FLIGHT INTO THE WORLD
On boit sa soif, on mange sa faim.—É.V., 'L'Amour.'
In this crisis the negation was driven to the last possible limits. The sick man had denied not only the outer world, but himself as well. Nothing had remained but vexation, disgust, and torment.
La vie en lui ne se prouvait
Que par l'horreur qu'il en avait.[1]
He had arrived at the last possibility, at that possibility which means destruction or transformation. The at first purely physical pain of the supersensitive organs of the senses had become a moral depression; the depression had become psychic suffering; and this again had gradually turned in a grandiose progression not only to pain in the individual thing but to suffering in the all: to cosmic pain. For Him, however, who in His loneliness took the suffering of the whole world upon His shoulders, who was strong enough to bear it for all the centuries, humanity has invented the symbol of 'God.' He who is born of earth and lives to die must perforce break down under so gigantic a burden. Into the last corner of his ego revengeful life had here driven the man who denied it, had driven him to the point where now he stood shivering before the abyss in his own breast, face to face with death and madness. The physical and poetic organism of Verhaeren was overheated to the most dangerous and extreme degree. This fever-heat—that of a flagellant —had brought his blood to the boiling-point; it was filling the chamber of his breast with pictures of such overwhelming horror that the explosion of self-destruction could only be prevented by opening the valve.
There were only two means of flight from this destruction: flight into the past—or flight into a new world. Many, Verlaine for instance, had in such catastrophes, wherein the whole structure of their lives tumbled to the ground, fled into the cathedrals of Catholicism rather than stand in solitude under the threatening sky. Verhaeren, however, though an inspired faith is one of the most living sources of his poetical power, was more afraid of the past than of the Unknown. He freed himself from the immense pressure upon him by fleeing into the world. He who in his pride had conceived the whole process of the world as a personal affair, he who had tried to solve the eternal discord, the undying 'yes' and 'no' of life in his own lonely self, now rushes into the very midst of things and involves himself in their process. He who previously had felt everything only subjectively, only in isolation, now objectifies himself; he who previously had shut himself off from reality, now lets his veins pulse in harmony with the breathing organism of life. He relinquishes his attitude of pride; he surrenders himself; lavishes himself joyously on everything; exchanges the pride of being alone for the immense pleasure of being everywhere. He no longer looks at all things in himself, but at himself in all things. But the poet in him frees himself, quite in Goethe's sense, by symbols. Verhaeren drives his superabundance out of himself into the whole world, just as Christ in the legend drove the devils out of the madman into the swine. The heat, the fever of his feeling—which, concentrated in his too narrow chest, were near bursting it—now animate with their fire the whole world around him, which of old had been to him congealed with ice. All the evil powers, which had slunk around him in the trappings of nightmares, he now transforms to shapes of life. He hammers away at them and shapes them anew; he is himself the smith of that noble poem of his, the smith of whom he says:
Dans son brasier, il a jeté
Les cris d'opiniâtreté,
La rage sourde et séculaire;
Dans son brasier d'or exalté,
Maître de soi, il a jeté
Révoltes, deuils, violences, colères,
Pour leur donner la trempe et la clarté
Du fer et de l'éclair.[2]
He objectifies his personality in the work of art, hammering out of the cold blocks, that weighed upon him with the weight of iron, monuments and statues of pain. All the feelings which of old weighed down upon him like dull fog, formless and prisoned in dream like nightmares, now become clear statues, symbols in stone of his soul's experiences. The poet has torn his fear, his burning, moaning, horrible fear, out of himself, and poured it into his bell-ringer, who is consumed in his blazing belfry. He has turned the monotony of his days to music in his poem of the rain; his mad fight against the elements, which in the end break his strength, he has shaped into the image of the ferryman struggling against the current that shatters his oars one after the other. His cruel probing of his own pain he has visualised in the idea of his fishermen, who with their nets all in holes go on fishing up nothing but suffering on suffering out of the sombre stream; his evil and red lusts he has spiritualised in his Aventurier, in the adventurer who returns home from a far land to celebrate his wedding feast with his dead love. Here his feelings are shaped no longer in moods, in the fluid material of dreams, but in the infinitely mobile form of human beings. Here there is symbolism in the highest sense, in Goethe's sense of liberation. For every feeling that has achieved artistic shape is as it were conjured away out of the breast. And thus the too heavy pressure slowly disappears from the poet's being, and the morbid fever from his work. Now and now only does he recognise the suicidal cowardice behind the visor of the pride that forced him to fly from the world, now and now only does he understand that fatal egoism which had taken refuge beyond the pale of the world:
J'ai été lâche et je me suis enfui
Du monde, en mon orgueil futile,[3]
This confession is the last liberating word of the crisis.