Modern civilization is a stepmother to poets; it is crowded, noisy and ugly, and they run away and seek refuge in gardens, or monasteries, or dreams of a happier past. But modern civilization is alive; it is the life of hundreds of millions of human beings, forging a new future. And there comes a new kind of poet, able to penetrate to the inner spirit of that future.
It was fitting that such a poet should be a Belgian; for Belgium is the center of the new industrialism in Europe. Here are great iron and steel plants, and vast cobwebs of railroads, and harbors to which the commerce of the world pours in. The past and the future meet here, for Belgium has an old history and art; it is a battle-ground of Catholicism and Protestantism, of modern science and ancient mysticism, of French revolution and German autocracy. It is wealthy, with all the class contrasts and antagonisms which modern capitalism brings.
Emile Verhaeren was born in 1855, of well-to-do retired parents. He lived in the country, but in Belgium the country is close to the towns, and the boy saw the river with the great ships, the factories and the busy artisans, a teeming life, stimulating to the imagination. He was educated in a Jesuit school, where they hoped to make a priest of him, but did not succeed. He studied law, and led a wild, freakish youth. He had been writing verses since childhood, Latin verses, and then the classical French Alexandrines, under the spell of Victor Hugo. Then came Zola, and young Verhaeren horrified his parents and friends by a volume of poetry portraying the violent and brutal facts of Flemish life. They are a gross and drunken people—we see them in the paintings of Rubens; and it was a time when young poets were in revolt against false idealism, and wanted to deal with reality, the more crude and hideous the better.
From excess of animalism the Belgian people revolt to the other extreme, asceticism; so the country is full of monks, gloomy and sober, living apart and contemplating the past with holy awe. Verhaeren wrote a second book, in which he portrayed strange types of these devotees. But he was content to admire them; he did not join them.
The poet exists by virtue of the fact that he is more sensitive than the average man; life hits him harder blows, and he flies from one extreme to the other. Modern science took from Verhaeren his Catholic faith, and there followed a period of pessimism, a terrible psychic crisis. Like Dostoievski and Strindberg, he came close to the border-line of insanity and suicide. But his restless mind would not give up to any suffering; he was thrilled even by the adventure of pain; he loved life, even though it held for him only the vision of death. All things are themes for art; so he wrote a book of nightmares, a pilgrimage of neurasthenia.
The sick poet had fled from the noisy and brutal world; he found his deliverance by coming back to it. Redemption lay in loving and understanding mankind in its manifold new activities. Those things which the poets generally affect to despise Verhaeren now took up with ecstasy: industrialism, machinery, the roar of cities, the manifold activities of crowds, in all these things he discovered a new power, promising an infinitude of beauty.
Verhaeren wrote in French, and used a new form of rhymed free verse, more obviously rhythmical than Whitman’s, marvelously responsive to every throb of the poet’s imagination. It is a kind of verse to chant aloud, an utterance of sweeping ecstasy. Verhaeren resembles Whitman in many ways; in his identification of himself with the toiling masses, his sense of the multitude as a new being, a thing with a life of its own. Like Whitman he accepts the universe, he sings the chant of humanity becoming God, conquering nature, and remaking existence in its own image.
Walt Whitman sang “these states,” and saw them as one mighty, triumphant land. Verhaeren also had a vision, he was the prophet of the United States of Europe. He had lived in all its great capitals, and knew and interpreted the forces which were bringing them together and making them one. Terrible places they are—“the octopus cities,” he calls them in the title of one of his volumes, and portrays them as gigantic tentacular monsters, sucking all the life-blood from the country. No poet has ever approached Verhaeren in the portrayal of the cruelty and loneliness and horror of these capitalist cities. You will find in “The Cry for Justice” a translation of one of these poems, the most frightful picture of prostitution ever given in verse.
Verhaeren welcomed science, and proclaimed mass solidarity, the surrender of the individual to the sweep of progress. He became a prophet and preacher of what he called “cosmic enthusiasm.” He was, of course, a Socialist and revolutionist. He wrote a lyrical drama called “The Dawn,” which has been translated into English by Arthur Symonds. Here in a mixture of prose and verse he celebrates a hero who surrenders the citadel of capitalism to the masses, and gives his life in the effort to abolish class conflict and build the happy future. Verhaeren wrote other plays which have not yet been translated or produced; they do not conform to the rules of the drama for profit, for they deal with humanity and not with sex. But the new time is coming—and here is one of its prophets.