Émile Verhaeren
“Mais les plus exaltés se dirent dans leur cœur,
‘Partons quand même avec notre âme inassouvie
Puisque la force et que la vie
Sont au delà des vérités et des erreurs.’”
“Vivre c’est prendre et donner avec liesse.
Toute la vie est dans l’essor.”
The above principles, prefixed to the Forces Tumultueuses of Émile Verhaeren, are well fitted to supply the key to a man who both in thought and in technique is indisputably the most modern and the most massive force in the whole of contemporary European poetry. For Verhaeren is no narrow specialist with an outlook limited to some particular sphere. He is the singer of the whole fulness of modern European life as a whole, with its clashes, its complexities, its agonies and its tensions, its deserted country-sides and its pullulating metropoles, its armaments and its Armageddons, its brothels, cathedrals, laboratories and Stock Exchanges, its sciences and its sensualities, its arts, philosophies and aspirations. His muse is no serene nymph piping delicately on some Parnassian slope, but an extremely tumultuous Amazon, at once primeval, and ultra-modern, chanting the pæan of battle, steeped in the wine of victory, and suckling the supermen of the future on her universal breasts. No muse in the whole of literature is more highly charged with vitality, and no reader is qualified to enjoy her unless he, too, is charged to the maximum with “the red tonic liquor of a harsh and formidable reality.”
Let us then glance first at the early milieu of a man who combines the exultant fury of the lyric with the wide outlook of the cosmopolitan sociologist, and who can incidentally beat both Baudelaire and Wordsworth at their own respective game.
Verhaeren was born on the 21st May 1855 at St. Amand in Belgium, one of the most strenuous countries in the modern world, which, it is interesting to remember, holds the European record for sensualism, alcoholism, and clericalism. St. Amand is situated on the broad plains of the Scheldt, and it is not unimportant to lay some stress on the Flemish ancestry and environment of a man who, though he wrote in the French language, is more Germanic than Gallic in his temperament, and who represents in the sphere of verse perhaps the nearest analogue to the crass majesty and red sensuality of Rubens. His early country upbringing, moreover, is responsible for that joie de vivre in the fields, and, above all, the wind, the symbolisation of fury and rebellion which was to inspire those nature lyrics, many of which are nearly as great, though by no means as interesting, as his cosmic and metropolitan poems.
Verhaeren was originally intended for the priest-hood, and was educated at the Jesuit school of St. Barbe in Ghent, where he had for his schoolfellows such men as Maeterlinck, Van Lenbergh, and Rodenbach. Leaving school, he went to Brussels, where he felt “his multiplied heart grow and become exalted” with the roaring intensity of metropolitan life. All thoughts of a holy life were now abandoned, and in 1881 the poet was called to the Bar. His chief interests, however, were literature, Socialism, and Brussels life. Joining the Young Belgian group under the leadership of Edmond Picard, he became a frequent contributor to L’Art Moderne and La Jeune Belgique. Politically he was a Socialist, associated himself with the Socialist leader Vandervelde, and was one of the founders of the philanthropic Maison des Peuples.
But it was in the poetic representation of “the monstrous scenery of the crass Flemish Kermesses” (Les Flamands, 1883) that Verhaeren gave the first vent to his violent virility. In this work a Rubensesque and Rabelaisian subject-matter is treated with poetic exaltation by a man who found in the great national festivals of past and present Flanders, with
“Des chocs de corps, des heurts de chair et des bourrades,
Des lèchements subis dans un etreignement,”
the same patriotic inspiration which Mr. G. K. Chesterton has discovered in that beer; into which he has, as it were, so successfully transubstantiated the whole national spirit of our English body-politic. Thus our poet wallows defiantly in the black roughness of his Flemish peasants:
“Les voici noirs, grossiers, bestiaux—ils sont tels,”
or casts regretful glances towards the healthier grossness of the artists of old Flanders:
“Vos pinceaux ignoraient le fard,
Les indécences, les malices,
Et les sous-entendus de vice
Qui clignent l’œil dans notre art,
Vos femmes suaient la santé,
Rouge de sang blanche de graisse,
Elles menaient les ruts en laisse
Avec des airs de royauté.”
But these poems are far more than mere erotic or gastronomic diversions. Somewhat turgid, no doubt, with red health, they yet possess the same sweep and the same impetus with which Aristophanes himself once gave expression to the riotous fecundity of the earth and the Dionysian forces of nature.
In Les Moines (The Monks, 1886), Verhaeren treats a subject-matter which primâ facie would seem to denote the abandonment of the cult of the flesh for the cult of the spirit. Yet such veneration as the poet may ever have possessed for the Catholic creed was æsthetic rather than religious. He penetrates, it is true, into the “enormous shrine where the Middle Ages slumber,” but it is less to worship than to describe in a rigid, but majestic prosody “the grand survivors of the Christian world”—the
“Moines venus vers nous des horizons gothiques
Mais dont l’âme mais dont l’esprit meurt de demain.”
Psychologically the interesting feature of this work is that, so far from being in any way obsessed by any Chestertonian nostalgia for a dead and mediæval past, the poet anticipates with all apparent serenity the day when “the final blasphemy will have transpierced God like to an immense sword.” Even, moreover, in these, as it were, antiquarian descriptions the poet emphasizes the contrast between the visionary life of the cloister (a life, albeit, where occasionally
“Un repas colossal souffle fourneaux béants
Éructant vers l’azur sa flamme et sa fumée”)
and the real life of the outside world, and seems by no means unsympathetic to the rebellious monk who requires
“Le ciel torride et le désert et l’air des monts
Et les tentations en rut des vieux demons
Agaçant de leurs doigts la chair enflée des gouges
En lui brûlant la lèvre avec de grands seins rouges.”
Yet both Les Flamands and Les Moines seem quite innocent and playful in comparison with the great black trinity of Les Soirs, Les Débâcles, and Les Flambeaux Noirs (1887-1891), in which Verhaeren gave expression to the mental and physical crisis which for a time seemed to imperil both his life and his reason. In these poems, many of which were written in London and its
“Gares de suie et de fumée ou du gaz pleure
Ses spleens d’argent lointain vers des chemins d’éclair,
Où des bêtes d’ennui baillent à l’heure
Dolente immensément qui tinte à Westminster,”
Verhaeren leaves the objective mood of his earlier poems to clothe his soul in the Nessian shirt of the most poisonous subjectivity. But true tragic dignity stalks in the very extremity of his agony. Compared, indeed, with the gigantic bass of this unhappiness, black, definite, drastic, what is the grey wistfulness of Verlaine but the hysterical falsetto of a whining child? Verhaeren, on the other hand, with the ecstatic defiance of a kind of Nietzschean Prometheus sets himself to plumb the lowest abysses of despair, and himself eggs on the eagles of torment to devour every shred of his own soul. With “brutal teeth of fire and madness he bites and outrages his own heart within him,” lashes himself in his thought and in his blood, in his effort, in his hope, in his blasphemy:
“Et quand lève le soir son calice de lie
Je me le verse à boire insatiablement.”
Or take again the sinister gusto of the passage:
“Aurai-j’enfin l’atroce joie
De voir nuits après nuits comme une proie
La démence attaquer mon cerveau,
Et détraque, malade, sorti de la prison
Et des travaux forcés de sa raison
D’appareiller vers un lointain nouveau?”
The technique of these poems is worthy of some study. Having little use for the orthodox alexandrine (except in a few instances like Le Gel, where the icy massiveness of the blocked couplets faithfully mirrors the polar desolation of his own soul), he fashions his own metres to incarnate his own moods. Such a refrain as “Ce minuit dallé d’ennui” will boom out again and again the dull monotonous clank of his own weary spirit. At other times the grinding engines of a disorganised mind whirr and jar with spasmodic feverishness:
“C’est l’heure où les hallucinés,
Les gueux, et les déracinés
Dressent leur orgueil dans la vie.”
Note, too, the ghastly effectiveness of the internal rhymes. Is not, for instance, such a line as
“Les chiens du noir espoir out aboyé ce soir”
a triple series, as it were, of metrical mirrors, where the bitten mind barks savagely back at its own mad image. Or listen to the Titanic thud of such a line as
“La Mer choque ses blocs de flots contre les rocs,”
or the silent smash of
“Dites suis-je seul avec mon âme,
Mon âme hélas maison d’ébène
Où s’est fendu sans bruit un soir
Le grand miroir de mon espoir?”
At times transcending the blank negativity of despair, the poet will coquet positively with his own madness, as he wanders “hallucinated in the forest of numbers,” or wishes to march towards “madness and her suns, her white suns of moonlight in the great weird noon, and her distant echoes bitten by dins and barkings and full of vermilion hounds.” Or abandoning the more specific formulation of his own emotions, he will give vent to his feelings by letting his brain dance upon the lurid boards of some macabre theme. The little poem, La Tête, is dank with all the smooth bloodiness of the guillotine, while the Dame en Noir, with the ghastly rhymes and assurances of its refrain, is swathed in a black pathos, in comparison with which the most lurid horrors of Baudelaire appear the mere artificial extravagances of a perverse mind.
As we have already seen, the blackness of the trilogy which we have just considered was no mere dabbling in morbidity, but the genuine expression of a genuine unhappiness. In, however, Les Apparus dans Mes Chemins, Les Vignes de Ma Muraille the storm gradually exhausts itself, and is replaced by a more serene and confident mood. Contrast, for instance, with the drastic violence of Les Débâcles the jaded weariness of such a lyric as Celui de la Fatigue, where the poet sings of an “ardour broken on the whirling staircase of the infinite,” or of such a passage as
“Je m’habille des loques de mes jours
Et le bâton de mon orgueil il plie,
Mes pieds dites comme ils sont lourds
De me porter de me trainer toujours
Au long de siècle de ma vie.”
And as a complete antithesis, again, to the black bloodiness of such poems as La Tête or Un Meurtre, take the white suavity of St. Georges:
“Il vient un bel ambassadeur
Du pays blanc illuminé de marbres
Où dans les pares au bords des mers sur l’arbre
De la bonté suavement croit la douceur.”
But this serenity marked rather a respite in Verhaeren’s development than a real abatement of his poetic fury. With the furnaces of his mind recharged to their maximum capacity with blazing health, he starts to race his muse over the main lines of the modern civilisation, which lead from The Hallucinated Country-sides to The Tentacular Towns. Though written at different times, these two sets of poems constitute the contrasting halves of a complete whole, and were published together in 1895 with two prologues, La Ville and La Plaine. The prologues, in particular, well illustrate the new rushing irregular prosody, specially forged for the purpose of hammering out that white-hot steel of the modern civilisation which enmeshes in its fabric all the helpless flotsam of the agricultural economy. The academic harmony of the alexandrine is here abandoned. The rhymes crash out at lesser and greater intervals as they march along on feet that range from the quick spasm of some dissyllabic line to the spondaic emphasis of a full-length alexandrine.
In Les Campagnes Hallucinés itself the prosody is no doubt simpler, as the poet describes the ruined and pestilential country with its fevers, its sins, its beggars, its pilgrims, its diseases, insanities and débauchés, and the immense monotony of its interminable plains.
“C’est la plaine, la plaine blême
Interminablement toujours la même,
Par au-dessus, souvent
Rage si forte le vent,
Que l’on dirait le ciel fendu
Au coup de boxe
De l’équinoxe;
Novembre hurle ainsi qu’un loup
Lamentable par le soir fou.”
Perhaps, however, the most sinister poems in Les Campagnes are the Chansons de Fou, with their naïf absurdities and their intuitive reason, where the rhymes laugh and clatter like rows of grinning teeth, and the almost Dureresque Le Fléau, from its exordium,
“La Mort a bu du sang
Au cabaret des Trois Cercueils
La Mort a mis sur le comptoir
Un écu noir,
‘C’est pour les cierges, pour les deuils,’”
down to its ghastly climax,
“Et les foules suivaient vers n’importent où,
Le grand squelette aimable et soûl
Qui trimballait sur son cheval bonhomme
L’épouvante de sa personne,
Jusqu’aux lointains de peur et de panique,
Sans éprouver l’horreur de son odeur,
Ni voir danser, sous un repli de sa tunique,
Le trousseau de vers blancs qui lui têtaient le cœur.”
The final significance of Les Campagnes lies in its last poem, Le Départ, describing the desertion by the whole country-side of that dead mournful plain which is being eaten up by the town.
“Tandis qu’au loin là-bas
Sous les cieux lourds fuligineux et gras,
Avec son front comme un Thabor,
Avec ses sugoirs noirs et ses rouges haleines
Hallucinant et attirant les gens des plaines,
C’est la ville que le jour plombe et que la nuit éclaire
La ville en plâtre, en stuc, en bois, en marbre, en fer, en or—
Tentaculaire.”
It is, however, in Les Villes Tentaculaires, where the fever and indefatigable aspiration of the town are described with a Zolaesque exaltation, that the originality of the departure initiated by Verhaeren is more specifically manifested. For he now boldly stalks forward as the pioneer realist in European poetry. Disregarding alike the orthodox subject-matter and the orthodox terminology of official poesy, he seeks and finds his inspiration in the vast forces at work in actual modern life. The realism of Verhaeren, in somewhat pointed contrast to the realism of some of our own patriotic or fashionable poets, even though such expressions as “cabs” and “steamers” are to be found in his work in the original English, depends for its æsthetic value neither on the swing of its slang nor the egregiousness of its expletives. The hot blast of his sincerity sweeps away at once any impeachment of mere dabbling in the ultra-modern. His diction is frequently brusque, and even red, if we may borrow his favourite colour, if not his favourite adjective; yet it never loses the dignity of authentic poetry. For the poet would seem to have been personally susceptible, in the highest degree, to that peculiar multiplication of vitality and intensification of emotion which is the essential effect produced by big metropoles upon certain temperaments. And this cerebral ecstasy is increased by the consciousness of being on the threshold of a new age, “for the ancient dream is dead, and the new one is now being forged.” Thus the poet will wander into The Cathedrals, take pity on the multitudinous misery of the praying hordes, and boom out again and again the refrain:
“Ô ces foules, ces foules
Et la misère et la détresse qui les foulent.”
But note the sociological symbolism of the climax:
“Et les vitraux grands de siècles agenouillés
Devant le Christ avec leurs papes immobiles
Et leurs martyrs et leurs héros semblent trembler
Au bruit d’un train lointain qui roule sur la ville.”
For refusing to bear the cross of Gothic ideas, the poet plunges deliberately into the inferno of modern life. And each fresh circle but kindles his ardour and inflames his Muse. For he will pass with growing exaltation from the muscled teeming life of the port to the garish ballet of a music hall where
“Des bataillons de chair et de cuisses en marche
Grouillent sur des rampes ou sous des arches,
Jambes, hanches, gorges, maillots, jupes, dentelles,”
and then, as midnight strikes and the crowd ebbs away, he will stalk into the “brilliant chemical atmosphere” where
“Au long de promenoirs qui s’ouvrent sur la nuit
—Balcons de fleurs, rampes de flammes—
Des femmes en deuil de leur âme
Entrecroisent leurs pas sans bruit.”
Nor does the poet disdain the grinding factories where
“Entre des murs de fer et pierre
Soudainement se lève altière
La force en rut de la matière,”
or even the Bourse itself, where he sings in feverish staccato rhythm the
“Langues sèches, regards aigus, gestes inverses,
Et cervelles qu’en tourbillons les millions traversent.”
But it is typical of Verhaeren’s essential optimism that after describing with Zolaesque detail both a strike and a “shop of luxury,” he should find the ransom of the future in
“La maison de la science au loin dardée
Obstinément par à travers les faits jusqu’aux idées.”
In Les Heures Claires (1896) the drastic violence of Les Villes Tentaculaires abates for the time being into a mood of resigned, but yet robust melancholy, which immortalises the sweetness, deepness, and softness of the poet’s love for his wife.
In Les Forces Tumultueuses, however, the poet has got once again into the full swing of his drastic stride. The mood is to some extent the same as that of Les Villes Tentaculaires, though the Zolaesque concreteness of detail is merged in the broadness of a genuine Lucretian sweep. The book consists of a series of lyrical poems, lyrical, albeit, in the sense rather of Pindar than of Herrick, which exalt the various phases of human energy. Thus in the poem, L’Art, Verhaeren soars upwards with a tremendous rush:
“D’un bond
Son pied cassant le sol profond
Son double aile dans la lumière
Le cou tendu, le feu sous les paupières
Partit, vers le soleil et vers l’extase,
Ce dévoreur d’espace et de splendeur Pégase.”
In Les Maîtres the poet describes the various types of superman, from “the monk” of the Middle Ages to the banker of the twentieth century, who dominates the world as he “binds sinister destiny to his bourgeois will,” and sows in the distance his winged gold.
“Son or aile qui s’enivre d’espace,
Son or planant, son or rapace,
Son or vivant,
Son or dont s’éclairent et rayonnent les vents,
Son or qui boit la terre
Par les pores de son misère
Son or ardent, son or furtif, son or retors.
Morceau d’espoir et de soleil—son or!”
Some mention must also be made of the poem, Les Femmes, which, subdivided into L’Éternelle, L’Amante, L’Amazone, ranks in our view as the greatest sex poem of the century. In contrast, for instance, with Swinburne, who treats sex rather as a thing of beauty and of pleasure than as an underlying world-force, and who has both the advantage and the disadvantage of the specifically classical conception of life, Verhaeren, whether he rings his changes in L’Amante on the soft refrain, “Mon rêve est embarqué dans une île flottante,” shows in L’Amazone that the New Woman can be something considerably more poetic than a Strindbergian monstrosity, or sings in L’Éternelle her “who thinks she encloses the whole world within her flesh,” will boom out again and again the cosmic and universal peal. The verse throughout is as beautiful as can be desired. But it has something more than beauty; it has stature, majesty, speed, force, that exaltation of reality which is the essence of the highest poetry.
In the poems, La Science, L’Erreur, La Folie, Les Cultes, Verhaeren proceeds to formulate his own philosophy of life, and his prophetic enthusiasm for the new modern truths, under whose clear feet the old texts have crumbled, as he expounds
“Comment la vie est une à travers tous les êtres
Qu’ils soient matière instruit esprit ou volonté
Forêt myriadaire et rouge où s’enchevêtrent
Les débordements fous de la fécondité.”
Put shortly, his philosophy is a compound of those of Nietzsche and of Bergson. His soul, no doubt, swings in unison with the universal rhythm of the world, but, like Nietzsche, he finds in force and life realities transcending all errors, and after a historic survey of the more popular deities of humanity from Gog to Jehovah, and from Satan to Christ, enunciates his belief in humanity in stanzas of sublime blasphemy, far more truly religious than the ambiguous scrolls and rubrics of any antiquarian creed:
“L’homme respire et sur la terre il marche, seul.
Il vit pour s’exalter du monde et de lui-même,
Sa langue oublie et la prière et le blasphême;
Ses pieds foulent le drap de son ancien linceul.
Il est l’heureuse audace au lieu d’être la crainte;
Tout l’infini ne retentit que de ses bonds
Vers l’avenir plus doux, plus clair et plus féconds
Dont s’aggrave le chant et s’alentit la plainte.
Penser, chercher, et découvrir sont ses exploits.
Il emplit jusqu’aux bords son existence brêve;
Il n’enfle aucun espoir, il ne fausse aucun rêve,
Et s’il lui faut des Dieux encore—qu’il les soit!”
In La Multiple Splendeur and Les Visages de la Vie the same insatiable gusto for an infinitude of life darts again and again its red tongue. It is impossible by mere quotation to do justice to the full vastness of Verhaeren’s lyric sweep. We would, however, at any rate, refer to the majesty of Le Monde with its combined crash and concord of incessant life and the Cyclopean weight of the adamantine line which buttresses at either end the flaming rivers of its verse,
“Le monde est fait avec des astres et des hommes,”
or to the sublimity of Les Penseurs in which the poet tells how
“Autour de la terre obsédée
Circule au fond des nuits, au cœur des jours
Toujours
L’orage amoncelé des idées,”
and how
“Descartes et Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant et Hegel”
“fixed the highest pinnacles of inaccessible problems for the goal of their silver arrows, and carried within themselves the grand obstinate dream of one day, imprisoning eternity in the white ice of immobile truth.”
The very names, too, of some of the poems may possibly reflect some of the facets of their multiplied splendour: Le Verbe, Les Vieux Empires, La Louange du Corps Humain, A la Gloire des Cieux, A la Gloire du Vent, Les Rêves, L’Europe, La Conquête, Les Souffrances, La Joie, La Ferveur, Les Idées, La Vie, L’Effort, L’Action, Plus Loin que les Gares, Le Soir. And again and again rings out in various keys the true Nietzschean note. For “vast hopes come from the unknown” has displaced the ancient balance whereof souls are now tired. But the only reality is life:
“La vie en cris ou en silence,
La vie en lutte ou en accord
Avec la vie avec la mort
La vie âpre, la vie intense,
Elle est ici dans la fureur ou dans la haine
De l’ascendant et rouge ardeur humaine.”
It is fine proof also of the vast vitality of Verhaeren that even in so recent a work as Les Rhythmes Souveraines the muscled majesty of his verse, though possibly a trifle less violent, shows no abatement of its essential strength. We would mention in particular the poems Michel Ange, Chant d’Hercule, Les Barbares with the swift crispness of its one-foot lines, and above all Le Paradis with its almost Miltonic picture of
“L’archange endormant Ève au creux de sa grande aile.”
But does not Verhaeren transcend Milton in the wideness of his humanity when he describes not with regret but with the maximum of exalted exultation how
“Ève bondit soudain hors de son aile immense,
Oh l’heureuse subite et féconde démence,
Que l’ange avec son cœur trop pur ne comprit pas.”
In his latest volume, Les Blés Mouvants, Verhaeren sinks back no doubt to a quieter and serener mood, but who shall say that these eclogues do not simply represent the sage crouch for another leonine spring?
We do not propose to make more than a passing reference to Verhaeren’s plays, for it is the lyric rather than the drama which is his true medium of expression.
Hélène de Sparte, with all its graceful Alexandrines, is inferior to any play by D’Annunzio, and even the socialist drama Les Aubes is, notwithstanding the fine verses with which it is sown, simply stiff and heavy when compared with Hauptmann’s Weavers. It is by his lyrics that Verhaeren lives, and will continue to live beyond his mere death whenever it comes, as the greatest and most essentially European poet of our new age. For his lyrics are equally great, both in their message and the method of their expression. Disdaining alike the cowardice and the perversity of those who, refusing to face the red realities of the present century, fly for their comfort to the pale shadows of the Middle Ages, Verhaeren has plunged boldly into the very brazier of our modern existence. He affirms, he combats, he prophesies, but he rarely, if ever, rests. He hymns every phase of life, from the human brain to the human body, and from the winds and seas of nature to the towns and marts of man. And no message is more virile, more tonic, more essentially healthy, for is not his message the phœnix of a new humanitarian faith soaring aloft on its fiery wings out of the corpses of the decomposing dogmas? And his prosody has the supreme excellence that it is not a mere æsthetic end in itself, but a drastic instrument of expression. Your pure æsthete, no doubt, may cavil at his ruggedness. For he is the Rodin of poetical rhyme, the veritable Vulcan of verse, or rather a Siegfried forging the sword of the future on the anvil of the present, as he drives in the stubborn nails of his nouns with the hissing hammers of his adjectives. His lines no doubt at times will growl, grind and boom, hit the reader in the face with all the force of a clenched fist, and palpitate with a full-bloodedness somewhat overpowering for the jaded and the anæmic. But is not this the very seal of success in a man who specifically sets himself to sing not the mere beauty of beauty, but the beauty of force, the beauty of life, “life violent, prodigious, unsatiated, the universal spasm of all things”?