Love
Ceux qui vivent d’amour vivent d’éternité.
E.V., Les Heures d’après-midi.
Filled with contemporary spirit as Verhaeren’s work is, there is one point in which it appears to stray from our epoch, to be remote from the artistic preoccupations of other poets. Verhaeren’s poetry is almost entirely free from eroticism. The problem of love is with him far from being, as it is with most poets, the feeling at the root of all feelings; it is hardly ever a motive force in his work; it remains a little arabesque delicately curved above his massive architecture. Verhaeren’s enthusiasms spring from other sources. Love is for him almost without a sexual shade of meaning, perfectly identical with enthusiasm, self-surrender, ecstasy; and the difference between the sexes does not seem to be an essential, but only an incidental form among the thousandfold militant forms of life. The love of woman, sexual necessity, is scarcely a force greater than any other in the circle of forces, never the most important or actually the root-force, as it is (for instance) to Dehmel, who derives the consciousness of all great cosmic phases of knowledge from the experience of love. Verhaeren’s horizons are illuminated, not by the flame of the erotic, but by the passionate fire of purely intellectual impulses. His first books, those lyric volumes which are nearly always a poet’s confessions of love, were devoted to landscapes and then to social phenomena, to monks, and to men who toil with their hands. The strength of his drama pulses in conflicts exclusively masculine. Thus his work, already vastly removed from that of the other lyrists of our time, is seen to be still more isolated. To Verhaeren love is only a single page, not the first and not the last, in the book of the world: this poet has lavished too much glowing passion and ecstatic feeling on all individual things and the universe for the cry of the desire of woman to ring higher than all other voices.
This lack of accentuation of eroticism in Verhaeren’s work does not by any means strike me as a weakness, a missing nerve in his artistic organism. It may read like a paradox, but it must be said: just this apparent artistic deficiency indicates personal strength. Verhaeren’s masculinity is so pronounced and strong that woman could never become the root-problem of his passion, or shake him in the foundations of his fate. To a really strong man, love, sexual love, is a matter of course; a sterling man does not feel it as an obstacle and not as a vital conflict, but as a necessity, like nourishment, air, and liberty. But a thing that is a matter of course is never conceived by an artist as a problem. In his youth Verhaeren was never perplexed by love, for the simple reason that he did not attach sufficient importance to it, because his poetic interests were in the first place directed to a mightier possession, a philosophy of life. A sterling man, as Verhaeren conceives him, does not spend his strength in sexual love. For such a man the metaphysical instinct, the longing for knowledge, the need of finding his inner statics in the cosmos, goes before love. ‘Eve voulait aimer, Adam voulait connaître.’1 Only to woman is love the sense of life; to man, in Verhaeren’s idea, the sense of life is knowledge. He expressed this sound idea still more clearly in an early poem:
Les forts montent la vie ainsi qu’un escalier,
Sans voir d’abord que les femmes sur leurs passages
Tendent vers eux leurs seins, leurs fronts et leur visages.2
Paying no heed to the seductions of love, the strong men, the really great, ascend to the skies, to spiritual knowledge; they gather the fruits of stars and comets; and then, only then, when they are returning, tired by their lonely wandering, do they observe women, and lay down in their hands the knowledge of the great worlds. Not in the beginning, in the vehement days of youth, but only when manhood is established, only in the time of inner maturity, can woman become a great experience for Verhaeren. He must first of all have acquired a firm footing, must know his place in the world, before he can yield himself up to love. It is strange that the sonnet I have quoted should have been written in youth, because, like a presentiment, it relates the fate of his own life in advance. For the images of women never stopped his path nor turned him aside from it; love, if I may say so, only occupied his senses and never absorbed his soul. Not till later, till the years when the crisis was undermining his body, when his nerves were giving way under the terrible strain, when solitude reared itself before his face like an inseparable foe, did a woman enter his life. Then, and not till then, did love and marriage—the personal symbol of eternal, exterior order—give him inward rest. And to this woman the only love-poems he ever wrote are addressed. In Verhaeren’s work, which is graded like a trilogy—in this symphony that is often brutal—there is a quiet, soft andante, a trilogy in the trilogy, one of love. From the point of view of art, these three books, Les Heures Claires, Les Heures d’Après-midi, and Les Heures du Soir, are not less in value than his great works, but they are more gentle. From this savage and passionate man one might have expected visionary, seething ecstasies, a tempestuous discharge of erotic feeling; but these books are a wonderful disappointment. They are not spoken to the crowd, but to one woman only, and for that reason they are not spoken loudly, but with a voice subdued. Religious consciousness—for with Verhaeren all that is poetic is religious in a new sense—finds a new form here. Here Verhaeren does not preach, he prays. These little pages are the privacy of his personal life, the confession of a passion which is great indeed, but veiled as it were with a delicate shame. ‘Oh! la tendresse des forts!’ is Bazalgette’s inspired comment. And in truth, it is impossible to imagine anything more touching than the sight of this mighty fighter here lowering his resonant voice to the soft breathings of devotion. These verses are quite simple, spoken low, as though wild and too passionate words might imperil so noble a feeling, as though a strong man, a brutal man, who is afraid of hurting a delicate woman with a touch accustomed to bronze, should lay his hand on hers only softly, most cautiously.
