Syntheses
Réunir notre esprit et le monde
Dans les deux mains d’une très simple loi profonde.
É.V., ‘L’Attente.’
After the great visions of the cities, after the wonderful interpretations of democracy, there was a moment of appeasement in Verhaeren’s work—a lyrical intermezzo of little books: an almanac of the months unfolding in short poems, the cosy happiness of wedded love enshrined in grateful song, the legends of Flanders told in richly coloured pictures, and then, in the great pentalogy Toute la Flandre, the cities, coasts, heroes, and great men of his native province compressed in one single picture. But after that Verhaeren takes up once again his old path across the earth; passes again through the roaring cities, the pregnant fields; wanders along the sea-shore; once again through the landscapes of Les Flamandes and Les Moines, of Les Villes Tentaculaires and Les Campagnes Hallucinées. It is now the return of the spiral in Goethe’s sense of evolution; the return to the same point, but on a higher level, with a loftier outlook, in a narrower circle, and for that reason nearer to the last, the highest point. Once again Verhaeren surveys the modern world: now, however, with different eyes, which no longer remain resting on the aspect of the world, but press farther to the cause of all. What he had formerly seen sensuously, the things whose values he had æsthetically estimated and transmuted, he now looks at from the intellectual side, that he may estimate their value morally. He no longer sees each thing separately, no longer adds picture to picture, vision to vision, like a game of coloured cards: he now unites them in one living chain. He no longer searches through individual and detached phenomena; he now sees them together against the background of his lofty intention to weld them into one single picture. Now he composes, not individual poems, but fragments of his world-poem. For, from the time that Verhaeren began to look at things with conscious enthusiasm, they assumed different forms. The straining of his epoch no longer seems to him to be a solitary manifestation of energy, but only a Protean form of the eternal discharge of vigour; the will to life no longer seems to him to be the deed of individual men, but the vitalised primitive will of all humanity. And so, just as of old he attempted in his vision a synthesis of energies, he now sees laws flowing into one supreme and highest thing, into a cosmic law.
Lyric exaltation now arches the dream of its laws over reality. But it is no longer the mere dream of a youth in expectancy of life—the anæmic, vague, dark, restless dream—but a man’s longing to get behind life and follow it to its earthly limit. It is a Utopia enhancing realities beyond themselves; it is the dream of Godhead in things. In the whole world Verhaeren sees a cosmic effort. ‘Le monde est trépidant de trains et de navires.’1 The whole world is excited with human activity and effort; manifestations of the feeling of life flame everywhere; everywhere humanity is fighting for something invisible and perhaps unattainable. But whereas of old the poet estimated the value of every separate energy, now he comprehends all energies as one uniform manifestation, recognises behind the unconscious activity of the individual the sway of something greater—the bourne of all humanity. All who work in the material of the temporal only symbolise eternal forces—intoxication, energy, conquest, joy, error, expectation, Utopia. And it is to these forces, or rather to these forms of the force at the root of all things, that his poems are addressed. In Les Visages de la Vie he seeks to describe yearning in all its forms and aims; its distribution in human labour, its restlessness, its vigour, and, above all, its beauty. But not only human manifestations now appear to him in a closer cohesion, the synthesis of realism and metaphysics now makes his relationship to elementary things richer and more heroic. Now, when he treats some motive he had already treated in the first books, and these poems of the first and last periods are compared, it is with astonishment and admiration that you trace the silent growth of these last years. I will mention one example. He had already sung a song to the wind. But the wind at that time was to him the evil storm that tousles cottages, shakes chimneys, forces its way into rooms, rages across country, and brings the winter. It was a senseless power, beautiful in its senselessness, but aimless, an incomprehensible element, a detached phenomenon of Nature. Now, however, the poet in his maturity looks upon it as the wanderer over the undying world, one that has seen all countries, that drives ships over seas, that has sated itself with the perfume of strange flowers and brings it from far away, that penetrates our chest like an aroma and steels and expands it. Now he loves the wind as one of the thousand things of the earth which contribute to the intensification of his vital feeling.
