Towns (‘Les Villes Tentaculaires’)
Le siècle et son horreur se condensent en elles
Mais leur âme contient la minute éternelle.
É.V., ‘Les Villes.’
When a man just recovered from illness steps for the first time with arms outspread, and as though climbing up from a dungeon, into the light of day, he is filled with a bliss beyond measure by the open air caressing him on all sides, by the orgies of the sunlight, the cataracts of deafening din: with a cry of infinite exultation he takes into himself the symphony of life. And from this first moment of his recovery Verhaeren was seized by a limitless thirst for the intoxication of life, as though with one single leap he would make good the lost years of his loneliness, of his illness, and of his crisis. His eyes, his ears, his nerves, all his senses, which had been a-hungered, now pounce on things with a pleasure that is almost murderous, and snatch everything to themselves in a frenzy of greed. At this time Verhaeren travelled from country to country, as though he would take possession of all Europe. He was in Germany, in Berlin, in Vienna, and in Prague; always a lonely wanderer; quite alone; ignorant of the language, and listening only to the voice of the town itself, to the strange, sombre murmuring, to the surge of the European metropolises. In Bayreuth he paid his devotions at the tomb of Wagner, whose music of ecstasy and passion he absorbed in Munich; in Colmar he learned to understand his beloved painter Mathias Grünewald; he saw and loved the tragic landscapes of northern Spain, those gloomy, treeless mountains, whose threatening silhouettes afterwards became the background of the fiery happenings in his drama of Philip II.; in Hamburg he was an excited spectator, day by day, of the stupendous traffic, the coming and going of the ships, the unloading and the loading of cargoes. Everywhere where life was intensive, expressive, and animated with a new energy, he passionately loved it. It is characteristic of his temperament that the harmonious beauty of peaceful and empty, of sleeping and dreaming cities appealed to him less than modern cities in their pall of soot and smoke. Almost intentionally his affection turns from the traditional ideal to one yet unknown. Florence, for many centuries the symbol of all poets, disappointed him: the Italian air was too mild, these contours were too meagre, too dreamy the streets. But London, this piled-up conglomeration of dwellings and workshops; this town that might have been cast in bronze; this teeming labyrinth of dingy streets; this ever-beating, restless heart of the world’s trade with its smoke of toil threatening to eclipse the sun; this was to him a revelation. Just the industrial towns, which had thus far tempted no poet; those towns which roll up the vault of their leaden sky with their own fog and smoke, which confine their inhabitants in leagues and leagues of congested masonry, these attract him. He, who revels in colour, grew fond of Paris, to which, since then, he has returned every year for the winter months. Just what is restless and busy, confused and breathless, hunted, eager, feverish, hot with an ardour as of rut, all this Babylonian medley lures him. He loves this pell-mell multiplicity and its strange music. Often he would travel for hours on the top of heavy omnibuses, to have a bird’s-eye view of the bustling throng, and here he would close his eyes the better to feel the dull rumour, this surging sound which, in its ceaselessness, is not unlike the rustling of a forest, beating against his body. No longer as in his earlier books does he follow the existence of simple callings; he loves the ascension of handiwork to mechanical labour, in which the aim is invisible, and only the grandiose organisation is revealed. And gradually this interest became the motive interest of his life. Socialism, which in those years was becoming strong and active, fell like a red drop into the morbid paleness of his poetic work. Vandervelde, the leader of the Labour Party, became his friend. And when, at this stage, the party founded the Maison du Peuple at Brussels, he readily helped, gave lectures at the Université Libre, took part in all the projects, and afterwards, wards, in the most beautiful vision of his poetical work, lifted them far above the political and actual into the great events of all humanity. His life, now inwardly established, henceforth beats with a strong and regular rhythm. He had in the meantime, by his marriage, attained a personal appeasement, a counterpoise for his unbridled restlessness. Now his wild ecstasies have their fixed point, from which they can survey the fiery vortex of the new phenomena. The morbid pictures, the feverish hallucinations, now become clear visions; not by flashes of lightning, but in a steady, beaming light are the horizons of our time now illuminated for him.
Now that he steps boldly into life, his first problem is to come to an understanding with the world around him, with his fellow-men, with the city itself. But it is not the city he lives in which interests him in a provincial sense, but the ideal, modern city, the monster city in general, this strange and uncanny thing that like a vampire has snatched to herself all the strength of the soil and of men to form a new residuum of power. She crowds together the contrasts of life; grades, in unexpected layers, immense riches over the most wretched poverty; strengthens opposing forces, and goads them to hostility, goads them to that desperate battle in which Verhaeren loves to see all things involved. The grandeur of this new organism is beyond the æsthetics of the past; and new and strange before Nature stand men also, with another rhythm, a hotter breath, quicker movements, wilder desires than were known to any association of men, to any calling or caste, of a previous time. It is a new outlook which not only sweeps the distance, but has also to reckon with height, with the piled tiers of houses, with new velocities and new conditions of space. A new blood, money, feeds these cities, a new energy fires them; they are driven to procreate a new faith, a new God, and a new art. Their dimensions, terrific, and of a beauty hitherto unknown, defy measurement; the order that rules is hidden in the earth behind a pathless wilderness.
