Émile Verhaeren

by Stefan Zweig

Réunir notre esprit et le monde
Dans les deux mains d'une très simple loi profonde.
É.V., 'L'Attente.'

After the great visions of the cities, after the wonderful interpretations of democracy, there was a moment of appeasement in Verhaeren's work—a lyrical intermezzo of little books: an almanac of the months unfolding in short poems, the cosy happiness of wedded love enshrined in grateful song, the legends of Flanders told in richly coloured pictures, and then, in the great pentalogy Toute la Flandre, the cities, coasts, heroes, and great men of his native province compressed in one single picture. But after that Verhaeren takes up once again his old path across the earth; passes again through the roaring cities, the pregnant fields; wanders along the sea-shore; once again through the landscapes of Les Flamandes and Les Moines, of Les Villes Tentaculaires and Les Campagnes Hallucinées. It is now the return of the spiral in Goethe's sense of evolution; the return to the same point, but on a higher level, with a loftier outlook, in a narrower circle, and for that reason nearer to the last, the highest point. Once again Verhaeren surveys the modern world: now, however, with different eyes, which no longer remain resting on the aspect of the world, but press farther to the cause of all. What he had formerly seen sensuously, the things whose values he had æsthetically estimated and transmuted, he now looks at from the intellectual side, that he may estimate their value morally. He no longer sees each thing separately, no longer adds picture to picture, vision to vision, like a game of coloured cards: he now unites them in one living chain. He no longer searches through individual and detached phenomena; he now sees them together against the background of his lofty intention to weld them into one single picture. Now he composes, not individual poems, but fragments of his world-poem. For, from the time that Verhaeren began to look at things with conscious enthusiasm, they assumed different forms. The straining of his epoch no longer seems to him to be a solitary manifestation of energy, but only a Protean form of the eternal discharge of vigour; the will to life no longer seems to him to be the deed of individual men, but the vitalised primitive will of all humanity. And so, just as of old he attempted in his vision a synthesis of energies, he now sees laws flowing into one supreme and highest thing, into a cosmic law.

Lyric exaltation now arches the dream of its laws over reality. But it is no longer the mere dream of a youth in expectancy of life—the anæmic, vague, dark, restless dream—but a man's longing to get behind life and follow it to its earthly limit. It is a Utopia enhancing realities beyond themselves; it is the dream of Godhead in things. In the whole world Verhaeren sees a cosmic effort. 'Le monde est trépidant de trains et de navires.'[1] The whole world is excited with human activity and effort; manifestations of the feeling of life flame everywhere; everywhere humanity is fighting for something invisible and perhaps unattainable. But whereas of old the poet estimated the value of every separate energy, now he comprehends all energies as one uniform manifestation, recognises behind the unconscious activity of the individual the sway of something greater—the bourne of all humanity. All who work in the material of the temporal only symbolise eternal forces—intoxication, energy, conquest, joy, error, expectation, Utopia. And it is to these forces, or rather to these forms of the force at the root of all things, that his poems are addressed. In Les Visages de la Vie he seeks to describe yearning in all its forms and aims; its distribution in human labour, its restlessness, its vigour, and, above all, its beauty. But not only human manifestations now appear to him in a closer cohesion, the synthesis of realism and metaphysics now makes his relationship to elementary things richer and more heroic. Now, when he treats some motive he had already treated in the first books, and these poems of the first and last periods are compared, it is with astonishment and admiration that you trace the silent growth of these last years. I will mention one example. He had already sung a song to the wind. But the wind at that time was to him the evil storm that tousles cottages, shakes chimneys, forces its way into rooms, rages across country, and brings the winter. It was a senseless power, beautiful in its senselessness, but aimless, an incomprehensible element, a detached phenomenon of Nature. Now, however, the poet in his maturity looks upon it as the wanderer over the undying world, one that has seen all countries, that drives ships over seas, that has sated itself with the perfume of strange flowers and brings it from far away, that penetrates our chest like an aroma and steels and expands it. Now he loves the wind as one of the thousand things of the earth which contribute to the intensification of his vital feeling.

Si j'aime, admire et chante avec folie,
Le vent,
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
C'est qu'il grandit mon être entier et c'est qu'avant
De s'infiltrer, par mes poumons et par mes pores,
Jusques au sang dont vit mon corps,
Avec sa force rude ou sa douceur profonde,
Immensément, il a étreint le monde.[2]

So, too, a tree becomes to him the image of the eternal renewal of strength, of resistance to the hardness of winter and of fate, of the will to new beauty in the spring. A mountain no longer appears to him as a chance raising of the landscape, but a great and mighty thing in whose keeps secrets lie, ores, and the source of springs, from whose summit, however, our eyes can sweep the world. The forest interprets itself to him as the labyrinth of a thousand paths, and as the many-voiced anthem of life: everything in nature becomes a freshening and a vivifying of this vitality. An absolute transmutation of values has taken place from the time that he has comprehended things as parts of the world's entity, and as themselves an entity. Travel, formerly a flight from reality, now becomes to him the opening out of new distances, of new possibilities; dream appears to him no longer as an illusion, but as the capacity of intensifying the real from its present to a future state. Europe is no longer to him a group of nations, a geographical idea, but the great symbol of conquest, money, gold, he no longer regards contemptuously as a materialising of life, but as a new spur for new ambition. And the sea, which in every succeeding work of his sings its unquiet rhythm, is no longer the murderous power that eats into the land, but the holy tide, the symbol of constant strength in eternal unrest; it is to him 'la mer nue et pure, comme une idée.'[3] Since everything coheres, he feels related to all in a touching brotherhood with things; he no longer feels the presence of things, he loves them like a piece of himself; he feels the sea physically in himself

Ma peau, mes mains et mes cheveux
Sentent la mer
Et sa couleur est dans mes yeux.[4]

And so, just as his vital feeling is renewed every time he comes into contact with the waves, he believes in a physical resurrection of the body out of the sea, believes that his rising from the water is a nouveau moment de conscience. Verhaeren has returned to the great cohesion: in Nature and in man there is no longer for him any phenomenon which might not become a symbol for him, a symbol of the great vital instinct, to stimulate and fire his vitality.

And since he now responds to all things with this one feeling, a uniform conception of the world must involuntarily result from this unity of feeling. To the unity of enthusiasm corresponds the unity of the world, the monistic feeling. Just as he himself derives nothing but an intensification and exaltation of his feelings from all things, nothing but the very sensation of life, all phenomena and activities must be a synthesis, all forces must flow into one single force as rivers flow into the ocean, all laws must merge in one single law

Toute la vie, avec ses lois, avec ses formes,
—Multiples doigts noueux de quelque main énorme—
S'entr'ouvre et se referme en un poing: l'unité.[5]

And thus, this straining of all humanity, discharged in a thousand forms, must be something in common, a fight against something lying outside of itself, against a resistance which still makes life seem hard, dull, and turbid. This fight of humanity cannot be other than directed against something that impedes the sensation of life. And this, the only thing which struggles against humanity, is in Verhaeren's eyes the supremacy of Nature, the mystery of divine intervention, the subjection of man to fate—in short, all divinity that does not reside in man. As soon as man is dependent on nobody except himself and his own strength, he too will attain the great joyousness of all the things of Nature.