Émile Verhaeren

SYNTHESES

After the great visions of the cities, after the wonderful interpretations of democracy, there was a moment of appeasement in Verhaeren's work—a lyrical intermezzo of little books: an almanac of the months unfolding in short poems, the cosy happiness of wedded love enshrined in grateful song, the legends of Flanders told in richly coloured pictures, and then, in the great pentalogy Toute la Flandre, the cities, coasts, heroes, and great men of his native province compressed in one single picture. But after that Verhaeren takes up once again his old path across the earth; passes again through the roaring cities, the pregnant fields; wanders along the sea-shore; once again through the landscapes of Les Flamandes and Les Moines, of Les Villes Tentaculaires and Les Campagnes Hallucinées. It is now the return of the spiral in Goethe's sense of evolution; the return to the same point, but on a higher level, with a loftier outlook, in a narrower circle, and for that reason nearer to the last, the highest point. Once again Verhaeren surveys the modern world: now, however, with different eyes, which no longer remain resting on the aspect of the world, but press farther to the cause of all. What he had formerly seen sensuously, the things whose values he had æsthetically estimated and transmuted, he now looks at from the intellectual side, that he may estimate their value morally. He no longer sees each thing separately, no longer adds picture to picture, vision to vision, like a game of coloured cards: he now unites them in one living chain. He no longer searches through individual and detached phenomena; he now sees them together against the background of his lofty intention to weld them into one single picture. Now he composes, not individual poems, but fragments of his world-poem. For, from the time that Verhaeren began to look at things with conscious enthusiasm, they assumed different forms. The straining of his epoch no longer seems to him to be a solitary manifestation of energy, but only a Protean form of the eternal discharge of vigour; the will to life no longer seems to him to be the deed of individual men, but the vitalised primitive will of all humanity. And so, just as of old he attempted in his vision a synthesis of energies, he now sees laws flowing into one supreme and highest thing, into a cosmic law.

Lyric exaltation now arches the dream of its laws over reality. But it is no longer the mere dream of a youth in expectancy of life—the anæmic, vague, dark, restless dream—but a man's longing to get behind life and follow it to its earthly limit. It is a Utopia enhancing realities beyond themselves; it is the dream of Godhead in things. In the whole world Verhaeren sees a cosmic effort. 'Le monde est trépidant de trains et de navires.'[1] The whole world is excited with human activity and effort; manifestations of the feeling of life flame everywhere; everywhere humanity is fighting for something invisible and perhaps unattainable. But whereas of old the poet estimated the value of every separate energy, now he comprehends all energies as one uniform manifestation, recognises behind the unconscious activity of the individual the sway of something greater—the bourne of all humanity. All who work in the material of the temporal only symbolise eternal forces—intoxication, energy, conquest, joy, error, expectation, Utopia. And it is to these forces, or rather to these forms of the force at the root of all things, that his poems are addressed. In Les Visages de la Vie he seeks to describe yearning in all its forms and aims; its distribution in human labour, its restlessness, its vigour, and, above all, its beauty. But not only human manifestations now appear to him in a closer cohesion, the synthesis of realism and metaphysics now makes his relationship to elementary things richer and more heroic. Now, when he treats some motive he had already treated in the first books, and these poems of the first and last periods are compared, it is with astonishment and admiration that you trace the silent growth of these last years. I will mention one example. He had already sung a song to the wind. But the wind at that time was to him the evil storm that tousles cottages, shakes chimneys, forces its way into rooms, rages across country, and brings the winter. It was a senseless power, beautiful in its senselessness, but aimless, an incomprehensible element, a detached phenomenon of Nature. Now, however, the poet in his maturity looks upon it as the wanderer over the undying world, one that has seen all countries, that drives ships over seas, that has sated itself with the perfume of strange flowers and brings it from far away, that penetrates our chest like an aroma and steels and expands it. Now he loves the wind as one of the thousand things of the earth which contribute to the intensification of his vital feeling.

Si j'aime, admire et chante avec folie,
Le vent,
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
C'est qu'il grandit mon être entier et c'est qu'avant
De s'infiltrer, par mes poumons et par mes pores,
Jusques au sang dont vit mon corps,
Avec sa force rude ou sa douceur profonde,
Immensément, il a étreint le monde.[2]

So, too, a tree becomes to him the image of the eternal renewal of strength, of resistance to the hardness of winter and of fate, of the will to new beauty in the spring. A mountain no longer appears to him as a chance raising of the landscape, but a great and mighty thing in whose keeps secrets lie, ores, and the source of springs, from whose summit, however, our eyes can sweep the world. The forest interprets itself to him as the labyrinth of a thousand paths, and as the many-voiced anthem of life: everything in nature becomes a freshening and a vivifying of this vitality. An absolute transmutation of values has taken place from the time that he has comprehended things as parts of the world's entity, and as themselves an entity. Travel, formerly a flight from reality, now becomes to him the opening out of new distances, of new possibilities; dream appears to him no longer as an illusion, but as the capacity of intensifying the real from its present to a future state. Europe is no longer to him a group of nations, a geographical idea, but the great symbol of conquest, money, gold, he no longer regards contemptuously as a materialising of life, but as a new spur for new ambition. And the sea, which in every succeeding work of his sings its unquiet rhythm, is no longer the murderous power that eats into the land, but the holy tide, the symbol of constant strength in eternal unrest; it is to him 'la mer nue et pure, comme une idée.'[3] Since everything coheres, he feels related to all in a touching brotherhood with things; he no longer feels the presence of things, he loves them like a piece of himself; he feels the sea physically in himself

