Émile Verhaeren. Stefan Zweig

Table of Contents

      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 their 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,