verhaeren was one of those men who feel all their life long “l’envie” (to use his own admirably expressive phrase), “l’envie de tailler en drapeaux l’étoffe de la vie.” the stuff of life can be put to worse uses. to cut it into flags is, on the whole, more admirable than to cut it, shall we say, into cerecloths, or money-bags, or parisian underclothing. a flag is a brave, a cheerful and a noble object. these are qualities for which we are prepared to forgive the flag its over-emphasis, its lack of subtlety, its touch of childishness. one can think of a number of writers who have marched through literary history like an army with banners. there was victor hugo, for example—one of verhaeren’s admired masters. there was balzac, to whose views of life verhaeren’s was, in some points, curiously akin. among the minor makers of oriflammes there is our own mr. chesterton, with his heroic air of being for ever on the point of setting out on a crusade, glorious with bunting and mounted on a rocking-horse.
the flag-maker is a man of energy and 156strong vitality. he likes to imagine that all that surrounds him is as large, as full of sap and as vigorous as he feels himself to be. he pictures the world as a place where the colours are strong and brightly contrasted, where a vigorous chiaroscuro leaves no doubt as to the true nature of light and darkness, and where all life pulsates, quivering and taut, like a banner in the wind. from the first we find in verhaeren all the characteristics of the tailor of banners. in his earliest book of verse, les flamands, we see him already delighting in such lines as
leurs deux poings monstrueux pataugeaient dans la pate.
already too we find him making copious use—or was it abuse?—as victor hugo had done before him, of words like “vaste,” “énorme,” “infini,” “infiniment,” “infinité,” “univers.” thus, in “l’ame de la ville,” he talks of an “énorme” viaduct, an “immense” train, a “monstrueux” sun, even of the “énorme” atmosphere. for verhaeren all roads lead to the infinite, wherever and whatever that may be.
les grand’routes tracent des croix
a l’infini, à travers bois;
les grand’routes tracent des croix lointaines
a l’infini, à travers plaines.
157infinity is one of those notions which are not to be lightly played with. the makers of flags like it because it can be contrasted so effectively with the microscopic finitude of man. writers like hugo and verhaeren talk so often and so easily about infinity that the idea ceases in their poetry to have any meaning at all.
i have said that, in certain respects, verhaeren, in his view of life, is not unlike balzac. this resemblance is most marked in some of the poems of his middle period, especially those in which he deals with aspects of contemporary life. les villes tentaculaires contains poems which are wholly balzacian in conception. take, for example, verhaeren’s rhapsody on the stock exchange:
une fureur réenflammée
au mirage du moindre espoir
monte soudain de l’entonnoir
de bruit et de fumée,
où l’on se bat, à coups de vols, en bas.
langues sèches, regards aigus, gestes inverses,
et cervelles, qu’en tourbillons les millions traversent,
echangent là leur peur et leur terreur ...
aux fins de mois, quand les débacles se décident
la mort les paraphe de suicides,
mais au jour même aux heures blêmes,
les volontés dans la fièvre revivent,
l’acharnement sournois
reprend comme autrefois.
158one cannot read these lines without thinking of balzac’s feverish money-makers, of the baron de nucingen, du tillet, the kellers and all the lesser misers and usurers, and all their victims. with their worked-up and rather melodramatic excitement, they breathe the very spirit of balzac’s prodigious film-scenario version of life.
verhaeren’s flag-making instinct led him to take special delight in all that is more than ordinarily large and strenuous. he extols and magnifies the gross violence of the flemish peasantry, their almost infinite capacity for taking food and drink, their industry, their animalism. in true rooseveltian style, he admired energy for its own sake. all his romping rhythms were dictated to him by the need to express this passion for the strenuous. his curious assonances and alliterations—
luttent et s’entrebuttent en disputes—
arise from this same desire to recapture the sense of violence and immediate life.
it is interesting to compare the violence and energy of verhaeren with the violence of an earlier poet—rimbaud, the marvellous boy, if ever there was one. rimbaud cut the stuff of life into flags, but into flags that 159never fluttered on this earth. his violence penetrated, in some sort, beyond the bounds of ordinary life. in some of his poems rimbaud seems actually to have reached the nameless goal towards which he was striving, to have arrived at that world of unheard-of spiritual vigour and beauty whose nature he can only describe in an exclamatory metaphor:
millions d’oiseaux d’or, ? future vigueur!
but the vigour of verhaeren is never anything so fine and spiritual as this “million of golden birds.” it is merely the vigour and violence of ordinary life speeded up to cinema intensity.
it is a noticeable fact that verhaeren was generally at his best when he took a holiday from the making and waving of flags. his flemish bucolics and the love poems of les heures, written for the most part in traditional form, and for the most part shorter and more concentrated than his poems of violence and energy, remain the most moving portion of his work. very interesting, too, are the poems belonging to that early phase of doubt and depression which saw the publication of les débacles and les flambeaux noirs. the energy and life of the later books is there, 160but in some sort concentrated, preserved and intensified, because turned inwards upon itself. of many of the later poems one feels that they were written much too easily. these must have been brought very painfully and laboriously to the birth.
