Not as a pioneer merely, but as a constant devotee throughout all the other changes in his art, Verhaeren, so lately and lamentably gone, is to be accounted the greatest exponent of modernism in poetry. In so styling him, we rate as the really vital modernism in the art, not the cult of sheer modernity of form and mood,—the ultra-modernism in which the poetic youth exults, but that more difficult modernity of substance which has as its aim to make poetry incorporate a world-view and reflect the spirit of its time. The task,—ancient and perennial in some respects, of getting the real world into the microcosm of art without shattering either one or the other, was of unusual difficulty in Verhaeren’s day. No life has been harder to transmute into art than modern life, and in no art so difficult as in that of poetry. Yet this was the master-passion of Verhaeren’s temperament and the consummate achievement of his work. Once achieved—and it must be remembered that Verhaeren’s modernism was wrested from the fin-desiécle aestheticism of a decadence that deliberately despaired of a solution of this problem—the whole movement, of which the ultramodernistic phases are still with us, was made possible. To assert that Verhaeren’s modernity is a bit old-fashioned and somewhat superceded now, as is so much the mode, is therefore but to emphasize his parental relation to the whole idea. Indeed let us venerate the more, if as the young radicals have hinted, it is the dowager-muse whom we must console.
With fiction and drama in the throes of naturalism, poetry at the time of Verhaeren’s début had renounced life, and was in full retreat toward the cloister or that other asylum of the eighties, the ivory towers. And it was his own instinctive and passionate love of the real in poetry, not Zola’s or Lemmonier’s creed, that sent him like a jealous and desperate lover in pursuit. And who can doubt in the light of what has subsequently happened in modern poetry, the comparative success of Verhaeren above all others in this respect, if he will but picture, let us say, Maeterlinck ecstatically returning from the convent with the maiden’s veil; Verhaeren, with less grace but more triumph, from the ivory towers with the damsel herself? It was this effort that produced the crude defiant realism of Les Flamandes (1883), and the vigorous protests, of L’Art Moderne. Though somewhat in excess of his nature, as the later poems show, these early pronouncements were a creed from which in principle Verhaeren never radically departed, and out of which modernistic realism in poetry takes its origin. There was proved to be something else between what poets then regarded their only alternative,—that of a pagan or a religious aestheticism.
For Verhaeren himself, however, the appeal to the realism of his native art, a fugitive sojourn with his stolen bride at the boisterous inn of Teniers, was but a temporary refuge. The ivory towers avoided, it was not so easy to flee the cloister. Training, association, and above all the trend of thought at the time, forced the issue upon him. Yet it seems unwarranted to construe Les Moines (1885), as so many critics have, as a recantation of modernism on Verhaeren’s part. A reaction from realism it undoubtedly was, but it is to Verhaeren’s credit that he never confounded modernity with a particular technique or a particular type of subject. The Monks is a modernistic as Les Flamandes. His familiarity and sympathy for what he is dealing with conceals the iconoclasm; his is a reverent vandalism. “Dwellers, long before death in a mystic and extrahuman world” and “You who alone still hold, upright, your dead God over the modern world” are written not in the mood of retreat, but of recall. Trailing humanity as ever, Verhaeren cathecizes it in the heart of the cloister, and chides it there for solving the problems of life in an artificial, selfish, and futile way. Having disdained aestheticism, he rejects asceticism too. The place of poetry he says in the splendid apostrophe, Aux Moines, is in its own temple in the midst of life, and not with
“Men of a dead and distant day,—men
Broken but living still,—poets, too,
Who cannot bear with us the common lot.”
Reverently, Verhaeren shuts the door to the Middle Ages.
The trials and labours of this course, Verhaeren seems to have realized, in anticipation; then later in painful actuality. The temple of modern art was to be sought in an immense and towering chaos. And being the universe itself, the problem was not to find a place for it, but to find a place in it for the poet. Les Soirs (1887), Les Débacles (1888), and Les Flambeaux noires belong to the working out of this problem, and to his own period of stress. Stéfan Zweig makes much of this phase as a record of personal struggle; it is as significant, or more so, as a journal of the mal du siécle. An Amiel’s Journal of its time, nowhere will a more exact or sincere testament be found than in this group of poems of what art was passing through in those years. It was the doubting period in poetry, when poets were sure of nothing but their own inner experiences, and of these in a morbidly subjective way. No depth or variety of this experience did Verhaeren leave unexplored,—
“I, too, would have my crown of thorns,
Each thought a thorn upon the brow,”—
but while the symbolists revelled in their subjectivity, Verhaeren strove mightily against it as the besetting solipsism he must escape to reach a vitally modern art.
“The world itself is most disdained of all,
And hands that hope to seize the light
Stretch toward the vague and unattainable.”
For he found no satisfaction in a phantom or an exiled beauty of the inner world, it withered like an exotic flower in his fevered hands. Groping toward what is real and vital in the world at large, he says of himself, “I have been a coward and have fled into a world of futile egoism.” Out of the polar darkness of this experience, like Henley, Verhaeren saw a new vision, not Henley’s indomitable self however, but the redeeming World. Like Henley’s though, Verhaeren’s discovery was made in the heart of the metropolis, where the necessity of finding an excuse for life is if anywhere imperative. In life as it showed itself there, most crude and common, but most real. Verhaeren grasped a new objective, that was not merely the release he desired from subjectivism, but a new world, for poetry to conquer.
