Pour vivre clair, ferme et juste,
Avec mon cœur, j'admire tout
Ce qui vibre, travaille et bout
Dans la tendresse humaine et sur la terre auguste.[2]
A thing only belongs to us when it is felt—not so much for us personally—as beautiful, necessary, and vivid: only when we have said 'yes' to it. And therefore our whole evolution can only be to admire as much as possible, to understand as much as possible, to let our feeling have intercourse with as many things as possible. To contemplate is too little; to understand is too little. Only when we have confirmed a thing from its very roots, confirmed it as necessary, does it really belong to us. 'II faut aimer pour découvrir avec génie.' And so our whole effort must be to overcome what is negative in ourselves, to reject nothing, to kill the critical spirit in ourselves, to strengthen what is positive in us, to assent as much as possible. Here again Verhaeren is in agreement with Nietzsche's last ideals: 'Warding things off, keeping things down, is a waste of energy, a squandering of strength on negative purposes.'[3] Criticism is sterile. Verhaeren is here as ever a relativist of values, for he knows that they are incessantly occupied in a process of transformation in favour of their highest value, and therefore he holds enthusiasm (the symbol of over-estimation) to be more important, in the sense of a higher justice, than what is apparently absolute justice itself.
For this is the essential: if in our estimation we often over-estimate things which in any case would preserve their inner value independently of our 'yes' or 'no,' that is not so great a danger as it is a profit that our own souls should grow by means of our admiration. 'Admirer, c'est se grandir.'[4] For if we admire more, and more intensively, than others, we shall ourselves grow richer than those timid ones who content themselves with choice morsels of life instead of grasping life in its entirety, who restrict themselves because they only place themselves in relationship with a part of the world and not with the whole cosmos. The more a man admires, the more he possesses:
Il faut admirer tout pour s'exalter soi-même
Et se dresser plus haut que ceux qui out vécu
De coupables souffrances et de désirs vaincus.[5]
For admiration means, in the highest sense, subordinating oneself to other things. The more a man suppresses his own personal pride, the higher he stands in the moral sense. For to accentuate oneself and to deny what is not oneself needs less strength than to suppress oneself and to surrender oneself in admiration to all else. Here Verhaeren sees the rise of a new ethical problem. A whole ladder of values is revealed to him in the moral standard of freedom and frankness with which a man can meet his fellows in his admiration; a ladder on whose topmost rung the man stands who rejects nothing whatever, who meets every manifestation of life with ecstasy. To be able to admire more means to grow more oneself:
Oh! vivre et vivre et se sentir meilleur
À mesure que bout plus fervemment le cœur;
Vivre plus clair, dès qu'on marche en conquête;
Vivre plus haut encor, dès que le sort s'entête
À dessécher la force et l'audace des bras.[6]
And so strong must this restless enthusiasm grow, this incessant enthusiasm for things, that the height of the ascent suddenly surprises one with a rapt feeling of dizziness. The lyrical commandment of the highest ecstasy is here an ethical standard:
Il faut en tes élans te dépasser sans cesse,
Être ton propre étonnement.[7]
In this idea of restless enthusiasm, the principles of which have also been expounded by Verhaeren in his essay Cosmic Enthusiasm (Insel-Almanach, 1913), he has established a poetic equivalent to his other great impulse of humanity, set an ethical ideal by the side of the metaphysical ideal. For if of old the yearning for knowledge, that superb struggle for the conquest of the unknown, was the only thing that placed man in an eternally living relationship to the new things, what is possibly a still more valuable instinct is discovered in this incessantly intensified ecstatic admiration. Admiring is more than estimating and knowing. To surrender oneself in love to all things is higher than the curiosity to know everything. 'Tout affronter vaut mieux que tout comprendre.'[8] For in all knowledge there is still a residue of selfishness, of the pride of personal acquisition, while admiration of things contains nothing but humility—that great humility, however, which is an infinite enrichment of life, because it signifies a dissolution in the all. Whereas knowledge is brought to a sudden standstill before many things and finds the road blocked with darkness, in admiration, in ecstasy, there is no limit set to the ego. Though many values lock themselves up from knowledge, none denies itself wholly to admiration. Even the smallest thing becomes great when it is penetrated with love, and the greater we let things grow—the more we enrich the substance of our own life—the more infinite we make our ego. It is the highest ethical task of a great man to find the highest value in every phenomenon, and to free this value from the thick and often stifling rind of antipathy and strangeness. Not to let oneself be repelled by resistance is the perfection of a noble enthusiasm. If anything whatsoever is void of beauty, it will have a power which by its energy expresses beauty. If anything seems strange and ugly in the traditional sense, it will set the wonderful task of finding out the new sense in which it is beautiful. And to have found this new beauty in the new things was the active greatness of the poetic work, the greatness which was unconscious and now becomes conscious, which was knowledge and now becomes law. While all others considered our great cities frightful and ugly, Verhaeren praised their magnificence; while all others abhorred science as an obstacle to poetry, Verhaeren celebrated it as the purest form of life. For he knows that everything changes, that 'ce qui fut hier le but est l'obstacle demain,'[9] and vice versa that the obstacle of to-day may perhaps be the goal of the next generation. He had already recognised in his poetry what the architectural movement in the great cities in the last few years has realised, that huge shops, as emporia of intellectual life, as new centres of force, provide tasks for art as stupendous as the cathedrals of old; that in the reek and smoke of teeming cities new tones of colour were waiting for painters, new problems for philosophers; that all that in our own time looms bulky and unseemly will to the next generation be well-proportioned and have to be called beautiful. Verhaeren's enthusiasm for what is new overcomes the resistance of reverence for tradition. Verhaeren has rendered signal service to our time by being the first to recognise and proclaim the great impressionists and all innovators in art and poetry. For to reject nothing new, to be hostile to nothing the world can offer, this only is what he understands by knowing the world as it is and truly loving it. His ladder of values ends on high in this absolute ideal of admiration of the whole world, not only of that which is but of that which shall be, of the identity of every ego with the time and its forms:
L'homme n'est suprême et clair que si sa volonté
Est d'être lui en même temps qu'il est monde.