^ LIBRARY ^
UNIVERStTY Of
CALIFORNIA
- SAN DIEGO .
^t
CONTEMPORARY
BELGIAN LITERATURE
CONTEMPORARY
BELGIAN LITERATURE
BY
JETHRO BITHELL
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
1916
[All rights reserved)
(HRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN)
CONTENTS
CHAP. FAGB
Preface vii
I. Belgian Literature till 1880 11
II. The Standard of Revolt 42
III. Camille Lemonnier 60
IV. Georges Eekhoud 85
V. ^MILE Verhaeren io8
VI. Maurice Maeterlinck 150
VII. The Symbolist Poets 190
VIII. The Parnassian Poets 253
IX. EugIine Demolder 264
X. Flemish Novelists and Dramatists . . . 279
XI. Walloon Novelists and Dramatists . . . 289
XII. Novelists in Flemish 314
XIII. Poets in Flemish 329
XIV. Essayists, Critics, and Scholars .... 354
Bibliography 373
Note 379
Index 380
PREFACE
The present sketch of contemporary Belgian litera-
ture lays no claim to completeness. Belgium to-
day teems with writers of merit ; and to have dealt
adequately with all of them would have needed a
series of volumes padded with academic detail.
The publisher and the author have for the moment
no farther ambition than to stimulate interest, and
to give information which is so sadly lacking in
this country that some of the most distinguished
of Belgian poets are living in exile in London un-
noticed and without a welcome, making munitions
(all honour to them), or living as they can.
There have been great difficulties of selection ;
and there are many authors whom I have read with
profit who are not even mentioned. In some in-
stances it has not been easy to decide whether an
author is Belgian or otherwise. Huysmans was of
Flemish parentage, but since he was born in Paris
it is no doubt best to consider him a Frenchman.
vii
Contemporary Belgian Literature
The brothers J. H. Rosny, who rank with the very
best of contemporary French novelists, might with
some justice have been claimed as Belgian writers,
for they are Belgians born, and they lived in
Brussels, I am told, till well on in their teens. But
they have been so long resident in France that they
might possibly resent being docketed as Belgians.
There is the same difficulty with regard to Francis
de Croisset and Henry Kistemaeckers, the only
Belgian-born playwrights who have become natural-
ised on the Paris stage. Henry Van de Velde,
again, lives in Germany and writes in German ;
Paul G^rardy, most Belgian of Belgians, is a
denaturalised Prussian ; while Leon Souguenet is
French-born but Belgian by habit.
There is always the question whether " Belgian
literature " exists at all. ... I have indicated in the
course of the book that some eminent Belgian
writers will not hear of such a thing. And, after
all, one never hears of Swiss literature. . . . That
may be, however, because there are so few Swiss
writers of international reputation. Belgium, on
the other hand, is not only rich in distinguished
writers, but these writers have a marked Belgian
vm
Preface
individuality, and for these reasons we are surely
justified in claiming a national literature (one of the
most interesting in Europe to-day) for the little
country over which the Germans have ridden
rough-shod.
To the living writers of Belgium this book
would express a practical sympathy by calling
attention to their work. They will need readers
after the war ; and they deserve them.
J. BITHELL.
IX
CONTEMPORARY
BELGIAN LITERATURE
CHAPTER I
BELGIAN LITERATURE TILL 1880
The best help in the appreciation of Belgian
literature is an understanding of the course of
Belgian history. Belgian literature, quite as much
as Belgian history, is a record of warfare, an epic of
invasions ventured and invasions repulsed, and of
the clash of hostile races within the country itself.
From without, two avid nations stretch out their
armies to seize the soil of the land ; from within,
two cultures that refuse to intermingle advance and
recede in their struggle for the heart and soul of
the state. And it is in our own days that this
age-long contest has reached the exasperation of
its violence : never was the fight between Teuton
and Frank so desperate as it is to-day, and never
II
Contemporary Belgian Literature
has the racial animosity flamed more in the elo-
quence of orators and the passion of poets than it
has done during the last thirty years between the
Yser and the Rhine.
This struggle for supremacy between two races is
at the same time a struggle between two languages,
between French and German. These languages
were first officially opposed to each other when, in
the year 842, the two sons of Louis the Pious
met near Strassburg and took an oath to support
each other. Each monarch swore in the language
spoken by the people of the other : Charles
the Bald of France in German, and Louis the
German in French. Here for the first time lan-
guage faces language in a momentous episode
of history. In the following year, 843, the soli-
darity of tribes speaking the same language was
set at nought when, by the Treaty of Verdun, the
empire of Charlemagne was divided among the
three sons of Louis the Pious, for by this treaty
the Scheldt was fixed as the western boundary of
the buffer state created for Lothar, who thus found
himself master of a portion of what is now Flanders,
while the remainder of the Flemish country was
12
Belgian Literature till 1880
attached to Neustria, that is, France. On the other
hand, the French-speaking tribes to the East of
the Scheldt were incorporated in Lothar's kingdom,
which, as far as the North is concerned, was mainly
German in language.
It must be remembered that the Teutonic
language spoken in the ninth century on either
bank of the Scheldt was essentially the same
language as that spoken along the Rhine : in
primitive stock it was the German language, which
split into Low German and High German, or, as
we say now, Dutch-Flemish and German, but still
kept all the resemblances of close kinship. Even
at the present day, from the philological point of
view, there is not much more than a difference
in consonants between Dutch or Flemish and the
High German spoken at Berlin ; and there is still
less difference between the language spoken by the
common people in North Germany, plattdeutsck,
and Dutch or Flemish.
The rivalry between Teutonic and French cul-
ture sharpened into savage animosity under the
Counts of Flanders : while in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries the aristocracy was French in
Contemporary Belgian Literature
spirit, the burghers remained staunchly Flemish ;
and the parties which then received the names
of Leliaerts (adherents of the French lilies) and
Clauwaerts (those who held by the Flemish clawing
lion) were the forerunners of the fransquillons and
the fiarningants of to-day. No comprehension of
Belgian literature is possible unless we keep these
racial and party differences in mind. We must
class Belgian writers : firstly, as Flemings or
Walloons ; secondly, as adherents of French cul-
ture or of Germanic (Dutch-Flemish) culture.
These are the simple lines of cleavage ; but they
do not, as we shall see, preclude complications.
The racial distinction in particular is often illusory :
thus, the Flemish writer Max Elskamp had a
Walloon mother, while the Walloon poet Iwan
Gilkin had a Flemish mother.
That part of Belgian literature which is French
in expression, " la litt^rature beige d'expression
fran^aise," ^ is mostly the work of the Walloons, a
race of Celtic extraction — the descendants of the old
Gallise or Belgse — who were Romanised at an early
^ This term, first used by Francis Nautet in his history of
Belgian literature, has been generally adopted.
14
Belgian Literature till 1880
date. It would serve no purpose in this sketch
to attempt to define exactly the boundaries of the
Walloon country ; but we may say roughly that
the provinces of Hainaut, Namur, and Liege are
Walloon — with the town of Liege as the literary
capital — while of the other provinces of Belgium
Antwerp, West Flanders, East Flanders, and
Limburg are almost wholly Flemish. Brabant
is mainly Flemish. Luxemburg is Walloon and
German.
That part of Belgian literature which is Dutch
in expression is the work of the Flemings. All
educated Flemings know French, and some of
them (Verhaeren, for instance) have never taken
the trouble to master Flemish. How far the native
Flemish of a writer colours his French style is
often a fascinating problem ; especially as the
young Flemish authors of the modern school
aim at reproducing their racial individuality in
their French style.
The Walloon writers are, practically without
exception, purists. They write the French of Paris.
The Flemings, on the other hand, are not always
purists : they do not all write the standardized form
15
Contemporary Belgian Literature
of their language, which is Dutch. The poems
of Guido Gezelle, for instance, are deliberately
Flemish in vocabulary and turn of phrase. Just
as Bjornstjerne Bjornsen in Norway, and the
writers of his school, the rebels of the maal-
str<zv, eschewed the pure Danish of Copen-
hagen to write what they considered to be the
Norwegian tongue, so Guido Gezelle, and with
him a tribe of " regional " writers, have preferred
to write the language they heard spoken about
them rather than lose sap and vigour by adapting
their local idiom to written Dutch. Their inten-
tions were justifiable, and the results have approved
them ; for Flemish literature, far from striking
literary Dutchmen as an uncouth patois, turns out
to have much the same charm as kaleyard has
for readers in the south of England. To foreign
readers, however, there is one great drawback : the
Dutchman can guess the meaning of a vocable,
but the foreigner who is learning the language has
to rely on a Dutch dictionary, and here he will look
in vain for many words which are purely Flemish.
There is the greatest difference between the
spirit of the literature written by the two races.
i6
Belgian Literature till 1880
Generalisations are always subject to exceptions,
but one may venture to adapt an idea of Balzac
and say that while the literature written by Walloons
is a literature of ideas, the literature written by
Flemings, whether in French or Flemish, is a
literature of images. The Walloons think ; the
Flemings paint. The Walloons are logicians,
masters of the correct outline ; the Flemings are
dreamers and colourists. The Walloons have pro-
duced no realists of distinction, for they are too
speculative and selective for that form of art ; the
Flemings, with their ideal of matter magnified,
have flung themselves into realism and out-Zolaed
Zola, but their realism is almost always a dream-
realism, in which dirt itself ferments with poetry.
The play of fancy, the scintillation of ideas of
the Walloons is opposed by the monumental vision,
the glowing ecstasy of the Flemings. On the one
side, philosophy ; on the other, mysticism. In the
Walloons there is the cult of exquisite form ; in
the Flemings there is a formlessness which often
(as in Georges Eekhoud's novels) swamps a
grandiose conception. In the Walloons there is
the inevitable ; in the Flemings, the sublime.
17 B
Contemporary Belgian Literature
A few words are necessary as to the use in
Belgium of the two languages. When, after the
taking of Antwerp by the Duke of Parma in 1585,
Belgium entered on a period of intellectual listless-
ness, the Flemish language, which had been illus-
trated by poets, artists, and scholars, fell into disuse ;
and when Napoleon incorporated Belgium in the
French Empire he eliminated it altogether and
made French the only official language. It was not
till after the Battle of Waterloo, which Professor
Paul Fredericq of Ghent calls " the dawn of the
revival in the Flemish districts," that the Flemings
began to take an interest in their mother tongue.
