Émile Verhaeren

VERHAEREN'S DRAMA

Émile Verhaeren's dramas seem to stand outside his work. Verhaeren is essentially a lyric poet. His whole feeling springs from lyric enthusiasm, and all neighbouring domains are merely sources whose strength flows into and feeds this one vital instinct. Verhaeren has almost always used the dramatic and the epic only as a means, never as an end in themselves: from the epic he has taken over into the vast sweep of his dithyrambic poems its broad, calm development, and from the drama the swift, abrupt contrast of transitions. The dramatic and the epic only serve him as a tonic, as a means to strengthen the blood of his lyric art. Although Verhaeren beside his lyric work has written dramas—four up to the present—these, in the edifice of his complete production, must be appreciated from a different point of view: from an architectural point of view. For the dramas are to him, in a certain sense, only a survey, a concentration of individual lyric crises, a synopsis of certain ideal complexes which have occupied some moment of his past; they are final settlements; the last point in lines of development; milestones of individual epochs. All that in the lyric poems, which never systematically bounded a domain, fell apart, is here made to converge to the focus of a programme. The lyric juxtaposition is fused into an inner relationship, the circle of ideas is co-ordinated like a picture in the frame of a play. Verhaeren's four tragedies represent four spheres of a conception of the universe: the religious, the social, the national, and the ethical. Le Cloître is a re-creation of the book of verse Les Moines, is the tragedy of Catholicism; Les Aubes is a condensation of the sociological trilogy Les Villes Tentaculaires, Les Campagnes Hallucinées, Les Villages Illusoires. Philip II. shapes the tragedy of the Antichrist, the contrast of Spain and Belgium, of sensuality and asceticism. And Hélène de Sparte, which in its outward form manifests a return to classicism, handles purely moral, eternal problems. As far as their contents are concerned, Verhaeren's dramas show no deviation, no change of the inner centre of gravity, and his new dramatic style is in perfect harmony with his new lyric style. For just as on the one hand he has used the dramatic element as a substance of his lyric work, here in his dramas he has transmuted the lyric element to a dramatic element. Here, too, we have nothing but visions intensified into exaltation. Here, as everywhere else, Verhaeren can only create by enthusiasm. What goads him on is the lyric moment in his enthusiasm, that second of the highest tension when passion, if it is not to shatter the frame of its generator, must have explosive words. The characters of his dramas are never anything but symbols of great passions, the bridge for this ascension of the exaltation. To him the action is no more than the way to the crises, to those seconds when some mighty force seizes on these characters and forces them to cry out. Whole scenes seem to be only awaiting for the moment when some one shall rise and turn to the crowd, wrestle with it and overthrow it, or be himself dashed to pieces.

The style of Verhaeren's dramas is purely lyrical; the pace is throughout passionate and feverish; and this method, which runs counter to all dramatic canons, was bound organically to create a new technique. The French drama had hitherto known only the rhymed Alexandrine or prose. In Verhaeren's dramas—for the first time to my knowledge—prose and verse (verse which is 'free' both as regards rhythm and rhyme) are throughout promiscuously mixed. Mixed, but not as in Shakespeare, in whose plays verse and prose alternate in individual scenes and establish, so to speak, a social stratification, serving-men speaking in prose and their masters in verse: in Verhaeren the prose passages are the broad, resting foundations of the action; the curved bowls, so to speak, from which the holy fire of the exaltation flames. His characters express their calm in prose, pass from calm to excitement, and in this intensification speak a language which imperceptibly merges into a poem. Not till their passion breaks out do they speak in verse, in those seconds, as it were, when their soul begins to vibrate; and in these passages one cannot help thinking of an aeroplane which is first driven along the ground and moves with ever greater speed till suddenly it soars aloft. In Verhaeren's drama the characters speak an ever purer language the more poetical they become; music breaks with their passion from their souls; just as many people who behave coarsely and awkwardly in ordinary life, in great moments suddenly achieve a bearing of heroic beauty. This embodies the idea that in enthusiasm a man discovers in himself another and a purer language; that passion and the yearning to free oneself from an immeasurable and intolerable earthly burden make a poet of any man. This idea is in harmony with Verhaeren's whole conception of the universe, his idea that the man swept away by passion and enthusiasm is on a higher plane than the critic with his lack of hot feeling; that receptivity for great sensations constitutes, so to speak, a scale of moral values. And the stage performances have shown that this new style is justified, that the transition from prose to verse, occurring as it does contemporaneously with the ascension from calm to passion, passes practically unnoticed by the audience, which is equivalent to saying that when put to the test the method was recognised as necessary.