How beautiful these poems are! When you read them, they take you softly by the hand and lead you into a garden. Here you see no more the murky horizon of the city, the workshops; you do not hear the din of streets, nor that resonant rhythm that raged along in cataract on cataract; you hear a gentle music as of a playing fountain. Passion does not project you here to the great ecstasies of humanity and the sky; it has no will to make you wild and fervid; it soothes you to tenderness and devotion. The strident voice has grown soft, these colours are of transparent crystal, this song seems to express the vast silence from which those great passions drew their force. But these poems are not artificial. They too are of one woof with the elements of Nature; but not with the great, wild, and heart-moving world, not with the fiery sky, not with thunder and tempests: it is only a garden that you surmise here, a peaceful cottage, with birds singing about it, where there are sweet-scented flowers and silence hanging between trees in blossom. The adventures are insignificant in feature. You breathe the poetry of everyday life, but not that of open and wildly surging roads—only the poetry of closed walls, softly spoken dialogues about little things, the tenderest secrets of home. These are the experiences of personal existence, this is the ordinary day between the great ecstasies. The lamp burns softly in the room, the silence is full of wonderful tenderness:
Et l’on se dit les simples choses:
Le fruit qu’on a cueilli dans le jardin;
La fleur qui s’est ouverte,
D’entre les mousses vertes,
Et la pensée éclose, en des émois soudains,
Au souvenir d’un mot de tendresse fanée
Surpris au fond d’un vieux tiroir,
Sur un billet de l’autre année.3
Here you have the deepest feeling, thanks and devotion, not in ecstasy to God and the world, but addressed to one single being. For Verhaeren is one who is ever receiving gifts, who always feels that he is being heaped with favours, who has always to give thanks for life and all its miracles. Without measure, with that zest, with that incessantly renewed joy which is the deepest secret of his art, he here again and again expresses love and gratitude. As Orpheus rises to Euridice from the nether world, here the sick lover ascends to the lady who has saved him from the dark. And again and again he thanks her for the good hours of quietness; again and again he reminds her of their first meeting, of the sunny happiness of these present days:
Avec mes sens, avec mon cœur et mon cerveau,
Avec mon être entier tendu comme un flambeau
Vers ta bonté et vers ta charité,
Je t’aime et te louange et je te remercie
D’être venue, un jour, si simplement,
Par les chemins du dévouement,
Prendre en tes mains bienfaisantes, ma vie.4
These verses are genuflexions, folded hands, love that by humility becomes religion.