Si j’aime, admire et chante avec folie,
Le vent,
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
C’est qu’il grandit mon être entier et c’est qu’avant
De s’infiltrer, par mes poumons et par mes pores,
Jusques au sang dont vit mon corps,
Avec sa force rude ou sa douceur profonde,
Immensément, il a étreint le monde.2
So, too, a tree becomes to him the image of the eternal renewal of strength, of resistance to the hardness of winter and of fate, of the will to new beauty in the spring. A mountain no longer appears to him as a chance raising of the landscape, but a great and mighty thing in whose keeps secrets lie, ores, and the source of springs, from whose summit, however, our eyes can sweep the world. The forest interprets itself to him as the labyrinth of a thousand paths, and as the many-voiced anthem of life: everything in nature becomes a freshening and a vivifying of this vitality. An absolute transmutation of values has taken place from the time that he has comprehended things as parts of the world’s entity, and as themselves an entity. Travel, formerly a flight from reality, now becomes to him the opening out of new distances, of new possibilities; dream appears to him no longer as an illusion, but as the capacity of intensifying the real from its present to a future state. Europe is no longer to him a group of nations, a geographical idea, but the great symbol of conquest, money, gold, he no longer regards contemptuously as a materialising of life, but as a new spur for new ambition. And the sea, which in every succeeding work of his sings its unquiet rhythm, is no longer the murderous power that eats into the land, but the holy tide, the symbol of constant strength in eternal unrest; it is to him ‘la mer nue et pure, comme une idée.’3 Since everything coheres, he feels related to all in a touching brotherhood with things; he no longer feels the presence of things, he loves them like a piece of himself; he feels the sea physically in himself
Ma peau, mes mains et mes cheveux
Sentent la mer
Et sa couleur est dans mes yeux.4
And so, just as his vital feeling is renewed every time he comes into contact with the waves, he believes in a physical resurrection of the body out of the sea, believes that his rising from the water is a nouveau moment de conscience. Verhaeren has returned to the great cohesion: in Nature and in man there is no longer for him any phenomenon which might not become a symbol for him, a symbol of the great vital instinct, to stimulate and fire his vitality.
And since he now responds to all things with this one feeling, a uniform conception of the world must involuntarily result from this unity of feeling. To the unity of enthusiasm corresponds the unity of the world, the monistic feeling. Just as he himself derives nothing but an intensification and exaltation of his feelings from all things, nothing but the very sensation of life, all phenomena and activities must be a synthesis, all forces must flow into one single force as rivers flow into the ocean, all laws must merge in one single law
Toute la vie, avec ses lois, avec ses formes,
—Multiples doigts noueux de quelque main énorme—
S’entr’ouvre et se referme en un poing: l’unité.5
And thus, this straining of all humanity, discharged in a thousand forms, must be something in common, a fight against something lying outside of itself, against a resistance which still makes life seem hard, dull, and turbid. This fight of humanity cannot be other than directed against something that impedes the sensation of life. And this, the only thing which struggles against humanity, is in Verhaeren’s eyes the supremacy of Nature, the mystery of divine intervention, the subjection of man to fate—in short, all divinity that does not reside in man. As soon as man is dependent on nobody except himself and his own strength, he too will attain the great joyousness of all the things of Nature.
This fight of man to become God, this fight for his independence, his freedom from chance and the supernatural—this is the great metaphysical idea of Verhaeren’s work. His last books seek to represent nothing else than this one highest battle of man, this struggle to be free from all that is laid upon him, not by himself, but by Nature, from all that impedes his will to become a thing of Nature, an elementary force, himself. This struggle is the highest and purest effort, for
Rien n’est plus haut, malgré l’angoisse et le tourment,
Que la bataille avec l’énigme et les ténèbres.6
Man in this battle defends himself against darkness, against what is unknown, against Heaven, against all laws that restrict his expansion; the whole aim of man, the aim he has unconsciously been following for a thousand years, is independence, is to become a law unto himself:
L’homme dans l’univers n’a qu’un maître, lui-même,
Et l’univers entier est ce maître, dans lui.7
To-day he is still counteracted by chance, or, as many conceive it, by divinity. Wholly to conquer this, to substitute the determination of one’s own destiny for chance, will be the great task of the future. Much has been taken from chance already. Lightning, the most dangerous power of heaven, is conquered; distances are bridged over; the forms of Nature are changed; social communities have by common action diverted the iniquity of the weather; diseases are from year to year being fathomed and checked; more and more every incalculable element is being brought within the range of calculation and fore-sight. But all that is unknown must more and more be the booty of man, whose highest will is ‘fouiller l’inconnu.’8 More and more his eyes penetrate the subterranean and mysterious workings of Nature.
Or aujourd’hui c’est la réalité
Secrète encor, mais néanmoins enclose
Au cours perpétuel et rythmique des choses,
Qu’on veut, avec ténacité,
Saisir, pour ordonner la vie et sa beauté
Selon les causes.9
For this battle everybody is a soldier in man’s war of liberation, all of us stand invisibly ranked together. Everybody who wrests from Nature in increment to knowledge, who does something never done before, everybody who by poetry fires others to action, tears off a piece of the veil. With every step forward that man takes against the dark, with every foot of ground he conquers, divinity loses strength to him; and this will go on until at length nothing remains of the God of old, until the identity of the two ideas humanity and divinity is unconsciously accomplished.
Héros, savant, artiste, apôtre, aventurier,
Chacun troue à son tour le mur noir des mystères
Et, grâce à ces labeurs groupés et solitaires,
L’être nouveau se sent l’univers tout entier.
Seen from this height, professions assume a new poetic value. In the front rank of fighting men Verhaeren sees those the effort of whose life it is to acquire knowledge—the men of science. Verhaeren is perhaps the only one among modern poets who has conceived of science as of perfectly equal value with poetry, who has discovered new moral and religious values in science, just as he had already discovered new æsthetic values in industrialism and democracy. Most poets had hitherto looked upon science as a hindrance, because they were afraid of clear things as they were afraid of real things. They looked upon science as the destroyer of myths, the negation of every noble superstition which in their eyes was indissolubly connected with the poetical. But just as machinery seemed to them to be ugly, because in the machines they saw beauty had retreated from the outer to the interior form, here too the new ethical value is hidden not in the method but in the aim. Verhaeren esteems science as the great fighter for the new conception of the world: ‘Le monde entier est repensé par leurs cervelles.’10 He knows that the little increments to knowledge which are continually being made in our days in thousands of places, in sanatoria and lecture-rooms, observatories and studies, with microscopes and chemical analyses, weighing and calculation, with measures and numbers, that these little additions to knowledge may, by comparison and reproduction, grow into great creative discoveries which will immensely enrich our vital feeling. And this hymn to science is at the same time a hymn to our epoch; for no epoch before ours has so consciously bought for the advancement of knowledge, none has been so replete with the longing for new knowledge and the transmutation of values:
L’acharnement à tout peser, à tout savoir
Fouille la forêt drue et mouvante des êtres.11
In inspired words Verhaeren celebrates science as the highest effort of our age as of the past; for he knows that what to us to-day is presupposed and self-evident was a thousand years-ago the goal of the most ardent effort, that the road we pace indolently to-day is soaked with the blood of martyrs.
Dites! quels temps versés au gouffre des années,
Et quelle angoisse ou quel espoir des destinées,
Et quels cerveaux chargés de noble lassitude
A-t-il fallu pour faire un peu de certitude?
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Dites! les feux et les bûchers; dites! les claies;
Les regards fous, en des visages d’effroi blanc;
Dites! les corps martyrisés, dites! les plaies
Criant la vérité, avec leur bouche en sang.12
But he knows equally well that the acquisitions of to-day are again only hypotheses for the new truths of to-morrow. Error is inevitable, but even error opens out new ways. In the beautiful idea of Brezina, the Czech poet, all ideal aims are floating islands that recede as we approach them. The highest aim is in effort itself, in the life which effort intensifies. Verhaeren’s optimism here guards his marches against banality, for he is sufficient of a mystic to know that it is the unknowable and the inaccessible that lend all things their impenetrable beauty. But the knowledge of this must not scare enthusiasm away:
Partons quand même, avec notre âme inassouvie,
Puisque la force et que la vie
Sont au delà des vérités et des erreurs.13
What if a few last things remain eternally inscrutable: ‘plutôt que d’en peupler les coins par des chimères, nous préférons ne point savoir.’14 Rather a world without gods than one with false gods, rather incomplete knowledge than false knowledge.
Here, where the heroes of science reach the limits of what is possible to them, a new group must stand by their side and help them in their work. These are the poets, who preach faith where knowledge ends. They must find the synthesis between science and religion, between the earthly and the divine, the new synthesis—religious confidence in science. Their optimism must force their fellow-men to have faith in science, as in earlier days they had faith in gods: though proofs fail them, they must demand from this new religion what the early fathers demanded for the old religion. And he himself, Verhaeren, he who once—here again a bitter ‘no’ is turned into an exulting ‘yes’—said in his beginnings
Toute science enferme au fond d’elle le doute,
Comme une mère enceinte étreint un enfant mort,15
he himself is to-day the first of confident enthusiasts. Where individual minds are still at war—
‘Oh! ces luttes là-haut entre ces dieux humains!16—
where their knowledge has not yet found a bridge, poets must with enthusiasm and confidence surmise a path. They must link law with perception; and in the same measure as the scientists have by knowledge fed their enthusiasm, they in their turn must feed knowledge by their confidence. If they have no proofs of actualities, their faith dowers them with the confidence to say, ‘nous croyons déjà ce que les autres sauront.’17 They scent and surmise new things before they are born; they trust hypotheses before they are proved. Already,
Pendant que disputent et s’embrouillent encor,
À coups de textes morts
Et de dogmes, les sages,18
they hear the hovering wings of the new truth. They already believe in what later generations will know; they derive vital joy from what their descendants will be the first to possess. They doubt in nothing; not that man will conquer the air, quell disease, make life cheerful and easier; they do not despair in progress, and in their ecstasy they leap over all obstacles. ‘Le cri de Faust n’est plus le nôtre’;19 the question as to ‘yes’ and ‘no’ has long since been joyfully answered in the affirmative, exults the poet; we no longer hesitate between the possibility and the impossibility of knowledge, we believe in it, and faith and confidence is already the highest knowledge of life. In this optimism of poets other discoverers of knowledge must now fulfil their growth, from these dreams they must derive strength for their activity; all men must in this way complete one another, that it may be possible for them to beleaguer darkness, perfect the conquest of God, and
Emprisonner quand même, un jour, l’éternité,
Dans le gel blanc d’une immobile vérité.20
For this new truth, the Man-God whom they are to discover, poets and scholars are the new saints; and his servants are all those whose brows are fiery with the fever of work, whose hands are scorched with experiments, whose nerves are strained by constant effort, whose eyes are fatigued by books. To all of these Verhaeren’s hymn is addressed:
Qu’ils soient sacrés par les foules, ces hommes
Qui scrutèrent les faits pour en tirer les lois.21
But still farther reaches Verhaeren’s enthusiasm for those who help in the new work, for the ‘saccageurs d’infini.’22 Not only the thinker and the poet extend the horizon of life, but each one also who creates and is in any way at work. Only the man who creates is really alive and really a man—‘seul existe qui crée.’23 And so his hymn is likewise addressed to those who toil with their hands, to those who, without knowing the aim, toil stolidly day by day in mines and fields; for they too build the face of the earth, create mountains where there were none, rear lights by the sea’s marge, construct machines and the huge telescopes that pry on the heavens: all of them forge the tools of knowledge and prepare the new era. Merchants who send across the ocean ships that spin threads from farthest shore to shore, they too weave the net of the great unity; traders who spread gold, who quicken the circulation of the world’s blood, they too co-operate in the battle waged with the dark. It is their league and union which, first of all, gives humanity its great strength; they all prepare the hour, the moment, which must inevitably come.
Il viendra l’instant, où tant d’efforts savants et ingénus,
Tant de génie et de cerveaux tendus vers l’inconnu,
Quand même, auront bâti sur des bases profondes
Et jaillissant au ciel, la synthèse du monde!24
Here in fiery dawns glimmer the days of the future. Tens of thousands will struggle, will prepare, until at last the one man comes who shall lay the last stone of the edifice, ‘le tranquille rebelle,’25 the Christ of this new religion.
C’est que celui qu’on attendait n’est point venu,
Celui que la nature entière
Suscitera un jour, âme et rose trémière,
Sous les soleils puissants non encore connus;
C’est que la race ardente et fine,
Dont il sera la fleur,
N’a point multiplié ses milliers de racines
Jusqu’au tréfonds des profondeurs.26
For here in Verhaeren’s work this vision arises fervent and glowing. Incessantly man proceeds on the path of his destiny. Once his whole world was replete with divinity, ‘jadis tout l’inconnu était peuplé de dieux’;27 then one single God took right and might into His hand; but now, by means of his strength and passion, man has wrested, year by year, one secret after the other from this Unknown Power. More and more he has conquered chance by laws, faith by knowledge, fear by safety; more and more the power of the gods glides insensibly into his hands, more and more he determines his own life; and the process will continue till he is in every respect the captain of his fate; he is less and less subject to laws he has not himself established; more and more Nature’s slave becomes her lord.
Races, régnez: puisque par vous la volonté du sort
Devient de plus en plus la volonté humaine.28
Gods will become men; exterior fate will return into their bosom; the saints will henceforth be only their brothers; and Paradise will be the earth itself. Most beautifully Verhaeren has expressed this idea in one of his latest books,29 in the symbol of Adam and Eve. Eve, expelled from the Garden of Eden, one day finds its doors open again. But she does not re-enter it, for her highest joy, her Paradise, is now in activity and the pleasure of the earth. Zest in existence, in life, joy of the earth, has never been more strongly and burningly exalted than in this symbol; never has the hymn of humanity been sung with greater fervour than by this poet—perhaps because he had denied life more wildly and more obstinately than any other. Here all contrasts sing together in a harmony without a flaw; the last enmity between man and Nature here becomes the ecstatic feeling of man’s godhead.
And strange to say, here the circle of life returns to itself. The books of the poet’s old age return to the days of his youth, to the school benches in Ghent where Maeterlinck also sat, the other great Fleming. Both, who lost themselves there, have found themselves again on the heights of life in their conception of the world, for Maeterlinck’s highest teaching also (in his book Wisdom and Destiny) is, that all fate is locked up in man himself, that it is man’s highest evolution, his highest duty, to conquer fate, all that lies outside him, God. This profound thought, which has thus twice in our days blossomed forth from Flemish soil, has been achieved on different paths. Maeterlinck has found it by listening to the mysticism of silence, Verhaeren by listening to the noise of life. He has found his new God not in the darkness of dreams but in the light of streets, in all places where men bestir themselves, and where from heavy hours the trembling flower of joy is born.
Footnotes
1 ‘La Conquête’ (La Multiple Splendeur).
2 ‘À la Gloire du Vent’ (La Multiple Splendeur).
3 ‘L’Eau’ (Les Visages de la Vie).
4 ‘Au Bord du Quai’ (Ibid.)
5 ‘La Conquête’ (Les Forces Tumultueuses)
6 ‘Les Cultes’ (Ibid.)
7 ‘Les Villes’ (Les Forces Tumultueuses).
8 ‘La Ferreur’ (La Multiple Splendeur).
9 ‘Vers le Futur’ (Les Villes Tentaculaires).
10 ‘La Conquête’ (Les Forces Tumultueuses).
11 ‘Vers le Futur’ (Les Villes Tentaculaires).
12 ‘La Recherche’ (Ibid.).
13 ‘L’Erreur’ (Les Forces Tumultueuses).
14 ‘La Ferveur’ (La Multiple Splendeur).
15 ‘Méditation’ (Les Moines).
16 ‘Les Penseurs’ (La Multiple Splendeur).
17 ‘La Science’ (Les Forces Tumultueuses).
18 ‘L’Action’ (Les Visages de la Vie).
19 ‘La Science’ (Les Forces Tumultueuses).
20 ‘Les Penseurs’ (La Multiple Splendeur).
21 ‘La Science’ (Les Forces Tumultueuses).
22 ‘Les Penseurs’ (La Multiple Splendeur).
23 ‘La Mort’ (La Multiple Splendeur).
24 ‘La Recherche’ (Les Villes Tentaculaires).
25 ‘L’Attente’ (Les Visages de la Vie).
26 ‘L’Attente’ (Les Visages de la Vie).
27 ‘La Folie’ (Les Forces Tumultueuses).
28 (La Multiple Splendeur).
29 Les Rythmes Souverains.