As my desire was not to make English poems about a French original, but to make the French poems in the text understandable, I have sacrificed the form to the content. The translations are exact, and in every case reproduce, as far as is possible in another language, the "perfume" of the poem.
By reading them, and then turning to the original and reading it aloud in French, those least versed in the tongue will get an idea of the music of the poem, while at the same time understanding it. In order not to tease those readers perfectly ac- quainted with French, no figures nor asterisks appear in the text, but each translation is accompanied by the number of the page on which the original is to be found. Another appendix contains bibliographies of the works of each author and a bibHography of books upon the subject, for the use of those who wish to pursue it farther.
In preparing this volume my thanks are due to M. Magdeleine Garret for invaluable assis- tance and information, — to her intimate knowledge of her own language, unerring taste, and trained critical faculty, I owe all that I have been able to acquire of the French tongue; to Mile. Jeanne Charon, for valuable suggestions of technical detail ; and to Mr. Flint, whose wide reading and critical articles on modem French poetry in " Poetry and Drama " have been of great service to me, for lists of books and expert knowledge. The news was re- ceived while this book was passing through the press, too late to be incorporated in the text.
I wish here to express my great admira- tion for his work, and my gratitude for an encouragement which even under the heavy weight of illness he did not stint to give. By his death France loses one of the greatest and most sincere artists of his generation. And I felt that I had a right to include him among French poets since he wrote in French. Now, the name of Emile Verhaeren is not only the best known name of my group, but a very well known name indeed.
Newspapers and magazines are full of his fame, various publishers are issuing translations of his poems, and a translation of a German biography of him appeared a year ago. But the most impor- tant thing which time has effected in his regard is to divorce him forever from the stream of French literature. He ranks now, not only as the prophet of a new era, but as the authentic voice of a dead era. The Belgium he portrays has been devastated by war, and so completely crushed that at the moment it can hardly be said to exist.
And even if in time the invaders are driven out, and Belgium is able to continue herself politically, it will be long before 3 4 Six French Poets she will have leisure to devote her energies again to the arts. When that time does come, we may be very sure that It will be a different civilization with which the arts will have to deal.
The pathetic splendour of circumstance, therefore, must always hang over Verhaeren's work, and enhance Its natural greatness still farther. Future ages will not only study him as a great poet, but as an accurate por- trayer of life In Belgium before the war. His artistic value, for many years at least. Is bound to be overshadowed by his historic value. He stands out as the finest flower of a ruined country, and as such can never again be contemplated as merely walking step by step with the writers of any other country, no matter how great.
At present, however, the war Is still too new to be regarded in this per- spective ; to us who are living not only to-day, but in such close relation to yesterday, it Is enough to point out what must be Verhaeren's future position, and then return and consider him as he has hitherto appeared to our own generation. To-day, Verhaeren is a man sixty years old, with twenty-three volumes of poems, three volumes of plays, and four volumes of prose to his credit.
He has been writing for over thirty years, and has had a great Influence upon young writers all over the world. It Is in this connection which we shall con- sider him here. What future work he will do will belong to that after- the- war period which we can Entile Verhaeren 5 only dimly foresee.
At the actual time of writing, Verhaeren has fled to England, where he has found an asylum and sympathetic friends. Vigorous as he is, the poems which he may write there will belong to a new epoch in his career, and with them future students of his work will have to deal.
Our con- sideration of him ends with the war. In understanding Verhaeren, one must first under- stand the conditions into which he was born. One of the great interests in his poetry is the effect it has had In changing and modifying those conditions. In , Hippolyte Taine wrote — in his chapter on "The Painting in the Low Coun- tries" in his "Philosophy of Art" — "to-day this literature hardly exists. Such fecundity is astonishing, and has called out a large number of volumes devoted to the study of so remarkable a phenomenon.
And all since , a period of little more than thirty years! Albert Heumann points out that "a fecund and independent literature commonly exists in a country of perfect material prosperity, and of an absolute political autonomy. Since , when Belgium forced herself upon the Powers as a separate nation and elected a king to suit herself, she has enjoyed extraordinary prosperity. The enormous energy of the people has developed their unusual natural facilities to the fullest extent. There are the coal fields in the Boisinage district near Mons, and in the neighbourhood of Liege. There are iron mines, and iron and steel works, at Charleroi and Liege.
