Some day many people will speak of Verhaeren's art; many love it to-day already. But I believe that nobody will be able to love the poet in the same degree as many to-day love the art of his life, this unique personality, as people love something that can be lost and never restored. If one at first seems to find a discord between the modesty, gentleness, and heartiness of his humanity, and the wildness, heroism, and hardness of his art, one at last discovers their unity in experience, in feeling. When one closes the door after a conversation with him, or one of his books after the last page, the prevailing impression is the same: enhanced joy in life, enthusiasm, confidence in the world, an intensified feeling of pleasure which shows life in purer, kindlier, and more magnificent forms. This idealising effect of life goes out equally strong from his person and from his work; every sort of contact with him, with the poet, with the man, seems to enrich life, and teaches one to apply to him in his turn the appreciation he always so readily had for all the gifts of life—gratitude ever renewed and boundlessly intensified in passion.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Vielé-Griffin, biographical note to Mockel's Verhaeren.
THE EUROPEAN IMPORTANCE OF HIS WORK
Futur, vous m'exaltez comme autrefois mon Dieu!
É.V., 'La Prière.'
The last force of everybody, the force which finally decides the effect, which alone and first of all is able to strain his work or his activity to the highest possibility, is the feeling of responsibility. To be responsible, and to feel that one is responsible, is equivalent to looking at one's whole life as a vast debt, which one is bound to strive with all one's strength to pay off; is equivalent to surveying one's momentary task on earth in the whole range of its significance, importance, and periphery, in order then to raise one's own inherent possibilities and capacities to their most complete mastery. For most people this earthly task is outwardly restricted in an office, in a profession, in the fixed round of some activity. With an artist, on the other hand, it is what one might call an infinite dimension which can never be attained; his task is therefore an unlimited, an eternal longing, a longing that never weakens. Since his duty can really only be to express himself with the greatest possible perfection, this responsibility coincides with the demand that he should bring his life, and with his life his talent, to the highest perfection, that he should, in Goethe's sense, 'expand his narrow existence to eternity.' The artist is responsible for his talent, because it is his task to express it. Now the higher the idea of art is understood, the more art feels its task to be the task of bringing the life of the universe into harmony, so much the more must the feeling of responsibility be intensified in a creative mind.
Now, of all the poets of our day Verhaeren is the one who has felt this feeling of responsibility most strongly. To write poetry is for him to express not himself only, but the striving and straining of the whole period as well, the fearful torment and the happiness that are in the birth of the new things. Just because his work comprises all the present and aims at expressing it in its entity, he feels himself responsible to the future. For him a true poet must visualise the whole psychic care of his time. For when later generations—in the same manner as they will question monuments concerning our art, pictures concerning our painters, social forms concerning our philosophers—ask of the verses and the works of our contemporaries the question, What was your hope, your feeling, the sum of your interpretation? how did you feel cities and men, things and gods?—shall we be able to answer them? This is the inner question of Verhaeren's artistic responsibility. And this feeling of responsibility has made his work great. Most of the poets of our day have been unconcerned with reality. Some of them strike up a dancing measure, rouse and amuse people lounging in theatres; others again tell of their own sorrow, ask for pity and compassion, they who have never felt for others. Verhaeren, however, heedless of the approval or disapproval of our time, turns his face towards the generations to be:
Celui qui me lira dans les siècles, un soir,
Troublant mes vers, sous leur sommeil ou sous leur cendre,
Et ranimant leur sens lointain pour mieux comprendre
Comment ceux d'aujourd'hui s'étaient armés d'espoir,
Qu'il sache, avec quel violent élan, ma joie
S'est, à travers les cris, les révoltes, les pleurs,
Ruée au combat fier et mâle des douleurs,
Pour en tirer l'amour, comme on conquiert sa proie.[1]
It was, in the last instance, this magnificent feeling of responsibility which did not permit him to pass by any manifestation of our present time without observing and appreciating it, for he knows that later generations will ask the question how we sensed the new thing, which to them is a possession and a matter of course, when it was still strange and almost hostile. His work is the answer. The true poet of to-day, in Verhaeren's eyes, must show forth the torment and the trouble of the whole psychic transition, the painful discovery of the new beauty in the new things, the revolt, the crisis, the struggles it costs to understand all this, to adapt ourselves to it, and in the end to love it. Verhaeren has attempted to express our whole time in its earthly, its material, its psychic form. His verses lyrically represent Europe at the turning of the century, us and our time; they consciously contemplate the whole circuit of the things of life: they write a lyric encyclopædia of our time, the intellectual atmosphere of Europe at the turning of the twentieth century.