Verhaeren’s Poetic Method
Je suis celle des surprises fécondes.
É.V., ‘Celle des Voyages.’
A real poem must not exhibit an artificial structure of parts, a mechanism; it must, like man himself, be organic, an indissoluble union of soul and body. It must have a living body of flesh, the substance of the word, the colour of the metaphors, the mechanism of the motion, the skeleton of the thought; but over and above all that it must possess that inexpressible something, the soul, which alone makes it organic; the breath, the rhythm, that inseparable essence which is no longer perceptible to intelligence, but only to feeling. It is not first in this transcendental element, however, that the poet’s personality is revealed: the poetry of a great poet must be characteristic in its very physis, in its very material. Side by side with that magic vibration, that intangible element of feeling, the materiality too, the weaving of the word, that net of expression in which the fugitive feeling is caught in the waters of the hidden life and lifted into the light, these too must be alone of their kind if they are to characterise the poet’s race, environment, and personality. This purely material organism of the poet too is, like every living thing, subject to growth, to the change of maturity and age. The structure of the poem, like every human face, must gradually, in the revolution of the years, work its way to character from the shifting features of childhood and the indistinctness of the general type, must in its sensuous externals, in the physiognomy of the material, show all psychic changes to the last acquisition of personality. In a real poet the technical aspect, the handicraft, the external element has a development that runs parallel to the intellectual and poetic contents. In form, too, the poem must at first represent a tradition, something that has been taken over; only in the revolt of youth will it achieve a personal form, and this itself will later, as it gradually grows cold and petrifies, represent an immutable type.
Verhaeren’s poetry has its evolution and its history in this purely formal sense. Even this poetry of Verhaeren’s, which to-day looms so immensely isolated and so victoriously characteristic in French literature that a connoisseur can, without a shadow of doubt, recognise the creator from a single stanza, has grown from a tradition, is the climax of a certain culture, and is at the same time related to a contemporary movement. When Verhaeren began to write, Victor Hugo, the crowned king of French lyric poetry, was dead; Baudelaire was forgotten; Paul Verlaine was still almost unknown. Victor Hugo’s heirs, who divided his kingdom as once the diadochi divided the kingdom of Alexander the Great, were only able to preserve the trappings of the glory gone, and the grandiloquence of their words contrasted ill with their thin voices and artificial feelings. Against this circle, against François Coppée, Catulle Mendès, Théodore de Banville and the rest of them, rose up a new school of young men who called themselves ‘decadents and symbolists.’ Here I must frankly admit that I am really unable to explain this idea, perhaps for the very reason that I have read so many varying definitions of it. The only thing that is certain is, that at that time a group of young writers rose up in concert against a tradition, and, in the most diverse experiments, sought a new lyrical expression. What this new thing consisted in would be hard to say. The truth is perhaps that all these poets were not French; that each of them brought some new element from his own country, his own race, his own past; that none of them felt that respect for the French tradition which was in the blood of the native poets as an inward barrier, and thus were able unconsciously to get nearer to their own artistic instinct. One only needs to look at the names, which often at the first glance betray the foreigner, the Americans Vielé-Griffin and Stuart Merrill, the Belgians Verhaeren, Maeterlinck, and Mockel, or which, as in the case of Jean Moréas, cover a complicated Greek name with a French pseudonym. The only indisputable exploit of this group really was that about 1885 they quickened the pace of French lyric poetry with a new unrest. Mallarmé plunged his verses into a secret darkness of symbols, until the words with their subterranean meaning almost became unintelligible, while Verlaine gave his lines the dream-rapt lightsomeness of a music never heard before. Gustave Kalm and Jules Laforgue were the first who did away, the one with rhyme and the other with the Alexandrine, and introduced the apparent irregularities of the vers libre. Each one did his best on his own account to find something new, and all of them had in common the same fiery eagerness to attack the idols of a derivative poetry, the same ardent longing for a new form of expression. True, their talent was soon choked up with sand, but that was because they over-estimated the technical side of the innovations they introduced and spent themselves in the investigation of theories, instead of developing their own personalities. As time went on their paths diverged widely. Many of them foundered in the sea of journalism; others are still, after a lapse of twenty years, walking round in a circle in the footsteps of their youth; and of the symbolists and decadents nothing is left but a page or so of literary history, a faded sign-board marking an empty shop. Verhaeren too was classed with them, although in my view he was never essentially influenced by this school. A man of such sturdy originality could not be more than stimulated by others, could not be more than confirmed in his natural tendency to revolt. His attitude with regard to the vers libre was by no means due to this influence. For it was not by suggestion from others, not by the instinct of imitation, but by inward necessity, that he discovered his new form. It was not the example of others that freed him from the fetters of tradition; he was forced to free himself from them of his own accord. This inner compulsion is alone of importance; for it is a matter of complete indifference whether a poet writes by chance in regular verse or in vers libres; the phenomenon can only be significant when a poet is of necessity and by inner pressure forced to free himself from tradition and to achieve a personal form.
It was as a Parnassian that Verhaeren began. His first poetical attempts, which he has never published, the verses he wrote at school and in his first years at the university, showed him hypnotised by the style of Lamartine and Victor Hugo. And even in the first two books he published, in Les Flamandes and Les Moines, there is not a single poem in which Verhaeren has gone beyond his models. His poem is indeed somewhat more mobile than the strict pattern of school exercises; it already shows slight traces of the cracks which at a later day will break the vessel to pieces. But this hint of insubordination was at that time necessitated more by the harshness and rebelliousness of the subject itself, by some stiffness or other in the turn of the phrase, which can only be explained by the fact of the poet’s alien race. Even a foreigner can recognise that the verse is not rounded off, that the rhythm is not balanced with the natural inevitable sense of form that a man of Latin race would have, but that here a forceful will is with difficulty constraining a barbaric temperament to harmony. Through his French one can hear the massive language of his race, something of the unwieldy strength we have in our old German ballads. And what his name at the first glance betrayed—the foreigner—was to the finer ear of a native easily perceptible from his French alone.
The farther Verhaeren proceeded in his development—the nearer he got to his real nature—the more the inheritance of his race in him revolted against the shackles of tradition—so much the more intensive became the impression of the Teutonic element in his verse. After all, development is in most cases nothing more than the awakening in us of our buried past. The highest demand of the Parnassian school, impassibilité, an immovableness as of bronze, is the antithesis of his stormy temperament, which drives him along to a wild rhythm, not to harmony. Deep, guttural notes vibrate in his verses, and make the song of his vowels rough; the angularity, the masculinity, abruptness, and hardness of his peasant’s nature peer through everywhere. In addition to this, there is now the inner transformation. So long as Verhaeren’s poetic tendency was merely pictorial, one that calmly and without excitement aimed at painting the passion of the Flemish people, the earnestness of monasteries, just so long did the Alexandrine best serve to divide the rhythmic waves of his inspiration and roll them along. But when his personal sympathy began to confuse the inner indifference of his first work, his verse became uneasy. The cracks in the Alexandrine became more and more perceptible; greater and greater in the poet grew his impatience of it and his desire to smash it. He is no longer satisfied with the vers ternaire, the verse of the Romanticists with its two cæsuras dividing the line into three parts of perfectly equal rhythm and weight; he takes the free Alexandrine introduced by Victor Hugo and develops it still further, makes it still more irregular. He gives the syllables a different quantity, a different sonority; they no longer rest, they rock to and fro. And gradually the earnest, immovable uniformity of accentuation is changed into a more billowing, rhythmic fluidity. But ere long this concession too becomes too trivial for him. A temperament so impetuous as his will endure no outward fetter whatever. For it is not repose that this fiery singer would describe, but his own excited state—the quivering and vibrating of his emotion, his febrile unrest. His great manifold feeling, which is nothing else than a modulated cry, cannot storm itself out in regular verse; it needs unquiet gestures, motion, freedom, the vers libre. The fact that at this time other poets in France were using the free verse, the fact that it was at that time—several dispute the priority—‘invented’ for poets, is of no consequence to us here. Such contemporaneous incidences never express a chance, but always a latent necessity. Free verse was nothing else than the inevitable reflex action of modern feeling, the poetic breaking free of the unrest which lay in the time. Whether or not Verhaeren at that time had models is of no importance. What has been taken over can never become organic, only what comes from personal experience is a real gain. And at that time it lay quite in the line of his development that by inner necessity he was forced to break his old instrument and create himself a new one. For the nervous unrest, the passionate agitation of Verhaeren’s later poems is unthinkable in regular verse. If verse is to describe in its own inner passion the immense multiplicity of modern impressions—their haste, their fire, their precipitous revulsion, their unexpectedness, their gloomy melancholy, and the overwhelming vastness of their dimensions—it must be strong and yet flexible, like a rapier. Such poems must be emancipated from rules: they must stride along like a real crowd, noisily seething; they must not walk in step, like soldiers on the march. And if they are to be spoken, they must not be recited in the stiff, cold, pathetically vibrating, self-conscious declamation of the Comédie Française; they must be spoken as though to a crowd; they must cry out, they must hail; and this-whipping up of an audience cannot be harmonious. These poems must be spontaneous and impulsive.
