But these individual accumulations of men into a multitude, these combinations of millions into towns, are not isolated. One bond holds them all together: modern traffic. The distances of reality have disappeared, and with them national divisions as well. By the side of the problem of individual conglomerations which only slowly are transformed into organisms, by the side of the individual races, the individual masses, now arises a greater synthesis, the synthesis of the European race. For the men of our continent are no longer so distant, so strange to one another as they formerly were. Social democracy with its organisation encompasses the masses from one end of Europe to the other. To-day the same desires fire the men of Paris, London, St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Rome. And already one common formula directs their exertions: money.
Races des vieux pays, forces désaccordées,
Vous nouez vos destins épars, depuis le temps
Que l'or met sous vos fronts le même espoir battant.[5]
Independently of the frontiers of countries, on a broad-based foundation, a unified race, a new community, the European, is in process of formation. Here desire and reality are near touching. Verhaeren sees Europe already united by one great common energy. Europe is for him the land of consciousness. While other continents, distant as though in a dream, are still living a vegetative life, while Africa and India are still dreaming as they dreamt in the darkness of primitive times, Europe is 'la forge où se frappe l'idée,'[6] the great smithy in which all differences, all individual observations, all results, are hammered and moulded into a new intellectuality, into European consciousness. The union is not yet inwardly complete; states are still hostile and ignorant of their community; but already 'le monde entier est repensé par leurs cervelles.'[7] Already they are working at the transvaluation of all feeling in the European sense. For a new system of ethics, a new system of æsthetics, will be required by the European, who, rich by the past, strong in the feeling of the multitude, is now conscious of drawing his strength from new masses. Here it is that Verhaeren's work sings over into Utopia; and in Les Aubes, the epilogue to Les Villes Tentaculaires, this glittering rainbow rises over the visions of reality to the new ideal; the prophetic dream of a better future rises over the still struggling present.
This yearning for the European has been expressed for the first time in poetry by Verhaeren, almost contemporaneously with Walt Whitman's hailing of the American and Friedrich Nietzsche's prophecy of the superman. It would be a tempting task, and full of interest, to set up the Pan-European in antithesis to the Pan-American. But to say that Verhaeren was the first of lyric poets to feel as consciously European as Walt Whitman felt American, is to establish his rank among the most considerable men of our time. Verhaeren is possibly the only lyric poet who has felt in accordance with contemporary feeling. That epitomises his whole claim to gratitude, for it sufficiently expresses the fact that he has taken to his heart the problem of the multitude; the energy of social innovations; the æsthetics of organisation; the grandeur of mechanical production; in a word, the poetry of material things. It is our own time, the new age, that speaks in his verse; and it speaks in its new language. This rhythm which he has discovered is no literary abstraction, but beats in perfect unison with the heart-beat of the crowd; it is an echo of the panting of our monster cities, of the clanking of trains, of the cry of the people; his language is new, because it is no longer the voice of one man, but unites in itself the many voices of the multitude. He has penetrated deeper than any other man into the feeling of the masses, and their surf echoes more strongly in his verse. The hollow rumbling, the bestial and tameless strength of their voice, the surf of the multitude, has here become shape and music, the highest identity. With pride one can say of Verhaeren what he himself vaunts in his 'Captain': 'Il est la foule,'[8] he himself is the multitude.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] A Backward Glance O'er Travelled Roads.
[2] 'La Conquête (La Multiple Splendeur).
[3] 'Sous les Prétoriens' (Au Bord de la Route).
[4] 'La Foule' (Les Visages de la Vie).
[5] 'La Conquête' (La Multiple Splendeur).