Émile Verhaeren

LOVE

Filled with contemporary spirit as Verhaeren's work is, there is one point in which it appears to stray from our epoch, to be remote from the artistic preoccupations of other poets. Verhaeren's poetry is almost entirely free from eroticism. The problem of love is with him far from being, as it is with most poets, the feeling at the root of all feelings; it is hardly ever a motive force in his work; it remains a little arabesque delicately curved above his massive architecture. Verhaeren's enthusiasms spring from other sources. Love is for him almost without a sexual shade of meaning, perfectly identical with enthusiasm, self-surrender, ecstasy; and the difference between the sexes does not seem to be an essential, but only an incidental form among the thousandfold militant forms of life. The love of woman, sexual necessity, is scarcely a force greater than any other in the circle of forces, never the most important or actually the root-force, as it is (for instance) to Dehmel, who derives the consciousness of all great cosmic phases of knowledge from the experience of love. Verhaeren's horizons are illuminated, not by the flame of the erotic, but by the passionate fire of purely intellectual impulses. His first books, those lyric volumes which are nearly always a poet's confessions of love, were devoted to landscapes and then to social phenomena, to monks, and to men who toil with their hands. The strength of his drama pulses in conflicts exclusively masculine. Thus his work, already vastly removed from that of the other lyrists of our time, is seen to be still more isolated. To Verhaeren love is only a single page, not the first and not the last, in the book of the world: this poet has lavished too much glowing passion and ecstatic feeling on all individual things and the universe for the cry of the desire of woman to ring higher than all other voices.

This lack of accentuation of eroticism in Verhaeren's work does not by any means strike me as a weakness, a missing nerve in his artistic organism. It may read like a paradox, but it must be said: just this apparent artistic deficiency indicates personal strength. Verhaeren's masculinity is so pronounced and strong that woman could never become the root-problem of his passion, or shake him in the foundations of his fate. To a really strong man, love, sexual love, is a matter of course; a sterling man does not feel it as an obstacle and not as a vital conflict, but as a necessity, like nourishment, air, and liberty. But a thing that is a matter of course is never conceived by an artist as a problem. In his youth Verhaeren was never perplexed by love, for the simple reason that he did not attach sufficient importance to it, because his poetic interests were in the first place directed to a mightier possession, a philosophy of life. A sterling man, as Verhaeren conceives him, does not spend his strength in sexual love. For such a man the metaphysical instinct, the longing for knowledge, the need of finding his inner statics in the cosmos, goes before love. 'Eve voulait aimer, Adam voulait connaître.'[1] Only to woman is love the sense of life; to man, in Verhaeren's idea, the sense of life is knowledge. He expressed this sound idea still more clearly in an early poem:

Les forts montent la vie ainsi qu'un escalier,
Sans voir d'abord que les femmes sur leurs passages
Tendent vers eux leurs seins, leurs fronts et leur visages.[2]

Paying no heed to the seductions of love, the strong men, the really great, ascend to the skies, to spiritual knowledge; they gather the fruits of stars and comets; and then, only then, when they are returning, tired by their lonely wandering, do they observe women, and lay down in their hands the knowledge of the great worlds. Not in the beginning, in the vehement days of youth, but only when manhood is established, only in the time of inner maturity, can woman become a great experience for Verhaeren. He must first of all have acquired a firm footing, must know his place in the world, before he can yield himself up to love. It is strange that the sonnet I have quoted should have been written in youth, because, like a presentiment, it relates the fate of his own life in advance. For the images of women never stopped his path nor turned him aside from it; love, if I may say so, only occupied his senses and never absorbed his soul. Not till later, till the years when the crisis was undermining his body, when his nerves were giving way under the terrible strain, when solitude reared itself before his face like an inseparable foe, did a woman enter his life. Then, and not till then, did love and marriage—the personal symbol of eternal, exterior order—give him inward rest. And to this woman the only love-poems he ever wrote are addressed. In Verhaeren's work, which is graded like a trilogy—in this symphony that is often brutal—there is a quiet, soft andante, a trilogy in the trilogy, one of love. From the point of view of art, these three books, Les Heures Claires, Les Heures d'Après-midi, and Les Heures du Soir, are not less in value than his great works, but they are more gentle. From this savage and passionate man one might have expected visionary, seething ecstasies, a tempestuous discharge of erotic feeling; but these books are a wonderful disappointment. They are not spoken to the crowd, but to one woman only, and for that reason they are not spoken loudly, but with a voice subdued. Religious consciousness—for with Verhaeren all that is poetic is religious in a new sense—finds a new form here. Here Verhaeren does not preach, he prays. These little pages are the privacy of his personal life, the confession of a passion which is great indeed, but veiled as it were with a delicate shame. 'Oh! la tendresse des forts!' is Bazalgette's inspired comment. And in truth, it is impossible to imagine anything more touching than the sight of this mighty fighter here lowering his resonant voice to the soft breathings of devotion. These verses are quite simple, spoken low, as though wild and too passionate words might imperil so noble a feeling, as though a strong man, a brutal man, who is afraid of hurting a delicate woman with a touch accustomed to bronze, should lay his hand on hers only softly, most cautiously.