Manifold is the diversity which Verhaeren’s poetry has achieved by its deliverance from the monotony of the Alexandrine. Now and now only can the verse reproduce the plastic side of an impression and the inward agitation of it; not only by a pictorial description, but in a purely external manner too; by the sound, by the music of the rhythm. The lines, sometimes darting far beyond the margin, sometimes, like an arrow, sharpened to a single word, have the whole key-board of feeling. They can pace with a grave step like long black funeral processions, if haply they would express the monotony of solitude, ‘Mes jours toujours plus lourds s’en vont roulant leur cours’;1 they can dart up like a falcon, white and glittering, soaring to the exulting cry ‘la joie,’ swift and as high as heaven over all the sad heaviness of earth. All the voices of day and night can now be represented onomato-poetically: all that is brusque and sudden by brevity; all that is ponderous and grandiose by a vast sweep of fulness; an unexpected thing by sudden harshness; haste in a feverishly accelerated movement; savagery by a precipitous change of velocity. Every line can now express the feeling by its rhythm alone. And one might without knowing French recognise the poetical intention of many of these poems merely by listening to their consonantal music, nay, often by looking at their typographical arrangement.
For this reason I should be tempted to call these poems with their vast range symphonic poems. They seem to have been conceived for an orchestra. They are not, like the poetry of a past generation, chamber music; they are not solitary violin soli; they are an inspired blending of all instruments; they are graded in individual sections which have a different tempo and the pauses of the transitions. In Verhaeren’s poetry the lyric exceeds the bounds of its domain and impinges on the dramatic and the epic. For his poem seeks not only to describe a mood, like a purely lyrical poem, it describes at the same time the birth of this mood. And this first part of the construction is epic; it is descriptive; it leads up from a lowly beginning to a great discharge of force. And, in the second place, the transitions are dramatic, those bursts of temperament from section to section, those precipitous falls and steep ascents which only at the end lead to a harmonious solution. From a purely external point of view Verhaeren’s poem is more extensive, longer, of a greater range than any other contemporary poetry; it shoots out farther beyond the limit of lyric poetry; and, careless of the boundary-line of æsthetics, it derives strength and nourishment from neighbouring domains. It comes nearer to rhetoric, nearer to epic poetry, nearer to the drama, nearer to philosophy than any other poetry of our day; it is more independent of set rules than poetry had been hitherto. And independent of rules—or obeying only a new inner rule—is Verhaeren’s form. Now, since the page no longer holds the fettered lines together in equal columns, the poet can write out his wild, overflowing feelings in their own wild, boldly curving lines. Verhaeren’s poem at this time—and that which is achieved in the years of maturity remains inalienable—has its own inner architectonics. But it can hardly be compared to a piece of architecture, a structure built with hands; it is rather like a manifestation of nature. It is elementary like every feeling; it discharges itself like a storm. First a vision moves up like a cloud; more and more densely it compresses itself; more and more sultrily, more and more oppressively it weighs on the feeling; higher and higher, hotter and hotter grows the inner tension, until at last in the lightning of the images, in the rolling of the rhythm, all the garnered strength discharges itself rhythmically. The andante always grows to a furioso; and only the last section shows again the clear, cleansed sky of calm, in an intellectual synthesis of the state of chaos. This structure of Verhaeren’s poem is almost invariable. It may be seen, for instance, in two parallel examples: in the poems ‘La Foule’ and ‘Vers la Mer’ in the book Les Visages de la Vie. Both set in with an adjuration, a vision. Here the crowd, its confusion, its strength; there a sensitive picture of the morning sea whose transparent tones remind one of Turner. Now the poet fires this still vision with his own passionateness. You see the crowd moving more and more restlessly, the waves surging more and more passionately; and ecstasy breaks out the moment the poet surrenders himself to these things, places himself among the crowd, sinks his feeling, his body in the sea. Then in the finale bursts forth the great cry of identity, in the one case the yearning to be all the crowd, in both that ecstatic gesture of the individual yearning for infinity. The first picture, which was only sensuously seen, grows at the end of the poem into a great ethic inspiration; from the vision is unfolded an unconquerable moral and metaphysical need. This form of intensification from individual feeling to universal feeling is the basic form of Verhaeren’s poem. It might be best, in order to convey a clear idea of its form, to use a geometrical term and say that these poems are, to a certain extent, poems in the form of a parabola. While the lyric in the current sense mostly represents a symmetrical and harmonious form, a return to itself, a circle, Verhaeren’s poem has the form of a parabola, apparently irregular but really equally governed by a law. His poems soar in a swift sustained flight, soar from the earth up into the clouds, from the real to the unreal, and then from a sudden zenith fling themselves back to the earth. The inspiration drives the feeling away from the pictorial, from passionless contemplation to this utmost height of possibility, far away from all sensuous perceptions high into the metaphysical, in order then, suddenly and unexpectedly, to bring it back to the terra firma of reality. And indeed, in the music of these poems there is something as of a darting upwards, something of the hissing and whizzing of a stone well thrown and of its sudden falling down. In their rhythm too is this increasing velocity, this catching of the breath and this return to the starting-point, this bethinking itself of gravity when it returns to the earth.
Something may now be said as to the means with which Verhaeren attains his vision, with which he seeks to represent the inner passionateness of things, with which he evokes enthusiasm. Let us first of all try to establish whether Verhaeren is what is called a master of language. Verhaeren’s command of language is not by any means unlimited. Both in his words and in his rhymes there is constant repetition which sometimes borders on monotony; but on the other hand there is a strangeness, a newness, an unexpectedness of wording which is almost unexampled in French lyric poetry. An enrichment of the language, however, does not proceed from neologisms alone; a word may become alive by the unexpectedness of a new application, by a transposition of the meaning, as Rainer Maria Rilke, for instance, has often done in the German lyric. To redeem ‘die armen Worte, die im Alltag darben,’2 and consecrate them anew to poetry, is perhaps a higher merit than creating new words. Now Verhaeren has above all, by the Flemish sense of language which he inherited, imported a certain Belgian timbre into French lyric poetry. Personally, it is true, he is almost ignorant of Flemish; nevertheless, by the vague music familiar to him from his childhood’s days, by a certain guttural tone, he has imported a nuance which is perhaps less? perceptible to the foreigner than to a Frenchman. At this point I should like to call Maurice Gauchez as a witness and borrow the most salient examples from his extraordinarily interesting monograph. Among the neologisms for which Gauchez suggests a foreign origin he quotes the following: les baisers rouges, les plumes majuscules, les malades hiératiques, la statue textuelle, les automnes prismatiques, le soir tourbillonaire, les solitudes océans, le ciel dédalien, le cœur myriadaire de la foule, les automnes apostumes, les vents vermeils, les navires cavalcadeurs, les gloires médusaires. And he rightly points out how much certain of Verhaeren’s verbs might enrich the French language: enturquoiser, rauquer, vacarmer, béquiller, s’enténébrer, se futiliser, se mesquiniser, larmer. But I for my part cannot look upon the enrichment here accruing from racial instinct as the essential thing in his verbal art: it only gives it a local colour, without really explaining what is astonishingly modern in his diction. Verhaeren has been a great creator of new things for the French lyric, above all by his extension of its range of subjects, by his renewal of poetic reality, by recruiting new forces for poetry in the domain of technical science. The great part of the new blood for his language came not so much from Flemish as from science. A man who writes poems on the Exchange, on the theatre, on science, who sings factories and railway stations, cannot ignore their terminology. He must borrow certain technical expressions from the vocabulary of science, certain pathological terms from medicine; he must extend the glossary of the poetic by the extension of the poetic itself. There are geographical surprises of rhyme to be found in Verhaeren: Berlin and Sakhalin, Moscow, the Balearic and other distant islands whose names have never previously lived in rhyme. And since science is by its own progress compelled to invent new names every day, since new machines demand new words for their necessities, here for the first time an inexhaustible source has been discovered for replenishing the French language.
This immense wealth, on the other hand, is jeopardised by something that might be called not so much poverty or restriction as fascination. Every one-sidedness of feeling produces, with its advantages, certain defects, and thus the constant passionateness which brought Verhaeren’s poetry near to oratory, to preaching, is at the same time responsible for a certain monotony of the metaphors. Verhaeren is hallucinated by certain words, images, adjectives, phrases. He repeats them incessantly through all his work. All things in which a many-headed passion is united he compares with a ‘brasier’; ‘carrefour’ is his symbol for indecision; ‘l’essor’ is for him the last straining of effort; many cries and words by which he hails his audience are repeated almost from page to page. The adjectives too are often monotonous; often indeed, with the cold ‘iques’ at the end of them, they are schematic; and even in the metaphors that phenomenon is unmistakable which in science is called pseudoanæsthesia, that is, the memory of a fixed feeling from the domain of some other sense is always individually associated with a certain colour or sound. For him ‘red’ expresses all that is passionate; ‘gold’ all greatness and pomp; ‘white’ all that is gentle; ‘black’ all enmity. His images have thus something abrupt and absolute; there is always in them, as Albert Mockel has demonstrated in his masterly study, the decisive, the sudden excitement, which overwhelms our astonishment. His images are as violent as his colours, as his rhythm. They have the suddenness of a cannon-ball which darts through space and is only perceptible to our vision when it reaches its aim and smashes the target. Possibly the inmost reason of this lies in the fact that these poems are intended to be spoken. A placard that is to have effect at some distance must be in glaring colours; pathos calls for images that hallucinate. Such images have indeed been found by Verhaeren, and by Verhaeren only. He hardly seems to know nuances. With the brutal instinct of a strong man he loves all that is glaring, all that is untrammelled. ‘La couleur, elle est dans ses œuvres une surprise de métaux et d’images.’3 But in this material they blaze, and with their lightnings they light up even the most distant horizon. I will only remind the reader of his ‘beffrois immensément vêtus de nuit’ or ‘la façade paraît pleurer des lettres d’or,’ or his ‘les gestes de lumière des phares.’ By the intensity of such images Verhaeren attains to quite an incomparable clearness of the feeling. ‘Personne, je crois, ne possède à l’égal de Verhaeren le don des lumières et des ombres, non point fondues, mais enchevêtrées, des noirs absolus coupés de blanches clartés.’4
One-sidedness of temperament here produces a one-sided advantage with all its artistic restrictions. So that Verhaeren is not a verbal artist in the unrestricted sense of one who always hits upon the only, the inevitable comparison for a thing; of one who flashes a bold word on the attention once and never retails it till it palls, who seems to use every word for the first time. His poetic vocabulary is rich, but by no means infinite; his sensibility is strong, but it has its restrictions. For, as is the case with every passionate poet, certain feelings at the last white-heat of excitement appear to him identical, seem to him to be capable of comparison only with the quite elementary things of Nature, with fire, the sea, the wind, thunder and lightning. To make the point clear, Verhaeren is not a verbal artist in Goethe’s sense, but rather in Schiller’s sense. With the latter, too, he has the gift in common of definitely expressing certain perceptions in one lyric line. He has discovered essences of the lyric feeling of life, lines that are now household words, or which at all events will be so. It will be sufficient to mention word formations such as ‘les villes tentaculaires,’ which in France have already become common-places, or such maxims as ‘La vie est à monter et non à descendre,’ or ‘Toute la vie est dans l’essor.’ In lines like these the lyric ecstasy is compressed as in a coin, and perpetuated in the current riches of the language.
This hardness and brutality, these abrupt transitions, constitute the individuality of Verhaeren’s poetry. At bottom it is nothing else than an accentuated masculinity. The voice, the music, is guttural, deep, raucous, masculine; the body of his poem has, like a man’s body, the beautiful movement of strength, but in repose gestures that are often hard and which only in passion regain their compelling beauty. Whereas French lyric poetry, so to speak, had imitated the female body, the delicate grace of its soft yielding lines; whereas its first concern was harmony; Verhaeren’s poem strove only for the rhythm of movement, only for the proud and vigorously ringing stride of a man, his leaping and running, the fighting display of his strength. This is not the only reason why the French have so long repudiated him. For where we delight in an echo from the German in his language, they feel the harshness of the Teutonic undertone; where we find a consonance with the German ballad, a re-birth of the German ballad as though it were awakening from the dreams of childhood, they see an opposition to the native tradition. And in fact, the farther Verhaeren has proceeded in his development, both in his personality and in his verse, the more the French varnish has peeled off his Teutonic perception. It was only in the time of his first dependence on tradition that his poetry was hardly to be distinguished from that of other writers in French. The farther he receded from the French standpoint, the more he unconsciously approached German art. To-day, perhaps, a return to classicism is perceptible in his poetry. The neologisms are not so audacious; the images are more schematic; the whole poem is calmer and more clarified. This, however, is by no means a cowardly compromise with a shattered tradition, no repentant return to the fold; it is the same phenomenon we meet in a similar manner in the late poems of Goethe, Schiller, Hugo, and Swinburne; the effect of the cooling of the blood in age; the yielding of sensuous perception to intellectual ideas. The victor has lost the fighter’s brutality; the man in his maturity no longer needs revolt but a conception of the world—harmony. Here, as in Verhaeren’s whole evolution, his verse is the most delicately sensitive indicator of the psychic revulsion, the perfect proof of a poetic and organic development which is really inward and dependent only on the laws of his blood.
Footnotes
1 ‘L’Heure Mauvaise’ (Au Bord de la Route).
2 ‘Poor words a-hungered in the working day.’—Rainer Maria Rilke, Mir sur Feier.
3 Albert Mockel, Émile Verhaeren.
4 Ibid. (Ibid.).