CONTEMPORARY FEELING

J'étais le carrefour où tout se rencontrait.—É.V., 'Le Mont.'

Verhaeren's deliverance from the stifling clasp of his crisis was a flight to realities. He saved himself by no longer fixing his gaze rigidly on himself and deeply probing every feeling of joy and torment, but by turning to the world of phenomena and flinging himself on its problems. He has no longer to stand in solitude facing the world; his desire is to multiply himself, to realise himself in everything that is alive, in everything that expresses a will, an idea, a form, anything at all animated. His poetic aim now is, not so much to analyse himself to himself, as to analyse himself in the whole world.

To realities, and particularly to the realities of our day, lyric poets had previously felt themselves alien. It had long been a commonplace to speak of the danger to art of industrialism, of democracy, of this age of machinery which makes pur life uniform, kills individuality, and drowns romance in actualities. All these poets have looked upon the new creations, machines, railways, monster cities, the telegraph, the telephone, all the triumphs of engineering, as a drag on the soaring of poetry. Ruskin preached that workshops should be demolished and chimneys razed to the ground; Tolstoy pointed to primitive man, who produces all his requirements from his own resources independently of any community, and saw in him the moral and æsthetic ideal of the future. In poetry, the past had gradually come to be identified with the poetical. People were enamoured of the glory that was Greece, of mail-coaches and narrow, crooked streets; they were filled with enthusiasm for all foreign cultures, and decried that of our own time as a phase of degeneration. Democracy, levelling all ranks and confining even the poet to the middle-class profession of author, seemed, as a social order, to be the correlation of machinery which, by the constructive skill of workshops, renders all manual dexterity unnecessary. All the poets, who were glad to avail themselves of the practical advantages provided by technical science, who had no objection to covering immense distances in the minimum time, who accepted the comfort of the modern house, the luxury of modern conditions of life, increased pecuniary rewards and social independence, refused obstinately to discover in these advantages a single poetic motive, a single object of inspiration, the least stimulus or ecstasy. Poetry had by degrees come to be something which was the very opposite of what-, ever is useful; all evolution seemed to these poets to be, from the point of view of culture, retrogression.

Now it is Verhaeren's great exploit that he effected a transmutation poetic values. He discovered the sublime in the far-spread serried ranks of democracy; beauty he found not only where it adapts itself to traditional ideas, but also where, still hidden by the cotyledon of the new, it is just beginning to unfold. By rejecting no phenomenon, in so far as an inward sense and a necessity dwelt in it, he infinitely extended the boundaries of the lyric art. He found a fruitful soil in the very places where all other poets despaired of poetic seed. He and he alone, who had for so long been eating his heart out in fierce isolation, feels the strength and fulness of society, the poetical element in the massed strength of great cities and in great inventions. His deepest longing, his most sublime exploit is the lyric discovery of the new beauty in new things.

The only way to this feat lay for him through the conviction that beauty does not express anything absolute, but something that changes with circumstances and with men; that beauty, like everything that is subject to evolution, is constantly changing. Yesterday's beauty is not to-day's beauty. Beauty is no more opposed than anything else to that tendency to spiritualisation which is the most characteristic symptom ind result of all culture. Physiologists have proved that the physical strength of modern man is inferior to that of his ancestors, but that his nervous system is more developed, so that strength is more and more concentrated in the intellect. The Hellenic hero was the wrestler, the expression of a body harmoniously developed in every limb, the perfection of strength and skill; the hero of our time is the thinker, the ideal of intellectual strength and suppleness. And since our only way of estimating the perfection of things is by the ideal of our personal feeling, the form of beauty likewise has been transformed and become intellectual. And even when we seek it in the body, as, for instance, in the ideal woman's figure, we have grown accustomed to seeing perfection not so much in robustness and plumpness as in a noble, slender play of lines which mysteriously expresses the soul. Beauty is turning away more and more from the outer surface, from the physical, to the interior aspects, to the psychic. In proportion as motive forces hide themselves and as harmony becomes less obvious, beauty intellectualises itself. It is becoming for us not so much a beauty of appearance as a beauty of; aim. If we are to admire the telegraph or the telephone, we shall not be satisfied with considering the exterior forms, the network of wires, the keys, the receivers; we shall be impressed rather by the ideal beauty, by the idea of a vibrating spark leaping over countries and whole continents. A machine is not wonderful on, account of its rattling, rusty, iron framework, but by the idea, deep-seated in its body, which is the principle of its magical activity. A modern idea of beauty must be adapted not only to the idea of beauty of the past, but also to that of the future. And the future of æsthetics is a kind of ideology, or, as Renan expresses it, an identity with the sciences. We shall lose the habit of understanding things only by our senses, of seeing their harmony only on their exterior surface, and we shall have to learn how to conceive their intellectual aims, their inner form, their psychic organisation, as beauty.

For these new things are only ugly when they are regarded with the eyes of a past century, when our contemporaries, jealously guarding a reverent over-estimation, valuing the rust and not the gold, despise modern works of art, and pay a thousand times too dear for the indifferent productions of a past age. Only in this state of feeling is it possible to esteem mail-coaches poetical and locomotives ugly; only thus is it possible for poets, who have not learned to see with emancipated and independent eyes, to assume such a hostile attitude, or at the best an indifferent attitude, to our realities. Let us remember Nietzsche's beautiful words: 'My formula for grandeur in man is amor fati: that a man should ask for nothing else, either in the past or in the future, in all eternity. We must not only endure what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is lying in necessity's face—but we must love it.'[1] And in this sense some few in our days have loved what is new, first as a necessity, and then as beauty. A generation ago now, Carlyle was the first to preach the heroism of everyday life, and exhorted the poets of his day not to describe the greatness they found in mouldy chronicles, but to look for it where it was nearest to them, in the realities around them. Constantin Meunier has found the idea of a new sculpture in democracy, Whistler and Monet have discovered in the smoky breath of this age of machinery a new tone of colour which is not less beautiful than Italy's eternal azure and the halcyon sky of Greece. It is only from the vast agglomerations, the immense dimensions of the new world that Walt Whitman has derived the strength and power of his voice. The whole difficulty which thus far has permitted only a few to serve the new beauty in the new things lies in the fact that our age is not yet a period of decided conviction, but only one of transition. The victory of machinery is not yet complete; handiwork still subsists, little towns still flourish, it is still possible to take refuge in an idyll, to find the old beauty in some sequestered corner. Not till the poet is shut off from all flight to inherited ideals will he be forced to change himself into a new man. For the new things have not yet organically developed their beauty. Every new thing on its first appearance is blended with something repellent, brutal, and ugly; it is only gradually that its inherent form shapes itself æsthetically. The first steamers, the first locomotives, the first automobiles, were ugly. But the slender, agile torpedo-boats of to-day, the bright-coloured, noiselessly—gliding automobiles with their hidden mechanism, the great, broad-chested Pacific Railway engines of to-day, are impressive by their outward form alone. Our huge shops, such as those which Messel built in Berlin, display a beauty in iron and glass which is hardly less than that of the cathedrals and palaces of old time. Certain great things, such as the Eiffel Tower, the Forth Bridge, modern men-of-war, furnaces belching flame, the Paris boulevards, have a new beauty beyond anything which past ages had to show. These new things compel a new enhancement of value, on the one hand by the idea that moves them, on the other hand by their democratic grandeur and their vast dimensions—equalled by none but the very greatest works of antiquity. But whatever is beautiful must, sooner or later, be conceived of as poetry. And thus, it is quite sure, Verhaeren has only been one of the first to build bridges from the old to the new time; others will come who will celebrate the new beauties in the new things—gigantic cities, engines, industrialism, democracy, this fiery striving for new standards of greatness—and they will not only be compelled to find the new beauties, they will also have to establish new laws for this new order, a different morality, a different religion, a different synthesis for this new conditionality. the poetic transmutation of the beautiful is only a first beginning of the poetic transmutation of the feeling of life.

But a poet never finds anything in things save his own temperament. If he is melancholy, the world in his books is void of sense, all lights are extinguished, laughter dies; if he is passionate, all feelings seethe in a fiery froth as though in a cauldron, and foam up in angry happenings. Whereas the real world is manifold, and contains the elixirs of pleasure and pain, confidence and despair, love and hate, only as elements so to speak, the world of great poets is the world of one single feeling. And so Verhaeren too sees all things in their new beauty with the feelings of his own life only, only with energy. In these the fiery years of his prime it is not harmony that he seeks, but energy, power. For him a thing is the more beautiful the more purpose, will, power, energy it contains. And since the whole world of to-day is over-heated with effort and energy; since our great towns are nothing but centres of multiplied energy; since machinery expresses nothing save force tanied and organised; since innumerable crowds are yoked in harmonious action—to him the world is full of beauty. He loves the new age because it does not isolate effort but condenses it, because it is not scattered but concentrated for action. And of a sudden everything he sees appears to be filled with soul. All that has will, all that has an aim in view—man, machine, crowd, city, money; all that vibrates, works, hammers, travels, exults; all that propagates itself and is multiplied, all that strives to be creation; all that bears in itself fire, impulse, electricity, feeling—all this rings again in his verse. All that of old had acted upon him as being cold and dead and hostile is now inspired with will and energy, and lives its minute; in this multiple gear there is nothing that is merely dust or useless ornamentation; everything is creation, everything is working its way towards the future. The town, this piled-up Babylon of stones and men, is of a sudden a living being, a vampire sucking the strength of the land; the factories, that had seemed to him nothing but an unsightly mass of masonry, now become the creators of a thousand things, which in their turn create new things out of themselves. All at once Verhaeren is the socialist poet, the poet of the age of machinery, of democracy, and of the European race. And energy fills his poetry too: it is strength let loose, enthusiasm, paroxysm, ecstasy, whatever you like to call it; but always active, glowing, moving strength; never rest, always activity. His poem is no longer declamation, no longer the marmoreal monument of a mood, but a crying aloud, a fight, a convulsive starting, a stooping down and a springing up again; it is a battle materialised. For him all values have been transmuted. It is just what had repelled him most—London, monster cities, railway stations, Exchanges, which now lure him most of all as poetic problems. The more a thing seems to resist beauty—the more he has first to discover its beauty by fighting it and wrestling with it in torment—with so much the greater ecstasy does he now extol it. The strength which had murderously raged against itself now, in creative ecstasy, breaks into the world. To tear down resistance, to snatch beauty from its most hidden corner, is now for him a tenfold strength and joy of creation. Verhaeren now creates the poem of the great city in the dionysiac sense; the hymn to our own time, to Europe; creates ecstasy, renewed and renewed again, in life.