And it is by passion, this innermost flame of Verhaeren's poetry, that his dramas live too. Their qualities are those of the lyrics; they have, above all, that vast power of vision which sets Philip II. against the tragic landscape of Spain; over the drama of Helen arches the heaven of Greece, blue, and mild, and open like a flower; and behind the tragedy of modern cities unrolls the inflamed scenery of the sky with the black arms of chimneys. And then the immense fervour of the ecstasy which, not in a slow, regular progression, but in savage, convulsive thrusts, whirls the action onward to the moments of the solution.

Thus Verhaeren's first drama derives its strength from the lyric source of a man's accusation of himself. Le Cloître is a paraphrase of Les Moines, the book of the monks. Here again all the characters are gathered together in the cool corridors of a monastery—the gentle, the wild, the feudal, the wrathful, the childlike, the learned monk; here, however, they do not act in isolation, but with all their strength the one against the other. They fight for the prior's chair, which is really the symbol of something higher. For just as in Les Moines every individual monk expressed symbolically some virtue of Catholicism and a distinct idea of God, here the prior's chair decides the question who is the most deserving of God. For his successor the old prior has designated Balthasar, a nobleman whom the monastery has sheltered for years. But he had only taken refuge there because he had killed his own father, thus escaping secular justice, and now he feels the consciousness of his guilt burning, feels the exasperated struggle between his own conscience and the lighter conscience of the others, who have long since forgiven him. And he cannot feel himself free before he has made his confession before the assembled monks, and even then only when he has repeated the confession, against the will of the monastery, to the people, and surrendered himself to the secular judges. The Roman Catholic idea of confession is here wonderfully in agreement with Dostoieffsky's conception of salvation by confession, of deliverance by suffering self-imposed. In three climaxes of equal force at the end of each of the three acts the tragic confession bursts into flame—first born of fear, then of a sense of justice, and at the last positively conceived as a pleasure; and here in these superb lyric ecstasies rest the strong pinions which bear the tragedy.

In the second, the social tragedy Les Aubes, the scenario is the present time. It has the purple scenery of Les Villes Tentaculaires, of the cities with the arms of polypi, which drain the blood of the poor dying country. Beggars, paupers, those who are starving, those who have been evicted, march to Oppidomagnum, the modern industrial city, and besiege it. It is the past once again storming the future. In the lyrical trilogy this struggle had been shaped in a hundred visionary instances; here, however, the bright sky of reconciliation is arched above the battle-field, over the realities hovers the dream. For here the future joins hands with the present. The great tribune, Hérénien, breaks the backbone of this battle and shows himself the hero of a new morality by secretly admitting the enemy into the city—in the old sense the action of a traitor—by yielding and thus transforming the struggle into a reconciliation. He is the tragic bearer of the moral idea that enmity may be overcome by goodness, and he falls as the first martyr of his faith. Verhaeren's social conception, his superb description of realities, here merge slowly in a Utopia; the dawns of the new days begin to shine above the pasts that are dead; the din of rebellion fades away in harmony. This drama, like the others, is far remote from the possibilities of the majority of theatres, because of the fact that here too an ethical idea is expressed with all the glow and ecstasy which as a rule in modern dramas is only found in the utterance of erotic desire.

The third tragedy, Philip II., is a national drama, although its scene is not laid in Flanders. Much as Charles de Coster in his Thyl Ulenspiegel had, with a Fleming's deadly hatred, seen in Philip II. the hereditary enemy of liberty, Verhaeren, who with the lyric poetry of his Toute la Flandre became the representative singer of his native land, painted this gloomy figure with hatred. Philip II. is here, as in Thyl Ulenspiegel, the hard, inflexible king who would fain put life out because it burns too red for him, who wishes to have the world as cool and marble-like as the chambers of the Escorial. Here of a sudden the reverse side of Roman Catholicism, whose passion was immortalised in Le Cloître, is rent open; its pitilessness and asceticism; its obstinate effort to overthrow the irrefragable joy of life. Don Carlos, however, is the fervent friend of the people, the friend of Flanders; he is the will to enjoyment, to merry moods, to passion. And this struggle between the 'yes' and the 'no' of life, this fight of Verhaeren's own lyric crisis, this fight between the denial and the passionate approval of enjoyment—at bottom, toe, the deepest cause of the war between Spain and the Netherlands—is here symbolised in characters. Of course, any comparison with Schiller's Don Carlos must tell against Verhaeren, for the German drama is far more dramatic and conceived on a scale of greater magnificence; but Verhaeren did not aim at a complete rounding off, at a plenitude of characters; all that he wanted was to show these two feelings in their struggle with each other, the enthusiasm of life and its suppression by force. A comparison with Schiller's drama best shows Verhaeren's disregard of dramatic canons, and at the same time the immense new lyric power of the play. For Spain is here seen with a strength and intensity of vision which is probably without a parallel in tragedy. The cold, hypocritical atmosphere can be felt; and better than from words the character of Philip can be perceived in that one silent scene in which he suddenly appears stealthily creeping to watch his son in the arms of the countess, and then, without a gleam in his rigid eyes, without the slightest movement of anger, vanishes again into the dark. Behind him, however, behind the spy and the eavesdropper, glides another shadow, the monk of the Inquisition: the eavesdropper is himself shadowed, the ruler is himself ruled. Visions like these, with the ecstasy of certain scenes, are the strongest motive power in Verhaeren's poetic construction. His dramatic art, like the art of his lyrics, does not rise in a steady ascent, but in sudden wild leaps and starts.

Only in his last drama, Hélène de Sparte, has Verhaeren come nearer to the accepted conception of the dramatic. That is characteristic of his organic development. For now that he is in the years when passion of necessity cools, harmony grows dear to him; and he who through all the years of his youth and prime was a revolutionary, now recognises the necessity of inner laws. By its mere intellectual substance this tragedy expresses the veering round: it is nothing else than the longing from passion to harmony, Helen's flight from adventures to repose. And the return is to be found again in the verse, for Verhaeren here for the first time takes up the traditional French metre; his form, though yet free, approaches the Alexandrine. The tragedy of Helen is the tragedy of beauty. Helen is one of those antique characters who in Greek literature were only sketched in fleeting lines, characters whom a modern poet is now entitled to fill in with his own fate. For from the Greek sources we really knew nothing about her personal fate; we only knew the effect she exercised, only the reflection of her personality on others, not that of others on her. She was the queen who inflamed all men; who was the cause of great wars; the woman for whose sake murder on murder was committed; who was snatched from one bed to another; for love of whom Achilles arose from the dead; who passed her life circled by disastrous passion. But whether she herself shared these passions, whether she grew by them or suffered by them, the poets tell us nothing. Verhaeren in his drama has now attempted to depict the tragedy of the woman who endures fearful suffering because she is always desired in lust and no more; who is consumed by the torture of being ever robbed from lover by lover; of never knowing the look of pure eyes, calm converse, quiet breathing; who is cursed always to stand at the pyre of passion, with the flames of men always blazing round her. Whoever looks at her at once desires her, snatches her; none waits and asks whether he serves her will; she is robbed like a chattel; she glides from hand to hand. In Verhaeren's drama Helen has returned home, a woman tired, tired of all unrest, of all her triumphs, tired of love; a woman hating her own beauty because it creates unrest, longing for nothing but old age, when none shall desire her more and her days shall be calm. Menelaus has brought her home, rescued her from all that stifling steam of criminal passion; now she would breathe quietly, live calm days, and be faithful to him. She desires no more than this. No passion can tempt her more. 'I have seen the flaring of so many flames that now I love only the hearth's glow and the lamp' is the expression of her poignant resignation. But fate will not yet let her go. Verhaeren has here seized on the great idea of the Greeks that everything that is superhuman on earth, every excessive gift, even that of beauty, is pursued as a hybrid by the envy of the gods, and must be paid for with pain. Too great beauty is no profit, but a tragic gift. And hardly has Helen returned, to rest and be happy, to be like everybody else, than new clouds roll themselves up above her head. Her own brother desires her; her enemy Electra desires her; her husband is murdered for her sake; and the old fearful battle threatens to break out anew for the possession of her body. Now she flees, away from men, out into nature. And here again, with the vision of genius, Verhaeren approaches Greek feeling. The forest is not dead to him, but animate; life does not stop at human beings; fauns emerge from the bushes, naiads from the rivers, bacchantes from the mountains, and all swarm round Helen in her despair, luring her to their lust, till she flees to Zeus in death.

It is characteristic of Verhaeren that he has made even this tragedy, the tragedy of Helen, anerotic, or better anti-erotic. Perhaps the slight interest which has hitherto been manifested in Verhaeren's dramas, and indeed partly in his whole work, may be ascribed to the fact that, in comparison with the other poets of his day, he has held himself aloof from erotic subjects, that the problem of love has only recently, in the years of his maturity, begun to interest him as a theme for his art. From the first Verhaeren concentrated all the passion which others lavished on the erotic in purely intellectual things, in enthusiasm, in admiration. In his dramas woman plays an almost subordinate rôle, and Le Cloître is perhaps the only important drama of our days which does not show a single woman among its characters and in its inner circle of problems. By this fact alone his dramatic aim strays too far from the interests of our public. For it is from a purely intellectual conflict that Verhaeren seeks to disengage that height and heat of passion which hitherto was known only in erotic themes; and therefore the exaltation strikes the majority of an audience as strange, and leaves them unmoved. All our contemporaries who seek art only in the theatre are too indifferent and timid to be snatched up, for a purely ethical problem, into an ecstasy so burning, so persistently lit with convulsive lightnings. This is the only explanation I can find for the opposition to Verhaeren's dramas, which are so full of beauty and of living, dramatic, passionate situations, and which, above all, contain something new, a new dramatic style. This very kindling of prose to verse was a revelation. But the whole dramatic aim is different in Verhaeren to that which obtains on the stage of to-day. His aim is not to excite interest, not to produce fear and compassion, but enthusiasm. He does not wish to occupy the minds of his audience, but to carry them away into his rhythm. He wishes to make them drunk with his great excitement, because only he who gazes in enthusiasm is capable of recognising these supreme passions; he wishes to make the spectators as feverish as the characters they see before them on the stage; he wishes to make their blood fiery; wishes to raise them above all cool, calm, and critical contemplation. His whole temperament, which drives along in the direction of superabundance; his art, which only fulfils its purpose in ecstasy; require impassioned actors and an impassioned audience. To create the ideal atmosphere which Verhaeren demands for his dramas would require an actor of kindred genius who should have no fear of being called emotional, and who would hurl the verses down like cataracts, emphasising like a demagogue and at the same time unfolding all the magnificence of the rhythm. For the poet asks for nothing save a feeling of enthusiasm corresponding to that which first created the poem in him. His intention is not to convince by logic, not to dazzle by pictures, but to whip up and carry along with him into that ultimate dizzy feeling which to him is alone identical with the highest form of the feeling of life—into passion.

In Germany Le Cloître,[1] as staged by Max Reinhardt, and again in the Deutsches Volkstheater in Vienna, has conquered the interest of a literary public and triumphed unreservedly over the obstacle of its own strangeness. There has been an exemplary production of Philip II. in the Munich Künstlertheater; Hélène de Sparte on the other hand has not yet found the setting it demands. As bodied forth in Paris by Ida Rubinstein, with decorations of a grandiose barbarism by Bakst, with a ground-colouring of music, it was effective more by the external magnificence of this somewhat sensationally advertised mise en scène than by its poetic qualities, smothered as they were by the accessories. A production which shall do justice to the play, leaving its pure lyric line unbedizened with glaring arabesques, is still waiting as a task for some actor-manager of genius who possesses that highest and rarest quality of being able to subordinate himself to the utterance, who is anxious not to ruin a noble simplicity by a spurious plenitude.

PART III

COSMIC POETRY

The poetic conquest of life represents, as it were, a process of combustion. Every poet feeds the flame of his inner being, his artistic passion, with the things of the world around him, transmutes them into flame, and himself shoots on high and dies down with them. The more the flame cools with the feebler circulation of the blood, the weaker grows this fire, and gradually the pure crystals, the residue from this battle of the inner flame with the things of reality, are separated from this process of combustion. Verhaeren's work was in his youth and prime a flame exceedingly hot, lawless, free, and flaring like the very years of his youth and prime. Now, however, in the work of his fifties, now that passion has cooled, the yearning is revealed to find the goal of this passion, the inherent lawfulness of this unrest. Enthusiasm for the present, poetic consumption of the world in visions without the residue of philosophy and logical knowledge, no longer suffice him. For all deeper contemplation of the present is unthinkable without an exceeding of its limits: all that is, is at the same time something that has been and something that will be. Nothing is so entirely the present that it is not intimately connected with the past and the future. The eternal and the permanent is the inward side of all phenomena. And the more the poet turns his visions from the exterior, from the pictorial, to the inner world, to psychology, the more he descends from external phenomena to the roots of forces, the more he must apprehend the permanent behind the transitoriness of things. No perception of a contemporary state is fertile unless it is impregnated with the perception of laws that are independent of time, unless the changing phenomena are recognised as transformations of the unchangeable primordial phenomenon. This transition from maturity to age, from contemplation to knowledge, corresponds to a new artistic transition in the incomparably organic development of this poet. A transition: no longer a re-formation, but a formation which moves both forwards and backwards, which is at the same time an evolution and a retrogression, just as the poetic form of Verhaeren's poetry no longer undergoes a transformation, but is petrified. What a man has acquired in the years of his prime is an inalienable possession; its value can be further increased only by knowledge, by the appraising of the possession. It may be said that a man who has passed his prime experiences nothing new: the static equilibrium is realised; what has been experienced is only the better understood. The experience is no longer a struggle, no longer a state of unrest, something that slips away; it is a possession. What passion has fought for and won with a leap is now set in order and appraised at its true value, by calm. This transition from youth to age is in Verhaeren, to use Nietzsche's phrase, a transition from the Dionysiac to the Apollinarian, from a plethora to harmony. His yearning is now vivre ardent et clair, to live passionately, but at the same time clearly to preserve his inner fire, but at the same time to lose his unrest. Verhaeren's books in these years grow more and more crystalline; the fire in them no longer blazes openly like a flaring pyre, but glitters and sparkles as with the thousand facets of a precious stone. The smoke and the unrest of the fire die down, and now the pure residues are clarified. Visions have become ideas, the wrestling earthly energies are now eternal immutable laws.

The will of these last years, of these last works, is the will to realise a cosmic poem. In the trilogy of the cities Verhaeren had laid hold on the universe as it lies around us to-day; he had snatched it to him and overcome it. In passionate visions he had shaped its image, achieved its form, and now it stood beside the actual world as his own. But a poet who would create the whole world for himself, the whole infinite vista of its possibilities by the side of its actualities, must give it everything: not only its form, not only its face, but its soul as well, its organism, its origin, and its evolution. He must not merely apprehend its pictorial aspect and its mechanical energy, he must give it an encyclopædic form. He must create a mythology for it, a new morality, a new history, a new system of dynamics, a new system of ethics. Above it or in it he must place a God who acts and transforms. He must fashion it in his poetry not only as something that is, not only as something in the present, but as something that has been and is becoming, something that is part and parcel of the past and of the future too. It must ring out the old and ring in the new. And this will to create a cosmic poem is to be found in Verhaeren's new and most precious books—Les Visages de la Vie, Les Forces Tumultueuses, La Multiple Splendeur, Les Rythmes Souverains—-books which by their mere title announce the effort to include the dome of heaven in their vast embrace. They are the pillars of a mighty structure, the great stanzas of the cosmic poem. They are no longer a conversation of the poet with himself and contemporary feeling; they are a pronouncement addressed to all the ages. S'élancer vers l'avenir is the longing they express: a turning away from all the pasts to speak to the future. The lyric element in them steps beyond the boundary-line of poetry. It kindles the neighbouring domains of philosophy and religion, kindles them to new possibilities. For not only æsthetically would Verhaeren come to an understanding with realities; not by poetry only would he overcome the new possibilities; he would fain master them morally and religiously as well. The task of these last and most important books of verse is no longer to apprehend the universe in individual phenomena, but to impress its new form on a new law. In Les Visages de la Vie Verhaeren has in individual poems glorified the eternal forces, gentleness, joy, strength, activity, enthusiasm; in Les Forces Tumultueuses the mysterious dynamics of union shining through all forms of the real; in La Multiple Splendeur the ethics of admiration, the joyous relationship of man with things and with himself; and in Les Rythmes Souverains he has celebrated the most illustrious heroes of his ideals. For life has long since ceased to be for him mere gazing and contemplation:

Car vivre, c'est prendre et donner avec liesse
...................avide et haletant
Devant la vie intense et sa rouge sagesse![1]

Description, poetic analysis, has gradually grown into a hymn, into 'laudi del cielo, del mare, del mondo,' into songs of the whole world and of the ego, and of the harmony of the world's beauty in its union with the ego. The lyrical has here become cosmic feeling, knowledge has become ecstasy. Over and above the knowledge that there cannot be anything isolated, that everything is arranged and obeys the last uniform law of the universe, over and above this knowledge rises something still higher—over the contemplation of the world rises faith in the feeling of the world. The glorious optimism of these works ends in the religious confidence that all contrasts will be harmonised; that man will more and more be conscious of the earth; that every individual must discover his own law of the world in himself, the law that makes it possible for him to apprehend everything lyrically, with enthusiasm, with joy.