There are quarries of marble, granite, and slate. Ghent is the capital of a vast textile industry ; and lace is manufactured all over the country, Brussels point being famous throughout the world.
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But this is not all, Belgium carries on or, alas! Antwerp is one of the largest and most important ports in the world. And again, this is not all, for Belgium is an agricultural country chiefly, and where everything is on so superlative a scale, "chiefly" means a great deal. In fact, it has about six and one-half millions of acres under cul- tivation. In this little bit of a country, less than half as big as the state of Maine, such an acreage is enormous.
But side by side with this booming modernism lives the other Belgium — mystic, superstitious — where moss-grown monasteries stand beside sluggish canals, and the angelus rings across flat, wind-blown Etnile Verhaeren 7 fields. Belgium is a strange mixture of activities, races, and opinions. Roman Catholics and Socialists dispute for control of the government, and authors write and publish in German and French, some fanatics even insist on doing so in Flemish, and agitate to have Flemish taught in the schools, a desire with which the Celtic movement in Ireland has made us familiar.
His father, Gustave Verhaeren, was the son of a cloth merchant of Brussels. His mother was a Mile. Debock, a na- tive of Saint-Amand, where her brother was pro- prietor of an oil plant. And presumably Gustave Verhaeren chose to live in Saint-Amand on account of his wife's connection in the country. The Ver- haerens were probably of Dutch extraction, but the Debocks were certainly French some centuries before, it is needless to say, as both families can be traced to different parts of Belgium in the eighteenth century.
Curiously enough, only French was spoken in Gustave Verhaeren's household, and the servants all came from Liege. Emile Verhaeren has never known Flemish, although he took some lessons in it from the schoolmaster in the village, when he was seven years old. Saint-Amand stands in a country of wide hori- 8 Six French Poets zons, where windmills stretch out their arms to the sky, and broad clouds sweep over it, trailing their shadows on the fiat plain below. It is a grey, northern country, of fogs and strong winds.
All these things impressed themselves upon the little Verhaeren's brain, and became a natural part of his consciousness, and the objects of his greatest love. As the boy Constable is said to have grown familiar with clouds, and to have acquired a love for them, in tending his father's windmill, so the boy Ver- haeren must have got his knowledge of weather and skies while wandering along the level, paved roads of East Flanders, buffeted by the wind and washed by the sun, or while lying in bed listening to the rain splash on tiled roofs, and patter against the shutters.
His poems are full of weather. They are almost a "line-a-day" book of temperatures and atmospheres. Take this of a violent wind, for in- stance: Un poing d'effroi tord les villages ; Les hauts clochers, dans les lointains, Envoient I'echo de leurs tocsins Bondir de plage en plage. Le vent chante, le vent babille avec pinson, tarin, moineau, le vent sififie, brille et scintille k la pointe des longs roseaux, Bmile Verhaeren 9 le vent se noue et s'entrelace et se denoue et puis, soudain, s'enfuit jusqu'aux vergers luisants, la-bas, ou les pommiers, pareils a des paons blancs, — nacre et soleil — lui font la roue.
Take this, of clouds: Et Septembre, la-haut, Avec son ciel de nacre et d'or voyage, Et suspend sur les pres, les champs et les hameaux Les blocs etincelants de ses plus beaux nuages. Or this, of a Httle river: L'entendez-vous, I'entendez-vous Le menu flot sur les cailloux? II passe et court et glisse, Et doucement dedie aux branches. Qui sur son cours se penchent, Sa chanson lisse. Gustave Verhaeren, his wife and little son, lived in a cottage of their own, with a garden blazing full of flowers. Behind it stretched the fields of yellow wheat, and close beside it ran the slow river.
In one of his last books, Verhaeren has described his childhood. He tells us how he played in the great barns, and climbed steeples, and listened to the maids singing old Flemish songs at their washing. He describes himself sitting with the watchmaker and marvelling at the little wheels of the watches, lo Six French Poets and standing on the bank of the river and looking at the heavy cargo boats sail by. Je me souviens du village pres de I'Escaut, D'ou Ton voyait les grands bateaux Passer ainsi qu'un rdve empanache de vent Et merveilletix de voiles. Le soir en cortege sous les etoiles.
By and by, he was sent to school in Brussels for two years, at the Institute Saint Louis ; and when he was thirteen or fourteen, he entered the Jesuit College of Sainte-Barbe in Ghent. Here, a few years later, came Maeterlinck also, but whether the boys met there I have not been able to find out. It had been decided in the family that Emile should enter his uncle's oil works, and succeed to the business.
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In the pleasant way of families from time immemorial, this had apparently been arranged without consulting Emile's wishes in the matter. At twenty, the boy had finished his college course, and he did come back to Saint-Amand and go into the oil works for a year. But the life was most distasteful to him ; he needed to see the world, to measure himself intellectually with other young men, and there is no reason to suppose that he showed the slightest taste or ability for business.
In order, however, to find some plausible reason for his dislike of the work, he pleaded to be allowed to study law. Whether he had tried writing at this Emile Verhaeren ii period and felt any desire to become a poet, I do not know. But to persuade a practical father and uncle to consent to his giving up a lucrative business in order to become a poet, would not be a simple task. And certainly in asking to become a lawyer, Emile stood more chance of having his wish granted. And young Verhaeren left home again to study law at the University of Louvain.
At Louvain, Verhaeren really did study law, strangely enough, and was graduated in But he did many other things also. He danced at Kermesses, drank beer, got drunk, and generally overdid things with the true Flemish ardour, whether for work or play. Among his fellow students there were various other tentative poets. Together they got up a little paper called La Semaine, and Ver- haeren published several pieces in it, under the pseudonym of "Rodolph.
Here was Verhaeren, a full-fledged barrister, enter- ing the office of Edmond Picard in Brussels. But his heart was not in the work, and he conducted the one or two quite unimportant cases he had to plead so half-heartedly, that Maitre Picard, himself, advised him to give up the law.
Brought up as a Roman Catholic, educated in a Jesuit college, he had been ardent and devout. Yet, even then, the Jesuits had failed to persuade him to become a priest. Now, with every year, his zest for living grew, his mind expanded and dared, and Catholicism dropped away from him forever. The mystic side of the Flemish character was to show itself in quite a different form, and only much later. In Brussels, Verhaeren found a set of young men, eager like himself, anxious to stamp themselves into literature. Zola's realistic novels were just begin- ning to be discussed in Belgium, and Camille Le- monnier was the interpreter of this new naturalism.
And just as a whole generation of younger writers in France adopted Zola's theories, so did they attract the younger writers of Belgium. And really the protest was necessary to down that long set of sen- timental hypocrisies known in England as " Victo- rian. In order to flaunt the banner of free, realistic art, with no taboos as the current slang of the reviews calls it , a remarkable and intelligent young man. Max Waller, poet and writer of short stories, got up a review entitled La Jeune Belgique.
In its effect on Belgian letters, this review has been com- pared to the Mercure de France and its place in Emile Verhaeren 13 French literature. The early death of the founder of La Jeune Belgique kept it from becoming the world-famous periodical it might have been. While it existed, it gave an opening for many remarkable young men, among others, Verhaeren. A pleasant anecdote is told of him at this time, how one rainy day he clumped into Lemonnier's lodgings never having met Lemonnier, by the way , and blurted out, "Je veux vous lire des vers!
Lemonnier encouraged him, criticised him, and, shortly after, the book was published. Then the storm broke, and howled about Verhaeren. The book was strong, vivid, brutal. It was as violent, as coarse, as full of animal spirits, as the pictures of Breugel the Elder, Teniers, or Jan Steen. Verhaeren pierced like an abscess. The battle waged furiously. All those adherents of the old order of sentimental idealization fell upon the book, and in the columns of V Europe Lemonnier strongly defended it. And really it is a startling book, written with a sort of fury of colour.
The red, fat flesh tints of Rubens have got into it, and the pages seem hot and smoky with perspiration. The desire to paint seems engrained in the Flemish character; M.
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Heu- 14 Six French Poets man declares that all Belgian writers, whether of poetry or prose, are painters. But, also, it must not be forgotten that they are Flemish painters, and their palettes are hot and highly coloured. In his poem, Les Vieux Mattres, Verhaeren speaks of these old masters as painting "les fureurs d'estomac, de ventre et de debauche.
They are marvellously done, blazing with colour and bla- tant with energy. Metrically, Les Flamandes is not particularly in- teresting, being written in the ordinary French alexandrine. The interest of the book lies in its treatment of subjects. This is one of them: Le foyer y brillait comme une rouge flaquc, Et ses flammes, mordant incessamment la plaque, Y rongeaient un sujet obscene en fer fondu.
Emile Verhaeren 15 Les rayons s'echappaient comme un jet d'emeraudes, Et, ci et la, partout donnaient des chiquenaudes De clarte vive aux brocs de verre, aux plats d'email. A voir sur tout relief tomber des etincelles, On eut dit — tant le feu s'emiettait par parcelles — Qu'on vannait du soleil a travers un vitrail.
Notice how wonderfully bright and sparkling it all is, — "the snapping of light in the glasses" and the fire "crumbling itself into sparks. Les Flamandes appeared in , and it was not until that Verhaeren's next book, Les Moines, published by quite a different firm, came out. Why Verhaeren changed his publisher, we do not know.
Why he changed his whole manner of writing can be guessed. I have said that the Flemish character is made up of two parts, one composed of violent and brutal animal spirits, the other of strange, unreasoning mysticism. This is shown by the fact that along the line of material prosperity the Belgians have advanced with leaps and bounds, while on the line of abstract ideas, of philosophical or scientific en- lightenment, they have contributed almost nothing to the world. Their aspirations toward a broader point of view led them only to the Utopia of the 1 6 Six French Poets materialistic socialist.
Verhaeren himself, with all his effort and achievement, can never quite free himself from the trammels of the material. Because the idealistic side of the Belgian mind is feeble and poor, and cannot get along without the swaddling clothes of superstition, Belgian mysticism is charm- ing, poetic, but — gets us nowhere. Whether Verhaeren wrote Les Moines to satisfy the need of expression for this gentler side of his nature, whether his painter's eye was fascinated by the pictorial value of old monasteries and quiet monks, or whether he wished to prove to the world that he could do things that were not violent, it is impossible to say.
None of his biographers has suggested the last reason. Presumably they would consider it beneath him, but I see no cause to sup- pose so great a man as Verhaeren to be in any way inhuman. And certainly to show the world that he has more than one string to his lute is a very natural desire in a young poet. Les Moines is a sad book, a faded book.
The monasteries are here, but bathed in the light of a pale sunset. As a boy, Verhaeren used often to go to the Bernhardine Monastery at Bornhem with his father. In order to renew his impressions of cloister life before writing this book, he passed three weeks at the monastery of Forges, near Chimay, and much of the book was written there. There is nothing in Les Moines to detain us here. Emile Verhaeren 17 It Is a book of delicate etchings, pensive and melan- choly, and again written In French alexandrines. In this book, more than In Les Flamandes, Verhaeren seems to be feeling his way.
Then Verhaeren broke down. He had travelled a great deal, had been to France, Germany, Spain, and England. That he had been overdoing, over- thlnklng, Is obvious. At any rate, he succumbed to what seems to have been a bad attack of nervous prostration, with gastric complications. Herr Zweig, In his exhaustive biography, spends a great deal of time In telling us how he had to have the door-bell taken off because he could not bear Its ringing, and how the people In the house had to go about In felt slippers.
Herr Zweig Is delighted with Les Soirs, Les Debacles, and Les Flambeaux Noirs, published respectively In , , and , because he considers them so remarkable a portrayal of an unusual state of mind, and says they must be "priceless to pathologists and psychologists. I do not suppose there is a person who will read these lines, who has not either been there himself or had a friend who has. That Verhaeren should have written three books during his illness is not surprising. Writers always write, no matter how they are.
With them It is so natural a function that It tires them less than to 1 8 Six French Poets do anything else. I could adduce a host of examples to prove this point, but two will do: Francis Park- man and Robert Louis Stevenson. I will quote two poems from Les Soirs, not be- cause of their interest to the pathologist and psy- chologist, but because they are such remarkable pictures, and because they show that wedding of sound to sense which is to become one of Verhaeren's most characteristic powers. Et ces quais infinis de lanternes fatales, Parques dont les fuseaux plongent aux profondeurs, Et ces marins noyes, sous les petales Des fleurs de boue ou la flamme met des lueurs.
Et ces chaies et ces gestes de femmes soules, Et ces alcools de lettres d'or jusques aux toits, Et tout a coup la mort, parmi ces foules ; O mon ame du soir, ce Londres noir qui traine en toi! Emile Verhaeren 19 See how long and slow the cadence is, and the heavy consonants make the poem knock and hum like the Westminster bells he mentions. It almost seems as though Big Ben must have been striking when he wrote the poem.
This intermixture of sound with pure painting Is one of Verhaeren's most remarkable traits. In this next poem, Le Moulin, we have another sombre landscape, but the whole movement is different ; from the first line we are conscious of sound, but it is no longer the insistent beating which underlies Londres; it is a sort of sliding, a faint, rushing noise.
Any one reading the first stanza aloud cannot fail to be conscious of it. It is this presence of sounds in his verse, quite apart from the connotations of his words, which gives Verhaeren's work its strange, magic reality, and makes it practically impossible to translate. Est triste et faible et lourde et lasse, infiniment. Autour d'un pale etang, quelques huttes de hetre Tres miserablement sont assises en rond ; Une lampe de cuivre est pendue au plafond Et patine de feu le mur et la fenetre.
Et dans la plaine immense, au bord du fiot dormeur, EUes fixent — les tres souff reteuses bicoques! Here, at last, Verhaeren begins to use that extraordinary vers libre for which he is afterwards to be so noted. Some poets seem capable of expressing themselves per- fectly In the classic alexandrine, some can use both old and new forms according to the content of the poem. Verhaeren's Intimate friend, Henri de Re- gnier, is remarkable for this. But the alexandrine has never seemed to fit Verhaeren. His tumultuous nature seems cramped by its limitations.
Figure the "Siegfried Idyl" played by an orchestra of flutes, and harps, and tambourines, and you will see what Entile Verhaeren 21 I mean; or imagine Schumann's "Fantasie, Op. Verhaeren's vers libre is always rhymed. And in a language so abounding in rhyme as the French, that is no handicap to the free poet. Not only does Verhaeren use end rhymes, he cannot resist the joy of internal rhymes. But I am anticipating, for in La Morte, as you will see, there are very few internal rhymes, although his fondness for alliteration and assonance begins to be noticeable. La Morte is a beautiful, foggy picture, sad, but with a kind of sadness which is already beginning to enjoy itself in a sombre sort of way.
In other words, Verhaeren is beginning to get well, but he is not quite willing to admit it yet. Des ponts de bronze, ou les wagons Entrechoquent d'interminables bruits de gonds Et des voiles de bateaux sombres Laissent sur elle, choir leurs ombres. Sans qu'une aiguille, k son cadran, ne bouge, Un grand beffroi masque de rouge La regarde, comme quelqu'un Immensement de triste et de defunt. Ses nerfs ont eclate, Tel soir illumine de fete, Qu'elle sentait deja le triomphe flotter Comme des aigles, sur sa tSte.
Au long des funebres murailles, Au long des usines de fer Dont les marteaxix tonnent 1' eclair, Elle se traine aux funerailles. Ce sont des quais et des casernes, Des quais toujours et leurs lanternes, Immobiles et lentes filandieres Des ors obscurs de leurs lumidres: En sa robe de joyaux morts, que solennise L'heure de pourpre a I'horizon, Le cadavre de ma raison Trains sur la Tamise. Elle s'en va vers les hasards Au fond de I'ombre et des brouillards, Au long bruit sourd des tocsins lourds, Cassant leur aile, au coin des tours. Derriere elle, laissant inassouvie La ville immense de la vie ; Elle s'en va vers I'inconnu noir Dormir en des tombeaux de soir, La-bas, on les vagues lentes et fortes ; Ouvrant leurs trous illimites, Engloutissent a toute etemite: In one line of this poem Verhaeren has given us the real cause of his illness.
His reason has died, he says, " from knowing too much. The mystic and the modern man have been struggling within him. It is this struggle which has forced so many French poets back to the Catholic Church. But Verhaeren was made of more resisting stuff. The struggle downed 24 Six French Poets him, but did not betray him. He fell back into no open arms ; by sheer effort he pushed himself up on his feet. I should have said that for some reason or other, Verhaeren spent most of these years of illness in London. His biographers imagine that the fog and gloom, what one of them calls the "melancholy scenery of industrial cities," was in harmony with his mood.
Perhaps this is true, and if so I think we are right in believing that his state of mind had more to do with his illness than the poor digestion to which it is usually attributed. However that may be, Verhaeren got better. He came out of his illness, as is usually the case with strong people, a sane, more self-reliant man.
He left the obscurity of London side streets to plunge into the stream of active life in the cities of his native Belgium. In , Verhaeren published two volumes of poems, with two different publishers.
Verhaeren is feeling the zest of life again, but it is a more spiritual zest than before, if one can use the term for such a very materialistic spirituality. Verhaeren is waking up, as it were, like a man stretching his arms, not yet fully awake. Saint Georges is probably the best known poem of the volume ; it begins charmingly: Emile Verhaeren 25 Ouverte en large eclair, parmi les brumes, Une avenue ; Et Saint Georges, fermentant d'ors, Avec des plumes et des ecumes, Au poitrail blanc de son cheval, sans mors, Descend.
L' equipage diamentaire Fait de sa chute, im triomphal chemin De la pitie du ciel, vers notre terra. But it has too few of Verhaeren's peculiar excellen- cies to be worth quoting in full. As my purpose in this book is to show and study each poet's individual characteristics, I shall only quote those poems which most evidently illustrate them. And now we have come to Verhaeren's great period ; to the books which have made him the great- est poet of Belgium, and one of the greatest poets of the world.
In these three books we have all Verhaeren's excellencies in rich profusion. Here are the towns, with their smoking factories, crowded streets, noisy theatres, and busy wharves ; here are the broad, level plains of Flanders starred with windmills, the little villages and farms, and the slow river where fishermen come. And here are painted a whole gallery of trades: We see the 26 Six French Poets peasants selling everything they possess to follow the long, white roads to the city — white tentacles for the swallowing city.
In these volumes, Verhaeren first shows that remarkable series of weather pieces to which I referred in the beginning of this essay. Verhaeren had found him- self. At a time when France was in the midst of Symbolisme; when nature, divorced from the pa- thetic fallacy, made little general appeal ; when every-day life was considered dull, and not to be thought about if possible; — Verhaeren wrote of nature, of daily happenings, and of modern inven- tions.
He not only wrote, he not only sang ; he shrieked, and cut capers, and pounded on a drum. Writing in French, Verhaeren has never been able to restrain himself within the canons of French taste. His effervescing nature found the French clarity and precision, that happy medium so cherished by the Gallic mind, as hampering as he would have found Greek artistic ideals had he lived several centuries earlier. He must put three rhymes one after the other if he felt like it ; he must have a couple of assonances in a line, or go on alliterating down half a page. There was nothing in his nature to make the ideas of the Symbolistes attractive to him ; he would none of them.
The mysticism of which I have spoken modified itself into a great humanitarian realization. He believed in mankind, in the future. Not precisely nothing is precise Emile Verhaeren 27 with Verhaeren , but vaguely, magnificently, with all the faith his ancestors had placed in the Church. A Frenchman would have felt constrained to put some definiteness into these hopes.
To give some form to what certainly amounted to a religion. Verhaeren was troubled by no such teasing diffi- culty. He simply burned with a nebulous ardour, and was happy and fecund. This is one of the reasons why Verhaeren's poetry is so much better understood and appreciated by Englishmen and Americans — Anglo-Saxons in short — and by Ger- mans, than any other French poetry.
There is a certain Teutonic grandeur of mind in Verhaeren which is extremely sympathetic to all Anglo-Saxons and Germans. Where the French intellect seems coldly analytic and calm, Verhaeren charms by his fiery activity. One of the devices which Verhaeren employs with consummate skill, is onomatopoeia, or using words which sound like the things described. This is at once wedded to, and apart from, the sort of sound I have mentioned above. He carries this effect through whole poems, and it is one of the reasons for the vividness of his poems on nature.
EUe s'effile ainsi, depuis hier soir, Des haillons mous qui pendent, Au ciel maussade et noir.
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EUe s'etire, patiente et lente, Sur les chemins, depuis hier soir, Sur les chemins et les venelles, Continuelle. Au long des lieues, Qui vont des champs, vers les banlieues. Par les routes interminablement courbees, Passent, peinant, suant, fumant, En un profil d'enterrement, Les attelages, baches bombees ; Dans les omieres regulieres Paralleles si longuement Qu'elles semblent, la nuit, se joindre au firmament, L'eau degoutte, pendant des heures ; Et les arbres pleurent et les demeures, Mouilles qu'ils sont de longue pluie, Tenacement, indefinie.