Ma peau, mes mains et mes cheveux
Sentent la mer
Et sa couleur est dans mes yeux.[4]

And so, just as his vital feeling is renewed every time he comes into contact with the waves, he believes in a physical resurrection of the body out of the sea, believes that his rising from the water is a nouveau moment de conscience. Verhaeren has returned to the great cohesion: in Nature and in man there is no longer for him any phenomenon which might not become a symbol for him, a symbol of the great vital instinct, to stimulate and fire his vitality.

And since he now responds to all things with this one feeling, a uniform conception of the world must involuntarily result from this unity of feeling. To the unity of enthusiasm corresponds the unity of the world, the monistic feeling. Just as he himself derives nothing but an intensification and exaltation of his feelings from all things, nothing but the very sensation of life, all phenomena and activities must be a synthesis, all forces must flow into one single force as rivers flow into the ocean, all laws must merge in one single law

Toute la vie, avec ses lois, avec ses formes,
—Multiples doigts noueux de quelque main énorme—
S'entr'ouvre et se referme en un poing: l'unité.[5]

And thus, this straining of all humanity, discharged in a thousand forms, must be something in common, a fight against something lying outside of itself, against a resistance which still makes life seem hard, dull, and turbid. This fight of humanity cannot be other than directed against something that impedes the sensation of life. And this, the only thing which struggles against humanity, is in Verhaeren's eyes the supremacy of Nature, the mystery of divine intervention, the subjection of man to fate—in short, all divinity that does not reside in man. As soon as man is dependent on nobody except himself and his own strength, he too will attain the great joyousness of all the things of Nature.

This fight of man to become God, this fight for his independence, his freedom from chance and the supernatural—this is the great metaphysical idea of Verhaeren's work. His last books seek to represent nothing else than this one highest battle of man, this struggle to be free from all that is laid upon him, not by himself, but by Nature, from all that impedes his will to become a thing of Nature, an elementary force, himself. This struggle is the highest and purest effort, for

Rien n'est plus haut, malgré l'angoisse et le tourment,
Que la bataille avec l'énigme et les ténèbres.[6]

Man in this battle defends himself against darkness, against what is unknown, against Heaven, against all laws that restrict his expansion; the whole aim of man, the aim he has unconsciously been following for a thousand years, is independence, is to become a law unto himself:

L'homme dans l'univers n'a qu'un maître, lui-même,
Et l'univers entier est ce maître, dans lui.[7]

To-day he is still counteracted by chance, or, as many conceive it, by divinity. Wholly to conquer this, to substitute the determination of one's own destiny for chance, will be the great task of the future. Much has been taken from chance already. Lightning, the most dangerous power of heaven, is conquered; distances are bridged over; the forms of Nature are changed; social communities have by common action diverted the iniquity of the weather; diseases are from year to year being fathomed and checked; more and more every incalculable element is being brought within the range of calculation and fore-sight. But all that is unknown must more and more be the booty of man, whose highest will is 'fouiller l'inconnu.'[8] More and more his eyes penetrate the subterranean and mysterious workings of Nature.

Or aujourd'hui c'est la réalité
Secrète encor, mais néanmoins enclose
Au cours perpétuel et rythmique des choses,

Qu'on veut, avec ténacité,
Saisir, pour ordonner la vie et sa beauté
Selon les causes.[9]

For this battle everybody is a soldier in man's war of liberation, all of us stand invisibly ranked together. Everybody who wrests from Nature in increment to knowledge, who does something never done before, everybody who by poetry fires others to action, tears off a piece of the veil. With every step forward that man takes against the dark, with every foot of ground he conquers, divinity loses strength to him; and this will go on until at length nothing remains of the God of old, until the identity of the two ideas humanity and divinity is unconsciously accomplished.

Héros, savant, artiste, apôtre, aventurier,
Chacun troue à son tour le mur noir des mystères
Et, grâce à ces labeurs groupés et solitaires,
L'être nouveau se sent l'univers tout entier.

