The Multitude
Mets en accord ta force avec les destinées
Que la foule, sans le savoir,
Promulgue, en cette nuit d’angoisse illuminée.
É.V., ‘La Foule.’
That great event which is the modern city was at bottom only possible by the organisation of the mighty multitudes of the people and the distribution of their forces. To organise is to weld unlike forces economically into an organism, to imitate something that has life and soul, in which nothing is superfluous and everything is necessary; it is to give a material its uniform strength, to give an idea the flesh and bones of its shape and of its possibility. Now the town has smelted the scattered forces of the country into a new material—into the multitude; it has converted much that used to be individually active force into mechanical force; it has humbled man to the condition of a handle, a rolling wheel; it has everywhere tied up the individuality of the single man in order to produce a new individuality, that of the crowd. For the multitude as a fact is a new thing. For centuries it was only a symbol, an idea. The inhabitants of whole countries were logically epitomised in a number, but with no suggestion of thus comprehending their immediate unity. Of course, in times past great armies have been known, hordes of fighting men and nomad tribes; but these only represented a volatile concentration, too unsettled, too inconstant to procreate an individuality, an æsthetic and moral value. And even those armies whose legendary greatness echoes down the centuries, the hordes of Tamerlaine, the hosts of the Persians, the legions of Rome, how poor is their number in comparison with the masses of human beings daily herded together in New York or London or Paris! Only in our own days, only in Oppidomagnum, has the multitude been welded together finally and for all time, been hooked together with bands of steel like the wheels of an immense machine; only recently has the crowd become a living being that grows and multiplies like a forest. Democracy has given it new intellectual forms, set a brain in the body, by making the multitude determinate, subject only to itself. It is a creation of the nineteenth century; it is a new value in our lives, and one that we must come to terms with; no less a value for our evolution than the highest values of the past. Walt Whitman, to whom one must constantly refer in dealing with Verhaeren’s work, although—let it be expressly stated here—Verhaeren quite independently and unconsciously arrived at the same goal from the same starting-point, once said: ‘Modern science and democracy seemed to be throwing out their challenge to poetry to put them in its statements in contradistinction to the songs and myths of the past.’1 And every modern poet will have to come to terms with the masses of democracy, will have to contemplate them synthetically as an individual living being, as a man, or as a God. In his Utopian drama Les Aubes Verhaeren has ranged them among the dramatis personæ, and, to express his inner vision, he has added this stage direction: ‘Les groupes agissent comme un seul personnage à faces multiples et antinomiques.’ For, like the images of Indian gods, they have a hundred arms, but their cry is in unison; their will is simple; their energy is uniform; one and the same is their heart, ‘le cœur myriadaire et rouge de la foule.’2 A hundred years of life in communion, a hundred years of distress in common, of hope in common, have welded them together into one unity, into one new feeling. Sleepless and restless like a dangerous animal lies the multitude in the monster cities; all the passions of individual man are hers, vanity, hunger, anger; she has all vices and crimes in common with her smallest member, man; only, everything in her is intensified to unknown magnitudes. Everything in her passions is stupendously superdimensional, beyond calculation, and, in a new sense, divine. For just as the gods of old were formed after the image of man, save that they represented man’s strength and intelligence magnified to the hundredth degree, the multitude is the synthesis of individual forces, the most prolific accumulation of passion.
With the multitude the individual comes into being, and without her he perishes. Consciously or unconsciously, every man is subject to her power. For the modern man is no longer free from the influence of others, as the tiller of the fields was in olden days, or the shepherd, or the hunter, each of whom was dependent only on the anger of heaven, the whims of the earth, on weather and hailstorms, on chance, which he clad in the august image of his god. The modern man is in all his feelings determined by the world around him, set in his place in the ranks, and moved with the ranks like a shuttle to and fro; he is a dependent in his instincts. We all feel socially; we cannot think away the others who are round us and in front of us any more than we can think away the air that nourishes us. We can flee from them, but we cannot flee away from what has penetrated us from them. For the multitude rules us like a force of nature, nourishes us with its feelings. The unsocial man is a fiction. Just as little as in a great city one can shut off one’s room entirely from the noise, the rhythm of the street, just so little can one think isolatedly, just so little can the soul keep itself at a distance from the great intellectual excitements of the multitude. Verhaeren himself made the attempt in the days when he wrote the verses:
Mon rêve, enfermons-nous dans ces choses lointaines
Comme en de tragiques tombeaux.3
But the life of reality claimed him again; for society destroys him who turns away from her, as one is destroyed who shuts himself out from the fresh air. The poet, too, must involuntarily think with the multitude and of the multitude. For to the same extent as democracy has exercised its levelling influence, to the same extent as it has limited individualities, enrolled the poet among the class of citizens, diminished the contrasts of chance, it has at the same time matured new forces in their multiplicity. In democracy the modern poet can find everything for which the ancients felt constrained to discover gods, those incalculable forces which bind the individual like enchantment. The town, the multitude feeds his energy with its exhaustless abundance; it multiplies his own strength. For everything the individual has lost is stored in it, great heroism and ecstatic enthusiasm. It is the great source of the unexpected and the incalculable in our days, the new thing concerning which no one knows how great it will grow. To have seen in it an enrichment, instead of a restriction, of the poetic instinct, is one of the great merits of Verhaeren. For while the majority of contemporary poets still maintain the fiction of the recluse in his wistful loneliness, while they recoil from before the multitude as though from men stricken with the plague, while they create for themselves an artificial seclusion, and heedlessly go their way past locomotives and telegraphs, banks and workshops, Verhaeren drinks greedily from these sources of new strength.
Comme une vague en des fleuves perdue,
Comme une aile effacée, au fond de l’étendue,
Engouffre-toi,
Mon cœur, en ces foules battant les capitales!
Réunis tous ces courants
Et prends
Si large part à ces brusques métamorphoses
D’hommes et de choses,
Que tu sentes l’obscure et formidable loi
Qui les domine et les opprime
Soudainement, à coups d’éclairs, s’inscrire en toi.4
For she, ‘la foule,’ the multitude, is the great transposer of values in our day. She takes into her bosom and transforms the men who come to her from the country, from the four winds of heaven; none of us escapes her levelling power. The most distant races are blended in the city’s huge melting-pot, are adapted to one another, and forthwith become a new thing, a different thing, a new race, the new race of contemporary man, who has made his peace with the atmosphere of the great city, who not only painfully feels the depression of her walls and his divorce from Nature, but creates himself a new strength and a new feeling of the universe in this manifold human presence. The great feat of the multitude is that it accelerates the process of changing values. The individual elements perish in favour of this individuality of a new community. Old communities lose their unity, new communities must arise. America is the first example: here, in a hundred years, one single great brotherhood, a new type, has been developed from the forces of a thousand peoples; and in our capitals, in Paris, Berlin, and London, people are already growing up who are not Frenchmen and not Germans, but in the first place only Parisians and Berliners, who have a different accent, a different way of thinking, whose native land is the great city, the multitude. The inhabitant of the great city, the democratic man of the multitude, is a sharply defined character. If he is a poet, his poetry must be social; if he is a thinker, the intelligence of the masses, the instinct of the many, must be his also. To have attempted the psychology of this multitude for the first time in poetry is one of the great feats of audacity for which we must be grateful to Verhaeren.
But these individual accumulations of men into a multitude, these combinations of millions into towns, are not isolated. One bond holds them all together: modern traffic. The distances of reality have disappeared, and with them national divisions as well. By the side of the problem of individual conglomerations which only slowly are transformed into organisms, by the side of the individual races, the individual masses, now arises a greater synthesis, the synthesis of the European race. For the men of our continent are no longer so distant, so strange to one another as they formerly were. Social democracy with its organisation encompasses the masses from one end of Europe to the other. To-day the same desires fire the men of Paris, London, St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Rome. And already one common formula directs their exertions: money.
Races des vieux pays, forces désaccordées,
Vous nouez vos destins épars, depuis le temps
Que l’or met sous vos fronts le même espoir battant.5
Independently of the frontiers of countries, on a broad-based foundation, a unified race, a new community, the European, is in process of formation. Here desire and reality are near touching. Verhaeren sees Europe already united by one great common energy. Europe is for him the land of consciousness. While other continents, distant as though in a dream, are still living a vegetative life, while Africa and India are still dreaming as they dreamt in the darkness of primitive times, Europe is ‘la forge où se frappe l’idée,’6 the great smithy in which all differences, all individual observations, all results, are hammered and moulded into a new intellectuality, into European consciousness. The union is not yet inwardly complete; states are still hostile and ignorant of their community; but already ‘le monde entier est repensé par leurs cervelles.’7 Already they are working at the transvaluation of all feeling in the European sense. For a new system of ethics, a new system of æsthetics, will be required by the European, who, rich by the past, strong in the feeling of the multitude, is now conscious of drawing his strength from new masses. Here it is that Verhaeren’s work sings over into Utopia; and in Les Aubes, the epilogue to Les Villes Tentaculaires, this glittering rainbow rises over the visions of reality to the new ideal; the prophetic dream of a better future rises over the still struggling present.
This yearning for the European has been expressed for the first time in poetry by Verhaeren, almost contemporaneously with Walt Whitman’s hailing of the American and Friedrich Nietzsche’s prophecy of the superman. It would be a tempting task, and full of interest, to set up the Pan-European in antithesis to the Pan-American. But to say that Verhaeren was the first of lyric poets to feel as consciously European as Walt Whitman felt American, is to establish his rank among the most considerable men of our time. Verhaeren is possibly the only lyric poet who has felt in accordance with contemporary feeling. That epitomises his whole claim to gratitude, for it sufficiently expresses the fact that he has taken to his heart the problem of the multitude; the energy of social innovations; the æsthetics of organisation; the grandeur of mechanical production; in a word, the poetry of material things. It is our own time, the new age, that speaks in his verse; and it speaks in its new language. This rhythm which he has discovered is no literary abstraction, but beats in perfect unison with the heart-beat of the crowd; it is an echo of the panting of our monster cities, of the clanking of trains, of the cry of the people; his language is new, because it is no longer the voice of one man, but unites in itself the many voices of the multitude. He has penetrated deeper than any other man into the feeling of the masses, and their surf echoes more strongly in his verse. The hollow rumbling, the bestial and tameless strength of their voice, the surf of the multitude, has here become shape and music, the highest identity. With pride one can say of Verhaeren what he himself vaunts in his ‘Captain’: ‘Il est la foule,’8 he himself is the multitude.
Footnotes
1 A Backward Glance O’er Travelled Roads.
2 ‘La Conquête (La Multiple Splendeur).
3 ‘Sous les Prétoriens’ (Au Bord de la Route).
4 ‘La Foule’ (Les Visages de la Vie).
5 ‘La Conquête’ (La Multiple Splendeur).
6 Ibid. (Ibid.).
7 ‘La Conquête’ (Les Forces Tumultueuses).
8 ‘Le Capitaine’ (Les Forces Tumultueuses).