Belgian literature begins, for all practical purposes, with Charles de Coster's national epic Uylenspiegel. De Coster died young, and was followed by the novelist Camille Lemonnier (1844-). Then comes the flood-tide, not in literature only, for Fernand Khnopff, Georges Minnes, Théo van Rysselberghe (the bosom friend of Verhaeren), and Constantin Meunier are as distinguished in painting and sculpture as, for instance, Georges Eekhoud and Joris-Karl Huysmans are in the novel.
The beginnings of the modern movement, which was directed, in the first instance, against Philistinism, may be traced back to the group of bellicose students who were gathered together at the University of Louvain about 1880.[5] Some of them, among whom were Émile Verhaeren and Ernest van Dyk (the famous Wagner tenor) founded a magazine, La Semaine des Etudiants, which was soon suppressed by the University authorities. Other students who later became famous were Iwan Gilkin and Albert Giraud; and Edmond Deman, who was to become Verhaeren's publisher and a maker of beautiful books. Another student, Max Waller, who, till his early death in 1889, was the imp of mischief in the literary world of Belgium, founded, in rivalry with La Semaine, the magazine Le Type, which was also suppressed. Later on Max Waller founded, in 1882, at Brussels, together with Georges Eekhoud and Gilkin, La Jeune Belgique, a review to which all the young bloods contributed, making common cause until they divided into verslibristes and Parnassians, after which the review was carried on, under the successive editorship of Waller, Gille, and Gilkin, as the organ of the French party ("l'art pour l'art et le culte de la forme"[6]). Other reviews which provided a battling-ground were L'Art Moderne[7] to which Verhaeren contributed, and La Wallonie, which Albert Mockel founded at Liège in 1884.
The exuberant vitality of these students, though it often led them into extremes, laid the foundation of a literature which is in many respects the most remarkable of contemporary Europe. Now that Tolstoy is dead, Maeterlinck and Verhaeren stand at the head of the literature of the whole world; and they are, as Johannes Schlaf has maintained, the perfect types of the "new European." It is absurd to consider them as Frenchmen; they are as much the product of their country as Ibsen is of Norway.
Modern Belgium, "between ardent France and grave Germany," the focus of all the roads of Europe, is as rich in intellectual gifts as it is teeming with material wealth. "The vitality of the Belgians," says Stefan Zweig in his splendid book on Verhaeren, "is magnificent. In no other part of Europe is life lived with such intensity, such gaiety. In no other country as in Flanders is excess in sensuality and pleasure a function of strength. The Flemings must be seen in their sensual life, in the avidity they bring to it, in the conscious joy they feel in it, in the endurance they show. It was in orgies that Jordaens found the models of his pictures: in every kermesse, in every funeral feast you could find them to this very day. Statistics show us that Belgium stands at the head of Europe in its consumption of alcohol. Out of every two houses one is an inn. Every town, every village has its brewery, and the brewers are the richest traders in the country. Nowhere else are festivals so animated, so noisy, so unrestrained. Nowhere else is life so loved, and lived with such superabundance, at such fever-heat." It is a land that has conquered the sea, and Spain, and is still unspent, raging with greedy appetites of body and brain. Verhaeren has vaunted it in himself:
"Je suis le fils de cette race
Dont les cerveaux plus que les dents
Sont solides et sont ardents
Et sont voraces.
Je suis le fils de cette race
Tenace,
Qui veut, après avoir voulu,
Encore, encore et encore plus."[8]
The greatest of all French poets, past and present, is Émile Verhaeren. He was born in 1855 at Saint Amand, a village on the Scheldt to the east of Antwerp. He has described the impressions of his childhood among the polders in his charming book Les Tendresses premières (1904), the processions of ships sailing, like a dream plumed with wind, down the river under the stars, the dikes, "la verte immensité des plaines et des plaines"; and in the superb symbolism of Les Villages illusoires he has magnified the villagers at their trades. He was educated at the Jesuit school Sainte-Barbe in Ghent, with Georges Rodenbach for a schoolfellow. Then he studied law at Louvain, made some feint of practising at Brussels, and, in 1883, burst upon his countrymen with his audacious book Les Flamandes, the fruit of close study of Flemish genre-painting and the poetry of Maupassant. An indignant critic called him "the Raphael of filth"; but he rehabilitated himself by "Les Moines" (1886), sonorous poems mirroring life in a Flemish monastery, painting monks whose asceticism is as savage and voluptuous as the huge joy in life illustrated in Les Flamandes.
These two books glow with health. But the poet had impaired his constitution by riotous living; and the trilogy which now followed, Les Soirs (1887), Les Débâcles (1888), and Les Flambeaux noirs (1890), form one long elegy of disease. These years, his "pathological period," were full of the blackest pessimism and despair. He was much in London at this time, in isolation all the more desperate as he could not speak English. He was fascinated by the atmosphere of the English capital, its immensity, its desolation, its fogs, identifying his own mind with all of it: "O mon âme du soir, ce Londres noir qui traîne en toi!" "Je suis l'immensément perdu," he cries out in despair; he yearns for his brain to give way: "When shall I have the atrocious joy of seeing madness, nerve by nerve, attack my mind?" But the very keenness of his self-observation gradually brings him healing: a mastery of the body by the brain. This intense wrestling with disease is full of significance, and one of the lessons which Verhaeren has to teach is that new conditions of existence, the din and dust of great cities, the never-resting activity of modern brains, will create a new man whose nervous system will be able to bear the strain imposed upon it. And when one sees Verhaeren turning from self-torture to lose himself in the energy of the restlessly progressing world, one thinks of John Addington Symonds growing stronger over "Leaves of Grass." His recovery and reconciliation with life are symbolized in his poem Saint George, one of the collection Les Apparus dans mes Chemins (1891).
In his first two books he had been a realist and a Parnassian. The volumes which follow are in vers libres, and they are, to a certain extent, symbolistic. Les Villages illusoires (1894) is all symbolism: the ferryman is the stubborn artist with the green reed of hope between his teeth; the fishermen symbolize the selfish society of to-day; the ropemaker weaves the horizons of the future.
Les Campagnes hallucinées (1893) describes the desolation of the country, deserted to glut the cities; Les Villes tentaculaires (1895) is a cinematograph of the town, while the play Les Aubes (1898) completes the trilogy, and prophesies the dawn of a better day after a cleansing with blood. In these three books contemporary life is visualized, reviled, condoned, explained, and reconciled with beauty. Poets (except Walt Whitman, whom Verhaeren continues) have turned their eyes away from the present to the past, and sung of rural quiet rather than of urban roar. When Henley's poem on the motor-car appeared, there was a cry of derision; but the only thing that was wrong with the poem was that it was not poetry. Verhaeren, however, has smitten poetry out of workshops, anvils, locomotives, girders, braziers, pavements, gin-shops, brothels, the Stock Exchange—out of all that is monstrous and ugly to those who look at material things, as Ruskin did, with the eyes of the past. The accepted ideal of beauty is Grecian; but to Verhaeren the beauty of a thing is not in its outward form, but in the idea that moves it. In Greece the athlete was beautiful; but strength to-day is in the nerves; to-day we see more beauty in a face moulded by mind than in the thews of a discus-thrower. Smoke is beautiful in the pictures of Whistler and Monet; the toil of grimy workmen is sublime in the sculpture of Constantin Meunier.[9] For Verhaeren, as Stefan Zweig says, "a thing is the more beautiful the more finality, will, power, energy it contains. The whole universe at the present moment is overheated; it is straining in throes of endeavour; our great towns are nothing but centres of multiplied energy; their machines are the expression of forces tamed and organized; their innumerable crowds are joined together in harmonious action. Thus to Verhaeren all things appear full of beauty. He loves our epoch because it does not disperse effort, but condenses it, because it is not scattered, but concentrated for action. All that has will, and an aim in view, man, machine, crowd, town, capital; all that vibrates, works, hammers, travels; all that bears in itself fire, impulse, electricity, and feeling—all this rings in his verse. Everything lives its minute; in this multiple gear there is no dust, no useless ornamentation; but everywhere is creation; the feeling of the future directs all action. The town is a living being."
Verhaeren knows the great cities of Europe. He has felt the spell of Hamburg, as well as of Hildesheim and of little towns in Spain. We have seen him during his period of depression isolated in London, and while in England he was fascinated by the reek of soot and tar in Liverpool and Glasgow. In London he would take a ticket to anywhere on "the underground," and roll along for hours; he wandered about the docks, and dreamed among the mummies in the British Museum. And though the town of his poems may be any town, it is no doubt, at the back of his mind, London.