Читать книгу Émile Verhaeren - Stefan Zweig - Страница 9

Table of Contents

Entre la France ardente et la grave Allemagne.

É.V., 'Charles le Téméraire.'

In Belgium the roads of Europe meet. A few hours transport one from Brussels, the heart of its iron arteries, to Germany, France, Holland, and England; and from Belgian ports all countries and all races are accessible across the pathless sea. The area of the land being small, it provides a miniature but infinitely varied synthesis of the life of Europe. All contrasts stand face to face concisely and sharply outlined. The train roars through the land: now past coal-mines, past furnaces and retorts that write the fiery script of toil on an ashen sky; now through golden fields or green pastures where sleek, brindled cows are grazing; now through great cities that point to heaven with their multitudinous chimneys; and lastly to the sea, the Rialto of the north, where mountains of cargoes are shipped and unshipped, and trade traffics with a thousand hands. Belgium is an agricultural land and an industrial land; it is at the same time conservative and socialistic, Roman Catholic and free-thinking; at once wealthy and wretched. There are colossal fortunes heaped up in the monster cities; and two hours thence the bitterest poverty sweats for the dole of a living in mines and barns. And again in the cities still greater forces wrestle with one another: life and death, the past and the future. Towns monkishly secluded, girt with ponderous mediæval walls, towns on whose swart and sedgy canals lonely swans glide like milky gondolas, towns like a dream, strengthless, prisoned in sleep eternal. At no great distance glitter the modern residential cities; Brussels with its glaring boulevards, where electric inscriptions dart coruscating up and down the fronts of buildings, where motor-cars whiz along, where the streets rumble, and modern life twitches with feverish nerves. Contrast on contrast. From the right the Teutonic tide dashes in, the Protestant faith; from the left, sumptuous and rigidly orthodox, Roman Catholicism. And the race itself is the restlessly struggling product of two races, the Flemish and the Walloon. Naked, clear, and direct are the contrasts which here defy each other; and the whole battle can be surveyed at a glance.

But so strong, so persistent is the inexorable pressure of the two neighbouring races, that this blend has already become a new ferment, a new race. Elements once contrary are now unrecognisably mixed in a new and growing product. Teutons speak French, people of Romance stock are Flemish in feeling. Pol de Mont, in spite of his Gallic name, is a Flemish poet; Verhaeren, Maeterlinck, and van Lerberghe, though no Frenchman can pronounce their names rightly, are French poets. And this new Belgian race is a strong race, one of the most capable in Europe. Contact with so many foreign cultures, the vicinity of such contradictory nations, has fertilised them; healthy rural labour has steeled their limbs; the near sea has opened their eyes to the great distances. Their consciousness of themselves is of no long date: it can only be reckoned from the time when their country became independent, hardly a hundred years ago. A nation younger than America, they are in their adolescence now, and rejoicing in their new, unsought strength. And just as in America, the blend of races here, together with the fruitful, healthy fields, has procreated robust men. For the Belgian race is a race pulsing with vitality. Nowhere in Europe is life so intensely, so merrily enjoyed as in Flanders, nowhere else is sensuality and pleasure in excess so much the measure of strength. They must be seen particularly in their sensual life; it must be seen how the Flemish enjoy; with what greediness, with what a conscious pleasure and robust endurance. It is among them that Jordaens found the models for his gluttonous orgies; and they could be found still at every kermesse, at every wake. Statistics prove that in the consumption of alcohol Belgium stands to-day at the head of Europe. Every second house is an inn, an estaminet; every town, every village has its brewery; and the brewers are the wealthiest men in the country. Nowhere else are festivals so loud, boisterous, and unbridled; nowhere else is life loved and lived with such a superabundant zest and glow. Belgium is the land of excessive vitality, and ever was so. They have fought for this plenitude of life, for this enjoyment full to satiety. Their most heroic exploit, their great war with the Spaniards, was only a struggle not so much for religion as for sensual freedom. These desperate revolts, this immense effort was in reality not directed against Roman Catholicism, but against the morality, the asceticism it enforced; not so much against Spain as against the sinister malignity of the Inquisition; against the taciturn, bitter, and insidious Puritanism which sought to curtail enjoyment; against the morose reserve of Philip II. All that they wanted at that time was to preserve their bright and laughing life, their free, dionysiac enjoyment, the imperious avidity of their senses; they were determined not to be limited by any measure short of excess. And with them life conquered. Health, strength, and fecundity is to this very day the mark of the Belgian people in town and country. Poverty itself is not hollow-cheeked and stunted here. Chubby, red-cheeked children play in the streets; the peasants working in the fields are straight and sturdy; even the artisans are as muscular and strong as they are in Constantin Meunier's bronzes; the women are moulded to bear children easily; the unbroken vigour of the old men persists in a secure defiance of age. Constantin Meunier was fifty when he began his life-work here; at sixty Verhaeren is at the zenith of his creative power. Insatiable seems the strength of this race, whose deepest feeling has been chiselled by Verhaeren in proud stanzas:

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, après avoir voulu

Encore, encore et encore plus![1]

This tremendous exertion has not been in vain. To-day Belgium is relatively the richest country in Europe. Its colony of the Congo is ten times as extensive as the mother-land. The Belgians hardly know where to place their capital: Belgian money is invested in Russia, in China, in Japan; they are concerned in all enterprises; their financiers control trusts in all countries. The middle classes, too, are healthy, strong, and contented.

