[21] Ibid. (Ibid.).
[22] 'La Joie' (La Multiple Splendeur).
[23] 'Léon Bazalgette', Émile Verhaeren.
[24] 'La Ferveur' (La Multiple Splendeur).
[25] 'Les Mages' (La Multiple Splendeur).
LOVE
Ceux qui vivent d'amour vivent d'éternité.
E.V., Les Heures d'après-midi.
Filled with contemporary spirit as Verhaeren's work is, there is one point in which it appears to stray from our epoch, to be remote from the artistic preoccupations of other poets. Verhaeren's poetry is almost entirely free from eroticism. The problem of love is with him far from being, as it is with most poets, the feeling at the root of all feelings; it is hardly ever a motive force in his work; it remains a little arabesque delicately curved above his massive architecture. Verhaeren's enthusiasms spring from other sources. Love is for him almost without a sexual shade of meaning, perfectly identical with enthusiasm, self-surrender, ecstasy; and the difference between the sexes does not seem to be an essential, but only an incidental form among the thousandfold militant forms of life. The love of woman, sexual necessity, is scarcely a force greater than any other in the circle of forces, never the most important or actually the root-force, as it is (for instance) to Dehmel, who derives the consciousness of all great cosmic phases of knowledge from the experience of love. Verhaeren's horizons are illuminated, not by the flame of the erotic, but by the passionate fire of purely intellectual impulses. His first books, those lyric volumes which are nearly always a poet's confessions of love, were devoted to landscapes and then to social phenomena, to monks, and to men who toil with their hands. The strength of his drama pulses in conflicts exclusively masculine. Thus his work, already vastly removed from that of the other lyrists of our time, is seen to be still more isolated. To Verhaeren love is only a single page, not the first and not the last, in the book of the world: this poet has lavished too much glowing passion and ecstatic feeling on all individual things and the universe for the cry of the desire of woman to ring higher than all other voices.
This lack of accentuation of eroticism in Verhaeren's work does not by any means strike me as a weakness, a missing nerve in his artistic organism. It may read like a paradox, but it must be said: just this apparent artistic deficiency indicates personal strength. Verhaeren's masculinity is so pronounced and strong that woman could never become the root-problem of his passion, or shake him in the foundations of his fate. To a really strong man, love, sexual love, is a matter of course; a sterling man does not feel it as an obstacle and not as a vital conflict, but as a necessity, like nourishment, air, and liberty. But a thing that is a matter of course is never conceived by an artist as a problem. In his youth Verhaeren was never perplexed by love, for the simple reason that he did not attach sufficient importance to it, because his poetic interests were in the first place directed to a mightier possession, a philosophy of life. A sterling man, as Verhaeren conceives him, does not spend his strength in sexual love. For such a man the metaphysical instinct, the longing for knowledge, the need of finding his inner statics in the cosmos, goes before love. 'Eve voulait aimer, Adam voulait connaître.'[1] Only to woman is love the sense of life; to man, in Verhaeren's idea, the sense of life is knowledge. He expressed this sound idea still more clearly in an early poem: