The European Importance of His Work
Futur, vous m’exaltez comme autrefois mon Dieu!
É.V., ‘La Prière.’
The last force of everybody, the force which finally decides the effect, which alone and first of all is able to strain his work or his activity to the highest possibility, is the feeling of responsibility. To be responsible, and to feel that one is responsible, is equivalent to looking at one’s whole life as a vast debt, which one is bound to strive with all one’s strength to pay off; is equivalent to surveying one’s momentary task on earth in the whole range of its significance, importance, and periphery, in order then to raise one’s own inherent possibilities and capacities to their most complete mastery. For most people this earthly task is outwardly restricted in an office, in a profession, in the fixed round of some activity. With an artist, on the other hand, it is what one might call an infinite dimension which can never be attained; his task is therefore an unlimited, an eternal longing, a longing that never weakens. Since his duty can really only be to express himself with the greatest possible perfection, this responsibility coincides with the demand that he should bring his life, and with his life his talent, to the highest perfection, that he should, in Goethe’s sense, ‘expand his narrow existence to eternity.’ The artist is responsible for his talent, because it is his task to express it. Now the higher the idea of art is understood, the more art feels its task to be the task of bringing the life of the universe into harmony, so much the more must the feeling of responsibility be intensified in a creative mind.
Now, of all the poets of our day Verhaeren is the one who has felt this feeling of responsibility most strongly. To write poetry is for him to express not himself only, but the striving and straining of the whole period as well, the fearful torment and the happiness that are in the birth of the new things. Just because his work comprises all the present and aims at expressing it in its entity, he feels himself responsible to the future. For him a true poet must visualise the whole psychic care of his time. For when later generations—in the same manner as they will question monuments concerning our art, pictures concerning our painters, social forms concerning our philosophers—ask of the verses and the works of our contemporaries the question, What was your hope, your feeling, the sum of your interpretation? how did you feel cities and men, things and gods?—shall we be able to answer them? This is the inner question of Verhaeren’s artistic responsibility. And this feeling of responsibility has made his work great. Most of the poets of our day have been unconcerned with reality. Some of them strike up a dancing measure, rouse and amuse people lounging in theatres; others again tell of their own sorrow, ask for pity and compassion, they who have never felt for others. Verhaeren, however, heedless of the approval or disapproval of our time, turns his face towards the generations to be:
Celui qui me lira dans les siècles, un soir,
Troublant mes vers, sous leur sommeil ou sous leur cendre,
Et ranimant leur sens lointain pour mieux comprendre
Comment ceux d’aujourd’hui s’étaient armés d’espoir,
Qu’il sache, avec quel violent élan, ma joie
S’est, à travers les cris, les révoltes, les pleurs,
Ruée au combat fier et mâle des douleurs,
Pour en tirer l’amour, comme on conquiert sa proie.1
It was, in the last instance, this magnificent feeling of responsibility which did not permit him to pass by any manifestation of our present time without observing and appreciating it, for he knows that later generations will ask the question how we sensed the new thing, which to them is a possession and a matter of course, when it was still strange and almost hostile. His work is the answer. The true poet of to-day, in Verhaeren’s eyes, must show forth the torment and the trouble of the whole psychic transition, the painful discovery of the new beauty in the new things, the revolt, the crisis, the struggles it costs to understand all this, to adapt ourselves to it, and in the end to love it. Verhaeren has attempted to express our whole time in its earthly, its material, its psychic form. His verses lyrically represent Europe at the turning of the century, us and our time; they consciously contemplate the whole circuit of the things of life: they write a lyric encyclopædia of our time, the intellectual atmosphere of Europe at the turning of the twentieth century.
The whole of Europe speaks with his voice, speaks with a voice that reaches beyond our time; and already from the whole of Europe comes the answer. In Belgium Verhaeren is above all the national poet, the poet of heaths, cities, dunes, and of the Flemish past, the great renewer of the national pride. But he stands too near his fellow-countrymen to be measured at his full height there. And in France, too, very few appreciate him at his true value. Most people regard him there in his literary aspect only and as a symbolist and decadent, an innovator of verse, an audacious and gifted revolutionary. But very few perceive the new and important work that is built up in his verses, very few comprehend the entity and the logical character of his cosmic philosophy. Nevertheless, his influence is already tangible. The new rhythm he has created can be recognised in many poets; and such a gifted disciple as Jules Romains has even brought his idea of the feeling of cities to new impressiveness. Best of all, however, he is understood by those Frenchmen who stand in a mystic communion with all that is great and urgent abroad; who feel an ethical need, a longing for an inner transmutation of values, for a re-moulding of races, for cosmopolitanism and a union of the nations; so, above all, Léon Bazalgette, who revealed Walt Whitman, the prophet of all strong and conscious reality in art, to France. Most joyfully of all, however, the answer rings from those countries which are themselves involved in deep-seated social and ethical crises, those countries where the need of religion is a vital instinct, which are eternally hungry for God, above all from Russia and Germany. In Russia the poet of Les Villes Tentaculaires is celebrated as he is nowhere else. As the poet of social innovations he is read in the Russian universities, and in the circles of the intellectuals he is regarded as the spiritual pioneer of our time. Brjussow, the distinguished young poet, has translated him, and afforded him the possibility of popularity. In other Slavonic countries, too, his work is beginning to spread.
Verhaeren’s success, one may well say triumph, has been strongest and most impressive in Germany; here it has been unexpectedly intensive even to us who have worked for it. A few years have sufficed to make him as popular here I as any native poet, and the most beautiful feature of his success is this, that people are already forgetting to look upon him as a foreigner. Verhaeren is to-day part and parcel of German culture; and much of our contemporary lyric poetry, its welcome turning to optimism for example, would be unthinkable but for his work and influence. Countless are the essays devoted to him, the recitations in which our best elocutionists—Kainz, Moissi, Kayssler, Heine, Wiecke, Durieux, Rosen, Gregori—have taken part; none of these interpreters, however, were as enthusiastically applauded as was Verhaeren himself on his tournée in Germany, which was a great experience no less for him than for our public, because he gladly felt that his work was now rooted for ever in German soil. In Scandinavia, where Johannes V. Jensen in his essays unconsciously transcribed Verhaeren’s lyric work, Ellen Key, the inspired prophetess of the feeling of life, has hailed him as she has hailed no other, and Georg Brandes, who crowns poets, has welcomed him with loud acclaim. Incessantly, in an irresistible, sure ascent, Verhaeren’s fame grows. And above all, his poetry is no longer regarded as an individual thing, but as a work, as a cosmic philosophy, as an answer to the questions of our time, as the strongest and most beautiful enrichment of our vital feeling. Wherever people are tired of pessimism, tired of confused mysticism, and tired of monistic shallowness; wherever a longing stirs for a pure idealistic form of contemplation, for a new reconciliation between our new realities and the old reverence for eternal secrets, for the secularisation of the divine, his name stands in the front rank. An answer comes from every direction, not because his work was a question, but because it was in itself an answer to the unconscious demand for a new community, a demand which is being made by men of all nations everywhere to-day.
But all this is only a beginning. Works like his, which are not paradoxical enough, not dazzling enough, to produce sudden ecstasies and literary fashions; which, by the mere fact that they have themselves grown organically into existence, can only grow organically, but for that reason irresistibly, in their influence; only lay hold of the masses slowly. Only later generations will enjoy the fruit which we, with renewed admiration, have seen ripening from the most modest of blossoms. But already a ring of men of all nations are joining hands, a ring of men who perceive a new centre of spirituality in Verhaeren. And we, the few who have wholly surrendered ourselves to his work, must appreciate it with that feeling only which he himself has taught us as the highest feeling of life—with enthusiasm, with gratitude ever renewed, and with joyful admiration. For to whom in our days should one offer more abundantly and stormily this new vital doctrine of enthusiasm as the happiest feeling than to Verhaeren, to him who was the first to wrest it in the bitterest struggles from the depths of our time, who was the first to shape it in the material of art, the first to raise it to the eternal law of life?
Footnotes
1 ‘Un Soir’ (Les Forces Tumultueuses).