Here Verhaeren's poetry far exceeds the boundary-line of literature; it becomes philosophy and it becomes religion. Verhaeren was from the very first an eminently religious man. In his childhood Catholicism was the deepest feeling of his life, but this Catholicism had perished in the crises of his adolescence, his religious feeling had given way to the rapt contemplation of all new things, to ecstasy inspired by the aspect of life. But now, when Verhaeren returns to the metaphysical, the old yearning is reawakened. The old gods are dead for him; Pan is dead, and Christ too. Now he feels the need of finding a new faith, a new certainty, a new God for the new sensation, this identity of I and world. The new conflicts have created a longing in him for a new equilibrium; his stormily religious feeling, determined to believe, needs new cognition. The image of the world would be incomplete without the God who rules it. All his yearning goes out to this God, and it finds its fulfilment. And this knowledge gives him the highest joy life can have, the loftiest pride life can bestow:
Voici l'heure qui bout de sang et de jeunesse.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Un vaste espoir, venu de l'inconnu, déplace
L'équilibre ancien dont les âmes sont lasses;
La nature paraît sculpter
Un visage nouveau à son éternité.[2]
To chisel this new face of God is the aim of his last and most mature works, in which the obstinate 'no' of his youth has become the loud exulting 'yes' of life, in which the great possibilities of old have become an unsuspected opulent reality.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'Un Soir' (Les Forces Tumultueuses).
[2] 'La Foule' (Les Visages de la Vie).
THE LYRIC UNIVERSE
Il faut aimer, pour découvrir avec génie.
É.V., 'Un Soir.'
If one is to understand Verhaeren's lyric work as a work of art, it must be kept in mind that he is a lyric poet, and a lyric poet only. A lyric poet only, not, however, in the limited sense of one who confines himself to the writing of lyric poems, but of one who, in a lofty and more extensive meaning of the term, transforms everything into emotion, who stands in a lyric relationship with all things, with the whole world. And since the innermost constitution of a man's talent unconsciously acts as the driving tendency, the direction of the aim of his life, his very fate and his conception of the world, since all this is so, the lyric poet that Verhaeren is must of necessity have a lyrical conception of the world, his cosmic feeling must be lyrical. To say that he has confined himself to the lyric style would be to diminish his stature. It is true that in all Verhaeren's imaginative work—and it is of considerable volume—there is no prose. A very thin volume of short stories did indeed appear many years ago and has long been out of print; but how tentative and provisional it was in scope may be seen from the fact that Verhaeren later on turned one of the stories, that of the bell-ringer in the burning tower, into a poem. And I might mention a whole series of poems which at bottom are nothing but short stories, and others again which are saturated with dramatic excitement, quite unlyrical problems, but all of them lyrically conceived. And even in his criticism of art and in that penetrating and beautiful book of his on Rembrandt, in which he represents the organic connection of the artist with his native province almost as a personal experience, the outstanding passages live by their lyric enthusiasm. Many of the poems again are spiritualised theories of art. The origin of language or the sociological problem of emigration, the economic contrast of agrarianism and industrialism: in an essay such things might be calmly treated, coldly passed in review. But this is characteristic of Verhaeren, that he is unable to take a cold, faint interest in anything: consciously or unconsciously he must be carried away by enthusiasm for the things he contemplates. The ecstasy of his excitement involuntarily whips him out of a slow trot into lyric fervour. Poetry is to him, like his philosophy, like his ethics, a lyrical soaring. It is characteristic of the great lyric poets, of Walt Whitman, Dehmel, Carducci, Rilke, Stefan George, that at a certain height of their artistry they renounce all other than lyric forms. Here, as elsewhere, great things only seem possible of attainment by concentration, only by the poet's freeing himself from the trammels of all other experiments. Great lyric poetry as the art of a life only accrues from the renunciation of all other forms of poetry.