Here Verhaeren's poetry far exceeds the boundary-line of literature; it becomes philosophy and it becomes religion. Verhaeren was from the very first an eminently religious man. In his childhood Catholicism was the deepest feeling of his life, but this Catholicism had perished in the crises of his adolescence, his religious feeling had given way to the rapt contemplation of all new things, to ecstasy inspired by the aspect of life. But now, when Verhaeren returns to the metaphysical, the old yearning is reawakened. The old gods are dead for him; Pan is dead, and Christ too. Now he feels the need of finding a new faith, a new certainty, a new God for the new sensation, this identity of I and world. The new conflicts have created a longing in him for a new equilibrium; his stormily religious feeling, determined to believe, needs new cognition. The image of the world would be incomplete without the God who rules it. All his yearning goes out to this God, and it finds its fulfilment. And this knowledge gives him the highest joy life can have, the loftiest pride life can bestow:

Voici l'heure qui bout de sang et de jeunesse.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Un vaste espoir, venu de l'inconnu, déplace
L'équilibre ancien dont les âmes sont lasses;
La nature paraît sculpter
Un visage nouveau à son éternité.[2]

To chisel this new face of God is the aim of his last and most mature works, in which the obstinate 'no' of his youth has become the loud exulting 'yes' of life, in which the great possibilities of old have become an unsuspected opulent reality.

THE LYRIC UNIVERSE

If one is to understand Verhaeren's lyric work as a work of art, it must be kept in mind that he is a lyric poet, and a lyric poet only. A lyric poet only, not, however, in the limited sense of one who confines himself to the writing of lyric poems, but of one who, in a lofty and more extensive meaning of the term, transforms everything into emotion, who stands in a lyric relationship with all things, with the whole world. And since the innermost constitution of a man's talent unconsciously acts as the driving tendency, the direction of the aim of his life, his very fate and his conception of the world, since all this is so, the lyric poet that Verhaeren is must of necessity have a lyrical conception of the world, his cosmic feeling must be lyrical. To say that he has confined himself to the lyric style would be to diminish his stature. It is true that in all Verhaeren's imaginative work—and it is of considerable volume—there is no prose. A very thin volume of short stories did indeed appear many years ago and has long been out of print; but how tentative and provisional it was in scope may be seen from the fact that Verhaeren later on turned one of the stories, that of the bell-ringer in the burning tower, into a poem. And I might mention a whole series of poems which at bottom are nothing but short stories, and others again which are saturated with dramatic excitement, quite unlyrical problems, but all of them lyrically conceived. And even in his criticism of art and in that penetrating and beautiful book of his on Rembrandt, in which he represents the organic connection of the artist with his native province almost as a personal experience, the outstanding passages live by their lyric enthusiasm. Many of the poems again are spiritualised theories of art. The origin of language or the sociological problem of emigration, the economic contrast of agrarianism and industrialism: in an essay such things might be calmly treated, coldly passed in review. But this is characteristic of Verhaeren, that he is unable to take a cold, faint interest in anything: consciously or unconsciously he must be carried away by enthusiasm for the things he contemplates. The ecstasy of his excitement involuntarily whips him out of a slow trot into lyric fervour. Poetry is to him, like his philosophy, like his ethics, a lyrical soaring. It is characteristic of the great lyric poets, of Walt Whitman, Dehmel, Carducci, Rilke, Stefan George, that at a certain height of their artistry they renounce all other than lyric forms. Here, as elsewhere, great things only seem possible of attainment by concentration, only by the poet's freeing himself from the trammels of all other experiments. Great lyric poetry as the art of a life only accrues from the renunciation of all other forms of poetry.