But still more beautiful and significant, perhaps, is the second volume of the trilogy Les Heures d’Après-midi; for here again a new thing has been discovered, a moral beauty exceeding erotic sensation, a greatness of feeling such as can only be conferred by the noblest experience of life. It is a book after fifteen years of wedlock. But in this time love has not grown poorer. The deepest secret of Verhaeren’s life, never to let his feelings grow cold and sink to a dead level, but unceasingly to enhance them, has denied a state of rest to his love also, and raised even this to something eternally animated and intensified. And so his love has been able to celebrate the highest triumph, vaincre l’habitude, to conquer monotony and the dearth of feeling. Perpetual ecstasy has made it strong. Only he who renews his passion really lives it. When love pauses, it passes. ‘Je te regarde, et tous les jours je te découvre.5 Every day has here renewed the feeling and made it independent of its beginning, independent of sensual pleasure. As in Verhaeren’s whole work, passion has here been spiritualised, ecstasy soars beyond individual experience. It is no longer an external appearance that the now ageing couple love in each other. Lips have paled, the body has lost its freshness, the flesh its gloss and colour; the years of union have written their charactery in the face. Only love has not withered: it has grown stronger than the physical attraction; it has defied change, because it has itself changed and incessantly been intensified. It is now unshakeable and inalienable:
Puisque je sais que rien au monde
Ne troublera jamais notre être exalté
Et que notre âme est trop profonde
Pour que l’amour dépende encor de la beauté.6
The temporal has here been overcome, and even the future, even death have no longer any terrors. Without fear of losing himself—for ‘qui vit d’amour vit d’éternité’—the lover can think of him who stands at the end of all ways. No fear can touch him more, for he knows he is loved, and Verhaeren has given wonderful expression to this feeling in a poem:
Vous m’avez dit, tel soir, des paroles si belles
Que sans doute les fleurs, qui se penchaient vers nous,
Soudain nous out aimés et que l’une d’entre elles,
Pour nous toucher tous deux, tomba sur nos genoux.
Vous me parliez des temps prochains où nos années,
Comme des fruits trop mûrs, se laisseraient cueillir;
Comment éclaterait le glas des destinées,
Et comme on s’aimerait en se sentant vieillir.
Votre voix m’enlaçait comme une chère étreinte,
Et votre cœur brûlait si tranquillement beau
Qu’en ce moment j’aurais pu voir s’ouvrir sans crainte
Les tortueux chemins qui vont vers le tombeau.7
The third volume, Les Heures du Soir, has wonderfully closed the peaceful cycle with a series of poems, which no doubt have old age for their motive, but which show no trace of lassitude in the artist. Summer has turned to autumn, but how opulent and ripe this autumn is: the golden fruits of memory hang down and glow in the reflection of the sun that has been so well loved. Once again love passes with bright images: he is changed and purified, but as masterful and as strong as on the first day.
I love these little poems of Verhaeren’s with a different and no less a love than that I do his great and important lyric works. I have never been able to understand why these poems—for as far as the iconoclastic work is concerned, respect for tradition and fear of innovations may have scared many people away—have not enjoyed a widespread popularity. For never since the tenderly vibrating music of Verlaine’s La Bonne Chanson, never since the letters of the Brownings, has wedded happiness been so marvellously celebrated as in these stanzas. Nowhere else has love been spiritualised so nobly, with such crystal purity, nowhere else has the synthesis of love and wedlock been more intrinsically fashioned. It is with a quite especial love that I love these poèmes francs et doux, for here behind the savage, ecstatic poet, the passionate and strong poet of Les Villes Tentaculaires, another poet appears, the simple, quiet, and modest poet, the gentle and kind poet, as we know him in life. Here, on the other side of the poetic ecstasy, we have the noble personality of Verhaeren, in whom we revere, not only a poetic force, but a human perfection as well. By the luminous gate of these frail poems goes the path to his own life.
Footnotes
1 ‘Le Paradis’ (Les Rythmes Souverains).
2 ‘Hommage’ (Au Bord de la Route).
3 ‘C’est la bonne heure où la lampe s’allume’ (Les Heures d’Après-midi).
4 ‘Avec mes sens, avec mon cœur et mon cerveau’. (Les Heures d’Après-midi).
5 ‘Voici quinze ans déjà’ (Les Heures d’Après-midi).
6 ‘Les baisers morts des défuntes années’ (Ibid.)
7 ‘Vous m’avez dit, tel soir’ (Les Heures d’Après-midi).