Seen from this height, professions assume a new poetic value. In the front rank of fighting men Verhaeren sees those the effort of whose life it is to acquire knowledge—the men of science. Verhaeren is perhaps the only one among modern poets who has conceived of science as of perfectly equal value with poetry, who has discovered new moral and religious values in science, just as he had already discovered new æsthetic values in industrialism and democracy. Most poets had hitherto looked upon science as a hindrance, because they were afraid of clear things as they were afraid of real things. They looked upon science as the destroyer of myths, the negation of every noble superstition which in their eyes was indissolubly connected with the poetical. But just as machinery seemed to them to be ugly, because in the machines they saw beauty had retreated from the outer to the interior form, here too the new ethical value is hidden not in the method but in the aim. Verhaeren esteems science as the great fighter for the new conception of the world: 'Le monde entier est repensé par leurs cervelles.'[10] He knows that the little increments to knowledge which are continually being made in our days in thousands of places, in sanatoria and lecture-rooms, observatories and studies, with microscopes and chemical analyses, weighing and calculation, with measures and numbers, that these little additions to knowledge may, by comparison and reproduction, grow into great creative discoveries which will immensely enrich our vital feeling. And this hymn to science is at the same time a hymn to our epoch; for no epoch before ours has so consciously bought for the advancement of knowledge, none has been so replete with the longing for new knowledge and the transmutation of values:

L'acharnement à tout peser, à tout savoir
Fouille la forêt drue et mouvante des êtres.[11]

In inspired words Verhaeren celebrates science as the highest effort of our age as of the past; for he knows that what to us to-day is presupposed and self-evident was a thousand years-ago the goal of the most ardent effort, that the road we pace indolently to-day is soaked with the blood of martyrs.

Dites! quels temps versés au gouffre des années,
Et quelle angoisse ou quel espoir des destinées,
Et quels cerveaux chargés de noble lassitude
A-t-il fallu pour faire un peu de certitude?
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Dites! les feux et les bûchers; dites! les claies;
Les regards fous, en des visages d'effroi blanc;
Dites! les corps martyrisés, dites! les plaies
Criant la vérité, avec leur bouche en sang.[12]

But he knows equally well that the acquisitions of to-day are again only hypotheses for the new truths of to-morrow. Error is inevitable, but even error opens out new ways. In the beautiful idea of Brezina, the Czech poet, all ideal aims are floating islands that recede as we approach them. The highest aim is in effort itself, in the life which effort intensifies. Verhaeren's optimism here guards his marches against banality, for he is sufficient of a mystic to know that it is the unknowable and the inaccessible that lend all things their impenetrable beauty. But the knowledge of this must not scare enthusiasm away:

Partons quand même, avec notre âme inassouvie,
Puisque la force et que la vie
Sont au delà des vérités et des erreurs.[13]

What if a few last things remain eternally inscrutable: 'plutôt que d'en peupler les coins par des chimères, nous préférons ne point savoir.'[14] Rather a world without gods than one with false gods, rather incomplete knowledge than false knowledge.

Here, where the heroes of science reach the limits of what is possible to them, a new group must stand by their side and help them in their work. These are the poets, who preach faith where knowledge ends. They must find the synthesis between science and religion, between the earthly and the divine, the new synthesis—religious confidence in science. Their optimism must force their fellow-men to have faith in science, as in earlier days they had faith in gods: though proofs fail them, they must demand from this new religion what the early fathers demanded for the old religion. And he himself, Verhaeren, he who once—here again a bitter 'no' is turned into an exulting 'yes'—said in his beginnings

Toute science enferme au fond d'elle le doute,
Comme une mère enceinte étreint un enfant mort,[15]

he himself is to-day the first of confident enthusiasts. Where individual minds are still at war—

'Oh! ces luttes là-haut entre ces dieux humains![16]—

where their knowledge has not yet found a bridge, poets must with enthusiasm and confidence surmise a path. They must link law with perception; and in the same measure as the scientists have by knowledge fed their enthusiasm, they in their turn must feed knowledge by their confidence. If they have no proofs of actualities, their faith dowers them with the confidence to say, 'nous croyons déjà ce que les autres sauront.'[17] They scent and surmise new things before they are born; they trust hypotheses before they are proved. Already,

Pendant que disputent et s'embrouillent encor,
À coups de textes morts
Et de dogmes, les sages,[18]

they hear the hovering wings of the new truth. They already believe in what later generations will know; they derive vital joy from what their descendants will be the first to possess. They doubt in nothing; not that man will conquer the air, quell disease, make life cheerful and easier; they do not despair in progress, and in their ecstasy they leap over all obstacles. 'Le cri de Faust n'est plus le nôtre';[19] the question as to 'yes' and 'no' has long since been joyfully answered in the affirmative, exults the poet; we no longer hesitate between the possibility and the impossibility of knowledge, we believe in it, and faith and confidence is already the highest knowledge of life. In this optimism of poets other discoverers of knowledge must now fulfil their growth, from these dreams they must derive strength for their activity; all men must in this way complete one another, that it may be possible for them to beleaguer darkness, perfect the conquest of God, and

Emprisonner quand même, un jour, l'éternité,
Dans le gel blanc d'une immobile vérité.[20]

For this new truth, the Man-God whom they are to discover, poets and scholars are the new saints; and his servants are all those whose brows are fiery with the fever of work, whose hands are scorched with experiments, whose nerves are strained by constant effort, whose eyes are fatigued by books. To all of these Verhaeren's hymn is addressed:

Qu'ils soient sacrés par les foules, ces hommes
Qui scrutèrent les faits pour en tirer les lois.[21]

But still farther reaches Verhaeren's enthusiasm for those who help in the new work, for the 'saccageurs d'infini.'[22] Not only the thinker and the poet extend the horizon of life, but each one also who creates and is in any way at work. Only the man who creates is really alive and really a man—'seul existe qui crée.'[23] And so his hymn is likewise addressed to those who toil with their hands, to those who, without knowing the aim, toil stolidly day by day in mines and fields; for they too build the face of the earth, create mountains where there were none, rear lights by the sea's marge, construct machines and the huge telescopes that pry on the heavens: all of them forge the tools of knowledge and prepare the new era. Merchants who send across the ocean ships that spin threads from farthest shore to shore, they too weave the net of the great unity; traders who spread gold, who quicken the circulation of the world's blood, they too co-operate in the battle waged with the dark. It is their league and union which, first of all, gives humanity its great strength; they all prepare the hour, the moment, which must inevitably come.

Il viendra l'instant, où tant d'efforts savants et ingénus,
Tant de génie et de cerveaux tendus vers l'inconnu,
Quand même, auront bâti sur des bases profondes
Et jaillissant au ciel, la synthèse du monde![24]

Here in fiery dawns glimmer the days of the future. Tens of thousands will struggle, will prepare, until at last the one man comes who shall lay the last stone of the edifice, 'le tranquille rebelle,'[25] the Christ of this new religion.

C'est que celui qu'on attendait n'est point venu,
Celui que la nature entière
Suscitera un jour, âme et rose trémière,
Sous les soleils puissants non encore connus;
C'est que la race ardente et fine,
Dont il sera la fleur,
N'a point multiplié ses milliers de racines
Jusqu'au tréfonds des profondeurs.[26]

For here in Verhaeren's work this vision arises fervent and glowing. Incessantly man proceeds on the path of his destiny. Once his whole world was replete with divinity, 'jadis tout l'inconnu était peuplé de dieux';[27] then one single God took right and might into His hand; but now, by means of his strength and passion, man has wrested, year by year, one secret after the other from this Unknown Power. More and more he has conquered chance by laws, faith by knowledge, fear by safety; more and more the power of the gods glides insensibly into his hands, more and more he determines his own life; and the process will continue till he is in every respect the captain of his fate; he is less and less subject to laws he has not himself established; more and more Nature's slave becomes her lord.

Races, régnez: puisque par vous la volonté du sort
Devient de plus en plus la volonté humaine.[28]

Gods will become men; exterior fate will return into their bosom; the saints will henceforth be only their brothers; and Paradise will be the earth itself. Most beautifully Verhaeren has expressed this idea in one of his latest books,[29] in the symbol of Adam and Eve. Eve, expelled from the Garden of Eden, one day finds its doors open again. But she does not re-enter it, for her highest joy, her Paradise, is now in activity and the pleasure of the earth. Zest in existence, in life, joy of the earth, has never been more strongly and burningly exalted than in this symbol; never has the hymn of humanity been sung with greater fervour than by this poet—perhaps because he had denied life more wildly and more obstinately than any other. Here all contrasts sing together in a harmony without a flaw; the last enmity between man and Nature here becomes the ecstatic feeling of man's godhead.

And strange to say, here the circle of life returns to itself. The books of the poet's old age return to the days of his youth, to the school benches in Ghent where Maeterlinck also sat, the other great Fleming. Both, who lost themselves there, have found themselves again on the heights of life in their conception of the world, for Maeterlinck's highest teaching also (in his book Wisdom and Destiny) is, that all fate is locked up in man himself, that it is man's highest evolution, his highest duty, to conquer fate, all that lies outside him, God. This profound thought, which has thus twice in our days blossomed forth from Flemish soil, has been achieved on different paths. Maeterlinck has found it by listening to the mysticism of silence, Verhaeren by listening to the noise of life. He has found his new God not in the darkness of dreams but in the light of streets, in all places where men bestir themselves, and where from heavy hours the trembling flower of joy is born.

THE ETHICS OF FERVOUR

The metaphysical ideal crystallised by Verhaeren from his contemplation of life, which was at first wildly passionate, but then more and more synoptical and logical, has been called unity. He has himself recently, in answer to a question submitted to various men of letters, confirmed this conception as part of his programme. 'It seems to me,' he says, 'that poetry is bound ere long to be merged in a very clear Pantheism. More and more the unity of the world is admitted by upright and healthy minds. That old dualism between the soul and the body, between God and the universe, is becoming effaced. Man is a fragment of the architecture of the world. He understands and is conscious of the entity of which he is a part.... He feels that he is encompassed and dominated, while at the same time he himself encompasses and dominates. By reason of his own miracles he is becoming, in some sort, that personal God that his ancestors believed in. Now I ask, is it possible that lyric exaltation should long remain indifferent to such an unchaining of human power, should hesitate to celebrate such a vast spectacle of grandeur? The poet of to-day has only to surrender himself to what he sees, hears, imagines, conjectures, for works to be born of his heart and brain that are young, vibrating, and new.'[1] But he who would build up the whole image must not make a halt at this stage of knowledge: over against the logical ordering of external things he must set another of inward things; against the knowledge of life he must set the feeling of life. He must set up an ethical ideal as well as a metaphysical ideal, a commandment of life corresponding to his law of life.

