VERHAEREN'S DRAMA
Toute la vie est dans l'essor.
É.V., Les Forces Tumultueuses.
Émile Verhaeren's dramas seem to stand outside his work. Verhaeren is essentially a lyric poet. His whole feeling springs from lyric enthusiasm, and all neighbouring domains are merely sources whose strength flows into and feeds this one vital instinct. Verhaeren has almost always used the dramatic and the epic only as a means, never as an end in themselves: from the epic he has taken over into the vast sweep of his dithyrambic poems its broad, calm development, and from the drama the swift, abrupt contrast of transitions. The dramatic and the epic only serve him as a tonic, as a means to strengthen the blood of his lyric art. Although Verhaeren beside his lyric work has written dramas—four up to the present—these, in the edifice of his complete production, must be appreciated from a different point of view: from an architectural point of view. For the dramas are to him, in a certain sense, only a survey, a concentration of individual lyric crises, a synopsis of certain ideal complexes which have occupied some moment of his past; they are final settlements; the last point in lines of development; milestones of individual epochs. All that in the lyric poems, which never systematically bounded a domain, fell apart, is here made to converge to the focus of a programme. The lyric juxtaposition is fused into an inner relationship, the circle of ideas is co-ordinated like a picture in the frame of a play. Verhaeren's four tragedies represent four spheres of a conception of the universe: the religious, the social, the national, and the ethical. Le Cloître is a re-creation of the book of verse Les Moines, is the tragedy of Catholicism; Les Aubes is a condensation of the sociological trilogy Les Villes Tentaculaires, Les Campagnes Hallucinées, Les Villages Illusoires. Philip II. shapes the tragedy of the Antichrist, the contrast of Spain and Belgium, of sensuality and asceticism. And Hélène de Sparte, which in its outward form manifests a return to classicism, handles purely moral, eternal problems. As far as their contents are concerned, Verhaeren's dramas show no deviation, no change of the inner centre of gravity, and his new dramatic style is in perfect harmony with his new lyric style. For just as on the one hand he has used the dramatic element as a substance of his lyric work, here in his dramas he has transmuted the lyric element to a dramatic element. Here, too, we have nothing but visions intensified into exaltation. Here, as everywhere else, Verhaeren can only create by enthusiasm. What goads him on is the lyric moment in his enthusiasm, that second of the highest tension when passion, if it is not to shatter the frame of its generator, must have explosive words. The characters of his dramas are never anything but symbols of great passions, the bridge for this ascension of the exaltation. To him the action is no more than the way to the crises, to those seconds when some mighty force seizes on these characters and forces them to cry out. Whole scenes seem to be only awaiting for the moment when some one shall rise and turn to the crowd, wrestle with it and overthrow it, or be himself dashed to pieces.
The style of Verhaeren's dramas is purely lyrical; the pace is throughout passionate and feverish; and this method, which runs counter to all dramatic canons, was bound organically to create a new technique. The French drama had hitherto known only the rhymed Alexandrine or prose. In Verhaeren's dramas—for the first time to my knowledge—prose and verse (verse which is 'free' both as regards rhythm and rhyme) are throughout promiscuously mixed. Mixed, but not as in Shakespeare, in whose plays verse and prose alternate in individual scenes and establish, so to speak, a social stratification, serving-men speaking in prose and their masters in verse: in Verhaeren the prose passages are the broad, resting foundations of the action; the curved bowls, so to speak, from which the holy fire of the exaltation flames. His characters express their calm in prose, pass from calm to excitement, and in this intensification speak a language which imperceptibly merges into a poem. Not till their passion breaks out do they speak in verse, in those seconds, as it were, when their soul begins to vibrate; and in these passages one cannot help thinking of an aeroplane which is first driven along the ground and moves with ever greater speed till suddenly it soars aloft. In Verhaeren's drama the characters speak an ever purer language the more poetical they become; music breaks with their passion from their souls; just as many people who behave coarsely and awkwardly in ordinary life, in great moments suddenly achieve a bearing of heroic beauty. This embodies the idea that in enthusiasm a man discovers in himself another and a purer language; that passion and the yearning to free oneself from an immeasurable and intolerable earthly burden make a poet of any man. This idea is in harmony with Verhaeren's whole conception of the universe, his idea that the man swept away by passion and enthusiasm is on a higher plane than the critic with his lack of hot feeling; that receptivity for great sensations constitutes, so to speak, a scale of moral values. And the stage performances have shown that this new style is justified, that the transition from prose to verse, occurring as it does contemporaneously with the ascension from calm to passion, passes practically unnoticed by the audience, which is equivalent to saying that when put to the test the method was recognised as necessary.
And it is by passion, this innermost flame of Verhaeren's poetry, that his dramas live too. Their qualities are those of the lyrics; they have, above all, that vast power of vision which sets Philip II. against the tragic landscape of Spain; over the drama of Helen arches the heaven of Greece, blue, and mild, and open like a flower; and behind the tragedy of modern cities unrolls the inflamed scenery of the sky with the black arms of chimneys. And then the immense fervour of the ecstasy which, not in a slow, regular progression, but in savage, convulsive thrusts, whirls the action onward to the moments of the solution.
Thus Verhaeren's first drama derives its strength from the lyric source of a man's accusation of himself. Le Cloître is a paraphrase of Les Moines, the book of the monks. Here again all the characters are gathered together in the cool corridors of a monastery—the gentle, the wild, the feudal, the wrathful, the childlike, the learned monk; here, however, they do not act in isolation, but with all their strength the one against the other. They fight for the prior's chair, which is really the symbol of something higher. For just as in Les Moines every individual monk expressed symbolically some virtue of Catholicism and a distinct idea of God, here the prior's chair decides the question who is the most deserving of God. For his successor the old prior has designated Balthasar, a nobleman whom the monastery has sheltered for years. But he had only taken refuge there because he had killed his own father, thus escaping secular justice, and now he feels the consciousness of his guilt burning, feels the exasperated struggle between his own conscience and the lighter conscience of the others, who have long since forgiven him. And he cannot feel himself free before he has made his confession before the assembled monks, and even then only when he has repeated the confession, against the will of the monastery, to the people, and surrendered himself to the secular judges. The Roman Catholic idea of confession is here wonderfully in agreement with Dostoieffsky's conception of salvation by confession, of deliverance by suffering self-imposed. In three climaxes of equal force at the end of each of the three acts the tragic confession bursts into flame—first born of fear, then of a sense of justice, and at the last positively conceived as a pleasure; and here in these superb lyric ecstasies rest the strong pinions which bear the tragedy.
In the second, the social tragedy Les Aubes, the scenario is the present time. It has the purple scenery of Les Villes Tentaculaires, of the cities with the arms of polypi, which drain the blood of the poor dying country. Beggars, paupers, those who are starving, those who have been evicted, march to Oppidomagnum, the modern industrial city, and besiege it. It is the past once again storming the future. In the lyrical trilogy this struggle had been shaped in a hundred visionary instances; here, however, the bright sky of reconciliation is arched above the battle-field, over the realities hovers the dream. For here the future joins hands with the present. The great tribune, Hérénien, breaks the backbone of this battle and shows himself the hero of a new morality by secretly admitting the enemy into the city—in the old sense the action of a traitor—by yielding and thus transforming the struggle into a reconciliation. He is the tragic bearer of the moral idea that enmity may be overcome by goodness, and he falls as the first martyr of his faith. Verhaeren's social conception, his superb description of realities, here merge slowly in a Utopia; the dawns of the new days begin to shine above the pasts that are dead; the din of rebellion fades away in harmony. This drama, like the others, is far remote from the possibilities of the majority of theatres, because of the fact that here too an ethical idea is expressed with all the glow and ecstasy which as a rule in modern dramas is only found in the utterance of erotic desire.
The third tragedy, Philip II., is a national drama, although its scene is not laid in Flanders. Much as Charles de Coster in his Thyl Ulenspiegel had, with a Fleming's deadly hatred, seen in Philip II. the hereditary enemy of liberty, Verhaeren, who with the lyric poetry of his Toute la Flandre became the representative singer of his native land, painted this gloomy figure with hatred. Philip II. is here, as in Thyl Ulenspiegel, the hard, inflexible king who would fain put life out because it burns too red for him, who wishes to have the world as cool and marble-like as the chambers of the Escorial. Here of a sudden the reverse side of Roman Catholicism, whose passion was immortalised in Le Cloître, is rent open; its pitilessness and asceticism; its obstinate effort to overthrow the irrefragable joy of life. Don Carlos, however, is the fervent friend of the people, the friend of Flanders; he is the will to enjoyment, to merry moods, to passion. And this struggle between the 'yes' and the 'no' of life, this fight of Verhaeren's own lyric crisis, this fight between the denial and the passionate approval of enjoyment—at bottom, toe, the deepest cause of the war between Spain and the Netherlands—is here symbolised in characters. Of course, any comparison with Schiller's Don Carlos must tell against Verhaeren, for the German drama is far more dramatic and conceived on a scale of greater magnificence; but Verhaeren did not aim at a complete rounding off, at a plenitude of characters; all that he wanted was to show these two feelings in their struggle with each other, the enthusiasm of life and its suppression by force. A comparison with Schiller's drama best shows Verhaeren's disregard of dramatic canons, and at the same time the immense new lyric power of the play. For Spain is here seen with a strength and intensity of vision which is probably without a parallel in tragedy. The cold, hypocritical atmosphere can be felt; and better than from words the character of Philip can be perceived in that one silent scene in which he suddenly appears stealthily creeping to watch his son in the arms of the countess, and then, without a gleam in his rigid eyes, without the slightest movement of anger, vanishes again into the dark. Behind him, however, behind the spy and the eavesdropper, glides another shadow, the monk of the Inquisition: the eavesdropper is himself shadowed, the ruler is himself ruled. Visions like these, with the ecstasy of certain scenes, are the strongest motive power in Verhaeren's poetic construction. His dramatic art, like the art of his lyrics, does not rise in a steady ascent, but in sudden wild leaps and starts.
Only in his last drama, Hélène de Sparte, has Verhaeren come nearer to the accepted conception of the dramatic. That is characteristic of his organic development. For now that he is in the years when passion of necessity cools, harmony grows dear to him; and he who through all the years of his youth and prime was a revolutionary, now recognises the necessity of inner laws. By its mere intellectual substance this tragedy expresses the veering round: it is nothing else than the longing from passion to harmony, Helen's flight from adventures to repose. And the return is to be found again in the verse, for Verhaeren here for the first time takes up the traditional French metre; his form, though yet free, approaches the Alexandrine. The tragedy of Helen is the tragedy of beauty. Helen is one of those antique characters who in Greek literature were only sketched in fleeting lines, characters whom a modern poet is now entitled to fill in with his own fate. For from the Greek sources we really knew nothing about her personal fate; we only knew the effect she exercised, only the reflection of her personality on others, not that of others on her. She was the queen who inflamed all men; who was the cause of great wars; the woman for whose sake murder on murder was committed; who was snatched from one bed to another; for love of whom Achilles arose from the dead; who passed her life circled by disastrous passion. But whether she herself shared these passions, whether she grew by them or suffered by them, the poets tell us nothing. Verhaeren in his drama has now attempted to depict the tragedy of the woman who endures fearful suffering because she is always desired in lust and no more; who is consumed by the torture of being ever robbed from lover by lover; of never knowing the look of pure eyes, calm converse, quiet breathing; who is cursed always to stand at the pyre of passion, with the flames of men always blazing round her. Whoever looks at her at once desires her, snatches her; none waits and asks whether he serves her will; she is robbed like a chattel; she glides from hand to hand. In Verhaeren's drama Helen has returned home, a woman tired, tired of all unrest, of all her triumphs, tired of love; a woman hating her own beauty because it creates unrest, longing for nothing but old age, when none shall desire her more and her days shall be calm. Menelaus has brought her home, rescued her from all that stifling steam of criminal passion; now she would breathe quietly, live calm days, and be faithful to him. She desires no more than this. No passion can tempt her more. 'I have seen the flaring of so many flames that now I love only the hearth's glow and the lamp' is the expression of her poignant resignation. But fate will not yet let her go. Verhaeren has here seized on the great idea of the Greeks that everything that is superhuman on earth, every excessive gift, even that of beauty, is pursued as a hybrid by the envy of the gods, and must be paid for with pain. Too great beauty is no profit, but a tragic gift. And hardly has Helen returned, to rest and be happy, to be like everybody else, than new clouds roll themselves up above her head. Her own brother desires her; her enemy Electra desires her; her husband is murdered for her sake; and the old fearful battle threatens to break out anew for the possession of her body. Now she flees, away from men, out into nature. And here again, with the vision of genius, Verhaeren approaches Greek feeling. The forest is not dead to him, but animate; life does not stop at human beings; fauns emerge from the bushes, naiads from the rivers, bacchantes from the mountains, and all swarm round Helen in her despair, luring her to their lust, till she flees to Zeus in death.
It is characteristic of Verhaeren that he has made even this tragedy, the tragedy of Helen, anerotic, or better anti-erotic. Perhaps the slight interest which has hitherto been manifested in Verhaeren's dramas, and indeed partly in his whole work, may be ascribed to the fact that, in comparison with the other poets of his day, he has held himself aloof from erotic subjects, that the problem of love has only recently, in the years of his maturity, begun to interest him as a theme for his art. From the first Verhaeren concentrated all the passion which others lavished on the erotic in purely intellectual things, in enthusiasm, in admiration. In his dramas woman plays an almost subordinate rôle, and Le Cloître is perhaps the only important drama of our days which does not show a single woman among its characters and in its inner circle of problems. By this fact alone his dramatic aim strays too far from the interests of our public. For it is from a purely intellectual conflict that Verhaeren seeks to disengage that height and heat of passion which hitherto was known only in erotic themes; and therefore the exaltation strikes the majority of an audience as strange, and leaves them unmoved. All our contemporaries who seek art only in the theatre are too indifferent and timid to be snatched up, for a purely ethical problem, into an ecstasy so burning, so persistently lit with convulsive lightnings. This is the only explanation I can find for the opposition to Verhaeren's dramas, which are so full of beauty and of living, dramatic, passionate situations, and which, above all, contain something new, a new dramatic style. This very kindling of prose to verse was a revelation. But the whole dramatic aim is different in Verhaeren to that which obtains on the stage of to-day. His aim is not to excite interest, not to produce fear and compassion, but enthusiasm. He does not wish to occupy the minds of his audience, but to carry them away into his rhythm. He wishes to make them drunk with his great excitement, because only he who gazes in enthusiasm is capable of recognising these supreme passions; he wishes to make the spectators as feverish as the characters they see before them on the stage; he wishes to make their blood fiery; wishes to raise them above all cool, calm, and critical contemplation. His whole temperament, which drives along in the direction of superabundance; his art, which only fulfils its purpose in ecstasy; require impassioned actors and an impassioned audience. To create the ideal atmosphere which Verhaeren demands for his dramas would require an actor of kindred genius who should have no fear of being called emotional, and who would hurl the verses down like cataracts, emphasising like a demagogue and at the same time unfolding all the magnificence of the rhythm. For the poet asks for nothing save a feeling of enthusiasm corresponding to that which first created the poem in him. His intention is not to convince by logic, not to dazzle by pictures, but to whip up and carry along with him into that ultimate dizzy feeling which to him is alone identical with the highest form of the feeling of life—into passion.