Such rich and healthy blood is more likely than any other to produce good art, and, above all, art full of the zest of life. For it is in countries with few possibilities of expansion that the desire for artistic activity is keenest. The imagination of great nations is for the most part absorbed by the practical demands of their development. The best strength of a great nation is claimed by politics, by administration, by the army and navy; but where political life is of necessity poor, where the problems of administration are forcibly restricted, men of genius almost exclusively seek their conquests in the domains of art. Scandinavia is one example, Belgium another, of countries in which the aristocracy of intellect have with the happiest results been forced back on art and science. In such young races the vital instinct must a priori make all artistic activity strong and healthy; and even when they produce a decadence, this reaction, this contradiction, is so decided and consequent, that strength lies in its very weakness. For only a strong light can cast strong shadows; only a strong, sensual race can bring forth the really great and earnest mystics; because a decided reaction which is conscious of its aim requires as much energy as positive creation.

The towering structure of Belgian art rests on a broad foundation. The preparation, the growing under the sod, took fifty years; and then in another fifty years it was reared aloft by the youth of one single generation. For every healthy evolution is slow, most of all in the Teutonic races, which are not so quick, supple, and dexterous as the Latin races, who learn by life itself rather than by studious application. This literature has grown ring by ring like a tree, with its roots deep in a healthy soil nourished by the unyielding perseverance of centuries. Like every confession of faith, this literature has its saints, its martyrs, and its disciples. The first of the creators, the forerunner, was Charles de Coster; and his great epic Thyl Ulenspiegel is the gospel of this new literature. His fate is sad, like that of all pioneers. In him the native blend of races is more plastically visualised than in all later writers. Of Teutonic extraction, he was born in Munich, wrote in French, and was the first man to feel as a Belgian. He earned his living painfully as a teacher at the Military School. And when his great romance appeared, it was difficult to find a publisher, and still more difficult to find appreciation, or even notice. And yet this work, with its wonderful confrontation of Ulenspiegel as the deliverer of Flanders with Philip II. as Antichrist, is to this day the most beautiful symbol of the struggle of light with darkness, of vitality with renunciation; an enduring monument in the world's literature, because it is the epic of a whole nation. With such a work of wide import did Belgian literature begin, a work that with its heroic battles stands like the Iliad as the proud and primitive beginning of a more delicate, but in its advanced culture more complex, literature. The place of this writer, who died prematurely, was taken by Camille Lemonnier, who accepted the hard task and the melancholy inheritance of pioneers—ingratitude and disillusion. Of this proud and noble character also one must speak as of a hero. For more than forty years he fought indefatigably for Belgium, a soldier leading the onset from first to last, launching book after book, creating, writing, calling to the fray and marshalling the new forces; and never resting till the adjective 'Belgian' ceased in Paris and Europe to be spoken with the contempt that attaches to 'provincial'; till, like once the name of the Gueux, what was originally a disgrace became a title of honour. Fearlessly, not to be discouraged by any failure, this superb writer sung his native land—fields, mines, towns, and men; the angry, fiery blood of youths and maidens; and over all the ardent yearning for a brighter, freer, greater religion, for rapt communion with the sublimity of Nature. With the ecstatic revelling in colour of his illustrious ancestor Rubens, who gathered all the things of life together in a glad festival of the senses, he, like a second voluptuary at the feast, has lavished colours, had his joy of all that is glowing, and glaring, and satiated, and, like every genuine artist, conceived of art as an intensifying of life, as life in intoxication. For more than forty years he created in this sense, and miraculously, just like the men of his country, like the peasants he painted, he waxed in vigour from year to year, from harvest to harvest, his books growing ever more fiery, ever more drunken with the zest and glow of life, his faith in life ever brighter and more confident. He was the first to feel the strength of his young country with conscious pride, and his voice rang out its loud appeal for new fighters till he no longer stood alone, till a company of other artists were ranged around him. Each of these he supported and firmly established, with a strong grip placing them at their vantage for the battle; and without envy, nay with joy, he saw his own work triumphantly overshadowed by the acclaimed creations of his juniors. With joy, because he probably considered not his own novels, but this creation of a literature his greatest and most lasting work. For it seemed as though in these years the whole land had become alive; as though every town, every profession, every class had sent forth a poet or a painter to immortalise them; as though this whole Belgium were eager to be symbolised in individual phases in works of art, until he should come who was destined to transform all towns and classes in a poem, enshrining in it the harmonised 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.