have to come to terms with the masses of democracy,
+will have to contemplate them synthetically as an individual living
+being, as a man, or as a God. In his Utopian drama <i>Les Aubes</i> Verhaeren
+has ranged them among the dramatis personæ, and, to express his inner
+vision, he has added this stage direction: 'Les groupes agissent comme
+un seul personnage à faces multiples et antinomiques.' For, like the
+images of Indian gods, they have a hundred arms, but their cry is in
+unison; their will is simple; their energy is uniform; one and the same
+is their heart, 'le cœur myriadaire et rouge de la foule.'<a name="FNanchor_2_65" id="FNanchor_2_65"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_65" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> A
+hundred years of life in communion, a hundred years of distress in
+common, of hope in common, have welded them together into one unity,
+into one new feeling. Sleepless and restless like a dangerous animal
+lies the multitude in the monster cities; all the passions of individual
+man are hers, vanity, hunger, anger; she has all vices and crimes in
+common with her smallest member, man; only, everything in her is
+intensified to unknown magnitudes. Everything in her passions is
+stupendously superdimensional, beyond calculation, and, in a new sense,
+divine. For just as the gods of old were formed after the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> image of man,
+save that they represented man's strength and intelligence magnified to
+the hundredth degree, the multitude is the synthesis of individual
+forces, the most prolific accumulation of passion.</p>
+
+<p>With the multitude the individual comes into being, and without her he
+perishes. Consciously or unconsciously, every man is subject to her
+power. For the modern man is no longer free from the influence of
+others, as the tiller of the fields was in olden days, or the shepherd,
+or the hunter, each of whom was dependent only on the anger of heaven,
+the whims of the earth, on weather and hailstorms, on chance, which he
+clad in the august image of his god. The modern man is in all his
+feelings determined by the world around him, set in his place in the
+ranks, and moved with the ranks like a shuttle to and fro; he is a
+dependent in his instincts. We all feel socially; we cannot think away
+the others who are round us and in front of us any more than we can
+think away the air that nourishes us. We can flee from them, but we
+cannot flee away from what has penetrated us from them. For the
+multitude rules us like a force of nature, nourishes us with its
+feelings. The unsocial man is a fiction. Just as little as in a great
+city one can shut off one's room entirely from the noise, the rhythm of
+the street, just so little can one think isolatedly, just so little can
+the soul keep itself at a distance from the great intellectual
+excitements<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> of the multitude. Verhaeren himself made the attempt in the
+days when he wrote the verses:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Mon rêve, enfermons-nous dans ces choses lointaines</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Comme en de tragiques tombeaux.<a name="FNanchor_3_66" id="FNanchor_3_66"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_66" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>But the life of reality claimed him again; for society destroys him who
+turns away from her, as one is destroyed who shuts himself out from the
+fresh air. The poet, too, must involuntarily think with the multitude
+and of the multitude. For to the same extent as democracy has exercised
+its levelling influence, to the same extent as it has limited
+individualities, enrolled the poet among the class of citizens,
+diminished the contrasts of chance, it has at the same time matured new
+forces in their multiplicity. In democracy the modern poet can find
+everything for which the ancients felt constrained to discover gods,
+those incalculable forces which bind the individual like enchantment.
+The town, the multitude feeds his energy with its exhaustless abundance;
+it multiplies his own strength. For everything the individual has lost
+is stored in it, great heroism and ecstatic enthusiasm. It is the great
+source of the unexpected and the incalculable in our days, the new thing
+concerning which no one knows how great it will grow. To have seen in it
+an enrichment, instead of a restriction, of the poetic instinct, is one
+of the great merits of Verhaeren. For while the majority of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>
+contemporary poets still maintain the fiction of the recluse in his
+wistful loneliness, while they recoil from before the multitude as
+though from men stricken with the plague, while they create for
+themselves an artificial seclusion, and heedlessly go their way past
+locomotives and telegraphs, banks and workshops, Verhaeren drinks
+greedily from these sources of new strength.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Comme une vague en des fleuves perdue,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Comme une aile effacée, au fond de l'étendue,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Engouffre-toi,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Mon cœur, en ces foules battant les capitales!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Réunis tous ces courants</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Et prends</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Si large part à ces brusques métamorphoses</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">D'hommes et de choses,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Que tu sentes l'obscure et formidable loi</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Qui les domine et les opprime</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Soudainement, à coups d'éclairs, s'inscrire en toi.<a name="FNanchor_4_67" id="FNanchor_4_67"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_67" class="fnanchor">[4]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>For she, 'la foule,' the multitude, is the great transposer of values in
+our day. She takes into her bosom and transforms the men who come to her
+from the country, from the four winds of heaven; none of us escapes her
+levelling power. The most distant races are blended in the city's huge
+melting-pot, are adapted to one another, and forthwith become a new
+thing, a different thing, a new race, the new race of contemporary man,
+who has made his peace with the atmosphere of the great city, who not
+only painfully feels the depression of her walls and his divorce from
+Nature, but creates himself a new strength<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> and a new feeling of the
+universe in this manifold human presence. The great feat of the
+multitude is that it accelerates the process of changing values. The
+individual elements perish in favour of this individuality of a new
+community. Old communities lose their unity, new communities must arise.
+America is the first example: here, in a hundred years, one single great
+brotherhood, a new type, has been developed from the forces of a
+thousand peoples; and in our capitals, in Paris, Berlin, and London,
+people are already growing up who are not Frenchmen and not Germans, but
+in the first place only Parisians and Berliners, who have a different
+accent, a different way of thinking, whose native land is the great
+city, the multitude. The inhabitant of the great city, the democratic
+man of the multitude, is a sharply defined character. If he is a poet,
+his poetry must be social; if he is a thinker, the intelligence of the
+masses, the instinct of the many, must be his also. To have attempted
+the psychology of this multitude for the first time in poetry is one of
+the great feats of audacity for which we must be grateful to Verhaeren.</p>
+
+<p>But these individual accumulations of men into a multitude, these
+combinations of millions into towns, are not isolated. One bond holds
+them all together: modern traffic. The distances of reality have
+disappeared, and with them national divisions as well. By the side of
+the problem of individual conglomerations which only slowly are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>
+transformed into organisms, by the side of the individual races, the
+individual masses, now arises a greater synthesis, the synthesis of the
+European race. For the men of our continent are no longer so distant, so
+strange to one another as they formerly were. Social democracy with its
+organisation encompasses the masses from one end of Europe to the other.
+To-day the same desires fire the men of Paris, London, St. Petersburg,
+Vienna, and Rome. And already one common formula directs their
+exertions: money.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Races des vieux pays, forces désaccordées,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vous nouez vos destins épars, depuis le temps</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Que l'or met sous vos fronts le même espoir battant.<a name="FNanchor_5_68" id="FNanchor_5_68"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_68" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Independently of the frontiers of countries, on a broad-based
+foundation, a unified race, a new community, the European, is in process
+of formation. Here desire and reality are near touching. Verhaeren sees
+Europe already united by one great common energy. Europe is for him the
+land of consciousness. While other continents, distant as though in a
+dream, are still living a vegetative life, while Africa and India are
+still dreaming as they dreamt in the darkness of primitive times, Europe
+is 'la forge où se frappe l'idée,'<a name="FNanchor_6_69" id="FNanchor_6_69"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_69" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> the great smithy in which all
+differences, all individual observations, all results, are hammered and
+moulded into a new intellectuality, into <i>European consciousness</i>. The
+union is not yet inwardly complete; states are still<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> hostile and
+ignorant of their community; but already 'le monde entier est repensé
+par leurs cervelles.'<a name="FNanchor_7_70" id="FNanchor_7_70"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_70" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> Already they are working at the transvaluation
+of all feeling in the European sense. For a new system of ethics, a new
+system of æsthetics, will be required by the European, who, rich by the
+past, strong in the feeling of the multitude, is now conscious of
+drawing his strength from new masses. Here it is that Verhaeren's work
+sings over into Utopia; and in <i>Les Aubes</i>, the epilogue to <i>Les Villes
+Tentaculaires,</i> this glittering rainbow rises over the visions of
+reality to the new ideal; the prophetic dream of a better future rises
+over the still struggling present.</p>
+
+<p>This yearning for the European has been expressed for the first time in
+poetry by Verhaeren, almost contemporaneously with Walt Whitman's
+hailing of the American and Friedrich Nietzsche's prophecy of the
+superman. It would be a tempting task, and full of interest, to set up
+the Pan-European in antithesis to the Pan-American. But to say that
+Verhaeren was the first of lyric poets to feel as consciously European
+as Walt Whitman felt American, is to establish his rank among the most
+considerable men of our time. Verhaeren is possibly the only lyric poet
+who has felt in accordance with contemporary feeling. That epitomises
+his whole claim to gratitude, for it sufficiently expresses the fact
+that he has taken<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> to his heart the problem of the multitude; the energy
+of social innovations; the æsthetics of organisation; the grandeur of
+mechanical production; in a word, the poetry of material things. It is
+our own time, the new age, that speaks in his verse; and it speaks in
+its new language. This rhythm which he has discovered is no literary
+abstraction, but beats in perfect unison with the heart-beat of the
+crowd; it is an echo of the panting of our monster cities, of the
+clanking of trains, of the cry of the people; his language is new,
+because it is no longer the voice of one man, but unites in itself the
+many voices of the multitude. He has penetrated deeper than any other
+man into the feeling of the masses, and their surf echoes more strongly
+in his verse. The hollow rumbling, the bestial and tameless strength of
+their voice, the surf of the multitude, has here become shape and music,
+the highest identity. With pride one can say of Verhaeren what he
+himself vaunts in his 'Captain': 'Il est la foule,'<a name="FNanchor_8_71" id="FNanchor_8_71"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_71" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> he himself is the
+multitude.</p>
+
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_64" id="Footnote_1_64"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_64"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> <i>A Backward Glance O'er Travelled Roads.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_65" id="Footnote_2_65"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_65"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 'La Conquête (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_66" id="Footnote_3_66"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_66"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 'Sous les Prétoriens' (<i>Au Bord de la Route</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_67" id="Footnote_4_67"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_67"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> 'La Foule' (<i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_68" id="Footnote_5_68"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_68"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> 'La Conquête' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_69" id="Footnote_6_69"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_69"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> <i>Ibid. (Ibid.).</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_70" id="Footnote_7_70"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_70"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> 'La Conquête' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_71" id="Footnote_8_71"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_71"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> 'Le Capitaine' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_RHYTHM_OF_LIFE" id="THE_RHYTHM_OF_LIFE"></a>THE RHYTHM OF LIFE</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dites, les rythmes sourds dans l'univers entier!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">En définir la marche et la passante image</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">En un soudain langage;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">.&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Prendre et capter cet infini en un cerveau,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pour lui donner ainsi sa plus haute existence.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 21em;">É.V., 'Le Verbe'.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p>The rhythm of modern life is a rhythm of excitement. The city with its
+multitudes is never completely at rest: even in its repose, in its
+silence, there is a secret bubbling as of lava in the bowels of a
+volcano, a waiting and watching, a nervous tension tinged with fever.
+For the idea of energy in the myriad-headed monster city is so
+concentrated, so intensified, that it never loses its rumbling activity.
+Rest, a polar feeling, would be the inner negation, the annihilation, of
+this new element. True, the city with her teeming masses is not always
+in the fever-throes of those great eruptions of passion when through the
+arteries of her streets the blood streams suddenly; when all her muscles
+seem to contract; when cries and enthusiasm blaze up like a flame; but
+always something seems to be expecting this fiery second, just as in
+modern man there is always the whipped unrest that is avid of new<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>
+things, new experiences. Modern cities are in perpetual vibration; and
+so is the multitude from man to man. Even if the individual is not
+excited, if his nerves are not always stirring with his own vibration,
+they are yet always vibrating in harmony with the obscure resonance of
+the universe. The great city's rhythm beats in our very sleep; the new
+rhythm, the rhythm of our life, is no longer the regular alternation of
+relaxation and repose, it is the steady vibration of an unintermitted
+activity.</p>
+
+<p>Now, a modern poet who wishes to create in real harmony with
+contemporary feeling must himself have something of the perpetual
+excitement, the unremitting watchfulness, the restless and nervous
+sensitiveness of our time; his heart must unconsciously beat in tact
+with the rhythm of the world around him. But not only unrest must
+flicker in him, not only must that excessive delicacy of feeling which
+is almost morbid be in him, this neurasthenic sleeplessness&mdash;not only
+the negative element of our epoch, but the grandiose as well, the
+superdimensional, the spontaneity of the sudden discharge of forces held
+in reserve, the overwhelming force of the great eruption. Like the
+masses of our towns, he must be so fashioned that a trifle will
+stimulate him to the greatest passion, must be so fashioned that he
+cannot help being carried away by the intoxication of his own strength.
+Just as the masses have, so to speak, organised themselves as a body,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>
+so that there is no individual excitement in them, no irritation and
+inflammation of any single part, but so that a reaction of the whole
+body responds to every separate irritation, just in the same manner must
+the excitement of a modern, a contemporary poet, a poet of a great town,
+never be the excitement of a single sense, but, if it is to be strong,
+it must quiver through the whole body like an electric shock. His poetic
+rhythm must therefore be physically vital; it must envelop all his
+feeling and thinking; it must respond to every individual irritation, to
+every individual sensation, with the massed weight of feeling of all his
+vital forces: the need of a rhythm strained to the full must be, as
+Nietzsche has so wonderfully demonstrated in his <i>Ecce Homo</i>! a measure
+for the strength of the inspiration, a sort of balancing, as it were, of
+the pressure and tension of the inspiration. For the poet of to-day, if
+he does not wish to remain the poet of the eternal yesterday, must, as a
+microcosm, imitate in his passion the macrocosm of the multitude,
+wherein also the excitement of the individual is trivial and aimless,
+and only the ebullition of the whole fermenting mass is irresistible and
+momentous.</p>
+
+<p>Then, in such poems, the <i>rhythm of modern life</i> will break through. At
+this moment we must remember what rhythm really means. The rhythm of a
+being is in the last instance nothing but its breathing. Everything that
+is alive, every organism, has breath, the interchange and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> resting-space
+between giving and taking. And so breathes a poem too; and it is
+worthless if it is not a living thing, if it is not an organism, a body
+with a soul. Only in its rhythm does it become alive, as man does in his
+breathing. But the diversity, the originality of the rhythm only arises
+from the alternation of these drawn breaths. Breathing is different in
+those who are calm, excited, joyous, nervous, oppressed, ecstatic. Every
+sensation produces its corresponding rhythm. And since every poet in his
+individuality represents a new form of inner passion, his poem too must
+have this rhythm of his own, the rhythm which expresses his personal
+poetic peculiarity just as characteristically as his speaking expresses
+an individual accent and dialect. To understand Verhaeren's rhythm we
+must remember this basic form of the poetic feeling at the heart of him;
+we must compare it with the feeling at the heart of those who have gone
+before him. In Victor Hugo there was the earnest, great, soaring rhythm
+of the loud speaker, of the preacher who never addresses individuals but
+always the whole nation; in Baudelaire there was the regular hymnic
+rhythm of the priest of art; in Verlaine the irregular, sweet, and
+gentle melody of one speaking in dreams. In Verhaeren, now, there is the
+rhythm of a man hurrying, rushing, running; of a restless, passionate
+man; the rhythm of the modern, of the Americanised man. It is often
+irregular; you hear in it the panting of one who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> is hunted, who is
+hurrying to his goal; you hear his impact with the obstacles he stumbles
+against, the sudden standstill of intemperate effort exhausted. But with
+him the rhythmic energy is never intellectual, never verbal, never
+musical; it is purely emotional, physical. Not only the end of the nerve
+vibrates and sounds; not only does the language shake the air; but out
+of the whole organism, as though all the nerve-strings had suddenly
+begun to sound the alarm, burst the terror and the ecstasy of fever. His
+poem is never a state of repose&mdash;no more than the multitude is ever
+quite repose&mdash;it is in a true sense rhythm, passion set in motion. You
+feel the excitement of the man in it, motion, the covering of a
+distance, activity; never contemplation comfortably resting, or dream
+girt with sleep. And as a matter of fact, it is from motion in the
+physical sense that nearly all his poems have arisen: Verhaeren has
+never composed poetry at his writing-table, but while wandering over the
+fields with a rhythmically moved body whose accelerated pace pulses to
+the very heart of the poem, or while rushing along through the din and
+bustle of streets in great cities. In these poems is that quicker
+rolling of the blood that comes from exercise, that jerk of unrest and
+passion tearing themselves away from repose. You feel that in this man
+feeling is too strong, that he would fain free himself from it, run away
+from it in his own body. The feeling is so strong that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> it turns to
+pain, or rather pressure, and the poem is nothing else than the erection
+that precedes relief, the throes that bring forth out of pregnancy. Just
+as the multitude in revolt bursts the bonds of its excitement and
+launches of a sudden all the passion dammed back for centuries, so
+springs from the poet like a geyser the passionate assault of words
+bursting from too long silence. These cries are a physical relief. These
+'élans captifs dans le muscle et la chair '<a name="FNanchor_1_72" id="FNanchor_1_72"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_72" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> are the relief of a
+convulsion, the easy breathing after oppression. As a passionate man is
+forced to relieve himself by gestures, or in a fit of rage, or in cries,
+or in weeping, or in some other state opposed to rest, the poet
+discharges his feeling in rhythmic words: 'L'homme à vous prononcer
+respirait plus à l'aise'<a name="FNanchor_2_73" id="FNanchor_2_73"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_73" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> he has said of the man who was the first to
+force the excess of his feeling into speech.</p>
+
+<p><i>It is, then, a force positively physical which produces Verhaeren's
+rhythm.</i> It is difficult to prove such an assertion, for the state of
+creation is unconscious and unapproachable, although it may intuitively
+be detected in those moments of recreation, in that second of a new
+birth when a poet recites his work, when he feels, as it were, the
+pressure of the feeling weighing upon him artificially in recollection,
+when by the force of his imagination he relieves himself again as at the
+birth of the poem. And any one who has once heard Verhaeren reciting
+poetry will know how<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> much with him the rhythm of body and poem is one
+and indivisible, how the excitement that becomes rhythmical in the
+vibrating word is at the same time converted into the identical gesture.
+The calm eyes grow keen, they seem to pierce the near paper; the arm is
+raised commandingly, and every finger of the hand is stretched out to
+mark the cæsura as though with an electric shock; to hammer the verses;
+and with the voice to eject the hurrying and almost screaming words into
+the room. In his movements there is then that terrific effort of one who
+would fain tear himself away from himself, that sublimest gesture of the
+poet striving away from the earth, striving away from himself, from the
+heavy gait of words to winged passion. Man coalesces with Nature in one
+second of the most wonderful identity:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Les os, le sang, les nerfs font alliance</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Avec on ne sait quoi de frémissant</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dans l'air et dans le vent;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">On s'éprouve léger et clair dans l'espace,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">On est heureux à crier grâce,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Les faits, les principes, les lois, on comprend tout;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Le cœur tremble d'amour et l'esprit semble fou</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">De l'ivresse de ses idées.<a name="FNanchor_3_74" id="FNanchor_3_74"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_74" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Every time that Verhaeren reads his poetry, this re-birth of the first
+creative state is renewed. <i>It is in the first place a deliverance from
+pain, and in the second place it is pleasure</i>. Again and again<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> the word
+darts along like a beast let loose; in the wildest rhythm; in a rhythm
+that begins slowly, cautiously; quickens; then grows wilder and wilder;
+grows to an intoxicating monotony, an ever-increasing speed, a rattling
+din that reminds one of an express whizzing along at full speed. Like a
+locomotive&mdash;for in Verhaeren's case one has to think in images of this
+kind, and not in outworn tropes as of Pegasus&mdash;the poem rushes on,
+driven only by a measure which reminds one of the short explosions of an
+automobile. And as a matter of fact the scansion of the locomotive, its
+restless rattling, has often been the cause of the rhythmic velocity of
+his verses. Verhaeren himself is fond of relating that he has often, and
+with delight, written poems on railway journeys, and that the cadence of
+his verse has then been fired by the regular rattle of the train. He
+describes wonderfully the rapture of the speed poured into his blood by
+the whizzing past of trains. The whistling of the wind in moaning trees,
+the dashing of the foaming sea along the shore, the echo a thousand
+times repeated of thunder in the mountains, all these strong sounds have
+become rhythm in his poems; all noisy things, all violent, swift
+emotions have made it brusque, angry, and excited:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Oh! les rythmes fougueux de la nature entière</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et les sentir et les darder à travers soi!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vivre les mouvements répandus dans les bois,</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Le sol, les vents, la mer et les tonnerres;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vouloir qu'en son cerveau tressaille l'univers;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et pour en condenser les frissons clairs</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">En ardentes images,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Aimer, aimer, surtout la foudre et les éclairs</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dont les dévorateurs de l'espace et de l'air</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Incendient leur passage!<a name="FNanchor_4_75" id="FNanchor_4_75"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_75" class="fnanchor">[4]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>But this is the new thing in Verhaeren, that he has transformed into
+rhythm not only the voice of Nature, but also the new noises, the
+grumbling of the multitude, the raging of cities, the rumbling of
+workshops. Often in his rhythm can be heard the beat of hammers; the
+hard, edged, regular whizzing of wheels; the whirring of looms; the
+hissing of locomotives; often the wild, restless tumult of streets; the
+humming and rumbling of dense masses of the people. Poets before him
+imitated in the harmony of their verse the monotony of sources and the
+babbling of water over pebbles, or the soughing voice of the wind. But
+he makes the voice of the new things speak; makes the rhythm of the
+city, this rhythm of fever and of unrest, this nervous moving of the
+crowd, this unquiet billowing of a new ocean, flow over into his new
+poem. Hence this up and down in his verses; this suddenness and
+unexpectedness; this incalculable element. <i>The new, the industrial
+noises have here become the music of poetry</i>. Since he does not seek to
+express his own individual sensation of life, but would himself only be
+a voice for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> the multitude, the rhythm is more roaring and restless than
+that of any individual being. Like the first poets, those of old time,
+before whom there were no outworn and exhausted words; like the poets
+whose feeling burst into flame at every word, every cry; who discovered
+themselves 'en exaltant la souffrance, le mal, le plaisir, le bien';
+like them when they</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">... confrontaient à chaque instant</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Leur âme étonnée et profonde</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Avec le monde,<a name="FNanchor_5_76" id="FNanchor_5_76"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_76" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>poets who would be modern must compare their own soul with that of their
+time, must always regulate their rhythm according to the mutation of
+their time. Their deepest yearning must be to find not only their own
+personal expression, but over and above it the poetic and musical
+representation of the highest identity between themselves and their
+time. For poets are the inheritors of a great patrimony:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">... En eux seuls survit, ample, intacte et profonde,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'ardeur</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dont s'enivrait, devant la terre et sa splendeur,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'homme naïf et clair aux premiers temps du monde;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">C'est que le rythme universel traverse encor</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Comme aux temps primitifs leur corps.<a name="FNanchor_6_77" id="FNanchor_6_77"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_77" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>They must, in these days, only express themselves when they have first
+adapted the rhythm of their own feeling to that of the universe, to the
+rhythm of the cities they live in, to the rhythm<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> of the multitude from
+which they have grown, to the rhythm of temporal as of eternal things.
+They must, like a vein in the heart of the world, reproduce every beat
+of the great hammer, every excitement, quickening of pace and
+obstruction of the feeling rolled round in the whole organism; they must
+learn from life the rhythm which shall again achieve the great harmony
+that was lost between the world and the work of art.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_72" id="Footnote_1_72"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_72"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'Le Verbe' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_73" id="Footnote_2_73"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_73"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i> (<i>Ibid.</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_74" id="Footnote_3_74"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_74"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 'Les Heures où l'on crée' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_75" id="Footnote_4_75"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_75"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> 'L'En-Avant' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_76" id="Footnote_5_76"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_76"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> 'Le Verbe' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_77" id="Footnote_6_77"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_77"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i> (<i>Ibid.</i>).<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_NEW_PATHOS" id="THE_NEW_PATHOS"></a>THE NEW PATHOS</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Lassé des mots, lassé des livres.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">.&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Je cherche, en ma fierté,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'acte qui sauve et qui délivre.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">É.V., 'L'Action.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The primitive poem, that which came into being long before writing or
+print, was nothing but a modulated cry that was hardly language, a cry
+won from joy or pain, mourning or despair, recollection or passionate
+entreaty, but always from fulness of feeling. It was pathetic, because
+it was produced by passion; pathetic, because its intention was to
+produce passion. The poem of those great and distant men who were the
+first to find word and speech in the darted cry of feeling, was an
+invocation of the crowd; an exhortation; a fiery incitement; an ecstasy;
+a direct electric discharge of feeling to feeling. The poet spoke to the
+others, an individual to a circle. The auditors stood before him in
+expectation&mdash;somewhat as Max Klinger in his new picture has gathered
+them together in front of blind Homer&mdash;they waited, watched, listened,
+surrendered themselves, let themselves be carried away; or they
+resisted. That poem and the delivery of it were not something finished
+and presented for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> approval; no vessel or ornament already hammered into
+shape and perfectly chiselled; they were something in the process of
+creation, something newly growing at that moment, a struggle with the
+hearer, a wrestling with him for his passion.</p>
+
+<p>Poets lost this close, glowing contact with the masses when writing was
+invented. What the dissemination of the written word, and still more, in
+after days, the infinite multiplication of printing, dowered them with;
+all the new influence over spaces hitherto closed; the fact that their
+words were henceforth alive in countries which they had never visited;
+that men drew strength and inspiration and vital courage from their
+words long after their own bodies had fallen into dust&mdash;this vast and
+mighty effect had only been obtained by relinquishing that other and
+perhaps not lesser effect&mdash;dialogue, that standing face to face with the
+multitude. By slow degrees poets became something imaginary to the
+public. When they spoke, they really only listened to themselves; more
+and more their poem became a lonely colloquy with themselves; the
+harangue became a monologue, more and more lyrical in a new sense and
+less and less moving. More and more their poem travelled away from
+speech; more and more it lost that mysterious, passionate fire that is
+only fed by the moment, by standing face to face with an excited crowd,
+by the magical influx of tension and stimulation out of the heart of
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> hearer into the poet's own words. For, with his expectation, with
+his eager eyes, his excitement, and his intractable impatience, every
+listener does something for the speaker: he goads him; he forces
+something of his expectant restlessness into the response that has not
+yet been made. But the moment the poet no longer spoke to the crowd, no
+longer to a circle, but fashioned his words for print and writing, a new
+and peculiar sensation was developed in him. He accustomed himself to
+speaking only for himself; to conceiving his own feeling as important,
+irrespective of effect and force; to holding a conversation with none
+but himself and silence. And his poem changed more and more. Now that
+the poet no longer had the panting roar of the response, the cry of
+passion, the exultation of enthusiasm, as the finale of his poetry&mdash;the
+last accord, as it were, belonging to his own music&mdash;he sought to
+complete the harmony in the verse by means of itself. He rounded his
+poem with an artist's care, as though it were an earthenware vessel;
+illumined it with colours like a picture; rilled it with music; more and
+more he relinquished the idea of persuading, of convincing,.of
+inspiring. He was content that the poem should have no feeling for other
+men, and gave it only the life and the mood of his own world. In that
+period of transition, we may suppose, 'poetic' diction first came into
+being, that language by the side of the living language which petrified<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>
+more and more as time went on into a dialect hostile to the world, into
+bloodless marble. Of old, the poetic language was not one that existed
+side by side with the real language; it was only the last
+intensification of the real language. By the rhythm of higher passion,
+by the fire of harangue, it became a sacred fire, a blest intoxication,
+a festivity in the work-a-day world. Thus, as intensified vitality,
+language could be different without ever being unintelligible, could
+remain with and yet above the people, while the lyric poetry of to-day
+has become, for the most part, strange and worthless to active men who
+live in the midst of realities, to the artisan and the toiler.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless in our own days there seem to be signs of a return to this
+primitive close contact between the poet and his audience; a new pathos
+is at its birth. The stage was the first bridge between the poet and the
+multitude. But here the actor was still the intermediary of the spoken
+word; the purely lyrical emotion was not an aim in itself, but only, for
+three or four hours, a help in the illusion. However, the time of the
+isolation of the poet from the crowd, which was formerly rendered
+necessary by the great distances between nation and nation, seems now to
+have been overcome by the shortening of space and by the
+industrialisation of cities. To-day poets once again recite their verse
+in lecture-halls, in the popular universities of America; nay, in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>
+churches Walt Whitman's lines ring out into the American consciousness,
+and what used to be created only by the seething seconds of political
+crises&mdash;one might instance Petöfi declaiming his national anthem 'Talpra
+Magyar' from the steps of the university to the revolutionary
+crowd&mdash;occurs almost every day. Now again as of old the lyric poet seems
+entitled to be, if not the intellectual leader of the time, at least he
+who must excite and quell the passions of the time; the rhapsodist who
+hails, kindles, and fans that holy fire, energy. The world seems to be
+waiting for Him who shall concentrate all life in a flash of lightning
+to light up all the deeps of darkness:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il monte&mdash;et l'on croirait que le monde l'attend,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Si large est la clameur des cœurs battant</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">À l'unisson de ses paroles souveraines.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il est effroi, danger, affre, fureur et haine;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il est ordre, silence, amour et volonté;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il scelle en lui toutes les violences lyriques.<a name="FNanchor_1_78" id="FNanchor_1_78"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_78" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Certainly the poem which would speak to the multitude must be different
+to the kind of poem that pleased our fathers. Above all, it must itself
+be a will, an aim, an energy, an evocation. All the technical
+excellence, the sweet music, the craft of vibrating rhythms, suppleness
+and flexibility of language, must, in the new poem, no longer be an aim
+in themselves, but only a means to kindle enthusiasm. Such a poem must
+no longer be a sentimental dialogue between a hermit and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> some other
+hermit, a stranger somewhere far away; it must no longer be the short,
+hurriedly trembling voice which is silenced ere the word's flame has
+blazed up in it; no, this new poem must be strongly exulting, richly
+inspired, with a far horizon for its goal, and rushing on with
+irresistible impetuosity. It is not written for gentle moods, but for
+loud, resonant words. He who would quell the crowd must have the rhythm
+of their own new and restless life in him; he who speaks to the crowd
+must be inspired by the new pathos. And this new pathos, this 'pathos
+which most of all accepts the world as it is' (in Nietzsche's sense),
+is, above all, zest, is the strength and the will to create ecstasy.
+This poem must not be sensitive and woebegone; it must not express a
+personal grief that seeks to enlist the sympathies of others; no, it
+must be inspired by a fulness of joy, by the will to create from joy
+itself passion that cannot be held down. Only great feelings bear the
+message to the crowd; small feelings, which can only in silence, as in
+motionless air, rise above the ground, are dashed down again. <i>The new
+pathos must contain the will, not to set souls in vibration, not to
+provide a delicate, æsthetic sense of pleasure, but to fire to a deed.</i>
+It must carry the hearer along with it; it must once again collect in
+itself the scattered forces of the poet of old time; it must in the poet
+recreate, for an hour, the demagogue, the musician, the actor, the
+orator; it must snatch the word<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> again off the paper into the air; it
+must carefully entrust feeling as a secret treasure to the individual;
+it must hurl this treasure into the surf of a multitude. Poems with such
+a new pathos cannot be created by feeble, passive men, whose mood can be
+changed at any minute by the world around them, but only by fighting
+natures, who are governed by an idea, by the thought of a duty; who seek
+to force their feeling on others; who elevate their inspiration to the
+inspiration of the whole world.</p>
+
+<p>This new lyric pathos is in our days growing lustily into life again.
+For centuries rhetoricians have been mocked at. The change of estimation
+in Schiller's case from worship to sufferance is a lasting proof. And
+let us remember that Nietzsche, the only German who in recent years has
+influenced the world, was only able to do so by creating a new
+rhetorical style&mdash;'I am the inventor of the dithyramb'&mdash;only by making
+his <i>Zarathustra</i> a preacher's book which insistently requires a loud,
+resonant voice. In France it was Victor Hugo who first recognised the
+necessity of direct address. But he, who, as it happens, stands on that
+narrowest boundary-line which separates genius from talent, he of whom
+one can say that he was either the least of the eternal, monumental
+poets or the greatest of the minor, the derivative poets, he confined
+himself to France, he never thought of any but the French nation&mdash;as
+Walt Whitman never thought of any<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> but the American nation&mdash;and, above
+all, he had not the high place whence to speak to his nation. He would
+have been greater if he had really had the tribune whence his thunder
+and lightning might have reached the multitude, instead of being always
+only a sinister grumbling from the background of exile. Of all the
+hundred volumes of his work perhaps nothing will remain except that
+commanding gesture of an orator which Rodin has perpetuated in his
+statue, and which is nothing else than the will to move to passion. He
+has created this will to pathos, but not the pathos itself; still, even
+the effort is a great and memorable achievement.</p>
+
+<p>Victor Hugo's inheritance, which was ill administered by chatterers and
+chauvinists, by Déroulède and such poets with their big drums and their
+trumpet-flourishes, has been taken over in France by Verhaeren. And he
+is the first whose voice again reaches the crowd, the first French
+realisation of a pathos which has absolutely the effect of art and
+poetry. He more than any other, he whose deepest delight it is to quell
+a grandiose resistance, he the <i>évocateur prodigieux</i>, as Bersaucourt<a name="FNanchor_2_79" id="FNanchor_2_79"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_79" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>
+has called him, was entitled to the mastery of the living word. Whenever
+I read a poem by Verhaeren, I am time after time astonished to find
+myself, when I have begun by reading it to myself, suddenly forced to
+read the words aloud; surprised to find myself reading<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> them louder and
+louder; surprised to find in my hand, in my whole body, the urgent need
+awakening of the gesture that hails and kindles an audience. For so
+strong is the passionateness of the original feeling, the inner cry and
+appeal in the words, that it forces its way through the reproduction,
+rings out loudly even from the dead letters. <i>All the great poems of
+Verhaeren are filled with the yearning to be spoken aloud, vehemently,
+in the zest and glow of passion</i>. If they are recited softly, they seem
+to be quite without melody; if they are read calmly and stolidly, they
+often seem hard, uneven, and abrupt. Many images recur with a certain
+regularity, many adjectives are repeated as petrified ideas&mdash;the trick
+of an orator who emphasises what is important by standing
+expressions&mdash;but the moment the poem is read aloud it is all alive
+again, the repetitions are suddenly revealed as superb instances of
+excitement reaching its mark, the recurring images take their place as
+regular milestones along a road rushing along wildly to the infinite.
+Verhaeren's poetry is the communication of an ecstasy, communication not
+in the sense of a secret to an individual, but of fire cast to kindle a
+crowd. His poems never seem to be quite completed, but to have been
+first created while being read, just as every good and fiery speech
+gives the impression of being improvised; they are always the unfolding
+of a state, a passionate analysis that acts like a discovery.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> They are
+moving, not harmonious. Just as an orator does not shock his audience at
+the very first with the conclusion of his reasoning, but pays out the
+chain of his arguments slowly and logically, Verhaeren builds his poems
+from visions, first in repose, then in the excitement that intensifies,
+and then with burning horizons foaming over more and more wildly in
+images. And these images again are rhetorical; they are not similes
+which can only be understood in their totality by the roundabout way of
+reflection; they are glaring flashes of lightning. A poem that would
+move those who hear it has need of metaphors which not only hit the mark
+of feeling, but which hit it immediately with deadly effect. They must
+be glaring, because they have to force the whole feeling in the
+expression of one second as quick as lightning. In this way the pathetic
+poem produces a new form of sensuous expression, and in this way too it
+creates itself a new rhythm of intensification. First of all, with the
+lightnings of his metaphors Verhaeren illuminates the vast landscape of
+visions; then, by a certain monotony of rhythm, he intensifies the
+astonishment and excitement to the highest ecstasy. Repeatedly, at the
+breathing-spaces of his great poems, you think you have reached the
+summit, only to be whipped to a higher leap, to a higher outlook. 'Il
+faut en tes élans te dépasser sans cesse';<a name="FNanchor_3_80" id="FNanchor_3_80"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_80" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> this, his moral
+commandment,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> is for him the highest poetical law as well. The deepest
+will of his pathetic poem is to whip up, to set running, to snatch his
+hearer along with him. 'Dites!' this summons which is like a gesture,
+the urgent 'encore, encore!' are appeals which in his poems are
+petrified into cries, just as every horseman has certain words to lure
+the last strength from his horse. <i>Such words are nothing but transposed
+oratorical gestures</i>. The hollow 'oh!' is the gesture of appeal; the
+short 'qu'importe!' the gesture as of one who casts away a burden grown
+too heavy; the slow, curving, far-sweeping 'immensément' is the heaping
+up of all infinity. These poems are lashed into fever heat. For not only
+do they themselves seek to fly like those other, the harmonious, the
+really lyric poems, which with wings outspread seem to hover near the
+clouds, they also seek to snatch up by force the whole heavy mass of the
+audience. This is the explanation of the constant repetitions in the
+poems, which are often very long, as though some last doubter were yet
+to be convinced, as though fire were to be darted into the blood of some
+last one yet immune. Everything strives forwards, forwards, dragging the
+resister along with ecstatic power.</p>
+
+<p>And here are seen the dangers of pathos. The first danger, that into
+which, for instance, Victor Hugo fell, was the emptiness, the hollowness
+of the feeling, the covering over of a void by a mighty gesture;
+enthusiasm resulting from a deliberate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> method, and not forced by inner
+feeling. Empty phrasing is and remains the first danger of the pathetic
+poem. The triteness of words 'plus sonores que solides'<a name="FNanchor_4_81" id="FNanchor_4_81"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_81" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> is the
+second. Here, however, in this new pathos, there is another and a new
+peril, that of the over-heating of feeling, that of excessive, unhealthy
+exaltation, which must then of necessity yield to exhaustion. No man can
+be in a constant fever of excitement, in an unremitting state of
+exaltation. And in these poems there is the will to unceasing ecstasy.
+By the pathos, too, the purely lyrical values of the poem often fall
+into danger. The will to be clear often forces the poet to a triteness
+of wording; the terseness necessitates frequent repetition; the impulse
+to build up an organic ecstasy often leads to excessive length. Owing to
+its glaring, clear colours the language loses that mystical element of
+lyric verse&mdash;the incommensurable, as Goethe called it&mdash;that magic hint
+of a secret thing fleeing from the crowd and the light of day. But at
+the same time this pathos signifies an immense enrichment of lyric
+resources, a transvaluation of the word, by the very fact that it is not
+exclusively intended for print but for declamation as well. The pathetic
+poem is not, like the lyric poem, a crystallised impression; it is not
+at the same time question and answer to itself; it is the expectation of
+an answer. The great pathos, therefore, grows with success, and
+involuntarily<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> mingles in the poem the craving and the answer of the
+poet's time. The voice of the poet is always as strong as the call that
+goes out to him. Verhaeren found this new pathos in the course of his
+development, because he no longer felt the voice of the crowd, of
+cities, and of all the new things as a hindrance to his lyric poetry,
+but as a challenge, as a rhetorical exhortation. And the more the world
+around us becomes ponderous, grandiose, and passionate&mdash;the more it
+becomes heroic in the concentration of its strength (heroic in that new
+strength that Emerson preached)&mdash;so much the more, too, must lyric
+poetry in the new sense, perhaps in Verhaeren's sense, be pathetic.
+Gigantic impressions cannot be forced into petty impressions; vast
+conceptions cannot be split up into mean fragments; a loud appeal needs
+a loud answer. All art is more dependent than we are aware on its epoch.
+The same secret dependence between demand and production seems to exist
+in the sphere of art as exists in commerce. Laws that escape our
+knowledge and cannot be prisoned in formulae can sometimes be glimpsed,
+hazy as a presentiment, in fugitive intuition.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_78" id="Footnote_1_78"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_78"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'Le Tribun' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_79" id="Footnote_2_79"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_79"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Albert de Bersaucourt, <i>Conférence sur Emile Verhaeren.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_80" id="Footnote_3_80"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_80"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 'L'Impossible' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_81" id="Footnote_4_81"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_81"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Albert Mockel, <i>Émile Verhaeren.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="VERHAERENS_POETIC_METHOD" id="VERHAERENS_POETIC_METHOD"></a>VERHAEREN'S POETIC METHOD</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Je suis celle des surprises fécondes.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 13em;">É.V., 'Celle des Voyages.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p>A real poem must not exhibit an artificial structure of parts, a
+mechanism; it must, like man himself, be organic, an indissoluble union
+of soul and body. It must have a living body of flesh, the substance of
+the word, the colour of the metaphors, the mechanism of the motion, the
+skeleton of the thought; but over and above all that it must possess
+that inexpressible something, the soul, which alone makes it organic;
+the breath, the rhythm, that inseparable essence which is no longer
+perceptible to intelligence, but only to feeling. It is not first in
+this transcendental element, however, that the poet's personality is
+revealed: the poetry of a great poet must be characteristic in its very
+physis, in its very material. Side by side with that magic vibration,
+that intangible element of feeling, the materiality too, the weaving of
+the word, that net of expression in which the fugitive feeling is caught
+in the waters of the hidden life and lifted into the light, these too
+must be alone of their kind if they are to characterise the poet's race,
+environment, and personality. This purely material organism of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> the poet
+too is, like every living thing, subject to growth, to the change of
+maturity and age. The structure of the poem, like every human face, must
+gradually, in the revolution of the years, work its way to character
+from the shifting features of childhood and the indistinctness of the
+general type, must in its sensuous externals, in the physiognomy of the
+material, show all psychic changes to the last acquisition of
+personality. In a real poet the technical aspect, the handicraft, the
+external element has a development that runs parallel to the
+intellectual and poetic contents. In form, too, the poem must at first
+represent a tradition, something that has been taken over; only in the
+revolt of youth will it achieve a personal form, and this itself will
+later, as it gradually grows cold and petrifies, represent an immutable
+type.</p>
+
+<p>Verhaeren's poetry has its evolution and its history in this purely
+formal sense. Even this poetry of Verhaeren's, which to-day looms so
+immensely isolated and so victoriously characteristic in French
+literature that a connoisseur can, without a shadow of doubt, recognise
+the creator from a single stanza, has grown from a tradition, is the
+climax of a certain culture, and is at the same time related to a
+contemporary movement. When Verhaeren began to write, Victor Hugo, the
+crowned king of French lyric poetry, was dead; Baudelaire was forgotten;
+Paul Verlaine was still almost unknown. Victor<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> Hugo's heirs, who
+divided his kingdom as once the diadochi divided the kingdom of
+Alexander the Great, were only able to preserve the trappings of the
+glory gone, and the grandiloquence of their words contrasted ill with
+their thin voices and artificial feelings. Against this circle, against
+François Coppée, Catulle Mendès, Théodore de Banville and the rest of
+them, rose up a new school of young men who called themselves 'decadents
+and symbolists.' Here I must frankly admit that I am really unable to
+explain this idea, perhaps for the very reason that I have read so many
+varying definitions of it. The only thing that is certain is, that at
+that time a group of young writers rose up in concert against a
+tradition, and, in the most diverse experiments, sought a new lyrical
+expression. What this new thing consisted in would be hard to say. The
+truth is perhaps that all these poets were not French; that each of them
+brought some new element from his own country, his own race, his own
+past; that none of them felt that respect for the French tradition which
+was in the blood of the native poets as an inward barrier, and thus were
+able unconsciously to get nearer to their own artistic instinct. One
+only needs to look at the names, which often at the first glance betray
+the foreigner, the Americans Vielé-Griffin and Stuart Merrill, the
+Belgians Verhaeren, Maeterlinck, and Mockel, or which, as in the case of
+Jean Moréas, cover a complicated Greek name with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> a French pseudonym.
+The only indisputable exploit of this group really was that about 1885
+they quickened the pace of French lyric poetry with a new unrest.
+Mallarmé plunged his verses into a secret darkness of symbols, until the
+words with their subterranean meaning almost became unintelligible,
+while Verlaine gave his lines the dream-rapt lightsomeness of a music
+never heard before. Gustave Kalm and Jules Laforgue were the first who
+did away, the one with rhyme and the other with the Alexandrine, and
+introduced the apparent irregularities of the <i>vers libre.</i> Each one did
+his best on his own account to find something new, and all of them had
+in common the same fiery eagerness to attack the idols of a derivative
+poetry, the same ardent longing for a new form of expression. True,
+their talent was soon choked up with sand, but that was because they
+over-estimated the technical side of the innovations they introduced and
+spent themselves in the investigation of theories, instead of developing
+their own personalities. As time went on their paths diverged widely.
+Many of them foundered in the sea of journalism; others are still, after
+a lapse of twenty years, walking round in a circle in the footsteps of
+their youth; and of the symbolists and decadents nothing is left but a
+page or so of literary history, a faded sign-board marking an empty
+shop. Verhaeren too was classed with them, although in my view he was
+never essentially influenced by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> this school. A man of such sturdy
+originality could not be more than stimulated by others, could not be
+more than confirmed in his natural tendency to revolt. His attitude with
+regard to the <i>vers libre</i> was by no means due to this influence. For it
+was not by suggestion from others, not by the instinct of imitation, but
+by inward necessity, that he discovered his new form. It was not the
+example of others that freed him from the fetters of tradition; he was
+forced to free himself from them of his own accord. This inner
+compulsion is alone of importance; for it is a matter of complete
+indifference whether a poet writes by chance in regular verse or in
+<i>vers libres</i>; the phenomenon can only be significant when a poet is of
+necessity and by inner pressure forced to free himself from tradition
+and to achieve a personal form.</p>
+
+<p>It was as a Parnassian that Verhaeren began. His first poetical
+attempts, which he has never published, the verses he wrote at school
+and in his first years at the university, showed him hypnotised by the
+style of Lamartine and Victor Hugo. And even in the first two books he
+published, in <i>Les Flamandes</i> and <i>Les Moines</i>, there is not a single
+poem in which Verhaeren has gone beyond his models. His poem is indeed
+somewhat more mobile than the strict pattern of school exercises; it
+already shows slight traces of the cracks which at a later day will
+break the vessel to pieces. But this hint of insubordination<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> was at
+that time necessitated more by the harshness and rebelliousness of the
+subject itself, by some stiffness or other in the turn of the phrase,
+which can only be explained by the fact of the poet's alien race. Even a
+foreigner can recognise that the verse is not rounded off, that the
+rhythm is not balanced with the natural inevitable sense of form that a
+man of Latin race would have, but that here a forceful will is with
+difficulty constraining a barbaric temperament to harmony. Through his
+French one can hear the massive language of his race, something of the
+unwieldy strength we have in our old German ballads. And what his name
+at the first glance betrayed&mdash;the foreigner&mdash;was to the finer ear of a
+native easily perceptible from his French alone.</p>
+
+<p>The farther Verhaeren proceeded in his development&mdash;the nearer he got to
+his real nature&mdash;the more the inheritance of his race in him revolted
+against the shackles of tradition&mdash;so much the more intensive became the
+impression of the Teutonic element in his verse. After all, development
+is in most cases nothing more than the awakening in us of our buried
+past. The highest demand of the Parnassian school, <i>impassibilité,</i> an
+immovableness as of bronze, is the antithesis of his stormy temperament,
+which drives him along to a wild rhythm, not to harmony. Deep, guttural
+notes vibrate in his verses, and make the song of his vowels rough; the
+angularity, the masculinity, abruptness, and hardness<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> of his peasant's
+nature peer through everywhere. In addition to this, there is now the
+inner transformation. So long as Verhaeren's poetic tendency was merely
+pictorial, one that calmly and without excitement aimed at painting the
+passion of the Flemish people, the earnestness of monasteries, just so
+long did the Alexandrine best serve to divide the rhythmic waves of his
+inspiration and roll them along. But when his personal sympathy began to
+confuse the inner indifference of his first work, his verse became
+uneasy. The cracks in the Alexandrine became more and more perceptible;
+greater and greater in the poet grew his impatience of it and his desire
+to smash it. He is no longer satisfied with the <i>vers ternaire</i>, the
+verse of the Romanticists with its two cæsuras dividing the line into
+three parts of perfectly equal rhythm and weight; he takes the free
+Alexandrine introduced by Victor Hugo and develops it still further,
+makes it still more irregular. He gives the syllables a different
+quantity, a different sonority; they no longer rest, they rock to and
+fro. And gradually the earnest, immovable uniformity of accentuation is
+changed into a more billowing, rhythmic fluidity. But ere long this
+concession too becomes too trivial for him. A temperament so impetuous
+as his will endure no outward fetter whatever. For it is not repose that
+this fiery singer would describe, but his own excited state&mdash;the
+quivering and vibrating of his emotion, his febrile<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> unrest. His great
+manifold feeling, which is nothing else than a modulated cry, cannot
+storm itself out in regular verse; it needs unquiet gestures, motion,
+freedom, the <i>vers libre</i>. The fact that at this time other poets in
+France were using the free verse, the fact that it was at that
+time&mdash;several dispute the priority&mdash;'invented' for poets, is of no
+consequence to us here. Such contemporaneous incidences never express a
+chance, but always a latent necessity. Free verse was nothing else than
+the inevitable reflex action of modern feeling, the poetic breaking free
+of the unrest which lay in the time. Whether or not Verhaeren at that
+time had models is of no importance. What has been taken over can never
+become organic, only what comes from personal experience is a real gain.
+And at that time it lay quite in the line of his development that by
+inner necessity he was forced to break his old instrument and create
+himself a new one. For the nervous unrest, the passionate agitation of
+Verhaeren's later poems is unthinkable in regular verse. If verse is to
+describe in its own inner passion the immense multiplicity of modern
+impressions&mdash;their haste, their fire, their precipitous revulsion, their
+unexpectedness, their gloomy melancholy, and the overwhelming vastness
+of their dimensions&mdash;it must be strong and yet flexible, like a rapier.
+Such poems must be emancipated from rules: they must stride along like a
+real crowd, noisily seething; they must<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> not walk in step, like soldiers
+on the march. And if they are to be spoken, they must not be recited in
+the stiff, cold, pathetically vibrating, self-conscious declamation of
+the Comédie Française; they must be spoken as though to a crowd; they
+must cry out, they must hail; and this-whipping up of an audience cannot
+be harmonious. These poems must be spontaneous and impulsive.</p>
+
+<p>Manifold is the diversity which Verhaeren's poetry has achieved by its
+deliverance from the monotony of the Alexandrine. Now and now only can
+the verse reproduce the plastic side of an impression and the inward
+agitation of it; not only by a pictorial description, but in a purely
+external manner too; by the sound, by the music of the rhythm. The
+lines, sometimes darting far beyond the margin, sometimes, like an
+arrow, sharpened to a single word, have the whole key-board of feeling.
+They can pace with a grave step like long black funeral processions, if
+haply they would express the monotony of solitude, 'Mes jours toujours
+plus lourds s'en vont roulant leur cours';<a name="FNanchor_1_82" id="FNanchor_1_82"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_82" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> they can dart up like a
+falcon, white and glittering, soaring to the exulting cry 'la joie,'
+swift and as high as heaven over all the sad heaviness of earth. All the
+voices of day and night can now be represented onomato-poetically: all
+that is brusque and sudden by brevity; all that is ponderous and
+grandiose by a vast sweep of fulness; an unexpected thing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> by sudden
+harshness; haste in a feverishly accelerated movement; savagery by a
+precipitous change of velocity. Every line can now express the feeling
+by its rhythm alone. And one might without knowing French recognise the
+poetical intention of many of these poems merely by listening to their
+consonantal music, nay, often by looking at their typographical
+arrangement.</p>
+
+<p>For this reason I should be tempted to call these poems with their vast
+range <i>symphonic</i> poems. They seem to have been conceived for an
+orchestra. They are not, like the poetry of a past generation, chamber
+music; they are not solitary violin <i>soli</i>; they are an inspired
+blending of all instruments; they are graded in individual sections
+which have a different <i>tempo</i> and the pauses of the transitions. In
+Verhaeren's poetry the lyric exceeds the bounds of its domain and
+impinges on the dramatic and the epic. For his poem seeks not only to
+describe a mood, like a purely lyrical poem, it describes at the same
+time the birth of this mood. And this first part of the construction is
+epic; it is descriptive; it leads up from a lowly beginning to a great
+discharge of force. And, in the second place, the transitions are
+dramatic, those bursts of temperament from section to section, those
+precipitous falls and steep ascents which only at the end lead to a
+harmonious solution. From a purely external point of view Verhaeren's
+poem is more extensive, longer, of a greater range than any other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>
+contemporary poetry; it shoots out farther beyond the limit of lyric
+poetry; and, careless of the boundary-line of æsthetics, it derives
+strength and nourishment from neighbouring domains. It comes nearer to
+rhetoric, nearer to epic poetry, nearer to the drama, nearer to
+philosophy than any other poetry of our day; it is more independent of
+set rules than poetry had been hitherto. And independent of rules&mdash;or
+obeying only a new inner rule&mdash;is Verhaeren's form. Now, since the page
+no longer holds the fettered lines together in equal columns, the poet
+can write out his wild, overflowing feelings in their own wild, boldly
+curving lines. Verhaeren's poem at this time&mdash;and that which is achieved
+in the years of maturity remains inalienable&mdash;has its own inner
+architectonics. But it can hardly be compared to a piece of
+architecture, a structure built with hands; it is rather like a
+manifestation of nature. It is elementary like every feeling; it
+discharges itself like a storm. First a vision moves up like a cloud;
+more and more densely it compresses itself; more and more sultrily, more
+and more oppressively it weighs on the feeling; higher and higher,
+hotter and hotter grows the inner tension, until at last in the
+lightning of the images, in the rolling of the rhythm, all the garnered
+strength discharges itself rhythmically. The andante always grows to a
+furioso; and only the last section shows again the clear, cleansed sky
+of calm, in an intellectual synthesis of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> the state of chaos. This
+structure of Verhaeren's poem is almost invariable. It may be seen, for
+instance, in two parallel examples: in the poems 'La Foule' and 'Vers la
+Mer' in the book <i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>. Both set in with an
+adjuration, a vision. Here the crowd, its confusion, its strength; there
+a sensitive picture of the morning sea whose transparent tones remind
+one of Turner. Now the poet fires this still vision with his own
+passionateness. You see the crowd moving more and more restlessly, the
+waves surging more and more passionately; and ecstasy breaks out the
+moment the poet surrenders himself to these things, places himself among
+the crowd, sinks his feeling, his body in the sea. Then in the finale
+bursts forth the great cry of identity, in the one case the yearning to
+be all the crowd, in both that ecstatic gesture of the individual
+yearning for infinity. The first picture, which was only sensuously
+seen, grows at the end of the poem into a great ethic inspiration; from
+the vision is unfolded an unconquerable moral and metaphysical need.
+This form of intensification from individual feeling to universal
+feeling is the basic form of Verhaeren's poem. It might be best, in
+order to convey a clear idea of its form, to use a geometrical term and
+say that these poems are, to a certain extent, <i>poems in the form of a
+parabola.</i> While the lyric in the current sense mostly represents a
+symmetrical and harmonious form, a return to itself, a circle,
+Verhaeren's poem has the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> form of a parabola, apparently irregular but
+really equally governed by a law. His poems soar in a swift sustained
+flight, soar from the earth up into the clouds, from the real to the
+unreal, and then from a sudden zenith fling themselves back to the
+earth. The inspiration drives the feeling away from the pictorial, from
+passionless contemplation to this utmost height of possibility, far away
+from all sensuous perceptions high into the metaphysical, in order then,
+suddenly and unexpectedly, to bring it back to the <i>terra firma</i> of
+reality. And indeed, in the music of these poems there is something as
+of a darting upwards, something of the hissing and whizzing of a stone
+well thrown and of its sudden falling down. In their rhythm too is this
+increasing velocity, this catching of the breath and this return to the
+starting-point, this bethinking itself of gravity when it returns to the
+earth.</p>
+
+<p>Something may now be said as to the means with which Verhaeren attains
+his vision, with which he seeks to represent the inner passionateness of
+things, with which he evokes enthusiasm. Let us first of all try to
+establish whether Verhaeren is what is called a master of language.
+Verhaeren's command of language is not by any means unlimited. Both in
+his words and in his rhymes there is constant repetition which sometimes
+borders on monotony; but on the other hand there is a strangeness, a
+newness, an unexpectedness of wording which is almost unexampled<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> in
+French lyric poetry. An enrichment of the language, however, does not
+proceed from neologisms alone; a word may become alive by the
+unexpectedness of a new application, by a transposition of the meaning,
+as Rainer Maria Rilke, for instance, has often done in the German lyric.
+To redeem 'die armen Worte, die im Alltag darben,'<a name="FNanchor_2_83" id="FNanchor_2_83"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_83" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> and consecrate
+them anew to poetry, is perhaps a higher merit than creating new words.
+Now Verhaeren has above all, by the Flemish sense of language which he
+inherited, imported a certain Belgian timbre into French lyric poetry.
+Personally, it is true, he is almost ignorant of Flemish; nevertheless,
+by the vague music familiar to him from his childhood's days, by a
+certain guttural tone, he has imported a nuance which is perhaps less?
+perceptible to the foreigner than to a Frenchman. At this point I should
+like to call Maurice Gauchez as a witness and borrow the most salient
+examples from his extraordinarily interesting monograph. Among the
+neologisms for which Gauchez suggests a foreign origin he quotes the
+following: les baisers rouges, les plumes majuscules, les malades
+hiératiques, la statue textuelle, les automnes prismatiques, le soir
+tourbillonaire, les solitudes océans, le ciel dédalien, le cœur
+myriadaire de la foule, les automnes apostumes, les vents vermeils, les
+navires cavalcadeurs, les gloires médusaires.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> And he rightly points out
+how much certain of Verhaeren's verbs might enrich the French language:
+enturquoiser, rauquer, vacarmer, béquiller, s'enténébrer, se futiliser,
+se mesquiniser, larmer. But I for my part cannot look upon the
+enrichment here accruing from racial instinct as the essential thing in
+his verbal art: it only gives it a local colour, without really
+explaining what is astonishingly modern in his diction. Verhaeren has
+been a great creator of new things for the French lyric, above all by
+his extension of its range of subjects, by his renewal of poetic
+reality, by recruiting new forces for poetry in the domain of technical
+science. <i>The great part of the new blood for his language came not so
+much from Flemish as from science</i>. A man who writes poems on the
+Exchange, on the theatre, on science, who sings factories and railway
+stations, cannot ignore their terminology. He must borrow certain
+technical expressions from the vocabulary of science, certain
+pathological terms from medicine; he must extend the glossary of the
+poetic by the extension of the poetic itself. There are geographical
+surprises of rhyme to be found in Verhaeren: Berlin and Sakhalin,
+Moscow, the Balearic and other distant islands whose names have never
+previously lived in rhyme. And since science is by its own progress
+compelled to invent new names every day, since new machines demand new
+words for their necessities, here for the first time an inexhaustible<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>
+source has been discovered for replenishing the French language.</p>
+
+<p>This immense wealth, on the other hand, is jeopardised by something that
+might be called not so much poverty or restriction as fascination. Every
+one-sidedness of feeling produces, with its advantages, certain defects,
+and thus the constant passionateness which brought Verhaeren's poetry
+near to oratory, to preaching, is at the same time responsible for a
+certain monotony of the metaphors. Verhaeren is hallucinated by certain
+words, images, adjectives, phrases. He repeats them incessantly through
+all his work. All things in which a many-headed passion is united he
+compares with a 'brasier'; 'carrefour' is his symbol for indecision;
+'l'essor' is for him the last straining of effort; many cries and words
+by which he hails his audience are repeated almost from page to page.
+The adjectives too are often monotonous; often indeed, with the cold
+'iques' at the end of them, they are schematic; and even in the
+metaphors that phenomenon is unmistakable which in science is called
+pseudoanæsthesia, that is, the memory of a fixed feeling from the domain
+of some other sense is always individually associated with a certain
+colour or sound. For him 'red' expresses all that is passionate; 'gold'
+all greatness and pomp; 'white' all that is gentle; 'black' all enmity.
+His images have thus something abrupt and absolute; there is always<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> in
+them, as Albert Mockel has demonstrated in his masterly study, the
+decisive, the sudden excitement, which overwhelms our astonishment. His
+images are as violent as his colours, as his rhythm. They have the
+suddenness of a cannon-ball which darts through space and is only
+perceptible to our vision when it reaches its aim and smashes the
+target. Possibly the inmost reason of this lies in the fact that these
+poems are intended to be spoken. A placard that is to have effect at
+some distance must be in glaring colours; pathos calls for images that
+hallucinate. Such images have indeed been found by Verhaeren, and by
+Verhaeren only. He hardly seems to know nuances. With the brutal
+instinct of a strong man he loves all that is glaring, all that is
+untrammelled. 'La couleur, elle est dans ses Å“uvres une surprise de
+métaux et d'images.'<a name="FNanchor_3_84" id="FNanchor_3_84"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_84" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> But in this material they blaze, and with their
+lightnings they light up even the most distant horizon. I will only
+remind the reader of his 'beffrois immensément vêtus de nuit' or 'la
+façade paraît pleurer des lettres d'or,' or his 'les gestes de lumière
+des phares.' By the intensity of such images Verhaeren attains to quite
+an incomparable clearness of the feeling. 'Personne, je crois, ne
+possède à l'égal de Verhaeren le don des lumières et des ombres, non
+point fondues, mais enchevêtrées, des noirs absolus coupés de blanches
+clartés.'<a name="FNanchor_4_85" id="FNanchor_4_85"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_85" class="fnanchor">[4]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>One-sidedness of temperament here produces a one-sided advantage with
+all its artistic restrictions. So that Verhaeren is not a verbal artist
+in the unrestricted sense of one who always hits upon the only, the
+inevitable comparison for a thing; of one who flashes a bold word on the
+attention once and never retails it till it palls, who seems to use
+every word for the first time. His poetic vocabulary is rich, but by no
+means infinite; his sensibility is strong, but it has its restrictions.
+For, as is the case with every passionate poet, certain feelings at the
+last white-heat of excitement appear to him identical, seem to him to be
+capable of comparison only with the quite elementary things of Nature,
+with fire, the sea, the wind, thunder and lightning. To make the point
+clear, Verhaeren is not a verbal artist in Goethe's sense, but rather in
+Schiller's sense. With the latter, too, he has the gift in common of
+definitely expressing certain perceptions in one lyric line. He has
+discovered essences of the lyric feeling of life, lines that are now
+household words, or which at all events will be so. It will be
+sufficient to mention word formations such as 'les villes
+tentaculaires,' which in France have already become common-places, or
+such maxims as 'La vie est à monter et non à descendre,' or 'Toute la
+vie est dans l'essor.' In lines like these the lyric ecstasy is
+compressed as in a coin, and perpetuated in the current riches of the
+language.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This hardness and brutality, these abrupt transitions, constitute the
+individuality of Verhaeren's poetry. At bottom it is nothing else than
+an accentuated masculinity. The voice, the music, is guttural, deep,
+raucous, masculine; the body of his poem has, like a man's body, the
+beautiful movement of strength, but in repose gestures that are often
+hard and which only in passion regain their compelling beauty. Whereas
+French lyric poetry, so to speak, had imitated the female body, the
+delicate grace of its soft yielding lines; whereas its first concern was
+harmony; Verhaeren's poem strove only for the rhythm of movement, only
+for the proud and vigorously ringing stride of a man, his leaping and
+running, the fighting display of his strength. This is not the only
+reason why the French have so long repudiated him. For where we delight
+in an echo from the German in his language, they feel the harshness of
+the Teutonic undertone; where we find a consonance with the German
+ballad, a re-birth of the German ballad as though it were awakening from
+the dreams of childhood, they see an opposition to the native tradition.
+And in fact, the farther Verhaeren has proceeded in his development,
+both in his personality and in his verse, the more the French varnish
+has peeled off his Teutonic perception. It was only in the time of his
+first dependence on tradition that his poetry was hardly to be
+distinguished from that of other writers in French.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> The farther he
+receded from the French standpoint, the more he unconsciously approached
+German art. To-day, perhaps, a return to classicism is perceptible in
+his poetry. The neologisms are not so audacious; the images are more
+schematic; the whole poem is calmer and more clarified. This, however,
+is by no means a cowardly compromise with a shattered tradition, no
+repentant return to the fold; it is the same phenomenon we meet in a
+similar manner in the late poems of Goethe, Schiller, Hugo, and
+Swinburne; the effect of the cooling of the blood in age; the yielding
+of sensuous perception to intellectual ideas. The victor has lost the
+fighter's brutality; the man in his maturity no longer needs revolt but
+a conception of the world&mdash;harmony. Here, as in Verhaeren's whole
+evolution, his verse is the most delicately sensitive indicator of the
+psychic revulsion, the perfect proof of a poetic and organic development
+which is really inward and dependent only on the laws of his blood.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_82" id="Footnote_1_82"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_82"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'L'Heure Mauvaise' (<i>Au Bord de la Route</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_83" id="Footnote_2_83"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_83"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 'Poor words a-hungered in the working day.'&mdash;Rainer Maria
+Rilke, <i>Mir sur Feier.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_84" id="Footnote_3_84"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_84"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Albert Mockel, <i>Émile Verhaeren</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_85" id="Footnote_4_85"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_85"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i> (<i>Ibid.</i>).<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="VERHAERENS_DRAMA" id="VERHAERENS_DRAMA"></a>VERHAEREN'S DRAMA</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Toute la vie est dans l'essor.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">É.V., <i>Les Forces Tumultueuses.</i></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Émile Verhaeren's dramas seem to stand outside his work. Verhaeren is
+essentially a lyric poet. His whole feeling springs from lyric
+enthusiasm, and all neighbouring domains are merely sources whose
+strength flows into and feeds this one vital instinct. Verhaeren has
+almost always used the dramatic and the epic only as a means, never as
+an end in themselves: from the epic he has taken over into the vast
+sweep of his dithyrambic poems its broad, calm development, and from the
+drama the swift, abrupt contrast of transitions. The dramatic and the
+epic only serve him as a tonic, as a means to strengthen the blood of
+his lyric art. Although Verhaeren beside his lyric work has written
+dramas&mdash;four up to the present&mdash;these, in the edifice of his complete
+production, must be appreciated from a different point of view: from an
+architectural point of view. For the dramas are to him, in a certain
+sense, only a survey, a concentration of individual lyric crises, a
+synopsis of certain ideal complexes which have occupied some moment of
+his past; they are final settlements;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> the last point in lines of
+development; milestones of individual epochs. All that in the lyric
+poems, which never systematically bounded a domain, fell apart, is here
+made to converge to the focus of a programme. The lyric juxtaposition is
+fused into an inner relationship, the circle of ideas is co-ordinated
+like a picture in the frame of a play. Verhaeren's four tragedies
+represent four spheres of a conception of the universe: the religious,
+the social, the national, and the ethical. <i>Le Cloître</i> is a re-creation
+of the book of verse <i>Les Moines</i>, is the tragedy of Catholicism; <i>Les
+Aubes</i> is a condensation of the sociological trilogy <i>Les Villes
+Tentaculaires, Les Campagnes Hallucinées, Les Villages Illusoires.
+Philip II.</i> shapes the tragedy of the Antichrist, the contrast of Spain
+and Belgium, of sensuality and asceticism. And <i>Hélène de Sparte</i>, which
+in its outward form manifests a return to classicism, handles purely
+moral, eternal problems. As far as their contents are concerned,
+Verhaeren's dramas show no deviation, no change of the inner centre of
+gravity, and his new dramatic style is in perfect harmony with his new
+lyric style. For just as on the one hand he has used the dramatic
+element as a substance of his lyric work, here in his dramas he has
+transmuted the lyric element to a dramatic element. Here, too, we have
+nothing but visions intensified into exaltation. Here, as everywhere
+else, Verhaeren can only create by enthusiasm. What goads him on is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> the
+lyric moment in his enthusiasm, that second of the highest tension when
+passion, if it is not to shatter the frame of its generator, must have
+explosive words. The characters of his dramas are never anything but
+symbols of great passions, the bridge for this ascension of the
+exaltation. To him the action is no more than the way to the crises, to
+those seconds when some mighty force seizes on these characters and
+forces them to cry out. Whole scenes seem to be only awaiting for the
+moment when some one shall rise and turn to the crowd, wrestle with it
+and overthrow it, or be himself dashed to pieces.</p>
+
+<p>The style of Verhaeren's dramas is purely lyrical; the pace is
+throughout passionate and feverish; and this method, which runs counter
+to all dramatic canons, was bound organically to create a new technique.
+The French drama had hitherto known only the rhymed Alexandrine or
+prose. In Verhaeren's dramas&mdash;for the first time to my knowledge&mdash;prose
+and verse (verse which is 'free' both as regards rhythm and rhyme) are
+throughout promiscuously mixed. Mixed, but not as in Shakespeare, in
+whose plays verse and prose alternate in individual scenes and
+establish, so to speak, a social stratification, serving-men speaking in
+prose and their masters in verse: in Verhaeren the prose passages are
+the broad, resting foundations of the action; the curved bowls, so to
+speak, from which the holy fire of the exaltation flames. His
+characters<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> express their calm in prose, pass from calm to excitement,
+and in this intensification speak a language which imperceptibly merges
+into a poem. Not till their passion breaks out do they speak in verse,
+in those seconds, as it were, when their soul begins to vibrate; and in
+these passages one cannot help thinking of an aeroplane which is first
+driven along the ground and moves with ever greater speed till suddenly
+it soars aloft. In Verhaeren's drama the characters speak an ever purer
+language the more poetical they become; music breaks with their passion
+from their souls; just as many people who behave coarsely and awkwardly
+in ordinary life, in great moments suddenly achieve a bearing of heroic
+beauty. This embodies the idea that in enthusiasm a man discovers in
+himself another and a purer language; that passion and the yearning to
+free oneself from an immeasurable and intolerable earthly burden make a
+poet of any man. This idea is in harmony with Verhaeren's whole
+conception of the universe, his idea that the man swept away by passion
+and enthusiasm is on a higher plane than the critic with his lack of hot
+feeling; that receptivity for great sensations constitutes, so to speak,
+a scale of moral values. And the stage performances have shown that this
+new style is justified, that the transition from prose to verse,
+occurring as it does contemporaneously with the ascension from calm to
+passion, passes practically unnoticed by the audience,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> which is
+equivalent to saying that when put to the test the method was recognised
+as necessary.</p>
+
+<p>And it is by passion, this innermost flame of Verhaeren's poetry, that
+his dramas live too. Their qualities are those of the lyrics; they have,
+above all, that vast power of vision which sets <i>Philip II</i>. against the
+tragic landscape of Spain; over the drama of Helen arches the heaven of
+Greece, blue, and mild, and open like a flower; and behind the tragedy
+of modern cities unrolls the inflamed scenery of the sky with the black
+arms of chimneys. And then the immense fervour of the ecstasy which, not
+in a slow, regular progression, but in savage, convulsive thrusts,
+whirls the action onward to the moments of the solution.</p>
+
+<p>Thus Verhaeren's first drama derives its strength from the lyric source
+of a man's accusation of himself. <i>Le Cloître</i> is a paraphrase of <i>Les
+Moines</i>, the book of the monks. Here again all the characters are
+gathered together in the cool corridors of a monastery&mdash;the gentle, the
+wild, the feudal, the wrathful, the childlike, the learned monk; here,
+however, they do not act in isolation, but with all their strength the
+one against the other. They fight for the prior's chair, which is really
+the symbol of something higher. For just as in <i>Les Moines</i> every
+individual monk expressed symbolically some virtue of Catholicism and a
+distinct idea of God, here the prior's chair decides the question who is
+the most deserving of God.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> For his successor the old prior has
+designated Balthasar, a nobleman whom the monastery has sheltered for
+years. But he had only taken refuge there because he had killed his own
+father, thus escaping secular justice, and now he feels the
+consciousness of his guilt burning, feels the exasperated struggle
+between his own conscience and the lighter conscience of the others, who
+have long since forgiven him. And he cannot feel himself free before he
+has made his confession before the assembled monks, and even then only
+when he has repeated the confession, against the will of the monastery,
+to the people, and surrendered himself to the secular judges. The Roman
+Catholic idea of confession is here wonderfully in agreement with
+Dostoieffsky's conception of salvation by confession, of deliverance by
+suffering self-imposed. In three climaxes of equal force at the end of
+each of the three acts the tragic confession bursts into flame&mdash;first
+born of fear, then of a sense of justice, and at the last positively
+conceived as a pleasure; and here in these superb lyric ecstasies rest
+the strong pinions which bear the tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>In the second, the social tragedy <i>Les Aubes,</i> the scenario is the
+present time. It has the purple scenery of <i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>,
+of the cities with the arms of polypi, which drain the blood of the poor
+dying country. Beggars, paupers, those who are starving, those who have
+been evicted, march to Oppidomagnum, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> modern industrial city, and
+besiege it. It is the past once again storming the future. In the
+lyrical trilogy this struggle had been shaped in a hundred visionary
+instances; here, however, the bright sky of reconciliation is arched
+above the battle-field, over the realities hovers the dream. For here
+the future joins hands with the present. The great tribune, Hérénien,
+breaks the backbone of this battle and shows himself the hero of a new
+morality by secretly admitting the enemy into the city&mdash;in the old sense
+the action of a traitor&mdash;by yielding and thus transforming the struggle
+into a reconciliation. He is the tragic bearer of the moral idea that
+enmity may be overcome by goodness, and he falls as the first martyr of
+his faith. Verhaeren's social conception, his superb description of
+realities, here merge slowly in a Utopia; the dawns of the new days
+begin to shine above the pasts that are dead; the din of rebellion fades
+away in harmony. This drama, like the others, is far remote from the
+possibilities of the majority of theatres, because of the fact that here
+too an ethical idea is expressed with all the glow and ecstasy which as
+a rule in modern dramas is only found in the utterance of erotic desire.</p>
+
+<p>The third tragedy, <i>Philip II</i>., is a national drama, although its scene
+is not laid in Flanders. Much as Charles de Coster in his <i>Thyl
+Ulenspiegel</i> had, with a Fleming's deadly hatred, seen in Philip II. the
+hereditary enemy of liberty,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> Verhaeren, who with the lyric poetry of
+his <i>Toute la Flandre</i> became the representative singer of his native
+land, painted this gloomy figure with hatred. Philip II. is here, as in
+<i>Thyl Ulenspiegel,</i> the hard, inflexible king who would fain put life
+out because it burns too red for him, who wishes to have the world as
+cool and marble-like as the chambers of the Escorial. Here of a sudden
+the reverse side of Roman Catholicism, whose passion was immortalised in
+<i>Le Cloître</i>, is rent open; its pitilessness and asceticism; its
+obstinate effort to overthrow the irrefragable joy of life. Don Carlos,
+however, is the fervent friend of the people, the friend of Flanders; he
+is the will to enjoyment, to merry moods, to passion. And this struggle
+between the 'yes' and the 'no' of life, this fight of Verhaeren's own
+lyric crisis, this fight between the denial and the passionate approval
+of enjoyment&mdash;at bottom, toe, the deepest cause of the war between Spain
+and the Netherlands&mdash;is here symbolised in characters. Of course, any
+comparison with Schiller's <i>Don Carlos</i> must tell against Verhaeren, for
+the German drama is far more dramatic and conceived on a scale of
+greater magnificence; but Verhaeren did not aim at a complete rounding
+off, at a plenitude of characters; all that he wanted was to show these
+two feelings in their struggle with each other, the enthusiasm of life
+and its suppression by force. A comparison with Schiller's drama best
+shows Verhaeren's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> disregard of dramatic canons, and at the same time
+the immense new lyric power of the play. For Spain is here seen with a
+strength and intensity of vision which is probably without a parallel in
+tragedy. The cold, hypocritical atmosphere can be felt; and better than
+from words the character of Philip can be perceived in that one silent
+scene in which he suddenly appears stealthily creeping to watch his son
+in the arms of the countess, and then, without a gleam in his rigid
+eyes, without the slightest movement of anger, vanishes again into the
+dark. Behind him, however, behind the spy and the eavesdropper, glides
+another shadow, the monk of the Inquisition: the eavesdropper is himself
+shadowed, the ruler is himself ruled. Visions like these, with the
+ecstasy of certain scenes, are the strongest motive power in Verhaeren's
+poetic construction. His dramatic art, like the art of his lyrics, does
+not rise in a steady ascent, but in sudden wild leaps and starts.</p>
+
+<p>Only in his last drama, <i>Hélène de Sparte</i>, has Verhaeren come nearer to
+the accepted conception of the dramatic. That is characteristic of his
+organic development. For now that he is in the years when passion of
+necessity cools, harmony grows dear to him; and he who through all the
+years of his youth and prime was a revolutionary, now recognises the
+necessity of inner laws. By its mere intellectual substance this tragedy
+expresses the veering round: it is nothing else<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> than the longing from
+passion to harmony, Helen's flight from adventures to repose. And the
+return is to be found again in the verse, for Verhaeren here for the
+first time takes up the traditional French metre; his form, though yet
+free, approaches the Alexandrine. The tragedy of Helen is the tragedy of
+beauty. Helen is one of those antique characters who in Greek literature
+were only sketched in fleeting lines, characters whom a modern poet is
+now entitled to fill in with his own fate. For from the Greek sources we
+really knew nothing about her personal fate; we only knew the effect she
+exercised, only the reflection of her personality on others, not that of
+others on her. She was the queen who inflamed all men; who was the cause
+of great wars; the woman for whose sake murder on murder was committed;
+who was snatched from one bed to another; for love of whom Achilles
+arose from the dead; who passed her life circled by disastrous passion.
+But whether she herself shared these passions, whether she grew by them
+or suffered by them, the poets tell us nothing. Verhaeren in his drama
+has now attempted to depict the tragedy of the woman who endures fearful
+suffering because she is always desired in lust and no more; who is
+consumed by the torture of being ever robbed from lover by lover; of
+never knowing the look of pure eyes, calm converse, quiet breathing; who
+is cursed always to stand at the pyre of passion, with the flames<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> of
+men always blazing round her. Whoever looks at her at once desires her,
+snatches her; none waits and asks whether he serves her will; she is
+robbed like a chattel; she glides from hand to hand. In Verhaeren's
+drama Helen has returned home, a woman tired, tired of all unrest, of
+all her triumphs, tired of love; a woman hating her own beauty because
+it creates unrest, longing for nothing but old age, when none shall
+desire her more and her days shall be calm. Menelaus has brought her
+home, rescued her from all that stifling steam of criminal passion; now
+she would breathe quietly, live calm days, and be faithful to him. She
+desires no more than this. No passion can tempt her more. 'I have seen
+the flaring of so many flames that now I love only the hearth's glow and
+the lamp' is the expression of her poignant resignation. But fate will
+not yet let her go. Verhaeren has here seized on the great idea of the
+Greeks that everything that is superhuman on earth, every excessive
+gift, even that of beauty, is pursued as a hybrid by the envy of the
+gods, and must be paid for with pain. Too great beauty is no profit, but
+a tragic gift. And hardly has Helen returned, to rest and be happy, to
+be like everybody else, than new clouds roll themselves up above her
+head. Her own brother desires her; her enemy Electra desires her; her
+husband is murdered for her sake; and the old fearful battle threatens
+to break out anew for the possession<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> of her body. Now she flees, away
+from men, out into nature. And here again, with the vision of genius,
+Verhaeren approaches Greek feeling. The forest is not dead to him, but
+animate; life does not stop at human beings; fauns emerge from the
+bushes, naiads from the rivers, bacchantes from the mountains, and all
+swarm round Helen in her despair, luring her to their lust, till she
+flees to Zeus in death.</p>
+
+<p>It is characteristic of Verhaeren that he has made even this tragedy,
+the tragedy of Helen, anerotic, or better anti-erotic. Perhaps the
+slight interest which has hitherto been manifested in Verhaeren's
+dramas, and indeed partly in his whole work, may be ascribed to the fact
+that, in comparison with the other poets of his day, he has held himself
+aloof from erotic subjects, that the problem of love has only recently,
+in the years of his maturity, begun to interest him as a theme for his
+art. From the first Verhaeren concentrated all the passion which others
+lavished on the erotic in purely intellectual things, in enthusiasm, in
+admiration. In his dramas woman plays an almost subordinate rôle, and
+<i>Le Cloître</i> is perhaps the only important drama of our days which does
+not show a single woman among its characters and in its inner circle of
+problems. By this fact alone his dramatic aim strays too far from the
+interests of our public. For it is from a purely intellectual conflict
+that Verhaeren seeks to disengage that height and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> heat of passion which
+hitherto was known only in erotic themes; and therefore the exaltation
+strikes the majority of an audience as strange, and leaves them unmoved.
+All our contemporaries who seek art only in the theatre are too
+indifferent and timid to be snatched up, for a purely ethical problem,
+into an ecstasy so burning, so persistently lit with convulsive
+lightnings. This is the only explanation I can find for the opposition
+to Verhaeren's dramas, which are so full of beauty and of living,
+dramatic, passionate situations, and which, above all, contain something
+new, a new dramatic style. This very kindling of prose to verse was a
+revelation. But the whole dramatic aim is different in Verhaeren to that
+which obtains on the stage of to-day. His aim is not to excite interest,
+not to produce fear and compassion, but enthusiasm. He does not wish to
+occupy the minds of his audience, but to carry them away into his
+rhythm. He wishes to make them drunk with his great excitement, because
+only he who gazes in enthusiasm is capable of recognising these supreme
+passions; he wishes to make the spectators as feverish as the characters
+they see before them on the stage; he wishes to make their blood fiery;
+wishes to raise them above all cool, calm, and critical contemplation.
+His whole temperament, which drives along in the direction of
+superabundance; his art, which only fulfils its purpose in ecstasy;
+require impassioned actors and an impassioned<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> audience. To create the
+ideal atmosphere which Verhaeren demands for his dramas would require an
+actor of kindred genius who should have no fear of being called
+emotional, and who would hurl the verses down like cataracts,
+emphasising like a demagogue and at the same time unfolding all the
+magnificence of the rhythm. For the poet asks for nothing save a feeling
+of enthusiasm corresponding to that which first created the poem in him.
+His intention is not to convince by logic, not to dazzle by pictures,
+but to whip up and carry along with him into that ultimate dizzy feeling
+which to him is alone identical with the highest form of the feeling of
+life&mdash;into passion.</p>
+
+<p>In Germany <i>Le Cloître</i>,<a name="FNanchor_1_86" id="FNanchor_1_86"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_86" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> as staged by Max Reinhardt, and again in the
+Deutsches Volkstheater in Vienna, has conquered the interest of a
+literary public and triumphed unreservedly over the obstacle of its own
+strangeness. There has been an exemplary production of <i>Philip II.</i> in
+the Munich Künstlertheater; <i>Hélène de Sparte</i> on the other hand has not
+yet found the setting it demands. As bodied forth in Paris by Ida
+Rubinstein, with decorations of a grandiose barbarism by Bakst, with a
+ground-colouring of music, it was effective more by the external
+magnificence of this somewhat sensationally advertised <i>mise en scène</i>
+than by its poetic qualities,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> smothered as they were by the
+accessories. A production which shall do justice to the play, leaving
+its pure lyric line unbedizened with glaring arabesques, is still
+waiting as a task for some actor-manager of genius who possesses that
+highest and rarest quality of being able to subordinate himself to the
+utterance, who is anxious not to ruin a noble simplicity by a spurious
+plenitude.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_86" id="Footnote_1_86"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_86"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> A version of <i>Le Cloître</i>, by Mr. Osman Edwards, was
+successfully produced by Miss Horniman at the Gaiety Theatre in
+Manchester in 1910.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span></p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="PART_III" id="PART_III"></a>PART III</h3>
+
+<h3>COMPLETING FORCES</h3>
+
+<h4>LES VISAGES DE LA VIE&mdash;LES FORCES TUMULTUEUSES&mdash;LA MULTIPLE</h4>
+<h4>SPLENDEUR&mdash;TOUTE LA FLANDRE-LES HEURES CLAIRES&mdash;LES HEURES</h4>
+<h4>D'APRÈS-MIDI&mdash;LES HEURES DU SOIR-LES RYTHMES SOUVERAINS&mdash;LES BLÉS
+MOUVANTS</h4>
+
+<h4>1900-1914</h4>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="COSMIC_POETRY" id="COSMIC_POETRY"></a>COSMIC POETRY</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 10.5em;">... Les vols</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vers la beauté toujours plus claire et plus certaine.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 20em;">É.V., 'Les Spectacles.'</span><br />
+</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span></p>
+<p>The poetic conquest of life represents, as it were, a process of
+combustion. Every poet feeds the flame of his inner being, his artistic
+passion, with the things of the world around him, transmutes them into
+flame, and himself shoots on high and dies down with them. The more the
+flame cools with the feebler circulation of the blood, the weaker grows
+this fire, and gradually the pure crystals, the residue from this battle
+of the inner flame with the things of reality, are separated from this
+process of combustion. Verhaeren's work was in his youth and prime a
+flame exceedingly hot, lawless, free, and flaring like the very years of
+his youth and prime. Now, however, in the work of his fifties, now that
+passion has cooled, the yearning is revealed to find the goal of this
+passion, the inherent lawfulness of this unrest. Enthusiasm for the
+present, poetic consumption of the world in visions without the residue
+of philosophy and logical knowledge, no longer suffice him. For all
+deeper contemplation of the present is unthinkable without an exceeding<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>
+of its limits: all that is, is at the same time something that has been
+and something that will be. Nothing is so entirely the present that it
+is not intimately connected with the past and the future. The eternal
+and the permanent is the inward side of all phenomena. And the more the
+poet turns his visions from the exterior, from the pictorial, to the
+inner world, to psychology, the more he descends from external phenomena
+to the roots of forces, the more he must apprehend the permanent behind
+the transitoriness of things. No perception of a contemporary state is
+fertile unless it is impregnated with the perception of laws that are
+independent of time, unless the changing phenomena are recognised as
+transformations of the unchangeable primordial phenomenon. This
+transition from maturity to age, from contemplation to knowledge,
+corresponds to a new artistic transition in the incomparably organic
+development of this poet. A transition: no longer a re-formation, but a
+formation which moves both forwards and backwards, which is at the same
+time an evolution and a retrogression, just as the poetic form of
+Verhaeren's poetry no longer undergoes a transformation, but is
+petrified. What a man has acquired in the years of his prime is an
+inalienable possession; its value can be further increased only by
+knowledge, by the appraising of the possession. It may be said that a
+man who has passed his prime experiences nothing new: the static
+equilibrium is realised;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> what has been experienced is only the better
+understood. The experience is no longer a struggle, no longer a state of
+unrest, something that slips away; it is a possession. What passion has
+fought for and won with a leap is now set in order and appraised at its
+true value, by calm. This transition from youth to age is in Verhaeren,
+to use Nietzsche's phrase, a transition from the Dionysiac to the
+Apollinarian, from a plethora to harmony. His yearning is now <i>vivre
+ardent et clair</i>, to live passionately, but at the same time clearly to
+preserve his inner fire, but at the same time to lose his unrest.
+Verhaeren's books in these years grow more and more crystalline; the
+fire in them no longer blazes openly like a flaring pyre, but glitters
+and sparkles as with the thousand facets of a precious stone. The smoke
+and the unrest of the fire die down, and now the pure residues are
+clarified. Visions have become ideas, the wrestling earthly energies are
+now eternal immutable laws.</p>
+
+<p>The will of these last years, of these last works, is the will to
+realise a cosmic poem. In the trilogy of the cities Verhaeren had laid
+hold on the universe as it lies around us to-day; he had snatched it to
+him and overcome it. In passionate visions he had shaped its image,
+achieved its form, and now it stood beside the actual world as his own.
+But a poet who would create the whole world for himself, the whole
+infinite vista of its possibilities by the side of its actualities, must
+give it everything:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> not only its form, not only its face, but its soul
+as well, its organism, its origin, and its evolution. He must not merely
+apprehend its pictorial aspect and its mechanical energy, he must give
+it an encyclopædic form. He must create a mythology for it, a new
+morality, a new history, a new system of dynamics, a new system of
+ethics. Above it or in it he must place a God who acts and transforms.
+He must fashion it in his poetry not only as something that is, not only
+as something in the present, but as something that has been and is
+becoming, something that is part and parcel of the past and of the
+future too. It must ring out the old and ring in the new. And this will
+to create a cosmic poem is to be found in Verhaeren's new and most
+precious books&mdash;<i>Les Visages de la Vie, Les Forces Tumultueuses, La
+Multiple Splendeur, Les Rythmes Souverains</i>&mdash;-books which by their mere
+title announce the effort to include the dome of heaven in their vast
+embrace. They are the pillars of a mighty structure, the great stanzas
+of the cosmic poem. They are no longer a conversation of the poet with
+himself and contemporary feeling; they are a pronouncement addressed to
+all the ages. <i>S'élancer vers l'avenir</i> is the longing they express: a
+turning away from all the pasts to speak to the future. The lyric
+element in them steps beyond the boundary-line of poetry. It kindles the
+neighbouring domains of philosophy and religion, kindles them to new
+possibilities. For not only<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> æsthetically would Verhaeren come to an
+understanding with realities; not by poetry only would he overcome the
+new possibilities; he would fain master them morally and religiously as
+well. The task of these last and most important books of verse is no
+longer to apprehend the universe in individual phenomena, but to impress
+its new form on a new law. In <i>Les Visages de la Vie</i> Verhaeren has in
+individual poems glorified the eternal forces, gentleness, joy,
+strength, activity, enthusiasm; in <i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i> the
+mysterious dynamics of union shining through all forms of the real; in
+<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i> the ethics of admiration, the joyous
+relationship of man with things and with himself; and in <i>Les Rythmes
+Souverains</i> he has celebrated the most illustrious heroes of his ideals.
+For life has long since ceased to be for him mere gazing and
+contemplation:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Car vivre, c'est prendre et donner avec liesse</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">...................avide et haletant</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Devant la vie intense et sa rouge sagesse!<a name="FNanchor_1_87" id="FNanchor_1_87"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_87" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Description, poetic analysis, has gradually grown into a hymn, into
+'laudi del cielo, del mare, del mondo,' into songs of the whole world
+and of the ego, and of the harmony of the world's beauty in its union
+with the ego. The lyrical has here become cosmic feeling, knowledge has
+become ecstasy. Over and above the knowledge that there cannot be
+anything isolated, that everything<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> is arranged and obeys the last
+uniform law of the universe, over and above this knowledge rises
+something still higher&mdash;over the contemplation of the world rises faith
+in the feeling of the world. The glorious optimism of these works ends
+in the religious confidence that all contrasts will be harmonised; that
+man will more and more be conscious of the earth; that every individual
+must discover his own law of the world in himself, the law that makes it
+possible for him to apprehend everything lyrically, with enthusiasm,
+with joy.</p>
+
+<p>Here Verhaeren's poetry far exceeds the boundary-line of literature; it
+becomes philosophy and it becomes religion. Verhaeren was from the very
+first an eminently religious man. In his childhood Catholicism was the
+deepest feeling of his life, but this Catholicism had perished in the
+crises of his adolescence, his religious feeling had given way to the
+rapt contemplation of all new things, to ecstasy inspired by the aspect
+of life. But now, when Verhaeren returns to the metaphysical, the old
+yearning is reawakened. The old gods are dead for him; Pan is dead, and
+Christ too. Now he feels the need of finding a new faith, a new
+certainty, a new God for the new sensation, this identity of I and
+world. The new conflicts have created a longing in him for a new
+equilibrium; his stormily religious feeling, determined to believe,
+needs new cognition. The image of the world would be incomplete without<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>
+the God who rules it. All his yearning goes out to this God, and it
+finds its fulfilment. And this knowledge gives him the highest joy life
+can have, the loftiest pride life can bestow:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Voici l'heure qui bout de sang et de jeunesse.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
+</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Un vaste espoir, venu de l'inconnu, déplace</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">L'équilibre ancien dont les âmes sont lasses;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6.5em;">La nature paraît sculpter</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5.5em;">Un visage nouveau à son éternité.<a name="FNanchor_2_88" id="FNanchor_2_88"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_88" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>To chisel this new face of God is the aim of his last and most mature
+works, in which the obstinate 'no' of his youth has become the loud
+exulting 'yes' of life, in which the great possibilities of old have
+become an unsuspected opulent reality.</p>
+
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_87" id="Footnote_1_87"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_87"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'Un Soir' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_88" id="Footnote_2_88"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_88"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 'La Foule' (<i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>).<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_LYRIC_UNIVERSE" id="THE_LYRIC_UNIVERSE"></a>THE LYRIC UNIVERSE</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il faut aimer, pour découvrir avec génie.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 20em;">É.V., 'Un Soir.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p>If one is to understand Verhaeren's lyric work as a work of art, it must
+be kept in mind that he is a lyric poet, and a lyric poet only. A lyric
+poet only, not, however, in the limited sense of one who confines
+himself to the writing of lyric poems, but of one who, in a lofty and
+more extensive meaning of the term, transforms everything into emotion,
+who stands in a lyric relationship with all things, with the whole
+world. And since the innermost constitution of a man's talent
+unconsciously acts as the driving tendency, the direction of the aim of
+his life, his very fate and his conception of the world, since all this
+is so, the lyric poet that Verhaeren is must of necessity have a lyrical
+conception of the world, his cosmic feeling <i>must</i> be lyrical. To say
+that he has confined himself to the lyric style would be to diminish his
+stature. It is true that in all Verhaeren's imaginative work&mdash;and it is
+of considerable volume&mdash;there is no prose. A very thin volume of short
+stories did indeed appear many years ago and has long been out of print;
+but how tentative and provisional it was in scope<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> may be seen from the
+fact that Verhaeren later on turned one of the stories, that of the
+bell-ringer in the burning tower, into a poem. And I might mention a
+whole series of poems which at bottom are nothing but short stories, and
+others again which are saturated with dramatic excitement, quite
+unlyrical problems, but all of them lyrically conceived. And even in his
+criticism of art and in that penetrating and beautiful book of his on
+Rembrandt, in which he represents the organic connection of the artist
+with his native province almost as a personal experience, the
+outstanding passages live by their lyric enthusiasm. Many of the poems
+again are spiritualised theories of art. The origin of language or the
+sociological problem of emigration, the economic contrast of agrarianism
+and industrialism: in an essay such things might be calmly treated,
+coldly passed in review. But this is characteristic of Verhaeren, that
+he is unable to take a cold, faint interest in anything: consciously or
+unconsciously he must be carried away by enthusiasm for the things he
+contemplates. The ecstasy of his excitement involuntarily whips him out
+of a slow trot into lyric fervour. Poetry is to him, like his
+philosophy, like his ethics, a lyrical soaring. It is characteristic of
+the great lyric poets, of Walt Whitman, Dehmel, Carducci, Rilke, Stefan
+George, that at a certain height of their artistry they renounce all
+other than lyric forms. Here, as elsewhere, great things only seem
+possible of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> attainment by concentration, only by the poet's freeing
+himself from the trammels of all other experiments. Great lyric poetry
+as the art of a life only accrues from the renunciation of all other
+forms of poetry.</p>
+
+<p>Infinite enthusiasm, <i>le lyrisme universel</i>, a rapt visionary sensation
+of the earth rolling as it were in an eternal vibration through the
+cosmos, is the aim of Verhaeren's work. Not to describe the world in
+isolated poems, not to break it up in impressions, but to feel it as
+itself a flaring, flaming poem, <i>not to be one who contemplates the
+world, but one who feels it</i>, this is his highest yearning. A lyric art
+can only grow to such intentions as these from emotions not felt by
+other lyrists. It is not, as with most poets, from gentle crepuscular
+feelings, from vague states of melancholy, that such an impulse is
+crystallised to lyrical expression; here it is an overflowing fulness of
+feeling, a bright joy in life, that engenders his poem; an explosion
+which in the days of his debility was a paroxysm, which as time went on
+changed to a pure enthusiasm, but which was always an eruption of
+strength. Lyric art is here a discharge of the whole feeling of life.
+With Verhaeren the excitement does not sting the individual nerve; it
+spreads electrically, inflames the blood, contracts the muscles,
+produces an immense pressure, and then discharges the whole energy of a
+body saturated with health and strength. <i>The will to discharge strength
+is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> the basic form of Verhaeren's lyric emotion</i>. His aim is to instil
+inspiration&mdash;first of all into himself (since inspiration always
+represents a higher state of ecstasy), and then into others. His lyric
+art is above all a launching of himself into exaltation, 'le pouvoir
+magique de s'hypnotiser soi-même.'<a name="FNanchor_1_89" id="FNanchor_1_89"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_89" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> He talks himself into passion,
+gives himself that impulsion which then bears others along with him. It
+is not a lack, a privation, not a complaint or a wish that his work
+expresses; it is a plethora, a superfluity of riches, a pressure. It is
+not a warding off of life but an eternal leaping at it. His poetry has
+not the modest longing of music to lure to reveries; it does not, like
+painting, seek to represent something: it would act like fiery wine; it
+would make all feelings strong and glowing, sink all hindrances, produce
+that sensation of lightness, of blessedness, that quivering intoxication
+which conquers all the heaviness of earth. His intention is to produce
+this state of drunkenness, 'non seulement la glorification de la nature
+mais la glorification même d'une vision intérieure.' And his attitude is
+not plaintive or defensive, it is the great spirited attitude of a hand
+raised and pointing out, 'regardez!' the adjuring attitude, 'dites!' or
+one that fires and animates, 'en avant!' but it is always a gesture from
+the poet's self towards something, always a swinging of his arms away
+from himself into the universe,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> always a pressing forward, a snatching
+away of himself from matter. And any one who really feels these poems
+feels, when the last line is read, that his blood is beating faster,
+feels that his body calls for exercise, feels the inspiration impelling
+him to action. <i>And this is the highest intention of Verhaeren's lyrical
+poetry, to animate, to quicken the blood, to fire the heart, to
+intensify vitality, to increase tenfold the sensation of life</i>.</p>
+
+<p>But not only in this basic emotion is Verhaeren sundered from all those
+other poets who fashion their verses from sadness, sickly longing,
+amorousness, and melancholy. Verhaeren's lyric poetry breathes in other
+realms, in another atmosphere. Verhaeren is what I should like to call a
+poet of the daylight, of the open air. If you peruse the lyric works of
+contemporary poets you will find that their moods mostly arise from
+states of dusk and darkness. Since they have only the power of
+reproducing blurred outlines, they are fond of landscapes softened by
+twilight; of night, when there is no hardness in things, when what they
+see meets them half-way, already shaping itself into verse. Like
+Tristan, they hate the day as the destroyer of poetry, and swathe
+themselves in the trembling chiaroscuro of twilight. But the really
+great lyric poets have always been poets of the daylight; poets of the
+day and of the light, as the Greeks were, to whom all things that were
+bathed in sun spoke of beauty and cheerfulness; poets of the day, as
+Walt<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> Whitman was, the American; as all strong men have been who were
+filled with the zest of life. In Germany we have Dehmel to love, one of
+the few who have the courage to look right into the shining face of
+things without the fear of being blinded. But Verhaeren loves things the
+more the more intensive and decided they are, the more dazzling they
+are, the more their glaring colours clash. He does not surprise things
+when they are asleep, when they are resting and are helpless and at the
+mercy of poetry; he pounces on them when they are wideawake and can
+defend themselves with all their hardness from the attacks of their
+lyric lover. He loves the day, which places things side by side in harsh
+contrast; he loves the light, because it stimulates the blood; the rain
+that lashes the body; the wind that whips the skin; cold, noise, he
+loves everything that really and vehemently forces in upon him,
+everything that forces him to fight. He loves hard things more than soft
+and rounded things; loves that characteristic, black, and gloomy city
+Toledo more than golden, dreamy Florence; he loves the wind and the
+weather of frowning, tragic landscapes; he even loves noisy and
+thunderous cities pregnant with smoke and choking air. His nerves are
+not so morbidly sensitive that they respond to the least suggestion, the
+feeblest touch, and then stand impotent, fainting, when they are faced
+by the impetuous stimulants of robust life; his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> nerves are&mdash;not dull,
+but healthy. They respond strongly to whatever lays hold of them
+strongly. If the other poets are like supersensitive beings who are
+excited by every trifle and lose their self-control when really great
+demands are made upon them, Verhaeren is like one who is hard to
+irritate, but who, if he is really stung, strikes out with his fists.
+<i>And Verhaeren does not love the poetical things that come to meet one
+already clothed in beauty; he loves those that have first to be wrestled
+with and overcome. Herein lies the exceeding masculinity of his art</i>. No
+one could ever surmise, in reading a poem of Verhaeren's, that it was
+the work of a woman. And as a matter of fact Verhaeren has not yet found
+an audience among women. For he is not one who moans and begs for pity;
+he is no passive poet, but a fighter, one who wrestles with all strong,
+wild, and living things until they yield up to him their innermost
+beauty.</p>
+
+<p>And this struggle for the lyric mastery of individual sensations
+gradually becomes a struggle for all things, for the whole world. For
+Verhaeren does not wish to conceive of anything as unlyrical; does not
+wish to blow lyric fragments off the immense mass of reality; he wishes
+to sculpture it into a new shape; wishes to chisel the whole world into
+a lyric. And this is the secret of his lyric work; <i>this</i> is his work,
+his task. Of a sudden we feel the distance between him and the majority
+of lyric poets. <i>They</i> have the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> feelings of people who receive gifts;
+they regard the sensations which come fluttering towards them as so many
+gay butterflies, capture them, and pin them down. Verhaeren, however, is
+the fighter, the worker, who is constrained to conquer everything, to
+shape the whole world anew, to rebuild it nearer to his heart's
+enthusiasm. He is the lyric poet pictured by Carducci in an imperishable
+poem&mdash;not the idler gazing into empty space; not the gardener decking
+the paths that his lady's feet must tread, and gathering frail violets
+for her bosom.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il poeta è un grande artiere,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Che al mestiere</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Fece i muscoli d'acciaio,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Capo ha fier, collo robusto,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Nudo il busto,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Duro il braccio, e l'occhio gaio.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>And that 'picchia, picchia,' that rhythm of Carducci's, that beat of the
+bronze hammer of toil, rings in the measure of his verses. All his poems
+have been toiled for, fought for; they are a trophy, a meed of victory;
+nothing is a lucky gift. Verhaeren's manuscripts look like a
+battlefield. For he is not a poet who, in Goethe's sense, composes poems
+for particular occasions; he is never overpowered by a sudden chance
+idea: he transforms a problem of life, an actuality, or an intellectual
+phase into a lyric mood. After he has molten the poetic idea in his
+passion to a white heat, he hammers it into a poem by his rhythm.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> His
+works are complexes: individual ideas attract him; he sets a hedge round
+their poetical field, ploughs it, scatters the seed in it, and never
+returns to the scene. What he has once achieved has no longer any
+attraction for him. To him poetry is always a fight, always work, always
+a plan. The layman who would fain look upon a lyric poem as a gift
+fallen from heaven will perhaps have no liking for this conscious
+method; an artist, on the other hand, will recognise in it the strength
+of a wise restraint, concentration on one aim, the will to compose not a
+lyric poem but a lyric work. A poetic work like that of Verhaeren, the
+work of a life, is not created by chance feeling alone, and not by
+enthusiasm. Such a work of art has, like a drama, its intellectual laws,
+the conquering and distributing powers of the intelligence, instinct,
+and above all that unifying will which suffers no dead points, no gaps,
+no stains in the work. And it is from such a vast lyric will that this
+work has arisen. Verhaeren is no favoured child of fortune, dowered with
+art in his cradle; his blood is heavy, Teutonic blood; and, fortunately,
+that ease and suppleness of the artisan which in all departments of
+labour produces a ready mediocrity was as much wanting in him as all
+physical skill. Verhaeren's poetic work, his form, his rhythm, his idea,
+his philosophy, his architectonics, all this is something he has
+acquired by labour, something he has painfully produced by passion and
+an obstinate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> will; but for that very reason it is something organic.
+For Verhaeren is one of those who learn slowly, persistently, and
+surely, only from their own experience and never from others, but who
+never forget and lose what they have once acquired; one of those who
+grow as the things of Nature do, as trees grow into their strength ring
+by ring, and rise year by year higher above the earth to gaze farther
+and farther out beyond the horizons and nearer and nearer into the
+heavens.</p>
+
+<p>And just for this reason, because this evolution was so persistent,
+because it was so wholly based upon experience, is the ascending line in
+his work so harmonious and so organic. No other lyric work of our days
+is so much a symbol of the seasons, so much a mirror of human
+periodicity. The revolt of spring, the sultriness of summer, the
+fruitage of autumn, and the cool clearness of winter gently merge in it,
+the one into the other. In his first books, at an age when many
+precocious poets have finished their development, he was still wrestling
+for his new form, for his expression. Nor did he at that time soon
+arrive at the heart of things; he remained for a long time absorbed in
+the purely picturesque contemplation of their external aspects. Then he
+attempted experiments, and freed himself in revolution. But in his
+beginnings he was always a student, an experimenter. In his second
+period, having really penetrated<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> below the surface, he found his own
+form, like every master, and subdued the internal with the external. But
+now that material is conquered, he that was a student and is now a
+master will of necessity be a teacher, and feel impelled to deduce
+forces from phenomena, laws from forces, the eternal from the earthly.
+From vacant contemplation he had risen to passionate creation, to active
+creation of art. The supreme creation of art has ever been the
+converting of the unconscious into consciousness, the recognition and
+knowledge of the laws of art; from the real the path proceeds to that
+which transcends reality, to faith and to religion. Like every really
+organic poet, Verhaeren has had to repeat the ascent of universal
+history in his own evolution.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_89" id="Footnote_1_89"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_89"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Albert Mockel, <i>Emile Verhaeren</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="SYNTHESES" id="SYNTHESES"></a>SYNTHESES</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Réunir notre esprit et le monde</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dans les deux mains d'une très simple loi profonde.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 19.5em;">É.V., 'L'Attente.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p>After the great visions of the cities, after the wonderful
+interpretations of democracy, there was a moment of appeasement in
+Verhaeren's work&mdash;a lyrical intermezzo of little books: an almanac of
+the months unfolding in short poems, the cosy happiness of wedded love
+enshrined in grateful song, the legends of Flanders told in richly
+coloured pictures, and then, in the great pentalogy <i>Toute la Flandre</i>,
+the cities, coasts, heroes, and great men of his native province
+compressed in one single picture. But after that Verhaeren takes up once
+again his old path across the earth; passes again through the roaring
+cities, the pregnant fields; wanders along the sea-shore; once again
+through the landscapes of <i>Les Flamandes</i> and <i>Les Moines</i>, of <i>Les
+Villes Tentaculaires</i> and <i>Les Campagnes Hallucinées</i>. It is now the
+return of the spiral in Goethe's sense of evolution; the return to the
+same point, but on a higher level, with a loftier outlook, in a narrower
+circle, and for that reason nearer to the last, the highest point. Once
+again Verhaeren<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> surveys the modern world: now, however, with different
+eyes, which no longer remain resting on the aspect of the world, but
+press farther to the cause of all. What he had formerly seen sensuously,
+the things whose values he had æsthetically estimated and transmuted, he
+now looks at from the intellectual side, that he may estimate their
+value morally. He no longer sees each thing separately, no longer adds
+picture to picture, vision to vision, like a game of coloured cards: he
+now unites them in one living chain. He no longer searches through
+individual and detached phenomena; he now sees them together against the
+background of his lofty intention to weld them into one single picture.
+Now he composes, not individual poems, but fragments of his world-poem.
+For, from the time that Verhaeren began to look at things with conscious
+enthusiasm, they assumed different forms. The straining of his epoch no
+longer seems to him to be a solitary manifestation of energy, but only a
+Protean form of the eternal discharge of vigour; the will to life no
+longer seems to him to be the deed of individual men, but the vitalised
+primitive will of all humanity. And so, just as of old he attempted in
+his vision a synthesis of energies, he now sees laws flowing into one
+supreme and highest thing, into a cosmic law.</p>
+
+<p>Lyric exaltation now arches the dream of its laws over reality. But it
+is no longer the mere<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> dream of a youth in expectancy of life&mdash;the
+anæmic, vague, dark, restless dream&mdash;but a man's longing to get behind
+life and follow it to its earthly limit. It is a Utopia enhancing
+realities beyond themselves; it is the dream of Godhead in things. In
+the whole world Verhaeren sees a cosmic effort. 'Le monde est trépidant
+de trains et de navires.'<a name="FNanchor_1_90" id="FNanchor_1_90"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_90" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> The whole world is excited with human
+activity and effort; manifestations of the feeling of life flame
+everywhere; everywhere humanity is fighting for something invisible and
+perhaps unattainable. But whereas of old the poet estimated the value of
+every separate energy, now he comprehends all energies as one uniform
+manifestation, recognises behind the unconscious activity of the
+individual the sway of something greater&mdash;the bourne of all humanity.
+All who work in the material of the temporal only symbolise eternal
+forces&mdash;intoxication, energy, conquest, joy, error, expectation, Utopia.
+And it is to these forces, or rather to these forms of the force at the
+root of all things, that his poems are addressed. In <i>Les Visages de la
+Vie</i> he seeks to describe yearning in all its forms and aims; its
+distribution in human labour, its restlessness, its vigour, and, above
+all, its beauty. But not only human manifestations now appear to him in
+a closer cohesion, the synthesis of realism and metaphysics now makes
+his relationship to elementary<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> things richer and more heroic. Now, when
+he treats some motive he had already treated in the first books, and
+these poems of the first and last periods are compared, it is with
+astonishment and admiration that you trace the silent growth of these
+last years. I will mention one example. He had already sung a song to
+the wind. But the wind at that time was to him the evil storm that
+tousles cottages, shakes chimneys, forces its way into rooms, rages
+across country, and brings the winter. It was a senseless power,
+beautiful in its senselessness, but aimless, an incomprehensible
+element, a detached phenomenon of Nature. Now, however, the poet in his
+maturity looks upon it as the wanderer over the undying world, one that
+has seen all countries, that drives ships over seas, that has sated
+itself with the perfume of strange flowers and brings it from far away,
+that penetrates our chest like an aroma and steels and expands it. Now
+he loves the wind as one of the thousand things of the earth which
+contribute to the intensification of his vital feeling.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Si j'aime, admire et chante avec folie,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Le vent,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * </span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">C'est qu'il grandit mon être entier et c'est qu'avant</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">De s'infiltrer, par mes poumons et par mes pores,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Jusques au sang dont vit mon corps,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Avec sa force rude ou sa douceur profonde,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Immensément, il a étreint le monde.<a name="FNanchor_2_91" id="FNanchor_2_91"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_91" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>So, too, a tree becomes to him the image of the eternal renewal of
+strength, of resistance to the hardness of winter and of fate, of the
+will to new beauty in the spring. A mountain no longer appears to him as
+a chance raising of the landscape, but a great and mighty thing in whose
+keeps secrets lie, ores, and the source of springs, from whose summit,
+however, our eyes can sweep the world. The forest interprets itself to
+him as the labyrinth of a thousand paths, and as the many-voiced anthem
+of life: everything in nature becomes a freshening and a vivifying of
+this vitality. <i>An absolute transmutation of values has taken place from
+the time that he has comprehended things as parts of the world's entity,
+and as themselves an entity</i>. Travel, formerly a flight from reality,
+now becomes to him the opening out of new distances, of new
+possibilities; dream appears to him no longer as an illusion, but as the
+capacity of intensifying the real from its present to a future state.
+Europe is no longer to him a group of nations, a geographical idea, but
+the great symbol of conquest, money, gold, he no longer regards
+contemptuously as a materialising of life, but as a new spur for new
+ambition. And the sea, which in every succeeding work of his sings its
+unquiet rhythm, is no longer the murderous power that eats into the
+land, but the holy tide, the symbol of constant strength in eternal
+unrest; it is to him 'la mer nue et pure, comme une<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> idée.'<a name="FNanchor_3_92" id="FNanchor_3_92"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_92" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> Since
+everything coheres, he feels related to all in a touching brotherhood
+with things; he no longer feels the presence of things, he loves them
+like a piece of himself; he feels the sea physically in himself</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Ma peau, mes mains et mes cheveux</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Sentent la mer</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et sa couleur est dans mes yeux.<a name="FNanchor_4_93" id="FNanchor_4_93"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_93" class="fnanchor">[4]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>And so, just as his vital feeling is renewed every time he comes into
+contact with the waves, he believes in a physical resurrection of the
+body out of the sea, believes that his rising from the water is a
+<i>nouveau moment de conscience</i>. Verhaeren has returned to the great
+cohesion: in Nature and in man there is no longer for him any phenomenon
+which might not become a symbol for him, a symbol of the great vital
+instinct, to stimulate and fire his vitality.</p>
+
+<p>And since he now responds to all things with this one feeling, a uniform
+conception of the world must involuntarily result from this unity of
+feeling. <i>To the unity of enthusiasm corresponds the unity of the world,
+the monistic feeling</i>. Just as he himself derives nothing but an
+intensification and exaltation of his feelings from all things, nothing
+but the very sensation of life, all phenomena and activities must be a
+synthesis, all forces must flow into one single force as rivers flow
+into the ocean, all laws must merge in one single law<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Toute la vie, avec ses lois, avec ses formes,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">&mdash;Multiples doigts noueux de quelque main énorme&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">S'entr'ouvre et se referme en un poing: l'unité.<a name="FNanchor_5_94" id="FNanchor_5_94"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_94" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>And thus, this straining of all humanity, discharged in a thousand
+forms, must be something in common, a fight against something lying
+outside of itself, against a resistance which still makes life seem
+hard, dull, and turbid. This fight of humanity cannot be other than
+directed against something that impedes the sensation of life. And this,
+the only thing which struggles against humanity, is in Verhaeren's eyes
+the supremacy of Nature, the mystery of divine intervention, the
+subjection of man to fate&mdash;in short, all divinity that does not reside
+in man. As soon as man is dependent on nobody except himself and his own
+strength, he too will attain the great joyousness of all the things of
+Nature.</p>
+
+<p><i>This fight of man to become God, this fight for his independence, his
+freedom from chance and the supernatural&mdash;this is the great metaphysical
+idea of Verhaeren's work</i>. His last books seek to represent nothing else
+than this one highest battle of man, this struggle to be free from all
+that is laid upon him, not by himself, but by Nature, from all that
+impedes his will to become a thing of Nature, an elementary force,
+himself. This struggle is the highest and purest effort, for</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Rien n'est plus haut, malgré l'angoisse et le tourment,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Que la bataille avec l'énigme et les ténèbres.<a name="FNanchor_6_95" id="FNanchor_6_95"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_95" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Man in this battle defends himself against darkness, against what is
+unknown, against Heaven, against all laws that restrict his expansion;
+the whole aim of man, the aim he has unconsciously been following for a
+thousand years, is independence, is to become a law unto himself:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'homme dans l'univers n'a qu'un maître, lui-même,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et l'univers entier est ce maître, dans lui.<a name="FNanchor_7_96" id="FNanchor_7_96"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_96" class="fnanchor">[7]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>To-day he is still counteracted by chance, or, as many conceive it, by
+divinity. Wholly to conquer this, to substitute the determination of
+one's own destiny for chance, will be the great task of the future. Much
+has been taken from chance already. Lightning, the most dangerous power
+of heaven, is conquered; distances are bridged over; the forms of Nature
+are changed; social communities have by common action diverted the
+iniquity of the weather; diseases are from year to year being fathomed
+and checked; more and more every incalculable element is being brought
+within the range of calculation and fore-sight. But all that is unknown
+must more and more be the booty of man, whose highest will is 'fouiller
+l'inconnu.'<a name="FNanchor_8_97" id="FNanchor_8_97"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_97" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> More and more his eyes penetrate the subterranean and
+mysterious workings of Nature.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Or aujourd'hui c'est la réalité</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Secrète encor, mais néanmoins enclose</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Au cours perpétuel et rythmique des choses,</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qu'on veut, avec ténacité,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Saisir, pour ordonner la vie et sa beauté</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Selon les causes.<a name="FNanchor_9_98" id="FNanchor_9_98"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_98" class="fnanchor">[9]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>For this battle everybody is a soldier in man's war of liberation, all
+of us stand invisibly ranked together. Everybody who wrests from Nature
+in increment to knowledge, who does something never done before,
+everybody who by poetry fires others to action, tears off a piece of the
+veil. With every step forward that man takes against the dark, with
+every foot of ground he conquers, divinity loses strength to him; and
+this will go on until at length nothing remains of the God of old, until
+the identity of the two ideas humanity and divinity is unconsciously
+accomplished.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Héros, savant, artiste, apôtre, aventurier,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Chacun troue à son tour le mur noir des mystères</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et, grâce à ces labeurs groupés et solitaires,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'être nouveau se sent l'univers tout entier.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Seen from this height, professions assume a new poetic value. In the
+front rank of fighting men Verhaeren sees those the effort of whose life
+it is to acquire knowledge&mdash;the men of science. Verhaeren is perhaps the
+only one among modern poets who has conceived of science as of perfectly
+equal value with poetry, <i>who has discovered new moral and religious
+values in science, just as he had already discovered new æsthetic values
+in industrialism<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> and democracy</i>. Most poets had hitherto looked upon
+science as a hindrance, because they were afraid of clear things as they
+were afraid of real things. They looked upon science as the destroyer of
+myths, the negation of every noble superstition which in their eyes was
+indissolubly connected with the poetical. But just as machinery seemed
+to them to be ugly, because in the machines they saw beauty had
+retreated from the outer to the interior form, here too the new ethical
+value is hidden not in the method but in the aim. Verhaeren esteems
+science as the great fighter for the new conception of the world: 'Le
+monde entier est repensé par leurs cervelles.'<a name="FNanchor_10_99" id="FNanchor_10_99"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_99" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> He knows that the
+little increments to knowledge which are continually being made in our
+days in thousands of places, in sanatoria and lecture-rooms,
+observatories and studies, with microscopes and chemical analyses,
+weighing and calculation, with measures and numbers, that these little
+additions to knowledge may, by comparison and reproduction, grow into
+great creative discoveries which will immensely enrich our vital
+feeling. And this hymn to science is at the same time a hymn to our
+epoch; for no epoch before ours has so consciously bought for the
+advancement of knowledge, none has been so replete with the longing for
+new knowledge and the transmutation of values:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'acharnement à tout peser, à tout savoir</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Fouille la forêt drue et mouvante des êtres.<a name="FNanchor_11_100" id="FNanchor_11_100"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_100" class="fnanchor">[11]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>In inspired words Verhaeren celebrates science as the highest effort of
+our age as of the past; for he knows that what to us to-day is
+presupposed and self-evident was a thousand years-ago the goal of the
+most ardent effort, that the road we pace indolently to-day is soaked
+with the blood of martyrs.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dites! quels temps versés au gouffre des années,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et quelle angoisse ou quel espoir des destinées,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et quels cerveaux chargés de noble lassitude</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">A-t-il fallu pour faire un peu de certitude?</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dites! les feux et les bûchers; dites! les claies;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Les regards fous, en des visages d'effroi blanc;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dites! les corps martyrisés, dites! les plaies</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Criant la vérité, avec leur bouche en sang.<a name="FNanchor_12_101" id="FNanchor_12_101"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_101" class="fnanchor">[12]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>But he knows equally well that the acquisitions of to-day are again only
+hypotheses for the new truths of to-morrow. Error is inevitable, but
+even error opens out new ways. In the beautiful idea of Brezina, the
+Czech poet, all ideal aims are floating islands that recede as we
+approach them. The highest aim is in effort itself, in the life which
+effort intensifies. Verhaeren's optimism here guards his marches against
+banality, for he is sufficient of a mystic to know that it is the
+unknowable and the inaccessible that lend all things their impenetrable
+beauty. But the knowledge of this must not scare enthusiasm away:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Partons quand même, avec notre âme inassouvie,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Puisque la force et que la vie</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Sont au delà des vérités et des erreurs.<a name="FNanchor_13_102" id="FNanchor_13_102"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_102" class="fnanchor">[13]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>What if a few last things remain eternally inscrutable: 'plutôt que d'en
+peupler les coins par des chimères, nous préférons ne point savoir.'<a name="FNanchor_14_103" id="FNanchor_14_103"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_103" class="fnanchor">[14]</a>
+Rather a world without gods than one with false gods, rather incomplete
+knowledge than false knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>Here, where the heroes of science reach the limits of what is possible
+to them, a new group must stand by their side and help them in their
+work. These are the poets, who preach faith where knowledge ends. They
+must find the synthesis between science and religion, between the
+earthly and the divine, the new synthesis&mdash;<i>religious confidence in
+science</i>. Their optimism must force their fellow-men to have faith in
+science, as in earlier days they had faith in gods: though proofs fail
+them, they must demand from this new religion what the early fathers
+demanded for the old religion. And he himself, Verhaeren, he who
+once&mdash;here again a bitter 'no' is turned into an exulting 'yes'&mdash;said in
+his beginnings</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Toute science enferme au fond d'elle le doute,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Comme une mère enceinte étreint un enfant mort,<a name="FNanchor_15_104" id="FNanchor_15_104"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_104" class="fnanchor">[15]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>he himself is to-day the first of confident enthusiasts. Where
+individual minds are still at war<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">'Oh! ces luttes là-haut entre ces dieux humains!<a name="FNanchor_16_105" id="FNanchor_16_105"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_105" class="fnanchor">[16]</a>&mdash;</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>where their knowledge has not yet found a bridge, poets must with
+enthusiasm and confidence surmise a path. They must link law with
+perception; and in the same measure as the scientists have by knowledge
+fed their enthusiasm, they in their turn must feed knowledge by their
+confidence. If they have no proofs of actualities, their faith dowers
+them with the confidence to say, 'nous croyons déjà ce que les autres
+sauront.'<a name="FNanchor_17_106" id="FNanchor_17_106"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_106" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> They scent and surmise new things before they are born;
+they trust hypotheses before they are proved. Already,</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pendant que disputent et s'embrouillent encor,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">À coups de textes morts</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et de dogmes, les sages,<a name="FNanchor_18_107" id="FNanchor_18_107"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_107" class="fnanchor">[18]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>they hear the hovering wings of the new truth. They already believe in
+what later generations will know; they derive vital joy from what their
+descendants will be the first to possess. They doubt in nothing; not
+that man will conquer the air, quell disease, make life cheerful and
+easier; they do not despair in progress, and in their ecstasy they leap
+over all obstacles. 'Le cri de Faust n'est plus le nôtre';<a name="FNanchor_19_108" id="FNanchor_19_108"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_108" class="fnanchor">[19]</a> the
+question as to 'yes' and 'no' has long since been joyfully answered in
+the affirmative, exults the poet; we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> no longer hesitate between the
+possibility and the impossibility of knowledge, we believe in it, and
+faith and confidence is already the highest knowledge of life. In this
+optimism of poets other discoverers of knowledge must now fulfil their
+growth, from these dreams they must derive strength for their activity;
+all men must in this way complete one another, that it may be possible
+for them to beleaguer darkness, perfect the conquest of God, and</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Emprisonner quand même, un jour, l'éternité,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dans le gel blanc d'une immobile vérité.<a name="FNanchor_20_109" id="FNanchor_20_109"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_109" class="fnanchor">[20]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>For this new truth, the Man-God whom they are to discover, poets and
+scholars are the new saints; and his servants are all those whose brows
+are fiery with the fever of work, whose hands are scorched with
+experiments, whose nerves are strained by constant effort, whose eyes
+are fatigued by books. To all of these Verhaeren's hymn is addressed:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qu'ils soient sacrés par les foules, ces hommes</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qui scrutèrent les faits pour en tirer les lois.<a name="FNanchor_21_110" id="FNanchor_21_110"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_110" class="fnanchor">[21]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>But still farther reaches Verhaeren's enthusiasm for those who help in
+the new work, for the 'saccageurs d'infini.'<a name="FNanchor_22_111" id="FNanchor_22_111"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_111" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> Not only the thinker
+and the poet extend the horizon of life, but each one also who creates
+and is in any way at work. Only the man who creates is really alive and
+really<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> a man&mdash;'seul existe qui crée.'<a name="FNanchor_23_112" id="FNanchor_23_112"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_112" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> And so his hymn is likewise
+addressed to those who toil with their hands, to those who, without
+knowing the aim, toil stolidly day by day in mines and fields; for they
+too build the face of the earth, create mountains where there were none,
+rear lights by the sea's marge, construct machines and the huge
+telescopes that pry on the heavens: all of them forge the tools of
+knowledge and prepare the new era. Merchants who send across the ocean
+ships that spin threads from farthest shore to shore, they too weave the
+net of the great unity; traders who spread gold, who quicken the
+circulation of the world's blood, they too co-operate in the battle
+waged with the dark. It is their league and union which, first of all,
+gives humanity its great strength; they all prepare the hour, the
+moment, which must inevitably come.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il viendra l'instant, où tant d'efforts savants et ingénus,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Tant de génie et de cerveaux tendus vers l'inconnu,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Quand même, auront bâti sur des bases profondes</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et jaillissant au ciel, la synthèse du monde!<a name="FNanchor_24_113" id="FNanchor_24_113"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_113" class="fnanchor">[24]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Here in fiery dawns glimmer the days of the future. Tens of thousands
+will struggle, will prepare, until at last the one man comes who shall
+lay the last stone of the edifice, 'le tranquille rebelle,'<a name="FNanchor_25_114" id="FNanchor_25_114"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_114" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> the
+Christ of this new religion.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">C'est que celui qu'on attendait n'est point venu,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Celui que la nature entière</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Suscitera un jour, âme et rose trémière,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Sous les soleils puissants non encore connus;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">C'est que la race ardente et fine,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dont il sera la fleur,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">N'a point multiplié ses milliers de racines</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Jusqu'au tréfonds des profondeurs.<a name="FNanchor_26_115" id="FNanchor_26_115"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_115" class="fnanchor">[26]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>For here in Verhaeren's work this vision arises fervent and glowing.
+Incessantly man proceeds on the path of his destiny. Once his whole
+world was replete with divinity, 'jadis tout l'inconnu était peuplé de
+dieux';<a name="FNanchor_27_116" id="FNanchor_27_116"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_116" class="fnanchor">[27]</a> then one single God took right and might into His hand; but
+now, by means of his strength and passion, man has wrested, year by
+year, one secret after the other from this Unknown Power. More and more
+he has conquered chance by laws, faith by knowledge, fear by safety;
+more and more the power of the gods glides insensibly into his hands,
+more and more he determines his own life; and the process will continue
+till he is in every respect the captain of his fate; he is less and less
+subject to laws he has not himself established; more and more Nature's
+slave becomes her lord.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Races, régnez: puisque par vous la volonté du sort</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Devient de plus en plus la volonté humaine.<a name="FNanchor_28_117" id="FNanchor_28_117"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_117" class="fnanchor">[28]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Gods will become men; exterior fate will return into their bosom; the
+saints will henceforth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> be only their brothers; and Paradise will be the
+earth itself. Most beautifully Verhaeren has expressed this idea in one
+of his latest books,<a name="FNanchor_29_118" id="FNanchor_29_118"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_118" class="fnanchor">[29]</a> in the symbol of Adam and Eve. Eve, expelled
+from the Garden of Eden, one day finds its doors open again. But she
+does not re-enter it, for her highest joy, her Paradise, is now in
+activity and the pleasure of the earth. Zest in existence, in life, joy
+of the earth, has never been more strongly and burningly exalted than in
+this symbol; never has the hymn of humanity been sung with greater
+fervour than by this poet&mdash;perhaps because he had denied life more
+wildly and more obstinately than any other. Here all contrasts sing
+together in a harmony without a flaw; the last enmity between man and
+Nature here becomes the ecstatic feeling of man's godhead.</p>
+
+<p>And strange to say, here the circle of life returns to itself. The books
+of the poet's old age return to the days of his youth, to the school
+benches in Ghent where Maeterlinck also sat, the other great Fleming.
+Both, who lost themselves there, have found themselves again on the
+heights of life in their conception of the world, for Maeterlinck's
+highest teaching also (in his book <i>Wisdom and Destiny</i>) is, that all
+fate is locked up in man himself, that it is man's highest evolution,
+his highest duty, to conquer fate, all that lies outside him, God. This
+profound thought, which has thus twice in our days blossomed forth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> from
+Flemish soil, has been achieved on different paths. Maeterlinck has
+found it by listening to the mysticism of silence, Verhaeren by
+listening to the noise of life. He has found his new God not in the
+darkness of dreams but in the light of streets, in all places where men
+bestir themselves, and where from heavy hours the trembling flower of
+joy is born.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_90" id="Footnote_1_90"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_90"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'La Conquête' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_91" id="Footnote_2_91"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_91"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 'À la Gloire du Vent' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_92" id="Footnote_3_92"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_92"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 'L'Eau' (<i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_93" id="Footnote_4_93"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_93"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> 'Au Bord du Quai' (<i>Ibid.</i>)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_94" id="Footnote_5_94"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_94"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> 'La Conquête' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_95" id="Footnote_6_95"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_95"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> 'Les Cultes' (<i>Ibid.</i>)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_96" id="Footnote_7_96"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_96"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> 'Les Villes' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_97" id="Footnote_8_97"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_97"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> 'La Ferreur' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_98" id="Footnote_9_98"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_98"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> 'Vers le Futur' (<i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_99" id="Footnote_10_99"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_99"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> 'La Conquête' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_100" id="Footnote_11_100"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_100"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> 'Vers le Futur' (<i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_101" id="Footnote_12_101"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_101"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> 'La Recherche' (<i>Ibid.</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_102" id="Footnote_13_102"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_102"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> 'L'Erreur' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_103" id="Footnote_14_103"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_103"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> 'La Ferveur' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_104" id="Footnote_15_104"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_104"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> 'Méditation' (<i>Les Moines</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_105" id="Footnote_16_105"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_105"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> 'Les Penseurs' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_106" id="Footnote_17_106"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_106"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> 'La Science' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_107" id="Footnote_18_107"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_107"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> 'L'Action' (<i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_108" id="Footnote_19_108"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_108"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> 'La Science' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_109" id="Footnote_20_109"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_109"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> 'Les Penseurs' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_110" id="Footnote_21_110"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_110"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> 'La Science' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_111" id="Footnote_22_111"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_111"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> 'Les Penseurs' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_112" id="Footnote_23_112"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_112"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> 'La Mort' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_113" id="Footnote_24_113"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_113"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> 'La Recherche' (<i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_114" id="Footnote_25_114"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_114"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> 'L'Attente' (<i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_115" id="Footnote_26_115"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_115"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> 'L'Attente' (<i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_116" id="Footnote_27_116"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_116"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> 'La Folie' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_117" id="Footnote_28_117"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_117"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_118" id="Footnote_29_118"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_118"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> <i>Les Rythmes Souverains.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_ETHICS_OF_FERVOUR" id="THE_ETHICS_OF_FERVOUR"></a>THE ETHICS OF FERVOUR</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">La vie est à monter et non pas à descendre.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 17em;">É.V., 'Les Rêves,'</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il faut admirer tout pour s'exalter soi-même</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et se dresser plus haut que ceux qui out vécu.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 17em;">É.V., 'La Vie.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The metaphysical ideal crystallised by Verhaeren from his contemplation
+of life, which was at first wildly passionate, but then more and more
+synoptical and logical, has been called unity. He has himself recently,
+in answer to a question submitted to various men of letters, confirmed
+this conception as part of his programme. 'It seems to me,' he says,
+'that poetry is bound ere long to be merged in a very clear Pantheism.
+More and more the unity of the world is admitted by upright and healthy
+minds. That old dualism between the soul and the body, between God and
+the universe, is becoming effaced. Man is a fragment of the architecture
+of the world. He understands and is conscious of the entity of which he
+is a part.... He feels that he is encompassed and dominated, while at
+the same time he himself encompasses and dominates. By reason of his own
+miracles he is becoming, in some sort, that personal God that his
+ancestors believed in. Now I ask, is it possible that lyric<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> exaltation
+should long remain indifferent to such an unchaining of human power,
+should hesitate to celebrate such a vast spectacle of grandeur? The poet
+of to-day has only to surrender himself to what he sees, hears,
+imagines, conjectures, for works to be born of his heart and brain that
+are young, vibrating, and new.'<a name="FNanchor_1_119" id="FNanchor_1_119"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_119" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> But he who would build up the whole
+image must not make a halt at this stage of knowledge: over against the
+logical ordering of external things he must set another of inward
+things; against the knowledge of life he must set the feeling of life.
+He must set up an ethical ideal as well as a metaphysical ideal, a
+commandment of life corresponding to his law of life.</p>
+
+<p>But great poets never discover a standard of life, a moral precept,
+which is not a reflex of the law of their own inner nature. Many
+possibilities of contemplation are open to the thinker, to the quiet
+observer; to the poet however, to the lyrist, only a poetic philosophy
+of life is possible, a contemplation lyrically exalted. Whereas the
+philosopher can attain the knowledge of unity by measurement and
+calculation, by a perception and calm computation of forces, a poet can
+discover the evolution of things in the direction of harmony and unity
+only in his ecstasy, only in an exalted state of enthusiasm. He will
+perforce recognise a commandment for the whole world in his own
+enthusiasm, and in his lyric ecstasy a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> moral demand of life. 'Toute la
+vie est dans l'essor,' for the poet all life is in ecstasy. And just as
+Verhaeren never described things in a state of rest, so too his
+comprehension of the universe is never conceivable except in the
+permanently exalted state of the unrest of joy and motion.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pour vivre clair, ferme et juste,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Avec mon cœur, j'admire tout</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Ce qui vibre, travaille et bout</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dans la tendresse humaine et sur la terre auguste.<a name="FNanchor_2_120" id="FNanchor_2_120"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_120" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A thing only belongs to us when it is felt&mdash;not so much for us
+personally&mdash;as beautiful, necessary, and vivid: only when we have said
+'yes' to it. <i>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</i>. 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.'<a name="FNanchor_3_121" id="FNanchor_3_121"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_121" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>For this is the essential: if in our estimation we often over-estimate
+things which in any case would preserve their inner value independently<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>
+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.'<a name="FNanchor_4_122" id="FNanchor_4_122"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_122" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> 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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il faut admirer tout pour s'exalter soi-même</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et se dresser plus haut que ceux qui out vécu</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">De coupables souffrances et de désirs vaincus.<a name="FNanchor_5_123" id="FNanchor_5_123"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_123" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>For admiration means, in the highest sense, subordinating oneself to
+other things. <i>The more a man suppresses his own personal pride, the
+higher he stands in the moral sense</i>. 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> ecstasy. To be able to admire more means to
+grow more oneself:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Oh! vivre et vivre et se sentir meilleur</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">À mesure que bout plus fervemment le cœur;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vivre plus clair, dès qu'on marche en conquête;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vivre plus haut encor, dès que le sort s'entête</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">À dessécher la force et l'audace des bras.<a name="FNanchor_6_124" id="FNanchor_6_124"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_124" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il faut en tes élans te dépasser sans cesse,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Être ton propre étonnement.<a name="FNanchor_7_125" id="FNanchor_7_125"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_125" class="fnanchor">[7]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>In this idea of restless enthusiasm, the principles of which have also
+been expounded by Verhaeren in his essay <i>Cosmic Enthusiasm</i>
+(<i>Insel-Almanach,</i> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>
+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.'<a name="FNanchor_8_126" id="FNanchor_8_126"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_126" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> 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&mdash;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. <i>Though
+many values lock themselves up from knowledge, none denies itself wholly
+to admiration</i>. Even the smallest thing becomes great when it is
+penetrated with love, and the greater we let things grow&mdash;the more we
+enrich the substance of our own life&mdash;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. <i>And to have found<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> 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</i>. 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,'<a name="FNanchor_9_127" id="FNanchor_9_127"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_127" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> and
+<i>vice versa</i> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> 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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'homme n'est suprême et clair que si sa volonté</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Est d'être lui en même temps qu'il est monde.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>And since this boundless admiration turns selfishness to
+dust&mdash;selfishness, the eternal obstacle to all purely human
+relations&mdash;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 <i>La Multiple
+Splendeur</i>, which has given definite expression to these ethical ideas,
+was originally intended to be called <i>Admirez-vous les Uns les Autres</i>.
+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&mdash;it will<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> regulate all earthly
+relationships; love shall be the social levelling.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'amour dont la puissance encore est inconnue,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dans sa profondeur douce et sa charité nue,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Ira porter la joie égale aux résignés;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Les sacs ventrus de l'or seront saignés</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Un soir d'ardente et large équité rouge;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Disparaîtront palais, banques, comptoirs et bouges;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Tout sera simple et clair, quand l'orgueil sera mort,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Quand l'homme, au lieu de croire à l'égoïste effort,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qui s'éterniserait, en une âme immortelle,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dispensera vers tous sa vie accidentelle;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Des paroles, qu'aucun livre ne fait prévoir,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Débrouilleront ce qui paraît complexe et noir;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Le faible aura sa part dans l'existence entière,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il aimera son sort&mdash;et la matière</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Confessera peut-être, alors, ce qui fut Dieu.<a name="FNanchor_10_128" id="FNanchor_10_128"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_128" class="fnanchor">[10]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Si nous nous admirons vraiment les uns les autres,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Du fond même de notre ardeur et notre foi,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vous les penseurs, vous les savants, vous les apôtres,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pour les temps qui viendront vous extrairez la loi.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Nous apportons, ivres du monde et de nous-mêmes,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Des cœurs d'hommes nouveaux dans le vieil univers.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Les Dieux sont loin et leur louange et leur blasphème;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Notre force est en nous et nous avons souffert.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Nous admirons nos mains, nos yeux et nos pensées,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Même notre douleur qui devient notre orgueil;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Toute recherche est fermement organisée</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pour fouiller l'inconnu dont nous cassons le seuil.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">S'il est encor là-bas des caves de mystère</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Où tout flambeau s'éteint ou recule effaré,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Plutôt que d'en peupler les coins par des chimères</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Nous préférons ne point savoir que nous leurrer.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Un infini plus sain nous cerne et nous pénètre;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Notre raison monte plus haut; notre cœur bout;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et nous nous exaltons si bellement des êtres</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Que nous changeons le sens que nous avons de tout.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Cerveau, tu règnes seul sur nos actes lucides;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Aimer, c'est asservir; admirer, se grandir;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">O tel profond vitrail, dans l'ombre des absides,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qui reflète la vie et la fait resplendir!</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Aubes, matins, midis et soirs, toute lumière</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Est aussitôt muée en or et en beauté,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il exalte l'espace et le ciel et la terre</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et transforme le monde à travers sa clarté.<a name="FNanchor_11_129" id="FNanchor_11_129"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_129" class="fnanchor">[11]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><i>This sensation of recognising oneself in all things by enthusiasm</i>, 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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> 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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Je ne distingue plus le monde de moi-même,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Je suis l'ample feuillage et les rameaux flottants,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Je suis le sol dont je foule les cailloux pâles</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et l'herbe des fossés où soudain je m'affale</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Ivre et fervent, hagard, heureux et sanglotant.<a name="FNanchor_12_130" id="FNanchor_12_130"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_130" class="fnanchor">[12]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>All the forms of the elements are a personal experience to him:
+'J'existe en tout ce qui m'entoure et me pénètre.'<a name="FNanchor_13_131" id="FNanchor_13_131"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_131" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> All that has
+happened becomes to him a manifestation of his own body; he feels all
+cosmic happenings as personal experiences:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Oh! les rythmes fougueux de la nature entière</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et les sentir et les darder à travers soi!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vivre les mouvements répandus dans les bois,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Le sol, les vents, la mer et les tonnerres;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vouloir qu'en son cerveau tressaille l'univers.<a name="FNanchor_14_132" id="FNanchor_14_132"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_132" class="fnanchor">[14]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Here the billows of enthusiasm dash higher and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> higher, this call to
+union by enthusiasm grows to an ever more passionate command:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Exaltez-vous encore et comprenez-vous mieux,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Reconnaissez-vous donc et magnifiez-vous</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dans l'ample et myriadaire splendeur des choses!<a name="FNanchor_15_133" id="FNanchor_15_133"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_133" class="fnanchor">[15]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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!'<a name="FNanchor_16_134" id="FNanchor_16_134"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_134" class="fnanchor">[16]</a> 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 <i>Starting from
+Paumanok</i>, preaches:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">None has ever yet adored or worshipped half enough,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">how certain the future is.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Aimer avec ferveur soi-même en tous les autres</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qui s'exaltent de même en de mêmes combats</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vers le même avenir dont on entend le pas;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Aimer leur cœur et leur cerveau pareils aux vôtres</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Parce qu'ils ont souffert, en des jours noirs et fous,</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Même angoisse, même affre et même deuil que vous.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et s'énivrer si fort de l'humaine bataille</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">&mdash;Pâle et flottant reflet des monstrueux assauts</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Ou des groupements d'or des étoiles, là-haut&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qu'on vit en tout ce qui agit, lutte ou tressaille</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et qu'on accepte avidement, le cœur ouvert,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'âpre et terrible loi qui régit l'univers.<a name="FNanchor_17_135" id="FNanchor_17_135"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_135" class="fnanchor">[17]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><i>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&mdash;this is Verhaeren's highest aim</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,'<a name="FNanchor_18_136" id="FNanchor_18_136"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_136" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> <i>the fact of life itself was his
+pleasure</i>, 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;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> happiness. And in such a moment of ecstasy he says,</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il me semble jusqu'à ce jour n'avoir vécu</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Que pour mourir et non pour vivre,<a name="FNanchor_19_137" id="FNanchor_19_137"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_137" class="fnanchor">[19]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>lines that seem to me unforgettable, as the highest ecstasy of vitality.</p>
+
+<p>And, wonderful to say, here too the circle is closed, here too the end
+of Verhaeren's know-ledge&mdash;as we have seen in so many things with
+him&mdash;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, <i>Les Flamandes</i>, as well as <i>Les Rythmes Souverains</i>
+and <i>Les Blés Mouvants,</i> celebrate life&mdash;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&mdash;here again in harmony with the great
+poets of our nation, with Nietzsche and Dehmel&mdash;is not suppression, but
+a conscious intensification of original instincts. Just as in&mdash;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> 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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Je marche avec l'orgueil d'aimer l'air et la terre,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">D'être immense et d'être fou</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et de mêler le monde et tout</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">À cet enivrement de vie élémentaire.<a name="FNanchor_20_138" id="FNanchor_20_138"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_138" class="fnanchor">[20]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">J'aime mes yeux, mes bras, mes mains, ma chair,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">mon torse</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et mes cheveux amples et blonds,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et je voudrais, par mes poumons,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Boire l'espace entier pour en gonfler ma force.<a name="FNanchor_21_139" id="FNanchor_21_139"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_139" class="fnanchor">[21]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The feeling of identity has given him absolute identity in regard to
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> 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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Soyez remerciés, mes yeux,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">D'être restés si clairs, sous mon front déjà vieux,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pour voir au loin bouger et vibrer la lumière;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et vous, mes mains, de tressaillir dans le soleil;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et vous, mes doigts, de vous dorer aux fruits vermeils</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pendus au long du mur, près des roses trémières.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Soyez remercié, mon corps,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">D'être ferme, rapide, et frémissant encor</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Au toucher des vents prompts ou des brises profondes;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et vous, mon torse clair et mes larges poumons,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">De respirer au long des mers ou sur les monts,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'air radieux et vif qui baigne et mord les mondes.<a name="FNanchor_22_140" id="FNanchor_22_140"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_140" class="fnanchor">[22]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Thus, too, he now celebrates all things to which he is related&mdash;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.
+<i>And just as he feels himself to be strong and healthy, so too his
+feeling conceives of the whole world as healthy and great</i>. 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> felt positively <i>in
+the body</i>, 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,'<a name="FNanchor_23_141" id="FNanchor_23_141"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_141" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> a discharge of human, of
+physical electricity. Joy here becomes a physical excess, an
+intoxication, a superabundance without parallel:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Nous apportons, ivres du monde et de nous-mêmes,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Des cœurs d'hommes nouveaux dans le vieil univers.<a name="FNanchor_24_142" id="FNanchor_24_142"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_142" class="fnanchor">[24]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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'!</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> 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 <i>Les Forcés Tumultueuses</i> shines <i>La Multiple
+Splendeur</i>. And to himself may be applied the words he dedicated to his
+hymn of all humanity&mdash;'La joie et la bonté sont les fleurs de sa
+force.'<a name="FNanchor_25_143" id="FNanchor_25_143"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_143" class="fnanchor">[25]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_119" id="Footnote_1_119"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_119"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> G. Le Cardonnel et Ch. Vellay, <i>La Littérature
+Contemporaine.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_120" id="Footnote_2_120"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_120"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 'Autour de ma Maison' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_121" id="Footnote_3_121"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_121"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> <i>Ecce Homo!</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_122" id="Footnote_4_122"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_122"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> 'La Ferveur' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_123" id="Footnote_5_123"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_123"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> 'La Vie' (<i>Ibid.</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_124" id="Footnote_6_124"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_124"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> 'L'Action' (<i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_125" id="Footnote_7_125"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_125"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> 'L'Impossible' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_126" id="Footnote_8_126"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_126"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> 'Les Rêves' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_127" id="Footnote_9_127"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_127"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> 'L'Impossible' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_128" id="Footnote_10_128"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_128"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> 'Un Soir' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_129" id="Footnote_11_129"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_129"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> 'La Ferveur' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_130" id="Footnote_12_130"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_130"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> 'Autour de ma Maison' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_131" id="Footnote_13_131"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_131"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> 'La Joie' (<i>Ibid</i>.).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_132" id="Footnote_14_132"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_132"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> 'L'En-avant' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_133" id="Footnote_15_133"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_133"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> 'La Louange du Corps Humain' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_134" id="Footnote_16_134"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_134"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> <i>Ibid. (Ibid.)</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_135" id="Footnote_17_135"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_135"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> 'La Vie' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_136" id="Footnote_18_136"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_136"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> 'Guillaume de Juliers' (<i>Les Héros</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_137" id="Footnote_19_137"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_137"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> 'Un Matin' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_138" id="Footnote_20_138"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_138"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> 'Un Matin' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_139" id="Footnote_21_139"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_139"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> <i>Ibid. (Ibid.)</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_140" id="Footnote_22_140"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_140"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> 'La Joie' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_141" id="Footnote_23_141"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_141"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> 'Léon Bazalgette', <i>Émile Verhaeren</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_142" id="Footnote_24_142"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_142"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> 'La Ferveur' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_143" id="Footnote_25_143"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_143"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> 'Les Mages' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="LOVE" id="LOVE"></a>LOVE</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Ceux qui vivent d'amour vivent d'éternité.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15.5em;">E.V., <i>Les Heures d'après-midi.</i></span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> 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.'<a name="FNanchor_1_144" id="FNanchor_1_144"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_144" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> Only to woman is love the sense of
+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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Les forts montent la vie ainsi qu'un escalier,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Sans voir d'abord que les femmes sur leurs passages</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Tendent vers eux leurs seins, leurs fronts et leur visages.<a name="FNanchor_2_145" id="FNanchor_2_145"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_145" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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. <i>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</i>. He must<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> 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&mdash;the personal symbol of eternal,
+exterior order&mdash;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&mdash;in this symphony that is often brutal&mdash;there is a
+quiet, soft andante, a trilogy in the trilogy, one of love. From the
+point of view of art, these three books, <i>Les Heures Claires, Les Heures
+d'Après-midi,</i> and <i>Les Heures du Soir</i>, 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> spoken loudly, but with a voice
+subdued. Religious consciousness&mdash;for with Verhaeren all that is poetic
+is religious in a new sense&mdash;finds a new form here. <i>Here Verhaeren does
+not preach, he prays</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> 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&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et l'on se dit les simples choses:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Le fruit qu'on a cueilli dans le jardin;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">La fleur qui s'est ouverte,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">D'entre les mousses vertes,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et la pensée éclose, en des émois soudains,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Au souvenir d'un mot de tendresse fanée</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">Surpris au fond d'un vieux tiroir,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">Sur un billet de l'autre année.<a name="FNanchor_3_146" id="FNanchor_3_146"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_146" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>
+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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Avec mes sens, avec mon cœur et mon cerveau,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Avec mon être entier tendu comme un flambeau</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Vers ta bonté et vers ta charité,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Je t'aime et te louange et je te remercie</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">D'être venue, un jour, si simplement,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Par les chemins du dévouement,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Prendre en tes mains bienfaisantes, ma vie.<a name="FNanchor_4_147" id="FNanchor_4_147"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_147" class="fnanchor">[4]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>These verses are genuflexions, folded hands, love that by humility
+becomes religion.</p>
+
+<p>But still more beautiful and significant, perhaps, is the second volume
+of the trilogy <i>Les Heures d'Après-midi</i>; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> poorer. <i>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</i>. And so his
+love has been able to celebrate the highest triumph, <i>vaincre
+l'habitude</i>, 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.<a name="FNanchor_5_148" id="FNanchor_5_148"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_148" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> 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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Puisque je sais que rien au monde</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Ne troublera jamais notre être exalté</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Et que notre âme est trop profonde</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pour que l'amour dépende encor de la beauté.<a name="FNanchor_6_149" id="FNanchor_6_149"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_149" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The temporal has here been overcome, and even the future, even death
+have no longer any terrors. Without fear of losing himself&mdash;for 'qui vit
+d'amour vit d'éternité'&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vous m'avez dit, tel soir, des paroles si belles</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Que sans doute les fleurs, qui se penchaient vers nous,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Soudain nous out aimés et que l'une d'entre elles,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pour nous toucher tous deux, tomba sur nos genoux.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vous me parliez des temps prochains où nos années,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Comme des fruits trop mûrs, se laisseraient cueillir;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Comment éclaterait le glas des destinées,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et comme on s'aimerait en se sentant vieillir.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Votre voix m'enlaçait comme une chère étreinte,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et votre cœur brûlait si tranquillement beau</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qu'en ce moment j'aurais pu voir s'ouvrir sans crainte</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Les tortueux chemins qui vont vers le tombeau.<a name="FNanchor_7_150" id="FNanchor_7_150"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_150" class="fnanchor">[7]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The third volume, <i>Les Heures du Soir</i>, 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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;for as far as the iconoclastic
+work is concerned, respect for tradition and fear of innovations may
+have scared many people away&mdash;have not enjoyed a widespread popularity.
