This fight of man to become God, this fight for his independence, his freedom from chance and the supernatural—this is the great metaphysical idea of Verhaeren's work. His last books seek to represent nothing else than this one highest battle of man, this struggle to be free from all that is laid upon him, not by himself, but by Nature, from all that impedes his will to become a thing of Nature, an elementary force, himself. This struggle is the highest and purest effort, for
Rien n'est plus haut, malgré l'angoisse et le tourment,
Que la bataille avec l'énigme et les ténèbres.[6]
Man in this battle defends himself against darkness, against what is unknown, against Heaven, against all laws that restrict his expansion; the whole aim of man, the aim he has unconsciously been following for a thousand years, is independence, is to become a law unto himself:
L'homme dans l'univers n'a qu'un maître, lui-même,
Et l'univers entier est ce maître, dans lui.[7]
To-day he is still counteracted by chance, or, as many conceive it, by divinity. Wholly to conquer this, to substitute the determination of one's own destiny for chance, will be the great task of the future. Much has been taken from chance already. Lightning, the most dangerous power of heaven, is conquered; distances are bridged over; the forms of Nature are changed; social communities have by common action diverted the iniquity of the weather; diseases are from year to year being fathomed and checked; more and more every incalculable element is being brought within the range of calculation and fore-sight. But all that is unknown must more and more be the booty of man, whose highest will is 'fouiller l'inconnu.'[8] More and more his eyes penetrate the subterranean and mysterious workings of Nature.
Or aujourd'hui c'est la réalité
Secrète encor, mais néanmoins enclose
Au cours perpétuel et rythmique des choses,
Qu'on veut, avec ténacité,
Saisir, pour ordonner la vie et sa beauté
Selon les causes.[9]
For this battle everybody is a soldier in man's war of liberation, all of us stand invisibly ranked together. Everybody who wrests from Nature in increment to knowledge, who does something never done before, everybody who by poetry fires others to action, tears off a piece of the veil. With every step forward that man takes against the dark, with every foot of ground he conquers, divinity loses strength to him; and this will go on until at length nothing remains of the God of old, until the identity of the two ideas humanity and divinity is unconsciously accomplished.
Héros, savant, artiste, apôtre, aventurier,
Chacun troue à son tour le mur noir des mystères
Et, grâce à ces labeurs groupés et solitaires,
L'être nouveau se sent l'univers tout entier.
Seen from this height, professions assume a new poetic value. In the front rank of fighting men Verhaeren sees those the effort of whose life it is to acquire knowledge—the men of science. Verhaeren is perhaps the only one among modern poets who has conceived of science as of perfectly equal value with poetry, who has discovered new moral and religious values in science, just as he had already discovered new æsthetic values in industrialism and democracy. Most poets had hitherto looked upon science as a hindrance, because they were afraid of clear things as they were afraid of real things. They looked upon science as the destroyer of myths, the negation of every noble superstition which in their eyes was indissolubly connected with the poetical. But just as machinery seemed to them to be ugly, because in the machines they saw beauty had retreated from the outer to the interior form, here too the new ethical value is hidden not in the method but in the aim. Verhaeren esteems science as the great fighter for the new conception of the world: 'Le monde entier est repensé par leurs cervelles.'[10] He knows that the little increments to knowledge which are continually being made in our days in thousands of places, in sanatoria and lecture-rooms, observatories and studies, with microscopes and chemical analyses, weighing and calculation, with measures and numbers, that these little additions to knowledge may, by comparison and reproduction, grow into great creative discoveries which will immensely enrich our vital feeling. And this hymn to science is at the same time a hymn to our epoch; for no epoch before ours has so consciously bought for the advancement of knowledge, none has been so replete with the longing for new knowledge and the transmutation of values: