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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 skittles over; and he would wander with the playing band from village to village, from fair to fair. And, sitting on the bank of the Scheldt, he would watch the ships, with their coloured streamers, come and go, and in his dreams follow them to the vast distances, which he only knew from sailors' yarns and pictures in old books. All this, this daily physical familiarity with the things of Nature, this lived insight into the thousand activities of the working-day, became his inalienable possession. Inalienable, too, was the humane feeling he acquired that he was one at heart with the people of his village. From them he learned the names of all these thousand things, and the intelligence of the mysterious mechanism in all skilled handiwork, and all the petty cares and perplexities of these many scattered little souls of life which, combined, are the soul of a whole land. And therefore Verhaeren is the only one among modern poets in the French tongue who is really popular with his countrymen of all ranks. He still goes in and out among them as their equal, sits in their circle even now, when fame has long since shown him his place among the best and noblest, chats with the peasants in the village inn, and loves to hear them discussing the weather and the harvest and the thousand little things of their narrow world. He belongs to them, and they belong to him. He loves their life, their cares, their labour, loves this whole land with its tempests raging from the north, with its hail and snow, its thundering sea and lowering clouds. It is with pride that he claims kindred with his race and land; and indeed there is often in his gait and in his gestures something of the peasant trampling with heavy steps and hard knee after his plough; and his eyes 'are grey as his native sea, his hair is yellow like the corn of his fields.' These elemental forces are in his whole being and production. You feel that he has never lost touch with Nature, that he is still organically connected with the fields, the sea, the open air; he to whom spring is physically painful, who is depressed by relaxing air, who loves the weather of his home-land, its vehemence, and its savage, tameless strength.

For this very reason he has in later years felt, what was natively uncongenial to him—the great cities—differently and far more intensely than poets brought up in them. What to the latter appeared self-evident was to him astonishment, abomination, terror, admiration, and love. For him the atmosphere we breathe in cities was heavy, stifling, poisoned; the streets between the massed houses were too narrow, too congested; hourly, at first in pain and then with admiration, he has felt the beautiful fearfulness of the vast dimensions, the strangeness of the new forms of life. Just as we walk through mountain ravines dumbfounded and terrified by their sublimity, he has walked through streets of cities, first slowly accustoming himself to them; thus he has explored them, described them, celebrated them, and in the deepest sense lived them. Their fever has streamed into his blood; their revolts have reared in him like wild horses; their haste and unrest has whipped his nerves for half the span of a man's life. But then he has returned home again. In his fifties he has taken refuge once more in his fields, under the lonely sky of Flanders. He lives in a lonely cottage somewhere in Belgium, where the railway does not reach, enjoying himself among cheerful and simple people who fill their days with plain labour, like the friends and companions of his boyhood. With a joy intensified he goes eagerly year by year to the sea, as though his lungs and his heart needed it to breathe strongly again, to feel life with more jubilant enthusiasm. In the man of sixty there is a wonderful return of his healthy, happy childhood; and to the Flanders that inspired his first verses his last have been dedicated.

Against this atavism, against this bright and inalienable joy in life, the patres of Sainte-Barbe could do nothing. They could only deflect his great hunger of life from material things, and turn it in the direction of science, of art. The priest they sought to make of him he has really become, only he has preached everything that they proscribed, and fought against everything that they praised. At the time Verhaeren leaves school, he is already filled with that noble yet feverish greed of life, that tameless yearning for intensive enjoyments heightened to the degree of pain which is so characteristic of him. The priesthood was repugnant to him. Nor was he more allured by the prospect, held out to him, of directing his uncle's workshop. It is not yet definitely the poetic vocation which appeals to him, but he does desire a free active calling with unlimited possibilities. To gain time for his final decision, he studies jurisprudence, and becomes a barrister. In these student years in Louvain Verhaeren gave free rein to his untameable zest in life; as a true Fleming he eschewed moderation and launched into intemperance. To this very day he is fond of telling of his liking for. good Belgian beer, and of how the students got drunk, danced at all the kermesses, caroused and feasted, when the fury came over them, and got into all kinds, of mischief, which often enough brought them into conflict with the police. Uncertainty was never a feature of his character, and so his Roman Catholicism was in those years no silent and impersonal faith, but a militant orthodoxy. A handful of hotspurs—the publisher Deman was one of them, and another was the tenor van Dyck—set a newspaper going, in which they lashed away mercilessly at the corruption of the modern world, and did not forget to blow their own trumpets. The university was not slow to veto these immature manifestations; but ere long they started a second periodical, which was, however, more in harmony with the great contemporary movements. Betweenwhiles verses were written. And still more passionate is the young poet's activity when, in the year 1881, he is called to the bar in Brussels. Here he makes friends with men of great vitality: he is welcomed by a circle of painters and artists, and a cénacle of young talents is formed who have the authentic enthusiasm for art, and who feel that they are violently opposed to the conservative bourgeoisie of Brussels. Verhaeren, who at this time greedily adopts all fashionable freakishness as something new, and struts about in fantastic apparel, promptly acquires notoriety by his vehement passionateness and his first literary attempts. He had begun to write verse in his school-days. Lamartine had been his model, then Victor Hugo, who bewitches young people, that lord of magnificent gestures, that undisputed master of words. These juvenilia of Verhaeren have never been published, and probably they have little interest, for in them his tameless vitality attempted expression in immaculate Alexandrines. More and more, as his artistic insight grew, he felt that his vocation was to be a poet; the meagre success he achieved as a barrister confirmed him in this conviction, and so in the end, following the advice of Edmond Picard, he discarded the barrister's gown, which now seemed to him as narrow and stifling as he had once thought the priest's cassock to be.

And then came the hour, the first decisive hour. Lemonnier was as fond of relating it as is Verhaeren; both would speak of it with their fervent, proud joy in a friendship of over thirty years; both with heartfelt admiration, the one for the other. Once, it was a rainy day, Verhaeren burst in on Lemonnier, whom he did not know, trampling into the elder man's lodging with his heavy peasant's tread, hailing him with his hearty gesture, and blurting out: 'Je veux vous lire des vers!' It was the manuscript of his first book Les Flamandes; and now he recited, while the rain poured down outside, with his hard voice and sharp scansion, his great enthusiasm and his compelling gestures, those pictures, palpitating with life, of Flanders, that first free confession of patriotism and foaming vitality. And Lemonnier encouraged him, congratulated him, helped him, and suggested alterations, and soon the book appeared, to the terror of Verhaeren's strictly orthodox family, to the horror of the critics, who were helpless in the face of such an explosion of strength. Execrated and lauded, it immediately compelled interest. In Belgium, it is true, it was less acclaimed than declaimed against; but nevertheless it everywhere excited a commotion, and that grumbling unrest which always heralds the advent of a new force.