The place of the City in Verhaeren’s poetry is as a symbol of this achievement. It dominates both of his great trilogies,—Les Campagnes Hallucinees (1893), Les Villages Illusoires (1895), Les Villes Tentaculaires (1896), and Les Forces Tumulteuses (1902), La Multiple Splendeur (1906), and Les Rythmes Souverains (1910). Symbolizing modern life for him, it stands for an attitude and treatment of subject which he carries throughout his art. The light source of his vision, it determines all the values of his art: we find it by the shadows it casts even when it is out of the picture, as in the depiction of what he not equivocally calls Illusory Villages and Ghostly Countrysides,—since they too must be keyed to his standard of art,—the real, the throbbingly actual,—which first revealed itself to him as an artistic criterion in the life of the Tentacular Cities. It is obviously not the city as such,—indeed Verhaeren never quite escaped his old preoccupation with peasant folk and country life in all their Flemish provinciality,—but the city as a symbol, a point of view, behind which we glimpse Verhaeren’s real gods, Humanity and Force.
The force he idealizes perhaps, but never the subject. It is a strange art, this vast untiring and exultantly descriptive realism, in which the style of Verhaeren seems all his earlier career to have been developing, at last finds an appropriate subject matter. Realism in fact never attained a completer triumph than in these depictions, genre pictures in themselves, but set in an epical series and moving with an epical force. Like the poem of Lucretius, it lacks only heroes to make it an epic. Indeed it is the way Lucretius would have written of modern life. For the hero is an infinite energy, as big in the atom as in the mass, suffusing everything, and carrying life with or without its will to its destiny: the divinity of the world is its moving energy, and the divinity in man the cosmic enthusiasm of it all. Nature and man, city and countryside, emotion and fact, seem thus in the same perspective are manifestations of a force as significant in the atom as in the aggregate. Yet so endowed with the life force is everything,—the very motions of the atoms and the dust so significant,—that out of an apparent materialism, an ardent vitalism is brought.
The humanism that is the counterpart of this worldview is indeed a rare emotion. Verhaeren only at times achieves it. His style records a perilous quest for it. On this score he is not to be judged by the style of his earlier or even of his middle period. In the one, he dehumanized man in a cold relentless portraiture and a mechanistic interpretation: in the other, he overanimated nature, and by a sheer rout of the pathetic fallacy, seems to have put into inanimate life all he took out of the human subject. Contrast the hard brush stroke of his portraits, presenting men “grim, course, and bestial, as they are,” with his mood-saturated description of inanimate things, the “tower clocks staring in dumb amazement,” “evenings crucified and agonizing in the west” and his notorious snow and rain, the one “cold with loveliness, warm with hate” and the other “long fingered, tearing to shreds the tattered firmament.” The achievement comes eventually only in his best art, in a resolution of this odd contrast as in the lines,—
“Thus are poor hearts,—with lakes of tears within them,
Pale,—as the tombstones of the cemetery.
Thus are poor shoulders,—with toil more weighted down
And burdened than their hut-roofs in the valleys.”
We then see that Verhaeren’s purpose was not a paradoxical technique, in which the usual emphasis is reversed by pictorializing man and poetizing nature, but a purpose, only gradually realized and revealed, to break the barrier between them that even the flood of romanticism had left intact. Life, for Verhaeren at this later stage, is what man and nature share in common: out of a deeper penetration into each, a new relevancy comes. By welding his figures to their backgrounds, like Rodin scarcely freeing them from the rock, he gains his essential purpose, which is to exhibit in an art free from conventional illusion and sentimental overemphasis, the underlying vitalism of the universe.
Style for Verhaeren was thus the corollary of his content and message. His periods of style follow his philosophy, and the form, determined as Zweig so aptly says by “inner necessity,” is the genuine idiom of his thought. Whether traditional or free in metre, symbolist or realistic in his imagery, Verhaeren, unlike so many modern poets, is never exploiting a technique or a form merely. His style accordingly in all its phases seems inevitable, dictated by the idea,—and all great style must be inevitable. This element more than any other, as with Whitman, gives Verhaeren greatness: defying classification, it puts their poetry above that of the schools. Strangely similar indeed, in spite of all differences of overtone, is the fundamental groundnote of Whitman’s and Verhaeren’s poetry. The catholic response vibrating to everything, the rhapsodic fling, the cosmic emotion and exultant vitalism in the poetry of each proclaims a striking spiritual kinship between them, which if rightly interpreted establishes their common paternity in the age. Easy to recognize, this modernism is none the less hard to define. What is it of which we feel that the style is but the shadow and reflection? Both poets are terribly explicit about it, yet for all their dogma, it is by no means clear. Democracy triumphant, the ethics of fervour, the religion of humanity, the cult of cosmicality, emotional pantheism, Dionysan neo-paganism,—all this and more it has been termed without a really satisfying caption. For Whitman and Verhaeren it was all one living creed—but their followers have had to cast lots and part their garments. Competent criticism has recently traced the idea in a half dozen or more contemporary schools, each stressing but an aspect, yet one apparently important enough for further emphasis and elaboration. The poetry of Dynamism, the most considerable of these, but catches the physics of the philosophy; while many, like “Effrénéisme,” the Paroxystes, Totalistes, Synchronists, Vorticists and what not, catch only the mannerism of the style. And we should not flatter ourselves that because we lack these isms in our literary discourse, we are free from the unfortunate sectarianism that has befallen this great idea. With its greatest exponents, a single ideal dominates all the aspects of the idea: with Whitman a thoroughgoing cleutherianism or Libertism, if you will; with Verhaeren, a consistent pan-Vitalism in which, giving the philosophy of the élan vitale a place in poetry, he celebrates the cosmic energy and its onrushing goal. To Whitman belongs the credit of discovery, the sounding of these new notes; to Verhaeren, their linking up and blending into something of a harmony. The modern dithyramb, like the ancient, has a philosophy of life, a religion, back of it: thus there was always in poetry for Verhaeren an almost religious and pæanizing strain that finds its climax in his most famous line, “O race of Man, bound to the golden stars.”
If any proof were needed that this is the persistent and fundamental note in Verhaeren, its presence in the personal lyrics where it is least to be expected, would finally prove the matter. The sequence of Les Heures Claires (1896), Les Heures D’Après-Midi (1905), and Les Heures du Soir (1911), into which the enigma of the universe scarcely intrudes, is dominated by the same point of view and philosophy. Though personal, we find Verhaeren interpreting his own private experience in the same cosmic way: love for him, even in his own life, is not an individual force or will or destiny, but a supra-human force moving to a destiny beyond the stars.
“No sooner lip to lip, than we are fraught
With sun-lit fervour that o’erpowers,
As though two gods within us sought
A godlike union in these souls of ours;
Ah, how we feel divinity is near—
Our hearts so freshened by their primal might
Of light,
That in their clarity the universe shines clear.
Ah, joy alone, the ferment of the earth,
To far, illimitable birth;
As there above, across the bars
Of heaven, where voyage veils of gossamer,
Are born the myriad-flowering stars.”
“Exaltation is this gift of thine,”—a line from another of these poems makes clear the derivation of it all; this ecstatic orphism which has so subtly grown up out of its opposite in modern life as the religion of the mysteries cropped out of a more sober paganism. But in Verhaeren, it is really a fine frenzy, steadied in a cosmic vision, and uttered “in all clarity.” Here perhaps is the necessary balm for the eroticism of contemporary poetry. A message yet unheard, it may eventually be one of Verhaeren’s greatest contributions.
The social aspects of Verhaeren’s poetry have always been overemphasized, very naturally, but somewhat unjustifiably. In the social disillusionment through which we are passing, and which involves so many of the ideals with which Verhaeren affiliated, it is well to recognize that back of the social creeds is a personal philosophy that may be their ultimate justification. Practically, as it seems now, Verhaeren has been robbed by circumstance of his greatest triumph, the achievement of Europeanism. Coming into French literature, with an essentially Teutonic temperament, he mediated much of what was common to these two cultures, and to the time and the larger aspects of modern life. There is no hedging the fact that racial difference made possible his achievement. Technically even, the rhapsodic rhythm and the form of free verse are foreign to French verse and the Gallic spirit, and the advance of French poetry in the last twenty years has been due considerably to the foreign yeast in the loaf,—Verhaeren’s subtle infusion having been one of the most efficacious. Ideally too, there has been a fusion of notions,—the deification of Force and Change, essentially Teutonic, with the humanitarian and cosmic scope so typical of the Gallic conception. Verhaeren was one of the great Europeans, who did much to fuse alien cultures in terms of their common problems; for his contributions have been so assimilated as to seem native. The elements that have discorded in practice have blended acceptably and permanently in a personal type of philosophy. Still the disillusionment of the social creed is keen, and may reverse the values, making the laureate of Belgium, the Verhaeren of Toût la Flandre, greater than Verhaeren, apostle of Europeanism. As either, Verhaeren himself would be, as he says of his countrymen in Ceûx de Liege, “secure beyond all praise.” Yet properly speaking, cosmopolitanism of culture goes with the cosmic scope of his philosophy. Because of its deep humanitarianism, his nationalism is as big as his cosmopolitanism. His work closed as it began on the note of vibrant nationalism. It is to be pitied though that in the last stage war broke the serenity of mood in which he could see and say that, “Life goes on its cyclic way, and though man suffers, Nature seems to be carving a new face for her eternity.” Modernists of all stripes could not forsee that the “transvaluation of all values” they were clamoring for was not the work of philosophy or art, but the travail and destiny of an age. Perhaps Verhaeren’s superlative claim is this representativeness he has gained by incorporating in his poetry the issues of the age; but if it should prove that through war men can attain a unity of which they could only dream in peace, then the prophet in Verhaeren will contest the poet’s fame.