Émile Verhaeren. Stefan Zweig

soul of the land. Are not the ancient Teutonic cities of Bruges, Courtrai, and Ypres spiritualised in the stanzas of Rodenbach, in the pastels of Fernand Khnopff, in the mystic statues of Georges Minne? Have not the sowers of corn and the workers in mines become stone in the busts of Constantin Meunier? Does not a great drunkenness glow in Georges Eekhoud's descriptions? The mystic art of Maeterlinck and Huysmans drinks its deepest strength from old cloisters and béguinages; the sun of the fields of Flanders glows in the pictures of Théo van Rysselberghe and Claus. The delicate walking of maidens and the singing of belfries have been made music in the stanzas of the gentle Charles van Lerberghe; the vehement sensuality of a savage race has been spiritualised in the refined eroticism of Félicien Rops. The Walloons have their representative in Albert Mockel; and how many others might still be named of the great creators: the sculptor van der Stappen; the painters Heymans, Stevens; the writers des Ombiaux, Demolder, Glesener, Crommelynck; who have all in their confident and irresistible advance conquered the esteem of France and the admiration of Europe. For they, and just they, were gifted with a sense of the great complex European feeling which in their work is glimpsed in its birth and growth; for they did not in their idea of a native land stop at the boundaries of Belgium, but included all the neighbouring countries, because they were at the same time patriots and cosmopolitans: Belgium was to them not only the place where all roads meet, but also that whence all roads start.

      Each of these had shaped his native land from his own angle of vision; a whole phalanx of artists had added picture to picture. Till then this great one came, Verhaeren, who saw, felt, and loved everything in Flanders, 'toute la Flandre.' Only in his work did it become a unity; for he has sung everything, land and sea, towns and workshops, cities dead and cities at their birth. He has not conceived of this Flanders of his as a separate phase, as a province, but as the heart of Europe, with the strength of its blood pulsing inwards from outside and outside from inwards; he has opened out horizons beyond the frontiers, and heightened and connected them; and with the same inspiration he has molten and welded the individual together with the whole until out of his work a life-work grew—the lyric epic of Flanders. What de Coster half a century before had not dared to fashion from the present, in which he despaired of finding pride, power, and the heroism of life, Verhaeren has realised; and thus he has become the 'carillonneur de la Flandre,' the bell-ringer who, as in olden days from the watch-tower, has summoned the whole land to the defence of its will to live, and the nation to the pride and consciousness of its power.

      This Verhaeren could only do, because he in himself represents all the contrasts, all the advantages of the Belgian race. He too is a ferment of contrasts, a new man made of split and divergent forces now victoriously harmonised. From the French he has his language and his form; from the Germans his instinctive seeking of God, his earnestness, his gravity, his need of metaphysics, and his impulse to pantheism. Political instincts, religious instincts, Catholicism and socialism, have struggled in him; he is at once a dweller in great cities and a cottager in the open country; and the deepest impulse of his people, their lack of moderation and their greed of life, is in the last instance the maxim of his poetic art. Only that their pleasure in intoxication has in him become joy in a noble drunkenness, in ecstasy; only that their carnal joy has become a delight in colour; that their mad raging is now in him a pleasure in a rhythm that roars and thunders and bursts in foam. The deepest thing in his race, an inflexible vitality which is not to be shaken by crises or catastrophes, has in him become universal law, a conscious, intensified zest in life. For when a country has become strong and rejoices in its strength, it needs, like every plethora, a cry, an exultation. Just as Walt Whitman was the exultation of America in its new strength, Verhaeren is the triumph of the Belgian race, and of the European race too. For this glad confession of life is so strong, so glowing, so virile that it cannot be thought of as breaking forth from the heart of one individual, but is evidently the delight of a fresh young nation in its beautiful and yet unfathomed power.

      FOOTNOTES:

      [1] 'Ma Race' (Les Forces Tumultueuses).

YOUTH IN FLANDERS

       Table of Contents

      Seize, dix-sept et dix-huit ans!

       O ce désir d'être avant l'âge et le vrai temps

       Celui

       Dont chacun dit

       Il boit à larges brocs et met à mal les filles!

       É.V., Les Tendresses Premières.

      The history of modern Belgian literature begins, by a whim of chance, in one and the same house. In Ghent, the favourite city of the Emperor Charles V., in the old, heavy Flemish town that is still girdled with ramparts, lies, remote from the noisy streets, the grey Jesuit college of Sainte-Barbe. A cloister with thick, cold, frowning walls, mute corridors, silent refectories, reminding one somewhat of the beautiful colleges in Oxford, save that here there is no ivy softening the walls, and no flowers to lay their variegated carpet over the green courts. Here, in the seventies, two strange pairs of boys meet on the school-benches; here among thousands of names are four which are destined in later days to be the pride of their country. First, Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren, then Maeterlinck and Charles van Lerberghe—two pairs of friendships, both of which are now torn asunder by death. The weaker, the more delicate of the four, Georges Rodenbach and Charles van Lerberghe, have died; Emile Verhaeren and Maeterlinck, the two heroes of Flanders, are still growing and not yet at the zenith of their fame. But all four began their course in the old college. The Jesuit fathers taught them their humanities, and even to write poems—in Latin, it is true, to begin with; and in this exercise, strange to say, Maeterlinck was excelled by van Lerberghe with his more instinctive sense of form, and Verhaeren by the more supple Georges Rodenbach. With rigorous earnestness the fathers trained them to respect the past, to have faith in conventional things, to think in old grooves, and to hate innovations. The aim was not only to keep them Catholics, but to win them for the priesthood: these cloister walls were to protect them from the hostile breath of the new world, from the freshening wind which, in Flanders as everywhere else, was assailing the growing generation.

      But in these four pupils the aim was not realised, least of all in Verhaeren, perhaps for the very reason that he, as the scion of a strictly orthodox family, was the most fitted to be a priest; because his mind did not absorb conviction mechanically, but achieved it by vital processes; because his inmost being was self-surrender and a glowing devotion to great ideas. However, the call of the open country, in which he had grown up, was too strong in him; the voice of life was too loud in his blood for so early a renunciation of all; his mind was too tameless to be satisfied with the established and the traditional. The impressions of his childhood were more vivid than the teaching of his masters. For Verhaeren was born in the country, at St. Amand on the Scheldt (on the 21st of May 1855), where the landscape rolls to the vast horizons of the heath and the sea. Here in the happiest manner kindly circumstances wove the garland of his earlier years. His parents were well-to-do people who had retired from the din of the town to this little corner of Flanders; here they had a cottage of their own, with a front garden ablaze with flowers of all colours. And immediately behind the house began the great golden fields, the tangle of flowering hedgerows; and close by was the river with its slow waves hasting no longer, feeling the nearness of their goal, the infinite ocean. Of the untrammelled days of his boyhood the ageing poet has told us in his wonderful book Les Tendresses Premières. He has told us of the boy he was when he ran across country; clambered into the corn-loft where the glittering grain was heaped; climbed steeples; watched the peasants at their sowing and reaping; and listened to the maids at the washing-tub singing old Flemish songs. He watched all trades; he rummaged in every corner. He would sit with the watch-maker, marvelling at the humming little wheels that fashioned the hour; and no less to see the glowing maw of the oven in the bakery swallowing the corn which only the day before had glided through his fingers in rustling ears, and was now already bread, golden, warm, and odorous. At games he would watch in astonishment the glad strength of the young fellows tumbling the reeling