Émile Verhaeren

THE RHYTHM OF LIFE

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.

THE NEW PATHOS

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.

VERHAEREN'S POETIC METHOD

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 œuvres 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.