



Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org




EMILE VERHAEREN

BY

STEFAN ZWEIG

LONDON

CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD

1914




[Illustration: Émile Verhaeren from an unpublished photograph by
Charles Bernier, 1914.]




PREFACE


Four years have passed since the present volume appeared simultaneously
in German and French. In the meantime Verhaeren's fame has been
spreading; but in English-speaking countries he is still not so well
known as he deserves to be.

Something of his philosophy--if it may be called philosophy rather than
a poet's inspired visualising of the world--has passed into the public
consciousness in a grotesquely distorted form in what is known as
'futurism.' So long as futurism is associated with those who have
acquired a facile notoriety by polluting the pure idea, it would be an
insult to Verhaeren to suggest that he is to be classed with the
futurists commonly so-called; but the whole purpose of the present
volume will prove that the gospel of a very serious and reasoned
futurism is to be found in Verhaeren's writings.

Of the writer of the book it may be said that there was no one more
fitted than he to write the authentic exposition of the teaching which
he has hailed as a new religion. His relations to the Master are not
only those of a fervent disciple, but of an apostle whose labour of
love has in German-speaking lands and beyond been crowned with signal
success. Himself a lyrist of distinction, Stefan Zweig has accomplished
the difficult feat, which in this country still waits to be done, of
translating the great mass of Verhaeren's poems into actual and enduring
verse. Another book of his on Verlaine is already known in an English
rendering; so that he bids fair to become known in this country as one
of the most gifted of the writers of Young-Vienna.

As to the translation, I have endeavoured to be faithful to my text,
which is the expression of a personality. Whatever divergences there are
have been necessitated by the lapse of time. For help in reading the
proofs I have to thank Mr. M.T.H. Sadler and Mr. Fritz Voigt.

                                               J. BITHELL.

  HAMMERFIELD,
_Nr_. HEMEL HEMPSTEAD,
  14_th July_ 1914.




CONTENTS


PART I

THE NEW AGE
THE NEW BELGIUM
YOUTH IN FLANDERS
'LES FLAMANDES'
THE MONKS
THE BREAK-DOWN
FLIGHT INTO THE WORLD

PART II

TOWNS ('LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES')
THE MULTITUDE
THE RHYTHM OF LIFE
THE NEW PATHOS
VERHAEREN'S POETIC METHOD
VERHAEREN'S DRAMA

PART III

COSMIC POETRY
THE LYRIC UNIVERSE
SYNTHESES
THE ETHICS OF FERVOUR
LOVE
THE ART OF VERHAEREN'S LIFE
THE EUROPEAN IMPORTANCE OF HIS WORK

BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX




PART I

DECIDING FORCES


LES FLAMANDES--LES MOINES--LES SOIRS--LES
DÉBâCLES--LES FLAMBEAUX NOIRS--AU BORD DE
LA ROUTE--LES APPARUS DANS MES CHEMINS

1883-1893



     Son tempérament, son caractère, sa vie, tout conspire à nous
     montrer son art tel que nous avons essayé de le définir. Une
     profonde unité les scelle. Et n'est-ce pas vers la découverte de
     cette unité-là, qui groupe en un faisceau solide les gestes, les
     pensées et les travaux d'un génie sur la terre, que la critique,
     revenue enfin de tant d'erreurs, devait tendre uniquement?

                                 VERHAEREN, _Rembrandt._




THE NEW AGE

     Tout bouge--et l'on dirait les horizons en marche.
                                        É.V., 'La Foule.'


The feeling of this age of ours, of this our moment in eternity, is
different in its conception of life from that of our ancestors. Only
eternal earth has changed not nor grown older, that field, gloomed by
the Unknown, on which the monotonous light of the seasons divides, in a
rhythmic round, the time of blossoms and of their withering; changeless
only are the action of the elements and the restless alternation of
night and day. But the aspect of earth's spirit has changed, all that is
subjected to the toil of man. Has changed, to change again. The
evolution of the phenomena of culture seems to proceed with ever greater
rapidity: never was the span of a hundred years as rich, as replete as
that which stretches to the threshold of our own days. Cities have shot
up which are as huge and bewildering, as impenetrable and as endless, as
nothing else has been save those virgin forests now fast receding before
the onward march of the tilled land. More and more the work of man
achieves the grandiose and elementary character that was once Nature's
secret. The lightning is in his hands, and protection from the
weather's sudden onslaughts; lands that once yawned far apart are now
forged together by the iron hoop with which of old only the narrow
strait was arched; oceans are united that have sought each other for
thousands of years; and now in the very air man is building a new road
from country to country. All has changed.

     Tout a changé: les ténèbres et les flambeaux.
     Les droits et les devoirs out fait d'autres faisceaux,
     Du sol jusqu'au soleil, une neuve énergie
     Diverge un sang torride, en la vie élargie;
     Des usines de fonte ouvrent, sous le ciel bleu,
     Des cratères en flamme et des fleuves en feu;
     De rapides vaisseaux, sans rameurs et sans voiles,
     La nuit, sur les flots bleus, étonnent les étoiles;
     Tout peuple réveillé se forge une autre loi;
     Autre est le crime, autre est l'orgueil, autre est l'exploit.[1]

Changed, too, is the relation of individual to individual, of the
individual to the whole; at once more onerous and less burdensome is the
network of social laws, at once more onerous and less burdensome our
whole life.

But a still greater thing has happened. Not only the real forms, the
transitory facts of life have changed, not only do we live in other
cities, other houses, not only are we dressed in different clothes, but
the infinite above us too, that which seemed unshakable, has changed
from what it was for our fathers and forefathers. Where the actual
changes, the relative changes also. The most elementary forms of our
conception, space and time, have been displaced. Space has become other
than it was, for we measure it with new velocities. Roads that took our
forefathers days to traverse can now be covered in one short hour; one
flying night transports us to warm and luxuriant lands that were once
separated from us by the hardships of a long journey. The perilous
forests of the tropics with Jheir strange constellations, to see which
cost those of old a year of their lives, are of a sudden near to us and
easy of access. We measure differently with these different velocities
of life. Time is more and more the victor of space. The eye, too, has
learned other distances, and in cold constellations is startled to
perceive the forms of primeval landscapes petrified; and the human voice
seems to have grown a thousand times stronger since it has learned to
carry on a friendly conversation a hundred miles away. In this new
relationship of forces we have a different perception of the spanning
round of the earth, and the rhythm of life, beating more brightly and
swiftly, is likewise becoming new for us. The distance from springtime
to springtime is greater now and yet less, greater and yet less is the
individual hour, greater and less our whole life.

And therefore is it with new feelings that we must comprehend this new
age. For we all feel that we must not measure the new with the old
measures our forefathers used, that we must not live through the new
with feelings outworn, that we must discover a new sense of distance, a
new sense of time, a new sense of space, that we must find a new music
for this nervous, feverish rhythm around us. This new-born human
conditionality calls for a new morality; this new union of equals a new
beauty; this new topsy-turvydom a new system of ethics. And this new
confrontation with another and still newer world, with another Unknown,
demands a new religion, a new God. A new sense of the universe is, with
a muffled rumour, welling up in the hearts of all of us.

New things, however, must be coined into new words. A new age calls for
new poets, poets whose conceptions have been nurtured by their
environment, poets who, in the expression they give to this new
environment, themselves vibrate with the feverish rotation of life. But
so many of our poets are pusillanimous. They feel that their voices are
out of harmony with reality; they feel that they are not incorporated
with the new organism and a necessary part of it; they have a dull
foreboding that they do not speak the language of our contemporary life.
In our great cities they are like strangers stranded. The great roaring
streams of our new sensations are to them terrific and inconceivable.
They are ready to accept all the comfort and luxury of modern life; they
are quick to take advantage of the facilities afforded by technical
science and organisation; but for their poetry they reject these
phenomena, because they cannot master them. They recoil from the task
of transmuting poetical values, of sensing whatever is poetically new in
these new things. And so they stand aside. They flee from the real, the
contemporary, to the immutable; they take refuge in whatsoever the
eternal evolution has left untouched; they sing the stars, the
springtime, the babbling of springs which is now as it ever was, the
myth of love; they hide behind the old symbols; they nestle to the old
gods. Not from the moment, from the molten flowing ore, do they seize
and mould the eternal--no, as ever of old they dig the symbols of the
eternal out of the cold clay of the past, like old Greek statues. They
are not on that account insignificant; but at best they produce
something important, never anything necessary.

