L'acharnement à tout peser, à tout savoir
Fouille la forêt drue et mouvante des êtres.[11]
In inspired words Verhaeren celebrates science as the highest effort of our age as of the past; for he knows that what to us to-day is presupposed and self-evident was a thousand years-ago the goal of the most ardent effort, that the road we pace indolently to-day is soaked with the blood of martyrs.
Dites! quels temps versés au gouffre des années,
Et quelle angoisse ou quel espoir des destinées,
Et quels cerveaux chargés de noble lassitude
A-t-il fallu pour faire un peu de certitude?
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Dites! les feux et les bûchers; dites! les claies;
Les regards fous, en des visages d'effroi blanc;
Dites! les corps martyrisés, dites! les plaies
Criant la vérité, avec leur bouche en sang.[12]
But he knows equally well that the acquisitions of to-day are again only hypotheses for the new truths of to-morrow. Error is inevitable, but even error opens out new ways. In the beautiful idea of Brezina, the Czech poet, all ideal aims are floating islands that recede as we approach them. The highest aim is in effort itself, in the life which effort intensifies. Verhaeren's optimism here guards his marches against banality, for he is sufficient of a mystic to know that it is the unknowable and the inaccessible that lend all things their impenetrable beauty. But the knowledge of this must not scare enthusiasm away:
Partons quand même, avec notre âme inassouvie,
Puisque la force et que la vie
Sont au delà des vérités et des erreurs.[13]
What if a few last things remain eternally inscrutable: 'plutôt que d'en peupler les coins par des chimères, nous préférons ne point savoir.'[14] Rather a world without gods than one with false gods, rather incomplete knowledge than false knowledge.
Here, where the heroes of science reach the limits of what is possible to them, a new group must stand by their side and help them in their work. These are the poets, who preach faith where knowledge ends. They must find the synthesis between science and religion, between the earthly and the divine, the new synthesis—religious confidence in science. Their optimism must force their fellow-men to have faith in science, as in earlier days they had faith in gods: though proofs fail them, they must demand from this new religion what the early fathers demanded for the old religion. And he himself, Verhaeren, he who once—here again a bitter 'no' is turned into an exulting 'yes'—said in his beginnings
Toute science enferme au fond d'elle le doute,
Comme une mère enceinte étreint un enfant mort,[15]
he himself is to-day the first of confident enthusiasts. Where individual minds are still at war—
'Oh! ces luttes là-haut entre ces dieux humains![16]—