How beautiful these poems are! When you read them, they take you softly by the hand and lead you into a garden. Here you see no more the murky horizon of the city, the workshops; you do not hear the din of streets, nor that resonant rhythm that raged along in cataract on cataract; you hear a gentle music as of a playing fountain. Passion does not project you here to the great ecstasies of humanity and the sky; it has no will to make you wild and fervid; it soothes you to tenderness and devotion. The strident voice has grown soft, these colours are of transparent crystal, this song seems to express the vast silence from which those great passions drew their force. But these poems are not artificial. They too are of one woof with the elements of Nature; but not with the great, wild, and heart-moving world, not with the fiery sky, not with thunder and tempests: it is only a garden that you surmise here, a peaceful cottage, with birds singing about it, where there are sweet-scented flowers and silence hanging between trees in blossom. The adventures are insignificant in feature. You breathe the poetry of everyday life, but not that of open and wildly surging roads—only the poetry of closed walls, softly spoken dialogues about little things, the tenderest secrets of home. These are the experiences of personal existence, this is the ordinary day between the great ecstasies. The lamp burns softly in the room, the silence is full of wonderful tenderness:

Et l'on se dit les simples choses:
Le fruit qu'on a cueilli dans le jardin;
La fleur qui s'est ouverte,
D'entre les mousses vertes,
Et la pensée éclose, en des émois soudains,
Au souvenir d'un mot de tendresse fanée
Surpris au fond d'un vieux tiroir,
Sur un billet de l'autre année.[3]

Here you have the deepest feeling, thanks and devotion, not in ecstasy to God and the world, but addressed to one single being. For Verhaeren is one who is ever receiving gifts, who always feels that he is being heaped with favours, who has always to give thanks for life and all its miracles. Without measure, with that zest, with that incessantly renewed joy which is the deepest secret of his art, he here again and again expresses love and gratitude. As Orpheus rises to Euridice from the nether world, here the sick lover ascends to the lady who has saved him from the dark. And again and again he thanks her for the good hours of quietness; again and again he reminds her of their first meeting, of the sunny happiness of these present days:

Avec mes sens, avec mon cœur et mon cerveau,
Avec mon être entier tendu comme un flambeau
Vers ta bonté et vers ta charité,
Je t'aime et te louange et je te remercie
D'être venue, un jour, si simplement,
Par les chemins du dévouement,
Prendre en tes mains bienfaisantes, ma vie.[4]

These verses are genuflexions, folded hands, love that by humility becomes religion.

But still more beautiful and significant, perhaps, is the second volume of the trilogy Les Heures d'Après-midi; for here again a new thing has been discovered, a moral beauty exceeding erotic sensation, a greatness of feeling such as can only be conferred by the noblest experience of life. It is a book after fifteen years of wedlock. But in this time love has not grown poorer. The deepest secret of Verhaeren's life, never to let his feelings grow cold and sink to a dead level, but unceasingly to enhance them, has denied a state of rest to his love also, and raised even this to something eternally animated and intensified. And so his love has been able to celebrate the highest triumph, vaincre l'habitude, to conquer monotony and the dearth of feeling. Perpetual ecstasy has made it strong. Only he who renews his passion really lives it. When love pauses, it passes. 'Je te regarde, et tous les jours je te découvre.[5] Every day has here renewed the feeling and made it independent of its beginning, independent of sensual pleasure. As in Verhaeren's whole work, passion has here been spiritualised, ecstasy soars beyond individual experience. It is no longer an external appearance that the now ageing couple love in each other. Lips have paled, the body has lost its freshness, the flesh its gloss and colour; the years of union have written their charactery in the face. Only love has not withered: it has grown stronger than the physical attraction; it has defied change, because it has itself changed and incessantly been intensified. It is now unshakeable and inalienable:

Puisque je sais que rien au monde
Ne troublera jamais notre être exalté
Et que notre âme est trop profonde
Pour que l'amour dépende encor de la beauté.[6]

The temporal has here been overcome, and even the future, even death have no longer any terrors. Without fear of losing himself—for 'qui vit d'amour vit d'éternité'—the lover can think of him who stands at the end of all ways. No fear can touch him more, for he knows he is loved, and Verhaeren has given wonderful expression to this feeling in a poem:

Vous m'avez dit, tel soir, des paroles si belles
Que sans doute les fleurs, qui se penchaient vers nous,
Soudain nous out aimés et que l'une d'entre elles,
Pour nous toucher tous deux, tomba sur nos genoux.
Vous me parliez des temps prochains où nos années,
Comme des fruits trop mûrs, se laisseraient cueillir;
Comment éclaterait le glas des destinées,
Et comme on s'aimerait en se sentant vieillir.
Votre voix m'enlaçait comme une chère étreinte,
Et votre cœur brûlait si tranquillement beau
Qu'en ce moment j'aurais pu voir s'ouvrir sans crainte
Les tortueux chemins qui vont vers le tombeau.[7]

The third volume, Les Heures du Soir, has wonderfully closed the peaceful cycle with a series of poems, which no doubt have old age for their motive, but which show no trace of lassitude in the artist. Summer has turned to autumn, but how opulent and ripe this autumn is: the golden fruits of memory hang down and glow in the reflection of the sun that has been so well loved. Once again love passes with bright images: he is changed and purified, but as masterful and as strong as on the first day.

I love these little poems of Verhaeren's with a different and no less a love than that I do his great and important lyric works. I have never been able to understand why these poems—for as far as the iconoclastic work is concerned, respect for tradition and fear of innovations may have scared many people away—have not enjoyed a widespread popularity. For never since the tenderly vibrating music of Verlaine's La Bonne Chanson, never since the letters of the Brownings, has wedded happiness been so marvellously celebrated as in these stanzas. Nowhere else has love been spiritualised so nobly, with such crystal purity, nowhere else has the synthesis of love and wedlock been more intrinsically fashioned. It is with a quite especial love that I love these poèmes francs et doux, for here behind the savage, ecstatic poet, the passionate and strong poet of Les Villes Tentaculaires, another poet appears, the simple, quiet, and modest poet, the gentle and kind poet, as we know him in life. Here, on the other side of the poetic ecstasy, we have the noble personality of Verhaeren, in whom we revere, not only a poetic force, but a human perfection as well. By the luminous gate of these frail poems goes the path to his own life.

THE ART OF VERHAEREN'S LIFE

In Verhaeren's case, there stands behind the poetic work of art the incomparable masterpiece of a great life, a wonderful, victorious battle for this art. For only a living humanity that had achieved harmony, not supple, ingenious intellectuality, could have arrived at such insight into knowledge. Verhaeren was not intrinsically a harmonious nature; he had, therefore, to make a double effort to transform the chaos of his feeling into a world. He was a restless and an intemperate man who had to tame himself; all the germs of dissipation and debauch were in his nature, all the possibilities of prodigality and self-destruction. Only a life secure in its aims, supported on a strong foundation, could force harmony from the conflicting inclinations he possessed; only a great humanity could compress such heterogeneous forces to one force. At the end and at the beginning of Verhaeren's works, at the end and at the beginning of his life, stands the same great soundness of health. The boy grew out of the healthy Flemish fields and was from his birth gifted with all the advantages of a robust race—and above all with passion. In the years of his youth he gave free rein to this passion for intemperance; he raged himself out in all directions; was intemperate in study, in drinking, in company, in his sexual life—he was intemperate in his art. He strained his strength to its uttermost limit, but he pulled himself together at the last moment, and returned to himself and the health that was his birthright. His harmony of to-day is not a gift of fate, but a prize won from life. At the critical moment Verhaeren had the power to turn round, in order, like Antæus, to recover his strength in the well of rejuvenescence of his native province and in the calm of family life.

Earth called him back, and his native province. Poetically and humanly, his return to Belgium signifies his deliverance, the triumph of the art of his life. Like the ship that he sings in La Guirlande des Dunes, the ship that has crossed all the seas of the world, and, though half dashed to pieces, ever comes sailing home again to Flanders, he himself has anchored again in the harbour whence he set sail. His poetry has ended where it began. In his last work he has celebrated the Flanders he sang as a youth, no longer, however, as a provincial poet, but as a national poet. Now he has ranged the past and the future along with the present, now he has sung Flanders too, not in individual poems, but as an entity in one poem. 'Verhaeren élargit de son propre souffle l'horizon de la petite patrie, et, comme le fit Balzac de son ingrate et douce Touraine, il annexe aux plaines flamandes le beau royaume humain de son idéalité et de son art.'[1] He has returned to his own race, to the bosom of Nature, to the eternal resources of health and life.

And now he lives at Caillou-qui-bique, a little hamlet in the Walloon district. Three or four houses stand there, far away from the railway, sequestered in the wood, and yet near the fields; and of these little houses the smallest, with few rooms and a quiet garden, is his. Here he leads the peaceful existence which is necessary for the growth of great work; here he holds solitary communion with Nature, undistracted by the voices of men and the hubbub of great towns; here he dreams his cosmic visions. He has the same healthy and simple food as the country people around him; he goes for early morning walks across the fields, talks to the peasants and the tradesmen of the village as though they were his equals; they tell him of their cares and petty transactions, and he listens to them with that unfeigned interest which he has for every form and variety of life. As he strides across the fields his great poems come into being, his step as it grows quicker and quicker gives them their rhythm, the wind gives them their melody, the distance their outlook. Any one who has been his guest there will recognise many features of the landscape in his poems, many a cottage, many a corner, many people, the little arts of the artisan. But how fugitive, how small everything appears there, everything that in the poem, thanks to the fire of the vision, is glowing, strong, and radiant with the promise of eternity! Verhaeren lives in his Walloon home in the autumn, but in spring and early summer he flees from his illness to the sea—flees from hay-fever. This illness of Verhaeren's has always seemed to me symbolical of his art and of his vital feeling, for it is, if I may say so, an elemental illness that, when pollen flies along the breeze, when spring lies out in sultry heat across the fields, a man's eyes should be filled with tears, his senses irritated, and his head oppressed. This suffering with Nature, this feeling in oneself of the pain which goes before the spring, this torment of the breaking forth of sap, of pressure in the air, has always appeared to me a symbol of the elemental and physical way that Verhaeren feels Nature. For it is as though Nature, which gives him all ecstasies, all its own dark secrets, gives him its own pain as well, as though its web reached into his blood, his nerves, as though the identity between the poet and the world had here attained a higher degree than in other men. In these painful first days of spring he flees to the sea, whose singing winds and sounding waves he loves. There he works rarely, for the restlessness of the sea makes him restless himself; it gives him only dreams, no works.

But Verhaeren is no longer a primitive spirit. He is attached by too many bonds to his contemporaries, too much in contact with all modern striving and creation, to be able to confine himself wholly to a rural existence. There is in him that wonderful double harmony of modern men which lives in brotherly communion with Nature and yet clings to Nature's supreme flower of culture. During the winter Verhaeren lives in Paris, the most alive of all cities; for, though quiet is an inner need of his, he looks on the unrest and noise of great cities as a precious stimulant. Here he receives those impressions of noisy life which, remembered in tranquillity, become poems. He loves to drift in the many-voiced confusion of teeming streets, to receive inspiration from pictures, books, and men. For years, in intimate cohesion with all that is coming into existence and growing in strength, he has followed the most delicate stirrings of the evolution of art, here too in the happiest manner combining detachment with sympathy. For he does not live really in Paris itself, but in Saint-Cloud, in a little flat which is full of pictures and books, and usually of good friends as well. For friendship, living, cheerful comradeship, has always been a necessity of life to him, to him who has the faculty of giving himself so whole-heartedly in friendship; and there is hardly one among the poets of to-day who has so many friends, and so many of the best. Rodin, Maeterlinck, Gide, Mockel, Vielé-Griffin, Signac, Rysselberghe, Rilke, Romain Rolland, all these, who have done great things for our time, are his close friends. With associates of this stamp he passes his life at Paris, carefully avoiding what is called society, aloof from the salons where fame is cultured and the transactions of art are negotiated. His innermost being is simplicity. And all his life long this modesty has made him indifferent to financial success, because he has never desired to rise above the primitive necessities of his life, never known the longing to dazzle and to be envied. While others, goaded by the success of their acquaintances, have been thrown off their balance and have worked themselves to death in fever, he has gone on his way calm and unheeding. He has worked, and let his work grow slowly and organically. And thus fame, which slowly but with irresistible sureness has grown to his stature, has not disturbed him. It is a pleasure to see how he has stood this last and greatest test, how he shoulders his fame stoutly, with joy but without pride. To-day Belgium celebrates in him her greatest poet. In France, where he was held an alien, he has forced esteem. The greatest good has been done, however, by the fact that from foreign races, from the whole of Europe and beyond it, from America, an answer has come to his great reputation, that the little enmities of the nations have called a halt before his work, and above all that it is the younger generation who are to-day enlisted under the banner of his enthusiasm. Inexhaustible has been his interest in young men; perhaps he has welcomed and encouraged every beginner with only too much kindness. For his delight in the art of others is inexhaustible; his infinite feeling of identity makes him in the highest sense impartial and enthusiastic, and it is a delight to see him stand in front of great works and to learn enthusiasm from him.

This apparent contrast between the art of his poetry and the art of his life is at first strange and surprising. For behind so passionate a poet one would never suspect so quiet and kind a man. Only his face—which has already allured so many painters and sculptors—speaks of passions and ecstasies; that brow across which, under locks growing grey, the deep lines graven by the crisis of his youth run like the furrows of a field. The pendent moustache (like that of Nietzsche) lends his face power and earnestness. The salient cheek-bones and sharply chiselled lines betray his peasant extraction, which is perhaps still more strongly accentuated by his gait, that hard, strikingly rhythmical, bowed gait which reminds one of the plougher treading in hard toil and in a bent posture over newly turned turf, his gait whose rhythm reminds one again and again of his poetry. But goodness shines in his eyes, which—couleur de mer—as though new-born after all the lassitude of the years of fever, are bright and fresh with life; there is goodness, too, in the hearty spontaneity of his gestures. In his face the first impression is strength; the second, that this strength is tempered with kindness. Like every noble face, it is, when translated into sculpture, the idea of his life.

Some day many people will speak of Verhaeren's art; many love it to-day already. But I believe that nobody will be able to love the poet in the same degree as many to-day love the art of his life, this unique personality, as people love something that can be lost and never restored. If one at first seems to find a discord between the modesty, gentleness, and heartiness of his humanity, and the wildness, heroism, and hardness of his art, one at last discovers their unity in experience, in feeling. When one closes the door after a conversation with him, or one of his books after the last page, the prevailing impression is the same: enhanced joy in life, enthusiasm, confidence in the world, an intensified feeling of pleasure which shows life in purer, kindlier, and more magnificent forms. This idealising effect of life goes out equally strong from his person and from his work; every sort of contact with him, with the poet, with the man, seems to enrich life, and teaches one to apply to him in his turn the appreciation he always so readily had for all the gifts of life—gratitude ever renewed and boundlessly intensified in passion.

THE EUROPEAN IMPORTANCE OF HIS WORK

The last force of everybody, the force which finally decides the effect, which alone and first of all is able to strain his work or his activity to the highest possibility, is the feeling of responsibility. To be responsible, and to feel that one is responsible, is equivalent to looking at one's whole life as a vast debt, which one is bound to strive with all one's strength to pay off; is equivalent to surveying one's momentary task on earth in the whole range of its significance, importance, and periphery, in order then to raise one's own inherent possibilities and capacities to their most complete mastery. For most people this earthly task is outwardly restricted in an office, in a profession, in the fixed round of some activity. With an artist, on the other hand, it is what one might call an infinite dimension which can never be attained; his task is therefore an unlimited, an eternal longing, a longing that never weakens. Since his duty can really only be to express himself with the greatest possible perfection, this responsibility coincides with the demand that he should bring his life, and with his life his talent, to the highest perfection, that he should, in Goethe's sense, 'expand his narrow existence to eternity.' The artist is responsible for his talent, because it is his task to express it. Now the higher the idea of art is understood, the more art feels its task to be the task of bringing the life of the universe into harmony, so much the more must the feeling of responsibility be intensified in a creative mind.

Now, of all the poets of our day Verhaeren is the one who has felt this feeling of responsibility most strongly. To write poetry is for him to express not himself only, but the striving and straining of the whole period as well, the fearful torment and the happiness that are in the birth of the new things. Just because his work comprises all the present and aims at expressing it in its entity, he feels himself responsible to the future. For him a true poet must visualise the whole psychic care of his time. For when later generations—in the same manner as they will question monuments concerning our art, pictures concerning our painters, social forms concerning our philosophers—ask of the verses and the works of our contemporaries the question, What was your hope, your feeling, the sum of your interpretation? how did you feel cities and men, things and gods?—shall we be able to answer them? This is the inner question of Verhaeren's artistic responsibility. And this feeling of responsibility has made his work great. Most of the poets of our day have been unconcerned with reality. Some of them strike up a dancing measure, rouse and amuse people lounging in theatres; others again tell of their own sorrow, ask for pity and compassion, they who have never felt for others. Verhaeren, however, heedless of the approval or disapproval of our time, turns his face towards the generations to be:

Celui qui me lira dans les siècles, un soir,
Troublant mes vers, sous leur sommeil ou sous leur cendre,
Et ranimant leur sens lointain pour mieux comprendre
Comment ceux d'aujourd'hui s'étaient armés d'espoir,
Qu'il sache, avec quel violent élan, ma joie
S'est, à travers les cris, les révoltes, les pleurs,
Ruée au combat fier et mâle des douleurs,
Pour en tirer l'amour, comme on conquiert sa proie.[1]

It was, in the last instance, this magnificent feeling of responsibility which did not permit him to pass by any manifestation of our present time without observing and appreciating it, for he knows that later generations will ask the question how we sensed the new thing, which to them is a possession and a matter of course, when it was still strange and almost hostile. His work is the answer. The true poet of to-day, in Verhaeren's eyes, must show forth the torment and the trouble of the whole psychic transition, the painful discovery of the new beauty in the new things, the revolt, the crisis, the struggles it costs to understand all this, to adapt ourselves to it, and in the end to love it. Verhaeren has attempted to express our whole time in its earthly, its material, its psychic form. His verses lyrically represent Europe at the turning of the century, us and our time; they consciously contemplate the whole circuit of the things of life: they write a lyric encyclopædia of our time, the intellectual atmosphere of Europe at the turning of the twentieth century.

The whole of Europe speaks with his voice, speaks with a voice that reaches beyond our time; and already from the whole of Europe comes the answer. In Belgium Verhaeren is above all the national poet, the poet of heaths, cities, dunes, and of the Flemish past, the great renewer of the national pride. But he stands too near his fellow-countrymen to be measured at his full height there. And in France, too, very few appreciate him at his true value. Most people regard him there in his literary aspect only and as a symbolist and decadent, an innovator of verse, an audacious and gifted revolutionary. But very few perceive the new and important work that is built up in his verses, very few comprehend the entity and the logical character of his cosmic philosophy. Nevertheless, his influence is already tangible. The new rhythm he has created can be recognised in many poets; and such a gifted disciple as Jules Romains has even brought his idea of the feeling of cities to new impressiveness. Best of all, however, he is understood by those Frenchmen who stand in a mystic communion with all that is great and urgent abroad; who feel an ethical need, a longing for an inner transmutation of values, for a re-moulding of races, for cosmopolitanism and a union of the nations; so, above all, Léon Bazalgette, who revealed Walt Whitman, the prophet of all strong and conscious reality in art, to France. Most joyfully of all, however, the answer rings from those countries which are themselves involved in deep-seated social and ethical crises, those countries where the need of religion is a vital instinct, which are eternally hungry for God, above all from Russia and Germany. In Russia the poet of Les Villes Tentaculaires is celebrated as he is nowhere else. As the poet of social innovations he is read in the Russian universities, and in the circles of the intellectuals he is regarded as the spiritual pioneer of our time. Brjussow, the distinguished young poet, has translated him, and afforded him the possibility of popularity. In other Slavonic countries, too, his work is beginning to spread.

Verhaeren's success, one may well say triumph, has been strongest and most impressive in Germany; here it has been unexpectedly intensive even to us who have worked for it. A few years have sufficed to make him as popular here I as any native poet, and the most beautiful feature of his success is this, that people are already forgetting to look upon him as a foreigner. Verhaeren is to-day part and parcel of German culture; and much of our contemporary lyric poetry, its welcome turning to optimism for example, would be unthinkable but for his work and influence. Countless are the essays devoted to him, the recitations in which our best elocutionists—Kainz, Moissi, Kayssler, Heine, Wiecke, Durieux, Rosen, Gregori—have taken part; none of these interpreters, however, were as enthusiastically applauded as was Verhaeren himself on his tournée in Germany, which was a great experience no less for him than for our public, because he gladly felt that his work was now rooted for ever in German soil. In Scandinavia, where Johannes V. Jensen in his essays unconsciously transcribed Verhaeren's lyric work, Ellen Key, the inspired prophetess of the feeling of life, has hailed him as she has hailed no other, and Georg Brandes, who crowns poets, has welcomed him with loud acclaim. Incessantly, in an irresistible, sure ascent, Verhaeren's fame grows. And above all, his poetry is no longer regarded as an individual thing, but as a work, as a cosmic philosophy, as an answer to the questions of our time, as the strongest and most beautiful enrichment of our vital feeling. Wherever people are tired of pessimism, tired of confused mysticism, and tired of monistic shallowness; wherever a longing stirs for a pure idealistic form of contemplation, for a new reconciliation between our new realities and the old reverence for eternal secrets, for the secularisation of the divine, his name stands in the front rank. An answer comes from every direction, not because his work was a question, but because it was in itself an answer to the unconscious demand for a new community, a demand which is being made by men of all nations everywhere to-day.

But all this is only a beginning. Works like his, which are not paradoxical enough, not dazzling enough, to produce sudden ecstasies and literary fashions; which, by the mere fact that they have themselves grown organically into existence, can only grow organically, but for that reason irresistibly, in their influence; only lay hold of the masses slowly. Only later generations will enjoy the fruit which we, with renewed admiration, have seen ripening from the most modest of blossoms. But already a ring of men of all nations are joining hands, a ring of men who perceive a new centre of spirituality in Verhaeren. And we, the few who have wholly surrendered ourselves to his work, must appreciate it with that feeling only which he himself has taught us as the highest feeling of life—with enthusiasm, with gratitude ever renewed, and with joyful admiration. For to whom in our days should one offer more abundantly and stormily this new vital doctrine of enthusiasm as the happiest feeling than to Verhaeren, to him who was the first to wrest it in the bitterest struggles from the depths of our time, who was the first to shape it in the material of art, the first to raise it to the eternal law of life?