For only that poet can be necessary to our time who himself feels that
everything in this time is necessary, and therefore beautiful. He must
be one whose whole endeavour as poet and man it is to make his own
sensations vibrate in unison with contemporary sensations; who makes the
rhythm of his poem nothing else than the echoed rhythm of living things;
who adjusts the beat of his verse to the beat of our own days, and takes
into his quivering veins the streaming blood of our time. He must not on
this account, when seeking to create new ideals, be a stranger to the
ideals of old; for all true progress is based on the deepest
understanding of the past. Progress must be for him as Guyau interprets
it: 'Le pouvoir, lorsqu'on est arrivé à un état supérieur, d'éprouver
des émotions et des sensations nouvelles, sans cesser d'être encore
accessible à ce que contenaient de grand ou de beau ses précédantes
émotions.'[2] A poet of our time can only be great when he conceives
this time as great. The preoccupations of his time must be his also; its
social problem must be his personal concern. In such a poet succeeding
generations would see how man has fought a way to them from the past,
how in every moment as it passed he has wrestled to identify the feeling
of his own mind with that of the cosmos. And even though the great works
of such a poet should be soon disintegrated and his poems obsolete,
though his images should have paled, there would yet remain imperishably
vivid that which is of greater moment, the invisible motives of his
inspiration, the melody, the breath, the rhythm of his time. Such poets,
besides pointing the way to the coming generation, are in a deeper sense
the incarnation of their own period. Hence the time has come to speak of
Émile Verhaeren, the greatest of modern poets, and perhaps the only one
who has been conscious of what is poetical in contemporary feeling, the
only one who has shaped that feeling in verse, the first poet who, with
skill incomparably inspired, has chiselled our epoch into a mighty
monument of rhyme.

In Verhaeren's work our age is mirrored. The new landscapes are in it;
the sinister silhouettes of the great cities; the seething masses of a
militant democracy; the subterranean shafts of mines; the last heavy
shadows of silent, dying cloisters. All the intellectual forces of our
time, our time's ideology, have here become a poem; the new social
ideas, the struggle of industrialism with agrarianism, the vampire force
which lures the rural population from the health-giving fields to the
burning quarries of the great city, the tragic fate of emigrants,
financial crises, the dazzling conquests of science, the syntheses of
philosophy, the triumphs of engineering, the new colours of the
impressionists. All the manifestations of the new age are here reflected
in a poet's soul in their action--first confused, then understood, then
joyfully acclaimed--on the sensations of a New European. How this work
came into being, out of what resistance and crises a poet has here
conquered the consciousness of the necessity and then of the beauty of
the new cosmic phase, it shall be our task to show. If the time has
indeed come to class Verhaeren, it is not so much with the poets that
his place will be found. He does not so much stand with or above the
verse-smiths or actual artists in verse, with the musicians, or
painters, as rather with the great organisers, those who have forced the
new social currents to flow between dikes; with the legislators who
prevent the clashing of flamboyant energies; with the philosophers, who
aim at co-ordinating and unifying all these vastly complicated
tendencies in one brilliant synthesis. His poetry is a created poet's
world; it is a resolute shaping of phases, a considered new æstheticism,
and a conscious new inspiration. He is not only the poet, he is at the
same time the preacher of our time. He was the first to conceive of it
as _beautiful_, but not like those who, in their zeal for embellishment,
tone down the dark colours and bring out the bright ones; he has
conceived of it--we shall have to show with what a painful and intensive
effort--after his first most obstinate rejection of it, as a necessity,
and he has then transformed this conception of its necessity, of its
purpose, into beauty. Ceasing to look backwards, he has looked forwards.
He feels, quite in the spirit of evolution, in the spirit of Nietzsche,
that our generation is raised high above all the past, that it is the
summit of all that is past, and the turning-point towards the future.
This will perhaps seem too much to many people