Émile Verhaeren

THE MONKS

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 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.

THE BREAK-DOWN

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 le 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.

FLIGHT INTO THE WORLD

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.