But great poets never discover a standard of life, a moral precept, which is not a reflex of the law of their own inner nature. Many possibilities of contemplation are open to the thinker, to the quiet observer; to the poet however, to the lyrist, only a poetic philosophy of life is possible, a contemplation lyrically exalted. Whereas the philosopher can attain the knowledge of unity by measurement and calculation, by a perception and calm computation of forces, a poet can discover the evolution of things in the direction of harmony and unity only in his ecstasy, only in an exalted state of enthusiasm. He will perforce recognise a commandment for the whole world in his own enthusiasm, and in his lyric ecstasy a moral demand of life. 'Toute la vie est dans l'essor,' for the poet all life is in ecstasy. And just as Verhaeren never described things in a state of rest, so too his comprehension of the universe is never conceivable except in the permanently exalted state of the unrest of joy and motion.

Verhaeren's relationship to the world around him was ever passionate. He has always approached things feverishly, as a lover approaches the woman he desires. Only what he has won by fighting has the value to him of a possession. Things do not belong to us as long as we pass them by, as long as we only look at them with unfeeling and cold eyes as though they were a scene in a play, a walking picture. To feel the connection between them and us, between the world and the poet, between man and man, to pass over from the purely contemplative state to the assessment of values, we must enter into some personal relationship of sympathy or antipathy. Verhaeren's first crisis had taught him that negation is sterile, and his recovery had then shown him that only assent, acceptance, affection, and enthusiasm can place us in a real relationship with things.

Pour vivre clair, ferme et juste,
Avec mon cœur, j'admire tout
Ce qui vibre, travaille et bout
Dans la tendresse humaine et sur la terre auguste.[2]

A thing only belongs to us when it is felt—not so much for us personally—as beautiful, necessary, and vivid: only when we have said 'yes' to it. And therefore our whole evolution can only be to admire as much as possible, to understand as much as possible, to let our feeling have intercourse with as many things as possible. To contemplate is too little; to understand is too little. Only when we have confirmed a thing from its very roots, confirmed it as necessary, does it really belong to us. 'II faut aimer pour découvrir avec génie.' And so our whole effort must be to overcome what is negative in ourselves, to reject nothing, to kill the critical spirit in ourselves, to strengthen what is positive in us, to assent as much as possible. Here again Verhaeren is in agreement with Nietzsche's last ideals: 'Warding things off, keeping things down, is a waste of energy, a squandering of strength on negative purposes.'[3] Criticism is sterile. Verhaeren is here as ever a relativist of values, for he knows that they are incessantly occupied in a process of transformation in favour of their highest value, and therefore he holds enthusiasm (the symbol of over-estimation) to be more important, in the sense of a higher justice, than what is apparently absolute justice itself.

For this is the essential: if in our estimation we often over-estimate things which in any case would preserve their inner value independently of our 'yes' or 'no,' that is not so great a danger as it is a profit that our own souls should grow by means of our admiration. 'Admirer, c'est se grandir.'[4] For if we admire more, and more intensively, than others, we shall ourselves grow richer than those timid ones who content themselves with choice morsels of life instead of grasping life in its entirety, who restrict themselves because they only place themselves in relationship with a part of the world and not with the whole cosmos. The more a man admires, the more he possesses:

Il faut admirer tout pour s'exalter soi-même
Et se dresser plus haut que ceux qui out vécu
De coupables souffrances et de désirs vaincus.[5]

For admiration means, in the highest sense, subordinating oneself to other things. The more a man suppresses his own personal pride, the higher he stands in the moral sense. For to accentuate oneself and to deny what is not oneself needs less strength than to suppress oneself and to surrender oneself in admiration to all else. Here Verhaeren sees the rise of a new ethical problem. A whole ladder of values is revealed to him in the moral standard of freedom and frankness with which a man can meet his fellows in his admiration; a ladder on whose topmost rung the man stands who rejects nothing whatever, who meets every manifestation of life with ecstasy. To be able to admire more means to grow more oneself:

Oh! vivre et vivre et se sentir meilleur
À mesure que bout plus fervemment le cœur;
Vivre plus clair, dès qu'on marche en conquête;
Vivre plus haut encor, dès que le sort s'entête
À dessécher la force et l'audace des bras.[6]

And so strong must this restless enthusiasm grow, this incessant enthusiasm for things, that the height of the ascent suddenly surprises one with a rapt feeling of dizziness. The lyrical commandment of the highest ecstasy is here an ethical standard:

Il faut en tes élans te dépasser sans cesse,
Être ton propre étonnement.[7]

In this idea of restless enthusiasm, the principles of which have also been expounded by Verhaeren in his essay Cosmic Enthusiasm (Insel-Almanach, 1913), he has established a poetic equivalent to his other great impulse of humanity, set an ethical ideal by the side of the metaphysical ideal. For if of old the yearning for knowledge, that superb struggle for the conquest of the unknown, was the only thing that placed man in an eternally living relationship to the new things, what is possibly a still more valuable instinct is discovered in this incessantly intensified ecstatic admiration. Admiring is more than estimating and knowing. To surrender oneself in love to all things is higher than the curiosity to know everything. 'Tout affronter vaut mieux que tout comprendre.'[8] For in all knowledge there is still a residue of selfishness, of the pride of personal acquisition, while admiration of things contains nothing but humility—that great humility, however, which is an infinite enrichment of life, because it signifies a dissolution in the all. Whereas knowledge is brought to a sudden standstill before many things and finds the road blocked with darkness, in admiration, in ecstasy, there is no limit set to the ego. Though many values lock themselves up from knowledge, none denies itself wholly to admiration. Even the smallest thing becomes great when it is penetrated with love, and the greater we let things grow—the more we enrich the substance of our own life—the more infinite we make our ego. It is the highest ethical task of a great man to find the highest value in every phenomenon, and to free this value from the thick and often stifling rind of antipathy and strangeness. Not to let oneself be repelled by resistance is the perfection of a noble enthusiasm. If anything whatsoever is void of beauty, it will have a power which by its energy expresses beauty. If anything seems strange and ugly in the traditional sense, it will set the wonderful task of finding out the new sense in which it is beautiful. And to have found this new beauty in the new things was the active greatness of the poetic work, the greatness which was unconscious and now becomes conscious, which was knowledge and now becomes law. While all others considered our great cities frightful and ugly, Verhaeren praised their magnificence; while all others abhorred science as an obstacle to poetry, Verhaeren celebrated it as the purest form of life. For he knows that everything changes, that 'ce qui fut hier le but est l'obstacle demain,'[9] and vice versa that the obstacle of to-day may perhaps be the goal of the next generation. He had already recognised in his poetry what the architectural movement in the great cities in the last few years has realised, that huge shops, as emporia of intellectual life, as new centres of force, provide tasks for art as stupendous as the cathedrals of old; that in the reek and smoke of teeming cities new tones of colour were waiting for painters, new problems for philosophers; that all that in our own time looms bulky and unseemly will to the next generation be well-proportioned and have to be called beautiful. Verhaeren's enthusiasm for what is new overcomes the resistance of reverence for tradition. Verhaeren has rendered signal service to our time by being the first to recognise and proclaim the great impressionists and all innovators in art and poetry. For to reject nothing new, to be hostile to nothing the world can offer, this only is what he understands by knowing the world as it is and truly loving it. His ladder of values ends on high in this absolute ideal of admiration of the whole world, not only of that which is but of that which shall be, of the identity of every ego with the time and its forms:

L'homme n'est suprême et clair que si sa volonté
Est d'être lui en même temps qu'il est monde.

And since this boundless admiration turns selfishness to dust—selfishness, the eternal obstacle to all purely human relations—since, in a word, it produces a kind of brotherly relationship to all things, it also opens out the possibility of levelling the relationship between man and man. The book La Multiple Splendeur, which has given definite expression to these ethical ideas, was originally intended to be called Admirez-vous les Uns les Autres. In this book self-surrender is considered as the highest ideal, the gift of oneself to the whole world, the distribution of oneself among all people. No longer, as in the earlier books, are energy, strength, and conquest by strength, the quelling of resistance, the ultimate sense of life, but goodness, scattering oneself broadcast, becoming the all by surrender to the all. Greatness in this new sense can only arise by ecstatic admiration. 'Il faut aimer pour découvrir avec génie.' Admiration and love are the strongest forces of the world. Love will be the highest form of the new relations—it will regulate all earthly relationships; love shall be the social levelling.

L'amour dont la puissance encore est inconnue,
Dans sa profondeur douce et sa charité nue,
Ira porter la joie égale aux résignés;
Les sacs ventrus de l'or seront saignés
Un soir d'ardente et large équité rouge;
Disparaîtront palais, banques, comptoirs et bouges;
Tout sera simple et clair, quand l'orgueil sera mort,
Quand l'homme, au lieu de croire à l'égoïste effort,
Qui s'éterniserait, en une âme immortelle,
Dispensera vers tous sa vie accidentelle;
Des paroles, qu'aucun livre ne fait prévoir,
Débrouilleront ce qui paraît complexe et noir;
Le faible aura sa part dans l'existence entière,
Il aimera son sort—et la matière
Confessera peut-être, alors, ce qui fut Dieu.[10]

And in still greater, still more monumental expression, in stone tables of the law as it were, Verhaeren has compressed his new moral idea in a single poem:

Si nous nous admirons vraiment les uns les autres,
Du fond même de notre ardeur et notre foi,
Vous les penseurs, vous les savants, vous les apôtres,
Pour les temps qui viendront vous extrairez la loi.

Nous apportons, ivres du monde et de nous-mêmes,
Des cœurs d'hommes nouveaux dans le vieil univers.
Les Dieux sont loin et leur louange et leur blasphème;
Notre force est en nous et nous avons souffert.

Nous admirons nos mains, nos yeux et nos pensées,
Même notre douleur qui devient notre orgueil;
Toute recherche est fermement organisée
Pour fouiller l'inconnu dont nous cassons le seuil.

S'il est encor là-bas des caves de mystère
Où tout flambeau s'éteint ou recule effaré,
Plutôt que d'en peupler les coins par des chimères
Nous préférons ne point savoir que nous leurrer.

Un infini plus sain nous cerne et nous pénètre;
Notre raison monte plus haut; notre cœur bout;
Et nous nous exaltons si bellement des êtres
Que nous changeons le sens que nous avons de tout.

Cerveau, tu règnes seul sur nos actes lucides;
Aimer, c'est asservir; admirer, se grandir;
O tel profond vitrail, dans l'ombre des absides,
Qui reflète la vie et la fait resplendir!

Aubes, matins, midis et soirs, toute lumière
Est aussitôt muée en or et en beauté,
Il exalte l'espace et le ciel et la terre
Et transforme le monde à travers sa clarté.[11]

This sensation of recognising oneself in all things by enthusiasm, of living with everything that has existence and a visible form, is pantheism, is a Teutonic conception of the universe. But in Verhaeren pantheism finds its very last intensification. Identity is to him not only cerebral knowledge, but experience; identity is not the sensation of being similar to things in body and soul, but an indissoluble unity. Whosoever admires a thing so wholly that he goes down to the roots of his feeling, that he dissolves and denies himself in order to be wholly this other thing, is at this moment of ecstasy identical with it. Ecstasy is no longer what it means in the Greek derivation, the fact of stepping out of oneself, of losing oneself; it signifies, in addition to that, the finding of oneself in the other thing. And with this Verhaeren's cosmic conception goes beyond pantheism. He not only senses things as though he were their brother; not only does he sense himself in them, he himself lives them. Not only does he feel his blood pouring into other beings, he no longer feels any blood of his own at all; he only feels this strange, glowing sap of the world in his veins. I know of no more fiery eruption than those moments of Verhaeren when he is no longer able to distinguish the world from his ego, this unique cosmic intoxication:

Je ne distingue plus le monde de moi-même,
Je suis l'ample feuillage et les rameaux flottants,
Je suis le sol dont je foule les cailloux pâles
Et l'herbe des fossés où soudain je m'affale
Ivre et fervent, hagard, heureux et sanglotant.[12]

All the forms of the elements are a personal experience to him: 'J'existe en tout ce qui m'entoure et me pénètre.'[13] All that has happened becomes to him a manifestation of his own body; he feels all cosmic happenings as personal experiences:

Oh! les rythmes fougueux de la nature entière
Et les sentir et les darder à travers soi!
Vivre les mouvements répandus dans les bois,
Le sol, les vents, la mer et les tonnerres;
Vouloir qu'en son cerveau tressaille l'univers.[14]

Here the billows of enthusiasm dash higher and higher, this call to union by enthusiasm grows to an ever more passionate command:

Exaltez-vous encore et comprenez-vous mieux,
Reconnaissez-vous donc et magnifiez-vous
Dans l'ample et myriadaire splendeur des choses![15]

For if men hitherto have arrived at no clear and harmonious relationship with one another, that was because, so Verhaeren thinks, they had not admiration sufficient, because they were too suspicious of one another, because they had too little faith. 'Magnifiez-vous donc et comprenez-vous mieux!'[16] he calls out to them, 'admirez-vous les uns les autres!' and here, in the last phase of his knowledge, he is again in agreement with the great American, who, in his poem Starting from Paumanok, preaches:

I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough,
None has ever yet adored or worshipped half enough,
None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and
how certain the future is.

For the highest pleasure is only in this highest ecstasy. And therefore these ideals of Verhaeren are not cold, sober commandments, but a passionate hymn.

Aimer avec ferveur soi-même en tous les autres
Qui s'exaltent de même en de mêmes combats
Vers le même avenir dont on entend le pas;
Aimer leur cœur et leur cerveau pareils aux vôtres
Parce qu'ils ont souffert, en des jours noirs et fous,
Même angoisse, même affre et même deuil que vous.

Et s'énivrer si fort de l'humaine bataille
—Pâle et flottant reflet des monstrueux assauts
Ou des groupements d'or des étoiles, là-haut—
Qu'on vit en tout ce qui agit, lutte ou tressaille
Et qu'on accepte avidement, le cœur ouvert,
L'âpre et terrible loi qui régit l'univers.[17]

To raise these mystic moments of ecstasy, these seconds of identity, which every one in his life experiences in quite rare and strange moments, to permanency, to a constant, unconquerable feeling of life—this is Verhaeren's highest aim. His cosmic conception is concentrated in this supreme ideal of an incessantly felt identity of the ego with its environment, of an identity ever fired anew by passion.

For not till nothing more is contemplation and everything is experience, not till this vast enrichment is accomplished, does life cease to be vegetative, indifferent, and somnolent, not till then does it turn to pure delight. Not to feel individual feelings of pleasure, but to feel life itself in all its forms as supreme pleasure, is the last goal of Verhaeren's art. What he says of Juliers, the hero of Flanders, 'son existence était sa volupté,'[18] the fact of life itself was his pleasure, is also his own highest longing. He does not want life that; he may fill out the span that is allotted to every mortal, but that he may consciously enjoy, and to the full, every minute of life as a delight and as; happiness. And in such a moment of ecstasy he says,

Il me semble jusqu'à ce jour n'avoir vécu
Que pour mourir et non pour vivre,[19]

lines that seem to me unforgettable, as the highest ecstasy of vitality.

And, wonderful to say, here too the circle is closed, here too the end of Verhaeren's know-ledge—as we have seen in so many things with him—is a return to the beginning. Here too there is nothing save an inherited instinct which has become a rapt consciousness. His first book and his last ones, Les Flamandes, as well as Les Rythmes Souverains and Les Blés Mouvants, celebrate life—the first, it is true, only life's outer form, the dull enjoyment of the senses: the last books, however, celebrate the conscious, intensified, sublimated feeling of life. Verhaeren's whole evolution—here again in harmony with the great poets of our nation, with Nietzsche and Dehmel—is not suppression, but a conscious intensification of original instincts. Just as in—his first books he described his native province, and again in his last, save that now the land is bounded by the horizons of the whole world, here again the feeling of life returns as the sense of life, but it is now enriched with all the knowledge he has acquired, with all the victories he has won. Passion, which was in his first book a chaotic revolt, has here become a law; the instinctive sensation of pleasure in health has been transformed into a deliberate and conscious pleasure in life and in all its forms. Now again Verhaeren feels the great pride of a strong man:

Je marche avec l'orgueil d'aimer l'air et la terre,
D'être immense et d'être fou
Et de mêler le monde et tout
À cet enivrement de vie élémentaire.[20]

The health of the strong race he once celebrated in the lads and lasses of his native province, he now sings in himself. And so strong is the identity between his ego and the world that he, desiring to sing the beauty of the whole world, is now compelled to include himself and to celebrate his own body. He who of old hated his body as a prison out of which he could not escape to flee from himself, he who wished to 'spit himself out,' now fits into the hymn of the world a stanza in celebration of his own ego:

J'aime mes yeux, mes bras, mes mains, ma chair,
mon torse
Et mes cheveux amples et blonds,
Et je voudrais, par mes poumons,
Boire l'espace entier pour en gonfler ma force.[21]

The feeling of identity has given him absolute identity in regard to himself.

It is not in vanity that he celebrates himself, but in gratitude. For the body is to him only a means of sensing the beauty, power, and beneficence of the world, is to him a wonderful possibility of enjoying things by strength in strong passion. And wonderful are these thanks of an ageing man to his eyes and ears and chest for still permitting him to feel earth's beauty with all the fervour of old:

Soyez remerciés, mes yeux,
D'être restés si clairs, sous mon front déjà vieux,
Pour voir au loin bouger et vibrer la lumière;
Et vous, mes mains, de tressaillir dans le soleil;
Et vous, mes doigts, de vous dorer aux fruits vermeils
Pendus au long du mur, près des roses trémières.

Soyez remercié, mon corps,
D'être ferme, rapide, et frémissant encor
Au toucher des vents prompts ou des brises profondes;
Et vous, mon torse clair et mes larges poumons,
De respirer au long des mers ou sur les monts,
L'air radieux et vif qui baigne et mord les mondes.[22]

Thus, too, he now celebrates all things to which he is related—his body; the race and the ancestors to whom he owes his being; the country fields that have given him youth; the cities that have given him his vast outlook: he celebrates Europe and America, the past and the future. And just as he feels himself to be strong and healthy, so too his feeling conceives of the whole world as healthy and great. That is the incomparable and, probably, the unparalleled thing in Verhaeren's verses, what makes him so exceedingly dear to many as to me, that here cheerfulness, worldly pleasure, joy, and ecstasy are sensed not only intellectually as pride, but that this pleasure is felt positively in the body, with all the fibres of the blood, with all the muscles and nerves of the man. His stanzas are really, as Bazalgette so beautifully says, 'une décharge d'électricité humaine,'[23] a discharge of human, of physical electricity. Joy here becomes a physical excess, an intoxication, a superabundance without parallel:

Nous apportons, ivres du monde et de nous-mêmes,
Des cœurs d'hommes nouveaux dans le vieil univers.[24]

There is now no disharmony between the individual poems; they are one single bubbling up of enthusiasm, 'un enivrement de soi-même'; over the many convulsive, quivering, irregular ecstasies of old now flames the ecstasy of the whole feeling of life. This ecstasy stands in our days like a figure proud, strong, and erect, exultingly flourishing the torch of passion aloft to greet the future, 'vers la joie'!

Here ends Verhaeren's ethic work. And I believe that no exaltation, no knowledge can again change this last pure form, or make it still more beautiful. A vast expenditure of force, the effort of one of our strongest and most incomparable men, has here reached its goal. Once force seemed to him to be the strength of the world; now, however, in his purer knowledge, he sees it in goodness, in admiration, in that force which, with the same intensity as turned it outwards of old, is now directed inwards; which no longer constrains to conquest, but to self-surrender, to a boundless humility. Over the immense savagery and apparent chaos of the first works this knowledge now arches this rainbow of reconciliation, over Les Forcés Tumultueuses shines La Multiple Splendeur. And to himself may be applied the words he dedicated to his hymn of all humanity—'La joie et la bonté sont les fleurs de sa force.'[25]