Contemporary Belgian Poetry / Selected and Translated by Jethro Bithell

To Émile Verhaeren. Tout bouge—et l'on dirait lea horizons en marche. Now let the dead past fall into the deep, With all its sleepy songs and churching chimes, You are the Bell that gospels mightier times O'er men who scale the Future's rugged steep, Not looking back to where the weaklings creep, But, with for battle-song your iron rimes, Marching front forwards to the visioned climes Where hearts are steeled and furious forces sweep. Of Jewish idols and Greek gods they sang, But louder than their voice hard anvils rang, And o'er their gardens smoke trailed waving hair; But while the old was ruined by the new, You pointed to a City far more fair; And, Master, with glad hearts we follow You.
CONTENTS.
Flemings:—Elskamp (French mother), Fontainas (French admixture), Giraud, Kinon (Walloon admixture), van Lerberghe, Le Roy, Maeterlinck, Ramaekers, Verhaeren.
Walloons:—Bonmariage (English mother), Braun (German grandfather), Isi-Collin, Jean Dominique, Gérardy (Prussian Walloon), Gilkin (Flemish mother), Gille, Marlow (English grandfather), Mockel (distant German extraction), Rency, Séverin.
Belgian literature begins, for all practical purposes, with Charles de Coster's national epic Uylenspiegel . De Coster died young, and was followed by the novelist Camille Lemonnier (1844-). Then comes the flood-tide, not in literature only, for Fernand Khnopff, Georges Minnes, Théo van Rysselberghe (the bosom friend of Verhaeren), and Constantin Meunier are as distinguished in painting and sculpture as, for instance, Georges Eekhoud and Joris-Karl Huysmans are in the novel.
The exuberant vitality of these students, though it often led them into extremes, laid the foundation of a literature which is in many respects the most remarkable of contemporary Europe. Now that Tolstoy is dead, Maeterlinck and Verhaeren stand at the head of the literature of the whole world; and they are, as Johannes Schlaf has maintained, the perfect types of the new European. It is absurd to consider them as Frenchmen; they are as much the product of their country as Ibsen is of Norway.