Infinite enthusiasm, le lyrisme universel, a rapt visionary sensation of the earth rolling as it were in an eternal vibration through the cosmos, is the aim of Verhaeren's work. Not to describe the world in isolated poems, not to break it up in impressions, but to feel it as itself a flaring, flaming poem, not to be one who contemplates the world, but one who feels it, this is his highest yearning. A lyric art can only grow to such intentions as these from emotions not felt by other lyrists. It is not, as with most poets, from gentle crepuscular feelings, from vague states of melancholy, that such an impulse is crystallised to lyrical expression; here it is an overflowing fulness of feeling, a bright joy in life, that engenders his poem; an explosion which in the days of his debility was a paroxysm, which as time went on changed to a pure enthusiasm, but which was always an eruption of strength. Lyric art is here a discharge of the whole feeling of life. With Verhaeren the excitement does not sting the individual nerve; it spreads electrically, inflames the blood, contracts the muscles, produces an immense pressure, and then discharges the whole energy of a body saturated with health and strength. The will to discharge strength is the basic form of Verhaeren's lyric emotion. His aim is to instil inspiration—first of all into himself (since inspiration always represents a higher state of ecstasy), and then into others. His lyric art is above all a launching of himself into exaltation, 'le pouvoir magique de s'hypnotiser soi-même.'[1] He talks himself into passion, gives himself that impulsion which then bears others along with him. It is not a lack, a privation, not a complaint or a wish that his work expresses; it is a plethora, a superfluity of riches, a pressure. It is not a warding off of life but an eternal leaping at it. His poetry has not the modest longing of music to lure to reveries; it does not, like painting, seek to represent something: it would act like fiery wine; it would make all feelings strong and glowing, sink all hindrances, produce that sensation of lightness, of blessedness, that quivering intoxication which conquers all the heaviness of earth. His intention is to produce this state of drunkenness, 'non seulement la glorification de la nature mais la glorification même d'une vision intérieure.' And his attitude is not plaintive or defensive, it is the great spirited attitude of a hand raised and pointing out, 'regardez!' the adjuring attitude, 'dites!' or one that fires and animates, 'en avant!' but it is always a gesture from the poet's self towards something, always a swinging of his arms away from himself into the universe, always a pressing forward, a snatching away of himself from matter. And any one who really feels these poems feels, when the last line is read, that his blood is beating faster, feels that his body calls for exercise, feels the inspiration impelling him to action. And this is the highest intention of Verhaeren's lyrical poetry, to animate, to quicken the blood, to fire the heart, to intensify vitality, to increase tenfold the sensation of life.

But not only in this basic emotion is Verhaeren sundered from all those other poets who fashion their verses from sadness, sickly longing, amorousness, and melancholy. Verhaeren's lyric poetry breathes in other realms, in another atmosphere. Verhaeren is what I should like to call a poet of the daylight, of the open air. If you peruse the lyric works of contemporary poets you will find that their moods mostly arise from states of dusk and darkness. Since they have only the power of reproducing blurred outlines, they are fond of landscapes softened by twilight; of night, when there is no hardness in things, when what they see meets them half-way, already shaping itself into verse. Like Tristan, they hate the day as the destroyer of poetry, and swathe themselves in the trembling chiaroscuro of twilight. But the really great lyric poets have always been poets of the daylight; poets of the day and of the light, as the Greeks were, to whom all things that were bathed in sun spoke of beauty and cheerfulness; poets of the day, as Walt Whitman was, the American; as all strong men have been who were filled with the zest of life. In Germany we have Dehmel to love, one of the few who have the courage to look right into the shining face of things without the fear of being blinded. But Verhaeren loves things the more the more intensive and decided they are, the more dazzling they are, the more their glaring colours clash. He does not surprise things when they are asleep, when they are resting and are helpless and at the mercy of poetry; he pounces on them when they are wideawake and can defend themselves with all their hardness from the attacks of their lyric lover. He loves the day, which places things side by side in harsh contrast; he loves the light, because it stimulates the blood; the rain that lashes the body; the wind that whips the skin; cold, noise, he loves everything that really and vehemently forces in upon him, everything that forces him to fight. He loves hard things more than soft and rounded things; loves that characteristic, black, and gloomy city Toledo more than golden, dreamy Florence; he loves the wind and the weather of frowning, tragic landscapes; he even loves noisy and thunderous cities pregnant with smoke and choking air. His nerves are not so morbidly sensitive that they respond to the least suggestion, the feeblest touch, and then stand impotent, fainting, when they are faced by the impetuous stimulants of robust life; his nerves are—not dull, but healthy. They respond strongly to whatever lays hold of them strongly. If the other poets are like supersensitive beings who are excited by every trifle and lose their self-control when really great demands are made upon them, Verhaeren is like one who is hard to irritate, but who, if he is really stung, strikes out with his fists. And Verhaeren does not love the poetical things that come to meet one already clothed in beauty; he loves those that have first to be wrestled with and overcome. Herein lies the exceeding masculinity of his art. No one could ever surmise, in reading a poem of Verhaeren's, that it was the work of a woman. And as a matter of fact Verhaeren has not yet found an audience among women. For he is not one who moans and begs for pity; he is no passive poet, but a fighter, one who wrestles with all strong, wild, and living things until they yield up to him their innermost beauty.

And this struggle for the lyric mastery of individual sensations gradually becomes a struggle for all things, for the whole world. For Verhaeren does not wish to conceive of anything as unlyrical; does not wish to blow lyric fragments off the immense mass of reality; he wishes to sculpture it into a new shape; wishes to chisel the whole world into a lyric. And this is the secret of his lyric work; this is his work, his task. Of a sudden we feel the distance between him and the majority of lyric poets. They have the feelings of people who receive gifts; they regard the sensations which come fluttering towards them as so many gay butterflies, capture them, and pin them down. Verhaeren, however, is the fighter, the worker, who is constrained to conquer everything, to shape the whole world anew, to rebuild it nearer to his heart's enthusiasm. He is the lyric poet pictured by Carducci in an imperishable poem—not the idler gazing into empty space; not the gardener decking the paths that his lady's feet must tread, and gathering frail violets for her bosom.

Il poeta è un grande artiere,
Che al mestiere
Fece i muscoli d'acciaio,
Capo ha fier, collo robusto,
Nudo il busto,
Duro il braccio, e l'occhio gaio.

And that 'picchia, picchia,' that rhythm of Carducci's, that beat of the bronze hammer of toil, rings in the measure of his verses. All his poems have been toiled for, fought for; they are a trophy, a meed of victory; nothing is a lucky gift. Verhaeren's manuscripts look like a battlefield. For he is not a poet who, in Goethe's sense, composes poems for particular occasions; he is never overpowered by a sudden chance idea: he transforms a problem of life, an actuality, or an intellectual phase into a lyric mood. After he has molten the poetic idea in his passion to a white heat, he hammers it into a poem by his rhythm. His works are complexes: individual ideas attract him; he sets a hedge round their poetical field, ploughs it, scatters the seed in it, and never returns to the scene. What he has once achieved has no longer any attraction for him. To him poetry is always a fight, always work, always a plan. The layman who would fain look upon a lyric poem as a gift fallen from heaven will perhaps have no liking for this conscious method; an artist, on the other hand, will recognise in it the strength of a wise restraint, concentration on one aim, the will to compose not a lyric poem but a lyric work. A poetic work like that of Verhaeren, the work of a life, is not created by chance feeling alone, and not by enthusiasm. Such a work of art has, like a drama, its intellectual laws, the conquering and distributing powers of the intelligence, instinct, and above all that unifying will which suffers no dead points, no gaps, no stains in the work. And it is from such a vast lyric will that this work has arisen. Verhaeren is no favoured child of fortune, dowered with art in his cradle; his blood is heavy, Teutonic blood; and, fortunately, that ease and suppleness of the artisan which in all departments of labour produces a ready mediocrity was as much wanting in him as all physical skill. Verhaeren's poetic work, his form, his rhythm, his idea, his philosophy, his architectonics, all this is something he has acquired by labour, something he has painfully produced by passion and an obstinate will; but for that very reason it is something organic. For Verhaeren is one of those who learn slowly, persistently, and surely, only from their own experience and never from others, but who never forget and lose what they have once acquired; one of those who grow as the things of Nature do, as trees grow into their strength ring by ring, and rise year by year higher above the earth to gaze farther and farther out beyond the horizons and nearer and nearer into the heavens.

And just for this reason, because this evolution was so persistent, because it was so wholly based upon experience, is the ascending line in his work so harmonious and so organic. No other lyric work of our days is so much a symbol of the seasons, so much a mirror of human periodicity. The revolt of spring, the sultriness of summer, the fruitage of autumn, and the cool clearness of winter gently merge in it, the one into the other. In his first books, at an age when many precocious poets have finished their development, he was still wrestling for his new form, for his expression. Nor did he at that time soon arrive at the heart of things; he remained for a long time absorbed in the purely picturesque contemplation of their external aspects. Then he attempted experiments, and freed himself in revolution. But in his beginnings he was always a student, an experimenter. In his second period, having really penetrated below the surface, he found his own form, like every master, and subdued the internal with the external. But now that material is conquered, he that was a student and is now a master will of necessity be a teacher, and feel impelled to deduce forces from phenomena, laws from forces, the eternal from the earthly. From vacant contemplation he had risen to passionate creation, to active creation of art. The supreme creation of art has ever been the converting of the unconscious into consciousness, the recognition and knowledge of the laws of art; from the real the path proceeds to that which transcends reality, to faith and to religion. Like every really organic poet, Verhaeren has had to repeat the ascent of universal history in his own evolution.