+For never since the tenderly vibrating music of Verlaine's <i>La Bonne
+Chanson</i>, 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 <i>poèmes francs et
+doux</i>, for here behind the savage, ecstatic poet, the passionate and
+strong poet of <i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>, 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.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_144" id="Footnote_1_144"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_144"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'Le Paradis' (<i>Les Rythmes Souverains</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_145" id="Footnote_2_145"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_145"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 'Hommage' (<i>Au Bord de la Route</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_146" id="Footnote_3_146"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_146"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 'C'est la bonne heure où la lampe s'allume' (<i>Les Heures
+d'Après-midi</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_147" id="Footnote_4_147"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_147"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> 'Avec mes sens, avec mon cœur et mon cerveau'. (<i>Les
+Heures d'Après-midi</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_148" id="Footnote_5_148"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_148"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> 'Voici quinze ans déjà' (<i>Les Heures d'Après-midi</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_149" id="Footnote_6_149"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_149"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> 'Les baisers morts des défuntes années' (<i>Ibid.</i>)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_150" id="Footnote_7_150"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_150"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> 'Vous m'avez dit, tel soir' (<i>Les Heures d'Après-midi</i>).<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_ART_OF_VERHAERENS_LIFE" id="THE_ART_OF_VERHAERENS_LIFE"></a>THE ART OF VERHAEREN'S LIFE</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Je suis d'accord avec moi-même</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et c'est assez.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 16em;">É.V.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Camille Lemonnier, the master of Verhaeren's youth, the friend of his
+prime, at the banquet offered by Belgium to the poet of <i>Toute la
+Flandre,</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>In Verhaeren's case, there stands behind the poetic work of art the
+incomparable masterpiece of a great life, a wonderful, victorious
+battle<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> 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&mdash;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&mdash;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>La Guirlande des Dunes</i>,
+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.'<a name="FNanchor_1_151" id="FNanchor_1_151"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_151" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> He has returned to his own race, to
+the bosom of Nature, to the eternal resources of health and life.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>
+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&mdash;flees from
+hay-fever. This illness of Verhaeren's has always seemed to me
+symbolical of his art<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>This apparent contrast between the art of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> 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&mdash;which
+has already allured so many painters and sculptors&mdash;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&mdash;<i>couleur de mer</i>&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> 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 <i>unity in
+experience, in feeling</i>. 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&mdash;gratitude ever renewed and
+boundlessly intensified in passion.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_151" id="Footnote_1_151"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_151"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Vielé-Griffin, biographical note to Mockel's <i>Verhaeren.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_EUROPEAN_IMPORTANCE_OF_HIS_WORK" id="THE_EUROPEAN_IMPORTANCE_OF_HIS_WORK"></a>THE EUROPEAN IMPORTANCE OF HIS WORK</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Futur, vous m'exaltez comme autrefois mon Dieu!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 17.5em;">É.V., 'La Prière.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Now, of all the poets of our day Verhaeren is the one who has felt this
+feeling of responsibility most strongly. To write poetry is for him to
+express not himself only, but the striving and straining of the whole
+period as well, the fearful torment and the happiness that are in the
+birth of the new things. Just because his work comprises all the present
+and aims at expressing it in its entity, he feels himself responsible to
+the future. For him a true poet must visualise the whole psychic care of
+his time. For when later generations&mdash;in the same manner as they will
+question monuments concerning our art, pictures concerning our painters,
+social forms concerning our philosophers&mdash;ask of the verses and the
+works of our contemporaries the question, What was your hope, your
+feeling, the sum of your interpretation? how did you feel cities and
+men, things and gods?&mdash;shall we be able to answer them? This is the
+inner question of Verhaeren's artistic responsibility.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> <i>And this
+feeling of responsibility has made his work great</i>. Most of the poets of
+our day have been unconcerned with reality. Some of them strike up a
+dancing measure, rouse and amuse people lounging in theatres; others
+again tell of their own sorrow, ask for pity and compassion, they who
+have never felt for others. Verhaeren, however, heedless of the approval
+or disapproval of our time, turns his face towards the generations to
+be:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Celui qui me lira dans les siècles, un soir,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Troublant mes vers, sous leur sommeil ou sous leur cendre,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et ranimant leur sens lointain pour mieux comprendre</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Comment ceux d'aujourd'hui s'étaient armés d'espoir,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qu'il sache, avec quel violent élan, ma joie</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">S'est, à travers les cris, les révoltes, les pleurs,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Ruée au combat fier et mâle des douleurs,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pour en tirer l'amour, comme on conquiert sa proie.<a name="FNanchor_1_152" id="FNanchor_1_152"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_152" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>It was, in the last instance, this magnificent feeling of responsibility
+which did not permit him to pass by any manifestation of our present
+time without observing and appreciating it, for he knows that later
+generations will ask the question how we sensed the new thing, which to
+them is a possession and a matter of course, when it was still strange
+and almost hostile. His work is the answer. The true poet of to-day, in
+Verhaeren's eyes, must show forth the torment and the trouble of the
+whole psychic transition, the painful discovery of the new beauty in the
+new things,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> the revolt, the crisis, the struggles it costs to
+understand all this, to adapt ourselves to it, and in the end to love
+it. Verhaeren has attempted to express our whole time in its earthly,
+its material, its psychic form. His verses lyrically represent Europe at
+the turning of the century, us and our time; they consciously
+contemplate the whole circuit of the things of life: <i>they write a lyric
+encyclopædia of our time, the intellectual atmosphere of Europe at the
+turning of the twentieth century.</i></p>
+
+<p>The whole of Europe speaks with his voice, speaks with a voice that
+reaches beyond our time; and already from the whole of Europe comes the
+answer. In Belgium Verhaeren is above all the national poet, the poet of
+heaths, cities, dunes, and of the Flemish past, the great renewer of the
+national pride. But he stands too near his fellow-countrymen to be
+measured at his full height there. And in France, too, very few
+appreciate him at his true value. Most people regard him there in his
+literary aspect only and as a symbolist and decadent, an innovator of
+verse, an audacious and gifted revolutionary. But very few perceive the
+new and important work that is built up in his verses, very few
+comprehend the entity and the logical character of his cosmic
+philosophy. Nevertheless, his influence is already tangible. The new
+rhythm he has created can be recognised in many poets; and such a gifted
+disciple as Jules Romains has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> even brought his idea of the feeling of
+cities to new impressiveness. Best of all, however, he is understood by
+those Frenchmen who stand in a mystic communion with all that is great
+and urgent abroad; who feel an ethical need, a longing for an inner
+transmutation of values, for a re-moulding of races, for cosmopolitanism
+and a union of the nations; so, above all, Léon Bazalgette, who revealed
+Walt Whitman, the prophet of all strong and conscious reality in art, to
+France. Most joyfully of all, however, the answer rings from those
+countries which are themselves involved in deep-seated social and
+ethical crises, those countries where the need of religion is a vital
+instinct, which are eternally hungry for God, above all from Russia and
+Germany. In Russia the poet of <i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i> is celebrated
+as he is nowhere else. As the poet of social innovations he is read in
+the Russian universities, and in the circles of the intellectuals he is
+regarded as the spiritual pioneer of our time. Brjussow, the
+distinguished young poet, has translated him, and afforded him the
+possibility of popularity. In other Slavonic countries, too, his work is
+beginning to spread.</p>
+
+<p>Verhaeren's success, one may well say triumph, has been strongest and
+most impressive in Germany; here it has been unexpectedly intensive even
+to us who have worked for it. A few years have sufficed to make him as
+popular here<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> I as any native poet, and the most beautiful feature of
+his success is this, that people are already forgetting to look upon him
+as a foreigner. Verhaeren is to-day part and parcel of German culture;
+and much of our contemporary lyric poetry, its welcome turning to
+optimism for example, would be unthinkable but for his work and
+influence. Countless are the essays devoted to him, the recitations in
+which our best elocutionists&mdash;Kainz, Moissi, Kayssler, Heine, Wiecke,
+Durieux, Rosen, Gregori&mdash;have taken part; none of these interpreters,
+however, were as enthusiastically applauded as was Verhaeren himself on
+his <i>tournée</i> in Germany, which was a great experience no less for him
+than for our public, because he gladly felt that his work was now rooted
+for ever in German soil. In Scandinavia, where Johannes V. Jensen in his
+essays unconsciously transcribed Verhaeren's lyric work, Ellen Key, the
+inspired prophetess of the feeling of life, has hailed him as she has
+hailed no other, and Georg Brandes, who crowns poets, has welcomed him
+with loud acclaim. Incessantly, in an irresistible, sure ascent,
+Verhaeren's fame grows. And above all, his poetry is no longer regarded
+as an individual thing, but as a work, as a cosmic philosophy, as an
+answer to the questions of our time, as the strongest and most beautiful
+enrichment of our vital feeling. Wherever people are tired of pessimism,
+tired of confused mysticism, and tired of monistic shallowness; wherever
+a longing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> stirs for a pure idealistic form of contemplation, for a new
+reconciliation between our new realities and the old reverence for
+eternal secrets, for the secularisation of the divine, his name stands
+in the front rank. An answer comes from every direction, not because his
+work was a question, but because it was in itself an answer to the
+unconscious demand for a new community, a demand which is being made by
+men of all nations everywhere to-day.</p>
+
+<p>But all this is only a beginning. Works like his, which are not
+paradoxical enough, not dazzling enough, to produce sudden ecstasies and
+literary fashions; which, by the mere fact that they have themselves
+grown organically into existence, can only grow organically, but for
+that reason irresistibly, in their influence; only lay hold of the
+masses slowly. Only later generations will enjoy the fruit which we,
+with renewed admiration, have seen ripening from the most modest of
+blossoms. But already a ring of men of all nations are joining hands, a
+ring of men who perceive a new centre of spirituality in Verhaeren. And
+we, the few who have wholly surrendered ourselves to his work, must
+appreciate it with that feeling only which he himself has taught us as
+the highest feeling of life&mdash;with enthusiasm, with gratitude ever
+renewed, and with joyful admiration. For to whom in our days should one
+offer more abundantly and stormily this new vital doctrine of enthusiasm
+as the happiest feeling<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> than to Verhaeren, to him who was the first to
+wrest it in the bitterest struggles from the depths of our time, who was
+the first to shape it in the material of art, the first to raise it to
+the eternal law of life?</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_152" id="Footnote_1_152"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_152"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'Un Soir' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="BIBLIOGRAPHY" id="BIBLIOGRAPHY"></a>BIBLIOGRAPHY</h3>
+
+
+<p>I. LES FLAMANDES, poèmes. Bruxelles, Hochsteyn, 1883. LES CONTES DE
+MINUIT, prose. Bruxelles (Collection de la 'Jeune Belgique'), Franck,
+1885.</p>
+
+<p>JOSEPH HEYMANS, PEINTRE, critique. Bruxelles (<i>Société Nouvelle</i>), 1885.</p>
+
+<p>II. LES MOINES, poèmes. Paris, Lemerre, 1886.</p>
+
+<p>FERNAND KHNOPFF, critique. Bruxelles (<i>Société Nouvelle</i>), 1886.</p>
+
+<p>III. Au BORD DE LA ROUTE, poèmes. Liège (<i>La Wallonie</i>), 1891.</p>
+
+<p>IV. LES SOIRS, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman, 1887.</p>
+
+<p>V. LES DÉBÂCLES, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman, 1888.</p>
+
+<p>VI. LES FLAMBEAUX NOIRS, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman, 1890.</p>
+
+<p>VII. LES VILLAGES ILLUSOIRES, poèmes, illustrés par Georges Minne.
+Bruxelles, Deman, 1895.</p>
+
+<p>VIII. LES APPARUS DANS MES CHEMINS, poèmes. Bruxelles, Lacomblez, 1891.</p>
+
+<p>LES CAMPAGNES HALLUCINÉES, poèmes, ornementés par T. van Rysselberghe.
+Bruxelles, Deman, 1893.</p>
+
+<p>ALMANACH, poèmes, illustrés par T. van Rysselberghe. Bruxelles,
+Dietrich, 1895.</p>
+
+<p>POÈMES (1<sup>e</sup> série, i., ii., iii.). Paris, Mercure de France, 1895.</p>
+
+<p>LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES, poèmes, couverture et ornementation par T. van
+Rysselberghe. Bruxelles, Deman, 1896.</p>
+
+<p>POÈMES (2<sup>e</sup> série, iv., v., vi.). Paris, Mercure de France, 1896.</p>
+
+<p>LES HEURES CLAIRES, poèmes, ornementés par T. van Rysselberghe.
+Bruxelles, Deman, 1896.</p>
+
+<p>ÉMILE VERHAEREN, 1883-1896, portrait par T. van Rysselberghe.
+[Bruxelles, Deman, 1896.] (An anthology, 'pour les amis du poète,')</p>
+
+<p>LES AUBES, drame lyrique en 4 actes, ornementé par T. van Rysselberghe.
+Bruxelles, Deman, 1898.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>ESPAÇA NEGRA, NOTAS DE VIAJE. Barcelona, Pedro Ortega, 1899.</p>
+
+<p>LES VISAGES DE LA VIE, poèmes, ornementés par T. van Rysselberghe.
+Bruxelles, Deman, 1899.</p>
+
+<p>POÈMES (3<sup>e</sup> série, vii., viii., <i>Les Vignes de ma Muraille</i>). Paris,
+Mercure de France, 1899.</p>
+
+<p>LE CLOÎTRE, drame en 4 actes, prose et vers, ornementé par T. van
+Rysselberghe. Bruxelles, Deman, 1900.</p>
+
+<p>PETITES LÉGENDES, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman, 1900.</p>
+
+<p>LES PETITS VIEUX. London, Hacon &amp; Ricketts, 1901.</p>
+
+<p>PHILIPPE H., tragédie en 3 actes, vers et prose. Paris, Mercure de
+France, 1901.</p>
+
+<p>LES FORCES TUMULTUEUSES, poèmes. Paris, Mercure de France, 1902.</p>
+
+<p>LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES, précédées des <i>Campagnes Hallucinées,</i> poèmes.
+Paris, Mercure de France, 1904.</p>
+
+<p>TOUTE LA FLANDRE: <i>Les Tendresses Premières</i>, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman,
+1904.</p>
+
+<p>LES HEURES D'APRÈS-MIDI, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman, 1905.</p>
+
+<p>REMBRANDT, étude. Paris, Henri Laurens [1905].</p>
+
+<p>IMAGES JAPONAISES, texte d'É. V ..., illustrations de Kwassou. Tokio,
+1906.</p>
+
+<p>LA MULTIPLE SPLENDEUR, poèmes. Paris, Mercure de France, 1906.</p>
+
+<p>TOUTE LA FLANDRE: <i>La Guirlande des Dunes</i>, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman,
+1907.</p>
+
+<p>LES LETTRES FRANÇAISES EN BELGIQUE. Bruxelles, Lamertin, 1907.</p>
+
+<p>LES VISAGES DE LA VIE (<i>Les Visages de la Vie, Les douze Mois</i>), poèmes,
+nouvelle édition. Paris, Mercure de France, 1908.</p>
+
+<p>TOUTE LA FLANDRE: <i>Les Héros</i>. Bruxelles, Deman, 1908.</p>
+
+<p>JAMES ENSOR, étude. Bruxelles, E. van Oest, 1908.</p>
+
+<p>TOUTE LA FLANDRE: <i>Les Villes à Pignons</i>. Bruxelles, Deman, 1909.</p>
+
+<p>HELENAS HEIMKEHR. Leipzig, Insel-Verlag, 1909. (Translation by Stefan
+Zweig of <i>Hélène de Sparte</i>.)</p>
+
+<p>DEUX DRAMES: LE CLOÃŽTRE, PHILIPPE II. Paris, Mercure de France, 1909.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>LES RYTHMES SOUVERAINS, poèmes. Paris, Mercure de France, 1910.</p>
+
+<p>PIERRE-PAUL RUBENS. Brussels, G. van Oest &amp; Cie., 1910.</p>
+
+<p>LES HEURES DU SOIR. Leipzig, Insel-Verlag, 1911.</p>
+
+<p>HÉLÈNE DE SPARTE, tragédie en 4 actes. Paris, 'Nouvelle Revue
+Française,' 1912.</p>
+
+<p>TOUTE LA FLANDRE: <i>Les Plaines</i>. Bruxelles, Deman, 1911.</p>
+
+<p>LES BLÉS MOUVANTS, poèmes. Paris, Crès, 1912.</p>
+
+<p>LES VILLAGES ILLUSOIRES, avec 15 gravures à l'eau forte par Henry Ramah.
+Leipzig, Insel-Verlag, 1913.</p>
+
+<p>RUBENS. Leipzig, Insel-Verlag, 1913.</p>
+
+<p>LES BLÉS MOUVANTS, poèmes. Paris, Mercure de France, 1913.</p>
+
+<p>ŒUVRES D'ÉMILE VERHAEREN (IV., V., VI., VII., VIII., <i>Les Vignes de
+ma Muraille</i>). Paris, Mercure de France, 1914.</p>
+
+
+
+<p class="caption">TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH</p>
+
+<p>THE DAWN (<i>Les Aubes</i>), by Émile Verhaeren, translated by Arthur Symons.
+London, Duckworth, 1898.</p>
+
+<p>POEMS BY ÉMILE VERHAEREN, selected and rendered into English by Alma
+Strettel. London, John Lane, 1899.</p>
+
+<p>CONTEMPORARY BELGIAN POETRY, selected and translated by Jethro Bithell.
+('Canterbury Poets' series.) London, Walter Scott, 1911. (60 pp. are
+translations of Verhaeren's poems.)</p>
+
+
+
+<p class="caption">CRITICISMS</p>
+
+
+<p>BOOKS</p>
+
+<p>Bazalgette, Léon: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Paris, Sansot, 1907. (One of the
+series 'Les Célébrités d'aujourd'hui.')</p>
+
+<p>Beaunier, André: LA POÉSIE NOUVELLE. Paris, Mercure de France, 1902.</p>
+
+<p>Bersaucourt, Albert de: CONFÉRENCE SUR ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Paris, Jouve,
+1908.</p>
+
+<p>Bever, Ad. van, et Paul Léautaud: POÈTES D'AUJOURD'HUI, nouvelle
+édition, tome 2. Paris, Mercure de France, 1909.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Boer, Julius de: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. [1907.] (One of the series 'Mannen en
+Vrouwen van beteekenis in onze dagen.')</p>
+
+<p>Bosch, Firmin van den: IMPRESSIONS DE LITTÉRATURE CONTEMPORAINE.
+Bruxelles, Vromant et Cie., 1905.</p>
+
+<p>Buisseret, Georges: L'ÉVOLUTION IDÉOLOGIQUE D'ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Paris,
+Mercure de France, 1910. (One of the series 'Les Hommes et les Idées.')</p>
+
+<p>Casier, Jean: LES 'MOINES' D'ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Gand, Leliaert et Siffer,
+1887.</p>
+
+<p>Crawford, Virginia M.: STUDIES IN FOREIGN LITERATURE. London, Duckworth,
+1899.</p>
+
+<p>Florian-Parmentier: TOUTES LES LYRES. Anthologie Critique ornée de
+dessins et de portraits, nouvelle série. Paris, Gastein-Serge, [1911].</p>
+
+<p>Gauchez, Maurice: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Bruxelles, éditions du 'Thyrse,'
+1908.</p>
+
+<p>Gilbert, Eugène: FRANCE ET BELGIQUE. Paris, Pion, Nourrit et Cie, 1905.</p>
+
+<p>Gosse, Edmund: FRENCH PROFILES. London, Heinemann, 1905.</p>
+
+<p>Gourmont, Remy de: LE LIVRE DES MASQUES. Paris, Mercure de France, 1896.</p>
+
+<p>Gourmont, Remy de: PROMENADES LITTÉRAIRES. Paris, Mercure de France,
+1904.</p>
+
+<p>Guilbeaux, Henri: É. VERHAEREN. Verviers, Wauthy, 1908.</p>
+
+<p>Hamel, A.G. van: HET LETTERKUNDIG LEVEN VAN FRANKRIJK. Amsterdam, van
+Kampen &amp; Zoon [1907].</p>
+
+<p>Hauser, Otto: DIE BELGISCHE LYRIK VON 1880-1900. Grossenhain, Baumert
+und Ronge, 1902.</p>
+
+<p>Heumann, Albert: LE MOUVEMENT LITTÉRAIRE BELGE D'EXPRESSION FRANÇAISE
+DEPUIS 1880. Paris, Mercure de France, 1913.</p>
+
+<p>Horrent, Désiré: ÉCRIVAINS BELGES D'AUJOURD'HUI. Bruxelles, Lacomblez,
+1904.</p>
+
+<p>Key, Ellen: SEELEN UND WERKE. Berlin, S. Fischer, 1911.</p>
+
+<p>Kinon, Victor: PORTRAITS D'AUTEURS. Bruxelles, Dechenne, 1910.</p>
+
+<p>Le Cardonnel, Georges, et Charles Vellay: LA LITTÉRATURE CONTEMPORAINE,
+1905. Paris, Mercure de France, 1906.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Lemonnier, Camille: LA VIE BELGE. Paris, Fasquelle, 1905.</p>
+
+<p>Mercereau, Alexandre: LA LITTÉRATURE ET LES IDÉES NOUVELLES. Paris,
+Figuière, and London, Stephen Swift, 1912.</p>
+
+<p>Mockel, Albert: ÉMILE VERHAEREN, avec une note biographique par F.
+Vielé-Griffin. Paris, Mercure de France, 1895.</p>
+
+<p>Nouhuys, W.G. van: VAN OVER DE GRENSEN, STUDIËN EN CRITIEKEN. Baarn,
+Hollandia Drukkerij, 1906.</p>
+
+<p>Oppeln-Bronikowski, F. von: DAS JUNGE FRANKREICH. Berlin, Oesterheld und
+Co., 1908.</p>
+
+<p>Ramaekers, Georges: É. VERHAEREN. Bruxelles, éditions de 'La Lutte,'
+1900.</p>
+
+<p>Rency, Georges: PHYSIONOMIES LITTÉRAIRES. Bruxelles, Dechenne et Cie,
+1907.</p>
+
+<p>Rimestad, Christian: FRANSK POESI I DET NITTENDE AARHUNDREDE.
+Kjøbenhavn, Det Schubotheske, 1906.</p>
+
+<p>Schellenberg, E.A.: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Leipzig, Xenien-Verlag, 1911.</p>
+
+<p>Schlaf, Johannes: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Berlin, Schuster und Loeffler,
+[1905].</p>
+
+<p>Smet, Abbé Jos. de: ÉMILE VERHAEREN, SA VIE ET SES ŒUVRES. Malines,
+1909.</p>
+
+<p>Tellier, Jules: Nos POÈTES. Paris, Despret, 1888.</p>
+
+<p>Thompson, Vance: FRENCH PORTRAITS. Boston, Badger &amp; Co., 1900.</p>
+
+<p>Vigié-Lecoq, E.: LA POÉSIE CONTEMPORAINE, 1884-1896. Paris, Mercure de
+France, 1897.</p>
+
+<p>Visan, Tancrède de: L'ATTITUDE DU LYRISME CONTEMPORAIN. Paris, Mercure
+de France, 1911.</p>
+
+<p>Zweig, Stefan: PREFACE TO ÉMILE VERHAERENS AUSGEWÄHLTE GEDICHTE IN
+NACHDICHTUNG. Berlin, Schuster und Loeffler, 1903.</p>
+
+
+<p>PERIODICALS</p>
+
+<p>Brandes, Georg: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. <i>Politiken</i>, Copenhagen, 8th June 1903.</p>
+
+<p>Brandes, Georg: ÉMILE VERHAEREN ALS DRAMATIKER. <i>Die Schaubühne</i>,
+Berlin, 5th April 1906.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Edwards, Osman: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. <i>The Savoy</i>, November 1897.</p>
+
+<p>Fontainas, André: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. <i>L'Art Moderne</i>, Brussels, 23rd
+February 1902.</p>
+
+<p>Fresnois, André du: LETTRE DE PARIS, HÉLÈNE DE SPARTE. <i>La Vie
+Intellectuelle</i>, Brussels, May 1912.</p>
+
+<p>Gosse, Edmund: M. VERHAEREN'S NEW POEMS (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).
+<i>Daily Chronicle</i>, 17th February 1902.</p>
+
+<p>Gosse, Edmund: M. VERHAEREN'S NEW POEMS (<i>Les Blés Mouvants</i>). <i>New
+Weekly</i>,18th April 1914.</p>
+
+<p>Gourmont, Jean de: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. <i>Les Marges</i>, Paris, March 1914.</p>
+
+<p>Krains, Hubert: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. <i>Société Nouvelle</i>, Brussels, June
+1895.</p>
+
+<p>Mauclair, Camille: TROIS POÈTES. <i>Revue Encyclopédique</i>, Paris, 25th
+April 1896.</p>
+
+<p>Maurras, Charles: LITTÉRATURE. <i>Revue Encyclopédique</i>, Paris, 23rd
+January 1897.</p>
+
+<p>Polak, Emile: ÉMILE VERHAEREN EN RUSSIE. <i>La Vie Intellectuelle,</i>
+Brussels, January 1914.</p>
+
+<p>Reboul, Jacques: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. <i>L'Olivier</i>, Paris, 15th February
+1914.</p>
+
+<p>Régnier, Henri de: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. <i>Revue Blanche</i>, Paris, March 1895.</p>
+
+<p>Rodrigue, G.M.: HÉLÈNE DE SPARTE. <i>Le Thyrse</i>, Brussels, July 1912.</p>
+
+<p>Sadler, Michael T.H.: ÉMILE VERHAEREN: AN APPRECIATION. <i>Poetry and
+Drama</i>, June 1913.</p>
+
+<p>Sautreau, Georges: L'ŒUVRE LYRIQUE D'ÉMILE VERHAEREN. <i>Revue
+Scandinave</i>, Paris, December 1911&mdash;January 1912.</p>
+
+<p>Speth, William: L'INSPIRATION DE VERHAEREN ET LES COLORISTES FLAMANDS.
+<i>La Vie des Lettres</i>, Paris, January 1914.</p>
+
+<p>Vielé-Griffin, Francis: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. <i>La Plume</i>, Paris,</p>
+
+<p>25th April 1896. Vielé-Griffin, Francis: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. <i>Mercure de
+France</i>, Paris, 15th March 1914.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h3><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a>INDEX</h3>
+
+<p>
+ACTORS, <a href='#Page_131'>131</a>, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>-<a href='#Page_175'>175</a>.<br />
+Admiration, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_101'>101</a>, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a>, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_217'>217</a> ff., <a href='#Page_259'>259</a>.<br />
+Aeroplanes, <a href='#Page_4'>4</a>, <a href='#Page_164'>164</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>.<br />
+Æsthetics, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a>, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_151'>151</a>, <a href='#Page_205'>205</a>.<br />
+Africa, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>.<br />
+Agrarianism, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_101'>101</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>.<br />
+'À la Gloire du Vent,' <a href='#Page_200'>200</a>.<br />
+Alcohol, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>.<br />
+Alexandrine, the, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>, <a href='#Page_48'>48</a>, 7<a href='#Page_4'>4</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_144'>144</a>, <a href='#Page_147'>147</a> ff., <a href='#Page_163'>163</a>, <a href='#Page_170'>170</a>.<br />
+<i>Almanack</i>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>.<br />
+<i>Also Sprach Zarathustra</i>,<a href='#Page_134'>134</a>.<br />
+America, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>,<br />
+  <a href='#Page_120'>120</a>, <a href='#Page_131'>131</a>-<a href='#Page_132'>132</a>, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>, <a href='#Page_250'>250</a>.<br />
+Artisans, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_131'>131</a>, <a href='#Page_194'>194</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>, <a href='#Page_235'>235</a>,<br />
+  <a href='#Page_247'>247</a>.<br />
+Asceticism, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_168'>168</a>.<br />
+<i>Au Bord de la Route</i>, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>-<a href='#Page_60'>60</a>, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a>, <a href='#Page_236'>236</a>.<br />
+'Au Bord du Quai,' <a href='#Page_202'>202</a>.<br />
+Auerbach, Berthold, <a href='#Page_38'>38</a>.<br />
+'Aujourd'hui,' <a href='#Page_4'>4</a>.<br />
+'Autour de ma Maison,' <a href='#Page_217'>217</a>, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>.<br />
+'Aux Moines,' <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_49'>49</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>.<br />
+<br />
+BAKST, LÉON, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+Ballads, old German, <a href='#Page_146'>146</a>, <a href='#Page_159'>159</a>.<br />
+Balzac, Honoré de, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>.<br />
+Banville, Théodore de, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>.<br />
+Baudelaire, Charles, <a href='#Page_59'>59</a>, <a href='#Page_120'>120</a>, <a href='#Page_142'>142</a>.<br />
+Bayreuth, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>.<br />
+Bazalgette, Léon, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>, <a href='#Page_238'>238</a>, <a href='#Page_257'>257</a>.<br />
+Beauty, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>-<a href='#Page_38'>38</a>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>, <a href='#Page_49'>49</a>-<a href='#Page_52'>52</a>, <a href='#Page_83'>83</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_96'>96</a> ff., <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>, <a href='#Page_206'>206</a>, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>, <a href='#Page_221'>221</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_230'>230</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>, <a href='#Page_240'>240</a>.<br />
+&mdash;, the new, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>, <a href='#Page_83'>83</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_96'>96</a> ff., <a href='#Page_100'>100</a>, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_170'>170</a>-<a href='#Page_172'>172</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_222'>222</a>, <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>.<br />
+<i>Béguinages</i>, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>.<br />
+Belfries, <a href='#Page_39'>39</a>, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>, <a href='#Page_157'>157</a>.<br />
+Belgian art, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>-<a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>.<br />
+&mdash;life, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>.<br />
+&mdash;literature, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>-<a href='#Page_26'>26</a>, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>-<a href='#Page_38'>38</a>.<br />
+&mdash;race, the, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a> ff., <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>-<a href='#Page_24'>24</a>.<br />
+Belgium, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a> ff., <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>.<br />
+Berlin, <a href='#Page_87'>87</a>, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>, <a href='#Page_113'>113</a>.<br />
+Bersaucourt, Albert de, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a>.<br />
+Bornhem, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>.<br />
+Brandes, Georg, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+Breughel, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>.<br />
+Brezina, Otokar, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>.<br />
+Brjussow, Valerius, <a href='#Page_257'>257</a>.<br />
+Brownings, the, <a href='#Page_243'>243</a>.<br />
+Bruges, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_39'>39</a>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>.<br />
+Brussels, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>.<br />
+<br />
+CAILLOU-QUI-BIQUE, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>.<br />
+Carducci, Giosuè, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_193'>193</a>.<br />
+Carlyle, Thomas, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>.<br />
+'Celle des Voyages,' <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>.<br />
+'Celui de la Fatigue,' <a href='#Page_66'>66</a>.<br />
+'Celui du Savoir,' <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>.<br />
+Chance, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_110'>110</a>, <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>, <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>.<br />
+'Charles le Téméraire,' <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>.<br />
+Charles v., <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>.<br />
+Chiaroscuro, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>.<br />
+Chimay, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>.<br />
+Christ, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>.<br />
+Christianity, <a href='#Page_49'>49</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>.<br />
+Cities, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>, <a href='#Page_4'>4</a>, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>-<a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>-<a href='#Page_30'>30</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_75'>75</a>-<a href='#Page_77'>77</a>, <a href='#Page_83'>83</a>, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a> ff., <a href='#Page_94'>94</a> ff.,<br />
+<a href='#Page_101'>101</a> ff., <a href='#Page_107'>107</a>, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>-<a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>-<a href='#Page_118'>118</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_125'>125</a>-<a href='#Page_126'>126</a>, <a href='#Page_131'>131</a>, <a href='#Page_140'>140</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>-<a href='#Page_167'>167</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_181'>181</a>, <a href='#Page_191'>191</a>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>, <a href='#Page_238'>238</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_247'>247</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>, <a href='#Page_257'>257</a>.<br />
+Classicism, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_52'>52</a>, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_84'>84</a>, <a href='#Page_100'>100</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_160'>160</a>, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a>, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>.<br />
+Claus, Émile, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+Cloisters, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>, <a href='#Page_26'>26</a>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>-<a href='#Page_46'>46</a>, <a href='#Page_147'>147</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_165'>165</a>-<a href='#Page_166'>166</a>.<br />
+Colmar, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>.<br />
+Comédie Française, the, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a>.<br />
+Concentration, <a href='#Page_188'>188</a>, <a href='#Page_194'>194</a>.<br />
+Congo, the, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>.<br />
+Conservatives, the, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>.<br />
+Contemporary feeling, <a href='#Page_5'>5</a> ff., <a href='#Page_81'>81</a>-<a href='#Page_90'>90</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_101'>101</a> ff., <a href='#Page_112'>112</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_118'>118</a>, <a href='#Page_148'>148</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a>, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a>, <a href='#Page_254'>254</a> ff.<br />
+Coppée, François, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>.<br />
+<i>Cosmic Enthusiasm</i>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a>.<br />
+Cosmic feeling, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>-<a href='#Page_70'>70</a>, <a href='#Page_74'>74</a>-<a href='#Page_75'>75</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_81'>81</a> ff., <a href='#Page_112'>112</a>-<a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_126'>126</a>, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>, <a href='#Page_152'>152</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_179'>179</a>-<a href='#Page_185'>185</a>, <a href='#Page_186'>186</a>, <a href='#Page_188'>188</a>, <a href='#Page_192'>192</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a> ff.,<br />
+<a href='#Page_219'>219</a>, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>, <a href='#Page_228'>228</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+&mdash;law, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>, <a href='#Page_202'>202</a>-<a href='#Page_203'>203</a>.<br />
+&mdash;pain, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>.<br />
+Cosmopolitanism, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_257'>257</a>.<br />
+Cosmos, the, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>.<br />
+Coster, Charles de, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_168'>168</a>.<br />
+Country, the, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_26'>26</a>, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_101'>101</a> ff., <a href='#Page_107'>107</a>, <a href='#Page_245'>245</a>, <a href='#Page_247'>247</a>, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a>.<br />
+Courtrai, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>.<br />
+Criticism, <a href='#Page_33'>33</a>-<a href='#Page_34'>34</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_218'>218</a>.<br />
+Crommelynck, Fernand, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+Crowd, the, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a> ff., <a href='#Page_117'>117</a>, <a href='#Page_118'>118</a>, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_122'>122</a>, <a href='#Page_125'>125</a>-<a href='#Page_127'>127</a>, <a href='#Page_129'>129</a>, <a href='#Page_130'>130</a>, <a href='#Page_132'>132</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_134'>134</a>-<a href='#Page_136'>136</a>, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>, <a href='#Page_140'>140</a>, <a href='#Page_148'>148</a>, <a href='#Page_152'>152</a>.<br />
+<br />
+DAVID, GERHARD, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>.<br />
+Death, <a href='#Page_60'>60</a>, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_242'>242</a>.<br />
+Decadence, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a>.<br />
+Decadents, the, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>.<br />
+Declamation (<i>see</i> Recitation).<br />
+Defregger, Franz, <a href='#Page_38'>38</a>.<br />
+Dehmel, Richard, <a href='#Page_75'>75</a>-<a href='#Page_76'>76</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_191'>191</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_229'>229</a>, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a>.<br />
+Deman, Edmond, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>.<br />
+Democracy, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>, <a href='#Page_81'>81</a> ff., <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_111'>111</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_206'>206</a>.<br />
+Demolder, Eugène, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+Déroulède, Paul, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a>.<br />
+Deutsches Volkstheater, Vienna, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+Dialogue, <a href='#Page_129'>129</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Disease, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a> ff., <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>, <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>.<br />
+Dithyramb, the, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>, <a href='#Page_161'>161</a>.<br />
+Divinity (<i>see</i> God).<br />
+Dixmude, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>.<br />
+Dostoieffsky, F.M., <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_166'>166</a>.<br />
+Drama, the, <a href='#Page_150'>150</a>, <a href='#Page_151'>151</a>, <a href='#Page_161'>161</a> ff.,<br />
+<a href='#Page_194'>194</a>, <a href='#Page_235'>235</a>.<br />
+Dyck, Ernest van, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Ecce Homo!</i> <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_66'>66</a>, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a>-<a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_119'>119</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_218'>218</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Ecstasy, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_66'>66</a>, <a href='#Page_75'>75</a>, <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_90'>90</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a>, <a href='#Page_128'>128</a>, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_136'>136</a>, <a href='#Page_137'>137</a>, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>, <a href='#Page_152'>152</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>-<a href='#Page_167'>167</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_169'>169</a>, <a href='#Page_173'>173</a>, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_189'>189</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_213'>213</a>, <a href='#Page_216'>216</a>, <a href='#Page_217'>217</a>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a>, <a href='#Page_221'>221</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_223'>223</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>-<a href='#Page_229'>229</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_235'>235</a>, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a>-<a href='#Page_239'>239</a>, <a href='#Page_241'>241</a>, <a href='#Page_243'>243</a>, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_251'>251</a>, <a href='#Page_259'>259</a>.<br />
+Edwards, Osman, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+Eekhoud, Georges, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+Egoism (<i>see</i> Selfishness).<br />
+Emerson, Ralph Waldo, <a href='#Page_140'>140</a>.<br />
+Emigrants, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>-<a href='#Page_103'>103</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>.<br />
+Energy, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a> ff., <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_95'>95</a>, <a href='#Page_96'>96</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>, <a href='#Page_117'>117</a>, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_132'>132</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>, <a href='#Page_218'>218</a>, <a href='#Page_221'>221</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_223'>223</a>.<br />
+Engineering, <a href='#Page_4'>4</a>, <a href='#Page_5'>5</a>, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>.<br />
+England, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>, <a href='#Page_90'>90</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>.<br />
+Enthusiasm, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>, <a href='#Page_132'>132</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_138'>138</a>, <a href='#Page_153'>153</a>, <a href='#Page_161'>161</a>-<a href='#Page_164'>164</a>, <a href='#Page_168'>168</a>, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a>-<a href='#Page_174'>174</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_179'>179</a>, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_188'>188</a>, <a href='#Page_193'>193</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_194'>194</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>, <a href='#Page_215'>215</a> ff,<br />
+<a href='#Page_220'>220</a>-<a href='#Page_222'>222</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>-<a href='#Page_227'>227</a>, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_250'>250</a>, <a href='#Page_252'>252</a>, <a href='#Page_259'>259</a>.<br />
+Epic, the, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_150'>150</a>, <a href='#Page_151'>151</a>, <a href='#Page_161'>161</a>.<br />
+Eroticism, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a>,<a href='#Page_172'>172</a>-<a href='#Page_173'>173</a>, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a>, <a href='#Page_235'>235</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_237'>237</a>, <a href='#Page_240'>240</a>.<br />
+Ethics, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_206'>206</a>, <a href='#Page_215'>215</a> ff., <a href='#Page_216'>216</a>.<br />
+Europe, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_101'>101</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_201'>201</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>, <a href='#Page_250'>250</a>, <a href='#Page_253'>253</a> ff.<br />
+European consciousness, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>.<br />
+&mdash;feeling, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+&mdash;race, the, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>-<a href='#Page_115'>115</a>.<br />
+&mdash;the New, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>.<br />
+Evolution, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a> ff., <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_142'>142</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_180'>180</a>, <a href='#Page_195'>195</a>-<a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_213'>213</a>, <a href='#Page_216'>216</a>, <a href='#Page_218'>218</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_229'>229</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+Excess, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_31'>31</a>, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>-<a href='#Page_41'>41</a>, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a>, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>, <a href='#Page_245'>245</a>.<br />
+Exchanges, <a href='#Page_90'>90</a>, <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>.<br />
+Exultation, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>, <a href='#Page_130'>130</a>, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>.<br />
+Eycks, van, the, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>.<br />
+<br />
+FACTORIES, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_97'>97</a>, <a href='#Page_100'>100</a>, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>.<br />
+Faith, <a href='#Page_31'>31</a>, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_95'>95</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <a href='#Page_196'>196</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>-<a href='#Page_210'>210</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_212'>212</a>, <a href='#Page_227'>227</a>.<br />
+Fate, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>, <a href='#Page_203'>203</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>, <a href='#Page_213'>213</a>.<br />
+Faust, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>.<br />
+Fellowship, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>, <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_223'>223</a>, <a href='#Page_227'>227</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+Fervour (<i>see</i> Enthusiasm).<br />
+Flanders, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_27'>27</a>, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_33'>33</a>, <a href='#Page_36'>36</a>, <a href='#Page_39'>39</a>, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_168'>168</a>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>.<br />
+Flemings, the, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>.<br />
+Flemish language, the, <a href='#Page_154'>154</a>, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>.<br />
+'Fleur Fatale,' <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>.<br />
+Florence, <a href='#Page_52'>52</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_191'>191</a>.<br />
+Force, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>, <a href='#Page_253'>253</a>.<br />
+Forth Bridge, the, <a href='#Page_87'>87</a>.<br />
+France, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>, <a href='#Page_250'>250</a>, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>.<br />
+Future, the, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_36'>36</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_53'>53</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a>, <a href='#Page_180'>180</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_201'>201</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_204'>204</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>, <a href='#Page_227'>227</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>, <a href='#Page_244'>244</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_246'>246</a>, <a href='#Page_253'>253</a>-<a href='#Page_255'>255</a>.<br />
+<br />
+GAIETY THEATRE, Manchester, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+Gauchez, Maurice, <a href='#Page_154'>154</a>.<br />
+Genius, men of, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a>.<br />
+Genre-pictures, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>.<br />
+George, Stefan, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>.<br />
+Germany, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>, <a href='#Page_257'>257</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+Ghent, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>, <a href='#Page_213'>213</a>.<br />
+Gide, Andre', <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+Glesener, Edmond, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+God, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_47'>47</a>-<a href='#Page_48'>48</a>, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_95'>95</a>, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_109'>109</a>-<a href='#Page_111'>111</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <a href='#Page_185'>185</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_199'>199</a>, <a href='#Page_203'>203</a>-<a href='#Page_205'>205</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>-<a href='#Page_215'>215</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_222'>222</a>, <a href='#Page_259'>259</a>.<br />
+Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_71'>71</a>, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>,<a href='#Page_139'>139</a>, <a href='#Page_158'>158</a>, <a href='#Page_160'>160</a>, <a href='#Page_193'>193</a>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_254'>254</a>.<br />
+Goodness, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_251'>251</a>.<br />
+Gothic art, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>.<br />
+Greece, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>.<br />
+Greeks, the, <a href='#Page_52'>52</a>, <a href='#Page_84'>84</a>, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a>, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>.<br />
+Grünewald, Mathias, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>.<br />
+Gueux, the, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>,<br />
+'Guillaume de Juliers,' <a href='#Page_228'>228</a>.<br />
+Guyau, Jean-Marie, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>.<br />
+<br />
+HAMBURG, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>.<br />
+Handiwork, <a href='#Page_28'>28</a>, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>.<br />
+Harmony, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_36'>36</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>, <a href='#Page_84'>84</a>, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a>, <a href='#Page_118'>118</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_125'>125</a>, <a href='#Page_127'>127</a>, <a href='#Page_130'>130</a>, <a href='#Page_146'>146</a>, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a>, <a href='#Page_160'>160</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_167'>167</a>, <a href='#Page_169'>169</a>, <a href='#Page_170'>170</a>, <a href='#Page_181'>181</a>, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_213'>213</a>, <a href='#Page_216'>216</a>, <a href='#Page_245'>245</a>, <a href='#Page_254'>254</a>.<br />
+Hay fever, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_247'>247</a>-<a href='#Page_248'>248</a>.<br />
+Health, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>-<a href='#Page_18'>18</a>, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_245'>245</a>, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>, <a href='#Page_251'>251</a>.<br />
+<i>Hélène de Sparte</i>,<a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>, <a href='#Page_169'>169</a>-<a href='#Page_172'>172</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_174'>174</a>-<a href='#Page_175'>175</a>.<br />
+Heymans, Joseph, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+Holland, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>.<br />
+Homer, <a href='#Page_128'>128</a>.<br />
+'Hommage,' <a href='#Page_236'>236</a>.<br />
+Horniman, Miss, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+Hugo, Victor, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>-<a href='#Page_11'>11</a>, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>, <a href='#Page_120'>120</a>, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>-<a href='#Page_135'>135</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_138'>138</a>, <a href='#Page_142'>142</a>-<a href='#Page_143'>143</a>, <a href='#Page_145'>145</a>, <a href='#Page_147'>147</a>, <a href='#Page_160'>160</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Humility, <a href='#Page_221'>221</a>, <a href='#Page_233'>233</a>, <a href='#Page_240'>240</a>.<br />
+Huysmans, Joris Karl, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+<br />
+IDENTITY, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>, <a href='#Page_96'>96</a>, <a href='#Page_126'>126</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <a href='#Page_205'>205</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_223'>223</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_228'>228</a>, <a href='#Page_230'>230</a>, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a>, <a href='#Page_250'>250</a>.<br />
+Iliad, the, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>.<br />
+Impressionists, the, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+India, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>.<br />
+Individual, the, <a href='#Page_110'>110</a>, <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>, <a href='#Page_118'>118</a>.<br />
+Industrialism, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>, <a href='#Page_81'>81</a> ff., <a href='#Page_101'>101</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_125'>125</a>, <a href='#Page_131'>131</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_205'>205</a>-<a href='#Page_206'>206</a>.<br />
+Inquisition, the, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_169'>169</a>.<br />
+'Insatiablement,' <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>.<br />
+Instinct, <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>, <a href='#Page_100'>100</a>, <a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>, <a href='#Page_236'>236</a>.<br />
+Intemperance (<i>see</i> Excess).<br />
+Intensification, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>, <a href='#Page_49'>49</a>, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_66'>66</a>, <a href='#Page_131'>131</a>, <a href='#Page_137'>137</a>, <a href='#Page_152'>152</a>, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_164'>164</a>, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_200'>200</a>-<a href='#Page_202'>202</a>, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_241'>241</a>, <a href='#Page_252'>252</a>, <a href='#Page_254'>254</a>.<br />
+Intoxication, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_189'>189</a>, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>.<br />
+Italy, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, <a href='#Page_191'>191</a>.<br />
+<br />
+JENSEN, JOHANNES V., <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+Jesuits, the, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>-<a href='#Page_26'>26</a>.<br />
+Jesus, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>.<br />
+Jordaens, Jakob, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>.<br />
+Joy, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_66'>66</a>, <a href='#Page_74'>74</a>, <a href='#Page_106'>106</a>, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <a href='#Page_214'>214</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_217'>217</a>, <a href='#Page_228'>228</a>, <a href='#Page_230'>230</a>-<a href='#Page_233'>233</a>, <a href='#Page_240'>240</a>.<br />
+<br />
+KAHN, GUSTAVE, <a href='#Page_144'>144</a>.<br />
+Kainz, Josef, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+Kermesses, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_31'>31</a>, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>.<br />
+Key, Ellen, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+Khnopff, Fernand, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>.<br />
+Klinger, Max, <a href='#Page_128'>128</a>.<br />
+Knowledge, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>, <a href='#Page_180'>180</a>, <a href='#Page_216'>216</a>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a>-<a href='#Page_222'>222</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_227'>227</a>, <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>-<a href='#Page_234'>234</a>, <a href='#Page_236'>236</a>, <a href='#Page_245'>245</a>.<br />
+Künstlertheater, Munich, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+<br />
+'LA BARQUE,' <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>.<br />
+'Là-has,' <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>.<br />
+Labour Party, Belgian, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>.<br />
+'La Bourse,' <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>.<br />
+'La Conquête' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>),<br />
+<a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>.<br />
+'La Conquête' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>),<br />
+<a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_203'>203</a>, <a href='#Page_206'>206</a>.<br />
+'L'Action,' <a href='#Page_128'>128</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a>.<br />
+'La Ferveur,' <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>, <a href='#Page_219'>219</a>, <a href='#Page_224'>224</a>-<a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>.<br />
+'La Folie,' <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>.<br />
+'La Forêt,' <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>.<br />
+Laforgue, Jules, <a href='#Page_144'>144</a>.<br />
+'La Foule,' <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>, <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>, <a href='#Page_95'>95</a>, <a href='#Page_107'>107</a>, <a href='#Page_112'>112</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_152'>152</a>, <a href='#Page_185'>185</a>.<br />
+<i>La Guirlande des Dunes</i>, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>.<br />
+'La Joie,' <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_66'>66</a>, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>.<br />
+'La Louange du Corps humain,' <a href='#Page_227'>227</a>.<br />
+Lamartine, A.M.L. de, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>, <a href='#Page_145'>145</a>.<br />
+'L'Âme de la Ville,' <a href='#Page_95'>95</a>, <a href='#Page_97'>97</a>, <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>.<br />
+'La Mort,' <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>.<br />
+'La Morte,' <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>.<br />
+'L'Amour,' <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>.<br />
+<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_122'>122</a>, <a href='#Page_126'>126</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>, <a href='#Page_200'>200</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_204'>204</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>, <a href='#Page_217'>217</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_219'>219</a>, <a href='#Page_221'>221</a>, <a href='#Page_223'>223</a>, <a href='#Page_224'>224</a>-<a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_227'>227</a>, <a href='#Page_228'>228</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>, <a href='#Page_233'>233</a>.<br />
+'La Plaine,' <a href='#Page_103'>103</a>.<br />
+'La Pluie,' <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>.<br />
+'La Prière,' <a href='#Page_253'>253</a>.<br />
+'La Recherche,' <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>.<br />
+'L'Art,' <a href='#Page_11'>11</a>.<br />
+'La Science,' <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>.<br />
+Latin races, the, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>.<br />
+'L'Attente,' <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>.<br />
+'L'Aventurier,' <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>.<br />
+'La Vie,' <a href='#Page_215'>215</a>, <a href='#Page_219'>219</a>, <a href='#Page_228'>228</a>.<br />
+'La Ville,' <a href='#Page_97'>97</a>.<br />
+'L'Eau,' <a href='#Page_201'>201</a>-<a href='#Page_202'>202</a>.<br />
+'Le Bazar,' <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>.<br />
+'Le Capitaine,' <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>.<br />
+Le Cardonnel, Georges, <a href='#Page_215'>215</a>-<a href='#Page_216'>216</a>.<br />
+<i>Le Cloître</i>, <a href='#Page_49'>49</a>, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>-<a href='#Page_166'>166</a>, <a href='#Page_168'>168</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_172'>172</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+'Le Départ,' <a href='#Page_103'>103</a>.<br />
+'Le Forgeron,' <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>.<br />
+'Le Gel,' <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>.<br />
+Lemonnier, Camille, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>-<a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_33'>33</a>, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>, <a href='#Page_244'>244</a>.<br />
+'Le Mont,' <a href='#Page_81'>81</a>.<br />
+'L'En-Avant,' <a href='#Page_125'>125</a>, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>.<br />
+'Le Paradis,' <a href='#Page_213'>213</a>, <a href='#Page_236'>236</a>.<br />
+'Le Passeur d'Eau,' <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>.<br />
+'Le Port,' <a href='#Page_103'>103</a>.<br />
+Lerberghe, Charles van, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>, <a href='#Page_26'>26</a>.<br />
+'Le Roc,' <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>, <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>.<br />
+'L'Erreur,' <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Apparus dans mes Chemins</i>, <a href='#Page_66'>66</a>, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>, <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Aubes</i>, <a href='#Page_103'>103</a>, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_166'>166</a>-<a href='#Page_167'>167</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Blés Mouvants</i>, <a href='#Page_36'>36</a>, <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>.<br />
+'Les Cultes,' <a href='#Page_203'>203</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Débâcles</i>, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>, <a href='#Page_60'>60</a>, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Campagnes Hallucinées</i>, <a href='#Page_97'>97</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_101'>101</a> ff., <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Flamandes</i>, <a href='#Page_33'>33</a>, <a href='#Page_36'>36</a> ff., <a href='#Page_49'>49</a>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Flambeaux Noirs</i>, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>, <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>, <a href='#Page_11'>11</a>, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>, <a href='#Page_123'>123</a>, <a href='#Page_125'>125</a>, <a href='#Page_132'>132</a>, <a href='#Page_137'>137</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_161'>161</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_186'>186</a>, <a href='#Page_203'>203</a>, <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_206'>206</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_222'>222</a>, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>, <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>, <a href='#Page_233'>233</a>, <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Héros</i>, <a href='#Page_4'>4</a>, <a href='#Page_228'>228</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Heures Claires</i>, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Heures d'Après-midi</i>, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a>, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_239'>239</a>, <a href='#Page_240'>240</a>, <a href='#Page_241'>241</a>, <a href='#Page_241'>241</a>, <a href='#Page_242'>242</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Heures du Soir</i>, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a>, <a href='#Page_242'>242</a>.<br />
+'Les Heures où l'on crée,' <a href='#Page_123'>123</a>.<br />
+'Les Mages,' <a href='#Page_233'>233</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Moines</i>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a> ff., <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>, <a href='#Page_145'>145</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>.<br />
+'Les Nombres,' <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>.<br />
+'Le Sonneur,' <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>.<br />
+'Les Pêcheurs,' <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>.<br />
+'Les Penseurs,' <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Petites Légendes</i>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>.<br />
+'Les Promeneuses,' <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>.<br />
+'Les Rêves,' <a href='#Page_215'>215</a>, <a href='#Page_221'>221</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Rythmes Souverains</i>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_213'>213</a>, <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>, <a href='#Page_236'>236</a>, <a href='#Page_253'>253</a>.<br />
+'Les Saintes,' <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Soirs</i>,<a href='#Page_57'>57</a>, <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>, <a href='#Page_60'>60</a>, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>.<br />
+'Les Spectacles,' <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Tendresses Premières</i>, <a href='#Page_4'>4</a>, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>, <a href='#Page_27'>27</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Vignes de ma Muraille</i>, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>.<br />
+'Les Vieux Maîtres,' <a href='#Page_39'>39</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Villages Illusoires</i>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>-<a href='#Page_71'>71</a>, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>.<br />
+'Les Villes,' <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>, <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a> ff.,<br />
+<a href='#Page_103'>103</a>, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_158'>158</a>, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_166'>166</a>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_205'>205</a>, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>, <a href='#Page_257'>257</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_66'>66</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_76'>76</a>, <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>, <a href='#Page_95'>95</a>, <a href='#Page_107'>107</a>, <a href='#Page_112'>112</a>, <a href='#Page_152'>152</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_185'>185</a>, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>, <a href='#Page_201'>201</a>-<a href='#Page_202'>202</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_211'>211</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a>.<br />
+'L'Étal,' <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>.<br />
+'Le Tribun,' <a href='#Page_132'>132</a>.<br />
+'Le Verbe,' <a href='#Page_117'>117</a>, <a href='#Page_122'>122</a>, <a href='#Page_126'>126</a>.<br />
+'L'Heure Mauvaise,' <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>, <a href='#Page_59'>59</a>, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a>.<br />
+'L'Impossible,' <a href='#Page_137'>137</a>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a>, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a>.<br />
+Locomotives, <a href='#Page_124'>124</a>, <a href='#Page_125'>125</a>.<br />
+London, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_90'>90</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>.<br />
+Louvain, <a href='#Page_31'>31</a>.<br />
+Love, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_66'>66</a>, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_170'>170</a>-<a href='#Page_173'>173</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_221'>221</a>, <a href='#Page_223'>223</a>-<a href='#Page_224'>224</a>, <a href='#Page_230'>230</a>, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a> ff.<br />
+<br />
+MACHINERY, <a href='#Page_74'>74</a>, <a href='#Page_81'>81</a>-<a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_84'>84</a> ff.,<br />
+<a href='#Page_155'>155</a>, <a href='#Page_206'>206</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>.<br />
+Madness, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a> ff., <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>.<br />
+Maeterlinck, Maurice, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_26'>26</a>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>, <a href='#Page_213'>213</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+<i>Maison du Peuple, La</i>, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>.<br />
+Mallarmé, Stéphane, <a href='#Page_144'>144</a>.<br />
+Manchester, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+'Ma Race,' <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>, <a href='#Page_35'>35</a>.<br />
+Marriage, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a> ff., <a href='#Page_243'>243</a>.<br />
+Martyrs, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>.<br />
+'Méditation,' <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>.<br />
+Mendès, Catulle, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>.<br />
+Merrill, Stuart, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>.<br />
+Messel, Alfred, <a href='#Page_87'>87</a>.<br />
+Metaphors, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>, <a href='#Page_136'>136</a>, <a href='#Page_137'>137</a>, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_156'>156</a>, <a href='#Page_157'>157</a>, <a href='#Page_160'>160</a>.<br />
+Metaphysics, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>, <a href='#Page_203'>203</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_215'>215</a>, <a href='#Page_216'>216</a>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a>, <a href='#Page_236'>236</a>.<br />
+Meunier, Constantin, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>.<br />
+Minne, Georges, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>.<br />
+Mockel, Albert, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_48'>48</a>, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_157'>157</a>, <a href='#Page_189'>189</a>, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+Monasteries (<i>see</i> Cloisters).<br />
+Monastery of Bornhem, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>.<br />
+&mdash;of Forges, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>.<br />
+Monet, Claude, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>.<br />
+Money, <a href='#Page_95'>95</a>, <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>-<a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>, <a href='#Page_103'>103</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a> <a href='#Page_201'>201</a>.<br />
+Monistic philosophy, <a href='#Page_202'>202</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+Monks, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a> ff., <a href='#Page_235'>235</a>.<br />
+Mont, Pol de, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>.<br />
+Morality, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_205'>205</a>, <a href='#Page_216'>216</a>, <a href='#Page_217'>217</a>, <a href='#Page_219'>219</a>, <a href='#Page_224'>224</a>.<br />
+Moréas, Jean, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>.<br />
+Motion, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a>, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>, <a href='#Page_217'>217</a>.<br />
+Motor-cars, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_87'>87</a>, <a href='#Page_124'>124</a>.<br />
+'Mourir,' <a href='#Page_60'>60</a>.<br />
+Multitude (<i>see</i> Crowd).<br />
+Munich, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+Music halls, <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>.<br />
+Mysticism, <a href='#Page_214'>214</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+Mystics, the, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a>, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>.<br />
+Mythology, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>.<br />
+<br />
+NATURALISM, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>-<a href='#Page_38'>38</a>, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>.<br />
+Nature, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Page_28'>28</a>, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_96'>96</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_112'>112</a>, <a href='#Page_123'>123</a>, <a href='#Page_125'>125</a>, <a href='#Page_158'>158</a>, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_195'>195</a>, <a href='#Page_200'>200</a>-<a href='#Page_205'>205</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>, <a href='#Page_213'>213</a>, <a href='#Page_239'>239</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_246'>246</a>, <a href='#Page_247'>247</a>, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a>.<br />
+Necessary, the, is the beautiful,<br />
+<a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_218'>218</a>.<br />
+Neologisms, <a href='#Page_154'>154</a>, <a href='#Page_160'>160</a>.<br />
+Neurasthenia, <a href='#Page_56'>56</a> ff., <a href='#Page_118'>118</a>.<br />
+New age, the, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a> ff., <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_206'>206</a>-<a href='#Page_207'>207</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>.<br />
+&mdash;European, the, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>.<br />
+New York, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>.<br />
+Nietzsche, Friedrich, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_66'>66</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_85'>85</a>-<a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_119'>119</a>, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>, <a href='#Page_181'>181</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_218'>218</a>, <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>, <a href='#Page_251'>251</a>.<br />
+<br />
+OMBIAUX, MAURICE DES, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+Onomatopœia, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a>.<br />
+Oppidomagnum, <a href='#Page_103'>103</a>, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <a href='#Page_166'>166</a>-<a href='#Page_167'>167</a>,<br />
+Optimism, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+Organisation, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>, <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>, <a href='#Page_101'>101</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_107'>107</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>, <a href='#Page_118'>118</a>-<a href='#Page_119'>119</a>.<br />
+Orgies, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_39'>39</a>, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>.<br />
+Oxford, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>.<br />
+<br />
+PAN, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>.<br />
+Pan-American, the, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>.<br />
+Pan-European, the, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>.<br />
+Pantheism, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>, <a href='#Page_215'>215</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>.<br />
+Paradise, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>-<a href='#Page_213'>213</a>.<br />
+Paris, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_87'>87</a>, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_174'>174</a>, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a>-<a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+Parnassian poetry, <a href='#Page_48'>48</a>, <a href='#Page_145'>145</a>, <a href='#Page_146'>146</a>.<br />
+Paroxysm, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_188'>188</a>.<br />
+<i>Parsival</i>,<a href='#Page_37'>37</a>.<br />
+Passion, <a href='#Page_48'>48</a>, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_97'>97</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_110'>110</a>, <a href='#Page_117'>117</a>, <a href='#Page_118'>118</a>, <a href='#Page_120'>120</a>-<a href='#Page_123'>123</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_128'>128</a>-<a href='#Page_131'>131</a>, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a>, <a href='#Page_136'>136</a>, <a href='#Page_147'>147</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_159'>159</a>, <a href='#Page_163'>163</a>-<a href='#Page_165'>165</a>, <a href='#Page_168'>168</a>-<a href='#Page_170'>170</a>, <a href='#Page_173'>173</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_179'>179</a>, <a href='#Page_181'>181</a>, <a href='#Page_189'>189</a>, <a href='#Page_194'>194</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>, <a href='#Page_215'>215</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_217'>217</a>, <a href='#Page_227'>227</a>-<a href='#Page_229'>229</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>, <a href='#Page_235'>235</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_238'>238</a>, <a href='#Page_241'>241</a>, <a href='#Page_245'>245</a>, <a href='#Page_251'>251</a>, <a href='#Page_252'>252</a>.<br />
+Past, the, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_26'>26</a>, <a href='#Page_36'>36</a>, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_50'>50</a>-<a href='#Page_53'>53</a>, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a> ff., <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_100'>100</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a>, <a href='#Page_180'>180</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_207'>207</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>.<br />
+Peasants, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>-<a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>-<a href='#Page_103'>103</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_146'>146</a>-<a href='#Page_147'>147</a>, <a href='#Page_247'>247</a>, <a href='#Page_251'>251</a>.<br />
+Pessimism, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+Petöfi, Alexander, <a href='#Page_132'>132</a>.<br />
+Philip II., <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>,<a href='#Page_167'>167</a>-<a href='#Page_169'>169</a>.<br />
+<i>Philippe II.</i>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>,<a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a>-<a href='#Page_169'>169</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+Philosophy, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_151'>151</a>, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_194'>194</a>, <a href='#Page_216'>216</a>, <a href='#Page_236'>236</a>, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+Picard, Edmond, <a href='#Page_33'>33</a>.<br />
+Poetry, the new, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>, <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_83'>83</a> ff., <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>-<a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>, <a href='#Page_119'>119</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_126'>126</a>, <a href='#Page_132'>132</a>, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>, <a href='#Page_137'>137</a>, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_205'>205</a>-<a href='#Page_206'>206</a>, <a href='#Page_216'>216</a>, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a>.<br />
+Poets, the, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>-<a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>-<a href='#Page_209'>209</a>.<br />
+&mdash;of the old school, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_51'>51</a>-<a href='#Page_52'>52</a>, <a href='#Page_81'>81</a> ff., <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>-<a href='#Page_112'>112</a>, <a href='#Page_125'>125</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_129'>129</a>-<a href='#Page_131'>131</a>, <a href='#Page_188'>188</a>, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>, <a href='#Page_192'>192</a>, <a href='#Page_193'>193</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_206'>206</a>, <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>.<br />
+Pol de Mont, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>.<br />
+Poverty, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>-<a href='#Page_103'>103</a>.<br />
+Prague, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>.<br />
+Present, the, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a> ff., <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_52'>52</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a>, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>-<a href='#Page_180'>180</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_201'>201</a>, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>, <a href='#Page_254'>254</a>, <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>.<br />
+Pride, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_219'>219</a>, <a href='#Page_221'>221</a>, <a href='#Page_224'>224</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_230'>230</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>.<br />
+Progress, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>-<a href='#Page_5'>5</a>, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>.<br />
+Prostitutes, <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>.<br />
+Protestantism, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>.<br />
+Pseudoanæsthesia, <a href='#Page_156'>156</a>.<br />
+Psychology, <a href='#Page_47'>47</a>, <a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_180'>180</a>.<br />
+Puritanism, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>.<br />
+<br />
+RABELAIS, FRANÇOIS, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>.<br />
+Realism, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>-<a href='#Page_38'>38</a>, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>.<br />
+Reality, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>-<a href='#Page_38'>38</a>, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>-<a href='#Page_52'>52</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_81'>81</a>, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a>-<a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_131'>131</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_153'>153</a>, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a>, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_185'>185</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_192'>192</a>, <a href='#Page_196'>196</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>, <a href='#Page_201'>201</a>, <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_206'>206</a>, <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>, <a href='#Page_259'>259</a>.<br />
+Recitation, <a href='#Page_122'>122</a>-<a href='#Page_123'>123</a>, <a href='#Page_128'>128</a> ff., <a href='#Page_136'>136</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_139'>139</a>, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a>, <a href='#Page_157'>157</a>.<br />
+Reinhardt, Max, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+Religion, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>, <a href='#Page_47'>47</a>, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_67'>67</a>,&nbsp; <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>,&nbsp; <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>-<a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <a href='#Page_196'>196</a>, <a href='#Page_205'>205</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_211'>211</a>, <a href='#Page_238'>238</a>, <a href='#Page_240'>240</a>, <a href='#Page_257'>257</a>.<br />
+&mdash;, a new, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>.<br />
+Rembrandt, <a href='#Page_11'>11</a>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>.<br />
+<i>Rembrandt</i>, <a href='#Page_2'>2</a>, <a href='#Page_11'>11</a>.<br />
+Renan, Ernest, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a>.<br />
+Renunciation, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>, <a href='#Page_27'>27</a>, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>, <a href='#Page_52'>52</a>.<br />
+Responsibility, <a href='#Page_253'>253</a> ff.<br />
+Revolt, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>, <a href='#Page_42'>42</a>, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_117'>117</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_122'>122</a>, <a href='#Page_142'>142</a>-<a href='#Page_146'>146</a>, <a href='#Page_160'>160</a>, <a href='#Page_169'>169</a>, <a href='#Page_195'>195</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_229'>229</a>, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>.<br />
+Rhapsodists, <a href='#Page_128'>128</a> ff.<br />
+Rhetoricians, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>.<br />
+Rhyme, <a href='#Page_144'>144</a>, <a href='#Page_153'>153</a>, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>.<br />
+Rhythm, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>, <a href='#Page_74'>74</a>, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_95'>95</a>, <a href='#Page_97'>97</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>, <a href='#Page_118'>118</a> ff., <a href='#Page_137'>137</a>, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_146'>146</a> ff., <a href='#Page_153'>153</a>, <a href='#Page_157'>157</a>, <a href='#Page_163'>163</a>, <a href='#Page_173'>173</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_193'>193</a>, <a href='#Page_194'>194</a>, <a href='#Page_201'>201</a>, <a href='#Page_238'>238</a>, <a href='#Page_247'>247</a>, <a href='#Page_251'>251</a>, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>.<br />
+&mdash;of life, the, <a href='#Page_5'>5</a>, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_11'>11</a>, <a href='#Page_117'>117</a> ff.<br />
+Rilke, Rainer Maria, <a href='#Page_154'>154</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+<i>Ring, The</i>, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>.<br />
+Rodenbach, Georges, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>, <a href='#Page_26'>26</a>, <a href='#Page_39'>39</a>.<br />
+Rodin, Auguste, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+Rolland, Romain, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>,<br />
+Romains, Jules, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>-<a href='#Page_257'>257</a>.<br />
+Roman Catholicism, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_26'>26</a>, <a href='#Page_31'>31</a>, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>-<a href='#Page_166'>166</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_168'>168</a>-<a href='#Page_169'>169</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>.<br />
+Romanticism, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>.<br />
+Romanticists, the, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>, <a href='#Page_147'>147</a>.<br />
+Rome, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>.<br />
+Rops, Félicien, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+Rubens, Peter Paul, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>.<br />
+Rubinstein, Ida, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+Ruskin, John, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>.<br />
+Russia, <a href='#Page_257'>257</a>.<br />
+Russians, the, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>.<br />
+Rysselberghe, Théo van, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+<br />
+ST. AMAND, <a href='#Page_27'>27</a>-<br />
+Saint-Cloud, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+'Saint Georges,' <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>.<br />
+Sainte-Barbe, College of, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>-<a href='#Page_26'>26</a>, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>, <a href='#Page_213'>213</a>.<br />
+St. Petersburg, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>.<br />
+Saints, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>.<br />
+'S'amoindrir,' <a href='#Page_60'>60</a>.<br />
+Scandinavia, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+Scheldt, the, <a href='#Page_27'>27</a>, <a href='#Page_28'>28</a>.<br />
+Schiller, Friedrich, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>,<a href='#Page_158'>158</a>, <a href='#Page_160'>160</a>, <a href='#Page_168'>168</a>.<br />
+Schlaf, Johannes, <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>.<br />
+Scholars, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>.<br />
+Science, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a>, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>, <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>, <a href='#Page_205'>205</a>-<a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a>.<br />
+Sea, the, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>, <a href='#Page_103'>103</a>, <a href='#Page_201'>201</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_202'>202</a>, <a href='#Page_247'>247</a>, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a>.<br />
+Selfishness, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_223'>223</a>.<br />
+Sensations, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>-<a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>,<a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_120'>120</a>, <a href='#Page_125'>125</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_130'>130</a>, <a href='#Page_164'>164</a>, <a href='#Page_188'>188</a>, <a href='#Page_189'>189</a>, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>, <a href='#Page_192'>192</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_202'>202</a>, <a href='#Page_203'>203</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_240'>240</a>.<br />
+Sensuality, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_98'>98</a>, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_170'>170</a>-<a href='#Page_172'>172</a>, <a href='#Page_241'>241</a>, <a href='#Page_245'>245</a>.<br />
+Sex, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a> ff.<br />
+Shakespeare, William, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_163'>163</a>.<br />
+Signac, Paul, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+Silence, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>-<a href='#Page_46'>46</a>, <a href='#Page_117'>117</a>, <a href='#Page_122'>122</a>, <a href='#Page_130'>130</a>, <a href='#Page_214'>214</a>, <a href='#Page_239'>239</a><br />
+'Si Morne,' <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>.<br />
+Social feeling, <a href='#Page_83'>83</a>, <a href='#Page_110'>110</a>.<br />
+&mdash;problem, the, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_101'>101</a> ff., <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>.<br />
+Socialism, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>, <a href='#Page_224'>224</a>.<br />
+Society, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+Solitude, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>, <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_81'>81</a>, <a href='#Page_83'>83</a>, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>, <a href='#Page_112'>112</a>, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a>.<br />
+Sonnets, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>.<br />
+Soul, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a>.<br />
+'Sous les Prétoriens,' <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>.<br />
+Spain, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>, <a href='#Page_191'>191</a>.<br />
+Spaniards, the, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>.<br />
+Stappen, van der, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+Stevens, Alfred, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+Strauss, David, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>.<br />
+Suicide, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>, <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>.<br />
+Superman, the, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>.<br />
+Symbolism, <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a> ff.<br />
+Symbolists, the, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a> ff., <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>.<br />
+Symbols, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>,<a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>, <a href='#Page_47'>47</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_71'>71</a>, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_107'>107</a>, <a href='#Page_144'>144</a>, <a href='#Page_163'>163</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_165'>165</a>, <a href='#Page_168'>168</a>, <a href='#Page_195'>195</a>, <a href='#Page_201'>201</a>, <a href='#Page_202'>202</a>, <a href='#Page_213'>213</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_218'>218</a>, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a>, <a href='#Page_247'>247</a>, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a>.<br />
+Swinburne, Algernon Charles, <a href='#Page_160'>160</a>.<br />
+<br />
+TAMERLAINE, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>.<br />
+<i>Tannhäuser</i>,<a href='#Page_37'>37</a>.<br />
+Teutonic elements, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a>, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_39'>39</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_146'>146</a>, <a href='#Page_159'>159</a>, <a href='#Page_194'>194</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>.<br />
+Thames, the, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>.<br />
+<i>Thyl Ulenspiegel</i>, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a>, <a href='#Page_168'>168</a>.<br />
+Toledo, <a href='#Page_191'>191</a>.<br />
+Tolstoy, Leo, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>.<br />
+Torpedo-boats, <a href='#Page_87'>87</a>.<br />
+<i>Toute la Flandre</i>, <a href='#Page_4'>4</a>, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>, <a href='#Page_27'>27</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_168'>168</a>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_244'>244</a>, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>.<br />
+Town (<i>see</i> City).<br />
+Tradition, <a href='#Page_26'>26</a>, <a href='#Page_27'>27</a>, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_145'>145</a>, <a href='#Page_146'>146</a>, <a href='#Page_243'>243</a>.<br />
+Travel, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>-<a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_124'>124</a>, <a href='#Page_201'>201</a>.<br />
+'Truandailles,' <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>.<br />
+Truth, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>-<a href='#Page_38'>38</a>.<br />
+Turner, J.M.W., <a href='#Page_152'>152</a>.<br />
+<br />
+UNITY, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_202'>202</a>, <a href='#Page_203'>203</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>, <a href='#Page_215'>215</a> ff., <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_252'>252</a>.<br />
+Université Libre, Brussels, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>.<br />
+Unknown, the, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_212'>212</a>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a>, <a href='#Page_224'>224</a>.<br />
+'Un Matin,' <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>.<br />
+'Un Soir' (<i>Au Bord de la Route</i>), <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>.<br />
+'Un Soir' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>), <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_186'>186</a>, <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>.<br />
+Utopia, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a>, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>.<br />
+<br />
+VANDERVELDE, EMIL, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>.<br />
+Vellay, Charles, <a href='#Page_215'>215</a>-<a href='#Page_216'>216</a>.<br />
+Venice, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Verhaeren, Émile, born at St. Amand on the<br />
+Scheldt, 1855, <a href='#Page_27'>27</a>; his boyhood, <a href='#Page_27'>27</a>-<a href='#Page_28'>28</a>; educated at<br />
+the College of Sainte-Barbe in Ghent, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>-<a href='#Page_26'>26</a>;<br />
+studies jurisprudence at Louvain, <a href='#Page_31'>31</a>; called to the<br />
+bar in Brussels, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>; his first verses, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>, <a href='#Page_33'>33</a>, <a href='#Page_145'>145</a><br />
+ff.; publication of <i>Les Flamandes,</i> <a href='#Page_33'>33</a> ff.;<br />
+resides for three weeks in the monastery of<br />
+Forges, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>; publication of <i>Les Moines</i>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a> ff.;<br />
+his health breaks down, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a> ff., <a href='#Page_237'>237</a>; his illness<br />
+is described in <i>Les Soirs, Les Débâcles, Les<br />
+Flambeaux Noirs,</i> and <i>Au Bord de la Route</i>, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a><br />
+ff.; his travels, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>-<a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_124'>124</a>; he is obsessed<br />
+by the atmosphere of London, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>; his recovery is<br />
+symbolised in some of the poems of <i>Les Villages<br />
+Illusoires</i>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>-<a href='#Page_71'>71</a>; his marriage, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a> ff., <a href='#Page_243'>243</a>;<br />
+his connection with the Labour Party and<br />
+Socialism, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>-<a href='#Page_94'>94</a>; the Flemish element in his<br />
+style, <a href='#Page_154'>154</a>-<a href='#Page_155'>155</a>; his technique, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a> ff.; stage<br />
+performances of his dramas, <a href='#Page_164'>164</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>-<a href='#Page_175'>175</a>; how he<br />
+recites his poetry, <a href='#Page_122'>122</a>-<a href='#Page_123'>123</a>; he resides at<br />
+Caillou-qui-bique and Saint-Cloud, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_248'>248</a>-<a href='#Page_249'>249</a>; his personal appearance, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, <a href='#Page_251'>251</a>; his<br />
+personality, <a href='#Page_244'>244</a> ff.<br />
+<br />
+Verlaine, Paul, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_120'>120</a>, <a href='#Page_142'>142</a>, <a href='#Page_144'>144</a>, <a href='#Page_243'>243</a>.<br />
+'Vers,' <a href='#Page_60'>60</a>.<br />
+'Vers la Mer,' <a href='#Page_152'>152</a>.<br />
+'Vers le Cloître,' <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>.<br />
+'Vers le Futur,' <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_205'>205</a>, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>.<br />
+<i>Vers libre</i>, the, <a href='#Page_74'>74</a>, <a href='#Page_144'>144</a> ff., <a href='#Page_163'>163</a>.<br />
+<i>Vers ternaire, le</i>, <a href='#Page_147'>147</a>.<br />
+Vielé-Griffin, Francis, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+Vienna, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+Vitality, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_33'>33</a>, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_119'>119</a>, <a href='#Page_131'>131</a>, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>, <a href='#Page_200'>200</a>-<a href='#Page_202'>202</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_206'>206</a>, <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+<br />
+WAGNER, RICHARD, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>.<br />
+Walloons, the, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+Weyden, Roger van der, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>.<br />
+Whistler, J. M'Neill, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>.<br />
+Whitman, Walt, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>-<a href='#Page_109'>109</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_132'>132</a>, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>-<a href='#Page_191'>191</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_227'>227</a> <a href='#Page_257'>257</a>.<br />
+Will, the, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_60'>60</a>-<a href='#Page_62'>62</a>, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>-<a href='#Page_74'>74</a>, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_181'>181</a>, <a href='#Page_194'>194</a>-<a href='#Page_195'>195</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>, <a href='#Page_203'>203</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_223'>223</a>.<br />
+<i>Wisdom and Destiny</i>, <a href='#Page_213'>213</a>.<br />
+Woman, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a>-<a href='#Page_173'>173</a>, <a href='#Page_192'>192</a>, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a> ff.<br />
+Women, Belgian, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>.<br />
+<br />
+YPRES, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>.<br />
+<br />
+ZOLA, ÉMILE, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>.<br />
+</p>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 35387 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #35387 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35387)
diff --git a/old/35387-0.txt b/old/35387-0.txt
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Émile Verhaeren, by Stefan Zweig
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Émile Verhaeren
+
+Author: Stefan Zweig
+
+Translator: Jethro Bithell
+
+Release Date: February 24, 2011 [EBook #35387]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ÉMILE VERHAEREN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org
+
+
+
+
+EMILE VERHAEREN
+
+BY
+
+STEFAN ZWEIG
+
+LONDON
+
+CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD
+
+1914
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Émile Verhaeren from an unpublished photograph by
+Charles Bernier, 1914.]
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+Four years have passed since the present volume appeared simultaneously
+in German and French. In the meantime Verhaeren's fame has been
+spreading; but in English-speaking countries he is still not so well
+known as he deserves to be.
+
+Something of his philosophy--if it may be called philosophy rather than
+a poet's inspired visualising of the world--has passed into the public
+consciousness in a grotesquely distorted form in what is known as
+'futurism.' So long as futurism is associated with those who have
+acquired a facile notoriety by polluting the pure idea, it would be an
+insult to Verhaeren to suggest that he is to be classed with the
+futurists commonly so-called; but the whole purpose of the present
+volume will prove that the gospel of a very serious and reasoned
+futurism is to be found in Verhaeren's writings.
+
+Of the writer of the book it may be said that there was no one more
+fitted than he to write the authentic exposition of the teaching which
+he has hailed as a new religion. His relations to the Master are not
+only those of a fervent disciple, but of an apostle whose labour of
+love has in German-speaking lands and beyond been crowned with signal
+success. Himself a lyrist of distinction, Stefan Zweig has accomplished
+the difficult feat, which in this country still waits to be done, of
+translating the great mass of Verhaeren's poems into actual and enduring
+verse. Another book of his on Verlaine is already known in an English
+rendering; so that he bids fair to become known in this country as one
+of the most gifted of the writers of Young-Vienna.
+
+As to the translation, I have endeavoured to be faithful to my text,
+which is the expression of a personality. Whatever divergences there are
+have been necessitated by the lapse of time. For help in reading the
+proofs I have to thank Mr. M.T.H. Sadler and Mr. Fritz Voigt.
+
+                                               J. BITHELL.
+
+  HAMMERFIELD,
+_Nr_. HEMEL HEMPSTEAD,
+  14_th July_ 1914.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PART I
+
+THE NEW AGE
+THE NEW BELGIUM
+YOUTH IN FLANDERS
+'LES FLAMANDES'
+THE MONKS
+THE BREAK-DOWN
+FLIGHT INTO THE WORLD
+
+PART II
+
+TOWNS ('LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES')
+THE MULTITUDE
+THE RHYTHM OF LIFE
+THE NEW PATHOS
+VERHAEREN'S POETIC METHOD
+VERHAEREN'S DRAMA
+
+PART III
+
+COSMIC POETRY
+THE LYRIC UNIVERSE
+SYNTHESES
+THE ETHICS OF FERVOUR
+LOVE
+THE ART OF VERHAEREN'S LIFE
+THE EUROPEAN IMPORTANCE OF HIS WORK
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+INDEX
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+DECIDING FORCES
+
+
+LES FLAMANDES--LES MOINES--LES SOIRS--LES
+DÉBâCLES--LES FLAMBEAUX NOIRS--AU BORD DE
+LA ROUTE--LES APPARUS DANS MES CHEMINS
+
+1883-1893
+
+
+
+     Son tempérament, son caractère, sa vie, tout conspire à nous
+     montrer son art tel que nous avons essayé de le définir. Une
+     profonde unité les scelle. Et n'est-ce pas vers la découverte de
+     cette unité-là, qui groupe en un faisceau solide les gestes, les
+     pensées et les travaux d'un génie sur la terre, que la critique,
+     revenue enfin de tant d'erreurs, devait tendre uniquement?
+
+                                 VERHAEREN, _Rembrandt._
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW AGE
+
+     Tout bouge--et l'on dirait les horizons en marche.
+                                        É.V., 'La Foule.'
+
+
+The feeling of this age of ours, of this our moment in eternity, is
+different in its conception of life from that of our ancestors. Only
+eternal earth has changed not nor grown older, that field, gloomed by
+the Unknown, on which the monotonous light of the seasons divides, in a
+rhythmic round, the time of blossoms and of their withering; changeless
+only are the action of the elements and the restless alternation of
+night and day. But the aspect of earth's spirit has changed, all that is
+subjected to the toil of man. Has changed, to change again. The
+evolution of the phenomena of culture seems to proceed with ever greater
+rapidity: never was the span of a hundred years as rich, as replete as
+that which stretches to the threshold of our own days. Cities have shot
+up which are as huge and bewildering, as impenetrable and as endless, as
+nothing else has been save those virgin forests now fast receding before
+the onward march of the tilled land. More and more the work of man
+achieves the grandiose and elementary character that was once Nature's
+secret. The lightning is in his hands, and protection from the
+weather's sudden onslaughts; lands that once yawned far apart are now
+forged together by the iron hoop with which of old only the narrow
+strait was arched; oceans are united that have sought each other for
+thousands of years; and now in the very air man is building a new road
+from country to country. All has changed.
+
+     Tout a changé: les ténèbres et les flambeaux.
+     Les droits et les devoirs out fait d'autres faisceaux,
+     Du sol jusqu'au soleil, une neuve énergie
+     Diverge un sang torride, en la vie élargie;
+     Des usines de fonte ouvrent, sous le ciel bleu,
+     Des cratères en flamme et des fleuves en feu;
+     De rapides vaisseaux, sans rameurs et sans voiles,
+     La nuit, sur les flots bleus, étonnent les étoiles;
+     Tout peuple réveillé se forge une autre loi;
+     Autre est le crime, autre est l'orgueil, autre est l'exploit.[1]
+
+Changed, too, is the relation of individual to individual, of the
+individual to the whole; at once more onerous and less burdensome is the
+network of social laws, at once more onerous and less burdensome our
+whole life.
+
+But a still greater thing has happened. Not only the real forms, the
+transitory facts of life have changed, not only do we live in other
+cities, other houses, not only are we dressed in different clothes, but
+the infinite above us too, that which seemed unshakable, has changed
+from what it was for our fathers and forefathers. Where the actual
+changes, the relative changes also. The most elementary forms of our
+conception, space and time, have been displaced. Space has become other
+than it was, for we measure it with new velocities. Roads that took our
+forefathers days to traverse can now be covered in one short hour; one
+flying night transports us to warm and luxuriant lands that were once
+separated from us by the hardships of a long journey. The perilous
+forests of the tropics with Jheir strange constellations, to see which
+cost those of old a year of their lives, are of a sudden near to us and
+easy of access. We measure differently with these different velocities
+of life. Time is more and more the victor of space. The eye, too, has
+learned other distances, and in cold constellations is startled to
+perceive the forms of primeval landscapes petrified; and the human voice
+seems to have grown a thousand times stronger since it has learned to
+carry on a friendly conversation a hundred miles away. In this new
+relationship of forces we have a different perception of the spanning
+round of the earth, and the rhythm of life, beating more brightly and
+swiftly, is likewise becoming new for us. The distance from springtime
+to springtime is greater now and yet less, greater and yet less is the
+individual hour, greater and less our whole life.
+
+And therefore is it with new feelings that we must comprehend this new
+age. For we all feel that we must not measure the new with the old
+measures our forefathers used, that we must not live through the new
+with feelings outworn, that we must discover a new sense of distance, a
+new sense of time, a new sense of space, that we must find a new music
+for this nervous, feverish rhythm around us. This new-born human
+conditionality calls for a new morality; this new union of equals a new
+beauty; this new topsy-turvydom a new system of ethics. And this new
+confrontation with another and still newer world, with another Unknown,
+demands a new religion, a new God. A new sense of the universe is, with
+a muffled rumour, welling up in the hearts of all of us.
+
+New things, however, must be coined into new words. A new age calls for
+new poets, poets whose conceptions have been nurtured by their
+environment, poets who, in the expression they give to this new
+environment, themselves vibrate with the feverish rotation of life. But
+so many of our poets are pusillanimous. They feel that their voices are
+out of harmony with reality; they feel that they are not incorporated
+with the new organism and a necessary part of it; they have a dull
+foreboding that they do not speak the language of our contemporary life.
+In our great cities they are like strangers stranded. The great roaring
+streams of our new sensations are to them terrific and inconceivable.
+They are ready to accept all the comfort and luxury of modern life; they
+are quick to take advantage of the facilities afforded by technical
+science and organisation; but for their poetry they reject these
+phenomena, because they cannot master them. They recoil from the task
+of transmuting poetical values, of sensing whatever is poetically new in
+these new things. And so they stand aside. They flee from the real, the
+contemporary, to the immutable; they take refuge in whatsoever the
+eternal evolution has left untouched; they sing the stars, the
+springtime, the babbling of springs which is now as it ever was, the
+myth of love; they hide behind the old symbols; they nestle to the old
+gods. Not from the moment, from the molten flowing ore, do they seize
+and mould the eternal--no, as ever of old they dig the symbols of the
+eternal out of the cold clay of the past, like old Greek statues. They
+are not on that account insignificant; but at best they produce
+something important, never anything necessary.
+
+For only that poet can be necessary to our time who himself feels that
+everything in this time is necessary, and therefore beautiful. He must
+be one whose whole endeavour as poet and man it is to make his own
+sensations vibrate in unison with contemporary sensations; who makes the
+rhythm of his poem nothing else than the echoed rhythm of living things;
+who adjusts the beat of his verse to the beat of our own days, and takes
+into his quivering veins the streaming blood of our time. He must not on
+this account, when seeking to create new ideals, be a stranger to the
+ideals of old; for all true progress is based on the deepest
+understanding of the past. Progress must be for him as Guyau interprets
+it: 'Le pouvoir, lorsqu'on est arrivé à un état supérieur, d'éprouver
+des émotions et des sensations nouvelles, sans cesser d'être encore
+accessible à ce que contenaient de grand ou de beau ses précédantes
+émotions.'[2] A poet of our time can only be great when he conceives
+this time as great. The preoccupations of his time must be his also; its
+social problem must be his personal concern. In such a poet succeeding
+generations would see how man has fought a way to them from the past,
+how in every moment as it passed he has wrestled to identify the feeling
+of his own mind with that of the cosmos. And even though the great works
+of such a poet should be soon disintegrated and his poems obsolete,
+though his images should have paled, there would yet remain imperishably
+vivid that which is of greater moment, the invisible motives of his
+inspiration, the melody, the breath, the rhythm of his time. Such poets,
+besides pointing the way to the coming generation, are in a deeper sense
+the incarnation of their own period. Hence the time has come to speak of
+Émile Verhaeren, the greatest of modern poets, and perhaps the only one
+who has been conscious of what is poetical in contemporary feeling, the
+only one who has shaped that feeling in verse, the first poet who, with
+skill incomparably inspired, has chiselled our epoch into a mighty
+monument of rhyme.
+
+In Verhaeren's work our age is mirrored. The new landscapes are in it;
+the sinister silhouettes of the great cities; the seething masses of a
+militant democracy; the subterranean shafts of mines; the last heavy
+shadows of silent, dying cloisters. All the intellectual forces of our
+time, our time's ideology, have here become a poem; the new social
+ideas, the struggle of industrialism with agrarianism, the vampire force
+which lures the rural population from the health-giving fields to the
+burning quarries of the great city, the tragic fate of emigrants,
+financial crises, the dazzling conquests of science, the syntheses of
+philosophy, the triumphs of engineering, the new colours of the
+impressionists. All the manifestations of the new age are here reflected
+in a poet's soul in their action--first confused, then understood, then
+joyfully acclaimed--on the sensations of a New European. How this work
+came into being, out of what resistance and crises a poet has here
+conquered the consciousness of the necessity and then of the beauty of
+the new cosmic phase, it shall be our task to show. If the time has
+indeed come to class Verhaeren, it is not so much with the poets that
+his place will be found. He does not so much stand with or above the
+verse-smiths or actual artists in verse, with the musicians, or
+painters, as rather with the great organisers, those who have forced the
+new social currents to flow between dikes; with the legislators who
+prevent the clashing of flamboyant energies; with the philosophers, who
+aim at co-ordinating and unifying all these vastly complicated
+tendencies in one brilliant synthesis. His poetry is a created poet's
+world; it is a resolute shaping of phases, a considered new æstheticism,
+and a conscious new inspiration. He is not only the poet, he is at the
+same time the preacher of our time. He was the first to conceive of it
+as _beautiful_, but not like those who, in their zeal for embellishment,
+tone down the dark colours and bring out the bright ones; he has
+conceived of it--we shall have to show with what a painful and intensive
+effort--after his first most obstinate rejection of it, as a necessity,
+and he has then transformed this conception of its necessity, of its
+purpose, into beauty. Ceasing to look backwards, he has looked forwards.
+He feels, quite in the spirit of evolution, in the spirit of Nietzsche,
+that our generation is raised high above all the past, that it is the
+summit of all that is past, and the turning-point towards the future.
+This will perhaps seem too much to many people, who are inclined to call
+our generation wretched and paltry, as though they had some inner
+knowledge of the magnificence or the paltriness of generations gone. For
+every generation only becomes great by the men who do not despair of it,
+only becomes great by its poets who conceive of it as great, by its
+charioteers of state who have confidence in its power of greatness. Of
+Shakespeare and Hugo Verhaeren says: 'Ils grandissaient leur
+siècle.'[3] They did not depict it with the perspective of others, but
+out of the heart of their own greatness. Of such geniuses as Rembrandt
+he says: 'Si plus tard, dans l'éloignement des siècles, ils semblent
+traduire mieux que personne leur temps, c'est qu'ils l'ont recréé
+d'après leur cerveau, et qu'ils l'ont imposé non pas tel qu'il était,
+mais tel qu'ils l'ont déformé.'[4] But by magnifying their century, by
+raising even ephemeral events of their own days into a vast perspective,
+they themselves became great. While those who of set purpose diminish,
+and while those by nature indifferent, are themselves diminished and
+disregarded as the centuries recede, poets such as these we honour tell,
+like illumined belfry clocks, the hour of the time to generations yet to
+come. If the others bequeath some slight possession, a poem or so,
+aphorisms, a book maybe, these survive more mightily: they survive in
+some great conception, some great idea of an age, in that music of life
+to which the faint-hearted and the ungifted of following epochs will
+listen as it sounds from the past, because they in their turn are unable
+to understand the rhythm of their own time. By this manner of inspired
+vision Verhaeren has come to be the great poet of our time, by approving
+of it as well as by depicting it, by the fact that he did not see the
+new things as they actually are, but celebrated them as a new beauty.
+He has approved of all that is in our epoch; of everything, to the very
+resistance to it which he has conceived of as only a welcome
+augmentation of the fighting force of our vitality. The whole atmosphere
+of our time seems compressed in the organ music of his work; and whether
+he touches the bright keys or the dark, whether he rolls out a lofty
+diapason or strikes a gentle concord, it is always the onward-rushing
+force of our time that vibrates in his poems. While other poets have
+grown ever more lifeless and languid, ever more secluded and
+disheartened, Verhaeren's voice has grown ever more resonant and
+vigorous, like an organ indeed, full of reverence and the mystical power
+of sublime prayer. A spirit positively religious, not of despondency,
+however, but of confidence and joy, breathes from this music of his,
+freshening and quickening the blood, till the world takes on brighter
+and more animated and more generous colours, and our vitality, fired by
+the fever of his verse, flashes with a richer and younger and more
+virile flame.
+
+But the fact that life, to-day of all days, needs nothing so urgently as
+the freshening and quickening of our vitality, is good reason why--quite
+apart from all literary admiration--we must read his books, is good
+reason why this poet must be discussed with all that glad enthusiasm
+which we have first learned for our lives from his work.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'Aujourd'hui'(_Les Héros_).
+
+[2] Guyau, _L'Esthétique Contemporaine._
+
+[3] 'L'Art' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[4] _Rembrandt_.
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW BELGIUM
+
+     Entre la France ardente et la grave Allemagne.
+             _É.V._, 'Charles le Téméraire.'
+
+
+In Belgium the roads of Europe meet. A few hours transport one from
+Brussels, the heart of its iron arteries, to Germany, France, Holland,
+and England; and from Belgian ports all countries and all races are
+accessible across the pathless sea. The area of the land being small, it
+provides a miniature but infinitely varied synthesis of the life of
+Europe. All contrasts stand face to face concisely and sharply outlined.
+The train roars through the land: now past coal-mines, past furnaces and
+retorts that write the fiery script of toil on an ashen sky; now through
+golden fields or green pastures where sleek, brindled cows are grazing;
+now through great cities that point to heaven with their multitudinous
+chimneys; and lastly to the sea, the Rialto of the north, where
+mountains of cargoes are shipped and unshipped, and trade traffics with
+a thousand hands. Belgium is an agricultural land and an industrial
+land; it is at the same time conservative and socialistic, Roman
+Catholic and free-thinking; at once wealthy and wretched. There are
+colossal fortunes heaped up in the monster cities; and two hours thence
+the bitterest poverty sweats for the dole of a living in mines and
+barns. And again in the cities still greater forces wrestle with one
+another: life and death, the past and the future. Towns monkishly
+secluded, girt with ponderous mediæval walls, towns on whose swart and
+sedgy canals lonely swans glide like milky gondolas, towns like a dream,
+strengthless, prisoned in sleep eternal. At no great distance glitter
+the modern residential cities; Brussels with its glaring boulevards,
+where electric inscriptions dart coruscating up and down the fronts of
+buildings, where motor-cars whiz along, where the streets rumble, and
+modern life twitches with feverish nerves. Contrast on contrast. From
+the right the Teutonic tide dashes in, the Protestant faith; from the
+left, sumptuous and rigidly orthodox, Roman Catholicism. And the race
+itself is the restlessly struggling product of two races, the Flemish
+and the Walloon. Naked, clear, and direct are the contrasts which here
+defy each other; and the whole battle can be surveyed at a glance.
+
+But so strong, so persistent is the inexorable pressure of the two
+neighbouring races, that this blend has already become a new ferment, a
+new race. Elements once contrary are now unrecognisably mixed in a new
+and growing product. Teutons speak French, people of Romance stock are
+Flemish in feeling. Pol de Mont, in spite of his Gallic name, is a
+Flemish poet; Verhaeren, Maeterlinck, and van Lerberghe, though no
+Frenchman can pronounce their names rightly, are French poets. And this
+new Belgian race is a strong race, one of the most capable in Europe.
+Contact with so many foreign cultures, the vicinity of such
+contradictory nations, has fertilised them; healthy rural labour has
+steeled their limbs; the near sea has opened their eyes to the great
+distances. Their consciousness of themselves is of no long date: it can
+only be reckoned from the time when their country became independent,
+hardly a hundred years ago. A nation younger than America, they are in
+their adolescence now, and rejoicing in their new, unsought strength.
+And just as in America, the blend of races here, together with the
+fruitful, healthy fields, has procreated robust men. For the Belgian
+race is a race pulsing with vitality. Nowhere in Europe is life so
+intensely, so merrily enjoyed as in Flanders, nowhere else is sensuality
+and pleasure in excess so much the measure of strength. They must be
+seen particularly in their sensual life; it must be seen how the Flemish
+enjoy; with what greediness, with what a conscious pleasure and robust
+endurance. It is among them that Jordaens found the models for his
+gluttonous orgies; and they could be found still at every kermesse, at
+every wake. Statistics prove that in the consumption of alcohol Belgium
+stands to-day at the head of Europe. Every second house is an inn, an
+_estaminet_; every town, every village has its brewery; and the brewers
+are the wealthiest men in the country. Nowhere else are festivals so
+loud, boisterous, and unbridled; nowhere else is life loved and lived
+with such a superabundant zest and glow. Belgium is the land of
+excessive vitality, and ever was so. They have fought for this plenitude
+of life, for this enjoyment full to satiety. Their most heroic exploit,
+their great war with the Spaniards, was only a struggle not so much for
+religion as for sensual freedom. These desperate revolts, this immense
+effort was in reality not directed against Roman Catholicism, but
+against the morality, the asceticism it enforced; not so much against
+Spain as against the sinister malignity of the Inquisition; against the
+taciturn, bitter, and insidious Puritanism which sought to curtail
+enjoyment; against the morose reserve of Philip II. All that they wanted
+at that time was to preserve their bright and laughing life, their free,
+dionysiac enjoyment, the imperious avidity of their senses; they were
+determined not to be limited by any measure short of excess. And with
+them life conquered. Health, strength, and fecundity is to this very day
+the mark of the Belgian people in town and country. Poverty itself is
+not hollow-cheeked and stunted here. Chubby, red-cheeked children play
+in the streets; the peasants working in the fields are straight and
+sturdy; even the artisans are as muscular and strong as they are in
+Constantin Meunier's bronzes; the women are moulded to bear children
+easily; the unbroken vigour of the old men persists in a secure defiance
+of age. Constantin Meunier was fifty when he began his life-work here;
+at sixty Verhaeren is at the zenith of his creative power. Insatiable
+seems the strength of this race, whose deepest feeling has been
+chiselled by Verhaeren in proud stanzas:
+
+    Je suis le fils de cette race,
+    Dont les cerveaux plus que les dents
+    Sont solides et sont ardents
+    Et sont voraces.
+    Je suis le fils de cette race
+    Tenace,
+    Qui veut, après avoir voulu
+    Encore, encore et encore plus![1]
+
+This tremendous exertion has not been in vain. To-day Belgium is
+relatively the richest country in Europe. Its colony of the Congo is ten
+times as extensive as the mother-land. The Belgians hardly know where to
+place their capital: Belgian money is invested in Russia, in China, in
+Japan; they are concerned in all enterprises; their financiers control
+trusts in all countries. The middle classes, too, are healthy, strong,
+and contented.
+
+Such rich and healthy blood is more likely than any other to produce
+good art, and, above all, art full of the zest of life. For it is in
+countries with few possibilities of expansion that the desire for
+artistic activity is keenest. The imagination of great nations is for
+the most part absorbed by the practical demands of their development.
+The best strength of a great nation is claimed by politics, by
+administration, by the army and navy; but where political life is of
+necessity poor, where the problems of administration are forcibly
+restricted, men of genius almost exclusively seek their conquests in the
+domains of art. Scandinavia is one example, Belgium another, of
+countries in which the aristocracy of intellect have with the happiest
+results been forced back on art and science. In such young races the
+vital instinct must _a priori_ make all artistic activity strong and
+healthy; and even when they produce a decadence, this reaction, this
+contradiction, is so decided and consequent, that strength lies in its
+very weakness. For only a strong light can cast strong shadows; only a
+strong, sensual race can bring forth the really great and earnest
+mystics; because a decided reaction which is conscious of its aim
+requires as much energy as positive creation.
+
+The towering structure of Belgian art rests on a broad foundation. The
+preparation, the growing under the sod, took fifty years; and then in
+another fifty years it was reared aloft by the youth of one single
+generation. For every healthy evolution is slow, most of all in the
+Teutonic races, which are not so quick, supple, and dexterous as the
+Latin races, who learn by life itself rather than by studious
+application. This literature has grown ring by ring like a tree, with
+its roots deep in a healthy soil nourished by the unyielding
+perseverance of centuries. Like every confession of faith, this
+literature has its saints, its martyrs, and its disciples. The first of
+the creators, the forerunner, was Charles de Coster; and his great epic
+_Thyl Ulenspiegel_ is the gospel of this new literature. His fate is
+sad, like that of all pioneers. In him the native blend of races is more
+plastically visualised than in all later writers. Of Teutonic
+extraction, he was born in Munich, wrote in French, and was the first
+man to feel as a Belgian. He earned his living painfully as a teacher at
+the Military School. And when his great romance appeared, it was
+difficult to find a publisher, and still more difficult to find
+appreciation, or even notice. And yet this work, with its wonderful
+confrontation of Ulenspiegel as the deliverer of Flanders with Philip
+II. as Antichrist, is to this day the most beautiful symbol of the
+struggle of light with darkness, of vitality with renunciation; an
+enduring monument in the world's literature, because it is the epic of a
+whole nation. With such a work of wide import did Belgian literature
+begin, a work that with its heroic battles stands like the Iliad as the
+proud and primitive beginning of a more delicate, but in its advanced
+culture more complex, literature. The place of this writer, who died
+prematurely, was taken by Camille Lemonnier, who accepted the hard task
+and the melancholy inheritance of pioneers--ingratitude and
+disillusion. Of this proud and noble character also one must speak as of
+a hero. For more than forty years he fought indefatigably for Belgium, a
+soldier leading the onset from first to last, launching book after book,
+creating, writing, calling to the fray and marshalling the new forces;
+and never resting till the adjective 'Belgian' ceased in Paris and
+Europe to be spoken with the contempt that attaches to 'provincial';
+till, like once the name of the Gueux, what was originally a disgrace
+became a title of honour. Fearlessly, not to be discouraged by any
+failure, this superb writer sung his native land--fields, mines, towns,
+and men; the angry, fiery blood of youths and maidens; and over all the
+ardent yearning for a brighter, freer, greater religion, for rapt
+communion with the sublimity of Nature. With the ecstatic revelling in
+colour of his illustrious ancestor Rubens, who gathered all the things
+of life together in a glad festival of the senses, he, like a second
+voluptuary at the feast, has lavished colours, had his joy of all that
+is glowing, and glaring, and satiated, and, like every genuine artist,
+conceived of art as an intensifying of life, as life in intoxication.
+For more than forty years he created in this sense, and miraculously,
+just like the men of his country, like the peasants he painted, he
+waxed in vigour from year to year, from harvest to harvest, his books
+growing ever more fiery, ever more drunken with the zest and glow of
+life, his faith in life ever brighter and more confident. He was the
+first to feel the strength of his young country with conscious pride,
+and his voice rang out its loud appeal for new fighters till he no
+longer stood alone, till a company of other artists were ranged around
+him. Each of these he supported and firmly established, with a strong
+grip placing them at their vantage for the battle; and without envy, nay
+with joy, he saw his own work triumphantly overshadowed by the acclaimed
+creations of his juniors. With joy, because he probably considered not
+his own novels, but this creation of a literature his greatest and most
+lasting work. For it seemed as though in these years the whole land had
+become alive; as though every town, every profession, every class had
+sent forth a poet or a painter to immortalise them; as though this whole
+Belgium were eager to be symbolised in individual phases in works of
+art, until he should come who was destined to transform all towns and
+classes in a poem, enshrining in it the harmonised soul of the land. Are
+not the ancient Teutonic cities of Bruges, Courtrai, and Ypres
+spiritualised in the stanzas of Rodenbach, in the pastels of Fernand
+Khnopff, in the mystic statues of Georges Minne? Have not the sowers of
+corn and the workers in mines become stone in the busts of Constantin
+Meunier? Does not a great drunkenness glow in Georges Eekhoud's
+descriptions? The mystic art of Maeterlinck and Huysmans drinks its
+deepest strength from old cloisters and _béguinages_; the sun of the
+fields of Flanders glows in the pictures of Théo van Rysselberghe and
+Claus. The delicate walking of maidens and the singing of belfries have
+been made music in the stanzas of the gentle Charles van Lerberghe; the
+vehement sensuality of a savage race has been spiritualised in the
+refined eroticism of Félicien Rops. The Walloons have their
+representative in Albert Mockel; and how many others might still be
+named of the great creators: the sculptor van der Stappen; the painters
+Heymans, Stevens; the writers des Ombiaux, Demolder, Glesener,
+Crommelynck; who have all in their confident and irresistible advance
+conquered the esteem of France and the admiration of Europe. For they,
+and just they, were gifted with a sense of the great complex European
+feeling which in their work is glimpsed in its birth and growth; for
+they did not in their idea of a native land stop at the boundaries of
+Belgium, but included all the neighbouring countries, because they were
+at the same time patriots and cosmopolitans: Belgium was to them not
+only the place where all roads meet, but also that whence all roads
+start.
+
+Each of these had shaped his native land from his own angle of vision; a
+whole phalanx of artists had added picture to picture. Till then this
+great one came, Verhaeren, who saw, felt, and loved everything in
+Flanders, 'toute la Flandre.' Only in his work did it become a unity;
+for he has sung everything, land and sea, towns and workshops, cities
+dead and cities at their birth. He has not conceived of this Flanders of
+his as a separate phase, as a province, but as the heart of Europe, with
+the strength of its blood pulsing inwards from outside and outside from
+inwards; he has opened out horizons beyond the frontiers, and heightened
+and connected them; and with the same inspiration he has molten and
+welded the individual together with the whole until out of his work a
+life-work grew--the lyric epic of Flanders. What de Coster half a
+century before had not dared to fashion from the present, in which he
+despaired of finding pride, power, and the heroism of life, Verhaeren
+has realised; and thus he has become the 'carillonneur de la Flandre,'
+the bell-ringer who, as in olden days from the watch-tower, has summoned
+the whole land to the defence of its will to live, and the nation to the
+pride and consciousness of its power.
+
+This Verhaeren could only do, because he in himself represents all the
+contrasts, all the advantages of the Belgian race. He too is a ferment
+of contrasts, a new man made of split and divergent forces now
+victoriously harmonised. From the French he has his language and his
+form; from the Germans his instinctive seeking of God, his earnestness,
+his gravity, his need of metaphysics, and his impulse to pantheism.
+Political instincts, religious instincts, Catholicism and socialism,
+have struggled in him; he is at once a dweller in great cities and a
+cottager in the open country; and the deepest impulse of his people,
+their lack of moderation and their greed of life, is in the last
+instance the maxim of his poetic art. Only that their pleasure in
+intoxication has in him become joy in a noble drunkenness, in ecstasy;
+only that their carnal joy has become a delight in colour; that their
+mad raging is now in him a pleasure in a rhythm that roars and thunders
+and bursts in foam. The deepest thing in his race, an inflexible
+vitality which is not to be shaken by crises or catastrophes, has in him
+become universal law, a conscious, intensified zest in life. For when a
+country has become strong and rejoices in its strength, it needs, like
+every plethora, a cry, an exultation. Just as Walt Whitman was the
+exultation of America in its new strength, Verhaeren is the triumph of
+the Belgian race, and of the European race too. For this glad confession
+of life is so strong, so glowing, so virile that it cannot be thought of
+as breaking forth from the heart of one individual, but is evidently the
+delight of a fresh young nation in its beautiful and yet unfathomed
+power.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'Ma Race' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+
+
+
+YOUTH IN FLANDERS
+
+        Seize, dix-sept et dix-huit ans!
+     O ce désir d'être avant l'âge et le vrai temps
+                        Celui
+                 Dont chacun dit
+     Il boit à larges brocs et met à mal les filles!
+                                    É.V., _Les Tendresses Premières_.
+
+The history of modern Belgian literature begins, by a whim of chance, in
+one and the same house. In Ghent, the favourite city of the Emperor
+Charles V., in the old, heavy Flemish town that is still girdled with
+ramparts, lies, remote from the noisy streets, the grey Jesuit college
+of Sainte-Barbe. A cloister with thick, cold, frowning walls, mute
+corridors, silent refectories, reminding one somewhat of the beautiful
+colleges in Oxford, save that here there is no ivy softening the walls,
+and no flowers to lay their variegated carpet over the green courts.
+Here, in the seventies, two strange pairs of boys meet on the
+school-benches; here among thousands of names are four which are
+destined in later days to be the pride of their country. First, Georges
+Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren, then Maeterlinck and Charles van
+Lerberghe--two pairs of friendships, both of which are now torn asunder
+by death. The weaker, the more delicate of the four, Georges Rodenbach
+and Charles van Lerberghe, have died; Emile Verhaeren and Maeterlinck,
+the two heroes of Flanders, are still growing and not yet at the zenith
+of their fame. But all four began their course in the old college. The
+Jesuit fathers taught them their humanities, and even to write poems--in
+Latin, it is true, to begin with; and in this exercise, strange to say,
+Maeterlinck was excelled by van Lerberghe with his more instinctive
+sense of form, and Verhaeren by the more supple Georges Rodenbach. With
+rigorous earnestness the fathers trained them to respect the past, to
+have faith in conventional things, to think in old grooves, and to hate
+innovations. The aim was not only to keep them Catholics, but to win
+them for the priesthood: these cloister walls were to protect them from
+the hostile breath of the new world, from the freshening wind which, in
+Flanders as everywhere else, was assailing the growing generation.
+
+But in these four pupils the aim was not realised, least of all in
+Verhaeren, perhaps for the very reason that he, as the scion of a
+strictly orthodox family, was the most fitted to be a priest; because
+his mind did not absorb conviction mechanically, but achieved it by
+vital processes; because his inmost being was self-surrender and a
+glowing devotion to great ideas. However, the call of the open country,
+in which he had grown up, was too strong in him; the voice of life was
+too loud in his blood for so early a renunciation of all; his mind was
+too tameless to be satisfied with the established and the traditional.
+The impressions of his childhood were more vivid than the teaching of
+his masters. For Verhaeren was born in the country, at St. Amand on the
+Scheldt (on the 21st of May 1855), where the landscape rolls to the vast
+horizons of the heath and the sea. Here in the happiest manner kindly
+circumstances wove the garland of his earlier years. His parents were
+well-to-do people who had retired from the din of the town to this
+little corner of Flanders; here they had a cottage of their own, with a
+front garden ablaze with flowers of all colours. And immediately behind
+the house began the great golden fields, the tangle of flowering
+hedgerows; and close by was the river with its slow waves hasting no
+longer, feeling the nearness of their goal, the infinite ocean. Of the
+untrammelled days of his boyhood the ageing poet has told us in his
+wonderful book _Les Tendresses Premières_. He has told us of the boy he
+was when he ran across country; clambered into the corn-loft where the
+glittering grain was heaped; climbed steeples; watched the peasants at
+their sowing and reaping; and listened to the maids at the washing-tub
+singing old Flemish songs. He watched all trades; he rummaged in every
+corner. He would sit with the watch-maker, marvelling at the humming
+little wheels that fashioned the hour; and no less to see the glowing
+maw of the oven in the bakery swallowing the corn which only the day
+before had glided through his fingers in rustling ears, and was now
+already bread, golden, warm, and odorous. At games he would watch in
+astonishment the glad strength of the young fellows tumbling the reeling
+skittles over; and he would wander with the playing band from village to
+village, from fair to fair. And, sitting on the bank of the Scheldt, he
+would watch the ships, with their coloured streamers, come and go, and
+in his dreams follow them to the vast distances, which he only knew from
+sailors' yarns and pictures in old books. All this, this daily physical
+familiarity with the things of Nature, this lived insight into the
+thousand activities of the working-day, became his inalienable
+possession. Inalienable, too, was the humane feeling he acquired that he
+was one at heart with the people of his village. From them he learned
+the names of all these thousand things, and the intelligence of the
+mysterious mechanism in all skilled handiwork, and all the petty cares
+and perplexities of these many scattered little souls of life which,
+combined, are the soul of a whole land. And therefore Verhaeren is the
+only one among modern poets in the French tongue who is really popular
+with his countrymen of all ranks. He still goes in and out among them as
+their equal, sits in their circle even now, when fame has long since
+shown him his place among the best and noblest, chats with the peasants
+in the village inn, and loves to hear them discussing the weather and
+the harvest and the thousand little things of their narrow world. He
+belongs to them, and they belong to him. He loves their life, their
+cares, their labour, loves this whole land with its tempests raging from
+the north, with its hail and snow, its thundering sea and lowering
+clouds. It is with pride that he claims kindred with his race and land;
+and indeed there is often in his gait and in his gestures something of
+the peasant trampling with heavy steps and hard knee after his plough;
+and his eyes 'are grey as his native sea, his hair is yellow like the
+corn of his fields.' These elemental forces are in his whole being and
+production. You feel that he has never lost touch with Nature, that he
+is still organically connected with the fields, the sea, the open air;
+he to whom spring is physically painful, who is depressed by relaxing
+air, who loves the weather of his home-land, its vehemence, and its
+savage, tameless strength.
+
+For this very reason he has in later years felt, what was natively
+uncongenial to him--the great cities--differently and far more intensely
+than poets brought up in them. What to the latter appeared self-evident
+was to him astonishment, abomination, terror, admiration, and love. For
+him the atmosphere we breathe in cities was heavy, stifling, poisoned;
+the streets between the massed houses were too narrow, too congested;
+hourly, at first in pain and then with admiration, he has felt the
+beautiful fearfulness of the vast dimensions, the strangeness of the new
+forms of life. Just as we walk through mountain ravines dumbfounded and
+terrified by their sublimity, he has walked through streets of cities,
+first slowly accustoming himself to them; thus he has explored them,
+described them, celebrated them, and in the deepest sense lived them.
+Their fever has streamed into his blood; their revolts have reared in
+him like wild horses; their haste and unrest has whipped his nerves for
+half the span of a man's life. But then he has returned home again. In
+his fifties he has taken refuge once more in his fields, under the
+lonely sky of Flanders. He lives in a lonely cottage somewhere in
+Belgium, where the railway does not reach, enjoying himself among
+cheerful and simple people who fill their days with plain labour, like
+the friends and companions of his boyhood. With a joy intensified he
+goes eagerly year by year to the sea, as though his lungs and his heart
+needed it to breathe strongly again, to feel life with more jubilant
+enthusiasm. In the man of sixty there is a wonderful return of his
+healthy, happy childhood; and to the Flanders that inspired his first
+verses his last have been dedicated.
+
+Against this atavism, against this bright and inalienable joy in life,
+the _patres_ of Sainte-Barbe could do nothing. They could only deflect
+his great hunger of life from material things, and turn it in the
+direction of science, of art. The priest they sought to make of him he
+has really become, only he has preached everything that they proscribed,
+and fought against everything that they praised. At the time Verhaeren
+leaves school, he is already filled with that noble yet feverish greed
+of life, that tameless yearning for intensive enjoyments heightened to
+the degree of pain which is so characteristic of him. The priesthood was
+repugnant to him. Nor was he more allured by the prospect, held out to
+him, of directing his uncle's workshop. It is not yet definitely the
+poetic vocation which appeals to him, but he does desire a free active
+calling with unlimited possibilities. To gain time for his final
+decision, he studies jurisprudence, and becomes a barrister. In these
+student years in Louvain Verhaeren gave free rein to his untameable zest
+in life; as a true Fleming he eschewed moderation and launched into
+intemperance. To this very day he is fond of telling of his liking for.
+good Belgian beer, and of how the students got drunk, danced at all the
+kermesses, caroused and feasted, when the fury came over them, and got
+into all kinds, of mischief, which often enough brought them into
+conflict with the police. Uncertainty was never a feature of his
+character, and so his Roman Catholicism was in those years no silent and
+impersonal faith, but a militant orthodoxy. A handful of hotspurs--the
+publisher Deman was one of them, and another was the tenor van Dyck--set
+a newspaper going, in which they lashed away mercilessly at the
+corruption of the modern world, and did not forget to blow their own
+trumpets. The university was not slow to veto these immature
+manifestations; but ere long they started a second periodical, which
+was, however, more in harmony with the great contemporary movements.
+Betweenwhiles verses were written. And still more passionate is the
+young poet's activity when, in the year 1881, he is called to the bar in
+Brussels. Here he makes friends with men of great vitality: he is
+welcomed by a circle of painters and artists, and a cénacle of young
+talents is formed who have the authentic enthusiasm for art, and who
+feel that they are violently opposed to the conservative bourgeoisie of
+Brussels. Verhaeren, who at this time greedily adopts all fashionable
+freakishness as something new, and struts about in fantastic apparel,
+promptly acquires notoriety by his vehement passionateness and his first
+literary attempts. He had begun to write verse in his school-days.
+Lamartine had been his model, then Victor Hugo, who bewitches young
+people, that lord of magnificent gestures, that undisputed master of
+words. These juvenilia of Verhaeren have never been published, and
+probably they have little interest, for in them his tameless vitality
+attempted expression in immaculate Alexandrines. More and more, as his
+artistic insight grew, he felt that his vocation was to be a poet; the
+meagre success he achieved as a barrister confirmed him in this
+conviction, and so in the end, following the advice of Edmond Picard, he
+discarded the barrister's gown, which now seemed to him as narrow and
+stifling as he had once thought the priest's cassock to be.
+
+And then came the hour, the first decisive hour. Lemonnier was as fond
+of relating it as is Verhaeren; both would speak of it with their
+fervent, proud joy in a friendship of over thirty years; both with
+heartfelt admiration, the one for the other. Once, it was a rainy day,
+Verhaeren burst in on Lemonnier, whom he did not know, trampling into
+the elder man's lodging with his heavy peasant's tread, hailing him with
+his hearty gesture, and blurting out: 'Je veux vous lire des vers!' It
+was the manuscript of his first book _Les Flamandes_; and now he
+recited, while the rain poured down outside, with his hard voice and
+sharp scansion, his great enthusiasm and his compelling gestures, those
+pictures, palpitating with life, of Flanders, that first free confession
+of patriotism and foaming vitality. And Lemonnier encouraged him,
+congratulated him, helped him, and suggested alterations, and soon the
+book appeared, to the terror of Verhaeren's strictly orthodox family, to
+the horror of the critics, who were helpless in the face of such an
+explosion of strength. Execrated and lauded, it immediately compelled
+interest. In Belgium, it is true, it was less acclaimed than declaimed
+against; but nevertheless it everywhere excited a commotion, and that
+grumbling unrest which always heralds the advent of a new force.
+
+
+
+
+'LES FLAMANDES'
+
+     Je suis le fils de cette race
+     Tenace,
+     Qui veut, après avoir voulu
+     Encore, encore et encore plus.
+                               É.V., _Ma Race_.
+
+The life-work of great artists contains not only a single, but a
+threefold work of art. The actual creation is only the first, and not
+always the most important; the second must be the life of the artists
+themselves; the third must be the harmoniously finished, organically
+connected relationship between the act of creating and the thing
+created, between poetry and life. To survey how inner growth is
+connected with external formation, how crises of physical reality are
+connected with artistic decadence, how development and completion
+interpenetrate as much in personal experience as in the artistic
+creation, must be an equal artistic rapture, must disengage as pure a
+line of beauty as the individual work. In Verhaeren these conditions of
+the threefold work of art are accomplished in full. Harsh and abrupt as
+the contrasts in his books seem to be, the totality of his development
+is yet rounded off to a clear line, to the figure of a circle. In the
+beginning the end was contained, and in the end the beginning: the bold
+curve returns to itself. Like one who travels round the world and
+circles the vast circumference of the globe, he comes back in the end to
+his starting-point. Beginning and end touch in the motive of his work.
+To the country to which his youth belonged his old age returns: Flanders
+inspired his first book, and to Flanders his last books are dedicated.
+
+True it is, between these two books _Les Flamandes_ and _Les Blés
+Mouvants_, between the work of the man of five-and-twenty and that of
+the man of sixty, lies the world of an evolution with, all its points of
+view and achievements. Only now, when the line that was at first so
+capricious has returned to itself, can its form be surveyed and its
+harmony perceived. A purely external observation has become penetration:
+the eye no longer exclusively regards the external phenomena of things,
+but all has been seized in his soul from within and imaged in accordance
+with its reality. Now nothing is seen isolated, from the point of view
+of curiosity or passing interest, but everything is looked upon as
+something that is, that has grown, and that is still growing. The motive
+is the same in the first and in the last books; only, in the first book
+we have isolated contemplation, while in the great creations of the last
+period the vast horizons of the modern world are set behind the scenes,
+with the shadows of the past on the one side, and, as well, with fiery
+presentiments of the future shedding a new light over the landscape.
+The painter, who only portrayed the outer surface, the patina, has
+developed into the poet, he who in a musical vibration vivifies the
+psychic and the inconceivable. These two works stand in the same
+relation to each other as Wagner's first operas, _Rienzi_ and
+_Tannhäuser_, do to his later creations, to the _Ring_ and _Parsifal_:
+what was at first only intuitive becomes consciously creative. And as in
+Wagner's case, so too with Verhaeren there are to this very day people
+who prefer the works that are still prisoned in the traditional form to
+those which were created later, and who are thus, in reality, greater
+strangers to the poet than those who, from principle, assume a hostile
+attitude to his artistic work.
+
+_Les Flamandes_, Verhaeren's first work, appeared in a period of
+literary commotion. Zola's realistic novels had just become the object
+of discussion; and they had stirred up, not France only, but the
+adjacent countries as well. In Belgium Camille Lemonnier was the
+interpreter of this new naturalism, which regarded absolute truth as
+more important than beauty, and which saw the sole aim of imaginative
+literature in photography, in the exact, scientifically accurate
+reproduction of reality. To-day, now that excessive naturalism has been
+overcome, we know that this theory only brings us half-way along the
+road; that beauty may live by the side of truth; that on the other hand
+truth is not identical with art, but that it was only necessary to
+establish a transmutation of the value of beauty; that it was in the
+actual, in realities, that beauty was to be sought. Every new theory, if
+it is to succeed, needs a strong dose of exaggeration. And the idea of
+realising reality in poetry seduced young Verhaeren into carefully
+avoiding, in the description of his native province, all that is
+sentimental and romantic, and deluded him with the hope of expressing in
+his verse only what is coarse, primitive, and savage. Something external
+and something internal, nature and intention, combined to cause this
+effect. For the hatred of all that is soft and weak, rounded off and in
+repose, is in Verhaeren's blood. His temperament was from the first
+fiery, and loved to respond to strong provocation with a violent blow.
+There was ever in him a love of the brutal, the hard, the rough, the
+angular; he had always a liking for what is glaring and intensive, loud
+and noisy. It is only in his latest books that, thanks to his cooler
+blood, he has attained classical perfection and purity. In those days,
+moreover, his hatred of sentimental idealisation, the hatred that in
+Germany fulminated against Defregger's drawing-room Tyrolese, Auerbach's
+scented peasants, and the spruce mythology of poetical pictures, led him
+deliberately to emphasise what is brutal, unæsthetic, and, as it was
+then felt, unpoetical; led him, as it were, to trample with heavy shoes
+in the tedious footsteps of French poets. Barbarian: this was the word
+they tried to kill him with, not so much on account of the harshness and
+coarseness of his diction, which often reminds one of the guttural
+sounds of German, as because of the savage selection of his instinct,
+which always preferred what is ringingly resonant and ferociously alive,
+which never fed on nectar and ambrosia, but tore red and steaming shreds
+of flesh from the body of life. And genuinely barbarous, savage with
+Teutonic strength, is this his inroad into French literature, reminding
+one of those migrations of the Teutons into the Latin lands, where they
+rushed ponderously to battle with wild and raucous cries, to learn,
+after a time, a higher culture and the finer instincts of life from
+those they had conquered. Verhaeren in this book does not describe what
+is amiable and dreamy in Flanders, not idylls, but 'les fureurs
+d'estomac, de ventre et de débauche,'[1] ail the explosions of the lust
+of life, the orgies of peasants, and even of the animal world. Before
+him, his old schoolfellow Rodenbach had described Flanders to the French
+in poems that sounded gently with a silvery note, like the peal of
+belfries hovering over roofs; he had reminded them of that unforgettable
+melancholy of the evening over the canals of Bruges, of the magic of the
+moonlight over fields framed with dikes and hedges of willows. But
+Verhaeren closes his ears to hints of death; he describes life at its
+maddest, 'le décor monstrueux des grasses kermesses,'[2] popular
+festivals, in which intoxication and sensual pleasure sting the
+unbridled strength of the crowd, in which the demands of the body and
+the greed of money come into conflict, and the bestial nature of man
+overthrows the painfully learned lessons of morality. And even in these
+descriptions, which often teem with the exuberance of Rabelais, one
+feels that even this explosive life is not mad enough for him, that he
+yearns to intensify life out and beyond reality: 'jadis les gars avaient
+les reins plus fermes et les garces plus beau téton.'[3] These young
+fellows are too weak for him, the wenches too gentle; he cries for the
+Flanders of olden time, as it lives in the glowing pictures of Rubens
+and Jordaens and Breughel. These are his true masters, they, the
+revellers, who created their masterpieces between two orgies, whose
+laughter and feasting ring into the motives of their pictures. Some of
+the poems in _Les Flamandes_ are direct imitations of certain interiors
+and sensual genre-pictures: lads afire with lust forcing wenches under
+the hedges; peasants in their drunken jubilation dancing round the inn
+table. His desire is to sing that superabundance of vitality which
+relieves itself by excess, excess flung into excess, even in sensual
+pleasures. And his own colours and words, which are laid on with lavish
+profusion and flow along in liquid fire, are themselves a debauch, a
+'rut' (a favourite word of his). This vaunting display of seething
+pictures is nothing less than an orgy. A terrific sensuality rages to
+exhaustion as much in the execution as in the motive, a delight in these
+creatures who have the madness of rutting stallions, who root about in
+odorous meats and in the flowering flesh of women, who of set purpose
+gorge themselves with beer and wine, and then in the dance and in
+embraces discharge all the fire they have swallowed. Now and again a
+reposeful picture alternates, firmly fixed in the dark frame of a
+sonnet. But the hot wave streams over these breathing-spaces, and again
+the mood is that of Rubens and of Jordaens, those mighty revellers.
+
+But naturalistic art is pictorial, not poetic. And it is the great
+defect of this book that it was written by an inspired painter only, not
+yet by a poet. The words are coloured, but they are not free; they do
+not yet rock themselves in their own rhythm; they do not yet storm along
+to soar aloft with the inspiration; they are wild horses regularly
+trotting along in the shafts of the Alexandrine. There is a disparity
+between the inner intractability and the external regularity of these
+poems. The ore has not yet been molten long enough in the crucible of
+life to burst the hereditary mould. You feel that the avidity of life
+which is the substance of the work has really been seen 'à travers un
+tempérament,' that here a strong personality is in revolt against all
+tradition, a strong personality whose ponderous onslaught was bound to
+strike terror into the cautious and the short-sighted. But the strength
+and the art are not yet emancipated. Verhaeren is already a passionate
+onlooker, but he is still only an onlooker, one who stands without and
+not within the vortex, who watches everything with inspired sympathy,
+but who has not yet experienced it. This land of Flanders has not yet
+become a part of the poet's sensibility; the new point of view and the
+new form for it are not yet achieved; there is yet wanting that final
+smelting of the artistic excitement which is bound to burst all bonds
+and restrictions, to flame along in its own free feeling in an
+enraptured intoxication.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'Les Vieux Maîtres' (_Les Flamandes_).
+
+[2] 'Les Vieux Maîtres' (_Les Flamandes_).
+
+[3] 'Truandailles' (_Ibid._).
+
+
+
+
+THE MONKS
+
+     Moines venus vers nous des horizons gothiques,
+     Mais dont l'âme, mais dont l'esprit meurt de demain....
+     Mes vers vous bâtiront de mystiques autels.
+                                       É.V., 'Aux Moines.'
+
+
+Rubens, that lavish reveller, is the genius of the Flemish zest in
+living; but zest in living is only the temperament and not the soul of
+Flanders. Before him there were the earnest masters of the cloisters,
+the primitives, the van Eycks, Memling, Gerhard David, Roger van der
+Weyden; and after them came Rembrandt, the meditative visionary, the
+restless seeker after new values. Belgium is something else beside the
+merry land of kermesses; the healthy, sensual people are not the soul of
+Flanders. Glaring lights cast strong shadows. All vitality that is
+strongly conscious of itself produces its counterpart, seclusion and
+asceticism; it is just the healthiest, the elemental races--the Russians
+of to-day for instance--who among their strong have the weak, among
+their gluttons of life those who avert their faces from it, among those
+who assent some who deny. By the side of the ambitious, teeming Belgium
+we have spoken of, there is a sequestered Belgium which is falling into
+ruins. Art exclusively in Rubens's sense could take no account of all
+those solitary cities, Bruges, Ypres, Dixmude, through whose noiseless
+streets the monks hasten like flocks of ravens in long processions, in
+whose canals the dumb white shadows of gliding nuns are mirrored. There,
+mid life's raging river, are broad islands of dream where men find
+refuge from realities. Even in the great Belgian cities there are such
+sequestered haunts of silence, the _béguinages,_ those little towns in
+the town, whither ageing men and women have retired, renouncing the
+world for the peace of the cloister. Quite as much as the passion of
+life, the Roman Catholic faith and monkish renunciation are nowhere so
+deeply and firmly rooted as in this Belgium, where sensual pleasure is
+so noisy in its excess. Here again an extreme of contrasts is revealed:
+frowning in the face of the materialistic view of life stands the
+spiritual view. While the masses in the exuberance of their health and
+strength proclaim life aloud and pounce on its eternal pleasures, aside
+and cut off from them stand another, far lesser company to whom life is
+only a waiting for death, whose silence is as persistent as the
+exultation of the others. Everywhere here austere faith has its black
+roots in the vigorous, fruitful soil. For religious feeling always
+remains alive among a people that has once, although centuries may have
+passed since, fought with every fibre of its being for its faith. This
+is a subterranean Belgium that works in secret and that easily escapes
+the cursory glance, for it lives in shadows and silence. From this
+silence, however, from this averted earnestness, Belgian art has derived
+that mystical nourishment which has lent its baffling strength to the
+works of Maeterlinck, the pictures of Fernand Khnopff and Georges Minne.
+Verhaeren, too, did not turn aside from this sombre region. He, as the
+painter of Belgian life, saw these shadows of a vanishing past, and, in
+1886, added to his first book _Les Flamandes_ a second, _Les Moines_. It
+almost seems as though he had first of all been obliged to exhaust both
+the historical styles of his native land before he could reach his own,
+the modern style. For this book is essentially a throw-back, a
+confession of faith in Gothic art.
+
+Monks are for Verhaeren heroic symbols of I mighty periods in the past.
+In his boyhood he I was familiar with their grave aspect. Near the
+cheerful house where his youth was passed, there was at Bornhem a
+Bernhardine monastery, whither the boy had often accompanied his father
+to confession, and in whose cold corridors he had often waited in
+astonishment and with a child's timidity, listening to the majestic
+chant of the liturgy married to the organ's earnest notes. And here, one
+day of days, he received, with a thrill of pious terror, his first
+communion. Since that day the monks had been to him, as he trod the
+beaten track of custom, beings in a strange world apart, the incarnation
+of the beautiful and the supersensual, the unearthly on his child's
+earth. And when, in the course of years, he sought to create in verse a
+vision of Flanders in all her luminous and burning colours, he could not
+forgo this mysterious chiaroscuro, this earnest tone. For three weeks he
+withdrew to the hospitable monastery of Forges, near Chimay, taking part
+in all the ceremonies and rites of the monks, who, in the hope of
+winning a priest, afforded him full insight into their life. But
+Verhaeren's attitude towards Roman Catholicism was by this time anything
+but religious, it was rather an æsthetic and poetic admiration for the
+noble romanticism of the ceremonial, a moral piety for the things of the
+past. He remained three weeks. Then he fled, oppressed by the nightmare
+of the ponderous walls, and, as a souvenir for himself, chiselled the
+image of the monastery in verse.
+
+This book too, no doubt, had no other aim than to be pictorial,
+descriptive. In rounded sonnets, as though etched by Rembrandt's needle,
+he fixed the chiaroscuro of the cloister's corridors, the hours of
+prayer, the earnest meetings of the monks, the silence in the intervals
+of the liturgy. The evenings over the landscape were described, in a
+ritual language, with the images of faith: the sun as it sets in crimson
+flaming like the wine in the chalice; steeples like luminous crosses in
+a silent sky; the rustling corn bowing when the bell rings to evensong.
+The poetry of devotion and repose was here revived: the harmony of the
+organ; the beauty of corridors garlanded with ivy; the touching idyll of
+the lonely cemetery; the peaceful dying of the prior; the visiting of
+the sick, and the I comfort it brings. Nothing was allowed in the deep
+light of the colours, in the grave repose of the theme, save what could
+be fitted into the strictly religious frame of the picture.
+
+But here the pictorial method proved to be I insufficient for the poetic
+effect. The problem of religious feeling is too close to the heart to be
+reached by outward, even by plastic manifestations. A thing which is so
+eminently hostile to the sensuous, nay, which is the very symbol of I
+all that is contrary to sensuousness, cannot be reached by a picturesque
+appeal to the senses; the description of an intellectual problem must
+cease to be descriptive and become psychology. And so, thus early in his
+career, Verhaeren is forced away from the picturesque. First, however,
+he attempts the plastic method: he gives us sombre statues of monks; but
+even as statues they are only types of an inner life, symbols of the
+ways to God. Verhaeren develops in his monks the difference of their
+characters, which are still effective even under the soutane; and by his
+delicate characterisation he shows the I manifold possibilities of
+religious feeling. The I feudal monk, a noble of ancient lineage, would
+make a conquest of God, as once his ancestors conquered castle and
+forest lands with spur and sword. The _moine flambeau_, he that is
+burning with fervour, would possess Him with his passion like a woman.
+The savage monk, he that has come from the heart of a forest, can only
+comprehend Him in heathen wise, only fear Him as the wielder of thunder
+and lightning, while the gentle monk, he that loves the Virgin with a
+troubadour's timid tenderness, flees from the fear of Him. One monk
+would fathom Him by the learning of books and by logic; another does not
+understand Him, cannot lay hold on Him, and yet finds Him everywhere, in
+all things, in all he experiences. Thus all the characters of life, the
+harshest contrasts, are jostled together, quelled only by the monastery
+rules. But they are only in juxtaposition, just as the painter loves all
+his colours and things equally, just as he places things in
+juxtaposition, without estimating them according to their value. So far
+there is nothing that binds them together inwardly, there is no conflict
+of forces, no great idea. Neither are the verses as yet free; they too
+have the effect of being bound by the strict discipline of the monks.
+'Il s'environne d'une sorte de froide lumière parnassienne qui en fait
+une œuvre plus anonyme, malgré la marque du poète poinçonnée à
+maintes places sur le métal poli,'[1] says Albert Mockel, the most
+subtle of æsthetic critics, of the book. Verhaeren must himself have
+felt this insufficiency, for, conscious of not having solved his
+problems in terms of poetry, he has remoulded both aspects of the
+country, renewed both books in another form after many years: _Les
+Moines_ in the tragedy _Le Cloître, Les Flamandes_ in the great
+pentalogy _Toute la Flandre._
+
+_Les Moines_ was the last of Verhaeren's descriptive books, the last in
+which he stood on the outer side of things contemplating them
+dispassionately. But already here there is too much temperament in him
+to allow him to look at things as altogether unconnected and
+undisciplined; the joy of magnifying and intensifying by feeling already
+stirs in him. At the end of the book he no longer sees the monks as
+isolated individuals, but gathers them all together in a great synthesis
+in his finale. Behind them the poet sees order, a secret law, a great
+force of life. They, these hermits who have renounced, who are scattered
+over the world in a thousand monasteries, are to the poet the last
+remnants of a great departed beauty, and they are so much the more
+grandiose as they have lost all feeling for our own time. They are the
+last ruins of moribund Christianity in a new world, projecting, in
+tragic loneliness, into our own days. 'Seuls vous survivez grands au
+monde chrétien mort!'[2] he hails them in admiration, for they have
+built the great House of God, and for many generations sacrificed their
+blood for the Host eternally white. In admiration he hails them. Not in
+faith and love, but in admiration for their fearless energy, and above
+all because they go on fighting undaunted for something that is dead and
+lost; because their beauty serves none other than itself; because they
+project into our own time like the ancient belfries of the land, which
+no longer call to prayer. In a land where everything else serves a
+purpose, pleasure and gold, they stand lonely; and they die without a
+cry and without a moan, fighting against an invisible enemy, they, the
+last defenders of beauty. For at that time, at that early stage of his
+career, beauty for Verhaeren was still identical with the past, because
+he had not yet discovered beauty for himself in the new things; in the
+monks he celebrates the last romanticists, because he had not yet found
+poetry in the things of reality, not yet found the new romance, the
+heroism of the working-day. He loves the monks as great dreamers, as the
+_chercheurs de chimères sublimes_, but he cannot help them, cannot
+defend what they possess, for behind them already stand their heirs.
+These heirs are the poets--a curious echo of David Strauss's idea about
+religion--who will have to be, what religion with its faithful was to
+the past, the guardians and eternal promoters of beauty. They it will
+be--here rings strangely the deepest intention of Verhaeren's later
+work--who will wave their new faith over the world like a banner, they,
+'les poètes venus trop tard pour être prêtres,'[3] who shall be the
+priests of a new fervour. All religions, all dogmas, are brittle and
+transitory, Christ dies as Pan dies; and even this poetic faith, the
+last and highest conquest of the mind, must in its time pass away.
+
+     Car il ne reste rien que l'art sur cette terre
+     Pour tenter un cerveau puissant et solitaire
+     Et le griser de rouge et tonique liqueur.
+
+In this great hymn to the future Verhaeren first turns away from the
+past and seeks the path to the future. For the poetic idea is here
+understood with new and greater feelings than in the beginning of his
+career. Poetry is for Verhaeren a confession not only as applied to an
+individual in Goethe's phrase, but in a religious sense as well: as the
+highest moral confession.
+
+Much as these two books are marked by the effort to describe Flanders as
+it actually is, stronger than this effort is the yearning at the heart
+of them to escape from the present to the past. Every temperament
+exceeds reality. Flanders was here described in the sense of an ideal;
+but the ideal in both cases was projected on the past. Beauty young
+Verhaeren had sought in the monks, the symbols of the past; strength and
+the fire of life he had sought in the old Flemish masters. He still
+needed the costume of the past to discover the heroic and the beautiful
+in the present, just like many of our poets, who, when they would paint
+strong men, must perforce place their dramas in the Florentine
+renaissance, and who, if they would fashion beauty, deck their
+characters with Greek costumes. To find strength and beauty, or in one
+word poetry, in the real things that surround us, is here still denied
+to Verhaeren; and therefore he has disowned his second book as well as
+his first. In the distance between the old and the new works the long
+road may be seen, and seen with pride, which leads from the traditional
+poet to the truly contemporary poet.
+
+Though not yet divided with a master hand, though not yet in the light
+of reality, the inner contrast of the country, the conflict between body
+and soul, between the joy of life and the longing for death, between
+pleasure and renunciation, the alternative between 'yes' and 'no,' was
+yet already contained in the contrast of these two books. And in a
+really emotional poet this contrast could not remain one that was purely
+external; it was bound to condense to an inner problem, to a personal
+decision between past and present. Two conceptions of the world, both
+inherited and in the blood, have here attained consciousness in one man;
+and though in life they may act independently in juxtaposition, in the
+individual the conflict must be fought out, the victory of the one or
+the other must be decided by force, or else by something higher, by an
+internal reconciliation. This conflict for a conception of the world
+pierces through the constant contrast between the acceptance and the
+denial of life in the poet, a conflict that for ten long years
+undermined his artistic and human experiences with terrific crises, and
+brought him to the verge of annihilation. The hostility which divides
+his country into two camps seems to have taken refuge in his soul to
+fight it out in a desperate and mortal duel: past and future seem to be
+fighting for a new synthesis. But only from such crises, from such
+pitiless struggles with the forces of one's own soul, do the vast
+conceptions of the universe and their new creative reconciliation grow.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Albert Mockel, _Émile Verhaeren_.
+
+[2] 'Aux Moines.'
+
+[3] 'Aux Moines.'
+
+
+
+
+THE BREAK-DOWN
+
+     Nous sommes tous des Christs qui embrassons nos croix.
+                                             É. V.,'La Joie,'
+
+Every feeling, every sensation is, in the last instance, the
+transformation of pain. Everything that in vibration or by contact
+touches the epithelium affects it as pain. As pain, which then, by the
+secret chemistry of the nerves, transmitted from centre to centre, is
+transformed into impressions, colours, sounds, and conceptions. The
+poet, whose last secret really is that he is more sensitive than others,
+that he purifies these pains of contact into feeling with a still more
+delicate filter, must have finer nerves than anybody else. Where others
+only receive a vague impression, he must have a clear perception, to
+which his feeling must respond, and the value of which he must be able
+to estimate. In Verhaeren's very first books a particular kind of
+reaction to every incitement was perceptible. His feeling really
+responds only to strong, intensive, sharp irritation; its delicacy was
+not abnormal, only the energy of the reaction was remarkable. His first
+artistic incitement; however, that of Flemish landscapes, was only one
+of the retina, glaring colours, pictorial charm; only in _Les Moines_
+had for the first time more delicate psychic shades been crystallised.
+In the meantime a transformation had taken place in his exterior life.
+Verhaeren had turned aside from the contemplation of Nature to
+concentrate his strength on the cultivation of his mind. He had
+travelled extensively, had been in Paris and London, in Spain and
+Germany; with impetuous haste he had assimilated all great ideas, all
+new phases, all the manifold theories of existence. Without a pause,
+incessantly, experiences assail him and tire him out. A thousand
+impressions accost him, each demanding an answer; great, sombre cities
+discharge their electric fire upon him, and fill his nerves with leaping
+flame. The sky above him is obscured by the clouds of cities; in London
+he wanders about as though wildered in a forest. This grey, misty city,
+that seems as though it were built of steel, casts its whole melancholy
+over the soul of him who lives there in loneliness, ignorant of the
+language, and who is so much the more lonely, as all these
+manifestations of the new life in great cities are still unintelligible
+to him. He is still unable to capture the poetry that is in them, and so
+they leap at him and penetrate him with a confused, unintelligible pain.
+And in this novel atmosphere the intense refinement of his nerves
+proceeds at such a pace that already the slightest contact with the
+outer world produces a quivering reaction. Every noise, every colour,
+every thought presses in upon him as though with sharp needles; his
+healthy sensibility becomes hypertrophied; that fineness of hearing, of
+which one is conscious, say in sea-sickness, which perceives every
+noise, even the slightest sound, as though it were the blow of a hammer,
+undermines his whole organism; every rapidly-passing smell corrodes him
+like an acid; every ray of light pricks him like a red-hot needle. The
+process is aggravated by a purely physical illness, which corresponds to
+his psychic ailment. Just at that time Verhaeren was attacked by a
+nervous affection of the stomach, one of those repercussions of the
+psychic on the physical system in which it is hard to say whether the
+ailing stomach causes the neurasthenic condition, or the weakness of the
+nerves the stagnation of the digestive functions. Both ailments are
+inwardly co-ordinated, both are a rejection of the outer impression, an
+impotent refusal of the chemical conversion. Just as the stomach feels
+all food as pain, as a foreign body, so the ear repels every sound as an
+intrusion, so the eye rejects every impression as pain. This nervous
+rejection of the outer world was already then, in Verhaeren's life,
+pathological. The bell on the door had to be removed, because it shocked
+his nerves; those who lived in the house had to wear felt slippers
+instead of shoes; the windows were closed to the noise of the street.
+These years in Verhaeren's life are the lowest depth, the crisis of his
+vitality. It is in such periods of depression that invalids shut
+themselves off from the world, from their fellow-men, from the light of
+day, from the din of existence, from books, from all contact with the
+outer world, because they instinctively feel that everything can be a
+renewal of their pain, and nothing an enrichment of their life. They
+seek to soften the world, to tone its colours down; they bury themselves
+in the monotony of solitude. This 'soudaine lassitude'[1] then impinges
+on to the moral nature; the will, losing the sense of life, is
+paralysed; all standards of value collapse; ideals founder in the most
+frightful Nihilism. The earth becomes a chaos, the sky an empty space;
+everything is reduced to nothingness, to an absolute negation. Such
+crises in the life of a poet are almost always sterile. And it is
+therefore of incalculable value that here a poet should have observed
+himself and given us a clear picture of himself in this state, that,
+without fear of the ugliness, the confusion of his ego, he should have
+described, in terms of art, the history of a psychic crisis. In
+Verhaeren's trilogy, _Les Soirs, Les Débâcles, Les Flambeaux Noirs_, we
+have a document that must be priceless to pathologists as to
+psychologists. For here a deep-seated will to extract the last
+consequence from every phase of life has reproduced the stadium of a
+mental illness right to the verge of madness; here a poet has with the
+persistence of a physician pursued the symptoms of his suffering
+through every stage of lacerating pain, and immortalised in poems the
+process of the inflammation of his nerves.
+
+The landscape of this book is no longer that of his native province;
+indeed, it can hardly be called one of earth. It is a grandiose
+landscape of dreams, horizons as though on some other planet, as though
+in one of those worlds which have cooled into moons, where the warmth of
+the earth has died out and an icy calm chills the vast far-seen spaces
+deserted of man. Already in the book of the monks, Rubens's merry
+landscape had been clouded over; and in the next, _Au Bord de la Route_,
+the grey hand of a cloud had eclipsed the sun. But here all the colours
+of life are burnt out, not a star shines down from this steel-grey
+metallic sky; only a cruel, freezing moon glides across it from time to
+time like a sardonic smile. These are books of pallid nights, with the
+immense wings of clouds closing the sky, over a narrowed world, in which
+the hours cling to things like heavy and clammy chains. They are works
+filled with a glacial cold. 'Il gèle ...'[2] one poem begins, and this
+shuddering tone pierces like the howling of dogs ever and ever again
+over an illimitable plain. The sun is dead, dead are the flowers, the
+trees; the very marshes are frozen in these white midnights:
+
+     Et la crainte saisit d'un immortel hiver
+     Et d'un grand Dieu soudain, glacial et splendide.[3]
+
+In his fever the poet is for ever dreaming of this cold, as though in a
+secret yearning for its cooling breath. No one speaks to him, only the
+winds howl senselessly through the streets like dogs round a house.
+Often dreams come, but they are _fleurs du mal_; they dart out of the
+ice burning, yellow, poisonous. More and more monotonous grow the days,
+more and more fearful; they fall down like drops, heavy and black.
+
+     Mes jours toujours plus lourds s'en vont roulant leur cours![4]
+
+In thought and sound these verses express ail the frightful horror of
+this desolation. Impotently the ticking of the clock hammers this
+endless void, and measures a barren time. Darker, and darker grows the
+world, more and more oppressive; the concave mirror of solitude distorts
+the poet's dreams into frightful grimaces, and spirits whisper evil
+thoughts in his restless heart.
+
+And like a fog, like a heavy, stifling cloud, fatigue sinks down on his
+soul. First pleasure in things had died, and then the very will to
+pleasure. The soul craves nothing now. The nerves have withdrawn their
+antennæ from the outer world; they are afraid of every impression; they
+are spent. Whatever chances to drift against them no longer becomes
+colour, sound, impression; the senses are too feeble for the chemical
+conversion of impressions: and so everything remains at the stage of
+pain, a dull, gnawing pain. Feeling, which the nerves are now powerless
+to feed, starves; desire is sunk in sleep. Autumn has come; all the
+flowers have withered; and winter comes apace.
+
+     Il fait novembre en mon âme.
+     Et c'est le vent du nord qui clame
+     Comme une bête dans mon âme.[5]
+
+Slowly, but irresistible as a swelling tide, emerges an evil thought:
+the idea of the senselessness of life, the thought of death. As the last
+of yearnings soars up the prayer:
+
+     Mourir! comme des fleurs trop énormes, mourir![6]
+
+For the poet's whole body is, as it were, sore from this contact with
+the outer world, from these little gnawing pains. Not a single great
+feeling can stand erect: everything is eaten away by this little,
+gnawing, twitching pain. But now the man in his torture springs up, as a
+beast, tormented by the stings of insects, tears its chains asunder and
+rushes madly and blindly along. The patient would fain flee from his bed
+of torture, but he cannot retrace his steps. No man can 'se recommencer
+enfant, avec calcul.'[7] Travels, dreams, do nothing but deaden the
+pain; and then the torment of the awakening sets in again with redoubled
+strength. Only one way is open: the road which leads forward, the road
+to annihilation. Out of a thousand petty pains, the will longs for one
+single pain that shall end all: the body that is being burnt piecemeal
+cries for the lightning. The sick man desires--as fever-patients will
+tear their wounds open--to make this pain, which tortures without
+destroying, so great and murderous that it will kill outright: to save
+his pride, he would fain be himself the cause of his destruction. Pain,
+he says to himself, shall not continue to be a series of pin-pricks; he
+refuses to 'pourrir, immensément emmailloté d'ennui';[8] he asks to be
+destroyed by a vast, fiery, savage pain; he demands a beautiful and
+tragic death. _The will to experience becomes here the will to suffer
+pain_ and even death. He will be glad to suffer any torture, but not
+this one low little thing; he can no longer endure to feel himself so
+contemptible, so wretched.
+
+     N'entendre plus se taire, en sa maison d'ébène,
+     Qu'un silence total dont auraient peur les morts.[9]
+
+And with a flagellant's pleasure the patient nurses this fire of fever,
+till it flames up in a bright blaze. The deepest secret of Verhaeren's
+art was from the first his joy in intemperance, the strength of his
+exaggeration. And so, too, he snatches up this pain, this neurasthenia
+to a wonderful, fiery, and grandiose ecstasy. A cry, a pleasure breaks
+out of this idea of liberation. For the first time the word 'joy' blazes
+again in the cry:
+
+     Le joie enfin me vient, de souffrir par moi-même,
+     Parce que je lé veux.[10]
+
+True, only a perverse joy, a sophism, the false triumph over life of the
+suicide, who believes he has conquered fate when, truth to tell, it has
+conquered him. But this self-deception is already sublime.
+
+By this sudden interference of the will the physical torture of the
+nerves becomes a psychic event; the illness of the body encroaches upon
+the intellect; the neurasthenia becomes a 'déformation morale'; the
+suffering schism of the poet's ego is of itself subdivided, so to speak,
+into two elements, one that excites pain and one that suffers pain. The
+psychic would fain tear itself free from the physical, the soul would
+fain withdraw from the tortured body:
+
+     Pour s'en aller vers les lointains et se défaire
+     De soi et des autres, un jour,
+     En un voyage ardent et mol comme l'amour
+     Et légendaire ainsi qu'un départ de galère![11]
+
+But the two are relentlessly bound up with each other, no flight is
+possible, however much disgust drives the poet to rescue at least a part
+of himself by snatching it into a purer, calmer, and higher state.
+Never, I believe, has the aversion of a sick man to himself, the will to
+health of a living man, been more cruel and more grandiose than in this
+book of a poet's diabolical revolt against himself. His suffering soul
+is torn into two parts. In a fearful personification the hangman and the
+condemned criminal wrestle for the mastery. 'Se cravacher dans sa
+pensée et dans son sang!'[12] and finally, in a paroxysm of fury, 'me
+cracher moi-même,'[13] these are the horribly shrilling cries of
+self-hatred and self-disgust. With all the strings of her whipped
+strength the soul tears to free herself from the rotting and tormented
+body, and her deepest torture is that this separation is impossible. In
+this distraction flickers already the first flame of madness.
+
+Never--if we except Dostoieffsky--has a poet's scalpel probed the wound
+of his ego so cruelly and so deeply, never has it gone so dangerously
+near to the nerve of life. And never perhaps, except in Nietzsche's
+_Ecce Homo!_ has a poet stepped so close to the edge of the precipice
+that juts above the abyss of existence, with so clear a consciousness of
+its vicinity, to feast on the feeling of dizziness and on the danger of
+death. The fire in Verhaeren's nerves has slowly inflamed his brain. But
+the other being, the poet in him, had remained watchful, observing the
+eye of madness slowly, inevitably, and as though magnetically attracted,
+coming nearer and nearer. 'L'absurdité grandit en moi comme une fleur
+fatale.'[14] In gentle fear, but at the same time with a secret
+voluptuous pleasure, he felt the dreaded thing approaching. For long
+already he had been conscious that this rending of himself had hunted
+his thinking from the circle of clarity. And in one grandiose poem, in
+which he sees the corpse of his reason floating down the grey Thames,
+the sick man describes that tragic foundering:
+
+     Elle est morte de trop savoir,
+     De trop vouloir sculpter la cause,
+     ---------------------------------
+     Elle est morte, atrocement,
+     D'un savant empoisonnement,
+     Elle est morte aussi d'un délire
+     Vers un absurde et rouge empire.[15]
+
+But no fear takes him at this thought. Verhaeren is a poet who loves
+paroxysm. And just as in his physical illness he had called out in the
+deepest joy for the intoxication of illness, for its exasperation, for
+death, so now his psychic illness demands its intoxication, the
+dissolution of all order, its most glorious foundering: madness. Here,
+too, the pleasure in the quest of pain is intensified to the highest
+superlative, to a voluptuous joy in self-destruction. And as sick men
+amid their torments scream of a sudden for death, this tortured man
+screams in grim yearning for madness:
+
+     Aurai-je enfin l'atroce joie
+     De voir, nerfs par nerfs, comme une proie,
+     La démence attaquer mon cerveau?[16]
+
+He has measured all the deeps of the spirit, but all the words of
+religion and science, all the elixirs of life, have been powerless to
+save him from this torment. He knows all sensations, and there was no
+greatness in any of them; all have goaded him, none have exalted him or
+raised him above himself. And now his heart yearns ardently for this
+last sensation of all. He is tired of waiting for it, he will go out to
+meet it: 'Je veux marcher vers la folie et ses soleils.'[17] He hails
+madness as though it were a saint, as though it were his saviour; he
+forces himself to 'croire à la démence ainsi qu'en une foi.'[18] It is a
+magnificent picture reminding one of the legend of Hercules, who,
+tortured by the fiery robe of Nessus, hurls himself on the pyre to be
+consumed by one great flame instead of being wretchedly burnt to death
+by a thousand slow and petty torments.
+
+Here the highest state of despair is reached; the black banner of death
+and the red one of madness are furled together. With unprecedented logic
+Verhaeren, despairing of an interpretation of life, has exalted
+senselessness as the sense of the universe. But it is just in this
+complete inversion that victory already lies. Johannes Schlaf, in his
+masterly study, has with great eloquence demonstrated that it is just at
+the moment when the sick man cries out like one being crucified, 'Je
+suis l'immensément perdu,'[19] just when he feels he is being drawn into
+the bosom of the infinite, that he is redeemed and delivered. Just this
+idea, which here had whipped the little pain to the verge of madness,
+
+     À chaque heure, violenter sa maladie;
+     L'aimer, et la maudire,[20]
+
+is already the deepest leitmotiv of Verhaeren's work, the key to unlock
+the gates of it. For the idea is nothing else than the idea of his life,
+to master all resistance by a boundless love, 'aimer le sort jusqu'en
+ses rages';[21] never to shun a thing, but to take everything and
+enhance it till it becomes creative, ecstatic pleasure; to welcome every
+suffering with fresh readiness. Even this cry for madness, no doubt the
+extreme document of human despair, is an immense yearning for clearness;
+in this tortured disgust with illness cries a joy in life perhaps else
+unknown in our days; and the whole conflict, which seems to be a flight
+from life, is in the last instance an immense heroism for which there is
+no name. Nietzsche's great saying is here fulfilled: 'For a dionysiac
+task a hammer's hardness, _the pleasure in destruction itself_, is most
+decidedly one of the preliminary conditions.'[22] And what at this
+period of Verhaeren's work appears still to be negative is in the higher
+sense a preparation for the positive, for the decisive consummation, of
+the later books.
+
+For that reason this crisis and the shaping of it in verse remain an
+imperishable monument of our contemporary literature, for it is at the
+same time an eternal monument to the conquest of human suffering by the
+power of art. Verhaeren's crisis--his exposition, for the sake of the
+value of life, of his inward struggle--has gone deeper than that of any
+other poet of our time. To this very day the sufferings of that time are
+graven, as though by iron wedges, in the furrows of his lofty brow; the
+recovery of his health and his subsequent robustness have been powerless
+to efface them. This crisis was a fire without parallel, a flame of
+passion. Not a single acquisition from the earlier days was rescued from
+it. Verhaeren's whole former relation to the world has broken down: his
+Catholic faith, his religion, his feeling for his native province, for
+the world, for life itself, all is destroyed. And when he builds up his
+work now, it must perforce be an entirely different one, with a
+different artistic expression, with different feelings, different
+knowledge, and different harmonies. This tempest has changed the
+landscape of his soul, where once the peace of a modest existence had
+prevailed, into a pathless desert. But this desert with its solitude has
+space and liberty for the building up of a new, a richer, an infinitely
+nobler world.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'L'Heure Mauvaise' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[2] 'La Barque' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[3] 'Le Gel' (_Les Soirs_).
+
+[4] 'L'Heure Mauvaise' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[5] 'Vers' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[6] 'Mourir' (_Les Soirs_).
+
+[7] 'S'amoindrir' (_Les Débâcles_).
+
+[8] 'Si Morne' (_Les Débâcles_)
+
+[9] 'Le Roc' (_Les Flambeaux Noirs_).
+
+[10] 'Insatiablement' (_Les Soirs_).
+
+[11] 'Là-bas' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[12] 'Vers le Cloître' (_Les Débâcles_).
+
+[13] 'Un Soir' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[14] 'Fleur Fatale' (_Les Débâcles_).
+
+[15] 'La Morte' (_Les Flambeaux Noirs_).
+
+[16] 'Le Roc' (_Ibid._).
+
+[17] 'Fleur Fatale' (_Les Débâcles_).
+
+[18] 'Le Roc' (_Les Flambeaux Noirs_).
+
+[19] 'Les Nombres' (_Ibid._).
+
+[20] 'Celui de la Fatigue' (_Les Apparus dans mes Chemins_).
+
+[21] 'La Joie' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[22] _Ecce Homo!_
+
+
+
+
+FLIGHT INTO THE WORLD
+
+     On boit sa soif, on mange sa faim.--É.V., 'L'Amour.'
+
+In this crisis the negation was driven to the last possible limits. The
+sick man had denied not only the outer world, but himself as well.
+Nothing had remained but vexation, disgust, and torment.
+
+     La vie en lui ne se prouvait
+     Que par l'horreur qu'il en avait.[1]
+
+He had arrived at the last possibility, at that possibility which means
+destruction or transformation. The at first purely physical pain of the
+supersensitive organs of the senses had become a moral depression; the
+depression had become psychic suffering; and this again had gradually
+turned in a grandiose progression not only to pain in the individual
+thing but to suffering in the all: to _cosmic pain_. For Him, however,
+who in His loneliness took the suffering of the whole world upon His
+shoulders, who was strong enough to bear it for all the centuries,
+humanity has invented the symbol of 'God.' He who is born of earth and
+lives to die must perforce break down under so gigantic a burden. Into
+the last corner of his ego revengeful life had here driven the man who
+denied it, had driven him to the point where now he stood shivering
+before the abyss in his own breast, face to face with death and madness.
+The physical and poetic organism of Verhaeren was overheated to the most
+dangerous and extreme degree. This fever-heat--that of a flagellant
+--had brought his blood to the boiling-point; it was filling the chamber
+of his breast with pictures of such overwhelming horror that the
+explosion of self-destruction could only be prevented by opening the
+valve.
+
+There were only two means of flight from this destruction: flight into
+the past--or flight into a new world. Many, Verlaine for instance, had
+in such catastrophes, wherein the whole structure of their lives tumbled
+to the ground, fled into the cathedrals of Catholicism rather than stand
+in solitude under the threatening sky. Verhaeren, however, though an
+inspired faith is one of the most living sources of his poetical power,
+was more afraid of the past than of the Unknown. _He freed himself from
+the immense pressure upon him by fleeing into the world_. He who in his
+pride had conceived the whole process of the world as a personal affair,
+he who had tried to solve the eternal discord, the undying 'yes' and
+'no' of life in his own lonely self, now rushes into the very midst of
+things and involves himself in their process. He who previously had felt
+everything only subjectively, only in isolation, now objectifies
+himself; he who previously had shut himself off from reality, now lets
+his veins pulse in harmony with the breathing organism of life. He
+relinquishes his attitude of pride; he surrenders himself; lavishes
+himself joyously on everything; exchanges the pride of being alone for
+the immense pleasure of being everywhere. _He no longer looks at all
+things in himself, but at himself in all things_. But the poet in him
+frees himself, quite in Goethe's sense, by symbols. Verhaeren drives his
+superabundance out of himself into the whole world, just as Christ in
+the legend drove the devils out of the madman into the swine. The heat,
+the fever of his feeling--which, concentrated in his too narrow chest,
+were near bursting it--now animate with their fire the whole world
+around him, which of old had been to him congealed with ice. All the
+evil powers, which had slunk around him in the trappings of nightmares,
+he now transforms to shapes of life. He hammers away at them and shapes
+them anew; he is himself the smith of that noble poem of his, the smith
+of whom he says:
+
+     Dans son brasier, il a jeté
+     Les cris d'opiniâtreté,
+     La rage sourde et séculaire;
+     Dans son brasier d'or exalté,
+     Maître de soi, il a jeté
+     Révoltes, deuils, violences, colères,
+     Pour leur donner la trempe et la clarté
+     Du fer et de l'éclair.[2]
+
+He objectifies his personality in the work of art, hammering out of the
+cold blocks, that weighed upon him with the weight of iron, monuments
+and statues of pain. All the feelings which of old weighed down upon him
+like dull fog, formless and prisoned in dream like nightmares, now
+become clear statues, symbols in stone of his soul's experiences. The
+poet has torn his fear, his burning, moaning, horrible fear, out of
+himself, and poured it into his bell-ringer, who is consumed in his
+blazing belfry. He has turned the monotony of his days to music in his
+poem of the rain; his mad fight against the elements, which in the end
+break his strength, he has shaped into the image of the ferryman
+struggling against the current that shatters his oars one after the
+other. His cruel probing of his own pain he has visualised in the idea
+of his fishermen, who with their nets all in holes go on fishing up
+nothing but suffering on suffering out of the sombre stream; his evil
+and red lusts he has spiritualised in his _Aventurier_, in the
+adventurer who returns home from a far land to celebrate his wedding
+feast with his dead love. Here his feelings are shaped no longer in
+moods, in the fluid material of dreams, but in the infinitely mobile
+form of human beings. Here there is symbolism in the highest sense, in
+Goethe's sense of liberation. For every feeling that has achieved
+artistic shape is as it were conjured away out of the breast. And thus
+the too heavy pressure slowly disappears from the poet's being, and the
+morbid fever from his work. Now and now only does he recognise the
+suicidal cowardice behind the visor of the pride that forced him to fly
+from the world, now and now only does he understand that fatal egoism
+which had taken refuge beyond the pale of the world:
+
+     J'ai été lâche et je me suis enfui
+     Du monde, en mon orgueil futile,[3]
+
+This confession is the last liberating word of the crisis.
+
+Now his despair--a despair like that of Faust--is overcome. The mood of
+Easter morning begins to sound the exulting cry, 'Earth has me
+again!'[4] with the anthems of the resurrection. Verhaeren has described
+this deliverance, this ascent from illness to health, from the most
+despairing 'no' to the most exultant 'yes,' in many symbols, most
+beautifully in that magnificent poem wherein St. George the
+dragon-slayer bows down to him with his shining lance; and again in that
+other poem in which the four gentle sisters approach him and announce
+his deliverance:
+
+     L'une est le bleu pardon, l'autre la bonté blanche,
+     La troisième l'amour pensif, la dernière le don
+     D'être, même pour les méchants, le sacrifice.[5]
+
+Goodness and love call to him now from where of old there were only
+hatred and despair. And in their approach already he feels the hope of
+recovery, the hope of a natural, artistic strength.
+
+     Et quand elles auront, dans ma maison,
+     Mis de l'ordre à mes torts, plié tous mes remords
+     Et refermé, sur mes péchés, toute cloison,
+     En leur pays d'or immobile, où le bonheur
+     Descend, sur des rives de fleurs entr'accordées,
+     Elles dresseront les hautes idées,
+     En sainte-table, pour mon cœur.[6]
+
+This feeling of recovery grows more and more secure, more and more the
+mist parts before the approaching sun of health. Now the poet knows that
+he has been wandering in the dark galleries of mines, that he has been
+hammering a labyrinth through the hard rock of hatred instead of walking
+the same path as his fellow-men in the light. And at last, bright and
+exultant, high above the shy voices of hope and prayer, the sudden
+triumph of certainty rings out. For the first time Verhaeren finds the
+form of the poem of the future--the dithyramb. Where of old, confused
+and lonely, _le carillon noir_ of pain sounded, now all the strings of
+the heart vibrate and sing.
+
+     Sonnez toutes mes voix d'espoir!
+     Sonnez en moi; sonnez, sous les rameaux,
+     En des routes claires et du soleil![7]
+
+And now the path proceeds in light 'vers les claires métamorphoses.'[8]
+
+This flight into the world was the great liberation. Not only has the
+body grown strong again and rejoices in the wandering and the way, but
+the soul too has become cheerful, the will has grown new wings that are
+stronger than the old, and the poet's art is filled with a fresh blood
+red with life. The deliverance is perceptible even in Verhaeren's verse,
+which with its delicate nerves reproduces all the phases of his soul.
+For his poetry, which at first in the indifference of its picturesque
+description preserved the cold form of the Alexandrine, and then, in the
+grim monotony of the crisis, tried to represent the void waste of
+feeling by a terrifying, gruesomely beautiful uniformity of rhythm, this
+poem of a sudden, as though out of a dream, starts into life, awakens
+like an animal from sleep, rears, prances, curvets; imitates all
+movements, threatens, exults, falls into ecstasy: in other words, all of
+a sudden, and independently of all influences and theories, he has won
+his way to the _vers libre,_ free verse. Just as the poet no longer
+shuts the I world up in himself, but bestows himself on the world, the
+poem too no longer seeks to lock the world up obstinately in its
+four-cornered prison, but surrenders itself to every feeling, every
+rhythm, every melody; it adapts itself, distends; with its foaming
+voluptuous joy it can fold in its embrace the illimitable length and
+breadth of cities, can contract to pick up the loveliness of one fallen
+blossom, can imitate the thundering voice of the street, the hammering
+of machines, and the whispering of lovers in a garden of spring. _The
+poem can now speak in all the languages of feeling, with all the voices
+of men; for the tortured, moaning cry of an individual has become the
+voice of the universe._
+
+But together with this new delight the poet feels the debt which he has
+withheld from his age. He beholds the lost years in which he lived only
+for himself, for his own little feeling, instead of listening to the
+voice of his time. With a remarkable concordance of genius Verhaeren's
+work here expresses what Dehmel--in the same year perhaps--fashioned
+with such grandeur in 'The Mountain Psalm,' the poem in which, looking
+down from the heights of solitude to the cities in their pall of smoke,
+he cries in ecstasy:
+
+     Was weinst du, Sturm?--Hinab, Erinnerungen!
+     dort pulst im Dunst der Weltstadt zitternd Herz!
+     Es grollt ein Schrei von Millionen Zungen
+     nach Glück und Frieden: Wurm, was will dein Schmerz!
+     Nicht sickert einsam mehr von Brust zu Brüsten,
+     wie einst die Sehnsucht, als ein stiller Quell;
+     heut stöhnt ein _Volk_ nach Klarheit, wild und gell,
+     und du schwelgst noch in Wehmutslüsten?
+
+     Siehst du den Qualm mit dicken Fäusten drohn
+     dort überm Wald der Schlote und der Essen?
+     Auf deine Reinheitsträume fällt der Hohn
+     der Arbeit! fühl's: sie ringt, von Schmutz zerfressen.
+     Du hast mit deiner Sehnsucht bloss gebuhlt,
+     in trüber Glut dich selber nur genossen;
+     schütte die Kraft aus, die dir zugeflossen,
+     und du wirst frei vom Druck der Schuld![9]
+
+Pour out the power that has flowed in upon thee! Surrender thyself! That
+too is Verhaeren's ecstatic cry at this hour. Opposites touch. _Supreme
+solitude is turned to supreme fellowship_. The poet feels that
+self-surrender is more than self-preservation. All at once he sees
+behind him the frightful danger of this self-seeking pain.
+
+     Et tout à coup je m'apparais celui
+     Qui s'est, hors de soi-même, enfui
+     Vers le sauvage appel des forces unanimes.[10]
+
+And he who in days gone by had fled from this appeal into cold solitude,
+now casts himself ecstatically into the arms of the world, with the I
+deepest yearning
+
+         De n'être plus qu'un tourbillon
+     Qui se disperse au vent mystérieux des choses.[11]
+
+He feels that in order to live to the full all the greatness and beauty
+of this fiery world, he must multiply himself, be a thousandfold and ten
+thousandfold what he is. 'Multiplie-toi!' Be manifold. Surrender
+thyself! For the first time this cry bursts up like a flame. Be
+manifold!
+
+     Multiplie et livre-toi! Défais
+     Ton être en des millions d'êtres;
+     Et sens l'immensité filtrer et transparaître.[12]
+
+Only from this brotherhood with all things accrue the possibilities of
+being a modern poet. Only by self-surrender to everything that is could
+Verhaeren attain to so grandiose a conception of contemporary
+manifestations, only thus could he become the poet of the democracy of
+cities, of industrialism, of science, the poet of Europe, the poet of
+our age. Only such a pantheistic feeling could create this intimate
+relationship between the world of self and the world surrounding self,
+the relationship which subsequently ends in an unparalleled identity:
+only so despairing a 'no' could be transformed to so enraptured a 'yes,'
+only one who had fled from the world could possess it with such passion.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'Un Soir' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[2] 'Le Forgeron' (_Les Villages Illusoires_).
+
+[3] 'Saint Georges' (_Les Apparus dans mes Chemins_).
+
+[4] Goethe's _Faust_, 1. 784.
+
+[5] 'Les Saintes' (_Les Apparus dans mes Chemins_).
+
+[6] 'Les Saintes' (_Les Apparus dans mes Chemins_).
+
+[7] 'Saint Georges' (_Ibid_).
+
+[8] 'Le Forgeron' (_Les Villages Illusoires_).
+
+[9] 'Why weepest thou, O storm?--Down, memories! Yonder in the smoke
+pulses the great city's trembling heart! A million grumbling tongues are
+crying for peace and happiness: worm, what would thy pain! Yearning no
+longer trickles lonely from breast to breasts, a quiet source and no
+more: to-day a _nation_ groans, and with wild, shrill voices demands
+clearness--and thou still revellest in the joys of melancholy?
+
+'Seest thou the reek and smoke threatening yonder over the forest of
+flues and chimneys? Upon thy dreams of purity falls the scorn of labour!
+Feel it: labour is struggling, eaten up with dirt! Thou hast but
+wantoned with thy yearning, thou hast but enjoyed thyself in turbid
+heat; pour out the power that has flowed in upon thee, and thou shalt be
+free from the burden of guilt!'--'Bergpsalm' (_Aber die Liebe_).
+
+[10] 'La Foule' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[11] 'Celui du Savoir' (_Les Apparus dans mes Chemins_).
+
+[12] 'La Forêt' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+CONSTRUCTIVE FORCES
+
+
+LES CAMPAGNES HALLUCINÉES--LES VILLAGES ILLUSOIRES
+--LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES--LES DRAMES
+
+1893-1900
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTEMPORARY FEELING
+
+      J'étais le carrefour où tout se rencontrait.--É.V., 'Le Mont.'
+
+
+Verhaeren's deliverance from the stifling clasp of his crisis was a
+flight to realities. He saved himself by no longer fixing his gaze
+rigidly on himself and deeply probing every feeling of joy and torment,
+but by turning to the world of phenomena and flinging himself on its
+problems. He has no longer to stand in solitude facing the world; his
+desire is to multiply himself, to realise himself in everything that is
+alive, in everything that expresses a will, an idea, a form, anything at
+all animated. His poetic aim now is, not so much to analyse himself to
+himself, as to analyse himself in the whole world.
+
+To realities, and particularly to the realities of our day, lyric poets
+had previously felt themselves alien. It had long been a commonplace to
+speak of the danger to art of industrialism, of democracy, of this age
+of machinery which makes pur life uniform, kills individuality, and
+drowns romance in actualities. All these poets have looked upon the new
+creations, machines, railways, monster cities, the telegraph, the
+telephone, all the triumphs of engineering, as a drag on the soaring of
+poetry. Ruskin preached that workshops should be demolished and chimneys
+razed to the ground; Tolstoy pointed to primitive man, who produces all
+his requirements from his own resources independently of any community,
+and saw in him the moral and æsthetic ideal of the future. In poetry,
+the past had gradually come to be identified with the poetical. People
+were enamoured of the glory that was Greece, of mail-coaches and narrow,
+crooked streets; they were filled with enthusiasm for all foreign
+cultures, and decried that of our own time as a phase of degeneration.
+Democracy, levelling all ranks and confining even the poet to the
+middle-class profession of author, seemed, as a social order, to be the
+correlation of machinery which, by the constructive skill of workshops,
+renders all manual dexterity unnecessary. All the poets, who were glad
+to avail themselves of the practical advantages provided by technical
+science, who had no objection to covering immense distances in the
+minimum time, who accepted the comfort of the modern house, the luxury
+of modern conditions of life, increased pecuniary rewards and social
+independence, refused obstinately to discover in these advantages a
+single poetic motive, a single object of inspiration, the least stimulus
+or ecstasy. Poetry had by degrees come to be something which was the
+very opposite of what-, ever is useful; all evolution seemed to these
+poets to be, from the point of view of culture, retrogression.
+
+Now it is Verhaeren's great exploit that he effected a transmutation
+poetic values. He discovered the sublime in the far-spread serried ranks
+of democracy; beauty he found not only where it adapts itself to
+traditional ideas, but also where, still hidden by the cotyledon of the
+new, it is just beginning to unfold. By rejecting no phenomenon, in so
+far as an inward sense and a necessity dwelt in it, he infinitely
+extended the boundaries of the lyric art. He found a fruitful soil in
+the very places where all other poets despaired of poetic seed. He and
+he alone, who had for so long been eating his heart out in fierce
+isolation, feels the strength and fulness of society, the poetical
+element in the massed strength of great cities and in great inventions.
+_His deepest longing, his most sublime exploit is the lyric discovery of
+the new beauty in new things._
+
+The only way to this feat lay for him through the conviction that beauty
+does not express anything absolute, but something that changes with
+circumstances and with men; that beauty, like everything that is subject
+to evolution, is constantly changing. Yesterday's beauty is not to-day's
+beauty. Beauty is no more opposed than anything else to that tendency to
+spiritualisation which is the most characteristic symptom ind result of
+all culture. Physiologists have proved that the physical strength of
+modern man is inferior to that of his ancestors, but that his nervous
+system is more developed, so that strength is more and more concentrated
+in the intellect. The Hellenic hero was the wrestler, the expression of
+a body harmoniously developed in every limb, the perfection of strength
+and skill; the hero of our time is the thinker, the ideal of
+intellectual strength and suppleness. And since our only way of
+estimating the perfection of things is by the ideal of our personal
+feeling, the form of beauty likewise has been transformed and become
+intellectual. And even when we seek it in the body, as, for instance, in
+the ideal woman's figure, we have grown accustomed to seeing perfection
+not so much in robustness and plumpness as in a noble, slender play of
+lines which mysteriously expresses the soul. Beauty is turning away more
+and more from the outer surface, from the physical, to the interior
+aspects, to the psychic. In proportion as motive forces hide themselves
+and as harmony becomes less obvious, beauty intellectualises itself. It
+is becoming for us not so much a beauty of appearance as a beauty of;
+aim. If we are to admire the telegraph or the telephone, we shall not be
+satisfied with considering the exterior forms, the network of wires, the
+keys, the receivers; we shall be impressed rather by the ideal beauty,
+by the idea of a vibrating spark leaping over countries and whole
+continents. A machine is not wonderful on, account of its rattling,
+rusty, iron framework, but by the idea, deep-seated in its body, which
+is the principle of its magical activity. A modern idea of beauty must
+be adapted not only to the idea of beauty of the past, but also to that
+of the future. And the future of æsthetics is a kind of ideology, or, as
+Renan expresses it, an identity with the sciences. We shall lose the
+habit of understanding things only by our senses, of seeing their
+harmony only on their exterior surface, and we shall have to learn how
+to conceive their intellectual aims, their inner form, their psychic
+organisation, as beauty.
+
+For these new things are only ugly when they are regarded with the eyes
+of a past century, when our contemporaries, jealously guarding a
+reverent over-estimation, valuing the rust and not the gold, despise
+modern works of art, and pay a thousand times too dear for the
+indifferent productions of a past age. Only in this state of feeling is
+it possible to esteem mail-coaches poetical and locomotives ugly; only
+thus is it possible for poets, who have not learned to see with
+emancipated and independent eyes, to assume such a hostile attitude, or
+at the best an indifferent attitude, to our realities. Let us remember
+Nietzsche's beautiful words: 'My formula for grandeur in man is _amor
+fati_: that a man should ask for nothing else, either in the past or in
+the future, in all eternity. We must not only endure what is necessary,
+still less conceal it--all idealism is lying in necessity's face--but
+we must _love_ it.'[1] And in this sense some few in our days have loved
+what is new, first as a necessity, and then as beauty. A generation ago
+now, Carlyle was the first to preach the heroism of everyday life, and
+exhorted the poets of his day not to describe the greatness they found
+in mouldy chronicles, but to look for it where it was nearest to them,
+in the realities around them. Constantin Meunier has found the idea of a
+new sculpture in democracy, Whistler and Monet have discovered in the
+smoky breath of this age of machinery a new tone of colour which is not
+less beautiful than Italy's eternal azure and the halcyon sky of Greece.
+It is only from the vast agglomerations, the immense dimensions of the
+new world that Walt Whitman has derived the strength and power of his
+voice. The whole difficulty which thus far has permitted only a few to
+serve the new beauty in the new things lies in the fact that our age is
+not yet a period of decided conviction, but only one of transition. The
+victory of machinery is not yet complete; handiwork still subsists,
+little towns still flourish, it is still possible to take refuge in an
+idyll, to find the old beauty in some sequestered corner. Not till the
+poet is shut off from all flight to inherited ideals will he be forced
+to change himself into a new man. For the new things have not yet
+organically developed their beauty. Every new thing on its first
+appearance is blended with something repellent, brutal, and ugly; it is
+only gradually that its inherent form shapes itself æsthetically. The
+first steamers, the first locomotives, the first automobiles, were ugly.
+But the slender, agile torpedo-boats of to-day, the bright-coloured,
+noiselessly--gliding automobiles with their hidden mechanism, the great,
+broad-chested Pacific Railway engines of to-day, are impressive by their
+outward form alone. Our huge shops, such as those which Messel built in
+Berlin, display a beauty in iron and glass which is hardly less than
+that of the cathedrals and palaces of old time. Certain great things,
+such as the Eiffel Tower, the Forth Bridge, modern men-of-war, furnaces
+belching flame, the Paris boulevards, have a new beauty beyond anything
+which past ages had to show. These new things compel a new enhancement
+of value, on the one hand by the idea that moves them, on the other hand
+by their democratic grandeur and their vast dimensions--equalled by none
+but the very greatest works of antiquity. But whatever is beautiful
+must, sooner or later, be conceived of as poetry. And thus, it is quite
+sure, Verhaeren has only been one of the first to build bridges from the
+old to the new time; others will come who will celebrate the new
+beauties in the new things--gigantic cities, engines, industrialism,
+democracy, this fiery striving for new standards of greatness--and they
+will not only be compelled to find the new beauties, they will also
+have to establish new laws for this new order, a different morality, a
+different religion, a different synthesis for this new conditionality.
+the poetic transmutation of the beautiful is only a first beginning of
+the poetic transmutation of the feeling of life.
+
+But a poet never finds anything in things save his own temperament. If
+he is melancholy, the world in his books is void of sense, all lights
+are extinguished, laughter dies; if he is passionate, all feelings
+seethe in a fiery froth as though in a cauldron, and foam up in angry
+happenings. Whereas the real world is manifold, and contains the elixirs
+of pleasure and pain, confidence and despair, love and hate, only as
+elements so to speak, the world of great poets is the world of one
+single feeling. And so Verhaeren too sees all things in their new beauty
+with the feelings of his own life only, only with energy. In these the
+fiery years of his prime it is not harmony that he seeks, but energy,
+power. For him a thing is the more beautiful the more purpose, will,
+power, energy it contains. And since the whole world of to-day is
+over-heated with effort and energy; since our great towns are nothing
+but centres of multiplied energy; since machinery expresses nothing save
+force tanied and organised; since innumerable crowds are yoked in
+harmonious action--to him the world is full of beauty. He loves the new
+age because it does not isolate effort but condenses it, because it is
+not scattered but concentrated for action. And of a sudden everything
+he sees appears to be filled with soul. All that has will, all that has
+an aim in view--man, machine, crowd, city, money; all that vibrates,
+works, hammers, travels, exults; all that propagates itself and is
+multiplied, all that strives to be creation; all that bears in itself
+fire, impulse, electricity, feeling--all this rings again in his verse.
+All that of old had acted upon him as being cold and dead and hostile is
+now inspired with will and energy, and lives its minute; in this
+multiple gear there is nothing that is merely dust or useless
+ornamentation; everything is creation, everything is working its way
+towards the future. The town, this piled-up Babylon of stones and men,
+is of a sudden a living being, a vampire sucking the strength of the
+land; the factories, that had seemed to him nothing but an unsightly
+mass of masonry, now become the creators of a thousand things, which in
+their turn create new things out of themselves. All at once Verhaeren is
+the socialist poet, the poet of the age of machinery, of democracy, and
+of the European race. And energy fills his poetry too: it is strength
+let loose, enthusiasm, paroxysm, ecstasy, whatever you like to call it;
+but always active, glowing, moving strength; never rest, always
+activity. His poem is no longer declamation, no longer the marmoreal
+monument of a mood, but a crying aloud, a fight, a convulsive starting,
+a stooping down and a springing up again; it is a battle materialised.
+For him all values have been transmuted. It is just what had repelled
+him most--London, monster cities, railway stations, Exchanges, which now
+lure him most of all as poetic problems. The more a thing seems to
+resist beauty--the more he has first to discover its beauty by fighting
+it and wrestling with it in torment--with so much the greater ecstasy
+does he now extol it. The strength which had murderously raged against
+itself now, in creative ecstasy, breaks into the world. To tear down
+resistance, to snatch beauty from its most hidden corner, is now for him
+a tenfold strength and joy of creation. _Verhaeren now creates the poem
+of the great city in the dionysiac sense_; the hymn to our own time, to
+Europe; creates ecstasy, renewed and renewed again, in life.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] _Ecce Homo!_
+
+
+
+
+TOWNS ('LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES')
+
+     Le siècle et son horreur se condensent en elles
+     Mais leur âme contient la minute éternelle.
+                                       É.V., 'Les Villes.'
+
+
+When a man just recovered from illness steps for the first time with
+arms outspread, and as though climbing up from a dungeon, into the light
+of day, he is filled with a bliss beyond measure by the open air
+caressing him on all sides, by the orgies of the sunlight, the cataracts
+of deafening din: with a cry of infinite exultation he takes into
+himself the symphony of life. And from this first moment of his recovery
+Verhaeren was seized by a limitless thirst for the intoxication of life,
+as though with one single leap he would make good the lost years of his
+loneliness, of his illness, and of his crisis. His eyes, his ears, his
+nerves, all his senses, which had been a-hungered, now pounce on things
+with a pleasure that is almost murderous, and snatch everything to
+themselves in a frenzy of greed. At this time Verhaeren travelled from
+country to country, as though he would take possession of all Europe. He
+was in Germany, in Berlin, in Vienna, and in Prague; always a lonely
+wanderer; quite alone; ignorant of the language, and listening only to
+the voice of the town itself, to the strange, sombre murmuring, to the
+surge of the European metropolises. In Bayreuth he paid his devotions at
+the tomb of Wagner, whose music of ecstasy and passion he absorbed in
+Munich; in Colmar he learned to understand his beloved painter Mathias
+Grünewald; he saw and loved the tragic landscapes of northern Spain,
+those gloomy, treeless mountains, whose threatening silhouettes
+afterwards became the background of the fiery happenings in his drama of
+_Philip II._; in Hamburg he was an excited spectator, day by day, of the
+stupendous traffic, the coming and going of the ships, the unloading and
+the loading of cargoes. Everywhere where life was intensive, expressive,
+and animated with a new energy, he passionately loved it. It is
+characteristic of his temperament that the harmonious beauty of peaceful
+and empty, of sleeping and dreaming cities appealed to him less than
+modern cities in their pall of soot and smoke. Almost intentionally his
+affection turns from the traditional ideal to one yet unknown. Florence,
+for many centuries the symbol of all poets, disappointed him: the
+Italian air was too mild, these contours were too meagre, too dreamy the
+streets. But London, this piled-up conglomeration of dwellings and
+workshops; this town that might have been cast in bronze; this teeming
+labyrinth of dingy streets; this ever-beating, restless heart of the
+world's trade with its smoke of toil threatening to eclipse the sun;
+this was to him a revelation. Just the industrial towns, which had thus
+far tempted no poet; those towns which roll up the vault of their leaden
+sky with their own fog and smoke, which confine their inhabitants in
+leagues and leagues of congested masonry, these attract him. He, who
+revels in colour, grew fond of Paris, to which, since then, he has
+returned every year for the winter months. Just what is restless and
+busy, confused and breathless, hunted, eager, feverish, hot with an
+ardour as of rut, all this Babylonian medley lures him. He loves this
+pell-mell multiplicity and its strange music. Often he would travel for
+hours on the top of heavy omnibuses, to have a bird's-eye view of the
+bustling throng, and here he would close his eyes the better to feel the
+dull rumour, this surging sound which, in its ceaselessness, is not
+unlike the rustling of a forest, beating against his body. No longer as
+in his earlier books does he follow the existence of simple callings; he
+loves the ascension of handiwork to mechanical labour, in which the aim
+is invisible, and only the grandiose organisation is revealed. And
+gradually this interest became the motive interest of his life.
+Socialism, which in those years was becoming strong and active, fell
+like a red drop into the morbid paleness of his poetic work.
+Vandervelde, the leader of the Labour Party, became his friend. And
+when, at this stage, the party founded the Maison du Peuple at Brussels,
+he readily helped, gave lectures at the Université Libre, took part in
+all the projects, and afterwards, wards, in the most beautiful vision
+of his poetical work, lifted them far above the political and actual
+into the great events of all humanity. His life, now inwardly
+established, henceforth beats with a strong and regular rhythm. He had
+in the meantime, by his marriage, attained a personal appeasement, a
+counterpoise for his unbridled restlessness. Now his wild ecstasies have
+their fixed point, from which they can survey the fiery vortex of the
+new phenomena. The morbid pictures, the feverish hallucinations, now
+become clear visions; not by flashes of lightning, but in a steady,
+beaming light are the horizons of our time now illuminated for him.
+
+Now that he steps boldly into life, his first problem is to come to an
+understanding with the world around him, with his fellow-men, with the
+city itself. But it is not the city he lives in which interests him in a
+provincial sense, but the ideal, modern city, the monster city in
+general, this strange and uncanny thing that like a vampire has snatched
+to herself all the strength of the soil and of men to form a new
+residuum of power. She crowds together the contrasts of life; grades, in
+unexpected layers, immense riches over the most wretched poverty;
+strengthens opposing forces, and goads them to hostility, goads them to
+that desperate battle in which Verhaeren loves to see all things
+involved. The grandeur of this new organism is beyond the æsthetics of
+the past; and new and strange before Nature stand men also, with
+another rhythm, a hotter breath, quicker movements, wilder desires than
+were known to any association of men, to any calling or caste, of a
+previous time. It is a new outlook which not only sweeps the distance,
+but has also to reckon with height, with the piled tiers of houses, with
+new velocities and new conditions of space. A new blood, money, feeds
+these cities, a new energy fires them; they are driven to procreate a
+new faith, a new God, and a new art. Their dimensions, terrific, and of
+a beauty hitherto unknown, defy measurement; the order that rules is
+hidden in the earth behind a pathless wilderness.
+
+     Quel océan, ses cœurs? ...
+     Quels nœuds de volonté serrés en son mystère![1]
+
+cries out the poet in wonderment as he strides through the city and is
+overpowered by her grandeur:
+
+     Toujours en son triomphe ou ses défaites,
+     Elle apparaît géante, et son cri sonne et son nom luit.[2]
+
+He feels that an enormous energy proceeds from her; he is conscious that
+her atmosphere rests with a new pressure on his body, that his blood
+quickens to keep pace with her rhythm. Merely to be near her starts the
+thrill of a new delight.
+
+     En ces villes ...
+            *       *       *       *       *
+     Je sens grandir et s'exalter en moi,
+     Et fermenter, soudain, mon cœur multiplié.[3]
+
+Involuntarily he feels himself becoming dependent on her, feels this
+grandiose coupling of energy producing a similar concentration of all
+his forces in himself too, feels his fever becoming infectious like her
+own, and feels--with an intensity unknown to any other poet of our
+days--the identity of his personality with the soul of the city. He
+knows she is dangerous, knows she will fill him with all restlessness,
+overheat him and excite him, confuse him with her hostile contrasts.
+
+     Voici la ville en or des rouges alchimies,
+     Où te fondre le cœur en un creuset nouveau
+     Et t'affoler d'un orage d'antinomies
+     Si fort qu'il foudroiera tes nerfs jusqu'au cerveau.[4]
+
+But he knows that she will impregnate him as well, give him power from
+her strength. There will never be a great man again who will pass her
+by, who will not be thrilled by her sensation, who will not live with
+her, and by her grow. Henceforth all new and strong men will stand in
+reciprocal action with her.
+
+This great recognition of a fact is, as we have seen, not spontaneous,
+but painfully acquired. For in the sense of the old beauty the aspect of
+a modern city is frightful. She is a sleepless, an ever wakeful woman;
+she does not, like Nature, sometimes rest; she is never silent.
+Restlessly she sucks men into her whirlpool; ceaselessly she pricks
+their nerves; day and night her life pulses. By day she is as grey as
+lead; a sultry shuttle of passions; a dark mine in which men, buried in
+the mines of her streets, are forced to unresting toil. How dense are
+these virgin forests of bronze and stone; and of all these thousands of
+streets 'à poumons lourds et haletants, vers on ne sait quels buts
+inquiétants,'[5] not one seems to lead into the open, into the light of
+day. Monotonous, like dull eyes, glare the millions of windows; and the
+darksome caverns in which men, themselves like machines, sit by
+machines, thunder in the unseizable rhythm of petrified exertion. Not a
+ray is reflected on them from the eternal; hostile, repulsive, and grey
+the town pants in the puffed smoke of her daily labour. But night,
+softening all harsh lines, fierily welds the lumbering limbs together
+into something new. By night the town is turned into one great
+seduction. Passion, fettered in the day-time, breaks its chains:
+
+      ... Pourtant, lorsque les soirs
+     Sculptent le firmament de leurs marteaux d'ébène,
+     La ville au loin s'étale et domine la plaine
+     Comme unnocturne et colossal espoir;
+     Elle surgit: désir, splendeur, hantise;
+     Sa clarté se projette en lueurs jusqu'aux cieux,
+     Son gaz myriadaire en buissons d'or s'attise,
+     Ses rails sont des chemins audacieux
+     Vers le bonheur fallacieux
+     Que la fortune et la force accompagnent;
+     Ses murs se dessinent pareils à une armée
+     Et ce qui vient d'elle encor de brume et de fumée
+     Arrive en appels clairs vers les campagnes.[6]
+
+These fiery eruptions Verhaeren shapes in grandiose visions. There is
+the vision of the music halls: wheels of fire revolve round a house,
+blazing letters climb up façades and lure the crowds to sit in front of
+the brilliant footlights. I Here the people's hunger for sensation is
+fed full, and art is cruelly murdered day by day. Here tedium is tamed
+for an hour or so, and whipped up with colour, flame, and music for
+another pleasure that is waiting outside, as soon as the illusion here
+sinks into the night:
+
+     Et minuit sonne et la foule s'écoule
+     --Le hall fermé--parmi les trottoirs noirs;
+     Et sous les lanternes qui pendent,
+     Rouges, dans la brume, ainsi que des viandes,
+     Ce sont les filles qui attendent....[7]
+
+they the harlots, 'les promeneuses,' 'les veuves d'elles-mêmes,'[8] who
+live on the sensual hunger of the masses. For sensual pleasure too is
+organised in cities, is guided into canals, like all instincts. But the
+primordial instinct is the same. The hunger which out in the fields and
+in the country was still pleasure in healthy food, in frothing beer, has
+here been converted into the idea of money. Money is what everybody
+hungers for here; money is the meaning of the town. 'Boire et manger de
+l'or'[9] is the hot dream of the crowd. Everything is expressed by
+money, 'tout se définit par des monnaies';[10] all values are
+subordinate to this new value, monetary value. Superb is the vision of
+the bazaar, where, on all the counters, in the many stories, everything
+is sold, not only as in reality objects in common use, but, in a loftier
+symbolism, ethical values as well: convictions and opinions, fame and
+name, honour and power, all the laws of life. But all this fiery blood
+of money flows together in the great heart of the city, flows into the
+Exchange, that greedy maw that swallows all the gold and spits it out
+again, which smelts all this hectic fever and then pours it flaming into
+all the veins of the city. Everything can be bought, even pleasure: in
+back streets, in _l'étal_, in the haunts where debauch lies in wait,
+women sell themselves as goods are sold in the bazaar. But this energy
+is not always regulated, not always made to flow between dikes. Here
+too, as in Nature, there are sudden catastrophes. Sometimes revolt is
+kindled, flashes up instantaneously, and this stream of money blazes
+itself a new trail. The masses pour out of their dismal caverns, greed
+takes possession of men, and the myriad-headed monster fights and bleeds
+for this one thing, this red-burning, relucent gold.
+
+But the great and powerful thing in these towns is not passion; it is
+the hidden strength behind these passions, the noble order that keeps
+them in their proper limits, and holds them in check. This rumbling
+chaos, this inundation of things doomed to die, is dominated in the
+_Villes Tentaculaires_ by three or four figures standing like
+statues--the tamers of passions. They are what kings and priests were of
+old, they who have the power of bridling ebullient energies and turning
+them to use. With hands of iron they hold down this wild and dangerous
+animal, they, the new rulers, statesmen, generals, demagogues,
+organisers. For the town is an animal in its movements, a beast in its
+passions, a brute in its instincts, a monster in its strength. It is
+ugly, like all rut. It cannot be contemplated with a pure pleasure, like
+a landscape gently and harmoniously fading in forest verdure; it rather
+evokes, at first, loathing, hatred, caution, and hostility. But that is
+the great thing in Verhaeren, that he always overcomes whatever is
+hostile, pain and torment, by a great vista, that in this panting steam
+of the unæsthetic he already sees the flame of the new beauty. Here for
+the first time is, seen the beauty of factories, _les usines
+rectangulaires,_ the fascination of a railway station, the new beauty in
+the new things. If the town is indeed ugly in its denseness, ugly in the
+sense of all classical ideals; if the picture of it is indeed I cruel
+and frightful; it is yet not unfertile. 'Le siècle et son horreur se
+condensent en elle, mais son âme contient la minute éternelle.' And this
+I feeling, that in her the minute of eternity is contained, that she is
+the new thing risen above all the pasts, a new thing that one must
+perforce come to terms with, this feeling makes her momentous and
+beautiful to the poet. If her form is loathsome, grey, and sombre, her
+idea, her organisation, are grandiose and admirable. And here, as
+always, where admiration finds a pivot, it can give the whole world the
+swing from negation to assent.
+
+But Verhaeren is by this time too little of an artist, too much
+interested in all the problems of life, to be able to contemplate the
+idea of the modern city from the æsthetic side alone. It is for him a
+still more important symbol for the expression of contemporary feeling.
+
+Not only the problem of the new social stratification is poetically
+digested in his trilogy, but also one of the most burning and pressing
+questions of political economy as of politics, the struggle between the
+centrifugal and the centripetal power, the struggle between agrarianism
+and industrialism. Town and country purchase their prosperity, the one
+by the impoverishment of the other. Production and trade, however much
+one is the condition of the other, at their extreme points are hostile
+forces. And how, in our days in Europe, the victory between town and
+country is being decided in favour of the town; how, gradually, the town
+is absorbing the best strength of the provinces--the problem of the
+_déracinés_--this has for the first time in poetry been described by
+Verhaeren in his magnificent vision of _Les Villes Tentaculaires_. The
+cities have sprung up like mushrooms. Millions have conglomerated. But
+where have they come from? From what sources have these immense masses
+suddenly streamed into the mighty reservoirs? The answer is quick to
+come. The heart of the city is fed with the oozing blood of the country.
+The country is impoverished. As though they were hallucinated, the
+peasants migrate to where gold is minted, to the town that in the
+evenings flames across the horizon; to where alone riches lies, and
+power. They march away with their carts, to sell their last stick of
+furniture, their last rags; they march away with their daughter, to
+deliver her up to lust; they march away with their son, to let him
+perish in the factories; they march away to dip their hands, they also,
+in this roaring river of gold. The fields are deserted. Only the
+fantastic figures of idiots stagger along lonely paths; the abandoned
+flour-mills are empty, and only turn when the wind smites against them.
+Fever rises from the marshes, where the water, no longer gathered into
+dikes, spreads putrefaction and pestilence. Beggars drag themselves from
+door to door, with the country's barrenness reflected in their eyes; to
+the last lingering cultivators come, sinuously, their worst enemies,
+_les donneurs de mauvais conseils_. The emigration agent entices them to
+wander to the lands of gold, and they squander what they have inherited
+from their ancestors, to seek a far-distant hope:
+
+     Avec leur chat, avec leur chien,
+     Avec, pour vivre, quel moyen?
+     S'en vont, le soir, par la grand'route.[11]
+
+And they who are not enticed away by emigration are evicted from hearth
+and home by usurers. Villages in which the dance of the kermesse has
+long been silent are of a sudden cut in two by a network of railways.
+There is no fairness in the fight. The country is conquered because the
+blood of its inhabitants has been sucked out of it. 'La plaine est morte
+et ne se défend plus.'[12] Everything streams to Oppidomagnum. This is
+the name given by Verhaeren in his symbolical drama _Les Aubes_--which,
+with the _Campagnes Hallucinées_ and the _Villes Tentaculaires_ forms
+the trilogy of the social revolution--to the monster city. This, with
+its arms as of a polypus, pitilessly sucks all the strength of the
+district round it. From all sides strength streams in upon it. 'Tous les
+chemins se rythment vers elle.' Not only from the country does she drink
+the strength of men, all the ocean seems to be pouring its waters only
+to her port. 'Toute la mer va vers la ville.'[13] The whole sea streams
+to the city; all the rolling waves seem only to exist that they may
+bring to her this wandering forest of ships. And she absorbs everything,
+digests it in the 'noire immensité des usines rectangulaires,'[14]
+greedily devours it, to spit it out again as gold.
+
+But this immense social struggle between the country and the town
+expresses, like the other new phases, something yet higher. It is only a
+momentary symbol of an eternal schism. The country is the symbol of the
+Conservatives. In the country the forms of labour are petrified, calm,
+and regular; there life is without haste, and only regulated by the
+rotation of the seasons. All sensations, all forms are pure and simple.
+These men stand nearer to the freaks of chance: a flash of lightning, a
+hailstorm can destroy their labour; and so they fear God, and do not
+dare to doubt in Him. The town, however, symbolises progress. In the
+thunder of the streets of to-day no Madonna's voice is heard; the life
+of the individual is protected from chance by prearranged order; the
+fever of the new creates also a yearning for new conditions of life, new
+circumstances, for a new God.
+
+     L'esprit des campagnes était l'esprit de Dieu;
+     Il eut la peur de la recherche et des révoltes,
+     Il chut; et le voici qui meurt, sous les essieux
+     Et sous les chars en feu des récoltes.[15]
+
+If the country was the past, the town is the future. The country only
+seeks to keep what it has, to preserve: its character, its beauty, its
+God. But the town must first of all create, must make itself the new
+beauty, the new faith, and the new God.
+
+     Le rêve ancien est mort et le nouveau se forge.
+     Il est fumant dans la pensée et la sueur
+     Des bras fiers de travail, des fronts fiers de lueurs,
+     Et la ville l'entend monter du fond des gorges
+     De ceux qui le portent en eux
+     Et le veulent crier et sangloter aux cieux.[16]
+
+But we, Verhaeren thinks, must not belong to this world of the past,
+this moribund world; no, we who live in towns must think with them, must
+live with the new age, create in league with it, and find a new language
+for its dumb yearning. A return to nature is no longer possible for us:
+evolution cannot be screwed back again. If we have lost great values, we
+must replace them by new; if our religious feeling for the old God is
+cold and dead, we must create new ideals. We must find new aims that our
+ancestors knew not of; in the new forms of the city we must find a new
+beauty, in her noises a new rhythm, in her confusion an order, in her
+energy an object, in her stammering a language.
+
+If the towns have destroyed much, they will perhaps create still more.
+In their melting-pot professions, races, religions, nations, languages
+are blended:
+
+      ...les Babels enfin réalisées
+     Et les peuples fondus et la cité commune
+     Et les langues se dissolvant en une.[17]
+
+'The old order changeth, giving place to new'; and we must not ask
+whether the new is better than the old; we must trust that it is so.
+The feverish convulsions of the great cities, this unrest, this
+screaming torment, cannot be in vain. For they, these pains and
+convulsions, are only the birth-throes of the new. But he who has been
+the first to feel, with a glad presentiment, this pain of the masses,
+this fermentation, as joy, this unrest as hope, must himself be an
+authentic new man, one of those who are called to give a poetic answer
+to all the complaints and questions of our time.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'L'Âme de la Ville' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[2] Ibid. (_Ibid._).
+
+[3] 'La Foule' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[4] 'Les Villes' (_Les Flambeaux Noirs_).
+
+[5] 'L'Âme de la Ville' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[6] 'La Ville' (_Les Campagnes Hallucinées_).
+
+[7] 'Les Spectacles' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[8] 'Les Promeneuses' (_Ibid_.).
+
+[9] 'La Bourse' (_Ibid._).
+
+[10] 'Le Bazar' (_Ibid._).
+
+[11] 'Le Départ' (_Les Campagnes Hallucinées_).
+
+[12] 'La Plaine' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[13] 'Le Port' (_Ibid._).
+
+[14] 'La Plaine' (_Ibid._).
+
+[15] 'Vers le Futur' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[16] 'L'Âme de la Ville' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[17] 'Le Port'(_Ibid._).
+
+
+
+
+THE MULTITUDE
+
+     Mets en accord ta force avec les destinées
+     Que la foule, sans le savoir,
+     Promulgue, en cette nuit d'angoisse illuminée.
+                                     É.V., 'La Foule.'
+
+
+That great event which is the modern city was at bottom only possible by
+the organisation of the mighty multitudes of the people and the
+distribution of their forces. To organise is to weld unlike forces
+economically into an organism, to imitate something that has life and
+soul, in which nothing is superfluous and everything is necessary; it is
+to give a material its uniform strength, to give an idea the flesh and
+bones of its shape and of its possibility. Now the town has smelted the
+scattered forces of the country into a new material--into the multitude;
+it has converted much that used to be individually active force into
+mechanical force; it has humbled man to the condition of a handle, a
+rolling wheel; it has everywhere tied up the individuality of the single
+man in order to produce a new individuality, that of the crowd. For the
+multitude as a fact is a new thing. For centuries it was only a symbol,
+an idea. The inhabitants of whole countries were logically epitomised in
+a number, but with no suggestion of thus comprehending their immediate
+unity. Of course, in times past great armies have been known, hordes of
+fighting men and nomad tribes; but these only represented a volatile
+concentration, too unsettled, too inconstant to procreate an
+individuality, an æsthetic and moral value. And even those armies whose
+legendary greatness echoes down the centuries, the hordes of Tamerlaine,
+the hosts of the Persians, the legions of Rome, how poor is their number
+in comparison with the masses of human beings daily herded together in
+New York or London or Paris! Only in our own days, only in Oppidomagnum,
+has the multitude been welded together finally and for all time, been
+hooked together with bands of steel like the wheels of an immense
+machine; only recently has the crowd become a living being that grows
+and multiplies like a forest. Democracy has given it new intellectual
+forms, set a brain in the body, by making the multitude determinate,
+subject only to itself. It is a creation of the nineteenth century; it
+is a new value in our lives, and one that we must come to terms with; no
+less a value for our evolution than the highest values of the past. Walt
+Whitman, to whom one must constantly refer in dealing with Verhaeren's
+work, although--let it be expressly stated here--Verhaeren quite
+independently and unconsciously arrived at the same goal from the same
+starting-point, once said: 'Modern science and democracy seemed to be
+throwing out their challenge to poetry to put them in its statements in
+contradistinction to the songs and myths of the past.'[1] And every
+modern poet will have to come to terms with the masses of democracy,
+will have to contemplate them synthetically as an individual living
+being, as a man, or as a God. In his Utopian drama _Les Aubes_ Verhaeren
+has ranged them among the dramatis personæ, and, to express his inner
+vision, he has added this stage direction: 'Les groupes agissent comme
+un seul personnage à faces multiples et antinomiques.' For, like the
+images of Indian gods, they have a hundred arms, but their cry is in
+unison; their will is simple; their energy is uniform; one and the same
+is their heart, 'le cœur myriadaire et rouge de la foule.'[2] A
+hundred years of life in communion, a hundred years of distress in
+common, of hope in common, have welded them together into one unity,
+into one new feeling. Sleepless and restless like a dangerous animal
+lies the multitude in the monster cities; all the passions of individual
+man are hers, vanity, hunger, anger; she has all vices and crimes in
+common with her smallest member, man; only, everything in her is
+intensified to unknown magnitudes. Everything in her passions is
+stupendously superdimensional, beyond calculation, and, in a new sense,
+divine. For just as the gods of old were formed after the image of man,
+save that they represented man's strength and intelligence magnified to
+the hundredth degree, the multitude is the synthesis of individual
+forces, the most prolific accumulation of passion.
+
+With the multitude the individual comes into being, and without her he
+perishes. Consciously or unconsciously, every man is subject to her
+power. For the modern man is no longer free from the influence of
+others, as the tiller of the fields was in olden days, or the shepherd,
+or the hunter, each of whom was dependent only on the anger of heaven,
+the whims of the earth, on weather and hailstorms, on chance, which he
+clad in the august image of his god. The modern man is in all his
+feelings determined by the world around him, set in his place in the
+ranks, and moved with the ranks like a shuttle to and fro; he is a
+dependent in his instincts. We all feel socially; we cannot think away
+the others who are round us and in front of us any more than we can
+think away the air that nourishes us. We can flee from them, but we
+cannot flee away from what has penetrated us from them. For the
+multitude rules us like a force of nature, nourishes us with its
+feelings. The unsocial man is a fiction. Just as little as in a great
+city one can shut off one's room entirely from the noise, the rhythm of
+the street, just so little can one think isolatedly, just so little can
+the soul keep itself at a distance from the great intellectual
+excitements of the multitude. Verhaeren himself made the attempt in the
+days when he wrote the verses:
+
+     Mon rêve, enfermons-nous dans ces choses lointaines
+     Comme en de tragiques tombeaux.[3]
+
+But the life of reality claimed him again; for society destroys him who
+turns away from her, as one is destroyed who shuts himself out from the
+fresh air. The poet, too, must involuntarily think with the multitude
+and of the multitude. For to the same extent as democracy has exercised
+its levelling influence, to the same extent as it has limited
+individualities, enrolled the poet among the class of citizens,
+diminished the contrasts of chance, it has at the same time matured new
+forces in their multiplicity. In democracy the modern poet can find
+everything for which the ancients felt constrained to discover gods,
+those incalculable forces which bind the individual like enchantment.
+The town, the multitude feeds his energy with its exhaustless abundance;
+it multiplies his own strength. For everything the individual has lost
+is stored in it, great heroism and ecstatic enthusiasm. It is the great
+source of the unexpected and the incalculable in our days, the new thing
+concerning which no one knows how great it will grow. To have seen in it
+an enrichment, instead of a restriction, of the poetic instinct, is one
+of the great merits of Verhaeren. For while the majority of
+contemporary poets still maintain the fiction of the recluse in his
+wistful loneliness, while they recoil from before the multitude as
+though from men stricken with the plague, while they create for
+themselves an artificial seclusion, and heedlessly go their way past
+locomotives and telegraphs, banks and workshops, Verhaeren drinks
+greedily from these sources of new strength.
+
+       Comme une vague en des fleuves perdue,
+       Comme une aile effacée, au fond de l'étendue,
+       Engouffre-toi,
+       Mon cœur, en ces foules battant les capitales!
+       Réunis tous ces courants
+       Et prends
+       Si large part à ces brusques métamorphoses
+       D'hommes et de choses,
+       Que tu sentes l'obscure et formidable loi
+       Qui les domine et les opprime
+     Soudainement, à coups d'éclairs, s'inscrire en toi.[4]
+
+For she, 'la foule,' the multitude, is the great transposer of values in
+our day. She takes into her bosom and transforms the men who come to her
+from the country, from the four winds of heaven; none of us escapes her
+levelling power. The most distant races are blended in the city's huge
+melting-pot, are adapted to one another, and forthwith become a new
+thing, a different thing, a new race, the new race of contemporary man,
+who has made his peace with the atmosphere of the great city, who not
+only painfully feels the depression of her walls and his divorce from
+Nature, but creates himself a new strength and a new feeling of the
+universe in this manifold human presence. The great feat of the
+multitude is that it accelerates the process of changing values. The
+individual elements perish in favour of this individuality of a new
+community. Old communities lose their unity, new communities must arise.
+America is the first example: here, in a hundred years, one single great
+brotherhood, a new type, has been developed from the forces of a
+thousand peoples; and in our capitals, in Paris, Berlin, and London,
+people are already growing up who are not Frenchmen and not Germans, but
+in the first place only Parisians and Berliners, who have a different
+accent, a different way of thinking, whose native land is the great
+city, the multitude. The inhabitant of the great city, the democratic
+man of the multitude, is a sharply defined character. If he is a poet,
+his poetry must be social; if he is a thinker, the intelligence of the
+masses, the instinct of the many, must be his also. To have attempted
+the psychology of this multitude for the first time in poetry is one of
+the great feats of audacity for which we must be grateful to Verhaeren.
+
+But these individual accumulations of men into a multitude, these
+combinations of millions into towns, are not isolated. One bond holds
+them all together: modern traffic. The distances of reality have
+disappeared, and with them national divisions as well. By the side of
+the problem of individual conglomerations which only slowly are
+transformed into organisms, by the side of the individual races, the
+individual masses, now arises a greater synthesis, the synthesis of the
+European race. For the men of our continent are no longer so distant, so
+strange to one another as they formerly were. Social democracy with its
+organisation encompasses the masses from one end of Europe to the other.
+To-day the same desires fire the men of Paris, London, St. Petersburg,
+Vienna, and Rome. And already one common formula directs their
+exertions: money.
+
+     Races des vieux pays, forces désaccordées,
+     Vous nouez vos destins épars, depuis le temps
+     Que l'or met sous vos fronts le même espoir battant.[5]
+
+Independently of the frontiers of countries, on a broad-based
+foundation, a unified race, a new community, the European, is in process
+of formation. Here desire and reality are near touching. Verhaeren sees
+Europe already united by one great common energy. Europe is for him the
+land of consciousness. While other continents, distant as though in a
+dream, are still living a vegetative life, while Africa and India are
+still dreaming as they dreamt in the darkness of primitive times, Europe
+is 'la forge où se frappe l'idée,'[6] the great smithy in which all
+differences, all individual observations, all results, are hammered and
+moulded into a new intellectuality, into _European consciousness_. The
+union is not yet inwardly complete; states are still hostile and
+ignorant of their community; but already 'le monde entier est repensé
+par leurs cervelles.'[7] Already they are working at the transvaluation
+of all feeling in the European sense. For a new system of ethics, a new
+system of æsthetics, will be required by the European, who, rich by the
+past, strong in the feeling of the multitude, is now conscious of
+drawing his strength from new masses. Here it is that Verhaeren's work
+sings over into Utopia; and in _Les Aubes_, the epilogue to _Les Villes
+Tentaculaires,_ this glittering rainbow rises over the visions of
+reality to the new ideal; the prophetic dream of a better future rises
+over the still struggling present.
+
+This yearning for the European has been expressed for the first time in
+poetry by Verhaeren, almost contemporaneously with Walt Whitman's
+hailing of the American and Friedrich Nietzsche's prophecy of the
+superman. It would be a tempting task, and full of interest, to set up
+the Pan-European in antithesis to the Pan-American. But to say that
+Verhaeren was the first of lyric poets to feel as consciously European
+as Walt Whitman felt American, is to establish his rank among the most
+considerable men of our time. Verhaeren is possibly the only lyric poet
+who has felt in accordance with contemporary feeling. That epitomises
+his whole claim to gratitude, for it sufficiently expresses the fact
+that he has taken to his heart the problem of the multitude; the energy
+of social innovations; the æsthetics of organisation; the grandeur of
+mechanical production; in a word, the poetry of material things. It is
+our own time, the new age, that speaks in his verse; and it speaks in
+its new language. This rhythm which he has discovered is no literary
+abstraction, but beats in perfect unison with the heart-beat of the
+crowd; it is an echo of the panting of our monster cities, of the
+clanking of trains, of the cry of the people; his language is new,
+because it is no longer the voice of one man, but unites in itself the
+many voices of the multitude. He has penetrated deeper than any other
+man into the feeling of the masses, and their surf echoes more strongly
+in his verse. The hollow rumbling, the bestial and tameless strength of
+their voice, the surf of the multitude, has here become shape and music,
+the highest identity. With pride one can say of Verhaeren what he
+himself vaunts in his 'Captain': 'Il est la foule,'[8] he himself is the
+multitude.
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] _A Backward Glance O'er Travelled Roads._
+
+[2] 'La Conquête (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[3] 'Sous les Prétoriens' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[4] 'La Foule' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[5] 'La Conquête' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[6] _Ibid. (Ibid.)._
+
+[7] 'La Conquête' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[8] 'Le Capitaine' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+
+
+
+THE RHYTHM OF LIFE
+
+     Dites, les rythmes sourds dans l'univers entier!
+     En définir la marche et la passante image
+     En un soudain langage;
+       .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
+     Prendre et capter cet infini en un cerveau,
+     Pour lui donner ainsi sa plus haute existence.
+                                          É.V., 'Le Verbe'.
+
+
+The rhythm of modern life is a rhythm of excitement. The city with its
+multitudes is never completely at rest: even in its repose, in its
+silence, there is a secret bubbling as of lava in the bowels of a
+volcano, a waiting and watching, a nervous tension tinged with fever.
+For the idea of energy in the myriad-headed monster city is so
+concentrated, so intensified, that it never loses its rumbling activity.
+Rest, a polar feeling, would be the inner negation, the annihilation, of
+this new element. True, the city with her teeming masses is not always
+in the fever-throes of those great eruptions of passion when through the
+arteries of her streets the blood streams suddenly; when all her muscles
+seem to contract; when cries and enthusiasm blaze up like a flame; but
+always something seems to be expecting this fiery second, just as in
+modern man there is always the whipped unrest that is avid of new
+things, new experiences. Modern cities are in perpetual vibration; and
+so is the multitude from man to man. Even if the individual is not
+excited, if his nerves are not always stirring with his own vibration,
+they are yet always vibrating in harmony with the obscure resonance of
+the universe. The great city's rhythm beats in our very sleep; the new
+rhythm, the rhythm of our life, is no longer the regular alternation of
+relaxation and repose, it is the steady vibration of an unintermitted
+activity.
+
+Now, a modern poet who wishes to create in real harmony with
+contemporary feeling must himself have something of the perpetual
+excitement, the unremitting watchfulness, the restless and nervous
+sensitiveness of our time; his heart must unconsciously beat in tact
+with the rhythm of the world around him. But not only unrest must
+flicker in him, not only must that excessive delicacy of feeling which
+is almost morbid be in him, this neurasthenic sleeplessness--not only
+the negative element of our epoch, but the grandiose as well, the
+superdimensional, the spontaneity of the sudden discharge of forces held
+in reserve, the overwhelming force of the great eruption. Like the
+masses of our towns, he must be so fashioned that a trifle will
+stimulate him to the greatest passion, must be so fashioned that he
+cannot help being carried away by the intoxication of his own strength.
+Just as the masses have, so to speak, organised themselves as a body,
+so that there is no individual excitement in them, no irritation and
+inflammation of any single part, but so that a reaction of the whole
+body responds to every separate irritation, just in the same manner must
+the excitement of a modern, a contemporary poet, a poet of a great town,
+never be the excitement of a single sense, but, if it is to be strong,
+it must quiver through the whole body like an electric shock. His poetic
+rhythm must therefore be physically vital; it must envelop all his
+feeling and thinking; it must respond to every individual irritation, to
+every individual sensation, with the massed weight of feeling of all his
+vital forces: the need of a rhythm strained to the full must be, as
+Nietzsche has so wonderfully demonstrated in his _Ecce Homo_! a measure
+for the strength of the inspiration, a sort of balancing, as it were, of
+the pressure and tension of the inspiration. For the poet of to-day, if
+he does not wish to remain the poet of the eternal yesterday, must, as a
+microcosm, imitate in his passion the macrocosm of the multitude,
+wherein also the excitement of the individual is trivial and aimless,
+and only the ebullition of the whole fermenting mass is irresistible and
+momentous.
+
+Then, in such poems, the _rhythm of modern life_ will break through. At
+this moment we must remember what rhythm really means. The rhythm of a
+being is in the last instance nothing but its breathing. Everything that
+is alive, every organism, has breath, the interchange and resting-space
+between giving and taking. And so breathes a poem too; and it is
+worthless if it is not a living thing, if it is not an organism, a body
+with a soul. Only in its rhythm does it become alive, as man does in his
+breathing. But the diversity, the originality of the rhythm only arises
+from the alternation of these drawn breaths. Breathing is different in
+those who are calm, excited, joyous, nervous, oppressed, ecstatic. Every
+sensation produces its corresponding rhythm. And since every poet in his
+individuality represents a new form of inner passion, his poem too must
+have this rhythm of his own, the rhythm which expresses his personal
+poetic peculiarity just as characteristically as his speaking expresses
+an individual accent and dialect. To understand Verhaeren's rhythm we
+must remember this basic form of the poetic feeling at the heart of him;
+we must compare it with the feeling at the heart of those who have gone
+before him. In Victor Hugo there was the earnest, great, soaring rhythm
+of the loud speaker, of the preacher who never addresses individuals but
+always the whole nation; in Baudelaire there was the regular hymnic
+rhythm of the priest of art; in Verlaine the irregular, sweet, and
+gentle melody of one speaking in dreams. In Verhaeren, now, there is the
+rhythm of a man hurrying, rushing, running; of a restless, passionate
+man; the rhythm of the modern, of the Americanised man. It is often
+irregular; you hear in it the panting of one who is hunted, who is
+hurrying to his goal; you hear his impact with the obstacles he stumbles
+against, the sudden standstill of intemperate effort exhausted. But with
+him the rhythmic energy is never intellectual, never verbal, never
+musical; it is purely emotional, physical. Not only the end of the nerve
+vibrates and sounds; not only does the language shake the air; but out
+of the whole organism, as though all the nerve-strings had suddenly
+begun to sound the alarm, burst the terror and the ecstasy of fever. His
+poem is never a state of repose--no more than the multitude is ever
+quite repose--it is in a true sense rhythm, passion set in motion. You
+feel the excitement of the man in it, motion, the covering of a
+distance, activity; never contemplation comfortably resting, or dream
+girt with sleep. And as a matter of fact, it is from motion in the
+physical sense that nearly all his poems have arisen: Verhaeren has
+never composed poetry at his writing-table, but while wandering over the
+fields with a rhythmically moved body whose accelerated pace pulses to
+the very heart of the poem, or while rushing along through the din and
+bustle of streets in great cities. In these poems is that quicker
+rolling of the blood that comes from exercise, that jerk of unrest and
+passion tearing themselves away from repose. You feel that in this man
+feeling is too strong, that he would fain free himself from it, run away
+from it in his own body. The feeling is so strong that it turns to
+pain, or rather pressure, and the poem is nothing else than the erection
+that precedes relief, the throes that bring forth out of pregnancy. Just
+as the multitude in revolt bursts the bonds of its excitement and
+launches of a sudden all the passion dammed back for centuries, so
+springs from the poet like a geyser the passionate assault of words
+bursting from too long silence. These cries are a physical relief. These
+'élans captifs dans le muscle et la chair '[1] are the relief of a
+convulsion, the easy breathing after oppression. As a passionate man is
+forced to relieve himself by gestures, or in a fit of rage, or in cries,
+or in weeping, or in some other state opposed to rest, the poet
+discharges his feeling in rhythmic words: 'L'homme à vous prononcer
+respirait plus à l'aise'[2] he has said of the man who was the first to
+force the excess of his feeling into speech.
+
+_It is, then, a force positively physical which produces Verhaeren's
+rhythm._ It is difficult to prove such an assertion, for the state of
+creation is unconscious and unapproachable, although it may intuitively
+be detected in those moments of recreation, in that second of a new
+birth when a poet recites his work, when he feels, as it were, the
+pressure of the feeling weighing upon him artificially in recollection,
+when by the force of his imagination he relieves himself again as at the
+birth of the poem. And any one who has once heard Verhaeren reciting
+poetry will know how much with him the rhythm of body and poem is one
+and indivisible, how the excitement that becomes rhythmical in the
+vibrating word is at the same time converted into the identical gesture.
+The calm eyes grow keen, they seem to pierce the near paper; the arm is
+raised commandingly, and every finger of the hand is stretched out to
+mark the cæsura as though with an electric shock; to hammer the verses;
+and with the voice to eject the hurrying and almost screaming words into
+the room. In his movements there is then that terrific effort of one who
+would fain tear himself away from himself, that sublimest gesture of the
+poet striving away from the earth, striving away from himself, from the
+heavy gait of words to winged passion. Man coalesces with Nature in one
+second of the most wonderful identity:
+
+     Les os, le sang, les nerfs font alliance
+     Avec on ne sait quoi de frémissant
+     Dans l'air et dans le vent;
+     On s'éprouve léger et clair dans l'espace,
+     On est heureux à crier grâce,
+     Les faits, les principes, les lois, on comprend tout;
+     Le cœur tremble d'amour et l'esprit semble fou
+     De l'ivresse de ses idées.[3]
+
+Every time that Verhaeren reads his poetry, this re-birth of the first
+creative state is renewed. _It is in the first place a deliverance from
+pain, and in the second place it is pleasure_. Again and again the word
+darts along like a beast let loose; in the wildest rhythm; in a rhythm
+that begins slowly, cautiously; quickens; then grows wilder and wilder;
+grows to an intoxicating monotony, an ever-increasing speed, a rattling
+din that reminds one of an express whizzing along at full speed. Like a
+locomotive--for in Verhaeren's case one has to think in images of this
+kind, and not in outworn tropes as of Pegasus--the poem rushes on,
+driven only by a measure which reminds one of the short explosions of an
+automobile. And as a matter of fact the scansion of the locomotive, its
+restless rattling, has often been the cause of the rhythmic velocity of
+his verses. Verhaeren himself is fond of relating that he has often, and
+with delight, written poems on railway journeys, and that the cadence of
+his verse has then been fired by the regular rattle of the train. He
+describes wonderfully the rapture of the speed poured into his blood by
+the whizzing past of trains. The whistling of the wind in moaning trees,
+the dashing of the foaming sea along the shore, the echo a thousand
+times repeated of thunder in the mountains, all these strong sounds have
+become rhythm in his poems; all noisy things, all violent, swift
+emotions have made it brusque, angry, and excited:
+
+     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;
+     Et pour en condenser les frissons clairs
+     En ardentes images,
+     Aimer, aimer, surtout la foudre et les éclairs
+     Dont les dévorateurs de l'espace et de l'air
+     Incendient leur passage![4]
+
+But this is the new thing in Verhaeren, that he has transformed into
+rhythm not only the voice of Nature, but also the new noises, the
+grumbling of the multitude, the raging of cities, the rumbling of
+workshops. Often in his rhythm can be heard the beat of hammers; the
+hard, edged, regular whizzing of wheels; the whirring of looms; the
+hissing of locomotives; often the wild, restless tumult of streets; the
+humming and rumbling of dense masses of the people. Poets before him
+imitated in the harmony of their verse the monotony of sources and the
+babbling of water over pebbles, or the soughing voice of the wind. But
+he makes the voice of the new things speak; makes the rhythm of the
+city, this rhythm of fever and of unrest, this nervous moving of the
+crowd, this unquiet billowing of a new ocean, flow over into his new
+poem. Hence this up and down in his verses; this suddenness and
+unexpectedness; this incalculable element. _The new, the industrial
+noises have here become the music of poetry_. Since he does not seek to
+express his own individual sensation of life, but would himself only be
+a voice for the multitude, the rhythm is more roaring and restless than
+that of any individual being. Like the first poets, those of old time,
+before whom there were no outworn and exhausted words; like the poets
+whose feeling burst into flame at every word, every cry; who discovered
+themselves 'en exaltant la souffrance, le mal, le plaisir, le bien';
+like them when they
+
+      ... confrontaient à chaque instant
+     Leur âme étonnée et profonde
+     Avec le monde,[5]
+
+poets who would be modern must compare their own soul with that of their
+time, must always regulate their rhythm according to the mutation of
+their time. Their deepest yearning must be to find not only their own
+personal expression, but over and above it the poetic and musical
+representation of the highest identity between themselves and their
+time. For poets are the inheritors of a great patrimony:
+
+      ... En eux seuls survit, ample, intacte et profonde,
+     L'ardeur
+     Dont s'enivrait, devant la terre et sa splendeur,
+     L'homme naïf et clair aux premiers temps du monde;
+     C'est que le rythme universel traverse encor
+     Comme aux temps primitifs leur corps.[6]
+
+They must, in these days, only express themselves when they have first
+adapted the rhythm of their own feeling to that of the universe, to the
+rhythm of the cities they live in, to the rhythm of the multitude from
+which they have grown, to the rhythm of temporal as of eternal things.
+They must, like a vein in the heart of the world, reproduce every beat
+of the great hammer, every excitement, quickening of pace and
+obstruction of the feeling rolled round in the whole organism; they must
+learn from life the rhythm which shall again achieve the great harmony
+that was lost between the world and the work of art.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'Le Verbe' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[2] _Ibid._ (_Ibid._).
+
+[3] 'Les Heures où l'on crée' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[4] 'L'En-Avant' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[5] 'Le Verbe' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[6] _Ibid._ (_Ibid._).
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW PATHOS
+
+     Lassé des mots, lassé des livres.
+       .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
+     Je cherche, en ma fierté,
+     L'acte qui sauve et qui délivre.
+                      É.V., 'L'Action.'
+
+The primitive poem, that which came into being long before writing or
+print, was nothing but a modulated cry that was hardly language, a cry
+won from joy or pain, mourning or despair, recollection or passionate
+entreaty, but always from fulness of feeling. It was pathetic, because
+it was produced by passion; pathetic, because its intention was to
+produce passion. The poem of those great and distant men who were the
+first to find word and speech in the darted cry of feeling, was an
+invocation of the crowd; an exhortation; a fiery incitement; an ecstasy;
+a direct electric discharge of feeling to feeling. The poet spoke to the
+others, an individual to a circle. The auditors stood before him in
+expectation--somewhat as Max Klinger in his new picture has gathered
+them together in front of blind Homer--they waited, watched, listened,
+surrendered themselves, let themselves be carried away; or they
+resisted. That poem and the delivery of it were not something finished
+and presented for approval; no vessel or ornament already hammered into
+shape and perfectly chiselled; they were something in the process of
+creation, something newly growing at that moment, a struggle with the
+hearer, a wrestling with him for his passion.
+
+Poets lost this close, glowing contact with the masses when writing was
+invented. What the dissemination of the written word, and still more, in
+after days, the infinite multiplication of printing, dowered them with;
+all the new influence over spaces hitherto closed; the fact that their
+words were henceforth alive in countries which they had never visited;
+that men drew strength and inspiration and vital courage from their
+words long after their own bodies had fallen into dust--this vast and
+mighty effect had only been obtained by relinquishing that other and
+perhaps not lesser effect--dialogue, that standing face to face with the
+multitude. By slow degrees poets became something imaginary to the
+public. When they spoke, they really only listened to themselves; more
+and more their poem became a lonely colloquy with themselves; the
+harangue became a monologue, more and more lyrical in a new sense and
+less and less moving. More and more their poem travelled away from
+speech; more and more it lost that mysterious, passionate fire that is
+only fed by the moment, by standing face to face with an excited crowd,
+by the magical influx of tension and stimulation out of the heart of
+the hearer into the poet's own words. For, with his expectation, with
+his eager eyes, his excitement, and his intractable impatience, every
+listener does something for the speaker: he goads him; he forces
+something of his expectant restlessness into the response that has not
+yet been made. But the moment the poet no longer spoke to the crowd, no
+longer to a circle, but fashioned his words for print and writing, a new
+and peculiar sensation was developed in him. He accustomed himself to
+speaking only for himself; to conceiving his own feeling as important,
+irrespective of effect and force; to holding a conversation with none
+but himself and silence. And his poem changed more and more. Now that
+the poet no longer had the panting roar of the response, the cry of
+passion, the exultation of enthusiasm, as the finale of his poetry--the
+last accord, as it were, belonging to his own music--he sought to
+complete the harmony in the verse by means of itself. He rounded his
+poem with an artist's care, as though it were an earthenware vessel;
+illumined it with colours like a picture; rilled it with music; more and
+more he relinquished the idea of persuading, of convincing,.of
+inspiring. He was content that the poem should have no feeling for other
+men, and gave it only the life and the mood of his own world. In that
+period of transition, we may suppose, 'poetic' diction first came into
+being, that language by the side of the living language which petrified
+more and more as time went on into a dialect hostile to the world, into
+bloodless marble. Of old, the poetic language was not one that existed
+side by side with the real language; it was only the last
+intensification of the real language. By the rhythm of higher passion,
+by the fire of harangue, it became a sacred fire, a blest intoxication,
+a festivity in the work-a-day world. Thus, as intensified vitality,
+language could be different without ever being unintelligible, could
+remain with and yet above the people, while the lyric poetry of to-day
+has become, for the most part, strange and worthless to active men who
+live in the midst of realities, to the artisan and the toiler.
+
+Nevertheless in our own days there seem to be signs of a return to this
+primitive close contact between the poet and his audience; a new pathos
+is at its birth. The stage was the first bridge between the poet and the
+multitude. But here the actor was still the intermediary of the spoken
+word; the purely lyrical emotion was not an aim in itself, but only, for
+three or four hours, a help in the illusion. However, the time of the
+isolation of the poet from the crowd, which was formerly rendered
+necessary by the great distances between nation and nation, seems now to
+have been overcome by the shortening of space and by the
+industrialisation of cities. To-day poets once again recite their verse
+in lecture-halls, in the popular universities of America; nay, in
+churches Walt Whitman's lines ring out into the American consciousness,
+and what used to be created only by the seething seconds of political
+crises--one might instance Petöfi declaiming his national anthem 'Talpra
+Magyar' from the steps of the university to the revolutionary
+crowd--occurs almost every day. Now again as of old the lyric poet seems
+entitled to be, if not the intellectual leader of the time, at least he
+who must excite and quell the passions of the time; the rhapsodist who
+hails, kindles, and fans that holy fire, energy. The world seems to be
+waiting for Him who shall concentrate all life in a flash of lightning
+to light up all the deeps of darkness:
+
+     Il monte--et l'on croirait que le monde l'attend,
+     Si large est la clameur des cœurs battant
+     À l'unisson de ses paroles souveraines.
+     Il est effroi, danger, affre, fureur et haine;
+     Il est ordre, silence, amour et volonté;
+     Il scelle en lui toutes les violences lyriques.[1]
+
+Certainly the poem which would speak to the multitude must be different
+to the kind of poem that pleased our fathers. Above all, it must itself
+be a will, an aim, an energy, an evocation. All the technical
+excellence, the sweet music, the craft of vibrating rhythms, suppleness
+and flexibility of language, must, in the new poem, no longer be an aim
+in themselves, but only a means to kindle enthusiasm. Such a poem must
+no longer be a sentimental dialogue between a hermit and some other
+hermit, a stranger somewhere far away; it must no longer be the short,
+hurriedly trembling voice which is silenced ere the word's flame has
+blazed up in it; no, this new poem must be strongly exulting, richly
+inspired, with a far horizon for its goal, and rushing on with
+irresistible impetuosity. It is not written for gentle moods, but for
+loud, resonant words. He who would quell the crowd must have the rhythm
+of their own new and restless life in him; he who speaks to the crowd
+must be inspired by the new pathos. And this new pathos, this 'pathos
+which most of all accepts the world as it is' (in Nietzsche's sense),
+is, above all, zest, is the strength and the will to create ecstasy.
+This poem must not be sensitive and woebegone; it must not express a
+personal grief that seeks to enlist the sympathies of others; no, it
+must be inspired by a fulness of joy, by the will to create from joy
+itself passion that cannot be held down. Only great feelings bear the
+message to the crowd; small feelings, which can only in silence, as in
+motionless air, rise above the ground, are dashed down again. _The new
+pathos must contain the will, not to set souls in vibration, not to
+provide a delicate, æsthetic sense of pleasure, but to fire to a deed._
+It must carry the hearer along with it; it must once again collect in
+itself the scattered forces of the poet of old time; it must in the poet
+recreate, for an hour, the demagogue, the musician, the actor, the
+orator; it must snatch the word again off the paper into the air; it
+must carefully entrust feeling as a secret treasure to the individual;
+it must hurl this treasure into the surf of a multitude. Poems with such
+a new pathos cannot be created by feeble, passive men, whose mood can be
+changed at any minute by the world around them, but only by fighting
+natures, who are governed by an idea, by the thought of a duty; who seek
+to force their feeling on others; who elevate their inspiration to the
+inspiration of the whole world.
+
+This new lyric pathos is in our days growing lustily into life again.
+For centuries rhetoricians have been mocked at. The change of estimation
+in Schiller's case from worship to sufferance is a lasting proof. And
+let us remember that Nietzsche, the only German who in recent years has
+influenced the world, was only able to do so by creating a new
+rhetorical style--'I am the inventor of the dithyramb'--only by making
+his _Zarathustra_ a preacher's book which insistently requires a loud,
+resonant voice. In France it was Victor Hugo who first recognised the
+necessity of direct address. But he, who, as it happens, stands on that
+narrowest boundary-line which separates genius from talent, he of whom
+one can say that he was either the least of the eternal, monumental
+poets or the greatest of the minor, the derivative poets, he confined
+himself to France, he never thought of any but the French nation--as
+Walt Whitman never thought of any but the American nation--and, above
+all, he had not the high place whence to speak to his nation. He would
+have been greater if he had really had the tribune whence his thunder
+and lightning might have reached the multitude, instead of being always
+only a sinister grumbling from the background of exile. Of all the
+hundred volumes of his work perhaps nothing will remain except that
+commanding gesture of an orator which Rodin has perpetuated in his
+statue, and which is nothing else than the will to move to passion. He
+has created this will to pathos, but not the pathos itself; still, even
+the effort is a great and memorable achievement.
+
+Victor Hugo's inheritance, which was ill administered by chatterers and
+chauvinists, by Déroulède and such poets with their big drums and their
+trumpet-flourishes, has been taken over in France by Verhaeren. And he
+is the first whose voice again reaches the crowd, the first French
+realisation of a pathos which has absolutely the effect of art and
+poetry. He more than any other, he whose deepest delight it is to quell
+a grandiose resistance, he the _évocateur prodigieux_, as Bersaucourt[2]
+has called him, was entitled to the mastery of the living word. Whenever
+I read a poem by Verhaeren, I am time after time astonished to find
+myself, when I have begun by reading it to myself, suddenly forced to
+read the words aloud; surprised to find myself reading them louder and
+louder; surprised to find in my hand, in my whole body, the urgent need
+awakening of the gesture that hails and kindles an audience. For so
+strong is the passionateness of the original feeling, the inner cry and
+appeal in the words, that it forces its way through the reproduction,
+rings out loudly even from the dead letters. _All the great poems of
+Verhaeren are filled with the yearning to be spoken aloud, vehemently,
+in the zest and glow of passion_. If they are recited softly, they seem
+to be quite without melody; if they are read calmly and stolidly, they
+often seem hard, uneven, and abrupt. Many images recur with a certain
+regularity, many adjectives are repeated as petrified ideas--the trick
+of an orator who emphasises what is important by standing
+expressions--but the moment the poem is read aloud it is all alive
+again, the repetitions are suddenly revealed as superb instances of
+excitement reaching its mark, the recurring images take their place as
+regular milestones along a road rushing along wildly to the infinite.
+Verhaeren's poetry is the communication of an ecstasy, communication not
+in the sense of a secret to an individual, but of fire cast to kindle a
+crowd. His poems never seem to be quite completed, but to have been
+first created while being read, just as every good and fiery speech
+gives the impression of being improvised; they are always the unfolding
+of a state, a passionate analysis that acts like a discovery. They are
+moving, not harmonious. Just as an orator does not shock his audience at
+the very first with the conclusion of his reasoning, but pays out the
+chain of his arguments slowly and logically, Verhaeren builds his poems
+from visions, first in repose, then in the excitement that intensifies,
+and then with burning horizons foaming over more and more wildly in
+images. And these images again are rhetorical; they are not similes
+which can only be understood in their totality by the roundabout way of
+reflection; they are glaring flashes of lightning. A poem that would
+move those who hear it has need of metaphors which not only hit the mark
+of feeling, but which hit it immediately with deadly effect. They must
+be glaring, because they have to force the whole feeling in the
+expression of one second as quick as lightning. In this way the pathetic
+poem produces a new form of sensuous expression, and in this way too it
+creates itself a new rhythm of intensification. First of all, with the
+lightnings of his metaphors Verhaeren illuminates the vast landscape of
+visions; then, by a certain monotony of rhythm, he intensifies the
+astonishment and excitement to the highest ecstasy. Repeatedly, at the
+breathing-spaces of his great poems, you think you have reached the
+summit, only to be whipped to a higher leap, to a higher outlook. 'Il
+faut en tes élans te dépasser sans cesse';[3] this, his moral
+commandment, is for him the highest poetical law as well. The deepest
+will of his pathetic poem is to whip up, to set running, to snatch his
+hearer along with him. 'Dites!' this summons which is like a gesture,
+the urgent 'encore, encore!' are appeals which in his poems are
+petrified into cries, just as every horseman has certain words to lure
+the last strength from his horse. _Such words are nothing but transposed
+oratorical gestures_. The hollow 'oh!' is the gesture of appeal; the
+short 'qu'importe!' the gesture as of one who casts away a burden grown
+too heavy; the slow, curving, far-sweeping 'immensément' is the heaping
+up of all infinity. These poems are lashed into fever heat. For not only
+do they themselves seek to fly like those other, the harmonious, the
+really lyric poems, which with wings outspread seem to hover near the
+clouds, they also seek to snatch up by force the whole heavy mass of the
+audience. This is the explanation of the constant repetitions in the
+poems, which are often very long, as though some last doubter were yet
+to be convinced, as though fire were to be darted into the blood of some
+last one yet immune. Everything strives forwards, forwards, dragging the
+resister along with ecstatic power.
+
+And here are seen the dangers of pathos. The first danger, that into
+which, for instance, Victor Hugo fell, was the emptiness, the hollowness
+of the feeling, the covering over of a void by a mighty gesture;
+enthusiasm resulting from a deliberate method, and not forced by inner
+feeling. Empty phrasing is and remains the first danger of the pathetic
+poem. The triteness of words 'plus sonores que solides'[4] is the
+second. Here, however, in this new pathos, there is another and a new
+peril, that of the over-heating of feeling, that of excessive, unhealthy
+exaltation, which must then of necessity yield to exhaustion. No man can
+be in a constant fever of excitement, in an unremitting state of
+exaltation. And in these poems there is the will to unceasing ecstasy.
+By the pathos, too, the purely lyrical values of the poem often fall
+into danger. The will to be clear often forces the poet to a triteness
+of wording; the terseness necessitates frequent repetition; the impulse
+to build up an organic ecstasy often leads to excessive length. Owing to
+its glaring, clear colours the language loses that mystical element of
+lyric verse--the incommensurable, as Goethe called it--that magic hint
+of a secret thing fleeing from the crowd and the light of day. But at
+the same time this pathos signifies an immense enrichment of lyric
+resources, a transvaluation of the word, by the very fact that it is not
+exclusively intended for print but for declamation as well. The pathetic
+poem is not, like the lyric poem, a crystallised impression; it is not
+at the same time question and answer to itself; it is the expectation of
+an answer. The great pathos, therefore, grows with success, and
+involuntarily mingles in the poem the craving and the answer of the
+poet's time. The voice of the poet is always as strong as the call that
+goes out to him. Verhaeren found this new pathos in the course of his
+development, because he no longer felt the voice of the crowd, of
+cities, and of all the new things as a hindrance to his lyric poetry,
+but as a challenge, as a rhetorical exhortation. And the more the world
+around us becomes ponderous, grandiose, and passionate--the more it
+becomes heroic in the concentration of its strength (heroic in that new
+strength that Emerson preached)--so much the more, too, must lyric
+poetry in the new sense, perhaps in Verhaeren's sense, be pathetic.
+Gigantic impressions cannot be forced into petty impressions; vast
+conceptions cannot be split up into mean fragments; a loud appeal needs
+a loud answer. All art is more dependent than we are aware on its epoch.
+The same secret dependence between demand and production seems to exist
+in the sphere of art as exists in commerce. Laws that escape our
+knowledge and cannot be prisoned in formulae can sometimes be glimpsed,
+hazy as a presentiment, in fugitive intuition.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'Le Tribun' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[2] Albert de Bersaucourt, _Conférence sur Emile Verhaeren._
+
+[3] 'L'Impossible' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[4] Albert Mockel, _Émile Verhaeren._
+
+
+
+
+VERHAEREN'S POETIC METHOD
+
+     Je suis celle des surprises fécondes.
+                          É.V., 'Celle des Voyages.'
+
+
+A real poem must not exhibit an artificial structure of parts, a
+mechanism; it must, like man himself, be organic, an indissoluble union
+of soul and body. It must have a living body of flesh, the substance of
+the word, the colour of the metaphors, the mechanism of the motion, the
+skeleton of the thought; but over and above all that it must possess
+that inexpressible something, the soul, which alone makes it organic;
+the breath, the rhythm, that inseparable essence which is no longer
+perceptible to intelligence, but only to feeling. It is not first in
+this transcendental element, however, that the poet's personality is
+revealed: the poetry of a great poet must be characteristic in its very
+physis, in its very material. Side by side with that magic vibration,
+that intangible element of feeling, the materiality too, the weaving of
+the word, that net of expression in which the fugitive feeling is caught
+in the waters of the hidden life and lifted into the light, these too
+must be alone of their kind if they are to characterise the poet's race,
+environment, and personality. This purely material organism of the poet
+too is, like every living thing, subject to growth, to the change of
+maturity and age. The structure of the poem, like every human face, must
+gradually, in the revolution of the years, work its way to character
+from the shifting features of childhood and the indistinctness of the
+general type, must in its sensuous externals, in the physiognomy of the
+material, show all psychic changes to the last acquisition of
+personality. In a real poet the technical aspect, the handicraft, the
+external element has a development that runs parallel to the
+intellectual and poetic contents. In form, too, the poem must at first
+represent a tradition, something that has been taken over; only in the
+revolt of youth will it achieve a personal form, and this itself will
+later, as it gradually grows cold and petrifies, represent an immutable
+type.
+
+Verhaeren's poetry has its evolution and its history in this purely
+formal sense. Even this poetry of Verhaeren's, which to-day looms so
+immensely isolated and so victoriously characteristic in French
+literature that a connoisseur can, without a shadow of doubt, recognise
+the creator from a single stanza, has grown from a tradition, is the
+climax of a certain culture, and is at the same time related to a
+contemporary movement. When Verhaeren began to write, Victor Hugo, the
+crowned king of French lyric poetry, was dead; Baudelaire was forgotten;
+Paul Verlaine was still almost unknown. Victor Hugo's heirs, who
+divided his kingdom as once the diadochi divided the kingdom of
+Alexander the Great, were only able to preserve the trappings of the
+glory gone, and the grandiloquence of their words contrasted ill with
+their thin voices and artificial feelings. Against this circle, against
+François Coppée, Catulle Mendès, Théodore de Banville and the rest of
+them, rose up a new school of young men who called themselves 'decadents
+and symbolists.' Here I must frankly admit that I am really unable to
+explain this idea, perhaps for the very reason that I have read so many
+varying definitions of it. The only thing that is certain is, that at
+that time a group of young writers rose up in concert against a
+tradition, and, in the most diverse experiments, sought a new lyrical
+expression. What this new thing consisted in would be hard to say. The
+truth is perhaps that all these poets were not French; that each of them
+brought some new element from his own country, his own race, his own
+past; that none of them felt that respect for the French tradition which
+was in the blood of the native poets as an inward barrier, and thus were
+able unconsciously to get nearer to their own artistic instinct. One
+only needs to look at the names, which often at the first glance betray
+the foreigner, the Americans Vielé-Griffin and Stuart Merrill, the
+Belgians Verhaeren, Maeterlinck, and Mockel, or which, as in the case of
+Jean Moréas, cover a complicated Greek name with a French pseudonym.
+The only indisputable exploit of this group really was that about 1885
+they quickened the pace of French lyric poetry with a new unrest.
+Mallarmé plunged his verses into a secret darkness of symbols, until the
+words with their subterranean meaning almost became unintelligible,
+while Verlaine gave his lines the dream-rapt lightsomeness of a music
+never heard before. Gustave Kalm and Jules Laforgue were the first who
+did away, the one with rhyme and the other with the Alexandrine, and
+introduced the apparent irregularities of the _vers libre._ Each one did
+his best on his own account to find something new, and all of them had
+in common the same fiery eagerness to attack the idols of a derivative
+poetry, the same ardent longing for a new form of expression. True,
+their talent was soon choked up with sand, but that was because they
+over-estimated the technical side of the innovations they introduced and
+spent themselves in the investigation of theories, instead of developing
+their own personalities. As time went on their paths diverged widely.
+Many of them foundered in the sea of journalism; others are still, after
+a lapse of twenty years, walking round in a circle in the footsteps of
+their youth; and of the symbolists and decadents nothing is left but a
+page or so of literary history, a faded sign-board marking an empty
+shop. Verhaeren too was classed with them, although in my view he was
+never essentially influenced by this school. A man of such sturdy
+originality could not be more than stimulated by others, could not be
+more than confirmed in his natural tendency to revolt. His attitude with
+regard to the _vers libre_ was by no means due to this influence. For it
+was not by suggestion from others, not by the instinct of imitation, but
+by inward necessity, that he discovered his new form. It was not the
+example of others that freed him from the fetters of tradition; he was
+forced to free himself from them of his own accord. This inner
+compulsion is alone of importance; for it is a matter of complete
+indifference whether a poet writes by chance in regular verse or in
+_vers libres_; the phenomenon can only be significant when a poet is of
+necessity and by inner pressure forced to free himself from tradition
+and to achieve a personal form.
+
+It was as a Parnassian that Verhaeren began. His first poetical
+attempts, which he has never published, the verses he wrote at school
+and in his first years at the university, showed him hypnotised by the
+style of Lamartine and Victor Hugo. And even in the first two books he
+published, in _Les Flamandes_ and _Les Moines_, there is not a single
+poem in which Verhaeren has gone beyond his models. His poem is indeed
+somewhat more mobile than the strict pattern of school exercises; it
+already shows slight traces of the cracks which at a later day will
+break the vessel to pieces. But this hint of insubordination was at
+that time necessitated more by the harshness and rebelliousness of the
+subject itself, by some stiffness or other in the turn of the phrase,
+which can only be explained by the fact of the poet's alien race. Even a
+foreigner can recognise that the verse is not rounded off, that the
+rhythm is not balanced with the natural inevitable sense of form that a
+man of Latin race would have, but that here a forceful will is with
+difficulty constraining a barbaric temperament to harmony. Through his
+French one can hear the massive language of his race, something of the
+unwieldy strength we have in our old German ballads. And what his name
+at the first glance betrayed--the foreigner--was to the finer ear of a
+native easily perceptible from his French alone.
+
+The farther Verhaeren proceeded in his development--the nearer he got to
+his real nature--the more the inheritance of his race in him revolted
+against the shackles of tradition--so much the more intensive became the
+impression of the Teutonic element in his verse. After all, development
+is in most cases nothing more than the awakening in us of our buried
+past. The highest demand of the Parnassian school, _impassibilité,_ an
+immovableness as of bronze, is the antithesis of his stormy temperament,
+which drives him along to a wild rhythm, not to harmony. Deep, guttural
+notes vibrate in his verses, and make the song of his vowels rough; the
+angularity, the masculinity, abruptness, and hardness of his peasant's
+nature peer through everywhere. In addition to this, there is now the
+inner transformation. So long as Verhaeren's poetic tendency was merely
+pictorial, one that calmly and without excitement aimed at painting the
+passion of the Flemish people, the earnestness of monasteries, just so
+long did the Alexandrine best serve to divide the rhythmic waves of his
+inspiration and roll them along. But when his personal sympathy began to
+confuse the inner indifference of his first work, his verse became
+uneasy. The cracks in the Alexandrine became more and more perceptible;
+greater and greater in the poet grew his impatience of it and his desire
+to smash it. He is no longer satisfied with the _vers ternaire_, the
+verse of the Romanticists with its two cæsuras dividing the line into
+three parts of perfectly equal rhythm and weight; he takes the free
+Alexandrine introduced by Victor Hugo and develops it still further,
+makes it still more irregular. He gives the syllables a different
+quantity, a different sonority; they no longer rest, they rock to and
+fro. And gradually the earnest, immovable uniformity of accentuation is
+changed into a more billowing, rhythmic fluidity. But ere long this
+concession too becomes too trivial for him. A temperament so impetuous
+as his will endure no outward fetter whatever. For it is not repose that
+this fiery singer would describe, but his own excited state--the
+quivering and vibrating of his emotion, his febrile unrest. His great
+manifold feeling, which is nothing else than a modulated cry, cannot
+storm itself out in regular verse; it needs unquiet gestures, motion,
+freedom, the _vers libre_. The fact that at this time other poets in
+France were using the free verse, the fact that it was at that
+time--several dispute the priority--'invented' for poets, is of no
+consequence to us here. Such contemporaneous incidences never express a
+chance, but always a latent necessity. Free verse was nothing else than
+the inevitable reflex action of modern feeling, the poetic breaking free
+of the unrest which lay in the time. Whether or not Verhaeren at that
+time had models is of no importance. What has been taken over can never
+become organic, only what comes from personal experience is a real gain.
+And at that time it lay quite in the line of his development that by
+inner necessity he was forced to break his old instrument and create
+himself a new one. For the nervous unrest, the passionate agitation of
+Verhaeren's later poems is unthinkable in regular verse. If verse is to
+describe in its own inner passion the immense multiplicity of modern
+impressions--their haste, their fire, their precipitous revulsion, their
+unexpectedness, their gloomy melancholy, and the overwhelming vastness
+of their dimensions--it must be strong and yet flexible, like a rapier.
+Such poems must be emancipated from rules: they must stride along like a
+real crowd, noisily seething; they must not walk in step, like soldiers
+on the march. And if they are to be spoken, they must not be recited in
+the stiff, cold, pathetically vibrating, self-conscious declamation of
+the Comédie Française; they must be spoken as though to a crowd; they
+must cry out, they must hail; and this-whipping up of an audience cannot
+be harmonious. These poems must be spontaneous and impulsive.
+
+Manifold is the diversity which Verhaeren's poetry has achieved by its
+deliverance from the monotony of the Alexandrine. Now and now only can
+the verse reproduce the plastic side of an impression and the inward
+agitation of it; not only by a pictorial description, but in a purely
+external manner too; by the sound, by the music of the rhythm. The
+lines, sometimes darting far beyond the margin, sometimes, like an
+arrow, sharpened to a single word, have the whole key-board of feeling.
+They can pace with a grave step like long black funeral processions, if
+haply they would express the monotony of solitude, 'Mes jours toujours
+plus lourds s'en vont roulant leur cours';[1] they can dart up like a
+falcon, white and glittering, soaring to the exulting cry 'la joie,'
+swift and as high as heaven over all the sad heaviness of earth. All the
+voices of day and night can now be represented onomato-poetically: all
+that is brusque and sudden by brevity; all that is ponderous and
+grandiose by a vast sweep of fulness; an unexpected thing by sudden
+harshness; haste in a feverishly accelerated movement; savagery by a
+precipitous change of velocity. Every line can now express the feeling
+by its rhythm alone. And one might without knowing French recognise the
+poetical intention of many of these poems merely by listening to their
+consonantal music, nay, often by looking at their typographical
+arrangement.
+
+For this reason I should be tempted to call these poems with their vast
+range _symphonic_ poems. They seem to have been conceived for an
+orchestra. They are not, like the poetry of a past generation, chamber
+music; they are not solitary violin _soli_; they are an inspired
+blending of all instruments; they are graded in individual sections
+which have a different _tempo_ and the pauses of the transitions. In
+Verhaeren's poetry the lyric exceeds the bounds of its domain and
+impinges on the dramatic and the epic. For his poem seeks not only to
+describe a mood, like a purely lyrical poem, it describes at the same
+time the birth of this mood. And this first part of the construction is
+epic; it is descriptive; it leads up from a lowly beginning to a great
+discharge of force. And, in the second place, the transitions are
+dramatic, those bursts of temperament from section to section, those
+precipitous falls and steep ascents which only at the end lead to a
+harmonious solution. From a purely external point of view Verhaeren's
+poem is more extensive, longer, of a greater range than any other
+contemporary poetry; it shoots out farther beyond the limit of lyric
+poetry; and, careless of the boundary-line of æsthetics, it derives
+strength and nourishment from neighbouring domains. It comes nearer to
+rhetoric, nearer to epic poetry, nearer to the drama, nearer to
+philosophy than any other poetry of our day; it is more independent of
+set rules than poetry had been hitherto. And independent of rules--or
+obeying only a new inner rule--is Verhaeren's form. Now, since the page
+no longer holds the fettered lines together in equal columns, the poet
+can write out his wild, overflowing feelings in their own wild, boldly
+curving lines. Verhaeren's poem at this time--and that which is achieved
+in the years of maturity remains inalienable--has its own inner
+architectonics. But it can hardly be compared to a piece of
+architecture, a structure built with hands; it is rather like a
+manifestation of nature. It is elementary like every feeling; it
+discharges itself like a storm. First a vision moves up like a cloud;
+more and more densely it compresses itself; more and more sultrily, more
+and more oppressively it weighs on the feeling; higher and higher,
+hotter and hotter grows the inner tension, until at last in the
+lightning of the images, in the rolling of the rhythm, all the garnered
+strength discharges itself rhythmically. The andante always grows to a
+furioso; and only the last section shows again the clear, cleansed sky
+of calm, in an intellectual synthesis of the state of chaos. This
+structure of Verhaeren's poem is almost invariable. It may be seen, for
+instance, in two parallel examples: in the poems 'La Foule' and 'Vers la
+Mer' in the book _Les Visages de la Vie_. Both set in with an
+adjuration, a vision. Here the crowd, its confusion, its strength; there
+a sensitive picture of the morning sea whose transparent tones remind
+one of Turner. Now the poet fires this still vision with his own
+passionateness. You see the crowd moving more and more restlessly, the
+waves surging more and more passionately; and ecstasy breaks out the
+moment the poet surrenders himself to these things, places himself among
+the crowd, sinks his feeling, his body in the sea. Then in the finale
+bursts forth the great cry of identity, in the one case the yearning to
+be all the crowd, in both that ecstatic gesture of the individual
+yearning for infinity. The first picture, which was only sensuously
+seen, grows at the end of the poem into a great ethic inspiration; from
+the vision is unfolded an unconquerable moral and metaphysical need.
+This form of intensification from individual feeling to universal
+feeling is the basic form of Verhaeren's poem. It might be best, in
+order to convey a clear idea of its form, to use a geometrical term and
+say that these poems are, to a certain extent, _poems in the form of a
+parabola._ While the lyric in the current sense mostly represents a
+symmetrical and harmonious form, a return to itself, a circle,
+Verhaeren's poem has the form of a parabola, apparently irregular but
+really equally governed by a law. His poems soar in a swift sustained
+flight, soar from the earth up into the clouds, from the real to the
+unreal, and then from a sudden zenith fling themselves back to the
+earth. The inspiration drives the feeling away from the pictorial, from
+passionless contemplation to this utmost height of possibility, far away
+from all sensuous perceptions high into the metaphysical, in order then,
+suddenly and unexpectedly, to bring it back to the _terra firma_ of
+reality. And indeed, in the music of these poems there is something as
+of a darting upwards, something of the hissing and whizzing of a stone
+well thrown and of its sudden falling down. In their rhythm too is this
+increasing velocity, this catching of the breath and this return to the
+starting-point, this bethinking itself of gravity when it returns to the
+earth.
+
+Something may now be said as to the means with which Verhaeren attains
+his vision, with which he seeks to represent the inner passionateness of
+things, with which he evokes enthusiasm. Let us first of all try to
+establish whether Verhaeren is what is called a master of language.
+Verhaeren's command of language is not by any means unlimited. Both in
+his words and in his rhymes there is constant repetition which sometimes
+borders on monotony; but on the other hand there is a strangeness, a
+newness, an unexpectedness of wording which is almost unexampled in
+French lyric poetry. An enrichment of the language, however, does not
+proceed from neologisms alone; a word may become alive by the
+unexpectedness of a new application, by a transposition of the meaning,
+as Rainer Maria Rilke, for instance, has often done in the German lyric.
+To redeem 'die armen Worte, die im Alltag darben,'[2] and consecrate
+them anew to poetry, is perhaps a higher merit than creating new words.
+Now Verhaeren has above all, by the Flemish sense of language which he
+inherited, imported a certain Belgian timbre into French lyric poetry.
+Personally, it is true, he is almost ignorant of Flemish; nevertheless,
+by the vague music familiar to him from his childhood's days, by a
+certain guttural tone, he has imported a nuance which is perhaps less?
+perceptible to the foreigner than to a Frenchman. At this point I should
+like to call Maurice Gauchez as a witness and borrow the most salient
+examples from his extraordinarily interesting monograph. Among the
+neologisms for which Gauchez suggests a foreign origin he quotes the
+following: les baisers rouges, les plumes majuscules, les malades
+hiératiques, la statue textuelle, les automnes prismatiques, le soir
+tourbillonaire, les solitudes océans, le ciel dédalien, le cœur
+myriadaire de la foule, les automnes apostumes, les vents vermeils, les
+navires cavalcadeurs, les gloires médusaires. And he rightly points out
+how much certain of Verhaeren's verbs might enrich the French language:
+enturquoiser, rauquer, vacarmer, béquiller, s'enténébrer, se futiliser,
+se mesquiniser, larmer. But I for my part cannot look upon the
+enrichment here accruing from racial instinct as the essential thing in
+his verbal art: it only gives it a local colour, without really
+explaining what is astonishingly modern in his diction. Verhaeren has
+been a great creator of new things for the French lyric, above all by
+his extension of its range of subjects, by his renewal of poetic
+reality, by recruiting new forces for poetry in the domain of technical
+science. _The great part of the new blood for his language came not so
+much from Flemish as from science_. A man who writes poems on the
+Exchange, on the theatre, on science, who sings factories and railway
+stations, cannot ignore their terminology. He must borrow certain
+technical expressions from the vocabulary of science, certain
+pathological terms from medicine; he must extend the glossary of the
+poetic by the extension of the poetic itself. There are geographical
+surprises of rhyme to be found in Verhaeren: Berlin and Sakhalin,
+Moscow, the Balearic and other distant islands whose names have never
+previously lived in rhyme. And since science is by its own progress
+compelled to invent new names every day, since new machines demand new
+words for their necessities, here for the first time an inexhaustible
+source has been discovered for replenishing the French language.
+
+This immense wealth, on the other hand, is jeopardised by something that
+might be called not so much poverty or restriction as fascination. Every
+one-sidedness of feeling produces, with its advantages, certain defects,
+and thus the constant passionateness which brought Verhaeren's poetry
+near to oratory, to preaching, is at the same time responsible for a
+certain monotony of the metaphors. Verhaeren is hallucinated by certain
+words, images, adjectives, phrases. He repeats them incessantly through
+all his work. All things in which a many-headed passion is united he
+compares with a 'brasier'; 'carrefour' is his symbol for indecision;
+'l'essor' is for him the last straining of effort; many cries and words
+by which he hails his audience are repeated almost from page to page.
+The adjectives too are often monotonous; often indeed, with the cold
+'iques' at the end of them, they are schematic; and even in the
+metaphors that phenomenon is unmistakable which in science is called
+pseudoanæsthesia, that is, the memory of a fixed feeling from the domain
+of some other sense is always individually associated with a certain
+colour or sound. For him 'red' expresses all that is passionate; 'gold'
+all greatness and pomp; 'white' all that is gentle; 'black' all enmity.
+His images have thus something abrupt and absolute; there is always in
+them, as Albert Mockel has demonstrated in his masterly study, the
+decisive, the sudden excitement, which overwhelms our astonishment. His
+images are as violent as his colours, as his rhythm. They have the
+suddenness of a cannon-ball which darts through space and is only
+perceptible to our vision when it reaches its aim and smashes the
+target. Possibly the inmost reason of this lies in the fact that these
+poems are intended to be spoken. A placard that is to have effect at
+some distance must be in glaring colours; pathos calls for images that
+hallucinate. Such images have indeed been found by Verhaeren, and by
+Verhaeren only. He hardly seems to know nuances. With the brutal
+instinct of a strong man he loves all that is glaring, all that is
+untrammelled. 'La couleur, elle est dans ses Å“uvres une surprise de
+métaux et d'images.'[3] But in this material they blaze, and with their
+lightnings they light up even the most distant horizon. I will only
+remind the reader of his 'beffrois immensément vêtus de nuit' or 'la
+façade paraît pleurer des lettres d'or,' or his 'les gestes de lumière
+des phares.' By the intensity of such images Verhaeren attains to quite
+an incomparable clearness of the feeling. 'Personne, je crois, ne
+possède à l'égal de Verhaeren le don des lumières et des ombres, non
+point fondues, mais enchevêtrées, des noirs absolus coupés de blanches
+clartés.'[4]
+
+One-sidedness of temperament here produces a one-sided advantage with
+all its artistic restrictions. So that Verhaeren is not a verbal artist
+in the unrestricted sense of one who always hits upon the only, the
+inevitable comparison for a thing; of one who flashes a bold word on the
+attention once and never retails it till it palls, who seems to use
+every word for the first time. His poetic vocabulary is rich, but by no
+means infinite; his sensibility is strong, but it has its restrictions.
+For, as is the case with every passionate poet, certain feelings at the
+last white-heat of excitement appear to him identical, seem to him to be
+capable of comparison only with the quite elementary things of Nature,
+with fire, the sea, the wind, thunder and lightning. To make the point
+clear, Verhaeren is not a verbal artist in Goethe's sense, but rather in
+Schiller's sense. With the latter, too, he has the gift in common of
+definitely expressing certain perceptions in one lyric line. He has
+discovered essences of the lyric feeling of life, lines that are now
+household words, or which at all events will be so. It will be
+sufficient to mention word formations such as 'les villes
+tentaculaires,' which in France have already become common-places, or
+such maxims as 'La vie est à monter et non à descendre,' or 'Toute la
+vie est dans l'essor.' In lines like these the lyric ecstasy is
+compressed as in a coin, and perpetuated in the current riches of the
+language.
+
+This hardness and brutality, these abrupt transitions, constitute the
+individuality of Verhaeren's poetry. At bottom it is nothing else than
+an accentuated masculinity. The voice, the music, is guttural, deep,
+raucous, masculine; the body of his poem has, like a man's body, the
+beautiful movement of strength, but in repose gestures that are often
+hard and which only in passion regain their compelling beauty. Whereas
+French lyric poetry, so to speak, had imitated the female body, the
+delicate grace of its soft yielding lines; whereas its first concern was
+harmony; Verhaeren's poem strove only for the rhythm of movement, only
+for the proud and vigorously ringing stride of a man, his leaping and
+running, the fighting display of his strength. This is not the only
+reason why the French have so long repudiated him. For where we delight
+in an echo from the German in his language, they feel the harshness of
+the Teutonic undertone; where we find a consonance with the German
+ballad, a re-birth of the German ballad as though it were awakening from
+the dreams of childhood, they see an opposition to the native tradition.
+And in fact, the farther Verhaeren has proceeded in his development,
+both in his personality and in his verse, the more the French varnish
+has peeled off his Teutonic perception. It was only in the time of his
+first dependence on tradition that his poetry was hardly to be
+distinguished from that of other writers in French. The farther he
+receded from the French standpoint, the more he unconsciously approached
+German art. To-day, perhaps, a return to classicism is perceptible in
+his poetry. The neologisms are not so audacious; the images are more
+schematic; the whole poem is calmer and more clarified. This, however,
+is by no means a cowardly compromise with a shattered tradition, no
+repentant return to the fold; it is the same phenomenon we meet in a
+similar manner in the late poems of Goethe, Schiller, Hugo, and
+Swinburne; the effect of the cooling of the blood in age; the yielding
+of sensuous perception to intellectual ideas. The victor has lost the
+fighter's brutality; the man in his maturity no longer needs revolt but
+a conception of the world--harmony. Here, as in Verhaeren's whole
+evolution, his verse is the most delicately sensitive indicator of the
+psychic revulsion, the perfect proof of a poetic and organic development
+which is really inward and dependent only on the laws of his blood.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'L'Heure Mauvaise' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[2] 'Poor words a-hungered in the working day.'--Rainer Maria Rilke,
+_Mir sur Feier._
+
+[3] Albert Mockel, _Émile Verhaeren_.
+
+[4] _Ibid._ (_Ibid._).
+
+
+
+
+VERHAEREN'S DRAMA
+
+     Toute la vie est dans l'essor.
+                      É.V., _Les Forces Tumultueuses._
+
+Émile Verhaeren's dramas seem to stand outside his work. Verhaeren is
+essentially a lyric poet. His whole feeling springs from lyric
+enthusiasm, and all neighbouring domains are merely sources whose
+strength flows into and feeds this one vital instinct. Verhaeren has
+almost always used the dramatic and the epic only as a means, never as
+an end in themselves: from the epic he has taken over into the vast
+sweep of his dithyrambic poems its broad, calm development, and from the
+drama the swift, abrupt contrast of transitions. The dramatic and the
+epic only serve him as a tonic, as a means to strengthen the blood of
+his lyric art. Although Verhaeren beside his lyric work has written
+dramas--four up to the present--these, in the edifice of his complete
+production, must be appreciated from a different point of view: from an
+architectural point of view. For the dramas are to him, in a certain
+sense, only a survey, a concentration of individual lyric crises, a
+synopsis of certain ideal complexes which have occupied some moment of
+his past; they are final settlements; the last point in lines of
+development; milestones of individual epochs. All that in the lyric
+poems, which never systematically bounded a domain, fell apart, is here
+made to converge to the focus of a programme. The lyric juxtaposition is
+fused into an inner relationship, the circle of ideas is co-ordinated
+like a picture in the frame of a play. Verhaeren's four tragedies
+represent four spheres of a conception of the universe: the religious,
+the social, the national, and the ethical. _Le Cloître_ is a re-creation
+of the book of verse _Les Moines_, is the tragedy of Catholicism; _Les
+Aubes_ is a condensation of the sociological trilogy _Les Villes
+Tentaculaires, Les Campagnes Hallucinées, Les Villages Illusoires.
+Philip II._ shapes the tragedy of the Antichrist, the contrast of Spain
+and Belgium, of sensuality and asceticism. And _Hélène de Sparte_, which
+in its outward form manifests a return to classicism, handles purely
+moral, eternal problems. As far as their contents are concerned,
+Verhaeren's dramas show no deviation, no change of the inner centre of
+gravity, and his new dramatic style is in perfect harmony with his new
+lyric style. For just as on the one hand he has used the dramatic
+element as a substance of his lyric work, here in his dramas he has
+transmuted the lyric element to a dramatic element. Here, too, we have
+nothing but visions intensified into exaltation. Here, as everywhere
+else, Verhaeren can only create by enthusiasm. What goads him on is the
+lyric moment in his enthusiasm, that second of the highest tension when
+passion, if it is not to shatter the frame of its generator, must have
+explosive words. The characters of his dramas are never anything but
+symbols of great passions, the bridge for this ascension of the
+exaltation. To him the action is no more than the way to the crises, to
+those seconds when some mighty force seizes on these characters and
+forces them to cry out. Whole scenes seem to be only awaiting for the
+moment when some one shall rise and turn to the crowd, wrestle with it
+and overthrow it, or be himself dashed to pieces.
+
+The style of Verhaeren's dramas is purely lyrical; the pace is
+throughout passionate and feverish; and this method, which runs counter
+to all dramatic canons, was bound organically to create a new technique.
+The French drama had hitherto known only the rhymed Alexandrine or
+prose. In Verhaeren's dramas--for the first time to my knowledge--prose
+and verse (verse which is 'free' both as regards rhythm and rhyme) are
+throughout promiscuously mixed. Mixed, but not as in Shakespeare, in
+whose plays verse and prose alternate in individual scenes and
+establish, so to speak, a social stratification, serving-men speaking in
+prose and their masters in verse: in Verhaeren the prose passages are
+the broad, resting foundations of the action; the curved bowls, so to
+speak, from which the holy fire of the exaltation flames. His
+characters express their calm in prose, pass from calm to excitement,
+and in this intensification speak a language which imperceptibly merges
+into a poem. Not till their passion breaks out do they speak in verse,
+in those seconds, as it were, when their soul begins to vibrate; and in
+these passages one cannot help thinking of an aeroplane which is first
+driven along the ground and moves with ever greater speed till suddenly
+it soars aloft. In Verhaeren's drama the characters speak an ever purer
+language the more poetical they become; music breaks with their passion
+from their souls; just as many people who behave coarsely and awkwardly
+in ordinary life, in great moments suddenly achieve a bearing of heroic
+beauty. This embodies the idea that in enthusiasm a man discovers in
+himself another and a purer language; that passion and the yearning to
+free oneself from an immeasurable and intolerable earthly burden make a
+poet of any man. This idea is in harmony with Verhaeren's whole
+conception of the universe, his idea that the man swept away by passion
+and enthusiasm is on a higher plane than the critic with his lack of hot
+feeling; that receptivity for great sensations constitutes, so to speak,
+a scale of moral values. And the stage performances have shown that this
+new style is justified, that the transition from prose to verse,
+occurring as it does contemporaneously with the ascension from calm to
+passion, passes practically unnoticed by the audience, which is
+equivalent to saying that when put to the test the method was recognised
+as necessary.
+
+And it is by passion, this innermost flame of Verhaeren's poetry, that
+his dramas live too. Their qualities are those of the lyrics; they have,
+above all, that vast power of vision which sets _Philip II_. against the
+tragic landscape of Spain; over the drama of Helen arches the heaven of
+Greece, blue, and mild, and open like a flower; and behind the tragedy
+of modern cities unrolls the inflamed scenery of the sky with the black
+arms of chimneys. And then the immense fervour of the ecstasy which, not
+in a slow, regular progression, but in savage, convulsive thrusts,
+whirls the action onward to the moments of the solution.
+
+Thus Verhaeren's first drama derives its strength from the lyric source
+of a man's accusation of himself. _Le Cloître_ is a paraphrase of _Les
+Moines_, the book of the monks. Here again all the characters are
+gathered together in the cool corridors of a monastery--the gentle, the
+wild, the feudal, the wrathful, the childlike, the learned monk; here,
+however, they do not act in isolation, but with all their strength the
+one against the other. They fight for the prior's chair, which is really
+the symbol of something higher. For just as in _Les Moines_ every
+individual monk expressed symbolically some virtue of Catholicism and a
+distinct idea of God, here the prior's chair decides the question who is
+the most deserving of God. For his successor the old prior has
+designated Balthasar, a nobleman whom the monastery has sheltered for
+years. But he had only taken refuge there because he had killed his own
+father, thus escaping secular justice, and now he feels the
+consciousness of his guilt burning, feels the exasperated struggle
+between his own conscience and the lighter conscience of the others, who
+have long since forgiven him. And he cannot feel himself free before he
+has made his confession before the assembled monks, and even then only
+when he has repeated the confession, against the will of the monastery,
+to the people, and surrendered himself to the secular judges. The Roman
+Catholic idea of confession is here wonderfully in agreement with
+Dostoieffsky's conception of salvation by confession, of deliverance by
+suffering self-imposed. In three climaxes of equal force at the end of
+each of the three acts the tragic confession bursts into flame--first
+born of fear, then of a sense of justice, and at the last positively
+conceived as a pleasure; and here in these superb lyric ecstasies rest
+the strong pinions which bear the tragedy.
+
+In the second, the social tragedy _Les Aubes,_ the scenario is the
+present time. It has the purple scenery of _Les Villes Tentaculaires_,
+of the cities with the arms of polypi, which drain the blood of the poor
+dying country. Beggars, paupers, those who are starving, those who have
+been evicted, march to Oppidomagnum, the modern industrial city, and
+besiege it. It is the past once again storming the future. In the
+lyrical trilogy this struggle had been shaped in a hundred visionary
+instances; here, however, the bright sky of reconciliation is arched
+above the battle-field, over the realities hovers the dream. For here
+the future joins hands with the present. The great tribune, Hérénien,
+breaks the backbone of this battle and shows himself the hero of a new
+morality by secretly admitting the enemy into the city--in the old sense
+the action of a traitor--by yielding and thus transforming the struggle
+into a reconciliation. He is the tragic bearer of the moral idea that
+enmity may be overcome by goodness, and he falls as the first martyr of
+his faith. Verhaeren's social conception, his superb description of
+realities, here merge slowly in a Utopia; the dawns of the new days
+begin to shine above the pasts that are dead; the din of rebellion fades
+away in harmony. This drama, like the others, is far remote from the
+possibilities of the majority of theatres, because of the fact that here
+too an ethical idea is expressed with all the glow and ecstasy which as
+a rule in modern dramas is only found in the utterance of erotic desire.
+
+The third tragedy, _Philip II_., is a national drama, although its scene
+is not laid in Flanders. Much as Charles de Coster in his _Thyl
+Ulenspiegel_ had, with a Fleming's deadly hatred, seen in Philip II. the
+hereditary enemy of liberty, Verhaeren, who with the lyric poetry of
+his _Toute la Flandre_ became the representative singer of his native
+land, painted this gloomy figure with hatred. Philip II. is here, as in
+_Thyl Ulenspiegel,_ the hard, inflexible king who would fain put life
+out because it burns too red for him, who wishes to have the world as
+cool and marble-like as the chambers of the Escorial. Here of a sudden
+the reverse side of Roman Catholicism, whose passion was immortalised in
+_Le Cloître_, is rent open; its pitilessness and asceticism; its
+obstinate effort to overthrow the irrefragable joy of life. Don Carlos,
+however, is the fervent friend of the people, the friend of Flanders; he
+is the will to enjoyment, to merry moods, to passion. And this struggle
+between the 'yes' and the 'no' of life, this fight of Verhaeren's own
+lyric crisis, this fight between the denial and the passionate approval
+of enjoyment--at bottom, toe, the deepest cause of the war between Spain
+and the Netherlands--is here symbolised in characters. Of course, any
+comparison with Schiller's _Don Carlos_ must tell against Verhaeren, for
+the German drama is far more dramatic and conceived on a scale of
+greater magnificence; but Verhaeren did not aim at a complete rounding
+off, at a plenitude of characters; all that he wanted was to show these
+two feelings in their struggle with each other, the enthusiasm of life
+and its suppression by force. A comparison with Schiller's drama best
+shows Verhaeren's disregard of dramatic canons, and at the same time
+the immense new lyric power of the play. For Spain is here seen with a
+strength and intensity of vision which is probably without a parallel in
+tragedy. The cold, hypocritical atmosphere can be felt; and better than
+from words the character of Philip can be perceived in that one silent
+scene in which he suddenly appears stealthily creeping to watch his son
+in the arms of the countess, and then, without a gleam in his rigid
+eyes, without the slightest movement of anger, vanishes again into the
+dark. Behind him, however, behind the spy and the eavesdropper, glides
+another shadow, the monk of the Inquisition: the eavesdropper is himself
+shadowed, the ruler is himself ruled. Visions like these, with the
+ecstasy of certain scenes, are the strongest motive power in Verhaeren's
+poetic construction. His dramatic art, like the art of his lyrics, does
+not rise in a steady ascent, but in sudden wild leaps and starts.
+
+Only in his last drama, _Hélène de Sparte_, has Verhaeren come nearer to
+the accepted conception of the dramatic. That is characteristic of his
+organic development. For now that he is in the years when passion of
+necessity cools, harmony grows dear to him; and he who through all the
+years of his youth and prime was a revolutionary, now recognises the
+necessity of inner laws. By its mere intellectual substance this tragedy
+expresses the veering round: it is nothing else than the longing from
+passion to harmony, Helen's flight from adventures to repose. And the
+return is to be found again in the verse, for Verhaeren here for the
+first time takes up the traditional French metre; his form, though yet
+free, approaches the Alexandrine. The tragedy of Helen is the tragedy of
+beauty. Helen is one of those antique characters who in Greek literature
+were only sketched in fleeting lines, characters whom a modern poet is
+now entitled to fill in with his own fate. For from the Greek sources we
+really knew nothing about her personal fate; we only knew the effect she
+exercised, only the reflection of her personality on others, not that of
+others on her. She was the queen who inflamed all men; who was the cause
+of great wars; the woman for whose sake murder on murder was committed;
+who was snatched from one bed to another; for love of whom Achilles
+arose from the dead; who passed her life circled by disastrous passion.
+But whether she herself shared these passions, whether she grew by them
+or suffered by them, the poets tell us nothing. Verhaeren in his drama
+has now attempted to depict the tragedy of the woman who endures fearful
+suffering because she is always desired in lust and no more; who is
+consumed by the torture of being ever robbed from lover by lover; of
+never knowing the look of pure eyes, calm converse, quiet breathing; who
+is cursed always to stand at the pyre of passion, with the flames of
+men always blazing round her. Whoever looks at her at once desires her,
+snatches her; none waits and asks whether he serves her will; she is
+robbed like a chattel; she glides from hand to hand. In Verhaeren's
+drama Helen has returned home, a woman tired, tired of all unrest, of
+all her triumphs, tired of love; a woman hating her own beauty because
+it creates unrest, longing for nothing but old age, when none shall
+desire her more and her days shall be calm. Menelaus has brought her
+home, rescued her from all that stifling steam of criminal passion; now
+she would breathe quietly, live calm days, and be faithful to him. She
+desires no more than this. No passion can tempt her more. 'I have seen
+the flaring of so many flames that now I love only the hearth's glow and
+the lamp' is the expression of her poignant resignation. But fate will
+not yet let her go. Verhaeren has here seized on the great idea of the
+Greeks that everything that is superhuman on earth, every excessive
+gift, even that of beauty, is pursued as a hybrid by the envy of the
+gods, and must be paid for with pain. Too great beauty is no profit, but
+a tragic gift. And hardly has Helen returned, to rest and be happy, to
+be like everybody else, than new clouds roll themselves up above her
+head. Her own brother desires her; her enemy Electra desires her; her
+husband is murdered for her sake; and the old fearful battle threatens
+to break out anew for the possession of her body. Now she flees, away
+from men, out into nature. And here again, with the vision of genius,
+Verhaeren approaches Greek feeling. The forest is not dead to him, but
+animate; life does not stop at human beings; fauns emerge from the
+bushes, naiads from the rivers, bacchantes from the mountains, and all
+swarm round Helen in her despair, luring her to their lust, till she
+flees to Zeus in death.
+
+It is characteristic of Verhaeren that he has made even this tragedy,
+the tragedy of Helen, anerotic, or better anti-erotic. Perhaps the
+slight interest which has hitherto been manifested in Verhaeren's
+dramas, and indeed partly in his whole work, may be ascribed to the fact
+that, in comparison with the other poets of his day, he has held himself
+aloof from erotic subjects, that the problem of love has only recently,
+in the years of his maturity, begun to interest him as a theme for his
+art. From the first Verhaeren concentrated all the passion which others
+lavished on the erotic in purely intellectual things, in enthusiasm, in
+admiration. In his dramas woman plays an almost subordinate rôle, and
+_Le Cloître_ is perhaps the only important drama of our days which does
+not show a single woman among its characters and in its inner circle of
+problems. By this fact alone his dramatic aim strays too far from the
+interests of our public. For it is from a purely intellectual conflict
+that Verhaeren seeks to disengage that height and heat of passion which
+hitherto was known only in erotic themes; and therefore the exaltation
+strikes the majority of an audience as strange, and leaves them unmoved.
+All our contemporaries who seek art only in the theatre are too
+indifferent and timid to be snatched up, for a purely ethical problem,
+into an ecstasy so burning, so persistently lit with convulsive
+lightnings. This is the only explanation I can find for the opposition
+to Verhaeren's dramas, which are so full of beauty and of living,
+dramatic, passionate situations, and which, above all, contain something
+new, a new dramatic style. This very kindling of prose to verse was a
+revelation. But the whole dramatic aim is different in Verhaeren to that
+which obtains on the stage of to-day. His aim is not to excite interest,
+not to produce fear and compassion, but enthusiasm. He does not wish to
+occupy the minds of his audience, but to carry them away into his
+rhythm. He wishes to make them drunk with his great excitement, because
+only he who gazes in enthusiasm is capable of recognising these supreme
+passions; he wishes to make the spectators as feverish as the characters
+they see before them on the stage; he wishes to make their blood fiery;
+wishes to raise them above all cool, calm, and critical contemplation.
+His whole temperament, which drives along in the direction of
+superabundance; his art, which only fulfils its purpose in ecstasy;
+require impassioned actors and an impassioned audience. To create the
+ideal atmosphere which Verhaeren demands for his dramas would require an
+actor of kindred genius who should have no fear of being called
+emotional, and who would hurl the verses down like cataracts,
+emphasising like a demagogue and at the same time unfolding all the
+magnificence of the rhythm. For the poet asks for nothing save a feeling
+of enthusiasm corresponding to that which first created the poem in him.
+His intention is not to convince by logic, not to dazzle by pictures,
+but to whip up and carry along with him into that ultimate dizzy feeling
+which to him is alone identical with the highest form of the feeling of
+life--into passion.
+
+In Germany _Le Cloître_,[1] as staged by Max Reinhardt, and again in the
+Deutsches Volkstheater in Vienna, has conquered the interest of a
+literary public and triumphed unreservedly over the obstacle of its own
+strangeness. There has been an exemplary production of _Philip II._ in
+the Munich Künstlertheater; _Hélène de Sparte_ on the other hand has not
+yet found the setting it demands. As bodied forth in Paris by Ida
+Rubinstein, with decorations of a grandiose barbarism by Bakst, with a
+ground-colouring of music, it was effective more by the external
+magnificence of this somewhat sensationally advertised _mise en scène_
+than by its poetic qualities, smothered as they were by the
+accessories. A production which shall do justice to the play, leaving
+its pure lyric line unbedizened with glaring arabesques, is still
+waiting as a task for some actor-manager of genius who possesses that
+highest and rarest quality of being able to subordinate himself to the
+utterance, who is anxious not to ruin a noble simplicity by a spurious
+plenitude.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] A version of _Le Cloître_, by Mr. Osman Edwards, was successfully
+produced by Miss Horniman at the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester in 1910.
+
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+COMPLETING FORCES
+
+
+LES VISAGES DE LA VIE--LES FORCES TUMULTUEUSES--LA MULTIPLE
+SPLENDEUR--TOUTE LA FLANDRE--LES HEURES CLAIRES --LES HEURES
+D'APRÈS-MIDI--LES HEURES DU SOIR--LES RYTHMES SOUVERAINS
+--LES BLÉS MOUVANTS
+
+1900-1914
+
+
+
+
+COSMIC POETRY
+
+                     ... Les vols
+     Vers la beauté toujours plus claire et plus certaine.
+                                        É.V., 'Les Spectacles.'
+
+The poetic conquest of life represents, as it were, a process of
+combustion. Every poet feeds the flame of his inner being, his artistic
+passion, with the things of the world around him, transmutes them into
+flame, and himself shoots on high and dies down with them. The more the
+flame cools with the feebler circulation of the blood, the weaker grows
+this fire, and gradually the pure crystals, the residue from this battle
+of the inner flame with the things of reality, are separated from this
+process of combustion. Verhaeren's work was in his youth and prime a
+flame exceedingly hot, lawless, free, and flaring like the very years of
+his youth and prime. Now, however, in the work of his fifties, now that
+passion has cooled, the yearning is revealed to find the goal of this
+passion, the inherent lawfulness of this unrest. Enthusiasm for the
+present, poetic consumption of the world in visions without the residue
+of philosophy and logical knowledge, no longer suffice him. For all
+deeper contemplation of the present is unthinkable without an exceeding
+of its limits: all that is, is at the same time something that has been
+and something that will be. Nothing is so entirely the present that it
+is not intimately connected with the past and the future. The eternal
+and the permanent is the inward side of all phenomena. And the more the
+poet turns his visions from the exterior, from the pictorial, to the
+inner world, to psychology, the more he descends from external phenomena
+to the roots of forces, the more he must apprehend the permanent behind
+the transitoriness of things. No perception of a contemporary state is
+fertile unless it is impregnated with the perception of laws that are
+independent of time, unless the changing phenomena are recognised as
+transformations of the unchangeable primordial phenomenon. This
+transition from maturity to age, from contemplation to knowledge,
+corresponds to a new artistic transition in the incomparably organic
+development of this poet. A transition: no longer a re-formation, but a
+formation which moves both forwards and backwards, which is at the same
+time an evolution and a retrogression, just as the poetic form of
+Verhaeren's poetry no longer undergoes a transformation, but is
+petrified. What a man has acquired in the years of his prime is an
+inalienable possession; its value can be further increased only by
+knowledge, by the appraising of the possession. It may be said that a
+man who has passed his prime experiences nothing new: the static
+equilibrium is realised; what has been experienced is only the better
+understood. The experience is no longer a struggle, no longer a state of
+unrest, something that slips away; it is a possession. What passion has
+fought for and won with a leap is now set in order and appraised at its
+true value, by calm. This transition from youth to age is in Verhaeren,
+to use Nietzsche's phrase, a transition from the Dionysiac to the
+Apollinarian, from a plethora to harmony. His yearning is now _vivre
+ardent et clair_, to live passionately, but at the same time clearly to
+preserve his inner fire, but at the same time to lose his unrest.
+Verhaeren's books in these years grow more and more crystalline; the
+fire in them no longer blazes openly like a flaring pyre, but glitters
+and sparkles as with the thousand facets of a precious stone. The smoke
+and the unrest of the fire die down, and now the pure residues are
+clarified. Visions have become ideas, the wrestling earthly energies are
+now eternal immutable laws.
+
+The will of these last years, of these last works, is the will to
+realise a cosmic poem. In the trilogy of the cities Verhaeren had laid
+hold on the universe as it lies around us to-day; he had snatched it to
+him and overcome it. In passionate visions he had shaped its image,
+achieved its form, and now it stood beside the actual world as his own.
+But a poet who would create the whole world for himself, the whole
+infinite vista of its possibilities by the side of its actualities, must
+give it everything: not only its form, not only its face, but its soul
+as well, its organism, its origin, and its evolution. He must not merely
+apprehend its pictorial aspect and its mechanical energy, he must give
+it an encyclopædic form. He must create a mythology for it, a new
+morality, a new history, a new system of dynamics, a new system of
+ethics. Above it or in it he must place a God who acts and transforms.
+He must fashion it in his poetry not only as something that is, not only
+as something in the present, but as something that has been and is
+becoming, something that is part and parcel of the past and of the
+future too. It must ring out the old and ring in the new. And this will
+to create a cosmic poem is to be found in Verhaeren's new and most
+precious books--_Les Visages de la Vie, Les Forces Tumultueuses, La
+Multiple Splendeur, Les Rythmes Souverains_---books which by their mere
+title announce the effort to include the dome of heaven in their vast
+embrace. They are the pillars of a mighty structure, the great stanzas
+of the cosmic poem. They are no longer a conversation of the poet with
+himself and contemporary feeling; they are a pronouncement addressed to
+all the ages. _S'élancer vers l'avenir_ is the longing they express: a
+turning away from all the pasts to speak to the future. The lyric
+element in them steps beyond the boundary-line of poetry. It kindles the
+neighbouring domains of philosophy and religion, kindles them to new
+possibilities. For not only æsthetically would Verhaeren come to an
+understanding with realities; not by poetry only would he overcome the
+new possibilities; he would fain master them morally and religiously as
+well. The task of these last and most important books of verse is no
+longer to apprehend the universe in individual phenomena, but to impress
+its new form on a new law. In _Les Visages de la Vie_ Verhaeren has in
+individual poems glorified the eternal forces, gentleness, joy,
+strength, activity, enthusiasm; in _Les Forces Tumultueuses_ the
+mysterious dynamics of union shining through all forms of the real; in
+_La Multiple Splendeur_ the ethics of admiration, the joyous
+relationship of man with things and with himself; and in _Les Rythmes
+Souverains_ he has celebrated the most illustrious heroes of his ideals.
+For life has long since ceased to be for him mere gazing and
+contemplation:
+
+     Car vivre, c'est prendre et donner avec liesse
+     ...................avide et haletant
+     Devant la vie intense et sa rouge sagesse![1]
+
+Description, poetic analysis, has gradually grown into a hymn, into
+'laudi del cielo, del mare, del mondo,' into songs of the whole world
+and of the ego, and of the harmony of the world's beauty in its union
+with the ego. The lyrical has here become cosmic feeling, knowledge has
+become ecstasy. Over and above the knowledge that there cannot be
+anything isolated, that everything is arranged and obeys the last
+uniform law of the universe, over and above this knowledge rises
+something still higher--over the contemplation of the world rises faith
+in the feeling of the world. The glorious optimism of these works ends
+in the religious confidence that all contrasts will be harmonised; that
+man will more and more be conscious of the earth; that every individual
+must discover his own law of the world in himself, the law that makes it
+possible for him to apprehend everything lyrically, with enthusiasm,
+with joy.
+
+Here Verhaeren's poetry far exceeds the boundary-line of literature; it
+becomes philosophy and it becomes religion. Verhaeren was from the very
+first an eminently religious man. In his childhood Catholicism was the
+deepest feeling of his life, but this Catholicism had perished in the
+crises of his adolescence, his religious feeling had given way to the
+rapt contemplation of all new things, to ecstasy inspired by the aspect
+of life. But now, when Verhaeren returns to the metaphysical, the old
+yearning is reawakened. The old gods are dead for him; Pan is dead, and
+Christ too. Now he feels the need of finding a new faith, a new
+certainty, a new God for the new sensation, this identity of I and
+world. The new conflicts have created a longing in him for a new
+equilibrium; his stormily religious feeling, determined to believe,
+needs new cognition. The image of the world would be incomplete without
+the God who rules it. All his yearning goes out to this God, and it
+finds its fulfilment. And this knowledge gives him the highest joy life
+can have, the loftiest pride life can bestow:
+
+      Voici l'heure qui bout de sang et de jeunesse.
+             *       *       *       *       *
+      Un vaste espoir, venu de l'inconnu, déplace
+      L'équilibre ancien dont les âmes sont lasses;
+             La nature paraît sculpter
+           Un visage nouveau à son éternité.[2]
+
+To chisel this new face of God is the aim of his last and most mature
+works, in which the obstinate 'no' of his youth has become the loud
+exulting 'yes' of life, in which the great possibilities of old have
+become an unsuspected opulent reality.
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'Un Soir' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[2] 'La Foule' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+
+
+
+THE LYRIC UNIVERSE
+
+     Il faut aimer, pour découvrir avec génie.
+                                        É.V., 'Un Soir.'
+
+
+If one is to understand Verhaeren's lyric work as a work of art, it must
+be kept in mind that he is a lyric poet, and a lyric poet only. A lyric
+poet only, not, however, in the limited sense of one who confines
+himself to the writing of lyric poems, but of one who, in a lofty and
+more extensive meaning of the term, transforms everything into emotion,
+who stands in a lyric relationship with all things, with the whole
+world. And since the innermost constitution of a man's talent
+unconsciously acts as the driving tendency, the direction of the aim of
+his life, his very fate and his conception of the world, since all this
+is so, the lyric poet that Verhaeren is must of necessity have a lyrical
+conception of the world, his cosmic feeling _must_ be lyrical. To say
+that he has confined himself to the lyric style would be to diminish his
+stature. It is true that in all Verhaeren's imaginative work--and it is
+of considerable volume--there is no prose. A very thin volume of short
+stories did indeed appear many years ago and has long been out of print;
+but how tentative and provisional it was in scope may be seen from the
+fact that Verhaeren later on turned one of the stories, that of the
+bell-ringer in the burning tower, into a poem. And I might mention a
+whole series of poems which at bottom are nothing but short stories, and
+others again which are saturated with dramatic excitement, quite
+unlyrical problems, but all of them lyrically conceived. And even in his
+criticism of art and in that penetrating and beautiful book of his on
+Rembrandt, in which he represents the organic connection of the artist
+with his native province almost as a personal experience, the
+outstanding passages live by their lyric enthusiasm. Many of the poems
+again are spiritualised theories of art. The origin of language or the
+sociological problem of emigration, the economic contrast of agrarianism
+and industrialism: in an essay such things might be calmly treated,
+coldly passed in review. But this is characteristic of Verhaeren, that
+he is unable to take a cold, faint interest in anything: consciously or
+unconsciously he must be carried away by enthusiasm for the things he
+contemplates. The ecstasy of his excitement involuntarily whips him out
+of a slow trot into lyric fervour. Poetry is to him, like his
+philosophy, like his ethics, a lyrical soaring. It is characteristic of
+the great lyric poets, of Walt Whitman, Dehmel, Carducci, Rilke, Stefan
+George, that at a certain height of their artistry they renounce all
+other than lyric forms. Here, as elsewhere, great things only seem
+possible of attainment by concentration, only by the poet's freeing
+himself from the trammels of all other experiments. Great lyric poetry
+as the art of a life only accrues from the renunciation of all other
+forms of poetry.
+
+Infinite enthusiasm, _le lyrisme universel_, a rapt visionary sensation
+of the earth rolling as it were in an eternal vibration through the
+cosmos, is the aim of Verhaeren's work. Not to describe the world in
+isolated poems, not to break it up in impressions, but to feel it as
+itself a flaring, flaming poem, _not to be one who contemplates the
+world, but one who feels it_, this is his highest yearning. A lyric art
+can only grow to such intentions as these from emotions not felt by
+other lyrists. It is not, as with most poets, from gentle crepuscular
+feelings, from vague states of melancholy, that such an impulse is
+crystallised to lyrical expression; here it is an overflowing fulness of
+feeling, a bright joy in life, that engenders his poem; an explosion
+which in the days of his debility was a paroxysm, which as time went on
+changed to a pure enthusiasm, but which was always an eruption of
+strength. Lyric art is here a discharge of the whole feeling of life.
+With Verhaeren the excitement does not sting the individual nerve; it
+spreads electrically, inflames the blood, contracts the muscles,
+produces an immense pressure, and then discharges the whole energy of a
+body saturated with health and strength. _The will to discharge strength
+is the basic form of Verhaeren's lyric emotion_. His aim is to instil
+inspiration--first of all into himself (since inspiration always
+represents a higher state of ecstasy), and then into others. His lyric
+art is above all a launching of himself into exaltation, 'le pouvoir
+magique de s'hypnotiser soi-même.'[1] He talks himself into passion,
+gives himself that impulsion which then bears others along with him. It
+is not a lack, a privation, not a complaint or a wish that his work
+expresses; it is a plethora, a superfluity of riches, a pressure. It is
+not a warding off of life but an eternal leaping at it. His poetry has
+not the modest longing of music to lure to reveries; it does not, like
+painting, seek to represent something: it would act like fiery wine; it
+would make all feelings strong and glowing, sink all hindrances, produce
+that sensation of lightness, of blessedness, that quivering intoxication
+which conquers all the heaviness of earth. His intention is to produce
+this state of drunkenness, 'non seulement la glorification de la nature
+mais la glorification même d'une vision intérieure.' And his attitude is
+not plaintive or defensive, it is the great spirited attitude of a hand
+raised and pointing out, 'regardez!' the adjuring attitude, 'dites!' or
+one that fires and animates, 'en avant!' but it is always a gesture from
+the poet's self towards something, always a swinging of his arms away
+from himself into the universe, always a pressing forward, a snatching
+away of himself from matter. And any one who really feels these poems
+feels, when the last line is read, that his blood is beating faster,
+feels that his body calls for exercise, feels the inspiration impelling
+him to action. _And this is the highest intention of Verhaeren's lyrical
+poetry, to animate, to quicken the blood, to fire the heart, to
+intensify vitality, to increase tenfold the sensation of life_.
+
+But not only in this basic emotion is Verhaeren sundered from all those
+other poets who fashion their verses from sadness, sickly longing,
+amorousness, and melancholy. Verhaeren's lyric poetry breathes in other
+realms, in another atmosphere. Verhaeren is what I should like to call a
+poet of the daylight, of the open air. If you peruse the lyric works of
+contemporary poets you will find that their moods mostly arise from
+states of dusk and darkness. Since they have only the power of
+reproducing blurred outlines, they are fond of landscapes softened by
+twilight; of night, when there is no hardness in things, when what they
+see meets them half-way, already shaping itself into verse. Like
+Tristan, they hate the day as the destroyer of poetry, and swathe
+themselves in the trembling chiaroscuro of twilight. But the really
+great lyric poets have always been poets of the daylight; poets of the
+day and of the light, as the Greeks were, to whom all things that were
+bathed in sun spoke of beauty and cheerfulness; poets of the day, as
+Walt Whitman was, the American; as all strong men have been who were
+filled with the zest of life. In Germany we have Dehmel to love, one of
+the few who have the courage to look right into the shining face of
+things without the fear of being blinded. But Verhaeren loves things the
+more the more intensive and decided they are, the more dazzling they
+are, the more their glaring colours clash. He does not surprise things
+when they are asleep, when they are resting and are helpless and at the
+mercy of poetry; he pounces on them when they are wideawake and can
+defend themselves with all their hardness from the attacks of their
+lyric lover. He loves the day, which places things side by side in harsh
+contrast; he loves the light, because it stimulates the blood; the rain
+that lashes the body; the wind that whips the skin; cold, noise, he
+loves everything that really and vehemently forces in upon him,
+everything that forces him to fight. He loves hard things more than soft
+and rounded things; loves that characteristic, black, and gloomy city
+Toledo more than golden, dreamy Florence; he loves the wind and the
+weather of frowning, tragic landscapes; he even loves noisy and
+thunderous cities pregnant with smoke and choking air. His nerves are
+not so morbidly sensitive that they respond to the least suggestion, the
+feeblest touch, and then stand impotent, fainting, when they are faced
+by the impetuous stimulants of robust life; his nerves are--not dull,
+but healthy. They respond strongly to whatever lays hold of them
+strongly. If the other poets are like supersensitive beings who are
+excited by every trifle and lose their self-control when really great
+demands are made upon them, Verhaeren is like one who is hard to
+irritate, but who, if he is really stung, strikes out with his fists.
+_And Verhaeren does not love the poetical things that come to meet one
+already clothed in beauty; he loves those that have first to be wrestled
+with and overcome. Herein lies the exceeding masculinity of his art_. No
+one could ever surmise, in reading a poem of Verhaeren's, that it was
+the work of a woman. And as a matter of fact Verhaeren has not yet found
+an audience among women. For he is not one who moans and begs for pity;
+he is no passive poet, but a fighter, one who wrestles with all strong,
+wild, and living things until they yield up to him their innermost
+beauty.
+
+And this struggle for the lyric mastery of individual sensations
+gradually becomes a struggle for all things, for the whole world. For
+Verhaeren does not wish to conceive of anything as unlyrical; does not
+wish to blow lyric fragments off the immense mass of reality; he wishes
+to sculpture it into a new shape; wishes to chisel the whole world into
+a lyric. And this is the secret of his lyric work; _this_ is his work,
+his task. Of a sudden we feel the distance between him and the majority
+of lyric poets. _They_ have the feelings of people who receive gifts;
+they regard the sensations which come fluttering towards them as so many
+gay butterflies, capture them, and pin them down. Verhaeren, however, is
+the fighter, the worker, who is constrained to conquer everything, to
+shape the whole world anew, to rebuild it nearer to his heart's
+enthusiasm. He is the lyric poet pictured by Carducci in an imperishable
+poem--not the idler gazing into empty space; not the gardener decking
+the paths that his lady's feet must tread, and gathering frail violets
+for her bosom.
+
+     Il poeta è un grande artiere,
+     Che al mestiere
+     Fece i muscoli d'acciaio,
+     Capo ha fier, collo robusto,
+     Nudo il busto,
+     Duro il braccio, e l'occhio gaio.
+
+And that 'picchia, picchia,' that rhythm of Carducci's, that beat of the
+bronze hammer of toil, rings in the measure of his verses. All his poems
+have been toiled for, fought for; they are a trophy, a meed of victory;
+nothing is a lucky gift. Verhaeren's manuscripts look like a
+battlefield. For he is not a poet who, in Goethe's sense, composes poems
+for particular occasions; he is never overpowered by a sudden chance
+idea: he transforms a problem of life, an actuality, or an intellectual
+phase into a lyric mood. After he has molten the poetic idea in his
+passion to a white heat, he hammers it into a poem by his rhythm. His
+works are complexes: individual ideas attract him; he sets a hedge round
+their poetical field, ploughs it, scatters the seed in it, and never
+returns to the scene. What he has once achieved has no longer any
+attraction for him. To him poetry is always a fight, always work, always
+a plan. The layman who would fain look upon a lyric poem as a gift
+fallen from heaven will perhaps have no liking for this conscious
+method; an artist, on the other hand, will recognise in it the strength
+of a wise restraint, concentration on one aim, the will to compose not a
+lyric poem but a lyric work. A poetic work like that of Verhaeren, the
+work of a life, is not created by chance feeling alone, and not by
+enthusiasm. Such a work of art has, like a drama, its intellectual laws,
+the conquering and distributing powers of the intelligence, instinct,
+and above all that unifying will which suffers no dead points, no gaps,
+no stains in the work. And it is from such a vast lyric will that this
+work has arisen. Verhaeren is no favoured child of fortune, dowered with
+art in his cradle; his blood is heavy, Teutonic blood; and, fortunately,
+that ease and suppleness of the artisan which in all departments of
+labour produces a ready mediocrity was as much wanting in him as all
+physical skill. Verhaeren's poetic work, his form, his rhythm, his idea,
+his philosophy, his architectonics, all this is something he has
+acquired by labour, something he has painfully produced by passion and
+an obstinate will; but for that very reason it is something organic.
+For Verhaeren is one of those who learn slowly, persistently, and
+surely, only from their own experience and never from others, but who
+never forget and lose what they have once acquired; one of those who
+grow as the things of Nature do, as trees grow into their strength ring
+by ring, and rise year by year higher above the earth to gaze farther
+and farther out beyond the horizons and nearer and nearer into the
+heavens.
+
+And just for this reason, because this evolution was so persistent,
+because it was so wholly based upon experience, is the ascending line in
+his work so harmonious and so organic. No other lyric work of our days
+is so much a symbol of the seasons, so much a mirror of human
+periodicity. The revolt of spring, the sultriness of summer, the
+fruitage of autumn, and the cool clearness of winter gently merge in it,
+the one into the other. In his first books, at an age when many
+precocious poets have finished their development, he was still wrestling
+for his new form, for his expression. Nor did he at that time soon
+arrive at the heart of things; he remained for a long time absorbed in
+the purely picturesque contemplation of their external aspects. Then he
+attempted experiments, and freed himself in revolution. But in his
+beginnings he was always a student, an experimenter. In his second
+period, having really penetrated below the surface, he found his own
+form, like every master, and subdued the internal with the external. But
+now that material is conquered, he that was a student and is now a
+master will of necessity be a teacher, and feel impelled to deduce
+forces from phenomena, laws from forces, the eternal from the earthly.
+From vacant contemplation he had risen to passionate creation, to active
+creation of art. The supreme creation of art has ever been the
+converting of the unconscious into consciousness, the recognition and
+knowledge of the laws of art; from the real the path proceeds to that
+which transcends reality, to faith and to religion. Like every really
+organic poet, Verhaeren has had to repeat the ascent of universal
+history in his own evolution.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Albert Mockel, _Emile Verhaeren_.
+
+
+
+
+SYNTHESES
+
+     Réunir notre esprit et le monde
+     Dans les deux mains d'une très simple loi profonde.
+                                       É.V., 'L'Attente.'
+
+
+After the great visions of the cities, after the wonderful
+interpretations of democracy, there was a moment of appeasement in
+Verhaeren's work--a lyrical intermezzo of little books: an almanac of
+the months unfolding in short poems, the cosy happiness of wedded love
+enshrined in grateful song, the legends of Flanders told in richly
+coloured pictures, and then, in the great pentalogy _Toute la Flandre_,
+the cities, coasts, heroes, and great men of his native province
+compressed in one single picture. But after that Verhaeren takes up once
+again his old path across the earth; passes again through the roaring
+cities, the pregnant fields; wanders along the sea-shore; once again
+through the landscapes of _Les Flamandes_ and _Les Moines_, of _Les
+Villes Tentaculaires_ and _Les Campagnes Hallucinées_. It is now the
+return of the spiral in Goethe's sense of evolution; the return to the
+same point, but on a higher level, with a loftier outlook, in a narrower
+circle, and for that reason nearer to the last, the highest point. Once
+again Verhaeren surveys the modern world: now, however, with different
+eyes, which no longer remain resting on the aspect of the world, but
+press farther to the cause of all. What he had formerly seen sensuously,
+the things whose values he had æsthetically estimated and transmuted, he
+now looks at from the intellectual side, that he may estimate their
+value morally. He no longer sees each thing separately, no longer adds
+picture to picture, vision to vision, like a game of coloured cards: he
+now unites them in one living chain. He no longer searches through
+individual and detached phenomena; he now sees them together against the
+background of his lofty intention to weld them into one single picture.
+Now he composes, not individual poems, but fragments of his world-poem.
+For, from the time that Verhaeren began to look at things with conscious
+enthusiasm, they assumed different forms. The straining of his epoch no
+longer seems to him to be a solitary manifestation of energy, but only a
+Protean form of the eternal discharge of vigour; the will to life no
+longer seems to him to be the deed of individual men, but the vitalised
+primitive will of all humanity. And so, just as of old he attempted in
+his vision a synthesis of energies, he now sees laws flowing into one
+supreme and highest thing, into a cosmic law.
+
+Lyric exaltation now arches the dream of its laws over reality. But it
+is no longer the mere dream of a youth in expectancy of life--the
+anæmic, vague, dark, restless dream--but a man's longing to get behind
+life and follow it to its earthly limit. It is a Utopia enhancing
+realities beyond themselves; it is the dream of Godhead in things. In
+the whole world Verhaeren sees a cosmic effort. 'Le monde est trépidant
+de trains et de navires.'[1] The whole world is excited with human
+activity and effort; manifestations of the feeling of life flame
+everywhere; everywhere humanity is fighting for something invisible and
+perhaps unattainable. But whereas of old the poet estimated the value of
+every separate energy, now he comprehends all energies as one uniform
+manifestation, recognises behind the unconscious activity of the
+individual the sway of something greater--the bourne of all humanity.
+All who work in the material of the temporal only symbolise eternal
+forces--intoxication, energy, conquest, joy, error, expectation, Utopia.
+And it is to these forces, or rather to these forms of the force at the
+root of all things, that his poems are addressed. In _Les Visages de la
+Vie_ he seeks to describe yearning in all its forms and aims; its
+distribution in human labour, its restlessness, its vigour, and, above
+all, its beauty. But not only human manifestations now appear to him in
+a closer cohesion, the synthesis of realism and metaphysics now makes
+his relationship to elementary things richer and more heroic. Now, when
+he treats some motive he had already treated in the first books, and
+these poems of the first and last periods are compared, it is with
+astonishment and admiration that you trace the silent growth of these
+last years. I will mention one example. He had already sung a song to
+the wind. But the wind at that time was to him the evil storm that
+tousles cottages, shakes chimneys, forces its way into rooms, rages
+across country, and brings the winter. It was a senseless power,
+beautiful in its senselessness, but aimless, an incomprehensible
+element, a detached phenomenon of Nature. Now, however, the poet in his
+maturity looks upon it as the wanderer over the undying world, one that
+has seen all countries, that drives ships over seas, that has sated
+itself with the perfume of strange flowers and brings it from far away,
+that penetrates our chest like an aroma and steels and expands it. Now
+he loves the wind as one of the thousand things of the earth which
+contribute to the intensification of his vital feeling.
+
+     Si j'aime, admire et chante avec folie,
+     Le vent,
+            *       *       *       *       *
+     C'est qu'il grandit mon être entier et c'est qu'avant
+     De s'infiltrer, par mes poumons et par mes pores,
+     Jusques au sang dont vit mon corps,
+     Avec sa force rude ou sa douceur profonde,
+     Immensément, il a étreint le monde.[2]
+
+So, too, a tree becomes to him the image of the eternal renewal of
+strength, of resistance to the hardness of winter and of fate, of the
+will to new beauty in the spring. A mountain no longer appears to him as
+a chance raising of the landscape, but a great and mighty thing in whose
+keeps secrets lie, ores, and the source of springs, from whose summit,
+however, our eyes can sweep the world. The forest interprets itself to
+him as the labyrinth of a thousand paths, and as the many-voiced anthem
+of life: everything in nature becomes a freshening and a vivifying of
+this vitality. _An absolute transmutation of values has taken place from
+the time that he has comprehended things as parts of the world's entity,
+and as themselves an entity_. Travel, formerly a flight from reality,
+now becomes to him the opening out of new distances, of new
+possibilities; dream appears to him no longer as an illusion, but as the
+capacity of intensifying the real from its present to a future state.
+Europe is no longer to him a group of nations, a geographical idea, but
+the great symbol of conquest, money, gold, he no longer regards
+contemptuously as a materialising of life, but as a new spur for new
+ambition. And the sea, which in every succeeding work of his sings its
+unquiet rhythm, is no longer the murderous power that eats into the
+land, but the holy tide, the symbol of constant strength in eternal
+unrest; it is to him 'la mer nue et pure, comme une idée.'[3] Since
+everything coheres, he feels related to all in a touching brotherhood
+with things; he no longer feels the presence of things, he loves them
+like a piece of himself; he feels the sea physically in himself
+
+     Ma peau, mes mains et mes cheveux
+     Sentent la mer
+     Et sa couleur est dans mes yeux.[4]
+
+And so, just as his vital feeling is renewed every time he comes into
+contact with the waves, he believes in a physical resurrection of the
+body out of the sea, believes that his rising from the water is a
+_nouveau moment de conscience_. Verhaeren has returned to the great
+cohesion: in Nature and in man there is no longer for him any phenomenon
+which might not become a symbol for him, a symbol of the great vital
+instinct, to stimulate and fire his vitality.
+
+And since he now responds to all things with this one feeling, a uniform
+conception of the world must involuntarily result from this unity of
+feeling. _To the unity of enthusiasm corresponds the unity of the world,
+the monistic feeling_. Just as he himself derives nothing but an
+intensification and exaltation of his feelings from all things, nothing
+but the very sensation of life, all phenomena and activities must be a
+synthesis, all forces must flow into one single force as rivers flow
+into the ocean, all laws must merge in one single law
+
+     Toute la vie, avec ses lois, avec ses formes,
+     --Multiples doigts noueux de quelque main énorme--
+     S'entr'ouvre et se referme en un poing: l'unité.[5]
+
+And thus, this straining of all humanity, discharged in a thousand
+forms, must be something in common, a fight against something lying
+outside of itself, against a resistance which still makes life seem
+hard, dull, and turbid. This fight of humanity cannot be other than
+directed against something that impedes the sensation of life. And this,
+the only thing which struggles against humanity, is in Verhaeren's eyes
+the supremacy of Nature, the mystery of divine intervention, the
+subjection of man to fate--in short, all divinity that does not reside
+in man. As soon as man is dependent on nobody except himself and his own
+strength, he too will attain the great joyousness of all the things of
+Nature.
+
+_This fight of man to become God, this fight for his independence, his
+freedom from chance and the supernatural--this is the great metaphysical
+idea of Verhaeren's work_. His last books seek to represent nothing else
+than this one highest battle of man, this struggle to be free from all
+that is laid upon him, not by himself, but by Nature, from all that
+impedes his will to become a thing of Nature, an elementary force,
+himself. This struggle is the highest and purest effort, for
+
+     Rien n'est plus haut, malgré l'angoisse et le tourment,
+     Que la bataille avec l'énigme et les ténèbres.[6]
+
+Man in this battle defends himself against darkness, against what is
+unknown, against Heaven, against all laws that restrict his expansion;
+the whole aim of man, the aim he has unconsciously been following for a
+thousand years, is independence, is to become a law unto himself:
+
+     L'homme dans l'univers n'a qu'un maître, lui-même,
+     Et l'univers entier est ce maître, dans lui.[7]
+
+To-day he is still counteracted by chance, or, as many conceive it, by
+divinity. Wholly to conquer this, to substitute the determination of
+one's own destiny for chance, will be the great task of the future. Much
+has been taken from chance already. Lightning, the most dangerous power
+of heaven, is conquered; distances are bridged over; the forms of Nature
+are changed; social communities have by common action diverted the
+iniquity of the weather; diseases are from year to year being fathomed
+and checked; more and more every incalculable element is being brought
+within the range of calculation and fore-sight. But all that is unknown
+must more and more be the booty of man, whose highest will is 'fouiller
+l'inconnu.'[8] More and more his eyes penetrate the subterranean and
+mysterious workings of Nature.
+
+     Or aujourd'hui c'est la réalité
+     Secrète encor, mais néanmoins enclose
+     Au cours perpétuel et rythmique des choses,
+
+     Qu'on veut, avec ténacité,
+     Saisir, pour ordonner la vie et sa beauté
+     Selon les causes.[9]
+
+For this battle everybody is a soldier in man's war of liberation, all
+of us stand invisibly ranked together. Everybody who wrests from Nature
+in increment to knowledge, who does something never done before,
+everybody who by poetry fires others to action, tears off a piece of the
+veil. With every step forward that man takes against the dark, with
+every foot of ground he conquers, divinity loses strength to him; and
+this will go on until at length nothing remains of the God of old, until
+the identity of the two ideas humanity and divinity is unconsciously
+accomplished.
+
+     Héros, savant, artiste, apôtre, aventurier,
+     Chacun troue à son tour le mur noir des mystères
+     Et, grâce à ces labeurs groupés et solitaires,
+     L'être nouveau se sent l'univers tout entier.
+
+Seen from this height, professions assume a new poetic value. In the
+front rank of fighting men Verhaeren sees those the effort of whose life
+it is to acquire knowledge--the men of science. Verhaeren is perhaps the
+only one among modern poets who has conceived of science as of perfectly
+equal value with poetry, _who has discovered new moral and religious
+values in science, just as he had already discovered new æsthetic values
+in industrialism and democracy_. Most poets had hitherto looked upon
+science as a hindrance, because they were afraid of clear things as they
+were afraid of real things. They looked upon science as the destroyer of
+myths, the negation of every noble superstition which in their eyes was
+indissolubly connected with the poetical. But just as machinery seemed
+to them to be ugly, because in the machines they saw beauty had
+retreated from the outer to the interior form, here too the new ethical
+value is hidden not in the method but in the aim. Verhaeren esteems
+science as the great fighter for the new conception of the world: 'Le
+monde entier est repensé par leurs cervelles.'[10] He knows that the
+little increments to knowledge which are continually being made in our
+days in thousands of places, in sanatoria and lecture-rooms,
+observatories and studies, with microscopes and chemical analyses,
+weighing and calculation, with measures and numbers, that these little
+additions to knowledge may, by comparison and reproduction, grow into
+great creative discoveries which will immensely enrich our vital
+feeling. And this hymn to science is at the same time a hymn to our
+epoch; for no epoch before ours has so consciously bought for the
+advancement of knowledge, none has been so replete with the longing for
+new knowledge and the transmutation of values:
+
+     L'acharnement à tout peser, à tout savoir
+     Fouille la forêt drue et mouvante des êtres.[11]
+
+In inspired words Verhaeren celebrates science as the highest effort of
+our age as of the past; for he knows that what to us to-day is
+presupposed and self-evident was a thousand years-ago the goal of the
+most ardent effort, that the road we pace indolently to-day is soaked
+with the blood of martyrs.
+
+     Dites! quels temps versés au gouffre des années,
+     Et quelle angoisse ou quel espoir des destinées,
+     Et quels cerveaux chargés de noble lassitude
+     A-t-il fallu pour faire un peu de certitude?
+            *       *       *       *       *
+     Dites! les feux et les bûchers; dites! les claies;
+     Les regards fous, en des visages d'effroi blanc;
+     Dites! les corps martyrisés, dites! les plaies
+     Criant la vérité, avec leur bouche en sang.[12]
+
+But he knows equally well that the acquisitions of to-day are again only
+hypotheses for the new truths of to-morrow. Error is inevitable, but
+even error opens out new ways. In the beautiful idea of Brezina, the
+Czech poet, all ideal aims are floating islands that recede as we
+approach them. The highest aim is in effort itself, in the life which
+effort intensifies. Verhaeren's optimism here guards his marches against
+banality, for he is sufficient of a mystic to know that it is the
+unknowable and the inaccessible that lend all things their impenetrable
+beauty. But the knowledge of this must not scare enthusiasm away:
+
+     Partons quand même, avec notre âme inassouvie,
+     Puisque la force et que la vie
+     Sont au delà des vérités et des erreurs.[13]
+
+What if a few last things remain eternally inscrutable: 'plutôt que d'en
+peupler les coins par des chimères, nous préférons ne point savoir.'[14]
+Rather a world without gods than one with false gods, rather incomplete
+knowledge than false knowledge.
+
+Here, where the heroes of science reach the limits of what is possible
+to them, a new group must stand by their side and help them in their
+work. These are the poets, who preach faith where knowledge ends. They
+must find the synthesis between science and religion, between the
+earthly and the divine, the new synthesis--_religious confidence in
+science_. Their optimism must force their fellow-men to have faith in
+science, as in earlier days they had faith in gods: though proofs fail
+them, they must demand from this new religion what the early fathers
+demanded for the old religion. And he himself, Verhaeren, he who
+once--here again a bitter 'no' is turned into an exulting 'yes'--said in
+his beginnings
+
+     Toute science enferme au fond d'elle le doute,
+     Comme une mère enceinte étreint un enfant mort,[15]
+
+he himself is to-day the first of confident enthusiasts. Where
+individual minds are still at war--
+
+     'Oh! ces luttes là-haut entre ces dieux humains![16]--
+
+where their knowledge has not yet found a bridge, poets must with
+enthusiasm and confidence surmise a path. They must link law with
+perception; and in the same measure as the scientists have by knowledge
+fed their enthusiasm, they in their turn must feed knowledge by their
+confidence. If they have no proofs of actualities, their faith dowers
+them with the confidence to say, 'nous croyons déjà ce que les autres
+sauront.'[17] They scent and surmise new things before they are born;
+they trust hypotheses before they are proved. Already,
+
+     Pendant que disputent et s'embrouillent encor,
+     À coups de textes morts
+     Et de dogmes, les sages,[18]
+
+they hear the hovering wings of the new truth. They already believe in
+what later generations will know; they derive vital joy from what their
+descendants will be the first to possess. They doubt in nothing; not
+that man will conquer the air, quell disease, make life cheerful and
+easier; they do not despair in progress, and in their ecstasy they leap
+over all obstacles. 'Le cri de Faust n'est plus le nôtre';[19] the
+question as to 'yes' and 'no' has long since been joyfully answered in
+the affirmative, exults the poet; we no longer hesitate between the
+possibility and the impossibility of knowledge, we believe in it, and
+faith and confidence is already the highest knowledge of life. In this
+optimism of poets other discoverers of knowledge must now fulfil their
+growth, from these dreams they must derive strength for their activity;
+all men must in this way complete one another, that it may be possible
+for them to beleaguer darkness, perfect the conquest of God, and
+
+     Emprisonner quand même, un jour, l'éternité,
+     Dans le gel blanc d'une immobile vérité.[20]
+
+For this new truth, the Man-God whom they are to discover, poets and
+scholars are the new saints; and his servants are all those whose brows
+are fiery with the fever of work, whose hands are scorched with
+experiments, whose nerves are strained by constant effort, whose eyes
+are fatigued by books. To all of these Verhaeren's hymn is addressed:
+
+     Qu'ils soient sacrés par les foules, ces hommes
+     Qui scrutèrent les faits pour en tirer les lois.[21]
+
+But still farther reaches Verhaeren's enthusiasm for those who help in
+the new work, for the 'saccageurs d'infini.'[22] Not only the thinker
+and the poet extend the horizon of life, but each one also who creates
+and is in any way at work. Only the man who creates is really alive and
+really a man--'seul existe qui crée.'[23] And so his hymn is likewise
+addressed to those who toil with their hands, to those who, without
+knowing the aim, toil stolidly day by day in mines and fields; for they
+too build the face of the earth, create mountains where there were none,
+rear lights by the sea's marge, construct machines and the huge
+telescopes that pry on the heavens: all of them forge the tools of
+knowledge and prepare the new era. Merchants who send across the ocean
+ships that spin threads from farthest shore to shore, they too weave the
+net of the great unity; traders who spread gold, who quicken the
+circulation of the world's blood, they too co-operate in the battle
+waged with the dark. It is their league and union which, first of all,
+gives humanity its great strength; they all prepare the hour, the
+moment, which must inevitably come.
+
+     Il viendra l'instant, où tant d'efforts savants et ingénus,
+     Tant de génie et de cerveaux tendus vers l'inconnu,
+     Quand même, auront bâti sur des bases profondes
+     Et jaillissant au ciel, la synthèse du monde![24]
+
+Here in fiery dawns glimmer the days of the future. Tens of thousands
+will struggle, will prepare, until at last the one man comes who shall
+lay the last stone of the edifice, 'le tranquille rebelle,'[25] the
+Christ of this new religion.
+
+     C'est que celui qu'on attendait n'est point venu,
+     Celui que la nature entière
+     Suscitera un jour, âme et rose trémière,
+     Sous les soleils puissants non encore connus;
+     C'est que la race ardente et fine,
+     Dont il sera la fleur,
+     N'a point multiplié ses milliers de racines
+     Jusqu'au tréfonds des profondeurs.[26]
+
+For here in Verhaeren's work this vision arises fervent and glowing.
+Incessantly man proceeds on the path of his destiny. Once his whole
+world was replete with divinity, 'jadis tout l'inconnu était peuplé de
+dieux';[27] then one single God took right and might into His hand; but
+now, by means of his strength and passion, man has wrested, year by
+year, one secret after the other from this Unknown Power. More and more
+he has conquered chance by laws, faith by knowledge, fear by safety;
+more and more the power of the gods glides insensibly into his hands,
+more and more he determines his own life; and the process will continue
+till he is in every respect the captain of his fate; he is less and less
+subject to laws he has not himself established; more and more Nature's
+slave becomes her lord.
+
+     Races, régnez: puisque par vous la volonté du sort
+     Devient de plus en plus la volonté humaine.[28]
+
+Gods will become men; exterior fate will return into their bosom; the
+saints will henceforth be only their brothers; and Paradise will be the
+earth itself. Most beautifully Verhaeren has expressed this idea in one
+of his latest books,[29] in the symbol of Adam and Eve. Eve, expelled
+from the Garden of Eden, one day finds its doors open again. But she
+does not re-enter it, for her highest joy, her Paradise, is now in
+activity and the pleasure of the earth. Zest in existence, in life, joy
+of the earth, has never been more strongly and burningly exalted than in
+this symbol; never has the hymn of humanity been sung with greater
+fervour than by this poet--perhaps because he had denied life more
+wildly and more obstinately than any other. Here all contrasts sing
+together in a harmony without a flaw; the last enmity between man and
+Nature here becomes the ecstatic feeling of man's godhead.
+
+And strange to say, here the circle of life returns to itself. The books
+of the poet's old age return to the days of his youth, to the school
+benches in Ghent where Maeterlinck also sat, the other great Fleming.
+Both, who lost themselves there, have found themselves again on the
+heights of life in their conception of the world, for Maeterlinck's
+highest teaching also (in his book _Wisdom and Destiny_) is, that all
+fate is locked up in man himself, that it is man's highest evolution,
+his highest duty, to conquer fate, all that lies outside him, God. This
+profound thought, which has thus twice in our days blossomed forth from
+Flemish soil, has been achieved on different paths. Maeterlinck has
+found it by listening to the mysticism of silence, Verhaeren by
+listening to the noise of life. He has found his new God not in the
+darkness of dreams but in the light of streets, in all places where men
+bestir themselves, and where from heavy hours the trembling flower of
+joy is born.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'La Conquête' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[2] 'À la Gloire du Vent' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[3] 'L'Eau' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[4] 'Au Bord du Quai' (_Ibid._)
+
+[5] 'La Conquête' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_)
+
+[6] 'Les Cultes' (_Ibid._)
+
+[7] 'Les Villes' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[8] 'La Ferreur' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[9] 'Vers le Futur' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[10] 'La Conquête' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[11] 'Vers le Futur' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[12] 'La Recherche' (_Ibid._).
+
+[13] 'L'Erreur' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[14] 'La Ferveur' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[15] 'Méditation' (_Les Moines_).
+
+[16] 'Les Penseurs' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[17] 'La Science' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[18] 'L'Action' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[19] 'La Science' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[20] 'Les Penseurs' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[21] 'La Science' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[22] 'Les Penseurs' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[23] 'La Mort' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[24] 'La Recherche' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[25] 'L'Attente' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[26] 'L'Attente' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[27] 'La Folie' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[28] (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[29] _Les Rythmes Souverains._
+
+
+
+
+THE ETHICS OF FERVOUR
+
+     La vie est à monter et non pas à descendre.
+                                  É.V., 'Les Rêves,'
+
+     Il faut admirer tout pour s'exalter soi-même
+     Et se dresser plus haut que ceux qui out vécu.
+                                  É.V., 'La Vie.'
+
+The metaphysical ideal crystallised by Verhaeren from his contemplation
+of life, which was at first wildly passionate, but then more and more
+synoptical and logical, has been called unity. He has himself recently,
+in answer to a question submitted to various men of letters, confirmed
+this conception as part of his programme. 'It seems to me,' he says,
+'that poetry is bound ere long to be merged in a very clear Pantheism.
+More and more the unity of the world is admitted by upright and healthy
+minds. That old dualism between the soul and the body, between God and
+the universe, is becoming effaced. Man is a fragment of the architecture
+of the world. He understands and is conscious of the entity of which he
+is a part.... He feels that he is encompassed and dominated, while at
+the same time he himself encompasses and dominates. By reason of his own
+miracles he is becoming, in some sort, that personal God that his
+ancestors believed in. Now I ask, is it possible that lyric exaltation
+should long remain indifferent to such an unchaining of human power,
+should hesitate to celebrate such a vast spectacle of grandeur? The poet
+of to-day has only to surrender himself to what he sees, hears,
+imagines, conjectures, for works to be born of his heart and brain that
+are young, vibrating, and new.'[1] But he who would build up the whole
+image must not make a halt at this stage of knowledge: over against the
+logical ordering of external things he must set another of inward
+things; against the knowledge of life he must set the feeling of life.
+He must set up an ethical ideal as well as a metaphysical ideal, a
+commandment of life corresponding to his law of life.
+
+But great poets never discover a standard of life, a moral precept,
+which is not a reflex of the law of their own inner nature. Many
+possibilities of contemplation are open to the thinker, to the quiet
+observer; to the poet however, to the lyrist, only a poetic philosophy
+of life is possible, a contemplation lyrically exalted. Whereas the
+philosopher can attain the knowledge of unity by measurement and
+calculation, by a perception and calm computation of forces, a poet can
+discover the evolution of things in the direction of harmony and unity
+only in his ecstasy, only in an exalted state of enthusiasm. He will
+perforce recognise a commandment for the whole world in his own
+enthusiasm, and in his lyric ecstasy a moral demand of life. 'Toute la
+vie est dans l'essor,' for the poet all life is in ecstasy. And just as
+Verhaeren never described things in a state of rest, so too his
+comprehension of the universe is never conceivable except in the
+permanently exalted state of the unrest of joy and motion.
+
+Verhaeren's relationship to the world around him was ever passionate. He
+has always approached things feverishly, as a lover approaches the woman
+he desires. Only what he has won by fighting has the value to him of a
+possession. Things do not belong to us as long as we pass them by, as
+long as we only look at them with unfeeling and cold eyes as though they
+were a scene in a play, a walking picture. To feel the connection
+between them and us, between the world and the poet, between man and
+man, to pass over from the purely contemplative state to the assessment
+of values, we must enter into some personal relationship of sympathy or
+antipathy. Verhaeren's first crisis had taught him that negation is
+sterile, and his recovery had then shown him that only assent,
+acceptance, affection, and enthusiasm can place us in a real
+relationship with things.
+
+     Pour vivre clair, ferme et juste,
+     Avec mon cœur, j'admire tout
+     Ce qui vibre, travaille et bout
+     Dans la tendresse humaine et sur la terre auguste.[2]
+
+A thing only belongs to us when it is felt--not so much for us
+personally--as beautiful, necessary, and vivid: only when we have said
+'yes' to it. _And therefore our whole evolution can only be to admire as
+much as possible, to understand as much as possible, to let our feeling
+have intercourse with as many things as possible_. To contemplate is too
+little; to understand is too little. Only when we have confirmed a thing
+from its very roots, confirmed it as necessary, does it really belong to
+us. 'II faut aimer pour découvrir avec génie.' And so our whole effort
+must be to overcome what is negative in ourselves, to reject nothing, to
+kill the critical spirit in ourselves, to strengthen what is positive in
+us, to assent as much as possible. Here again Verhaeren is in agreement
+with Nietzsche's last ideals: 'Warding things off, keeping things down,
+is a waste of energy, a squandering of strength on negative
+purposes.'[3] Criticism is sterile. Verhaeren is here as ever a
+relativist of values, for he knows that they are incessantly occupied in
+a process of transformation in favour of their highest value, and
+therefore he holds enthusiasm (the symbol of over-estimation) to be more
+important, in the sense of a higher justice, than what is apparently
+absolute justice itself.
+
+For this is the essential: if in our estimation we often over-estimate
+things which in any case would preserve their inner value independently
+of our 'yes' or 'no,' that is not so great a danger as it is a profit
+that our own souls should grow by means of our admiration. 'Admirer,
+c'est se grandir.'[4] For if we admire more, and more intensively, than
+others, we shall ourselves grow richer than those timid ones who content
+themselves with choice morsels of life instead of grasping life in its
+entirety, who restrict themselves because they only place themselves in
+relationship with a part of the world and not with the whole cosmos. The
+more a man admires, the more he possesses:
+
+     Il faut admirer tout pour s'exalter soi-même
+     Et se dresser plus haut que ceux qui out vécu
+     De coupables souffrances et de désirs vaincus.[5]
+
+For admiration means, in the highest sense, subordinating oneself to
+other things. _The more a man suppresses his own personal pride, the
+higher he stands in the moral sense_. For to accentuate oneself and to
+deny what is not oneself needs less strength than to suppress oneself
+and to surrender oneself in admiration to all else. Here Verhaeren sees
+the rise of a new ethical problem. A whole ladder of values is revealed
+to him in the moral standard of freedom and frankness with which a man
+can meet his fellows in his admiration; a ladder on whose topmost rung
+the man stands who rejects nothing whatever, who meets every
+manifestation of life with ecstasy. To be able to admire more means to
+grow more oneself:
+
+     Oh! vivre et vivre et se sentir meilleur
+     À mesure que bout plus fervemment le cœur;
+     Vivre plus clair, dès qu'on marche en conquête;
+     Vivre plus haut encor, dès que le sort s'entête
+     À dessécher la force et l'audace des bras.[6]
+
+And so strong must this restless enthusiasm grow, this incessant
+enthusiasm for things, that the height of the ascent suddenly surprises
+one with a rapt feeling of dizziness. The lyrical commandment of the
+highest ecstasy is here an ethical standard:
+
+     Il faut en tes élans te dépasser sans cesse,
+     Être ton propre étonnement.[7]
+
+In this idea of restless enthusiasm, the principles of which have also
+been expounded by Verhaeren in his essay _Cosmic Enthusiasm_
+(_Insel-Almanach,_ 1913), he has established a poetic equivalent to his
+other great impulse of humanity, set an ethical ideal by the side of the
+metaphysical ideal. For if of old the yearning for knowledge, that
+superb struggle for the conquest of the unknown, was the only thing that
+placed man in an eternally living relationship to the new things, what
+is possibly a still more valuable instinct is discovered in this
+incessantly intensified ecstatic admiration. Admiring is more than
+estimating and knowing. To surrender oneself in love to all things is
+higher than the curiosity to know everything. 'Tout affronter vaut mieux
+que tout comprendre.'[8] For in all knowledge there is still a residue
+of selfishness, of the pride of personal acquisition, while admiration
+of things contains nothing but humility--that great humility, however,
+which is an infinite enrichment of life, because it signifies a
+dissolution in the all. Whereas knowledge is brought to a sudden
+standstill before many things and finds the road blocked with darkness,
+in admiration, in ecstasy, there is no limit set to the ego. _Though
+many values lock themselves up from knowledge, none denies itself wholly
+to admiration_. Even the smallest thing becomes great when it is
+penetrated with love, and the greater we let things grow--the more we
+enrich the substance of our own life--the more infinite we make our ego.
+It is the highest ethical task of a great man to find the highest value
+in every phenomenon, and to free this value from the thick and often
+stifling rind of antipathy and strangeness. Not to let oneself be
+repelled by resistance is the perfection of a noble enthusiasm. If
+anything whatsoever is void of beauty, it will have a power which by its
+energy expresses beauty. If anything seems strange and ugly in the
+traditional sense, it will set the wonderful task of finding out the new
+sense in which it is beautiful. _And to have found this new beauty in
+the new things was the active greatness of the poetic work, the
+greatness which was unconscious and now becomes conscious, which was
+knowledge and now becomes law_. While all others considered our great
+cities frightful and ugly, Verhaeren praised their magnificence; while
+all others abhorred science as an obstacle to poetry, Verhaeren
+celebrated it as the purest form of life. For he knows that everything
+changes, that 'ce qui fut hier le but est l'obstacle demain,'[9] and
+_vice versa_ that the obstacle of to-day may perhaps be the goal of the
+next generation. He had already recognised in his poetry what the
+architectural movement in the great cities in the last few years has
+realised, that huge shops, as emporia of intellectual life, as new
+centres of force, provide tasks for art as stupendous as the cathedrals
+of old; that in the reek and smoke of teeming cities new tones of colour
+were waiting for painters, new problems for philosophers; that all that
+in our own time looms bulky and unseemly will to the next generation be
+well-proportioned and have to be called beautiful. Verhaeren's
+enthusiasm for what is new overcomes the resistance of reverence for
+tradition. Verhaeren has rendered signal service to our time by being
+the first to recognise and proclaim the great impressionists and all
+innovators in art and poetry. For to reject nothing new, to be hostile
+to nothing the world can offer, this only is what he understands by
+knowing the world as it is and truly loving it. His ladder of values
+ends on high in this absolute ideal of admiration of the whole world,
+not only of that which is but of that which shall be, of the identity of
+every ego with the time and its forms:
+
+     L'homme n'est suprême et clair que si sa volonté
+     Est d'être lui en même temps qu'il est monde.
+
+And since this boundless admiration turns selfishness to
+dust--selfishness, the eternal obstacle to all purely human
+relations--since, in a word, it produces a kind of brotherly
+relationship to all things, it also opens out the possibility of
+levelling the relationship between man and man. The book _La Multiple
+Splendeur_, which has given definite expression to these ethical ideas,
+was originally intended to be called _Admirez-vous les Uns les Autres_.
+In this book self-surrender is considered as the highest ideal, the gift
+of oneself to the whole world, the distribution of oneself among all
+people. No longer, as in the earlier books, are energy, strength, and
+conquest by strength, the quelling of resistance, the ultimate sense of
+life, but goodness, scattering oneself broadcast, becoming the all by
+surrender to the all. Greatness in this new sense can only arise by
+ecstatic admiration. 'Il faut aimer pour découvrir avec génie.'
+Admiration and love are the strongest forces of the world. Love will be
+the highest form of the new relations--it will regulate all earthly
+relationships; love shall be the social levelling.
+
+     L'amour dont la puissance encore est inconnue,
+     Dans sa profondeur douce et sa charité nue,
+     Ira porter la joie égale aux résignés;
+     Les sacs ventrus de l'or seront saignés
+     Un soir d'ardente et large équité rouge;
+     Disparaîtront palais, banques, comptoirs et bouges;
+     Tout sera simple et clair, quand l'orgueil sera mort,
+     Quand l'homme, au lieu de croire à l'égoïste effort,
+     Qui s'éterniserait, en une âme immortelle,
+     Dispensera vers tous sa vie accidentelle;
+     Des paroles, qu'aucun livre ne fait prévoir,
+     Débrouilleront ce qui paraît complexe et noir;
+     Le faible aura sa part dans l'existence entière,
+     Il aimera son sort--et la matière
+     Confessera peut-être, alors, ce qui fut Dieu.[10]
+
+And in still greater, still more monumental expression, in stone tables
+of the law as it were, Verhaeren has compressed his new moral idea in a
+single poem:
+
+     Si nous nous admirons vraiment les uns les autres,
+     Du fond même de notre ardeur et notre foi,
+     Vous les penseurs, vous les savants, vous les apôtres,
+     Pour les temps qui viendront vous extrairez la loi.
+
+     Nous apportons, ivres du monde et de nous-mêmes,
+     Des cœurs d'hommes nouveaux dans le vieil univers.
+     Les Dieux sont loin et leur louange et leur blasphème;
+     Notre force est en nous et nous avons souffert.
+
+     Nous admirons nos mains, nos yeux et nos pensées,
+     Même notre douleur qui devient notre orgueil;
+     Toute recherche est fermement organisée
+     Pour fouiller l'inconnu dont nous cassons le seuil.
+
+     S'il est encor là-bas des caves de mystère
+     Où tout flambeau s'éteint ou recule effaré,
+     Plutôt que d'en peupler les coins par des chimères
+     Nous préférons ne point savoir que nous leurrer.
+
+     Un infini plus sain nous cerne et nous pénètre;
+     Notre raison monte plus haut; notre cœur bout;
+     Et nous nous exaltons si bellement des êtres
+     Que nous changeons le sens que nous avons de tout.
+
+     Cerveau, tu règnes seul sur nos actes lucides;
+     Aimer, c'est asservir; admirer, se grandir;
+     O tel profond vitrail, dans l'ombre des absides,
+     Qui reflète la vie et la fait resplendir!
+
+     Aubes, matins, midis et soirs, toute lumière
+     Est aussitôt muée en or et en beauté,
+     Il exalte l'espace et le ciel et la terre
+     Et transforme le monde à travers sa clarté.[11]
+
+_This sensation of recognising oneself in all things by enthusiasm_, of
+living with everything that has existence and a visible form, is
+pantheism, is a Teutonic conception of the universe. But in Verhaeren
+pantheism finds its very last intensification. Identity is to him not
+only cerebral knowledge, but experience; identity is not the sensation
+of being similar to things in body and soul, but an indissoluble unity.
+Whosoever admires a thing so wholly that he goes down to the roots of
+his feeling, that he dissolves and denies himself in order to be wholly
+this other thing, is at this moment of ecstasy identical with it.
+Ecstasy is no longer what it means in the Greek derivation, the fact of
+stepping out of oneself, of losing oneself; it signifies, in addition
+to that, the finding of oneself in the other thing. And with this
+Verhaeren's cosmic conception goes beyond pantheism. He not only senses
+things as though he were their brother; not only does he sense himself
+in them, he himself lives them. Not only does he feel his blood pouring
+into other beings, he no longer feels any blood of his own at all; he
+only feels this strange, glowing sap of the world in his veins. I know
+of no more fiery eruption than those moments of Verhaeren when he is no
+longer able to distinguish the world from his ego, this unique cosmic
+intoxication:
+
+     Je ne distingue plus le monde de moi-même,
+     Je suis l'ample feuillage et les rameaux flottants,
+     Je suis le sol dont je foule les cailloux pâles
+     Et l'herbe des fossés où soudain je m'affale
+     Ivre et fervent, hagard, heureux et sanglotant.[12]
+
+All the forms of the elements are a personal experience to him:
+'J'existe en tout ce qui m'entoure et me pénètre.'[13] All that has
+happened becomes to him a manifestation of his own body; he feels all
+cosmic happenings as personal experiences:
+
+     Oh! les rythmes fougueux de la nature entière
+     Et les sentir et les darder à travers soi!
+     Vivre les mouvements répandus dans les bois,
+     Le sol, les vents, la mer et les tonnerres;
+     Vouloir qu'en son cerveau tressaille l'univers.[14]
+
+Here the billows of enthusiasm dash higher and higher, this call to
+union by enthusiasm grows to an ever more passionate command:
+
+     Exaltez-vous encore et comprenez-vous mieux,
+     Reconnaissez-vous donc et magnifiez-vous
+     Dans l'ample et myriadaire splendeur des choses![15]
+
+For if men hitherto have arrived at no clear and harmonious relationship
+with one another, that was because, so Verhaeren thinks, they had not
+admiration sufficient, because they were too suspicious of one another,
+because they had too little faith. 'Magnifiez-vous donc et
+comprenez-vous mieux!'[16] he calls out to them, 'admirez-vous les uns
+les autres!' and here, in the last phase of his knowledge, he is again
+in agreement with the great American, who, in his poem _Starting from
+Paumanok_, preaches:
+
+     I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough,
+     None has ever yet adored or worshipped half enough,
+     None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and
+         how certain the future is.
+
+For the highest pleasure is only in this highest ecstasy. And therefore
+these ideals of Verhaeren are not cold, sober commandments, but a
+passionate hymn.
+
+     Aimer avec ferveur soi-même en tous les autres
+     Qui s'exaltent de même en de mêmes combats
+     Vers le même avenir dont on entend le pas;
+     Aimer leur cœur et leur cerveau pareils aux vôtres
+     Parce qu'ils ont souffert, en des jours noirs et fous,
+     Même angoisse, même affre et même deuil que vous.
+
+     Et s'énivrer si fort de l'humaine bataille
+     --Pâle et flottant reflet des monstrueux assauts
+     Ou des groupements d'or des étoiles, là-haut--
+     Qu'on vit en tout ce qui agit, lutte ou tressaille
+     Et qu'on accepte avidement, le cœur ouvert,
+     L'âpre et terrible loi qui régit l'univers.[17]
+
+_To raise these mystic moments of ecstasy, these seconds of identity,
+which every one in his life experiences in quite rare and strange
+moments, to permanency, to a constant, unconquerable feeling of
+life--this is Verhaeren's highest aim_. His cosmic conception is
+concentrated in this supreme ideal of an incessantly felt identity of
+the ego with its environment, of an identity ever fired anew by passion.
+
+For not till nothing more is contemplation and everything is experience,
+not till this vast enrichment is accomplished, does life cease to be
+vegetative, indifferent, and somnolent, not till then does it turn to
+pure delight. Not to feel individual feelings of pleasure, but to feel
+life itself in all its forms as supreme pleasure, is the last goal of
+Verhaeren's art. What he says of Juliers, the hero of Flanders, 'son
+existence était sa volupté,'[18] _the fact of life itself was his
+pleasure_, is also his own highest longing. He does not want life that;
+he may fill out the span that is allotted to every mortal, but that he
+may consciously enjoy, and to the full, every minute of life as a
+delight and as; happiness. And in such a moment of ecstasy he says,
+
+     Il me semble jusqu'à ce jour n'avoir vécu
+     Que pour mourir et non pour vivre,[19]
+
+lines that seem to me unforgettable, as the highest ecstasy of vitality.
+
+And, wonderful to say, here too the circle is closed, here too the end
+of Verhaeren's know-ledge--as we have seen in so many things with
+him--is a return to the beginning. Here too there is nothing save an
+inherited instinct which has become a rapt consciousness. His first book
+and his last ones, _Les Flamandes_, as well as _Les Rythmes Souverains_
+and _Les Blés Mouvants,_ celebrate life--the first, it is true, only
+life's outer form, the dull enjoyment of the senses: the last books,
+however, celebrate the conscious, intensified, sublimated feeling of
+life. Verhaeren's whole evolution--here again in harmony with the great
+poets of our nation, with Nietzsche and Dehmel--is not suppression, but
+a conscious intensification of original instincts. Just as in--his first
+books he described his native province, and again in his last, save that
+now the land is bounded by the horizons of the whole world, here again
+the feeling of life returns as the sense of life, but it is now enriched
+with all the knowledge he has acquired, with all the victories he has
+won. Passion, which was in his first book a chaotic revolt, has here
+become a law; the instinctive sensation of pleasure in health has been
+transformed into a deliberate and conscious pleasure in life and in all
+its forms. Now again Verhaeren feels the great pride of a strong man:
+
+     Je marche avec l'orgueil d'aimer l'air et la terre,
+     D'être immense et d'être fou
+     Et de mêler le monde et tout
+     À cet enivrement de vie élémentaire.[20]
+
+The health of the strong race he once celebrated in the lads and lasses
+of his native province, he now sings in himself. And so strong is the
+identity between his ego and the world that he, desiring to sing the
+beauty of the whole world, is now compelled to include himself and to
+celebrate his own body. He who of old hated his body as a prison out of
+which he could not escape to flee from himself, he who wished to 'spit
+himself out,' now fits into the hymn of the world a stanza in
+celebration of his own ego:
+
+     J'aime mes yeux, mes bras, mes mains, ma chair,
+         mon torse
+     Et mes cheveux amples et blonds,
+     Et je voudrais, par mes poumons,
+     Boire l'espace entier pour en gonfler ma force.[21]
+
+The feeling of identity has given him absolute identity in regard to
+himself.
+
+It is not in vanity that he celebrates himself, but in gratitude. For
+the body is to him only a means of sensing the beauty, power, and
+beneficence of the world, is to him a wonderful possibility of enjoying
+things by strength in strong passion. And wonderful are these thanks of
+an ageing man to his eyes and ears and chest for still permitting him to
+feel earth's beauty with all the fervour of old:
+
+     Soyez remerciés, mes yeux,
+     D'être restés si clairs, sous mon front déjà vieux,
+     Pour voir au loin bouger et vibrer la lumière;
+     Et vous, mes mains, de tressaillir dans le soleil;
+     Et vous, mes doigts, de vous dorer aux fruits vermeils
+     Pendus au long du mur, près des roses trémières.
+
+     Soyez remercié, mon corps,
+     D'être ferme, rapide, et frémissant encor
+     Au toucher des vents prompts ou des brises profondes;
+     Et vous, mon torse clair et mes larges poumons,
+     De respirer au long des mers ou sur les monts,
+     L'air radieux et vif qui baigne et mord les mondes.[22]
+
+Thus, too, he now celebrates all things to which he is related--his
+body; the race and the ancestors to whom he owes his being; the country
+fields that have given him youth; the cities that have given him his
+vast outlook: he celebrates Europe and America, the past and the future.
+_And just as he feels himself to be strong and healthy, so too his
+feeling conceives of the whole world as healthy and great_. That is the
+incomparable and, probably, the unparalleled thing in Verhaeren's
+verses, what makes him so exceedingly dear to many as to me, that here
+cheerfulness, worldly pleasure, joy, and ecstasy are sensed not only
+intellectually as pride, but that this pleasure is felt positively _in
+the body_, with all the fibres of the blood, with all the muscles and
+nerves of the man. His stanzas are really, as Bazalgette so beautifully
+says, 'une décharge d'électricité humaine,'[23] a discharge of human, of
+physical electricity. Joy here becomes a physical excess, an
+intoxication, a superabundance without parallel:
+
+     Nous apportons, ivres du monde et de nous-mêmes,
+     Des cœurs d'hommes nouveaux dans le vieil univers.[24]
+
+There is now no disharmony between the individual poems; they are one
+single bubbling up of enthusiasm, 'un enivrement de soi-même'; over the
+many convulsive, quivering, irregular ecstasies of old now flames the
+ecstasy of the whole feeling of life. This ecstasy stands in our days
+like a figure proud, strong, and erect, exultingly flourishing the torch
+of passion aloft to greet the future, 'vers la joie'!
+
+Here ends Verhaeren's ethic work. And I believe that no exaltation, no
+knowledge can again change this last pure form, or make it still more
+beautiful. A vast expenditure of force, the effort of one of our
+strongest and most incomparable men, has here reached its goal. Once
+force seemed to him to be the strength of the world; now, however, in
+his purer knowledge, he sees it in goodness, in admiration, in that
+force which, with the same intensity as turned it outwards of old, is
+now directed inwards; which no longer constrains to conquest, but to
+self-surrender, to a boundless humility. Over the immense savagery and
+apparent chaos of the first works this knowledge now arches this rainbow
+of reconciliation, over _Les Forcés Tumultueuses_ shines _La Multiple
+Splendeur_. And to himself may be applied the words he dedicated to his
+hymn of all humanity--'La joie et la bonté sont les fleurs de sa
+force.'[25]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] G. Le Cardonnel et Ch. Vellay, _La Littérature Contemporaine._
+
+[2] 'Autour de ma Maison' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[3] _Ecce Homo!_.
+
+[4] 'La Ferveur' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[5] 'La Vie' (_Ibid._).
+
+[6] 'L'Action' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[7] 'L'Impossible' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[8] 'Les Rêves' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[9] 'L'Impossible' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[10] 'Un Soir' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[11] 'La Ferveur' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[12] 'Autour de ma Maison' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[13] 'La Joie' (_Ibid_.).
+
+[14] 'L'En-avant' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[15] 'La Louange du Corps Humain' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[16] _Ibid. (Ibid.)_
+
+[17] 'La Vie' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[18] 'Guillaume de Juliers' (_Les Héros_).
+
+[19] 'Un Matin' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[20] 'Un Matin' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[21] _Ibid. (Ibid.)_.
+
+[22] 'La Joie' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[23] 'Léon Bazalgette', _Émile Verhaeren_.
+
+[24] 'La Ferveur' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[25] 'Les Mages' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+
+
+
+LOVE
+
+     Ceux qui vivent d'amour vivent d'éternité.
+                               E.V., _Les Heures d'après-midi._
+
+
+Filled with contemporary spirit as Verhaeren's work is, there is one
+point in which it appears to stray from our epoch, to be remote from the
+artistic preoccupations of other poets. Verhaeren's poetry is almost
+entirely free from eroticism. The problem of love is with him far from
+being, as it is with most poets, the feeling at the root of all
+feelings; it is hardly ever a motive force in his work; it remains a
+little arabesque delicately curved above his massive architecture.
+Verhaeren's enthusiasms spring from other sources. Love is for him
+almost without a sexual shade of meaning, perfectly identical with
+enthusiasm, self-surrender, ecstasy; and the difference between the
+sexes does not seem to be an essential, but only an incidental form
+among the thousandfold militant forms of life. The love of woman, sexual
+necessity, is scarcely a force greater than any other in the circle of
+forces, never the most important or actually the root-force, as it is
+(for instance) to Dehmel, who derives the consciousness of all great
+cosmic phases of knowledge from the experience of love. Verhaeren's
+horizons are illuminated, not by the flame of the erotic, but by the
+passionate fire of purely intellectual impulses. His first books, those
+lyric volumes which are nearly always a poet's confessions of love, were
+devoted to landscapes and then to social phenomena, to monks, and to men
+who toil with their hands. The strength of his drama pulses in conflicts
+exclusively masculine. Thus his work, already vastly removed from that
+of the other lyrists of our time, is seen to be still more isolated. To
+Verhaeren love is only a single page, not the first and not the last, in
+the book of the world: this poet has lavished too much glowing passion
+and ecstatic feeling on all individual things and the universe for the
+cry of the desire of woman to ring higher than all other voices.
+
+This lack of accentuation of eroticism in Verhaeren's work does not by
+any means strike me as a weakness, a missing nerve in his artistic
+organism. It may read like a paradox, but it must be said: just this
+apparent artistic deficiency indicates personal strength. Verhaeren's
+masculinity is so pronounced and strong that woman could never become
+the root-problem of his passion, or shake him in the foundations of his
+fate. To a really strong man, love, sexual love, is a matter of course;
+a sterling man does not feel it as an obstacle and not as a vital
+conflict, but as a necessity, like nourishment, air, and liberty. But a
+thing that is a matter of course is never conceived by an artist as a
+problem. In his youth Verhaeren was never perplexed by love, for the
+simple reason that he did not attach sufficient importance to it,
+because his poetic interests were in the first place directed to a
+mightier possession, a philosophy of life. A sterling man, as Verhaeren
+conceives him, does not spend his strength in sexual love. For such a
+man the metaphysical instinct, the longing for knowledge, the need of
+finding his inner statics in the cosmos, goes before love. 'Eve voulait
+aimer, Adam voulait connaître.'[1] Only to woman is love the sense pf
+life; to man, in Verhaeren's idea, the sense of life is knowledge. He
+expressed this sound idea still more clearly in an early poem:
+
+     Les forts montent la vie ainsi qu'un escalier,
+     Sans voir d'abord que les femmes sur leurs passages
+     Tendent vers eux leurs seins, leurs fronts et leur visages.[2]
+
+Paying no heed to the seductions of love, the strong men, the really
+great, ascend to the skies, to spiritual knowledge; they gather the
+fruits of stars and comets; and then, only then, when they are
+returning, tired by their lonely wandering, do they observe women, and
+lay down in their hands the knowledge of the great worlds. _Not in the
+beginning, in the vehement days of youth, but only when manhood is
+established, only in the time of inner maturity, can woman become a
+great experience for Verhaeren_. He must first of all have acquired a
+firm footing, must know his place in the world, before he can yield
+himself up to love. It is strange that the sonnet I have quoted should
+have been written in youth, because, like a presentiment, it relates the
+fate of his own life in advance. For the images of women never stopped
+his path nor turned him aside from it; love, if I may say so, only
+occupied his senses and never absorbed his soul. Not till later, till
+the years when the crisis was undermining his body, when his nerves were
+giving way under the terrible strain, when solitude reared itself before
+his face like an inseparable foe, did a woman enter his life. Then, and
+not till then, did love and marriage--the personal symbol of eternal,
+exterior order--give him inward rest. And to this woman the only
+love-poems he ever wrote are addressed. In Verhaeren's work, which is
+graded like a trilogy--in this symphony that is often brutal--there is a
+quiet, soft andante, a trilogy in the trilogy, one of love. From the
+point of view of art, these three books, _Les Heures Claires, Les Heures
+d'Après-midi,_ and _Les Heures du Soir_, are not less in value than his
+great works, but they are more gentle. From this savage and passionate
+man one might have expected visionary, seething ecstasies, a tempestuous
+discharge of erotic feeling; but these books are a wonderful
+disappointment. They are not spoken to the crowd, but to one woman only,
+and for that reason they are not spoken loudly, but with a voice
+subdued. Religious consciousness--for with Verhaeren all that is poetic
+is religious in a new sense--finds a new form here. _Here Verhaeren does
+not preach, he prays_. These little pages are the privacy of his
+personal life, the confession of a passion which is great indeed, but
+veiled as it were with a delicate shame. 'Oh! la tendresse des forts!'
+is Bazalgette's inspired comment. And in truth, it is impossible to
+imagine anything more touching than the sight of this mighty fighter
+here lowering his resonant voice to the soft breathings of devotion.
+These verses are quite simple, spoken low, as though wild and too
+passionate words might imperil so noble a feeling, as though a strong
+man, a brutal man, who is afraid of hurting a delicate woman with a
+touch accustomed to bronze, should lay his hand on hers only softly,
+most cautiously.
+
+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.
+
+Now, of all the poets of our day Verhaeren is the one who has felt this
+feeling of responsibility most strongly. To write poetry is for him to
+express not himself only, but the striving and straining of the whole
+period as well, the fearful torment and the happiness that are in the
+birth of the new things. Just because his work comprises all the present
+and aims at expressing it in its entity, he feels himself responsible to
+the future. For him a true poet must visualise the whole psychic care of
+his time. For when later generations--in the same manner as they will
+question monuments concerning our art, pictures concerning our painters,
+social forms concerning our philosophers--ask of the verses and the
+works of our contemporaries the question, What was your hope, your
+feeling, the sum of your interpretation? how did you feel cities and
+men, things and gods?--shall we be able to answer them? This is the
+inner question of Verhaeren's artistic responsibility. _And this
+feeling of responsibility has made his work great_. Most of the poets of
+our day have been unconcerned with reality. Some of them strike up a
+dancing measure, rouse and amuse people lounging in theatres; others
+again tell of their own sorrow, ask for pity and compassion, they who
+have never felt for others. Verhaeren, however, heedless of the approval
+or disapproval of our time, turns his face towards the generations to
+be:
+
+     Celui qui me lira dans les siècles, un soir,
+     Troublant mes vers, sous leur sommeil ou sous leur cendre,
+     Et ranimant leur sens lointain pour mieux comprendre
+     Comment ceux d'aujourd'hui s'étaient armés d'espoir,
+     Qu'il sache, avec quel violent élan, ma joie
+     S'est, à travers les cris, les révoltes, les pleurs,
+     Ruée au combat fier et mâle des douleurs,
+     Pour en tirer l'amour, comme on conquiert sa proie.[1]
+
+It was, in the last instance, this magnificent feeling of responsibility
+which did not permit him to pass by any manifestation of our present
+time without observing and appreciating it, for he knows that later
+generations will ask the question how we sensed the new thing, which to
+them is a possession and a matter of course, when it was still strange
+and almost hostile. His work is the answer. The true poet of to-day, in
+Verhaeren's eyes, must show forth the torment and the trouble of the
+whole psychic transition, the painful discovery of the new beauty in the
+new things, the revolt, the crisis, the struggles it costs to
+understand all this, to adapt ourselves to it, and in the end to love
+it. Verhaeren has attempted to express our whole time in its earthly,
+its material, its psychic form. His verses lyrically represent Europe at
+the turning of the century, us and our time; they consciously
+contemplate the whole circuit of the things of life: _they write a lyric
+encyclopædia of our time, the intellectual atmosphere of Europe at the
+turning of the twentieth century._
+
+The whole of Europe speaks with his voice, speaks with a voice that
+reaches beyond our time; and already from the whole of Europe comes the
+answer. In Belgium Verhaeren is above all the national poet, the poet of
+heaths, cities, dunes, and of the Flemish past, the great renewer of the
+national pride. But he stands too near his fellow-countrymen to be
+measured at his full height there. And in France, too, very few
+appreciate him at his true value. Most people regard him there in his
+literary aspect only and as a symbolist and decadent, an innovator of
+verse, an audacious and gifted revolutionary. But very few perceive the
+new and important work that is built up in his verses, very few
+comprehend the entity and the logical character of his cosmic
+philosophy. Nevertheless, his influence is already tangible. The new
+rhythm he has created can be recognised in many poets; and such a gifted
+disciple as Jules Romains has even brought his idea of the feeling of
+cities to new impressiveness. Best of all, however, he is understood by
+those Frenchmen who stand in a mystic communion with all that is great
+and urgent abroad; who feel an ethical need, a longing for an inner
+transmutation of values, for a re-moulding of races, for cosmopolitanism
+and a union of the nations; so, above all, Léon Bazalgette, who revealed
+Walt Whitman, the prophet of all strong and conscious reality in art, to
+France. Most joyfully of all, however, the answer rings from those
+countries which are themselves involved in deep-seated social and
+ethical crises, those countries where the need of religion is a vital
+instinct, which are eternally hungry for God, above all from Russia and
+Germany. In Russia the poet of _Les Villes Tentaculaires_ is celebrated
+as he is nowhere else. As the poet of social innovations he is read in
+the Russian universities, and in the circles of the intellectuals he is
+regarded as the spiritual pioneer of our time. Brjussow, the
+distinguished young poet, has translated him, and afforded him the
+possibility of popularity. In other Slavonic countries, too, his work is
+beginning to spread.
+
+Verhaeren's success, one may well say triumph, has been strongest and
+most impressive in Germany; here it has been unexpectedly intensive even
+to us who have worked for it. A few years have sufficed to make him as
+popular here I as any native poet, and the most beautiful feature of
+his success is this, that people are already forgetting to look upon him
+as a foreigner. Verhaeren is to-day part and parcel of German culture;
+and much of our contemporary lyric poetry, its welcome turning to
+optimism for example, would be unthinkable but for his work and
+influence. Countless are the essays devoted to him, the recitations in
+which our best elocutionists--Kainz, Moissi, Kayssler, Heine, Wiecke,
+Durieux, Rosen, Gregori--have taken part; none of these interpreters,
+however, were as enthusiastically applauded as was Verhaeren himself on
+his _tournée_ in Germany, which was a great experience no less for him
+than for our public, because he gladly felt that his work was now rooted
+for ever in German soil. In Scandinavia, where Johannes V. Jensen in his
+essays unconsciously transcribed Verhaeren's lyric work, Ellen Key, the
+inspired prophetess of the feeling of life, has hailed him as she has
+hailed no other, and Georg Brandes, who crowns poets, has welcomed him
+with loud acclaim. Incessantly, in an irresistible, sure ascent,
+Verhaeren's fame grows. And above all, his poetry is no longer regarded
+as an individual thing, but as a work, as a cosmic philosophy, as an
+answer to the questions of our time, as the strongest and most beautiful
+enrichment of our vital feeling. Wherever people are tired of pessimism,
+tired of confused mysticism, and tired of monistic shallowness; wherever
+a longing stirs for a pure idealistic form of contemplation, for a new
+reconciliation between our new realities and the old reverence for
+eternal secrets, for the secularisation of the divine, his name stands
+in the front rank. An answer comes from every direction, not because his
+work was a question, but because it was in itself an answer to the
+unconscious demand for a new community, a demand which is being made by
+men of all nations everywhere to-day.
+
+But all this is only a beginning. Works like his, which are not
+paradoxical enough, not dazzling enough, to produce sudden ecstasies and
+literary fashions; which, by the mere fact that they have themselves
+grown organically into existence, can only grow organically, but for
+that reason irresistibly, in their influence; only lay hold of the
+masses slowly. Only later generations will enjoy the fruit which we,
+with renewed admiration, have seen ripening from the most modest of
+blossoms. But already a ring of men of all nations are joining hands, a
+ring of men who perceive a new centre of spirituality in Verhaeren. And
+we, the few who have wholly surrendered ourselves to his work, must
+appreciate it with that feeling only which he himself has taught us as
+the highest feeling of life--with enthusiasm, with gratitude ever
+renewed, and with joyful admiration. For to whom in our days should one
+offer more abundantly and stormily this new vital doctrine of enthusiasm
+as the happiest feeling than to Verhaeren, to him who was the first to
+wrest it in the bitterest struggles from the depths of our time, who was
+the first to shape it in the material of art, the first to raise it to
+the eternal law of life?
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'Un Soir' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+
+I. LES FLAMANDES, poèmes. Bruxelles, Hochsteyn, 1883. LES CONTES DE
+MINUIT, prose. Bruxelles (Collection de la 'Jeune Belgique'), Franck,
+1885.
+
+JOSEPH HEYMANS, PEINTRE, critique. Bruxelles (_Société Nouvelle_), 1885.
+
+II. LES MOINES, poèmes. Paris, Lemerre, 1886.
+
+FERNAND KHNOPFF, critique. Bruxelles (_Société Nouvelle_), 1886.
+
+III. Au BORD DE LA ROUTE, poèmes. Liège (_La Wallonie_), 1891.
+
+IV. LES SOIRS, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman, 1887.
+
+V. LES DÉBÂCLES, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman, 1888.
+
+VI. LES FLAMBEAUX NOIRS, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman, 1890.
+
+VII. LES VILLAGES ILLUSOIRES, poèmes, illustrés par Georges Minne.
+Bruxelles, Deman, 1895.
+
+VIII. LES APPARUS DANS MES CHEMINS, poèmes. Bruxelles, Lacomblez, 1891.
+
+LES CAMPAGNES HALLUCINÉES, poèmes, ornementés par T. van Rysselberghe.
+Bruxelles, Deman, 1893.
+
+ALMANACH, poèmes, illustrés par T. van Rysselberghe. Bruxelles,
+Dietrich, 1895.
+
+POÈMES (1e série, i., ii., iii.). Paris, Mercure de France, 1895.
+
+LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES, poèmes, couverture et ornementation par T. van
+Rysselberghe. Bruxelles, Deman, 1896.
+
+POÈMES (2e série, iv., v., vi.). Paris, Mercure de France, 1896.
+
+LES HEURES CLAIRES, poèmes, ornementés par T. van Rysselberghe.
+Bruxelles, Deman, 1896.
+
+ÉMILE VERHAEREN, 1883-1896, portrait par T. van Rysselberghe.
+[Bruxelles, Deman, 1896.] (An anthology, 'pour les amis du poète,')
+
+LES AUBES, drame lyrique en 4 actes, ornementé par T. van Rysselberghe.
+Bruxelles, Deman, 1898.
+
+ESPAÇA NEGRA, NOTAS DE VIAJE. Barcelona, Pedro Ortega, 1899.
+
+LES VISAGES DE LA VIE, poèmes, ornementés par T. van Rysselberghe.
+Bruxelles, Deman, 1899.
+
+POÈMES (3e série, vii., viii., _Les Vignes de ma Muraille_). Paris,
+Mercure de France, 1899.
+
+LE CLOÎTRE, drame en 4 actes, prose et vers, ornementé par T. van
+Rysselberghe. Bruxelles, Deman, 1900.
+
+PETITES LÉGENDES, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman, 1900.
+
+LES PETITS VIEUX. London, Hacon & Ricketts, 1901.
+
+PHILIPPE H., tragédie en 3 actes, vers et prose. Paris, Mercure de
+France, 1901.
+
+LES FORCES TUMULTUEUSES, poèmes. Paris, Mercure de France, 1902.
+
+LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES, précédées des _Campagnes Hallucinées,_ poèmes.
+Paris, Mercure de France, 1904.
+
+TOUTE LA FLANDRE: _Les Tendresses Premières_, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman,
+1904.
+
+LES HEURES D'APRÈS-MIDI, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman, 1905.
+
+REMBRANDT, étude. Paris, Henri Laurens [1905].
+
+IMAGES JAPONAISES, texte d'É. V ..., illustrations de Kwassou. Tokio,
+1906.
+
+LA MULTIPLE SPLENDEUR, poèmes. Paris, Mercure de France, 1906.
+
+TOUTE LA FLANDRE: _La Guirlande des Dunes_, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman,
+1907.
+
+LES LETTRES FRANÇAISES EN BELGIQUE. Bruxelles, Lamertin, 1907.
+
+LES VISAGES DE LA VIE (_Les Visages de la Vie, Les douze Mois_), poèmes,
+nouvelle édition. Paris, Mercure de France, 1908.
+
+TOUTE LA FLANDRE: _Les Héros_. Bruxelles, Deman, 1908.
+
+JAMES ENSOR, étude. Bruxelles, E. van Oest, 1908.
+
+TOUTE LA FLANDRE: _Les Villes à Pignons_. Bruxelles, Deman, 1909.
+
+HELENAS HEIMKEHR. Leipzig, Insel-Verlag, 1909. (Translation by Stefan
+Zweig of _Hélène de Sparte_.)
+
+DEUX DRAMES: LE CLOÃŽTRE, PHILIPPE II. Paris, Mercure de France, 1909.
+
+LES RYTHMES SOUVERAINS, poèmes. Paris, Mercure de France, 1910.
+
+PIERRE-PAUL RUBENS. Brussels, G. van Oest & Cie., 1910.
+
+LES HEURES DU SOIR. Leipzig, Insel-Verlag, 1911.
+
+HÉLÈNE DE SPARTE, tragédie en 4 actes. Paris, 'Nouvelle Revue
+Française,' 1912.
+
+TOUTE LA FLANDRE: _Les Plaines_. Bruxelles, Deman, 1911.
+
+LES BLÉS MOUVANTS, poèmes. Paris, Crès, 1912.
+
+LES VILLAGES ILLUSOIRES, avec 15 gravures à l'eau forte par Henry Ramah.
+Leipzig, Insel-Verlag, 1913.
+
+RUBENS. Leipzig, Insel-Verlag, 1913.
+
+LES BLÉS MOUVANTS, poèmes. Paris, Mercure de France, 1913.
+
+ŒUVRES D'ÉMILE VERHAEREN (IV., V., VI., VII., VIII., _Les Vignes de
+ma Muraille_). Paris, Mercure de France, 1914.
+
+
+
+TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH
+
+THE DAWN (_Les Aubes_), by Émile Verhaeren, translated by Arthur Symons.
+London, Duckworth, 1898.
+
+POEMS BY ÉMILE VERHAEREN, selected and rendered into English by Alma
+Strettel. London, John Lane, 1899.
+
+CONTEMPORARY BELGIAN POETRY, selected and translated by Jethro Bithell.
+('Canterbury Poets' series.) London, Walter Scott, 1911. (60 pp. are
+translations of Verhaeren's poems.)
+
+
+
+CRITICISMS
+
+
+BOOKS
+
+Bazalgette, Léon: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Paris, Sansot, 1907. (One of the
+series 'Les Célébrités d'aujourd'hui.')
+
+Beaunier, André: LA POÉSIE NOUVELLE. Paris, Mercure de France, 1902.
+
+Bersaucourt, Albert de: CONFÉRENCE SUR ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Paris, Jouve,
+1908.
+
+Bever, Ad. van, et Paul Léautaud: POÈTES D'AUJOURD'HUI, nouvelle
+édition, tome 2. Paris, Mercure de France, 1909.
+
+Boer, Julius de: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. [1907.] (One of the series 'Mannen en
+Vrouwen van beteekenis in onze dagen.')
+
+Bosch, Firmin van den: IMPRESSIONS DE LITTÉRATURE CONTEMPORAINE.
+Bruxelles, Vromant et Cie., 1905.
+
+Buisseret, Georges: L'ÉVOLUTION IDÉOLOGIQUE D'ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Paris,
+Mercure de France, 1910. (One of the series 'Les Hommes et les Idées.')
+
+Casier, Jean: LES 'MOINES' D'ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Gand, Leliaert et Siffer,
+1887.
+
+Crawford, Virginia M.: STUDIES IN FOREIGN LITERATURE. London, Duckworth,
+1899.
+
+Florian-Parmentier: TOUTES LES LYRES. Anthologie Critique ornée de
+dessins et de portraits, nouvelle série. Paris, Gastein-Serge, [1911].
+
+Gauchez, Maurice: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Bruxelles, éditions du 'Thyrse,'
+1908.
+
+Gilbert, Eugène: FRANCE ET BELGIQUE. Paris, Pion, Nourrit et Cie, 1905.
+
+Gosse, Edmund: FRENCH PROFILES. London, Heinemann, 1905.
+
+Gourmont, Remy de: LE LIVRE DES MASQUES. Paris, Mercure de France, 1896.
+
+Gourmont, Remy de: PROMENADES LITTÉRAIRES. Paris, Mercure de France,
+1904.
+
+Guilbeaux, Henri: É. VERHAEREN. Verviers, Wauthy, 1908.
+
+Hamel, A. G. van: HET LETTERKUNDIG LEVEN VAN FRANKRIJK. Amsterdam, van
+Kampen & Zoon [1907].
+
+Hauser, Otto: DIE BELGISCHE LYRIK VON 1880-1900. Grossenhain, Baumert
+und Ronge, 1902.
+
+Heumann, Albert: LE MOUVEMENT LITTÉRAIRE BELGE D'EXPRESSION FRANÇAISE
+DEPUIS 1880. Paris, Mercure de France, 1913.
+
+Horrent, Désiré: ÉCRIVAINS BELGES D'AUJOURD'HUI. Bruxelles, Lacomblez,
+1904.
+
+Key, Ellen: SEELEN UND WERKE. Berlin, S. Fischer, 1911.
+
+Kinon, Victor: PORTRAITS D'AUTEURS. Bruxelles, Dechenne, 1910.
+
+Le Cardonnel, Georges, et Charles Vellay: LA LITTÉRATURE CONTEMPORAINE,
+1905. Paris, Mercure de France, 1906.
+
+Lemonnier, Camille: LA VIE BELGE. Paris, Fasquelle, 1905.
+
+Mercereau, Alexandre: LA LITTÉRATURE ET LES IDÉES NOUVELLES. Paris,
+Figuière, and London, Stephen Swift, 1912.
+
+Mockel, Albert: ÉMILE VERHAEREN, avec une note biographique par F.
+Vielé-Griffin. Paris, Mercure de France, 1895.
+
+Nouhuys, W.G. van: VAN OVER DE GRENSEN, STUDIËN EN CRITIEKEN. Baarn,
+Hollandia Drukkerij, 1906.
+
+Oppeln-Bronikowski, F. von: DAS JUNGE FRANKREICH. Berlin, Oesterheld und
+Co., 1908.
+
+Ramaekers, Georges: É. VERHAEREN. Bruxelles, éditions de 'La Lutte,'
+1900.
+
+Rency, Georges: PHYSIONOMIES LITTÉRAIRES. Bruxelles, Dechenne et Cie,
+1907.
+
+Rimestad, Christian: FRANSK POESI I DET NITTENDE AARHUNDREDE.
+Kjøbenhavn, Det Schubotheske, 1906.
+
+Schellenberg, E.A.: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Leipzig, Xenien-Verlag, 1911.
+
+Schlaf, Johannes: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Berlin, Schuster und Loeffler,
+[1905].
+
+Smet, Abbé Jos. de: ÉMILE VERHAEREN, SA VIE ET SES ŒUVRES. Malines,
+1909.
+
+Tellier, Jules: Nos POÈTES. Paris, Despret, 1888.
+
+Thompson, Vance: FRENCH PORTRAITS. Boston, Badger & Co., 1900.
+
+Vigié-Lecoq, E.: LA POÉSIE CONTEMPORAINE, 1884-1896. Paris, Mercure de
+France, 1897.
+
+Visan, Tancrède de: L'ATTITUDE DU LYRISME CONTEMPORAIN. Paris, Mercure
+de France, 1911.
+
+Zweig, Stefan: PREFACE TO ÉMILE VERHAERENS AUSGEWÄHLTE GEDICHTE IN
+NACHDICHTUNG. Berlin, Schuster und Loeffler, 1903.
+
+
+PERIODICALS
+
+Brandes, Georg: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _Politiken_, Copenhagen, 8th June 1903.
+
+Brandes, Georg: ÉMILE VERHAEREN ALS DRAMATIKER. _Die Schaubühne_,
+Berlin, 5th April 1906.
+
+Edwards, Osman: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _The Savoy_, November 1897.
+
+Fontainas, André: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _L'Art Moderne_, Brussels, 23rd
+February 1902.
+
+Fresnois, André du: LETTRE DE PARIS, HÉLÈNE DE SPARTE. _La Vie
+Intellectuelle_, Brussels, May 1912.
+
+Gosse, Edmund: M. VERHAEREN'S NEW POEMS (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+_Daily Chronicle_, 17th February 1902.
+
+Gosse, Edmund: M. VERHAEREN'S NEW POEMS (_Les Blés Mouvants_). _New
+Weekly_,18th April 1914.
+
+Gourmont, Jean de: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _Les Marges_, Paris, March 1914.
+
+Krains, Hubert: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _Société Nouvelle_, Brussels, June
+1895.
+
+Mauclair, Camille: TROIS POÈTES. _Revue Encyclopédique_, Paris, 25th
+April 1896.
+
+Maurras, Charles: LITTÉRATURE. _Revue Encyclopédique_, Paris, 23rd
+January 1897.
+
+Polak, Emile: ÉMILE VERHAEREN EN RUSSIE. _La Vie Intellectuelle,_
+Brussels, January 1914.
+
+Reboul, Jacques: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _L'Olivier_, Paris, 15th February
+1914.
+
+Régnier, Henri de: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _Revue Blanche_, Paris, March 1895.
+
+Rodrigue, G.M.: HÉLÈNE DE SPARTE. _Le Thyrse_, Brussels, July 1912.
+
+Sadler, Michael T.H.: ÉMILE VERHAEREN: AN APPRECIATION. _Poetry and
+Drama_, June 1913.
+
+Sautreau, Georges: L'ŒUVRE LYRIQUE D'ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _Revue
+Scandinave_, Paris, December 1911--January 1912.
+
+Speth, William: L'INSPIRATION DE VERHAEREN ET LES COLORISTES FLAMANDS.
+_La Vie des Lettres_, Paris, January 1914.
+
+Vielé-Griffin, Francis: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _La Plume_, Paris,
+
+25th April 1896. Vielé-Griffin, Francis: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _Mercure de
+France_, Paris, 15th March 1914.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+    ACTORS, 131, 133, 174-175.
+    Admiration, 12, 29, 30, 46, 50,
+      101, 172, 183, 217 ff., 259.
+    Aeroplanes, 4, 164, 209.
+    Æsthetics, 10, 85, 94, 115, 116,
+      151, 205.
+    Africa, 114.
+    Agrarianism, 9, 101, 187.
+    'À la Gloire du Vent,' 200.
+    Alcohol, 15.
+    Alexandrine, the, 32, 41, 48, 74,
+      144, 147 ff., 163, 170.
+    _Almanack_, 197.
+    _Also Sprach Zarathustra_,134.
+    America, 15, 24, 108, 113, 115,
+     120, 131-132, 135, 231, 250.
+    Artisans, 16, 131, 194, 211, 235,
+     247.
+    Asceticism, 16, 43, 162, 168.
+    _Au Bord de la Route_, 57-60, 62,
+     63, 68, 111, 149, 236.
+    'Au Bord du Quai,' 202.
+    Auerbach, Berthold, 38.
+    'Aujourd'hui,' 4.
+    'Autour de ma Maison,' 217, 226.
+    'Aux Moines,' 43, 49, 51.
+
+    BAKST, LÉON, 174.
+    Ballads, old German, 146, 159.
+    Balzac, Honoré de, 246.
+    Banville, Théodore de, 143.
+    Baudelaire, Charles, 59, 120, 142.
+    Bayreuth, 92.
+    Bazalgette, Léon, 232, 238, 257.
+    Beauty, 37-38, 45, 49-52, 83,
+     96 ff., 104, 199, 206, 207, 221,
+     230, 231, 240.
+    --, the new, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 83,
+     96 ff., 100, 104, 105, 170-172,
+     222, 255.
+    _Béguinages_, 22, 44.
+    Belfries, 39, 50, 157.
+    Belgian art, 21-22, 45.
+    --life, 45.
+    --literature, 19, 25-26, 37-38.
+    --race, the, 17 ff., 23-24.
+    Belgium, 13 ff., 256.
+    Berlin, 87, 91, 113.
+    Bersaucourt, Albert de, 135.
+    Bornhem, 45.
+    Brandes, Georg, 258.
+    Breughel, 40.
+    Brezina, Otokar, 207.
+    Brjussow, Valerius, 257.
+    Brownings, the, 243.
+    Bruges, 21, 39, 43.
+    Brussels, 14, 32, 93.
+
+    CAILLOU-QUI-BIQUE, 30, 246.
+    Carducci, Giosuè, 187, 193.
+    Carlyle, Thomas, 86.
+    'Celle des Voyages,' 141.
+    'Celui de la Fatigue,' 66.
+    'Celui du Savoir,' 76.
+    Chance, 104, 110, 111, 204, 212.
+    'Charles le Téméraire,' 13.
+    Charles v., 25.
+    Chiaroscuro, 46, 190.
+    Chimay, 46.
+    Christ, 68, 70, 184, 211.
+    Christianity, 49, 51.
+    Cities, 3, 4, 6, 9, 13-14, 29-30,
+      55, 75-77, 83, 89 ff., 94 ff.,
+      101 ff., 107, 109, 111-113, 116-118,
+      125-126, 131, 140, 165-167,
+      181, 191, 197, 222, 231, 238,
+      247, 249, 257.
+    Classicism, 7, 52, 82, 84, 100,
+    160, 162, 172, 190.
+    Claus, Émile, 22.
+    Cloisters, 9, 22, 25, 26, 43-46, 147,
+      165-166.
+    Colmar, 92.
+    Comédie Française, the, 149.
+    Concentration, 188, 194.
+    Congo, the, 17.
+    Conservatives, the, 104.
+    Contemporary feeling, 5 ff., 81-90,
+      101 ff., 112, 115, 118, 148,
+      182, 234, 248, 254 ff.
+    Coppée, François, 143.
+    _Cosmic Enthusiasm_, 220.
+    Cosmic feeling, 8, 69-70, 74-75,
+      81 ff., 112-113, 126, 134, 152,
+      179-185, 186, 188, 192, 198 ff.,
+      219, 226, 228, 231, 256, 258.
+    --law, 198, 202-203.
+    --pain, 68.
+    Cosmopolitanism, 22, 257.
+    Cosmos, the, 8.
+    Coster, Charles de, 19, 23, 167,
+      168.
+    Country, the, 9, 15, 26, 29, 30,
+      101 ff., 107, 245, 247, 248.
+    Courtrai, 21.
+    Criticism, 33-34, 187, 218.
+    Crommelynck, Fernand, 22.
+    Crowd, the, 104 ff., 117, 118, 121,
+      122, 125-127, 129, 130, 132,
+      134-136, 139, 140, 148, 152.
+
+    DAVID, GERHARD, 43.
+    Death, 60, 61, 63, 65, 69, 242.
+    Decadence, 18.
+    Decadents, the, 143, 256.
+    Declamation (_see_ Recitation).
+    Defregger, Franz, 38.
+    Dehmel, Richard, 75-76, 187, 191,
+      229, 234.
+    Deman, Edmond, 32.
+    Democracy, 9, 77, 81 ff., 108, 109,
+      111, 114, 197, 206.
+    Demolder, Eugène, 22.
+    Déroulède, Paul, 135.
+    Deutsches Volkstheater, Vienna, 174.
+    Dialogue, 129.
+
+    Disease, 55 ff., 102, 204, 209.
+    Dithyramb, the, 73, 161.
+    Divinity (_see_ God).
+    Dixmude, 44.
+    Dostoieffsky, F.M., 63, 166.
+    Drama, the, 150, 151, 161 ff.,
+      194, 235.
+    Dyck, Ernest van, 32.
+
+    _Ecce Homo!_ 63, 66, 85-86, 119,
+      218.
+
+    Ecstasy, 24, 61, 66, 75, 76, 82,
+      89, 90, 92, 94, 121, 128, 133,
+      136, 137, 139, 152, 165-167,
+      169, 173, 183, 184, 187, 189,
+      209, 213, 216, 217, 220, 221,
+      223, 225-229, 231, 232, 234,
+      235, 237-239, 241, 243, 248,
+      251, 259.
+    Edwards, Osman, 174.
+    Eekhoud, Georges, 22.
+    Egoism (_see_ Selfishness).
+    Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 140.
+    Emigrants, 9, 102-103, 187.
+    Energy, 50, 88 ff., 92, 95, 96, 99,
+      105, 111, 114, 116, 117, 121,
+      132, 182, 198, 199, 218, 221,
+      223.
+    Engineering, 4, 5, 9, 82.
+    England, 13, 55, 63, 64, 90, 92,
+      108, 113, 114.
+    Enthusiasm, 12, 30, 89, 111, 132,
+      138, 153, 161-164, 168, 172-174,
+      179, 183, 184, 187, 188, 193,
+      194, 198, 207, 209, 210, 215 ff,
+      220-222, 225-227, 232, 234,
+      250, 252, 259.
+    Epic, the, 19, 23, 150, 151, 161.
+    Eroticism, 167,172-173, 234, 235,
+      237, 240.
+    Ethics, 6, 115, 182, 183, 187,
+      206, 215 ff., 216.
+    Europe, 9, 13, 20, 23, 101, 114,
+      201, 231, 250, 253 ff.
+    European consciousness, 114.
+    --feeling, 22.
+    --race, the, 114-115.
+    --the New, 9.
+    Evolution, 3 ff., 10, 82, 105, 142,
+      180, 195-197, 213, 216, 218,
+      229, 249.
+    Excess, 15, 16, 24, 31, 40-41, 44,
+      61, 121, 139, 232, 245.
+    Exchanges, 90, 98, 99, 155.
+    Exultation, 24, 44, 91, 130, 133.
+    Eycks, van, the, 43.
+
+    FACTORIES, 89, 97, 100, 102, 155.
+    Faith, 31, 44, 46, 50, 67, 69, 95,
+      104, 167, 184, 196, 208-210,
+      212, 227.
+    Fate, 62, 203, 212, 213.
+    Faust, 72, 209.
+    Fellowship, 73, 76, 94, 223, 227, 249.
+    Fervour (_see_ Enthusiasm).
+    Flanders, 15, 19, 22, 23, 27, 30,
+      33, 36, 39, 40, 43, 44, 46, 51,
+      168, 197, 246, 246, 256.
+    Flemings, the, 14, 15, 43.
+    Flemish language, the, 154, 155.
+    'Fleur Fatale,' 63, 65.
+    Florence, 52, 92, 191.
+    Force, 232, 253.
+    Forth Bridge, the, 87.
+    France, 13, 22, 134, 250, 256.
+    Future, the, 8, 10, 14, 36, 51, 53,
+      89, 104, 115, 167, 180, 182, 201,
+      204, 211, 227, 231, 232, 244,
+      246, 253-255.
+
+    GAIETY THEATRE, Manchester, 174.
+    Gauchez, Maurice, 154.
+    Genius, men of, 18.
+    Genre-pictures, 40.
+    George, Stefan, 187.
+    Germany, 19, 55, 91, 92, 174, 257, 258.
+    Ghent, 25, 213.
+    Gide, Andre', 249.
+    Glesener, Edmond, 22.
+    God, 6, 7, 47-48, 68, 95, 104, 105,
+      109-111, 165, 182, 184, 185,
+      199, 203-205, 208, 210, 212-215,
+      222, 259.
+    Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 70,
+      71, 72,139, 158, 160, 193, 197,
+      254.
+    Goodness, 72, 251.
+    Gothic art, 45.
+    Greece, 82, 86, 165.
+    Greeks, the, 52, 84, 172, 190.
+    Grünewald, Mathias, 92.
+    Gueux, the, 20,
+    'Guillaume de Juliers,' 228.
+    Guyau, Jean-Marie, 8.
+
+    HAMBURG, 92.
+    Handiwork, 28, 82, 86, 93, 211.
+    Harmony, 23, 36, 70, 84, 85, 118,
+      125, 127, 130, 146, 149, 160,
+      167, 169, 170, 181, 183, 184,
+      213, 216, 245, 254.
+    Hay fever, 29, 247-248.
+    Health, 16-18, 67, 72, 73, 231,
+      245, 246, 251.
+    _Hélène de Sparte_,162, 165, 169-172,
+      174-175.
+    Heymans, Joseph, 22.
+    Holland, 13.
+    Homer, 128.
+    'Hommage,' 236.
+    Horniman, Miss, 174.
+    Hugo, Victor, 10-11, 32, 120, 134-135,
+      138, 142-143, 145, 147, 160.
+
+    Humility, 221, 233, 240.
+    Huysmans, Joris Karl, 22.
+
+    IDENTITY, 8, 77, 96, 126, 184, 205,
+      223, 225, 228, 230, 248, 250.
+    Iliad, the, 19.
+    Impressionists, the, 9, 86, 222, 249.
+    India, 109, 114.
+    Individual, the, 110, 111, 118.
+    Industrialism, 9, 77, 81 ff., 101,
+      125, 131, 187, 205-206.
+    Inquisition, the, 16, 169.
+    'Insatiablement,' 61.
+    Instinct, 98, 100, 113, 229, 236.
+    Intemperance (_see_ Excess).
+    Intensification, 20, 24, 30, 49, 64,
+      66, 131, 137, 152, 162, 164, 190,
+      200-202, 207, 220, 225, 229,
+      241, 252, 254.
+    Intoxication, 20, 22, 24, 64, 91,
+      189, 199, 232.
+    Italy, 13, 86, 92, 108, 114, 191.
+
+    JENSEN, JOHANNES V., 258.
+    Jesuits, the, 25-26.
+    Jesus, 68, 70.
+    Jordaens, Jakob, 15, 40, 41.
+    Joy, 61, 66, 74, 106, 133, 184, 214,
+      217, 228, 230-233, 240.
+
+    KAHN, GUSTAVE, 144.
+    Kainz, Josef, 258.
+    Kermesses, 15, 31, 40, 43.
+    Key, Ellen, 258.
+    Khnopff, Fernand, 21, 45.
+    Klinger, Max, 128.
+    Knowledge, 179, 180, 216, 220-222,
+      225, 227, 229, 232-234, 236, 245.
+    Künstlertheater, Munich, 174.
+
+    'LA BARQUE,' 58.
+    'Là-has,' 62.
+    Labour Party, Belgian, 93.
+    'La Bourse,' 98.
+    'La Conquête' (_La Multiple Splendeur_),
+      109, 114, 199.
+    'La Conquête' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_),
+      115, 203, 206.
+    'L'Action,' 128, 209, 220.
+    'La Ferveur,' 204, 208, 219, 224-225, 232.
+    'La Folie,' 212.
+    'La Forêt,' 77.
+    Laforgue, Jules, 144.
+    'La Foule,' 3, 76, 95, 107, 112,
+      152, 185.
+    _La Guirlande des Dunes_, 246.
+    'La Joie,' 55, 66, 226, 231.
+    'La Louange du Corps humain,' 227.
+    Lamartine, A.M.L. de, 32, 145.
+    'L'Âme de la Ville,' 95, 97, 105.
+    'La Mort,' 211.
+    'La Morte,' 64.
+    'L'Amour,' 68.
+    _La Multiple Splendeur_, 109, 114,
+      122, 126, 182, 183, 199, 200,
+      204, 208, 209, 210, 211, 217,
+      219, 221, 223, 224-225, 226,
+      227, 228, 231, 232, 233.
+    'La Plaine,' 103.
+    'La Pluie,' 71.
+    'La Prière,' 253.
+    'La Recherche,' 207, 211.
+    'L'Art,' 11.
+    'La Science,' 209, 210.
+    Latin races, the, 19.
+    'L'Attente,' 197, 211, 212.
+    'L'Aventurier,' 71.
+    'La Vie,' 215, 219, 228.
+    'La Ville,' 97.
+    'L'Eau,' 201-202.
+    'Le Bazar,' 98, 99.
+    'Le Capitaine,' 116.
+    Le Cardonnel, Georges, 215-216.
+    _Le Cloître_, 49, 162, 165-166, 168,
+      172, 174.
+    'Le Départ,' 103.
+    'Le Forgeron,' 70, 73.
+    'Le Gel,' 58.
+    Lemonnier, Camille, 20-21, 33, 37, 244.
+    'Le Mont,' 81.
+    'L'En-Avant,' 125, 226.
+    'Le Paradis,' 213, 236.
+    'Le Passeur d'Eau,' 71.
+    'Le Port,' 103.
+    Lerberghe, Charles van, 15, 22, 25, 26.
+    'Le Roc,' 61, 64, 65.
+    'L'Erreur,' 208.
+    _Les Apparus dans mes Chemins_, 66, 72, 73, 76.
+    _Les Aubes_, 103, 109, 115, 162, 166-167.
+    _Les Blés Mouvants_, 36, 229.
+    'Les Cultes,' 203.
+    _Les Débâcles_, 57, 60, 61, 63, 65.
+    _Les Campagnes Hallucinées_, 97,
+      101 ff., 162, 197.
+    _Les Flamandes_, 33, 36 ff., 49, 45,
+      197, 229.
+    _Les Flambeaux Noirs_, 67, 61, 64, 65.
+    _Les Forces Tumultueuses_, 11, 17,
+      115, 116, 123, 125, 132, 137,
+      161, 182, 183, 186, 203, 204,
+      206, 208, 209, 210, 212, 220,
+      222, 226, 229, 233, 255.
+    _Les Héros_, 4, 228.
+    _Les Heures Claires_, 237.
+    _Les Heures d'Après-midi_, 234, 237,
+      239, 240, 241, 241, 242.
+    _Les Heures du Soir_, 237, 242.
+    'Les Heures où l'on crée,' 123.
+    'Les Mages,' 233.
+    _Les Moines_, 43 ff., 55, 58, 145,
+      162, 165, 197, 208.
+    'Les Nombres,' 65.
+    'Le Sonneur,' 71, 187.
+    'Les Pêcheurs,' 71.
+    'Les Penseurs,' 209, 210.
+    _Les Petites Légendes_, 197.
+    'Les Promeneuses,' 98.
+    'Les Rêves,' 215, 221.
+    _Les Rythmes Souverains_, 182, 183,
+      213, 229, 236, 253.
+    'Les Saintes,' 72, 73.
+    _Les Soirs_,57, 58, 60, 61.
+    'Les Spectacles,' 98, 179.
+    _Les Tendresses Premières_, 4, 25, 27.
+    _Les Vignes de ma Muraille_, 141.
+    'Les Vieux Maîtres,' 39.
+    _Les Villages Illusoires_, 70-71, 73, 162, 187.
+    'Les Villes,' 91, 204.
+    _Les Villes Tentaculaires_, 91 ff.,
+      103, 104, 105, 115, 158, 162,
+      166, 197, 205, 207, 211, 257.
+    _Les Visages de la Vie_ ,3, 55, 66,
+      76, 77, 95, 107, 112, 152, 182,
+      183, 185, 199, 201-202, 209,
+      211, 212, 220.
+    'L'Étal,' 99.
+    'Le Tribun,' 132.
+    'Le Verbe,' 117, 122, 126.
+    'L'Heure Mauvaise,' 57, 59, 149.
+    'L'Impossible,' 137, 220, 222.
+    Locomotives, 124, 125.
+    London, 55, 63, 90, 92, 108, 113, 114.
+    Louvain, 31.
+    Love, 7, 29, 66, 72, 86, 170-173,
+      197, 221, 223-224, 230, 234 ff.
+
+    MACHINERY, 74, 81-82, 84 ff.,
+      155, 206, 211.
+    Madness, 57, 63 ff., 69, 102.
+    Maeterlinck, Maurice, 15, 22, 25,
+      26, 45, 143, 213, 249.
+    _Maison du Peuple, La_, 93.
+    Mallarmé, Stéphane, 144.
+    Manchester, 174.
+    'Ma Race,' 17, 35.
+    Marriage, 94, 197, 237 ff., 243.
+    Martyrs, 19, 207.
+    'Méditation,' 208.
+    Mendès, Catulle, 143.
+    Merrill, Stuart, 143.
+    Messel, Alfred, 87.
+    Metaphors, 46, 136, 137, 141,
+      156, 157, 160.
+    Metaphysics, 24, 184, 199, 203,
+      215, 216, 220, 236.
+    Meunier, Constantin, 17, 22, 86.
+    Minne, Georges, 21, 45.
+    Mockel, Albert, 22, 48, 139, 143,
+    157, 189, 246, 249.
+    Monasteries (_see_ Cloisters).
+    Monastery of Bornhem, 45.
+    --of Forges, 46.
+    Monet, Claude, 86.
+    Money, 95, 98-99, 102, 103, 114 201.
+    Monistic philosophy, 202, 258.
+    Monks, 44, 45 ff., 235.
+    Mont, Pol de, 14.
+    Morality, 6, 16, 40, 51, 88, 167,
+      182, 205, 216, 217, 219, 224.
+    Moréas, Jean, 143.
+    Motion, 121, 141, 217.
+    Motor-cars, 14, 87, 124.
+    'Mourir,' 60.
+    Multitude (_see_ Crowd).
+    Munich, 19, 92, 174.
+    Music halls, 98.
+    Mysticism, 214, 258.
+    Mystics, the, 18, 207.
+    Mythology, 51, 172, 182, 184.
+
+    NATURALISM, 37-38, 41.
+    Nature, 3, 20, 28, 29, 55, 94, 96,
+      99, 105, 112, 123, 125, 158, 172,
+      195, 200-205, 212, 213, 239,
+      246, 247, 248.
+    Necessary, the, is the beautiful,
+      7, 9, 10, 86, 218.
+    Neologisms, 154, 160.
+    Neurasthenia, 56 ff., 118.
+    New age, the, 3 ff., 105, 206-207, 211.
+    --European, the, 9.
+    New York, 108.
+    Nietzsche, Friedrich, 10, 68, 66,
+      85-86, 115, 119, 133, 134, 181,
+      218, 229, 251.
+
+    OMBIAUX, MAURICE DES, 22.
+    Onomatopœia, 149.
+    Oppidomagnum, 103, 108, 166-167,
+    Optimism, 184, 207, 208, 210, 258.
+    Organisation, 6, 88, 93, 98, 101,
+      107, 114, 116, 118-119.
+    Orgies, 15, 39, 40, 41.
+    Oxford, 25.
+
+    PAN, 51, 184.
+    Pan-American, the, 115.
+    Pan-European, the, 115.
+    Pantheism, 24, 77, 215, 225, 226.
+    Paradise, 212-213.
+    Paris, 55, 87, 93, 108, 113, 114,
+      174, 248-249.
+    Parnassian poetry, 48, 145, 146.
+    Paroxysm, 63, 64, 89, 188.
+    _Parsival_,37.
+    Passion, 48, 67, 77, 92, 97, 99,
+      109, 110, 117, 118, 120-123,
+      128-131, 133, 135, 136, 147,
+      159, 163-165, 168-170, 173, 174,
+      179, 181, 189, 194, 212, 215,
+      217, 227-229, 231, 232, 235,
+      238, 241, 245, 251, 252.
+    Past, the, 7, 10, 14, 26, 36, 46,
+      50-53, 69, 82, 85 ff., 94, 100,
+      104, 105, 109, 167, 180, 182,
+      207, 231, 246.
+    Peasants, 16, 20-21, 29, 102-103,
+      146-147, 247, 251.
+    Pessimism, 43, 68, 258.
+    Petöfi, Alexander, 132.
+    Philip II., 16, 19,167-169.
+    _Philippe II._, 92,162, 165, 167-169, 174.
+    Philosophy, 9, 10, 151, 179, 182,
+      184, 187, 194, 216, 236, 256, 258.
+    Picard, Edmond, 33.
+    Poetry, the new, 6, 7, 8, 73, 77,
+      83 ff., 109, 111-113, 116, 119,
+      126, 132, 133, 137, 139, 155,
+      205-206, 216, 222.
+    Poets, the, 50-51, 82, 208-209.
+    --of the old school, 6, 7, 12,
+      51-52, 81 ff., 109, 111-112, 125,
+      129-131, 188, 190, 192, 193,
+      206, 255.
+    Pol de Mont, 14.
+    Poverty, 14, 16, 94, 102-103.
+    Prague, 91.
+    Present, the, 3 ff., 10, 51, 52,
+      105, 115, 167, 179-180, 182,
+      201, 246, 254, 255, 256.
+    Pride, 23, 70, 72, 219, 221, 224,
+      230, 231, 256.
+    Progress, 3-5, 7, 104, 209.
+    Prostitutes, 98, 99, 102.
+    Protestantism, 14.
+    Pseudoanæsthesia, 156.
+    Psychology, 47, 113, 180.
+    Puritanism, 16.
+
+    RABELAIS, FRANÇOIS, 40.
+    Realism, 37-38, 199.
+    Reality, 6, 7, 37-38, 50-52, 70,
+      81, 85-86, 111, 114, 115, 131,
+      153, 155, 167, 179, 183, 185,
+      192, 196, 198, 199, 201, 204,
+      206, 255, 259.
+    Recitation, 122-123, 128 ff., 136,
+      139, 149, 157.
+    Reinhardt, Max, 174.
+    Religion, 6, 9, 24, 44, 47, 50, 64,
+      67,  105,  182-184, 196, 205, 208,
+      211, 238, 240, 257.
+    --, a new, 6, 20, 50, 88, 104.
+    Rembrandt, 11, 43, 46, 187.
+    _Rembrandt_, 2, 11.
+    Renan, Ernest, 85.
+    Renunciation, 19, 27, 44, 52.
+    Responsibility, 253 ff.
+    Revolt, 16, 30, 42, 62, 99, 117,
+      122, 142-146, 160, 169, 195,
+      229, 256.
+    Rhapsodists, 128 ff.
+    Rhetoricians, 134.
+    Rhyme, 144, 153, 155.
+    Rhythm, 24, 41, 74, 94, 95, 97,
+      105, 116, 118 ff., 137, 141,
+      146 ff., 153, 157, 163, 173, 174,
+      193, 194, 201, 238, 247, 251, 256.
+    --of life, the, 5, 7, 8, 11, 117 ff.
+    Rilke, Rainer Maria, 154, 187, 249.
+    _Ring, The_, 37.
+    Rodenbach, Georges, 21, 25, 26, 39.
+    Rodin, Auguste, 135, 249.
+    Rolland, Romain, 249,
+    Romains, Jules, 256-257.
+    Roman Catholicism, 14, 16, 24,
+      26, 31, 44, 46, 67, 69, 162, 165-166,
+      168-169, 184.
+    Romanticism, 46.
+    Romanticists, the, 50, 147.
+    Rome, 108, 114.
+    Rops, Félicien, 22.
+    Rubens, Peter Paul, 20, 40, 41,
+      43, 58.
+    Rubinstein, Ida, 174.
+    Ruskin, John, 82.
+    Russia, 257.
+    Russians, the, 43.
+    Rysselberghe, Théo van, 22, 249.
+
+    ST. AMAND, 27-
+    Saint-Cloud, 249.
+    'Saint Georges,' 72, 73.
+    Sainte-Barbe, College of, 25-26, 30, 213.
+    St. Petersburg, 114.
+    Saints, 19, 210, 212.
+    'S'amoindrir,' 60.
+    Scandinavia, 18, 258.
+    Scheldt, the, 27, 28.
+    Schiller, Friedrich, 134,158, 160, 168.
+    Schlaf, Johannes, 65.
+    Scholars, 209, 210.
+    Science, 6, 9, 18, 64, 77, 82, 85,
+      108, 155, 205-209, 222.
+    Sea, the, 13, 15, 30, 103, 201,
+      202, 247, 248.
+    Selfishness, 72, 223.
+    Sensations, 6-9, 65,104, 120, 125,
+      130, 164, 188, 189, 190, 192,
+      202, 203, 225, 240.
+    Sensuality, 15, 16, 24, 40, 41, 44,
+      98, 162, 170-172, 241, 245.
+    Sex, 234 ff.
+    Shakespeare, William, 10, 163.
+    Signac, Paul, 249.
+    Silence, 44-46, 117, 122, 130, 214, 239
+    'Si Morne,' 61.
+    Social feeling, 83, 110.
+    --problem, the, 8, 9, 101 ff., 187.
+    Socialism, 9, 24, 89, 93, 224.
+    Society, 249.
+    Solitude, 44, 55, 57, 69, 70, 76,
+      81, 83, 86, 91, 112, 237.
+    Sonnets, 41, 46.
+    Soul, 43, 89, 141, 182, 225, 237.
+    'Sous les Prétoriens,' 111.
+    Spain, 16, 55, 92, 162, 165, 191.
+    Spaniards, the, 16.
+    Stappen, van der, 22.
+    Stevens, Alfred, 22.
+    Strauss, David, 50.
+    Suicide, 62, 64, 65.
+    Superman, the, 115.
+    Symbolism, 71, 99, 143 ff.
+    Symbolists, the, 143 ff., 256.
+    Symbols, 7, 19,21, 45, 47, 51, 70,
+      71, 72, 92, 104, 107, 144, 163,
+      165, 168, 195, 201, 202, 213,
+      218, 237, 247, 248.
+    Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 160.
+
+    TAMERLAINE, 108.
+    _Tannhäuser_,37.
+    Teutonic elements, 14, 18, 24, 39,
+      146, 159, 194, 225.
+    Thames, the, 64.
+    _Thyl Ulenspiegel_, 19, 167, 168.
+    Toledo, 191.
+    Tolstoy, Leo, 82.
+    Torpedo-boats, 87.
+    _Toute la Flandre_, 4, 23, 25, 27,
+      168, 197, 244, 246.
+    Town (_see_ City).
+    Tradition, 26, 27, 85, 92, 145, 146, 243.
+    Travel, 55, 91-92, 124, 201.
+    'Truandailies,' 40.
+    Truth, 37-38.
+    Turner, J.M.W., 152.
+
+    UNITY, 23, 108, 113, 114, 199,
+      202, 203, 211, 215 ff., 225, 252.
+    Université Libre, Brussels, 93.
+    Unknown, the, 3, 6, 69, 204, 207,
+      212, 220, 224.
+    'Un Matin,' 229.
+    'Un Soir ' (_Au Bord de la Route_), 63, 68.
+    'Un Soir' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_), 183, 186, 255.
+    Utopia, 109, 115, 167, 199.
+
+    VANDERVELDE, EMIL, 93.
+    Vellay, Charles, 215-216.
+    Venice, 13.
+
+    Verhaeren, Émile, born at St. Amand on the
+    Scheldt, 1855, 27; his boyhood, 27-28; educated at
+    the College of Sainte-Barbe in Ghent, 25-26;
+    studies jurisprudence at Louvain, 31; called to the
+    bar in Brussels, 32; his first verses, 32, 33, 145
+    ff.; publication of _Les Flamandes,_ 33 ff.;
+    resides for three weeks in the monastery of
+    Forges, 46; publication of _Les Moines_, 45 ff.;
+    his health breaks down, 55 ff., 237; his illness
+    is described in _Les Soirs, Les Débâcles, Les
+    Flambeaux Noirs,_ and _Au Bord de la Route_, 57
+    ff.; his travels, 55, 91-92, 124; he is obsessed
+    by the atmosphere of London, 55; his recovery is
+    symbolised in some of the poems of _Les Villages
+    Illusoires_, 70-71; his marriage, 94, 237 ff., 243;
+    his connection with the Labour Party and
+    Socialism, 89, 93-94; the Flemish element in his
+    style, 154-155; his technique, 141 ff.; stage
+    performances of his dramas, 164, 174-175; how he
+    recites his poetry, 122-123; he resides at
+    Caillou-qui-bique and Saint-Cloud, 30, 93, 246,
+    248-249; his personal appearance, 67, 251; his
+    personality, 244 ff.
+
+    Verlaine, Paul, 69, 120, 142, 144, 243.
+    'Vers,' 60.
+    'Vers la Mer,' 152.
+    'Vers le Cloître,' 63.
+    'Vers le Futur,' 104, 205, 207.
+    _Vers libre_, the, 74, 144 ff., 163.
+    _Vers ternaire, le_, 147.
+    Vielé-Griffin, Francis, 143, 246, 249.
+    Vienna, 91, 114, 174.
+    Vitality, 12, 15, 16, 19, 24, 32,
+      33, 40, 43, 119, 131, 190, 200-202,
+      206, 229, 248, 258.
+
+    WAGNER, RICHARD, 37, 92.
+    Walloons, the, 14, 22.
+    Weyden, Roger van der, 43.
+    Whistler, J. M'Neill, 86.
+    Whitman, Walt, 24, 86, 108-109,
+      115, 132, 134, 187, 190-191,
+      227 257.
+    Will, the, 23, 60-62, 73-74, 133,
+      181, 194-195, 198, 203, 212,
+      223.
+    _Wisdom and Destiny_, 213.
+    Woman, 172-173, 192, 234 ff.
+    Women, Belgian, 17.
+
+    YPRES, 21, 43.
+
+    ZOLA, ÉMILE, 37.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Émile Verhaeren, by Stefan Zweig
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Émile Verhaeren, by Stefan Zweig
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Émile Verhaeren
+
+Author: Stefan Zweig
+
+Translator: Jethro Bithell
+
+Release Date: February 24, 2011 [EBook #35387]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ÉMILE VERHAEREN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org
+
+
+
+
+EMILE VERHAEREN
+
+BY
+
+STEFAN ZWEIG
+
+LONDON
+
+CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD
+
+1914
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Émile Verhaeren from an unpublished photograph by
+Charles Bernier, 1914.]
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+Four years have passed since the present volume appeared simultaneously
+in German and French. In the meantime Verhaeren's fame has been
+spreading; but in English-speaking countries he is still not so well
+known as he deserves to be.
+
+Something of his philosophy--if it may be called philosophy rather than
+a poet's inspired visualising of the world--has passed into the public
+consciousness in a grotesquely distorted form in what is known as
+'futurism.' So long as futurism is associated with those who have
+acquired a facile notoriety by polluting the pure idea, it would be an
+insult to Verhaeren to suggest that he is to be classed with the
+futurists commonly so-called; but the whole purpose of the present
+volume will prove that the gospel of a very serious and reasoned
+futurism is to be found in Verhaeren's writings.
+
+Of the writer of the book it may be said that there was no one more
+fitted than he to write the authentic exposition of the teaching which
+he has hailed as a new religion. His relations to the Master are not
+only those of a fervent disciple, but of an apostle whose labour of
+love has in German-speaking lands and beyond been crowned with signal
+success. Himself a lyrist of distinction, Stefan Zweig has accomplished
+the difficult feat, which in this country still waits to be done, of
+translating the great mass of Verhaeren's poems into actual and enduring
+verse. Another book of his on Verlaine is already known in an English
+rendering; so that he bids fair to become known in this country as one
+of the most gifted of the writers of Young-Vienna.
+
+As to the translation, I have endeavoured to be faithful to my text,
+which is the expression of a personality. Whatever divergences there are
+have been necessitated by the lapse of time. For help in reading the
+proofs I have to thank Mr. M.T.H. Sadler and Mr. Fritz Voigt.
+
+                                               J. BITHELL.
+
+  HAMMERFIELD,
+_Nr_. HEMEL HEMPSTEAD,
+  14_th July_ 1914.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PART I
+
+THE NEW AGE
+THE NEW BELGIUM
+YOUTH IN FLANDERS
+'LES FLAMANDES'
+THE MONKS
+THE BREAK-DOWN
+FLIGHT INTO THE WORLD
+
+PART II
+
+TOWNS ('LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES')
+THE MULTITUDE
+THE RHYTHM OF LIFE
+THE NEW PATHOS
+VERHAEREN'S POETIC METHOD
+VERHAEREN'S DRAMA
+
+PART III
+
+COSMIC POETRY
+THE LYRIC UNIVERSE
+SYNTHESES
+THE ETHICS OF FERVOUR
+LOVE
+THE ART OF VERHAEREN'S LIFE
+THE EUROPEAN IMPORTANCE OF HIS WORK
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+INDEX
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+DECIDING FORCES
+
+ES FLAMANDES--LES MOINES--LES SOIRS--LES
+
+DÉBâCLES--LES FLAMBEAUX NOIRS--AU BORD DE
+
+LA ROUTE--LES APPARUS DANS MES CHEMINS
+
+1883-1893
+
+
+
+     Son tempérament, son caractère, sa vie, tout conspire à nous
+     montrer son art tel que nous avons essayé de le définir. Une
+     profonde unité les scelle. Et n'est-ce pas vers la découverte de
+     cette unité-là, qui groupe en un faisceau solide les gestes, les
+     pensées et les travaux d'un génie sur la terre, que la critique,
+     revenue enfin de tant d'erreurs, devait tendre uniquement?
+
+                                 VERHAEREN, _Rembrandt._
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW AGE
+
+     Tout bouge--et l'on dirait les horizons en marche.
+                                        É.V., 'La Foule.'
+
+
+The feeling of this age of ours, of this our moment in eternity, is
+different in its conception of life from that of our ancestors. Only
+eternal earth has changed not nor grown older, that field, gloomed by
+the Unknown, on which the monotonous light of the seasons divides, in a
+rhythmic round, the time of blossoms and of their withering; changeless
+only are the action of the elements and the restless alternation of
+night and day. But the aspect of earth's spirit has changed, all that is
+subjected to the toil of man. Has changed, to change again. The
+evolution of the phenomena of culture seems to proceed with ever greater
+rapidity: never was the span of a hundred years as rich, as replete as
+that which stretches to the threshold of our own days. Cities have shot
+up which are as huge and bewildering, as impenetrable and as endless, as
+nothing else has been save those virgin forests now fast receding before
+the onward march of the tilled land. More and more the work of man
+achieves the grandiose and elementary character that was once Nature's
+secret. The lightning is in his hands, and protection from the
+weather's sudden onslaughts; lands that once yawned far apart are now
+forged together by the iron hoop with which of old only the narrow
+strait was arched; oceans are united that have sought each other for
+thousands of years; and now in the very air man is building a new road
+from country to country. All has changed.
+
+     Tout a changé: les ténèbres et les flambeaux.
+     Les droits et les devoirs out fait d'autres faisceaux,
+     Du sol jusqu'au soleil, une neuve énergie
+     Diverge un sang torride, en la vie élargie;
+     Des usines de fonte ouvrent, sous le ciel bleu,
+     Des cratères en flamme et des fleuves en feu;
+     De rapides vaisseaux, sans rameurs et sans voiles,
+     La nuit, sur les flots bleus, étonnent les étoiles;
+     Tout peuple réveillé se forge une autre loi;
+     Autre est le crime, autre est l'orgueil, autre est l'exploit.[1]
+
+Changed, too, is the relation of individual to individual, of the
+individual to the whole; at once more onerous and less burdensome is the
+network of social laws, at once more onerous and less burdensome our
+whole life.
+
+But a still greater thing has happened. Not only the real forms, the
+transitory facts of life have changed, not only do we live in other
+cities, other houses, not only are we dressed in different clothes, but
+the infinite above us too, that which seemed unshakable, has changed
+from what it was for our fathers and forefathers. Where the actual
+changes, the relative changes also. The most elementary forms of our
+conception, space and time, have been displaced. Space has become other
+than it was, for we measure it with new velocities. Roads that took our
+forefathers days to traverse can now be covered in one short hour; one
+flying night transports us to warm and luxuriant lands that were once
+separated from us by the hardships of a long journey. The perilous
+forests of the tropics with Jheir strange constellations, to see which
+cost those of old a year of their lives, are of a sudden near to us and
+easy of access. We measure differently with these different velocities
+of life. Time is more and more the victor of space. The eye, too, has
+learned other distances, and in cold constellations is startled to
+perceive the forms of primeval landscapes petrified; and the human voice
+seems to have grown a thousand times stronger since it has learned to
+carry on a friendly conversation a hundred miles away. In this new
+relationship of forces we have a different perception of the spanning
+round of the earth, and the rhythm of life, beating more brightly and
+swiftly, is likewise becoming new for us. The distance from springtime
+to springtime is greater now and yet less, greater and yet less is the
+individual hour, greater and less our whole life.
+
+And therefore is it with new feelings that we must comprehend this new
+age. For we all feel that we must not measure the new with the old
+measures our forefathers used, that we must not live through the new
+with feelings outworn, that we must discover a new sense of distance, a
+new sense of time, a new sense of space, that we must find a new music
+for this nervous, feverish rhythm around us. This new-born human
+conditionality calls for a new morality; this new union of equals a new
+beauty; this new topsy-turvydom a new system of ethics. And this new
+confrontation with another and still newer world, with another Unknown,
+demands a new religion, a new God. A new sense of the universe is, with
+a muffled rumour, welling up in the hearts of all of us.
+
+New things, however, must be coined into new words. A new age calls for
+new poets, poets whose conceptions have been nurtured by their
+environment, poets who, in the expression they give to this new
+environment, themselves vibrate with the feverish rotation of life. But
+so many of our poets are pusillanimous. They feel that their voices are
+out of harmony with reality; they feel that they are not incorporated
+with the new organism and a necessary part of it; they have a dull
+foreboding that they do not speak the language of our contemporary life.
+In our great cities they are like strangers stranded. The great roaring
+streams of our new sensations are to them terrific and inconceivable.
+They are ready to accept all the comfort and luxury of modern life; they
+are quick to take advantage of the facilities afforded by technical
+science and organisation; but for their poetry they reject these
+phenomena, because they cannot master them. They recoil from the task
+of transmuting poetical values, of sensing whatever is poetically new in
+these new things. And so they stand aside. They flee from the real, the
+contemporary, to the immutable; they take refuge in whatsoever the
+eternal evolution has left untouched; they sing the stars, the
+springtime, the babbling of springs which is now as it ever was, the
+myth of love; they hide behind the old symbols; they nestle to the old
+gods. Not from the moment, from the molten flowing ore, do they seize
+and mould the eternal--no, as ever of old they dig the symbols of the
+eternal out of the cold clay of the past, like old Greek statues. They
+are not on that account insignificant; but at best they produce
+something important, never anything necessary.
+
+For only that poet can be necessary to our time who himself feels that
+everything in this time is necessary, and therefore beautiful. He must
+be one whose whole endeavour as poet and man it is to make his own
+sensations vibrate in unison with contemporary sensations; who makes the
+rhythm of his poem nothing else than the echoed rhythm of living things;
+who adjusts the beat of his verse to the beat of our own days, and takes
+into his quivering veins the streaming blood of our time. He must not on
+this account, when seeking to create new ideals, be a stranger to the
+ideals of old; for all true progress is based on the deepest
+understanding of the past. Progress must be for him as Guyau interprets
+it: 'Le pouvoir, lorsqu'on est arrivé à un état supérieur, d'éprouver
+des émotions et des sensations nouvelles, sans cesser d'être encore
+accessible à ce que contenaient de grand ou de beau ses précédantes
+émotions.'[2] A poet of our time can only be great when he conceives
+this time as great. The preoccupations of his time must be his also; its
+social problem must be his personal concern. In such a poet succeeding
+generations would see how man has fought a way to them from the past,
+how in every moment as it passed he has wrestled to identify the feeling
+of his own mind with that of the cosmos. And even though the great works
+of such a poet should be soon disintegrated and his poems obsolete,
+though his images should have paled, there would yet remain imperishably
+vivid that which is of greater moment, the invisible motives of his
+inspiration, the melody, the breath, the rhythm of his time. Such poets,
+besides pointing the way to the coming generation, are in a deeper sense
+the incarnation of their own period. Hence the time has come to speak of
+Émile Verhaeren, the greatest of modern poets, and perhaps the only one
+who has been conscious of what is poetical in contemporary feeling, the
+only one who has shaped that feeling in verse, the first poet who, with
+skill incomparably inspired, has chiselled our epoch into a mighty
+monument of rhyme.
+
+In Verhaeren's work our age is mirrored. The new landscapes are in it;
+the sinister silhouettes of the great cities; the seething masses of a
+militant democracy; the subterranean shafts of mines; the last heavy
+shadows of silent, dying cloisters. All the intellectual forces of our
+time, our time's ideology, have here become a poem; the new social
+ideas, the struggle of industrialism with agrarianism, the vampire force
+which lures the rural population from the health-giving fields to the
+burning quarries of the great city, the tragic fate of emigrants,
+financial crises, the dazzling conquests of science, the syntheses of
+philosophy, the triumphs of engineering, the new colours of the
+impressionists. All the manifestations of the new age are here reflected
+in a poet's soul in their action--first confused, then understood, then
+joyfully acclaimed--on the sensations of a New European. How this work
+came into being, out of what resistance and crises a poet has here
+conquered the consciousness of the necessity and then of the beauty of
+the new cosmic phase, it shall be our task to show. If the time has
+indeed come to class Verhaeren, it is not so much with the poets that
+his place will be found. He does not so much stand with or above the
+verse-smiths or actual artists in verse, with the musicians, or
+painters, as rather with the great organisers, those who have forced the
+new social currents to flow between dikes; with the legislators who
+prevent the clashing of flamboyant energies; with the philosophers, who
+aim at co-ordinating and unifying all these vastly complicated
+tendencies in one brilliant synthesis. His poetry is a created poet's
+world; it is a resolute shaping of phases, a considered new æstheticism,
+and a conscious new inspiration. He is not only the poet, he is at the
+same time the preacher of our time. He was the first to conceive of it
+as _beautiful_, but not like those who, in their zeal for embellishment,
+tone down the dark colours and bring out the bright ones; he has
+conceived of it--we shall have to show with what a painful and intensive
+effort--after his first most obstinate rejection of it, as a necessity,
+and he has then transformed this conception of its necessity, of its
+purpose, into beauty. Ceasing to look backwards, he has looked forwards.
+He feels, quite in the spirit of evolution, in the spirit of Nietzsche,
+that our generation is raised high above all the past, that it is the
+summit of all that is past, and the turning-point towards the future.
+This will perhaps seem too much to many people, who are inclined to call
+our generation wretched and paltry, as though they had some inner
+knowledge of the magnificence or the paltriness of generations gone. For
+every generation only becomes great by the men who do not despair of it,
+only becomes great by its poets who conceive of it as great, by its
+charioteers of state who have confidence in its power of greatness. Of
+Shakespeare and Hugo Verhaeren says: 'Ils grandissaient leur
+siècle.'[3] They did not depict it with the perspective of others, but
+out of the heart of their own greatness. Of such geniuses as Rembrandt
+he says: 'Si plus tard, dans l'éloignement des siècles, ils semblent
+traduire mieux que personne leur temps, c'est qu'ils l'ont recréé
+d'après leur cerveau, et qu'ils l'ont imposé non pas tel qu'il était,
+mais tel qu'ils l'ont déformé.'[4] But by magnifying their century, by
+raising even ephemeral events of their own days into a vast perspective,
+they themselves became great. While those who of set purpose diminish,
+and while those by nature indifferent, are themselves diminished and
+disregarded as the centuries recede, poets such as these we honour tell,
+like illumined belfry clocks, the hour of the time to generations yet to
+come. If the others bequeath some slight possession, a poem or so,
+aphorisms, a book maybe, these survive more mightily: they survive in
+some great conception, some great idea of an age, in that music of life
+to which the faint-hearted and the ungifted of following epochs will
+listen as it sounds from the past, because they in their turn are unable
+to understand the rhythm of their own time. By this manner of inspired
+vision Verhaeren has come to be the great poet of our time, by approving
+of it as well as by depicting it, by the fact that he did not see the
+new things as they actually are, but celebrated them as a new beauty.
+He has approved of all that is in our epoch; of everything, to the very
+resistance to it which he has conceived of as only a welcome
+augmentation of the fighting force of our vitality. The whole atmosphere
+of our time seems compressed in the organ music of his work; and whether
+he touches the bright keys or the dark, whether he rolls out a lofty
+diapason or strikes a gentle concord, it is always the onward-rushing
+force of our time that vibrates in his poems. While other poets have
+grown ever more lifeless and languid, ever more secluded and
+disheartened, Verhaeren's voice has grown ever more resonant and
+vigorous, like an organ indeed, full of reverence and the mystical power
+of sublime prayer. A spirit positively religious, not of despondency,
+however, but of confidence and joy, breathes from this music of his,
+freshening and quickening the blood, till the world takes on brighter
+and more animated and more generous colours, and our vitality, fired by
+the fever of his verse, flashes with a richer and younger and more
+virile flame.
+
+But the fact that life, to-day of all days, needs nothing so urgently as
+the freshening and quickening of our vitality, is good reason why--quite
+apart from all literary admiration--we must read his books, is good
+reason why this poet must be discussed with all that glad enthusiasm
+which we have first learned for our lives from his work.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'Aujourd'hui'(_Les Héros_).
+
+[2] Guyau, _L'Esthétique Contemporaine._
+
+[3] 'L'Art' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[4] _Rembrandt_.
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW BELGIUM
+
+     Entre la France ardente et la grave Allemagne.
+             _É.V._, 'Charles le Téméraire.'
+
+
+In Belgium the roads of Europe meet. A few hours transport one from
+Brussels, the heart of its iron arteries, to Germany, France, Holland,
+and England; and from Belgian ports all countries and all races are
+accessible across the pathless sea. The area of the land being small, it
+provides a miniature but infinitely varied synthesis of the life of
+Europe. All contrasts stand face to face concisely and sharply outlined.
+The train roars through the land: now past coal-mines, past furnaces and
+retorts that write the fiery script of toil on an ashen sky; now through
+golden fields or green pastures where sleek, brindled cows are grazing;
+now through great cities that point to heaven with their multitudinous
+chimneys; and lastly to the sea, the Rialto of the north, where
+mountains of cargoes are shipped and unshipped, and trade traffics with
+a thousand hands. Belgium is an agricultural land and an industrial
+land; it is at the same time conservative and socialistic, Roman
+Catholic and free-thinking; at once wealthy and wretched. There are
+colossal fortunes heaped up in the monster cities; and two hours thence
+the bitterest poverty sweats for the dole of a living in mines and
+barns. And again in the cities still greater forces wrestle with one
+another: life and death, the past and the future. Towns monkishly
+secluded, girt with ponderous mediæval walls, towns on whose swart and
+sedgy canals lonely swans glide like milky gondolas, towns like a dream,
+strengthless, prisoned in sleep eternal. At no great distance glitter
+the modern residential cities; Brussels with its glaring boulevards,
+where electric inscriptions dart coruscating up and down the fronts of
+buildings, where motor-cars whiz along, where the streets rumble, and
+modern life twitches with feverish nerves. Contrast on contrast. From
+the right the Teutonic tide dashes in, the Protestant faith; from the
+left, sumptuous and rigidly orthodox, Roman Catholicism. And the race
+itself is the restlessly struggling product of two races, the Flemish
+and the Walloon. Naked, clear, and direct are the contrasts which here
+defy each other; and the whole battle can be surveyed at a glance.
+
+But so strong, so persistent is the inexorable pressure of the two
+neighbouring races, that this blend has already become a new ferment, a
+new race. Elements once contrary are now unrecognisably mixed in a new
+and growing product. Teutons speak French, people of Romance stock are
+Flemish in feeling. Pol de Mont, in spite of his Gallic name, is a
+Flemish poet; Verhaeren, Maeterlinck, and van Lerberghe, though no
+Frenchman can pronounce their names rightly, are French poets. And this
+new Belgian race is a strong race, one of the most capable in Europe.
+Contact with so many foreign cultures, the vicinity of such
+contradictory nations, has fertilised them; healthy rural labour has
+steeled their limbs; the near sea has opened their eyes to the great
+distances. Their consciousness of themselves is of no long date: it can
+only be reckoned from the time when their country became independent,
+hardly a hundred years ago. A nation younger than America, they are in
+their adolescence now, and rejoicing in their new, unsought strength.
+And just as in America, the blend of races here, together with the
+fruitful, healthy fields, has procreated robust men. For the Belgian
+race is a race pulsing with vitality. Nowhere in Europe is life so
+intensely, so merrily enjoyed as in Flanders, nowhere else is sensuality
+and pleasure in excess so much the measure of strength. They must be
+seen particularly in their sensual life; it must be seen how the Flemish
+enjoy; with what greediness, with what a conscious pleasure and robust
+endurance. It is among them that Jordaens found the models for his
+gluttonous orgies; and they could be found still at every kermesse, at
+every wake. Statistics prove that in the consumption of alcohol Belgium
+stands to-day at the head of Europe. Every second house is an inn, an
+_estaminet_; every town, every village has its brewery; and the brewers
+are the wealthiest men in the country. Nowhere else are festivals so
+loud, boisterous, and unbridled; nowhere else is life loved and lived
+with such a superabundant zest and glow. Belgium is the land of
+excessive vitality, and ever was so. They have fought for this plenitude
+of life, for this enjoyment full to satiety. Their most heroic exploit,
+their great war with the Spaniards, was only a struggle not so much for
+religion as for sensual freedom. These desperate revolts, this immense
+effort was in reality not directed against Roman Catholicism, but
+against the morality, the asceticism it enforced; not so much against
+Spain as against the sinister malignity of the Inquisition; against the
+taciturn, bitter, and insidious Puritanism which sought to curtail
+enjoyment; against the morose reserve of Philip II. All that they wanted
+at that time was to preserve their bright and laughing life, their free,
+dionysiac enjoyment, the imperious avidity of their senses; they were
+determined not to be limited by any measure short of excess. And with
+them life conquered. Health, strength, and fecundity is to this very day
+the mark of the Belgian people in town and country. Poverty itself is
+not hollow-cheeked and stunted here. Chubby, red-cheeked children play
+in the streets; the peasants working in the fields are straight and
+sturdy; even the artisans are as muscular and strong as they are in
+Constantin Meunier's bronzes; the women are moulded to bear children
+easily; the unbroken vigour of the old men persists in a secure defiance
+of age. Constantin Meunier was fifty when he began his life-work here;
+at sixty Verhaeren is at the zenith of his creative power. Insatiable
+seems the strength of this race, whose deepest feeling has been
+chiselled by Verhaeren in proud stanzas:
+
+    Je suis le fils de cette race,
+    Dont les cerveaux plus que les dents
+    Sont solides et sont ardents
+    Et sont voraces.
+    Je suis le fils de cette race
+    Tenace,
+    Qui veut, après avoir voulu
+    Encore, encore et encore plus![1]
+
+This tremendous exertion has not been in vain. To-day Belgium is
+relatively the richest country in Europe. Its colony of the Congo is ten
+times as extensive as the mother-land. The Belgians hardly know where to
+place their capital: Belgian money is invested in Russia, in China, in
+Japan; they are concerned in all enterprises; their financiers control
+trusts in all countries. The middle classes, too, are healthy, strong,
+and contented.
+
+Such rich and healthy blood is more likely than any other to produce
+good art, and, above all, art full of the zest of life. For it is in
+countries with few possibilities of expansion that the desire for
+artistic activity is keenest. The imagination of great nations is for
+the most part absorbed by the practical demands of their development.
+The best strength of a great nation is claimed by politics, by
+administration, by the army and navy; but where political life is of
+necessity poor, where the problems of administration are forcibly
+restricted, men of genius almost exclusively seek their conquests in the
+domains of art. Scandinavia is one example, Belgium another, of
+countries in which the aristocracy of intellect have with the happiest
+results been forced back on art and science. In such young races the
+vital instinct must _a priori_ make all artistic activity strong and
+healthy; and even when they produce a decadence, this reaction, this
+contradiction, is so decided and consequent, that strength lies in its
+very weakness. For only a strong light can cast strong shadows; only a
+strong, sensual race can bring forth the really great and earnest
+mystics; because a decided reaction which is conscious of its aim
+requires as much energy as positive creation.
+
+The towering structure of Belgian art rests on a broad foundation. The
+preparation, the growing under the sod, took fifty years; and then in
+another fifty years it was reared aloft by the youth of one single
+generation. For every healthy evolution is slow, most of all in the
+Teutonic races, which are not so quick, supple, and dexterous as the
+Latin races, who learn by life itself rather than by studious
+application. This literature has grown ring by ring like a tree, with
+its roots deep in a healthy soil nourished by the unyielding
+perseverance of centuries. Like every confession of faith, this
+literature has its saints, its martyrs, and its disciples. The first of
+the creators, the forerunner, was Charles de Coster; and his great epic
+_Thyl Ulenspiegel_ is the gospel of this new literature. His fate is
+sad, like that of all pioneers. In him the native blend of races is more
+plastically visualised than in all later writers. Of Teutonic
+extraction, he was born in Munich, wrote in French, and was the first
+man to feel as a Belgian. He earned his living painfully as a teacher at
+the Military School. And when his great romance appeared, it was
+difficult to find a publisher, and still more difficult to find
+appreciation, or even notice. And yet this work, with its wonderful
+confrontation of Ulenspiegel as the deliverer of Flanders with Philip
+II. as Antichrist, is to this day the most beautiful symbol of the
+struggle of light with darkness, of vitality with renunciation; an
+enduring monument in the world's literature, because it is the epic of a
+whole nation. With such a work of wide import did Belgian literature
+begin, a work that with its heroic battles stands like the Iliad as the
+proud and primitive beginning of a more delicate, but in its advanced
+culture more complex, literature. The place of this writer, who died
+prematurely, was taken by Camille Lemonnier, who accepted the hard task
+and the melancholy inheritance of pioneers--ingratitude and
+disillusion. Of this proud and noble character also one must speak as of
+a hero. For more than forty years he fought indefatigably for Belgium, a
+soldier leading the onset from first to last, launching book after book,
+creating, writing, calling to the fray and marshalling the new forces;
+and never resting till the adjective 'Belgian' ceased in Paris and
+Europe to be spoken with the contempt that attaches to 'provincial';
+till, like once the name of the Gueux, what was originally a disgrace
+became a title of honour. Fearlessly, not to be discouraged by any
+failure, this superb writer sung his native land--fields, mines, towns,
+and men; the angry, fiery blood of youths and maidens; and over all the
+ardent yearning for a brighter, freer, greater religion, for rapt
+communion with the sublimity of Nature. With the ecstatic revelling in
+colour of his illustrious ancestor Rubens, who gathered all the things
+of life together in a glad festival of the senses, he, like a second
+voluptuary at the feast, has lavished colours, had his joy of all that
+is glowing, and glaring, and satiated, and, like every genuine artist,
+conceived of art as an intensifying of life, as life in intoxication.
+For more than forty years he created in this sense, and miraculously,
+just like the men of his country, like the peasants he painted, he
+waxed in vigour from year to year, from harvest to harvest, his books
+growing ever more fiery, ever more drunken with the zest and glow of
+life, his faith in life ever brighter and more confident. He was the
+first to feel the strength of his young country with conscious pride,
+and his voice rang out its loud appeal for new fighters till he no
+longer stood alone, till a company of other artists were ranged around
+him. Each of these he supported and firmly established, with a strong
+grip placing them at their vantage for the battle; and without envy, nay
+with joy, he saw his own work triumphantly overshadowed by the acclaimed
+creations of his juniors. With joy, because he probably considered not
+his own novels, but this creation of a literature his greatest and most
+lasting work. For it seemed as though in these years the whole land had
+become alive; as though every town, every profession, every class had
+sent forth a poet or a painter to immortalise them; as though this whole
+Belgium were eager to be symbolised in individual phases in works of
+art, until he should come who was destined to transform all towns and
+classes in a poem, enshrining in it the harmonised soul of the land. Are
+not the ancient Teutonic cities of Bruges, Courtrai, and Ypres
+spiritualised in the stanzas of Rodenbach, in the pastels of Fernand
+Khnopff, in the mystic statues of Georges Minne? Have not the sowers of
+corn and the workers in mines become stone in the busts of Constantin
+Meunier? Does not a great drunkenness glow in Georges Eekhoud's
+descriptions? The mystic art of Maeterlinck and Huysmans drinks its
+deepest strength from old cloisters and _béguinages_; the sun of the
+fields of Flanders glows in the pictures of Théo van Rysselberghe and
+Claus. The delicate walking of maidens and the singing of belfries have
+been made music in the stanzas of the gentle Charles van Lerberghe; the
+vehement sensuality of a savage race has been spiritualised in the
+refined eroticism of Félicien Rops. The Walloons have their
+representative in Albert Mockel; and how many others might still be
+named of the great creators: the sculptor van der Stappen; the painters
+Heymans, Stevens; the writers des Ombiaux, Demolder, Glesener,
+Crommelynck; who have all in their confident and irresistible advance
+conquered the esteem of France and the admiration of Europe. For they,
+and just they, were gifted with a sense of the great complex European
+feeling which in their work is glimpsed in its birth and growth; for
+they did not in their idea of a native land stop at the boundaries of
+Belgium, but included all the neighbouring countries, because they were
+at the same time patriots and cosmopolitans: Belgium was to them not
+only the place where all roads meet, but also that whence all roads
+start.
+
+Each of these had shaped his native land from his own angle of vision; a
+whole phalanx of artists had added picture to picture. Till then this
+great one came, Verhaeren, who saw, felt, and loved everything in
+Flanders, 'toute la Flandre.' Only in his work did it become a unity;
+for he has sung everything, land and sea, towns and workshops, cities
+dead and cities at their birth. He has not conceived of this Flanders of
+his as a separate phase, as a province, but as the heart of Europe, with
+the strength of its blood pulsing inwards from outside and outside from
+inwards; he has opened out horizons beyond the frontiers, and heightened
+and connected them; and with the same inspiration he has molten and
+welded the individual together with the whole until out of his work a
+life-work grew--the lyric epic of Flanders. What de Coster half a
+century before had not dared to fashion from the present, in which he
+despaired of finding pride, power, and the heroism of life, Verhaeren
+has realised; and thus he has become the 'carillonneur de la Flandre,'
+the bell-ringer who, as in olden days from the watch-tower, has summoned
+the whole land to the defence of its will to live, and the nation to the
+pride and consciousness of its power.
+
+This Verhaeren could only do, because he in himself represents all the
+contrasts, all the advantages of the Belgian race. He too is a ferment
+of contrasts, a new man made of split and divergent forces now
+victoriously harmonised. From the French he has his language and his
+form; from the Germans his instinctive seeking of God, his earnestness,
+his gravity, his need of metaphysics, and his impulse to pantheism.
+Political instincts, religious instincts, Catholicism and socialism,
+have struggled in him; he is at once a dweller in great cities and a
+cottager in the open country; and the deepest impulse of his people,
+their lack of moderation and their greed of life, is in the last
+instance the maxim of his poetic art. Only that their pleasure in
+intoxication has in him become joy in a noble drunkenness, in ecstasy;
+only that their carnal joy has become a delight in colour; that their
+mad raging is now in him a pleasure in a rhythm that roars and thunders
+and bursts in foam. The deepest thing in his race, an inflexible
+vitality which is not to be shaken by crises or catastrophes, has in him
+become universal law, a conscious, intensified zest in life. For when a
+country has become strong and rejoices in its strength, it needs, like
+every plethora, a cry, an exultation. Just as Walt Whitman was the
+exultation of America in its new strength, Verhaeren is the triumph of
+the Belgian race, and of the European race too. For this glad confession
+of life is so strong, so glowing, so virile that it cannot be thought of
+as breaking forth from the heart of one individual, but is evidently the
+delight of a fresh young nation in its beautiful and yet unfathomed
+power.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'Ma Race' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+
+
+
+YOUTH IN FLANDERS
+
+        Seize, dix-sept et dix-huit ans!
+     O ce désir d'être avant l'âge et le vrai temps
+                        Celui
+                 Dont chacun dit
+     Il boit à larges brocs et met à mal les filles!
+                                    É.V., _Les Tendresses Premières_.
+
+The history of modern Belgian literature begins, by a whim of chance, in
+one and the same house. In Ghent, the favourite city of the Emperor
+Charles V., in the old, heavy Flemish town that is still girdled with
+ramparts, lies, remote from the noisy streets, the grey Jesuit college
+of Sainte-Barbe. A cloister with thick, cold, frowning walls, mute
+corridors, silent refectories, reminding one somewhat of the beautiful
+colleges in Oxford, save that here there is no ivy softening the walls,
+and no flowers to lay their variegated carpet over the green courts.
+Here, in the seventies, two strange pairs of boys meet on the
+school-benches; here among thousands of names are four which are
+destined in later days to be the pride of their country. First, Georges
+Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren, then Maeterlinck and Charles van
+Lerberghe--two pairs of friendships, both of which are now torn asunder
+by death. The weaker, the more delicate of the four, Georges Rodenbach
+and Charles van Lerberghe, have died; Emile Verhaeren and Maeterlinck,
+the two heroes of Flanders, are still growing and not yet at the zenith
+of their fame. But all four began their course in the old college. The
+Jesuit fathers taught them their humanities, and even to write poems--in
+Latin, it is true, to begin with; and in this exercise, strange to say,
+Maeterlinck was excelled by van Lerberghe with his more instinctive
+sense of form, and Verhaeren by the more supple Georges Rodenbach. With
+rigorous earnestness the fathers trained them to respect the past, to
+have faith in conventional things, to think in old grooves, and to hate
+innovations. The aim was not only to keep them Catholics, but to win
+them for the priesthood: these cloister walls were to protect them from
+the hostile breath of the new world, from the freshening wind which, in
+Flanders as everywhere else, was assailing the growing generation.
+
+But in these four pupils the aim was not realised, least of all in
+Verhaeren, perhaps for the very reason that he, as the scion of a
+strictly orthodox family, was the most fitted to be a priest; because
+his mind did not absorb conviction mechanically, but achieved it by
+vital processes; because his inmost being was self-surrender and a
+glowing devotion to great ideas. However, the call of the open country,
+in which he had grown up, was too strong in him; the voice of life was
+too loud in his blood for so early a renunciation of all; his mind was
+too tameless to be satisfied with the established and the traditional.
+The impressions of his childhood were more vivid than the teaching of
+his masters. For Verhaeren was born in the country, at St. Amand on the
+Scheldt (on the 21st of May 1855), where the landscape rolls to the vast
+horizons of the heath and the sea. Here in the happiest manner kindly
+circumstances wove the garland of his earlier years. His parents were
+well-to-do people who had retired from the din of the town to this
+little corner of Flanders; here they had a cottage of their own, with a
+front garden ablaze with flowers of all colours. And immediately behind
+the house began the great golden fields, the tangle of flowering
+hedgerows; and close by was the river with its slow waves hasting no
+longer, feeling the nearness of their goal, the infinite ocean. Of the
+untrammelled days of his boyhood the ageing poet has told us in his
+wonderful book _Les Tendresses Premières_. He has told us of the boy he
+was when he ran across country; clambered into the corn-loft where the
+glittering grain was heaped; climbed steeples; watched the peasants at
+their sowing and reaping; and listened to the maids at the washing-tub
+singing old Flemish songs. He watched all trades; he rummaged in every
+corner. He would sit with the watch-maker, marvelling at the humming
+little wheels that fashioned the hour; and no less to see the glowing
+maw of the oven in the bakery swallowing the corn which only the day
+before had glided through his fingers in rustling ears, and was now
+already bread, golden, warm, and odorous. At games he would watch in
+astonishment the glad strength of the young fellows tumbling the reeling
+skittles over; and he would wander with the playing band from village to
+village, from fair to fair. And, sitting on the bank of the Scheldt, he
+would watch the ships, with their coloured streamers, come and go, and
+in his dreams follow them to the vast distances, which he only knew from
+sailors' yarns and pictures in old books. All this, this daily physical
+familiarity with the things of Nature, this lived insight into the
+thousand activities of the working-day, became his inalienable
+possession. Inalienable, too, was the humane feeling he acquired that he
+was one at heart with the people of his village. From them he learned
+the names of all these thousand things, and the intelligence of the
+mysterious mechanism in all skilled handiwork, and all the petty cares
+and perplexities of these many scattered little souls of life which,
+combined, are the soul of a whole land. And therefore Verhaeren is the
+only one among modern poets in the French tongue who is really popular
+with his countrymen of all ranks. He still goes in and out among them as
+their equal, sits in their circle even now, when fame has long since
+shown him his place among the best and noblest, chats with the peasants
+in the village inn, and loves to hear them discussing the weather and
+the harvest and the thousand little things of their narrow world. He
+belongs to them, and they belong to him. He loves their life, their
+cares, their labour, loves this whole land with its tempests raging from
+the north, with its hail and snow, its thundering sea and lowering
+clouds. It is with pride that he claims kindred with his race and land;
+and indeed there is often in his gait and in his gestures something of
+the peasant trampling with heavy steps and hard knee after his plough;
+and his eyes 'are grey as his native sea, his hair is yellow like the
+corn of his fields.' These elemental forces are in his whole being and
+production. You feel that he has never lost touch with Nature, that he
+is still organically connected with the fields, the sea, the open air;
+he to whom spring is physically painful, who is depressed by relaxing
+air, who loves the weather of his home-land, its vehemence, and its
+savage, tameless strength.
+
+For this very reason he has in later years felt, what was natively
+uncongenial to him--the great cities--differently and far more intensely
+than poets brought up in them. What to the latter appeared self-evident
+was to him astonishment, abomination, terror, admiration, and love. For
+him the atmosphere we breathe in cities was heavy, stifling, poisoned;
+the streets between the massed houses were too narrow, too congested;
+hourly, at first in pain and then with admiration, he has felt the
+beautiful fearfulness of the vast dimensions, the strangeness of the new
+forms of life. Just as we walk through mountain ravines dumbfounded and
+terrified by their sublimity, he has walked through streets of cities,
+first slowly accustoming himself to them; thus he has explored them,
+described them, celebrated them, and in the deepest sense lived them.
+Their fever has streamed into his blood; their revolts have reared in
+him like wild horses; their haste and unrest has whipped his nerves for
+half the span of a man's life. But then he has returned home again. In
+his fifties he has taken refuge once more in his fields, under the
+lonely sky of Flanders. He lives in a lonely cottage somewhere in
+Belgium, where the railway does not reach, enjoying himself among
+cheerful and simple people who fill their days with plain labour, like
+the friends and companions of his boyhood. With a joy intensified he
+goes eagerly year by year to the sea, as though his lungs and his heart
+needed it to breathe strongly again, to feel life with more jubilant
+enthusiasm. In the man of sixty there is a wonderful return of his
+healthy, happy childhood; and to the Flanders that inspired his first
+verses his last have been dedicated.
+
+Against this atavism, against this bright and inalienable joy in life,
+the _patres_ of Sainte-Barbe could do nothing. They could only deflect
+his great hunger of life from material things, and turn it in the
+direction of science, of art. The priest they sought to make of him he
+has really become, only he has preached everything that they proscribed,
+and fought against everything that they praised. At the time Verhaeren
+leaves school, he is already filled with that noble yet feverish greed
+of life, that tameless yearning for intensive enjoyments heightened to
+the degree of pain which is so characteristic of him. The priesthood was
+repugnant to him. Nor was he more allured by the prospect, held out to
+him, of directing his uncle's workshop. It is not yet definitely the
+poetic vocation which appeals to him, but he does desire a free active
+calling with unlimited possibilities. To gain time for his final
+decision, he studies jurisprudence, and becomes a barrister. In these
+student years in Louvain Verhaeren gave free rein to his untameable zest
+in life; as a true Fleming he eschewed moderation and launched into
+intemperance. To this very day he is fond of telling of his liking for.
+good Belgian beer, and of how the students got drunk, danced at all the
+kermesses, caroused and feasted, when the fury came over them, and got
+into all kinds, of mischief, which often enough brought them into
+conflict with the police. Uncertainty was never a feature of his
+character, and so his Roman Catholicism was in those years no silent and
+impersonal faith, but a militant orthodoxy. A handful of hotspurs--the
+publisher Deman was one of them, and another was the tenor van Dyck--set
+a newspaper going, in which they lashed away mercilessly at the
+corruption of the modern world, and did not forget to blow their own
+trumpets. The university was not slow to veto these immature
+manifestations; but ere long they started a second periodical, which
+was, however, more in harmony with the great contemporary movements.
+Betweenwhiles verses were written. And still more passionate is the
+young poet's activity when, in the year 1881, he is called to the bar in
+Brussels. Here he makes friends with men of great vitality: he is
+welcomed by a circle of painters and artists, and a cénacle of young
+talents is formed who have the authentic enthusiasm for art, and who
+feel that they are violently opposed to the conservative bourgeoisie of
+Brussels. Verhaeren, who at this time greedily adopts all fashionable
+freakishness as something new, and struts about in fantastic apparel,
+promptly acquires notoriety by his vehement passionateness and his first
+literary attempts. He had begun to write verse in his school-days.
+Lamartine had been his model, then Victor Hugo, who bewitches young
+people, that lord of magnificent gestures, that undisputed master of
+words. These juvenilia of Verhaeren have never been published, and
+probably they have little interest, for in them his tameless vitality
+attempted expression in immaculate Alexandrines. More and more, as his
+artistic insight grew, he felt that his vocation was to be a poet; the
+meagre success he achieved as a barrister confirmed him in this
+conviction, and so in the end, following the advice of Edmond Picard, he
+discarded the barrister's gown, which now seemed to him as narrow and
+stifling as he had once thought the priest's cassock to be.
+
+And then came the hour, the first decisive hour. Lemonnier was as fond
+of relating it as is Verhaeren; both would speak of it with their
+fervent, proud joy in a friendship of over thirty years; both with
+heartfelt admiration, the one for the other. Once, it was a rainy day,
+Verhaeren burst in on Lemonnier, whom he did not know, trampling into
+the elder man's lodging with his heavy peasant's tread, hailing him with
+his hearty gesture, and blurting out: 'Je veux vous lire des vers!' It
+was the manuscript of his first book _Les Flamandes_; and now he
+recited, while the rain poured down outside, with his hard voice and
+sharp scansion, his great enthusiasm and his compelling gestures, those
+pictures, palpitating with life, of Flanders, that first free confession
+of patriotism and foaming vitality. And Lemonnier encouraged him,
+congratulated him, helped him, and suggested alterations, and soon the
+book appeared, to the terror of Verhaeren's strictly orthodox family, to
+the horror of the critics, who were helpless in the face of such an
+explosion of strength. Execrated and lauded, it immediately compelled
+interest. In Belgium, it is true, it was less acclaimed than declaimed
+against; but nevertheless it everywhere excited a commotion, and that
+grumbling unrest which always heralds the advent of a new force.
+
+
+
+
+'LES FLAMANDES'
+
+     Je suis le fils de cette race
+     Tenace,
+     Qui veut, après avoir voulu
+     Encore, encore et encore plus.
+                               É.V., _Ma Race_.
+
+The life-work of great artists contains not only a single, but a
+threefold work of art. The actual creation is only the first, and not
+always the most important; the second must be the life of the artists
+themselves; the third must be the harmoniously finished, organically
+connected relationship between the act of creating and the thing
+created, between poetry and life. To survey how inner growth is
+connected with external formation, how crises of physical reality are
+connected with artistic decadence, how development and completion
+interpenetrate as much in personal experience as in the artistic
+creation, must be an equal artistic rapture, must disengage as pure a
+line of beauty as the individual work. In Verhaeren these conditions of
+the threefold work of art are accomplished in full. Harsh and abrupt as
+the contrasts in his books seem to be, the totality of his development
+is yet rounded off to a clear line, to the figure of a circle. In the
+beginning the end was contained, and in the end the beginning: the bold
+curve returns to itself. Like one who travels round the world and
+circles the vast circumference of the globe, he comes back in the end to
+his starting-point. Beginning and end touch in the motive of his work.
+To the country to which his youth belonged his old age returns: Flanders
+inspired his first book, and to Flanders his last books are dedicated.
+
+True it is, between these two books _Les Flamandes_ and _Les Blés
+Mouvants_, between the work of the man of five-and-twenty and that of
+the man of sixty, lies the world of an evolution with, all its points of
+view and achievements. Only now, when the line that was at first so
+capricious has returned to itself, can its form be surveyed and its
+harmony perceived. A purely external observation has become penetration:
+the eye no longer exclusively regards the external phenomena of things,
+but all has been seized in his soul from within and imaged in accordance
+with its reality. Now nothing is seen isolated, from the point of view
+of curiosity or passing interest, but everything is looked upon as
+something that is, that has grown, and that is still growing. The motive
+is the same in the first and in the last books; only, in the first book
+we have isolated contemplation, while in the great creations of the last
+period the vast horizons of the modern world are set behind the scenes,
+with the shadows of the past on the one side, and, as well, with fiery
+presentiments of the future shedding a new light over the landscape.
+The painter, who only portrayed the outer surface, the patina, has
+developed into the poet, he who in a musical vibration vivifies the
+psychic and the inconceivable. These two works stand in the same
+relation to each other as Wagner's first operas, _Rienzi_ and
+_Tannhäuser_, do to his later creations, to the _Ring_ and _Parsifal_:
+what was at first only intuitive becomes consciously creative. And as in
+Wagner's case, so too with Verhaeren there are to this very day people
+who prefer the works that are still prisoned in the traditional form to
+those which were created later, and who are thus, in reality, greater
+strangers to the poet than those who, from principle, assume a hostile
+attitude to his artistic work.
+
+_Les Flamandes_, Verhaeren's first work, appeared in a period of
+literary commotion. Zola's realistic novels had just become the object
+of discussion; and they had stirred up, not France only, but the
+adjacent countries as well. In Belgium Camille Lemonnier was the
+interpreter of this new naturalism, which regarded absolute truth as
+more important than beauty, and which saw the sole aim of imaginative
+literature in photography, in the exact, scientifically accurate
+reproduction of reality. To-day, now that excessive naturalism has been
+overcome, we know that this theory only brings us half-way along the
+road; that beauty may live by the side of truth; that on the other hand
+truth is not identical with art, but that it was only necessary to
+establish a transmutation of the value of beauty; that it was in the
+actual, in realities, that beauty was to be sought. Every new theory, if
+it is to succeed, needs a strong dose of exaggeration. And the idea of
+realising reality in poetry seduced young Verhaeren into carefully
+avoiding, in the description of his native province, all that is
+sentimental and romantic, and deluded him with the hope of expressing in
+his verse only what is coarse, primitive, and savage. Something external
+and something internal, nature and intention, combined to cause this
+effect. For the hatred of all that is soft and weak, rounded off and in
+repose, is in Verhaeren's blood. His temperament was from the first
+fiery, and loved to respond to strong provocation with a violent blow.
+There was ever in him a love of the brutal, the hard, the rough, the
+angular; he had always a liking for what is glaring and intensive, loud
+and noisy. It is only in his latest books that, thanks to his cooler
+blood, he has attained classical perfection and purity. In those days,
+moreover, his hatred of sentimental idealisation, the hatred that in
+Germany fulminated against Defregger's drawing-room Tyrolese, Auerbach's
+scented peasants, and the spruce mythology of poetical pictures, led him
+deliberately to emphasise what is brutal, unæsthetic, and, as it was
+then felt, unpoetical; led him, as it were, to trample with heavy shoes
+in the tedious footsteps of French poets. Barbarian: this was the word
+they tried to kill him with, not so much on account of the harshness and
+coarseness of his diction, which often reminds one of the guttural
+sounds of German, as because of the savage selection of his instinct,
+which always preferred what is ringingly resonant and ferociously alive,
+which never fed on nectar and ambrosia, but tore red and steaming shreds
+of flesh from the body of life. And genuinely barbarous, savage with
+Teutonic strength, is this his inroad into French literature, reminding
+one of those migrations of the Teutons into the Latin lands, where they
+rushed ponderously to battle with wild and raucous cries, to learn,
+after a time, a higher culture and the finer instincts of life from
+those they had conquered. Verhaeren in this book does not describe what
+is amiable and dreamy in Flanders, not idylls, but 'les fureurs
+d'estomac, de ventre et de débauche,'[1] ail the explosions of the lust
+of life, the orgies of peasants, and even of the animal world. Before
+him, his old schoolfellow Rodenbach had described Flanders to the French
+in poems that sounded gently with a silvery note, like the peal of
+belfries hovering over roofs; he had reminded them of that unforgettable
+melancholy of the evening over the canals of Bruges, of the magic of the
+moonlight over fields framed with dikes and hedges of willows. But
+Verhaeren closes his ears to hints of death; he describes life at its
+maddest, 'le décor monstrueux des grasses kermesses,'[2] popular
+festivals, in which intoxication and sensual pleasure sting the
+unbridled strength of the crowd, in which the demands of the body and
+the greed of money come into conflict, and the bestial nature of man
+overthrows the painfully learned lessons of morality. And even in these
+descriptions, which often teem with the exuberance of Rabelais, one
+feels that even this explosive life is not mad enough for him, that he
+yearns to intensify life out and beyond reality: 'jadis les gars avaient
+les reins plus fermes et les garces plus beau téton.'[3] These young
+fellows are too weak for him, the wenches too gentle; he cries for the
+Flanders of olden time, as it lives in the glowing pictures of Rubens
+and Jordaens and Breughel. These are his true masters, they, the
+revellers, who created their masterpieces between two orgies, whose
+laughter and feasting ring into the motives of their pictures. Some of
+the poems in _Les Flamandes_ are direct imitations of certain interiors
+and sensual genre-pictures: lads afire with lust forcing wenches under
+the hedges; peasants in their drunken jubilation dancing round the inn
+table. His desire is to sing that superabundance of vitality which
+relieves itself by excess, excess flung into excess, even in sensual
+pleasures. And his own colours and words, which are laid on with lavish
+profusion and flow along in liquid fire, are themselves a debauch, a
+'rut' (a favourite word of his). This vaunting display of seething
+pictures is nothing less than an orgy. A terrific sensuality rages to
+exhaustion as much in the execution as in the motive, a delight in these
+creatures who have the madness of rutting stallions, who root about in
+odorous meats and in the flowering flesh of women, who of set purpose
+gorge themselves with beer and wine, and then in the dance and in
+embraces discharge all the fire they have swallowed. Now and again a
+reposeful picture alternates, firmly fixed in the dark frame of a
+sonnet. But the hot wave streams over these breathing-spaces, and again
+the mood is that of Rubens and of Jordaens, those mighty revellers.
+
+But naturalistic art is pictorial, not poetic. And it is the great
+defect of this book that it was written by an inspired painter only, not
+yet by a poet. The words are coloured, but they are not free; they do
+not yet rock themselves in their own rhythm; they do not yet storm along
+to soar aloft with the inspiration; they are wild horses regularly
+trotting along in the shafts of the Alexandrine. There is a disparity
+between the inner intractability and the external regularity of these
+poems. The ore has not yet been molten long enough in the crucible of
+life to burst the hereditary mould. You feel that the avidity of life
+which is the substance of the work has really been seen 'à travers un
+tempérament,' that here a strong personality is in revolt against all
+tradition, a strong personality whose ponderous onslaught was bound to
+strike terror into the cautious and the short-sighted. But the strength
+and the art are not yet emancipated. Verhaeren is already a passionate
+onlooker, but he is still only an onlooker, one who stands without and
+not within the vortex, who watches everything with inspired sympathy,
+but who has not yet experienced it. This land of Flanders has not yet
+become a part of the poet's sensibility; the new point of view and the
+new form for it are not yet achieved; there is yet wanting that final
+smelting of the artistic excitement which is bound to burst all bonds
+and restrictions, to flame along in its own free feeling in an
+enraptured intoxication.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'Les Vieux Maîtres' (_Les Flamandes_).
+
+[2] 'Les Vieux Maîtres' (_Les Flamandes_).
+
+[3] 'Truandailles' (_Ibid._).
+
+
+
+
+THE MONKS
+
+     Moines venus vers nous des horizons gothiques,
+     Mais dont l'âme, mais dont l'esprit meurt de demain....
+     Mes vers vous bâtiront de mystiques autels.
+                                       É.V., 'Aux Moines.'
+
+
+Rubens, that lavish reveller, is the genius of the Flemish zest in
+living; but zest in living is only the temperament and not the soul of
+Flanders. Before him there were the earnest masters of the cloisters,
+the primitives, the van Eycks, Memling, Gerhard David, Roger van der
+Weyden; and after them came Rembrandt, the meditative visionary, the
+restless seeker after new values. Belgium is something else beside the
+merry land of kermesses; the healthy, sensual people are not the soul of
+Flanders. Glaring lights cast strong shadows. All vitality that is
+strongly conscious of itself produces its counterpart, seclusion and
+asceticism; it is just the healthiest, the elemental races--the Russians
+of to-day for instance--who among their strong have the weak, among
+their gluttons of life those who avert their faces from it, among those
+who assent some who deny. By the side of the ambitious, teeming Belgium
+we have spoken of, there is a sequestered Belgium which is falling into
+ruins. Art exclusively in Rubens's sense could take no account of all
+those solitary cities, Bruges, Ypres, Dixmude, through whose noiseless
+streets the monks hasten like flocks of ravens in long processions, in
+whose canals the dumb white shadows of gliding nuns are mirrored. There,
+mid life's raging river, are broad islands of dream where men find
+refuge from realities. Even in the great Belgian cities there are such
+sequestered haunts of silence, the _béguinages,_ those little towns in
+the town, whither ageing men and women have retired, renouncing the
+world for the peace of the cloister. Quite as much as the passion of
+life, the Roman Catholic faith and monkish renunciation are nowhere so
+deeply and firmly rooted as in this Belgium, where sensual pleasure is
+so noisy in its excess. Here again an extreme of contrasts is revealed:
+frowning in the face of the materialistic view of life stands the
+spiritual view. While the masses in the exuberance of their health and
+strength proclaim life aloud and pounce on its eternal pleasures, aside
+and cut off from them stand another, far lesser company to whom life is
+only a waiting for death, whose silence is as persistent as the
+exultation of the others. Everywhere here austere faith has its black
+roots in the vigorous, fruitful soil. For religious feeling always
+remains alive among a people that has once, although centuries may have
+passed since, fought with every fibre of its being for its faith. This
+is a subterranean Belgium that works in secret and that easily escapes
+the cursory glance, for it lives in shadows and silence. From this
+silence, however, from this averted earnestness, Belgian art has derived
+that mystical nourishment which has lent its baffling strength to the
+works of Maeterlinck, the pictures of Fernand Khnopff and Georges Minne.
+Verhaeren, too, did not turn aside from this sombre region. He, as the
+painter of Belgian life, saw these shadows of a vanishing past, and, in
+1886, added to his first book _Les Flamandes_ a second, _Les Moines_. It
+almost seems as though he had first of all been obliged to exhaust both
+the historical styles of his native land before he could reach his own,
+the modern style. For this book is essentially a throw-back, a
+confession of faith in Gothic art.
+
+Monks are for Verhaeren heroic symbols of I mighty periods in the past.
+In his boyhood he I was familiar with their grave aspect. Near the
+cheerful house where his youth was passed, there was at Bornhem a
+Bernhardine monastery, whither the boy had often accompanied his father
+to confession, and in whose cold corridors he had often waited in
+astonishment and with a child's timidity, listening to the majestic
+chant of the liturgy married to the organ's earnest notes. And here, one
+day of days, he received, with a thrill of pious terror, his first
+communion. Since that day the monks had been to him, as he trod the
+beaten track of custom, beings in a strange world apart, the incarnation
+of the beautiful and the supersensual, the unearthly on his child's
+earth. And when, in the course of years, he sought to create in verse a
+vision of Flanders in all her luminous and burning colours, he could not
+forgo this mysterious chiaroscuro, this earnest tone. For three weeks he
+withdrew to the hospitable monastery of Forges, near Chimay, taking part
+in all the ceremonies and rites of the monks, who, in the hope of
+winning a priest, afforded him full insight into their life. But
+Verhaeren's attitude towards Roman Catholicism was by this time anything
+but religious, it was rather an æsthetic and poetic admiration for the
+noble romanticism of the ceremonial, a moral piety for the things of the
+past. He remained three weeks. Then he fled, oppressed by the nightmare
+of the ponderous walls, and, as a souvenir for himself, chiselled the
+image of the monastery in verse.
+
+This book too, no doubt, had no other aim than to be pictorial,
+descriptive. In rounded sonnets, as though etched by Rembrandt's needle,
+he fixed the chiaroscuro of the cloister's corridors, the hours of
+prayer, the earnest meetings of the monks, the silence in the intervals
+of the liturgy. The evenings over the landscape were described, in a
+ritual language, with the images of faith: the sun as it sets in crimson
+flaming like the wine in the chalice; steeples like luminous crosses in
+a silent sky; the rustling corn bowing when the bell rings to evensong.
+The poetry of devotion and repose was here revived: the harmony of the
+organ; the beauty of corridors garlanded with ivy; the touching idyll of
+the lonely cemetery; the peaceful dying of the prior; the visiting of
+the sick, and the I comfort it brings. Nothing was allowed in the deep
+light of the colours, in the grave repose of the theme, save what could
+be fitted into the strictly religious frame of the picture.
+
+But here the pictorial method proved to be I insufficient for the poetic
+effect. The problem of religious feeling is too close to the heart to be
+reached by outward, even by plastic manifestations. A thing which is so
+eminently hostile to the sensuous, nay, which is the very symbol of I
+all that is contrary to sensuousness, cannot be reached by a picturesque
+appeal to the senses; the description of an intellectual problem must
+cease to be descriptive and become psychology. And so, thus early in his
+career, Verhaeren is forced away from the picturesque. First, however,
+he attempts the plastic method: he gives us sombre statues of monks; but
+even as statues they are only types of an inner life, symbols of the
+ways to God. Verhaeren develops in his monks the difference of their
+characters, which are still effective even under the soutane; and by his
+delicate characterisation he shows the I manifold possibilities of
+religious feeling. The I feudal monk, a noble of ancient lineage, would
+make a conquest of God, as once his ancestors conquered castle and
+forest lands with spur and sword. The _moine flambeau_, he that is
+burning with fervour, would possess Him with his passion like a woman.
+The savage monk, he that has come from the heart of a forest, can only
+comprehend Him in heathen wise, only fear Him as the wielder of thunder
+and lightning, while the gentle monk, he that loves the Virgin with a
+troubadour's timid tenderness, flees from the fear of Him. One monk
+would fathom Him by the learning of books and by logic; another does not
+understand Him, cannot lay hold on Him, and yet finds Him everywhere, in
+all things, in all he experiences. Thus all the characters of life, the
+harshest contrasts, are jostled together, quelled only by the monastery
+rules. But they are only in juxtaposition, just as the painter loves all
+his colours and things equally, just as he places things in
+juxtaposition, without estimating them according to their value. So far
+there is nothing that binds them together inwardly, there is no conflict
+of forces, no great idea. Neither are the verses as yet free; they too
+have the effect of being bound by the strict discipline of the monks.
+'Il s'environne d'une sorte de froide lumière parnassienne qui en fait
+une oeuvre plus anonyme, malgré la marque du poète poinçonnée à
+maintes places sur le métal poli,'[1] says Albert Mockel, the most
+subtle of æsthetic critics, of the book. Verhaeren must himself have
+felt this insufficiency, for, conscious of not having solved his
+problems in terms of poetry, he has remoulded both aspects of the
+country, renewed both books in another form after many years: _Les
+Moines_ in the tragedy _Le Cloître, Les Flamandes_ in the great
+pentalogy _Toute la Flandre._
+
+_Les Moines_ was the last of Verhaeren's descriptive books, the last in
+which he stood on the outer side of things contemplating them
+dispassionately. But already here there is too much temperament in him
+to allow him to look at things as altogether unconnected and
+undisciplined; the joy of magnifying and intensifying by feeling already
+stirs in him. At the end of the book he no longer sees the monks as
+isolated individuals, but gathers them all together in a great synthesis
+in his finale. Behind them the poet sees order, a secret law, a great
+force of life. They, these hermits who have renounced, who are scattered
+over the world in a thousand monasteries, are to the poet the last
+remnants of a great departed beauty, and they are so much the more
+grandiose as they have lost all feeling for our own time. They are the
+last ruins of moribund Christianity in a new world, projecting, in
+tragic loneliness, into our own days. 'Seuls vous survivez grands au
+monde chrétien mort!'[2] he hails them in admiration, for they have
+built the great House of God, and for many generations sacrificed their
+blood for the Host eternally white. In admiration he hails them. Not in
+faith and love, but in admiration for their fearless energy, and above
+all because they go on fighting undaunted for something that is dead and
+lost; because their beauty serves none other than itself; because they
+project into our own time like the ancient belfries of the land, which
+no longer call to prayer. In a land where everything else serves a
+purpose, pleasure and gold, they stand lonely; and they die without a
+cry and without a moan, fighting against an invisible enemy, they, the
+last defenders of beauty. For at that time, at that early stage of his
+career, beauty for Verhaeren was still identical with the past, because
+he had not yet discovered beauty for himself in the new things; in the
+monks he celebrates the last romanticists, because he had not yet found
+poetry in the things of reality, not yet found the new romance, the
+heroism of the working-day. He loves the monks as great dreamers, as the
+_chercheurs de chimères sublimes_, but he cannot help them, cannot
+defend what they possess, for behind them already stand their heirs.
+These heirs are the poets--a curious echo of David Strauss's idea about
+religion--who will have to be, what religion with its faithful was to
+the past, the guardians and eternal promoters of beauty. They it will
+be--here rings strangely the deepest intention of Verhaeren's later
+work--who will wave their new faith over the world like a banner, they,
+'les poètes venus trop tard pour être prêtres,'[3] who shall be the
+priests of a new fervour. All religions, all dogmas, are brittle and
+transitory, Christ dies as Pan dies; and even this poetic faith, the
+last and highest conquest of the mind, must in its time pass away.
+
+     Car il ne reste rien que l'art sur cette terre
+     Pour tenter un cerveau puissant et solitaire
+     Et le griser de rouge et tonique liqueur.
+
+In this great hymn to the future Verhaeren first turns away from the
+past and seeks the path to the future. For the poetic idea is here
+understood with new and greater feelings than in the beginning of his
+career. Poetry is for Verhaeren a confession not only as applied to an
+individual in Goethe's phrase, but in a religious sense as well: as the
+highest moral confession.
+
+Much as these two books are marked by the effort to describe Flanders as
+it actually is, stronger than this effort is the yearning at the heart
+of them to escape from the present to the past. Every temperament
+exceeds reality. Flanders was here described in the sense of an ideal;
+but the ideal in both cases was projected on the past. Beauty young
+Verhaeren had sought in the monks, the symbols of the past; strength and
+the fire of life he had sought in the old Flemish masters. He still
+needed the costume of the past to discover the heroic and the beautiful
+in the present, just like many of our poets, who, when they would paint
+strong men, must perforce place their dramas in the Florentine
+renaissance, and who, if they would fashion beauty, deck their
+characters with Greek costumes. To find strength and beauty, or in one
+word poetry, in the real things that surround us, is here still denied
+to Verhaeren; and therefore he has disowned his second book as well as
+his first. In the distance between the old and the new works the long
+road may be seen, and seen with pride, which leads from the traditional
+poet to the truly contemporary poet.
+
+Though not yet divided with a master hand, though not yet in the light
+of reality, the inner contrast of the country, the conflict between body
+and soul, between the joy of life and the longing for death, between
+pleasure and renunciation, the alternative between 'yes' and 'no,' was
+yet already contained in the contrast of these two books. And in a
+really emotional poet this contrast could not remain one that was purely
+external; it was bound to condense to an inner problem, to a personal
+decision between past and present. Two conceptions of the world, both
+inherited and in the blood, have here attained consciousness in one man;
+and though in life they may act independently in juxtaposition, in the
+individual the conflict must be fought out, the victory of the one or
+the other must be decided by force, or else by something higher, by an
+internal reconciliation. This conflict for a conception of the world
+pierces through the constant contrast between the acceptance and the
+denial of life in the poet, a conflict that for ten long years
+undermined his artistic and human experiences with terrific crises, and
+brought him to the verge of annihilation. The hostility which divides
+his country into two camps seems to have taken refuge in his soul to
+fight it out in a desperate and mortal duel: past and future seem to be
+fighting for a new synthesis. But only from such crises, from such
+pitiless struggles with the forces of one's own soul, do the vast
+conceptions of the universe and their new creative reconciliation grow.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Albert Mockel, _Émile Verhaeren_.
+
+[2] 'Aux Moines.'
+
+[3] 'Aux Moines.'
+
+
+
+
+THE BREAK-DOWN
+
+     Nous sommes tous des Christs qui embrassons nos croix.
+                                             É. V.,'La Joie,'
+
+Every feeling, every sensation is, in the last instance, the
+transformation of pain. Everything that in vibration or by contact
+touches the epithelium affects it as pain. As pain, which then, by the
+secret chemistry of the nerves, transmitted from centre to centre, is
+transformed into impressions, colours, sounds, and conceptions. The
+poet, whose last secret really is that he is more sensitive than others,
+that he purifies these pains of contact into feeling with a still more
+delicate filter, must have finer nerves than anybody else. Where others
+only receive a vague impression, he must have a clear perception, to
+which his feeling must respond, and the value of which he must be able
+to estimate. In Verhaeren's very first books a particular kind of
+reaction to every incitement was perceptible. His feeling really
+responds only to strong, intensive, sharp irritation; its delicacy was
+not abnormal, only the energy of the reaction was remarkable. His first
+artistic incitement; however, that of Flemish landscapes, was only one
+of the retina, glaring colours, pictorial charm; only in _Les Moines_
+had for the first time more delicate psychic shades been crystallised.
+In the meantime a transformation had taken place in his exterior life.
+Verhaeren had turned aside from the contemplation of Nature to
+concentrate his strength on the cultivation of his mind. He had
+travelled extensively, had been in Paris and London, in Spain and
+Germany; with impetuous haste he had assimilated all great ideas, all
+new phases, all the manifold theories of existence. Without a pause,
+incessantly, experiences assail him and tire him out. A thousand
+impressions accost him, each demanding an answer; great, sombre cities
+discharge their electric fire upon him, and fill his nerves with leaping
+flame. The sky above him is obscured by the clouds of cities; in London
+he wanders about as though wildered in a forest. This grey, misty city,
+that seems as though it were built of steel, casts its whole melancholy
+over the soul of him who lives there in loneliness, ignorant of the
+language, and who is so much the more lonely, as all these
+manifestations of the new life in great cities are still unintelligible
+to him. He is still unable to capture the poetry that is in them, and so
+they leap at him and penetrate him with a confused, unintelligible pain.
+And in this novel atmosphere the intense refinement of his nerves
+proceeds at such a pace that already the slightest contact with the
+outer world produces a quivering reaction. Every noise, every colour,
+every thought presses in upon him as though with sharp needles; his
+healthy sensibility becomes hypertrophied; that fineness of hearing, of
+which one is conscious, say in sea-sickness, which perceives every
+noise, even the slightest sound, as though it were the blow of a hammer,
+undermines his whole organism; every rapidly-passing smell corrodes him
+like an acid; every ray of light pricks him like a red-hot needle. The
+process is aggravated by a purely physical illness, which corresponds to
+his psychic ailment. Just at that time Verhaeren was attacked by a
+nervous affection of the stomach, one of those repercussions of the
+psychic on the physical system in which it is hard to say whether the
+ailing stomach causes the neurasthenic condition, or the weakness of the
+nerves the stagnation of the digestive functions. Both ailments are
+inwardly co-ordinated, both are a rejection of the outer impression, an
+impotent refusal of the chemical conversion. Just as the stomach feels
+all food as pain, as a foreign body, so the ear repels every sound as an
+intrusion, so the eye rejects every impression as pain. This nervous
+rejection of the outer world was already then, in Verhaeren's life,
+pathological. The bell on the door had to be removed, because it shocked
+his nerves; those who lived in the house had to wear felt slippers
+instead of shoes; the windows were closed to the noise of the street.
+These years in Verhaeren's life are the lowest depth, the crisis of his
+vitality. It is in such periods of depression that invalids shut
+themselves off from the world, from their fellow-men, from the light of
+day, from the din of existence, from books, from all contact with the
+outer world, because they instinctively feel that everything can be a
+renewal of their pain, and nothing an enrichment of their life. They
+seek to soften the world, to tone its colours down; they bury themselves
+in the monotony of solitude. This 'soudaine lassitude'[1] then impinges
+on to the moral nature; the will, losing the sense of life, is
+paralysed; all standards of value collapse; ideals founder in the most
+frightful Nihilism. The earth becomes a chaos, the sky an empty space;
+everything is reduced to nothingness, to an absolute negation. Such
+crises in the life of a poet are almost always sterile. And it is
+therefore of incalculable value that here a poet should have observed
+himself and given us a clear picture of himself in this state, that,
+without fear of the ugliness, the confusion of his ego, he should have
+described, in terms of art, the history of a psychic crisis. In
+Verhaeren's trilogy, _Les Soirs, Les Débâcles, Les Flambeaux Noirs_, we
+have a document that must be priceless to pathologists as to
+psychologists. For here a deep-seated will to extract the last
+consequence from every phase of life has reproduced the stadium of a
+mental illness right to the verge of madness; here a poet has with the
+persistence of a physician pursued the symptoms of his suffering
+through every stage of lacerating pain, and immortalised in poems the
+process of the inflammation of his nerves.
+
+The landscape of this book is no longer that of his native province;
+indeed, it can hardly be called one of earth. It is a grandiose
+landscape of dreams, horizons as though on some other planet, as though
+in one of those worlds which have cooled into moons, where the warmth of
+the earth has died out and an icy calm chills the vast far-seen spaces
+deserted of man. Already in the book of the monks, Rubens's merry
+landscape had been clouded over; and in the next, _Au Bord de la Route_,
+the grey hand of a cloud had eclipsed the sun. But here all the colours
+of life are burnt out, not a star shines down from this steel-grey
+metallic sky; only a cruel, freezing moon glides across it from time to
+time like a sardonic smile. These are books of pallid nights, with the
+immense wings of clouds closing the sky, over a narrowed world, in which
+the hours cling to things like heavy and clammy chains. They are works
+filled with a glacial cold. 'Il gèle ...'[2] one poem begins, and this
+shuddering tone pierces like the howling of dogs ever and ever again
+over an illimitable plain. The sun is dead, dead are the flowers, the
+trees; the very marshes are frozen in these white midnights:
+
+     Et la crainte saisit d'un immortel hiver
+     Et d'un grand Dieu soudain, glacial et splendide.[3]
+
+In his fever the poet is for ever dreaming of this cold, as though in a
+secret yearning for its cooling breath. No one speaks to him, only the
+winds howl senselessly through the streets like dogs round a house.
+Often dreams come, but they are _fleurs du mal_; they dart out of the
+ice burning, yellow, poisonous. More and more monotonous grow the days,
+more and more fearful; they fall down like drops, heavy and black.
+
+     Mes jours toujours plus lourds s'en vont roulant leur cours![4]
+
+In thought and sound these verses express ail the frightful horror of
+this desolation. Impotently the ticking of the clock hammers this
+endless void, and measures a barren time. Darker, and darker grows the
+world, more and more oppressive; the concave mirror of solitude distorts
+the poet's dreams into frightful grimaces, and spirits whisper evil
+thoughts in his restless heart.
+
+And like a fog, like a heavy, stifling cloud, fatigue sinks down on his
+soul. First pleasure in things had died, and then the very will to
+pleasure. The soul craves nothing now. The nerves have withdrawn their
+antennæ from the outer world; they are afraid of every impression; they
+are spent. Whatever chances to drift against them no longer becomes
+colour, sound, impression; the senses are too feeble for the chemical
+conversion of impressions: and so everything remains at the stage of
+pain, a dull, gnawing pain. Feeling, which the nerves are now powerless
+to feed, starves; desire is sunk in sleep. Autumn has come; all the
+flowers have withered; and winter comes apace.
+
+     Il fait novembre en mon âme.
+     Et c'est le vent du nord qui clame
+     Comme une bête dans mon âme.[5]
+
+Slowly, but irresistible as a swelling tide, emerges an evil thought:
+the idea of the senselessness of life, the thought of death. As the last
+of yearnings soars up the prayer:
+
+     Mourir! comme des fleurs trop énormes, mourir![6]
+
+For the poet's whole body is, as it were, sore from this contact with
+the outer world, from these little gnawing pains. Not a single great
+feeling can stand erect: everything is eaten away by this little,
+gnawing, twitching pain. But now the man in his torture springs up, as a
+beast, tormented by the stings of insects, tears its chains asunder and
+rushes madly and blindly along. The patient would fain flee from his bed
+of torture, but he cannot retrace his steps. No man can 'se recommencer
+enfant, avec calcul.'[7] Travels, dreams, do nothing but deaden the
+pain; and then the torment of the awakening sets in again with redoubled
+strength. Only one way is open: the road which leads forward, the road
+to annihilation. Out of a thousand petty pains, the will longs for one
+single pain that shall end all: the body that is being burnt piecemeal
+cries for the lightning. The sick man desires--as fever-patients will
+tear their wounds open--to make this pain, which tortures without
+destroying, so great and murderous that it will kill outright: to save
+his pride, he would fain be himself the cause of his destruction. Pain,
+he says to himself, shall not continue to be a series of pin-pricks; he
+refuses to 'pourrir, immensément emmailloté d'ennui';[8] he asks to be
+destroyed by a vast, fiery, savage pain; he demands a beautiful and
+tragic death. _The will to experience becomes here the will to suffer
+pain_ and even death. He will be glad to suffer any torture, but not
+this one low little thing; he can no longer endure to feel himself so
+contemptible, so wretched.
+
+     N'entendre plus se taire, en sa maison d'ébène,
+     Qu'un silence total dont auraient peur les morts.[9]
+
+And with a flagellant's pleasure the patient nurses this fire of fever,
+till it flames up in a bright blaze. The deepest secret of Verhaeren's
+art was from the first his joy in intemperance, the strength of his
+exaggeration. And so, too, he snatches up this pain, this neurasthenia
+to a wonderful, fiery, and grandiose ecstasy. A cry, a pleasure breaks
+out of this idea of liberation. For the first time the word 'joy' blazes
+again in the cry:
+
+     Le joie enfin me vient, de souffrir par moi-même,
+     Parce que je lé veux.[10]
+
+True, only a perverse joy, a sophism, the false triumph over life of the
+suicide, who believes he has conquered fate when, truth to tell, it has
+conquered him. But this self-deception is already sublime.
+
+By this sudden interference of the will the physical torture of the
+nerves becomes a psychic event; the illness of the body encroaches upon
+the intellect; the neurasthenia becomes a 'déformation morale'; the
+suffering schism of the poet's ego is of itself subdivided, so to speak,
+into two elements, one that excites pain and one that suffers pain. The
+psychic would fain tear itself free from the physical, the soul would
+fain withdraw from the tortured body:
+
+     Pour s'en aller vers les lointains et se défaire
+     De soi et des autres, un jour,
+     En un voyage ardent et mol comme l'amour
+     Et légendaire ainsi qu'un départ de galère![11]
+
+But the two are relentlessly bound up with each other, no flight is
+possible, however much disgust drives the poet to rescue at least a part
+of himself by snatching it into a purer, calmer, and higher state.
+Never, I believe, has the aversion of a sick man to himself, the will to
+health of a living man, been more cruel and more grandiose than in this
+book of a poet's diabolical revolt against himself. His suffering soul
+is torn into two parts. In a fearful personification the hangman and the
+condemned criminal wrestle for the mastery. 'Se cravacher dans sa
+pensée et dans son sang!'[12] and finally, in a paroxysm of fury, 'me
+cracher moi-même,'[13] these are the horribly shrilling cries of
+self-hatred and self-disgust. With all the strings of her whipped
+strength the soul tears to free herself from the rotting and tormented
+body, and her deepest torture is that this separation is impossible. In
+this distraction flickers already the first flame of madness.
+
+Never--if we except Dostoieffsky--has a poet's scalpel probed the wound
+of his ego so cruelly and so deeply, never has it gone so dangerously
+near to the nerve of life. And never perhaps, except in Nietzsche's
+_Ecce Homo!_ has a poet stepped so close to the edge of the precipice
+that juts above the abyss of existence, with so clear a consciousness of
+its vicinity, to feast on the feeling of dizziness and on the danger of
+death. The fire in Verhaeren's nerves has slowly inflamed his brain. But
+the other being, the poet in him, had remained watchful, observing the
+eye of madness slowly, inevitably, and as though magnetically attracted,
+coming nearer and nearer. 'L'absurdité grandit en moi comme une fleur
+fatale.'[14] In gentle fear, but at the same time with a secret
+voluptuous pleasure, he felt the dreaded thing approaching. For long
+already he had been conscious that this rending of himself had hunted
+his thinking from the circle of clarity. And in one grandiose poem, in
+which he sees the corpse of his reason floating down the grey Thames,
+the sick man describes that tragic foundering:
+
+     Elle est morte de trop savoir,
+     De trop vouloir sculpter la cause,
+     ---------------------------------
+     Elle est morte, atrocement,
+     D'un savant empoisonnement,
+     Elle est morte aussi d'un délire
+     Vers un absurde et rouge empire.[15]
+
+But no fear takes him at this thought. Verhaeren is a poet who loves
+paroxysm. And just as in his physical illness he had called out in the
+deepest joy for the intoxication of illness, for its exasperation, for
+death, so now his psychic illness demands its intoxication, the
+dissolution of all order, its most glorious foundering: madness. Here,
+too, the pleasure in the quest of pain is intensified to the highest
+superlative, to a voluptuous joy in self-destruction. And as sick men
+amid their torments scream of a sudden for death, this tortured man
+screams in grim yearning for madness:
+
+     Aurai-je enfin l'atroce joie
+     De voir, nerfs par nerfs, comme une proie,
+     La démence attaquer mon cerveau?[16]
+
+He has measured all the deeps of the spirit, but all the words of
+religion and science, all the elixirs of life, have been powerless to
+save him from this torment. He knows all sensations, and there was no
+greatness in any of them; all have goaded him, none have exalted him or
+raised him above himself. And now his heart yearns ardently for this
+last sensation of all. He is tired of waiting for it, he will go out to
+meet it: 'Je veux marcher vers la folie et ses soleils.'[17] He hails
+madness as though it were a saint, as though it were his saviour; he
+forces himself to 'croire à la démence ainsi qu'en une foi.'[18] It is a
+magnificent picture reminding one of the legend of Hercules, who,
+tortured by the fiery robe of Nessus, hurls himself on the pyre to be
+consumed by one great flame instead of being wretchedly burnt to death
+by a thousand slow and petty torments.
+
+Here the highest state of despair is reached; the black banner of death
+and the red one of madness are furled together. With unprecedented logic
+Verhaeren, despairing of an interpretation of life, has exalted
+senselessness as the sense of the universe. But it is just in this
+complete inversion that victory already lies. Johannes Schlaf, in his
+masterly study, has with great eloquence demonstrated that it is just at
+the moment when the sick man cries out like one being crucified, 'Je
+suis l'immensément perdu,'[19] just when he feels he is being drawn into
+the bosom of the infinite, that he is redeemed and delivered. Just this
+idea, which here had whipped the little pain to the verge of madness,
+
+     À chaque heure, violenter sa maladie;
+     L'aimer, et la maudire,[20]
+
+is already the deepest leitmotiv of Verhaeren's work, the key to unlock
+the gates of it. For the idea is nothing else than the idea of his life,
+to master all resistance by a boundless love, 'aimer le sort jusqu'en
+ses rages';[21] never to shun a thing, but to take everything and
+enhance it till it becomes creative, ecstatic pleasure; to welcome every
+suffering with fresh readiness. Even this cry for madness, no doubt the
+extreme document of human despair, is an immense yearning for clearness;
+in this tortured disgust with illness cries a joy in life perhaps else
+unknown in our days; and the whole conflict, which seems to be a flight
+from life, is in the last instance an immense heroism for which there is
+no name. Nietzsche's great saying is here fulfilled: 'For a dionysiac
+task a hammer's hardness, _the pleasure in destruction itself_, is most
+decidedly one of the preliminary conditions.'[22] And what at this
+period of Verhaeren's work appears still to be negative is in the higher
+sense a preparation for the positive, for the decisive consummation, of
+the later books.
+
+For that reason this crisis and the shaping of it in verse remain an
+imperishable monument of our contemporary literature, for it is at the
+same time an eternal monument to the conquest of human suffering by the
+power of art. Verhaeren's crisis--his exposition, for the sake of the
+value of life, of his inward struggle--has gone deeper than that of any
+other poet of our time. To this very day the sufferings of that time are
+graven, as though by iron wedges, in the furrows of his lofty brow; the
+recovery of his health and his subsequent robustness have been powerless
+to efface them. This crisis was a fire without parallel, a flame of
+passion. Not a single acquisition from the earlier days was rescued from
+it. Verhaeren's whole former relation to the world has broken down: his
+Catholic faith, his religion, his feeling for his native province, for
+the world, for life itself, all is destroyed. And when he builds up his
+work now, it must perforce be an entirely different one, with a
+different artistic expression, with different feelings, different
+knowledge, and different harmonies. This tempest has changed the
+landscape of his soul, where once the peace of a modest existence had
+prevailed, into a pathless desert. But this desert with its solitude has
+space and liberty for the building up of a new, a richer, an infinitely
+nobler world.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'L'Heure Mauvaise' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[2] 'La Barque' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[3] 'Le Gel' (_Les Soirs_).
+
+[4] 'L'Heure Mauvaise' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[5] 'Vers' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[6] 'Mourir' (_Les Soirs_).
+
+[7] 'S'amoindrir' (_Les Débâcles_).
+
+[8] 'Si Morne' (_Les Débâcles_)
+
+[9] 'Le Roc' (_Les Flambeaux Noirs_).
+
+[10] 'Insatiablement' (_Les Soirs_).
+
+[11] 'Là-bas' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[12] 'Vers le Cloître' (_Les Débâcles_).
+
+[13] 'Un Soir' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[14] 'Fleur Fatale' (_Les Débâcles_).
+
+[15] 'La Morte' (_Les Flambeaux Noirs_).
+
+[16] 'Le Roc' (_Ibid._).
+
+[17] 'Fleur Fatale' (_Les Débâcles_).
+
+[18] 'Le Roc' (_Les Flambeaux Noirs_).
+
+[19] 'Les Nombres' (_Ibid._).
+
+[20] 'Celui de la Fatigue' (_Les Apparus dans mes Chemins_).
+
+[21] 'La Joie' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[22] _Ecce Homo!_
+
+
+
+
+FLIGHT INTO THE WORLD
+
+     On boit sa soif, on mange sa faim.--É.V., 'L'Amour.'
+
+In this crisis the negation was driven to the last possible limits. The
+sick man had denied not only the outer world, but himself as well.
+Nothing had remained but vexation, disgust, and torment.
+
+     La vie en lui ne se prouvait
+     Que par l'horreur qu'il en avait.[1]
+
+He had arrived at the last possibility, at that possibility which means
+destruction or transformation. The at first purely physical pain of the
+supersensitive organs of the senses had become a moral depression; the
+depression had become psychic suffering; and this again had gradually
+turned in a grandiose progression not only to pain in the individual
+thing but to suffering in the all: to _cosmic pain_. For Him, however,
+who in His loneliness took the suffering of the whole world upon His
+shoulders, who was strong enough to bear it for all the centuries,
+humanity has invented the symbol of 'God.' He who is born of earth and
+lives to die must perforce break down under so gigantic a burden. Into
+the last corner of his ego revengeful life had here driven the man who
+denied it, had driven him to the point where now he stood shivering
+before the abyss in his own breast, face to face with death and madness.
+The physical and poetic organism of Verhaeren was overheated to the most
+dangerous and extreme degree. This fever-heat--that of a flagellant
+--had brought his blood to the boiling-point; it was filling the chamber
+of his breast with pictures of such overwhelming horror that the
+explosion of self-destruction could only be prevented by opening the
+valve.
+
+There were only two means of flight from this destruction: flight into
+the past--or flight into a new world. Many, Verlaine for instance, had
+in such catastrophes, wherein the whole structure of their lives tumbled
+to the ground, fled into the cathedrals of Catholicism rather than stand
+in solitude under the threatening sky. Verhaeren, however, though an
+inspired faith is one of the most living sources of his poetical power,
+was more afraid of the past than of the Unknown. _He freed himself from
+the immense pressure upon him by fleeing into the world_. He who in his
+pride had conceived the whole process of the world as a personal affair,
+he who had tried to solve the eternal discord, the undying 'yes' and
+'no' of life in his own lonely self, now rushes into the very midst of
+things and involves himself in their process. He who previously had felt
+everything only subjectively, only in isolation, now objectifies
+himself; he who previously had shut himself off from reality, now lets
+his veins pulse in harmony with the breathing organism of life. He
+relinquishes his attitude of pride; he surrenders himself; lavishes
+himself joyously on everything; exchanges the pride of being alone for
+the immense pleasure of being everywhere. _He no longer looks at all
+things in himself, but at himself in all things_. But the poet in him
+frees himself, quite in Goethe's sense, by symbols. Verhaeren drives his
+superabundance out of himself into the whole world, just as Christ in
+the legend drove the devils out of the madman into the swine. The heat,
+the fever of his feeling--which, concentrated in his too narrow chest,
+were near bursting it--now animate with their fire the whole world
+around him, which of old had been to him congealed with ice. All the
+evil powers, which had slunk around him in the trappings of nightmares,
+he now transforms to shapes of life. He hammers away at them and shapes
+them anew; he is himself the smith of that noble poem of his, the smith
+of whom he says:
+
+     Dans son brasier, il a jeté
+     Les cris d'opiniâtreté,
+     La rage sourde et séculaire;
+     Dans son brasier d'or exalté,
+     Maître de soi, il a jeté
+     Révoltes, deuils, violences, colères,
+     Pour leur donner la trempe et la clarté
+     Du fer et de l'éclair.[2]
+
+He objectifies his personality in the work of art, hammering out of the
+cold blocks, that weighed upon him with the weight of iron, monuments
+and statues of pain. All the feelings which of old weighed down upon him
+like dull fog, formless and prisoned in dream like nightmares, now
+become clear statues, symbols in stone of his soul's experiences. The
+poet has torn his fear, his burning, moaning, horrible fear, out of
+himself, and poured it into his bell-ringer, who is consumed in his
+blazing belfry. He has turned the monotony of his days to music in his
+poem of the rain; his mad fight against the elements, which in the end
+break his strength, he has shaped into the image of the ferryman
+struggling against the current that shatters his oars one after the
+other. His cruel probing of his own pain he has visualised in the idea
+of his fishermen, who with their nets all in holes go on fishing up
+nothing but suffering on suffering out of the sombre stream; his evil
+and red lusts he has spiritualised in his _Aventurier_, in the
+adventurer who returns home from a far land to celebrate his wedding
+feast with his dead love. Here his feelings are shaped no longer in
+moods, in the fluid material of dreams, but in the infinitely mobile
+form of human beings. Here there is symbolism in the highest sense, in
+Goethe's sense of liberation. For every feeling that has achieved
+artistic shape is as it were conjured away out of the breast. And thus
+the too heavy pressure slowly disappears from the poet's being, and the
+morbid fever from his work. Now and now only does he recognise the
+suicidal cowardice behind the visor of the pride that forced him to fly
+from the world, now and now only does he understand that fatal egoism
+which had taken refuge beyond the pale of the world:
+
+     J'ai été lâche et je me suis enfui
+     Du monde, en mon orgueil futile,[3]
+
+This confession is the last liberating word of the crisis.
+
+Now his despair--a despair like that of Faust--is overcome. The mood of
+Easter morning begins to sound the exulting cry, 'Earth has me
+again!'[4] with the anthems of the resurrection. Verhaeren has described
+this deliverance, this ascent from illness to health, from the most
+despairing 'no' to the most exultant 'yes,' in many symbols, most
+beautifully in that magnificent poem wherein St. George the
+dragon-slayer bows down to him with his shining lance; and again in that
+other poem in which the four gentle sisters approach him and announce
+his deliverance:
+
+     L'une est le bleu pardon, l'autre la bonté blanche,
+     La troisième l'amour pensif, la dernière le don
+     D'être, même pour les méchants, le sacrifice.[5]
+
+Goodness and love call to him now from where of old there were only
+hatred and despair. And in their approach already he feels the hope of
+recovery, the hope of a natural, artistic strength.
+
+     Et quand elles auront, dans ma maison,
+     Mis de l'ordre à mes torts, plié tous mes remords
+     Et refermé, sur mes péchés, toute cloison,
+     En leur pays d'or immobile, où le bonheur
+     Descend, sur des rives de fleurs entr'accordées,
+     Elles dresseront les hautes idées,
+     En sainte-table, pour mon coeur.[6]
+
+This feeling of recovery grows more and more secure, more and more the
+mist parts before the approaching sun of health. Now the poet knows that
+he has been wandering in the dark galleries of mines, that he has been
+hammering a labyrinth through the hard rock of hatred instead of walking
+the same path as his fellow-men in the light. And at last, bright and
+exultant, high above the shy voices of hope and prayer, the sudden
+triumph of certainty rings out. For the first time Verhaeren finds the
+form of the poem of the future--the dithyramb. Where of old, confused
+and lonely, _le carillon noir_ of pain sounded, now all the strings of
+the heart vibrate and sing.
+
+     Sonnez toutes mes voix d'espoir!
+     Sonnez en moi; sonnez, sous les rameaux,
+     En des routes claires et du soleil![7]
+
+And now the path proceeds in light 'vers les claires métamorphoses.'[8]
+
+This flight into the world was the great liberation. Not only has the
+body grown strong again and rejoices in the wandering and the way, but
+the soul too has become cheerful, the will has grown new wings that are
+stronger than the old, and the poet's art is filled with a fresh blood
+red with life. The deliverance is perceptible even in Verhaeren's verse,
+which with its delicate nerves reproduces all the phases of his soul.
+For his poetry, which at first in the indifference of its picturesque
+description preserved the cold form of the Alexandrine, and then, in the
+grim monotony of the crisis, tried to represent the void waste of
+feeling by a terrifying, gruesomely beautiful uniformity of rhythm, this
+poem of a sudden, as though out of a dream, starts into life, awakens
+like an animal from sleep, rears, prances, curvets; imitates all
+movements, threatens, exults, falls into ecstasy: in other words, all of
+a sudden, and independently of all influences and theories, he has won
+his way to the _vers libre,_ free verse. Just as the poet no longer
+shuts the I world up in himself, but bestows himself on the world, the
+poem too no longer seeks to lock the world up obstinately in its
+four-cornered prison, but surrenders itself to every feeling, every
+rhythm, every melody; it adapts itself, distends; with its foaming
+voluptuous joy it can fold in its embrace the illimitable length and
+breadth of cities, can contract to pick up the loveliness of one fallen
+blossom, can imitate the thundering voice of the street, the hammering
+of machines, and the whispering of lovers in a garden of spring. _The
+poem can now speak in all the languages of feeling, with all the voices
+of men; for the tortured, moaning cry of an individual has become the
+voice of the universe._
+
+But together with this new delight the poet feels the debt which he has
+withheld from his age. He beholds the lost years in which he lived only
+for himself, for his own little feeling, instead of listening to the
+voice of his time. With a remarkable concordance of genius Verhaeren's
+work here expresses what Dehmel--in the same year perhaps--fashioned
+with such grandeur in 'The Mountain Psalm,' the poem in which, looking
+down from the heights of solitude to the cities in their pall of smoke,
+he cries in ecstasy:
+
+     Was weinst du, Sturm?--Hinab, Erinnerungen!
+     dort pulst im Dunst der Weltstadt zitternd Herz!
+     Es grollt ein Schrei von Millionen Zungen
+     nach Glück und Frieden: Wurm, was will dein Schmerz!
+     Nicht sickert einsam mehr von Brust zu Brüsten,
+     wie einst die Sehnsucht, als ein stiller Quell;
+     heut stöhnt ein _Volk_ nach Klarheit, wild und gell,
+     und du schwelgst noch in Wehmutslüsten?
+
+     Siehst du den Qualm mit dicken Fäusten drohn
+     dort überm Wald der Schlote und der Essen?
+     Auf deine Reinheitsträume fällt der Hohn
+     der Arbeit! fühl's: sie ringt, von Schmutz zerfressen.
+     Du hast mit deiner Sehnsucht bloss gebuhlt,
+     in trüber Glut dich selber nur genossen;
+     schütte die Kraft aus, die dir zugeflossen,
+     und du wirst frei vom Druck der Schuld![9]
+
+Pour out the power that has flowed in upon thee! Surrender thyself! That
+too is Verhaeren's ecstatic cry at this hour. Opposites touch. _Supreme
+solitude is turned to supreme fellowship_. The poet feels that
+self-surrender is more than self-preservation. All at once he sees
+behind him the frightful danger of this self-seeking pain.
+
+     Et tout à coup je m'apparais celui
+     Qui s'est, hors de soi-même, enfui
+     Vers le sauvage appel des forces unanimes.[10]
+
+And he who in days gone by had fled from this appeal into cold solitude,
+now casts himself ecstatically into the arms of the world, with the I
+deepest yearning
+
+         De n'être plus qu'un tourbillon
+     Qui se disperse au vent mystérieux des choses.[11]
+
+He feels that in order to live to the full all the greatness and beauty
+of this fiery world, he must multiply himself, be a thousandfold and ten
+thousandfold what he is. 'Multiplie-toi!' Be manifold. Surrender
+thyself! For the first time this cry bursts up like a flame. Be
+manifold!
+
+     Multiplie et livre-toi! Défais
+     Ton être en des millions d'êtres;
+     Et sens l'immensité filtrer et transparaître.[12]
+
+Only from this brotherhood with all things accrue the possibilities of
+being a modern poet. Only by self-surrender to everything that is could
+Verhaeren attain to so grandiose a conception of contemporary
+manifestations, only thus could he become the poet of the democracy of
+cities, of industrialism, of science, the poet of Europe, the poet of
+our age. Only such a pantheistic feeling could create this intimate
+relationship between the world of self and the world surrounding self,
+the relationship which subsequently ends in an unparalleled identity:
+only so despairing a 'no' could be transformed to so enraptured a 'yes,'
+only one who had fled from the world could possess it with such passion.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'Un Soir' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[2] 'Le Forgeron' (_Les Villages Illusoires_).
+
+[3] 'Saint Georges' (_Les Apparus dans mes Chemins_).
+
+[4] Goethe's _Faust_, 1. 784.
+
+[5] 'Les Saintes' (_Les Apparus dans mes Chemins_).
+
+[6] 'Les Saintes' (_Les Apparus dans mes Chemins_).
+
+[7] 'Saint Georges' (_Ibid_).
+
+[8] 'Le Forgeron' (_Les Villages Illusoires_).
+
+[9] 'Why weepest thou, O storm?--Down, memories! Yonder in the smoke
+pulses the great city's trembling heart! A million grumbling tongues are
+crying for peace and happiness: worm, what would thy pain! Yearning no
+longer trickles lonely from breast to breasts, a quiet source and no
+more: to-day a _nation_ groans, and with wild, shrill voices demands
+clearness--and thou still revellest in the joys of melancholy?
+
+'Seest thou the reek and smoke threatening yonder over the forest of
+flues and chimneys? Upon thy dreams of purity falls the scorn of labour!
+Feel it: labour is struggling, eaten up with dirt! Thou hast but
+wantoned with thy yearning, thou hast but enjoyed thyself in turbid
+heat; pour out the power that has flowed in upon thee, and thou shalt be
+free from the burden of guilt!'--'Bergpsalm' (_Aber die Liebe_).
+
+[10] 'La Foule' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[11] 'Celui du Savoir' (_Les Apparus dans mes Chemins_).
+
+[12] 'La Forêt' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+CONSTRUCTIVE FORCES
+
+
+LES CAMPAGNES HALLUCINÉES--LES VILLAGES ILLUSOIRES
+--LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES--LES DRAMES
+
+1893-1900
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTEMPORARY FEELING
+
+      J'étais le carrefour où tout se rencontrait.--É.V., 'Le Mont.'
+
+
+Verhaeren's deliverance from the stifling clasp of his crisis was a
+flight to realities. He saved himself by no longer fixing his gaze
+rigidly on himself and deeply probing every feeling of joy and torment,
+but by turning to the world of phenomena and flinging himself on its
+problems. He has no longer to stand in solitude facing the world; his
+desire is to multiply himself, to realise himself in everything that is
+alive, in everything that expresses a will, an idea, a form, anything at
+all animated. His poetic aim now is, not so much to analyse himself to
+himself, as to analyse himself in the whole world.
+
+To realities, and particularly to the realities of our day, lyric poets
+had previously felt themselves alien. It had long been a commonplace to
+speak of the danger to art of industrialism, of democracy, of this age
+of machinery which makes pur life uniform, kills individuality, and
+drowns romance in actualities. All these poets have looked upon the new
+creations, machines, railways, monster cities, the telegraph, the
+telephone, all the triumphs of engineering, as a drag on the soaring of
+poetry. Ruskin preached that workshops should be demolished and chimneys
+razed to the ground; Tolstoy pointed to primitive man, who produces all
+his requirements from his own resources independently of any community,
+and saw in him the moral and æsthetic ideal of the future. In poetry,
+the past had gradually come to be identified with the poetical. People
+were enamoured of the glory that was Greece, of mail-coaches and narrow,
+crooked streets; they were filled with enthusiasm for all foreign
+cultures, and decried that of our own time as a phase of degeneration.
+Democracy, levelling all ranks and confining even the poet to the
+middle-class profession of author, seemed, as a social order, to be the
+correlation of machinery which, by the constructive skill of workshops,
+renders all manual dexterity unnecessary. All the poets, who were glad
+to avail themselves of the practical advantages provided by technical
+science, who had no objection to covering immense distances in the
+minimum time, who accepted the comfort of the modern house, the luxury
+of modern conditions of life, increased pecuniary rewards and social
+independence, refused obstinately to discover in these advantages a
+single poetic motive, a single object of inspiration, the least stimulus
+or ecstasy. Poetry had by degrees come to be something which was the
+very opposite of what-, ever is useful; all evolution seemed to these
+poets to be, from the point of view of culture, retrogression.
+
+Now it is Verhaeren's great exploit that he effected a transmutation
+poetic values. He discovered the sublime in the far-spread serried ranks
+of democracy; beauty he found not only where it adapts itself to
+traditional ideas, but also where, still hidden by the cotyledon of the
+new, it is just beginning to unfold. By rejecting no phenomenon, in so
+far as an inward sense and a necessity dwelt in it, he infinitely
+extended the boundaries of the lyric art. He found a fruitful soil in
+the very places where all other poets despaired of poetic seed. He and
+he alone, who had for so long been eating his heart out in fierce
+isolation, feels the strength and fulness of society, the poetical
+element in the massed strength of great cities and in great inventions.
+_His deepest longing, his most sublime exploit is the lyric discovery of
+the new beauty in new things._
+
+The only way to this feat lay for him through the conviction that beauty
+does not express anything absolute, but something that changes with
+circumstances and with men; that beauty, like everything that is subject
+to evolution, is constantly changing. Yesterday's beauty is not to-day's
+beauty. Beauty is no more opposed than anything else to that tendency to
+spiritualisation which is the most characteristic symptom ind result of
+all culture. Physiologists have proved that the physical strength of
+modern man is inferior to that of his ancestors, but that his nervous
+system is more developed, so that strength is more and more concentrated
+in the intellect. The Hellenic hero was the wrestler, the expression of
+a body harmoniously developed in every limb, the perfection of strength
+and skill; the hero of our time is the thinker, the ideal of
+intellectual strength and suppleness. And since our only way of
+estimating the perfection of things is by the ideal of our personal
+feeling, the form of beauty likewise has been transformed and become
+intellectual. And even when we seek it in the body, as, for instance, in
+the ideal woman's figure, we have grown accustomed to seeing perfection
+not so much in robustness and plumpness as in a noble, slender play of
+lines which mysteriously expresses the soul. Beauty is turning away more
+and more from the outer surface, from the physical, to the interior
+aspects, to the psychic. In proportion as motive forces hide themselves
+and as harmony becomes less obvious, beauty intellectualises itself. It
+is becoming for us not so much a beauty of appearance as a beauty of;
+aim. If we are to admire the telegraph or the telephone, we shall not be
+satisfied with considering the exterior forms, the network of wires, the
+keys, the receivers; we shall be impressed rather by the ideal beauty,
+by the idea of a vibrating spark leaping over countries and whole
+continents. A machine is not wonderful on, account of its rattling,
+rusty, iron framework, but by the idea, deep-seated in its body, which
+is the principle of its magical activity. A modern idea of beauty must
+be adapted not only to the idea of beauty of the past, but also to that
+of the future. And the future of æsthetics is a kind of ideology, or, as
+Renan expresses it, an identity with the sciences. We shall lose the
+habit of understanding things only by our senses, of seeing their
+harmony only on their exterior surface, and we shall have to learn how
+to conceive their intellectual aims, their inner form, their psychic
+organisation, as beauty.
+
+For these new things are only ugly when they are regarded with the eyes
+of a past century, when our contemporaries, jealously guarding a
+reverent over-estimation, valuing the rust and not the gold, despise
+modern works of art, and pay a thousand times too dear for the
+indifferent productions of a past age. Only in this state of feeling is
+it possible to esteem mail-coaches poetical and locomotives ugly; only
+thus is it possible for poets, who have not learned to see with
+emancipated and independent eyes, to assume such a hostile attitude, or
+at the best an indifferent attitude, to our realities. Let us remember
+Nietzsche's beautiful words: 'My formula for grandeur in man is _amor
+fati_: that a man should ask for nothing else, either in the past or in
+the future, in all eternity. We must not only endure what is necessary,
+still less conceal it--all idealism is lying in necessity's face--but
+we must _love_ it.'[1] And in this sense some few in our days have loved
+what is new, first as a necessity, and then as beauty. A generation ago
+now, Carlyle was the first to preach the heroism of everyday life, and
+exhorted the poets of his day not to describe the greatness they found
+in mouldy chronicles, but to look for it where it was nearest to them,
+in the realities around them. Constantin Meunier has found the idea of a
+new sculpture in democracy, Whistler and Monet have discovered in the
+smoky breath of this age of machinery a new tone of colour which is not
+less beautiful than Italy's eternal azure and the halcyon sky of Greece.
+It is only from the vast agglomerations, the immense dimensions of the
+new world that Walt Whitman has derived the strength and power of his
+voice. The whole difficulty which thus far has permitted only a few to
+serve the new beauty in the new things lies in the fact that our age is
+not yet a period of decided conviction, but only one of transition. The
+victory of machinery is not yet complete; handiwork still subsists,
+little towns still flourish, it is still possible to take refuge in an
+idyll, to find the old beauty in some sequestered corner. Not till the
+poet is shut off from all flight to inherited ideals will he be forced
+to change himself into a new man. For the new things have not yet
+organically developed their beauty. Every new thing on its first
+appearance is blended with something repellent, brutal, and ugly; it is
+only gradually that its inherent form shapes itself æsthetically. The
+first steamers, the first locomotives, the first automobiles, were ugly.
+But the slender, agile torpedo-boats of to-day, the bright-coloured,
+noiselessly--gliding automobiles with their hidden mechanism, the great,
+broad-chested Pacific Railway engines of to-day, are impressive by their
+outward form alone. Our huge shops, such as those which Messel built in
+Berlin, display a beauty in iron and glass which is hardly less than
+that of the cathedrals and palaces of old time. Certain great things,
+such as the Eiffel Tower, the Forth Bridge, modern men-of-war, furnaces
+belching flame, the Paris boulevards, have a new beauty beyond anything
+which past ages had to show. These new things compel a new enhancement
+of value, on the one hand by the idea that moves them, on the other hand
+by their democratic grandeur and their vast dimensions--equalled by none
+but the very greatest works of antiquity. But whatever is beautiful
+must, sooner or later, be conceived of as poetry. And thus, it is quite
+sure, Verhaeren has only been one of the first to build bridges from the
+old to the new time; others will come who will celebrate the new
+beauties in the new things--gigantic cities, engines, industrialism,
+democracy, this fiery striving for new standards of greatness--and they
+will not only be compelled to find the new beauties, they will also
+have to establish new laws for this new order, a different morality, a
+different religion, a different synthesis for this new conditionality.
+the poetic transmutation of the beautiful is only a first beginning of
+the poetic transmutation of the feeling of life.
+
+But a poet never finds anything in things save his own temperament. If
+he is melancholy, the world in his books is void of sense, all lights
+are extinguished, laughter dies; if he is passionate, all feelings
+seethe in a fiery froth as though in a cauldron, and foam up in angry
+happenings. Whereas the real world is manifold, and contains the elixirs
+of pleasure and pain, confidence and despair, love and hate, only as
+elements so to speak, the world of great poets is the world of one
+single feeling. And so Verhaeren too sees all things in their new beauty
+with the feelings of his own life only, only with energy. In these the
+fiery years of his prime it is not harmony that he seeks, but energy,
+power. For him a thing is the more beautiful the more purpose, will,
+power, energy it contains. And since the whole world of to-day is
+over-heated with effort and energy; since our great towns are nothing
+but centres of multiplied energy; since machinery expresses nothing save
+force tanied and organised; since innumerable crowds are yoked in
+harmonious action--to him the world is full of beauty. He loves the new
+age because it does not isolate effort but condenses it, because it is
+not scattered but concentrated for action. And of a sudden everything
+he sees appears to be filled with soul. All that has will, all that has
+an aim in view--man, machine, crowd, city, money; all that vibrates,
+works, hammers, travels, exults; all that propagates itself and is
+multiplied, all that strives to be creation; all that bears in itself
+fire, impulse, electricity, feeling--all this rings again in his verse.
+All that of old had acted upon him as being cold and dead and hostile is
+now inspired with will and energy, and lives its minute; in this
+multiple gear there is nothing that is merely dust or useless
+ornamentation; everything is creation, everything is working its way
+towards the future. The town, this piled-up Babylon of stones and men,
+is of a sudden a living being, a vampire sucking the strength of the
+land; the factories, that had seemed to him nothing but an unsightly
+mass of masonry, now become the creators of a thousand things, which in
+their turn create new things out of themselves. All at once Verhaeren is
+the socialist poet, the poet of the age of machinery, of democracy, and
+of the European race. And energy fills his poetry too: it is strength
+let loose, enthusiasm, paroxysm, ecstasy, whatever you like to call it;
+but always active, glowing, moving strength; never rest, always
+activity. His poem is no longer declamation, no longer the marmoreal
+monument of a mood, but a crying aloud, a fight, a convulsive starting,
+a stooping down and a springing up again; it is a battle materialised.
+For him all values have been transmuted. It is just what had repelled
+him most--London, monster cities, railway stations, Exchanges, which now
+lure him most of all as poetic problems. The more a thing seems to
+resist beauty--the more he has first to discover its beauty by fighting
+it and wrestling with it in torment--with so much the greater ecstasy
+does he now extol it. The strength which had murderously raged against
+itself now, in creative ecstasy, breaks into the world. To tear down
+resistance, to snatch beauty from its most hidden corner, is now for him
+a tenfold strength and joy of creation. _Verhaeren now creates the poem
+of the great city in the dionysiac sense_; the hymn to our own time, to
+Europe; creates ecstasy, renewed and renewed again, in life.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] _Ecce Homo!_
+
+
+
+
+TOWNS ('LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES')
+
+     Le siècle et son horreur se condensent en elles
+     Mais leur âme contient la minute éternelle.
+                                       É.V., 'Les Villes.'
+
+
+When a man just recovered from illness steps for the first time with
+arms outspread, and as though climbing up from a dungeon, into the light
+of day, he is filled with a bliss beyond measure by the open air
+caressing him on all sides, by the orgies of the sunlight, the cataracts
+of deafening din: with a cry of infinite exultation he takes into
+himself the symphony of life. And from this first moment of his recovery
+Verhaeren was seized by a limitless thirst for the intoxication of life,
+as though with one single leap he would make good the lost years of his
+loneliness, of his illness, and of his crisis. His eyes, his ears, his
+nerves, all his senses, which had been a-hungered, now pounce on things
+with a pleasure that is almost murderous, and snatch everything to
+themselves in a frenzy of greed. At this time Verhaeren travelled from
+country to country, as though he would take possession of all Europe. He
+was in Germany, in Berlin, in Vienna, and in Prague; always a lonely
+wanderer; quite alone; ignorant of the language, and listening only to
+the voice of the town itself, to the strange, sombre murmuring, to the
+surge of the European metropolises. In Bayreuth he paid his devotions at
+the tomb of Wagner, whose music of ecstasy and passion he absorbed in
+Munich; in Colmar he learned to understand his beloved painter Mathias
+Grünewald; he saw and loved the tragic landscapes of northern Spain,
+those gloomy, treeless mountains, whose threatening silhouettes
+afterwards became the background of the fiery happenings in his drama of
+_Philip II._; in Hamburg he was an excited spectator, day by day, of the
+stupendous traffic, the coming and going of the ships, the unloading and
+the loading of cargoes. Everywhere where life was intensive, expressive,
+and animated with a new energy, he passionately loved it. It is
+characteristic of his temperament that the harmonious beauty of peaceful
+and empty, of sleeping and dreaming cities appealed to him less than
+modern cities in their pall of soot and smoke. Almost intentionally his
+affection turns from the traditional ideal to one yet unknown. Florence,
+for many centuries the symbol of all poets, disappointed him: the
+Italian air was too mild, these contours were too meagre, too dreamy the
+streets. But London, this piled-up conglomeration of dwellings and
+workshops; this town that might have been cast in bronze; this teeming
+labyrinth of dingy streets; this ever-beating, restless heart of the
+world's trade with its smoke of toil threatening to eclipse the sun;
+this was to him a revelation. Just the industrial towns, which had thus
+far tempted no poet; those towns which roll up the vault of their leaden
+sky with their own fog and smoke, which confine their inhabitants in
+leagues and leagues of congested masonry, these attract him. He, who
+revels in colour, grew fond of Paris, to which, since then, he has
+returned every year for the winter months. Just what is restless and
+busy, confused and breathless, hunted, eager, feverish, hot with an
+ardour as of rut, all this Babylonian medley lures him. He loves this
+pell-mell multiplicity and its strange music. Often he would travel for
+hours on the top of heavy omnibuses, to have a bird's-eye view of the
+bustling throng, and here he would close his eyes the better to feel the
+dull rumour, this surging sound which, in its ceaselessness, is not
+unlike the rustling of a forest, beating against his body. No longer as
+in his earlier books does he follow the existence of simple callings; he
+loves the ascension of handiwork to mechanical labour, in which the aim
+is invisible, and only the grandiose organisation is revealed. And
+gradually this interest became the motive interest of his life.
+Socialism, which in those years was becoming strong and active, fell
+like a red drop into the morbid paleness of his poetic work.
+Vandervelde, the leader of the Labour Party, became his friend. And
+when, at this stage, the party founded the Maison du Peuple at Brussels,
+he readily helped, gave lectures at the Université Libre, took part in
+all the projects, and afterwards, wards, in the most beautiful vision
+of his poetical work, lifted them far above the political and actual
+into the great events of all humanity. His life, now inwardly
+established, henceforth beats with a strong and regular rhythm. He had
+in the meantime, by his marriage, attained a personal appeasement, a
+counterpoise for his unbridled restlessness. Now his wild ecstasies have
+their fixed point, from which they can survey the fiery vortex of the
+new phenomena. The morbid pictures, the feverish hallucinations, now
+become clear visions; not by flashes of lightning, but in a steady,
+beaming light are the horizons of our time now illuminated for him.
+
+Now that he steps boldly into life, his first problem is to come to an
+understanding with the world around him, with his fellow-men, with the
+city itself. But it is not the city he lives in which interests him in a
+provincial sense, but the ideal, modern city, the monster city in
+general, this strange and uncanny thing that like a vampire has snatched
+to herself all the strength of the soil and of men to form a new
+residuum of power. She crowds together the contrasts of life; grades, in
+unexpected layers, immense riches over the most wretched poverty;
+strengthens opposing forces, and goads them to hostility, goads them to
+that desperate battle in which Verhaeren loves to see all things
+involved. The grandeur of this new organism is beyond the æsthetics of
+the past; and new and strange before Nature stand men also, with
+another rhythm, a hotter breath, quicker movements, wilder desires than
+were known to any association of men, to any calling or caste, of a
+previous time. It is a new outlook which not only sweeps the distance,
+but has also to reckon with height, with the piled tiers of houses, with
+new velocities and new conditions of space. A new blood, money, feeds
+these cities, a new energy fires them; they are driven to procreate a
+new faith, a new God, and a new art. Their dimensions, terrific, and of
+a beauty hitherto unknown, defy measurement; the order that rules is
+hidden in the earth behind a pathless wilderness.
+
+     Quel océan, ses coeurs? ...
+     Quels noeuds de volonté serrés en son mystère![1]
+
+cries out the poet in wonderment as he strides through the city and is
+overpowered by her grandeur:
+
+     Toujours en son triomphe ou ses défaites,
+     Elle apparaît géante, et son cri sonne et son nom luit.[2]
+
+He feels that an enormous energy proceeds from her; he is conscious that
+her atmosphere rests with a new pressure on his body, that his blood
+quickens to keep pace with her rhythm. Merely to be near her starts the
+thrill of a new delight.
+
+     En ces villes ...
+            *       *       *       *       *
+     Je sens grandir et s'exalter en moi,
+     Et fermenter, soudain, mon coeur multiplié.[3]
+
+Involuntarily he feels himself becoming dependent on her, feels this
+grandiose coupling of energy producing a similar concentration of all
+his forces in himself too, feels his fever becoming infectious like her
+own, and feels--with an intensity unknown to any other poet of our
+days--the identity of his personality with the soul of the city. He
+knows she is dangerous, knows she will fill him with all restlessness,
+overheat him and excite him, confuse him with her hostile contrasts.
+
+     Voici la ville en or des rouges alchimies,
+     Où te fondre le coeur en un creuset nouveau
+     Et t'affoler d'un orage d'antinomies
+     Si fort qu'il foudroiera tes nerfs jusqu'au cerveau.[4]
+
+But he knows that she will impregnate him as well, give him power from
+her strength. There will never be a great man again who will pass her
+by, who will not be thrilled by her sensation, who will not live with
+her, and by her grow. Henceforth all new and strong men will stand in
+reciprocal action with her.
+
+This great recognition of a fact is, as we have seen, not spontaneous,
+but painfully acquired. For in the sense of the old beauty the aspect of
+a modern city is frightful. She is a sleepless, an ever wakeful woman;
+she does not, like Nature, sometimes rest; she is never silent.
+Restlessly she sucks men into her whirlpool; ceaselessly she pricks
+their nerves; day and night her life pulses. By day she is as grey as
+lead; a sultry shuttle of passions; a dark mine in which men, buried in
+the mines of her streets, are forced to unresting toil. How dense are
+these virgin forests of bronze and stone; and of all these thousands of
+streets 'à poumons lourds et haletants, vers on ne sait quels buts
+inquiétants,'[5] not one seems to lead into the open, into the light of
+day. Monotonous, like dull eyes, glare the millions of windows; and the
+darksome caverns in which men, themselves like machines, sit by
+machines, thunder in the unseizable rhythm of petrified exertion. Not a
+ray is reflected on them from the eternal; hostile, repulsive, and grey
+the town pants in the puffed smoke of her daily labour. But night,
+softening all harsh lines, fierily welds the lumbering limbs together
+into something new. By night the town is turned into one great
+seduction. Passion, fettered in the day-time, breaks its chains:
+
+      ... Pourtant, lorsque les soirs
+     Sculptent le firmament de leurs marteaux d'ébène,
+     La ville au loin s'étale et domine la plaine
+     Comme unnocturne et colossal espoir;
+     Elle surgit: désir, splendeur, hantise;
+     Sa clarté se projette en lueurs jusqu'aux cieux,
+     Son gaz myriadaire en buissons d'or s'attise,
+     Ses rails sont des chemins audacieux
+     Vers le bonheur fallacieux
+     Que la fortune et la force accompagnent;
+     Ses murs se dessinent pareils à une armée
+     Et ce qui vient d'elle encor de brume et de fumée
+     Arrive en appels clairs vers les campagnes.[6]
+
+These fiery eruptions Verhaeren shapes in grandiose visions. There is
+the vision of the music halls: wheels of fire revolve round a house,
+blazing letters climb up façades and lure the crowds to sit in front of
+the brilliant footlights. I Here the people's hunger for sensation is
+fed full, and art is cruelly murdered day by day. Here tedium is tamed
+for an hour or so, and whipped up with colour, flame, and music for
+another pleasure that is waiting outside, as soon as the illusion here
+sinks into the night:
+
+     Et minuit sonne et la foule s'écoule
+     --Le hall fermé--parmi les trottoirs noirs;
+     Et sous les lanternes qui pendent,
+     Rouges, dans la brume, ainsi que des viandes,
+     Ce sont les filles qui attendent....[7]
+
+they the harlots, 'les promeneuses,' 'les veuves d'elles-mêmes,'[8] who
+live on the sensual hunger of the masses. For sensual pleasure too is
+organised in cities, is guided into canals, like all instincts. But the
+primordial instinct is the same. The hunger which out in the fields and
+in the country was still pleasure in healthy food, in frothing beer, has
+here been converted into the idea of money. Money is what everybody
+hungers for here; money is the meaning of the town. 'Boire et manger de
+l'or'[9] is the hot dream of the crowd. Everything is expressed by
+money, 'tout se définit par des monnaies';[10] all values are
+subordinate to this new value, monetary value. Superb is the vision of
+the bazaar, where, on all the counters, in the many stories, everything
+is sold, not only as in reality objects in common use, but, in a loftier
+symbolism, ethical values as well: convictions and opinions, fame and
+name, honour and power, all the laws of life. But all this fiery blood
+of money flows together in the great heart of the city, flows into the
+Exchange, that greedy maw that swallows all the gold and spits it out
+again, which smelts all this hectic fever and then pours it flaming into
+all the veins of the city. Everything can be bought, even pleasure: in
+back streets, in _l'étal_, in the haunts where debauch lies in wait,
+women sell themselves as goods are sold in the bazaar. But this energy
+is not always regulated, not always made to flow between dikes. Here
+too, as in Nature, there are sudden catastrophes. Sometimes revolt is
+kindled, flashes up instantaneously, and this stream of money blazes
+itself a new trail. The masses pour out of their dismal caverns, greed
+takes possession of men, and the myriad-headed monster fights and bleeds
+for this one thing, this red-burning, relucent gold.
+
+But the great and powerful thing in these towns is not passion; it is
+the hidden strength behind these passions, the noble order that keeps
+them in their proper limits, and holds them in check. This rumbling
+chaos, this inundation of things doomed to die, is dominated in the
+_Villes Tentaculaires_ by three or four figures standing like
+statues--the tamers of passions. They are what kings and priests were of
+old, they who have the power of bridling ebullient energies and turning
+them to use. With hands of iron they hold down this wild and dangerous
+animal, they, the new rulers, statesmen, generals, demagogues,
+organisers. For the town is an animal in its movements, a beast in its
+passions, a brute in its instincts, a monster in its strength. It is
+ugly, like all rut. It cannot be contemplated with a pure pleasure, like
+a landscape gently and harmoniously fading in forest verdure; it rather
+evokes, at first, loathing, hatred, caution, and hostility. But that is
+the great thing in Verhaeren, that he always overcomes whatever is
+hostile, pain and torment, by a great vista, that in this panting steam
+of the unæsthetic he already sees the flame of the new beauty. Here for
+the first time is, seen the beauty of factories, _les usines
+rectangulaires,_ the fascination of a railway station, the new beauty in
+the new things. If the town is indeed ugly in its denseness, ugly in the
+sense of all classical ideals; if the picture of it is indeed I cruel
+and frightful; it is yet not unfertile. 'Le siècle et son horreur se
+condensent en elle, mais son âme contient la minute éternelle.' And this
+I feeling, that in her the minute of eternity is contained, that she is
+the new thing risen above all the pasts, a new thing that one must
+perforce come to terms with, this feeling makes her momentous and
+beautiful to the poet. If her form is loathsome, grey, and sombre, her
+idea, her organisation, are grandiose and admirable. And here, as
+always, where admiration finds a pivot, it can give the whole world the
+swing from negation to assent.
+
+But Verhaeren is by this time too little of an artist, too much
+interested in all the problems of life, to be able to contemplate the
+idea of the modern city from the æsthetic side alone. It is for him a
+still more important symbol for the expression of contemporary feeling.
+
+Not only the problem of the new social stratification is poetically
+digested in his trilogy, but also one of the most burning and pressing
+questions of political economy as of politics, the struggle between the
+centrifugal and the centripetal power, the struggle between agrarianism
+and industrialism. Town and country purchase their prosperity, the one
+by the impoverishment of the other. Production and trade, however much
+one is the condition of the other, at their extreme points are hostile
+forces. And how, in our days in Europe, the victory between town and
+country is being decided in favour of the town; how, gradually, the town
+is absorbing the best strength of the provinces--the problem of the
+_déracinés_--this has for the first time in poetry been described by
+Verhaeren in his magnificent vision of _Les Villes Tentaculaires_. The
+cities have sprung up like mushrooms. Millions have conglomerated. But
+where have they come from? From what sources have these immense masses
+suddenly streamed into the mighty reservoirs? The answer is quick to
+come. The heart of the city is fed with the oozing blood of the country.
+The country is impoverished. As though they were hallucinated, the
+peasants migrate to where gold is minted, to the town that in the
+evenings flames across the horizon; to where alone riches lies, and
+power. They march away with their carts, to sell their last stick of
+furniture, their last rags; they march away with their daughter, to
+deliver her up to lust; they march away with their son, to let him
+perish in the factories; they march away to dip their hands, they also,
+in this roaring river of gold. The fields are deserted. Only the
+fantastic figures of idiots stagger along lonely paths; the abandoned
+flour-mills are empty, and only turn when the wind smites against them.
+Fever rises from the marshes, where the water, no longer gathered into
+dikes, spreads putrefaction and pestilence. Beggars drag themselves from
+door to door, with the country's barrenness reflected in their eyes; to
+the last lingering cultivators come, sinuously, their worst enemies,
+_les donneurs de mauvais conseils_. The emigration agent entices them to
+wander to the lands of gold, and they squander what they have inherited
+from their ancestors, to seek a far-distant hope:
+
+     Avec leur chat, avec leur chien,
+     Avec, pour vivre, quel moyen?
+     S'en vont, le soir, par la grand'route.[11]
+
+And they who are not enticed away by emigration are evicted from hearth
+and home by usurers. Villages in which the dance of the kermesse has
+long been silent are of a sudden cut in two by a network of railways.
+There is no fairness in the fight. The country is conquered because the
+blood of its inhabitants has been sucked out of it. 'La plaine est morte
+et ne se défend plus.'[12] Everything streams to Oppidomagnum. This is
+the name given by Verhaeren in his symbolical drama _Les Aubes_--which,
+with the _Campagnes Hallucinées_ and the _Villes Tentaculaires_ forms
+the trilogy of the social revolution--to the monster city. This, with
+its arms as of a polypus, pitilessly sucks all the strength of the
+district round it. From all sides strength streams in upon it. 'Tous les
+chemins se rythment vers elle.' Not only from the country does she drink
+the strength of men, all the ocean seems to be pouring its waters only
+to her port. 'Toute la mer va vers la ville.'[13] The whole sea streams
+to the city; all the rolling waves seem only to exist that they may
+bring to her this wandering forest of ships. And she absorbs everything,
+digests it in the 'noire immensité des usines rectangulaires,'[14]
+greedily devours it, to spit it out again as gold.
+
+But this immense social struggle between the country and the town
+expresses, like the other new phases, something yet higher. It is only a
+momentary symbol of an eternal schism. The country is the symbol of the
+Conservatives. In the country the forms of labour are petrified, calm,
+and regular; there life is without haste, and only regulated by the
+rotation of the seasons. All sensations, all forms are pure and simple.
+These men stand nearer to the freaks of chance: a flash of lightning, a
+hailstorm can destroy their labour; and so they fear God, and do not
+dare to doubt in Him. The town, however, symbolises progress. In the
+thunder of the streets of to-day no Madonna's voice is heard; the life
+of the individual is protected from chance by prearranged order; the
+fever of the new creates also a yearning for new conditions of life, new
+circumstances, for a new God.
+
+     L'esprit des campagnes était l'esprit de Dieu;
+     Il eut la peur de la recherche et des révoltes,
+     Il chut; et le voici qui meurt, sous les essieux
+     Et sous les chars en feu des récoltes.[15]
+
+If the country was the past, the town is the future. The country only
+seeks to keep what it has, to preserve: its character, its beauty, its
+God. But the town must first of all create, must make itself the new
+beauty, the new faith, and the new God.
+
+     Le rêve ancien est mort et le nouveau se forge.
+     Il est fumant dans la pensée et la sueur
+     Des bras fiers de travail, des fronts fiers de lueurs,
+     Et la ville l'entend monter du fond des gorges
+     De ceux qui le portent en eux
+     Et le veulent crier et sangloter aux cieux.[16]
+
+But we, Verhaeren thinks, must not belong to this world of the past,
+this moribund world; no, we who live in towns must think with them, must
+live with the new age, create in league with it, and find a new language
+for its dumb yearning. A return to nature is no longer possible for us:
+evolution cannot be screwed back again. If we have lost great values, we
+must replace them by new; if our religious feeling for the old God is
+cold and dead, we must create new ideals. We must find new aims that our
+ancestors knew not of; in the new forms of the city we must find a new
+beauty, in her noises a new rhythm, in her confusion an order, in her
+energy an object, in her stammering a language.
+
+If the towns have destroyed much, they will perhaps create still more.
+In their melting-pot professions, races, religions, nations, languages
+are blended:
+
+      ...les Babels enfin réalisées
+     Et les peuples fondus et la cité commune
+     Et les langues se dissolvant en une.[17]
+
+'The old order changeth, giving place to new'; and we must not ask
+whether the new is better than the old; we must trust that it is so.
+The feverish convulsions of the great cities, this unrest, this
+screaming torment, cannot be in vain. For they, these pains and
+convulsions, are only the birth-throes of the new. But he who has been
+the first to feel, with a glad presentiment, this pain of the masses,
+this fermentation, as joy, this unrest as hope, must himself be an
+authentic new man, one of those who are called to give a poetic answer
+to all the complaints and questions of our time.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'L'Âme de la Ville' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[2] Ibid. (_Ibid._).
+
+[3] 'La Foule' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[4] 'Les Villes' (_Les Flambeaux Noirs_).
+
+[5] 'L'Âme de la Ville' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[6] 'La Ville' (_Les Campagnes Hallucinées_).
+
+[7] 'Les Spectacles' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[8] 'Les Promeneuses' (_Ibid_.).
+
+[9] 'La Bourse' (_Ibid._).
+
+[10] 'Le Bazar' (_Ibid._).
+
+[11] 'Le Départ' (_Les Campagnes Hallucinées_).
+
+[12] 'La Plaine' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[13] 'Le Port' (_Ibid._).
+
+[14] 'La Plaine' (_Ibid._).
+
+[15] 'Vers le Futur' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[16] 'L'Âme de la Ville' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[17] 'Le Port'(_Ibid._).
+
+
+
+
+THE MULTITUDE
+
+     Mets en accord ta force avec les destinées
+     Que la foule, sans le savoir,
+     Promulgue, en cette nuit d'angoisse illuminée.
+                                     É.V., 'La Foule.'
+
+
+That great event which is the modern city was at bottom only possible by
+the organisation of the mighty multitudes of the people and the
+distribution of their forces. To organise is to weld unlike forces
+economically into an organism, to imitate something that has life and
+soul, in which nothing is superfluous and everything is necessary; it is
+to give a material its uniform strength, to give an idea the flesh and
+bones of its shape and of its possibility. Now the town has smelted the
+scattered forces of the country into a new material--into the multitude;
+it has converted much that used to be individually active force into
+mechanical force; it has humbled man to the condition of a handle, a
+rolling wheel; it has everywhere tied up the individuality of the single
+man in order to produce a new individuality, that of the crowd. For the
+multitude as a fact is a new thing. For centuries it was only a symbol,
+an idea. The inhabitants of whole countries were logically epitomised in
+a number, but with no suggestion of thus comprehending their immediate
+unity. Of course, in times past great armies have been known, hordes of
+fighting men and nomad tribes; but these only represented a volatile
+concentration, too unsettled, too inconstant to procreate an
+individuality, an æsthetic and moral value. And even those armies whose
+legendary greatness echoes down the centuries, the hordes of Tamerlaine,
+the hosts of the Persians, the legions of Rome, how poor is their number
+in comparison with the masses of human beings daily herded together in
+New York or London or Paris! Only in our own days, only in Oppidomagnum,
+has the multitude been welded together finally and for all time, been
+hooked together with bands of steel like the wheels of an immense
+machine; only recently has the crowd become a living being that grows
+and multiplies like a forest. Democracy has given it new intellectual
+forms, set a brain in the body, by making the multitude determinate,
+subject only to itself. It is a creation of the nineteenth century; it
+is a new value in our lives, and one that we must come to terms with; no
+less a value for our evolution than the highest values of the past. Walt
+Whitman, to whom one must constantly refer in dealing with Verhaeren's
+work, although--let it be expressly stated here--Verhaeren quite
+independently and unconsciously arrived at the same goal from the same
+starting-point, once said: 'Modern science and democracy seemed to be
+throwing out their challenge to poetry to put them in its statements in
+contradistinction to the songs and myths of the past.'[1] And every
+modern poet will have to come to terms with the masses of democracy,
+will have to contemplate them synthetically as an individual living
+being, as a man, or as a God. In his Utopian drama _Les Aubes_ Verhaeren
+has ranged them among the dramatis personæ, and, to express his inner
+vision, he has added this stage direction: 'Les groupes agissent comme
+un seul personnage à faces multiples et antinomiques.' For, like the
+images of Indian gods, they have a hundred arms, but their cry is in
+unison; their will is simple; their energy is uniform; one and the same
+is their heart, 'le coeur myriadaire et rouge de la foule.'[2] A
+hundred years of life in communion, a hundred years of distress in
+common, of hope in common, have welded them together into one unity,
+into one new feeling. Sleepless and restless like a dangerous animal
+lies the multitude in the monster cities; all the passions of individual
+man are hers, vanity, hunger, anger; she has all vices and crimes in
+common with her smallest member, man; only, everything in her is
+intensified to unknown magnitudes. Everything in her passions is
+stupendously superdimensional, beyond calculation, and, in a new sense,
+divine. For just as the gods of old were formed after the image of man,
+save that they represented man's strength and intelligence magnified to
+the hundredth degree, the multitude is the synthesis of individual
+forces, the most prolific accumulation of passion.
+
+With the multitude the individual comes into being, and without her he
+perishes. Consciously or unconsciously, every man is subject to her
+power. For the modern man is no longer free from the influence of
+others, as the tiller of the fields was in olden days, or the shepherd,
+or the hunter, each of whom was dependent only on the anger of heaven,
+the whims of the earth, on weather and hailstorms, on chance, which he
+clad in the august image of his god. The modern man is in all his
+feelings determined by the world around him, set in his place in the
+ranks, and moved with the ranks like a shuttle to and fro; he is a
+dependent in his instincts. We all feel socially; we cannot think away
+the others who are round us and in front of us any more than we can
+think away the air that nourishes us. We can flee from them, but we
+cannot flee away from what has penetrated us from them. For the
+multitude rules us like a force of nature, nourishes us with its
+feelings. The unsocial man is a fiction. Just as little as in a great
+city one can shut off one's room entirely from the noise, the rhythm of
+the street, just so little can one think isolatedly, just so little can
+the soul keep itself at a distance from the great intellectual
+excitements of the multitude. Verhaeren himself made the attempt in the
+days when he wrote the verses:
+
+     Mon rêve, enfermons-nous dans ces choses lointaines
+     Comme en de tragiques tombeaux.[3]
+
+But the life of reality claimed him again; for society destroys him who
+turns away from her, as one is destroyed who shuts himself out from the
+fresh air. The poet, too, must involuntarily think with the multitude
+and of the multitude. For to the same extent as democracy has exercised
+its levelling influence, to the same extent as it has limited
+individualities, enrolled the poet among the class of citizens,
+diminished the contrasts of chance, it has at the same time matured new
+forces in their multiplicity. In democracy the modern poet can find
+everything for which the ancients felt constrained to discover gods,
+those incalculable forces which bind the individual like enchantment.
+The town, the multitude feeds his energy with its exhaustless abundance;
+it multiplies his own strength. For everything the individual has lost
+is stored in it, great heroism and ecstatic enthusiasm. It is the great
+source of the unexpected and the incalculable in our days, the new thing
+concerning which no one knows how great it will grow. To have seen in it
+an enrichment, instead of a restriction, of the poetic instinct, is one
+of the great merits of Verhaeren. For while the majority of
+contemporary poets still maintain the fiction of the recluse in his
+wistful loneliness, while they recoil from before the multitude as
+though from men stricken with the plague, while they create for
+themselves an artificial seclusion, and heedlessly go their way past
+locomotives and telegraphs, banks and workshops, Verhaeren drinks
+greedily from these sources of new strength.
+
+       Comme une vague en des fleuves perdue,
+       Comme une aile effacée, au fond de l'étendue,
+       Engouffre-toi,
+       Mon coeur, en ces foules battant les capitales!
+       Réunis tous ces courants
+       Et prends
+       Si large part à ces brusques métamorphoses
+       D'hommes et de choses,
+       Que tu sentes l'obscure et formidable loi
+       Qui les domine et les opprime
+     Soudainement, à coups d'éclairs, s'inscrire en toi.[4]
+
+For she, 'la foule,' the multitude, is the great transposer of values in
+our day. She takes into her bosom and transforms the men who come to her
+from the country, from the four winds of heaven; none of us escapes her
+levelling power. The most distant races are blended in the city's huge
+melting-pot, are adapted to one another, and forthwith become a new
+thing, a different thing, a new race, the new race of contemporary man,
+who has made his peace with the atmosphere of the great city, who not
+only painfully feels the depression of her walls and his divorce from
+Nature, but creates himself a new strength and a new feeling of the
+universe in this manifold human presence. The great feat of the
+multitude is that it accelerates the process of changing values. The
+individual elements perish in favour of this individuality of a new
+community. Old communities lose their unity, new communities must arise.
+America is the first example: here, in a hundred years, one single great
+brotherhood, a new type, has been developed from the forces of a
+thousand peoples; and in our capitals, in Paris, Berlin, and London,
+people are already growing up who are not Frenchmen and not Germans, but
+in the first place only Parisians and Berliners, who have a different
+accent, a different way of thinking, whose native land is the great
+city, the multitude. The inhabitant of the great city, the democratic
+man of the multitude, is a sharply defined character. If he is a poet,
+his poetry must be social; if he is a thinker, the intelligence of the
+masses, the instinct of the many, must be his also. To have attempted
+the psychology of this multitude for the first time in poetry is one of
+the great feats of audacity for which we must be grateful to Verhaeren.
+
+But these individual accumulations of men into a multitude, these
+combinations of millions into towns, are not isolated. One bond holds
+them all together: modern traffic. The distances of reality have
+disappeared, and with them national divisions as well. By the side of
+the problem of individual conglomerations which only slowly are
+transformed into organisms, by the side of the individual races, the
+individual masses, now arises a greater synthesis, the synthesis of the
+European race. For the men of our continent are no longer so distant, so
+strange to one another as they formerly were. Social democracy with its
+organisation encompasses the masses from one end of Europe to the other.
+To-day the same desires fire the men of Paris, London, St. Petersburg,
+Vienna, and Rome. And already one common formula directs their
+exertions: money.
+
+     Races des vieux pays, forces désaccordées,
+     Vous nouez vos destins épars, depuis le temps
+     Que l'or met sous vos fronts le même espoir battant.[5]
+
+Independently of the frontiers of countries, on a broad-based
+foundation, a unified race, a new community, the European, is in process
+of formation. Here desire and reality are near touching. Verhaeren sees
+Europe already united by one great common energy. Europe is for him the
+land of consciousness. While other continents, distant as though in a
+dream, are still living a vegetative life, while Africa and India are
+still dreaming as they dreamt in the darkness of primitive times, Europe
+is 'la forge où se frappe l'idée,'[6] the great smithy in which all
+differences, all individual observations, all results, are hammered and
+moulded into a new intellectuality, into _European consciousness_. The
+union is not yet inwardly complete; states are still hostile and
+ignorant of their community; but already 'le monde entier est repensé
+par leurs cervelles.'[7] Already they are working at the transvaluation
+of all feeling in the European sense. For a new system of ethics, a new
+system of æsthetics, will be required by the European, who, rich by the
+past, strong in the feeling of the multitude, is now conscious of
+drawing his strength from new masses. Here it is that Verhaeren's work
+sings over into Utopia; and in _Les Aubes_, the epilogue to _Les Villes
+Tentaculaires,_ this glittering rainbow rises over the visions of
+reality to the new ideal; the prophetic dream of a better future rises
+over the still struggling present.
+
+This yearning for the European has been expressed for the first time in
+poetry by Verhaeren, almost contemporaneously with Walt Whitman's
+hailing of the American and Friedrich Nietzsche's prophecy of the
+superman. It would be a tempting task, and full of interest, to set up
+the Pan-European in antithesis to the Pan-American. But to say that
+Verhaeren was the first of lyric poets to feel as consciously European
+as Walt Whitman felt American, is to establish his rank among the most
+considerable men of our time. Verhaeren is possibly the only lyric poet
+who has felt in accordance with contemporary feeling. That epitomises
+his whole claim to gratitude, for it sufficiently expresses the fact
+that he has taken to his heart the problem of the multitude; the energy
+of social innovations; the æsthetics of organisation; the grandeur of
+mechanical production; in a word, the poetry of material things. It is
+our own time, the new age, that speaks in his verse; and it speaks in
+its new language. This rhythm which he has discovered is no literary
+abstraction, but beats in perfect unison with the heart-beat of the
+crowd; it is an echo of the panting of our monster cities, of the
+clanking of trains, of the cry of the people; his language is new,
+because it is no longer the voice of one man, but unites in itself the
+many voices of the multitude. He has penetrated deeper than any other
+man into the feeling of the masses, and their surf echoes more strongly
+in his verse. The hollow rumbling, the bestial and tameless strength of
+their voice, the surf of the multitude, has here become shape and music,
+the highest identity. With pride one can say of Verhaeren what he
+himself vaunts in his 'Captain': 'Il est la foule,'[8] he himself is the
+multitude.
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] _A Backward Glance O'er Travelled Roads._
+
+[2] 'La Conquête (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[3] 'Sous les Prétoriens' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[4] 'La Foule' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[5] 'La Conquête' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[6] _Ibid. (Ibid.)._
+
+[7] 'La Conquête' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[8] 'Le Capitaine' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+
+
+
+THE RHYTHM OF LIFE
+
+     Dites, les rythmes sourds dans l'univers entier!
+     En définir la marche et la passante image
+     En un soudain langage;
+       .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
+     Prendre et capter cet infini en un cerveau,
+     Pour lui donner ainsi sa plus haute existence.
+                                          É.V., 'Le Verbe'.
+
+
+The rhythm of modern life is a rhythm of excitement. The city with its
+multitudes is never completely at rest: even in its repose, in its
+silence, there is a secret bubbling as of lava in the bowels of a
+volcano, a waiting and watching, a nervous tension tinged with fever.
+For the idea of energy in the myriad-headed monster city is so
+concentrated, so intensified, that it never loses its rumbling activity.
+Rest, a polar feeling, would be the inner negation, the annihilation, of
+this new element. True, the city with her teeming masses is not always
+in the fever-throes of those great eruptions of passion when through the
+arteries of her streets the blood streams suddenly; when all her muscles
+seem to contract; when cries and enthusiasm blaze up like a flame; but
+always something seems to be expecting this fiery second, just as in
+modern man there is always the whipped unrest that is avid of new
+things, new experiences. Modern cities are in perpetual vibration; and
+so is the multitude from man to man. Even if the individual is not
+excited, if his nerves are not always stirring with his own vibration,
+they are yet always vibrating in harmony with the obscure resonance of
+the universe. The great city's rhythm beats in our very sleep; the new
+rhythm, the rhythm of our life, is no longer the regular alternation of
+relaxation and repose, it is the steady vibration of an unintermitted
+activity.
+
+Now, a modern poet who wishes to create in real harmony with
+contemporary feeling must himself have something of the perpetual
+excitement, the unremitting watchfulness, the restless and nervous
+sensitiveness of our time; his heart must unconsciously beat in tact
+with the rhythm of the world around him. But not only unrest must
+flicker in him, not only must that excessive delicacy of feeling which
+is almost morbid be in him, this neurasthenic sleeplessness--not only
+the negative element of our epoch, but the grandiose as well, the
+superdimensional, the spontaneity of the sudden discharge of forces held
+in reserve, the overwhelming force of the great eruption. Like the
+masses of our towns, he must be so fashioned that a trifle will
+stimulate him to the greatest passion, must be so fashioned that he
+cannot help being carried away by the intoxication of his own strength.
+Just as the masses have, so to speak, organised themselves as a body,
+so that there is no individual excitement in them, no irritation and
+inflammation of any single part, but so that a reaction of the whole
+body responds to every separate irritation, just in the same manner must
+the excitement of a modern, a contemporary poet, a poet of a great town,
+never be the excitement of a single sense, but, if it is to be strong,
+it must quiver through the whole body like an electric shock. His poetic
+rhythm must therefore be physically vital; it must envelop all his
+feeling and thinking; it must respond to every individual irritation, to
+every individual sensation, with the massed weight of feeling of all his
+vital forces: the need of a rhythm strained to the full must be, as
+Nietzsche has so wonderfully demonstrated in his _Ecce Homo_! a measure
+for the strength of the inspiration, a sort of balancing, as it were, of
+the pressure and tension of the inspiration. For the poet of to-day, if
+he does not wish to remain the poet of the eternal yesterday, must, as a
+microcosm, imitate in his passion the macrocosm of the multitude,
+wherein also the excitement of the individual is trivial and aimless,
+and only the ebullition of the whole fermenting mass is irresistible and
+momentous.
+
+Then, in such poems, the _rhythm of modern life_ will break through. At
+this moment we must remember what rhythm really means. The rhythm of a
+being is in the last instance nothing but its breathing. Everything that
+is alive, every organism, has breath, the interchange and resting-space
+between giving and taking. And so breathes a poem too; and it is
+worthless if it is not a living thing, if it is not an organism, a body
+with a soul. Only in its rhythm does it become alive, as man does in his
+breathing. But the diversity, the originality of the rhythm only arises
+from the alternation of these drawn breaths. Breathing is different in
+those who are calm, excited, joyous, nervous, oppressed, ecstatic. Every
+sensation produces its corresponding rhythm. And since every poet in his
+individuality represents a new form of inner passion, his poem too must
+have this rhythm of his own, the rhythm which expresses his personal
+poetic peculiarity just as characteristically as his speaking expresses
+an individual accent and dialect. To understand Verhaeren's rhythm we
+must remember this basic form of the poetic feeling at the heart of him;
+we must compare it with the feeling at the heart of those who have gone
+before him. In Victor Hugo there was the earnest, great, soaring rhythm
+of the loud speaker, of the preacher who never addresses individuals but
+always the whole nation; in Baudelaire there was the regular hymnic
+rhythm of the priest of art; in Verlaine the irregular, sweet, and
+gentle melody of one speaking in dreams. In Verhaeren, now, there is the
+rhythm of a man hurrying, rushing, running; of a restless, passionate
+man; the rhythm of the modern, of the Americanised man. It is often
+irregular; you hear in it the panting of one who is hunted, who is
+hurrying to his goal; you hear his impact with the obstacles he stumbles
+against, the sudden standstill of intemperate effort exhausted. But with
+him the rhythmic energy is never intellectual, never verbal, never
+musical; it is purely emotional, physical. Not only the end of the nerve
+vibrates and sounds; not only does the language shake the air; but out
+of the whole organism, as though all the nerve-strings had suddenly
+begun to sound the alarm, burst the terror and the ecstasy of fever. His
+poem is never a state of repose--no more than the multitude is ever
+quite repose--it is in a true sense rhythm, passion set in motion. You
+feel the excitement of the man in it, motion, the covering of a
+distance, activity; never contemplation comfortably resting, or dream
+girt with sleep. And as a matter of fact, it is from motion in the
+physical sense that nearly all his poems have arisen: Verhaeren has
+never composed poetry at his writing-table, but while wandering over the
+fields with a rhythmically moved body whose accelerated pace pulses to
+the very heart of the poem, or while rushing along through the din and
+bustle of streets in great cities. In these poems is that quicker
+rolling of the blood that comes from exercise, that jerk of unrest and
+passion tearing themselves away from repose. You feel that in this man
+feeling is too strong, that he would fain free himself from it, run away
+from it in his own body. The feeling is so strong that it turns to
+pain, or rather pressure, and the poem is nothing else than the erection
+that precedes relief, the throes that bring forth out of pregnancy. Just
+as the multitude in revolt bursts the bonds of its excitement and
+launches of a sudden all the passion dammed back for centuries, so
+springs from the poet like a geyser the passionate assault of words
+bursting from too long silence. These cries are a physical relief. These
+'élans captifs dans le muscle et la chair '[1] are the relief of a
+convulsion, the easy breathing after oppression. As a passionate man is
+forced to relieve himself by gestures, or in a fit of rage, or in cries,
+or in weeping, or in some other state opposed to rest, the poet
+discharges his feeling in rhythmic words: 'L'homme à vous prononcer
+respirait plus à l'aise'[2] he has said of the man who was the first to
+force the excess of his feeling into speech.
+
+_It is, then, a force positively physical which produces Verhaeren's
+rhythm._ It is difficult to prove such an assertion, for the state of
+creation is unconscious and unapproachable, although it may intuitively
+be detected in those moments of recreation, in that second of a new
+birth when a poet recites his work, when he feels, as it were, the
+pressure of the feeling weighing upon him artificially in recollection,
+when by the force of his imagination he relieves himself again as at the
+birth of the poem. And any one who has once heard Verhaeren reciting
+poetry will know how much with him the rhythm of body and poem is one
+and indivisible, how the excitement that becomes rhythmical in the
+vibrating word is at the same time converted into the identical gesture.
+The calm eyes grow keen, they seem to pierce the near paper; the arm is
+raised commandingly, and every finger of the hand is stretched out to
+mark the cæsura as though with an electric shock; to hammer the verses;
+and with the voice to eject the hurrying and almost screaming words into
+the room. In his movements there is then that terrific effort of one who
+would fain tear himself away from himself, that sublimest gesture of the
+poet striving away from the earth, striving away from himself, from the
+heavy gait of words to winged passion. Man coalesces with Nature in one
+second of the most wonderful identity:
+
+     Les os, le sang, les nerfs font alliance
+     Avec on ne sait quoi de frémissant
+     Dans l'air et dans le vent;
+     On s'éprouve léger et clair dans l'espace,
+     On est heureux à crier grâce,
+     Les faits, les principes, les lois, on comprend tout;
+     Le coeur tremble d'amour et l'esprit semble fou
+     De l'ivresse de ses idées.[3]
+
+Every time that Verhaeren reads his poetry, this re-birth of the first
+creative state is renewed. _It is in the first place a deliverance from
+pain, and in the second place it is pleasure_. Again and again the word
+darts along like a beast let loose; in the wildest rhythm; in a rhythm
+that begins slowly, cautiously; quickens; then grows wilder and wilder;
+grows to an intoxicating monotony, an ever-increasing speed, a rattling
+din that reminds one of an express whizzing along at full speed. Like a
+locomotive--for in Verhaeren's case one has to think in images of this
+kind, and not in outworn tropes as of Pegasus--the poem rushes on,
+driven only by a measure which reminds one of the short explosions of an
+automobile. And as a matter of fact the scansion of the locomotive, its
+restless rattling, has often been the cause of the rhythmic velocity of
+his verses. Verhaeren himself is fond of relating that he has often, and
+with delight, written poems on railway journeys, and that the cadence of
+his verse has then been fired by the regular rattle of the train. He
+describes wonderfully the rapture of the speed poured into his blood by
+the whizzing past of trains. The whistling of the wind in moaning trees,
+the dashing of the foaming sea along the shore, the echo a thousand
+times repeated of thunder in the mountains, all these strong sounds have
+become rhythm in his poems; all noisy things, all violent, swift
+emotions have made it brusque, angry, and excited:
+
+     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;
+     Et pour en condenser les frissons clairs
+     En ardentes images,
+     Aimer, aimer, surtout la foudre et les éclairs
+     Dont les dévorateurs de l'espace et de l'air
+     Incendient leur passage![4]
+
+But this is the new thing in Verhaeren, that he has transformed into
+rhythm not only the voice of Nature, but also the new noises, the
+grumbling of the multitude, the raging of cities, the rumbling of
+workshops. Often in his rhythm can be heard the beat of hammers; the
+hard, edged, regular whizzing of wheels; the whirring of looms; the
+hissing of locomotives; often the wild, restless tumult of streets; the
+humming and rumbling of dense masses of the people. Poets before him
+imitated in the harmony of their verse the monotony of sources and the
+babbling of water over pebbles, or the soughing voice of the wind. But
+he makes the voice of the new things speak; makes the rhythm of the
+city, this rhythm of fever and of unrest, this nervous moving of the
+crowd, this unquiet billowing of a new ocean, flow over into his new
+poem. Hence this up and down in his verses; this suddenness and
+unexpectedness; this incalculable element. _The new, the industrial
+noises have here become the music of poetry_. Since he does not seek to
+express his own individual sensation of life, but would himself only be
+a voice for the multitude, the rhythm is more roaring and restless than
+that of any individual being. Like the first poets, those of old time,
+before whom there were no outworn and exhausted words; like the poets
+whose feeling burst into flame at every word, every cry; who discovered
+themselves 'en exaltant la souffrance, le mal, le plaisir, le bien';
+like them when they
+
+      ... confrontaient à chaque instant
+     Leur âme étonnée et profonde
+     Avec le monde,[5]
+
+poets who would be modern must compare their own soul with that of their
+time, must always regulate their rhythm according to the mutation of
+their time. Their deepest yearning must be to find not only their own
+personal expression, but over and above it the poetic and musical
+representation of the highest identity between themselves and their
+time. For poets are the inheritors of a great patrimony:
+
+      ... En eux seuls survit, ample, intacte et profonde,
+     L'ardeur
+     Dont s'enivrait, devant la terre et sa splendeur,
+     L'homme naïf et clair aux premiers temps du monde;
+     C'est que le rythme universel traverse encor
+     Comme aux temps primitifs leur corps.[6]
+
+They must, in these days, only express themselves when they have first
+adapted the rhythm of their own feeling to that of the universe, to the
+rhythm of the cities they live in, to the rhythm of the multitude from
+which they have grown, to the rhythm of temporal as of eternal things.
+They must, like a vein in the heart of the world, reproduce every beat
+of the great hammer, every excitement, quickening of pace and
+obstruction of the feeling rolled round in the whole organism; they must
+learn from life the rhythm which shall again achieve the great harmony
+that was lost between the world and the work of art.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'Le Verbe' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[2] _Ibid._ (_Ibid._).
+
+[3] 'Les Heures où l'on crée' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[4] 'L'En-Avant' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[5] 'Le Verbe' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[6] _Ibid._ (_Ibid._).
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW PATHOS
+
+     Lassé des mots, lassé des livres.
+       .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
+     Je cherche, en ma fierté,
+     L'acte qui sauve et qui délivre.
+                      É.V., 'L'Action.'
+
+The primitive poem, that which came into being long before writing or
+print, was nothing but a modulated cry that was hardly language, a cry
+won from joy or pain, mourning or despair, recollection or passionate
+entreaty, but always from fulness of feeling. It was pathetic, because
+it was produced by passion; pathetic, because its intention was to
+produce passion. The poem of those great and distant men who were the
+first to find word and speech in the darted cry of feeling, was an
+invocation of the crowd; an exhortation; a fiery incitement; an ecstasy;
+a direct electric discharge of feeling to feeling. The poet spoke to the
+others, an individual to a circle. The auditors stood before him in
+expectation--somewhat as Max Klinger in his new picture has gathered
+them together in front of blind Homer--they waited, watched, listened,
+surrendered themselves, let themselves be carried away; or they
+resisted. That poem and the delivery of it were not something finished
+and presented for approval; no vessel or ornament already hammered into
+shape and perfectly chiselled; they were something in the process of
+creation, something newly growing at that moment, a struggle with the
+hearer, a wrestling with him for his passion.
+
+Poets lost this close, glowing contact with the masses when writing was
+invented. What the dissemination of the written word, and still more, in
+after days, the infinite multiplication of printing, dowered them with;
+all the new influence over spaces hitherto closed; the fact that their
+words were henceforth alive in countries which they had never visited;
+that men drew strength and inspiration and vital courage from their
+words long after their own bodies had fallen into dust--this vast and
+mighty effect had only been obtained by relinquishing that other and
+perhaps not lesser effect--dialogue, that standing face to face with the
+multitude. By slow degrees poets became something imaginary to the
+public. When they spoke, they really only listened to themselves; more
+and more their poem became a lonely colloquy with themselves; the
+harangue became a monologue, more and more lyrical in a new sense and
+less and less moving. More and more their poem travelled away from
+speech; more and more it lost that mysterious, passionate fire that is
+only fed by the moment, by standing face to face with an excited crowd,
+by the magical influx of tension and stimulation out of the heart of
+the hearer into the poet's own words. For, with his expectation, with
+his eager eyes, his excitement, and his intractable impatience, every
+listener does something for the speaker: he goads him; he forces
+something of his expectant restlessness into the response that has not
+yet been made. But the moment the poet no longer spoke to the crowd, no
+longer to a circle, but fashioned his words for print and writing, a new
+and peculiar sensation was developed in him. He accustomed himself to
+speaking only for himself; to conceiving his own feeling as important,
+irrespective of effect and force; to holding a conversation with none
+but himself and silence. And his poem changed more and more. Now that
+the poet no longer had the panting roar of the response, the cry of
+passion, the exultation of enthusiasm, as the finale of his poetry--the
+last accord, as it were, belonging to his own music--he sought to
+complete the harmony in the verse by means of itself. He rounded his
+poem with an artist's care, as though it were an earthenware vessel;
+illumined it with colours like a picture; rilled it with music; more and
+more he relinquished the idea of persuading, of convincing,.of
+inspiring. He was content that the poem should have no feeling for other
+men, and gave it only the life and the mood of his own world. In that
+period of transition, we may suppose, 'poetic' diction first came into
+being, that language by the side of the living language which petrified
+more and more as time went on into a dialect hostile to the world, into
+bloodless marble. Of old, the poetic language was not one that existed
+side by side with the real language; it was only the last
+intensification of the real language. By the rhythm of higher passion,
+by the fire of harangue, it became a sacred fire, a blest intoxication,
+a festivity in the work-a-day world. Thus, as intensified vitality,
+language could be different without ever being unintelligible, could
+remain with and yet above the people, while the lyric poetry of to-day
+has become, for the most part, strange and worthless to active men who
+live in the midst of realities, to the artisan and the toiler.
+
+Nevertheless in our own days there seem to be signs of a return to this
+primitive close contact between the poet and his audience; a new pathos
+is at its birth. The stage was the first bridge between the poet and the
+multitude. But here the actor was still the intermediary of the spoken
+word; the purely lyrical emotion was not an aim in itself, but only, for
+three or four hours, a help in the illusion. However, the time of the
+isolation of the poet from the crowd, which was formerly rendered
+necessary by the great distances between nation and nation, seems now to
+have been overcome by the shortening of space and by the
+industrialisation of cities. To-day poets once again recite their verse
+in lecture-halls, in the popular universities of America; nay, in
+churches Walt Whitman's lines ring out into the American consciousness,
+and what used to be created only by the seething seconds of political
+crises--one might instance Petöfi declaiming his national anthem 'Talpra
+Magyar' from the steps of the university to the revolutionary
+crowd--occurs almost every day. Now again as of old the lyric poet seems
+entitled to be, if not the intellectual leader of the time, at least he
+who must excite and quell the passions of the time; the rhapsodist who
+hails, kindles, and fans that holy fire, energy. The world seems to be
+waiting for Him who shall concentrate all life in a flash of lightning
+to light up all the deeps of darkness:
+
+     Il monte--et l'on croirait que le monde l'attend,
+     Si large est la clameur des coeurs battant
+     À l'unisson de ses paroles souveraines.
+     Il est effroi, danger, affre, fureur et haine;
+     Il est ordre, silence, amour et volonté;
+     Il scelle en lui toutes les violences lyriques.[1]
+
+Certainly the poem which would speak to the multitude must be different
+to the kind of poem that pleased our fathers. Above all, it must itself
+be a will, an aim, an energy, an evocation. All the technical
+excellence, the sweet music, the craft of vibrating rhythms, suppleness
+and flexibility of language, must, in the new poem, no longer be an aim
+in themselves, but only a means to kindle enthusiasm. Such a poem must
+no longer be a sentimental dialogue between a hermit and some other
+hermit, a stranger somewhere far away; it must no longer be the short,
+hurriedly trembling voice which is silenced ere the word's flame has
+blazed up in it; no, this new poem must be strongly exulting, richly
+inspired, with a far horizon for its goal, and rushing on with
+irresistible impetuosity. It is not written for gentle moods, but for
+loud, resonant words. He who would quell the crowd must have the rhythm
+of their own new and restless life in him; he who speaks to the crowd
+must be inspired by the new pathos. And this new pathos, this 'pathos
+which most of all accepts the world as it is' (in Nietzsche's sense),
+is, above all, zest, is the strength and the will to create ecstasy.
+This poem must not be sensitive and woebegone; it must not express a
+personal grief that seeks to enlist the sympathies of others; no, it
+must be inspired by a fulness of joy, by the will to create from joy
+itself passion that cannot be held down. Only great feelings bear the
+message to the crowd; small feelings, which can only in silence, as in
+motionless air, rise above the ground, are dashed down again. _The new
+pathos must contain the will, not to set souls in vibration, not to
+provide a delicate, æsthetic sense of pleasure, but to fire to a deed._
+It must carry the hearer along with it; it must once again collect in
+itself the scattered forces of the poet of old time; it must in the poet
+recreate, for an hour, the demagogue, the musician, the actor, the
+orator; it must snatch the word again off the paper into the air; it
+must carefully entrust feeling as a secret treasure to the individual;
+it must hurl this treasure into the surf of a multitude. Poems with such
+a new pathos cannot be created by feeble, passive men, whose mood can be
+changed at any minute by the world around them, but only by fighting
+natures, who are governed by an idea, by the thought of a duty; who seek
+to force their feeling on others; who elevate their inspiration to the
+inspiration of the whole world.
+
+This new lyric pathos is in our days growing lustily into life again.
+For centuries rhetoricians have been mocked at. The change of estimation
+in Schiller's case from worship to sufferance is a lasting proof. And
+let us remember that Nietzsche, the only German who in recent years has
+influenced the world, was only able to do so by creating a new
+rhetorical style--'I am the inventor of the dithyramb'--only by making
+his _Zarathustra_ a preacher's book which insistently requires a loud,
+resonant voice. In France it was Victor Hugo who first recognised the
+necessity of direct address. But he, who, as it happens, stands on that
+narrowest boundary-line which separates genius from talent, he of whom
+one can say that he was either the least of the eternal, monumental
+poets or the greatest of the minor, the derivative poets, he confined
+himself to France, he never thought of any but the French nation--as
+Walt Whitman never thought of any but the American nation--and, above
+all, he had not the high place whence to speak to his nation. He would
+have been greater if he had really had the tribune whence his thunder
+and lightning might have reached the multitude, instead of being always
+only a sinister grumbling from the background of exile. Of all the
+hundred volumes of his work perhaps nothing will remain except that
+commanding gesture of an orator which Rodin has perpetuated in his
+statue, and which is nothing else than the will to move to passion. He
+has created this will to pathos, but not the pathos itself; still, even
+the effort is a great and memorable achievement.
+
+Victor Hugo's inheritance, which was ill administered by chatterers and
+chauvinists, by Déroulède and such poets with their big drums and their
+trumpet-flourishes, has been taken over in France by Verhaeren. And he
+is the first whose voice again reaches the crowd, the first French
+realisation of a pathos which has absolutely the effect of art and
+poetry. He more than any other, he whose deepest delight it is to quell
+a grandiose resistance, he the _évocateur prodigieux_, as Bersaucourt[2]
+has called him, was entitled to the mastery of the living word. Whenever
+I read a poem by Verhaeren, I am time after time astonished to find
+myself, when I have begun by reading it to myself, suddenly forced to
+read the words aloud; surprised to find myself reading them louder and
+louder; surprised to find in my hand, in my whole body, the urgent need
+awakening of the gesture that hails and kindles an audience. For so
+strong is the passionateness of the original feeling, the inner cry and
+appeal in the words, that it forces its way through the reproduction,
+rings out loudly even from the dead letters. _All the great poems of
+Verhaeren are filled with the yearning to be spoken aloud, vehemently,
+in the zest and glow of passion_. If they are recited softly, they seem
+to be quite without melody; if they are read calmly and stolidly, they
+often seem hard, uneven, and abrupt. Many images recur with a certain
+regularity, many adjectives are repeated as petrified ideas--the trick
+of an orator who emphasises what is important by standing
+expressions--but the moment the poem is read aloud it is all alive
+again, the repetitions are suddenly revealed as superb instances of
+excitement reaching its mark, the recurring images take their place as
+regular milestones along a road rushing along wildly to the infinite.
+Verhaeren's poetry is the communication of an ecstasy, communication not
+in the sense of a secret to an individual, but of fire cast to kindle a
+crowd. His poems never seem to be quite completed, but to have been
+first created while being read, just as every good and fiery speech
+gives the impression of being improvised; they are always the unfolding
+of a state, a passionate analysis that acts like a discovery. They are
+moving, not harmonious. Just as an orator does not shock his audience at
+the very first with the conclusion of his reasoning, but pays out the
+chain of his arguments slowly and logically, Verhaeren builds his poems
+from visions, first in repose, then in the excitement that intensifies,
+and then with burning horizons foaming over more and more wildly in
+images. And these images again are rhetorical; they are not similes
+which can only be understood in their totality by the roundabout way of
+reflection; they are glaring flashes of lightning. A poem that would
+move those who hear it has need of metaphors which not only hit the mark
+of feeling, but which hit it immediately with deadly effect. They must
+be glaring, because they have to force the whole feeling in the
+expression of one second as quick as lightning. In this way the pathetic
+poem produces a new form of sensuous expression, and in this way too it
+creates itself a new rhythm of intensification. First of all, with the
+lightnings of his metaphors Verhaeren illuminates the vast landscape of
+visions; then, by a certain monotony of rhythm, he intensifies the
+astonishment and excitement to the highest ecstasy. Repeatedly, at the
+breathing-spaces of his great poems, you think you have reached the
+summit, only to be whipped to a higher leap, to a higher outlook. 'Il
+faut en tes élans te dépasser sans cesse';[3] this, his moral
+commandment, is for him the highest poetical law as well. The deepest
+will of his pathetic poem is to whip up, to set running, to snatch his
+hearer along with him. 'Dites!' this summons which is like a gesture,
+the urgent 'encore, encore!' are appeals which in his poems are
+petrified into cries, just as every horseman has certain words to lure
+the last strength from his horse. _Such words are nothing but transposed
+oratorical gestures_. The hollow 'oh!' is the gesture of appeal; the
+short 'qu'importe!' the gesture as of one who casts away a burden grown
+too heavy; the slow, curving, far-sweeping 'immensément' is the heaping
+up of all infinity. These poems are lashed into fever heat. For not only
+do they themselves seek to fly like those other, the harmonious, the
+really lyric poems, which with wings outspread seem to hover near the
+clouds, they also seek to snatch up by force the whole heavy mass of the
+audience. This is the explanation of the constant repetitions in the
+poems, which are often very long, as though some last doubter were yet
+to be convinced, as though fire were to be darted into the blood of some
+last one yet immune. Everything strives forwards, forwards, dragging the
+resister along with ecstatic power.
+
+And here are seen the dangers of pathos. The first danger, that into
+which, for instance, Victor Hugo fell, was the emptiness, the hollowness
+of the feeling, the covering over of a void by a mighty gesture;
+enthusiasm resulting from a deliberate method, and not forced by inner
+feeling. Empty phrasing is and remains the first danger of the pathetic
+poem. The triteness of words 'plus sonores que solides'[4] is the
+second. Here, however, in this new pathos, there is another and a new
+peril, that of the over-heating of feeling, that of excessive, unhealthy
+exaltation, which must then of necessity yield to exhaustion. No man can
+be in a constant fever of excitement, in an unremitting state of
+exaltation. And in these poems there is the will to unceasing ecstasy.
+By the pathos, too, the purely lyrical values of the poem often fall
+into danger. The will to be clear often forces the poet to a triteness
+of wording; the terseness necessitates frequent repetition; the impulse
+to build up an organic ecstasy often leads to excessive length. Owing to
+its glaring, clear colours the language loses that mystical element of
+lyric verse--the incommensurable, as Goethe called it--that magic hint
+of a secret thing fleeing from the crowd and the light of day. But at
+the same time this pathos signifies an immense enrichment of lyric
+resources, a transvaluation of the word, by the very fact that it is not
+exclusively intended for print but for declamation as well. The pathetic
+poem is not, like the lyric poem, a crystallised impression; it is not
+at the same time question and answer to itself; it is the expectation of
+an answer. The great pathos, therefore, grows with success, and
+involuntarily mingles in the poem the craving and the answer of the
+poet's time. The voice of the poet is always as strong as the call that
+goes out to him. Verhaeren found this new pathos in the course of his
+development, because he no longer felt the voice of the crowd, of
+cities, and of all the new things as a hindrance to his lyric poetry,
+but as a challenge, as a rhetorical exhortation. And the more the world
+around us becomes ponderous, grandiose, and passionate--the more it
+becomes heroic in the concentration of its strength (heroic in that new
+strength that Emerson preached)--so much the more, too, must lyric
+poetry in the new sense, perhaps in Verhaeren's sense, be pathetic.
+Gigantic impressions cannot be forced into petty impressions; vast
+conceptions cannot be split up into mean fragments; a loud appeal needs
+a loud answer. All art is more dependent than we are aware on its epoch.
+The same secret dependence between demand and production seems to exist
+in the sphere of art as exists in commerce. Laws that escape our
+knowledge and cannot be prisoned in formulae can sometimes be glimpsed,
+hazy as a presentiment, in fugitive intuition.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'Le Tribun' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[2] Albert de Bersaucourt, _Conférence sur Emile Verhaeren._
+
+[3] 'L'Impossible' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[4] Albert Mockel, _Émile Verhaeren._
+
+
+
+
+VERHAEREN'S POETIC METHOD
+
+     Je suis celle des surprises fécondes.
+                          É.V., 'Celle des Voyages.'
+
+
+A real poem must not exhibit an artificial structure of parts, a
+mechanism; it must, like man himself, be organic, an indissoluble union
+of soul and body. It must have a living body of flesh, the substance of
+the word, the colour of the metaphors, the mechanism of the motion, the
+skeleton of the thought; but over and above all that it must possess
+that inexpressible something, the soul, which alone makes it organic;
+the breath, the rhythm, that inseparable essence which is no longer
+perceptible to intelligence, but only to feeling. It is not first in
+this transcendental element, however, that the poet's personality is
+revealed: the poetry of a great poet must be characteristic in its very
+physis, in its very material. Side by side with that magic vibration,
+that intangible element of feeling, the materiality too, the weaving of
+the word, that net of expression in which the fugitive feeling is caught
+in the waters of the hidden life and lifted into the light, these too
+must be alone of their kind if they are to characterise the poet's race,
+environment, and personality. This purely material organism of the poet
+too is, like every living thing, subject to growth, to the change of
+maturity and age. The structure of the poem, like every human face, must
+gradually, in the revolution of the years, work its way to character
+from the shifting features of childhood and the indistinctness of the
+general type, must in its sensuous externals, in the physiognomy of the
+material, show all psychic changes to the last acquisition of
+personality. In a real poet the technical aspect, the handicraft, the
+external element has a development that runs parallel to the
+intellectual and poetic contents. In form, too, the poem must at first
+represent a tradition, something that has been taken over; only in the
+revolt of youth will it achieve a personal form, and this itself will
+later, as it gradually grows cold and petrifies, represent an immutable
+type.
+
+Verhaeren's poetry has its evolution and its history in this purely
+formal sense. Even this poetry of Verhaeren's, which to-day looms so
+immensely isolated and so victoriously characteristic in French
+literature that a connoisseur can, without a shadow of doubt, recognise
+the creator from a single stanza, has grown from a tradition, is the
+climax of a certain culture, and is at the same time related to a
+contemporary movement. When Verhaeren began to write, Victor Hugo, the
+crowned king of French lyric poetry, was dead; Baudelaire was forgotten;
+Paul Verlaine was still almost unknown. Victor Hugo's heirs, who
+divided his kingdom as once the diadochi divided the kingdom of
+Alexander the Great, were only able to preserve the trappings of the
+glory gone, and the grandiloquence of their words contrasted ill with
+their thin voices and artificial feelings. Against this circle, against
+François Coppée, Catulle Mendès, Théodore de Banville and the rest of
+them, rose up a new school of young men who called themselves 'decadents
+and symbolists.' Here I must frankly admit that I am really unable to
+explain this idea, perhaps for the very reason that I have read so many
+varying definitions of it. The only thing that is certain is, that at
+that time a group of young writers rose up in concert against a
+tradition, and, in the most diverse experiments, sought a new lyrical
+expression. What this new thing consisted in would be hard to say. The
+truth is perhaps that all these poets were not French; that each of them
+brought some new element from his own country, his own race, his own
+past; that none of them felt that respect for the French tradition which
+was in the blood of the native poets as an inward barrier, and thus were
+able unconsciously to get nearer to their own artistic instinct. One
+only needs to look at the names, which often at the first glance betray
+the foreigner, the Americans Vielé-Griffin and Stuart Merrill, the
+Belgians Verhaeren, Maeterlinck, and Mockel, or which, as in the case of
+Jean Moréas, cover a complicated Greek name with a French pseudonym.
+The only indisputable exploit of this group really was that about 1885
+they quickened the pace of French lyric poetry with a new unrest.
+Mallarmé plunged his verses into a secret darkness of symbols, until the
+words with their subterranean meaning almost became unintelligible,
+while Verlaine gave his lines the dream-rapt lightsomeness of a music
+never heard before. Gustave Kalm and Jules Laforgue were the first who
+did away, the one with rhyme and the other with the Alexandrine, and
+introduced the apparent irregularities of the _vers libre._ Each one did
+his best on his own account to find something new, and all of them had
+in common the same fiery eagerness to attack the idols of a derivative
+poetry, the same ardent longing for a new form of expression. True,
+their talent was soon choked up with sand, but that was because they
+over-estimated the technical side of the innovations they introduced and
+spent themselves in the investigation of theories, instead of developing
+their own personalities. As time went on their paths diverged widely.
+Many of them foundered in the sea of journalism; others are still, after
+a lapse of twenty years, walking round in a circle in the footsteps of
+their youth; and of the symbolists and decadents nothing is left but a
+page or so of literary history, a faded sign-board marking an empty
+shop. Verhaeren too was classed with them, although in my view he was
+never essentially influenced by this school. A man of such sturdy
+originality could not be more than stimulated by others, could not be
+more than confirmed in his natural tendency to revolt. His attitude with
+regard to the _vers libre_ was by no means due to this influence. For it
+was not by suggestion from others, not by the instinct of imitation, but
+by inward necessity, that he discovered his new form. It was not the
+example of others that freed him from the fetters of tradition; he was
+forced to free himself from them of his own accord. This inner
+compulsion is alone of importance; for it is a matter of complete
+indifference whether a poet writes by chance in regular verse or in
+_vers libres_; the phenomenon can only be significant when a poet is of
+necessity and by inner pressure forced to free himself from tradition
+and to achieve a personal form.
+
+It was as a Parnassian that Verhaeren began. His first poetical
+attempts, which he has never published, the verses he wrote at school
+and in his first years at the university, showed him hypnotised by the
+style of Lamartine and Victor Hugo. And even in the first two books he
+published, in _Les Flamandes_ and _Les Moines_, there is not a single
+poem in which Verhaeren has gone beyond his models. His poem is indeed
+somewhat more mobile than the strict pattern of school exercises; it
+already shows slight traces of the cracks which at a later day will
+break the vessel to pieces. But this hint of insubordination was at
+that time necessitated more by the harshness and rebelliousness of the
+subject itself, by some stiffness or other in the turn of the phrase,
+which can only be explained by the fact of the poet's alien race. Even a
+foreigner can recognise that the verse is not rounded off, that the
+rhythm is not balanced with the natural inevitable sense of form that a
+man of Latin race would have, but that here a forceful will is with
+difficulty constraining a barbaric temperament to harmony. Through his
+French one can hear the massive language of his race, something of the
+unwieldy strength we have in our old German ballads. And what his name
+at the first glance betrayed--the foreigner--was to the finer ear of a
+native easily perceptible from his French alone.
+
+The farther Verhaeren proceeded in his development--the nearer he got to
+his real nature--the more the inheritance of his race in him revolted
+against the shackles of tradition--so much the more intensive became the
+impression of the Teutonic element in his verse. After all, development
+is in most cases nothing more than the awakening in us of our buried
+past. The highest demand of the Parnassian school, _impassibilité,_ an
+immovableness as of bronze, is the antithesis of his stormy temperament,
+which drives him along to a wild rhythm, not to harmony. Deep, guttural
+notes vibrate in his verses, and make the song of his vowels rough; the
+angularity, the masculinity, abruptness, and hardness of his peasant's
+nature peer through everywhere. In addition to this, there is now the
+inner transformation. So long as Verhaeren's poetic tendency was merely
+pictorial, one that calmly and without excitement aimed at painting the
+passion of the Flemish people, the earnestness of monasteries, just so
+long did the Alexandrine best serve to divide the rhythmic waves of his
+inspiration and roll them along. But when his personal sympathy began to
+confuse the inner indifference of his first work, his verse became
+uneasy. The cracks in the Alexandrine became more and more perceptible;
+greater and greater in the poet grew his impatience of it and his desire
+to smash it. He is no longer satisfied with the _vers ternaire_, the
+verse of the Romanticists with its two cæsuras dividing the line into
+three parts of perfectly equal rhythm and weight; he takes the free
+Alexandrine introduced by Victor Hugo and develops it still further,
+makes it still more irregular. He gives the syllables a different
+quantity, a different sonority; they no longer rest, they rock to and
+fro. And gradually the earnest, immovable uniformity of accentuation is
+changed into a more billowing, rhythmic fluidity. But ere long this
+concession too becomes too trivial for him. A temperament so impetuous
+as his will endure no outward fetter whatever. For it is not repose that
+this fiery singer would describe, but his own excited state--the
+quivering and vibrating of his emotion, his febrile unrest. His great
+manifold feeling, which is nothing else than a modulated cry, cannot
+storm itself out in regular verse; it needs unquiet gestures, motion,
+freedom, the _vers libre_. The fact that at this time other poets in
+France were using the free verse, the fact that it was at that
+time--several dispute the priority--'invented' for poets, is of no
+consequence to us here. Such contemporaneous incidences never express a
+chance, but always a latent necessity. Free verse was nothing else than
+the inevitable reflex action of modern feeling, the poetic breaking free
+of the unrest which lay in the time. Whether or not Verhaeren at that
+time had models is of no importance. What has been taken over can never
+become organic, only what comes from personal experience is a real gain.
+And at that time it lay quite in the line of his development that by
+inner necessity he was forced to break his old instrument and create
+himself a new one. For the nervous unrest, the passionate agitation of
+Verhaeren's later poems is unthinkable in regular verse. If verse is to
+describe in its own inner passion the immense multiplicity of modern
+impressions--their haste, their fire, their precipitous revulsion, their
+unexpectedness, their gloomy melancholy, and the overwhelming vastness
+of their dimensions--it must be strong and yet flexible, like a rapier.
+Such poems must be emancipated from rules: they must stride along like a
+real crowd, noisily seething; they must not walk in step, like soldiers
+on the march. And if they are to be spoken, they must not be recited in
+the stiff, cold, pathetically vibrating, self-conscious declamation of
+the Comédie Française; they must be spoken as though to a crowd; they
+must cry out, they must hail; and this-whipping up of an audience cannot
+be harmonious. These poems must be spontaneous and impulsive.
+
+Manifold is the diversity which Verhaeren's poetry has achieved by its
+deliverance from the monotony of the Alexandrine. Now and now only can
+the verse reproduce the plastic side of an impression and the inward
+agitation of it; not only by a pictorial description, but in a purely
+external manner too; by the sound, by the music of the rhythm. The
+lines, sometimes darting far beyond the margin, sometimes, like an
+arrow, sharpened to a single word, have the whole key-board of feeling.
+They can pace with a grave step like long black funeral processions, if
+haply they would express the monotony of solitude, 'Mes jours toujours
+plus lourds s'en vont roulant leur cours';[1] they can dart up like a
+falcon, white and glittering, soaring to the exulting cry 'la joie,'
+swift and as high as heaven over all the sad heaviness of earth. All the
+voices of day and night can now be represented onomato-poetically: all
+that is brusque and sudden by brevity; all that is ponderous and
+grandiose by a vast sweep of fulness; an unexpected thing by sudden
+harshness; haste in a feverishly accelerated movement; savagery by a
+precipitous change of velocity. Every line can now express the feeling
+by its rhythm alone. And one might without knowing French recognise the
+poetical intention of many of these poems merely by listening to their
+consonantal music, nay, often by looking at their typographical
+arrangement.
+
+For this reason I should be tempted to call these poems with their vast
+range _symphonic_ poems. They seem to have been conceived for an
+orchestra. They are not, like the poetry of a past generation, chamber
+music; they are not solitary violin _soli_; they are an inspired
+blending of all instruments; they are graded in individual sections
+which have a different _tempo_ and the pauses of the transitions. In
+Verhaeren's poetry the lyric exceeds the bounds of its domain and
+impinges on the dramatic and the epic. For his poem seeks not only to
+describe a mood, like a purely lyrical poem, it describes at the same
+time the birth of this mood. And this first part of the construction is
+epic; it is descriptive; it leads up from a lowly beginning to a great
+discharge of force. And, in the second place, the transitions are
+dramatic, those bursts of temperament from section to section, those
+precipitous falls and steep ascents which only at the end lead to a
+harmonious solution. From a purely external point of view Verhaeren's
+poem is more extensive, longer, of a greater range than any other
+contemporary poetry; it shoots out farther beyond the limit of lyric
+poetry; and, careless of the boundary-line of æsthetics, it derives
+strength and nourishment from neighbouring domains. It comes nearer to
+rhetoric, nearer to epic poetry, nearer to the drama, nearer to
+philosophy than any other poetry of our day; it is more independent of
+set rules than poetry had been hitherto. And independent of rules--or
+obeying only a new inner rule--is Verhaeren's form. Now, since the page
+no longer holds the fettered lines together in equal columns, the poet
+can write out his wild, overflowing feelings in their own wild, boldly
+curving lines. Verhaeren's poem at this time--and that which is achieved
+in the years of maturity remains inalienable--has its own inner
+architectonics. But it can hardly be compared to a piece of
+architecture, a structure built with hands; it is rather like a
+manifestation of nature. It is elementary like every feeling; it
+discharges itself like a storm. First a vision moves up like a cloud;
+more and more densely it compresses itself; more and more sultrily, more
+and more oppressively it weighs on the feeling; higher and higher,
+hotter and hotter grows the inner tension, until at last in the
+lightning of the images, in the rolling of the rhythm, all the garnered
+strength discharges itself rhythmically. The andante always grows to a
+furioso; and only the last section shows again the clear, cleansed sky
+of calm, in an intellectual synthesis of the state of chaos. This
+structure of Verhaeren's poem is almost invariable. It may be seen, for
+instance, in two parallel examples: in the poems 'La Foule' and 'Vers la
+Mer' in the book _Les Visages de la Vie_. Both set in with an
+adjuration, a vision. Here the crowd, its confusion, its strength; there
+a sensitive picture of the morning sea whose transparent tones remind
+one of Turner. Now the poet fires this still vision with his own
+passionateness. You see the crowd moving more and more restlessly, the
+waves surging more and more passionately; and ecstasy breaks out the
+moment the poet surrenders himself to these things, places himself among
+the crowd, sinks his feeling, his body in the sea. Then in the finale
+bursts forth the great cry of identity, in the one case the yearning to
+be all the crowd, in both that ecstatic gesture of the individual
+yearning for infinity. The first picture, which was only sensuously
+seen, grows at the end of the poem into a great ethic inspiration; from
+the vision is unfolded an unconquerable moral and metaphysical need.
+This form of intensification from individual feeling to universal
+feeling is the basic form of Verhaeren's poem. It might be best, in
+order to convey a clear idea of its form, to use a geometrical term and
+say that these poems are, to a certain extent, _poems in the form of a
+parabola._ While the lyric in the current sense mostly represents a
+symmetrical and harmonious form, a return to itself, a circle,
+Verhaeren's poem has the form of a parabola, apparently irregular but
+really equally governed by a law. His poems soar in a swift sustained
+flight, soar from the earth up into the clouds, from the real to the
+unreal, and then from a sudden zenith fling themselves back to the
+earth. The inspiration drives the feeling away from the pictorial, from
+passionless contemplation to this utmost height of possibility, far away
+from all sensuous perceptions high into the metaphysical, in order then,
+suddenly and unexpectedly, to bring it back to the _terra firma_ of
+reality. And indeed, in the music of these poems there is something as
+of a darting upwards, something of the hissing and whizzing of a stone
+well thrown and of its sudden falling down. In their rhythm too is this
+increasing velocity, this catching of the breath and this return to the
+starting-point, this bethinking itself of gravity when it returns to the
+earth.
+
+Something may now be said as to the means with which Verhaeren attains
+his vision, with which he seeks to represent the inner passionateness of
+things, with which he evokes enthusiasm. Let us first of all try to
+establish whether Verhaeren is what is called a master of language.
+Verhaeren's command of language is not by any means unlimited. Both in
+his words and in his rhymes there is constant repetition which sometimes
+borders on monotony; but on the other hand there is a strangeness, a
+newness, an unexpectedness of wording which is almost unexampled in
+French lyric poetry. An enrichment of the language, however, does not
+proceed from neologisms alone; a word may become alive by the
+unexpectedness of a new application, by a transposition of the meaning,
+as Rainer Maria Rilke, for instance, has often done in the German lyric.
+To redeem 'die armen Worte, die im Alltag darben,'[2] and consecrate
+them anew to poetry, is perhaps a higher merit than creating new words.
+Now Verhaeren has above all, by the Flemish sense of language which he
+inherited, imported a certain Belgian timbre into French lyric poetry.
+Personally, it is true, he is almost ignorant of Flemish; nevertheless,
+by the vague music familiar to him from his childhood's days, by a
+certain guttural tone, he has imported a nuance which is perhaps less?
+perceptible to the foreigner than to a Frenchman. At this point I should
+like to call Maurice Gauchez as a witness and borrow the most salient
+examples from his extraordinarily interesting monograph. Among the
+neologisms for which Gauchez suggests a foreign origin he quotes the
+following: les baisers rouges, les plumes majuscules, les malades
+hiératiques, la statue textuelle, les automnes prismatiques, le soir
+tourbillonaire, les solitudes océans, le ciel dédalien, le coeur
+myriadaire de la foule, les automnes apostumes, les vents vermeils, les
+navires cavalcadeurs, les gloires médusaires. And he rightly points out
+how much certain of Verhaeren's verbs might enrich the French language:
+enturquoiser, rauquer, vacarmer, béquiller, s'enténébrer, se futiliser,
+se mesquiniser, larmer. But I for my part cannot look upon the
+enrichment here accruing from racial instinct as the essential thing in
+his verbal art: it only gives it a local colour, without really
+explaining what is astonishingly modern in his diction. Verhaeren has
+been a great creator of new things for the French lyric, above all by
+his extension of its range of subjects, by his renewal of poetic
+reality, by recruiting new forces for poetry in the domain of technical
+science. _The great part of the new blood for his language came not so
+much from Flemish as from science_. A man who writes poems on the
+Exchange, on the theatre, on science, who sings factories and railway
+stations, cannot ignore their terminology. He must borrow certain
+technical expressions from the vocabulary of science, certain
+pathological terms from medicine; he must extend the glossary of the
+poetic by the extension of the poetic itself. There are geographical
+surprises of rhyme to be found in Verhaeren: Berlin and Sakhalin,
+Moscow, the Balearic and other distant islands whose names have never
+previously lived in rhyme. And since science is by its own progress
+compelled to invent new names every day, since new machines demand new
+words for their necessities, here for the first time an inexhaustible
+source has been discovered for replenishing the French language.
+
+This immense wealth, on the other hand, is jeopardised by something that
+might be called not so much poverty or restriction as fascination. Every
+one-sidedness of feeling produces, with its advantages, certain defects,
+and thus the constant passionateness which brought Verhaeren's poetry
+near to oratory, to preaching, is at the same time responsible for a
+certain monotony of the metaphors. Verhaeren is hallucinated by certain
+words, images, adjectives, phrases. He repeats them incessantly through
+all his work. All things in which a many-headed passion is united he
+compares with a 'brasier'; 'carrefour' is his symbol for indecision;
+'l'essor' is for him the last straining of effort; many cries and words
+by which he hails his audience are repeated almost from page to page.
+The adjectives too are often monotonous; often indeed, with the cold
+'iques' at the end of them, they are schematic; and even in the
+metaphors that phenomenon is unmistakable which in science is called
+pseudoanæsthesia, that is, the memory of a fixed feeling from the domain
+of some other sense is always individually associated with a certain
+colour or sound. For him 'red' expresses all that is passionate; 'gold'
+all greatness and pomp; 'white' all that is gentle; 'black' all enmity.
+His images have thus something abrupt and absolute; there is always in
+them, as Albert Mockel has demonstrated in his masterly study, the
+decisive, the sudden excitement, which overwhelms our astonishment. His
+images are as violent as his colours, as his rhythm. They have the
+suddenness of a cannon-ball which darts through space and is only
+perceptible to our vision when it reaches its aim and smashes the
+target. Possibly the inmost reason of this lies in the fact that these
+poems are intended to be spoken. A placard that is to have effect at
+some distance must be in glaring colours; pathos calls for images that
+hallucinate. Such images have indeed been found by Verhaeren, and by
+Verhaeren only. He hardly seems to know nuances. With the brutal
+instinct of a strong man he loves all that is glaring, all that is
+untrammelled. 'La couleur, elle est dans ses oeuvres une surprise de
+métaux et d'images.'[3] But in this material they blaze, and with their
+lightnings they light up even the most distant horizon. I will only
+remind the reader of his 'beffrois immensément vêtus de nuit' or 'la
+façade paraît pleurer des lettres d'or,' or his 'les gestes de lumière
+des phares.' By the intensity of such images Verhaeren attains to quite
+an incomparable clearness of the feeling. 'Personne, je crois, ne
+possède à l'égal de Verhaeren le don des lumières et des ombres, non
+point fondues, mais enchevêtrées, des noirs absolus coupés de blanches
+clartés.'[4]
+
+One-sidedness of temperament here produces a one-sided advantage with
+all its artistic restrictions. So that Verhaeren is not a verbal artist
+in the unrestricted sense of one who always hits upon the only, the
+inevitable comparison for a thing; of one who flashes a bold word on the
+attention once and never retails it till it palls, who seems to use
+every word for the first time. His poetic vocabulary is rich, but by no
+means infinite; his sensibility is strong, but it has its restrictions.
+For, as is the case with every passionate poet, certain feelings at the
+last white-heat of excitement appear to him identical, seem to him to be
+capable of comparison only with the quite elementary things of Nature,
+with fire, the sea, the wind, thunder and lightning. To make the point
+clear, Verhaeren is not a verbal artist in Goethe's sense, but rather in
+Schiller's sense. With the latter, too, he has the gift in common of
+definitely expressing certain perceptions in one lyric line. He has
+discovered essences of the lyric feeling of life, lines that are now
+household words, or which at all events will be so. It will be
+sufficient to mention word formations such as 'les villes
+tentaculaires,' which in France have already become common-places, or
+such maxims as 'La vie est à monter et non à descendre,' or 'Toute la
+vie est dans l'essor.' In lines like these the lyric ecstasy is
+compressed as in a coin, and perpetuated in the current riches of the
+language.
+
+This hardness and brutality, these abrupt transitions, constitute the
+individuality of Verhaeren's poetry. At bottom it is nothing else than
+an accentuated masculinity. The voice, the music, is guttural, deep,
+raucous, masculine; the body of his poem has, like a man's body, the
+beautiful movement of strength, but in repose gestures that are often
+hard and which only in passion regain their compelling beauty. Whereas
+French lyric poetry, so to speak, had imitated the female body, the
+delicate grace of its soft yielding lines; whereas its first concern was
+harmony; Verhaeren's poem strove only for the rhythm of movement, only
+for the proud and vigorously ringing stride of a man, his leaping and
+running, the fighting display of his strength. This is not the only
+reason why the French have so long repudiated him. For where we delight
+in an echo from the German in his language, they feel the harshness of
+the Teutonic undertone; where we find a consonance with the German
+ballad, a re-birth of the German ballad as though it were awakening from
+the dreams of childhood, they see an opposition to the native tradition.
+And in fact, the farther Verhaeren has proceeded in his development,
+both in his personality and in his verse, the more the French varnish
+has peeled off his Teutonic perception. It was only in the time of his
+first dependence on tradition that his poetry was hardly to be
+distinguished from that of other writers in French. The farther he
+receded from the French standpoint, the more he unconsciously approached
+German art. To-day, perhaps, a return to classicism is perceptible in
+his poetry. The neologisms are not so audacious; the images are more
+schematic; the whole poem is calmer and more clarified. This, however,
+is by no means a cowardly compromise with a shattered tradition, no
+repentant return to the fold; it is the same phenomenon we meet in a
+similar manner in the late poems of Goethe, Schiller, Hugo, and
+Swinburne; the effect of the cooling of the blood in age; the yielding
+of sensuous perception to intellectual ideas. The victor has lost the
+fighter's brutality; the man in his maturity no longer needs revolt but
+a conception of the world--harmony. Here, as in Verhaeren's whole
+evolution, his verse is the most delicately sensitive indicator of the
+psychic revulsion, the perfect proof of a poetic and organic development
+which is really inward and dependent only on the laws of his blood.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'L'Heure Mauvaise' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
+
+[2] 'Poor words a-hungered in the working day.'--Rainer Maria Rilke,
+_Mir sur Feier._
+
+[3] Albert Mockel, _Émile Verhaeren_.
+
+[4] _Ibid._ (_Ibid._).
+
+
+
+
+VERHAEREN'S DRAMA
+
+     Toute la vie est dans l'essor.
+                      É.V., _Les Forces Tumultueuses._
+
+Émile Verhaeren's dramas seem to stand outside his work. Verhaeren is
+essentially a lyric poet. His whole feeling springs from lyric
+enthusiasm, and all neighbouring domains are merely sources whose
+strength flows into and feeds this one vital instinct. Verhaeren has
+almost always used the dramatic and the epic only as a means, never as
+an end in themselves: from the epic he has taken over into the vast
+sweep of his dithyrambic poems its broad, calm development, and from the
+drama the swift, abrupt contrast of transitions. The dramatic and the
+epic only serve him as a tonic, as a means to strengthen the blood of
+his lyric art. Although Verhaeren beside his lyric work has written
+dramas--four up to the present--these, in the edifice of his complete
+production, must be appreciated from a different point of view: from an
+architectural point of view. For the dramas are to him, in a certain
+sense, only a survey, a concentration of individual lyric crises, a
+synopsis of certain ideal complexes which have occupied some moment of
+his past; they are final settlements; the last point in lines of
+development; milestones of individual epochs. All that in the lyric
+poems, which never systematically bounded a domain, fell apart, is here
+made to converge to the focus of a programme. The lyric juxtaposition is
+fused into an inner relationship, the circle of ideas is co-ordinated
+like a picture in the frame of a play. Verhaeren's four tragedies
+represent four spheres of a conception of the universe: the religious,
+the social, the national, and the ethical. _Le Cloître_ is a re-creation
+of the book of verse _Les Moines_, is the tragedy of Catholicism; _Les
+Aubes_ is a condensation of the sociological trilogy _Les Villes
+Tentaculaires, Les Campagnes Hallucinées, Les Villages Illusoires.
+Philip II._ shapes the tragedy of the Antichrist, the contrast of Spain
+and Belgium, of sensuality and asceticism. And _Hélène de Sparte_, which
+in its outward form manifests a return to classicism, handles purely
+moral, eternal problems. As far as their contents are concerned,
+Verhaeren's dramas show no deviation, no change of the inner centre of
+gravity, and his new dramatic style is in perfect harmony with his new
+lyric style. For just as on the one hand he has used the dramatic
+element as a substance of his lyric work, here in his dramas he has
+transmuted the lyric element to a dramatic element. Here, too, we have
+nothing but visions intensified into exaltation. Here, as everywhere
+else, Verhaeren can only create by enthusiasm. What goads him on is the
+lyric moment in his enthusiasm, that second of the highest tension when
+passion, if it is not to shatter the frame of its generator, must have
+explosive words. The characters of his dramas are never anything but
+symbols of great passions, the bridge for this ascension of the
+exaltation. To him the action is no more than the way to the crises, to
+those seconds when some mighty force seizes on these characters and
+forces them to cry out. Whole scenes seem to be only awaiting for the
+moment when some one shall rise and turn to the crowd, wrestle with it
+and overthrow it, or be himself dashed to pieces.
+
+The style of Verhaeren's dramas is purely lyrical; the pace is
+throughout passionate and feverish; and this method, which runs counter
+to all dramatic canons, was bound organically to create a new technique.
+The French drama had hitherto known only the rhymed Alexandrine or
+prose. In Verhaeren's dramas--for the first time to my knowledge--prose
+and verse (verse which is 'free' both as regards rhythm and rhyme) are
+throughout promiscuously mixed. Mixed, but not as in Shakespeare, in
+whose plays verse and prose alternate in individual scenes and
+establish, so to speak, a social stratification, serving-men speaking in
+prose and their masters in verse: in Verhaeren the prose passages are
+the broad, resting foundations of the action; the curved bowls, so to
+speak, from which the holy fire of the exaltation flames. His
+characters express their calm in prose, pass from calm to excitement,
+and in this intensification speak a language which imperceptibly merges
+into a poem. Not till their passion breaks out do they speak in verse,
+in those seconds, as it were, when their soul begins to vibrate; and in
+these passages one cannot help thinking of an aeroplane which is first
+driven along the ground and moves with ever greater speed till suddenly
+it soars aloft. In Verhaeren's drama the characters speak an ever purer
+language the more poetical they become; music breaks with their passion
+from their souls; just as many people who behave coarsely and awkwardly
+in ordinary life, in great moments suddenly achieve a bearing of heroic
+beauty. This embodies the idea that in enthusiasm a man discovers in
+himself another and a purer language; that passion and the yearning to
+free oneself from an immeasurable and intolerable earthly burden make a
+poet of any man. This idea is in harmony with Verhaeren's whole
+conception of the universe, his idea that the man swept away by passion
+and enthusiasm is on a higher plane than the critic with his lack of hot
+feeling; that receptivity for great sensations constitutes, so to speak,
+a scale of moral values. And the stage performances have shown that this
+new style is justified, that the transition from prose to verse,
+occurring as it does contemporaneously with the ascension from calm to
+passion, passes practically unnoticed by the audience, which is
+equivalent to saying that when put to the test the method was recognised
+as necessary.
+
+And it is by passion, this innermost flame of Verhaeren's poetry, that
+his dramas live too. Their qualities are those of the lyrics; they have,
+above all, that vast power of vision which sets _Philip II_. against the
+tragic landscape of Spain; over the drama of Helen arches the heaven of
+Greece, blue, and mild, and open like a flower; and behind the tragedy
+of modern cities unrolls the inflamed scenery of the sky with the black
+arms of chimneys. And then the immense fervour of the ecstasy which, not
+in a slow, regular progression, but in savage, convulsive thrusts,
+whirls the action onward to the moments of the solution.
+
+Thus Verhaeren's first drama derives its strength from the lyric source
+of a man's accusation of himself. _Le Cloître_ is a paraphrase of _Les
+Moines_, the book of the monks. Here again all the characters are
+gathered together in the cool corridors of a monastery--the gentle, the
+wild, the feudal, the wrathful, the childlike, the learned monk; here,
+however, they do not act in isolation, but with all their strength the
+one against the other. They fight for the prior's chair, which is really
+the symbol of something higher. For just as in _Les Moines_ every
+individual monk expressed symbolically some virtue of Catholicism and a
+distinct idea of God, here the prior's chair decides the question who is
+the most deserving of God. For his successor the old prior has
+designated Balthasar, a nobleman whom the monastery has sheltered for
+years. But he had only taken refuge there because he had killed his own
+father, thus escaping secular justice, and now he feels the
+consciousness of his guilt burning, feels the exasperated struggle
+between his own conscience and the lighter conscience of the others, who
+have long since forgiven him. And he cannot feel himself free before he
+has made his confession before the assembled monks, and even then only
+when he has repeated the confession, against the will of the monastery,
+to the people, and surrendered himself to the secular judges. The Roman
+Catholic idea of confession is here wonderfully in agreement with
+Dostoieffsky's conception of salvation by confession, of deliverance by
+suffering self-imposed. In three climaxes of equal force at the end of
+each of the three acts the tragic confession bursts into flame--first
+born of fear, then of a sense of justice, and at the last positively
+conceived as a pleasure; and here in these superb lyric ecstasies rest
+the strong pinions which bear the tragedy.
+
+In the second, the social tragedy _Les Aubes,_ the scenario is the
+present time. It has the purple scenery of _Les Villes Tentaculaires_,
+of the cities with the arms of polypi, which drain the blood of the poor
+dying country. Beggars, paupers, those who are starving, those who have
+been evicted, march to Oppidomagnum, the modern industrial city, and
+besiege it. It is the past once again storming the future. In the
+lyrical trilogy this struggle had been shaped in a hundred visionary
+instances; here, however, the bright sky of reconciliation is arched
+above the battle-field, over the realities hovers the dream. For here
+the future joins hands with the present. The great tribune, Hérénien,
+breaks the backbone of this battle and shows himself the hero of a new
+morality by secretly admitting the enemy into the city--in the old sense
+the action of a traitor--by yielding and thus transforming the struggle
+into a reconciliation. He is the tragic bearer of the moral idea that
+enmity may be overcome by goodness, and he falls as the first martyr of
+his faith. Verhaeren's social conception, his superb description of
+realities, here merge slowly in a Utopia; the dawns of the new days
+begin to shine above the pasts that are dead; the din of rebellion fades
+away in harmony. This drama, like the others, is far remote from the
+possibilities of the majority of theatres, because of the fact that here
+too an ethical idea is expressed with all the glow and ecstasy which as
+a rule in modern dramas is only found in the utterance of erotic desire.
+
+The third tragedy, _Philip II_., is a national drama, although its scene
+is not laid in Flanders. Much as Charles de Coster in his _Thyl
+Ulenspiegel_ had, with a Fleming's deadly hatred, seen in Philip II. the
+hereditary enemy of liberty, Verhaeren, who with the lyric poetry of
+his _Toute la Flandre_ became the representative singer of his native
+land, painted this gloomy figure with hatred. Philip II. is here, as in
+_Thyl Ulenspiegel,_ the hard, inflexible king who would fain put life
+out because it burns too red for him, who wishes to have the world as
+cool and marble-like as the chambers of the Escorial. Here of a sudden
+the reverse side of Roman Catholicism, whose passion was immortalised in
+_Le Cloître_, is rent open; its pitilessness and asceticism; its
+obstinate effort to overthrow the irrefragable joy of life. Don Carlos,
+however, is the fervent friend of the people, the friend of Flanders; he
+is the will to enjoyment, to merry moods, to passion. And this struggle
+between the 'yes' and the 'no' of life, this fight of Verhaeren's own
+lyric crisis, this fight between the denial and the passionate approval
+of enjoyment--at bottom, toe, the deepest cause of the war between Spain
+and the Netherlands--is here symbolised in characters. Of course, any
+comparison with Schiller's _Don Carlos_ must tell against Verhaeren, for
+the German drama is far more dramatic and conceived on a scale of
+greater magnificence; but Verhaeren did not aim at a complete rounding
+off, at a plenitude of characters; all that he wanted was to show these
+two feelings in their struggle with each other, the enthusiasm of life
+and its suppression by force. A comparison with Schiller's drama best
+shows Verhaeren's disregard of dramatic canons, and at the same time
+the immense new lyric power of the play. For Spain is here seen with a
+strength and intensity of vision which is probably without a parallel in
+tragedy. The cold, hypocritical atmosphere can be felt; and better than
+from words the character of Philip can be perceived in that one silent
+scene in which he suddenly appears stealthily creeping to watch his son
+in the arms of the countess, and then, without a gleam in his rigid
+eyes, without the slightest movement of anger, vanishes again into the
+dark. Behind him, however, behind the spy and the eavesdropper, glides
+another shadow, the monk of the Inquisition: the eavesdropper is himself
+shadowed, the ruler is himself ruled. Visions like these, with the
+ecstasy of certain scenes, are the strongest motive power in Verhaeren's
+poetic construction. His dramatic art, like the art of his lyrics, does
+not rise in a steady ascent, but in sudden wild leaps and starts.
+
+Only in his last drama, _Hélène de Sparte_, has Verhaeren come nearer to
+the accepted conception of the dramatic. That is characteristic of his
+organic development. For now that he is in the years when passion of
+necessity cools, harmony grows dear to him; and he who through all the
+years of his youth and prime was a revolutionary, now recognises the
+necessity of inner laws. By its mere intellectual substance this tragedy
+expresses the veering round: it is nothing else than the longing from
+passion to harmony, Helen's flight from adventures to repose. And the
+return is to be found again in the verse, for Verhaeren here for the
+first time takes up the traditional French metre; his form, though yet
+free, approaches the Alexandrine. The tragedy of Helen is the tragedy of
+beauty. Helen is one of those antique characters who in Greek literature
+were only sketched in fleeting lines, characters whom a modern poet is
+now entitled to fill in with his own fate. For from the Greek sources we
+really knew nothing about her personal fate; we only knew the effect she
+exercised, only the reflection of her personality on others, not that of
+others on her. She was the queen who inflamed all men; who was the cause
+of great wars; the woman for whose sake murder on murder was committed;
+who was snatched from one bed to another; for love of whom Achilles
+arose from the dead; who passed her life circled by disastrous passion.
+But whether she herself shared these passions, whether she grew by them
+or suffered by them, the poets tell us nothing. Verhaeren in his drama
+has now attempted to depict the tragedy of the woman who endures fearful
+suffering because she is always desired in lust and no more; who is
+consumed by the torture of being ever robbed from lover by lover; of
+never knowing the look of pure eyes, calm converse, quiet breathing; who
+is cursed always to stand at the pyre of passion, with the flames of
+men always blazing round her. Whoever looks at her at once desires her,
+snatches her; none waits and asks whether he serves her will; she is
+robbed like a chattel; she glides from hand to hand. In Verhaeren's
+drama Helen has returned home, a woman tired, tired of all unrest, of
+all her triumphs, tired of love; a woman hating her own beauty because
+it creates unrest, longing for nothing but old age, when none shall
+desire her more and her days shall be calm. Menelaus has brought her
+home, rescued her from all that stifling steam of criminal passion; now
+she would breathe quietly, live calm days, and be faithful to him. She
+desires no more than this. No passion can tempt her more. 'I have seen
+the flaring of so many flames that now I love only the hearth's glow and
+the lamp' is the expression of her poignant resignation. But fate will
+not yet let her go. Verhaeren has here seized on the great idea of the
+Greeks that everything that is superhuman on earth, every excessive
+gift, even that of beauty, is pursued as a hybrid by the envy of the
+gods, and must be paid for with pain. Too great beauty is no profit, but
+a tragic gift. And hardly has Helen returned, to rest and be happy, to
+be like everybody else, than new clouds roll themselves up above her
+head. Her own brother desires her; her enemy Electra desires her; her
+husband is murdered for her sake; and the old fearful battle threatens
+to break out anew for the possession of her body. Now she flees, away
+from men, out into nature. And here again, with the vision of genius,
+Verhaeren approaches Greek feeling. The forest is not dead to him, but
+animate; life does not stop at human beings; fauns emerge from the
+bushes, naiads from the rivers, bacchantes from the mountains, and all
+swarm round Helen in her despair, luring her to their lust, till she
+flees to Zeus in death.
+
+It is characteristic of Verhaeren that he has made even this tragedy,
+the tragedy of Helen, anerotic, or better anti-erotic. Perhaps the
+slight interest which has hitherto been manifested in Verhaeren's
+dramas, and indeed partly in his whole work, may be ascribed to the fact
+that, in comparison with the other poets of his day, he has held himself
+aloof from erotic subjects, that the problem of love has only recently,
+in the years of his maturity, begun to interest him as a theme for his
+art. From the first Verhaeren concentrated all the passion which others
+lavished on the erotic in purely intellectual things, in enthusiasm, in
+admiration. In his dramas woman plays an almost subordinate rôle, and
+_Le Cloître_ is perhaps the only important drama of our days which does
+not show a single woman among its characters and in its inner circle of
+problems. By this fact alone his dramatic aim strays too far from the
+interests of our public. For it is from a purely intellectual conflict
+that Verhaeren seeks to disengage that height and heat of passion which
+hitherto was known only in erotic themes; and therefore the exaltation
+strikes the majority of an audience as strange, and leaves them unmoved.
+All our contemporaries who seek art only in the theatre are too
+indifferent and timid to be snatched up, for a purely ethical problem,
+into an ecstasy so burning, so persistently lit with convulsive
+lightnings. This is the only explanation I can find for the opposition
+to Verhaeren's dramas, which are so full of beauty and of living,
+dramatic, passionate situations, and which, above all, contain something
+new, a new dramatic style. This very kindling of prose to verse was a
+revelation. But the whole dramatic aim is different in Verhaeren to that
+which obtains on the stage of to-day. His aim is not to excite interest,
+not to produce fear and compassion, but enthusiasm. He does not wish to
+occupy the minds of his audience, but to carry them away into his
+rhythm. He wishes to make them drunk with his great excitement, because
+only he who gazes in enthusiasm is capable of recognising these supreme
+passions; he wishes to make the spectators as feverish as the characters
+they see before them on the stage; he wishes to make their blood fiery;
+wishes to raise them above all cool, calm, and critical contemplation.
+His whole temperament, which drives along in the direction of
+superabundance; his art, which only fulfils its purpose in ecstasy;
+require impassioned actors and an impassioned audience. To create the
+ideal atmosphere which Verhaeren demands for his dramas would require an
+actor of kindred genius who should have no fear of being called
+emotional, and who would hurl the verses down like cataracts,
+emphasising like a demagogue and at the same time unfolding all the
+magnificence of the rhythm. For the poet asks for nothing save a feeling
+of enthusiasm corresponding to that which first created the poem in him.
+His intention is not to convince by logic, not to dazzle by pictures,
+but to whip up and carry along with him into that ultimate dizzy feeling
+which to him is alone identical with the highest form of the feeling of
+life--into passion.
+
+In Germany _Le Cloître_,[1] as staged by Max Reinhardt, and again in the
+Deutsches Volkstheater in Vienna, has conquered the interest of a
+literary public and triumphed unreservedly over the obstacle of its own
+strangeness. There has been an exemplary production of _Philip II._ in
+the Munich Künstlertheater; _Hélène de Sparte_ on the other hand has not
+yet found the setting it demands. As bodied forth in Paris by Ida
+Rubinstein, with decorations of a grandiose barbarism by Bakst, with a
+ground-colouring of music, it was effective more by the external
+magnificence of this somewhat sensationally advertised _mise en scène_
+than by its poetic qualities, smothered as they were by the
+accessories. A production which shall do justice to the play, leaving
+its pure lyric line unbedizened with glaring arabesques, is still
+waiting as a task for some actor-manager of genius who possesses that
+highest and rarest quality of being able to subordinate himself to the
+utterance, who is anxious not to ruin a noble simplicity by a spurious
+plenitude.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] A version of _Le Cloître_, by Mr. Osman Edwards, was successfully
+produced by Miss Horniman at the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester in 1910.
+
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+COMPLETING FORCES
+
+
+LES VISAGES DE LA VIE--LES FORCES TUMULTUEUSES--LA MULTIPLE
+SPLENDEUR--TOUTE LA FLANDRE--LES HEURES CLAIRES--LES HEURES
+D'APRÈS-MIDI--LES HEURES DU SOIR--LES RYTHMES SOUVERAINS
+--LES BLÉS MOUVANTS
+
+1900-1914
+
+
+
+
+COSMIC POETRY
+
+                     ... Les vols
+     Vers la beauté toujours plus claire et plus certaine.
+                                        É.V., 'Les Spectacles.'
+
+The poetic conquest of life represents, as it were, a process of
+combustion. Every poet feeds the flame of his inner being, his artistic
+passion, with the things of the world around him, transmutes them into
+flame, and himself shoots on high and dies down with them. The more the
+flame cools with the feebler circulation of the blood, the weaker grows
+this fire, and gradually the pure crystals, the residue from this battle
+of the inner flame with the things of reality, are separated from this
+process of combustion. Verhaeren's work was in his youth and prime a
+flame exceedingly hot, lawless, free, and flaring like the very years of
+his youth and prime. Now, however, in the work of his fifties, now that
+passion has cooled, the yearning is revealed to find the goal of this
+passion, the inherent lawfulness of this unrest. Enthusiasm for the
+present, poetic consumption of the world in visions without the residue
+of philosophy and logical knowledge, no longer suffice him. For all
+deeper contemplation of the present is unthinkable without an exceeding
+of its limits: all that is, is at the same time something that has been
+and something that will be. Nothing is so entirely the present that it
+is not intimately connected with the past and the future. The eternal
+and the permanent is the inward side of all phenomena. And the more the
+poet turns his visions from the exterior, from the pictorial, to the
+inner world, to psychology, the more he descends from external phenomena
+to the roots of forces, the more he must apprehend the permanent behind
+the transitoriness of things. No perception of a contemporary state is
+fertile unless it is impregnated with the perception of laws that are
+independent of time, unless the changing phenomena are recognised as
+transformations of the unchangeable primordial phenomenon. This
+transition from maturity to age, from contemplation to knowledge,
+corresponds to a new artistic transition in the incomparably organic
+development of this poet. A transition: no longer a re-formation, but a
+formation which moves both forwards and backwards, which is at the same
+time an evolution and a retrogression, just as the poetic form of
+Verhaeren's poetry no longer undergoes a transformation, but is
+petrified. What a man has acquired in the years of his prime is an
+inalienable possession; its value can be further increased only by
+knowledge, by the appraising of the possession. It may be said that a
+man who has passed his prime experiences nothing new: the static
+equilibrium is realised; what has been experienced is only the better
+understood. The experience is no longer a struggle, no longer a state of
+unrest, something that slips away; it is a possession. What passion has
+fought for and won with a leap is now set in order and appraised at its
+true value, by calm. This transition from youth to age is in Verhaeren,
+to use Nietzsche's phrase, a transition from the Dionysiac to the
+Apollinarian, from a plethora to harmony. His yearning is now _vivre
+ardent et clair_, to live passionately, but at the same time clearly to
+preserve his inner fire, but at the same time to lose his unrest.
+Verhaeren's books in these years grow more and more crystalline; the
+fire in them no longer blazes openly like a flaring pyre, but glitters
+and sparkles as with the thousand facets of a precious stone. The smoke
+and the unrest of the fire die down, and now the pure residues are
+clarified. Visions have become ideas, the wrestling earthly energies are
+now eternal immutable laws.
+
+The will of these last years, of these last works, is the will to
+realise a cosmic poem. In the trilogy of the cities Verhaeren had laid
+hold on the universe as it lies around us to-day; he had snatched it to
+him and overcome it. In passionate visions he had shaped its image,
+achieved its form, and now it stood beside the actual world as his own.
+But a poet who would create the whole world for himself, the whole
+infinite vista of its possibilities by the side of its actualities, must
+give it everything: not only its form, not only its face, but its soul
+as well, its organism, its origin, and its evolution. He must not merely
+apprehend its pictorial aspect and its mechanical energy, he must give
+it an encyclopædic form. He must create a mythology for it, a new
+morality, a new history, a new system of dynamics, a new system of
+ethics. Above it or in it he must place a God who acts and transforms.
+He must fashion it in his poetry not only as something that is, not only
+as something in the present, but as something that has been and is
+becoming, something that is part and parcel of the past and of the
+future too. It must ring out the old and ring in the new. And this will
+to create a cosmic poem is to be found in Verhaeren's new and most
+precious books--_Les Visages de la Vie, Les Forces Tumultueuses, La
+Multiple Splendeur, Les Rythmes Souverains_---books which by their mere
+title announce the effort to include the dome of heaven in their vast
+embrace. They are the pillars of a mighty structure, the great stanzas
+of the cosmic poem. They are no longer a conversation of the poet with
+himself and contemporary feeling; they are a pronouncement addressed to
+all the ages. _S'élancer vers l'avenir_ is the longing they express: a
+turning away from all the pasts to speak to the future. The lyric
+element in them steps beyond the boundary-line of poetry. It kindles the
+neighbouring domains of philosophy and religion, kindles them to new
+possibilities. For not only æsthetically would Verhaeren come to an
+understanding with realities; not by poetry only would he overcome the
+new possibilities; he would fain master them morally and religiously as
+well. The task of these last and most important books of verse is no
+longer to apprehend the universe in individual phenomena, but to impress
+its new form on a new law. In _Les Visages de la Vie_ Verhaeren has in
+individual poems glorified the eternal forces, gentleness, joy,
+strength, activity, enthusiasm; in _Les Forces Tumultueuses_ the
+mysterious dynamics of union shining through all forms of the real; in
+_La Multiple Splendeur_ the ethics of admiration, the joyous
+relationship of man with things and with himself; and in _Les Rythmes
+Souverains_ he has celebrated the most illustrious heroes of his ideals.
+For life has long since ceased to be for him mere gazing and
+contemplation:
+
+     Car vivre, c'est prendre et donner avec liesse
+     ...................avide et haletant
+     Devant la vie intense et sa rouge sagesse![1]
+
+Description, poetic analysis, has gradually grown into a hymn, into
+'laudi del cielo, del mare, del mondo,' into songs of the whole world
+and of the ego, and of the harmony of the world's beauty in its union
+with the ego. The lyrical has here become cosmic feeling, knowledge has
+become ecstasy. Over and above the knowledge that there cannot be
+anything isolated, that everything is arranged and obeys the last
+uniform law of the universe, over and above this knowledge rises
+something still higher--over the contemplation of the world rises faith
+in the feeling of the world. The glorious optimism of these works ends
+in the religious confidence that all contrasts will be harmonised; that
+man will more and more be conscious of the earth; that every individual
+must discover his own law of the world in himself, the law that makes it
+possible for him to apprehend everything lyrically, with enthusiasm,
+with joy.
+
+Here Verhaeren's poetry far exceeds the boundary-line of literature; it
+becomes philosophy and it becomes religion. Verhaeren was from the very
+first an eminently religious man. In his childhood Catholicism was the
+deepest feeling of his life, but this Catholicism had perished in the
+crises of his adolescence, his religious feeling had given way to the
+rapt contemplation of all new things, to ecstasy inspired by the aspect
+of life. But now, when Verhaeren returns to the metaphysical, the old
+yearning is reawakened. The old gods are dead for him; Pan is dead, and
+Christ too. Now he feels the need of finding a new faith, a new
+certainty, a new God for the new sensation, this identity of I and
+world. The new conflicts have created a longing in him for a new
+equilibrium; his stormily religious feeling, determined to believe,
+needs new cognition. The image of the world would be incomplete without
+the God who rules it. All his yearning goes out to this God, and it
+finds its fulfilment. And this knowledge gives him the highest joy life
+can have, the loftiest pride life can bestow:
+
+      Voici l'heure qui bout de sang et de jeunesse.
+             *       *       *       *       *
+      Un vaste espoir, venu de l'inconnu, déplace
+      L'équilibre ancien dont les âmes sont lasses;
+             La nature paraît sculpter
+           Un visage nouveau à son éternité.[2]
+
+To chisel this new face of God is the aim of his last and most mature
+works, in which the obstinate 'no' of his youth has become the loud
+exulting 'yes' of life, in which the great possibilities of old have
+become an unsuspected opulent reality.
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'Un Soir' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[2] 'La Foule' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+
+
+
+THE LYRIC UNIVERSE
+
+     Il faut aimer, pour découvrir avec génie.
+                                        É.V., 'Un Soir.'
+
+
+If one is to understand Verhaeren's lyric work as a work of art, it must
+be kept in mind that he is a lyric poet, and a lyric poet only. A lyric
+poet only, not, however, in the limited sense of one who confines
+himself to the writing of lyric poems, but of one who, in a lofty and
+more extensive meaning of the term, transforms everything into emotion,
+who stands in a lyric relationship with all things, with the whole
+world. And since the innermost constitution of a man's talent
+unconsciously acts as the driving tendency, the direction of the aim of
+his life, his very fate and his conception of the world, since all this
+is so, the lyric poet that Verhaeren is must of necessity have a lyrical
+conception of the world, his cosmic feeling _must_ be lyrical. To say
+that he has confined himself to the lyric style would be to diminish his
+stature. It is true that in all Verhaeren's imaginative work--and it is
+of considerable volume--there is no prose. A very thin volume of short
+stories did indeed appear many years ago and has long been out of print;
+but how tentative and provisional it was in scope may be seen from the
+fact that Verhaeren later on turned one of the stories, that of the
+bell-ringer in the burning tower, into a poem. And I might mention a
+whole series of poems which at bottom are nothing but short stories, and
+others again which are saturated with dramatic excitement, quite
+unlyrical problems, but all of them lyrically conceived. And even in his
+criticism of art and in that penetrating and beautiful book of his on
+Rembrandt, in which he represents the organic connection of the artist
+with his native province almost as a personal experience, the
+outstanding passages live by their lyric enthusiasm. Many of the poems
+again are spiritualised theories of art. The origin of language or the
+sociological problem of emigration, the economic contrast of agrarianism
+and industrialism: in an essay such things might be calmly treated,
+coldly passed in review. But this is characteristic of Verhaeren, that
+he is unable to take a cold, faint interest in anything: consciously or
+unconsciously he must be carried away by enthusiasm for the things he
+contemplates. The ecstasy of his excitement involuntarily whips him out
+of a slow trot into lyric fervour. Poetry is to him, like his
+philosophy, like his ethics, a lyrical soaring. It is characteristic of
+the great lyric poets, of Walt Whitman, Dehmel, Carducci, Rilke, Stefan
+George, that at a certain height of their artistry they renounce all
+other than lyric forms. Here, as elsewhere, great things only seem
+possible of attainment by concentration, only by the poet's freeing
+himself from the trammels of all other experiments. Great lyric poetry
+as the art of a life only accrues from the renunciation of all other
+forms of poetry.
+
+Infinite enthusiasm, _le lyrisme universel_, a rapt visionary sensation
+of the earth rolling as it were in an eternal vibration through the
+cosmos, is the aim of Verhaeren's work. Not to describe the world in
+isolated poems, not to break it up in impressions, but to feel it as
+itself a flaring, flaming poem, _not to be one who contemplates the
+world, but one who feels it_, this is his highest yearning. A lyric art
+can only grow to such intentions as these from emotions not felt by
+other lyrists. It is not, as with most poets, from gentle crepuscular
+feelings, from vague states of melancholy, that such an impulse is
+crystallised to lyrical expression; here it is an overflowing fulness of
+feeling, a bright joy in life, that engenders his poem; an explosion
+which in the days of his debility was a paroxysm, which as time went on
+changed to a pure enthusiasm, but which was always an eruption of
+strength. Lyric art is here a discharge of the whole feeling of life.
+With Verhaeren the excitement does not sting the individual nerve; it
+spreads electrically, inflames the blood, contracts the muscles,
+produces an immense pressure, and then discharges the whole energy of a
+body saturated with health and strength. _The will to discharge strength
+is the basic form of Verhaeren's lyric emotion_. His aim is to instil
+inspiration--first of all into himself (since inspiration always
+represents a higher state of ecstasy), and then into others. His lyric
+art is above all a launching of himself into exaltation, 'le pouvoir
+magique de s'hypnotiser soi-même.'[1] He talks himself into passion,
+gives himself that impulsion which then bears others along with him. It
+is not a lack, a privation, not a complaint or a wish that his work
+expresses; it is a plethora, a superfluity of riches, a pressure. It is
+not a warding off of life but an eternal leaping at it. His poetry has
+not the modest longing of music to lure to reveries; it does not, like
+painting, seek to represent something: it would act like fiery wine; it
+would make all feelings strong and glowing, sink all hindrances, produce
+that sensation of lightness, of blessedness, that quivering intoxication
+which conquers all the heaviness of earth. His intention is to produce
+this state of drunkenness, 'non seulement la glorification de la nature
+mais la glorification même d'une vision intérieure.' And his attitude is
+not plaintive or defensive, it is the great spirited attitude of a hand
+raised and pointing out, 'regardez!' the adjuring attitude, 'dites!' or
+one that fires and animates, 'en avant!' but it is always a gesture from
+the poet's self towards something, always a swinging of his arms away
+from himself into the universe, always a pressing forward, a snatching
+away of himself from matter. And any one who really feels these poems
+feels, when the last line is read, that his blood is beating faster,
+feels that his body calls for exercise, feels the inspiration impelling
+him to action. _And this is the highest intention of Verhaeren's lyrical
+poetry, to animate, to quicken the blood, to fire the heart, to
+intensify vitality, to increase tenfold the sensation of life_.
+
+But not only in this basic emotion is Verhaeren sundered from all those
+other poets who fashion their verses from sadness, sickly longing,
+amorousness, and melancholy. Verhaeren's lyric poetry breathes in other
+realms, in another atmosphere. Verhaeren is what I should like to call a
+poet of the daylight, of the open air. If you peruse the lyric works of
+contemporary poets you will find that their moods mostly arise from
+states of dusk and darkness. Since they have only the power of
+reproducing blurred outlines, they are fond of landscapes softened by
+twilight; of night, when there is no hardness in things, when what they
+see meets them half-way, already shaping itself into verse. Like
+Tristan, they hate the day as the destroyer of poetry, and swathe
+themselves in the trembling chiaroscuro of twilight. But the really
+great lyric poets have always been poets of the daylight; poets of the
+day and of the light, as the Greeks were, to whom all things that were
+bathed in sun spoke of beauty and cheerfulness; poets of the day, as
+Walt Whitman was, the American; as all strong men have been who were
+filled with the zest of life. In Germany we have Dehmel to love, one of
+the few who have the courage to look right into the shining face of
+things without the fear of being blinded. But Verhaeren loves things the
+more the more intensive and decided they are, the more dazzling they
+are, the more their glaring colours clash. He does not surprise things
+when they are asleep, when they are resting and are helpless and at the
+mercy of poetry; he pounces on them when they are wideawake and can
+defend themselves with all their hardness from the attacks of their
+lyric lover. He loves the day, which places things side by side in harsh
+contrast; he loves the light, because it stimulates the blood; the rain
+that lashes the body; the wind that whips the skin; cold, noise, he
+loves everything that really and vehemently forces in upon him,
+everything that forces him to fight. He loves hard things more than soft
+and rounded things; loves that characteristic, black, and gloomy city
+Toledo more than golden, dreamy Florence; he loves the wind and the
+weather of frowning, tragic landscapes; he even loves noisy and
+thunderous cities pregnant with smoke and choking air. His nerves are
+not so morbidly sensitive that they respond to the least suggestion, the
+feeblest touch, and then stand impotent, fainting, when they are faced
+by the impetuous stimulants of robust life; his nerves are--not dull,
+but healthy. They respond strongly to whatever lays hold of them
+strongly. If the other poets are like supersensitive beings who are
+excited by every trifle and lose their self-control when really great
+demands are made upon them, Verhaeren is like one who is hard to
+irritate, but who, if he is really stung, strikes out with his fists.
+_And Verhaeren does not love the poetical things that come to meet one
+already clothed in beauty; he loves those that have first to be wrestled
+with and overcome. Herein lies the exceeding masculinity of his art_. No
+one could ever surmise, in reading a poem of Verhaeren's, that it was
+the work of a woman. And as a matter of fact Verhaeren has not yet found
+an audience among women. For he is not one who moans and begs for pity;
+he is no passive poet, but a fighter, one who wrestles with all strong,
+wild, and living things until they yield up to him their innermost
+beauty.
+
+And this struggle for the lyric mastery of individual sensations
+gradually becomes a struggle for all things, for the whole world. For
+Verhaeren does not wish to conceive of anything as unlyrical; does not
+wish to blow lyric fragments off the immense mass of reality; he wishes
+to sculpture it into a new shape; wishes to chisel the whole world into
+a lyric. And this is the secret of his lyric work; _this_ is his work,
+his task. Of a sudden we feel the distance between him and the majority
+of lyric poets. _They_ have the feelings of people who receive gifts;
+they regard the sensations which come fluttering towards them as so many
+gay butterflies, capture them, and pin them down. Verhaeren, however, is
+the fighter, the worker, who is constrained to conquer everything, to
+shape the whole world anew, to rebuild it nearer to his heart's
+enthusiasm. He is the lyric poet pictured by Carducci in an imperishable
+poem--not the idler gazing into empty space; not the gardener decking
+the paths that his lady's feet must tread, and gathering frail violets
+for her bosom.
+
+     Il poeta è un grande artiere,
+     Che al mestiere
+     Fece i muscoli d'acciaio,
+     Capo ha fier, collo robusto,
+     Nudo il busto,
+     Duro il braccio, e l'occhio gaio.
+
+And that 'picchia, picchia,' that rhythm of Carducci's, that beat of the
+bronze hammer of toil, rings in the measure of his verses. All his poems
+have been toiled for, fought for; they are a trophy, a meed of victory;
+nothing is a lucky gift. Verhaeren's manuscripts look like a
+battlefield. For he is not a poet who, in Goethe's sense, composes poems
+for particular occasions; he is never overpowered by a sudden chance
+idea: he transforms a problem of life, an actuality, or an intellectual
+phase into a lyric mood. After he has molten the poetic idea in his
+passion to a white heat, he hammers it into a poem by his rhythm. His
+works are complexes: individual ideas attract him; he sets a hedge round
+their poetical field, ploughs it, scatters the seed in it, and never
+returns to the scene. What he has once achieved has no longer any
+attraction for him. To him poetry is always a fight, always work, always
+a plan. The layman who would fain look upon a lyric poem as a gift
+fallen from heaven will perhaps have no liking for this conscious
+method; an artist, on the other hand, will recognise in it the strength
+of a wise restraint, concentration on one aim, the will to compose not a
+lyric poem but a lyric work. A poetic work like that of Verhaeren, the
+work of a life, is not created by chance feeling alone, and not by
+enthusiasm. Such a work of art has, like a drama, its intellectual laws,
+the conquering and distributing powers of the intelligence, instinct,
+and above all that unifying will which suffers no dead points, no gaps,
+no stains in the work. And it is from such a vast lyric will that this
+work has arisen. Verhaeren is no favoured child of fortune, dowered with
+art in his cradle; his blood is heavy, Teutonic blood; and, fortunately,
+that ease and suppleness of the artisan which in all departments of
+labour produces a ready mediocrity was as much wanting in him as all
+physical skill. Verhaeren's poetic work, his form, his rhythm, his idea,
+his philosophy, his architectonics, all this is something he has
+acquired by labour, something he has painfully produced by passion and
+an obstinate will; but for that very reason it is something organic.
+For Verhaeren is one of those who learn slowly, persistently, and
+surely, only from their own experience and never from others, but who
+never forget and lose what they have once acquired; one of those who
+grow as the things of Nature do, as trees grow into their strength ring
+by ring, and rise year by year higher above the earth to gaze farther
+and farther out beyond the horizons and nearer and nearer into the
+heavens.
+
+And just for this reason, because this evolution was so persistent,
+because it was so wholly based upon experience, is the ascending line in
+his work so harmonious and so organic. No other lyric work of our days
+is so much a symbol of the seasons, so much a mirror of human
+periodicity. The revolt of spring, the sultriness of summer, the
+fruitage of autumn, and the cool clearness of winter gently merge in it,
+the one into the other. In his first books, at an age when many
+precocious poets have finished their development, he was still wrestling
+for his new form, for his expression. Nor did he at that time soon
+arrive at the heart of things; he remained for a long time absorbed in
+the purely picturesque contemplation of their external aspects. Then he
+attempted experiments, and freed himself in revolution. But in his
+beginnings he was always a student, an experimenter. In his second
+period, having really penetrated below the surface, he found his own
+form, like every master, and subdued the internal with the external. But
+now that material is conquered, he that was a student and is now a
+master will of necessity be a teacher, and feel impelled to deduce
+forces from phenomena, laws from forces, the eternal from the earthly.
+From vacant contemplation he had risen to passionate creation, to active
+creation of art. The supreme creation of art has ever been the
+converting of the unconscious into consciousness, the recognition and
+knowledge of the laws of art; from the real the path proceeds to that
+which transcends reality, to faith and to religion. Like every really
+organic poet, Verhaeren has had to repeat the ascent of universal
+history in his own evolution.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Albert Mockel, _Emile Verhaeren_.
+
+
+
+
+SYNTHESES
+
+     Réunir notre esprit et le monde
+     Dans les deux mains d'une très simple loi profonde.
+                                       É.V., 'L'Attente.'
+
+
+After the great visions of the cities, after the wonderful
+interpretations of democracy, there was a moment of appeasement in
+Verhaeren's work--a lyrical intermezzo of little books: an almanac of
+the months unfolding in short poems, the cosy happiness of wedded love
+enshrined in grateful song, the legends of Flanders told in richly
+coloured pictures, and then, in the great pentalogy _Toute la Flandre_,
+the cities, coasts, heroes, and great men of his native province
+compressed in one single picture. But after that Verhaeren takes up once
+again his old path across the earth; passes again through the roaring
+cities, the pregnant fields; wanders along the sea-shore; once again
+through the landscapes of _Les Flamandes_ and _Les Moines_, of _Les
+Villes Tentaculaires_ and _Les Campagnes Hallucinées_. It is now the
+return of the spiral in Goethe's sense of evolution; the return to the
+same point, but on a higher level, with a loftier outlook, in a narrower
+circle, and for that reason nearer to the last, the highest point. Once
+again Verhaeren surveys the modern world: now, however, with different
+eyes, which no longer remain resting on the aspect of the world, but
+press farther to the cause of all. What he had formerly seen sensuously,
+the things whose values he had æsthetically estimated and transmuted, he
+now looks at from the intellectual side, that he may estimate their
+value morally. He no longer sees each thing separately, no longer adds
+picture to picture, vision to vision, like a game of coloured cards: he
+now unites them in one living chain. He no longer searches through
+individual and detached phenomena; he now sees them together against the
+background of his lofty intention to weld them into one single picture.
+Now he composes, not individual poems, but fragments of his world-poem.
+For, from the time that Verhaeren began to look at things with conscious
+enthusiasm, they assumed different forms. The straining of his epoch no
+longer seems to him to be a solitary manifestation of energy, but only a
+Protean form of the eternal discharge of vigour; the will to life no
+longer seems to him to be the deed of individual men, but the vitalised
+primitive will of all humanity. And so, just as of old he attempted in
+his vision a synthesis of energies, he now sees laws flowing into one
+supreme and highest thing, into a cosmic law.
+
+Lyric exaltation now arches the dream of its laws over reality. But it
+is no longer the mere dream of a youth in expectancy of life--the
+anæmic, vague, dark, restless dream--but a man's longing to get behind
+life and follow it to its earthly limit. It is a Utopia enhancing
+realities beyond themselves; it is the dream of Godhead in things. In
+the whole world Verhaeren sees a cosmic effort. 'Le monde est trépidant
+de trains et de navires.'[1] The whole world is excited with human
+activity and effort; manifestations of the feeling of life flame
+everywhere; everywhere humanity is fighting for something invisible and
+perhaps unattainable. But whereas of old the poet estimated the value of
+every separate energy, now he comprehends all energies as one uniform
+manifestation, recognises behind the unconscious activity of the
+individual the sway of something greater--the bourne of all humanity.
+All who work in the material of the temporal only symbolise eternal
+forces--intoxication, energy, conquest, joy, error, expectation, Utopia.
+And it is to these forces, or rather to these forms of the force at the
+root of all things, that his poems are addressed. In _Les Visages de la
+Vie_ he seeks to describe yearning in all its forms and aims; its
+distribution in human labour, its restlessness, its vigour, and, above
+all, its beauty. But not only human manifestations now appear to him in
+a closer cohesion, the synthesis of realism and metaphysics now makes
+his relationship to elementary things richer and more heroic. Now, when
+he treats some motive he had already treated in the first books, and
+these poems of the first and last periods are compared, it is with
+astonishment and admiration that you trace the silent growth of these
+last years. I will mention one example. He had already sung a song to
+the wind. But the wind at that time was to him the evil storm that
+tousles cottages, shakes chimneys, forces its way into rooms, rages
+across country, and brings the winter. It was a senseless power,
+beautiful in its senselessness, but aimless, an incomprehensible
+element, a detached phenomenon of Nature. Now, however, the poet in his
+maturity looks upon it as the wanderer over the undying world, one that
+has seen all countries, that drives ships over seas, that has sated
+itself with the perfume of strange flowers and brings it from far away,
+that penetrates our chest like an aroma and steels and expands it. Now
+he loves the wind as one of the thousand things of the earth which
+contribute to the intensification of his vital feeling.
+
+     Si j'aime, admire et chante avec folie,
+     Le vent,
+            *       *       *       *       *
+     C'est qu'il grandit mon être entier et c'est qu'avant
+     De s'infiltrer, par mes poumons et par mes pores,
+     Jusques au sang dont vit mon corps,
+     Avec sa force rude ou sa douceur profonde,
+     Immensément, il a étreint le monde.[2]
+
+So, too, a tree becomes to him the image of the eternal renewal of
+strength, of resistance to the hardness of winter and of fate, of the
+will to new beauty in the spring. A mountain no longer appears to him as
+a chance raising of the landscape, but a great and mighty thing in whose
+keeps secrets lie, ores, and the source of springs, from whose summit,
+however, our eyes can sweep the world. The forest interprets itself to
+him as the labyrinth of a thousand paths, and as the many-voiced anthem
+of life: everything in nature becomes a freshening and a vivifying of
+this vitality. _An absolute transmutation of values has taken place from
+the time that he has comprehended things as parts of the world's entity,
+and as themselves an entity_. Travel, formerly a flight from reality,
+now becomes to him the opening out of new distances, of new
+possibilities; dream appears to him no longer as an illusion, but as the
+capacity of intensifying the real from its present to a future state.
+Europe is no longer to him a group of nations, a geographical idea, but
+the great symbol of conquest, money, gold, he no longer regards
+contemptuously as a materialising of life, but as a new spur for new
+ambition. And the sea, which in every succeeding work of his sings its
+unquiet rhythm, is no longer the murderous power that eats into the
+land, but the holy tide, the symbol of constant strength in eternal
+unrest; it is to him 'la mer nue et pure, comme une idée.'[3] Since
+everything coheres, he feels related to all in a touching brotherhood
+with things; he no longer feels the presence of things, he loves them
+like a piece of himself; he feels the sea physically in himself
+
+     Ma peau, mes mains et mes cheveux
+     Sentent la mer
+     Et sa couleur est dans mes yeux.[4]
+
+And so, just as his vital feeling is renewed every time he comes into
+contact with the waves, he believes in a physical resurrection of the
+body out of the sea, believes that his rising from the water is a
+_nouveau moment de conscience_. Verhaeren has returned to the great
+cohesion: in Nature and in man there is no longer for him any phenomenon
+which might not become a symbol for him, a symbol of the great vital
+instinct, to stimulate and fire his vitality.
+
+And since he now responds to all things with this one feeling, a uniform
+conception of the world must involuntarily result from this unity of
+feeling. _To the unity of enthusiasm corresponds the unity of the world,
+the monistic feeling_. Just as he himself derives nothing but an
+intensification and exaltation of his feelings from all things, nothing
+but the very sensation of life, all phenomena and activities must be a
+synthesis, all forces must flow into one single force as rivers flow
+into the ocean, all laws must merge in one single law
+
+     Toute la vie, avec ses lois, avec ses formes,
+     --Multiples doigts noueux de quelque main énorme--
+     S'entr'ouvre et se referme en un poing: l'unité.[5]
+
+And thus, this straining of all humanity, discharged in a thousand
+forms, must be something in common, a fight against something lying
+outside of itself, against a resistance which still makes life seem
+hard, dull, and turbid. This fight of humanity cannot be other than
+directed against something that impedes the sensation of life. And this,
+the only thing which struggles against humanity, is in Verhaeren's eyes
+the supremacy of Nature, the mystery of divine intervention, the
+subjection of man to fate--in short, all divinity that does not reside
+in man. As soon as man is dependent on nobody except himself and his own
+strength, he too will attain the great joyousness of all the things of
+Nature.
+
+_This fight of man to become God, this fight for his independence, his
+freedom from chance and the supernatural--this is the great metaphysical
+idea of Verhaeren's work_. His last books seek to represent nothing else
+than this one highest battle of man, this struggle to be free from all
+that is laid upon him, not by himself, but by Nature, from all that
+impedes his will to become a thing of Nature, an elementary force,
+himself. This struggle is the highest and purest effort, for
+
+     Rien n'est plus haut, malgré l'angoisse et le tourment,
+     Que la bataille avec l'énigme et les ténèbres.[6]
+
+Man in this battle defends himself against darkness, against what is
+unknown, against Heaven, against all laws that restrict his expansion;
+the whole aim of man, the aim he has unconsciously been following for a
+thousand years, is independence, is to become a law unto himself:
+
+     L'homme dans l'univers n'a qu'un maître, lui-même,
+     Et l'univers entier est ce maître, dans lui.[7]
+
+To-day he is still counteracted by chance, or, as many conceive it, by
+divinity. Wholly to conquer this, to substitute the determination of
+one's own destiny for chance, will be the great task of the future. Much
+has been taken from chance already. Lightning, the most dangerous power
+of heaven, is conquered; distances are bridged over; the forms of Nature
+are changed; social communities have by common action diverted the
+iniquity of the weather; diseases are from year to year being fathomed
+and checked; more and more every incalculable element is being brought
+within the range of calculation and fore-sight. But all that is unknown
+must more and more be the booty of man, whose highest will is 'fouiller
+l'inconnu.'[8] More and more his eyes penetrate the subterranean and
+mysterious workings of Nature.
+
+     Or aujourd'hui c'est la réalité
+     Secrète encor, mais néanmoins enclose
+     Au cours perpétuel et rythmique des choses,
+
+     Qu'on veut, avec ténacité,
+     Saisir, pour ordonner la vie et sa beauté
+     Selon les causes.[9]
+
+For this battle everybody is a soldier in man's war of liberation, all
+of us stand invisibly ranked together. Everybody who wrests from Nature
+in increment to knowledge, who does something never done before,
+everybody who by poetry fires others to action, tears off a piece of the
+veil. With every step forward that man takes against the dark, with
+every foot of ground he conquers, divinity loses strength to him; and
+this will go on until at length nothing remains of the God of old, until
+the identity of the two ideas humanity and divinity is unconsciously
+accomplished.
+
+     Héros, savant, artiste, apôtre, aventurier,
+     Chacun troue à son tour le mur noir des mystères
+     Et, grâce à ces labeurs groupés et solitaires,
+     L'être nouveau se sent l'univers tout entier.
+
+Seen from this height, professions assume a new poetic value. In the
+front rank of fighting men Verhaeren sees those the effort of whose life
+it is to acquire knowledge--the men of science. Verhaeren is perhaps the
+only one among modern poets who has conceived of science as of perfectly
+equal value with poetry, _who has discovered new moral and religious
+values in science, just as he had already discovered new æsthetic values
+in industrialism and democracy_. Most poets had hitherto looked upon
+science as a hindrance, because they were afraid of clear things as they
+were afraid of real things. They looked upon science as the destroyer of
+myths, the negation of every noble superstition which in their eyes was
+indissolubly connected with the poetical. But just as machinery seemed
+to them to be ugly, because in the machines they saw beauty had
+retreated from the outer to the interior form, here too the new ethical
+value is hidden not in the method but in the aim. Verhaeren esteems
+science as the great fighter for the new conception of the world: 'Le
+monde entier est repensé par leurs cervelles.'[10] He knows that the
+little increments to knowledge which are continually being made in our
+days in thousands of places, in sanatoria and lecture-rooms,
+observatories and studies, with microscopes and chemical analyses,
+weighing and calculation, with measures and numbers, that these little
+additions to knowledge may, by comparison and reproduction, grow into
+great creative discoveries which will immensely enrich our vital
+feeling. And this hymn to science is at the same time a hymn to our
+epoch; for no epoch before ours has so consciously bought for the
+advancement of knowledge, none has been so replete with the longing for
+new knowledge and the transmutation of values:
+
+     L'acharnement à tout peser, à tout savoir
+     Fouille la forêt drue et mouvante des êtres.[11]
+
+In inspired words Verhaeren celebrates science as the highest effort of
+our age as of the past; for he knows that what to us to-day is
+presupposed and self-evident was a thousand years-ago the goal of the
+most ardent effort, that the road we pace indolently to-day is soaked
+with the blood of martyrs.
+
+     Dites! quels temps versés au gouffre des années,
+     Et quelle angoisse ou quel espoir des destinées,
+     Et quels cerveaux chargés de noble lassitude
+     A-t-il fallu pour faire un peu de certitude?
+            *       *       *       *       *
+     Dites! les feux et les bûchers; dites! les claies;
+     Les regards fous, en des visages d'effroi blanc;
+     Dites! les corps martyrisés, dites! les plaies
+     Criant la vérité, avec leur bouche en sang.[12]
+
+But he knows equally well that the acquisitions of to-day are again only
+hypotheses for the new truths of to-morrow. Error is inevitable, but
+even error opens out new ways. In the beautiful idea of Brezina, the
+Czech poet, all ideal aims are floating islands that recede as we
+approach them. The highest aim is in effort itself, in the life which
+effort intensifies. Verhaeren's optimism here guards his marches against
+banality, for he is sufficient of a mystic to know that it is the
+unknowable and the inaccessible that lend all things their impenetrable
+beauty. But the knowledge of this must not scare enthusiasm away:
+
+     Partons quand même, avec notre âme inassouvie,
+     Puisque la force et que la vie
+     Sont au delà des vérités et des erreurs.[13]
+
+What if a few last things remain eternally inscrutable: 'plutôt que d'en
+peupler les coins par des chimères, nous préférons ne point savoir.'[14]
+Rather a world without gods than one with false gods, rather incomplete
+knowledge than false knowledge.
+
+Here, where the heroes of science reach the limits of what is possible
+to them, a new group must stand by their side and help them in their
+work. These are the poets, who preach faith where knowledge ends. They
+must find the synthesis between science and religion, between the
+earthly and the divine, the new synthesis--_religious confidence in
+science_. Their optimism must force their fellow-men to have faith in
+science, as in earlier days they had faith in gods: though proofs fail
+them, they must demand from this new religion what the early fathers
+demanded for the old religion. And he himself, Verhaeren, he who
+once--here again a bitter 'no' is turned into an exulting 'yes'--said in
+his beginnings
+
+     Toute science enferme au fond d'elle le doute,
+     Comme une mère enceinte étreint un enfant mort,[15]
+
+he himself is to-day the first of confident enthusiasts. Where
+individual minds are still at war--
+
+     'Oh! ces luttes là-haut entre ces dieux humains![16]--
+
+where their knowledge has not yet found a bridge, poets must with
+enthusiasm and confidence surmise a path. They must link law with
+perception; and in the same measure as the scientists have by knowledge
+fed their enthusiasm, they in their turn must feed knowledge by their
+confidence. If they have no proofs of actualities, their faith dowers
+them with the confidence to say, 'nous croyons déjà ce que les autres
+sauront.'[17] They scent and surmise new things before they are born;
+they trust hypotheses before they are proved. Already,
+
+     Pendant que disputent et s'embrouillent encor,
+     À coups de textes morts
+     Et de dogmes, les sages,[18]
+
+they hear the hovering wings of the new truth. They already believe in
+what later generations will know; they derive vital joy from what their
+descendants will be the first to possess. They doubt in nothing; not
+that man will conquer the air, quell disease, make life cheerful and
+easier; they do not despair in progress, and in their ecstasy they leap
+over all obstacles. 'Le cri de Faust n'est plus le nôtre';[19] the
+question as to 'yes' and 'no' has long since been joyfully answered in
+the affirmative, exults the poet; we no longer hesitate between the
+possibility and the impossibility of knowledge, we believe in it, and
+faith and confidence is already the highest knowledge of life. In this
+optimism of poets other discoverers of knowledge must now fulfil their
+growth, from these dreams they must derive strength for their activity;
+all men must in this way complete one another, that it may be possible
+for them to beleaguer darkness, perfect the conquest of God, and
+
+     Emprisonner quand même, un jour, l'éternité,
+     Dans le gel blanc d'une immobile vérité.[20]
+
+For this new truth, the Man-God whom they are to discover, poets and
+scholars are the new saints; and his servants are all those whose brows
+are fiery with the fever of work, whose hands are scorched with
+experiments, whose nerves are strained by constant effort, whose eyes
+are fatigued by books. To all of these Verhaeren's hymn is addressed:
+
+     Qu'ils soient sacrés par les foules, ces hommes
+     Qui scrutèrent les faits pour en tirer les lois.[21]
+
+But still farther reaches Verhaeren's enthusiasm for those who help in
+the new work, for the 'saccageurs d'infini.'[22] Not only the thinker
+and the poet extend the horizon of life, but each one also who creates
+and is in any way at work. Only the man who creates is really alive and
+really a man--'seul existe qui crée.'[23] And so his hymn is likewise
+addressed to those who toil with their hands, to those who, without
+knowing the aim, toil stolidly day by day in mines and fields; for they
+too build the face of the earth, create mountains where there were none,
+rear lights by the sea's marge, construct machines and the huge
+telescopes that pry on the heavens: all of them forge the tools of
+knowledge and prepare the new era. Merchants who send across the ocean
+ships that spin threads from farthest shore to shore, they too weave the
+net of the great unity; traders who spread gold, who quicken the
+circulation of the world's blood, they too co-operate in the battle
+waged with the dark. It is their league and union which, first of all,
+gives humanity its great strength; they all prepare the hour, the
+moment, which must inevitably come.
+
+     Il viendra l'instant, où tant d'efforts savants et ingénus,
+     Tant de génie et de cerveaux tendus vers l'inconnu,
+     Quand même, auront bâti sur des bases profondes
+     Et jaillissant au ciel, la synthèse du monde![24]
+
+Here in fiery dawns glimmer the days of the future. Tens of thousands
+will struggle, will prepare, until at last the one man comes who shall
+lay the last stone of the edifice, 'le tranquille rebelle,'[25] the
+Christ of this new religion.
+
+     C'est que celui qu'on attendait n'est point venu,
+     Celui que la nature entière
+     Suscitera un jour, âme et rose trémière,
+     Sous les soleils puissants non encore connus;
+     C'est que la race ardente et fine,
+     Dont il sera la fleur,
+     N'a point multiplié ses milliers de racines
+     Jusqu'au tréfonds des profondeurs.[26]
+
+For here in Verhaeren's work this vision arises fervent and glowing.
+Incessantly man proceeds on the path of his destiny. Once his whole
+world was replete with divinity, 'jadis tout l'inconnu était peuplé de
+dieux';[27] then one single God took right and might into His hand; but
+now, by means of his strength and passion, man has wrested, year by
+year, one secret after the other from this Unknown Power. More and more
+he has conquered chance by laws, faith by knowledge, fear by safety;
+more and more the power of the gods glides insensibly into his hands,
+more and more he determines his own life; and the process will continue
+till he is in every respect the captain of his fate; he is less and less
+subject to laws he has not himself established; more and more Nature's
+slave becomes her lord.
+
+     Races, régnez: puisque par vous la volonté du sort
+     Devient de plus en plus la volonté humaine.[28]
+
+Gods will become men; exterior fate will return into their bosom; the
+saints will henceforth be only their brothers; and Paradise will be the
+earth itself. Most beautifully Verhaeren has expressed this idea in one
+of his latest books,[29] in the symbol of Adam and Eve. Eve, expelled
+from the Garden of Eden, one day finds its doors open again. But she
+does not re-enter it, for her highest joy, her Paradise, is now in
+activity and the pleasure of the earth. Zest in existence, in life, joy
+of the earth, has never been more strongly and burningly exalted than in
+this symbol; never has the hymn of humanity been sung with greater
+fervour than by this poet--perhaps because he had denied life more
+wildly and more obstinately than any other. Here all contrasts sing
+together in a harmony without a flaw; the last enmity between man and
+Nature here becomes the ecstatic feeling of man's godhead.
+
+And strange to say, here the circle of life returns to itself. The books
+of the poet's old age return to the days of his youth, to the school
+benches in Ghent where Maeterlinck also sat, the other great Fleming.
+Both, who lost themselves there, have found themselves again on the
+heights of life in their conception of the world, for Maeterlinck's
+highest teaching also (in his book _Wisdom and Destiny_) is, that all
+fate is locked up in man himself, that it is man's highest evolution,
+his highest duty, to conquer fate, all that lies outside him, God. This
+profound thought, which has thus twice in our days blossomed forth from
+Flemish soil, has been achieved on different paths. Maeterlinck has
+found it by listening to the mysticism of silence, Verhaeren by
+listening to the noise of life. He has found his new God not in the
+darkness of dreams but in the light of streets, in all places where men
+bestir themselves, and where from heavy hours the trembling flower of
+joy is born.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'La Conquête' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[2] 'À la Gloire du Vent' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[3] 'L'Eau' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[4] 'Au Bord du Quai' (_Ibid._)
+
+[5] 'La Conquête' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_)
+
+[6] 'Les Cultes' (_Ibid._)
+
+[7] 'Les Villes' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[8] 'La Ferreur' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[9] 'Vers le Futur' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[10] 'La Conquête' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[11] 'Vers le Futur' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[12] 'La Recherche' (_Ibid._).
+
+[13] 'L'Erreur' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[14] 'La Ferveur' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[15] 'Méditation' (_Les Moines_).
+
+[16] 'Les Penseurs' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[17] 'La Science' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[18] 'L'Action' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[19] 'La Science' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[20] 'Les Penseurs' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[21] 'La Science' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[22] 'Les Penseurs' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[23] 'La Mort' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[24] 'La Recherche' (_Les Villes Tentaculaires_).
+
+[25] 'L'Attente' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[26] 'L'Attente' (_Les Visages de la Vie_).
+
+[27] 'La Folie' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+[28] (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
+
+[29] _Les Rythmes Souverains._
+
+
+
+
+THE ETHICS OF FERVOUR
+
+     La vie est à monter et non pas à descendre.
+                                  É.V., 'Les Rêves,'
+
+     Il faut admirer tout pour s'exalter soi-même
+     Et se dresser plus haut que ceux qui out vécu.
+                                  É.V., 'La Vie.'
+
+The metaphysical ideal crystallised by Verhaeren from his contemplation
+of life, which was at first wildly passionate, but then more and more
+synoptical and logical, has been called unity. He has himself recently,
+in answer to a question submitted to various men of letters, confirmed
+this conception as part of his programme. 'It seems to me,' he says,
+'that poetry is bound ere long to be merged in a very clear Pantheism.
+More and more the unity of the world is admitted by upright and healthy
+minds. That old dualism between the soul and the body, between God and
+the universe, is becoming effaced. Man is a fragment of the architecture
+of the world. He understands and is conscious of the entity of which he
+is a part.... He feels that he is encompassed and dominated, while at
+the same time he himself encompasses and dominates. By reason of his own
+miracles he is becoming, in some sort, that personal God that his
+ancestors believed in. Now I ask, is it possible that lyric exaltation
+should long remain indifferent to such an unchaining of human power,
+should hesitate to celebrate such a vast spectacle of grandeur? The poet
+of to-day has only to surrender himself to what he sees, hears,
+imagines, conjectures, for works to be born of his heart and brain that
+are young, vibrating, and new.'[1] But he who would build up the whole
+image must not make a halt at this stage of knowledge: over against the
+logical ordering of external things he must set another of inward
+things; against the knowledge of life he must set the feeling of life.
+He must set up an ethical ideal as well as a metaphysical ideal, a
+commandment of life corresponding to his law of life.
+
+But great poets never discover a standard of life, a moral precept,
+which is not a reflex of the law of their own inner nature. Many
+possibilities of contemplation are open to the thinker, to the quiet
+observer; to the poet however, to the lyrist, only a poetic philosophy
+of life is possible, a contemplation lyrically exalted. Whereas the
+philosopher can attain the knowledge of unity by measurement and
+calculation, by a perception and calm computation of forces, a poet can
+discover the evolution of things in the direction of harmony and unity
+only in his ecstasy, only in an exalted state of enthusiasm. He will
+perforce recognise a commandment for the whole world in his own
+enthusiasm, and in his lyric ecstasy a moral demand of life. 'Toute la
+vie est dans l'essor,' for the poet all life is in ecstasy. And just as
+Verhaeren never described things in a state of rest, so too his
+comprehension of the universe is never conceivable except in the
+permanently exalted state of the unrest of joy and motion.
+
+Verhaeren's relationship to the world around him was ever passionate. He
+has always approached things feverishly, as a lover approaches the woman
+he desires. Only what he has won by fighting has the value to him of a
+possession. Things do not belong to us as long as we pass them by, as
+long as we only look at them with unfeeling and cold eyes as though they
+were a scene in a play, a walking picture. To feel the connection
+between them and us, between the world and the poet, between man and
+man, to pass over from the purely contemplative state to the assessment
+of values, we must enter into some personal relationship of sympathy or
+antipathy. Verhaeren's first crisis had taught him that negation is
+sterile, and his recovery had then shown him that only assent,
+acceptance, affection, and enthusiasm can place us in a real
+relationship with things.
+
+     Pour vivre clair, ferme et juste,
+     Avec mon coeur, 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 coeur;
+     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 coeurs 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 coeur 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 coeur 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 coeur 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 coeurs 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 coeur 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 coeur 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 coeur 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.
+
+Now, of all the poets of our day Verhaeren is the one who has felt this
+feeling of responsibility most strongly. To write poetry is for him to
+express not himself only, but the striving and straining of the whole
+period as well, the fearful torment and the happiness that are in the
+birth of the new things. Just because his work comprises all the present
+and aims at expressing it in its entity, he feels himself responsible to
+the future. For him a true poet must visualise the whole psychic care of
+his time. For when later generations--in the same manner as they will
+question monuments concerning our art, pictures concerning our painters,
+social forms concerning our philosophers--ask of the verses and the
+works of our contemporaries the question, What was your hope, your
+feeling, the sum of your interpretation? how did you feel cities and
+men, things and gods?--shall we be able to answer them? This is the
+inner question of Verhaeren's artistic responsibility. _And this
+feeling of responsibility has made his work great_. Most of the poets of
+our day have been unconcerned with reality. Some of them strike up a
+dancing measure, rouse and amuse people lounging in theatres; others
+again tell of their own sorrow, ask for pity and compassion, they who
+have never felt for others. Verhaeren, however, heedless of the approval
+or disapproval of our time, turns his face towards the generations to
+be:
+
+     Celui qui me lira dans les siècles, un soir,
+     Troublant mes vers, sous leur sommeil ou sous leur cendre,
+     Et ranimant leur sens lointain pour mieux comprendre
+     Comment ceux d'aujourd'hui s'étaient armés d'espoir,
+     Qu'il sache, avec quel violent élan, ma joie
+     S'est, à travers les cris, les révoltes, les pleurs,
+     Ruée au combat fier et mâle des douleurs,
+     Pour en tirer l'amour, comme on conquiert sa proie.[1]
+
+It was, in the last instance, this magnificent feeling of responsibility
+which did not permit him to pass by any manifestation of our present
+time without observing and appreciating it, for he knows that later
+generations will ask the question how we sensed the new thing, which to
+them is a possession and a matter of course, when it was still strange
+and almost hostile. His work is the answer. The true poet of to-day, in
+Verhaeren's eyes, must show forth the torment and the trouble of the
+whole psychic transition, the painful discovery of the new beauty in the
+new things, the revolt, the crisis, the struggles it costs to
+understand all this, to adapt ourselves to it, and in the end to love
+it. Verhaeren has attempted to express our whole time in its earthly,
+its material, its psychic form. His verses lyrically represent Europe at
+the turning of the century, us and our time; they consciously
+contemplate the whole circuit of the things of life: _they write a lyric
+encyclopædia of our time, the intellectual atmosphere of Europe at the
+turning of the twentieth century._
+
+The whole of Europe speaks with his voice, speaks with a voice that
+reaches beyond our time; and already from the whole of Europe comes the
+answer. In Belgium Verhaeren is above all the national poet, the poet of
+heaths, cities, dunes, and of the Flemish past, the great renewer of the
+national pride. But he stands too near his fellow-countrymen to be
+measured at his full height there. And in France, too, very few
+appreciate him at his true value. Most people regard him there in his
+literary aspect only and as a symbolist and decadent, an innovator of
+verse, an audacious and gifted revolutionary. But very few perceive the
+new and important work that is built up in his verses, very few
+comprehend the entity and the logical character of his cosmic
+philosophy. Nevertheless, his influence is already tangible. The new
+rhythm he has created can be recognised in many poets; and such a gifted
+disciple as Jules Romains has even brought his idea of the feeling of
+cities to new impressiveness. Best of all, however, he is understood by
+those Frenchmen who stand in a mystic communion with all that is great
+and urgent abroad; who feel an ethical need, a longing for an inner
+transmutation of values, for a re-moulding of races, for cosmopolitanism
+and a union of the nations; so, above all, Léon Bazalgette, who revealed
+Walt Whitman, the prophet of all strong and conscious reality in art, to
+France. Most joyfully of all, however, the answer rings from those
+countries which are themselves involved in deep-seated social and
+ethical crises, those countries where the need of religion is a vital
+instinct, which are eternally hungry for God, above all from Russia and
+Germany. In Russia the poet of _Les Villes Tentaculaires_ is celebrated
+as he is nowhere else. As the poet of social innovations he is read in
+the Russian universities, and in the circles of the intellectuals he is
+regarded as the spiritual pioneer of our time. Brjussow, the
+distinguished young poet, has translated him, and afforded him the
+possibility of popularity. In other Slavonic countries, too, his work is
+beginning to spread.
+
+Verhaeren's success, one may well say triumph, has been strongest and
+most impressive in Germany; here it has been unexpectedly intensive even
+to us who have worked for it. A few years have sufficed to make him as
+popular here I as any native poet, and the most beautiful feature of
+his success is this, that people are already forgetting to look upon him
+as a foreigner. Verhaeren is to-day part and parcel of German culture;
+and much of our contemporary lyric poetry, its welcome turning to
+optimism for example, would be unthinkable but for his work and
+influence. Countless are the essays devoted to him, the recitations in
+which our best elocutionists--Kainz, Moissi, Kayssler, Heine, Wiecke,
+Durieux, Rosen, Gregori--have taken part; none of these interpreters,
+however, were as enthusiastically applauded as was Verhaeren himself on
+his _tournée_ in Germany, which was a great experience no less for him
+than for our public, because he gladly felt that his work was now rooted
+for ever in German soil. In Scandinavia, where Johannes V. Jensen in his
+essays unconsciously transcribed Verhaeren's lyric work, Ellen Key, the
+inspired prophetess of the feeling of life, has hailed him as she has
+hailed no other, and Georg Brandes, who crowns poets, has welcomed him
+with loud acclaim. Incessantly, in an irresistible, sure ascent,
+Verhaeren's fame grows. And above all, his poetry is no longer regarded
+as an individual thing, but as a work, as a cosmic philosophy, as an
+answer to the questions of our time, as the strongest and most beautiful
+enrichment of our vital feeling. Wherever people are tired of pessimism,
+tired of confused mysticism, and tired of monistic shallowness; wherever
+a longing stirs for a pure idealistic form of contemplation, for a new
+reconciliation between our new realities and the old reverence for
+eternal secrets, for the secularisation of the divine, his name stands
+in the front rank. An answer comes from every direction, not because his
+work was a question, but because it was in itself an answer to the
+unconscious demand for a new community, a demand which is being made by
+men of all nations everywhere to-day.
+
+But all this is only a beginning. Works like his, which are not
+paradoxical enough, not dazzling enough, to produce sudden ecstasies and
+literary fashions; which, by the mere fact that they have themselves
+grown organically into existence, can only grow organically, but for
+that reason irresistibly, in their influence; only lay hold of the
+masses slowly. Only later generations will enjoy the fruit which we,
+with renewed admiration, have seen ripening from the most modest of
+blossoms. But already a ring of men of all nations are joining hands, a
+ring of men who perceive a new centre of spirituality in Verhaeren. And
+we, the few who have wholly surrendered ourselves to his work, must
+appreciate it with that feeling only which he himself has taught us as
+the highest feeling of life--with enthusiasm, with gratitude ever
+renewed, and with joyful admiration. For to whom in our days should one
+offer more abundantly and stormily this new vital doctrine of enthusiasm
+as the happiest feeling than to Verhaeren, to him who was the first to
+wrest it in the bitterest struggles from the depths of our time, who was
+the first to shape it in the material of art, the first to raise it to
+the eternal law of life?
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'Un Soir' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+
+I. LES FLAMANDES, poèmes. Bruxelles, Hochsteyn, 1883. LES CONTES DE
+MINUIT, prose. Bruxelles (Collection de la 'Jeune Belgique'), Franck,
+1885.
+
+JOSEPH HEYMANS, PEINTRE, critique. Bruxelles (_Société Nouvelle_), 1885.
+
+II. LES MOINES, poèmes. Paris, Lemerre, 1886.
+
+FERNAND KHNOPFF, critique. Bruxelles (_Société Nouvelle_), 1886.
+
+III. Au BORD DE LA ROUTE, poèmes. Liège (_La Wallonie_), 1891.
+
+IV. LES SOIRS, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman, 1887.
+
+V. LES DÉBÂCLES, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman, 1888.
+
+VI. LES FLAMBEAUX NOIRS, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman, 1890.
+
+VII. LES VILLAGES ILLUSOIRES, poèmes, illustrés par Georges Minne.
+Bruxelles, Deman, 1895.
+
+VIII. LES APPARUS DANS MES CHEMINS, poèmes. Bruxelles, Lacomblez, 1891.
+
+LES CAMPAGNES HALLUCINÉES, poèmes, ornementés par T. van Rysselberghe.
+Bruxelles, Deman, 1893.
+
+ALMANACH, poèmes, illustrés par T. van Rysselberghe. Bruxelles,
+Dietrich, 1895.
+
+POÈMES (1e série, i., ii., iii.). Paris, Mercure de France, 1895.
+
+LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES, poèmes, couverture et ornementation par T. van
+Rysselberghe. Bruxelles, Deman, 1896.
+
+POÈMES (2e série, iv., v., vi.). Paris, Mercure de France, 1896.
+
+LES HEURES CLAIRES, poèmes, ornementés par T. van Rysselberghe.
+Bruxelles, Deman, 1896.
+
+ÉMILE VERHAEREN, 1883-1896, portrait par T. van Rysselberghe.
+[Bruxelles, Deman, 1896.] (An anthology, 'pour les amis du poète,')
+
+LES AUBES, drame lyrique en 4 actes, ornementé par T. van Rysselberghe.
+Bruxelles, Deman, 1898.
+
+ESPAÇA NEGRA, NOTAS DE VIAJE. Barcelona, Pedro Ortega, 1899.
+
+LES VISAGES DE LA VIE, poèmes, ornementés par T. van Rysselberghe.
+Bruxelles, Deman, 1899.
+
+POÈMES (3e série, vii., viii., _Les Vignes de ma Muraille_). Paris,
+Mercure de France, 1899.
+
+LE CLOÎTRE, drame en 4 actes, prose et vers, ornementé par T. van
+Rysselberghe. Bruxelles, Deman, 1900.
+
+PETITES LÉGENDES, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman, 1900.
+
+LES PETITS VIEUX. London, Hacon & Ricketts, 1901.
+
+PHILIPPE H., tragédie en 3 actes, vers et prose. Paris, Mercure de
+France, 1901.
+
+LES FORCES TUMULTUEUSES, poèmes. Paris, Mercure de France, 1902.
+
+LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES, précédées des _Campagnes Hallucinées,_ poèmes.
+Paris, Mercure de France, 1904.
+
+TOUTE LA FLANDRE: _Les Tendresses Premières_, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman,
+1904.
+
+LES HEURES D'APRÈS-MIDI, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman, 1905.
+
+REMBRANDT, étude. Paris, Henri Laurens [1905].
+
+IMAGES JAPONAISES, texte d'É. V ..., illustrations de Kwassou. Tokio,
+1906.
+
+LA MULTIPLE SPLENDEUR, poèmes. Paris, Mercure de France, 1906.
+
+TOUTE LA FLANDRE: _La Guirlande des Dunes_, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman,
+1907.
+
+LES LETTRES FRANÇAISES EN BELGIQUE. Bruxelles, Lamertin, 1907.
+
+LES VISAGES DE LA VIE (_Les Visages de la Vie, Les douze Mois_), poèmes,
+nouvelle édition. Paris, Mercure de France, 1908.
+
+TOUTE LA FLANDRE: _Les Héros_. Bruxelles, Deman, 1908.
+
+JAMES ENSOR, étude. Bruxelles, E. van Oest, 1908.
+
+TOUTE LA FLANDRE: _Les Villes à Pignons_. Bruxelles, Deman, 1909.
+
+HELENAS HEIMKEHR. Leipzig, Insel-Verlag, 1909. (Translation by Stefan
+Zweig of _Hélène de Sparte_.)
+
+DEUX DRAMES: LE CLOÎTRE, PHILIPPE II. Paris, Mercure de France, 1909.
+
+LES RYTHMES SOUVERAINS, poèmes. Paris, Mercure de France, 1910.
+
+PIERRE-PAUL RUBENS. Brussels, G. van Oest & Cie., 1910.
+
+LES HEURES DU SOIR. Leipzig, Insel-Verlag, 1911.
+
+HÉLÈNE DE SPARTE, tragédie en 4 actes. Paris, 'Nouvelle Revue
+Française,' 1912.
+
+TOUTE LA FLANDRE: _Les Plaines_. Bruxelles, Deman, 1911.
+
+LES BLÉS MOUVANTS, poèmes. Paris, Crès, 1912.
+
+LES VILLAGES ILLUSOIRES, avec 15 gravures à l'eau forte par Henry Ramah.
+Leipzig, Insel-Verlag, 1913.
+
+RUBENS. Leipzig, Insel-Verlag, 1913.
+
+LES BLÉS MOUVANTS, poèmes. Paris, Mercure de France, 1913.
+
+OEUVRES D'ÉMILE VERHAEREN (IV., V., VI., VII., VIII., _Les Vignes de
+ma Muraille_). Paris, Mercure de France, 1914.
+
+
+
+TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH
+
+THE DAWN (_Les Aubes_), by Émile Verhaeren, translated by Arthur Symons.
+London, Duckworth, 1898.
+
+POEMS BY ÉMILE VERHAEREN, selected and rendered into English by Alma
+Strettel. London, John Lane, 1899.
+
+CONTEMPORARY BELGIAN POETRY, selected and translated by Jethro Bithell.
+('Canterbury Poets' series.) London, Walter Scott, 1911. (60 pp. are
+translations of Verhaeren's poems.)
+
+
+
+CRITICISMS
+
+
+BOOKS
+
+Bazalgette, Léon: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Paris, Sansot, 1907. (One of the
+series 'Les Célébrités d'aujourd'hui.')
+
+Beaunier, André: LA POÉSIE NOUVELLE. Paris, Mercure de France, 1902.
+
+Bersaucourt, Albert de: CONFÉRENCE SUR ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Paris, Jouve,
+1908.
+
+Bever, Ad. van, et Paul Léautaud: POÈTES D'AUJOURD'HUI, nouvelle
+édition, tome 2. Paris, Mercure de France, 1909.
+
+Boer, Julius de: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. [1907.] (One of the series 'Mannen en
+Vrouwen van beteekenis in onze dagen.')
+
+Bosch, Firmin van den: IMPRESSIONS DE LITTÉRATURE CONTEMPORAINE.
+Bruxelles, Vromant et Cie., 1905.
+
+Buisseret, Georges: L'ÉVOLUTION IDÉOLOGIQUE D'ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Paris,
+Mercure de France, 1910. (One of the series 'Les Hommes et les Idées.')
+
+Casier, Jean: LES 'MOINES' D'ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Gand, Leliaert et Siffer,
+1887.
+
+Crawford, Virginia M.: STUDIES IN FOREIGN LITERATURE. London, Duckworth,
+1899.
+
+Florian-Parmentier: TOUTES LES LYRES. Anthologie Critique ornée de
+dessins et de portraits, nouvelle série. Paris, Gastein-Serge, [1911].
+
+Gauchez, Maurice: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Bruxelles, éditions du 'Thyrse,'
+1908.
+
+Gilbert, Eugène: FRANCE ET BELGIQUE. Paris, Pion, Nourrit et Cie, 1905.
+
+Gosse, Edmund: FRENCH PROFILES. London, Heinemann, 1905.
+
+Gourmont, Remy de: LE LIVRE DES MASQUES. Paris, Mercure de France, 1896.
+
+Gourmont, Remy de: PROMENADES LITTÉRAIRES. Paris, Mercure de France,
+1904.
+
+Guilbeaux, Henri: É. VERHAEREN. Verviers, Wauthy, 1908.
+
+Hamel, A. G. van: HET LETTERKUNDIG LEVEN VAN FRANKRIJK. Amsterdam, van
+Kampen & Zoon [1907].
+
+Hauser, Otto: DIE BELGISCHE LYRIK VON 1880-1900. Grossenhain, Baumert
+und Ronge, 1902.
+
+Heumann, Albert: LE MOUVEMENT LITTÉRAIRE BELGE D'EXPRESSION FRANÇAISE
+DEPUIS 1880. Paris, Mercure de France, 1913.
+
+Horrent, Désiré: ÉCRIVAINS BELGES D'AUJOURD'HUI. Bruxelles, Lacomblez,
+1904.
+
+Key, Ellen: SEELEN UND WERKE. Berlin, S. Fischer, 1911.
+
+Kinon, Victor: PORTRAITS D'AUTEURS. Bruxelles, Dechenne, 1910.
+
+Le Cardonnel, Georges, et Charles Vellay: LA LITTÉRATURE CONTEMPORAINE,
+1905. Paris, Mercure de France, 1906.
+
+Lemonnier, Camille: LA VIE BELGE. Paris, Fasquelle, 1905.
+
+Mercereau, Alexandre: LA LITTÉRATURE ET LES IDÉES NOUVELLES. Paris,
+Figuière, and London, Stephen Swift, 1912.
+
+Mockel, Albert: ÉMILE VERHAEREN, avec une note biographique par F.
+Vielé-Griffin. Paris, Mercure de France, 1895.
+
+Nouhuys, W.G. van: VAN OVER DE GRENSEN, STUDIËN EN CRITIEKEN. Baarn,
+Hollandia Drukkerij, 1906.
+
+Oppeln-Bronikowski, F. von: DAS JUNGE FRANKREICH. Berlin, Oesterheld und
+Co., 1908.
+
+Ramaekers, Georges: É. VERHAEREN. Bruxelles, éditions de 'La Lutte,'
+1900.
+
+Rency, Georges: PHYSIONOMIES LITTÉRAIRES. Bruxelles, Dechenne et Cie,
+1907.
+
+Rimestad, Christian: FRANSK POESI I DET NITTENDE AARHUNDREDE.
+Kjøbenhavn, Det Schubotheske, 1906.
+
+Schellenberg, E.A.: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Leipzig, Xenien-Verlag, 1911.
+
+Schlaf, Johannes: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Berlin, Schuster und Loeffler,
+[1905].
+
+Smet, Abbé Jos. de: ÉMILE VERHAEREN, SA VIE ET SES OEUVRES. Malines,
+1909.
+
+Tellier, Jules: Nos POÈTES. Paris, Despret, 1888.
+
+Thompson, Vance: FRENCH PORTRAITS. Boston, Badger & Co., 1900.
+
+Vigié-Lecoq, E.: LA POÉSIE CONTEMPORAINE, 1884-1896. Paris, Mercure de
+France, 1897.
+
+Visan, Tancrède de: L'ATTITUDE DU LYRISME CONTEMPORAIN. Paris, Mercure
+de France, 1911.
+
+Zweig, Stefan: PREFACE TO ÉMILE VERHAERENS AUSGEWÄHLTE GEDICHTE IN
+NACHDICHTUNG. Berlin, Schuster und Loeffler, 1903.
+
+
+PERIODICALS
+
+Brandes, Georg: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _Politiken_, Copenhagen, 8th June 1903.
+
+Brandes, Georg: ÉMILE VERHAEREN ALS DRAMATIKER. _Die Schaubühne_,
+Berlin, 5th April 1906.
+
+Edwards, Osman: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _The Savoy_, November 1897.
+
+Fontainas, André: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _L'Art Moderne_, Brussels, 23rd
+February 1902.
+
+Fresnois, André du: LETTRE DE PARIS, HÉLÈNE DE SPARTE. _La Vie
+Intellectuelle_, Brussels, May 1912.
+
+Gosse, Edmund: M. VERHAEREN'S NEW POEMS (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
+_Daily Chronicle_, 17th February 1902.
+
+Gosse, Edmund: M. VERHAEREN'S NEW POEMS (_Les Blés Mouvants_). _New
+Weekly_,18th April 1914.
+
+Gourmont, Jean de: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _Les Marges_, Paris, March 1914.
+
+Krains, Hubert: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _Société Nouvelle_, Brussels, June
+1895.
+
+Mauclair, Camille: TROIS POÈTES. _Revue Encyclopédique_, Paris, 25th
+April 1896.
+
+Maurras, Charles: LITTÉRATURE. _Revue Encyclopédique_, Paris, 23rd
+January 1897.
+
+Polak, Emile: ÉMILE VERHAEREN EN RUSSIE. _La Vie Intellectuelle,_
+Brussels, January 1914.
+
+Reboul, Jacques: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _L'Olivier_, Paris, 15th February
+1914.
+
+Régnier, Henri de: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _Revue Blanche_, Paris, March 1895.
+
+Rodrigue, G.M.: HÉLÈNE DE SPARTE. _Le Thyrse_, Brussels, July 1912.
+
+Sadler, Michael T.H.: ÉMILE VERHAEREN: AN APPRECIATION. _Poetry and
+Drama_, June 1913.
+
+Sautreau, Georges: L'OEUVRE LYRIQUE D'ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _Revue
+Scandinave_, Paris, December 1911--January 1912.
+
+Speth, William: L'INSPIRATION DE VERHAEREN ET LES COLORISTES FLAMANDS.
+_La Vie des Lettres_, Paris, January 1914.
+
+Vielé-Griffin, Francis: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _La Plume_, Paris,
+
+25th April 1896. Vielé-Griffin, Francis: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. _Mercure de
+France_, Paris, 15th March 1914.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+    ACTORS, 131, 133, 174-175.
+    Admiration, 12, 29, 30, 46, 50,
+      101, 172, 183, 217 ff., 259.
+    Aeroplanes, 4, 164, 209.
+    Æsthetics, 10, 85, 94, 115, 116,
+      151, 205.
+    Africa, 114.
+    Agrarianism, 9, 101, 187.
+    'À la Gloire du Vent,' 200.
+    Alcohol, 15.
+    Alexandrine, the, 32, 41, 48, 74,
+      144, 147 ff., 163, 170.
+    _Almanack_, 197.
+    _Also Sprach Zarathustra_,134.
+    America, 15, 24, 108, 113, 115,
+     120, 131-132, 135, 231, 250.
+    Artisans, 16, 131, 194, 211, 235,
+     247.
+    Asceticism, 16, 43, 162, 168.
+    _Au Bord de la Route_, 57-60, 62,
+     63, 68, 111, 149, 236.
+    'Au Bord du Quai,' 202.
+    Auerbach, Berthold, 38.
+    'Aujourd'hui,' 4.
+    'Autour de ma Maison,' 217, 226.
+    'Aux Moines,' 43, 49, 51.
+
+    BAKST, LÉON, 174.
+    Ballads, old German, 146, 159.
+    Balzac, Honoré de, 246.
+    Banville, Théodore de, 143.
+    Baudelaire, Charles, 59, 120, 142.
+    Bayreuth, 92.
+    Bazalgette, Léon, 232, 238, 257.
+    Beauty, 37-38, 45, 49-52, 83,
+     96 ff., 104, 199, 206, 207, 221,
+     230, 231, 240.
+    --, the new, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 83,
+     96 ff., 100, 104, 105, 170-172,
+     222, 255.
+    _Béguinages_, 22, 44.
+    Belfries, 39, 50, 157.
+    Belgian art, 21-22, 45.
+    --life, 45.
+    --literature, 19, 25-26, 37-38.
+    --race, the, 17 ff., 23-24.
+    Belgium, 13 ff., 256.
+    Berlin, 87, 91, 113.
+    Bersaucourt, Albert de, 135.
+    Bornhem, 45.
+    Brandes, Georg, 258.
+    Breughel, 40.
+    Brezina, Otokar, 207.
+    Brjussow, Valerius, 257.
+    Brownings, the, 243.
+    Bruges, 21, 39, 43.
+    Brussels, 14, 32, 93.
+
+    CAILLOU-QUI-BIQUE, 30, 246.
+    Carducci, Giosuè, 187, 193.
+    Carlyle, Thomas, 86.
+    'Celle des Voyages,' 141.
+    'Celui de la Fatigue,' 66.
+    'Celui du Savoir,' 76.
+    Chance, 104, 110, 111, 204, 212.
+    'Charles le Téméraire,' 13.
+    Charles v., 25.
+    Chiaroscuro, 46, 190.
+    Chimay, 46.
+    Christ, 68, 70, 184, 211.
+    Christianity, 49, 51.
+    Cities, 3, 4, 6, 9, 13-14, 29-30,
+      55, 75-77, 83, 89 ff., 94 ff.,
+      101 ff., 107, 109, 111-113, 116-118,
+      125-126, 131, 140, 165-167,
+      181, 191, 197, 222, 231, 238,
+      247, 249, 257.
+    Classicism, 7, 52, 82, 84, 100,
+    160, 162, 172, 190.
+    Claus, Émile, 22.
+    Cloisters, 9, 22, 25, 26, 43-46, 147,
+      165-166.
+    Colmar, 92.
+    Comédie Française, the, 149.
+    Concentration, 188, 194.
+    Congo, the, 17.
+    Conservatives, the, 104.
+    Contemporary feeling, 5 ff., 81-90,
+      101 ff., 112, 115, 118, 148,
+      182, 234, 248, 254 ff.
+    Coppée, François, 143.
+    _Cosmic Enthusiasm_, 220.
+    Cosmic feeling, 8, 69-70, 74-75,
+      81 ff., 112-113, 126, 134, 152,
+      179-185, 186, 188, 192, 198 ff.,
+      219, 226, 228, 231, 256, 258.
+    --law, 198, 202-203.
+    --pain, 68.
+    Cosmopolitanism, 22, 257.
+    Cosmos, the, 8.
+    Coster, Charles de, 19, 23, 167,
+      168.
+    Country, the, 9, 15, 26, 29, 30,
+      101 ff., 107, 245, 247, 248.
+    Courtrai, 21.
+    Criticism, 33-34, 187, 218.
+    Crommelynck, Fernand, 22.
+    Crowd, the, 104 ff., 117, 118, 121,
+      122, 125-127, 129, 130, 132,
+      134-136, 139, 140, 148, 152.
+
+    DAVID, GERHARD, 43.
+    Death, 60, 61, 63, 65, 69, 242.
+    Decadence, 18.
+    Decadents, the, 143, 256.
+    Declamation (_see_ Recitation).
+    Defregger, Franz, 38.
+    Dehmel, Richard, 75-76, 187, 191,
+      229, 234.
+    Deman, Edmond, 32.
+    Democracy, 9, 77, 81 ff., 108, 109,
+      111, 114, 197, 206.
+    Demolder, Eugène, 22.
+    Déroulède, Paul, 135.
+    Deutsches Volkstheater, Vienna, 174.
+    Dialogue, 129.
+
+    Disease, 55 ff., 102, 204, 209.
+    Dithyramb, the, 73, 161.
+    Divinity (_see_ God).
+    Dixmude, 44.
+    Dostoieffsky, F.M., 63, 166.
+    Drama, the, 150, 151, 161 ff.,
+      194, 235.
+    Dyck, Ernest van, 32.
+
+    _Ecce Homo!_ 63, 66, 85-86, 119,
+      218.
+
+    Ecstasy, 24, 61, 66, 75, 76, 82,
+      89, 90, 92, 94, 121, 128, 133,
+      136, 137, 139, 152, 165-167,
+      169, 173, 183, 184, 187, 189,
+      209, 213, 216, 217, 220, 221,
+      223, 225-229, 231, 232, 234,
+      235, 237-239, 241, 243, 248,
+      251, 259.
+    Edwards, Osman, 174.
+    Eekhoud, Georges, 22.
+    Egoism (_see_ Selfishness).
+    Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 140.
+    Emigrants, 9, 102-103, 187.
+    Energy, 50, 88 ff., 92, 95, 96, 99,
+      105, 111, 114, 116, 117, 121,
+      132, 182, 198, 199, 218, 221,
+      223.
+    Engineering, 4, 5, 9, 82.
+    England, 13, 55, 63, 64, 90, 92,
+      108, 113, 114.
+    Enthusiasm, 12, 30, 89, 111, 132,
+      138, 153, 161-164, 168, 172-174,
+      179, 183, 184, 187, 188, 193,
+      194, 198, 207, 209, 210, 215 ff,
+      220-222, 225-227, 232, 234,
+      250, 252, 259.
+    Epic, the, 19, 23, 150, 151, 161.
+    Eroticism, 167,172-173, 234, 235,
+      237, 240.
+    Ethics, 6, 115, 182, 183, 187,
+      206, 215 ff., 216.
+    Europe, 9, 13, 20, 23, 101, 114,
+      201, 231, 250, 253 ff.
+    European consciousness, 114.
+    --feeling, 22.
+    --race, the, 114-115.
+    --the New, 9.
+    Evolution, 3 ff., 10, 82, 105, 142,
+      180, 195-197, 213, 216, 218,
+      229, 249.
+    Excess, 15, 16, 24, 31, 40-41, 44,
+      61, 121, 139, 232, 245.
+    Exchanges, 90, 98, 99, 155.
+    Exultation, 24, 44, 91, 130, 133.
+    Eycks, van, the, 43.
+
+    FACTORIES, 89, 97, 100, 102, 155.
+    Faith, 31, 44, 46, 50, 67, 69, 95,
+      104, 167, 184, 196, 208-210,
+      212, 227.
+    Fate, 62, 203, 212, 213.
+    Faust, 72, 209.
+    Fellowship, 73, 76, 94, 223, 227, 249.
+    Fervour (_see_ Enthusiasm).
+    Flanders, 15, 19, 22, 23, 27, 30,
+      33, 36, 39, 40, 43, 44, 46, 51,
+      168, 197, 246, 246, 256.
+    Flemings, the, 14, 15, 43.
+    Flemish language, the, 154, 155.
+    'Fleur Fatale,' 63, 65.
+    Florence, 52, 92, 191.
+    Force, 232, 253.
+    Forth Bridge, the, 87.
+    France, 13, 22, 134, 250, 256.
+    Future, the, 8, 10, 14, 36, 51, 53,
+      89, 104, 115, 167, 180, 182, 201,
+      204, 211, 227, 231, 232, 244,
+      246, 253-255.
+
+    GAIETY THEATRE, Manchester, 174.
+    Gauchez, Maurice, 154.
+    Genius, men of, 18.
+    Genre-pictures, 40.
+    George, Stefan, 187.
+    Germany, 19, 55, 91, 92, 174, 257, 258.
+    Ghent, 25, 213.
+    Gide, Andre', 249.
+    Glesener, Edmond, 22.
+    God, 6, 7, 47-48, 68, 95, 104, 105,
+      109-111, 165, 182, 184, 185,
+      199, 203-205, 208, 210, 212-215,
+      222, 259.
+    Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 70,
+      71, 72,139, 158, 160, 193, 197,
+      254.
+    Goodness, 72, 251.
+    Gothic art, 45.
+    Greece, 82, 86, 165.
+    Greeks, the, 52, 84, 172, 190.
+    Grünewald, Mathias, 92.
+    Gueux, the, 20,
+    'Guillaume de Juliers,' 228.
+    Guyau, Jean-Marie, 8.
+
+    HAMBURG, 92.
+    Handiwork, 28, 82, 86, 93, 211.
+    Harmony, 23, 36, 70, 84, 85, 118,
+      125, 127, 130, 146, 149, 160,
+      167, 169, 170, 181, 183, 184,
+      213, 216, 245, 254.
+    Hay fever, 29, 247-248.
+    Health, 16-18, 67, 72, 73, 231,
+      245, 246, 251.
+    _Hélène de Sparte_,162, 165, 169-172,
+      174-175.
+    Heymans, Joseph, 22.
+    Holland, 13.
+    Homer, 128.
+    'Hommage,' 236.
+    Horniman, Miss, 174.
+    Hugo, Victor, 10-11, 32, 120, 134-135,
+      138, 142-143, 145, 147, 160.
+
+    Humility, 221, 233, 240.
+    Huysmans, Joris Karl, 22.
+
+    IDENTITY, 8, 77, 96, 126, 184, 205,
+      223, 225, 228, 230, 248, 250.
+    Iliad, the, 19.
+    Impressionists, the, 9, 86, 222, 249.
+    India, 109, 114.
+    Individual, the, 110, 111, 118.
+    Industrialism, 9, 77, 81 ff., 101,
+      125, 131, 187, 205-206.
+    Inquisition, the, 16, 169.
+    'Insatiablement,' 61.
+    Instinct, 98, 100, 113, 229, 236.
+    Intemperance (_see_ Excess).
+    Intensification, 20, 24, 30, 49, 64,
+      66, 131, 137, 152, 162, 164, 190,
+      200-202, 207, 220, 225, 229,
+      241, 252, 254.
+    Intoxication, 20, 22, 24, 64, 91,
+      189, 199, 232.
+    Italy, 13, 86, 92, 108, 114, 191.
+
+    JENSEN, JOHANNES V., 258.
+    Jesuits, the, 25-26.
+    Jesus, 68, 70.
+    Jordaens, Jakob, 15, 40, 41.
+    Joy, 61, 66, 74, 106, 133, 184, 214,
+      217, 228, 230-233, 240.
+
+    KAHN, GUSTAVE, 144.
+    Kainz, Josef, 258.
+    Kermesses, 15, 31, 40, 43.
+    Key, Ellen, 258.
+    Khnopff, Fernand, 21, 45.
+    Klinger, Max, 128.
+    Knowledge, 179, 180, 216, 220-222,
+      225, 227, 229, 232-234, 236, 245.
+    Künstlertheater, Munich, 174.
+
+    'LA BARQUE,' 58.
+    'Là-has,' 62.
+    Labour Party, Belgian, 93.
+    'La Bourse,' 98.
+    'La Conquête' (_La Multiple Splendeur_),
+      109, 114, 199.
+    'La Conquête' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_),
+      115, 203, 206.
+    'L'Action,' 128, 209, 220.
+    'La Ferveur,' 204, 208, 219, 224-225, 232.
+    'La Folie,' 212.
+    'La Forêt,' 77.
+    Laforgue, Jules, 144.
+    'La Foule,' 3, 76, 95, 107, 112,
+      152, 185.
+    _La Guirlande des Dunes_, 246.
+    'La Joie,' 55, 66, 226, 231.
+    'La Louange du Corps humain,' 227.
+    Lamartine, A.M.L. de, 32, 145.
+    'L'Âme de la Ville,' 95, 97, 105.
+    'La Mort,' 211.
+    'La Morte,' 64.
+    'L'Amour,' 68.
+    _La Multiple Splendeur_, 109, 114,
+      122, 126, 182, 183, 199, 200,
+      204, 208, 209, 210, 211, 217,
+      219, 221, 223, 224-225, 226,
+      227, 228, 231, 232, 233.
+    'La Plaine,' 103.
+    'La Pluie,' 71.
+    'La Prière,' 253.
+    'La Recherche,' 207, 211.
+    'L'Art,' 11.
+    'La Science,' 209, 210.
+    Latin races, the, 19.
+    'L'Attente,' 197, 211, 212.
+    'L'Aventurier,' 71.
+    'La Vie,' 215, 219, 228.
+    'La Ville,' 97.
+    'L'Eau,' 201-202.
+    'Le Bazar,' 98, 99.
+    'Le Capitaine,' 116.
+    Le Cardonnel, Georges, 215-216.
+    _Le Cloître_, 49, 162, 165-166, 168,
+      172, 174.
+    'Le Départ,' 103.
+    'Le Forgeron,' 70, 73.
+    'Le Gel,' 58.
+    Lemonnier, Camille, 20-21, 33, 37, 244.
+    'Le Mont,' 81.
+    'L'En-Avant,' 125, 226.
+    'Le Paradis,' 213, 236.
+    'Le Passeur d'Eau,' 71.
+    'Le Port,' 103.
+    Lerberghe, Charles van, 15, 22, 25, 26.
+    'Le Roc,' 61, 64, 65.
+    'L'Erreur,' 208.
+    _Les Apparus dans mes Chemins_, 66, 72, 73, 76.
+    _Les Aubes_, 103, 109, 115, 162, 166-167.
+    _Les Blés Mouvants_, 36, 229.
+    'Les Cultes,' 203.
+    _Les Débâcles_, 57, 60, 61, 63, 65.
+    _Les Campagnes Hallucinées_, 97,
+      101 ff., 162, 197.
+    _Les Flamandes_, 33, 36 ff., 49, 45,
+      197, 229.
+    _Les Flambeaux Noirs_, 67, 61, 64, 65.
+    _Les Forces Tumultueuses_, 11, 17,
+      115, 116, 123, 125, 132, 137,
+      161, 182, 183, 186, 203, 204,
+      206, 208, 209, 210, 212, 220,
+      222, 226, 229, 233, 255.
+    _Les Héros_, 4, 228.
+    _Les Heures Claires_, 237.
+    _Les Heures d'Après-midi_, 234, 237,
+      239, 240, 241, 241, 242.
+    _Les Heures du Soir_, 237, 242.
+    'Les Heures où l'on crée,' 123.
+    'Les Mages,' 233.
+    _Les Moines_, 43 ff., 55, 58, 145,
+      162, 165, 197, 208.
+    'Les Nombres,' 65.
+    'Le Sonneur,' 71, 187.
+    'Les Pêcheurs,' 71.
+    'Les Penseurs,' 209, 210.
+    _Les Petites Légendes_, 197.
+    'Les Promeneuses,' 98.
+    'Les Rêves,' 215, 221.
+    _Les Rythmes Souverains_, 182, 183,
+      213, 229, 236, 253.
+    'Les Saintes,' 72, 73.
+    _Les Soirs_,57, 58, 60, 61.
+    'Les Spectacles,' 98, 179.
+    _Les Tendresses Premières_, 4, 25, 27.
+    _Les Vignes de ma Muraille_, 141.
+    'Les Vieux Maîtres,' 39.
+    _Les Villages Illusoires_, 70-71, 73, 162, 187.
+    'Les Villes,' 91, 204.
+    _Les Villes Tentaculaires_, 91 ff.,
+      103, 104, 105, 115, 158, 162,
+      166, 197, 205, 207, 211, 257.
+    _Les Visages de la Vie_ ,3, 55, 66,
+      76, 77, 95, 107, 112, 152, 182,
+      183, 185, 199, 201-202, 209,
+      211, 212, 220.
+    'L'Étal,' 99.
+    'Le Tribun,' 132.
+    'Le Verbe,' 117, 122, 126.
+    'L'Heure Mauvaise,' 57, 59, 149.
+    'L'Impossible,' 137, 220, 222.
+    Locomotives, 124, 125.
+    London, 55, 63, 90, 92, 108, 113, 114.
+    Louvain, 31.
+    Love, 7, 29, 66, 72, 86, 170-173,
+      197, 221, 223-224, 230, 234 ff.
+
+    MACHINERY, 74, 81-82, 84 ff.,
+      155, 206, 211.
+    Madness, 57, 63 ff., 69, 102.
+    Maeterlinck, Maurice, 15, 22, 25,
+      26, 45, 143, 213, 249.
+    _Maison du Peuple, La_, 93.
+    Mallarmé, Stéphane, 144.
+    Manchester, 174.
+    'Ma Race,' 17, 35.
+    Marriage, 94, 197, 237 ff., 243.
+    Martyrs, 19, 207.
+    'Méditation,' 208.
+    Mendès, Catulle, 143.
+    Merrill, Stuart, 143.
+    Messel, Alfred, 87.
+    Metaphors, 46, 136, 137, 141,
+      156, 157, 160.
+    Metaphysics, 24, 184, 199, 203,
+      215, 216, 220, 236.
+    Meunier, Constantin, 17, 22, 86.
+    Minne, Georges, 21, 45.
+    Mockel, Albert, 22, 48, 139, 143,
+    157, 189, 246, 249.
+    Monasteries (_see_ Cloisters).
+    Monastery of Bornhem, 45.
+    --of Forges, 46.
+    Monet, Claude, 86.
+    Money, 95, 98-99, 102, 103, 114 201.
+    Monistic philosophy, 202, 258.
+    Monks, 44, 45 ff., 235.
+    Mont, Pol de, 14.
+    Morality, 6, 16, 40, 51, 88, 167,
+      182, 205, 216, 217, 219, 224.
+    Moréas, Jean, 143.
+    Motion, 121, 141, 217.
+    Motor-cars, 14, 87, 124.
+    'Mourir,' 60.
+    Multitude (_see_ Crowd).
+    Munich, 19, 92, 174.
+    Music halls, 98.
+    Mysticism, 214, 258.
+    Mystics, the, 18, 207.
+    Mythology, 51, 172, 182, 184.
+
+    NATURALISM, 37-38, 41.
+    Nature, 3, 20, 28, 29, 55, 94, 96,
+      99, 105, 112, 123, 125, 158, 172,
+      195, 200-205, 212, 213, 239,
+      246, 247, 248.
+    Necessary, the, is the beautiful,
+      7, 9, 10, 86, 218.
+    Neologisms, 154, 160.
+    Neurasthenia, 56 ff., 118.
+    New age, the, 3 ff., 105, 206-207, 211.
+    --European, the, 9.
+    New York, 108.
+    Nietzsche, Friedrich, 10, 68, 66,
+      85-86, 115, 119, 133, 134, 181,
+      218, 229, 251.
+
+    OMBIAUX, MAURICE DES, 22.
+    Onomatopoeia, 149.
+    Oppidomagnum, 103, 108, 166-167,
+    Optimism, 184, 207, 208, 210, 258.
+    Organisation, 6, 88, 93, 98, 101,
+      107, 114, 116, 118-119.
+    Orgies, 15, 39, 40, 41.
+    Oxford, 25.
+
+    PAN, 51, 184.
+    Pan-American, the, 115.
+    Pan-European, the, 115.
+    Pantheism, 24, 77, 215, 225, 226.
+    Paradise, 212-213.
+    Paris, 55, 87, 93, 108, 113, 114,
+      174, 248-249.
+    Parnassian poetry, 48, 145, 146.
+    Paroxysm, 63, 64, 89, 188.
+    _Parsival_,37.
+    Passion, 48, 67, 77, 92, 97, 99,
+      109, 110, 117, 118, 120-123,
+      128-131, 133, 135, 136, 147,
+      159, 163-165, 168-170, 173, 174,
+      179, 181, 189, 194, 212, 215,
+      217, 227-229, 231, 232, 235,
+      238, 241, 245, 251, 252.
+    Past, the, 7, 10, 14, 26, 36, 46,
+      50-53, 69, 82, 85 ff., 94, 100,
+      104, 105, 109, 167, 180, 182,
+      207, 231, 246.
+    Peasants, 16, 20-21, 29, 102-103,
+      146-147, 247, 251.
+    Pessimism, 43, 68, 258.
+    Petöfi, Alexander, 132.
+    Philip II., 16, 19,167-169.
+    _Philippe II._, 92,162, 165, 167-169, 174.
+    Philosophy, 9, 10, 151, 179, 182,
+      184, 187, 194, 216, 236, 256, 258.
+    Picard, Edmond, 33.
+    Poetry, the new, 6, 7, 8, 73, 77,
+      83 ff., 109, 111-113, 116, 119,
+      126, 132, 133, 137, 139, 155,
+      205-206, 216, 222.
+    Poets, the, 50-51, 82, 208-209.
+    --of the old school, 6, 7, 12,
+      51-52, 81 ff., 109, 111-112, 125,
+      129-131, 188, 190, 192, 193,
+      206, 255.
+    Pol de Mont, 14.
+    Poverty, 14, 16, 94, 102-103.
+    Prague, 91.
+    Present, the, 3 ff., 10, 51, 52,
+      105, 115, 167, 179-180, 182,
+      201, 246, 254, 255, 256.
+    Pride, 23, 70, 72, 219, 221, 224,
+      230, 231, 256.
+    Progress, 3-5, 7, 104, 209.
+    Prostitutes, 98, 99, 102.
+    Protestantism, 14.
+    Pseudoanæsthesia, 156.
+    Psychology, 47, 113, 180.
+    Puritanism, 16.
+
+    RABELAIS, FRANÇOIS, 40.
+    Realism, 37-38, 199.
+    Reality, 6, 7, 37-38, 50-52, 70,
+      81, 85-86, 111, 114, 115, 131,
+      153, 155, 167, 179, 183, 185,
+      192, 196, 198, 199, 201, 204,
+      206, 255, 259.
+    Recitation, 122-123, 128 ff., 136,
+      139, 149, 157.
+    Reinhardt, Max, 174.
+    Religion, 6, 9, 24, 44, 47, 50, 64,
+      67,  105,  182-184, 196, 205, 208,
+      211, 238, 240, 257.
+    --, a new, 6, 20, 50, 88, 104.
+    Rembrandt, 11, 43, 46, 187.
+    _Rembrandt_, 2, 11.
+    Renan, Ernest, 85.
+    Renunciation, 19, 27, 44, 52.
+    Responsibility, 253 ff.
+    Revolt, 16, 30, 42, 62, 99, 117,
+      122, 142-146, 160, 169, 195,
+      229, 256.
+    Rhapsodists, 128 ff.
+    Rhetoricians, 134.
+    Rhyme, 144, 153, 155.
+    Rhythm, 24, 41, 74, 94, 95, 97,
+      105, 116, 118 ff., 137, 141,
+      146 ff., 153, 157, 163, 173, 174,
+      193, 194, 201, 238, 247, 251, 256.
+    --of life, the, 5, 7, 8, 11, 117 ff.
+    Rilke, Rainer Maria, 154, 187, 249.
+    _Ring, The_, 37.
+    Rodenbach, Georges, 21, 25, 26, 39.
+    Rodin, Auguste, 135, 249.
+    Rolland, Romain, 249,
+    Romains, Jules, 256-257.
+    Roman Catholicism, 14, 16, 24,
+      26, 31, 44, 46, 67, 69, 162, 165-166,
+      168-169, 184.
+    Romanticism, 46.
+    Romanticists, the, 50, 147.
+    Rome, 108, 114.
+    Rops, Félicien, 22.
+    Rubens, Peter Paul, 20, 40, 41,
+      43, 58.
+    Rubinstein, Ida, 174.
+    Ruskin, John, 82.
+    Russia, 257.
+    Russians, the, 43.
+    Rysselberghe, Théo van, 22, 249.
+
+    ST. AMAND, 27-
+    Saint-Cloud, 249.
+    'Saint Georges,' 72, 73.
+    Sainte-Barbe, College of, 25-26, 30, 213.
+    St. Petersburg, 114.
+    Saints, 19, 210, 212.
+    'S'amoindrir,' 60.
+    Scandinavia, 18, 258.
+    Scheldt, the, 27, 28.
+    Schiller, Friedrich, 134,158, 160, 168.
+    Schlaf, Johannes, 65.
+    Scholars, 209, 210.
+    Science, 6, 9, 18, 64, 77, 82, 85,
+      108, 155, 205-209, 222.
+    Sea, the, 13, 15, 30, 103, 201,
+      202, 247, 248.
+    Selfishness, 72, 223.
+    Sensations, 6-9, 65,104, 120, 125,
+      130, 164, 188, 189, 190, 192,
+      202, 203, 225, 240.
+    Sensuality, 15, 16, 24, 40, 41, 44,
+      98, 162, 170-172, 241, 245.
+    Sex, 234 ff.
+    Shakespeare, William, 10, 163.
+    Signac, Paul, 249.
+    Silence, 44-46, 117, 122, 130, 214, 239
+    'Si Morne,' 61.
+    Social feeling, 83, 110.
+    --problem, the, 8, 9, 101 ff., 187.
+    Socialism, 9, 24, 89, 93, 224.
+    Society, 249.
+    Solitude, 44, 55, 57, 69, 70, 76,
+      81, 83, 86, 91, 112, 237.
+    Sonnets, 41, 46.
+    Soul, 43, 89, 141, 182, 225, 237.
+    'Sous les Prétoriens,' 111.
+    Spain, 16, 55, 92, 162, 165, 191.
+    Spaniards, the, 16.
+    Stappen, van der, 22.
+    Stevens, Alfred, 22.
+    Strauss, David, 50.
+    Suicide, 62, 64, 65.
+    Superman, the, 115.
+    Symbolism, 71, 99, 143 ff.
+    Symbolists, the, 143 ff., 256.
+    Symbols, 7, 19,21, 45, 47, 51, 70,
+      71, 72, 92, 104, 107, 144, 163,
+      165, 168, 195, 201, 202, 213,
+      218, 237, 247, 248.
+    Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 160.
+
+    TAMERLAINE, 108.
+    _Tannhäuser_,37.
+    Teutonic elements, 14, 18, 24, 39,
+      146, 159, 194, 225.
+    Thames, the, 64.
+    _Thyl Ulenspiegel_, 19, 167, 168.
+    Toledo, 191.
+    Tolstoy, Leo, 82.
+    Torpedo-boats, 87.
+    _Toute la Flandre_, 4, 23, 25, 27,
+      168, 197, 244, 246.
+    Town (_see_ City).
+    Tradition, 26, 27, 85, 92, 145, 146, 243.
+    Travel, 55, 91-92, 124, 201.
+    'Truandailies,' 40.
+    Truth, 37-38.
+    Turner, J.M.W., 152.
+
+    UNITY, 23, 108, 113, 114, 199,
+      202, 203, 211, 215 ff., 225, 252.
+    Université Libre, Brussels, 93.
+    Unknown, the, 3, 6, 69, 204, 207,
+      212, 220, 224.
+    'Un Matin,' 229.
+    'Un Soir ' (_Au Bord de la Route_), 63, 68.
+    'Un Soir' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_), 183, 186, 255.
+    Utopia, 109, 115, 167, 199.
+
+    VANDERVELDE, EMIL, 93.
+    Vellay, Charles, 215-216.
+    Venice, 13.
+
+    Verhaeren, Émile, born at St. Amand on the
+    Scheldt, 1855, 27; his boyhood, 27-28; educated at
+    the College of Sainte-Barbe in Ghent, 25-26;
+    studies jurisprudence at Louvain, 31; called to the
+    bar in Brussels, 32; his first verses, 32, 33, 145
+    ff.; publication of _Les Flamandes,_ 33 ff.;
+    resides for three weeks in the monastery of
+    Forges, 46; publication of _Les Moines_, 45 ff.;
+    his health breaks down, 55 ff., 237; his illness
+    is described in _Les Soirs, Les Débâcles, Les
+    Flambeaux Noirs,_ and _Au Bord de la Route_, 57
+    ff.; his travels, 55, 91-92, 124; he is obsessed
+    by the atmosphere of London, 55; his recovery is
+    symbolised in some of the poems of _Les Villages
+    Illusoires_, 70-71; his marriage, 94, 237 ff., 243;
+    his connection with the Labour Party and
+    Socialism, 89, 93-94; the Flemish element in his
+    style, 154-155; his technique, 141 ff.; stage
+    performances of his dramas, 164, 174-175; how he
+    recites his poetry, 122-123; he resides at
+    Caillou-qui-bique and Saint-Cloud, 30, 93, 246,
+    248-249; his personal appearance, 67, 251; his
+    personality, 244 ff.
+
+    Verlaine, Paul, 69, 120, 142, 144, 243.
+    'Vers,' 60.
+    'Vers la Mer,' 152.
+    'Vers le Cloître,' 63.
+    'Vers le Futur,' 104, 205, 207.
+    _Vers libre_, the, 74, 144 ff., 163.
+    _Vers ternaire, le_, 147.
+    Vielé-Griffin, Francis, 143, 246, 249.
+    Vienna, 91, 114, 174.
+    Vitality, 12, 15, 16, 19, 24, 32,
+      33, 40, 43, 119, 131, 190, 200-202,
+      206, 229, 248, 258.
+
+    WAGNER, RICHARD, 37, 92.
+    Walloons, the, 14, 22.
+    Weyden, Roger van der, 43.
+    Whistler, J. M'Neill, 86.
+    Whitman, Walt, 24, 86, 108-109,
+      115, 132, 134, 187, 190-191,
+      227 257.
+    Will, the, 23, 60-62, 73-74, 133,
+      181, 194-195, 198, 203, 212,
+      223.
+    _Wisdom and Destiny_, 213.
+    Woman, 172-173, 192, 234 ff.
+    Women, Belgian, 17.
+
+    YPRES, 21, 43.
+
+    ZOLA, ÉMILE, 37.
+
+
+
+
+
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Émile Verhaeren, by Stefan Zweig
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Émile Verhaeren
+
+Author: Stefan Zweig
+
+Translator: Jethro Bithell
+
+Release Date: February 24, 2011 [EBook #35387]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ÉMILE VERHAEREN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<h1>ÉMILE VERHAEREN</h1>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>STEFAN ZWEIG</h2>
+
+<h5>LONDON</h5>
+
+<h5>CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD</h5>
+
+<h5>1914</h5>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 283px;">
+<img src="images/verhaeren.png" width="283" alt="Émile Verhaeren from an unpublished photograph by
+Charles Bernier, 1914." title="" />
+<span class="caption">Émile Verhaeren from an unpublished photograph by
+Charles Bernier, 1914.</span>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE"></a>PREFACE</h3>
+
+
+<p>Four years have passed since the present volume appeared simultaneously
+in German and French. In the meantime Verhaeren's fame has been
+spreading; but in English-speaking countries he is still not so well
+known as he deserves to be.</p>
+
+<p>Something of his philosophy&mdash;if it may be called philosophy rather than
+a poet's inspired visualising of the world&mdash;has passed into the public
+consciousness in a grotesquely distorted form in what is known as
+'futurism.' So long as futurism is associated with those who have
+acquired a facile notoriety by polluting the pure idea, it would be an
+insult to Verhaeren to suggest that he is to be classed with the
+futurists commonly so-called; but the whole purpose of the present
+volume will prove that the gospel of a very serious and reasoned
+futurism is to be found in Verhaeren's writings.</p>
+
+<p>Of the writer of the book it may be said that there was no one more
+fitted than he to write the authentic exposition of the teaching which
+he has hailed as a new religion. His relations to the Master are not
+only those of a fervent disciple,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</a></span> but of an apostle whose labour of
+love has in German-speaking lands and beyond been crowned with signal
+success. Himself a lyrist of distinction, Stefan Zweig has accomplished
+the difficult feat, which in this country still waits to be done, of
+translating the great mass of Verhaeren's poems into actual and enduring
+verse. Another book of his on Verlaine is already known in an English
+rendering; so that he bids fair to become known in this country as one
+of the most gifted of the writers of Young-Vienna.</p>
+
+<p>As to the translation, I have endeavoured to be faithful to my text,
+which is the expression of a personality. Whatever divergences there are
+have been necessitated by the lapse of time. For help in reading the
+proofs I have to thank Mr. M.T.H. Sadler and Mr. Fritz Voigt.</p>
+
+<p class="content">
+<span style="margin-left: 23.5em;">J. BITHELL.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">HAMMERFIELD,</span><br />
+<i>Nr</i>. HEMEL HEMPSTEAD,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">14<i>th July</i> 1914.</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+
+<p class="caption">
+CONTENTS</p>
+<p class="content">
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">PART I</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_NEW_AGE">THE NEW AGE</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_NEW_BELGIUM">THE NEW BELGIUM</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#YOUTH_IN_FLANDERS">YOUTH IN FLANDERS</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#LES_FLAMANDES">'LES FLAMANDES'</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_MONKS">THE MONKS</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_BREAK-DOWN">THE BREAK-DOWN</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#FLIGHT_INTO_THE_WORLD">FLIGHT INTO THE WORLD</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">PART II</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#CONTEMPORARY_FEELING">CONTEMPORARY FEELING</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#TOWNS_LES_VILLES_TENTACULAIRES">TOWNS ('LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES')</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_MULTITUDE">THE MULTITUDE</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_RHYTHM_OF_LIFE">THE RHYTHM OF LIFE</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_NEW_PATHOS">THE NEW PATHOS</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#VERHAERENS_POETIC_METHOD">VERHAEREN'S POETIC METHOD</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#VERHAERENS_DRAMA">VERHAEREN'S DRAMA</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">PART III</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#COSMIC_POETRY">COSMIC POETRY</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_LYRIC_UNIVERSE">THE LYRIC UNIVERSE</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#SYNTHESES">SYNTHESES</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_ETHICS_OF_FERVOUR">THE ETHICS OF FERVOUR</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#LOVE">LOVE</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_ART_OF_VERHAERENS_LIFE">THE ART OF VERHAEREN'S LIFE</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_EUROPEAN_IMPORTANCE_OF_HIS_WORK">THE EUROPEAN IMPORTANCE OF HIS WORK</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#BIBLIOGRAPHY">BIBLIOGRAPHY</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#INDEX">INDEX</a></span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3>PART I</h3>
+
+<h3>DECIDING FORCES</h3>
+
+<h4>LES FLAMANDES&mdash;LES MOINES&mdash;LES SOIRS&mdash;LES</h4>
+
+<h4>DÉBÂCLES&mdash;LES FLAMBEAUX NOIRS&mdash;AU BORD DE</h4>
+
+<h4>LA ROUTE&mdash;LES APPARUS DANS MES CHEMINS</h4>
+
+<h4>1883-1893</h4>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<blockquote><p>Son tempérament, son caractère, sa vie, tout conspire à nous montrer son
+art tel que nous avons essayé de le définir. Une profonde unité les
+scelle. Et n'est-ce pas vers la découverte de cette unité-là, qui groupe
+en un faisceau solide les gestes, les pensées et les travaux d'un génie
+sur la terre, que la critique, revenue enfin de tant d'erreurs, devait
+tendre uniquement?</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 22.5em;">VERHAEREN, <i>Rembrandt.</i></span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_NEW_AGE" id="THE_NEW_AGE"></a>THE NEW AGE</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Tout bouge&mdash;et l'on dirait les horizons en marche.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 20em;">É.V., 'La Foule.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p>The feeling of this age of ours, of this our moment in eternity, is
+different in its conception of life from that of our ancestors. Only
+eternal earth has changed not nor grown older, that field, gloomed by
+the Unknown, on which the monotonous light of the seasons divides, in a
+rhythmic round, the time of blossoms and of their withering; changeless
+only are the action of the elements and the restless alternation of
+night and day. But the aspect of earth's spirit has changed, all that is
+subjected to the toil of man. Has changed, to change again. The
+evolution of the phenomena of culture seems to proceed with ever greater
+rapidity: never was the span of a hundred years as rich, as replete as
+that which stretches to the threshold of our own days. Cities have shot
+up which are as huge and bewildering, as impenetrable and as endless, as
+nothing else has been save those virgin forests now fast receding before
+the onward march of the tilled land. More and more the work of man
+achieves the grandiose and elementary character that was once Nature's
+secret. The lightning is in his hands, and protection from the
+weather's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> sudden onslaughts; lands that once yawned far apart are now
+forged together by the iron hoop with which of old only the narrow
+strait was arched; oceans are united that have sought each other for
+thousands of years; and now in the very air man is building a new road
+from country to country. All has changed.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Tout a changé: les ténèbres et les flambeaux.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Les droits et les devoirs out fait d'autres faisceaux,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Du sol jusqu'au soleil, une neuve énergie</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Diverge un sang torride, en la vie élargie;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Des usines de fonte ouvrent, sous le ciel bleu,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Des cratères en flamme et des fleuves en feu;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">De rapides vaisseaux, sans rameurs et sans voiles,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">La nuit, sur les flots bleus, étonnent les étoiles;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Tout peuple réveillé se forge une autre loi;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Autre est le crime, autre est l'orgueil, autre est l'exploit.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Changed, too, is the relation of individual to individual, of the
+individual to the whole; at once more onerous and less burdensome is the
+network of social laws, at once more onerous and less burdensome our
+whole life.</p>
+
+<p>But a still greater thing has happened. Not only the real forms, the
+transitory facts of life have changed, not only do we live in other
+cities, other houses, not only are we dressed in different clothes, but
+the infinite above us too, that which seemed unshakable, has changed
+from what it was for our fathers and forefathers. Where the actual
+changes, the relative changes also. The most elementary forms of our
+conception, space<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> and time, have been displaced. Space has become other
+than it was, for we measure it with new velocities. Roads that took our
+forefathers days to traverse can now be covered in one short hour; one
+flying night transports us to warm and luxuriant lands that were once
+separated from us by the hardships of a long journey. The perilous
+forests of the tropics with their strange constellations, to see which
+cost those of old a year of their lives, are of a sudden near to us and
+easy of access. We measure differently with these different velocities
+of life. Time is more and more the victor of space. The eye, too, has
+learned other distances, and in cold constellations is startled to
+perceive the forms of primeval landscapes petrified; and the human voice
+seems to have grown a thousand times stronger since it has learned to
+carry on a friendly conversation a hundred miles away. In this new
+relationship of forces we have a different perception of the spanning
+round of the earth, and the rhythm of life, beating more brightly and
+swiftly, is likewise becoming new for us. The distance from springtime
+to springtime is greater now and yet less, greater and yet less is the
+individual hour, greater and less our whole life.</p>
+
+<p>And therefore is it with new feelings that we must comprehend this new
+age. For we all feel that we must not measure the new with the old
+measures our forefathers used, that we must not live through the new
+with feelings outworn, that we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> must discover a new sense of distance, a
+new sense of time, a new sense of space, that we must find a new music
+for this nervous, feverish rhythm around us. This new-born human
+conditionality calls for a new morality; this new union of equals a new
+beauty; this new topsy-turvydom a new system of ethics. And this new
+confrontation with another and still newer world, with another Unknown,
+demands a new religion, a new God. A new sense of the universe is, with
+a muffled rumour, welling up in the hearts of all of us.</p>
+
+<p>New things, however, must be coined into new words. A new age calls for
+new poets, poets whose conceptions have been nurtured by their
+environment, poets who, in the expression they give to this new
+environment, themselves vibrate with the feverish rotation of life. But
+so many of our poets are pusillanimous. They feel that their voices are
+out of harmony with reality; they feel that they are not incorporated
+with the new organism and a necessary part of it; they have a dull
+foreboding that they do not speak the language of our contemporary life.
+In our great cities they are like strangers stranded. The great roaring
+streams of our new sensations are to them terrific and inconceivable.
+They are ready to accept all the comfort and luxury of modern life; they
+are quick to take advantage of the facilities afforded by technical
+science and organisation; but for their poetry they reject these
+phenomena, because they cannot master<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> them. They recoil from the task
+of transmuting poetical values, of sensing whatever is poetically new in
+these new things. And so they stand aside. They flee from the real, the
+contemporary, to the immutable; they take refuge in whatsoever the
+eternal evolution has left untouched; they sing the stars, the
+springtime, the babbling of springs which is now as it ever was, the
+myth of love; they hide behind the old symbols; they nestle to the old
+gods. Not from the moment, from the molten flowing ore, do they seize
+and mould the eternal&mdash;no, as ever of old they dig the symbols of the
+eternal out of the cold clay of the past, like old Greek statues. They
+are not on that account insignificant; but at best they produce
+something important, never anything necessary.</p>
+
+<p>For only that poet can be necessary to our time who himself feels that
+everything in this time is necessary, and therefore beautiful. He must
+be one whose whole endeavour as poet and man it is to make his own
+sensations vibrate in unison with contemporary sensations; who makes the
+rhythm of his poem nothing else than the echoed rhythm of living things;
+who adjusts the beat of his verse to the beat of our own days, and takes
+into his quivering veins the streaming blood of our time. He must not on
+this account, when seeking to create new ideals, be a stranger to the
+ideals of old; for all true progress is based on the deepest
+understanding of the past. Progress<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> must be for him as Guyau interprets
+it: 'Le pouvoir, lorsqu'on est arrivé à un état supérieur, d'éprouver
+des émotions et des sensations nouvelles, sans cesser d'être encore
+accessible à ce que contenaient de grand ou de beau ses précédantes
+émotions.'<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> A poet of our time can only be great when he conceives
+this time as great. The preoccupations of his time must be his also; its
+social problem must be his personal concern. In such a poet succeeding
+generations would see how man has fought a way to them from the past,
+how in every moment as it passed he has wrestled to identify the feeling
+of his own mind with that of the cosmos. And even though the great works
+of such a poet should be soon disintegrated and his poems obsolete,
+though his images should have paled, there would yet remain imperishably
+vivid that which is of greater moment, the invisible motives of his
+inspiration, the melody, the breath, the rhythm of his time. Such poets,
+besides pointing the way to the coming generation, are in a deeper sense
+the incarnation of their own period. Hence the time has come to speak of
+Émile Verhaeren, the greatest of modern poets, and perhaps the only one
+who has been conscious of what is poetical in contemporary feeling, the
+only one who has shaped that feeling in verse, the first poet who, with
+skill incomparably inspired, has chiselled our epoch into a mighty
+monument of rhyme.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In Verhaeren's work our age is mirrored. The new landscapes are in it;
+the sinister silhouettes of the great cities; the seething masses of a
+militant democracy; the subterranean shafts of mines; the last heavy
+shadows of silent, dying cloisters. All the intellectual forces of our
+time, our time's ideology, have here become a poem; the new social
+ideas, the struggle of industrialism with agrarianism, the vampire force
+which lures the rural population from the health-giving fields to the
+burning quarries of the great city, the tragic fate of emigrants,
+financial crises, the dazzling conquests of science, the syntheses of
+philosophy, the triumphs of engineering, the new colours of the
+impressionists. All the manifestations of the new age are here reflected
+in a poet's soul in their action&mdash;first confused, then understood, then
+joyfully acclaimed&mdash;on the sensations of a New European. How this work
+came into being, out of what resistance and crises a poet has here
+conquered the consciousness of the necessity and then of the beauty of
+the new cosmic phase, it shall be our task to show. If the time has
+indeed come to class Verhaeren, it is not so much with the poets that
+his place will be found. He does not so much stand with or above the
+verse-smiths or actual artists in verse, with the musicians, or
+painters, as rather with the great organisers, those who have forced the
+new social currents to flow between dikes; with the legislators who
+prevent the clashing of flamboyant<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> energies; with the philosophers, who
+aim at co-ordinating and unifying all these vastly complicated
+tendencies in one brilliant synthesis. His poetry is a created poet's
+world; it is a resolute shaping of phases, a considered new æstheticism,
+and a conscious new inspiration. He is not only the poet, he is at the
+same time the preacher of our time. He was the first to conceive of it
+as <i>beautiful</i>, but not like those who, in their zeal for embellishment,
+tone down the dark colours and bring out the bright ones; he has
+conceived of it&mdash;we shall have to show with what a painful and intensive
+effort&mdash;after his first most obstinate rejection of it, as a necessity,
+and he has then transformed this conception of its necessity, of its
+purpose, into beauty. Ceasing to look backwards, he has looked forwards.
+He feels, quite in the spirit of evolution, in the spirit of Nietzsche,
+that our generation is raised high above all the past, that it is the
+summit of all that is past, and the turning-point towards the future.
+This will perhaps seem too much to many people, who are inclined to call
+our generation wretched and paltry, as though they had some inner
+knowledge of the magnificence or the paltriness of generations gone. For
+every generation only becomes great by the men who do not despair of it,
+only becomes great by its poets who conceive of it as great, by its
+charioteers of state who have confidence in its power of greatness. Of
+Shakespeare and Hugo<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> Verhaeren says: 'Ils grandissaient leur
+siècle.'<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> They did not depict it with the perspective of others, but
+out of the heart of their own greatness. Of such geniuses as Rembrandt
+he says: 'Si plus tard, dans l'éloignement des siècles, ils semblent
+traduire mieux que personne leur temps, c'est qu'ils l'ont recréé
+d'après leur cerveau, et qu'ils l'ont imposé non pas tel qu'il était,
+mais tel qu'ils l'ont déformé.'<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> But by magnifying their century, by
+raising even ephemeral events of their own days into a vast perspective,
+they themselves became great. While those who of set purpose diminish,
+and while those by nature indifferent, are themselves diminished and
+disregarded as the centuries recede, poets such as these we honour tell,
+like illumined belfry clocks, the hour of the time to generations yet to
+come. If the others bequeath some slight possession, a poem or so,
+aphorisms, a book maybe, these survive more mightily: they survive in
+some great conception, some great idea of an age, in that music of life
+to which the faint-hearted and the ungifted of following epochs will
+listen as it sounds from the past, because they in their turn are unable
+to understand the rhythm of their own time. By this manner of inspired
+vision Verhaeren has come to be the great poet of our time, by approving
+of it as well as by depicting it, by the fact that he did not see the
+new things as they actually are, but celebrated them<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> as a new beauty.
+He has approved of all that is in our epoch; of everything, to the very
+resistance to it which he has conceived of as only a welcome
+augmentation of the fighting force of our vitality. The whole atmosphere
+of our time seems compressed in the organ music of his work; and whether
+he touches the bright keys or the dark, whether he rolls out a lofty
+diapason or strikes a gentle concord, it is always the onward-rushing
+force of our time that vibrates in his poems. While other poets have
+grown ever more lifeless and languid, ever more secluded and
+disheartened, Verhaeren's voice has grown ever more resonant and
+vigorous, like an organ indeed, full of reverence and the mystical power
+of sublime prayer. A spirit positively religious, not of despondency,
+however, but of confidence and joy, breathes from this music of his,
+freshening and quickening the blood, till the world takes on brighter
+and more animated and more generous colours, and our vitality, fired by
+the fever of his verse, flashes with a richer and younger and more
+virile flame.</p>
+
+<p>But the fact that life, to-day of all days, needs nothing so urgently as
+the freshening and quickening of our vitality, is good reason why&mdash;quite
+apart from all literary admiration&mdash;we must read his books, is good
+reason why this poet must be discussed with all that glad enthusiasm
+which we have first learned for our lives from his work.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'Aujourd'hui'(<i>Les Héros</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Guyau, <i>L'Esthétique Contemporaine.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 'L'Art' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> <i>Rembrandt</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_NEW_BELGIUM" id="THE_NEW_BELGIUM"></a>THE NEW BELGIUM</h3>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Entre la France ardente et la grave Allemagne.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 17.5em;"><i>É.V.</i>, 'Charles le Téméraire.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p>In Belgium the roads of Europe meet. A few hours transport one from
+Brussels, the heart of its iron arteries, to Germany, France, Holland,
+and England; and from Belgian ports all countries and all races are
+accessible across the pathless sea. The area of the land being small, it
+provides a miniature but infinitely varied synthesis of the life of
+Europe. All contrasts stand face to face concisely and sharply outlined.
+The train roars through the land: now past coal-mines, past furnaces and
+retorts that write the fiery script of toil on an ashen sky; now through
+golden fields or green pastures where sleek, brindled cows are grazing;
+now through great cities that point to heaven with their multitudinous
+chimneys; and lastly to the sea, the Rialto of the north, where
+mountains of cargoes are shipped and unshipped, and trade traffics with
+a thousand hands. Belgium is an agricultural land and an industrial
+land; it is at the same time conservative and socialistic, Roman
+Catholic and free-thinking; at once wealthy and wretched. There are
+colossal fortunes heaped up<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> in the monster cities; and two hours thence
+the bitterest poverty sweats for the dole of a living in mines and
+barns. And again in the cities still greater forces wrestle with one
+another: life and death, the past and the future. Towns monkishly
+secluded, girt with ponderous mediæval walls, towns on whose swart and
+sedgy canals lonely swans glide like milky gondolas, towns like a dream,
+strengthless, prisoned in sleep eternal. At no great distance glitter
+the modern residential cities; Brussels with its glaring boulevards,
+where electric inscriptions dart coruscating up and down the fronts of
+buildings, where motor-cars whiz along, where the streets rumble, and
+modern life twitches with feverish nerves. Contrast on contrast. From
+the right the Teutonic tide dashes in, the Protestant faith; from the
+left, sumptuous and rigidly orthodox, Roman Catholicism. And the race
+itself is the restlessly struggling product of two races, the Flemish
+and the Walloon. Naked, clear, and direct are the contrasts which here
+defy each other; and the whole battle can be surveyed at a glance.</p>
+
+<p>But so strong, so persistent is the inexorable pressure of the two
+neighbouring races, that this blend has already become a new ferment, a
+new race. Elements once contrary are now unrecognisably mixed in a new
+and growing product. Teutons speak French, people of Romance stock are
+Flemish in feeling. Pol de Mont, in spite of his Gallic name, is a
+Flemish poet; Verhaeren,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> Maeterlinck, and van Lerberghe, though no
+Frenchman can pronounce their names rightly, are French poets. And this
+new Belgian race is a strong race, one of the most capable in Europe.
+Contact with so many foreign cultures, the vicinity of such
+contradictory nations, has fertilised them; healthy rural labour has
+steeled their limbs; the near sea has opened their eyes to the great
+distances. Their consciousness of themselves is of no long date: it can
+only be reckoned from the time when their country became independent,
+hardly a hundred years ago. A nation younger than America, they are in
+their adolescence now, and rejoicing in their new, unsought strength.
+And just as in America, the blend of races here, together with the
+fruitful, healthy fields, has procreated robust men. For the Belgian
+race is a race pulsing with vitality. Nowhere in Europe is life so
+intensely, so merrily enjoyed as in Flanders, nowhere else is sensuality
+and pleasure in excess so much the measure of strength. They must be
+seen particularly in their sensual life; it must be seen how the Flemish
+enjoy; with what greediness, with what a conscious pleasure and robust
+endurance. It is among them that Jordaens found the models for his
+gluttonous orgies; and they could be found still at every kermesse, at
+every wake. Statistics prove that in the consumption of alcohol Belgium
+stands to-day at the head of Europe. Every second house is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> an inn, an
+<i>estaminet</i>; every town, every village has its brewery; and the brewers
+are the wealthiest men in the country. Nowhere else are festivals so
+loud, boisterous, and unbridled; nowhere else is life loved and lived
+with such a superabundant zest and glow. Belgium is the land of
+excessive vitality, and ever was so. They have fought for this plenitude
+of life, for this enjoyment full to satiety. Their most heroic exploit,
+their great war with the Spaniards, was only a struggle not so much for
+religion as for sensual freedom. These desperate revolts, this immense
+effort was in reality not directed against Roman Catholicism, but
+against the morality, the asceticism it enforced; not so much against
+Spain as against the sinister malignity of the Inquisition; against the
+taciturn, bitter, and insidious Puritanism which sought to curtail
+enjoyment; against the morose reserve of Philip II. All that they wanted
+at that time was to preserve their bright and laughing life, their free,
+dionysiac enjoyment, the imperious avidity of their senses; they were
+determined not to be limited by any measure short of excess. And with
+them life conquered. Health, strength, and fecundity is to this very day
+the mark of the Belgian people in town and country. Poverty itself is
+not hollow-cheeked and stunted here. Chubby, red-cheeked children play
+in the streets; the peasants working in the fields are straight and
+sturdy; even the artisans are as muscular<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> and strong as they are in
+Constantin Meunier's bronzes; the women are moulded to bear children
+easily; the unbroken vigour of the old men persists in a secure defiance
+of age. Constantin Meunier was fifty when he began his life-work here;
+at sixty Verhaeren is at the zenith of his creative power. Insatiable
+seems the strength of this race, whose deepest feeling has been
+chiselled by Verhaeren in proud stanzas:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Je suis le fils de cette race,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Dont les cerveaux plus que les dents</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Sont solides et sont ardents</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Et sont voraces.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Je suis le fils de cette race</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Tenace,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Qui veut, après avoir voulu</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Encore, encore et encore plus!<a name="FNanchor_1_5" id="FNanchor_1_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_5" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>This tremendous exertion has not been in vain. To-day Belgium is
+relatively the richest country in Europe. Its colony of the Congo is ten
+times as extensive as the mother-land. The Belgians hardly know where to
+place their capital: Belgian money is invested in Russia, in China, in
+Japan; they are concerned in all enterprises; their financiers control
+trusts in all countries. The middle classes, too, are healthy, strong,
+and contented.</p>
+
+<p>Such rich and healthy blood is more likely than any other to produce
+good art, and, above all, art full of the zest of life. For it is in
+countries<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> with few possibilities of expansion that the desire for
+artistic activity is keenest. The imagination of great nations is for
+the most part absorbed by the practical demands of their development.
+The best strength of a great nation is claimed by politics, by
+administration, by the army and navy; but where political life is of
+necessity poor, where the problems of administration are forcibly
+restricted, men of genius almost exclusively seek their conquests in the
+domains of art. Scandinavia is one example, Belgium another, of
+countries in which the aristocracy of intellect have with the happiest
+results been forced back on art and science. In such young races the
+vital instinct must <i>a priori</i> make all artistic activity strong and
+healthy; and even when they produce a decadence, this reaction, this
+contradiction, is so decided and consequent, that strength lies in its
+very weakness. For only a strong light can cast strong shadows; only a
+strong, sensual race can bring forth the really great and earnest
+mystics; because a decided reaction which is conscious of its aim
+requires as much energy as positive creation.</p>
+
+<p>The towering structure of Belgian art rests on a broad foundation. The
+preparation, the growing under the sod, took fifty years; and then in
+another fifty years it was reared aloft by the youth of one single
+generation. For every healthy evolution is slow, most of all in the
+Teutonic races, which are not so quick, supple, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> dexterous as the
+Latin races, who learn by life itself rather than by studious
+application. This literature has grown ring by ring like a tree, with
+its roots deep in a healthy soil nourished by the unyielding
+perseverance of centuries. Like every confession of faith, this
+literature has its saints, its martyrs, and its disciples. The first of
+the creators, the forerunner, was Charles de Coster; and his great epic
+<i>Thyl Ulenspiegel</i> is the gospel of this new literature. His fate is
+sad, like that of all pioneers. In him the native blend of races is more
+plastically visualised than in all later writers. Of Teutonic
+extraction, he was born in Munich, wrote in French, and was the first
+man to feel as a Belgian. He earned his living painfully as a teacher at
+the Military School. And when his great romance appeared, it was
+difficult to find a publisher, and still more difficult to find
+appreciation, or even notice. And yet this work, with its wonderful
+confrontation of Ulenspiegel as the deliverer of Flanders with Philip
+II. as Antichrist, is to this day the most beautiful symbol of the
+struggle of light with darkness, of vitality with renunciation; an
+enduring monument in the world's literature, because it is the epic of a
+whole nation. With such a work of wide import did Belgian literature
+begin, a work that with its heroic battles stands like the Iliad as the
+proud and primitive beginning of a more delicate, but in its advanced
+culture more complex, literature. The place of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> this writer, who died
+prematurely, was taken by Camille Lemonnier, who accepted the hard task
+and the melancholy inheritance of pioneers&mdash;ingratitude and
+disillusion. Of this proud and noble character also one must speak as of
+a hero. For more than forty years he fought indefatigably for Belgium, a
+soldier leading the onset from first to last, launching book after book,
+creating, writing, calling to the fray and marshalling the new forces;
+and never resting till the adjective 'Belgian' ceased in Paris and
+Europe to be spoken with the contempt that attaches to 'provincial';
+till, like once the name of the Gueux, what was originally a disgrace
+became a title of honour. Fearlessly, not to be discouraged by any
+failure, this superb writer sung his native land&mdash;fields, mines, towns,
+and men; the angry, fiery blood of youths and maidens; and over all the
+ardent yearning for a brighter, freer, greater religion, for rapt
+communion with the sublimity of Nature. With the ecstatic revelling in
+colour of his illustrious ancestor Rubens, who gathered all the things
+of life together in a glad festival of the senses, he, like a second
+voluptuary at the feast, has lavished colours, had his joy of all that
+is glowing, and glaring, and satiated, and, like every genuine artist,
+conceived of art as an intensifying of life, as life in intoxication.
+For more than forty years he created in this sense, and miraculously,
+just like the men of his country, like the peasants<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> he painted, he
+waxed in vigour from year to year, from harvest to harvest, his books
+growing ever more fiery, ever more drunken with the zest and glow of
+life, his faith in life ever brighter and more confident. He was the
+first to feel the strength of his young country with conscious pride,
+and his voice rang out its loud appeal for new fighters till he no
+longer stood alone, till a company of other artists were ranged around
+him. Each of these he supported and firmly established, with a strong
+grip placing them at their vantage for the battle; and without envy, nay
+with joy, he saw his own work triumphantly overshadowed by the acclaimed
+creations of his juniors. With joy, because he probably considered not
+his own novels, but this creation of a literature his greatest and most
+lasting work. For it seemed as though in these years the whole land had
+become alive; as though every town, every profession, every class had
+sent forth a poet or a painter to immortalise them; as though this whole
+Belgium were eager to be symbolised in individual phases in works of
+art, until he should come who was destined to transform all towns and
+classes in a poem, enshrining in it the harmonised soul of the land. Are
+not the ancient Teutonic cities of Bruges, Courtrai, and Ypres
+spiritualised in the stanzas of Rodenbach, in the pastels of Fernand
+Khnopff, in the mystic statues of Georges Minne? Have not the sowers of
+corn and the workers in mines become<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> stone in the busts of Constantin
+Meunier? Does not a great drunkenness glow in Georges Eekhoud's
+descriptions? The mystic art of Maeterlinck and Huysmans drinks its
+deepest strength from old cloisters and <i>béguinages</i>; the sun of the
+fields of Flanders glows in the pictures of Théo van Rysselberghe and
+Claus. The delicate walking of maidens and the singing of belfries have
+been made music in the stanzas of the gentle Charles van Lerberghe; the
+vehement sensuality of a savage race has been spiritualised in the
+refined eroticism of Félicien Rops. The Walloons have their
+representative in Albert Mockel; and how many others might still be
+named of the great creators: the sculptor van der Stappen; the painters
+Heymans, Stevens; the writers des Ombiaux, Demolder, Glesener,
+Crommelynck; who have all in their confident and irresistible advance
+conquered the esteem of France and the admiration of Europe. For they,
+and just they, were gifted with a sense of the great complex European
+feeling which in their work is glimpsed in its birth and growth; for
+they did not in their idea of a native land stop at the boundaries of
+Belgium, but included all the neighbouring countries, because they were
+at the same time patriots and cosmopolitans: Belgium was to them not
+only the place where all roads meet, but also that whence all roads
+start.</p>
+
+<p>Each of these had shaped his native land from his own angle of vision; a
+whole phalanx of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> artists had added picture to picture. Till then this
+great one came, Verhaeren, who saw, felt, and loved everything in
+Flanders, 'toute la Flandre.' Only in his work did it become a unity;
+for he has sung everything, land and sea, towns and workshops, cities
+dead and cities at their birth. He has not conceived of this Flanders of
+his as a separate phase, as a province, but as the heart of Europe, with
+the strength of its blood pulsing inwards from outside and outside from
+inwards; he has opened out horizons beyond the frontiers, and heightened
+and connected them; and with the same inspiration he has molten and
+welded the individual together with the whole until out of his work a
+life-work grew&mdash;the lyric epic of Flanders. What de Coster half a
+century before had not dared to fashion from the present, in which he
+despaired of finding pride, power, and the heroism of life, Verhaeren
+has realised; and thus he has become the 'carillonneur de la Flandre,'
+the bell-ringer who, as in olden days from the watch-tower, has summoned
+the whole land to the defence of its will to live, and the nation to the
+pride and consciousness of its power.</p>
+
+<p>This Verhaeren could only do, because he in himself represents all the
+contrasts, all the advantages of the Belgian race. He too is a ferment
+of contrasts, a new man made of split and divergent forces now
+victoriously harmonised. From the French he has his language and his
+form;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> from the Germans his instinctive seeking of God, his earnestness,
+his gravity, his need of metaphysics, and his impulse to pantheism.
+Political instincts, religious instincts, Catholicism and socialism,
+have struggled in him; he is at once a dweller in great cities and a
+cottager in the open country; and the deepest impulse of his people,
+their lack of moderation and their greed of life, is in the last
+instance the maxim of his poetic art. Only that their pleasure in
+intoxication has in him become joy in a noble drunkenness, in ecstasy;
+only that their carnal joy has become a delight in colour; that their
+mad raging is now in him a pleasure in a rhythm that roars and thunders
+and bursts in foam. The deepest thing in his race, an inflexible
+vitality which is not to be shaken by crises or catastrophes, has in him
+become universal law, a conscious, intensified zest in life. For when a
+country has become strong and rejoices in its strength, it needs, like
+every plethora, a cry, an exultation. Just as Walt Whitman was the
+exultation of America in its new strength, Verhaeren is the triumph of
+the Belgian race, and of the European race too. For this glad confession
+of life is so strong, so glowing, so virile that it cannot be thought of
+as breaking forth from the heart of one individual, but is evidently the
+delight of a fresh young nation in its beautiful and yet unfathomed
+power.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_5" id="Footnote_1_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_5"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'Ma Race' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="YOUTH_IN_FLANDERS" id="YOUTH_IN_FLANDERS"></a>YOUTH IN FLANDERS</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">Seize, dix-sept et dix-huit ans!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">O ce désir d'être avant l'âge et le vrai temps</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">Celui</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8.5em;">Dont chacun dit</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il boit à larges brocs et met à mal les filles!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 18em;">É.V., <i>Les Tendresses Premières</i>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The history of modern Belgian literature begins, by a whim of chance, in
+one and the same house. In Ghent, the favourite city of the Emperor
+Charles V., in the old, heavy Flemish town that is still girdled with
+ramparts, lies, remote from the noisy streets, the grey Jesuit college
+of Sainte-Barbe. A cloister with thick, cold, frowning walls, mute
+corridors, silent refectories, reminding one somewhat of the beautiful
+colleges in Oxford, save that here there is no ivy softening the walls,
+and no flowers to lay their variegated carpet over the green courts.
+Here, in the seventies, two strange pairs of boys meet on the
+school-benches; here among thousands of names are four which are
+destined in later days to be the pride of their country. First, Georges
+Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren, then Maeterlinck and Charles van
+Lerberghe&mdash;two pairs of friendships, both of which are now torn asunder
+by death. The weaker, the more delicate of the four,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> Georges Rodenbach
+and Charles van Lerberghe, have died; Emile Verhaeren and Maeterlinck,
+the two heroes of Flanders, are still growing and not yet at the zenith
+of their fame. But all four began their course in the old college. The
+Jesuit fathers taught them their humanities, and even to write poems&mdash;in
+Latin, it is true, to begin with; and in this exercise, strange to say,
+Maeterlinck was excelled by van Lerberghe with his more instinctive
+sense of form, and Verhaeren by the more supple Georges Rodenbach. With
+rigorous earnestness the fathers trained them to respect the past, to
+have faith in conventional things, to think in old grooves, and to hate
+innovations. The aim was not only to keep them Catholics, but to win
+them for the priesthood: these cloister walls were to protect them from
+the hostile breath of the new world, from the freshening wind which, in
+Flanders as everywhere else, was assailing the growing generation.</p>
+
+<p>But in these four pupils the aim was not realised, least of all in
+Verhaeren, perhaps for the very reason that he, as the scion of a
+strictly orthodox family, was the most fitted to be a priest; because
+his mind did not absorb conviction mechanically, but achieved it by
+vital processes; because his inmost being was self-surrender and a
+glowing devotion to great ideas. However, the call of the open country,
+in which he had grown up, was too strong in him; the voice of life was
+too loud in his blood for so early<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> a renunciation of all; his mind was
+too tameless to be satisfied with the established and the traditional.
+The impressions of his childhood were more vivid than the teaching of
+his masters. For Verhaeren was born in the country, at St. Amand on the
+Scheldt (on the 21st of May 1855), where the landscape rolls to the vast
+horizons of the heath and the sea. Here in the happiest manner kindly
+circumstances wove the garland of his earlier years. His parents were
+well-to-do people who had retired from the din of the town to this
+little corner of Flanders; here they had a cottage of their own, with a
+front garden ablaze with flowers of all colours. And immediately behind
+the house began the great golden fields, the tangle of flowering
+hedgerows; and close by was the river with its slow waves hasting no
+longer, feeling the nearness of their goal, the infinite ocean. Of the
+untrammelled days of his boyhood the ageing poet has told us in his
+wonderful book <i>Les Tendresses Premières</i>. He has told us of the boy he
+was when he ran across country; clambered into the corn-loft where the
+glittering grain was heaped; climbed steeples; watched the peasants at
+their sowing and reaping; and listened to the maids at the washing-tub
+singing old Flemish songs. He watched all trades; he rummaged in every
+corner. He would sit with the watch-maker, marvelling at the humming
+little wheels that fashioned the hour; and no less to see the glowing
+maw of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> oven in the bakery swallowing the corn which only the day
+before had glided through his fingers in rustling ears, and was now
+already bread, golden, warm, and odorous. At games he would watch in
+astonishment the glad strength of the young fellows tumbling the reeling
+skittles over; and he would wander with the playing band from village to
+village, from fair to fair. And, sitting on the bank of the Scheldt, he
+would watch the ships, with their coloured streamers, come and go, and
+in his dreams follow them to the vast distances, which he only knew from
+sailors' yarns and pictures in old books. All this, this daily physical
+familiarity with the things of Nature, this lived insight into the
+thousand activities of the working-day, became his inalienable
+possession. Inalienable, too, was the humane feeling he acquired that he
+was one at heart with the people of his village. From them he learned
+the names of all these thousand things, and the intelligence of the
+mysterious mechanism in all skilled handiwork, and all the petty cares
+and perplexities of these many scattered little souls of life which,
+combined, are the soul of a whole land. And therefore Verhaeren is the
+only one among modern poets in the French tongue who is really popular
+with his countrymen of all ranks. He still goes in and out among them as
+their equal, sits in their circle even now, when fame has long since
+shown him his place among the best and noblest, chats with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> the peasants
+in the village inn, and loves to hear them discussing the weather and
+the harvest and the thousand little things of their narrow world. He
+belongs to them, and they belong to him. He loves their life, their
+cares, their labour, loves this whole land with its tempests raging from
+the north, with its hail and snow, its thundering sea and lowering
+clouds. It is with pride that he claims kindred with his race and land;
+and indeed there is often in his gait and in his gestures something of
+the peasant trampling with heavy steps and hard knee after his plough;
+and his eyes 'are grey as his native sea, his hair is yellow like the
+corn of his fields.' These elemental forces are in his whole being and
+production. You feel that he has never lost touch with Nature, that he
+is still organically connected with the fields, the sea, the open air;
+he to whom spring is physically painful, who is depressed by relaxing
+air, who loves the weather of his home-land, its vehemence, and its
+savage, tameless strength.</p>
+
+<p>For this very reason he has in later years felt, what was natively
+uncongenial to him&mdash;the great cities&mdash;differently and far more intensely
+than poets brought up in them. What to the latter appeared self-evident
+was to him astonishment, abomination, terror, admiration, and love. For
+him the atmosphere we breathe in cities was heavy, stifling, poisoned;
+the streets between the massed houses were too narrow, too<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> congested;
+hourly, at first in pain and then with admiration, he has felt the
+beautiful fearfulness of the vast dimensions, the strangeness of the new
+forms of life. Just as we walk through mountain ravines dumbfounded and
+terrified by their sublimity, he has walked through streets of cities,
+first slowly accustoming himself to them; thus he has explored them,
+described them, celebrated them, and in the deepest sense lived them.
+Their fever has streamed into his blood; their revolts have reared in
+him like wild horses; their haste and unrest has whipped his nerves for
+half the span of a man's life. But then he has returned home again. In
+his fifties he has taken refuge once more in his fields, under the
+lonely sky of Flanders. He lives in a lonely cottage somewhere in
+Belgium, where the railway does not reach, enjoying himself among
+cheerful and simple people who fill their days with plain labour, like
+the friends and companions of his boyhood. With a joy intensified he
+goes eagerly year by year to the sea, as though his lungs and his heart
+needed it to breathe strongly again, to feel life with more jubilant
+enthusiasm. In the man of sixty there is a wonderful return of his
+healthy, happy childhood; and to the Flanders that inspired his first
+verses his last have been dedicated.</p>
+
+<p>Against this atavism, against this bright and inalienable joy in life,
+the <i>patres</i> of Sainte-Barbe could do nothing. They could only deflect
+his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> great hunger of life from material things, and turn it in the
+direction of science, of art. The priest they sought to make of him he
+has really become, only he has preached everything that they proscribed,
+and fought against everything that they praised. At the time Verhaeren
+leaves school, he is already filled with that noble yet feverish greed
+of life, that tameless yearning for intensive enjoyments heightened to
+the degree of pain which is so characteristic of him. The priesthood was
+repugnant to him. Nor was he more allured by the prospect, held out to
+him, of directing his uncle's workshop. It is not yet definitely the
+poetic vocation which appeals to him, but he does desire a free active
+calling with unlimited possibilities. To gain time for his final
+decision, he studies jurisprudence, and becomes a barrister. In these
+student years in Louvain Verhaeren gave free rein to his untameable zest
+in life; as a true Fleming he eschewed moderation and launched into
+intemperance. To this very day he is fond of telling of his liking for.
+good Belgian beer, and of how the students got drunk, danced at all the
+kermesses, caroused and feasted, when the fury came over them, and got
+into all kinds, of mischief, which often enough brought them into
+conflict with the police. Uncertainty was never a feature of his
+character, and so his Roman Catholicism was in those years no silent and
+impersonal faith, but a militant orthodoxy. A handful of hotspurs&mdash;the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>
+publisher Deman was one of them, and another was the tenor van Dyck&mdash;set
+a newspaper going, in which they lashed away mercilessly at the
+corruption of the modern world, and did not forget to blow their own
+trumpets. The university was not slow to veto these immature
+manifestations; but ere long they started a second periodical, which
+was, however, more in harmony with the great contemporary movements.
+Betweenwhiles verses were written. And still more passionate is the
+young poet's activity when, in the year 1881, he is called to the bar in
+Brussels. Here he makes friends with men of great vitality: he is
+welcomed by a circle of painters and artists, and a cénacle of young
+talents is formed who have the authentic enthusiasm for art, and who
+feel that they are violently opposed to the conservative bourgeoisie of
+Brussels. Verhaeren, who at this time greedily adopts all fashionable
+freakishness as something new, and struts about in fantastic apparel,
+promptly acquires notoriety by his vehement passionateness and his first
+literary attempts. He had begun to write verse in his school-days.
+Lamartine had been his model, then Victor Hugo, who bewitches young
+people, that lord of magnificent gestures, that undisputed master of
+words. These juvenilia of Verhaeren have never been published, and
+probably they have little interest, for in them his tameless vitality
+attempted expression in immaculate Alexandrines. More<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> and more, as his
+artistic insight grew, he felt that his vocation was to be a poet; the
+meagre success he achieved as a barrister confirmed him in this
+conviction, and so in the end, following the advice of Edmond Picard, he
+discarded the barrister's gown, which now seemed to him as narrow and
+stifling as he had once thought the priest's cassock to be.</p>
+
+<p>And then came the hour, the first decisive hour. Lemonnier was as fond
+of relating it as is Verhaeren; both would speak of it with their
+fervent, proud joy in a friendship of over thirty years; both with
+heartfelt admiration, the one for the other. Once, it was a rainy day,
+Verhaeren burst in on Lemonnier, whom he did not know, trampling into
+the elder man's lodging with his heavy peasant's tread, hailing him with
+his hearty gesture, and blurting out: 'Je veux vous lire des vers!' It
+was the manuscript of his first book <i>Les Flamandes</i>; and now he
+recited, while the rain poured down outside, with his hard voice and
+sharp scansion, his great enthusiasm and his compelling gestures, those
+pictures, palpitating with life, of Flanders, that first free confession
+of patriotism and foaming vitality. And Lemonnier encouraged him,
+congratulated him, helped him, and suggested alterations, and soon the
+book appeared, to the terror of Verhaeren's strictly orthodox family, to
+the horror of the critics, who were helpless in the face of such an
+explosion of strength. Execrated<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> and lauded, it immediately compelled
+interest. In Belgium, it is true, it was less acclaimed than declaimed
+against; but nevertheless it everywhere excited a commotion, and that
+grumbling unrest which always heralds the advent of a new force.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="LES_FLAMANDES" id="LES_FLAMANDES"></a>'LES FLAMANDES'</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Je suis le fils de cette race</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Tenace,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qui veut, après avoir voulu</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Encore, encore et encore plus.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15.5em;">É.V., <i>Ma Race</i>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The life-work of great artists contains not only a single, but a
+threefold work of art. The actual creation is only the first, and not
+always the most important; the second must be the life of the artists
+themselves; the third must be the harmoniously finished, organically
+connected relationship between the act of creating and the thing
+created, between poetry and life. To survey how inner growth is
+connected with external formation, how crises of physical reality are
+connected with artistic decadence, how development and completion
+interpenetrate as much in personal experience as in the artistic
+creation, must be an equal artistic rapture, must disengage as pure a
+line of beauty as the individual work. In Verhaeren these conditions of
+the threefold work of art are accomplished in full. Harsh and abrupt as
+the contrasts in his books seem to be, the totality of his development
+is yet rounded off to a clear line, to the figure of a circle. In the
+beginning the end was contained, and in the end<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> the beginning: the bold
+curve returns to itself. Like one who travels round the world and
+circles the vast circumference of the globe, he comes back in the end to
+his starting-point. Beginning and end touch in the motive of his work.
+To the country to which his youth belonged his old age returns: Flanders
+inspired his first book, and to Flanders his last books are dedicated.</p>
+
+<p>True it is, between these two books <i>Les Flamandes</i> and <i>Les Blés
+Mouvants</i>, between the work of the man of five-and-twenty and that of
+the man of sixty, lies the world of an evolution with, all its points of
+view and achievements. Only now, when the line that was at first so
+capricious has returned to itself, can its form be surveyed and its
+harmony perceived. A purely external observation has become penetration:
+the eye no longer exclusively regards the external phenomena of things,
+but all has been seized in his soul from within and imaged in accordance
+with its reality. Now nothing is seen isolated, from the point of view
+of curiosity or passing interest, but everything is looked upon as
+something that is, that has grown, and that is still growing. The motive
+is the same in the first and in the last books; only, in the first book
+we have isolated contemplation, while in the great creations of the last
+period the vast horizons of the modern world are set behind the scenes,
+with the shadows of the past on the one side, and, as well, with fiery
+presentiments of the future<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> shedding a new light over the landscape.
+The painter, who only portrayed the outer surface, the patina, has
+developed into the poet, he who in a musical vibration vivifies the
+psychic and the inconceivable. These two works stand in the same
+relation to each other as Wagner's first operas, <i>Rienzi</i> and
+<i>Tannhäuser</i>, do to his later creations, to the <i>Ring</i> and <i>Parsifal</i>:
+what was at first only intuitive becomes consciously creative. And as in
+Wagner's case, so too with Verhaeren there are to this very day people
+who prefer the works that are still prisoned in the traditional form to
+those which were created later, and who are thus, in reality, greater
+strangers to the poet than those who, from principle, assume a hostile
+attitude to his artistic work.</p>
+
+<p><i>Les Flamandes</i>, Verhaeren's first work, appeared in a period of
+literary commotion. Zola's realistic novels had just become the object
+of discussion; and they had stirred up, not France only, but the
+adjacent countries as well. In Belgium Camille Lemonnier was the
+interpreter of this new naturalism, which regarded absolute truth as
+more important than beauty, and which saw the sole aim of imaginative
+literature in photography, in the exact, scientifically accurate
+reproduction of reality. To-day, now that excessive naturalism has been
+overcome, we know that this theory only brings us half-way along the
+road; that beauty may live by the side of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> truth; that on the other hand
+truth is not identical with art, but that it was only necessary to
+establish a transmutation of the value of beauty; that it was in the
+actual, in realities, that beauty was to be sought. Every new theory, if
+it is to succeed, needs a strong dose of exaggeration. And the idea of
+realising reality in poetry seduced young Verhaeren into carefully
+avoiding, in the description of his native province, all that is
+sentimental and romantic, and deluded him with the hope of expressing in
+his verse only what is coarse, primitive, and savage. Something external
+and something internal, nature and intention, combined to cause this
+effect. For the hatred of all that is soft and weak, rounded off and in
+repose, is in Verhaeren's blood. His temperament was from the first
+fiery, and loved to respond to strong provocation with a violent blow.
+There was ever in him a love of the brutal, the hard, the rough, the
+angular; he had always a liking for what is glaring and intensive, loud
+and noisy. It is only in his latest books that, thanks to his cooler
+blood, he has attained classical perfection and purity. In those days,
+moreover, his hatred of sentimental idealisation, the hatred that in
+Germany fulminated against Defregger's drawing-room Tyrolese, Auerbach's
+scented peasants, and the spruce mythology of poetical pictures, led him
+deliberately to emphasise what is brutal, unæsthetic, and, as it was
+then felt, unpoetical;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> led him, as it were, to trample with heavy shoes
+in the tedious footsteps of French poets. Barbarian: this was the word
+they tried to kill him with, not so much on account of the harshness and
+coarseness of his diction, which often reminds one of the guttural
+sounds of German, as because of the savage selection of his instinct,
+which always preferred what is ringingly resonant and ferociously alive,
+which never fed on nectar and ambrosia, but tore red and steaming shreds
+of flesh from the body of life. And genuinely barbarous, savage with
+Teutonic strength, is this his inroad into French literature, reminding
+one of those migrations of the Teutons into the Latin lands, where they
+rushed ponderously to battle with wild and raucous cries, to learn,
+after a time, a higher culture and the finer instincts of life from
+those they had conquered. Verhaeren in this book does not describe what
+is amiable and dreamy in Flanders, not idylls, but 'les fureurs
+d'estomac, de ventre et de débauche,'<a name="FNanchor_1_6" id="FNanchor_1_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_6" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> ail the explosions of the lust
+of life, the orgies of peasants, and even of the animal world. Before
+him, his old schoolfellow Rodenbach had described Flanders to the French
+in poems that sounded gently with a silvery note, like the peal of
+belfries hovering over roofs; he had reminded them of that unforgettable
+melancholy of the evening over the canals of Bruges, of the magic of the
+moonlight over fields framed with dikes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> and hedges of willows. But
+Verhaeren closes his ears to hints of death; he describes life at its
+maddest, 'le décor monstrueux des grasses kermesses,'<a name="FNanchor_2_7" id="FNanchor_2_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_7" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> popular
+festivals, in which intoxication and sensual pleasure sting the
+unbridled strength of the crowd, in which the demands of the body and
+the greed of money come into conflict, and the bestial nature of man
+overthrows the painfully learned lessons of morality. And even in these
+descriptions, which often teem with the exuberance of Rabelais, one
+feels that even this explosive life is not mad enough for him, that he
+yearns to intensify life out and beyond reality: 'jadis les gars avaient
+les reins plus fermes et les garces plus beau téton.'<a name="FNanchor_3_8" id="FNanchor_3_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_8" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> These young
+fellows are too weak for him, the wenches too gentle; he cries for the
+Flanders of olden time, as it lives in the glowing pictures of Rubens
+and Jordaens and Breughel. These are his true masters, they, the
+revellers, who created their masterpieces between two orgies, whose
+laughter and feasting ring into the motives of their pictures. Some of
+the poems in <i>Les Flamandes</i> are direct imitations of certain interiors
+and sensual genre-pictures: lads afire with lust forcing wenches under
+the hedges; peasants in their drunken jubilation dancing round the inn
+table. His desire is to sing that superabundance of vitality which
+relieves itself by excess,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> excess flung into excess, even in sensual
+pleasures. And his own colours and words, which are laid on with lavish
+profusion and flow along in liquid fire, are themselves a debauch, a
+'rut' (a favourite word of his). This vaunting display of seething
+pictures is nothing less than an orgy. A terrific sensuality rages to
+exhaustion as much in the execution as in the motive, a delight in these
+creatures who have the madness of rutting stallions, who root about in
+odorous meats and in the flowering flesh of women, who of set purpose
+gorge themselves with beer and wine, and then in the dance and in
+embraces discharge all the fire they have swallowed. Now and again a
+reposeful picture alternates, firmly fixed in the dark frame of a
+sonnet. But the hot wave streams over these breathing-spaces, and again
+the mood is that of Rubens and of Jordaens, those mighty revellers.</p>
+
+<p>But naturalistic art is pictorial, not poetic. And it is the great
+defect of this book that it was written by an inspired painter only, not
+yet by a poet. The words are coloured, but they are not free; they do
+not yet rock themselves in their own rhythm; they do not yet storm along
+to soar aloft with the inspiration; they are wild horses regularly
+trotting along in the shafts of the Alexandrine. There is a disparity
+between the inner intractability and the external regularity of these
+poems. The ore has not yet been molten long enough in the crucible of
+life to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> burst the hereditary mould. You feel that the avidity of life
+which is the substance of the work has really been seen 'à travers un
+tempérament,' that here a strong personality is in revolt against all
+tradition, a strong personality whose ponderous onslaught was bound to
+strike terror into the cautious and the short-sighted. But the strength
+and the art are not yet emancipated. Verhaeren is already a passionate
+onlooker, but he is still only an onlooker, one who stands without and
+not within the vortex, who watches everything with inspired sympathy,
+but who has not yet experienced it. This land of Flanders has not yet
+become a part of the poet's sensibility; the new point of view and the
+new form for it are not yet achieved; there is yet wanting that final
+smelting of the artistic excitement which is bound to burst all bonds
+and restrictions, to flame along in its own free feeling in an
+enraptured intoxication.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_6" id="Footnote_1_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_6"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'Les Vieux Maîtres' (<i>Les Flamandes</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_7" id="Footnote_2_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_7"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 'Les Vieux Maîtres' (<i>Les Flamandes</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_8" id="Footnote_3_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_8"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 'Truandailles' (<i>Ibid.</i>).<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_MONKS" id="THE_MONKS"></a>THE MONKS</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Moines venus vers nous des horizons gothiques,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Mais dont l'âme, mais dont l'esprit meurt de demain....</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Mes vers vous bâtiront de mystiques autels.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 19.5em;">É.V., 'Aux Moines.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p>Rubens, that lavish reveller, is the genius of the Flemish zest in
+living; but zest in living is only the temperament and not the soul of
+Flanders. Before him there were the earnest masters of the cloisters,
+the primitives, the van Eycks, Memling, Gerhard David, Roger van der
+Weyden; and after them came Rembrandt, the meditative visionary, the
+restless seeker after new values. Belgium is something else beside the
+merry land of kermesses; the healthy, sensual people are not the soul of
+Flanders. Glaring lights cast strong shadows. All vitality that is
+strongly conscious of itself produces its counterpart, seclusion and
+asceticism; it is just the healthiest, the elemental races&mdash;the Russians
+of to-day for instance&mdash;who among their strong have the weak, among
+their gluttons of life those who avert their faces from it, among those
+who assent some who deny. By the side of the ambitious, teeming Belgium
+we have spoken of, there is a sequestered Belgium which is falling into
+ruins. Art exclusively in Rubens's sense could take no account of all
+those solitary cities, Bruges, Ypres,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> Dixmude, through whose noiseless
+streets the monks hasten like flocks of ravens in long processions, in
+whose canals the dumb white shadows of gliding nuns are mirrored. There,
+mid life's raging river, are broad islands of dream where men find
+refuge from realities. Even in the great Belgian cities there are such
+sequestered haunts of silence, the <i>béguinages,</i> those little towns in
+the town, whither ageing men and women have retired, renouncing the
+world for the peace of the cloister. Quite as much as the passion of
+life, the Roman Catholic faith and monkish renunciation are nowhere so
+deeply and firmly rooted as in this Belgium, where sensual pleasure is
+so noisy in its excess. Here again an extreme of contrasts is revealed:
+frowning in the face of the materialistic view of life stands the
+spiritual view. While the masses in the exuberance of their health and
+strength proclaim life aloud and pounce on its eternal pleasures, aside
+and cut off from them stand another, far lesser company to whom life is
+only a waiting for death, whose silence is as persistent as the
+exultation of the others. Everywhere here austere faith has its black
+roots in the vigorous, fruitful soil. For religious feeling always
+remains alive among a people that has once, although centuries may have
+passed since, fought with every fibre of its being for its faith. This
+is a subterranean Belgium that works in secret and that easily escapes
+the cursory glance, for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> it lives in shadows and silence. From this
+silence, however, from this averted earnestness, Belgian art has derived
+that mystical nourishment which has lent its baffling strength to the
+works of Maeterlinck, the pictures of Fernand Khnopff and Georges Minne.
+Verhaeren, too, did not turn aside from this sombre region. He, as the
+painter of Belgian life, saw these shadows of a vanishing past, and, in
+1886, added to his first book <i>Les Flamandes</i> a second, <i>Les Moines</i>. It
+almost seems as though he had first of all been obliged to exhaust both
+the historical styles of his native land before he could reach his own,
+the modern style. For this book is essentially a throw-back, a
+confession of faith in Gothic art.</p>
+
+<p>Monks are for Verhaeren heroic symbols of I mighty periods in the past.
+In his boyhood he was familiar with their grave aspect. Near the
+cheerful house where his youth was passed, there was at Bornhem a
+Bernhardine monastery, whither the boy had often accompanied his father
+to confession, and in whose cold corridors he had often waited in
+astonishment and with a child's timidity, listening to the majestic
+chant of the liturgy married to the organ's earnest notes. And here, one
+day of days, he received, with a thrill of pious terror, his first
+communion. Since that day the monks had been to him, as he trod the
+beaten track of custom, beings in a strange world apart, the incarnation
+of the beautiful<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> and the supersensual, the unearthly on his child's
+earth. And when, in the course of years, he sought to create in verse a
+vision of Flanders in all her luminous and burning colours, he could not
+forgo this mysterious chiaroscuro, this earnest tone. For three weeks he
+withdrew to the hospitable monastery of Forges, near Chimay, taking part
+in all the ceremonies and rites of the monks, who, in the hope of
+winning a priest, afforded him full insight into their life. But
+Verhaeren's attitude towards Roman Catholicism was by this time anything
+but religious, it was rather an æsthetic and poetic admiration for the
+noble romanticism of the ceremonial, a moral piety for the things of the
+past. He remained three weeks. Then he fled, oppressed by the nightmare
+of the ponderous walls, and, as a souvenir for himself, chiselled the
+image of the monastery in verse.</p>
+
+<p>This book too, no doubt, had no other aim than to be pictorial,
+descriptive. In rounded sonnets, as though etched by Rembrandt's needle,
+he fixed the chiaroscuro of the cloister's corridors, the hours of
+prayer, the earnest meetings of the monks, the silence in the intervals
+of the liturgy. The evenings over the landscape were described, in a
+ritual language, with the images of faith: the sun as it sets in crimson
+flaming like the wine in the chalice; steeples like luminous crosses in
+a silent sky; the rustling corn bowing when the bell rings to evensong.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>
+The poetry of devotion and repose was here revived: the harmony of the
+organ; the beauty of corridors garlanded with ivy; the touching idyll of
+the lonely cemetery; the peaceful dying of the prior; the visiting of
+the sick, and the I comfort it brings. Nothing was allowed in the deep
+light of the colours, in the grave repose of the theme, save what could
+be fitted into the strictly religious frame of the picture.</p>
+
+<p>But here the pictorial method proved to be I insufficient for the poetic
+effect. The problem of religious feeling is too close to the heart to be
+reached by outward, even by plastic manifestations. A thing which is so
+eminently hostile to the sensuous, nay, which is the very symbol of I
+all that is contrary to sensuousness, cannot be reached by a picturesque
+appeal to the senses; the description of an intellectual problem must
+cease to be descriptive and become psychology. And so, thus early in his
+career, Verhaeren is forced away from the picturesque. First, however,
+he attempts the plastic method: he gives us sombre statues of monks; but
+even as statues they are only types of an inner life, symbols of the
+ways to God. Verhaeren develops in his monks the difference of their
+characters, which are still effective even under the soutane; and by his
+delicate characterisation he shows the I manifold possibilities of
+religious feeling. The I feudal monk, a noble of ancient lineage, would
+make a conquest of God, as once his ancestors<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> conquered castle and
+forest lands with spur and sword. The <i>moine flambeau</i>, he that is
+burning with fervour, would possess Him with his passion like a woman.
+The savage monk, he that has come from the heart of a forest, can only
+comprehend Him in heathen wise, only fear Him as the wielder of thunder
+and lightning, while the gentle monk, he that loves the Virgin with a
+troubadour's timid tenderness, flees from the fear of Him. One monk
+would fathom Him by the learning of books and by logic; another does not
+understand Him, cannot lay hold on Him, and yet finds Him everywhere, in
+all things, in all he experiences. Thus all the characters of life, the
+harshest contrasts, are jostled together, quelled only by the monastery
+rules. But they are only in juxtaposition, just as the painter loves all
+his colours and things equally, just as he places things in
+juxtaposition, without estimating them according to their value. So far
+there is nothing that binds them together inwardly, there is no conflict
+of forces, no great idea. Neither are the verses as yet free; they too
+have the effect of being bound by the strict discipline of the monks.
+'Il s'environne d'une sorte de froide lumière parnassienne qui en fait
+une œuvre plus anonyme, malgré la marque du poète poinçonnée à
+maintes places sur le métal poli,'<a name="FNanchor_1_9" id="FNanchor_1_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_9" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> says Albert Mockel, the most
+subtle of æsthetic critics, of the book. Verhaeren must himself<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> have
+felt this insufficiency, for, conscious of not having solved his
+problems in terms of poetry, he has remoulded both aspects of the
+country, renewed both books in another form after many years: <i>Les
+Moines</i> in the tragedy <i>Le Cloître, Les Flamandes</i> in the great
+pentalogy <i>Toute la Flandre.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Les Moines</i> was the last of Verhaeren's descriptive books, the last in
+which he stood on the outer side of things contemplating them
+dispassionately. But already here there is too much temperament in him
+to allow him to look at things as altogether unconnected and
+undisciplined; the joy of magnifying and intensifying by feeling already
+stirs in him. At the end of the book he no longer sees the monks as
+isolated individuals, but gathers them all together in a great synthesis
+in his finale. Behind them the poet sees order, a secret law, a great
+force of life. They, these hermits who have renounced, who are scattered
+over the world in a thousand monasteries, are to the poet the last
+remnants of a great (departed beauty, and they are so much the more
+grandiose as they have lost all feeling for our own time. They are the
+last ruins of moribund Christianity in a new world, projecting, in
+tragic loneliness, into our own days. 'Seuls vous survivez grands au
+monde chrétien mort!'<a name="FNanchor_2_10" id="FNanchor_2_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_10" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> he hails them in admiration, for they have
+built the great House of God, and for many generations sacrificed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> their
+blood for the Host eternally white. In admiration he hails them. Not in
+faith and love, but in admiration for their fearless energy, and above
+all because they go on fighting undaunted for something that is dead and
+lost; because their beauty serves none other than itself; because they
+project into our own time like the ancient belfries of the land, which
+no longer call to prayer. In a land where everything else serves a
+purpose, pleasure and gold, they stand lonely; and they die without a
+cry and without a moan, fighting against an invisible enemy, they, the
+last defenders of beauty. For at that time, at that early stage of his
+career, beauty for Verhaeren was still identical with the past, because
+he had not yet discovered beauty for himself in the new things; in the
+monks he celebrates the last romanticists, because he had not yet found
+poetry in the things of reality, not yet found the new romance, the
+heroism of the working-day. He loves the monks as great dreamers, as the
+<i>chercheurs de chimères sublimes</i>, but he cannot help them, cannot
+defend what they possess, for behind them already stand their heirs.
+These heirs are the poets&mdash;a curious echo of David Strauss's idea about
+religion&mdash;who will have to be, what religion with its faithful was to
+the past, the guardians and eternal promoters of beauty. They it will
+be&mdash;here rings strangely the deepest intention of Verhaeren's later
+work&mdash;who will wave their new faith over the world like a banner, they,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>
+'les poètes venus trop tard pour être prêtres,'<a name="FNanchor_3_11" id="FNanchor_3_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_11" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> who shall be the
+priests of a new fervour. All religions, all dogmas, are brittle and
+transitory, Christ dies as Pan dies; and even this poetic faith, the
+last and highest conquest of the mind, must in its time pass away.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Car il ne reste rien que l'art sur cette terre</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pour tenter un cerveau puissant et solitaire</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et le griser de rouge et tonique liqueur.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>In this great hymn to the future Verhaeren first turns away from the
+past and seeks the path to the future. For the poetic idea is here
+understood with new and greater feelings than in the beginning of his
+career. Poetry is for Verhaeren a confession not only as applied to an
+individual in Goethe's phrase, but in a religious sense as well: as the
+highest moral confession.</p>
+
+<p>Much as these two books are marked by the effort to describe Flanders as
+it actually is, stronger than this effort is the yearning at the heart
+of them to escape from the present to the past. Every temperament
+exceeds reality. Flanders was here described in the sense of an ideal;
+but the ideal in both cases was projected on the past. Beauty young
+Verhaeren had sought in the monks, the symbols of the past; strength and
+the fire of life he had sought in the old Flemish masters. He still
+needed the costume of the past to discover the heroic and the beautiful
+in the present, just like many of our<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> poets, who, when they would paint
+strong men, must perforce place their dramas in the Florentine
+renaissance, and who, if they would fashion beauty, deck their
+characters with Greek costumes. To find strength and beauty, or in one
+word poetry, in the real things that surround us, is here still denied
+to Verhaeren; and therefore he has disowned his second book as well as
+his first. In the distance between the old and the new works the long
+road may be seen, and seen with pride, which leads from the traditional
+poet to the truly contemporary poet.</p>
+
+<p>Though not yet divided with a master hand, though not yet in the light
+of reality, the inner contrast of the country, the conflict between body
+and soul, between the joy of life and the longing for death, between
+pleasure and renunciation, the alternative between 'yes' and 'no,' was
+yet already contained in the contrast of these two books. And in a
+really emotional poet this contrast could not remain one that was purely
+external; it was bound to condense to an inner problem, to a personal
+decision between past and present. Two conceptions of the world, both
+inherited and in the blood, have here attained consciousness in one man;
+and though in life they may act independently in juxtaposition, in the
+individual the conflict must be fought out, the victory of the one or
+the other must be decided by force, or else by something higher, by an
+internal reconciliation. This conflict for a conception of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> the world
+pierces through the constant contrast between the acceptance and the
+denial of life in the poet, a conflict that for ten long years
+undermined his artistic and human experiences with terrific crises, and
+brought him to the verge of annihilation. The hostility which divides
+his ' country into two camps seems to have taken refuge in his soul to
+fight it out in a desperate and mortal duel: past and future seem to be
+fighting for a new synthesis. But only from such crises, from such
+pitiless struggles with the forces of one's own soul, do the vast
+conceptions of the universe and their new creative reconciliation grow.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_9" id="Footnote_1_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_9"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Albert Mockel, <i>Émile Verhaeren</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_10" id="Footnote_2_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_10"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 'Aux Moines.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_11" id="Footnote_3_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_11"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 'Aux Moines.'<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_BREAK-DOWN" id="THE_BREAK-DOWN"></a>THE BREAK-DOWN</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Nous sommes tous des Christs qui embrassons nos croix.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 22.5em;">É. V.,'La Joie,'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Every feeling, every sensation is, in the last instance, the
+transformation of pain. Everything that in vibration or by contact
+touches the epithelium affects it as pain. As pain, which then, by the
+secret chemistry of the nerves, transmitted from centre to centre, is
+transformed into impressions, colours, sounds, and conceptions. The
+poet, whose last secret really is that he is more sensitive than others,
+that he purifies these pains of contact into feeling with a still more
+delicate filter, must have finer nerves than anybody else. Where others
+only receive a vague impression, he must have a clear perception, to
+which his feeling must respond, and the value of which he must be able
+to estimate. In Verhaeren's very first books a particular kind of
+reaction to every incitement was perceptible. His feeling really
+responds only to strong, intensive, sharp irritation; its delicacy was
+not abnormal, only the energy of the reaction was remarkable. His first
+artistic incitement; however, that of Flemish landscapes, was only one
+of the retina, glaring colours, pictorial charm;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> only in <i>Les Moines</i>
+had for the first time more delicate psychic shades been crystallised.
+In the meantime a transformation had taken place in his exterior life.
+Verhaeren had turned aside from the contemplation of Nature to
+concentrate his strength on the cultivation of his mind. He had
+travelled extensively, had been in Paris and London, in Spain and
+Germany; with impetuous haste he had assimilated all great ideas, all
+new phases, all the manifold theories of existence. Without a pause,
+incessantly, experiences assail him and tire him out. A thousand
+impressions accost him, each demanding an answer; great, sombre cities
+discharge their electric fire upon him, and fill his nerves with leaping
+flame. The sky above him is obscured by the clouds of cities; in London
+he wanders about as though wildered in a forest. This grey, misty city,
+that seems as though it were built of steel, casts its whole melancholy
+over the soul of him who lives there in loneliness, ignorant of the
+language, and who is so much the more lonely, as all these
+manifestations of the new life in great cities are still unintelligible
+to him. He is still unable to capture the poetry that is in them, and so
+they leap at him and penetrate him with a confused, unintelligible pain.
+And in this novel atmosphere the intense refinement of his nerves
+proceeds at such a pace that already the slightest contact with the
+outer world produces a quivering reaction. Every noise, every colour,
+every thought<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> presses in upon him as though with sharp needles; his
+healthy sensibility becomes hypertrophied; that fineness of hearing, of
+which one is conscious, say in sea-sickness, which perceives every
+noise, even the slightest sound, as though it were the blow of a hammer,
+undermines his whole organism; every rapidly-passing smell corrodes him
+like an acid; every ray of light pricks him like a red-hot needle. The
+process is aggravated by a purely physical illness, which corresponds to
+his psychic ailment. Just at that time Verhaeren was attacked by a
+nervous affection of the stomach, one of those repercussions of the
+psychic on the physical system in which it is hard to say whether the
+ailing stomach causes the neurasthenic condition, or the weakness of the
+nerves the stagnation of the digestive functions. Both ailments are
+inwardly co-ordinated, both are a rejection of the outer impression, an
+impotent refusal of the chemical conversion. Just as the stomach feels
+all food as pain, as a foreign body, so the ear repels every sound as an
+intrusion, so the eye rejects every impression as pain. This nervous
+rejection of the outer world was already then, in Verhaeren's life,
+pathological. The bell on the door had to be removed, because it shocked
+his nerves; those who lived in the house had to wear felt slippers
+instead of shoes; the windows were closed to the noise of the street.
+These years in Verhaeren's life are the lowest depth, the crisis of his
+vitality. It is in such periods of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> depression that invalids shut
+themselves off from the world, from their fellow-men, from the light of
+day, from the din of existence, from books, from all contact with the
+outer world, because they instinctively feel that everything can be a
+renewal of their pain, and nothing an enrichment of their life. They
+seek to soften the world, to tone its colours down; they bury themselves
+in the monotony of solitude. This 'soudaine lassitude'<a name="FNanchor_1_12" id="FNanchor_1_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_12" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> then impinges
+on to the moral nature; the will, losing the sense of life, is
+paralysed; all standards of value collapse; ideals founder in the most
+frightful Nihilism. The earth becomes a chaos, the sky an empty space;
+everything is reduced to nothingness, to an absolute negation. Such
+crises in the life of a poet are almost always sterile. And it is
+therefore of incalculable value that here a poet should have observed
+himself and given us a clear picture of himself in this state, that,
+without fear of the ugliness, the confusion of his ego, he should have
+described, in terms of art, the history of a psychic crisis. In
+Verhaeren's trilogy, <i>Les Soirs, Les Débâcles, Les Flambeaux Noirs</i>, we
+have a document that must be priceless to pathologists as to
+psychologists. For here a deep-seated will to extract the last
+consequence from every phase of life has reproduced the stadium of a
+mental illness right to the verge of madness; here a poet has with the
+persistence of a physician pursued<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> the symptoms of his suffering
+through every stage of lacerating pain, and immortalised in poems the
+process of the inflammation of his nerves.</p>
+
+<p>The landscape of this book is no longer that of his native province;
+indeed, it can hardly be called one of earth. It is a grandiose
+landscape of dreams, horizons as though on some other planet, as though
+in one of those worlds which have cooled into moons, where the warmth of
+the earth has died out and an icy calm chills the vast far-seen spaces
+deserted of man. Already in the book of the monks, Rubens's merry
+landscape had been clouded over; and in the next, <i>Au Bord de la Route</i>,
+the grey hand of a cloud had eclipsed the sun. But here all the colours
+of life are burnt out, not a star shines down from this steel-grey
+metallic sky; only a cruel, freezing moon glides across it from time to
+time like a sardonic smile. These are books of pallid nights, with the
+immense wings of clouds closing the sky, over a narrowed world, in which
+the hours cling to things like heavy and clammy chains. They are works
+filled with a glacial cold. 'Il gèle ...'<a name="FNanchor_2_13" id="FNanchor_2_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_13" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> one poem begins, and this
+shuddering tone pierces like the howling of dogs ever and ever again
+over an illimitable plain. The sun is dead, dead are the flowers, the
+trees; the very marshes are frozen in these white midnights:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et la crainte saisit d'un immortel hiver</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et d'un grand Dieu soudain, glacial et splendide.<a name="FNanchor_3_14" id="FNanchor_3_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_14" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In his fever the poet is for ever dreaming of this cold, as though in a
+secret yearning for its cooling breath. No one speaks to him, only the
+winds howl senselessly through the streets like dogs round a house.
+Often dreams come, but they are <i>fleurs du mal</i>; they dart out of the
+ice burning, yellow, poisonous. More and more monotonous grow the days,
+more and more fearful; they fall down like drops, heavy and black.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Mes jours toujours plus lourds s'en vont roulant leur cours!<a name="FNanchor_4_15" id="FNanchor_4_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_15" class="fnanchor">[4]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>In thought and sound these verses express ail the frightful horror of
+this desolation. Impotently the ticking of the clock hammers this
+endless void, and measures a barren time. Darker, and darker grows the
+world, more and more oppressive; the concave mirror of solitude distorts
+the poet's dreams into frightful grimaces, and spirits whisper evil
+thoughts in his restless heart.</p>
+
+<p>And like a fog, like a heavy, stifling cloud, fatigue sinks down on his
+soul. First pleasure in things had died, and then the very will to
+pleasure. The soul craves nothing now. The nerves have withdrawn their
+antennæ from the outer world; they are afraid of every impression; they
+are spent. Whatever chances to drift against them no longer becomes
+colour, sound, impression; the senses are too feeble for the chemical
+conversion of impressions: and so everything remains at the stage of
+pain, a dull, gnawing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> pain. Feeling, which the nerves are now powerless
+to feed, starves; desire is sunk in sleep. Autumn has come; all the
+flowers have withered; and winter comes apace.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il fait novembre en mon âme.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et c'est le vent du nord qui clame</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Comme une bête dans mon âme.<a name="FNanchor_5_16" id="FNanchor_5_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_16" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Slowly, but irresistible as a swelling tide, emerges an evil thought:
+the idea of the senselessness of life, the thought of death. As the last
+of yearnings soars up the prayer:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Mourir! comme des fleurs trop énormes, mourir!<a name="FNanchor_6_17" id="FNanchor_6_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_17" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>For the poet's whole body is, as it were, sore from this contact with
+the outer world, from these little gnawing pains. Not a single great
+feeling can stand erect: everything is eaten away by this little,
+gnawing, twitching pain. But now the man in his torture springs up, as a
+beast, tormented by the stings of insects, tears its chains asunder and
+rushes madly and blindly along. The patient would fain flee from his bed
+of torture, but he cannot retrace his steps. No man can 'se recommencer
+enfant, avec calcul.'<a name="FNanchor_7_18" id="FNanchor_7_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_18" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> Travels, dreams, do nothing but deaden the
+pain; and then the torment of the awakening sets in again with redoubled
+strength. Only one way is open: the road which leads forward, the road
+to annihilation. Out of a thousand petty pains, the will longs for one
+single pain that shall<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> end all: the body that is being burnt piecemeal
+cries for the lightning. The sick man desires&mdash;as fever-patients will
+tear their wounds open&mdash;to make this pain, which tortures without
+destroying, so great and murderous that it will kill outright: to save
+his pride, he would fain be himself the cause of his destruction. Pain,
+he says to himself, shall not continue to be a series of pin-pricks; he
+refuses to 'pourrir, immensément emmailloté d'ennui';<a name="FNanchor_8_19" id="FNanchor_8_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_19" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> he asks to be
+destroyed by a vast, fiery, savage pain; he demands a beautiful and
+tragic death. <i>The will to experience becomes here the will to suffer
+pain</i> and even death. He will be glad to suffer any torture, but not
+this one low little thing; he can no longer endure to feel himself so
+contemptible, so wretched.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">N'entendre plus se taire, en sa maison d'ébène,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qu'un silence total dont auraient peur les morts.<a name="FNanchor_9_20" id="FNanchor_9_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_20" class="fnanchor">[9]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>And with a flagellant's pleasure the patient nurses this fire of fever,
+till it flames up in a bright blaze. The deepest secret of Verhaeren's
+art was from the first his joy in intemperance, the strength of his
+exaggeration. And so, too, he snatches up this pain, this neurasthenia
+to a wonderful, fiery, and grandiose ecstasy. A cry, a pleasure breaks
+out of this idea of liberation. For the first time the word 'joy' blazes
+again in the cry:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Le joie enfin me vient, de souffrir par moi-même,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Parce que je le veux.<a name="FNanchor_10_21" id="FNanchor_10_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_21" class="fnanchor">[10]</a></span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>True, only a perverse joy, a sophism, the false triumph over life of the
+suicide, who believes he has conquered fate when, truth to tell, it has
+conquered him. But this self-deception is already sublime.</p>
+
+<p>By this sudden interference of the will the physical torture of the
+nerves becomes a psychic event; the illness of the body encroaches upon
+the intellect; the neurasthenia becomes a 'déformation morale'; the
+suffering schism of the poet's ego is of itself subdivided, so to speak,
+into two elements, one that excites pain and one that suffers pain. The
+psychic would fain tear itself free from the physical, the soul would
+fain withdraw from the tortured body:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pour s'en aller vers les lointains et se défaire</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">De soi et des autres, un jour,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">En un voyage ardent et mol comme l'amour</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et légendaire ainsi qu'un départ de galère!<a name="FNanchor_11_22" id="FNanchor_11_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_22" class="fnanchor">[11]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>But the two are relentlessly bound up with each other, no flight is
+possible, however much disgust drives the poet to rescue at least a part
+of himself by snatching it into a purer, calmer, and higher state.
+Never, I believe, has the aversion of a sick man to himself, the will to
+health of a living man, been more cruel and more grandiose than in this
+book of a poet's diabolical revolt against himself. His suffering soul
+is torn into two parts. In a fearful personification the hangman and the
+condemned criminal wrestle<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> for the mastery. 'Se cravacher dans sa
+pensée et dans son sang!'<a name="FNanchor_12_23" id="FNanchor_12_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_23" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> and finally, in a paroxysm of fury, 'me
+cracher moi-même,'<a name="FNanchor_13_24" id="FNanchor_13_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_24" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> these are the horribly shrilling cries of
+self-hatred and self-disgust. With all the strings of her whipped
+strength the soul tears to free herself from the rotting and tormented
+body, and her deepest torture is that this separation is impossible. In
+this distraction flickers already the first flame of madness.</p>
+
+<p>Never&mdash;if we except Dostoieffsky&mdash;has a poet's scalpel probed the wound
+of his ego so cruelly and so deeply, never has it gone so dangerously
+near to the nerve of life. And never perhaps, except in Nietzsche's
+<i>Ecce Homo!</i> has a poet stepped so close to the edge of the precipice
+that juts above the abyss of existence, with so clear a consciousness of
+its vicinity, to feast on the feeling of dizziness and on the danger of
+death. The fire in Verhaeren's nerves has slowly inflamed his brain. But
+the other being, the poet in him, had remained watchful, observing the
+eye of madness slowly, inevitably, and as though magnetically attracted,
+coming nearer and nearer. 'L'absurdité grandit en moi comme une fleur
+fatale.'<a name="FNanchor_14_25" id="FNanchor_14_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_25" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> In gentle fear, but at the same time with a secret
+voluptuous pleasure, he felt the dreaded thing approaching. For long
+already he had been conscious that this rending of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> himself had hunted
+his thinking from the circle of clarity. And in one grandiose poem, in
+which he sees the corpse of his reason floating down the grey Thames,
+the sick man describes that tragic foundering:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Elle est morte de trop savoir,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">De trop vouloir sculpter la cause,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;-</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Elle est morte, atrocement,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">D'un savant empoisonnement,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Elle est morte aussi d'un délire</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vers un absurde et rouge empire.<a name="FNanchor_15_26" id="FNanchor_15_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_26" class="fnanchor">[15]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>But no fear takes him at this thought. Verhaeren is a poet who loves
+paroxysm. And just as in his physical illness he had called out in the
+deepest joy for the intoxication of illness, for its exasperation, for
+death, so now his psychic illness demands its intoxication, the
+dissolution of all order, its most glorious foundering: madness. Here,
+too, the pleasure in the quest of pain is intensified to the highest
+superlative, to a voluptuous joy in self-destruction. And as sick men
+amid their torments scream of a sudden for death, this tortured man
+screams in grim yearning for madness:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Aurai-je enfin l'atroce joie</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">De voir, nerfs par nerfs, comme une proie,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">La démence attaquer mon cerveau?<a name="FNanchor_16_27" id="FNanchor_16_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_27" class="fnanchor">[16]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>He has measured all the deeps of the spirit, but all the words of
+religion and science, all the elixirs<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> of life, have been powerless to
+save him from this torment. He knows all sensations, and there was no
+greatness in any of them; all have goaded him, none have exalted him or
+raised him above himself. And now his heart yearns ardently for this
+last sensation of all. He is tired of waiting for it, he will go out to
+meet it: 'Je veux marcher vers la folie et ses soleils.'<a name="FNanchor_17_28" id="FNanchor_17_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_28" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> He hails
+madness as though it were a saint, as though it were his saviour; he
+forces himself to 'croire à la démence ainsi qu'en une foi.'<a name="FNanchor_18_29" id="FNanchor_18_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_29" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> It is a
+magnificent picture reminding one of the legend of Hercules, who,
+tortured by the fiery robe of Nessus, hurls himself on the pyre to be
+consumed by one great flame instead of being wretchedly burnt to death
+by a thousand slow and petty torments.</p>
+
+<p>Here the highest state of despair is reached; the black banner of death
+and the red one of madness are furled together. With unprecedented logic
+Verhaeren, despairing of an interpretation of life, has exalted
+senselessness as the sense of the universe. But it is just in this
+complete inversion that victory already lies. Johannes Schlaf, in his
+masterly study, has with great eloquence demonstrated that it is just at
+the moment when the sick man cries out like one being crucified, 'Je
+suis l'immensément perdu,'<a name="FNanchor_19_30" id="FNanchor_19_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_30" class="fnanchor">[19]</a> just when he feels he is being drawn into
+the bosom of the infinite, that he is redeemed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> and delivered. Just this
+idea, which here had whipped the little pain to the verge of madness,</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">À chaque heure, violenter sa maladie;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'aimer, et la maudire,<a name="FNanchor_20_31" id="FNanchor_20_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_31" class="fnanchor">[20]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>is already the deepest leitmotiv of Verhaeren's work, the key to unlock
+the gates of it. For the idea is nothing else than the idea of his life,
+to master all resistance by a boundless love, 'aimer le sort jusqu'en
+ses rages';<a name="FNanchor_21_32" id="FNanchor_21_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_32" class="fnanchor">[21]</a> never to shun a thing, but to take everything and
+enhance it till it becomes creative, ecstatic pleasure; to welcome every
+suffering with fresh readiness. Even this cry for madness, no doubt the
+extreme document of human despair, is an immense yearning for clearness;
+in this tortured disgust with illness cries a joy in life perhaps else
+unknown in our days; and the whole conflict, which seems to be a flight
+from life, is in the last instance an immense heroism for which there is
+no name. Nietzsche's great saying is here fulfilled: 'For a dionysiac
+task a hammer's hardness, <i>the pleasure in destruction itself</i>, is most
+decidedly one of the preliminary conditions.'<a name="FNanchor_22_33" id="FNanchor_22_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_33" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> And what at this
+period of Verhaeren's work appears still to be negative is in the higher
+sense a preparation for the positive, for the decisive consummation, of
+the later books.</p>
+
+<p>For that reason this crisis and the shaping of it in verse remain an
+imperishable monument<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> of our contemporary literature, for it is at the
+same time an eternal monument to the conquest of human suffering by the
+power of art. Verhaeren's crisis&mdash;his exposition, for the sake of the
+value of life, of his inward struggle&mdash;has gone deeper than that of any
+other poet of our time. To this very day the sufferings of that time are
+graven, as though by iron wedges, in the furrows of his lofty brow; the
+recovery of his health and his subsequent robustness have been powerless
+to efface them. This crisis was a fire without parallel, a flame of
+passion. Not a single acquisition from the earlier days was rescued from
+it. Verhaeren's whole former relation to the world has broken down: his
+Catholic faith, his religion, his feeling for his native province, for
+the world, for life itself, all is destroyed. And when he builds up his
+work now, it must perforce be an entirely different one, with a
+different artistic expression, with different feelings, different
+knowledge, and different harmonies. This tempest has changed the
+landscape of his soul, where once the peace of a modest existence had
+prevailed, into a pathless desert. But this desert with its solitude has
+space and liberty for the building up of a new, a richer, an infinitely
+nobler world.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_12" id="Footnote_1_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_12"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'L'Heure Mauvaise' (<i>Au Bord de la Route</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_13" id="Footnote_2_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_13"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 'La Barque' (<i>Au Bord de la Route</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_14" id="Footnote_3_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_14"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 'Le Gel' (<i>Les Soirs</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_15" id="Footnote_4_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_15"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> 'L'Heure Mauvaise' (<i>Au Bord de la Route</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_16" id="Footnote_5_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_16"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> 'Vers' (<i>Au Bord de la Route</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_17" id="Footnote_6_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_17"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> 'Mourir' (<i>Les Soirs</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_18" id="Footnote_7_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_18"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> 'S'amoindrir' (<i>Les Débâcles</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_19" id="Footnote_8_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_19"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> 'Si Morne' (<i>Les Débâcles</i>)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_20" id="Footnote_9_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_20"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> 'Le Roc' (<i>Les Flambeaux Noirs</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_21" id="Footnote_10_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_21"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> 'Insatiablement' (<i>Les Soirs</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_22" id="Footnote_11_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_22"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> 'Là-bas' (<i>Au Bord de la Route</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_23" id="Footnote_12_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_23"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> 'Vers le Cloître' (<i>Les Débâcles</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_24" id="Footnote_13_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_24"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> 'Un Soir' (<i>Au Bord de la Route</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_25" id="Footnote_14_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_25"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> 'Fleur Fatale' (<i>Les Débâcles</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_26" id="Footnote_15_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_26"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> 'La Morte' (<i>Les Flambeaux Noirs</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_27" id="Footnote_16_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_27"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> 'Le Roc' (<i>Ibid.</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_28" id="Footnote_17_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_28"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> 'Fleur Fatale' (<i>Les Débâcles</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_29" id="Footnote_18_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_29"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> 'Le Roc' (<i>Les Flambeaux Noirs</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_30" id="Footnote_19_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_30"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> 'Les Nombres' (<i>Ibid.</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_31" id="Footnote_20_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_31"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> 'Celui de la Fatigue' (<i>Les Apparus dans mes Chemins</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_32" id="Footnote_21_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_32"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> 'La Joie' (<i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_33" id="Footnote_22_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_33"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> <i>Ecce Homo!</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="FLIGHT_INTO_THE_WORLD" id="FLIGHT_INTO_THE_WORLD"></a>FLIGHT INTO THE WORLD</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">On boit sa soif, on mange sa faim.&mdash;É.V., 'L'Amour.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>In this crisis the negation was driven to the last possible limits. The
+sick man had denied not only the outer world, but himself as well.
+Nothing had remained but vexation, disgust, and torment.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">La vie en lui ne se prouvait</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Que par l'horreur qu'il en avait.<a name="FNanchor_1_34" id="FNanchor_1_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_34" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>He had arrived at the last possibility, at that possibility which means
+destruction or transformation. The at first purely physical pain of the
+supersensitive organs of the senses had become a moral depression; the
+depression had become psychic suffering; and this again had gradually
+turned in a grandiose progression not only to pain in the individual
+thing but to suffering in the all: to <i>cosmic pain</i>. For Him, however,
+who in His loneliness took the suffering of the whole world upon His
+shoulders, who was strong enough to bear it for all the centuries,
+humanity has invented the symbol of 'God.' He who is born of earth and
+lives to die must perforce break down under so gigantic a burden. Into
+the last corner<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> of his ego revengeful life had here driven the man who
+denied it, had driven him to the point where now he stood shivering
+before the abyss in his own breast, face to face with death and madness.
+The physical and poetic organism of Verhaeren was overheated to the most
+dangerous and extreme degree. This fever-heat&mdash;that of a flagellant
+&mdash;had brought his blood to the boiling-point; it was filling the chamber
+of his breast with pictures of such overwhelming horror that the
+explosion of self-destruction could only be prevented by opening the
+valve.</p>
+
+<p>There were only two means of flight from this destruction: flight into
+the past&mdash;or flight into a new world. Many, Verlaine for instance, had
+in such catastrophes, wherein the whole structure of their lives tumbled
+to the ground, fled into the cathedrals of Catholicism rather than stand
+in solitude under the threatening sky. Verhaeren, however, though an
+inspired faith is one of the most living sources of his poetical power,
+was more afraid of the past than of the Unknown. <i>He freed himself from
+the immense pressure upon him by fleeing into the world</i>. He who in his
+pride had conceived the whole process of the world as a personal affair,
+he who had tried to solve the eternal discord, the undying 'yes' and
+'no' of life in his own lonely self, now rushes into the very midst of
+things and involves himself in their process. He who previously had felt
+everything only subjectively, only in isolation, now objectifies<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>
+himself; he who previously had shut himself off from reality, now lets
+his veins pulse in harmony with the breathing organism of life. He
+relinquishes his attitude of pride; he surrenders himself; lavishes
+himself joyously on everything; exchanges the pride of being alone for
+the immense pleasure of being everywhere. <i>He no longer looks at all
+things in himself, but at himself in all things</i>. But the poet in him
+frees himself, quite in Goethe's sense, by symbols. Verhaeren drives his
+superabundance out of himself into the whole world, just as Christ in
+the legend drove the devils out of the madman into the swine. The heat,
+the fever of his feeling&mdash;which, concentrated in his too narrow chest,
+were near bursting it&mdash;now animate with their fire the whole world
+around him, which of old had been to him congealed with ice. All the
+evil powers, which had slunk around him in the trappings of nightmares,
+he now transforms to shapes of life. He hammers away at them and shapes
+them anew; he is himself the smith of that noble poem of his, the smith
+of whom he says:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dans son brasier, il a jeté</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Les cris d'opiniâtreté,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">La rage sourde et séculaire;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dans son brasier d'or exalté,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Maître de soi, il a jeté</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Révoltes, deuils, violences, colères,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pour leur donner la trempe et la clarté</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Du fer et de l'éclair.<a name="FNanchor_2_35" id="FNanchor_2_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_35" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He objectifies his personality in the work of art, hammering out of the
+cold blocks, that weighed upon him with the weight of iron, monuments
+and statues of pain. All the feelings which of old weighed down upon him
+like dull fog, formless and prisoned in dream like nightmares, now
+become clear statues, symbols in stone of his soul's experiences. The
+poet has torn his fear, his burning, moaning, horrible fear, out of
+himself, and poured it into his bell-ringer, who is consumed in his
+blazing belfry. He has turned the monotony of his days to music in his
+poem of the rain; his mad fight against the elements, which in the end
+break his strength, he has shaped into the image of the ferryman
+struggling against the current that shatters his oars one after the
+other. His cruel probing of his own pain he has visualised in the idea
+of his fishermen, who with their nets all in holes go on fishing up
+nothing but suffering on suffering out of the sombre stream; his evil
+and red lusts he has spiritualised in his <i>Aventurier</i>, in the
+adventurer who returns home from a far land to celebrate his wedding
+feast with his dead love. Here his feelings are shaped no longer in
+moods, in the fluid material of dreams, but in the infinitely mobile
+form of human beings. Here there is symbolism in the highest sense, in
+Goethe's sense of liberation. For every feeling that has achieved
+artistic shape is as it were conjured away out of the breast. And thus
+the too heavy pressure slowly disappears from the poet's being,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> and the
+morbid fever from his work. Now and now only does he recognise the
+suicidal cowardice behind the visor of the pride that forced him to fly
+from the world, now and now only does he understand that fatal egoism
+which had taken refuge beyond the pale of the world:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">J'ai été lâche et je me suis enfui</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Du monde, en mon orgueil futile,<a name="FNanchor_3_36" id="FNanchor_3_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_36" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>This confession is the last liberating word of the crisis.</p>
+
+<p>Now his despair&mdash;a despair like that of Faust&mdash;is overcome. The mood of
+Easter morning begins to sound the exulting cry, 'Earth has me
+again!'<a name="FNanchor_4_37" id="FNanchor_4_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_37" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> with the anthems of the resurrection. Verhaeren has described
+this deliverance, this ascent from illness to health, from the most
+despairing 'no' to the most exultant 'yes,' in many symbols, most
+beautifully in that magnificent poem wherein St. George the
+dragon-slayer bows down to him with his shining lance; and again in that
+other poem in which the four gentle sisters approach him and announce
+his deliverance:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'une est le bleu pardon, l'autre la bonté blanche,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">La troisième l'amour pensif, la dernière le don</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">D'être, même pour les méchants, le sacrifice.<a name="FNanchor_5_38" id="FNanchor_5_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_38" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Goodness and love call to him now from where of old there were only
+hatred and despair. And in their approach already he feels the hope of
+recovery, the hope of a natural, artistic strength.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et quand elles auront, dans ma maison,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Mis de l'ordre à mes torts, plié tous mes remords</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et refermé, sur mes péchés, toute cloison,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">En leur pays d'or immobile, où le bonheur</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Descend, sur des rives de fleurs entr'accordées,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Elles dresseront les hautes idées,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">En sainte-table, pour mon cœur.<a name="FNanchor_6_39" id="FNanchor_6_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_39" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>This feeling of recovery grows more and more secure, more and more the
+mist parts before the approaching sun of health. Now the poet knows that
+he has been wandering in the dark galleries of mines, that he has been
+hammering a labyrinth through the hard rock of hatred instead of walking
+the same path as his fellow-men in the light. And at last, bright and
+exultant, high above the shy voices of hope and prayer, the sudden
+triumph of certainty rings out. For the first time Verhaeren finds the
+form of the poem of the future&mdash;the dithyramb. Where of old, confused
+and lonely, <i>le carillon noir</i> of pain sounded, now all the strings of
+the heart vibrate and sing.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Sonnez toutes mes voix d'espoir!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Sonnez en moi; sonnez, sous les rameaux,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">En des routes claires et du soleil!<a name="FNanchor_7_40" id="FNanchor_7_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_40" class="fnanchor">[7]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>And now the path proceeds in light 'vers les claires métamorphoses.'<a name="FNanchor_8_41" id="FNanchor_8_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_41" class="fnanchor">[8]</a></p>
+
+<p>This flight into the world was the great liberation. Not only has the
+body grown strong again and rejoices in the wandering and the way, but
+the soul too has become cheerful, the will has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> grown new wings that are
+stronger than the old, and the poet's art is filled with a fresh blood
+red with life. The deliverance is perceptible even in Verhaeren's verse,
+which with its delicate nerves reproduces all the phases of his soul.
+For his poetry, which at first in the indifference of its picturesque
+description preserved the cold form of the Alexandrine, and then, in the
+grim monotony of the crisis, tried to represent the void waste of
+feeling by a terrifying, gruesomely beautiful uniformity of rhythm, this
+poem of a sudden, as though out of a dream, starts into life, awakens
+like an animal from sleep, rears, prances, curvets; imitates all
+movements, threatens, exults, falls into ecstasy: in other words, all of
+a sudden, and independently of all influences and theories, he has won
+his way to the <i>vers libre,</i> free verse. Just as the poet no longer
+shuts the I world up in himself, but bestows himself on the world, the
+poem too no longer seeks to lock the world up obstinately in its
+four-cornered prison, but surrenders itself to every feeling, every
+rhythm, every melody; it adapts itself, distends; with its foaming
+voluptuous joy it can fold in its embrace the illimitable length and
+breadth of cities, can contract to pick up the loveliness of one fallen
+blossom, can imitate the thundering voice of the street, the hammering
+of machines, and the whispering of lovers in a garden of spring. <i>The
+poem can now speak in all the languages of feeling, with all the voices
+of men; for the tortured,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> moaning cry of an individual has become the
+voice of the universe.</i></p>
+
+<p>But together with this new delight the poet feels the debt which he has
+withheld from his age. He beholds the lost years in which he lived only
+for himself, for his own little feeling, instead of listening to the
+voice of his time. With a remarkable concordance of genius Verhaeren's
+work here expresses what Dehmel&mdash;in the same year perhaps&mdash;fashioned
+with such grandeur in 'The Mountain Psalm,' the poem in which, looking
+down from the heights of solitude to the cities in their pall of smoke,
+he cries in ecstasy:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Was weinst du, Sturm?&mdash;Hinab, Erinnerungen!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">dort pulst im Dunst der Weltstadt zitternd Herz!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Es grollt ein Schrei von Millionen Zungen</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">nach Glück und Frieden: Wurm, was will dein Schmerz!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Nicht sickert einsam mehr von Brust zu Brüsten,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">wie einst die Sehnsucht, als ein stiller Quell;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">heut stöhnt ein <i>Volk</i> nach Klarheit, wild und gell,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">und du schwelgst noch in Wehmutslüsten?</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Siehst du den Qualm mit dicken Fäusten drohn</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">dort überm Wald der Schlote und der Essen?</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Auf deine Reinheitsträume fällt der Hohn</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">der Arbeit! fühl's: sie ringt, von Schmutz zerfressen.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Du hast mit deiner Sehnsucht bloss gebuhlt,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">in trüber Glut dich selber nur genossen;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">schütte die Kraft aus, die dir zugeflossen,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">und du wirst frei vom Druck der Schuld!<a name="FNanchor_9_42" id="FNanchor_9_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_42" class="fnanchor">[9]</a></span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Pour out the power that has flowed in upon thee! Surrender thyself! That
+too is Verhaeren's ecstatic cry at this hour. Opposites touch. <i>Supreme
+solitude is turned to supreme fellowship</i>. The poet feels that
+self-surrender is more than self-preservation. All at once he sees
+behind him the frightful danger of this self-seeking pain.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et tout à coup je m'apparais celui</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qui s'est, hors de soi-même, enfui</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vers le sauvage appel des forces unanimes.<a name="FNanchor_10_43" id="FNanchor_10_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_43" class="fnanchor">[10]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>And he who in days gone by had fled from this appeal into cold solitude,
+now casts himself ecstatically into the arms of the world, with the I
+deepest yearning</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">De n'être plus qu'un tourbillon</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qui se disperse au vent mystérieux des choses.<a name="FNanchor_11_44" id="FNanchor_11_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_44" class="fnanchor">[11]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>He feels that in order to live to the full all the greatness and beauty
+of this fiery world, he must multiply himself, be a thousandfold and ten
+thousandfold what he is. 'Multiplie-toi!' Be manifold. Surrender
+thyself! For the first time this cry bursts up like a flame. Be
+manifold!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Multiplie et livre-toi! Défais</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Ton être en des millions d'êtres;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et sens l'immensité filtrer et transparaître.<a name="FNanchor_12_45" id="FNanchor_12_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_45" class="fnanchor">[12]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Only from this brotherhood with all things accrue the possibilities of
+being a modern poet. Only by self-surrender to everything that is could
+Verhaeren attain to so grandiose a conception of contemporary
+manifestations, only thus could he become the poet of the democracy of
+cities, of industrialism, of science, the poet of Europe, the poet of
+our age. Only such a pantheistic feeling could create this intimate
+relationship between the world of self and the world surrounding self,
+the relationship which subsequently ends in an unparalleled identity:
+only so despairing a 'no' could be transformed to so enraptured a 'yes,'
+only one who had fled from the world could possess it with such passion.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_34" id="Footnote_1_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_34"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'Un Soir' (<i>Au Bord de la Route</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_35" id="Footnote_2_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_35"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 'Le Forgeron' (<i>Les Villages Illusoires</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_36" id="Footnote_3_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_36"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 'Saint Georges' (<i>Les Apparus dans mes Chemins</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_37" id="Footnote_4_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_37"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Goethe's <i>Faust</i>, 1. 784.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_38" id="Footnote_5_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_38"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> 'Les Saintes' (<i>Les Apparus dans mes Chemins</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_39" id="Footnote_6_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_39"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> 'Les Saintes' (<i>Les Apparus dans mes Chemins</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_40" id="Footnote_7_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_40"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> 'Saint Georges' (<i>Ibid</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_41" id="Footnote_8_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_41"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> 'Le Forgeron' (<i>Les Villages Illusoires</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_42" id="Footnote_9_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_42"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> 'Why weepest thou, O storm?&mdash;Down, memories! Yonder in the
+smoke pulses the great city's trembling heart! A million grumbling
+tongues are crying for peace and happiness: worm, what would thy pain!
+Yearning no longer trickles lonely from breast to breasts, a quiet
+source and no more: to-day a <i>nation</i> groans, and with wild, shrill
+voices demands clearness&mdash;and thou still revellest in the joys of
+melancholy?
+</p><p>
+'Seest thou the reek and smoke threatening yonder over the forest of
+flues and chimneys? Upon thy dreams of purity falls the scorn of labour!
+Feel it: labour is struggling, eaten up with dirt! Thou hast but
+wantoned with thy yearning, thou hast but enjoyed thyself in turbid
+heat; pour out the power that has flowed in upon thee, and thou shalt be
+free from the burden of guilt!'&mdash;'Bergpsalm' (<i>Aber die Liebe</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_43" id="Footnote_10_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_43"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> 'La Foule' (<i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_44" id="Footnote_11_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_44"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> 'Celui du Savoir' (<i>Les Apparus dans mes Chemins</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_45" id="Footnote_12_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_45"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> 'La Forêt' (<i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>).<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span></p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="PART_II" id="PART_II"></a>PART II</h3>
+
+<h3>CONSTRUCTIVE FORCES</h3>
+
+
+<h4>LES CAMPAGNES HALLUCINÉES&mdash;LES VILLAGES</h4>
+
+<h4>ILLUSOIRES&mdash;LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES&mdash;</h4>
+
+<h4>LES DRAMES</h4>
+
+<h4>1893-1900</h4>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CONTEMPORARY_FEELING" id="CONTEMPORARY_FEELING"></a>CONTEMPORARY FEELING</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">J'étais le carrefour où tout se rencontrait.&mdash;É.V., 'Le Mont.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p>Verhaeren's deliverance from the stifling clasp of his crisis was a
+flight to realities. He saved himself by no longer fixing his gaze
+rigidly on himself and deeply probing every feeling of joy and torment,
+but by turning to the world of phenomena and flinging himself on its
+problems. He has no longer to stand in solitude facing the world; his
+desire is to multiply himself, to realise himself in everything that is
+alive, in everything that expresses a will, an idea, a form, anything at
+all animated. His poetic aim now is, not so much to analyse himself to
+himself, as to analyse himself in the whole world.</p>
+
+<p>To realities, and particularly to the realities of our day, lyric poets
+had previously felt themselves alien. It had long been a commonplace to
+speak of the danger to art of industrialism, of democracy, of this age
+of machinery which makes pur life uniform, kills individuality, and
+drowns romance in actualities. All these poets have looked upon the new
+creations, machines, railways, monster cities, the telegraph, the
+telephone,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> all the triumphs of engineering, as a drag on the soaring of
+poetry. Ruskin preached that workshops should be demolished and chimneys
+razed to the ground; Tolstoy pointed to primitive man, who produces all
+his requirements from his own resources independently of any community,
+and saw in him the moral and æsthetic ideal of the future. In poetry,
+the past had gradually come to be identified with the poetical. People
+were enamoured of the glory that was Greece, of mail-coaches and narrow,
+crooked streets; they were filled with enthusiasm for all foreign
+cultures, and decried that of our own time as a phase of degeneration.
+Democracy, levelling all ranks and confining even the poet to the
+middle-class profession of author, seemed, as a social order, to be the
+correlation of machinery which, by the constructive skill of workshops,
+renders all manual dexterity unnecessary. All the poets, who were glad
+to avail themselves of the practical advantages provided by technical
+science, who had no objection to covering immense distances in the
+minimum time, who accepted the comfort of the modern house, the luxury
+of modern conditions of life, increased pecuniary rewards and social
+independence, refused obstinately to discover in these advantages a
+single poetic motive, a single object of inspiration, the least stimulus
+or ecstasy. Poetry had by degrees come to be something which was the
+very opposite of what-, ever is useful; all evolution seemed to these<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>
+poets to be, from the point of view of culture, retrogression.</p>
+
+<p>Now it is Verhaeren's great exploit that he effected a transmutation
+poetic values. He discovered the sublime in the far-spread serried ranks
+of democracy; beauty he found not only where it adapts itself to
+traditional ideas, but also where, still hidden by the cotyledon of the
+new, it is just beginning to unfold. By rejecting no phenomenon, in so
+far as an inward sense and a necessity dwelt in it, he infinitely
+extended the boundaries of the lyric art. He found a fruitful soil in
+the very places where all other poets despaired of poetic seed. He and
+he alone, who had for so long been eating his heart out in fierce
+isolation, feels the strength and fulness of society, the poetical
+element in the massed strength of great cities and in great inventions.
+<i>His deepest longing, his most sublime exploit is the lyric discovery of
+the new beauty in new things.</i></p>
+
+<p>The only way to this feat lay for him through the conviction that beauty
+does not express anything absolute, but something that changes with
+circumstances and with men; that beauty, like everything that is subject
+to evolution, is constantly changing. Yesterday's beauty is not to-day's
+beauty. Beauty is no more opposed than anything else to that tendency to
+spiritualisation which is the most characteristic symptom ind result of
+all culture. Physiologists have proved that the physical strength of
+modern man<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> is inferior to that of his ancestors, but that his nervous
+system is more developed, so that strength is more and more concentrated
+in the intellect. The Hellenic hero was the wrestler, the expression of
+a body harmoniously developed in every limb, the perfection of strength
+and skill; the hero of our time is the thinker, the ideal of
+intellectual strength and suppleness. And since our only way of
+estimating the perfection of things is by the ideal of our personal
+feeling, the form of beauty likewise has been transformed and become
+intellectual. And even when we seek it in the body, as, for instance, in
+the ideal woman's figure, we have grown accustomed to seeing perfection
+not so much in robustness and plumpness as in a noble, slender play of
+lines which mysteriously expresses the soul. Beauty is turning away more
+and more from the outer surface, from the physical, to the interior
+aspects, to the psychic. In proportion as motive forces hide themselves
+and as harmony becomes less obvious, beauty intellectualises itself. It
+is becoming for us not so much a beauty of appearance as a beauty of;
+aim. If we are to admire the telegraph or the telephone, we shall not be
+satisfied with considering the exterior forms, the network of wires, the
+keys, the receivers; we shall be impressed rather by the ideal beauty,
+by the idea of a vibrating spark leaping over countries and whole
+continents. A machine is not wonderful on, account of its rattling,
+rusty, iron framework, but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> by the idea, deep-seated in its body, which
+is the principle of its magical activity. A modern idea of beauty must
+be adapted not only to the idea of beauty of the past, but also to that
+of the future. And the future of æsthetics is a kind of ideology, or, as
+Renan expresses it, an identity with the sciences. We shall lose the
+habit of understanding things only by our senses, of seeing their
+harmony only on their exterior surface, and we shall have to learn how
+to conceive their intellectual aims, their inner form, their psychic
+organisation, as beauty.</p>
+
+<p>For these new things are only ugly when they are regarded with the eyes
+of a past century, when our contemporaries, jealously guarding a
+reverent over-estimation, valuing the rust and not the gold, despise
+modern works of art, and pay a thousand times too dear for the
+indifferent productions of a past age. Only in this state of feeling is
+it possible to esteem mail-coaches poetical and locomotives ugly; only
+thus is it possible for poets, who have not learned to see with
+emancipated and independent eyes, to assume such a hostile attitude, or
+at the best an indifferent attitude, to our realities. Let us remember
+Nietzsche's beautiful words: 'My formula for grandeur in man is <i>amor
+fati</i>: that a man should ask for nothing else, either in the past or in
+the future, in all eternity. We must not only endure what is necessary,
+still less conceal it&mdash;all idealism is lying in necessity's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> face&mdash;but
+we must <i>love</i> it.'<a name="FNanchor_1_46" id="FNanchor_1_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_46" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> And in this sense some few in our days have loved
+what is new, first as a necessity, and then as beauty. A generation ago
+now, Carlyle was the first to preach the heroism of everyday life, and
+exhorted the poets of his day not to describe the greatness they found
+in mouldy chronicles, but to look for it where it was nearest to them,
+in the realities around them. Constantin Meunier has found the idea of a
+new sculpture in democracy, Whistler and Monet have discovered in the
+smoky breath of this age of machinery a new tone of colour which is not
+less beautiful than Italy's eternal azure and the halcyon sky of Greece.
+It is only from the vast agglomerations, the immense dimensions of the
+new world that Walt Whitman has derived the strength and power of his
+voice. The whole difficulty which thus far has permitted only a few to
+serve the new beauty in the new things lies in the fact that our age is
+not yet a period of decided conviction, but only one of transition. The
+victory of machinery is not yet complete; handiwork still subsists,
+little towns still flourish, it is still possible to take refuge in an
+idyll, to find the old beauty in some sequestered corner. Not till the
+poet is shut off from all flight to inherited ideals will he be forced
+to change himself into a new man. For the new things have not yet
+organically developed their beauty. Every new thing on its first
+appearance<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> is blended with something repellent, brutal, and ugly; it is
+only gradually that its inherent form shapes itself æsthetically. The
+first steamers, the first locomotives, the first automobiles, were ugly.
+But the slender, agile torpedo-boats of to-day, the bright-coloured,
+noiselessly&mdash;gliding automobiles with their hidden mechanism, the great,
+broad-chested Pacific Railway engines of to-day, are impressive by their
+outward form alone. Our huge shops, such as those which Messel built in
+Berlin, display a beauty in iron and glass which is hardly less than
+that of the cathedrals and palaces of old time. Certain great things,
+such as the Eiffel Tower, the Forth Bridge, modern men-of-war, furnaces
+belching flame, the Paris boulevards, have a new beauty beyond anything
+which past ages had to show. These new things compel a new enhancement
+of value, on the one hand by the idea that moves them, on the other hand
+by their democratic grandeur and their vast dimensions&mdash;equalled by none
+but the very greatest works of antiquity. But whatever is beautiful
+must, sooner or later, be conceived of as poetry. And thus, it is quite
+sure, Verhaeren has only been one of the first to build bridges from the
+old to the new time; others will come who will celebrate the new
+beauties in the new things&mdash;gigantic cities, engines, industrialism,
+democracy, this fiery striving for new standards of greatness&mdash;and they
+will not only be compelled to find the new beauties,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> they will also
+have to establish new laws for this new order, a different morality, a
+different religion, a different synthesis for this new conditionality.
+the poetic transmutation of the beautiful is only a first beginning of
+the poetic transmutation of the feeling of life.</p>
+
+<p>But a poet never finds anything in things save his own temperament. If
+he is melancholy, the world in his books is void of sense, all lights
+are extinguished, laughter dies; if he is passionate, all feelings
+seethe in a fiery froth as though in a cauldron, and foam up in angry
+happenings. Whereas the real world is manifold, and contains the elixirs
+of pleasure and pain, confidence and despair, love and hate, only as
+elements so to speak, the world of great poets is the world of one
+single feeling. And so Verhaeren too sees all things in their new beauty
+with the feelings of his own life only, only with energy. In these the
+fiery years of his prime it is not harmony that he seeks, but energy,
+power. For him a thing is the more beautiful the more purpose, will,
+power, energy it contains. And since the whole world of to-day is
+over-heated with effort and energy; since our great towns are nothing
+but centres of multiplied energy; since machinery expresses nothing save
+force tanied and organised; since innumerable crowds are yoked in
+harmonious action&mdash;to him the world is full of beauty. He loves the new
+age because it does not isolate effort but condenses it, because it is
+not scattered but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> concentrated for action. And of a sudden everything
+he sees appears to be filled with soul. All that has will, all that has
+an aim in view&mdash;man, machine, crowd, city, money; all that vibrates,
+works, hammers, travels, exults; all that propagates itself and is
+multiplied, all that strives to be creation; all that bears in itself
+fire, impulse, electricity, feeling&mdash;all this rings again in his verse.
+All that of old had acted upon him as being cold and dead and hostile is
+now inspired with will and energy, and lives its minute; in this
+multiple gear there is nothing that is merely dust or useless
+ornamentation; everything is creation, everything is working its way
+towards the future. The town, this piled-up Babylon of stones and men,
+is of a sudden a living being, a vampire sucking the strength of the
+land; the factories, that had seemed to him nothing but an unsightly
+mass of masonry, now become the creators of a thousand things, which in
+their turn create new things out of themselves. All at once Verhaeren is
+the socialist poet, the poet of the age of machinery, of democracy, and
+of the European race. And energy fills his poetry too: it is strength
+let loose, enthusiasm, paroxysm, ecstasy, whatever you like to call it;
+but always active, glowing, moving strength; never rest, always
+activity. His poem is no longer declamation, no longer the marmoreal
+monument of a mood, but a crying aloud, a fight, a convulsive starting,
+a stooping down and a springing up again; it is a battle<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> materialised.
+For him all values have been transmuted. It is just what had repelled
+him most&mdash;London, monster cities, railway stations, Exchanges, which now
+lure him most of all as poetic problems. The more a thing seems to
+resist beauty&mdash;the more he has first to discover its beauty by fighting
+it and wrestling with it in torment&mdash;with so much the greater ecstasy
+does he now extol it. The strength which had murderously raged against
+itself now, in creative ecstasy, breaks into the world. To tear down
+resistance, to snatch beauty from its most hidden corner, is now for him
+a tenfold strength and joy of creation. <i>Verhaeren now creates the poem
+of the great city in the dionysiac sense</i>; the hymn to our own time, to
+Europe; creates ecstasy, renewed and renewed again, in life.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_46" id="Footnote_1_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_46"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> <i>Ecce Homo!</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="TOWNS_LES_VILLES_TENTACULAIRES" id="TOWNS_LES_VILLES_TENTACULAIRES"></a>TOWNS ('LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES')</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Le siècle et son horreur se condensent en elles</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Mais leur âme contient la minute éternelle.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 19.5em;">É.V., 'Les Villes.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p>When a man just recovered from illness steps for the first time with
+arms outspread, and as though climbing up from a dungeon, into the light
+of day, he is filled with a bliss beyond measure by the open air
+caressing him on all sides, by the orgies of the sunlight, the cataracts
+of deafening din: with a cry of infinite exultation he takes into
+himself the symphony of life. And from this first moment of his recovery
+Verhaeren was seized by a limitless thirst for the intoxication of life,
+as though with one single leap he would make good the lost years of his
+loneliness, of his illness, and of his crisis. His eyes, his ears, his
+nerves, all his senses, which had been a-hungered, now pounce on things
+with a pleasure that is almost murderous, and snatch everything to
+themselves in a frenzy of greed. At this time Verhaeren travelled from
+country to country, as though he would take possession of all Europe. He
+was in Germany, in Berlin, in Vienna, and in Prague; always a lonely
+wanderer; quite alone; ignorant of the language, and listening only to
+the voice of the town itself, to the strange, sombre murmuring,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> to the
+surge of the European metropolises. In Bayreuth he paid his devotions at
+the tomb of Wagner, whose music of ecstasy and passion he absorbed in
+Munich; in Colmar he learned to understand his beloved painter Mathias
+Grünewald; he saw and loved the tragic landscapes of northern Spain,
+those gloomy, treeless mountains, whose threatening silhouettes
+afterwards became the background of the fiery happenings in his drama of
+<i>Philip II.</i>; in Hamburg he was an excited spectator, day by day, of the
+stupendous traffic, the coming and going of the ships, the unloading and
+the loading of cargoes. Everywhere where life was intensive, expressive,
+and animated with a new energy, he passionately loved it. It is
+characteristic of his temperament that the harmonious beauty of peaceful
+and empty, of sleeping and dreaming cities appealed to him less than
+modern cities in their pall of soot and smoke. Almost intentionally his
+affection turns from the traditional ideal to one yet unknown. Florence,
+for many centuries the symbol of all poets, disappointed him: the
+Italian air was too mild, these contours were too meagre, too dreamy the
+streets. But London, this piled-up conglomeration of dwellings and
+workshops; this town that might have been cast in bronze; this teeming
+labyrinth of dingy streets; this ever-beating, restless heart of the
+world's trade with its smoke of toil threatening to eclipse the sun;
+this was to him a revelation. Just the industrial towns,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> which had thus
+far tempted no poet; those towns which roll up the vault of their leaden
+sky with their own fog and smoke, which confine their inhabitants in
+leagues and leagues of congested masonry, these attract him. He, who
+revels in colour, grew fond of Paris, to which, since then, he has
+returned every year for the winter months. Just what is restless and
+busy, confused and breathless, hunted, eager, feverish, hot with an
+ardour as of rut, all this Babylonian medley lures him. He loves this
+pell-mell multiplicity and its strange music. Often he would travel for
+hours on the top of heavy omnibuses, to have a bird's-eye view of the
+bustling throng, and here he would close his eyes the better to feel the
+dull rumour, this surging sound which, in its ceaselessness, is not
+unlike the rustling of a forest, beating against his body. No longer as
+in his earlier books does he follow the existence of simple callings; he
+loves the ascension of handiwork to mechanical labour, in which the aim
+is invisible, and only the grandiose organisation is revealed. And
+gradually this interest became the motive interest of his life.
+Socialism, which in those years was becoming strong and active, fell
+like a red drop into the morbid paleness of his poetic work.
+Vandervelde, the leader of the Labour Party, became his friend. And
+when, at this stage, the party founded the Maison du Peuple at Brussels,
+he readily helped, gave lectures at the Université Libre, took part in
+all the projects, and afterwards,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> wards, in the most beautiful vision
+of his poetical work, lifted them far above the political and actual
+into the great events of all humanity. His life, now inwardly
+established, henceforth beats with a strong and regular rhythm. He had
+in the meantime, by his marriage, attained a personal appeasement, a
+counterpoise for his unbridled restlessness. Now his wild ecstasies have
+their fixed point, from which they can survey the fiery vortex of the
+new phenomena. The morbid pictures, the feverish hallucinations, now
+become clear visions; not by flashes of lightning, but in a steady,
+beaming light are the horizons of our time now illuminated for him.</p>
+
+<p>Now that he steps boldly into life, his first problem is to come to an
+understanding with the world around him, with his fellow-men, with the
+city itself. But it is not the city he lives in which interests him in a
+provincial sense, but the ideal, modern city, the monster city in
+general, this strange and uncanny thing that like a vampire has snatched
+to herself all the strength of the soil and of men to form a new
+residuum of power. She crowds together the contrasts of life; grades, in
+unexpected layers, immense riches over the most wretched poverty;
+strengthens opposing forces, and goads them to hostility, goads them to
+that desperate battle in which Verhaeren loves to see all things
+involved. The grandeur of this new organism is beyond the æsthetics of
+the past; and new and strange before Nature stand men also,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> with
+another rhythm, a hotter breath, quicker movements, wilder desires than
+were known to any association of men, to any calling or caste, of a
+previous time. It is a new outlook which not only sweeps the distance,
+but has also to reckon with height, with the piled tiers of houses, with
+new velocities and new conditions of space. A new blood, money, feeds
+these cities, a new energy fires them; they are driven to procreate a
+new faith, a new God, and a new art. Their dimensions, terrific, and of
+a beauty hitherto unknown, defy measurement; the order that rules is
+hidden in the earth behind a pathless wilderness.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Quel océan, ses cœurs? ...</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Quels nœuds de volonté serrés en son mystère!<a name="FNanchor_1_47" id="FNanchor_1_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_47" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>cries out the poet in wonderment as he strides through the city and is
+overpowered by her grandeur:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Toujours en son triomphe ou ses défaites,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Elle apparaît géante, et son cri sonne et son nom luit.<a name="FNanchor_2_48" id="FNanchor_2_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_48" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>He feels that an enormous energy proceeds from her; he is conscious that
+her atmosphere rests with a new pressure on his body, that his blood
+quickens to keep pace with her rhythm. Merely to be near her starts the
+thrill of a new delight.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">En ces villes ...</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * </span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Je sens grandir et s'exalter en moi,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et fermenter, soudain, mon cœur multiplié.<a name="FNanchor_3_49" id="FNanchor_3_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_49" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Involuntarily he feels himself becoming dependent on her, feels this
+grandiose coupling of energy producing a similar concentration of all
+his forces in himself too, feels his fever becoming infectious like her
+own, and feels&mdash;with an intensity unknown to any other poet of our
+days&mdash;the identity of his personality with the soul of the city. He
+knows she is dangerous, knows she will fill him with all restlessness,
+overheat him and excite him, confuse him with her hostile contrasts.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Voici la ville en or des rouges alchimies,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Où te fondre le cœur en un creuset nouveau</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et t'affoler d'un orage d'antinomies</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Si fort qu'il foudroiera tes nerfs jusqu'au cerveau.<a name="FNanchor_4_50" id="FNanchor_4_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_50" class="fnanchor">[4]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>But he knows that she will impregnate him as well, give him power from
+her strength. There will never be a great man again who will pass her
+by, who will not be thrilled by her sensation, who will not live with
+her, and by her grow. Henceforth all new and strong men will stand in
+reciprocal action with her.</p>
+
+<p>This great recognition of a fact is, as we have seen, not spontaneous,
+but painfully acquired. For in the sense of the old beauty the aspect of
+a modern city is frightful. She is a sleepless, an ever wakeful woman;
+she does not, like Nature, sometimes rest; she is never silent.
+Restlessly she sucks men into her whirlpool; ceaselessly she pricks
+their nerves; day and night her life pulses. By day she is as grey as
+lead; a sultry shuttle of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> passions; a dark mine in which men, buried in
+the mines of her streets, are forced to unresting toil. How dense are
+these virgin forests of bronze and stone; and of all these thousands of
+streets 'à poumons lourds et haletants, vers on ne sait quels buts
+inquiétants,'<a name="FNanchor_5_51" id="FNanchor_5_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_51" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> not one seems to lead into the open, into the light of
+day. Monotonous, like dull eyes, glare the millions of windows; and the
+darksome caverns in which men, themselves like machines, sit by
+machines, thunder in the unseizable rhythm of petrified exertion. Not a
+ray is reflected on them from the eternal; hostile, repulsive, and grey
+the town pants in the puffed smoke of her daily labour. But night,
+softening all harsh lines, fierily welds the lumbering limbs together
+into something new. By night the town is turned into one great
+seduction. Passion, fettered in the day-time, breaks its chains:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">... Pourtant, lorsque les soirs</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Sculptent le firmament de leurs marteaux d'ébène,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">La ville au loin s'étale et domine la plaine</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Comme unnocturne et colossal espoir;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Elle surgit: désir, splendeur, hantise;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Sa clarté se projette en lueurs jusqu'aux cieux,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Son gaz myriadaire en buissons d'or s'attise,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Ses rails sont des chemins audacieux</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vers le bonheur fallacieux</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Que la fortune et la force accompagnent;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Ses murs se dessinent pareils à une armée</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et ce qui vient d'elle encor de brume et de fumée</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Arrive en appels clairs vers les campagnes.<a name="FNanchor_6_52" id="FNanchor_6_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_52" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>These fiery eruptions Verhaeren shapes in grandiose visions. There is
+the vision of the music halls: wheels of fire revolve round a house,
+blazing letters climb up façades and lure the crowds to sit in front of
+the brilliant footlights. I Here the people's hunger for sensation is
+fed full, and art is cruelly murdered day by day. Here tedium is tamed
+for an hour or so, and whipped up with colour, flame, and music for
+another pleasure that is waiting outside, as soon as the illusion here
+sinks into the night:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et minuit sonne et la foule s'écoule</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">&mdash;Le hall fermé&mdash;parmi les trottoirs noirs;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et sous les lanternes qui pendent,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Rouges, dans la brume, ainsi que des viandes,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Ce sont les filles qui attendent....<a name="FNanchor_7_53" id="FNanchor_7_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_53" class="fnanchor">[7]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>they the harlots, 'les promeneuses,' 'les veuves d'elles-mêmes,'<a name="FNanchor_8_54" id="FNanchor_8_54"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_54" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> who
+live on the sensual hunger of the masses. For sensual pleasure too is
+organised in cities, is guided into canals, like all instincts. But the
+primordial instinct is the same. The hunger which out in the fields and
+in the country was still pleasure in healthy food, in frothing beer, has
+here been converted into the idea of money. Money is what everybody
+hungers for here; money is the meaning of the town. 'Boire et manger de
+l'or'<a name="FNanchor_9_55" id="FNanchor_9_55"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_55" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> is the hot dream of the crowd. Everything is expressed by
+money, 'tout se définit par des monnaies';<a name="FNanchor_10_56" id="FNanchor_10_56"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_56" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> values are
+subordinate to this new value, monetary value. Superb is the vision of
+the bazaar, where, on all the counters, in the many stories, everything
+is sold, not only as in reality objects in common use, but, in a loftier
+symbolism, ethical values as well: convictions and opinions, fame and
+name, honour and power, all the laws of life. But all this fiery blood
+of money flows together in the great heart of the city, flows into the
+Exchange, that greedy maw that swallows all the gold and spits it out
+again, which smelts all this hectic fever and then pours it flaming into
+all the veins of the city. Everything can be bought, even pleasure: in
+back streets, in <i>l'étal</i>, in the haunts where debauch lies in wait,
+women sell themselves as goods are sold in the bazaar. But this energy
+is not always regulated, not always made to flow between dikes. Here
+too, as in Nature, there are sudden catastrophes. Sometimes revolt is
+kindled, flashes up instantaneously, and this stream of money blazes
+itself a new trail. The masses pour out of their dismal caverns, greed
+takes possession of men, and the myriad-headed monster fights and bleeds
+for this one thing, this red-burning, relucent gold.</p>
+
+<p>But the great and powerful thing in these towns is not passion; it is
+the hidden strength behind these passions, the noble order that keeps
+them in their proper limits, and holds them in check. This rumbling
+chaos, this inundation of things<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> doomed to die, is dominated in the
+<i>Villes Tentaculaires</i> by three or four figures standing like
+statues&mdash;the tamers of passions. They are what kings and priests were of
+old, they who have the power of bridling ebullient energies and turning
+them to use. With hands of iron they hold down this wild and dangerous
+animal, they, the new rulers, statesmen, generals, demagogues,
+organisers. For the town is an animal in its movements, a beast in its
+passions, a brute in its instincts, a monster in its strength. It is
+ugly, like all rut. It cannot be contemplated with a pure pleasure, like
+a landscape gently and harmoniously fading in forest verdure; it rather
+evokes, at first, loathing, hatred, caution, and hostility. But that is
+the great thing in Verhaeren, that he always overcomes whatever is
+hostile, pain and torment, by a great vista, that in this panting steam
+of the unæsthetic he already sees the flame of the new beauty. Here for
+the first time is, seen the beauty of factories, <i>les usines
+rectangulaires,</i> the fascination of a railway station, the new beauty in
+the new things. If the town is indeed ugly in its denseness, ugly in the
+sense of all classical ideals; if the picture of it is indeed I cruel
+and frightful; it is yet not unfertile. 'Le siècle et son horreur se
+condensent en elle, mais son âme contient la minute éternelle.' And this
+I feeling, that in her the minute of eternity is contained, that she is
+the new thing risen above all the pasts, a new thing that one must
+perforce<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> come to terms with, this feeling makes her momentous and
+beautiful to the poet. If her form is loathsome, grey, and sombre, her
+idea, her organisation, are grandiose and admirable. And here, as
+always, where admiration finds a pivot, it can give the whole world the
+swing from negation to assent.</p>
+
+<p>But Verhaeren is by this time too little of an artist, too much
+interested in all the problems of life, to be able to contemplate the
+idea of the modern city from the æsthetic side alone. It is for him a
+still more important symbol for the expression of contemporary feeling.</p>
+
+<p>Not only the problem of the new social stratification is poetically
+digested in his trilogy, but also one of the most burning and pressing
+questions of political economy as of politics, the struggle between the
+centrifugal and the centripetal power, the struggle between agrarianism
+and industrialism. Town and country purchase their prosperity, the one
+by the impoverishment of the other. Production and trade, however much
+one is the condition of the other, at their extreme points are hostile
+forces. And how, in our days in Europe, the victory between town and
+country is being decided in favour of the town; how, gradually, the town
+is absorbing the best strength of the provinces&mdash;the problem of the
+<i>déracinés</i>&mdash;this has for the first time in poetry been described by
+Verhaeren in his magnificent vision of <i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>. The
+cities have sprung<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> up like mushrooms. Millions have conglomerated. But
+where have they come from? From what sources have these immense masses
+suddenly streamed into the mighty reservoirs? The answer is quick to
+come. The heart of the city is fed with the oozing blood of the country.
+The country is impoverished. As though they were hallucinated, the
+peasants migrate to where gold is minted, to the town that in the
+evenings flames across the horizon; to where alone riches lies, and
+power. They march away with their carts, to sell their last stick of
+furniture, their last rags; they march away with their daughter, to
+deliver her up to lust; they march away with their son, to let him
+perish in the factories; they march away to dip their hands, they also,
+in this roaring river of gold. The fields are deserted. Only the
+fantastic figures of idiots stagger along lonely paths; the abandoned
+flour-mills are empty, and only turn when the wind smites against them.
+Fever rises from the marshes, where the water, no longer gathered into
+dikes, spreads putrefaction and pestilence. Beggars drag themselves from
+door to door, with the country's barrenness reflected in their eyes; to
+the last lingering cultivators come, sinuously, their worst enemies,
+<i>les donneurs de mauvais conseils</i>. The emigration agent entices them to
+wander to the lands of gold, and they squander what they have inherited
+from their ancestors, to seek a far-distant hope:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Avec leur chat, avec leur chien,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Avec, pour vivre, quel moyen?</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">S'en vont, le soir, par la grand'route.<a name="FNanchor_11_57" id="FNanchor_11_57"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_57" class="fnanchor">[11]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>And they who are not enticed away by emigration are evicted from hearth
+and home by usurers. Villages in which the dance of the kermesse has
+long been silent are of a sudden cut in two by a network of railways.
+There is no fairness in the fight. The country is conquered because the
+blood of its inhabitants has been sucked out of it. 'La plaine est morte
+et ne se défend plus.'<a name="FNanchor_12_58" id="FNanchor_12_58"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_58" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> Everything streams to Oppidomagnum. This is
+the name given by Verhaeren in his symbolical drama <i>Les Aubes</i>&mdash;which,
+with the <i>Campagnes Hallucinées</i> and the <i>Villes Tentaculaires</i> forms
+the trilogy of the social revolution&mdash;to the monster city. This, with
+its arms as of a polypus, pitilessly sucks all the strength of the
+district round it. From all sides strength streams in upon it. 'Tous les
+chemins se rythment vers elle.' Not only from the country does she drink
+the strength of men, all the ocean seems to be pouring its waters only
+to her port. 'Toute la mer va vers la ville.'<a name="FNanchor_13_59" id="FNanchor_13_59"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_59" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> The whole sea streams
+to the city; all the rolling waves seem only to exist that they may
+bring to her this wandering forest of ships. And she absorbs everything,
+digests it in the 'noire immensité des usines rectangulaires,'<a name="FNanchor_14_60" id="FNanchor_14_60"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_60" class="fnanchor">[14]</a>
+greedily devours it, to spit it out again as gold.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But this immense social struggle between the country and the town
+expresses, like the other new phases, something yet higher. It is only a
+momentary symbol of an eternal schism. The country is the symbol of the
+Conservatives. In the country the forms of labour are petrified, calm,
+and regular; there life is without haste, and only regulated by the
+rotation of the seasons. All sensations, all forms are pure and simple.
+These men stand nearer to the freaks of chance: a flash of lightning, a
+hailstorm can destroy their labour; and so they fear God, and do not
+dare to doubt in Him. The town, however, symbolises progress. In the
+thunder of the streets of to-day no Madonna's voice is heard; the life
+of the individual is protected from chance by prearranged order; the
+fever of the new creates also a yearning for new conditions of life, new
+circumstances, for a new God.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'esprit des campagnes était l'esprit de Dieu;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il eut la peur de la recherche et des révoltes,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il chut; et le voici qui meurt, sous les essieux</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et sous les chars en feu des récoltes.<a name="FNanchor_15_61" id="FNanchor_15_61"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_61" class="fnanchor">[15]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>If the country was the past, the town is the future. The country only
+seeks to keep what it has, to preserve: its character, its beauty, its
+God. But the town must first of all create, must make itself the new
+beauty, the new faith, and the new God.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Le rêve ancien est mort et le nouveau se forge.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il est fumant dans la pensée et la sueur</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Des bras fiers de travail, des fronts fiers de lueurs,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et la ville l'entend monter du fond des gorges</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">De ceux qui le portent en eux</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et le veulent crier et sangloter aux cieux.<a name="FNanchor_16_62" id="FNanchor_16_62"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_62" class="fnanchor">[16]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>But we, Verhaeren thinks, must not belong to this world of the past,
+this moribund world; no, we who live in towns must think with them, must
+live with the new age, create in league with it, and find a new language
+for its dumb yearning. A return to nature is no longer possible for us:
+evolution cannot be screwed back again. If we have lost great values, we
+must replace them by new; if our religious feeling for the old God is
+cold and dead, we must create new ideals. We must find new aims that our
+ancestors knew not of; in the new forms of the city we must find a new
+beauty, in her noises a new rhythm, in her confusion an order, in her
+energy an object, in her stammering a language.</p>
+
+<p>If the towns have destroyed much, they will perhaps create still more.
+In their melting-pot professions, races, religions, nations, languages
+are blended:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">...les Babels enfin réalisées</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et les peuples fondus et la cité commune</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et les langues se dissolvant en une.<a name="FNanchor_17_63" id="FNanchor_17_63"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_63" class="fnanchor">[17]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>'The old order changeth, giving place to new'; and we must not ask
+whether the new is better<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> than the old; we must trust that it is so.
+The feverish convulsions of the great cities, this unrest, this
+screaming torment, cannot be in vain. For they, these pains and
+convulsions, are only the birth-throes of the new. But he who has been
+the first to feel, with a glad presentiment, this pain of the masses,
+this fermentation, as joy, this unrest as hope, must himself be an
+authentic new man, one of those who are called to give a poetic answer
+to all the complaints and questions of our time.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_47" id="Footnote_1_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_47"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'L'Âme de la Ville' (<i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_48" id="Footnote_2_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_48"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Ibid. (<i>Ibid.</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_49" id="Footnote_3_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_49"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 'La Foule' (<i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_50" id="Footnote_4_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_50"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> 'Les Villes' (<i>Les Flambeaux Noirs</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_51" id="Footnote_5_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_51"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> 'L'Âme de la Ville' (<i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_52" id="Footnote_6_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_52"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> 'La Ville' (<i>Les Campagnes Hallucinées</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_53" id="Footnote_7_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_53"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> 'Les Spectacles' (<i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_54" id="Footnote_8_54"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_54"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> 'Les Promeneuses' (<i>Ibid</i>.).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_55" id="Footnote_9_55"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_55"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> 'La Bourse' (<i>Ibid.</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_56" id="Footnote_10_56"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_56"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> 'Le Bazar' (<i>Ibid.</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_57" id="Footnote_11_57"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_57"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> 'Le Départ' (<i>Les Campagnes Hallucinées</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_58" id="Footnote_12_58"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_58"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> 'La Plaine' (<i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_59" id="Footnote_13_59"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_59"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> 'Le Port' (<i>Ibid.</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_60" id="Footnote_14_60"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_60"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> 'La Plaine' (<i>Ibid.</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_61" id="Footnote_15_61"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_61"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> 'Vers le Futur' (<i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_62" id="Footnote_16_62"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_62"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> 'L'Âme de la Ville' (<i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_63" id="Footnote_17_63"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_63"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> 'Le Port'(<i>Ibid.</i>).<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_MULTITUDE" id="THE_MULTITUDE"></a>THE MULTITUDE</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Mets en accord ta force avec les destinées</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Que la foule, sans le savoir,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Promulgue, en cette nuit d'angoisse illuminée.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 18.5em;">É.V., 'La Foule.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p>That great event which is the modern city was at bottom only possible by
+the organisation of the mighty multitudes of the people and the
+distribution of their forces. To organise is to weld unlike forces
+economically into an organism, to imitate something that has life and
+soul, in which nothing is superfluous and everything is necessary; it is
+to give a material its uniform strength, to give an idea the flesh and
+bones of its shape and of its possibility. Now the town has smelted the
+scattered forces of the country into a new material&mdash;into the multitude;
+it has converted much that used to be individually active force into
+mechanical force; it has humbled man to the condition of a handle, a
+rolling wheel; it has everywhere tied up the individuality of the single
+man in order to produce a new individuality, that of the crowd. For the
+multitude as a fact is a new thing. For centuries it was only a symbol,
+an idea. The inhabitants of whole countries were logically epitomised in
+a number, but with no<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> suggestion of thus comprehending their immediate
+unity. Of course, in times past great armies have been known, hordes of
+fighting men and nomad tribes; but these only represented a volatile
+concentration, too unsettled, too inconstant to procreate an
+individuality, an æsthetic and moral value. And even those armies whose
+legendary greatness echoes down the centuries, the hordes of Tamerlaine,
+the hosts of the Persians, the legions of Rome, how poor is their number
+in comparison with the masses of human beings daily herded together in
+New York or London or Paris! Only in our own days, only in Oppidomagnum,
+has the multitude been welded together finally and for all time, been
+hooked together with bands of steel like the wheels of an immense
+machine; only recently has the crowd become a living being that grows
+and multiplies like a forest. Democracy has given it new intellectual
+forms, set a brain in the body, by making the multitude determinate,
+subject only to itself. It is a creation of the nineteenth century; it
+is a new value in our lives, and one that we must come to terms with; no
+less a value for our evolution than the highest values of the past. Walt
+Whitman, to whom one must constantly refer in dealing with Verhaeren's
+work, although&mdash;let it be expressly stated here&mdash;Verhaeren quite
+independently and unconsciously arrived at the same goal from the same
+starting-point, once said: 'Modern science and democracy seemed to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>
+throwing out their challenge to poetry to put them in its statements in
+contradistinction to the songs and myths of the past.'<a name="FNanchor_1_64" id="FNanchor_1_64"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_64" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> And every
+modern poet will have to come to terms with the masses of democracy,
+will have to contemplate them synthetically as an individual living
+being, as a man, or as a God. In his Utopian drama <i>Les Aubes</i> Verhaeren
+has ranged them among the dramatis personæ, and, to express his inner
+vision, he has added this stage direction: 'Les groupes agissent comme
+un seul personnage à faces multiples et antinomiques.' For, like the
+images of Indian gods, they have a hundred arms, but their cry is in
+unison; their will is simple; their energy is uniform; one and the same
+is their heart, 'le cœur myriadaire et rouge de la foule.'<a name="FNanchor_2_65" id="FNanchor_2_65"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_65" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> A
+hundred years of life in communion, a hundred years of distress in
+common, of hope in common, have welded them together into one unity,
+into one new feeling. Sleepless and restless like a dangerous animal
+lies the multitude in the monster cities; all the passions of individual
+man are hers, vanity, hunger, anger; she has all vices and crimes in
+common with her smallest member, man; only, everything in her is
+intensified to unknown magnitudes. Everything in her passions is
+stupendously superdimensional, beyond calculation, and, in a new sense,
+divine. For just as the gods of old were formed after the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> image of man,
+save that they represented man's strength and intelligence magnified to
+the hundredth degree, the multitude is the synthesis of individual
+forces, the most prolific accumulation of passion.</p>
+
+<p>With the multitude the individual comes into being, and without her he
+perishes. Consciously or unconsciously, every man is subject to her
+power. For the modern man is no longer free from the influence of
+others, as the tiller of the fields was in olden days, or the shepherd,
+or the hunter, each of whom was dependent only on the anger of heaven,
+the whims of the earth, on weather and hailstorms, on chance, which he
+clad in the august image of his god. The modern man is in all his
+feelings determined by the world around him, set in his place in the
+ranks, and moved with the ranks like a shuttle to and fro; he is a
+dependent in his instincts. We all feel socially; we cannot think away
+the others who are round us and in front of us any more than we can
+think away the air that nourishes us. We can flee from them, but we
+cannot flee away from what has penetrated us from them. For the
+multitude rules us like a force of nature, nourishes us with its
+feelings. The unsocial man is a fiction. Just as little as in a great
+city one can shut off one's room entirely from the noise, the rhythm of
+the street, just so little can one think isolatedly, just so little can
+the soul keep itself at a distance from the great intellectual
+excitements<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> of the multitude. Verhaeren himself made the attempt in the
+days when he wrote the verses:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Mon rêve, enfermons-nous dans ces choses lointaines</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Comme en de tragiques tombeaux.<a name="FNanchor_3_66" id="FNanchor_3_66"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_66" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>But the life of reality claimed him again; for society destroys him who
+turns away from her, as one is destroyed who shuts himself out from the
+fresh air. The poet, too, must involuntarily think with the multitude
+and of the multitude. For to the same extent as democracy has exercised
+its levelling influence, to the same extent as it has limited
+individualities, enrolled the poet among the class of citizens,
+diminished the contrasts of chance, it has at the same time matured new
+forces in their multiplicity. In democracy the modern poet can find
+everything for which the ancients felt constrained to discover gods,
+those incalculable forces which bind the individual like enchantment.
+The town, the multitude feeds his energy with its exhaustless abundance;
+it multiplies his own strength. For everything the individual has lost
+is stored in it, great heroism and ecstatic enthusiasm. It is the great
+source of the unexpected and the incalculable in our days, the new thing
+concerning which no one knows how great it will grow. To have seen in it
+an enrichment, instead of a restriction, of the poetic instinct, is one
+of the great merits of Verhaeren. For while the majority of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>
+contemporary poets still maintain the fiction of the recluse in his
+wistful loneliness, while they recoil from before the multitude as
+though from men stricken with the plague, while they create for
+themselves an artificial seclusion, and heedlessly go their way past
+locomotives and telegraphs, banks and workshops, Verhaeren drinks
+greedily from these sources of new strength.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Comme une vague en des fleuves perdue,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Comme une aile effacée, au fond de l'étendue,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Engouffre-toi,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Mon cœur, en ces foules battant les capitales!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Réunis tous ces courants</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Et prends</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Si large part à ces brusques métamorphoses</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">D'hommes et de choses,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Que tu sentes l'obscure et formidable loi</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Qui les domine et les opprime</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Soudainement, à coups d'éclairs, s'inscrire en toi.<a name="FNanchor_4_67" id="FNanchor_4_67"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_67" class="fnanchor">[4]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>For she, 'la foule,' the multitude, is the great transposer of values in
+our day. She takes into her bosom and transforms the men who come to her
+from the country, from the four winds of heaven; none of us escapes her
+levelling power. The most distant races are blended in the city's huge
+melting-pot, are adapted to one another, and forthwith become a new
+thing, a different thing, a new race, the new race of contemporary man,
+who has made his peace with the atmosphere of the great city, who not
+only painfully feels the depression of her walls and his divorce from
+Nature, but creates himself a new strength<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> and a new feeling of the
+universe in this manifold human presence. The great feat of the
+multitude is that it accelerates the process of changing values. The
+individual elements perish in favour of this individuality of a new
+community. Old communities lose their unity, new communities must arise.
+America is the first example: here, in a hundred years, one single great
+brotherhood, a new type, has been developed from the forces of a
+thousand peoples; and in our capitals, in Paris, Berlin, and London,
+people are already growing up who are not Frenchmen and not Germans, but
+in the first place only Parisians and Berliners, who have a different
+accent, a different way of thinking, whose native land is the great
+city, the multitude. The inhabitant of the great city, the democratic
+man of the multitude, is a sharply defined character. If he is a poet,
+his poetry must be social; if he is a thinker, the intelligence of the
+masses, the instinct of the many, must be his also. To have attempted
+the psychology of this multitude for the first time in poetry is one of
+the great feats of audacity for which we must be grateful to Verhaeren.</p>
+
+<p>But these individual accumulations of men into a multitude, these
+combinations of millions into towns, are not isolated. One bond holds
+them all together: modern traffic. The distances of reality have
+disappeared, and with them national divisions as well. By the side of
+the problem of individual conglomerations which only slowly are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>
+transformed into organisms, by the side of the individual races, the
+individual masses, now arises a greater synthesis, the synthesis of the
+European race. For the men of our continent are no longer so distant, so
+strange to one another as they formerly were. Social democracy with its
+organisation encompasses the masses from one end of Europe to the other.
+To-day the same desires fire the men of Paris, London, St. Petersburg,
+Vienna, and Rome. And already one common formula directs their
+exertions: money.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Races des vieux pays, forces désaccordées,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vous nouez vos destins épars, depuis le temps</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Que l'or met sous vos fronts le même espoir battant.<a name="FNanchor_5_68" id="FNanchor_5_68"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_68" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Independently of the frontiers of countries, on a broad-based
+foundation, a unified race, a new community, the European, is in process
+of formation. Here desire and reality are near touching. Verhaeren sees
+Europe already united by one great common energy. Europe is for him the
+land of consciousness. While other continents, distant as though in a
+dream, are still living a vegetative life, while Africa and India are
+still dreaming as they dreamt in the darkness of primitive times, Europe
+is 'la forge où se frappe l'idée,'<a name="FNanchor_6_69" id="FNanchor_6_69"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_69" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> the great smithy in which all
+differences, all individual observations, all results, are hammered and
+moulded into a new intellectuality, into <i>European consciousness</i>. The
+union is not yet inwardly complete; states are still<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> hostile and
+ignorant of their community; but already 'le monde entier est repensé
+par leurs cervelles.'<a name="FNanchor_7_70" id="FNanchor_7_70"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_70" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> Already they are working at the transvaluation
+of all feeling in the European sense. For a new system of ethics, a new
+system of æsthetics, will be required by the European, who, rich by the
+past, strong in the feeling of the multitude, is now conscious of
+drawing his strength from new masses. Here it is that Verhaeren's work
+sings over into Utopia; and in <i>Les Aubes</i>, the epilogue to <i>Les Villes
+Tentaculaires,</i> this glittering rainbow rises over the visions of
+reality to the new ideal; the prophetic dream of a better future rises
+over the still struggling present.</p>
+
+<p>This yearning for the European has been expressed for the first time in
+poetry by Verhaeren, almost contemporaneously with Walt Whitman's
+hailing of the American and Friedrich Nietzsche's prophecy of the
+superman. It would be a tempting task, and full of interest, to set up
+the Pan-European in antithesis to the Pan-American. But to say that
+Verhaeren was the first of lyric poets to feel as consciously European
+as Walt Whitman felt American, is to establish his rank among the most
+considerable men of our time. Verhaeren is possibly the only lyric poet
+who has felt in accordance with contemporary feeling. That epitomises
+his whole claim to gratitude, for it sufficiently expresses the fact
+that he has taken<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> to his heart the problem of the multitude; the energy
+of social innovations; the æsthetics of organisation; the grandeur of
+mechanical production; in a word, the poetry of material things. It is
+our own time, the new age, that speaks in his verse; and it speaks in
+its new language. This rhythm which he has discovered is no literary
+abstraction, but beats in perfect unison with the heart-beat of the
+crowd; it is an echo of the panting of our monster cities, of the
+clanking of trains, of the cry of the people; his language is new,
+because it is no longer the voice of one man, but unites in itself the
+many voices of the multitude. He has penetrated deeper than any other
+man into the feeling of the masses, and their surf echoes more strongly
+in his verse. The hollow rumbling, the bestial and tameless strength of
+their voice, the surf of the multitude, has here become shape and music,
+the highest identity. With pride one can say of Verhaeren what he
+himself vaunts in his 'Captain': 'Il est la foule,'<a name="FNanchor_8_71" id="FNanchor_8_71"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_71" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> he himself is the
+multitude.</p>
+
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_64" id="Footnote_1_64"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_64"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> <i>A Backward Glance O'er Travelled Roads.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_65" id="Footnote_2_65"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_65"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 'La Conquête (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_66" id="Footnote_3_66"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_66"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 'Sous les Prétoriens' (<i>Au Bord de la Route</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_67" id="Footnote_4_67"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_67"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> 'La Foule' (<i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_68" id="Footnote_5_68"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_68"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> 'La Conquête' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_69" id="Footnote_6_69"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_69"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> <i>Ibid. (Ibid.).</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_70" id="Footnote_7_70"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_70"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> 'La Conquête' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_71" id="Footnote_8_71"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_71"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> 'Le Capitaine' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_RHYTHM_OF_LIFE" id="THE_RHYTHM_OF_LIFE"></a>THE RHYTHM OF LIFE</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dites, les rythmes sourds dans l'univers entier!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">En définir la marche et la passante image</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">En un soudain langage;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">.&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Prendre et capter cet infini en un cerveau,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pour lui donner ainsi sa plus haute existence.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 21em;">É.V., 'Le Verbe'.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p>The rhythm of modern life is a rhythm of excitement. The city with its
+multitudes is never completely at rest: even in its repose, in its
+silence, there is a secret bubbling as of lava in the bowels of a
+volcano, a waiting and watching, a nervous tension tinged with fever.
+For the idea of energy in the myriad-headed monster city is so
+concentrated, so intensified, that it never loses its rumbling activity.
+Rest, a polar feeling, would be the inner negation, the annihilation, of
+this new element. True, the city with her teeming masses is not always
+in the fever-throes of those great eruptions of passion when through the
+arteries of her streets the blood streams suddenly; when all her muscles
+seem to contract; when cries and enthusiasm blaze up like a flame; but
+always something seems to be expecting this fiery second, just as in
+modern man there is always the whipped unrest that is avid of new<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>
+things, new experiences. Modern cities are in perpetual vibration; and
+so is the multitude from man to man. Even if the individual is not
+excited, if his nerves are not always stirring with his own vibration,
+they are yet always vibrating in harmony with the obscure resonance of
+the universe. The great city's rhythm beats in our very sleep; the new
+rhythm, the rhythm of our life, is no longer the regular alternation of
+relaxation and repose, it is the steady vibration of an unintermitted
+activity.</p>
+
+<p>Now, a modern poet who wishes to create in real harmony with
+contemporary feeling must himself have something of the perpetual
+excitement, the unremitting watchfulness, the restless and nervous
+sensitiveness of our time; his heart must unconsciously beat in tact
+with the rhythm of the world around him. But not only unrest must
+flicker in him, not only must that excessive delicacy of feeling which
+is almost morbid be in him, this neurasthenic sleeplessness&mdash;not only
+the negative element of our epoch, but the grandiose as well, the
+superdimensional, the spontaneity of the sudden discharge of forces held
+in reserve, the overwhelming force of the great eruption. Like the
+masses of our towns, he must be so fashioned that a trifle will
+stimulate him to the greatest passion, must be so fashioned that he
+cannot help being carried away by the intoxication of his own strength.
+Just as the masses have, so to speak, organised themselves as a body,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>
+so that there is no individual excitement in them, no irritation and
+inflammation of any single part, but so that a reaction of the whole
+body responds to every separate irritation, just in the same manner must
+the excitement of a modern, a contemporary poet, a poet of a great town,
+never be the excitement of a single sense, but, if it is to be strong,
+it must quiver through the whole body like an electric shock. His poetic
+rhythm must therefore be physically vital; it must envelop all his
+feeling and thinking; it must respond to every individual irritation, to
+every individual sensation, with the massed weight of feeling of all his
+vital forces: the need of a rhythm strained to the full must be, as
+Nietzsche has so wonderfully demonstrated in his <i>Ecce Homo</i>! a measure
+for the strength of the inspiration, a sort of balancing, as it were, of
+the pressure and tension of the inspiration. For the poet of to-day, if
+he does not wish to remain the poet of the eternal yesterday, must, as a
+microcosm, imitate in his passion the macrocosm of the multitude,
+wherein also the excitement of the individual is trivial and aimless,
+and only the ebullition of the whole fermenting mass is irresistible and
+momentous.</p>
+
+<p>Then, in such poems, the <i>rhythm of modern life</i> will break through. At
+this moment we must remember what rhythm really means. The rhythm of a
+being is in the last instance nothing but its breathing. Everything that
+is alive, every organism, has breath, the interchange and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> resting-space
+between giving and taking. And so breathes a poem too; and it is
+worthless if it is not a living thing, if it is not an organism, a body
+with a soul. Only in its rhythm does it become alive, as man does in his
+breathing. But the diversity, the originality of the rhythm only arises
+from the alternation of these drawn breaths. Breathing is different in
+those who are calm, excited, joyous, nervous, oppressed, ecstatic. Every
+sensation produces its corresponding rhythm. And since every poet in his
+individuality represents a new form of inner passion, his poem too must
+have this rhythm of his own, the rhythm which expresses his personal
+poetic peculiarity just as characteristically as his speaking expresses
+an individual accent and dialect. To understand Verhaeren's rhythm we
+must remember this basic form of the poetic feeling at the heart of him;
+we must compare it with the feeling at the heart of those who have gone
+before him. In Victor Hugo there was the earnest, great, soaring rhythm
+of the loud speaker, of the preacher who never addresses individuals but
+always the whole nation; in Baudelaire there was the regular hymnic
+rhythm of the priest of art; in Verlaine the irregular, sweet, and
+gentle melody of one speaking in dreams. In Verhaeren, now, there is the
+rhythm of a man hurrying, rushing, running; of a restless, passionate
+man; the rhythm of the modern, of the Americanised man. It is often
+irregular; you hear in it the panting of one who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> is hunted, who is
+hurrying to his goal; you hear his impact with the obstacles he stumbles
+against, the sudden standstill of intemperate effort exhausted. But with
+him the rhythmic energy is never intellectual, never verbal, never
+musical; it is purely emotional, physical. Not only the end of the nerve
+vibrates and sounds; not only does the language shake the air; but out
+of the whole organism, as though all the nerve-strings had suddenly
+begun to sound the alarm, burst the terror and the ecstasy of fever. His
+poem is never a state of repose&mdash;no more than the multitude is ever
+quite repose&mdash;it is in a true sense rhythm, passion set in motion. You
+feel the excitement of the man in it, motion, the covering of a
+distance, activity; never contemplation comfortably resting, or dream
+girt with sleep. And as a matter of fact, it is from motion in the
+physical sense that nearly all his poems have arisen: Verhaeren has
+never composed poetry at his writing-table, but while wandering over the
+fields with a rhythmically moved body whose accelerated pace pulses to
+the very heart of the poem, or while rushing along through the din and
+bustle of streets in great cities. In these poems is that quicker
+rolling of the blood that comes from exercise, that jerk of unrest and
+passion tearing themselves away from repose. You feel that in this man
+feeling is too strong, that he would fain free himself from it, run away
+from it in his own body. The feeling is so strong that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> it turns to
+pain, or rather pressure, and the poem is nothing else than the erection
+that precedes relief, the throes that bring forth out of pregnancy. Just
+as the multitude in revolt bursts the bonds of its excitement and
+launches of a sudden all the passion dammed back for centuries, so
+springs from the poet like a geyser the passionate assault of words
+bursting from too long silence. These cries are a physical relief. These
+'élans captifs dans le muscle et la chair '<a name="FNanchor_1_72" id="FNanchor_1_72"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_72" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> are the relief of a
+convulsion, the easy breathing after oppression. As a passionate man is
+forced to relieve himself by gestures, or in a fit of rage, or in cries,
+or in weeping, or in some other state opposed to rest, the poet
+discharges his feeling in rhythmic words: 'L'homme à vous prononcer
+respirait plus à l'aise'<a name="FNanchor_2_73" id="FNanchor_2_73"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_73" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> he has said of the man who was the first to
+force the excess of his feeling into speech.</p>
+
+<p><i>It is, then, a force positively physical which produces Verhaeren's
+rhythm.</i> It is difficult to prove such an assertion, for the state of
+creation is unconscious and unapproachable, although it may intuitively
+be detected in those moments of recreation, in that second of a new
+birth when a poet recites his work, when he feels, as it were, the
+pressure of the feeling weighing upon him artificially in recollection,
+when by the force of his imagination he relieves himself again as at the
+birth of the poem. And any one who has once heard Verhaeren reciting
+poetry will know how<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> much with him the rhythm of body and poem is one
+and indivisible, how the excitement that becomes rhythmical in the
+vibrating word is at the same time converted into the identical gesture.
+The calm eyes grow keen, they seem to pierce the near paper; the arm is
+raised commandingly, and every finger of the hand is stretched out to
+mark the cæsura as though with an electric shock; to hammer the verses;
+and with the voice to eject the hurrying and almost screaming words into
+the room. In his movements there is then that terrific effort of one who
+would fain tear himself away from himself, that sublimest gesture of the
+poet striving away from the earth, striving away from himself, from the
+heavy gait of words to winged passion. Man coalesces with Nature in one
+second of the most wonderful identity:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Les os, le sang, les nerfs font alliance</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Avec on ne sait quoi de frémissant</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dans l'air et dans le vent;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">On s'éprouve léger et clair dans l'espace,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">On est heureux à crier grâce,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Les faits, les principes, les lois, on comprend tout;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Le cœur tremble d'amour et l'esprit semble fou</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">De l'ivresse de ses idées.<a name="FNanchor_3_74" id="FNanchor_3_74"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_74" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Every time that Verhaeren reads his poetry, this re-birth of the first
+creative state is renewed. <i>It is in the first place a deliverance from
+pain, and in the second place it is pleasure</i>. Again and again<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> the word
+darts along like a beast let loose; in the wildest rhythm; in a rhythm
+that begins slowly, cautiously; quickens; then grows wilder and wilder;
+grows to an intoxicating monotony, an ever-increasing speed, a rattling
+din that reminds one of an express whizzing along at full speed. Like a
+locomotive&mdash;for in Verhaeren's case one has to think in images of this
+kind, and not in outworn tropes as of Pegasus&mdash;the poem rushes on,
+driven only by a measure which reminds one of the short explosions of an
+automobile. And as a matter of fact the scansion of the locomotive, its
+restless rattling, has often been the cause of the rhythmic velocity of
+his verses. Verhaeren himself is fond of relating that he has often, and
+with delight, written poems on railway journeys, and that the cadence of
+his verse has then been fired by the regular rattle of the train. He
+describes wonderfully the rapture of the speed poured into his blood by
+the whizzing past of trains. The whistling of the wind in moaning trees,
+the dashing of the foaming sea along the shore, the echo a thousand
+times repeated of thunder in the mountains, all these strong sounds have
+become rhythm in his poems; all noisy things, all violent, swift
+emotions have made it brusque, angry, and excited:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Oh! les rythmes fougueux de la nature entière</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et les sentir et les darder à travers soi!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vivre les mouvements répandus dans les bois,</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Le sol, les vents, la mer et les tonnerres;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vouloir qu'en son cerveau tressaille l'univers;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et pour en condenser les frissons clairs</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">En ardentes images,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Aimer, aimer, surtout la foudre et les éclairs</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dont les dévorateurs de l'espace et de l'air</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Incendient leur passage!<a name="FNanchor_4_75" id="FNanchor_4_75"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_75" class="fnanchor">[4]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>But this is the new thing in Verhaeren, that he has transformed into
+rhythm not only the voice of Nature, but also the new noises, the
+grumbling of the multitude, the raging of cities, the rumbling of
+workshops. Often in his rhythm can be heard the beat of hammers; the
+hard, edged, regular whizzing of wheels; the whirring of looms; the
+hissing of locomotives; often the wild, restless tumult of streets; the
+humming and rumbling of dense masses of the people. Poets before him
+imitated in the harmony of their verse the monotony of sources and the
+babbling of water over pebbles, or the soughing voice of the wind. But
+he makes the voice of the new things speak; makes the rhythm of the
+city, this rhythm of fever and of unrest, this nervous moving of the
+crowd, this unquiet billowing of a new ocean, flow over into his new
+poem. Hence this up and down in his verses; this suddenness and
+unexpectedness; this incalculable element. <i>The new, the industrial
+noises have here become the music of poetry</i>. Since he does not seek to
+express his own individual sensation of life, but would himself only be
+a voice for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> the multitude, the rhythm is more roaring and restless than
+that of any individual being. Like the first poets, those of old time,
+before whom there were no outworn and exhausted words; like the poets
+whose feeling burst into flame at every word, every cry; who discovered
+themselves 'en exaltant la souffrance, le mal, le plaisir, le bien';
+like them when they</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">... confrontaient à chaque instant</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Leur âme étonnée et profonde</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Avec le monde,<a name="FNanchor_5_76" id="FNanchor_5_76"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_76" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>poets who would be modern must compare their own soul with that of their
+time, must always regulate their rhythm according to the mutation of
+their time. Their deepest yearning must be to find not only their own
+personal expression, but over and above it the poetic and musical
+representation of the highest identity between themselves and their
+time. For poets are the inheritors of a great patrimony:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">... En eux seuls survit, ample, intacte et profonde,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'ardeur</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dont s'enivrait, devant la terre et sa splendeur,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'homme naïf et clair aux premiers temps du monde;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">C'est que le rythme universel traverse encor</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Comme aux temps primitifs leur corps.<a name="FNanchor_6_77" id="FNanchor_6_77"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_77" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>They must, in these days, only express themselves when they have first
+adapted the rhythm of their own feeling to that of the universe, to the
+rhythm of the cities they live in, to the rhythm<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> of the multitude from
+which they have grown, to the rhythm of temporal as of eternal things.
+They must, like a vein in the heart of the world, reproduce every beat
+of the great hammer, every excitement, quickening of pace and
+obstruction of the feeling rolled round in the whole organism; they must
+learn from life the rhythm which shall again achieve the great harmony
+that was lost between the world and the work of art.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_72" id="Footnote_1_72"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_72"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'Le Verbe' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_73" id="Footnote_2_73"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_73"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i> (<i>Ibid.</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_74" id="Footnote_3_74"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_74"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 'Les Heures où l'on crée' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_75" id="Footnote_4_75"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_75"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> 'L'En-Avant' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_76" id="Footnote_5_76"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_76"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> 'Le Verbe' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_77" id="Footnote_6_77"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_77"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i> (<i>Ibid.</i>).<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_NEW_PATHOS" id="THE_NEW_PATHOS"></a>THE NEW PATHOS</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Lassé des mots, lassé des livres.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">.&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .&nbsp; .</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Je cherche, en ma fierté,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'acte qui sauve et qui délivre.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">É.V., 'L'Action.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The primitive poem, that which came into being long before writing or
+print, was nothing but a modulated cry that was hardly language, a cry
+won from joy or pain, mourning or despair, recollection or passionate
+entreaty, but always from fulness of feeling. It was pathetic, because
+it was produced by passion; pathetic, because its intention was to
+produce passion. The poem of those great and distant men who were the
+first to find word and speech in the darted cry of feeling, was an
+invocation of the crowd; an exhortation; a fiery incitement; an ecstasy;
+a direct electric discharge of feeling to feeling. The poet spoke to the
+others, an individual to a circle. The auditors stood before him in
+expectation&mdash;somewhat as Max Klinger in his new picture has gathered
+them together in front of blind Homer&mdash;they waited, watched, listened,
+surrendered themselves, let themselves be carried away; or they
+resisted. That poem and the delivery of it were not something finished
+and presented for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> approval; no vessel or ornament already hammered into
+shape and perfectly chiselled; they were something in the process of
+creation, something newly growing at that moment, a struggle with the
+hearer, a wrestling with him for his passion.</p>
+
+<p>Poets lost this close, glowing contact with the masses when writing was
+invented. What the dissemination of the written word, and still more, in
+after days, the infinite multiplication of printing, dowered them with;
+all the new influence over spaces hitherto closed; the fact that their
+words were henceforth alive in countries which they had never visited;
+that men drew strength and inspiration and vital courage from their
+words long after their own bodies had fallen into dust&mdash;this vast and
+mighty effect had only been obtained by relinquishing that other and
+perhaps not lesser effect&mdash;dialogue, that standing face to face with the
+multitude. By slow degrees poets became something imaginary to the
+public. When they spoke, they really only listened to themselves; more
+and more their poem became a lonely colloquy with themselves; the
+harangue became a monologue, more and more lyrical in a new sense and
+less and less moving. More and more their poem travelled away from
+speech; more and more it lost that mysterious, passionate fire that is
+only fed by the moment, by standing face to face with an excited crowd,
+by the magical influx of tension and stimulation out of the heart of
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> hearer into the poet's own words. For, with his expectation, with
+his eager eyes, his excitement, and his intractable impatience, every
+listener does something for the speaker: he goads him; he forces
+something of his expectant restlessness into the response that has not
+yet been made. But the moment the poet no longer spoke to the crowd, no
+longer to a circle, but fashioned his words for print and writing, a new
+and peculiar sensation was developed in him. He accustomed himself to
+speaking only for himself; to conceiving his own feeling as important,
+irrespective of effect and force; to holding a conversation with none
+but himself and silence. And his poem changed more and more. Now that
+the poet no longer had the panting roar of the response, the cry of
+passion, the exultation of enthusiasm, as the finale of his poetry&mdash;the
+last accord, as it were, belonging to his own music&mdash;he sought to
+complete the harmony in the verse by means of itself. He rounded his
+poem with an artist's care, as though it were an earthenware vessel;
+illumined it with colours like a picture; rilled it with music; more and
+more he relinquished the idea of persuading, of convincing,.of
+inspiring. He was content that the poem should have no feeling for other
+men, and gave it only the life and the mood of his own world. In that
+period of transition, we may suppose, 'poetic' diction first came into
+being, that language by the side of the living language which petrified<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>
+more and more as time went on into a dialect hostile to the world, into
+bloodless marble. Of old, the poetic language was not one that existed
+side by side with the real language; it was only the last
+intensification of the real language. By the rhythm of higher passion,
+by the fire of harangue, it became a sacred fire, a blest intoxication,
+a festivity in the work-a-day world. Thus, as intensified vitality,
+language could be different without ever being unintelligible, could
+remain with and yet above the people, while the lyric poetry of to-day
+has become, for the most part, strange and worthless to active men who
+live in the midst of realities, to the artisan and the toiler.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless in our own days there seem to be signs of a return to this
+primitive close contact between the poet and his audience; a new pathos
+is at its birth. The stage was the first bridge between the poet and the
+multitude. But here the actor was still the intermediary of the spoken
+word; the purely lyrical emotion was not an aim in itself, but only, for
+three or four hours, a help in the illusion. However, the time of the
+isolation of the poet from the crowd, which was formerly rendered
+necessary by the great distances between nation and nation, seems now to
+have been overcome by the shortening of space and by the
+industrialisation of cities. To-day poets once again recite their verse
+in lecture-halls, in the popular universities of America; nay, in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>
+churches Walt Whitman's lines ring out into the American consciousness,
+and what used to be created only by the seething seconds of political
+crises&mdash;one might instance Petöfi declaiming his national anthem 'Talpra
+Magyar' from the steps of the university to the revolutionary
+crowd&mdash;occurs almost every day. Now again as of old the lyric poet seems
+entitled to be, if not the intellectual leader of the time, at least he
+who must excite and quell the passions of the time; the rhapsodist who
+hails, kindles, and fans that holy fire, energy. The world seems to be
+waiting for Him who shall concentrate all life in a flash of lightning
+to light up all the deeps of darkness:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il monte&mdash;et l'on croirait que le monde l'attend,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Si large est la clameur des cœurs battant</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">À l'unisson de ses paroles souveraines.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il est effroi, danger, affre, fureur et haine;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il est ordre, silence, amour et volonté;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il scelle en lui toutes les violences lyriques.<a name="FNanchor_1_78" id="FNanchor_1_78"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_78" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Certainly the poem which would speak to the multitude must be different
+to the kind of poem that pleased our fathers. Above all, it must itself
+be a will, an aim, an energy, an evocation. All the technical
+excellence, the sweet music, the craft of vibrating rhythms, suppleness
+and flexibility of language, must, in the new poem, no longer be an aim
+in themselves, but only a means to kindle enthusiasm. Such a poem must
+no longer be a sentimental dialogue between a hermit and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> some other
+hermit, a stranger somewhere far away; it must no longer be the short,
+hurriedly trembling voice which is silenced ere the word's flame has
+blazed up in it; no, this new poem must be strongly exulting, richly
+inspired, with a far horizon for its goal, and rushing on with
+irresistible impetuosity. It is not written for gentle moods, but for
+loud, resonant words. He who would quell the crowd must have the rhythm
+of their own new and restless life in him; he who speaks to the crowd
+must be inspired by the new pathos. And this new pathos, this 'pathos
+which most of all accepts the world as it is' (in Nietzsche's sense),
+is, above all, zest, is the strength and the will to create ecstasy.
+This poem must not be sensitive and woebegone; it must not express a
+personal grief that seeks to enlist the sympathies of others; no, it
+must be inspired by a fulness of joy, by the will to create from joy
+itself passion that cannot be held down. Only great feelings bear the
+message to the crowd; small feelings, which can only in silence, as in
+motionless air, rise above the ground, are dashed down again. <i>The new
+pathos must contain the will, not to set souls in vibration, not to
+provide a delicate, æsthetic sense of pleasure, but to fire to a deed.</i>
+It must carry the hearer along with it; it must once again collect in
+itself the scattered forces of the poet of old time; it must in the poet
+recreate, for an hour, the demagogue, the musician, the actor, the
+orator; it must snatch the word<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> again off the paper into the air; it
+must carefully entrust feeling as a secret treasure to the individual;
+it must hurl this treasure into the surf of a multitude. Poems with such
+a new pathos cannot be created by feeble, passive men, whose mood can be
+changed at any minute by the world around them, but only by fighting
+natures, who are governed by an idea, by the thought of a duty; who seek
+to force their feeling on others; who elevate their inspiration to the
+inspiration of the whole world.</p>
+
+<p>This new lyric pathos is in our days growing lustily into life again.
+For centuries rhetoricians have been mocked at. The change of estimation
+in Schiller's case from worship to sufferance is a lasting proof. And
+let us remember that Nietzsche, the only German who in recent years has
+influenced the world, was only able to do so by creating a new
+rhetorical style&mdash;'I am the inventor of the dithyramb'&mdash;only by making
+his <i>Zarathustra</i> a preacher's book which insistently requires a loud,
+resonant voice. In France it was Victor Hugo who first recognised the
+necessity of direct address. But he, who, as it happens, stands on that
+narrowest boundary-line which separates genius from talent, he of whom
+one can say that he was either the least of the eternal, monumental
+poets or the greatest of the minor, the derivative poets, he confined
+himself to France, he never thought of any but the French nation&mdash;as
+Walt Whitman never thought of any<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> but the American nation&mdash;and, above
+all, he had not the high place whence to speak to his nation. He would
+have been greater if he had really had the tribune whence his thunder
+and lightning might have reached the multitude, instead of being always
+only a sinister grumbling from the background of exile. Of all the
+hundred volumes of his work perhaps nothing will remain except that
+commanding gesture of an orator which Rodin has perpetuated in his
+statue, and which is nothing else than the will to move to passion. He
+has created this will to pathos, but not the pathos itself; still, even
+the effort is a great and memorable achievement.</p>
+
+<p>Victor Hugo's inheritance, which was ill administered by chatterers and
+chauvinists, by Déroulède and such poets with their big drums and their
+trumpet-flourishes, has been taken over in France by Verhaeren. And he
+is the first whose voice again reaches the crowd, the first French
+realisation of a pathos which has absolutely the effect of art and
+poetry. He more than any other, he whose deepest delight it is to quell
+a grandiose resistance, he the <i>évocateur prodigieux</i>, as Bersaucourt<a name="FNanchor_2_79" id="FNanchor_2_79"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_79" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>
+has called him, was entitled to the mastery of the living word. Whenever
+I read a poem by Verhaeren, I am time after time astonished to find
+myself, when I have begun by reading it to myself, suddenly forced to
+read the words aloud; surprised to find myself reading<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> them louder and
+louder; surprised to find in my hand, in my whole body, the urgent need
+awakening of the gesture that hails and kindles an audience. For so
+strong is the passionateness of the original feeling, the inner cry and
+appeal in the words, that it forces its way through the reproduction,
+rings out loudly even from the dead letters. <i>All the great poems of
+Verhaeren are filled with the yearning to be spoken aloud, vehemently,
+in the zest and glow of passion</i>. If they are recited softly, they seem
+to be quite without melody; if they are read calmly and stolidly, they
+often seem hard, uneven, and abrupt. Many images recur with a certain
+regularity, many adjectives are repeated as petrified ideas&mdash;the trick
+of an orator who emphasises what is important by standing
+expressions&mdash;but the moment the poem is read aloud it is all alive
+again, the repetitions are suddenly revealed as superb instances of
+excitement reaching its mark, the recurring images take their place as
+regular milestones along a road rushing along wildly to the infinite.
+Verhaeren's poetry is the communication of an ecstasy, communication not
+in the sense of a secret to an individual, but of fire cast to kindle a
+crowd. His poems never seem to be quite completed, but to have been
+first created while being read, just as every good and fiery speech
+gives the impression of being improvised; they are always the unfolding
+of a state, a passionate analysis that acts like a discovery.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> They are
+moving, not harmonious. Just as an orator does not shock his audience at
+the very first with the conclusion of his reasoning, but pays out the
+chain of his arguments slowly and logically, Verhaeren builds his poems
+from visions, first in repose, then in the excitement that intensifies,
+and then with burning horizons foaming over more and more wildly in
+images. And these images again are rhetorical; they are not similes
+which can only be understood in their totality by the roundabout way of
+reflection; they are glaring flashes of lightning. A poem that would
+move those who hear it has need of metaphors which not only hit the mark
+of feeling, but which hit it immediately with deadly effect. They must
+be glaring, because they have to force the whole feeling in the
+expression of one second as quick as lightning. In this way the pathetic
+poem produces a new form of sensuous expression, and in this way too it
+creates itself a new rhythm of intensification. First of all, with the
+lightnings of his metaphors Verhaeren illuminates the vast landscape of
+visions; then, by a certain monotony of rhythm, he intensifies the
+astonishment and excitement to the highest ecstasy. Repeatedly, at the
+breathing-spaces of his great poems, you think you have reached the
+summit, only to be whipped to a higher leap, to a higher outlook. 'Il
+faut en tes élans te dépasser sans cesse';<a name="FNanchor_3_80" id="FNanchor_3_80"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_80" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> this, his moral
+commandment,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> is for him the highest poetical law as well. The deepest
+will of his pathetic poem is to whip up, to set running, to snatch his
+hearer along with him. 'Dites!' this summons which is like a gesture,
+the urgent 'encore, encore!' are appeals which in his poems are
+petrified into cries, just as every horseman has certain words to lure
+the last strength from his horse. <i>Such words are nothing but transposed
+oratorical gestures</i>. The hollow 'oh!' is the gesture of appeal; the
+short 'qu'importe!' the gesture as of one who casts away a burden grown
+too heavy; the slow, curving, far-sweeping 'immensément' is the heaping
+up of all infinity. These poems are lashed into fever heat. For not only
+do they themselves seek to fly like those other, the harmonious, the
+really lyric poems, which with wings outspread seem to hover near the
+clouds, they also seek to snatch up by force the whole heavy mass of the
+audience. This is the explanation of the constant repetitions in the
+poems, which are often very long, as though some last doubter were yet
+to be convinced, as though fire were to be darted into the blood of some
+last one yet immune. Everything strives forwards, forwards, dragging the
+resister along with ecstatic power.</p>
+
+<p>And here are seen the dangers of pathos. The first danger, that into
+which, for instance, Victor Hugo fell, was the emptiness, the hollowness
+of the feeling, the covering over of a void by a mighty gesture;
+enthusiasm resulting from a deliberate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> method, and not forced by inner
+feeling. Empty phrasing is and remains the first danger of the pathetic
+poem. The triteness of words 'plus sonores que solides'<a name="FNanchor_4_81" id="FNanchor_4_81"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_81" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> is the
+second. Here, however, in this new pathos, there is another and a new
+peril, that of the over-heating of feeling, that of excessive, unhealthy
+exaltation, which must then of necessity yield to exhaustion. No man can
+be in a constant fever of excitement, in an unremitting state of
+exaltation. And in these poems there is the will to unceasing ecstasy.
+By the pathos, too, the purely lyrical values of the poem often fall
+into danger. The will to be clear often forces the poet to a triteness
+of wording; the terseness necessitates frequent repetition; the impulse
+to build up an organic ecstasy often leads to excessive length. Owing to
+its glaring, clear colours the language loses that mystical element of
+lyric verse&mdash;the incommensurable, as Goethe called it&mdash;that magic hint
+of a secret thing fleeing from the crowd and the light of day. But at
+the same time this pathos signifies an immense enrichment of lyric
+resources, a transvaluation of the word, by the very fact that it is not
+exclusively intended for print but for declamation as well. The pathetic
+poem is not, like the lyric poem, a crystallised impression; it is not
+at the same time question and answer to itself; it is the expectation of
+an answer. The great pathos, therefore, grows with success, and
+involuntarily<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> mingles in the poem the craving and the answer of the
+poet's time. The voice of the poet is always as strong as the call that
+goes out to him. Verhaeren found this new pathos in the course of his
+development, because he no longer felt the voice of the crowd, of
+cities, and of all the new things as a hindrance to his lyric poetry,
+but as a challenge, as a rhetorical exhortation. And the more the world
+around us becomes ponderous, grandiose, and passionate&mdash;the more it
+becomes heroic in the concentration of its strength (heroic in that new
+strength that Emerson preached)&mdash;so much the more, too, must lyric
+poetry in the new sense, perhaps in Verhaeren's sense, be pathetic.
+Gigantic impressions cannot be forced into petty impressions; vast
+conceptions cannot be split up into mean fragments; a loud appeal needs
+a loud answer. All art is more dependent than we are aware on its epoch.
+The same secret dependence between demand and production seems to exist
+in the sphere of art as exists in commerce. Laws that escape our
+knowledge and cannot be prisoned in formulae can sometimes be glimpsed,
+hazy as a presentiment, in fugitive intuition.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_78" id="Footnote_1_78"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_78"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'Le Tribun' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_79" id="Footnote_2_79"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_79"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Albert de Bersaucourt, <i>Conférence sur Emile Verhaeren.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_80" id="Footnote_3_80"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_80"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 'L'Impossible' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_81" id="Footnote_4_81"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_81"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Albert Mockel, <i>Émile Verhaeren.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="VERHAERENS_POETIC_METHOD" id="VERHAERENS_POETIC_METHOD"></a>VERHAEREN'S POETIC METHOD</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Je suis celle des surprises fécondes.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 13em;">É.V., 'Celle des Voyages.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p>A real poem must not exhibit an artificial structure of parts, a
+mechanism; it must, like man himself, be organic, an indissoluble union
+of soul and body. It must have a living body of flesh, the substance of
+the word, the colour of the metaphors, the mechanism of the motion, the
+skeleton of the thought; but over and above all that it must possess
+that inexpressible something, the soul, which alone makes it organic;
+the breath, the rhythm, that inseparable essence which is no longer
+perceptible to intelligence, but only to feeling. It is not first in
+this transcendental element, however, that the poet's personality is
+revealed: the poetry of a great poet must be characteristic in its very
+physis, in its very material. Side by side with that magic vibration,
+that intangible element of feeling, the materiality too, the weaving of
+the word, that net of expression in which the fugitive feeling is caught
+in the waters of the hidden life and lifted into the light, these too
+must be alone of their kind if they are to characterise the poet's race,
+environment, and personality. This purely material organism of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> the poet
+too is, like every living thing, subject to growth, to the change of
+maturity and age. The structure of the poem, like every human face, must
+gradually, in the revolution of the years, work its way to character
+from the shifting features of childhood and the indistinctness of the
+general type, must in its sensuous externals, in the physiognomy of the
+material, show all psychic changes to the last acquisition of
+personality. In a real poet the technical aspect, the handicraft, the
+external element has a development that runs parallel to the
+intellectual and poetic contents. In form, too, the poem must at first
+represent a tradition, something that has been taken over; only in the
+revolt of youth will it achieve a personal form, and this itself will
+later, as it gradually grows cold and petrifies, represent an immutable
+type.</p>
+
+<p>Verhaeren's poetry has its evolution and its history in this purely
+formal sense. Even this poetry of Verhaeren's, which to-day looms so
+immensely isolated and so victoriously characteristic in French
+literature that a connoisseur can, without a shadow of doubt, recognise
+the creator from a single stanza, has grown from a tradition, is the
+climax of a certain culture, and is at the same time related to a
+contemporary movement. When Verhaeren began to write, Victor Hugo, the
+crowned king of French lyric poetry, was dead; Baudelaire was forgotten;
+Paul Verlaine was still almost unknown. Victor<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> Hugo's heirs, who
+divided his kingdom as once the diadochi divided the kingdom of
+Alexander the Great, were only able to preserve the trappings of the
+glory gone, and the grandiloquence of their words contrasted ill with
+their thin voices and artificial feelings. Against this circle, against
+François Coppée, Catulle Mendès, Théodore de Banville and the rest of
+them, rose up a new school of young men who called themselves 'decadents
+and symbolists.' Here I must frankly admit that I am really unable to
+explain this idea, perhaps for the very reason that I have read so many
+varying definitions of it. The only thing that is certain is, that at
+that time a group of young writers rose up in concert against a
+tradition, and, in the most diverse experiments, sought a new lyrical
+expression. What this new thing consisted in would be hard to say. The
+truth is perhaps that all these poets were not French; that each of them
+brought some new element from his own country, his own race, his own
+past; that none of them felt that respect for the French tradition which
+was in the blood of the native poets as an inward barrier, and thus were
+able unconsciously to get nearer to their own artistic instinct. One
+only needs to look at the names, which often at the first glance betray
+the foreigner, the Americans Vielé-Griffin and Stuart Merrill, the
+Belgians Verhaeren, Maeterlinck, and Mockel, or which, as in the case of
+Jean Moréas, cover a complicated Greek name with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> a French pseudonym.
+The only indisputable exploit of this group really was that about 1885
+they quickened the pace of French lyric poetry with a new unrest.
+Mallarmé plunged his verses into a secret darkness of symbols, until the
+words with their subterranean meaning almost became unintelligible,
+while Verlaine gave his lines the dream-rapt lightsomeness of a music
+never heard before. Gustave Kalm and Jules Laforgue were the first who
+did away, the one with rhyme and the other with the Alexandrine, and
+introduced the apparent irregularities of the <i>vers libre.</i> Each one did
+his best on his own account to find something new, and all of them had
+in common the same fiery eagerness to attack the idols of a derivative
+poetry, the same ardent longing for a new form of expression. True,
+their talent was soon choked up with sand, but that was because they
+over-estimated the technical side of the innovations they introduced and
+spent themselves in the investigation of theories, instead of developing
+their own personalities. As time went on their paths diverged widely.
+Many of them foundered in the sea of journalism; others are still, after
+a lapse of twenty years, walking round in a circle in the footsteps of
+their youth; and of the symbolists and decadents nothing is left but a
+page or so of literary history, a faded sign-board marking an empty
+shop. Verhaeren too was classed with them, although in my view he was
+never essentially influenced by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> this school. A man of such sturdy
+originality could not be more than stimulated by others, could not be
+more than confirmed in his natural tendency to revolt. His attitude with
+regard to the <i>vers libre</i> was by no means due to this influence. For it
+was not by suggestion from others, not by the instinct of imitation, but
+by inward necessity, that he discovered his new form. It was not the
+example of others that freed him from the fetters of tradition; he was
+forced to free himself from them of his own accord. This inner
+compulsion is alone of importance; for it is a matter of complete
+indifference whether a poet writes by chance in regular verse or in
+<i>vers libres</i>; the phenomenon can only be significant when a poet is of
+necessity and by inner pressure forced to free himself from tradition
+and to achieve a personal form.</p>
+
+<p>It was as a Parnassian that Verhaeren began. His first poetical
+attempts, which he has never published, the verses he wrote at school
+and in his first years at the university, showed him hypnotised by the
+style of Lamartine and Victor Hugo. And even in the first two books he
+published, in <i>Les Flamandes</i> and <i>Les Moines</i>, there is not a single
+poem in which Verhaeren has gone beyond his models. His poem is indeed
+somewhat more mobile than the strict pattern of school exercises; it
+already shows slight traces of the cracks which at a later day will
+break the vessel to pieces. But this hint of insubordination<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> was at
+that time necessitated more by the harshness and rebelliousness of the
+subject itself, by some stiffness or other in the turn of the phrase,
+which can only be explained by the fact of the poet's alien race. Even a
+foreigner can recognise that the verse is not rounded off, that the
+rhythm is not balanced with the natural inevitable sense of form that a
+man of Latin race would have, but that here a forceful will is with
+difficulty constraining a barbaric temperament to harmony. Through his
+French one can hear the massive language of his race, something of the
+unwieldy strength we have in our old German ballads. And what his name
+at the first glance betrayed&mdash;the foreigner&mdash;was to the finer ear of a
+native easily perceptible from his French alone.</p>
+
+<p>The farther Verhaeren proceeded in his development&mdash;the nearer he got to
+his real nature&mdash;the more the inheritance of his race in him revolted
+against the shackles of tradition&mdash;so much the more intensive became the
+impression of the Teutonic element in his verse. After all, development
+is in most cases nothing more than the awakening in us of our buried
+past. The highest demand of the Parnassian school, <i>impassibilité,</i> an
+immovableness as of bronze, is the antithesis of his stormy temperament,
+which drives him along to a wild rhythm, not to harmony. Deep, guttural
+notes vibrate in his verses, and make the song of his vowels rough; the
+angularity, the masculinity, abruptness, and hardness<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> of his peasant's
+nature peer through everywhere. In addition to this, there is now the
+inner transformation. So long as Verhaeren's poetic tendency was merely
+pictorial, one that calmly and without excitement aimed at painting the
+passion of the Flemish people, the earnestness of monasteries, just so
+long did the Alexandrine best serve to divide the rhythmic waves of his
+inspiration and roll them along. But when his personal sympathy began to
+confuse the inner indifference of his first work, his verse became
+uneasy. The cracks in the Alexandrine became more and more perceptible;
+greater and greater in the poet grew his impatience of it and his desire
+to smash it. He is no longer satisfied with the <i>vers ternaire</i>, the
+verse of the Romanticists with its two cæsuras dividing the line into
+three parts of perfectly equal rhythm and weight; he takes the free
+Alexandrine introduced by Victor Hugo and develops it still further,
+makes it still more irregular. He gives the syllables a different
+quantity, a different sonority; they no longer rest, they rock to and
+fro. And gradually the earnest, immovable uniformity of accentuation is
+changed into a more billowing, rhythmic fluidity. But ere long this
+concession too becomes too trivial for him. A temperament so impetuous
+as his will endure no outward fetter whatever. For it is not repose that
+this fiery singer would describe, but his own excited state&mdash;the
+quivering and vibrating of his emotion, his febrile<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> unrest. His great
+manifold feeling, which is nothing else than a modulated cry, cannot
+storm itself out in regular verse; it needs unquiet gestures, motion,
+freedom, the <i>vers libre</i>. The fact that at this time other poets in
+France were using the free verse, the fact that it was at that
+time&mdash;several dispute the priority&mdash;'invented' for poets, is of no
+consequence to us here. Such contemporaneous incidences never express a
+chance, but always a latent necessity. Free verse was nothing else than
+the inevitable reflex action of modern feeling, the poetic breaking free
+of the unrest which lay in the time. Whether or not Verhaeren at that
+time had models is of no importance. What has been taken over can never
+become organic, only what comes from personal experience is a real gain.
+And at that time it lay quite in the line of his development that by
+inner necessity he was forced to break his old instrument and create
+himself a new one. For the nervous unrest, the passionate agitation of
+Verhaeren's later poems is unthinkable in regular verse. If verse is to
+describe in its own inner passion the immense multiplicity of modern
+impressions&mdash;their haste, their fire, their precipitous revulsion, their
+unexpectedness, their gloomy melancholy, and the overwhelming vastness
+of their dimensions&mdash;it must be strong and yet flexible, like a rapier.
+Such poems must be emancipated from rules: they must stride along like a
+real crowd, noisily seething; they must<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> not walk in step, like soldiers
+on the march. And if they are to be spoken, they must not be recited in
+the stiff, cold, pathetically vibrating, self-conscious declamation of
+the Comédie Française; they must be spoken as though to a crowd; they
+must cry out, they must hail; and this-whipping up of an audience cannot
+be harmonious. These poems must be spontaneous and impulsive.</p>
+
+<p>Manifold is the diversity which Verhaeren's poetry has achieved by its
+deliverance from the monotony of the Alexandrine. Now and now only can
+the verse reproduce the plastic side of an impression and the inward
+agitation of it; not only by a pictorial description, but in a purely
+external manner too; by the sound, by the music of the rhythm. The
+lines, sometimes darting far beyond the margin, sometimes, like an
+arrow, sharpened to a single word, have the whole key-board of feeling.
+They can pace with a grave step like long black funeral processions, if
+haply they would express the monotony of solitude, 'Mes jours toujours
+plus lourds s'en vont roulant leur cours';<a name="FNanchor_1_82" id="FNanchor_1_82"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_82" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> they can dart up like a
+falcon, white and glittering, soaring to the exulting cry 'la joie,'
+swift and as high as heaven over all the sad heaviness of earth. All the
+voices of day and night can now be represented onomato-poetically: all
+that is brusque and sudden by brevity; all that is ponderous and
+grandiose by a vast sweep of fulness; an unexpected thing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> by sudden
+harshness; haste in a feverishly accelerated movement; savagery by a
+precipitous change of velocity. Every line can now express the feeling
+by its rhythm alone. And one might without knowing French recognise the
+poetical intention of many of these poems merely by listening to their
+consonantal music, nay, often by looking at their typographical
+arrangement.</p>
+
+<p>For this reason I should be tempted to call these poems with their vast
+range <i>symphonic</i> poems. They seem to have been conceived for an
+orchestra. They are not, like the poetry of a past generation, chamber
+music; they are not solitary violin <i>soli</i>; they are an inspired
+blending of all instruments; they are graded in individual sections
+which have a different <i>tempo</i> and the pauses of the transitions. In
+Verhaeren's poetry the lyric exceeds the bounds of its domain and
+impinges on the dramatic and the epic. For his poem seeks not only to
+describe a mood, like a purely lyrical poem, it describes at the same
+time the birth of this mood. And this first part of the construction is
+epic; it is descriptive; it leads up from a lowly beginning to a great
+discharge of force. And, in the second place, the transitions are
+dramatic, those bursts of temperament from section to section, those
+precipitous falls and steep ascents which only at the end lead to a
+harmonious solution. From a purely external point of view Verhaeren's
+poem is more extensive, longer, of a greater range than any other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>
+contemporary poetry; it shoots out farther beyond the limit of lyric
+poetry; and, careless of the boundary-line of æsthetics, it derives
+strength and nourishment from neighbouring domains. It comes nearer to
+rhetoric, nearer to epic poetry, nearer to the drama, nearer to
+philosophy than any other poetry of our day; it is more independent of
+set rules than poetry had been hitherto. And independent of rules&mdash;or
+obeying only a new inner rule&mdash;is Verhaeren's form. Now, since the page
+no longer holds the fettered lines together in equal columns, the poet
+can write out his wild, overflowing feelings in their own wild, boldly
+curving lines. Verhaeren's poem at this time&mdash;and that which is achieved
+in the years of maturity remains inalienable&mdash;has its own inner
+architectonics. But it can hardly be compared to a piece of
+architecture, a structure built with hands; it is rather like a
+manifestation of nature. It is elementary like every feeling; it
+discharges itself like a storm. First a vision moves up like a cloud;
+more and more densely it compresses itself; more and more sultrily, more
+and more oppressively it weighs on the feeling; higher and higher,
+hotter and hotter grows the inner tension, until at last in the
+lightning of the images, in the rolling of the rhythm, all the garnered
+strength discharges itself rhythmically. The andante always grows to a
+furioso; and only the last section shows again the clear, cleansed sky
+of calm, in an intellectual synthesis of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> the state of chaos. This
+structure of Verhaeren's poem is almost invariable. It may be seen, for
+instance, in two parallel examples: in the poems 'La Foule' and 'Vers la
+Mer' in the book <i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>. Both set in with an
+adjuration, a vision. Here the crowd, its confusion, its strength; there
+a sensitive picture of the morning sea whose transparent tones remind
+one of Turner. Now the poet fires this still vision with his own
+passionateness. You see the crowd moving more and more restlessly, the
+waves surging more and more passionately; and ecstasy breaks out the
+moment the poet surrenders himself to these things, places himself among
+the crowd, sinks his feeling, his body in the sea. Then in the finale
+bursts forth the great cry of identity, in the one case the yearning to
+be all the crowd, in both that ecstatic gesture of the individual
+yearning for infinity. The first picture, which was only sensuously
+seen, grows at the end of the poem into a great ethic inspiration; from
+the vision is unfolded an unconquerable moral and metaphysical need.
+This form of intensification from individual feeling to universal
+feeling is the basic form of Verhaeren's poem. It might be best, in
+order to convey a clear idea of its form, to use a geometrical term and
+say that these poems are, to a certain extent, <i>poems in the form of a
+parabola.</i> While the lyric in the current sense mostly represents a
+symmetrical and harmonious form, a return to itself, a circle,
+Verhaeren's poem has the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> form of a parabola, apparently irregular but
+really equally governed by a law. His poems soar in a swift sustained
+flight, soar from the earth up into the clouds, from the real to the
+unreal, and then from a sudden zenith fling themselves back to the
+earth. The inspiration drives the feeling away from the pictorial, from
+passionless contemplation to this utmost height of possibility, far away
+from all sensuous perceptions high into the metaphysical, in order then,
+suddenly and unexpectedly, to bring it back to the <i>terra firma</i> of
+reality. And indeed, in the music of these poems there is something as
+of a darting upwards, something of the hissing and whizzing of a stone
+well thrown and of its sudden falling down. In their rhythm too is this
+increasing velocity, this catching of the breath and this return to the
+starting-point, this bethinking itself of gravity when it returns to the
+earth.</p>
+
+<p>Something may now be said as to the means with which Verhaeren attains
+his vision, with which he seeks to represent the inner passionateness of
+things, with which he evokes enthusiasm. Let us first of all try to
+establish whether Verhaeren is what is called a master of language.
+Verhaeren's command of language is not by any means unlimited. Both in
+his words and in his rhymes there is constant repetition which sometimes
+borders on monotony; but on the other hand there is a strangeness, a
+newness, an unexpectedness of wording which is almost unexampled<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> in
+French lyric poetry. An enrichment of the language, however, does not
+proceed from neologisms alone; a word may become alive by the
+unexpectedness of a new application, by a transposition of the meaning,
+as Rainer Maria Rilke, for instance, has often done in the German lyric.
+To redeem 'die armen Worte, die im Alltag darben,'<a name="FNanchor_2_83" id="FNanchor_2_83"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_83" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> and consecrate
+them anew to poetry, is perhaps a higher merit than creating new words.
+Now Verhaeren has above all, by the Flemish sense of language which he
+inherited, imported a certain Belgian timbre into French lyric poetry.
+Personally, it is true, he is almost ignorant of Flemish; nevertheless,
+by the vague music familiar to him from his childhood's days, by a
+certain guttural tone, he has imported a nuance which is perhaps less?
+perceptible to the foreigner than to a Frenchman. At this point I should
+like to call Maurice Gauchez as a witness and borrow the most salient
+examples from his extraordinarily interesting monograph. Among the
+neologisms for which Gauchez suggests a foreign origin he quotes the
+following: les baisers rouges, les plumes majuscules, les malades
+hiératiques, la statue textuelle, les automnes prismatiques, le soir
+tourbillonaire, les solitudes océans, le ciel dédalien, le cœur
+myriadaire de la foule, les automnes apostumes, les vents vermeils, les
+navires cavalcadeurs, les gloires médusaires.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> And he rightly points out
+how much certain of Verhaeren's verbs might enrich the French language:
+enturquoiser, rauquer, vacarmer, béquiller, s'enténébrer, se futiliser,
+se mesquiniser, larmer. But I for my part cannot look upon the
+enrichment here accruing from racial instinct as the essential thing in
+his verbal art: it only gives it a local colour, without really
+explaining what is astonishingly modern in his diction. Verhaeren has
+been a great creator of new things for the French lyric, above all by
+his extension of its range of subjects, by his renewal of poetic
+reality, by recruiting new forces for poetry in the domain of technical
+science. <i>The great part of the new blood for his language came not so
+much from Flemish as from science</i>. A man who writes poems on the
+Exchange, on the theatre, on science, who sings factories and railway
+stations, cannot ignore their terminology. He must borrow certain
+technical expressions from the vocabulary of science, certain
+pathological terms from medicine; he must extend the glossary of the
+poetic by the extension of the poetic itself. There are geographical
+surprises of rhyme to be found in Verhaeren: Berlin and Sakhalin,
+Moscow, the Balearic and other distant islands whose names have never
+previously lived in rhyme. And since science is by its own progress
+compelled to invent new names every day, since new machines demand new
+words for their necessities, here for the first time an inexhaustible<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>
+source has been discovered for replenishing the French language.</p>
+
+<p>This immense wealth, on the other hand, is jeopardised by something that
+might be called not so much poverty or restriction as fascination. Every
+one-sidedness of feeling produces, with its advantages, certain defects,
+and thus the constant passionateness which brought Verhaeren's poetry
+near to oratory, to preaching, is at the same time responsible for a
+certain monotony of the metaphors. Verhaeren is hallucinated by certain
+words, images, adjectives, phrases. He repeats them incessantly through
+all his work. All things in which a many-headed passion is united he
+compares with a 'brasier'; 'carrefour' is his symbol for indecision;
+'l'essor' is for him the last straining of effort; many cries and words
+by which he hails his audience are repeated almost from page to page.
+The adjectives too are often monotonous; often indeed, with the cold
+'iques' at the end of them, they are schematic; and even in the
+metaphors that phenomenon is unmistakable which in science is called
+pseudoanæsthesia, that is, the memory of a fixed feeling from the domain
+of some other sense is always individually associated with a certain
+colour or sound. For him 'red' expresses all that is passionate; 'gold'
+all greatness and pomp; 'white' all that is gentle; 'black' all enmity.
+His images have thus something abrupt and absolute; there is always<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> in
+them, as Albert Mockel has demonstrated in his masterly study, the
+decisive, the sudden excitement, which overwhelms our astonishment. His
+images are as violent as his colours, as his rhythm. They have the
+suddenness of a cannon-ball which darts through space and is only
+perceptible to our vision when it reaches its aim and smashes the
+target. Possibly the inmost reason of this lies in the fact that these
+poems are intended to be spoken. A placard that is to have effect at
+some distance must be in glaring colours; pathos calls for images that
+hallucinate. Such images have indeed been found by Verhaeren, and by
+Verhaeren only. He hardly seems to know nuances. With the brutal
+instinct of a strong man he loves all that is glaring, all that is
+untrammelled. 'La couleur, elle est dans ses Å“uvres une surprise de
+métaux et d'images.'<a name="FNanchor_3_84" id="FNanchor_3_84"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_84" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> But in this material they blaze, and with their
+lightnings they light up even the most distant horizon. I will only
+remind the reader of his 'beffrois immensément vêtus de nuit' or 'la
+façade paraît pleurer des lettres d'or,' or his 'les gestes de lumière
+des phares.' By the intensity of such images Verhaeren attains to quite
+an incomparable clearness of the feeling. 'Personne, je crois, ne
+possède à l'égal de Verhaeren le don des lumières et des ombres, non
+point fondues, mais enchevêtrées, des noirs absolus coupés de blanches
+clartés.'<a name="FNanchor_4_85" id="FNanchor_4_85"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_85" class="fnanchor">[4]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>One-sidedness of temperament here produces a one-sided advantage with
+all its artistic restrictions. So that Verhaeren is not a verbal artist
+in the unrestricted sense of one who always hits upon the only, the
+inevitable comparison for a thing; of one who flashes a bold word on the
+attention once and never retails it till it palls, who seems to use
+every word for the first time. His poetic vocabulary is rich, but by no
+means infinite; his sensibility is strong, but it has its restrictions.
+For, as is the case with every passionate poet, certain feelings at the
+last white-heat of excitement appear to him identical, seem to him to be
+capable of comparison only with the quite elementary things of Nature,
+with fire, the sea, the wind, thunder and lightning. To make the point
+clear, Verhaeren is not a verbal artist in Goethe's sense, but rather in
+Schiller's sense. With the latter, too, he has the gift in common of
+definitely expressing certain perceptions in one lyric line. He has
+discovered essences of the lyric feeling of life, lines that are now
+household words, or which at all events will be so. It will be
+sufficient to mention word formations such as 'les villes
+tentaculaires,' which in France have already become common-places, or
+such maxims as 'La vie est à monter et non à descendre,' or 'Toute la
+vie est dans l'essor.' In lines like these the lyric ecstasy is
+compressed as in a coin, and perpetuated in the current riches of the
+language.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This hardness and brutality, these abrupt transitions, constitute the
+individuality of Verhaeren's poetry. At bottom it is nothing else than
+an accentuated masculinity. The voice, the music, is guttural, deep,
+raucous, masculine; the body of his poem has, like a man's body, the
+beautiful movement of strength, but in repose gestures that are often
+hard and which only in passion regain their compelling beauty. Whereas
+French lyric poetry, so to speak, had imitated the female body, the
+delicate grace of its soft yielding lines; whereas its first concern was
+harmony; Verhaeren's poem strove only for the rhythm of movement, only
+for the proud and vigorously ringing stride of a man, his leaping and
+running, the fighting display of his strength. This is not the only
+reason why the French have so long repudiated him. For where we delight
+in an echo from the German in his language, they feel the harshness of
+the Teutonic undertone; where we find a consonance with the German
+ballad, a re-birth of the German ballad as though it were awakening from
+the dreams of childhood, they see an opposition to the native tradition.
+And in fact, the farther Verhaeren has proceeded in his development,
+both in his personality and in his verse, the more the French varnish
+has peeled off his Teutonic perception. It was only in the time of his
+first dependence on tradition that his poetry was hardly to be
+distinguished from that of other writers in French.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> The farther he
+receded from the French standpoint, the more he unconsciously approached
+German art. To-day, perhaps, a return to classicism is perceptible in
+his poetry. The neologisms are not so audacious; the images are more
+schematic; the whole poem is calmer and more clarified. This, however,
+is by no means a cowardly compromise with a shattered tradition, no
+repentant return to the fold; it is the same phenomenon we meet in a
+similar manner in the late poems of Goethe, Schiller, Hugo, and
+Swinburne; the effect of the cooling of the blood in age; the yielding
+of sensuous perception to intellectual ideas. The victor has lost the
+fighter's brutality; the man in his maturity no longer needs revolt but
+a conception of the world&mdash;harmony. Here, as in Verhaeren's whole
+evolution, his verse is the most delicately sensitive indicator of the
+psychic revulsion, the perfect proof of a poetic and organic development
+which is really inward and dependent only on the laws of his blood.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_82" id="Footnote_1_82"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_82"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'L'Heure Mauvaise' (<i>Au Bord de la Route</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_83" id="Footnote_2_83"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_83"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 'Poor words a-hungered in the working day.'&mdash;Rainer Maria
+Rilke, <i>Mir sur Feier.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_84" id="Footnote_3_84"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_84"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Albert Mockel, <i>Émile Verhaeren</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_85" id="Footnote_4_85"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_85"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i> (<i>Ibid.</i>).<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="VERHAERENS_DRAMA" id="VERHAERENS_DRAMA"></a>VERHAEREN'S DRAMA</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Toute la vie est dans l'essor.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">É.V., <i>Les Forces Tumultueuses.</i></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Émile Verhaeren's dramas seem to stand outside his work. Verhaeren is
+essentially a lyric poet. His whole feeling springs from lyric
+enthusiasm, and all neighbouring domains are merely sources whose
+strength flows into and feeds this one vital instinct. Verhaeren has
+almost always used the dramatic and the epic only as a means, never as
+an end in themselves: from the epic he has taken over into the vast
+sweep of his dithyrambic poems its broad, calm development, and from the
+drama the swift, abrupt contrast of transitions. The dramatic and the
+epic only serve him as a tonic, as a means to strengthen the blood of
+his lyric art. Although Verhaeren beside his lyric work has written
+dramas&mdash;four up to the present&mdash;these, in the edifice of his complete
+production, must be appreciated from a different point of view: from an
+architectural point of view. For the dramas are to him, in a certain
+sense, only a survey, a concentration of individual lyric crises, a
+synopsis of certain ideal complexes which have occupied some moment of
+his past; they are final settlements;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> the last point in lines of
+development; milestones of individual epochs. All that in the lyric
+poems, which never systematically bounded a domain, fell apart, is here
+made to converge to the focus of a programme. The lyric juxtaposition is
+fused into an inner relationship, the circle of ideas is co-ordinated
+like a picture in the frame of a play. Verhaeren's four tragedies
+represent four spheres of a conception of the universe: the religious,
+the social, the national, and the ethical. <i>Le Cloître</i> is a re-creation
+of the book of verse <i>Les Moines</i>, is the tragedy of Catholicism; <i>Les
+Aubes</i> is a condensation of the sociological trilogy <i>Les Villes
+Tentaculaires, Les Campagnes Hallucinées, Les Villages Illusoires.
+Philip II.</i> shapes the tragedy of the Antichrist, the contrast of Spain
+and Belgium, of sensuality and asceticism. And <i>Hélène de Sparte</i>, which
+in its outward form manifests a return to classicism, handles purely
+moral, eternal problems. As far as their contents are concerned,
+Verhaeren's dramas show no deviation, no change of the inner centre of
+gravity, and his new dramatic style is in perfect harmony with his new
+lyric style. For just as on the one hand he has used the dramatic
+element as a substance of his lyric work, here in his dramas he has
+transmuted the lyric element to a dramatic element. Here, too, we have
+nothing but visions intensified into exaltation. Here, as everywhere
+else, Verhaeren can only create by enthusiasm. What goads him on is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> the
+lyric moment in his enthusiasm, that second of the highest tension when
+passion, if it is not to shatter the frame of its generator, must have
+explosive words. The characters of his dramas are never anything but
+symbols of great passions, the bridge for this ascension of the
+exaltation. To him the action is no more than the way to the crises, to
+those seconds when some mighty force seizes on these characters and
+forces them to cry out. Whole scenes seem to be only awaiting for the
+moment when some one shall rise and turn to the crowd, wrestle with it
+and overthrow it, or be himself dashed to pieces.</p>
+
+<p>The style of Verhaeren's dramas is purely lyrical; the pace is
+throughout passionate and feverish; and this method, which runs counter
+to all dramatic canons, was bound organically to create a new technique.
+The French drama had hitherto known only the rhymed Alexandrine or
+prose. In Verhaeren's dramas&mdash;for the first time to my knowledge&mdash;prose
+and verse (verse which is 'free' both as regards rhythm and rhyme) are
+throughout promiscuously mixed. Mixed, but not as in Shakespeare, in
+whose plays verse and prose alternate in individual scenes and
+establish, so to speak, a social stratification, serving-men speaking in
+prose and their masters in verse: in Verhaeren the prose passages are
+the broad, resting foundations of the action; the curved bowls, so to
+speak, from which the holy fire of the exaltation flames. His
+characters<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> express their calm in prose, pass from calm to excitement,
+and in this intensification speak a language which imperceptibly merges
+into a poem. Not till their passion breaks out do they speak in verse,
+in those seconds, as it were, when their soul begins to vibrate; and in
+these passages one cannot help thinking of an aeroplane which is first
+driven along the ground and moves with ever greater speed till suddenly
+it soars aloft. In Verhaeren's drama the characters speak an ever purer
+language the more poetical they become; music breaks with their passion
+from their souls; just as many people who behave coarsely and awkwardly
+in ordinary life, in great moments suddenly achieve a bearing of heroic
+beauty. This embodies the idea that in enthusiasm a man discovers in
+himself another and a purer language; that passion and the yearning to
+free oneself from an immeasurable and intolerable earthly burden make a
+poet of any man. This idea is in harmony with Verhaeren's whole
+conception of the universe, his idea that the man swept away by passion
+and enthusiasm is on a higher plane than the critic with his lack of hot
+feeling; that receptivity for great sensations constitutes, so to speak,
+a scale of moral values. And the stage performances have shown that this
+new style is justified, that the transition from prose to verse,
+occurring as it does contemporaneously with the ascension from calm to
+passion, passes practically unnoticed by the audience,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> which is
+equivalent to saying that when put to the test the method was recognised
+as necessary.</p>
+
+<p>And it is by passion, this innermost flame of Verhaeren's poetry, that
+his dramas live too. Their qualities are those of the lyrics; they have,
+above all, that vast power of vision which sets <i>Philip II</i>. against the
+tragic landscape of Spain; over the drama of Helen arches the heaven of
+Greece, blue, and mild, and open like a flower; and behind the tragedy
+of modern cities unrolls the inflamed scenery of the sky with the black
+arms of chimneys. And then the immense fervour of the ecstasy which, not
+in a slow, regular progression, but in savage, convulsive thrusts,
+whirls the action onward to the moments of the solution.</p>
+
+<p>Thus Verhaeren's first drama derives its strength from the lyric source
+of a man's accusation of himself. <i>Le Cloître</i> is a paraphrase of <i>Les
+Moines</i>, the book of the monks. Here again all the characters are
+gathered together in the cool corridors of a monastery&mdash;the gentle, the
+wild, the feudal, the wrathful, the childlike, the learned monk; here,
+however, they do not act in isolation, but with all their strength the
+one against the other. They fight for the prior's chair, which is really
+the symbol of something higher. For just as in <i>Les Moines</i> every
+individual monk expressed symbolically some virtue of Catholicism and a
+distinct idea of God, here the prior's chair decides the question who is
+the most deserving of God.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> For his successor the old prior has
+designated Balthasar, a nobleman whom the monastery has sheltered for
+years. But he had only taken refuge there because he had killed his own
+father, thus escaping secular justice, and now he feels the
+consciousness of his guilt burning, feels the exasperated struggle
+between his own conscience and the lighter conscience of the others, who
+have long since forgiven him. And he cannot feel himself free before he
+has made his confession before the assembled monks, and even then only
+when he has repeated the confession, against the will of the monastery,
+to the people, and surrendered himself to the secular judges. The Roman
+Catholic idea of confession is here wonderfully in agreement with
+Dostoieffsky's conception of salvation by confession, of deliverance by
+suffering self-imposed. In three climaxes of equal force at the end of
+each of the three acts the tragic confession bursts into flame&mdash;first
+born of fear, then of a sense of justice, and at the last positively
+conceived as a pleasure; and here in these superb lyric ecstasies rest
+the strong pinions which bear the tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>In the second, the social tragedy <i>Les Aubes,</i> the scenario is the
+present time. It has the purple scenery of <i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>,
+of the cities with the arms of polypi, which drain the blood of the poor
+dying country. Beggars, paupers, those who are starving, those who have
+been evicted, march to Oppidomagnum, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> modern industrial city, and
+besiege it. It is the past once again storming the future. In the
+lyrical trilogy this struggle had been shaped in a hundred visionary
+instances; here, however, the bright sky of reconciliation is arched
+above the battle-field, over the realities hovers the dream. For here
+the future joins hands with the present. The great tribune, Hérénien,
+breaks the backbone of this battle and shows himself the hero of a new
+morality by secretly admitting the enemy into the city&mdash;in the old sense
+the action of a traitor&mdash;by yielding and thus transforming the struggle
+into a reconciliation. He is the tragic bearer of the moral idea that
+enmity may be overcome by goodness, and he falls as the first martyr of
+his faith. Verhaeren's social conception, his superb description of
+realities, here merge slowly in a Utopia; the dawns of the new days
+begin to shine above the pasts that are dead; the din of rebellion fades
+away in harmony. This drama, like the others, is far remote from the
+possibilities of the majority of theatres, because of the fact that here
+too an ethical idea is expressed with all the glow and ecstasy which as
+a rule in modern dramas is only found in the utterance of erotic desire.</p>
+
+<p>The third tragedy, <i>Philip II</i>., is a national drama, although its scene
+is not laid in Flanders. Much as Charles de Coster in his <i>Thyl
+Ulenspiegel</i> had, with a Fleming's deadly hatred, seen in Philip II. the
+hereditary enemy of liberty,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> Verhaeren, who with the lyric poetry of
+his <i>Toute la Flandre</i> became the representative singer of his native
+land, painted this gloomy figure with hatred. Philip II. is here, as in
+<i>Thyl Ulenspiegel,</i> the hard, inflexible king who would fain put life
+out because it burns too red for him, who wishes to have the world as
+cool and marble-like as the chambers of the Escorial. Here of a sudden
+the reverse side of Roman Catholicism, whose passion was immortalised in
+<i>Le Cloître</i>, is rent open; its pitilessness and asceticism; its
+obstinate effort to overthrow the irrefragable joy of life. Don Carlos,
+however, is the fervent friend of the people, the friend of Flanders; he
+is the will to enjoyment, to merry moods, to passion. And this struggle
+between the 'yes' and the 'no' of life, this fight of Verhaeren's own
+lyric crisis, this fight between the denial and the passionate approval
+of enjoyment&mdash;at bottom, toe, the deepest cause of the war between Spain
+and the Netherlands&mdash;is here symbolised in characters. Of course, any
+comparison with Schiller's <i>Don Carlos</i> must tell against Verhaeren, for
+the German drama is far more dramatic and conceived on a scale of
+greater magnificence; but Verhaeren did not aim at a complete rounding
+off, at a plenitude of characters; all that he wanted was to show these
+two feelings in their struggle with each other, the enthusiasm of life
+and its suppression by force. A comparison with Schiller's drama best
+shows Verhaeren's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> disregard of dramatic canons, and at the same time
+the immense new lyric power of the play. For Spain is here seen with a
+strength and intensity of vision which is probably without a parallel in
+tragedy. The cold, hypocritical atmosphere can be felt; and better than
+from words the character of Philip can be perceived in that one silent
+scene in which he suddenly appears stealthily creeping to watch his son
+in the arms of the countess, and then, without a gleam in his rigid
+eyes, without the slightest movement of anger, vanishes again into the
+dark. Behind him, however, behind the spy and the eavesdropper, glides
+another shadow, the monk of the Inquisition: the eavesdropper is himself
+shadowed, the ruler is himself ruled. Visions like these, with the
+ecstasy of certain scenes, are the strongest motive power in Verhaeren's
+poetic construction. His dramatic art, like the art of his lyrics, does
+not rise in a steady ascent, but in sudden wild leaps and starts.</p>
+
+<p>Only in his last drama, <i>Hélène de Sparte</i>, has Verhaeren come nearer to
+the accepted conception of the dramatic. That is characteristic of his
+organic development. For now that he is in the years when passion of
+necessity cools, harmony grows dear to him; and he who through all the
+years of his youth and prime was a revolutionary, now recognises the
+necessity of inner laws. By its mere intellectual substance this tragedy
+expresses the veering round: it is nothing else<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> than the longing from
+passion to harmony, Helen's flight from adventures to repose. And the
+return is to be found again in the verse, for Verhaeren here for the
+first time takes up the traditional French metre; his form, though yet
+free, approaches the Alexandrine. The tragedy of Helen is the tragedy of
+beauty. Helen is one of those antique characters who in Greek literature
+were only sketched in fleeting lines, characters whom a modern poet is
+now entitled to fill in with his own fate. For from the Greek sources we
+really knew nothing about her personal fate; we only knew the effect she
+exercised, only the reflection of her personality on others, not that of
+others on her. She was the queen who inflamed all men; who was the cause
+of great wars; the woman for whose sake murder on murder was committed;
+who was snatched from one bed to another; for love of whom Achilles
+arose from the dead; who passed her life circled by disastrous passion.
+But whether she herself shared these passions, whether she grew by them
+or suffered by them, the poets tell us nothing. Verhaeren in his drama
+has now attempted to depict the tragedy of the woman who endures fearful
+suffering because she is always desired in lust and no more; who is
+consumed by the torture of being ever robbed from lover by lover; of
+never knowing the look of pure eyes, calm converse, quiet breathing; who
+is cursed always to stand at the pyre of passion, with the flames<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> of
+men always blazing round her. Whoever looks at her at once desires her,
+snatches her; none waits and asks whether he serves her will; she is
+robbed like a chattel; she glides from hand to hand. In Verhaeren's
+drama Helen has returned home, a woman tired, tired of all unrest, of
+all her triumphs, tired of love; a woman hating her own beauty because
+it creates unrest, longing for nothing but old age, when none shall
+desire her more and her days shall be calm. Menelaus has brought her
+home, rescued her from all that stifling steam of criminal passion; now
+she would breathe quietly, live calm days, and be faithful to him. She
+desires no more than this. No passion can tempt her more. 'I have seen
+the flaring of so many flames that now I love only the hearth's glow and
+the lamp' is the expression of her poignant resignation. But fate will
+not yet let her go. Verhaeren has here seized on the great idea of the
+Greeks that everything that is superhuman on earth, every excessive
+gift, even that of beauty, is pursued as a hybrid by the envy of the
+gods, and must be paid for with pain. Too great beauty is no profit, but
+a tragic gift. And hardly has Helen returned, to rest and be happy, to
+be like everybody else, than new clouds roll themselves up above her
+head. Her own brother desires her; her enemy Electra desires her; her
+husband is murdered for her sake; and the old fearful battle threatens
+to break out anew for the possession<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> of her body. Now she flees, away
+from men, out into nature. And here again, with the vision of genius,
+Verhaeren approaches Greek feeling. The forest is not dead to him, but
+animate; life does not stop at human beings; fauns emerge from the
+bushes, naiads from the rivers, bacchantes from the mountains, and all
+swarm round Helen in her despair, luring her to their lust, till she
+flees to Zeus in death.</p>
+
+<p>It is characteristic of Verhaeren that he has made even this tragedy,
+the tragedy of Helen, anerotic, or better anti-erotic. Perhaps the
+slight interest which has hitherto been manifested in Verhaeren's
+dramas, and indeed partly in his whole work, may be ascribed to the fact
+that, in comparison with the other poets of his day, he has held himself
+aloof from erotic subjects, that the problem of love has only recently,
+in the years of his maturity, begun to interest him as a theme for his
+art. From the first Verhaeren concentrated all the passion which others
+lavished on the erotic in purely intellectual things, in enthusiasm, in
+admiration. In his dramas woman plays an almost subordinate rôle, and
+<i>Le Cloître</i> is perhaps the only important drama of our days which does
+not show a single woman among its characters and in its inner circle of
+problems. By this fact alone his dramatic aim strays too far from the
+interests of our public. For it is from a purely intellectual conflict
+that Verhaeren seeks to disengage that height and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> heat of passion which
+hitherto was known only in erotic themes; and therefore the exaltation
+strikes the majority of an audience as strange, and leaves them unmoved.
+All our contemporaries who seek art only in the theatre are too
+indifferent and timid to be snatched up, for a purely ethical problem,
+into an ecstasy so burning, so persistently lit with convulsive
+lightnings. This is the only explanation I can find for the opposition
+to Verhaeren's dramas, which are so full of beauty and of living,
+dramatic, passionate situations, and which, above all, contain something
+new, a new dramatic style. This very kindling of prose to verse was a
+revelation. But the whole dramatic aim is different in Verhaeren to that
+which obtains on the stage of to-day. His aim is not to excite interest,
+not to produce fear and compassion, but enthusiasm. He does not wish to
+occupy the minds of his audience, but to carry them away into his
+rhythm. He wishes to make them drunk with his great excitement, because
+only he who gazes in enthusiasm is capable of recognising these supreme
+passions; he wishes to make the spectators as feverish as the characters
+they see before them on the stage; he wishes to make their blood fiery;
+wishes to raise them above all cool, calm, and critical contemplation.
+His whole temperament, which drives along in the direction of
+superabundance; his art, which only fulfils its purpose in ecstasy;
+require impassioned actors and an impassioned<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> audience. To create the
+ideal atmosphere which Verhaeren demands for his dramas would require an
+actor of kindred genius who should have no fear of being called
+emotional, and who would hurl the verses down like cataracts,
+emphasising like a demagogue and at the same time unfolding all the
+magnificence of the rhythm. For the poet asks for nothing save a feeling
+of enthusiasm corresponding to that which first created the poem in him.
+His intention is not to convince by logic, not to dazzle by pictures,
+but to whip up and carry along with him into that ultimate dizzy feeling
+which to him is alone identical with the highest form of the feeling of
+life&mdash;into passion.</p>
+
+<p>In Germany <i>Le Cloître</i>,<a name="FNanchor_1_86" id="FNanchor_1_86"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_86" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> as staged by Max Reinhardt, and again in the
+Deutsches Volkstheater in Vienna, has conquered the interest of a
+literary public and triumphed unreservedly over the obstacle of its own
+strangeness. There has been an exemplary production of <i>Philip II.</i> in
+the Munich Künstlertheater; <i>Hélène de Sparte</i> on the other hand has not
+yet found the setting it demands. As bodied forth in Paris by Ida
+Rubinstein, with decorations of a grandiose barbarism by Bakst, with a
+ground-colouring of music, it was effective more by the external
+magnificence of this somewhat sensationally advertised <i>mise en scène</i>
+than by its poetic qualities,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> smothered as they were by the
+accessories. A production which shall do justice to the play, leaving
+its pure lyric line unbedizened with glaring arabesques, is still
+waiting as a task for some actor-manager of genius who possesses that
+highest and rarest quality of being able to subordinate himself to the
+utterance, who is anxious not to ruin a noble simplicity by a spurious
+plenitude.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_86" id="Footnote_1_86"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_86"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> A version of <i>Le Cloître</i>, by Mr. Osman Edwards, was
+successfully produced by Miss Horniman at the Gaiety Theatre in
+Manchester in 1910.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span></p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="PART_III" id="PART_III"></a>PART III</h3>
+
+<h3>COMPLETING FORCES</h3>
+
+<h4>LES VISAGES DE LA VIE&mdash;LES FORCES TUMULTUEUSES&mdash;LA MULTIPLE</h4>
+<h4>SPLENDEUR&mdash;TOUTE LA FLANDRE-LES HEURES CLAIRES&mdash;LES HEURES</h4>
+<h4>D'APRÈS-MIDI&mdash;LES HEURES DU SOIR-LES RYTHMES SOUVERAINS&mdash;LES BLÉS
+MOUVANTS</h4>
+
+<h4>1900-1914</h4>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="COSMIC_POETRY" id="COSMIC_POETRY"></a>COSMIC POETRY</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 10.5em;">... Les vols</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vers la beauté toujours plus claire et plus certaine.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 20em;">É.V., 'Les Spectacles.'</span><br />
+</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span></p>
+<p>The poetic conquest of life represents, as it were, a process of
+combustion. Every poet feeds the flame of his inner being, his artistic
+passion, with the things of the world around him, transmutes them into
+flame, and himself shoots on high and dies down with them. The more the
+flame cools with the feebler circulation of the blood, the weaker grows
+this fire, and gradually the pure crystals, the residue from this battle
+of the inner flame with the things of reality, are separated from this
+process of combustion. Verhaeren's work was in his youth and prime a
+flame exceedingly hot, lawless, free, and flaring like the very years of
+his youth and prime. Now, however, in the work of his fifties, now that
+passion has cooled, the yearning is revealed to find the goal of this
+passion, the inherent lawfulness of this unrest. Enthusiasm for the
+present, poetic consumption of the world in visions without the residue
+of philosophy and logical knowledge, no longer suffice him. For all
+deeper contemplation of the present is unthinkable without an exceeding<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>
+of its limits: all that is, is at the same time something that has been
+and something that will be. Nothing is so entirely the present that it
+is not intimately connected with the past and the future. The eternal
+and the permanent is the inward side of all phenomena. And the more the
+poet turns his visions from the exterior, from the pictorial, to the
+inner world, to psychology, the more he descends from external phenomena
+to the roots of forces, the more he must apprehend the permanent behind
+the transitoriness of things. No perception of a contemporary state is
+fertile unless it is impregnated with the perception of laws that are
+independent of time, unless the changing phenomena are recognised as
+transformations of the unchangeable primordial phenomenon. This
+transition from maturity to age, from contemplation to knowledge,
+corresponds to a new artistic transition in the incomparably organic
+development of this poet. A transition: no longer a re-formation, but a
+formation which moves both forwards and backwards, which is at the same
+time an evolution and a retrogression, just as the poetic form of
+Verhaeren's poetry no longer undergoes a transformation, but is
+petrified. What a man has acquired in the years of his prime is an
+inalienable possession; its value can be further increased only by
+knowledge, by the appraising of the possession. It may be said that a
+man who has passed his prime experiences nothing new: the static
+equilibrium is realised;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> what has been experienced is only the better
+understood. The experience is no longer a struggle, no longer a state of
+unrest, something that slips away; it is a possession. What passion has
+fought for and won with a leap is now set in order and appraised at its
+true value, by calm. This transition from youth to age is in Verhaeren,
+to use Nietzsche's phrase, a transition from the Dionysiac to the
+Apollinarian, from a plethora to harmony. His yearning is now <i>vivre
+ardent et clair</i>, to live passionately, but at the same time clearly to
+preserve his inner fire, but at the same time to lose his unrest.
+Verhaeren's books in these years grow more and more crystalline; the
+fire in them no longer blazes openly like a flaring pyre, but glitters
+and sparkles as with the thousand facets of a precious stone. The smoke
+and the unrest of the fire die down, and now the pure residues are
+clarified. Visions have become ideas, the wrestling earthly energies are
+now eternal immutable laws.</p>
+
+<p>The will of these last years, of these last works, is the will to
+realise a cosmic poem. In the trilogy of the cities Verhaeren had laid
+hold on the universe as it lies around us to-day; he had snatched it to
+him and overcome it. In passionate visions he had shaped its image,
+achieved its form, and now it stood beside the actual world as his own.
+But a poet who would create the whole world for himself, the whole
+infinite vista of its possibilities by the side of its actualities, must
+give it everything:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> not only its form, not only its face, but its soul
+as well, its organism, its origin, and its evolution. He must not merely
+apprehend its pictorial aspect and its mechanical energy, he must give
+it an encyclopædic form. He must create a mythology for it, a new
+morality, a new history, a new system of dynamics, a new system of
+ethics. Above it or in it he must place a God who acts and transforms.
+He must fashion it in his poetry not only as something that is, not only
+as something in the present, but as something that has been and is
+becoming, something that is part and parcel of the past and of the
+future too. It must ring out the old and ring in the new. And this will
+to create a cosmic poem is to be found in Verhaeren's new and most
+precious books&mdash;<i>Les Visages de la Vie, Les Forces Tumultueuses, La
+Multiple Splendeur, Les Rythmes Souverains</i>&mdash;-books which by their mere
+title announce the effort to include the dome of heaven in their vast
+embrace. They are the pillars of a mighty structure, the great stanzas
+of the cosmic poem. They are no longer a conversation of the poet with
+himself and contemporary feeling; they are a pronouncement addressed to
+all the ages. <i>S'élancer vers l'avenir</i> is the longing they express: a
+turning away from all the pasts to speak to the future. The lyric
+element in them steps beyond the boundary-line of poetry. It kindles the
+neighbouring domains of philosophy and religion, kindles them to new
+possibilities. For not only<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> æsthetically would Verhaeren come to an
+understanding with realities; not by poetry only would he overcome the
+new possibilities; he would fain master them morally and religiously as
+well. The task of these last and most important books of verse is no
+longer to apprehend the universe in individual phenomena, but to impress
+its new form on a new law. In <i>Les Visages de la Vie</i> Verhaeren has in
+individual poems glorified the eternal forces, gentleness, joy,
+strength, activity, enthusiasm; in <i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i> the
+mysterious dynamics of union shining through all forms of the real; in
+<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i> the ethics of admiration, the joyous
+relationship of man with things and with himself; and in <i>Les Rythmes
+Souverains</i> he has celebrated the most illustrious heroes of his ideals.
+For life has long since ceased to be for him mere gazing and
+contemplation:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Car vivre, c'est prendre et donner avec liesse</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">...................avide et haletant</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Devant la vie intense et sa rouge sagesse!<a name="FNanchor_1_87" id="FNanchor_1_87"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_87" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Description, poetic analysis, has gradually grown into a hymn, into
+'laudi del cielo, del mare, del mondo,' into songs of the whole world
+and of the ego, and of the harmony of the world's beauty in its union
+with the ego. The lyrical has here become cosmic feeling, knowledge has
+become ecstasy. Over and above the knowledge that there cannot be
+anything isolated, that everything<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> is arranged and obeys the last
+uniform law of the universe, over and above this knowledge rises
+something still higher&mdash;over the contemplation of the world rises faith
+in the feeling of the world. The glorious optimism of these works ends
+in the religious confidence that all contrasts will be harmonised; that
+man will more and more be conscious of the earth; that every individual
+must discover his own law of the world in himself, the law that makes it
+possible for him to apprehend everything lyrically, with enthusiasm,
+with joy.</p>
+
+<p>Here Verhaeren's poetry far exceeds the boundary-line of literature; it
+becomes philosophy and it becomes religion. Verhaeren was from the very
+first an eminently religious man. In his childhood Catholicism was the
+deepest feeling of his life, but this Catholicism had perished in the
+crises of his adolescence, his religious feeling had given way to the
+rapt contemplation of all new things, to ecstasy inspired by the aspect
+of life. But now, when Verhaeren returns to the metaphysical, the old
+yearning is reawakened. The old gods are dead for him; Pan is dead, and
+Christ too. Now he feels the need of finding a new faith, a new
+certainty, a new God for the new sensation, this identity of I and
+world. The new conflicts have created a longing in him for a new
+equilibrium; his stormily religious feeling, determined to believe,
+needs new cognition. The image of the world would be incomplete without<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>
+the God who rules it. All his yearning goes out to this God, and it
+finds its fulfilment. And this knowledge gives him the highest joy life
+can have, the loftiest pride life can bestow:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Voici l'heure qui bout de sang et de jeunesse.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
+</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Un vaste espoir, venu de l'inconnu, déplace</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">L'équilibre ancien dont les âmes sont lasses;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6.5em;">La nature paraît sculpter</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5.5em;">Un visage nouveau à son éternité.<a name="FNanchor_2_88" id="FNanchor_2_88"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_88" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>To chisel this new face of God is the aim of his last and most mature
+works, in which the obstinate 'no' of his youth has become the loud
+exulting 'yes' of life, in which the great possibilities of old have
+become an unsuspected opulent reality.</p>
+
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_87" id="Footnote_1_87"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_87"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'Un Soir' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_88" id="Footnote_2_88"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_88"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 'La Foule' (<i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>).<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_LYRIC_UNIVERSE" id="THE_LYRIC_UNIVERSE"></a>THE LYRIC UNIVERSE</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il faut aimer, pour découvrir avec génie.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 20em;">É.V., 'Un Soir.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p>If one is to understand Verhaeren's lyric work as a work of art, it must
+be kept in mind that he is a lyric poet, and a lyric poet only. A lyric
+poet only, not, however, in the limited sense of one who confines
+himself to the writing of lyric poems, but of one who, in a lofty and
+more extensive meaning of the term, transforms everything into emotion,
+who stands in a lyric relationship with all things, with the whole
+world. And since the innermost constitution of a man's talent
+unconsciously acts as the driving tendency, the direction of the aim of
+his life, his very fate and his conception of the world, since all this
+is so, the lyric poet that Verhaeren is must of necessity have a lyrical
+conception of the world, his cosmic feeling <i>must</i> be lyrical. To say
+that he has confined himself to the lyric style would be to diminish his
+stature. It is true that in all Verhaeren's imaginative work&mdash;and it is
+of considerable volume&mdash;there is no prose. A very thin volume of short
+stories did indeed appear many years ago and has long been out of print;
+but how tentative and provisional it was in scope<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> may be seen from the
+fact that Verhaeren later on turned one of the stories, that of the
+bell-ringer in the burning tower, into a poem. And I might mention a
+whole series of poems which at bottom are nothing but short stories, and
+others again which are saturated with dramatic excitement, quite
+unlyrical problems, but all of them lyrically conceived. And even in his
+criticism of art and in that penetrating and beautiful book of his on
+Rembrandt, in which he represents the organic connection of the artist
+with his native province almost as a personal experience, the
+outstanding passages live by their lyric enthusiasm. Many of the poems
+again are spiritualised theories of art. The origin of language or the
+sociological problem of emigration, the economic contrast of agrarianism
+and industrialism: in an essay such things might be calmly treated,
+coldly passed in review. But this is characteristic of Verhaeren, that
+he is unable to take a cold, faint interest in anything: consciously or
+unconsciously he must be carried away by enthusiasm for the things he
+contemplates. The ecstasy of his excitement involuntarily whips him out
+of a slow trot into lyric fervour. Poetry is to him, like his
+philosophy, like his ethics, a lyrical soaring. It is characteristic of
+the great lyric poets, of Walt Whitman, Dehmel, Carducci, Rilke, Stefan
+George, that at a certain height of their artistry they renounce all
+other than lyric forms. Here, as elsewhere, great things only seem
+possible of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> attainment by concentration, only by the poet's freeing
+himself from the trammels of all other experiments. Great lyric poetry
+as the art of a life only accrues from the renunciation of all other
+forms of poetry.</p>
+
+<p>Infinite enthusiasm, <i>le lyrisme universel</i>, a rapt visionary sensation
+of the earth rolling as it were in an eternal vibration through the
+cosmos, is the aim of Verhaeren's work. Not to describe the world in
+isolated poems, not to break it up in impressions, but to feel it as
+itself a flaring, flaming poem, <i>not to be one who contemplates the
+world, but one who feels it</i>, this is his highest yearning. A lyric art
+can only grow to such intentions as these from emotions not felt by
+other lyrists. It is not, as with most poets, from gentle crepuscular
+feelings, from vague states of melancholy, that such an impulse is
+crystallised to lyrical expression; here it is an overflowing fulness of
+feeling, a bright joy in life, that engenders his poem; an explosion
+which in the days of his debility was a paroxysm, which as time went on
+changed to a pure enthusiasm, but which was always an eruption of
+strength. Lyric art is here a discharge of the whole feeling of life.
+With Verhaeren the excitement does not sting the individual nerve; it
+spreads electrically, inflames the blood, contracts the muscles,
+produces an immense pressure, and then discharges the whole energy of a
+body saturated with health and strength. <i>The will to discharge strength
+is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> the basic form of Verhaeren's lyric emotion</i>. His aim is to instil
+inspiration&mdash;first of all into himself (since inspiration always
+represents a higher state of ecstasy), and then into others. His lyric
+art is above all a launching of himself into exaltation, 'le pouvoir
+magique de s'hypnotiser soi-même.'<a name="FNanchor_1_89" id="FNanchor_1_89"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_89" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> He talks himself into passion,
+gives himself that impulsion which then bears others along with him. It
+is not a lack, a privation, not a complaint or a wish that his work
+expresses; it is a plethora, a superfluity of riches, a pressure. It is
+not a warding off of life but an eternal leaping at it. His poetry has
+not the modest longing of music to lure to reveries; it does not, like
+painting, seek to represent something: it would act like fiery wine; it
+would make all feelings strong and glowing, sink all hindrances, produce
+that sensation of lightness, of blessedness, that quivering intoxication
+which conquers all the heaviness of earth. His intention is to produce
+this state of drunkenness, 'non seulement la glorification de la nature
+mais la glorification même d'une vision intérieure.' And his attitude is
+not plaintive or defensive, it is the great spirited attitude of a hand
+raised and pointing out, 'regardez!' the adjuring attitude, 'dites!' or
+one that fires and animates, 'en avant!' but it is always a gesture from
+the poet's self towards something, always a swinging of his arms away
+from himself into the universe,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> always a pressing forward, a snatching
+away of himself from matter. And any one who really feels these poems
+feels, when the last line is read, that his blood is beating faster,
+feels that his body calls for exercise, feels the inspiration impelling
+him to action. <i>And this is the highest intention of Verhaeren's lyrical
+poetry, to animate, to quicken the blood, to fire the heart, to
+intensify vitality, to increase tenfold the sensation of life</i>.</p>
+
+<p>But not only in this basic emotion is Verhaeren sundered from all those
+other poets who fashion their verses from sadness, sickly longing,
+amorousness, and melancholy. Verhaeren's lyric poetry breathes in other
+realms, in another atmosphere. Verhaeren is what I should like to call a
+poet of the daylight, of the open air. If you peruse the lyric works of
+contemporary poets you will find that their moods mostly arise from
+states of dusk and darkness. Since they have only the power of
+reproducing blurred outlines, they are fond of landscapes softened by
+twilight; of night, when there is no hardness in things, when what they
+see meets them half-way, already shaping itself into verse. Like
+Tristan, they hate the day as the destroyer of poetry, and swathe
+themselves in the trembling chiaroscuro of twilight. But the really
+great lyric poets have always been poets of the daylight; poets of the
+day and of the light, as the Greeks were, to whom all things that were
+bathed in sun spoke of beauty and cheerfulness; poets of the day, as
+Walt<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> Whitman was, the American; as all strong men have been who were
+filled with the zest of life. In Germany we have Dehmel to love, one of
+the few who have the courage to look right into the shining face of
+things without the fear of being blinded. But Verhaeren loves things the
+more the more intensive and decided they are, the more dazzling they
+are, the more their glaring colours clash. He does not surprise things
+when they are asleep, when they are resting and are helpless and at the
+mercy of poetry; he pounces on them when they are wideawake and can
+defend themselves with all their hardness from the attacks of their
+lyric lover. He loves the day, which places things side by side in harsh
+contrast; he loves the light, because it stimulates the blood; the rain
+that lashes the body; the wind that whips the skin; cold, noise, he
+loves everything that really and vehemently forces in upon him,
+everything that forces him to fight. He loves hard things more than soft
+and rounded things; loves that characteristic, black, and gloomy city
+Toledo more than golden, dreamy Florence; he loves the wind and the
+weather of frowning, tragic landscapes; he even loves noisy and
+thunderous cities pregnant with smoke and choking air. His nerves are
+not so morbidly sensitive that they respond to the least suggestion, the
+feeblest touch, and then stand impotent, fainting, when they are faced
+by the impetuous stimulants of robust life; his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> nerves are&mdash;not dull,
+but healthy. They respond strongly to whatever lays hold of them
+strongly. If the other poets are like supersensitive beings who are
+excited by every trifle and lose their self-control when really great
+demands are made upon them, Verhaeren is like one who is hard to
+irritate, but who, if he is really stung, strikes out with his fists.
+<i>And Verhaeren does not love the poetical things that come to meet one
+already clothed in beauty; he loves those that have first to be wrestled
+with and overcome. Herein lies the exceeding masculinity of his art</i>. No
+one could ever surmise, in reading a poem of Verhaeren's, that it was
+the work of a woman. And as a matter of fact Verhaeren has not yet found
+an audience among women. For he is not one who moans and begs for pity;
+he is no passive poet, but a fighter, one who wrestles with all strong,
+wild, and living things until they yield up to him their innermost
+beauty.</p>
+
+<p>And this struggle for the lyric mastery of individual sensations
+gradually becomes a struggle for all things, for the whole world. For
+Verhaeren does not wish to conceive of anything as unlyrical; does not
+wish to blow lyric fragments off the immense mass of reality; he wishes
+to sculpture it into a new shape; wishes to chisel the whole world into
+a lyric. And this is the secret of his lyric work; <i>this</i> is his work,
+his task. Of a sudden we feel the distance between him and the majority
+of lyric poets. <i>They</i> have the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> feelings of people who receive gifts;
+they regard the sensations which come fluttering towards them as so many
+gay butterflies, capture them, and pin them down. Verhaeren, however, is
+the fighter, the worker, who is constrained to conquer everything, to
+shape the whole world anew, to rebuild it nearer to his heart's
+enthusiasm. He is the lyric poet pictured by Carducci in an imperishable
+poem&mdash;not the idler gazing into empty space; not the gardener decking
+the paths that his lady's feet must tread, and gathering frail violets
+for her bosom.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il poeta è un grande artiere,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Che al mestiere</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Fece i muscoli d'acciaio,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Capo ha fier, collo robusto,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Nudo il busto,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Duro il braccio, e l'occhio gaio.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>And that 'picchia, picchia,' that rhythm of Carducci's, that beat of the
+bronze hammer of toil, rings in the measure of his verses. All his poems
+have been toiled for, fought for; they are a trophy, a meed of victory;
+nothing is a lucky gift. Verhaeren's manuscripts look like a
+battlefield. For he is not a poet who, in Goethe's sense, composes poems
+for particular occasions; he is never overpowered by a sudden chance
+idea: he transforms a problem of life, an actuality, or an intellectual
+phase into a lyric mood. After he has molten the poetic idea in his
+passion to a white heat, he hammers it into a poem by his rhythm.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> His
+works are complexes: individual ideas attract him; he sets a hedge round
+their poetical field, ploughs it, scatters the seed in it, and never
+returns to the scene. What he has once achieved has no longer any
+attraction for him. To him poetry is always a fight, always work, always
+a plan. The layman who would fain look upon a lyric poem as a gift
+fallen from heaven will perhaps have no liking for this conscious
+method; an artist, on the other hand, will recognise in it the strength
+of a wise restraint, concentration on one aim, the will to compose not a
+lyric poem but a lyric work. A poetic work like that of Verhaeren, the
+work of a life, is not created by chance feeling alone, and not by
+enthusiasm. Such a work of art has, like a drama, its intellectual laws,
+the conquering and distributing powers of the intelligence, instinct,
+and above all that unifying will which suffers no dead points, no gaps,
+no stains in the work. And it is from such a vast lyric will that this
+work has arisen. Verhaeren is no favoured child of fortune, dowered with
+art in his cradle; his blood is heavy, Teutonic blood; and, fortunately,
+that ease and suppleness of the artisan which in all departments of
+labour produces a ready mediocrity was as much wanting in him as all
+physical skill. Verhaeren's poetic work, his form, his rhythm, his idea,
+his philosophy, his architectonics, all this is something he has
+acquired by labour, something he has painfully produced by passion and
+an obstinate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> will; but for that very reason it is something organic.
+For Verhaeren is one of those who learn slowly, persistently, and
+surely, only from their own experience and never from others, but who
+never forget and lose what they have once acquired; one of those who
+grow as the things of Nature do, as trees grow into their strength ring
+by ring, and rise year by year higher above the earth to gaze farther
+and farther out beyond the horizons and nearer and nearer into the
+heavens.</p>
+
+<p>And just for this reason, because this evolution was so persistent,
+because it was so wholly based upon experience, is the ascending line in
+his work so harmonious and so organic. No other lyric work of our days
+is so much a symbol of the seasons, so much a mirror of human
+periodicity. The revolt of spring, the sultriness of summer, the
+fruitage of autumn, and the cool clearness of winter gently merge in it,
+the one into the other. In his first books, at an age when many
+precocious poets have finished their development, he was still wrestling
+for his new form, for his expression. Nor did he at that time soon
+arrive at the heart of things; he remained for a long time absorbed in
+the purely picturesque contemplation of their external aspects. Then he
+attempted experiments, and freed himself in revolution. But in his
+beginnings he was always a student, an experimenter. In his second
+period, having really penetrated<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> below the surface, he found his own
+form, like every master, and subdued the internal with the external. But
+now that material is conquered, he that was a student and is now a
+master will of necessity be a teacher, and feel impelled to deduce
+forces from phenomena, laws from forces, the eternal from the earthly.
+From vacant contemplation he had risen to passionate creation, to active
+creation of art. The supreme creation of art has ever been the
+converting of the unconscious into consciousness, the recognition and
+knowledge of the laws of art; from the real the path proceeds to that
+which transcends reality, to faith and to religion. Like every really
+organic poet, Verhaeren has had to repeat the ascent of universal
+history in his own evolution.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_89" id="Footnote_1_89"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_89"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Albert Mockel, <i>Emile Verhaeren</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="SYNTHESES" id="SYNTHESES"></a>SYNTHESES</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Réunir notre esprit et le monde</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dans les deux mains d'une très simple loi profonde.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 19.5em;">É.V., 'L'Attente.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p>After the great visions of the cities, after the wonderful
+interpretations of democracy, there was a moment of appeasement in
+Verhaeren's work&mdash;a lyrical intermezzo of little books: an almanac of
+the months unfolding in short poems, the cosy happiness of wedded love
+enshrined in grateful song, the legends of Flanders told in richly
+coloured pictures, and then, in the great pentalogy <i>Toute la Flandre</i>,
+the cities, coasts, heroes, and great men of his native province
+compressed in one single picture. But after that Verhaeren takes up once
+again his old path across the earth; passes again through the roaring
+cities, the pregnant fields; wanders along the sea-shore; once again
+through the landscapes of <i>Les Flamandes</i> and <i>Les Moines</i>, of <i>Les
+Villes Tentaculaires</i> and <i>Les Campagnes Hallucinées</i>. It is now the
+return of the spiral in Goethe's sense of evolution; the return to the
+same point, but on a higher level, with a loftier outlook, in a narrower
+circle, and for that reason nearer to the last, the highest point. Once
+again Verhaeren<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> surveys the modern world: now, however, with different
+eyes, which no longer remain resting on the aspect of the world, but
+press farther to the cause of all. What he had formerly seen sensuously,
+the things whose values he had æsthetically estimated and transmuted, he
+now looks at from the intellectual side, that he may estimate their
+value morally. He no longer sees each thing separately, no longer adds
+picture to picture, vision to vision, like a game of coloured cards: he
+now unites them in one living chain. He no longer searches through
+individual and detached phenomena; he now sees them together against the
+background of his lofty intention to weld them into one single picture.
+Now he composes, not individual poems, but fragments of his world-poem.
+For, from the time that Verhaeren began to look at things with conscious
+enthusiasm, they assumed different forms. The straining of his epoch no
+longer seems to him to be a solitary manifestation of energy, but only a
+Protean form of the eternal discharge of vigour; the will to life no
+longer seems to him to be the deed of individual men, but the vitalised
+primitive will of all humanity. And so, just as of old he attempted in
+his vision a synthesis of energies, he now sees laws flowing into one
+supreme and highest thing, into a cosmic law.</p>
+
+<p>Lyric exaltation now arches the dream of its laws over reality. But it
+is no longer the mere<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> dream of a youth in expectancy of life&mdash;the
+anæmic, vague, dark, restless dream&mdash;but a man's longing to get behind
+life and follow it to its earthly limit. It is a Utopia enhancing
+realities beyond themselves; it is the dream of Godhead in things. In
+the whole world Verhaeren sees a cosmic effort. 'Le monde est trépidant
+de trains et de navires.'<a name="FNanchor_1_90" id="FNanchor_1_90"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_90" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> The whole world is excited with human
+activity and effort; manifestations of the feeling of life flame
+everywhere; everywhere humanity is fighting for something invisible and
+perhaps unattainable. But whereas of old the poet estimated the value of
+every separate energy, now he comprehends all energies as one uniform
+manifestation, recognises behind the unconscious activity of the
+individual the sway of something greater&mdash;the bourne of all humanity.
+All who work in the material of the temporal only symbolise eternal
+forces&mdash;intoxication, energy, conquest, joy, error, expectation, Utopia.
+And it is to these forces, or rather to these forms of the force at the
+root of all things, that his poems are addressed. In <i>Les Visages de la
+Vie</i> he seeks to describe yearning in all its forms and aims; its
+distribution in human labour, its restlessness, its vigour, and, above
+all, its beauty. But not only human manifestations now appear to him in
+a closer cohesion, the synthesis of realism and metaphysics now makes
+his relationship to elementary<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> things richer and more heroic. Now, when
+he treats some motive he had already treated in the first books, and
+these poems of the first and last periods are compared, it is with
+astonishment and admiration that you trace the silent growth of these
+last years. I will mention one example. He had already sung a song to
+the wind. But the wind at that time was to him the evil storm that
+tousles cottages, shakes chimneys, forces its way into rooms, rages
+across country, and brings the winter. It was a senseless power,
+beautiful in its senselessness, but aimless, an incomprehensible
+element, a detached phenomenon of Nature. Now, however, the poet in his
+maturity looks upon it as the wanderer over the undying world, one that
+has seen all countries, that drives ships over seas, that has sated
+itself with the perfume of strange flowers and brings it from far away,
+that penetrates our chest like an aroma and steels and expands it. Now
+he loves the wind as one of the thousand things of the earth which
+contribute to the intensification of his vital feeling.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Si j'aime, admire et chante avec folie,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Le vent,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * </span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">C'est qu'il grandit mon être entier et c'est qu'avant</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">De s'infiltrer, par mes poumons et par mes pores,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Jusques au sang dont vit mon corps,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Avec sa force rude ou sa douceur profonde,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Immensément, il a étreint le monde.<a name="FNanchor_2_91" id="FNanchor_2_91"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_91" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>So, too, a tree becomes to him the image of the eternal renewal of
+strength, of resistance to the hardness of winter and of fate, of the
+will to new beauty in the spring. A mountain no longer appears to him as
+a chance raising of the landscape, but a great and mighty thing in whose
+keeps secrets lie, ores, and the source of springs, from whose summit,
+however, our eyes can sweep the world. The forest interprets itself to
+him as the labyrinth of a thousand paths, and as the many-voiced anthem
+of life: everything in nature becomes a freshening and a vivifying of
+this vitality. <i>An absolute transmutation of values has taken place from
+the time that he has comprehended things as parts of the world's entity,
+and as themselves an entity</i>. Travel, formerly a flight from reality,
+now becomes to him the opening out of new distances, of new
+possibilities; dream appears to him no longer as an illusion, but as the
+capacity of intensifying the real from its present to a future state.
+Europe is no longer to him a group of nations, a geographical idea, but
+the great symbol of conquest, money, gold, he no longer regards
+contemptuously as a materialising of life, but as a new spur for new
+ambition. And the sea, which in every succeeding work of his sings its
+unquiet rhythm, is no longer the murderous power that eats into the
+land, but the holy tide, the symbol of constant strength in eternal
+unrest; it is to him 'la mer nue et pure, comme une<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> idée.'<a name="FNanchor_3_92" id="FNanchor_3_92"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_92" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> Since
+everything coheres, he feels related to all in a touching brotherhood
+with things; he no longer feels the presence of things, he loves them
+like a piece of himself; he feels the sea physically in himself</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Ma peau, mes mains et mes cheveux</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Sentent la mer</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et sa couleur est dans mes yeux.<a name="FNanchor_4_93" id="FNanchor_4_93"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_93" class="fnanchor">[4]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>And so, just as his vital feeling is renewed every time he comes into
+contact with the waves, he believes in a physical resurrection of the
+body out of the sea, believes that his rising from the water is a
+<i>nouveau moment de conscience</i>. Verhaeren has returned to the great
+cohesion: in Nature and in man there is no longer for him any phenomenon
+which might not become a symbol for him, a symbol of the great vital
+instinct, to stimulate and fire his vitality.</p>
+
+<p>And since he now responds to all things with this one feeling, a uniform
+conception of the world must involuntarily result from this unity of
+feeling. <i>To the unity of enthusiasm corresponds the unity of the world,
+the monistic feeling</i>. Just as he himself derives nothing but an
+intensification and exaltation of his feelings from all things, nothing
+but the very sensation of life, all phenomena and activities must be a
+synthesis, all forces must flow into one single force as rivers flow
+into the ocean, all laws must merge in one single law<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Toute la vie, avec ses lois, avec ses formes,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">&mdash;Multiples doigts noueux de quelque main énorme&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">S'entr'ouvre et se referme en un poing: l'unité.<a name="FNanchor_5_94" id="FNanchor_5_94"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_94" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>And thus, this straining of all humanity, discharged in a thousand
+forms, must be something in common, a fight against something lying
+outside of itself, against a resistance which still makes life seem
+hard, dull, and turbid. This fight of humanity cannot be other than
+directed against something that impedes the sensation of life. And this,
+the only thing which struggles against humanity, is in Verhaeren's eyes
+the supremacy of Nature, the mystery of divine intervention, the
+subjection of man to fate&mdash;in short, all divinity that does not reside
+in man. As soon as man is dependent on nobody except himself and his own
+strength, he too will attain the great joyousness of all the things of
+Nature.</p>
+
+<p><i>This fight of man to become God, this fight for his independence, his
+freedom from chance and the supernatural&mdash;this is the great metaphysical
+idea of Verhaeren's work</i>. His last books seek to represent nothing else
+than this one highest battle of man, this struggle to be free from all
+that is laid upon him, not by himself, but by Nature, from all that
+impedes his will to become a thing of Nature, an elementary force,
+himself. This struggle is the highest and purest effort, for</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Rien n'est plus haut, malgré l'angoisse et le tourment,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Que la bataille avec l'énigme et les ténèbres.<a name="FNanchor_6_95" id="FNanchor_6_95"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_95" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Man in this battle defends himself against darkness, against what is
+unknown, against Heaven, against all laws that restrict his expansion;
+the whole aim of man, the aim he has unconsciously been following for a
+thousand years, is independence, is to become a law unto himself:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'homme dans l'univers n'a qu'un maître, lui-même,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et l'univers entier est ce maître, dans lui.<a name="FNanchor_7_96" id="FNanchor_7_96"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_96" class="fnanchor">[7]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>To-day he is still counteracted by chance, or, as many conceive it, by
+divinity. Wholly to conquer this, to substitute the determination of
+one's own destiny for chance, will be the great task of the future. Much
+has been taken from chance already. Lightning, the most dangerous power
+of heaven, is conquered; distances are bridged over; the forms of Nature
+are changed; social communities have by common action diverted the
+iniquity of the weather; diseases are from year to year being fathomed
+and checked; more and more every incalculable element is being brought
+within the range of calculation and fore-sight. But all that is unknown
+must more and more be the booty of man, whose highest will is 'fouiller
+l'inconnu.'<a name="FNanchor_8_97" id="FNanchor_8_97"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_97" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> More and more his eyes penetrate the subterranean and
+mysterious workings of Nature.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Or aujourd'hui c'est la réalité</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Secrète encor, mais néanmoins enclose</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Au cours perpétuel et rythmique des choses,</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qu'on veut, avec ténacité,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Saisir, pour ordonner la vie et sa beauté</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Selon les causes.<a name="FNanchor_9_98" id="FNanchor_9_98"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_98" class="fnanchor">[9]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>For this battle everybody is a soldier in man's war of liberation, all
+of us stand invisibly ranked together. Everybody who wrests from Nature
+in increment to knowledge, who does something never done before,
+everybody who by poetry fires others to action, tears off a piece of the
+veil. With every step forward that man takes against the dark, with
+every foot of ground he conquers, divinity loses strength to him; and
+this will go on until at length nothing remains of the God of old, until
+the identity of the two ideas humanity and divinity is unconsciously
+accomplished.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Héros, savant, artiste, apôtre, aventurier,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Chacun troue à son tour le mur noir des mystères</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et, grâce à ces labeurs groupés et solitaires,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'être nouveau se sent l'univers tout entier.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Seen from this height, professions assume a new poetic value. In the
+front rank of fighting men Verhaeren sees those the effort of whose life
+it is to acquire knowledge&mdash;the men of science. Verhaeren is perhaps the
+only one among modern poets who has conceived of science as of perfectly
+equal value with poetry, <i>who has discovered new moral and religious
+values in science, just as he had already discovered new æsthetic values
+in industrialism<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> and democracy</i>. Most poets had hitherto looked upon
+science as a hindrance, because they were afraid of clear things as they
+were afraid of real things. They looked upon science as the destroyer of
+myths, the negation of every noble superstition which in their eyes was
+indissolubly connected with the poetical. But just as machinery seemed
+to them to be ugly, because in the machines they saw beauty had
+retreated from the outer to the interior form, here too the new ethical
+value is hidden not in the method but in the aim. Verhaeren esteems
+science as the great fighter for the new conception of the world: 'Le
+monde entier est repensé par leurs cervelles.'<a name="FNanchor_10_99" id="FNanchor_10_99"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_99" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> He knows that the
+little increments to knowledge which are continually being made in our
+days in thousands of places, in sanatoria and lecture-rooms,
+observatories and studies, with microscopes and chemical analyses,
+weighing and calculation, with measures and numbers, that these little
+additions to knowledge may, by comparison and reproduction, grow into
+great creative discoveries which will immensely enrich our vital
+feeling. And this hymn to science is at the same time a hymn to our
+epoch; for no epoch before ours has so consciously bought for the
+advancement of knowledge, none has been so replete with the longing for
+new knowledge and the transmutation of values:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'acharnement à tout peser, à tout savoir</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Fouille la forêt drue et mouvante des êtres.<a name="FNanchor_11_100" id="FNanchor_11_100"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_100" class="fnanchor">[11]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>In inspired words Verhaeren celebrates science as the highest effort of
+our age as of the past; for he knows that what to us to-day is
+presupposed and self-evident was a thousand years-ago the goal of the
+most ardent effort, that the road we pace indolently to-day is soaked
+with the blood of martyrs.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dites! quels temps versés au gouffre des années,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et quelle angoisse ou quel espoir des destinées,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et quels cerveaux chargés de noble lassitude</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">A-t-il fallu pour faire un peu de certitude?</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dites! les feux et les bûchers; dites! les claies;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Les regards fous, en des visages d'effroi blanc;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dites! les corps martyrisés, dites! les plaies</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Criant la vérité, avec leur bouche en sang.<a name="FNanchor_12_101" id="FNanchor_12_101"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_101" class="fnanchor">[12]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>But he knows equally well that the acquisitions of to-day are again only
+hypotheses for the new truths of to-morrow. Error is inevitable, but
+even error opens out new ways. In the beautiful idea of Brezina, the
+Czech poet, all ideal aims are floating islands that recede as we
+approach them. The highest aim is in effort itself, in the life which
+effort intensifies. Verhaeren's optimism here guards his marches against
+banality, for he is sufficient of a mystic to know that it is the
+unknowable and the inaccessible that lend all things their impenetrable
+beauty. But the knowledge of this must not scare enthusiasm away:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Partons quand même, avec notre âme inassouvie,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Puisque la force et que la vie</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Sont au delà des vérités et des erreurs.<a name="FNanchor_13_102" id="FNanchor_13_102"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_102" class="fnanchor">[13]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>What if a few last things remain eternally inscrutable: 'plutôt que d'en
+peupler les coins par des chimères, nous préférons ne point savoir.'<a name="FNanchor_14_103" id="FNanchor_14_103"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_103" class="fnanchor">[14]</a>
+Rather a world without gods than one with false gods, rather incomplete
+knowledge than false knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>Here, where the heroes of science reach the limits of what is possible
+to them, a new group must stand by their side and help them in their
+work. These are the poets, who preach faith where knowledge ends. They
+must find the synthesis between science and religion, between the
+earthly and the divine, the new synthesis&mdash;<i>religious confidence in
+science</i>. Their optimism must force their fellow-men to have faith in
+science, as in earlier days they had faith in gods: though proofs fail
+them, they must demand from this new religion what the early fathers
+demanded for the old religion. And he himself, Verhaeren, he who
+once&mdash;here again a bitter 'no' is turned into an exulting 'yes'&mdash;said in
+his beginnings</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Toute science enferme au fond d'elle le doute,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Comme une mère enceinte étreint un enfant mort,<a name="FNanchor_15_104" id="FNanchor_15_104"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_104" class="fnanchor">[15]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>he himself is to-day the first of confident enthusiasts. Where
+individual minds are still at war<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">'Oh! ces luttes là-haut entre ces dieux humains!<a name="FNanchor_16_105" id="FNanchor_16_105"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_105" class="fnanchor">[16]</a>&mdash;</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>where their knowledge has not yet found a bridge, poets must with
+enthusiasm and confidence surmise a path. They must link law with
+perception; and in the same measure as the scientists have by knowledge
+fed their enthusiasm, they in their turn must feed knowledge by their
+confidence. If they have no proofs of actualities, their faith dowers
+them with the confidence to say, 'nous croyons déjà ce que les autres
+sauront.'<a name="FNanchor_17_106" id="FNanchor_17_106"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_106" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> They scent and surmise new things before they are born;
+they trust hypotheses before they are proved. Already,</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pendant que disputent et s'embrouillent encor,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">À coups de textes morts</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et de dogmes, les sages,<a name="FNanchor_18_107" id="FNanchor_18_107"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_107" class="fnanchor">[18]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>they hear the hovering wings of the new truth. They already believe in
+what later generations will know; they derive vital joy from what their
+descendants will be the first to possess. They doubt in nothing; not
+that man will conquer the air, quell disease, make life cheerful and
+easier; they do not despair in progress, and in their ecstasy they leap
+over all obstacles. 'Le cri de Faust n'est plus le nôtre';<a name="FNanchor_19_108" id="FNanchor_19_108"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_108" class="fnanchor">[19]</a> the
+question as to 'yes' and 'no' has long since been joyfully answered in
+the affirmative, exults the poet; we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> no longer hesitate between the
+possibility and the impossibility of knowledge, we believe in it, and
+faith and confidence is already the highest knowledge of life. In this
+optimism of poets other discoverers of knowledge must now fulfil their
+growth, from these dreams they must derive strength for their activity;
+all men must in this way complete one another, that it may be possible
+for them to beleaguer darkness, perfect the conquest of God, and</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Emprisonner quand même, un jour, l'éternité,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dans le gel blanc d'une immobile vérité.<a name="FNanchor_20_109" id="FNanchor_20_109"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_109" class="fnanchor">[20]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>For this new truth, the Man-God whom they are to discover, poets and
+scholars are the new saints; and his servants are all those whose brows
+are fiery with the fever of work, whose hands are scorched with
+experiments, whose nerves are strained by constant effort, whose eyes
+are fatigued by books. To all of these Verhaeren's hymn is addressed:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qu'ils soient sacrés par les foules, ces hommes</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qui scrutèrent les faits pour en tirer les lois.<a name="FNanchor_21_110" id="FNanchor_21_110"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_110" class="fnanchor">[21]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>But still farther reaches Verhaeren's enthusiasm for those who help in
+the new work, for the 'saccageurs d'infini.'<a name="FNanchor_22_111" id="FNanchor_22_111"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_111" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> Not only the thinker
+and the poet extend the horizon of life, but each one also who creates
+and is in any way at work. Only the man who creates is really alive and
+really<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> a man&mdash;'seul existe qui crée.'<a name="FNanchor_23_112" id="FNanchor_23_112"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_112" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> And so his hymn is likewise
+addressed to those who toil with their hands, to those who, without
+knowing the aim, toil stolidly day by day in mines and fields; for they
+too build the face of the earth, create mountains where there were none,
+rear lights by the sea's marge, construct machines and the huge
+telescopes that pry on the heavens: all of them forge the tools of
+knowledge and prepare the new era. Merchants who send across the ocean
+ships that spin threads from farthest shore to shore, they too weave the
+net of the great unity; traders who spread gold, who quicken the
+circulation of the world's blood, they too co-operate in the battle
+waged with the dark. It is their league and union which, first of all,
+gives humanity its great strength; they all prepare the hour, the
+moment, which must inevitably come.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il viendra l'instant, où tant d'efforts savants et ingénus,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Tant de génie et de cerveaux tendus vers l'inconnu,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Quand même, auront bâti sur des bases profondes</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et jaillissant au ciel, la synthèse du monde!<a name="FNanchor_24_113" id="FNanchor_24_113"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_113" class="fnanchor">[24]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Here in fiery dawns glimmer the days of the future. Tens of thousands
+will struggle, will prepare, until at last the one man comes who shall
+lay the last stone of the edifice, 'le tranquille rebelle,'<a name="FNanchor_25_114" id="FNanchor_25_114"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_114" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> the
+Christ of this new religion.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">C'est que celui qu'on attendait n'est point venu,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Celui que la nature entière</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Suscitera un jour, âme et rose trémière,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Sous les soleils puissants non encore connus;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">C'est que la race ardente et fine,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dont il sera la fleur,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">N'a point multiplié ses milliers de racines</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Jusqu'au tréfonds des profondeurs.<a name="FNanchor_26_115" id="FNanchor_26_115"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_115" class="fnanchor">[26]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>For here in Verhaeren's work this vision arises fervent and glowing.
+Incessantly man proceeds on the path of his destiny. Once his whole
+world was replete with divinity, 'jadis tout l'inconnu était peuplé de
+dieux';<a name="FNanchor_27_116" id="FNanchor_27_116"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_116" class="fnanchor">[27]</a> then one single God took right and might into His hand; but
+now, by means of his strength and passion, man has wrested, year by
+year, one secret after the other from this Unknown Power. More and more
+he has conquered chance by laws, faith by knowledge, fear by safety;
+more and more the power of the gods glides insensibly into his hands,
+more and more he determines his own life; and the process will continue
+till he is in every respect the captain of his fate; he is less and less
+subject to laws he has not himself established; more and more Nature's
+slave becomes her lord.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Races, régnez: puisque par vous la volonté du sort</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Devient de plus en plus la volonté humaine.<a name="FNanchor_28_117" id="FNanchor_28_117"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_117" class="fnanchor">[28]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Gods will become men; exterior fate will return into their bosom; the
+saints will henceforth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> be only their brothers; and Paradise will be the
+earth itself. Most beautifully Verhaeren has expressed this idea in one
+of his latest books,<a name="FNanchor_29_118" id="FNanchor_29_118"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_118" class="fnanchor">[29]</a> in the symbol of Adam and Eve. Eve, expelled
+from the Garden of Eden, one day finds its doors open again. But she
+does not re-enter it, for her highest joy, her Paradise, is now in
+activity and the pleasure of the earth. Zest in existence, in life, joy
+of the earth, has never been more strongly and burningly exalted than in
+this symbol; never has the hymn of humanity been sung with greater
+fervour than by this poet&mdash;perhaps because he had denied life more
+wildly and more obstinately than any other. Here all contrasts sing
+together in a harmony without a flaw; the last enmity between man and
+Nature here becomes the ecstatic feeling of man's godhead.</p>
+
+<p>And strange to say, here the circle of life returns to itself. The books
+of the poet's old age return to the days of his youth, to the school
+benches in Ghent where Maeterlinck also sat, the other great Fleming.
+Both, who lost themselves there, have found themselves again on the
+heights of life in their conception of the world, for Maeterlinck's
+highest teaching also (in his book <i>Wisdom and Destiny</i>) is, that all
+fate is locked up in man himself, that it is man's highest evolution,
+his highest duty, to conquer fate, all that lies outside him, God. This
+profound thought, which has thus twice in our days blossomed forth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> from
+Flemish soil, has been achieved on different paths. Maeterlinck has
+found it by listening to the mysticism of silence, Verhaeren by
+listening to the noise of life. He has found his new God not in the
+darkness of dreams but in the light of streets, in all places where men
+bestir themselves, and where from heavy hours the trembling flower of
+joy is born.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_90" id="Footnote_1_90"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_90"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'La Conquête' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_91" id="Footnote_2_91"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_91"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 'À la Gloire du Vent' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_92" id="Footnote_3_92"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_92"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 'L'Eau' (<i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_93" id="Footnote_4_93"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_93"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> 'Au Bord du Quai' (<i>Ibid.</i>)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_94" id="Footnote_5_94"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_94"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> 'La Conquête' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_95" id="Footnote_6_95"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_95"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> 'Les Cultes' (<i>Ibid.</i>)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_96" id="Footnote_7_96"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_96"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> 'Les Villes' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_97" id="Footnote_8_97"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_97"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> 'La Ferreur' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_98" id="Footnote_9_98"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_98"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> 'Vers le Futur' (<i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_99" id="Footnote_10_99"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_99"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> 'La Conquête' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_100" id="Footnote_11_100"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_100"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> 'Vers le Futur' (<i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_101" id="Footnote_12_101"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_101"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> 'La Recherche' (<i>Ibid.</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_102" id="Footnote_13_102"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_102"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> 'L'Erreur' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_103" id="Footnote_14_103"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_103"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> 'La Ferveur' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_104" id="Footnote_15_104"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_104"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> 'Méditation' (<i>Les Moines</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_105" id="Footnote_16_105"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_105"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> 'Les Penseurs' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_106" id="Footnote_17_106"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_106"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> 'La Science' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_107" id="Footnote_18_107"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_107"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> 'L'Action' (<i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_108" id="Footnote_19_108"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_108"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> 'La Science' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_109" id="Footnote_20_109"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_109"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> 'Les Penseurs' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_110" id="Footnote_21_110"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_110"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> 'La Science' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_111" id="Footnote_22_111"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_111"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> 'Les Penseurs' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_112" id="Footnote_23_112"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_112"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> 'La Mort' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_113" id="Footnote_24_113"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_113"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> 'La Recherche' (<i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_114" id="Footnote_25_114"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_114"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> 'L'Attente' (<i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_115" id="Footnote_26_115"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_115"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> 'L'Attente' (<i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_116" id="Footnote_27_116"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_116"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> 'La Folie' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_117" id="Footnote_28_117"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_117"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_118" id="Footnote_29_118"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_118"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> <i>Les Rythmes Souverains.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_ETHICS_OF_FERVOUR" id="THE_ETHICS_OF_FERVOUR"></a>THE ETHICS OF FERVOUR</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">La vie est à monter et non pas à descendre.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 17em;">É.V., 'Les Rêves,'</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il faut admirer tout pour s'exalter soi-même</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et se dresser plus haut que ceux qui out vécu.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 17em;">É.V., 'La Vie.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The metaphysical ideal crystallised by Verhaeren from his contemplation
+of life, which was at first wildly passionate, but then more and more
+synoptical and logical, has been called unity. He has himself recently,
+in answer to a question submitted to various men of letters, confirmed
+this conception as part of his programme. 'It seems to me,' he says,
+'that poetry is bound ere long to be merged in a very clear Pantheism.
+More and more the unity of the world is admitted by upright and healthy
+minds. That old dualism between the soul and the body, between God and
+the universe, is becoming effaced. Man is a fragment of the architecture
+of the world. He understands and is conscious of the entity of which he
+is a part.... He feels that he is encompassed and dominated, while at
+the same time he himself encompasses and dominates. By reason of his own
+miracles he is becoming, in some sort, that personal God that his
+ancestors believed in. Now I ask, is it possible that lyric<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> exaltation
+should long remain indifferent to such an unchaining of human power,
+should hesitate to celebrate such a vast spectacle of grandeur? The poet
+of to-day has only to surrender himself to what he sees, hears,
+imagines, conjectures, for works to be born of his heart and brain that
+are young, vibrating, and new.'<a name="FNanchor_1_119" id="FNanchor_1_119"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_119" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> But he who would build up the whole
+image must not make a halt at this stage of knowledge: over against the
+logical ordering of external things he must set another of inward
+things; against the knowledge of life he must set the feeling of life.
+He must set up an ethical ideal as well as a metaphysical ideal, a
+commandment of life corresponding to his law of life.</p>
+
+<p>But great poets never discover a standard of life, a moral precept,
+which is not a reflex of the law of their own inner nature. Many
+possibilities of contemplation are open to the thinker, to the quiet
+observer; to the poet however, to the lyrist, only a poetic philosophy
+of life is possible, a contemplation lyrically exalted. Whereas the
+philosopher can attain the knowledge of unity by measurement and
+calculation, by a perception and calm computation of forces, a poet can
+discover the evolution of things in the direction of harmony and unity
+only in his ecstasy, only in an exalted state of enthusiasm. He will
+perforce recognise a commandment for the whole world in his own
+enthusiasm, and in his lyric ecstasy a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> moral demand of life. 'Toute la
+vie est dans l'essor,' for the poet all life is in ecstasy. And just as
+Verhaeren never described things in a state of rest, so too his
+comprehension of the universe is never conceivable except in the
+permanently exalted state of the unrest of joy and motion.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pour vivre clair, ferme et juste,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Avec mon cœur, j'admire tout</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Ce qui vibre, travaille et bout</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dans la tendresse humaine et sur la terre auguste.<a name="FNanchor_2_120" id="FNanchor_2_120"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_120" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A thing only belongs to us when it is felt&mdash;not so much for us
+personally&mdash;as beautiful, necessary, and vivid: only when we have said
+'yes' to it. <i>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</i>. 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.'<a name="FNanchor_3_121" id="FNanchor_3_121"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_121" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>For this is the essential: if in our estimation we often over-estimate
+things which in any case would preserve their inner value independently<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>
+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.'<a name="FNanchor_4_122" id="FNanchor_4_122"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_122" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> 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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il faut admirer tout pour s'exalter soi-même</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et se dresser plus haut que ceux qui out vécu</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">De coupables souffrances et de désirs vaincus.<a name="FNanchor_5_123" id="FNanchor_5_123"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_123" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>For admiration means, in the highest sense, subordinating oneself to
+other things. <i>The more a man suppresses his own personal pride, the
+higher he stands in the moral sense</i>. 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> ecstasy. To be able to admire more means to
+grow more oneself:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Oh! vivre et vivre et se sentir meilleur</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">À mesure que bout plus fervemment le cœur;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vivre plus clair, dès qu'on marche en conquête;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vivre plus haut encor, dès que le sort s'entête</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">À dessécher la force et l'audace des bras.<a name="FNanchor_6_124" id="FNanchor_6_124"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_124" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il faut en tes élans te dépasser sans cesse,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Être ton propre étonnement.<a name="FNanchor_7_125" id="FNanchor_7_125"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_125" class="fnanchor">[7]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>In this idea of restless enthusiasm, the principles of which have also
+been expounded by Verhaeren in his essay <i>Cosmic Enthusiasm</i>
+(<i>Insel-Almanach,</i> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>
+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.'<a name="FNanchor_8_126" id="FNanchor_8_126"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_126" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> 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&mdash;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. <i>Though
+many values lock themselves up from knowledge, none denies itself wholly
+to admiration</i>. Even the smallest thing becomes great when it is
+penetrated with love, and the greater we let things grow&mdash;the more we
+enrich the substance of our own life&mdash;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. <i>And to have found<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> 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</i>. 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,'<a name="FNanchor_9_127" id="FNanchor_9_127"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_127" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> and
+<i>vice versa</i> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> 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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'homme n'est suprême et clair que si sa volonté</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Est d'être lui en même temps qu'il est monde.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>And since this boundless admiration turns selfishness to
+dust&mdash;selfishness, the eternal obstacle to all purely human
+relations&mdash;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 <i>La Multiple
+Splendeur</i>, which has given definite expression to these ethical ideas,
+was originally intended to be called <i>Admirez-vous les Uns les Autres</i>.
+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&mdash;it will<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> regulate all earthly
+relationships; love shall be the social levelling.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'amour dont la puissance encore est inconnue,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dans sa profondeur douce et sa charité nue,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Ira porter la joie égale aux résignés;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Les sacs ventrus de l'or seront saignés</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Un soir d'ardente et large équité rouge;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Disparaîtront palais, banques, comptoirs et bouges;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Tout sera simple et clair, quand l'orgueil sera mort,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Quand l'homme, au lieu de croire à l'égoïste effort,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qui s'éterniserait, en une âme immortelle,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dispensera vers tous sa vie accidentelle;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Des paroles, qu'aucun livre ne fait prévoir,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Débrouilleront ce qui paraît complexe et noir;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Le faible aura sa part dans l'existence entière,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il aimera son sort&mdash;et la matière</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Confessera peut-être, alors, ce qui fut Dieu.<a name="FNanchor_10_128" id="FNanchor_10_128"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_128" class="fnanchor">[10]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Si nous nous admirons vraiment les uns les autres,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Du fond même de notre ardeur et notre foi,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vous les penseurs, vous les savants, vous les apôtres,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pour les temps qui viendront vous extrairez la loi.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Nous apportons, ivres du monde et de nous-mêmes,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Des cœurs d'hommes nouveaux dans le vieil univers.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Les Dieux sont loin et leur louange et leur blasphème;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Notre force est en nous et nous avons souffert.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Nous admirons nos mains, nos yeux et nos pensées,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Même notre douleur qui devient notre orgueil;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Toute recherche est fermement organisée</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pour fouiller l'inconnu dont nous cassons le seuil.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">S'il est encor là-bas des caves de mystère</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Où tout flambeau s'éteint ou recule effaré,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Plutôt que d'en peupler les coins par des chimères</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Nous préférons ne point savoir que nous leurrer.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Un infini plus sain nous cerne et nous pénètre;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Notre raison monte plus haut; notre cœur bout;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et nous nous exaltons si bellement des êtres</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Que nous changeons le sens que nous avons de tout.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Cerveau, tu règnes seul sur nos actes lucides;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Aimer, c'est asservir; admirer, se grandir;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">O tel profond vitrail, dans l'ombre des absides,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qui reflète la vie et la fait resplendir!</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Aubes, matins, midis et soirs, toute lumière</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Est aussitôt muée en or et en beauté,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il exalte l'espace et le ciel et la terre</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et transforme le monde à travers sa clarté.<a name="FNanchor_11_129" id="FNanchor_11_129"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_129" class="fnanchor">[11]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><i>This sensation of recognising oneself in all things by enthusiasm</i>, 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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> 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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Je ne distingue plus le monde de moi-même,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Je suis l'ample feuillage et les rameaux flottants,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Je suis le sol dont je foule les cailloux pâles</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et l'herbe des fossés où soudain je m'affale</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Ivre et fervent, hagard, heureux et sanglotant.<a name="FNanchor_12_130" id="FNanchor_12_130"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_130" class="fnanchor">[12]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>All the forms of the elements are a personal experience to him:
+'J'existe en tout ce qui m'entoure et me pénètre.'<a name="FNanchor_13_131" id="FNanchor_13_131"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_131" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> All that has
+happened becomes to him a manifestation of his own body; he feels all
+cosmic happenings as personal experiences:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Oh! les rythmes fougueux de la nature entière</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et les sentir et les darder à travers soi!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vivre les mouvements répandus dans les bois,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Le sol, les vents, la mer et les tonnerres;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vouloir qu'en son cerveau tressaille l'univers.<a name="FNanchor_14_132" id="FNanchor_14_132"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_132" class="fnanchor">[14]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Here the billows of enthusiasm dash higher and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> higher, this call to
+union by enthusiasm grows to an ever more passionate command:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Exaltez-vous encore et comprenez-vous mieux,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Reconnaissez-vous donc et magnifiez-vous</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Dans l'ample et myriadaire splendeur des choses!<a name="FNanchor_15_133" id="FNanchor_15_133"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_133" class="fnanchor">[15]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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!'<a name="FNanchor_16_134" id="FNanchor_16_134"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_134" class="fnanchor">[16]</a> 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 <i>Starting from
+Paumanok</i>, preaches:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">None has ever yet adored or worshipped half enough,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">how certain the future is.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Aimer avec ferveur soi-même en tous les autres</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qui s'exaltent de même en de mêmes combats</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vers le même avenir dont on entend le pas;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Aimer leur cœur et leur cerveau pareils aux vôtres</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Parce qu'ils ont souffert, en des jours noirs et fous,</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Même angoisse, même affre et même deuil que vous.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et s'énivrer si fort de l'humaine bataille</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">&mdash;Pâle et flottant reflet des monstrueux assauts</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Ou des groupements d'or des étoiles, là-haut&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qu'on vit en tout ce qui agit, lutte ou tressaille</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et qu'on accepte avidement, le cœur ouvert,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'âpre et terrible loi qui régit l'univers.<a name="FNanchor_17_135" id="FNanchor_17_135"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_135" class="fnanchor">[17]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><i>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&mdash;this is Verhaeren's highest aim</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,'<a name="FNanchor_18_136" id="FNanchor_18_136"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_136" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> <i>the fact of life itself was his
+pleasure</i>, 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;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> happiness. And in such a moment of ecstasy he says,</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Il me semble jusqu'à ce jour n'avoir vécu</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Que pour mourir et non pour vivre,<a name="FNanchor_19_137" id="FNanchor_19_137"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_137" class="fnanchor">[19]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>lines that seem to me unforgettable, as the highest ecstasy of vitality.</p>
+
+<p>And, wonderful to say, here too the circle is closed, here too the end
+of Verhaeren's know-ledge&mdash;as we have seen in so many things with
+him&mdash;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, <i>Les Flamandes</i>, as well as <i>Les Rythmes Souverains</i>
+and <i>Les Blés Mouvants,</i> celebrate life&mdash;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&mdash;here again in harmony with the great
+poets of our nation, with Nietzsche and Dehmel&mdash;is not suppression, but
+a conscious intensification of original instincts. Just as in&mdash;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> 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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Je marche avec l'orgueil d'aimer l'air et la terre,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">D'être immense et d'être fou</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et de mêler le monde et tout</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">À cet enivrement de vie élémentaire.<a name="FNanchor_20_138" id="FNanchor_20_138"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_138" class="fnanchor">[20]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">J'aime mes yeux, mes bras, mes mains, ma chair,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">mon torse</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et mes cheveux amples et blonds,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et je voudrais, par mes poumons,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Boire l'espace entier pour en gonfler ma force.<a name="FNanchor_21_139" id="FNanchor_21_139"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_139" class="fnanchor">[21]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The feeling of identity has given him absolute identity in regard to
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> 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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Soyez remerciés, mes yeux,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">D'être restés si clairs, sous mon front déjà vieux,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pour voir au loin bouger et vibrer la lumière;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et vous, mes mains, de tressaillir dans le soleil;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et vous, mes doigts, de vous dorer aux fruits vermeils</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pendus au long du mur, près des roses trémières.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Soyez remercié, mon corps,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">D'être ferme, rapide, et frémissant encor</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Au toucher des vents prompts ou des brises profondes;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et vous, mon torse clair et mes larges poumons,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">De respirer au long des mers ou sur les monts,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">L'air radieux et vif qui baigne et mord les mondes.<a name="FNanchor_22_140" id="FNanchor_22_140"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_140" class="fnanchor">[22]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Thus, too, he now celebrates all things to which he is related&mdash;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.
+<i>And just as he feels himself to be strong and healthy, so too his
+feeling conceives of the whole world as healthy and great</i>. 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> felt positively <i>in
+the body</i>, 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,'<a name="FNanchor_23_141" id="FNanchor_23_141"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_141" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> a discharge of human, of
+physical electricity. Joy here becomes a physical excess, an
+intoxication, a superabundance without parallel:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Nous apportons, ivres du monde et de nous-mêmes,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Des cœurs d'hommes nouveaux dans le vieil univers.<a name="FNanchor_24_142" id="FNanchor_24_142"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_142" class="fnanchor">[24]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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'!</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> 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 <i>Les Forcés Tumultueuses</i> shines <i>La Multiple
+Splendeur</i>. And to himself may be applied the words he dedicated to his
+hymn of all humanity&mdash;'La joie et la bonté sont les fleurs de sa
+force.'<a name="FNanchor_25_143" id="FNanchor_25_143"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_143" class="fnanchor">[25]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_119" id="Footnote_1_119"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_119"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> G. Le Cardonnel et Ch. Vellay, <i>La Littérature
+Contemporaine.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_120" id="Footnote_2_120"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_120"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 'Autour de ma Maison' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_121" id="Footnote_3_121"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_121"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> <i>Ecce Homo!</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_122" id="Footnote_4_122"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_122"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> 'La Ferveur' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_123" id="Footnote_5_123"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_123"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> 'La Vie' (<i>Ibid.</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_124" id="Footnote_6_124"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_124"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> 'L'Action' (<i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_125" id="Footnote_7_125"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_125"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> 'L'Impossible' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_126" id="Footnote_8_126"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_126"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> 'Les Rêves' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_127" id="Footnote_9_127"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_127"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> 'L'Impossible' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_128" id="Footnote_10_128"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_128"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> 'Un Soir' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_129" id="Footnote_11_129"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_129"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> 'La Ferveur' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_130" id="Footnote_12_130"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_130"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> 'Autour de ma Maison' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_131" id="Footnote_13_131"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_131"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> 'La Joie' (<i>Ibid</i>.).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_132" id="Footnote_14_132"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_132"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> 'L'En-avant' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_133" id="Footnote_15_133"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_133"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> 'La Louange du Corps Humain' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_134" id="Footnote_16_134"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_134"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> <i>Ibid. (Ibid.)</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_135" id="Footnote_17_135"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_135"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> 'La Vie' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_136" id="Footnote_18_136"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_136"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> 'Guillaume de Juliers' (<i>Les Héros</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_137" id="Footnote_19_137"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_137"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> 'Un Matin' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_138" id="Footnote_20_138"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_138"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> 'Un Matin' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_139" id="Footnote_21_139"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_139"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> <i>Ibid. (Ibid.)</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_140" id="Footnote_22_140"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_140"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> 'La Joie' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_141" id="Footnote_23_141"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_141"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> 'Léon Bazalgette', <i>Émile Verhaeren</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_142" id="Footnote_24_142"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_142"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> 'La Ferveur' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_143" id="Footnote_25_143"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_143"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> 'Les Mages' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>).<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="LOVE" id="LOVE"></a>LOVE</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Ceux qui vivent d'amour vivent d'éternité.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15.5em;">E.V., <i>Les Heures d'après-midi.</i></span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> 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.'<a name="FNanchor_1_144" id="FNanchor_1_144"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_144" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> Only to woman is love the sense of
+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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Les forts montent la vie ainsi qu'un escalier,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Sans voir d'abord que les femmes sur leurs passages</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Tendent vers eux leurs seins, leurs fronts et leur visages.<a name="FNanchor_2_145" id="FNanchor_2_145"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_145" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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. <i>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</i>. He must<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> 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&mdash;the personal symbol of eternal,
+exterior order&mdash;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&mdash;in this symphony that is often brutal&mdash;there is a
+quiet, soft andante, a trilogy in the trilogy, one of love. From the
+point of view of art, these three books, <i>Les Heures Claires, Les Heures
+d'Après-midi,</i> and <i>Les Heures du Soir</i>, 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> spoken loudly, but with a voice
+subdued. Religious consciousness&mdash;for with Verhaeren all that is poetic
+is religious in a new sense&mdash;finds a new form here. <i>Here Verhaeren does
+not preach, he prays</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> 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&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et l'on se dit les simples choses:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Le fruit qu'on a cueilli dans le jardin;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">La fleur qui s'est ouverte,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">D'entre les mousses vertes,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et la pensée éclose, en des émois soudains,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Au souvenir d'un mot de tendresse fanée</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">Surpris au fond d'un vieux tiroir,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">Sur un billet de l'autre année.<a name="FNanchor_3_146" id="FNanchor_3_146"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_146" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>
+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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Avec mes sens, avec mon cœur et mon cerveau,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Avec mon être entier tendu comme un flambeau</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Vers ta bonté et vers ta charité,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Je t'aime et te louange et je te remercie</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">D'être venue, un jour, si simplement,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Par les chemins du dévouement,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Prendre en tes mains bienfaisantes, ma vie.<a name="FNanchor_4_147" id="FNanchor_4_147"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_147" class="fnanchor">[4]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>These verses are genuflexions, folded hands, love that by humility
+becomes religion.</p>
+
+<p>But still more beautiful and significant, perhaps, is the second volume
+of the trilogy <i>Les Heures d'Après-midi</i>; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> poorer. <i>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</i>. And so his
+love has been able to celebrate the highest triumph, <i>vaincre
+l'habitude</i>, 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.<a name="FNanchor_5_148" id="FNanchor_5_148"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_148" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> 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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Puisque je sais que rien au monde</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Ne troublera jamais notre être exalté</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Et que notre âme est trop profonde</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pour que l'amour dépende encor de la beauté.<a name="FNanchor_6_149" id="FNanchor_6_149"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_149" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The temporal has here been overcome, and even the future, even death
+have no longer any terrors. Without fear of losing himself&mdash;for 'qui vit
+d'amour vit d'éternité'&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vous m'avez dit, tel soir, des paroles si belles</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Que sans doute les fleurs, qui se penchaient vers nous,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Soudain nous out aimés et que l'une d'entre elles,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pour nous toucher tous deux, tomba sur nos genoux.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Vous me parliez des temps prochains où nos années,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Comme des fruits trop mûrs, se laisseraient cueillir;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Comment éclaterait le glas des destinées,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et comme on s'aimerait en se sentant vieillir.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Votre voix m'enlaçait comme une chère étreinte,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et votre cœur brûlait si tranquillement beau</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qu'en ce moment j'aurais pu voir s'ouvrir sans crainte</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Les tortueux chemins qui vont vers le tombeau.<a name="FNanchor_7_150" id="FNanchor_7_150"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_150" class="fnanchor">[7]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The third volume, <i>Les Heures du Soir</i>, 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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;for as far as the iconoclastic
+work is concerned, respect for tradition and fear of innovations may
+have scared many people away&mdash;have not enjoyed a widespread popularity.
+For never since the tenderly vibrating music of Verlaine's <i>La Bonne
+Chanson</i>, 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 <i>poèmes francs et
+doux</i>, for here behind the savage, ecstatic poet, the passionate and
+strong poet of <i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>, 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.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_144" id="Footnote_1_144"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_144"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'Le Paradis' (<i>Les Rythmes Souverains</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_145" id="Footnote_2_145"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_145"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 'Hommage' (<i>Au Bord de la Route</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_146" id="Footnote_3_146"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_146"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 'C'est la bonne heure où la lampe s'allume' (<i>Les Heures
+d'Après-midi</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_147" id="Footnote_4_147"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_147"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> 'Avec mes sens, avec mon cœur et mon cerveau'. (<i>Les
+Heures d'Après-midi</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_148" id="Footnote_5_148"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_148"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> 'Voici quinze ans déjà' (<i>Les Heures d'Après-midi</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_149" id="Footnote_6_149"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_149"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> 'Les baisers morts des défuntes années' (<i>Ibid.</i>)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_150" id="Footnote_7_150"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_150"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> 'Vous m'avez dit, tel soir' (<i>Les Heures d'Après-midi</i>).<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_ART_OF_VERHAERENS_LIFE" id="THE_ART_OF_VERHAERENS_LIFE"></a>THE ART OF VERHAEREN'S LIFE</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Je suis d'accord avec moi-même</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et c'est assez.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 16em;">É.V.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Camille Lemonnier, the master of Verhaeren's youth, the friend of his
+prime, at the banquet offered by Belgium to the poet of <i>Toute la
+Flandre,</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>In Verhaeren's case, there stands behind the poetic work of art the
+incomparable masterpiece of a great life, a wonderful, victorious
+battle<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> 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&mdash;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&mdash;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>La Guirlande des Dunes</i>,
+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.'<a name="FNanchor_1_151" id="FNanchor_1_151"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_151" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> He has returned to his own race, to
+the bosom of Nature, to the eternal resources of health and life.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>
+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&mdash;flees from
+hay-fever. This illness of Verhaeren's has always seemed to me
+symbolical of his art<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>This apparent contrast between the art of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> 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&mdash;which
+has already allured so many painters and sculptors&mdash;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&mdash;<i>couleur de mer</i>&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> 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 <i>unity in
+experience, in feeling</i>. 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&mdash;gratitude ever renewed and
+boundlessly intensified in passion.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_151" id="Footnote_1_151"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_151"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Vielé-Griffin, biographical note to Mockel's <i>Verhaeren.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_EUROPEAN_IMPORTANCE_OF_HIS_WORK" id="THE_EUROPEAN_IMPORTANCE_OF_HIS_WORK"></a>THE EUROPEAN IMPORTANCE OF HIS WORK</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Futur, vous m'exaltez comme autrefois mon Dieu!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 17.5em;">É.V., 'La Prière.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Now, of all the poets of our day Verhaeren is the one who has felt this
+feeling of responsibility most strongly. To write poetry is for him to
+express not himself only, but the striving and straining of the whole
+period as well, the fearful torment and the happiness that are in the
+birth of the new things. Just because his work comprises all the present
+and aims at expressing it in its entity, he feels himself responsible to
+the future. For him a true poet must visualise the whole psychic care of
+his time. For when later generations&mdash;in the same manner as they will
+question monuments concerning our art, pictures concerning our painters,
+social forms concerning our philosophers&mdash;ask of the verses and the
+works of our contemporaries the question, What was your hope, your
+feeling, the sum of your interpretation? how did you feel cities and
+men, things and gods?&mdash;shall we be able to answer them? This is the
+inner question of Verhaeren's artistic responsibility.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> <i>And this
+feeling of responsibility has made his work great</i>. Most of the poets of
+our day have been unconcerned with reality. Some of them strike up a
+dancing measure, rouse and amuse people lounging in theatres; others
+again tell of their own sorrow, ask for pity and compassion, they who
+have never felt for others. Verhaeren, however, heedless of the approval
+or disapproval of our time, turns his face towards the generations to
+be:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Celui qui me lira dans les siècles, un soir,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Troublant mes vers, sous leur sommeil ou sous leur cendre,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et ranimant leur sens lointain pour mieux comprendre</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Comment ceux d'aujourd'hui s'étaient armés d'espoir,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Qu'il sache, avec quel violent élan, ma joie</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">S'est, à travers les cris, les révoltes, les pleurs,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Ruée au combat fier et mâle des douleurs,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pour en tirer l'amour, comme on conquiert sa proie.<a name="FNanchor_1_152" id="FNanchor_1_152"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_152" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>It was, in the last instance, this magnificent feeling of responsibility
+which did not permit him to pass by any manifestation of our present
+time without observing and appreciating it, for he knows that later
+generations will ask the question how we sensed the new thing, which to
+them is a possession and a matter of course, when it was still strange
+and almost hostile. His work is the answer. The true poet of to-day, in
+Verhaeren's eyes, must show forth the torment and the trouble of the
+whole psychic transition, the painful discovery of the new beauty in the
+new things,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> the revolt, the crisis, the struggles it costs to
+understand all this, to adapt ourselves to it, and in the end to love
+it. Verhaeren has attempted to express our whole time in its earthly,
+its material, its psychic form. His verses lyrically represent Europe at
+the turning of the century, us and our time; they consciously
+contemplate the whole circuit of the things of life: <i>they write a lyric
+encyclopædia of our time, the intellectual atmosphere of Europe at the
+turning of the twentieth century.</i></p>
+
+<p>The whole of Europe speaks with his voice, speaks with a voice that
+reaches beyond our time; and already from the whole of Europe comes the
+answer. In Belgium Verhaeren is above all the national poet, the poet of
+heaths, cities, dunes, and of the Flemish past, the great renewer of the
+national pride. But he stands too near his fellow-countrymen to be
+measured at his full height there. And in France, too, very few
+appreciate him at his true value. Most people regard him there in his
+literary aspect only and as a symbolist and decadent, an innovator of
+verse, an audacious and gifted revolutionary. But very few perceive the
+new and important work that is built up in his verses, very few
+comprehend the entity and the logical character of his cosmic
+philosophy. Nevertheless, his influence is already tangible. The new
+rhythm he has created can be recognised in many poets; and such a gifted
+disciple as Jules Romains has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> even brought his idea of the feeling of
+cities to new impressiveness. Best of all, however, he is understood by
+those Frenchmen who stand in a mystic communion with all that is great
+and urgent abroad; who feel an ethical need, a longing for an inner
+transmutation of values, for a re-moulding of races, for cosmopolitanism
+and a union of the nations; so, above all, Léon Bazalgette, who revealed
+Walt Whitman, the prophet of all strong and conscious reality in art, to
+France. Most joyfully of all, however, the answer rings from those
+countries which are themselves involved in deep-seated social and
+ethical crises, those countries where the need of religion is a vital
+instinct, which are eternally hungry for God, above all from Russia and
+Germany. In Russia the poet of <i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i> is celebrated
+as he is nowhere else. As the poet of social innovations he is read in
+the Russian universities, and in the circles of the intellectuals he is
+regarded as the spiritual pioneer of our time. Brjussow, the
+distinguished young poet, has translated him, and afforded him the
+possibility of popularity. In other Slavonic countries, too, his work is
+beginning to spread.</p>
+
+<p>Verhaeren's success, one may well say triumph, has been strongest and
+most impressive in Germany; here it has been unexpectedly intensive even
+to us who have worked for it. A few years have sufficed to make him as
+popular here<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> I as any native poet, and the most beautiful feature of
+his success is this, that people are already forgetting to look upon him
+as a foreigner. Verhaeren is to-day part and parcel of German culture;
+and much of our contemporary lyric poetry, its welcome turning to
+optimism for example, would be unthinkable but for his work and
+influence. Countless are the essays devoted to him, the recitations in
+which our best elocutionists&mdash;Kainz, Moissi, Kayssler, Heine, Wiecke,
+Durieux, Rosen, Gregori&mdash;have taken part; none of these interpreters,
+however, were as enthusiastically applauded as was Verhaeren himself on
+his <i>tournée</i> in Germany, which was a great experience no less for him
+than for our public, because he gladly felt that his work was now rooted
+for ever in German soil. In Scandinavia, where Johannes V. Jensen in his
+essays unconsciously transcribed Verhaeren's lyric work, Ellen Key, the
+inspired prophetess of the feeling of life, has hailed him as she has
+hailed no other, and Georg Brandes, who crowns poets, has welcomed him
+with loud acclaim. Incessantly, in an irresistible, sure ascent,
+Verhaeren's fame grows. And above all, his poetry is no longer regarded
+as an individual thing, but as a work, as a cosmic philosophy, as an
+answer to the questions of our time, as the strongest and most beautiful
+enrichment of our vital feeling. Wherever people are tired of pessimism,
+tired of confused mysticism, and tired of monistic shallowness; wherever
+a longing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> stirs for a pure idealistic form of contemplation, for a new
+reconciliation between our new realities and the old reverence for
+eternal secrets, for the secularisation of the divine, his name stands
+in the front rank. An answer comes from every direction, not because his
+work was a question, but because it was in itself an answer to the
+unconscious demand for a new community, a demand which is being made by
+men of all nations everywhere to-day.</p>
+
+<p>But all this is only a beginning. Works like his, which are not
+paradoxical enough, not dazzling enough, to produce sudden ecstasies and
+literary fashions; which, by the mere fact that they have themselves
+grown organically into existence, can only grow organically, but for
+that reason irresistibly, in their influence; only lay hold of the
+masses slowly. Only later generations will enjoy the fruit which we,
+with renewed admiration, have seen ripening from the most modest of
+blossoms. But already a ring of men of all nations are joining hands, a
+ring of men who perceive a new centre of spirituality in Verhaeren. And
+we, the few who have wholly surrendered ourselves to his work, must
+appreciate it with that feeling only which he himself has taught us as
+the highest feeling of life&mdash;with enthusiasm, with gratitude ever
+renewed, and with joyful admiration. For to whom in our days should one
+offer more abundantly and stormily this new vital doctrine of enthusiasm
+as the happiest feeling<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> than to Verhaeren, to him who was the first to
+wrest it in the bitterest struggles from the depths of our time, who was
+the first to shape it in the material of art, the first to raise it to
+the eternal law of life?</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_152" id="Footnote_1_152"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_152"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'Un Soir' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="BIBLIOGRAPHY" id="BIBLIOGRAPHY"></a>BIBLIOGRAPHY</h3>
+
+
+<p>I. LES FLAMANDES, poèmes. Bruxelles, Hochsteyn, 1883. LES CONTES DE
+MINUIT, prose. Bruxelles (Collection de la 'Jeune Belgique'), Franck,
+1885.</p>
+
+<p>JOSEPH HEYMANS, PEINTRE, critique. Bruxelles (<i>Société Nouvelle</i>), 1885.</p>
+
+<p>II. LES MOINES, poèmes. Paris, Lemerre, 1886.</p>
+
+<p>FERNAND KHNOPFF, critique. Bruxelles (<i>Société Nouvelle</i>), 1886.</p>
+
+<p>III. Au BORD DE LA ROUTE, poèmes. Liège (<i>La Wallonie</i>), 1891.</p>
+
+<p>IV. LES SOIRS, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman, 1887.</p>
+
+<p>V. LES DÉBÂCLES, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman, 1888.</p>
+
+<p>VI. LES FLAMBEAUX NOIRS, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman, 1890.</p>
+
+<p>VII. LES VILLAGES ILLUSOIRES, poèmes, illustrés par Georges Minne.
+Bruxelles, Deman, 1895.</p>
+
+<p>VIII. LES APPARUS DANS MES CHEMINS, poèmes. Bruxelles, Lacomblez, 1891.</p>
+
+<p>LES CAMPAGNES HALLUCINÉES, poèmes, ornementés par T. van Rysselberghe.
+Bruxelles, Deman, 1893.</p>
+
+<p>ALMANACH, poèmes, illustrés par T. van Rysselberghe. Bruxelles,
+Dietrich, 1895.</p>
+
+<p>POÈMES (1<sup>e</sup> série, i., ii., iii.). Paris, Mercure de France, 1895.</p>
+
+<p>LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES, poèmes, couverture et ornementation par T. van
+Rysselberghe. Bruxelles, Deman, 1896.</p>
+
+<p>POÈMES (2<sup>e</sup> série, iv., v., vi.). Paris, Mercure de France, 1896.</p>
+
+<p>LES HEURES CLAIRES, poèmes, ornementés par T. van Rysselberghe.
+Bruxelles, Deman, 1896.</p>
+
+<p>ÉMILE VERHAEREN, 1883-1896, portrait par T. van Rysselberghe.
+[Bruxelles, Deman, 1896.] (An anthology, 'pour les amis du poète,')</p>
+
+<p>LES AUBES, drame lyrique en 4 actes, ornementé par T. van Rysselberghe.
+Bruxelles, Deman, 1898.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>ESPAÇA NEGRA, NOTAS DE VIAJE. Barcelona, Pedro Ortega, 1899.</p>
+
+<p>LES VISAGES DE LA VIE, poèmes, ornementés par T. van Rysselberghe.
+Bruxelles, Deman, 1899.</p>
+
+<p>POÈMES (3<sup>e</sup> série, vii., viii., <i>Les Vignes de ma Muraille</i>). Paris,
+Mercure de France, 1899.</p>
+
+<p>LE CLOÎTRE, drame en 4 actes, prose et vers, ornementé par T. van
+Rysselberghe. Bruxelles, Deman, 1900.</p>
+
+<p>PETITES LÉGENDES, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman, 1900.</p>
+
+<p>LES PETITS VIEUX. London, Hacon &amp; Ricketts, 1901.</p>
+
+<p>PHILIPPE H., tragédie en 3 actes, vers et prose. Paris, Mercure de
+France, 1901.</p>
+
+<p>LES FORCES TUMULTUEUSES, poèmes. Paris, Mercure de France, 1902.</p>
+
+<p>LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES, précédées des <i>Campagnes Hallucinées,</i> poèmes.
+Paris, Mercure de France, 1904.</p>
+
+<p>TOUTE LA FLANDRE: <i>Les Tendresses Premières</i>, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman,
+1904.</p>
+
+<p>LES HEURES D'APRÈS-MIDI, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman, 1905.</p>
+
+<p>REMBRANDT, étude. Paris, Henri Laurens [1905].</p>
+
+<p>IMAGES JAPONAISES, texte d'É. V ..., illustrations de Kwassou. Tokio,
+1906.</p>
+
+<p>LA MULTIPLE SPLENDEUR, poèmes. Paris, Mercure de France, 1906.</p>
+
+<p>TOUTE LA FLANDRE: <i>La Guirlande des Dunes</i>, poèmes. Bruxelles, Deman,
+1907.</p>
+
+<p>LES LETTRES FRANÇAISES EN BELGIQUE. Bruxelles, Lamertin, 1907.</p>
+
+<p>LES VISAGES DE LA VIE (<i>Les Visages de la Vie, Les douze Mois</i>), poèmes,
+nouvelle édition. Paris, Mercure de France, 1908.</p>
+
+<p>TOUTE LA FLANDRE: <i>Les Héros</i>. Bruxelles, Deman, 1908.</p>
+
+<p>JAMES ENSOR, étude. Bruxelles, E. van Oest, 1908.</p>
+
+<p>TOUTE LA FLANDRE: <i>Les Villes à Pignons</i>. Bruxelles, Deman, 1909.</p>
+
+<p>HELENAS HEIMKEHR. Leipzig, Insel-Verlag, 1909. (Translation by Stefan
+Zweig of <i>Hélène de Sparte</i>.)</p>
+
+<p>DEUX DRAMES: LE CLOÃŽTRE, PHILIPPE II. Paris, Mercure de France, 1909.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>LES RYTHMES SOUVERAINS, poèmes. Paris, Mercure de France, 1910.</p>
+
+<p>PIERRE-PAUL RUBENS. Brussels, G. van Oest &amp; Cie., 1910.</p>
+
+<p>LES HEURES DU SOIR. Leipzig, Insel-Verlag, 1911.</p>
+
+<p>HÉLÈNE DE SPARTE, tragédie en 4 actes. Paris, 'Nouvelle Revue
+Française,' 1912.</p>
+
+<p>TOUTE LA FLANDRE: <i>Les Plaines</i>. Bruxelles, Deman, 1911.</p>
+
+<p>LES BLÉS MOUVANTS, poèmes. Paris, Crès, 1912.</p>
+
+<p>LES VILLAGES ILLUSOIRES, avec 15 gravures à l'eau forte par Henry Ramah.
+Leipzig, Insel-Verlag, 1913.</p>
+
+<p>RUBENS. Leipzig, Insel-Verlag, 1913.</p>
+
+<p>LES BLÉS MOUVANTS, poèmes. Paris, Mercure de France, 1913.</p>
+
+<p>ŒUVRES D'ÉMILE VERHAEREN (IV., V., VI., VII., VIII., <i>Les Vignes de
+ma Muraille</i>). Paris, Mercure de France, 1914.</p>
+
+
+
+<p class="caption">TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH</p>
+
+<p>THE DAWN (<i>Les Aubes</i>), by Émile Verhaeren, translated by Arthur Symons.
+London, Duckworth, 1898.</p>
+
+<p>POEMS BY ÉMILE VERHAEREN, selected and rendered into English by Alma
+Strettel. London, John Lane, 1899.</p>
+
+<p>CONTEMPORARY BELGIAN POETRY, selected and translated by Jethro Bithell.
+('Canterbury Poets' series.) London, Walter Scott, 1911. (60 pp. are
+translations of Verhaeren's poems.)</p>
+
+
+
+<p class="caption">CRITICISMS</p>
+
+
+<p>BOOKS</p>
+
+<p>Bazalgette, Léon: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Paris, Sansot, 1907. (One of the
+series 'Les Célébrités d'aujourd'hui.')</p>
+
+<p>Beaunier, André: LA POÉSIE NOUVELLE. Paris, Mercure de France, 1902.</p>
+
+<p>Bersaucourt, Albert de: CONFÉRENCE SUR ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Paris, Jouve,
+1908.</p>
+
+<p>Bever, Ad. van, et Paul Léautaud: POÈTES D'AUJOURD'HUI, nouvelle
+édition, tome 2. Paris, Mercure de France, 1909.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Boer, Julius de: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. [1907.] (One of the series 'Mannen en
+Vrouwen van beteekenis in onze dagen.')</p>
+
+<p>Bosch, Firmin van den: IMPRESSIONS DE LITTÉRATURE CONTEMPORAINE.
+Bruxelles, Vromant et Cie., 1905.</p>
+
+<p>Buisseret, Georges: L'ÉVOLUTION IDÉOLOGIQUE D'ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Paris,
+Mercure de France, 1910. (One of the series 'Les Hommes et les Idées.')</p>
+
+<p>Casier, Jean: LES 'MOINES' D'ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Gand, Leliaert et Siffer,
+1887.</p>
+
+<p>Crawford, Virginia M.: STUDIES IN FOREIGN LITERATURE. London, Duckworth,
+1899.</p>
+
+<p>Florian-Parmentier: TOUTES LES LYRES. Anthologie Critique ornée de
+dessins et de portraits, nouvelle série. Paris, Gastein-Serge, [1911].</p>
+
+<p>Gauchez, Maurice: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Bruxelles, éditions du 'Thyrse,'
+1908.</p>
+
+<p>Gilbert, Eugène: FRANCE ET BELGIQUE. Paris, Pion, Nourrit et Cie, 1905.</p>
+
+<p>Gosse, Edmund: FRENCH PROFILES. London, Heinemann, 1905.</p>
+
+<p>Gourmont, Remy de: LE LIVRE DES MASQUES. Paris, Mercure de France, 1896.</p>
+
+<p>Gourmont, Remy de: PROMENADES LITTÉRAIRES. Paris, Mercure de France,
+1904.</p>
+
+<p>Guilbeaux, Henri: É. VERHAEREN. Verviers, Wauthy, 1908.</p>
+
+<p>Hamel, A.G. van: HET LETTERKUNDIG LEVEN VAN FRANKRIJK. Amsterdam, van
+Kampen &amp; Zoon [1907].</p>
+
+<p>Hauser, Otto: DIE BELGISCHE LYRIK VON 1880-1900. Grossenhain, Baumert
+und Ronge, 1902.</p>
+
+<p>Heumann, Albert: LE MOUVEMENT LITTÉRAIRE BELGE D'EXPRESSION FRANÇAISE
+DEPUIS 1880. Paris, Mercure de France, 1913.</p>
+
+<p>Horrent, Désiré: ÉCRIVAINS BELGES D'AUJOURD'HUI. Bruxelles, Lacomblez,
+1904.</p>
+
+<p>Key, Ellen: SEELEN UND WERKE. Berlin, S. Fischer, 1911.</p>
+
+<p>Kinon, Victor: PORTRAITS D'AUTEURS. Bruxelles, Dechenne, 1910.</p>
+
+<p>Le Cardonnel, Georges, et Charles Vellay: LA LITTÉRATURE CONTEMPORAINE,
+1905. Paris, Mercure de France, 1906.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Lemonnier, Camille: LA VIE BELGE. Paris, Fasquelle, 1905.</p>
+
+<p>Mercereau, Alexandre: LA LITTÉRATURE ET LES IDÉES NOUVELLES. Paris,
+Figuière, and London, Stephen Swift, 1912.</p>
+
+<p>Mockel, Albert: ÉMILE VERHAEREN, avec une note biographique par F.
+Vielé-Griffin. Paris, Mercure de France, 1895.</p>
+
+<p>Nouhuys, W.G. van: VAN OVER DE GRENSEN, STUDIËN EN CRITIEKEN. Baarn,
+Hollandia Drukkerij, 1906.</p>
+
+<p>Oppeln-Bronikowski, F. von: DAS JUNGE FRANKREICH. Berlin, Oesterheld und
+Co., 1908.</p>
+
+<p>Ramaekers, Georges: É. VERHAEREN. Bruxelles, éditions de 'La Lutte,'
+1900.</p>
+
+<p>Rency, Georges: PHYSIONOMIES LITTÉRAIRES. Bruxelles, Dechenne et Cie,
+1907.</p>
+
+<p>Rimestad, Christian: FRANSK POESI I DET NITTENDE AARHUNDREDE.
+Kjøbenhavn, Det Schubotheske, 1906.</p>
+
+<p>Schellenberg, E.A.: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Leipzig, Xenien-Verlag, 1911.</p>
+
+<p>Schlaf, Johannes: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. Berlin, Schuster und Loeffler,
+[1905].</p>
+
+<p>Smet, Abbé Jos. de: ÉMILE VERHAEREN, SA VIE ET SES ŒUVRES. Malines,
+1909.</p>
+
+<p>Tellier, Jules: Nos POÈTES. Paris, Despret, 1888.</p>
+
+<p>Thompson, Vance: FRENCH PORTRAITS. Boston, Badger &amp; Co., 1900.</p>
+
+<p>Vigié-Lecoq, E.: LA POÉSIE CONTEMPORAINE, 1884-1896. Paris, Mercure de
+France, 1897.</p>
+
+<p>Visan, Tancrède de: L'ATTITUDE DU LYRISME CONTEMPORAIN. Paris, Mercure
+de France, 1911.</p>
+
+<p>Zweig, Stefan: PREFACE TO ÉMILE VERHAERENS AUSGEWÄHLTE GEDICHTE IN
+NACHDICHTUNG. Berlin, Schuster und Loeffler, 1903.</p>
+
+
+<p>PERIODICALS</p>
+
+<p>Brandes, Georg: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. <i>Politiken</i>, Copenhagen, 8th June 1903.</p>
+
+<p>Brandes, Georg: ÉMILE VERHAEREN ALS DRAMATIKER. <i>Die Schaubühne</i>,
+Berlin, 5th April 1906.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Edwards, Osman: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. <i>The Savoy</i>, November 1897.</p>
+
+<p>Fontainas, André: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. <i>L'Art Moderne</i>, Brussels, 23rd
+February 1902.</p>
+
+<p>Fresnois, André du: LETTRE DE PARIS, HÉLÈNE DE SPARTE. <i>La Vie
+Intellectuelle</i>, Brussels, May 1912.</p>
+
+<p>Gosse, Edmund: M. VERHAEREN'S NEW POEMS (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>).
+<i>Daily Chronicle</i>, 17th February 1902.</p>
+
+<p>Gosse, Edmund: M. VERHAEREN'S NEW POEMS (<i>Les Blés Mouvants</i>). <i>New
+Weekly</i>,18th April 1914.</p>
+
+<p>Gourmont, Jean de: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. <i>Les Marges</i>, Paris, March 1914.</p>
+
+<p>Krains, Hubert: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. <i>Société Nouvelle</i>, Brussels, June
+1895.</p>
+
+<p>Mauclair, Camille: TROIS POÈTES. <i>Revue Encyclopédique</i>, Paris, 25th
+April 1896.</p>
+
+<p>Maurras, Charles: LITTÉRATURE. <i>Revue Encyclopédique</i>, Paris, 23rd
+January 1897.</p>
+
+<p>Polak, Emile: ÉMILE VERHAEREN EN RUSSIE. <i>La Vie Intellectuelle,</i>
+Brussels, January 1914.</p>
+
+<p>Reboul, Jacques: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. <i>L'Olivier</i>, Paris, 15th February
+1914.</p>
+
+<p>Régnier, Henri de: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. <i>Revue Blanche</i>, Paris, March 1895.</p>
+
+<p>Rodrigue, G.M.: HÉLÈNE DE SPARTE. <i>Le Thyrse</i>, Brussels, July 1912.</p>
+
+<p>Sadler, Michael T.H.: ÉMILE VERHAEREN: AN APPRECIATION. <i>Poetry and
+Drama</i>, June 1913.</p>
+
+<p>Sautreau, Georges: L'ŒUVRE LYRIQUE D'ÉMILE VERHAEREN. <i>Revue
+Scandinave</i>, Paris, December 1911&mdash;January 1912.</p>
+
+<p>Speth, William: L'INSPIRATION DE VERHAEREN ET LES COLORISTES FLAMANDS.
+<i>La Vie des Lettres</i>, Paris, January 1914.</p>
+
+<p>Vielé-Griffin, Francis: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. <i>La Plume</i>, Paris,</p>
+
+<p>25th April 1896. Vielé-Griffin, Francis: ÉMILE VERHAEREN. <i>Mercure de
+France</i>, Paris, 15th March 1914.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h3><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a>INDEX</h3>
+
+<p>
+ACTORS, <a href='#Page_131'>131</a>, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>-<a href='#Page_175'>175</a>.<br />
+Admiration, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_101'>101</a>, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a>, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_217'>217</a> ff., <a href='#Page_259'>259</a>.<br />
+Aeroplanes, <a href='#Page_4'>4</a>, <a href='#Page_164'>164</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>.<br />
+Æsthetics, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a>, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_151'>151</a>, <a href='#Page_205'>205</a>.<br />
+Africa, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>.<br />
+Agrarianism, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_101'>101</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>.<br />
+'À la Gloire du Vent,' <a href='#Page_200'>200</a>.<br />
+Alcohol, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>.<br />
+Alexandrine, the, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>, <a href='#Page_48'>48</a>, 7<a href='#Page_4'>4</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_144'>144</a>, <a href='#Page_147'>147</a> ff., <a href='#Page_163'>163</a>, <a href='#Page_170'>170</a>.<br />
+<i>Almanack</i>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>.<br />
+<i>Also Sprach Zarathustra</i>,<a href='#Page_134'>134</a>.<br />
+America, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>,<br />
+  <a href='#Page_120'>120</a>, <a href='#Page_131'>131</a>-<a href='#Page_132'>132</a>, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>, <a href='#Page_250'>250</a>.<br />
+Artisans, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_131'>131</a>, <a href='#Page_194'>194</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>, <a href='#Page_235'>235</a>,<br />
+  <a href='#Page_247'>247</a>.<br />
+Asceticism, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_168'>168</a>.<br />
+<i>Au Bord de la Route</i>, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>-<a href='#Page_60'>60</a>, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a>, <a href='#Page_236'>236</a>.<br />
+'Au Bord du Quai,' <a href='#Page_202'>202</a>.<br />
+Auerbach, Berthold, <a href='#Page_38'>38</a>.<br />
+'Aujourd'hui,' <a href='#Page_4'>4</a>.<br />
+'Autour de ma Maison,' <a href='#Page_217'>217</a>, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>.<br />
+'Aux Moines,' <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_49'>49</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>.<br />
+<br />
+BAKST, LÉON, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+Ballads, old German, <a href='#Page_146'>146</a>, <a href='#Page_159'>159</a>.<br />
+Balzac, Honoré de, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>.<br />
+Banville, Théodore de, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>.<br />
+Baudelaire, Charles, <a href='#Page_59'>59</a>, <a href='#Page_120'>120</a>, <a href='#Page_142'>142</a>.<br />
+Bayreuth, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>.<br />
+Bazalgette, Léon, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>, <a href='#Page_238'>238</a>, <a href='#Page_257'>257</a>.<br />
+Beauty, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>-<a href='#Page_38'>38</a>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>, <a href='#Page_49'>49</a>-<a href='#Page_52'>52</a>, <a href='#Page_83'>83</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_96'>96</a> ff., <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>, <a href='#Page_206'>206</a>, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>, <a href='#Page_221'>221</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_230'>230</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>, <a href='#Page_240'>240</a>.<br />
+&mdash;, the new, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>, <a href='#Page_83'>83</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_96'>96</a> ff., <a href='#Page_100'>100</a>, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_170'>170</a>-<a href='#Page_172'>172</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_222'>222</a>, <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>.<br />
+<i>Béguinages</i>, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>.<br />
+Belfries, <a href='#Page_39'>39</a>, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>, <a href='#Page_157'>157</a>.<br />
+Belgian art, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>-<a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>.<br />
+&mdash;life, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>.<br />
+&mdash;literature, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>-<a href='#Page_26'>26</a>, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>-<a href='#Page_38'>38</a>.<br />
+&mdash;race, the, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a> ff., <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>-<a href='#Page_24'>24</a>.<br />
+Belgium, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a> ff., <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>.<br />
+Berlin, <a href='#Page_87'>87</a>, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>, <a href='#Page_113'>113</a>.<br />
+Bersaucourt, Albert de, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a>.<br />
+Bornhem, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>.<br />
+Brandes, Georg, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+Breughel, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>.<br />
+Brezina, Otokar, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>.<br />
+Brjussow, Valerius, <a href='#Page_257'>257</a>.<br />
+Brownings, the, <a href='#Page_243'>243</a>.<br />
+Bruges, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_39'>39</a>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>.<br />
+Brussels, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>.<br />
+<br />
+CAILLOU-QUI-BIQUE, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>.<br />
+Carducci, Giosuè, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_193'>193</a>.<br />
+Carlyle, Thomas, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>.<br />
+'Celle des Voyages,' <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>.<br />
+'Celui de la Fatigue,' <a href='#Page_66'>66</a>.<br />
+'Celui du Savoir,' <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>.<br />
+Chance, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_110'>110</a>, <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>, <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>.<br />
+'Charles le Téméraire,' <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>.<br />
+Charles v., <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>.<br />
+Chiaroscuro, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>.<br />
+Chimay, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>.<br />
+Christ, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>.<br />
+Christianity, <a href='#Page_49'>49</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>.<br />
+Cities, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>, <a href='#Page_4'>4</a>, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>-<a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>-<a href='#Page_30'>30</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_75'>75</a>-<a href='#Page_77'>77</a>, <a href='#Page_83'>83</a>, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a> ff., <a href='#Page_94'>94</a> ff.,<br />
+<a href='#Page_101'>101</a> ff., <a href='#Page_107'>107</a>, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>-<a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>-<a href='#Page_118'>118</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_125'>125</a>-<a href='#Page_126'>126</a>, <a href='#Page_131'>131</a>, <a href='#Page_140'>140</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>-<a href='#Page_167'>167</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_181'>181</a>, <a href='#Page_191'>191</a>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>, <a href='#Page_238'>238</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_247'>247</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>, <a href='#Page_257'>257</a>.<br />
+Classicism, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_52'>52</a>, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_84'>84</a>, <a href='#Page_100'>100</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_160'>160</a>, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a>, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>.<br />
+Claus, Émile, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+Cloisters, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>, <a href='#Page_26'>26</a>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>-<a href='#Page_46'>46</a>, <a href='#Page_147'>147</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_165'>165</a>-<a href='#Page_166'>166</a>.<br />
+Colmar, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>.<br />
+Comédie Française, the, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a>.<br />
+Concentration, <a href='#Page_188'>188</a>, <a href='#Page_194'>194</a>.<br />
+Congo, the, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>.<br />
+Conservatives, the, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>.<br />
+Contemporary feeling, <a href='#Page_5'>5</a> ff., <a href='#Page_81'>81</a>-<a href='#Page_90'>90</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_101'>101</a> ff., <a href='#Page_112'>112</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_118'>118</a>, <a href='#Page_148'>148</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a>, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a>, <a href='#Page_254'>254</a> ff.<br />
+Coppée, François, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>.<br />
+<i>Cosmic Enthusiasm</i>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a>.<br />
+Cosmic feeling, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>-<a href='#Page_70'>70</a>, <a href='#Page_74'>74</a>-<a href='#Page_75'>75</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_81'>81</a> ff., <a href='#Page_112'>112</a>-<a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_126'>126</a>, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>, <a href='#Page_152'>152</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_179'>179</a>-<a href='#Page_185'>185</a>, <a href='#Page_186'>186</a>, <a href='#Page_188'>188</a>, <a href='#Page_192'>192</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a> ff.,<br />
+<a href='#Page_219'>219</a>, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>, <a href='#Page_228'>228</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+&mdash;law, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>, <a href='#Page_202'>202</a>-<a href='#Page_203'>203</a>.<br />
+&mdash;pain, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>.<br />
+Cosmopolitanism, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_257'>257</a>.<br />
+Cosmos, the, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>.<br />
+Coster, Charles de, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_168'>168</a>.<br />
+Country, the, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_26'>26</a>, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_101'>101</a> ff., <a href='#Page_107'>107</a>, <a href='#Page_245'>245</a>, <a href='#Page_247'>247</a>, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a>.<br />
+Courtrai, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>.<br />
+Criticism, <a href='#Page_33'>33</a>-<a href='#Page_34'>34</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_218'>218</a>.<br />
+Crommelynck, Fernand, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+Crowd, the, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a> ff., <a href='#Page_117'>117</a>, <a href='#Page_118'>118</a>, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_122'>122</a>, <a href='#Page_125'>125</a>-<a href='#Page_127'>127</a>, <a href='#Page_129'>129</a>, <a href='#Page_130'>130</a>, <a href='#Page_132'>132</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_134'>134</a>-<a href='#Page_136'>136</a>, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>, <a href='#Page_140'>140</a>, <a href='#Page_148'>148</a>, <a href='#Page_152'>152</a>.<br />
+<br />
+DAVID, GERHARD, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>.<br />
+Death, <a href='#Page_60'>60</a>, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_242'>242</a>.<br />
+Decadence, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a>.<br />
+Decadents, the, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>.<br />
+Declamation (<i>see</i> Recitation).<br />
+Defregger, Franz, <a href='#Page_38'>38</a>.<br />
+Dehmel, Richard, <a href='#Page_75'>75</a>-<a href='#Page_76'>76</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_191'>191</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_229'>229</a>, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a>.<br />
+Deman, Edmond, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>.<br />
+Democracy, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>, <a href='#Page_81'>81</a> ff., <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_111'>111</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_206'>206</a>.<br />
+Demolder, Eugène, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+Déroulède, Paul, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a>.<br />
+Deutsches Volkstheater, Vienna, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+Dialogue, <a href='#Page_129'>129</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Disease, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a> ff., <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>, <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>.<br />
+Dithyramb, the, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>, <a href='#Page_161'>161</a>.<br />
+Divinity (<i>see</i> God).<br />
+Dixmude, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>.<br />
+Dostoieffsky, F.M., <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_166'>166</a>.<br />
+Drama, the, <a href='#Page_150'>150</a>, <a href='#Page_151'>151</a>, <a href='#Page_161'>161</a> ff.,<br />
+<a href='#Page_194'>194</a>, <a href='#Page_235'>235</a>.<br />
+Dyck, Ernest van, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Ecce Homo!</i> <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_66'>66</a>, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a>-<a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_119'>119</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_218'>218</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Ecstasy, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_66'>66</a>, <a href='#Page_75'>75</a>, <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_90'>90</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a>, <a href='#Page_128'>128</a>, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_136'>136</a>, <a href='#Page_137'>137</a>, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>, <a href='#Page_152'>152</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>-<a href='#Page_167'>167</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_169'>169</a>, <a href='#Page_173'>173</a>, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_189'>189</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_213'>213</a>, <a href='#Page_216'>216</a>, <a href='#Page_217'>217</a>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a>, <a href='#Page_221'>221</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_223'>223</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>-<a href='#Page_229'>229</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_235'>235</a>, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a>-<a href='#Page_239'>239</a>, <a href='#Page_241'>241</a>, <a href='#Page_243'>243</a>, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_251'>251</a>, <a href='#Page_259'>259</a>.<br />
+Edwards, Osman, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+Eekhoud, Georges, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+Egoism (<i>see</i> Selfishness).<br />
+Emerson, Ralph Waldo, <a href='#Page_140'>140</a>.<br />
+Emigrants, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>-<a href='#Page_103'>103</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>.<br />
+Energy, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a> ff., <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_95'>95</a>, <a href='#Page_96'>96</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>, <a href='#Page_117'>117</a>, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_132'>132</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>, <a href='#Page_218'>218</a>, <a href='#Page_221'>221</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_223'>223</a>.<br />
+Engineering, <a href='#Page_4'>4</a>, <a href='#Page_5'>5</a>, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>.<br />
+England, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>, <a href='#Page_90'>90</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>.<br />
+Enthusiasm, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>, <a href='#Page_132'>132</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_138'>138</a>, <a href='#Page_153'>153</a>, <a href='#Page_161'>161</a>-<a href='#Page_164'>164</a>, <a href='#Page_168'>168</a>, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a>-<a href='#Page_174'>174</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_179'>179</a>, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_188'>188</a>, <a href='#Page_193'>193</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_194'>194</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>, <a href='#Page_215'>215</a> ff,<br />
+<a href='#Page_220'>220</a>-<a href='#Page_222'>222</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>-<a href='#Page_227'>227</a>, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_250'>250</a>, <a href='#Page_252'>252</a>, <a href='#Page_259'>259</a>.<br />
+Epic, the, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_150'>150</a>, <a href='#Page_151'>151</a>, <a href='#Page_161'>161</a>.<br />
+Eroticism, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a>,<a href='#Page_172'>172</a>-<a href='#Page_173'>173</a>, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a>, <a href='#Page_235'>235</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_237'>237</a>, <a href='#Page_240'>240</a>.<br />
+Ethics, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_206'>206</a>, <a href='#Page_215'>215</a> ff., <a href='#Page_216'>216</a>.<br />
+Europe, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_101'>101</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_201'>201</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>, <a href='#Page_250'>250</a>, <a href='#Page_253'>253</a> ff.<br />
+European consciousness, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>.<br />
+&mdash;feeling, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+&mdash;race, the, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>-<a href='#Page_115'>115</a>.<br />
+&mdash;the New, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>.<br />
+Evolution, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a> ff., <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_142'>142</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_180'>180</a>, <a href='#Page_195'>195</a>-<a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_213'>213</a>, <a href='#Page_216'>216</a>, <a href='#Page_218'>218</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_229'>229</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+Excess, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_31'>31</a>, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>-<a href='#Page_41'>41</a>, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a>, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>, <a href='#Page_245'>245</a>.<br />
+Exchanges, <a href='#Page_90'>90</a>, <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>.<br />
+Exultation, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>, <a href='#Page_130'>130</a>, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>.<br />
+Eycks, van, the, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>.<br />
+<br />
+FACTORIES, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_97'>97</a>, <a href='#Page_100'>100</a>, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>.<br />
+Faith, <a href='#Page_31'>31</a>, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_95'>95</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <a href='#Page_196'>196</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>-<a href='#Page_210'>210</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_212'>212</a>, <a href='#Page_227'>227</a>.<br />
+Fate, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>, <a href='#Page_203'>203</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>, <a href='#Page_213'>213</a>.<br />
+Faust, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>.<br />
+Fellowship, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>, <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_223'>223</a>, <a href='#Page_227'>227</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+Fervour (<i>see</i> Enthusiasm).<br />
+Flanders, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_27'>27</a>, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_33'>33</a>, <a href='#Page_36'>36</a>, <a href='#Page_39'>39</a>, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_168'>168</a>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>.<br />
+Flemings, the, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>.<br />
+Flemish language, the, <a href='#Page_154'>154</a>, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>.<br />
+'Fleur Fatale,' <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>.<br />
+Florence, <a href='#Page_52'>52</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_191'>191</a>.<br />
+Force, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>, <a href='#Page_253'>253</a>.<br />
+Forth Bridge, the, <a href='#Page_87'>87</a>.<br />
+France, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>, <a href='#Page_250'>250</a>, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>.<br />
+Future, the, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_36'>36</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_53'>53</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a>, <a href='#Page_180'>180</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_201'>201</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_204'>204</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>, <a href='#Page_227'>227</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>, <a href='#Page_244'>244</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_246'>246</a>, <a href='#Page_253'>253</a>-<a href='#Page_255'>255</a>.<br />
+<br />
+GAIETY THEATRE, Manchester, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+Gauchez, Maurice, <a href='#Page_154'>154</a>.<br />
+Genius, men of, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a>.<br />
+Genre-pictures, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>.<br />
+George, Stefan, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>.<br />
+Germany, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>, <a href='#Page_257'>257</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+Ghent, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>, <a href='#Page_213'>213</a>.<br />
+Gide, Andre', <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+Glesener, Edmond, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+God, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_47'>47</a>-<a href='#Page_48'>48</a>, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_95'>95</a>, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_109'>109</a>-<a href='#Page_111'>111</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <a href='#Page_185'>185</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_199'>199</a>, <a href='#Page_203'>203</a>-<a href='#Page_205'>205</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>-<a href='#Page_215'>215</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_222'>222</a>, <a href='#Page_259'>259</a>.<br />
+Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_71'>71</a>, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>,<a href='#Page_139'>139</a>, <a href='#Page_158'>158</a>, <a href='#Page_160'>160</a>, <a href='#Page_193'>193</a>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_254'>254</a>.<br />
+Goodness, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_251'>251</a>.<br />
+Gothic art, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>.<br />
+Greece, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>.<br />
+Greeks, the, <a href='#Page_52'>52</a>, <a href='#Page_84'>84</a>, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a>, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>.<br />
+Grünewald, Mathias, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>.<br />
+Gueux, the, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>,<br />
+'Guillaume de Juliers,' <a href='#Page_228'>228</a>.<br />
+Guyau, Jean-Marie, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>.<br />
+<br />
+HAMBURG, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>.<br />
+Handiwork, <a href='#Page_28'>28</a>, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>.<br />
+Harmony, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_36'>36</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>, <a href='#Page_84'>84</a>, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a>, <a href='#Page_118'>118</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_125'>125</a>, <a href='#Page_127'>127</a>, <a href='#Page_130'>130</a>, <a href='#Page_146'>146</a>, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a>, <a href='#Page_160'>160</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_167'>167</a>, <a href='#Page_169'>169</a>, <a href='#Page_170'>170</a>, <a href='#Page_181'>181</a>, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_213'>213</a>, <a href='#Page_216'>216</a>, <a href='#Page_245'>245</a>, <a href='#Page_254'>254</a>.<br />
+Hay fever, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_247'>247</a>-<a href='#Page_248'>248</a>.<br />
+Health, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>-<a href='#Page_18'>18</a>, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_245'>245</a>, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>, <a href='#Page_251'>251</a>.<br />
+<i>Hélène de Sparte</i>,<a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>, <a href='#Page_169'>169</a>-<a href='#Page_172'>172</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_174'>174</a>-<a href='#Page_175'>175</a>.<br />
+Heymans, Joseph, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+Holland, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>.<br />
+Homer, <a href='#Page_128'>128</a>.<br />
+'Hommage,' <a href='#Page_236'>236</a>.<br />
+Horniman, Miss, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+Hugo, Victor, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>-<a href='#Page_11'>11</a>, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>, <a href='#Page_120'>120</a>, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>-<a href='#Page_135'>135</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_138'>138</a>, <a href='#Page_142'>142</a>-<a href='#Page_143'>143</a>, <a href='#Page_145'>145</a>, <a href='#Page_147'>147</a>, <a href='#Page_160'>160</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Humility, <a href='#Page_221'>221</a>, <a href='#Page_233'>233</a>, <a href='#Page_240'>240</a>.<br />
+Huysmans, Joris Karl, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+<br />
+IDENTITY, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>, <a href='#Page_96'>96</a>, <a href='#Page_126'>126</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <a href='#Page_205'>205</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_223'>223</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_228'>228</a>, <a href='#Page_230'>230</a>, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a>, <a href='#Page_250'>250</a>.<br />
+Iliad, the, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>.<br />
+Impressionists, the, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+India, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>.<br />
+Individual, the, <a href='#Page_110'>110</a>, <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>, <a href='#Page_118'>118</a>.<br />
+Industrialism, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>, <a href='#Page_81'>81</a> ff., <a href='#Page_101'>101</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_125'>125</a>, <a href='#Page_131'>131</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_205'>205</a>-<a href='#Page_206'>206</a>.<br />
+Inquisition, the, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_169'>169</a>.<br />
+'Insatiablement,' <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>.<br />
+Instinct, <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>, <a href='#Page_100'>100</a>, <a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>, <a href='#Page_236'>236</a>.<br />
+Intemperance (<i>see</i> Excess).<br />
+Intensification, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>, <a href='#Page_49'>49</a>, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_66'>66</a>, <a href='#Page_131'>131</a>, <a href='#Page_137'>137</a>, <a href='#Page_152'>152</a>, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_164'>164</a>, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_200'>200</a>-<a href='#Page_202'>202</a>, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_241'>241</a>, <a href='#Page_252'>252</a>, <a href='#Page_254'>254</a>.<br />
+Intoxication, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_189'>189</a>, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>.<br />
+Italy, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, <a href='#Page_191'>191</a>.<br />
+<br />
+JENSEN, JOHANNES V., <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+Jesuits, the, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>-<a href='#Page_26'>26</a>.<br />
+Jesus, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>.<br />
+Jordaens, Jakob, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>.<br />
+Joy, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_66'>66</a>, <a href='#Page_74'>74</a>, <a href='#Page_106'>106</a>, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <a href='#Page_214'>214</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_217'>217</a>, <a href='#Page_228'>228</a>, <a href='#Page_230'>230</a>-<a href='#Page_233'>233</a>, <a href='#Page_240'>240</a>.<br />
+<br />
+KAHN, GUSTAVE, <a href='#Page_144'>144</a>.<br />
+Kainz, Josef, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+Kermesses, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_31'>31</a>, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>.<br />
+Key, Ellen, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+Khnopff, Fernand, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>.<br />
+Klinger, Max, <a href='#Page_128'>128</a>.<br />
+Knowledge, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>, <a href='#Page_180'>180</a>, <a href='#Page_216'>216</a>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a>-<a href='#Page_222'>222</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_227'>227</a>, <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>-<a href='#Page_234'>234</a>, <a href='#Page_236'>236</a>, <a href='#Page_245'>245</a>.<br />
+Künstlertheater, Munich, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+<br />
+'LA BARQUE,' <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>.<br />
+'Là-has,' <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>.<br />
+Labour Party, Belgian, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>.<br />
+'La Bourse,' <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>.<br />
+'La Conquête' (<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>),<br />
+<a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>.<br />
+'La Conquête' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>),<br />
+<a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_203'>203</a>, <a href='#Page_206'>206</a>.<br />
+'L'Action,' <a href='#Page_128'>128</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a>.<br />
+'La Ferveur,' <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>, <a href='#Page_219'>219</a>, <a href='#Page_224'>224</a>-<a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>.<br />
+'La Folie,' <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>.<br />
+'La Forêt,' <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>.<br />
+Laforgue, Jules, <a href='#Page_144'>144</a>.<br />
+'La Foule,' <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>, <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>, <a href='#Page_95'>95</a>, <a href='#Page_107'>107</a>, <a href='#Page_112'>112</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_152'>152</a>, <a href='#Page_185'>185</a>.<br />
+<i>La Guirlande des Dunes</i>, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>.<br />
+'La Joie,' <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_66'>66</a>, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>.<br />
+'La Louange du Corps humain,' <a href='#Page_227'>227</a>.<br />
+Lamartine, A.M.L. de, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>, <a href='#Page_145'>145</a>.<br />
+'L'Âme de la Ville,' <a href='#Page_95'>95</a>, <a href='#Page_97'>97</a>, <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>.<br />
+'La Mort,' <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>.<br />
+'La Morte,' <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>.<br />
+'L'Amour,' <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>.<br />
+<i>La Multiple Splendeur</i>, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_122'>122</a>, <a href='#Page_126'>126</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>, <a href='#Page_200'>200</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_204'>204</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>, <a href='#Page_217'>217</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_219'>219</a>, <a href='#Page_221'>221</a>, <a href='#Page_223'>223</a>, <a href='#Page_224'>224</a>-<a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_227'>227</a>, <a href='#Page_228'>228</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>, <a href='#Page_233'>233</a>.<br />
+'La Plaine,' <a href='#Page_103'>103</a>.<br />
+'La Pluie,' <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>.<br />
+'La Prière,' <a href='#Page_253'>253</a>.<br />
+'La Recherche,' <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>.<br />
+'L'Art,' <a href='#Page_11'>11</a>.<br />
+'La Science,' <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>.<br />
+Latin races, the, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>.<br />
+'L'Attente,' <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>.<br />
+'L'Aventurier,' <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>.<br />
+'La Vie,' <a href='#Page_215'>215</a>, <a href='#Page_219'>219</a>, <a href='#Page_228'>228</a>.<br />
+'La Ville,' <a href='#Page_97'>97</a>.<br />
+'L'Eau,' <a href='#Page_201'>201</a>-<a href='#Page_202'>202</a>.<br />
+'Le Bazar,' <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>.<br />
+'Le Capitaine,' <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>.<br />
+Le Cardonnel, Georges, <a href='#Page_215'>215</a>-<a href='#Page_216'>216</a>.<br />
+<i>Le Cloître</i>, <a href='#Page_49'>49</a>, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>-<a href='#Page_166'>166</a>, <a href='#Page_168'>168</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_172'>172</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+'Le Départ,' <a href='#Page_103'>103</a>.<br />
+'Le Forgeron,' <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>.<br />
+'Le Gel,' <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>.<br />
+Lemonnier, Camille, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>-<a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_33'>33</a>, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>, <a href='#Page_244'>244</a>.<br />
+'Le Mont,' <a href='#Page_81'>81</a>.<br />
+'L'En-Avant,' <a href='#Page_125'>125</a>, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>.<br />
+'Le Paradis,' <a href='#Page_213'>213</a>, <a href='#Page_236'>236</a>.<br />
+'Le Passeur d'Eau,' <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>.<br />
+'Le Port,' <a href='#Page_103'>103</a>.<br />
+Lerberghe, Charles van, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>, <a href='#Page_26'>26</a>.<br />
+'Le Roc,' <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>, <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>.<br />
+'L'Erreur,' <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Apparus dans mes Chemins</i>, <a href='#Page_66'>66</a>, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>, <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Aubes</i>, <a href='#Page_103'>103</a>, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_166'>166</a>-<a href='#Page_167'>167</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Blés Mouvants</i>, <a href='#Page_36'>36</a>, <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>.<br />
+'Les Cultes,' <a href='#Page_203'>203</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Débâcles</i>, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>, <a href='#Page_60'>60</a>, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Campagnes Hallucinées</i>, <a href='#Page_97'>97</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_101'>101</a> ff., <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Flamandes</i>, <a href='#Page_33'>33</a>, <a href='#Page_36'>36</a> ff., <a href='#Page_49'>49</a>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Flambeaux Noirs</i>, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>, <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>, <a href='#Page_11'>11</a>, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>, <a href='#Page_123'>123</a>, <a href='#Page_125'>125</a>, <a href='#Page_132'>132</a>, <a href='#Page_137'>137</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_161'>161</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_186'>186</a>, <a href='#Page_203'>203</a>, <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_206'>206</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_222'>222</a>, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>, <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>, <a href='#Page_233'>233</a>, <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Héros</i>, <a href='#Page_4'>4</a>, <a href='#Page_228'>228</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Heures Claires</i>, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Heures d'Après-midi</i>, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a>, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_239'>239</a>, <a href='#Page_240'>240</a>, <a href='#Page_241'>241</a>, <a href='#Page_241'>241</a>, <a href='#Page_242'>242</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Heures du Soir</i>, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a>, <a href='#Page_242'>242</a>.<br />
+'Les Heures où l'on crée,' <a href='#Page_123'>123</a>.<br />
+'Les Mages,' <a href='#Page_233'>233</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Moines</i>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a> ff., <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>, <a href='#Page_145'>145</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>.<br />
+'Les Nombres,' <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>.<br />
+'Le Sonneur,' <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>.<br />
+'Les Pêcheurs,' <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>.<br />
+'Les Penseurs,' <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Petites Légendes</i>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>.<br />
+'Les Promeneuses,' <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>.<br />
+'Les Rêves,' <a href='#Page_215'>215</a>, <a href='#Page_221'>221</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Rythmes Souverains</i>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_213'>213</a>, <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>, <a href='#Page_236'>236</a>, <a href='#Page_253'>253</a>.<br />
+'Les Saintes,' <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Soirs</i>,<a href='#Page_57'>57</a>, <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>, <a href='#Page_60'>60</a>, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>.<br />
+'Les Spectacles,' <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Tendresses Premières</i>, <a href='#Page_4'>4</a>, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>, <a href='#Page_27'>27</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Vignes de ma Muraille</i>, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>.<br />
+'Les Vieux Maîtres,' <a href='#Page_39'>39</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Villages Illusoires</i>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>-<a href='#Page_71'>71</a>, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>.<br />
+'Les Villes,' <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>, <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Villes Tentaculaires</i>, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a> ff.,<br />
+<a href='#Page_103'>103</a>, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_158'>158</a>, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_166'>166</a>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_205'>205</a>, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>, <a href='#Page_257'>257</a>.<br />
+<i>Les Visages de la Vie</i>, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_66'>66</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_76'>76</a>, <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>, <a href='#Page_95'>95</a>, <a href='#Page_107'>107</a>, <a href='#Page_112'>112</a>, <a href='#Page_152'>152</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_185'>185</a>, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>, <a href='#Page_201'>201</a>-<a href='#Page_202'>202</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_211'>211</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a>.<br />
+'L'Étal,' <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>.<br />
+'Le Tribun,' <a href='#Page_132'>132</a>.<br />
+'Le Verbe,' <a href='#Page_117'>117</a>, <a href='#Page_122'>122</a>, <a href='#Page_126'>126</a>.<br />
+'L'Heure Mauvaise,' <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>, <a href='#Page_59'>59</a>, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a>.<br />
+'L'Impossible,' <a href='#Page_137'>137</a>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a>, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a>.<br />
+Locomotives, <a href='#Page_124'>124</a>, <a href='#Page_125'>125</a>.<br />
+London, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_90'>90</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>.<br />
+Louvain, <a href='#Page_31'>31</a>.<br />
+Love, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_66'>66</a>, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_170'>170</a>-<a href='#Page_173'>173</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_221'>221</a>, <a href='#Page_223'>223</a>-<a href='#Page_224'>224</a>, <a href='#Page_230'>230</a>, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a> ff.<br />
+<br />
+MACHINERY, <a href='#Page_74'>74</a>, <a href='#Page_81'>81</a>-<a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_84'>84</a> ff.,<br />
+<a href='#Page_155'>155</a>, <a href='#Page_206'>206</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>.<br />
+Madness, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a> ff., <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>.<br />
+Maeterlinck, Maurice, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_26'>26</a>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>, <a href='#Page_213'>213</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+<i>Maison du Peuple, La</i>, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>.<br />
+Mallarmé, Stéphane, <a href='#Page_144'>144</a>.<br />
+Manchester, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+'Ma Race,' <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>, <a href='#Page_35'>35</a>.<br />
+Marriage, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a> ff., <a href='#Page_243'>243</a>.<br />
+Martyrs, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>.<br />
+'Méditation,' <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>.<br />
+Mendès, Catulle, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>.<br />
+Merrill, Stuart, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>.<br />
+Messel, Alfred, <a href='#Page_87'>87</a>.<br />
+Metaphors, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>, <a href='#Page_136'>136</a>, <a href='#Page_137'>137</a>, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_156'>156</a>, <a href='#Page_157'>157</a>, <a href='#Page_160'>160</a>.<br />
+Metaphysics, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>, <a href='#Page_203'>203</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_215'>215</a>, <a href='#Page_216'>216</a>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a>, <a href='#Page_236'>236</a>.<br />
+Meunier, Constantin, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>.<br />
+Minne, Georges, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>.<br />
+Mockel, Albert, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_48'>48</a>, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_157'>157</a>, <a href='#Page_189'>189</a>, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+Monasteries (<i>see</i> Cloisters).<br />
+Monastery of Bornhem, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>.<br />
+&mdash;of Forges, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>.<br />
+Monet, Claude, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>.<br />
+Money, <a href='#Page_95'>95</a>, <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>-<a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>, <a href='#Page_103'>103</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a> <a href='#Page_201'>201</a>.<br />
+Monistic philosophy, <a href='#Page_202'>202</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+Monks, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a> ff., <a href='#Page_235'>235</a>.<br />
+Mont, Pol de, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>.<br />
+Morality, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_205'>205</a>, <a href='#Page_216'>216</a>, <a href='#Page_217'>217</a>, <a href='#Page_219'>219</a>, <a href='#Page_224'>224</a>.<br />
+Moréas, Jean, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>.<br />
+Motion, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a>, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>, <a href='#Page_217'>217</a>.<br />
+Motor-cars, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_87'>87</a>, <a href='#Page_124'>124</a>.<br />
+'Mourir,' <a href='#Page_60'>60</a>.<br />
+Multitude (<i>see</i> Crowd).<br />
+Munich, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+Music halls, <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>.<br />
+Mysticism, <a href='#Page_214'>214</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+Mystics, the, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a>, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>.<br />
+Mythology, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>.<br />
+<br />
+NATURALISM, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>-<a href='#Page_38'>38</a>, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>.<br />
+Nature, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Page_28'>28</a>, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_96'>96</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_112'>112</a>, <a href='#Page_123'>123</a>, <a href='#Page_125'>125</a>, <a href='#Page_158'>158</a>, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_195'>195</a>, <a href='#Page_200'>200</a>-<a href='#Page_205'>205</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>, <a href='#Page_213'>213</a>, <a href='#Page_239'>239</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_246'>246</a>, <a href='#Page_247'>247</a>, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a>.<br />
+Necessary, the, is the beautiful,<br />
+<a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_218'>218</a>.<br />
+Neologisms, <a href='#Page_154'>154</a>, <a href='#Page_160'>160</a>.<br />
+Neurasthenia, <a href='#Page_56'>56</a> ff., <a href='#Page_118'>118</a>.<br />
+New age, the, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a> ff., <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_206'>206</a>-<a href='#Page_207'>207</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>.<br />
+&mdash;European, the, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>.<br />
+New York, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>.<br />
+Nietzsche, Friedrich, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_66'>66</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_85'>85</a>-<a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_119'>119</a>, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>, <a href='#Page_181'>181</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_218'>218</a>, <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>, <a href='#Page_251'>251</a>.<br />
+<br />
+OMBIAUX, MAURICE DES, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+Onomatopœia, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a>.<br />
+Oppidomagnum, <a href='#Page_103'>103</a>, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <a href='#Page_166'>166</a>-<a href='#Page_167'>167</a>,<br />
+Optimism, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+Organisation, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>, <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>, <a href='#Page_101'>101</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_107'>107</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>, <a href='#Page_118'>118</a>-<a href='#Page_119'>119</a>.<br />
+Orgies, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_39'>39</a>, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>.<br />
+Oxford, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>.<br />
+<br />
+PAN, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>.<br />
+Pan-American, the, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>.<br />
+Pan-European, the, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>.<br />
+Pantheism, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>, <a href='#Page_215'>215</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>.<br />
+Paradise, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>-<a href='#Page_213'>213</a>.<br />
+Paris, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_87'>87</a>, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_174'>174</a>, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a>-<a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+Parnassian poetry, <a href='#Page_48'>48</a>, <a href='#Page_145'>145</a>, <a href='#Page_146'>146</a>.<br />
+Paroxysm, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_188'>188</a>.<br />
+<i>Parsival</i>,<a href='#Page_37'>37</a>.<br />
+Passion, <a href='#Page_48'>48</a>, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_97'>97</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_110'>110</a>, <a href='#Page_117'>117</a>, <a href='#Page_118'>118</a>, <a href='#Page_120'>120</a>-<a href='#Page_123'>123</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_128'>128</a>-<a href='#Page_131'>131</a>, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a>, <a href='#Page_136'>136</a>, <a href='#Page_147'>147</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_159'>159</a>, <a href='#Page_163'>163</a>-<a href='#Page_165'>165</a>, <a href='#Page_168'>168</a>-<a href='#Page_170'>170</a>, <a href='#Page_173'>173</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_179'>179</a>, <a href='#Page_181'>181</a>, <a href='#Page_189'>189</a>, <a href='#Page_194'>194</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>, <a href='#Page_215'>215</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_217'>217</a>, <a href='#Page_227'>227</a>-<a href='#Page_229'>229</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>, <a href='#Page_235'>235</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_238'>238</a>, <a href='#Page_241'>241</a>, <a href='#Page_245'>245</a>, <a href='#Page_251'>251</a>, <a href='#Page_252'>252</a>.<br />
+Past, the, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_26'>26</a>, <a href='#Page_36'>36</a>, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_50'>50</a>-<a href='#Page_53'>53</a>, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a> ff., <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_100'>100</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a>, <a href='#Page_180'>180</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_207'>207</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>.<br />
+Peasants, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>-<a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>-<a href='#Page_103'>103</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_146'>146</a>-<a href='#Page_147'>147</a>, <a href='#Page_247'>247</a>, <a href='#Page_251'>251</a>.<br />
+Pessimism, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+Petöfi, Alexander, <a href='#Page_132'>132</a>.<br />
+Philip II., <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>,<a href='#Page_167'>167</a>-<a href='#Page_169'>169</a>.<br />
+<i>Philippe II.</i>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>,<a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a>-<a href='#Page_169'>169</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+Philosophy, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_151'>151</a>, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_194'>194</a>, <a href='#Page_216'>216</a>, <a href='#Page_236'>236</a>, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+Picard, Edmond, <a href='#Page_33'>33</a>.<br />
+Poetry, the new, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>, <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_83'>83</a> ff., <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>-<a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>, <a href='#Page_119'>119</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_126'>126</a>, <a href='#Page_132'>132</a>, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>, <a href='#Page_137'>137</a>, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_205'>205</a>-<a href='#Page_206'>206</a>, <a href='#Page_216'>216</a>, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a>.<br />
+Poets, the, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>-<a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>-<a href='#Page_209'>209</a>.<br />
+&mdash;of the old school, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_51'>51</a>-<a href='#Page_52'>52</a>, <a href='#Page_81'>81</a> ff., <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>-<a href='#Page_112'>112</a>, <a href='#Page_125'>125</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_129'>129</a>-<a href='#Page_131'>131</a>, <a href='#Page_188'>188</a>, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>, <a href='#Page_192'>192</a>, <a href='#Page_193'>193</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_206'>206</a>, <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>.<br />
+Pol de Mont, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>.<br />
+Poverty, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>-<a href='#Page_103'>103</a>.<br />
+Prague, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>.<br />
+Present, the, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a> ff., <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_52'>52</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a>, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>-<a href='#Page_180'>180</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_201'>201</a>, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>, <a href='#Page_254'>254</a>, <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>.<br />
+Pride, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_219'>219</a>, <a href='#Page_221'>221</a>, <a href='#Page_224'>224</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_230'>230</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>.<br />
+Progress, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>-<a href='#Page_5'>5</a>, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>.<br />
+Prostitutes, <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>.<br />
+Protestantism, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>.<br />
+Pseudoanæsthesia, <a href='#Page_156'>156</a>.<br />
+Psychology, <a href='#Page_47'>47</a>, <a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_180'>180</a>.<br />
+Puritanism, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>.<br />
+<br />
+RABELAIS, FRANÇOIS, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>.<br />
+Realism, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>-<a href='#Page_38'>38</a>, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>.<br />
+Reality, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>-<a href='#Page_38'>38</a>, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>-<a href='#Page_52'>52</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_81'>81</a>, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a>-<a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_131'>131</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_153'>153</a>, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a>, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_185'>185</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_192'>192</a>, <a href='#Page_196'>196</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>, <a href='#Page_201'>201</a>, <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_206'>206</a>, <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>, <a href='#Page_259'>259</a>.<br />
+Recitation, <a href='#Page_122'>122</a>-<a href='#Page_123'>123</a>, <a href='#Page_128'>128</a> ff., <a href='#Page_136'>136</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_139'>139</a>, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a>, <a href='#Page_157'>157</a>.<br />
+Reinhardt, Max, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+Religion, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>, <a href='#Page_47'>47</a>, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_67'>67</a>,&nbsp; <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>,&nbsp; <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>-<a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <a href='#Page_196'>196</a>, <a href='#Page_205'>205</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_211'>211</a>, <a href='#Page_238'>238</a>, <a href='#Page_240'>240</a>, <a href='#Page_257'>257</a>.<br />
+&mdash;, a new, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>.<br />
+Rembrandt, <a href='#Page_11'>11</a>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>.<br />
+<i>Rembrandt</i>, <a href='#Page_2'>2</a>, <a href='#Page_11'>11</a>.<br />
+Renan, Ernest, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a>.<br />
+Renunciation, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>, <a href='#Page_27'>27</a>, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>, <a href='#Page_52'>52</a>.<br />
+Responsibility, <a href='#Page_253'>253</a> ff.<br />
+Revolt, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>, <a href='#Page_42'>42</a>, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_117'>117</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_122'>122</a>, <a href='#Page_142'>142</a>-<a href='#Page_146'>146</a>, <a href='#Page_160'>160</a>, <a href='#Page_169'>169</a>, <a href='#Page_195'>195</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_229'>229</a>, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>.<br />
+Rhapsodists, <a href='#Page_128'>128</a> ff.<br />
+Rhetoricians, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>.<br />
+Rhyme, <a href='#Page_144'>144</a>, <a href='#Page_153'>153</a>, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>.<br />
+Rhythm, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>, <a href='#Page_74'>74</a>, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_95'>95</a>, <a href='#Page_97'>97</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>, <a href='#Page_118'>118</a> ff., <a href='#Page_137'>137</a>, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_146'>146</a> ff., <a href='#Page_153'>153</a>, <a href='#Page_157'>157</a>, <a href='#Page_163'>163</a>, <a href='#Page_173'>173</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_193'>193</a>, <a href='#Page_194'>194</a>, <a href='#Page_201'>201</a>, <a href='#Page_238'>238</a>, <a href='#Page_247'>247</a>, <a href='#Page_251'>251</a>, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>.<br />
+&mdash;of life, the, <a href='#Page_5'>5</a>, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_11'>11</a>, <a href='#Page_117'>117</a> ff.<br />
+Rilke, Rainer Maria, <a href='#Page_154'>154</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+<i>Ring, The</i>, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>.<br />
+Rodenbach, Georges, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>, <a href='#Page_26'>26</a>, <a href='#Page_39'>39</a>.<br />
+Rodin, Auguste, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+Rolland, Romain, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>,<br />
+Romains, Jules, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>-<a href='#Page_257'>257</a>.<br />
+Roman Catholicism, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_26'>26</a>, <a href='#Page_31'>31</a>, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>-<a href='#Page_166'>166</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_168'>168</a>-<a href='#Page_169'>169</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>.<br />
+Romanticism, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>.<br />
+Romanticists, the, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>, <a href='#Page_147'>147</a>.<br />
+Rome, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>.<br />
+Rops, Félicien, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+Rubens, Peter Paul, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>.<br />
+Rubinstein, Ida, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+Ruskin, John, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>.<br />
+Russia, <a href='#Page_257'>257</a>.<br />
+Russians, the, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>.<br />
+Rysselberghe, Théo van, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+<br />
+ST. AMAND, <a href='#Page_27'>27</a>-<br />
+Saint-Cloud, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+'Saint Georges,' <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>.<br />
+Sainte-Barbe, College of, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>-<a href='#Page_26'>26</a>, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>, <a href='#Page_213'>213</a>.<br />
+St. Petersburg, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>.<br />
+Saints, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>.<br />
+'S'amoindrir,' <a href='#Page_60'>60</a>.<br />
+Scandinavia, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+Scheldt, the, <a href='#Page_27'>27</a>, <a href='#Page_28'>28</a>.<br />
+Schiller, Friedrich, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>,<a href='#Page_158'>158</a>, <a href='#Page_160'>160</a>, <a href='#Page_168'>168</a>.<br />
+Schlaf, Johannes, <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>.<br />
+Scholars, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>.<br />
+Science, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a>, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>, <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>, <a href='#Page_205'>205</a>-<a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a>.<br />
+Sea, the, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>, <a href='#Page_103'>103</a>, <a href='#Page_201'>201</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_202'>202</a>, <a href='#Page_247'>247</a>, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a>.<br />
+Selfishness, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_223'>223</a>.<br />
+Sensations, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>-<a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>,<a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_120'>120</a>, <a href='#Page_125'>125</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_130'>130</a>, <a href='#Page_164'>164</a>, <a href='#Page_188'>188</a>, <a href='#Page_189'>189</a>, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>, <a href='#Page_192'>192</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_202'>202</a>, <a href='#Page_203'>203</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_240'>240</a>.<br />
+Sensuality, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_98'>98</a>, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_170'>170</a>-<a href='#Page_172'>172</a>, <a href='#Page_241'>241</a>, <a href='#Page_245'>245</a>.<br />
+Sex, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a> ff.<br />
+Shakespeare, William, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_163'>163</a>.<br />
+Signac, Paul, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+Silence, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>-<a href='#Page_46'>46</a>, <a href='#Page_117'>117</a>, <a href='#Page_122'>122</a>, <a href='#Page_130'>130</a>, <a href='#Page_214'>214</a>, <a href='#Page_239'>239</a><br />
+'Si Morne,' <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>.<br />
+Social feeling, <a href='#Page_83'>83</a>, <a href='#Page_110'>110</a>.<br />
+&mdash;problem, the, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_101'>101</a> ff., <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>.<br />
+Socialism, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>, <a href='#Page_224'>224</a>.<br />
+Society, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+Solitude, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>, <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_81'>81</a>, <a href='#Page_83'>83</a>, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>, <a href='#Page_112'>112</a>, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a>.<br />
+Sonnets, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>.<br />
+Soul, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a>.<br />
+'Sous les Prétoriens,' <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>.<br />
+Spain, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>, <a href='#Page_191'>191</a>.<br />
+Spaniards, the, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>.<br />
+Stappen, van der, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+Stevens, Alfred, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+Strauss, David, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>.<br />
+Suicide, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>, <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>.<br />
+Superman, the, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>.<br />
+Symbolism, <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a> ff.<br />
+Symbolists, the, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a> ff., <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>.<br />
+Symbols, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>,<a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>, <a href='#Page_47'>47</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_71'>71</a>, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_107'>107</a>, <a href='#Page_144'>144</a>, <a href='#Page_163'>163</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_165'>165</a>, <a href='#Page_168'>168</a>, <a href='#Page_195'>195</a>, <a href='#Page_201'>201</a>, <a href='#Page_202'>202</a>, <a href='#Page_213'>213</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_218'>218</a>, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a>, <a href='#Page_247'>247</a>, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a>.<br />
+Swinburne, Algernon Charles, <a href='#Page_160'>160</a>.<br />
+<br />
+TAMERLAINE, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>.<br />
+<i>Tannhäuser</i>,<a href='#Page_37'>37</a>.<br />
+Teutonic elements, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a>, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_39'>39</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_146'>146</a>, <a href='#Page_159'>159</a>, <a href='#Page_194'>194</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>.<br />
+Thames, the, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>.<br />
+<i>Thyl Ulenspiegel</i>, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a>, <a href='#Page_168'>168</a>.<br />
+Toledo, <a href='#Page_191'>191</a>.<br />
+Tolstoy, Leo, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>.<br />
+Torpedo-boats, <a href='#Page_87'>87</a>.<br />
+<i>Toute la Flandre</i>, <a href='#Page_4'>4</a>, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>, <a href='#Page_27'>27</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_168'>168</a>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_244'>244</a>, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>.<br />
+Town (<i>see</i> City).<br />
+Tradition, <a href='#Page_26'>26</a>, <a href='#Page_27'>27</a>, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_145'>145</a>, <a href='#Page_146'>146</a>, <a href='#Page_243'>243</a>.<br />
+Travel, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>-<a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_124'>124</a>, <a href='#Page_201'>201</a>.<br />
+'Truandailles,' <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>.<br />
+Truth, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>-<a href='#Page_38'>38</a>.<br />
+Turner, J.M.W., <a href='#Page_152'>152</a>.<br />
+<br />
+UNITY, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_202'>202</a>, <a href='#Page_203'>203</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>, <a href='#Page_215'>215</a> ff., <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_252'>252</a>.<br />
+Université Libre, Brussels, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>.<br />
+Unknown, the, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_212'>212</a>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a>, <a href='#Page_224'>224</a>.<br />
+'Un Matin,' <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>.<br />
+'Un Soir' (<i>Au Bord de la Route</i>), <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>.<br />
+'Un Soir' (<i>Les Forces Tumultueuses</i>), <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_186'>186</a>, <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>.<br />
+Utopia, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a>, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>.<br />
+<br />
+VANDERVELDE, EMIL, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>.<br />
+Vellay, Charles, <a href='#Page_215'>215</a>-<a href='#Page_216'>216</a>.<br />
+Venice, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Verhaeren, Émile, born at St. Amand on the<br />
+Scheldt, 1855, <a href='#Page_27'>27</a>; his boyhood, <a href='#Page_27'>27</a>-<a href='#Page_28'>28</a>; educated at<br />
+the College of Sainte-Barbe in Ghent, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>-<a href='#Page_26'>26</a>;<br />
+studies jurisprudence at Louvain, <a href='#Page_31'>31</a>; called to the<br />
+bar in Brussels, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>; his first verses, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>, <a href='#Page_33'>33</a>, <a href='#Page_145'>145</a><br />
+ff.; publication of <i>Les Flamandes,</i> <a href='#Page_33'>33</a> ff.;<br />
+resides for three weeks in the monastery of<br />
+Forges, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>; publication of <i>Les Moines</i>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a> ff.;<br />
+his health breaks down, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a> ff., <a href='#Page_237'>237</a>; his illness<br />
+is described in <i>Les Soirs, Les Débâcles, Les<br />
+Flambeaux Noirs,</i> and <i>Au Bord de la Route</i>, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a><br />
+ff.; his travels, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>-<a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_124'>124</a>; he is obsessed<br />
+by the atmosphere of London, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>; his recovery is<br />
+symbolised in some of the poems of <i>Les Villages<br />
+Illusoires</i>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>-<a href='#Page_71'>71</a>; his marriage, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a> ff., <a href='#Page_243'>243</a>;<br />
+his connection with the Labour Party and<br />
+Socialism, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>-<a href='#Page_94'>94</a>; the Flemish element in his<br />
+style, <a href='#Page_154'>154</a>-<a href='#Page_155'>155</a>; his technique, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a> ff.; stage<br />
+performances of his dramas, <a href='#Page_164'>164</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>-<a href='#Page_175'>175</a>; how he<br />
+recites his poetry, <a href='#Page_122'>122</a>-<a href='#Page_123'>123</a>; he resides at<br />
+Caillou-qui-bique and Saint-Cloud, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_248'>248</a>-<a href='#Page_249'>249</a>; his personal appearance, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, <a href='#Page_251'>251</a>; his<br />
+personality, <a href='#Page_244'>244</a> ff.<br />
+<br />
+Verlaine, Paul, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_120'>120</a>, <a href='#Page_142'>142</a>, <a href='#Page_144'>144</a>, <a href='#Page_243'>243</a>.<br />
+'Vers,' <a href='#Page_60'>60</a>.<br />
+'Vers la Mer,' <a href='#Page_152'>152</a>.<br />
+'Vers le Cloître,' <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>.<br />
+'Vers le Futur,' <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_205'>205</a>, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>.<br />
+<i>Vers libre</i>, the, <a href='#Page_74'>74</a>, <a href='#Page_144'>144</a> ff., <a href='#Page_163'>163</a>.<br />
+<i>Vers ternaire, le</i>, <a href='#Page_147'>147</a>.<br />
+Vielé-Griffin, Francis, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.<br />
+Vienna, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.<br />
+Vitality, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_33'>33</a>, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_119'>119</a>, <a href='#Page_131'>131</a>, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>, <a href='#Page_200'>200</a>-<a href='#Page_202'>202</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_206'>206</a>, <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.<br />
+<br />
+WAGNER, RICHARD, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>.<br />
+Walloons, the, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.<br />
+Weyden, Roger van der, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>.<br />
+Whistler, J. M'Neill, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>.<br />
+Whitman, Walt, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>-<a href='#Page_109'>109</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_132'>132</a>, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>-<a href='#Page_191'>191</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_227'>227</a> <a href='#Page_257'>257</a>.<br />
+Will, the, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_60'>60</a>-<a href='#Page_62'>62</a>, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>-<a href='#Page_74'>74</a>, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_181'>181</a>, <a href='#Page_194'>194</a>-<a href='#Page_195'>195</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>, <a href='#Page_203'>203</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>,<br />
+<a href='#Page_223'>223</a>.<br />
+<i>Wisdom and Destiny</i>, <a href='#Page_213'>213</a>.<br />
+Woman, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a>-<a href='#Page_173'>173</a>, <a href='#Page_192'>192</a>, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a> ff.<br />
+Women, Belgian, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>.<br />
+<br />
+YPRES, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>.<br />
+<br />
+ZOLA, ÉMILE, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>.<br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Émile Verhaeren, by Stefan Zweig
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