Quel océan, ses cœurs?...
Quels nœuds de volonté serrés en son mystère!1
cries out the poet in wonderment as he strides through the city and is overpowered by her grandeur:
Toujours en son triomphe ou ses défaites,
Elle apparaît géante, et son cri sonne et son nom luit.2
He feels that an enormous energy proceeds from her; he is conscious that her atmosphere rests with a new pressure on his body, that his blood quickens to keep pace with her rhythm. Merely to be near her starts the thrill of a new delight.
En ces villes...
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Je sens grandir et s’exalter en moi,
Et fermenter, soudain, mon cœur multiplié.3
Involuntarily he feels himself becoming dependent on her, feels this grandiose coupling of energy producing a similar concentration of all his forces in himself too, feels his fever becoming infectious like her own, and feels—with an intensity unknown to any other poet of our days—the identity of his personality with the soul of the city. He knows she is dangerous, knows she will fill him with all restlessness, overheat him and excite him, confuse him with her hostile contrasts.
Voici la ville en or des rouges alchimies,
Où te fondre le cœur en un creuset nouveau
Et t’affoler d’un orage d’antinomies
Si fort qu’il foudroiera tes nerfs jusqu’au cerveau.4
But he knows that she will impregnate him as well, give him power from her strength. There will never be a great man again who will pass her by, who will not be thrilled by her sensation, who will not live with her, and by her grow. Henceforth all new and strong men will stand in reciprocal action with her.
This great recognition of a fact is, as we have seen, not spontaneous, but painfully acquired. For in the sense of the old beauty the aspect of a modern city is frightful. She is a sleepless, an ever wakeful woman; she does not, like Nature, sometimes rest; she is never silent. Restlessly she sucks men into her whirlpool; ceaselessly she pricks their nerves; day and night her life pulses. By day she is as grey as lead; a sultry shuttle of passions; a dark mine in which men, buried in the mines of her streets, are forced to unresting toil. How dense are these virgin forests of bronze and stone; and of all these thousands of streets ‘à poumons lourds et haletants, vers on ne sait quels buts inquiétants,’5 not one seems to lead into the open, into the light of day. Monotonous, like dull eyes, glare the millions of windows; and the darksome caverns in which men, themselves like machines, sit by machines, thunder in the unseizable rhythm of petrified exertion. Not a ray is reflected on them from the eternal; hostile, repulsive, and grey the town pants in the puffed smoke of her daily labour. But night, softening all harsh lines, fierily welds the lumbering limbs together into something new. By night the town is turned into one great seduction. Passion, fettered in the day-time, breaks its chains:
... Pourtant, lorsque les soirs
Sculptent le firmament de leurs marteaux d’ébène,
La ville au loin s’étale et domine la plaine
Comme unnocturne et colossal espoir;
Elle surgit: désir, splendeur, hantise;
Sa clarté se projette en lueurs jusqu’aux cieux,
Son gaz myriadaire en buissons d’or s’attise,
Ses rails sont des chemins audacieux
Vers le bonheur fallacieux
Que la fortune et la force accompagnent;
Ses murs se dessinent pareils à une armée
Et ce qui vient d’elle encor de brume et de fumée
Arrive en appels clairs vers les campagnes.6
These fiery eruptions Verhaeren shapes in grandiose visions. There is the vision of the music halls: wheels of fire revolve round a house, blazing letters climb up façades and lure the crowds to sit in front of the brilliant footlights. I Here the people’s hunger for sensation is fed full, and art is cruelly murdered day by day. Here tedium is tamed for an hour or so, and whipped up with colour, flame, and music for another pleasure that is waiting outside, as soon as the illusion here sinks into the night:
Et minuit sonne et la foule s’écoule
—Le hall fermé—parmi les trottoirs noirs;
Et sous les lanternes qui pendent,
Rouges, dans la brume, ainsi que des viandes,
Ce sont les filles qui attendent....7
they the harlots, ‘les promeneuses,’ ‘les veuves d’elles-mêmes,’8 who live on the sensual hunger of the masses. For sensual pleasure too is organised in cities, is guided into canals, like all instincts. But the primordial instinct is the same. The hunger which out in the fields and in the country was still pleasure in healthy food, in frothing beer, has here been converted into the idea of money. Money is what everybody hungers for here; money is the meaning of the town. ‘Boire et manger de l’or’9 is the hot dream of the crowd. Everything is expressed by money, ‘tout se définit par des monnaies’;10 all values are subordinate to this new value, monetary value. Superb is the vision of the bazaar, where, on all the counters, in the many stories, everything is sold, not only as in reality objects in common use, but, in a loftier symbolism, ethical values as well: convictions and opinions, fame and name, honour and power, all the laws of life. But all this fiery blood of money flows together in the great heart of the city, flows into the Exchange, that greedy maw that swallows all the gold and spits it out again, which smelts all this hectic fever and then pours it flaming into all the veins of the city. Everything can be bought, even pleasure: in back streets, in l’étal, in the haunts where debauch lies in wait, women sell themselves as goods are sold in the bazaar. But this energy is not always regulated, not always made to flow between dikes. Here too, as in Nature, there are sudden catastrophes. Sometimes revolt is kindled, flashes up instantaneously, and this stream of money blazes itself a new trail. The masses pour out of their dismal caverns, greed takes possession of men, and the myriad-headed monster fights and bleeds for this one thing, this red-burning, relucent gold.
But the great and powerful thing in these towns is not passion; it is the hidden strength behind these passions, the noble order that keeps them in their proper limits, and holds them in check. This rumbling chaos, this inundation of things doomed to die, is dominated in the Villes Tentaculaires by three or four figures standing like statues—the tamers of passions. They are what kings and priests were of old, they who have the power of bridling ebullient energies and turning them to use. With hands of iron they hold down this wild and dangerous animal, they, the new rulers, statesmen, generals, demagogues, organisers. For the town is an animal in its movements, a beast in its passions, a brute in its instincts, a monster in its strength. It is ugly, like all rut. It cannot be contemplated with a pure pleasure, like a landscape gently and harmoniously fading in forest verdure; it rather evokes, at first, loathing, hatred, caution, and hostility. But that is the great thing in Verhaeren, that he always overcomes whatever is hostile, pain and torment, by a great vista, that in this panting steam of the unæsthetic he already sees the flame of the new beauty. Here for the first time is, seen the beauty of factories, les usines rectangulaires, the fascination of a railway station, the new beauty in the new things. If the town is indeed ugly in its denseness, ugly in the sense of all classical ideals; if the picture of it is indeed I cruel and frightful; it is yet not unfertile. ‘Le siècle et son horreur se condensent en elle, mais son âme contient la minute éternelle.’ And this I feeling, that in her the minute of eternity is contained, that she is the new thing risen above all the pasts, a new thing that one must perforce come to terms with, this feeling makes her momentous and beautiful to the poet. If her form is loathsome, grey, and sombre, her idea, her organisation, are grandiose and admirable. And here, as always, where admiration finds a pivot, it can give the whole world the swing from negation to assent.
But Verhaeren is by this time too little of an artist, too much interested in all the problems of life, to be able to contemplate the idea of the modern city from the æsthetic side alone. It is for him a still more important symbol for the expression of contemporary feeling.
Not only the problem of the new social stratification is poetically digested in his trilogy, but also one of the most burning and pressing questions of political economy as of politics, the struggle between the centrifugal and the centripetal power, the struggle between agrarianism and industrialism. Town and country purchase their prosperity, the one by the impoverishment of the other. Production and trade, however much one is the condition of the other, at their extreme points are hostile forces. And how, in our days in Europe, the victory between town and country is being decided in favour of the town; how, gradually, the town is absorbing the best strength of the provinces—the problem of the déracinés—this has for the first time in poetry been described by Verhaeren in his magnificent vision of Les Villes Tentaculaires. The cities have sprung up like mushrooms. Millions have conglomerated. But where have they come from? From what sources have these immense masses suddenly streamed into the mighty reservoirs? The answer is quick to come. The heart of the city is fed with the oozing blood of the country. The country is impoverished. As though they were hallucinated, the peasants migrate to where gold is minted, to the town that in the evenings flames across the horizon; to where alone riches lies, and power. They march away with their carts, to sell their last stick of furniture, their last rags; they march away with their daughter, to deliver her up to lust; they march away with their son, to let him perish in the factories; they march away to dip their hands, they also, in this roaring river of gold. The fields are deserted. Only the fantastic figures of idiots stagger along lonely paths; the abandoned flour-mills are empty, and only turn when the wind smites against them. Fever rises from the marshes, where the water, no longer gathered into dikes, spreads putrefaction and pestilence. Beggars drag themselves from door to door, with the country’s barrenness reflected in their eyes; to the last lingering cultivators come, sinuously, their worst enemies, les donneurs de mauvais conseils. The emigration agent entices them to wander to the lands of gold, and they squander what they have inherited from their ancestors, to seek a far-distant hope:
Avec leur chat, avec leur chien,
Avec, pour vivre, quel moyen?
S’en vont, le soir, par la grand’route.11
And they who are not enticed away by emigration are evicted from hearth and home by usurers. Villages in which the dance of the kermesse has long been silent are of a sudden cut in two by a network of railways. There is no fairness in the fight. The country is conquered because the blood of its inhabitants has been sucked out of it. ‘La plaine est morte et ne se défend plus.’12 Everything streams to Oppidomagnum. This is the name given by Verhaeren in his symbolical drama Les Aubes—which, with the Campagnes Hallucinées and the Villes Tentaculaires forms the trilogy of the social revolution—to the monster city. This, with its arms as of a polypus, pitilessly sucks all the strength of the district round it. From all sides strength streams in upon it. ‘Tous les chemins se rythment vers elle.’ Not only from the country does she drink the strength of men, all the ocean seems to be pouring its waters only to her port. ‘Toute la mer va vers la ville.’13 The whole sea streams to the city; all the rolling waves seem only to exist that they may bring to her this wandering forest of ships. And she absorbs everything, digests it in the ‘noire immensité des usines rectangulaires,’14 greedily devours it, to spit it out again as gold.
But this immense social struggle between the country and the town expresses, like the other new phases, something yet higher. It is only a momentary symbol of an eternal schism. The country is the symbol of the Conservatives. In the country the forms of labour are petrified, calm, and regular; there life is without haste, and only regulated by the rotation of the seasons. All sensations, all forms are pure and simple. These men stand nearer to the freaks of chance: a flash of lightning, a hailstorm can destroy their labour; and so they fear God, and do not dare to doubt in Him. The town, however, symbolises progress. In the thunder of the streets of to-day no Madonna’s voice is heard; the life of the individual is protected from chance by prearranged order; the fever of the new creates also a yearning for new conditions of life, new circumstances, for a new God.
L’esprit des campagnes était l’esprit de Dieu;
Il eut la peur de la recherche et des révoltes,
Il chut; et le voici qui meurt, sous les essieux
Et sous les chars en feu des récoltes.15
If the country was the past, the town is the future. The country only seeks to keep what it has, to preserve: its character, its beauty, its God. But the town must first of all create, must make itself the new beauty, the new faith, and the new God.
Le rêve ancien est mort et le nouveau se forge.
Il est fumant dans la pensée et la sueur
Des bras fiers de travail, des fronts fiers de lueurs,
Et la ville l’entend monter du fond des gorges
De ceux qui le portent en eux
Et le veulent crier et sangloter aux cieux.16
But we, Verhaeren thinks, must not belong to this world of the past, this moribund world; no, we who live in towns must think with them, must live with the new age, create in league with it, and find a new language for its dumb yearning. A return to nature is no longer possible for us: evolution cannot be screwed back again. If we have lost great values, we must replace them by new; if our religious feeling for the old God is cold and dead, we must create new ideals. We must find new aims that our ancestors knew not of; in the new forms of the city we must find a new beauty, in her noises a new rhythm, in her confusion an order, in her energy an object, in her stammering a language.
If the towns have destroyed much, they will perhaps create still more. In their melting-pot professions, races, religions, nations, languages are blended:
...les Babels enfin réalisées
Et les peuples fondus et la cité commune
Et les langues se dissolvant en une.17
‘The old order changeth, giving place to new’; and we must not ask whether the new is better than the old; we must trust that it is so. The feverish convulsions of the great cities, this unrest, this screaming torment, cannot be in vain. For they, these pains and convulsions, are only the birth-throes of the new. But he who has been the first to feel, with a glad presentiment, this pain of the masses, this fermentation, as joy, this unrest as hope, must himself be an authentic new man, one of those who are called to give a poetic answer to all the complaints and questions of our time.
Footnotes
1 ‘L’Âme de la Ville’ (Les Villes Tentaculaires).
2 Ibid. (Ibid.).
3 ‘La Foule’ (Les Visages de la Vie).
4 ‘Les Villes’ (Les Flambeaux Noirs).
5 ‘L’Âme de la Ville’ (Les Villes Tentaculaires).
6 ‘La Ville’ (Les Campagnes Hallucinées).
7 ‘Les Spectacles’ (Les Villes Tentaculaires).
8 ‘Les Promeneuses’ (Ibid.).
9 ‘La Bourse’ (Ibid.).
10 ‘Le Bazar’ (Ibid.).
11 ‘Le Départ’ (Les Campagnes Hallucinées).
12 ‘La Plaine’ (Les Villes Tentaculaires).
13 ‘Le Port’ (Ibid.).
14 ‘La Plaine’ (Ibid.).
15 ‘Vers le Futur’ (Les Villes Tentaculaires).
16 ‘L’Âme de la Ville’ (Les Villes Tentaculaires).
17 ‘Le Port’(Ibid.).