The whole of Europe speaks with his voice, speaks with a voice that reaches beyond our time; and already from the whole of Europe comes the answer. In Belgium Verhaeren is above all the national poet, the poet of heaths, cities, dunes, and of the Flemish past, the great renewer of the national pride. But he stands too near his fellow-countrymen to be measured at his full height there. And in France, too, very few appreciate him at his true value. Most people regard him there in his literary aspect only and as a symbolist and decadent, an innovator of verse, an audacious and gifted revolutionary. But very few perceive the new and important work that is built up in his verses, very few comprehend the entity and the logical character of his cosmic philosophy. Nevertheless, his influence is already tangible. The new rhythm he has created can be recognised in many poets; and such a gifted disciple as Jules Romains has even brought his idea of the feeling of cities to new impressiveness. Best of all, however, he is understood by those Frenchmen who stand in a mystic communion with all that is great and urgent abroad; who feel an ethical need, a longing for an inner transmutation of values, for a re-moulding of races, for cosmopolitanism and a union of the nations; so, above all, Léon Bazalgette, who revealed Walt Whitman, the prophet of all strong and conscious reality in art, to France. Most joyfully of all, however, the answer rings from those countries which are themselves involved in deep-seated social and ethical crises, those countries where the need of religion is a vital instinct, which are eternally hungry for God, above all from Russia and Germany. In Russia the poet of Les Villes Tentaculaires is celebrated as he is nowhere else. As the poet of social innovations he is read in the Russian universities, and in the circles of the intellectuals he is regarded as the spiritual pioneer of our time. Brjussow, the distinguished young poet, has translated him, and afforded him the possibility of popularity. In other Slavonic countries, too, his work is beginning to spread.
Verhaeren's success, one may well say triumph, has been strongest and most impressive in Germany; here it has been unexpectedly intensive even to us who have worked for it. A few years have sufficed to make him as popular here I as any native poet, and the most beautiful feature of his success is this, that people are already forgetting to look upon him as a foreigner. Verhaeren is to-day part and parcel of German culture; and much of our contemporary lyric poetry, its welcome turning to optimism for example, would be unthinkable but for his work and influence. Countless are the essays devoted to him, the recitations in which our best elocutionists—Kainz, Moissi, Kayssler, Heine, Wiecke, Durieux, Rosen, Gregori—have taken part; none of these interpreters, however, were as enthusiastically applauded as was Verhaeren himself on his tournée in Germany, which was a great experience no less for him than for our public, because he gladly felt that his work was now rooted for ever in German soil. In Scandinavia, where Johannes V. Jensen in his essays unconsciously transcribed Verhaeren's lyric work, Ellen Key, the inspired prophetess of the feeling of life, has hailed him as she has hailed no other, and Georg Brandes, who crowns poets, has welcomed him with loud acclaim. Incessantly, in an irresistible, sure ascent, Verhaeren's fame grows. And above all, his poetry is no longer regarded as an individual thing, but as a work, as a cosmic philosophy, as an answer to the questions of our time, as the strongest and most beautiful enrichment of our vital feeling. Wherever people are tired of pessimism, tired of confused mysticism, and tired of monistic shallowness; wherever a longing stirs for a pure idealistic form of contemplation, for a new reconciliation between our new realities and the old reverence for eternal secrets, for the secularisation of the divine, his name stands in the front rank. An answer comes from every direction, not because his work was a question, but because it was in itself an answer to the unconscious demand for a new community, a demand which is being made by men of all nations everywhere to-day.
But all this is only a beginning. Works like his, which are not paradoxical enough, not dazzling enough, to produce sudden ecstasies and literary fashions; which, by the mere fact that they have themselves grown organically into existence, can only grow organically, but for that reason irresistibly, in their influence; only lay hold of the masses slowly. Only later generations will enjoy the fruit which we, with renewed admiration, have seen ripening from the most modest of blossoms. But already a ring of men of all nations are joining hands, a ring of men who perceive a new centre of spirituality in Verhaeren. And we, the few who have wholly surrendered ourselves to his work, must appreciate it with that feeling only which he himself has taught us as the highest feeling of life—with enthusiasm, with gratitude ever renewed, and with joyful admiration. For to whom in our days should one offer more abundantly and stormily this new vital doctrine of enthusiasm as the happiest feeling than to Verhaeren, to him who was the first to wrest it in the bitterest struggles from the depths of our time, who was the first to shape it in the material of art, the first to raise it to the eternal law of life?
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'Un Soir' (Les Forces Tumultueuses).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. LES FLAMANDES, poèmes. Bruxelles, Hochsteyn, 1883. LES CONTES DE MINUIT, prose. Bruxelles (Collection de la 'Jeune Belgique'), Franck, 1885.
JOSEPH HEYMANS, PEINTRE, critique. Bruxelles (Société Nouvelle), 1885.
II. LES MOINES, poèmes. Paris, Lemerre, 1886.