Nevertheless in our own days there seem to be signs of a return to this primitive close contact between the poet and his audience; a new pathos is at its birth. The stage was the first bridge between the poet and the multitude. But here the actor was still the intermediary of the spoken word; the purely lyrical emotion was not an aim in itself, but only, for three or four hours, a help in the illusion. However, the time of the isolation of the poet from the crowd, which was formerly rendered necessary by the great distances between nation and nation, seems now to have been overcome by the shortening of space and by the industrialisation of cities. To-day poets once again recite their verse in lecture-halls, in the popular universities of America; nay, in churches Walt Whitman's lines ring out into the American consciousness, and what used to be created only by the seething seconds of political crises—one might instance Petöfi declaiming his national anthem 'Talpra Magyar' from the steps of the university to the revolutionary crowd—occurs almost every day. Now again as of old the lyric poet seems entitled to be, if not the intellectual leader of the time, at least he who must excite and quell the passions of the time; the rhapsodist who hails, kindles, and fans that holy fire, energy. The world seems to be waiting for Him who shall concentrate all life in a flash of lightning to light up all the deeps of darkness:
Il monte—et l'on croirait que le monde l'attend,
Si large est la clameur des cœurs battant
À l'unisson de ses paroles souveraines.
Il est effroi, danger, affre, fureur et haine;
Il est ordre, silence, amour et volonté;
Il scelle en lui toutes les violences lyriques.[1]
Certainly the poem which would speak to the multitude must be different to the kind of poem that pleased our fathers. Above all, it must itself be a will, an aim, an energy, an evocation. All the technical excellence, the sweet music, the craft of vibrating rhythms, suppleness and flexibility of language, must, in the new poem, no longer be an aim in themselves, but only a means to kindle enthusiasm. Such a poem must no longer be a sentimental dialogue between a hermit and some other hermit, a stranger somewhere far away; it must no longer be the short, hurriedly trembling voice which is silenced ere the word's flame has blazed up in it; no, this new poem must be strongly exulting, richly inspired, with a far horizon for its goal, and rushing on with irresistible impetuosity. It is not written for gentle moods, but for loud, resonant words. He who would quell the crowd must have the rhythm of their own new and restless life in him; he who speaks to the crowd must be inspired by the new pathos. And this new pathos, this 'pathos which most of all accepts the world as it is' (in Nietzsche's sense), is, above all, zest, is the strength and the will to create ecstasy. This poem must not be sensitive and woebegone; it must not express a personal grief that seeks to enlist the sympathies of others; no, it must be inspired by a fulness of joy, by the will to create from joy itself passion that cannot be held down. Only great feelings bear the message to the crowd; small feelings, which can only in silence, as in motionless air, rise above the ground, are dashed down again. The new pathos must contain the will, not to set souls in vibration, not to provide a delicate, æsthetic sense of pleasure, but to fire to a deed. It must carry the hearer along with it; it must once again collect in itself the scattered forces of the poet of old time; it must in the poet recreate, for an hour, the demagogue, the musician, the actor, the orator; it must snatch the word again off the paper into the air; it must carefully entrust feeling as a secret treasure to the individual; it must hurl this treasure into the surf of a multitude. Poems with such a new pathos cannot be created by feeble, passive men, whose mood can be changed at any minute by the world around them, but only by fighting natures, who are governed by an idea, by the thought of a duty; who seek to force their feeling on others; who elevate their inspiration to the inspiration of the whole world.
This new lyric pathos is in our days growing lustily into life again. For centuries rhetoricians have been mocked at. The change of estimation in Schiller's case from worship to sufferance is a lasting proof. And let us remember that Nietzsche, the only German who in recent years has influenced the world, was only able to do so by creating a new rhetorical style—'I am the inventor of the dithyramb'—only by making his Zarathustra a preacher's book which insistently requires a loud, resonant voice. In France it was Victor Hugo who first recognised the necessity of direct address. But he, who, as it happens, stands on that narrowest boundary-line which separates genius from talent, he of whom one can say that he was either the least of the eternal, monumental poets or the greatest of the minor, the derivative poets, he confined himself to France, he never thought of any but the French nation—as Walt Whitman never thought of any but the American nation—and, above all, he had not the high place whence to speak to his nation. He would have been greater if he had really had the tribune whence his thunder and lightning might have reached the multitude, instead of being always only a sinister grumbling from the background of exile. Of all the hundred volumes of his work perhaps nothing will remain except that commanding gesture of an orator which Rodin has perpetuated in his statue, and which is nothing else than the will to move to passion. He has created this will to pathos, but not the pathos itself; still, even the effort is a great and memorable achievement.
Victor Hugo's inheritance, which was ill administered by chatterers and chauvinists, by Déroulède and such poets with their big drums and their trumpet-flourishes, has been taken over in France by Verhaeren. And he is the first whose voice again reaches the crowd, the first French realisation of a pathos which has absolutely the effect of art and poetry. He more than any other, he whose deepest delight it is to quell a grandiose resistance, he the évocateur prodigieux, as Bersaucourt[2] has called him, was entitled to the mastery of the living word. Whenever I read a poem by Verhaeren, I am time after time astonished to find myself, when I have begun by reading it to myself, suddenly forced to read the words aloud; surprised to find myself reading them louder and louder; surprised to find in my hand, in my whole body, the urgent need awakening of the gesture that hails and kindles an audience. For so strong is the passionateness of the original feeling, the inner cry and appeal in the words, that it forces its way through the reproduction, rings out loudly even from the dead letters. All the great poems of Verhaeren are filled with the yearning to be spoken aloud, vehemently, in the zest and glow of passion. If they are recited softly, they seem to be quite without melody; if they are read calmly and stolidly, they often seem hard, uneven, and abrupt. Many images recur with a certain regularity, many adjectives are repeated as petrified ideas—the trick of an orator who emphasises what is important by standing expressions—but the moment the poem is read aloud it is all alive again, the repetitions are suddenly revealed as superb instances of excitement reaching its mark, the recurring images take their place as regular milestones along a road rushing along wildly to the infinite. Verhaeren's poetry is the communication of an ecstasy, communication not in the sense of a secret to an individual, but of fire cast to kindle a crowd. His poems never seem to be quite completed, but to have been first created while being read, just as every good and fiery speech gives the impression of being improvised; they are always the unfolding of a state, a passionate analysis that acts like a discovery. They are moving, not harmonious. Just as an orator does not shock his audience at the very first with the conclusion of his reasoning, but pays out the chain of his arguments slowly and logically, Verhaeren builds his poems from visions, first in repose, then in the excitement that intensifies, and then with burning horizons foaming over more and more wildly in images. And these images again are rhetorical; they are not similes which can only be understood in their totality by the roundabout way of reflection; they are glaring flashes of lightning. A poem that would move those who hear it has need of metaphors which not only hit the mark of feeling, but which hit it immediately with deadly effect. They must be glaring, because they have to force the whole feeling in the expression of one second as quick as lightning. In this way the pathetic poem produces a new form of sensuous expression, and in this way too it creates itself a new rhythm of intensification. First of all, with the lightnings of his metaphors Verhaeren illuminates the vast landscape of visions; then, by a certain monotony of rhythm, he intensifies the astonishment and excitement to the highest ecstasy. Repeatedly, at the breathing-spaces of his great poems, you think you have reached the summit, only to be whipped to a higher leap, to a higher outlook. 'Il faut en tes élans te dépasser sans cesse';[3] this, his moral commandment, is for him the highest poetical law as well. The deepest will of his pathetic poem is to whip up, to set running, to snatch his hearer along with him. 'Dites!' this summons which is like a gesture, the urgent 'encore, encore!' are appeals which in his poems are petrified into cries, just as every horseman has certain words to lure the last strength from his horse. Such words are nothing but transposed oratorical gestures. The hollow 'oh!' is the gesture of appeal; the short 'qu'importe!' the gesture as of one who casts away a burden grown too heavy; the slow, curving, far-sweeping 'immensément' is the heaping up of all infinity. These poems are lashed into fever heat. For not only do they themselves seek to fly like those other, the harmonious, the really lyric poems, which with wings outspread seem to hover near the clouds, they also seek to snatch up by force the whole heavy mass of the audience. This is the explanation of the constant repetitions in the poems, which are often very long, as though some last doubter were yet to be convinced, as though fire were to be darted into the blood of some last one yet immune. Everything strives forwards, forwards, dragging the resister along with ecstatic power.
And here are seen the dangers of pathos. The first danger, that into which, for instance, Victor Hugo fell, was the emptiness, the hollowness of the feeling, the covering over of a void by a mighty gesture; enthusiasm resulting from a deliberate method, and not forced by inner feeling. Empty phrasing is and remains the first danger of the pathetic poem. The triteness of words 'plus sonores que solides'[4] is the second. Here, however, in this new pathos, there is another and a new peril, that of the over-heating of feeling, that of excessive, unhealthy exaltation, which must then of necessity yield to exhaustion. No man can be in a constant fever of excitement, in an unremitting state of exaltation. And in these poems there is the will to unceasing ecstasy. By the pathos, too, the purely lyrical values of the poem often fall into danger. The will to be clear often forces the poet to a triteness of wording; the terseness necessitates frequent repetition; the impulse to build up an organic ecstasy often leads to excessive length. Owing to its glaring, clear colours the language loses that mystical element of lyric verse—the incommensurable, as Goethe called it—that magic hint of a secret thing fleeing from the crowd and the light of day. But at the same time this pathos signifies an immense enrichment of lyric resources, a transvaluation of the word, by the very fact that it is not exclusively intended for print but for declamation as well. The pathetic poem is not, like the lyric poem, a crystallised impression; it is not at the same time question and answer to itself; it is the expectation of an answer. The great pathos, therefore, grows with success, and involuntarily mingles in the poem the craving and the answer of the poet's time. The voice of the poet is always as strong as the call that goes out to him. Verhaeren found this new pathos in the course of his development, because he no longer felt the voice of the crowd, of cities, and of all the new things as a hindrance to his lyric poetry, but as a challenge, as a rhetorical exhortation. And the more the world around us becomes ponderous, grandiose, and passionate—the more it becomes heroic in the concentration of its strength (heroic in that new strength that Emerson preached)—so much the more, too, must lyric poetry in the new sense, perhaps in Verhaeren's sense, be pathetic. Gigantic impressions cannot be forced into petty impressions; vast conceptions cannot be split up into mean fragments; a loud appeal needs a loud answer. All art is more dependent than we are aware on its epoch. The same secret dependence between demand and production seems to exist in the sphere of art as exists in commerce. Laws that escape our knowledge and cannot be prisoned in formulae can sometimes be glimpsed, hazy as a presentiment, in fugitive intuition.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'Le Tribun' (Les Forces Tumultueuses).
[2] Albert de Bersaucourt, Conférence sur Emile Verhaeren.
[3] 'L'Impossible' (Les Forces Tumultueuses).