Emile Verhaeren 29 Les rivieres, a travers leurs digues pourries, Se degonflent sur les prairies, Ou flotte au loin du foin noye ; Le vent gifle aulnes et noyers ; Sinistrement, dans I'eau jusqu'a mi-corps, De grands bceufs noirs beuglent vers les cieux tors ; Le soir approche, avec ses ombres, Dont les plaines et les taillis s'encombrent, Et c'est toujours la pluie La longue pluie Fine et dense, comme la suie. Linges et chapelets de loques Qui s'effiloquent, Au long de batons droits ; Bleus colombiers coUes au toit ; Carreaux, avec, sur leur vitre sinistre, Un emplatre de papier bistre ; Logis dont les gouttieres regulieres Forment des croix sur des pignons de pierre ; Moulins plantes uniformes et momes, Sur leur butte, comme des comes ; Clochers et chapelles voisines, 30 Six French Poets La pluie, La longue pluie, Pendant I'hiver, les assassine.
La pluie, La longue pluie, avec ses longs fils gris, Avec ses cheveux d'eau, avec ses rides, La longue pluie Des vieux pays, Etemelle et torpide! The long sweeping I's of the first stanza give the effect of the interminable lines of rain in an extraor- dinary manner, and the repetition of Even apart from the beauty and surprise of the rhymes, the movement of this poem, and its pictorial quality, make it one of Verhaeren's masterpieces.
I only wish I had space to give them all. Two other poems in this book I cannot pass by. They are pictures of village Hfe, full of feeling and understanding, and rich in that pictorial sense which never deserts Verhaeren. The first one, Le Meunier, Emile Verhaeren 31 is made up of the beauty of terror — terror worked up, little by little, from the first line to the last.
Verhaeren is no mere descriptive poet. Neither is he a surface realist. His realism contains the psy- chologic as well as the physiologic. Spadeful by spadeful, the earth rattles down on the cofifin, and with each spadeful the grave-digger's terror grows, with the silence of the night, and the gradual per- vading, haunting, of the personality of the dead miller, all about, till "the wind passes by as though it were someone," and the grave-digger throws down his spade and flees.
After that, "total silence comes. Le jour dardait sa clarte fausse Sur la beche du fossoyeur ; Un chien errait pres de la fosse, L'aboi tendu vers la lueur. La beche, a chacune des pellet6es, Telle un miroir se deplagait, Luisait, mordait et s'enfongait, Sous les terres violentdes. Le soleil chut sous les ombres suspectes. Au village la-bas, Personne au mort n'avait pret6 deux draps. Au village la-bas, Nul n'avait dit une pridre. Au village la-bas, Personne au mort n'avait sonne le glas.
Le fossoyeur se sentit seul Devant ce defunt sans linceul Dont tous avaient gardd la haine Et la crainte, dans les veines. Les plus anciens ne savaient pas Depuis quels jours, loin du village, II perdurait, la-bas, Guettant I'envol et les voyages Et les signes des feux dans les nuages. II effrayait par le silence Dont il avait, sans bruit, Tisse son existence ; II effrayait encor Par les yeux d'or De son moulin tout a coup clairs, la nuit. Le fossoyeur voyait I'ombre et ses houles Grandir comme des foules Et le village et ses closes fenetres Se fondre au loin et disparaitre.
L'universelle inquietude Peuplait de oris la solitude ; En voiles noirs et bruns, Le vent passait comme quelqu'un ; Tout le vague des horizons hostiles Se precisait en frolements febriles Jusqu'au moment ou, les yeux fous, Jetant sa beche n'importe ou, Avec les bras multiples de la nuit En menaces, derriere lui, Comme un larron, il s'encourut. A splendid impressionist picture, with the burning hay-ricks starting up, one after the other, out of the blackness.
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Et voici, clairs, de la boue et de Tor, Dans le ciel noir qui s'empanache, — Quand brusquement una autre meule au loin s'allume! EUe est immense — et comme un trousseau rouge Qu'on agite de sulfureux serpents, Les feux — ils sont passants sur les arpents Et les fermes et les hameaux, ou bouge, De vitre a vitre, un caillot rouge. Tandis qu'au loin, obstinement silencieux, Des fous, avec de la stupeur aux yeux — regardent. Le vent chasse des cailloux d'or, Dans un dechirement de voiles. Le feu devient clameur hurlee en flamme Vers les echos, vers les la-bas, Sur I'autre bord, ou brusquement les au-dela Du fleuve s'eclairent comme un songe: La mort passagere du firmament, Que vers les fins de I'epouvante, Le del entier semble partir.
One strange thing about Verhaeren is his true greatness. No matter how onomatopceic he be- comes, no matter how much he alhterates, or what- ever other devices he makes use of, he never becomes 38 Six French Poets claptrap. Every young poet knows how dangerous the methods I am speaking of are, with what terrible ease they give a poem a meretricious turn, and immediately a certain vaudevillian flavour has crept in.
No matter what Verhaeren does, his work remains great, and full of what Matthew Arnold calls " high seriousness. A great genius will disobey all rules and yet produce works of art, perforce. Verhaeren's message has become so much a part of our modern temper that we hardly realize how new and original it was in poetry twenty years ago. Jules Romain in La Vie Unanime has gone Ver- haeren one better, but would he have been there at all if Verhaeren had not preceded him?
Remy de Gourmont, over-subtilized French intellect that he is, thinks that Verhaeren hates the groaning towns, the lonely villages. Which only proves that even remarkable minds have their limitations. A brood- ing Northerner, Verhaeren sees the sorrow, the travail, the sordidness, going on all about him, and loves the world just the same, and wildly believes in a future in which it shall somehow grind itself back to beauty. Les Villes Tentaculaires is full of this sordidness, a sordidness overlaid with grandeur, as iridescent colour plays over the skin of a dying fish. But it is also full of the constant, inevitable pushing on, the movement, one might call it, of change.
Comme un torse de pierre et de metal debout, Avec, en son mystere immonde, Le coeur battant et haletant du monde, Le monument de I'or, dans les tenebres, bout. Autour de lui, les banques noires Dressent des lourds frontons que soutiennent, des bras. Les Hercules d'airain dont les gros muscles las Semblent lever des coffres-forts vers la victoire.
Le carrefour, d'ou il erige sa bataille, Suce la fievre et le tumulte De chaque ardeur vers son aimant occulte ; Le carrefour et ses squares et ses murailles Et ses grappes de gaz sans nombre, Qui font bouger des paquets d'ombre Et de lueurs, sur les trottoirs. Tant de reves, tels des feux roux, Entremelent leur flamme et leurs remous, De haut en bas, du palais fou! Le gain coupable et monstrueux 40 Six French Poets S'y resserre, comme des nceucls, Et son desir se dissemine et se propage Partant chauffer de seuil a seuil, Dans la ville, les contigus orgueils. Les comptoirs lourds grondent comme un orage, Les luxes gros se jalousent et r agent Et les faillites en tempetes, Soudainement, a coups brutaux, Battent et chavirent les tetes Des grands bourgeois monumentaux.
L'apres-midi, a tel moment, La fidvre encore augmente Et penetre le monument Et dans les murs fermente. On croit la voir se raviver aux lampes Immobiles, comme des hampes, Et se couler, de rampe en rampe, Et s'ameuter et eclater Et crepiter, sur les paliers Et les marbres des escaliers. En paquets pleins, en lourds trousseaux, Sont rejetes et cahotes et ballottes Et s'effarent en ces bagarres, Jusqu'a ce que leurs sommes lasses, Masses contre masses, Se cassent. Tels jours, quand les debacles se decident, La mort les paraphe de suicides Et les chutes s'effritent en mines Qui s'illuminent En obseques exaltatives.
On se trahit, on se sourit et Ton se mord Et Ton travaille a d'autres morts. La haine ronfle, ainsi qu'une machine, Autour de -ceux qu'elle assassine. The dramatic intensity of this poem equals that of Le Meunier. I have already spoken of his visualizing gift, of his power of reproducing sound in words ; the third side of his greatness is the sense of drama. In spite of the decoration in La Bourse, in spite of such lines, beautiful in themselves, as La-bas!
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Vous le verrez se dresser devant vous, fier, et vous dire avec orgueil:. Mais savez-vous pour qui? Pour une jeune juive de seize ans. Il lui donna un violent coup de pied, avant d'entrer dans la salle d'attente. Si je tarde, attends-moi sur cette banquette. Elle tendit la main. Il aurait voulu voir toutes ces femmes se mettre en rang devant lui. Perplexe, il se demanda: