Contemporary Belgian Poetry Part 1

Contemporary Belgian Poetry.

by Various.

INTRODUCTION.

Otto Hauser refers the Belgian renascence in art and literature to the influence of the pre-Raphaelites. The influence of painting is at all events certain.[1] That of music is not less marked.[2] Baudelaire has been continued by Rodenbach, Giraud, and Gilkin. Verlaine's method in _Fetes galantes_ is imitated in Giraud's _Heros et Pierrots_ (Fischbacher, Paris). The naturalistic style of Zola was independently initiated in Belgium by Camille Lemonnier, who directly influenced Verhaeren. But the most potent influence is that of Mallarme, whose symbolism has transformed contemporary poetry. It was a feature of the symbolists to return to the free metres and the simplicity of the folk-song; and there are echoes of popular poetry in the verse of Braun, Elskamp, Gerardy, Kinon, van Lerberghe, and Mockel.

Belgium is a country of mixed nationalities. The two languages spoken are Flemish and French. Flemish is a Low German dialect, the written form of which is identical with Dutch. Practically all educated Flemings speak French, which is the official language; the French Belgians, who rarely know Flemish,[3] are called Walloons. Only those authors who write in French are represented in the present volume, and they may be cla.s.sed as follows:

Flemings:--Elskamp (French mother), Fontainas (French admixture), Giraud, Kinon (Walloon admixture), van Lerberghe, Le Roy, Maeterlinck, Ramaekers, Verhaeren.

Walloons:--Bonmariage (English mother), Braun (German grandfather), Isi-Collin, Jean Dominique, Gerardy (Prussian Walloon), Gilkin (Flemish mother), Gille, Marlow (English grandfather), Mockel (distant German extraction), Rency, Severin.

The Belgian poets are again divided into two very hostile camps with regard to metrical questions. The Parna.s.sians (the term is used for want of a better) cling to the traditional forms of French verse (what Byron called "monotony in wire"), and to the time-honoured diction; whereas the _verslibristes_ use the free forms of verse imported into France from Germany by Jules Laforgue, and perfected by (among others) the American Viele-Griffin. It must be noted, however, that there is a tendency among the _verslibristes_ to return to the cla.s.sical style: Verhaeren, who wrote in _vers libres_ after his first two volumes, has, in his last book, _Les Rythmes souverains,_ approximated to the regular alexandrine. Van Lerberghe, in a letter written in 1905, condemns the _vers libre_; but his own work is an immortal monument of its practicability.[4] The chief Parna.s.sians are Giraud, Gilkin (whose _Promethee,_ however, is in _vers libres_), Gille, and Severin, Max Elskamp is a _verslibriste_ only in his use of a.s.sonance.

Belgian literature begins, for all practical purposes, with Charles de Coster's national epic _Uylenspiegel_. De Coster died young, and was followed by the novelist Camille Lemonnier (1844-). Then comes the flood-tide, not in literature only, for Fernand Khnopff, Georges Minnes, Theo van Rysselberghe (the bosom friend of Verhaeren), and Constantin Meunier are as distinguished in painting and sculpture as, for instance, Georges Eekhoud and Joris-Karl Huysmans are in the novel.

The beginnings of the modern movement, which was directed, in the first instance, against Philistinism, may be traced back to the group of bellicose students who were gathered together at the University of Louvain about 1880.[5] Some of them, among whom were emile Verhaeren and Ernest van Dyk (the famous Wagner tenor) founded a magazine, _La Semaine des Etudiants,_ which was soon suppressed by the University authorities.

Other students who later became famous were Iwan Gilkin and Albert Giraud; and Edmond Deman, who was to become Verhaeren's publisher and a maker of beautiful books. Another student, Max Waller, who, till his early death in 1889, was the imp of mischief in the literary world of Belgium, founded, in rivalry with _La Semaine,_ the magazine _Le Type_, which was also suppressed. Later on Max Waller founded, in 1882, at Brussels, together with Georges Eekhoud and Gilkin, _La Jeune Belgique_, a review to which all the young bloods contributed, making common cause until they divided into _verslibristes_ and Parna.s.sians, after which the review was carried on, under the successive editorship of Waller, Gille, and Gilkin, as the organ of the French party ("l'art pour l'art et le culte de la forme"[6]). Other reviews which provided a battling-ground were _L'Art Moderne_[7] to which Verhaeren contributed, and _La Wallonie,_ which Albert Mockel founded at Liege in 1884.

The exuberant vitality of these students, though it often led them into extremes, laid the foundation of a literature which is in many respects the most remarkable of contemporary Europe. Now that Tolstoy is dead, Maeterlinck and Verhaeren stand at the head of the literature of the whole world; and they are, as Johannes Schlaf has maintained, the perfect types of the "new European." It is absurd to consider them as Frenchmen; they are as much the product of their country as Ibsen is of Norway.

Modern Belgium, "between ardent France and grave Germany," the focus of all the roads of Europe, is as rich in intellectual gifts as it is teeming with material wealth. "The vitality of the Belgians," says Stefan Zweig in his splendid book on Verhaeren, "is magnificent. In no other part of Europe is life lived with such intensity, such gaiety. In no other country as in Flanders is excess in sensuality and pleasure a function of strength. The Flemings must be seen in their sensual life, in the avidity they bring to it, in the conscious joy they feel in it, in the endurance they show. It was in orgies that Jordaens found the models of his pictures: in every kermesse, in every funeral feast you could find them to this very day. Statistics show us that Belgium stands at the head of Europe in its consumption of alcohol. Out of every two houses one is an inn. Every town, every village has its brewery, and the brewers are the richest traders in the country. Nowhere else are festivals so animated, so noisy, so unrestrained. Nowhere else is life so loved, and lived with such superabundance, at such fever-heat." It is a land that has conquered the sea, and Spain, and is still unspent, raging with greedy appet.i.tes of body and brain. Verhaeren has vaunted it in himself:

"Je suis le fils de cette race Dont les cerveaux plus que les dents Sont solides et sont ardents Et sont voraces.

Je suis le fils de cette race Tenace, Qui veut, apres avoir voulu, Encore, encore et encore plus."[8]

The greatest of all French poets, past and present, is emile Verhaeren.

He was born in 1855 at Saint Amand, a village on the Scheldt to the east of Antwerp. He has described the impressions of his childhood among the polders in his charming book _Les Tendresses premieres_ (1904), the processions of ships sailing, like a dream plumed with wind, down the river under the stars, the dikes, "la verte immensite des plaines et des plaines"; and in the superb symbolism of _Les Villages illusoires_ he has magnified the villagers at their trades. He was educated at the Jesuit school Sainte-Barbe in Ghent, with Georges Rodenbach for a schoolfellow. Then he studied law at Louvain, made some feint of practising at Brussels, and, in 1883, burst upon his countrymen with his audacious book _Les Flamandes_, the fruit of close study of Flemish _genre_-painting and the poetry of Maupa.s.sant. An indignant critic called him "the Raphael of filth"; but he rehabilitated himself by "_Les Moines_" (1886), sonorous poems mirroring life in a Flemish monastery, painting monks whose asceticism is as savage and voluptuous as the huge joy in life ill.u.s.trated in _Les Flamandes._

These two books glow with health. But the poet had impaired his const.i.tution by riotous living; and the trilogy which now followed, _Les Soirs_ (1887), _Les Debacles_ (1888), and _Les Flambeaux noirs_ (1890), form one long elegy of disease. These years, his "pathological period,"

were full of the blackest pessimism and despair. He was much in London at this time, in isolation all the more desperate as he could not speak English. He was fascinated by the atmosphere of the English capital, its immensity, its desolation, its fogs, identifying his own mind with all of it: "_O mon ame du soir, ce Londres noir qui traine en toi!_" "Je suis l'immens.e.m.e.nt perdu," he cries out in despair; he yearns for his brain to give way: "When shall I have the atrocious joy of seeing madness, nerve by nerve, attack my mind?" But the very keenness of his self-observation gradually brings him healing: a mastery of the body by the brain. This intense wrestling with disease is full of significance, and one of the lessons which Verhaeren has to teach is that new conditions of existence, the din and dust of great cities, the never-resting activity of modern brains, will create a new man whose nervous system will be able to bear the strain imposed upon it. And when one sees Verhaeren turning from self-torture to lose himself in the energy of the restlessly progressing world, one thinks of John Addington Symonds growing stronger over "Leaves of Gra.s.s." His recovery and reconciliation with life are symbolized in his poem _Saint George_, one of the collection _Les Apparus dans mes Chemins_ (1891).

In his first two books he had been a realist and a Parna.s.sian. The volumes which follow are in _vers libres_, and they are, to a certain extent, symbolistic. _Les Villages illusoires_ (1894) is all symbolism: the ferryman is the stubborn artist with the green reed of hope between his teeth; the fishermen symbolize the selfish society of to-day; the ropemaker weaves the horizons of the future.

_Les Campagnes hallucinees_ (1893) describes the desolation of the country, deserted to glut the cities; _Les Villes tentaculaires_ (1895) is a cinematograph of the town, while the play _Les Aubes_ (1898) completes the trilogy, and prophesies the dawn of a better day after a cleansing with blood. In these three books contemporary life is visualized, reviled, condoned, explained, and reconciled with beauty.

Poets (except Walt Whitman, whom Verhaeren continues) have turned their eyes away from the present to the past, and sung of rural quiet rather than of urban roar. When Henley's poem on the motor-car appeared, there was a cry of derision; but the only thing that was wrong with the poem was that it was not poetry. Verhaeren, however, has smitten poetry out of workshops, anvils, locomotives, girders, braziers, pavements, gin-shops, brothels, the Stock Exchange--out of all that is monstrous and ugly to those who look at material things, as Ruskin did, with the eyes of the past. The accepted ideal of beauty is Grecian; but to Verhaeren the beauty of a thing is not in its outward form, but in the idea that moves it. In Greece the athlete was beautiful; but strength to-day is in the nerves; to-day we see more beauty in a face moulded by mind than in the thews of a discus-thrower. Smoke is beautiful in the pictures of Whistler and Monet; the toil of grimy workmen is sublime in the sculpture of Constantin Meunier.[9] For Verhaeren, as Stefan Zweig says, "a thing is the more beautiful the more finality, will, power, energy it contains. The whole universe at the present moment is overheated; it is straining in throes of endeavour; our great towns are nothing but centres of multiplied energy; their machines are the expression of forces tamed and organized; their innumerable crowds are joined together in harmonious action. Thus to Verhaeren all things appear full of beauty. He loves our epoch because it does not disperse effort, but condenses it, because it is not scattered, but concentrated for action. All that has will, and an aim in view, man, machine, crowd, town, capital; all that vibrates, works, hammers, travels; all that bears in itself fire, impulse, electricity, and feeling--all this rings in his verse. Everything lives its minute; in this multiple gear there is no dust, no useless ornamentation; but everywhere is creation; the feeling of the future directs all action. The town is a living being."

Verhaeren knows the great cities of Europe. He has felt the spell of Hamburg, as well as of Hildesheim and of little towns in Spain. We have seen him during his period of depression isolated in London, and while in England he was fascinated by the reek of soot and tar in Liverpool and Glasgow. In London he would take a ticket to anywhere on "the underground," and roll along for hours; he wandered about the docks, and dreamed among the mummies in the British Museum. And though the town of his poems may be any town, it is no doubt, at the back of his mind, London.

In _Les Heures claires_ (1896) and _Les Heures d'apres-midi_ (1905), Verhaeren sings the "douce accalmie" of his wedded life. To translate some of the poems in these collections would be like forcing one's way into a sanctuary. As this:

"Tres doucement, plus doucement encore, Berce ma tete entre tes bras, Mon front fievreux et mes yeux las; Tres doucement, plus doucement encore, Baise mes levres, et dis-moi Ces mots plus doux a chaque aurore, Quand me les dit ta voix Et que tu t'es donnee, et que je t'aime encore."

In another trilogy _Toute la Flandre_ (_Les Tendresses premieres_, 1904; _La Guirlande des Dunes_, 1907; _Les Heros_, 1908) he sings his native province. Of his plays, _Le Cloitre_, in the translation of Osman Edwards, was staged, with honour and glory to all concerned, by the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester in 1910.

The reputation of Verhaeren's schoolfellow, Georges Rodenbach (1855-98), has waned considerably since his death. He trails such weary Alexandrines as:

"Aux heures du soir morne ou l'on voudrait mourir, Ou l'on se sent le coeur trop seul, l'ame trop la.s.se, Quel rafraichiss.e.m.e.nt de se voir dans la glace."

Verhaeren and Rodenbach were followed on the benches of the College Sainte-Barbe at Ghent by Charles van Lerberghe, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Gregoire Le Roy. Van Lerberghe's first work, _Les Flaireurs_ (1889), is in a style which is said to have suggested that of Maeterlinck's first plays. His comedy _Pan_ (1906) is full of devilment. In his lyric verse there is no sediment; all is clear and rippling like a beck dancing down a hill-side in the sunshine of summer dawn. If poetry is music, he is a poet unparalleled. He sings

"Avec des mots Si frais, si virginaux, Avec des mots si purs, Qu'ils tremblent dans l'azur, Et semblent dits, Pour la premiere fois au paradis."

What a gem is this poem:--

Elle dort dans l'ombre des branches, Parmi les fleurs du bel ete.

Une fleur au soleil se penche....

N'est ce pas un cygne enchante?

Elle dort doucement et songe.

Son sein respire lentement.

Vers son sein nu la fleur allonge Son long col frele et vacillant.

Et sans qu'elle s'en effarouche, La longue, pale fleur a mis, Silencieus.e.m.e.nt, sa bouche Autour du bean sein endormi.

"Ce que nous enseigne Charles van Lerberghe," says Albert Mockel in his masterly book on his friend, "c'est la puissance de la grace. Le charme de ses vers est unique; le sentiment dont ils nous penetrent a une sorte de plenitude heureuse qui console le coeur en appelant l'ame vers la clarte. Une onde invisible nous rafraichit, nous pacifie ... Mais la force des plus grands peut seule se flechir a une pareille douceur, et il faut la surete d'un incomparable artiste pour faire de la parole ecrite cette chose lumineuse et imponderable qui semble autour de nous comme une poussiere d'or suspendue."

It is scarcely necessary to enter into details here about Maeterlinck; he needs no introduction to English readers. He has only published one volume of lyrics, _Serres Chaudes_ (1889), which is now printed with the fifteen songs he wrote later. In a music laden with sleep rise the faint, forced lilies of a super-sensitive soul, looking through gla.s.s darkly at a world whose contradictions seem irreconcilable. Verhaeren has characterized these poems as follows: "C'etait d'une inattendue angoisse, d'une extraordinaire et infinie tristesse, d'une plainte profonde et simple sortie de l'instinct scelle au fond de nous-memes.

Cela ne s'expliquait pas, mais cela perforait le fond de notre ame et trouvait sa justification dans tout l'inexplicable et dans tout l'inconnu. L'inconscient ou plutot la subconscience y reconnaissait son langage, ou plutot son balbutiement...."

Gregoire Le Roy has been an electrician, and is now Librarian of the _Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts_ at Brussels. He is the poet of retrospection, as Maeterlinck is the poet of introspection. His heart "pleure d'autrefois." He is the hermit bowed down by silver hair, bending at eventide over the embers of the past, visited by weird guests draped with legend. The weft of his verse is torn by translation, it cannot be grasped, it is wafted through shadows.

Max Elskamp is a poet who reminds one that Mariolatry is Minnesong.

There is no reason why the devout should not be edified by his poems, but his intention is rather to give a subtle idealization of Flemish life. Those who know Flemish painting will easily read themselves into the enchanting version of Flanders that he gives us, a Flanders how different to that of Verhaeren and yet how equally true!

"Et c'est alors un pays d'ailes Aux hirondelles, Flandres des tours Et de naf et bon sejour; Et c'est alors un pays d'ailes Et tout d'amour."

Thomas Braun, Victor Kinon, and Georges Ramaekers are fervent Roman Catholics. Braun's _Livre des Benedictions_ is a beautifully printed book ill.u.s.trated by the quaint woodcuts of his brother, who is a Benedictine monk. It is a thoroughly Flemish book; but a volume of verse which he has just published, _J'ai plie le genou_ (published by Deman), is Walloon in feeling. His other volume, _Philatelie_ (Bibliotheque de l'Occident, Paris, 1910) is poetry for stamp-collectors! Braun and Kinon are bucolic poets, somewhat in the manner of the French poet Francis Jammes, who aims at uncompromising fidelity to nature and the utmost simplicity of diction. But part of Kinon's work is in the style of Max Elskamp, fascinating poetry concerning pilgrimages,[10] and the devotional life of Flanders. Ramaekers, the editor of _Le Catholique,_ is inspired "par la vision si riante et si forte du Brabant jovial, intime, et monastique." _Le Chant des Trois Regnes_ is a forest of mysticism. The "Three Reigns" are those of the Father = the cult of minerals; the Son = of plants; the Holy Ghost = of Love. Some of the poems would delight an architect. His knowledge of paintings appears equally well in his other volume of verse, _Les Saisons mystiques_ (Librairie moderne, Brussels, 1910).

Andre Fontainas is a symbolist of the symbolists. Mallarme himself could not have bettered the following exciting sonnet:

Le givre: vivre libre en l'ire de l'hiver, Rumeur qui se retrait au regard d'une vitre Ou, peut-etre, fremit ephemere l'elytre De tel vol ou d'un souffle epais de menu-vair.

Le ciel gris s'est, fanfare! a soi-meme entr'ouvert: N'est-ce pas qu'y ruisselle au front morne une mitre?

Non! senile n.o.blesse ou nul n'elude un t.i.tre A se mentir moins vil que ne rampe le ver.

L'heure suit l'heure encore, aucune n'est la seule: Pareille a soi, voici venir qui l'enlinceule Pour brusque naitre d'elle et pour mourir soudain.

Un chardon bleu, pas meme, au suaire, ni cirse Offrant, reve chetif et dedain du jardin, Ne fut-ce qu'une epine a s'en former un thyrse.

But the great ma.s.s of his poetry is perfectly intelligible. He is a romanticist, but in a new sense; for whereas the old romanticists turned from the sordid present to the motley middle ages and the choral pomp of Rome, Fontainas haunts the labyrinths of his soul, and projects his conscience beyond the bounds of s.p.a.ce and time. In Fontainas, as in Gerardy, knights ride through pathless forests, but these are not the knights of Spenser. The _Faery Queen_ is a record of events in the outer world; Fontainas is a _chevalier errant_ in the inner world of the spirit, and his castles are only settling-places for the dove of thought winging out of the unknown.

Iwan Gilkin and Albert Giraud are Satanists. Gilkin's _La Nuit_, "une vision terrifiante des turpitudes humaines," is the most interesting book in Baudelaire's style since Baudelaire. He began it with the intention of continuing his pilgrimage in two following books through Purgatory and Paradise; but, as he warns his readers in the preface to _La Nuit: This is h.e.l.l!_ Gilkin seems to have had no apt.i.tude for Purgatory and Paradise after h.e.l.l; at all events, his following works have nothing to make an Englishman blush. _Le Cerisier Fleuri_ (1899) is a collection of verse in the cla.s.sical style; but Gilkin has since given his best work to the drama: _Promethee_ (1899), _Etudiants russes_ (1906), _Savonarole_ (1906). _Jonas_ (1900) is a satire predicting the conquest of Europe by Asia.

Albert Giraud is undoubtedly a poet of high rank. His colouring is marvellous. Above all, he is a very personal poet; one can always hear the beating of his heart--"a maint endroit le sentiment mal contenu creve l'enveloppe de serenite."[11] He is a pessimist and a Baudelairian: "Il se plait," says Desire Horrent, "a remuer le fond vaseux des ames, a gouter le charme morbide des voluptes rares et raffinees."

Albert Mockel is one of those very rare cases in which a good critic is at the same time a good poet. As a critic[12] he has probably no rival except Remy de Gourmont. His hall-mark is subtlety; but his learning, too, makes one gasp. (He might, no doubt, have been a professor if he had not been so brilliant). His poetry is philosophy; and the wonderful thing is that it should be such poetry. It is as light as a breeze, and like a deep river that shows its pebbles. He has in preparation a book of verse, _La Flamme Immortelle_, which will be a magnificent realization of his doctrine of _Aspiration._ Verhaeren interprets the outer world, Mockel the inner world as reflected in the outer world: for existence is double, form and shadow. Mockel has written, too, a child's story-book, _Contes pour les enfants d'hier_[13] which should not be given to children.