The union with Holland helped them little, for by
their arrogant bearing and direct injustice the Dutch
alienated both Flemings and Walloons. There
was, moreover, bound to be a complete misunder-
standing between the Protestants of Holland and
the Roman Catholics of Belgium. Literary influence
there could be none, for to the Belgian catholics
Dutch literature, by the mere fact that it was Pro-
testant literature, was anathema, and the clergy did
all they could to prevent the reading of Dutch
books. After the revolution of 1830, which resulted
18
Belgian Literature till 1880
in the separation of Belgium from Holland, the
Belgian Government made French the official
language again ; but as time went on the Flemings
awoke to a consciousness of their rights, and
the " Flemish Movement " began. In this fierce
struggle against the supremacy and over-estimation
of the French language, as of French ideals, the
first hero was J. F. Willems (i 793-1 846). It was
to Holland, and not to France, that the flamin-
gants, or at all events the free-thinking enthusiasts
among them, looked for intellectual support ; it was
Teutonic, that is, Dutch and German culture, not
French culture, that was held out as the natural
ideal of the Flemings. An old saw of the Middle
Ages, that what is French is false,-^ was revived ;
while a comparison was made between the licentious-
ness of French literature and the domestic purity
and healthfulness of Teutonic books. The French
were corrupt ; the Teutons were sound. These
complacent main ideas of the Flemish movement
were set in currency by J. F. Willems in his news-
paper articles. He has left no work worthy of
mention ; the groundwork even of his philology has
1 " Wat walsch is, valsch is."
19
Contemporary Belgian Literature
given way : he must be remembered, however, as
the herald of the Flemish renaissance.
But the man who, in the words sculptured on
his monument at Antwerp, taught the Flemings to
read, was Hendrik Conscience ( 1 8 1 2- 1 883). There
had been no popular literature before his novels
appeared ; and it would not be wrong to call him
the father of Modern Flemish literature. It is
curious that so Flemish a writer should be half
French by birth. At the time when Napoleon I
was pointing a pistol at the heart of England by
turning Antv/erp into a dockyard, Pierre Conscience,
a French boatswain who had suffered a long
captivity on British hulks, settled in the Flemish
port as a foreman in the shipbuilding yards. He
married a native of the town, a Flemish woman ;
and Hendrik Conscience was their son. The boy
had no education worth speaking of, but he read
all the books he could lay his hands on, including
many an old tome hauled out of the rubbish heaps
of his father, who, after the fall of Napoleon, had
established himself in business as a paper dealer.
Hendrik's health was delicate, and he was left very
much to himself : he swam like a water-rat in the
20
Belgian Literature till 1880
Scheldt, and ran about the streets of Antwerp,
picking up the legends of old Flemish life which
had never died out among the people. This out-
door life, full of the stuff of stories, ended when,
in his teens, it became necessary for him to earn
his keep as an usher in a school, a thankless posi-
tion, in which his abnormal shyness, which troubled
him throughout life and amounted to a disease,
cost him great suffering. When the revolution of
1830 broke out, he enlisted with the rebel forces,
and, in spite of his delicate constitution and dreamy
nature, he would seem to have acquitted himself
fairly well in actual fighting. He has related his
experiences vividly in his De Omwenteling van
1830 (The Revolution of 1830.) His best known
work is De Leeuw van Vlaanderen (The Lion of
Flanders), a historical novel written round the Battle
of the Spurs of Gold. Conscience has been cele-
brated by the flamingants as one of the heroes of
their movement ; he was anything but one-sided,
however, and his novel The Mayor of Liege, with its
glorification of the Walloons, is an adequate counter-
poise to his Lion of Flanders. Conscience was no
partisan : he was a Belgian patriot. From the
21
Contemporary Belgian Literature
point of view of international literature, his novels
have little value : they have the maudlin sentiment-
ality and the stereotyped romantic characters of
immature literature ; they are, in the least compli-
mentary sense, books for the people.
The Flemish Movement drew vigour from a
number of poets who are still read. The influence
of English poetry is glaringly manifest in the work
of Karel L. Ledeganck (1805- 1847). He is known
in his own country as "the Flemish Byron," but
there is nothing of Byron in this amiable, hard-
working Philistine except a few tricks of style.
However, Ledeganck is the classical Flemish poet
to people who do not read poetry ; his collected
verse in a gorgeous binding may be seen, with
The Lion of Flanders, on the centre table of the
Flemish salon. The best known poem in the
Flemish tongue was written by Ledeganck : it is
De Drie Ztistersteden (The Three Sister Cities ),
a tribute of sounding rhetoric to the poet's native
city of Ghent and her rivals Antwerp and Bruges —
Flemish cities these, so runs the moral, no sinks of
iniquity as in the South. (All depends on the point
of view : according to another Fleming, Georges
22
Belgian Literature till 1880
Eekhoud, Antwerp at all events has never in the
course of its history lagged behind Sodom and
Gomorrha.)
Ledeganck is the classical poet, but on the shelf
or the costly table-cover. In the mouths of men it
is Guido Gezelle (1830-1899) who is most frequently
quoted. Ledeganck is praised, but Guido Gezelle
is loved. " Guido Gezelle is the soul of Flanders,"
says a Flemish poet of our days, Hugo Verriest.
Gezelle was born, a gardener's son, at Bruges ; he
was trained as a priest at Roulers, and learned
English from the English students there. He was
appointed professeur de commerce, teacher of com-
mercial subjects (of which he knew absolutely
nothing) at Bruges. Later on he received a more
congenial post, that of teacher of literature, but his
popularity with the students and his independent
ways of teaching were offensive to his superiors,
and it was found convenient to remove him to other
duties. After filling various minor posts, he was
given a curacy at Courtrai, where he spent twenty-
eight years in what to him was exile. He had been
in his element as a teacher of literature, and his
heart is said to have been broken by his unmerited
23
Contemporary Belgian Literature
disgrace. Not till he was in his sixty-ninth year
was he recalled to Bruges to fill a position more in
keeping with his distinction, and here he died in
1899. Before his disgrace he had published various
volumes of verse, which had been favourably noticed
but had not become widely known. Two years
after his death a volume of his verse was published
at Amsterdam, and the Dutch immediately hailed
this obscure Flemish priest as a poet of the first
magnitude. Since then his popularity has grown
continually, and his best poems are now part and
parcel of Flemish (and Dutch) culture. Unfortu-
nately, political considerations have something to
do with his vogue : persecuted by the orthodox
party in his lifetime, he has been set up since his
death as the idol of the Roman Q^\}i\oX\q. flamingants,
and the result is that something more than justice is
done to him. He was often inspired, but some-
times he was merely a headlong rhymester. At
his best he was a most delicate poet — he had
something of the grace and lightness of that
other parson in a far village, Herrick, as witness
this playful hymning :
24
Belgian Literature till 1880
A MAY DAY
The cherry-tree, as you may see,
Has donned a robe of pride :
For it is May, and she to-day
Must be a happy bride.
Her every bough is hiding now.
All in the sunshine bright,
Behind a veil so pure and frail
Of blossoms shining white.
When glittering rime in winter time
Bedecked her, she was fair :
But fairer far her blossoms are
Than frosted branches bare.
Her beauty then might show to men
How their existence soon
Must pass in pain, as cold and vain
As shadows under the moon.
But no disguise to cheat the eyes
Is this her bridal dress :
O she is dressed indeed in blest
And living loveliness.
Gezelle's pupil Hugo Verriest has published verse
of distinction, and he is to-day one of the most dis-
tinguished men in Belgium : famous as orator, and
25
Contemporary Belgian Literature
as head of the Roman Catholic Flemish movement/
Like his master, he has been relegated by his
superiors to obscurity : he is the curate of Ingoy-
ghem, "the remotest village in the Flemish pro-
vinces," a village which is doubly famous, because
of its curate, and because it is the home of Guido
Gezelle's nephew, the novelist Stijn Streuvels.
Hugo Verriest, unlike Gezelle, has not been broken
by the disgrace into which a Church that hates
originality has sought to plunge him ; indeed he has
turned it into strength, and there is no Cardinal in
the land who looms larger in the eyes of intelli-
gent Roman Catholics than the fighting curate of
Ingoyghem.
Of the French-writing poets before 1880, the
most important is Andr^ van Hasselt (1806-1874).
Born at Maestricht, he was by birth a Dutchman,
and he learned French by dint of hard work.
During a visit to Paris he made the acquaintance
of Victor Hugo and Sainte-Beuve, and was by
^ The Flemish Movement is split into two hostile camps. The
Roman Catholic section hate Holland as the land of heretics ; the
liberal and free-thinking section, the heads of which are Pol de
Mont and Cyriel Buysse, hate the Roman Catholic Church and are
Dutch (if not German) in sympathy.
26
Belgian Literature till 1880
them converted to the Romantic programme. His
masterpiece is the philosophical epic Les Quatre
Incarnations du Christ. Van Hasselt explains
his intentions as follows : " This work is but the
development of several verses of Isaiah (chapters
XV., v., 6-9), a simple expose of the successive
phases of the progress of humanity as determined
by the manifestation of the Christian spirit in
the main events of history, until the complete
realisation on earth of the Saviour's teaching."
This conception would repel most modern readers,
though there are some whom it would attract ; but
in any case it is the idea rather than the execution
which forces attention. Andr6 van Hasselt has at
all events some importance in the history of French
versification by virtue of his metrical experiments.
He made determined attempts to write French
accentual poetry, that is to say, verse constructed,
as in English and Teutonic poetry, by the regular
iteration of accents, instead of, as in French, by
the counting of syllables.
Maeterlinck is not the first "popular philo-
sopher " produced by Belgium. Much of the
charm of Maeterlinck's first essays was contained
27
Contemporary Belgian Literature
in the gentle pessimism of Octave Pirmez, "the
hermit of Agoz," as he is called, from the castle
in the Ardennes where he spent his days in medita-
tion and in the contemplation of nature. At Agoz
he wrote his Heures de Philosophies. His Jours
de Solitude were inspired by his rambles in Italy.
Pirmez was a Walloon mystic. His way of tran-
scribing his thoughts and sensations reminds one
of Amiel.
There is one Belgian writer before 1880 of
whom it cannot be denied that he is of equal rank
with the best men of to-day. This is Charles de
Coster. He was born at Munich in 1827, in the
house of the Apostolic Nuncio Count Mercy
d'Argenteau, Archbishop of Tyr, who stood god-
father to him. According to some investigators,
the Archbishop was himself the boy's father, the
mother being a servant in the Apostolic household.
At all events no expense was spared in De Coster's
education, and in the natural course he would have
studied at Louvain, and advanced to high distinc-
tion, if his character had not been wayward. He
was for a time a bank clerk, but ran away and
struggled along at the democratic University of
28
Belgian Literature till 1880
Brussels, where he came under the influence of
Eugene van Bemmel, a professor of literature who
is remembered for a meritorious novel, Dom Placide.
In 1854 van Bemmel launched the Revue Trimes-
trielle (1854-68), to which De Coster contributed
his first prose. In another Brussels review, Uylen-
spiegel, which had Felicien Rops for an illustrator,
appeared one of the short stories of De Coster's
Lege7ides Flamandes, a book which was hailed with
enthusiasm by discerning critics. These legends,
the subjects of which were taken from Flemish
folklore, were written in an old French style, the
only idiom which in De Coster's opinion was fitted
to reproduce the atmosphere of old Flemish life.
The entanglement of a love affair cost the hand-
some and elegant young author the suffering which
can be read in his Lettres a Elisa, published after
his death by Charles Potvin. The old French of
Les Legendes Flaniandes was so like the real thing
that it won De Coster the reputation of a medise-
valist ; and in i860 he was appointed to the Royal
Commission which had been created to publish
old laws. This gave him a chance of studying
old manuscripts, which he did with such profit
29
Contemporary Belgian Literature
that old French became to him as natural a vehicle
of thought as the French of his own day. Old
Flemish, too, he knew thoroughly ; he was versed
in old Flemish authors such as Marnix van St.
Aldegonde. If he had had staying power, his
position would have assured him a competence ;
but he was too restless, and in 1864 he resigned,
to find that literature was a slave-driver, and to
feel more than ever what he called "the horrible
power of money." In 1861 he had published
Contes Brabangons (in modern French) ; this book
helped to establish his reputation, but did not
materially help his financial position.
With the old French classics — Roman de
Renard, Montaigne, Rabelais — he had long been
familiar, and he was able to imitate their style with
far greater sureness than Balzac had done in his
Contes Drolatiques, He had fortified his lingu-
istic knowledge by solid studies in mediaeval his-
tory, and during his employment at the Archives
du Royaume he had excerpted many old French
and Flemish documents relatino^ to the sixteenth
century. He had studied the old chroniclers ; van
Meteren's Flemish chronicle in particular he had
30
Belgian Literature till 1880
read ten times. He needed all his learning for the
masterpiece of his life, La Ldgende et les Aventures
Mrotques, j'oyetcses et glorieuses d'Ulenspiegel et de
Lamme Goedzak azt pays de Flandres et ailleurs,
which took him ten years to complete. During
the period of composition he roamed about in the
Netherlands, familiarising himself with the locali-
ties of his story, visiting the kermesses, listening
to the racy conversation of the peasants in the
taverns.
The Legend of Ulenspiegel is a complex book.
Its main purpose is superb : to write the epic of the
Flemish race, to take a Flemish hero and in him to
celebrate the deeds of the Flemings. But not in
verse, for that would take away the sting of reality.
It should be full of the immense sadness of Flemish
history, and yet not be sad : Flanders should not
show its wounds and ask for pity, it should jest at
them. It should not so much curse the Spanish
tyrant as mock him ; it should show him impotent
to quell the joy in life of a virile people. It should
be a book of glaring contrasts : Fleming and
Spaniard, tolerance and bigotry, should be opposed
as black is to white. All the life of Flanders should
31
Contemporary Belgian Literature
be concentrated on this its most heroic period, on
the sixteenth century. Flanders should lose all,
and yet be unconquered (was there some prophetic
vision here ?) ; the hero should not die — for the
spirit of Flanders cannot die — but rise again from
the grave. De Coster was fain to sacrifice position
and comfort to live for this task alone : to create
an atmosphere of poetry and legend in which his
countrymen should see themselves idealised and
yet true ; and (since Flemish has no international
significance) he would write in the old French of
Rabelais.
There is room for different conceptions of the
Fleming. It is possibly a misconception to think
of him as a taciturn mystic, with all his fires burning
inward, but ready to burst forth on provocation.
This may be true of the Dutchman ; it may be true
of the peasants of the Campine as we see them in
the novels of Eekhoud and Virres. But it is not
universally true ; or at all events taciturnity is only
one side of the Flemish character. Such a con-
ception could not serve De Coster for the purpose
of his epic, for it was to be Rabelaisian, not
Calvinistic. The quality which struck him most
32
Belgian Literature till i88o
in the Fleming was that habit of cunning which
we observed in the Boers, and which became
familiar to us by its Dutch term, "slim." To call
it "foxy" would be incorrect; for that would imply
meanness ; and the Fleming is hardly mean. He
has an eye to the main chance at all times ; but
the typical Fleming, though never frank and trans-
parent, only develops cunning to a fine art when
he is threatened by superior force. This side of
his nature is turned forth at epic length in the old
poem of Renard the Fox, which was fashioned
mainly in Flanders. De Coster was bound to
be influenced by this poem in planning his book.
But (though a Fleming so modern as Stijn
Streuvels has re-written Renard the Fox and
kept the old shape) modern thought is too direct
to be placed in the mouths of animals. De Coster
knew better than do that. He knew another
old Germanic legend which satirises the follies
and vices of the rich and shows the weak using
cunning to baffle those set above him. This
was the German chapbook of Till Eulenspiegel,
which, in its Flemish dress of Thyl Ulenspiegel,
had become so well known that the arch wag and
33 c
Contemporary Belgian Literature
arrant rogue who gives the book its name had come
to be claimed as a native of Damme, near Bruges.
The genesis of Eulenspiegel was due to the same
conditions as those which gave rise to Renard the
Fox: the political helplessness of the serf in the
Middle Ages except in so far as he could outwit his
legal masters, the grasping lord of the manor and
the corrupt priest. But whereas in the beast-epic
there is bitterness, in the wag's itinerary there is a
laughing superiority which mocks while it cheats.
Renard is a venomous rogue ; Eulenspiegel is an
irresistible jester. It occurred to De Coster to
fuse these two old tales, to blend the proverbial
characters of Renard and Eulenspiegel, to give a
valid reason for the trickery and make it work for a
noble purpose, at the same time mellowing it by
a luxuriant humour.
The legend of Till Eulenspiegel, which first
appeared at the end of the fifteenth century, is
sufficiently well known in its English form as Till
Owlglass. De Coster takes over a number of the
episodes bodily ; others he modifies to suit his
purpose. The great part of the book, however,
is the heir of his own invention.
34
Belgian Literature till 1880
If Thyl had been merely a wag or a schemer,
he would not have been the complete Fleming,
for there is another salient trait in the Flemish
character : that noisy mirth and joy in good things,
that almost frenzied sensualism which runs riot in
Eekhoud's and Demolder's novels, the Rabelaisian-
ism of the old genre pictures, the rubicund gluttony
of Jan Steen. But this quality is burlesque, not
heroic ; and Thyl was to be a hero. De Coster,
therefore, detached this Flemish feature from Thyl
and concentrated it in the person of Lamme
Goedzak, a great eater, a sensualist who cannot
live without his wife. This character was also
proverbial, and De Coster took it from a series of
old broadsides coarsely illustrating the story of a
henpecked man. Thyl was to represent the brain
and soul of Flanders, Lamme its stomach.
The story opens with idylls of childhood. Thyl
grows up as the weeds grow, and plays his pranks
and lives his idle life until his father, the very
incarnation of unsuspecting innocence, is burnt at
the stake and his mother put to the rack by the
fiends of the Inquisition. He collects his father's
ashes, and ever after wears them on his breast —
35
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" My father's ashes are beating on my heart " is now
the watchword — to fortify him in his mission of
vengeance, in his crusade to redeem the land. He
joins the Gueux, and roams the Netherlands, with
Lamme Goedzak (since the brain cannot exist
without the stomach) accompanying him, fomenting
rebellion, recruiting soldiers, acting as a spy and
messenger.
As in all tales of adventure, against the shape
of light the shape of darkness is projected, hero
faces villain. The villain is Philip II of Spain.
De Coster had already pilloried the tyrant in
Smetse Smee, a masterpiece of satire and merri-
ment, one of his LSgendes Flamandes. Thyl and
Philip are contrasted in their doings from the
cradle onwards. While Thyl is growing up by
the canals and the hedgerows, amid the cackle of
the busy guilds, with Nele, his foster-sister and his
love to be (the symbol of the devotion of Flemish
women), growing up along with him, a curtain is
lifted at the Escorial and we see :
" Now the Emperor, home from the wars, questioned
wherefore his son PhiHp had not come to greet him.
" The Archbishop who was tutor to the child answered
36
Belgian Literature till 1880
that he had refused to do so, for he loved only books
and seclusion.
" The Emperor inquired where he was at that moment.
" The tutor answered that they might seek him wher-
ever it was dark. Which they did.
" And when they had passed through a goodly number
of rooms, they came at last to a kind of closet, with an
earth floor, and lit by a sky-light. Here they beheld a
stake driven into the ground, and thereto a she-monkey
was bound, most small and frail, which had been sent from
the Indies to gladden the heart of His Royal Highness
by its youthful antics. At the foot of the stake lay sticks,
red, and still smoking ; and in the closet there was an evil
smell of singed hair.
" The pretty beast had so cruelly suffered as it perished
in this fire that its delicate frame seemed to be, not that
of an animal that had lived, but rather the fragment of a
wrinkled and twisted root ; and in its mouth, that was open
as though crying in the death agony, foam specked with
blood was to be seen, and its face was still wet with tears.
" * Who has done this ? ' asked the Emperor.
" The tutor durst not reply, and both stood and spake
not, being sad and wrathful.
** Suddenly, in this silence, the feeble sound of a cough
was heard coming from a corner of the darkness behind
them. His Majesty, turning round, perceived the infante
Don Philip, clothed all in black and sucking a lemon.
" ' Don Philip,' he said, ' come forth and salute me.'
" The infante did not stir, but looked at him with his
timid eyes in which there was no love.
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" ' Hast thou burnt this little beast in this fire ? ' asked
the Emperor.
" The infante bowed his head.
" But the Emperor spake again :
" * If thou in thy cruelty hast done this thing, have the
courage to confess it.'
" The infante made no reply.
" His Majesty snatched the lemon from his hands, and
cast it to the ground, and was about to beat his son, who
was pissing with terror, but the Archbishop stayed his
hand, whispering in his ear :
" ' His Royal Highness will some day be a great burner
of heretics.'
" The Emperor smiled, and both went out, leaving the
infante alone with his she-monkey."
The vividness of this scene, with its vital detail
of the lemon, will not be disputed, and picture
after picture of this kind is flashed across the pages.
There is no consecutive narrative, no painstaking
stringing together of dates and events : this is a
cinematograph show, not an ordered story. The
variety is astounding ; each episode is distinct ;
and the scene shifts from Flanders to Spain, from
Brussels to Nuremberg. The lightness of touch
is wonderful : the words seem to float in the short
sentences, the rhythm is without a jolt.
38
Belgian Literature till 1880
The book had been eagerly expected, and it
was adequately noticed when it at last appeared.
But it was not a bookseller's success. It was an
edition de luxe, enriched by the drawings of dis-
tinguished artists, Felicien Rops among others,
and its price was prohibitive. Moreover it was in
old French, and though this archaic diction had
added a charm to the more legendary poetry or the
more fantastic buffoonery of the Ldgendes Flam-
andes, in so long and ambitious a book as Tkyl
Ulenspiegel it proved an obstacle. It was not till
the Legende was issued in a cheap edition by
Paul Lacomblez in 1^93 that it began to make
headway. Camille Lemonnier calls the book
" the Bible of the Flemings." This is Swin-
burnian praise. Thyl Ulenspiegel is to this day
not widely known in France, where up to the
present there has been a prejudice against all
Belgian literature ; in Belgium it is known but
unread. To the Roman Catholics, of course,
it is a work of the devil ; to the flamingants it
is poison, for it is in French. There only remain
the Walloons and the freethinking Flemings to
do justice to this great work ; but it may be
39
Contemporary Belgian Literature
doubted if to many even of them it is a " Bible."
It is, perhaps, too long. It lacks unity — some of
the episodes, for instance, which are taken from
the Till Eulenspiegel chapbook, are quite ex-
traneous. Then there are some allegorical chapters
which glow with colour but lend themselves to
interpretation somewhat as does the Book of
Revelation. Only in one country has this prose
epic been justly appreciated as a book to be
read : the Germans, with their well-known logic,
claim it as a German work, as a book which
glorifies the sterling Germanic character (in the
spirit of Pan-Germanism) and shows the wicked-
ness and inferiority of the Latin races.
The book, then, did not definitely improve De
Coster's financial position, and in 1870 he was glad
to accept the professorship of history and French
literature at the Military School in Brussels. His
salary was ample ; but it was so much booty for
his creditors. Broken by misfortune and the work
of a galley-slave, he died in 1879, at Ixelles, a
suburb of Brussels, where in 191 1 a monument
was raised to him. At this ceremony Camille
Lemonnier delivered the oration which is now
40
Belgian Literature till 1880
the preface to the third edition of Thy I (191 2).
Lemonnier's praise was burning with enthusiasm.
"Love breathed," he said, "and the wind of battle
arose, and carried everything away in the holy
intoxication of creating a new native land ! . . . Here
a people died, and freed themselves ; freed a soul
that was tortured in vain by tyrants, a soul that,
like fire, flames the higher the more it is repressed.
Everywhere the stake, the wheel. . . . And yet the
good song, the song of love and courage, ends
never. It bursts forth as life does, like the soul of
the bravest of nations. From the vaults of death
itself it ascends and defies death. ... It is the
great lesson, never to despair. . . ."
41
CHAPTER II
THE STANDARD OF REVOLT
It has been said that from 1830 to 1880 Belgium
"enjoyed liberty, tranquillity, and . . . sleep."
There is point in the epigram, so far as concerns
the intellectual activity of the general public. But
the statement that Belgium before 1880 was "a
literary desert," is not strictly correct. It would
be correct to say that in the years in question
Belgian literature was unknown outside of Belgium ;
it would be correct to say that what was good in
Belgian literature was little read in Belgium itself
before 1880. Before that year Belgian literary
productivity was certainly meagre. Compared
with any of the three Scandinavian countries, for
instance, Belgian literature before 1880 had little
claim to the attention of the world ; and from the
international point of view it might be said that
of all the writers who were at their best between
i860 and 1880 only De Coster and Guido Gezelle
42
The Standard of Revolt
survive. It might of course be urged that these
two writers were during their lifetime kept in the
shade by such occasional and official versifiers as
Louis Hymans, in whose epithalamium to the
Princess Stephanie the following stanza occurs :
" Vous allez nous quitter, princesse,
Pour devenir archiduchesse
Et sur le trone des Habsbourg
Faire asseoir le sang des Cobourg."
Charles Potvin is another favourite of those days ;
he is now hardly known except by what he did
for De Coster. In the shade, however, fighting
their way as literary hacks, or writing masterpieces
(like Guido Gezelle) in utter renunciation, men of
real genius were preparing the way for the new
generation. Camille Lemonnier, the great path-
finder, had plunged into journalism in 1 863 ; and
by 1875 ^he term " Jeune-Belgique," which was to
be the watchword of the new movement, had ap-
peared in V Artiste^ a review (edited by Theodore
Hannon) which called for a programme of " natural-
ism and modernity."
It was at the University of Louvain that the
new voices were first heard. Here in 1880 and
43
Contemporary Belgian Literature
the following years a group of students were
gathered together who were nearly all of them to
become famous. One of them was Emile Verhaeren,
already conspicuous by his grande tignasse blonde
(shock of fair hair) and his long drooping mous-
tache. Another, I wan Gilkin, was so deeply
moved when he first heard Verhaeren recite at the
Literary Society of the University that he hurried
off to his lodgings and there and then indited a
sonnet to the elder student. This he promptly
dropped into Verhaeren's letter-box, and was de-
lighted the following morning to receive a return
sonnet, equally complimentary. "In fourteen tor-
tured lines," Gilkin relates, " I had said : ' You
are a poet 1 ' and Verhaeren responded in the
same terms : ' You are another.' We were great
friends after that."
The greatest light among the students, as they
then considered, was Emile van Arenbergh, "an
excellent young man, with a grave, slow voice,
solemn gestures, and a soul candid and serene."
Magnificent as his verse was his superb fur coat
with a wide Astrakhan collar, clad in which he once
appeared at the Police Court in the heats of July,
44
The Standard of Revolt
to answer for an escapade. The youngest of the
group was Albert Giraud : he was about eighteen
at the time. He was timid and nonchalant ; but
he spoke magnificently when he caught fire at the
debates of the Literary Society — then, "the words
leapt from his mouth like roaring lions."
Very intimate with the French- writing students
was Albrecht Rodenbach. Born in 1856 at
Roulers, he had been the pupil of Hugo Verriest
at the Little Seminary in that town, which
figures largely in the history of the Flemish
revival. Before his arrival in Louvain, he had
corresponded with another young Flemish-writing
poet of great ambition, Pol de Mont, a native
of Brabant (born near Ternath, 1857). Both
looked far ahead to the same ideals of a great
national literature in Flemish, and both wished
to make a beginning of the revival by creat-
ing a strong Students' Union. In this they suc-
ceeded : the first meeting of Flemish students was
held at Ghent in 1877, and by the time these
two heralds of a revolution which was to run par-
allel with that of the French-writing students, and
to have far-reaching political consequences, had
45
Contemporary Belgian Literature
become fellow-students in Louvain, their first books
had been launched. Albrecht Rodenbach's Eerste
Gedichten (First Poems) had appeared at Roulers
in 1878; Pol de Mont's first volume of verse,
Klimopki^anksens, had been published in 1876.
Unfortunately, Albrecht Rodenbach died of con-
sumption in 1880; his was the tragic fate, but
also the immortality of regret, of Keats. He
would never have been a great poet ; he had no
depth. But he had a boundless enthusiasm for
the Flemish cause, and it is rather as the prophet
of the Flemish revival, who might have led the
chosen into the Promised Land, than as a poet
that his memory is kept green. There is (or was,
before the war) a statue to him in Roulers. Strange
to say, there is a particularly virile note in the
lyrics of this doomed consumptive, as in his am-
bitious verse play Gudrun^ which appeared two
years after his death. Albrecht Rodenbach's death
left Pol de Mont the undisputed leader of the
Flemish revival — a revival which he was to lead
more and more in the direction of Germany. An-
other of the Flemish students who was to become
a pillar of the movement was Jan Blockx, the
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The Standard of Revolt
future director of the Conservatoire at Antwerp,
and after Peter Benott the greatest of Flemish
musicians. He died in 191 2.
These students, French and Flemish, lived the
true Bohemian life. Pol de Mont and Albrecht
Rodenbach, with their flowing locks and the prac-
tised poetic expression of their features, were a
public spectacle when they took their afternoon
constitutional through the town. As to the French-
writing students, we know by Gilkin's confessions
that they were addicted to " beer, coffee, punch,
and hot wine." They studied in the summer
holidays exclusively (most of them law, which they
seem to have considered a great bore) ; and they
passed their examinations (or failed in them) in
October. Once they got into difficulties with the
police by unearthing a signpost and carrying it
through the streets of Louvain in the dead of night
between a double row of lugubrious candles, while
they sang De profundis and Dies ircB. This music
may have been well worth listening to, for one of
the singers was Ernest van Dyck, who was to
become a famous Wagner tenor at Bayreuth.
Verhaeren lodged in the third story in the house
47
Contemporary Belgian Literature
of a cutler named J oris, and if a visitor called he
would leap on to the landing and shout downstairs
at the top of his voice : " Madame J oris ! Madame
Joris ! A cup of tea, please ! " Sometimes the
visitors followed each other fast, but Verhaeren
called for a cup of tea for each new-comer. The
friends were careful not to suggest any alteration of
this *' immutable rite, which gave his lodgings some-
thing sacred." They lent books to one another,
but Verhaeren could only be trusted with books of
no value, on account of his "savage enthusiasms."
When he was struck by a particularly fine passage
he had a habit of screaming, " Nom de Dieu ! que
c'est beau!" (Good God! how fine it is!), and the
volume would then bring the plaster down from the
ceiling. This violent handling of books scandalised
another member of the group, who was already
possessed with a mania for collecting rare editions :
this was Edmond Deman, who in the course of time
became a celebrated bibliophile and publisher of
beautiful books, including the first lovely editions of
Verhaeren's books. " He is a Red Skin! " Deman
used to say of Verhaeren in those days.
On the 1 8th of October 1879, in the streets of
48
The Standard of Revolt
Louvain the newsboys were crying a new students'
magazine. This was La Semaine des J^tudiants,
and at first it sold like hot cakes. Its first verses,
Rimes davant-poste, were signed " Rodolphe."
This was the pen-name of Verhaeren, whose con-
tributions show that at that time he was one of the
least revolutionary of the group ; he was inclined
to imitate Fran9ois Copp^e, and the ideal he pro-
claimed was : to live peaceably in his village, near
a river with a singing tide, to have wife and
children. But one day he read Maupassant's Vers,
and he wrote no more domestic idylls — from that
moment he was a realist.
If Maupassant's volume of verse was the coup de
foudre for Verhaeren, Baudelaire's Fleurs de Mai
was the same thing for Iwan Gilkin. Albert Giraud
made him read it at the critical moment ; and through
these two poets it was destined to turn a large part
of the poetry of young Belgium into gloomy channels.
It was Gilkin who, in the thirteenth number of
La Semaine des £tudiants^ signed a sensational
manifesto. After pointing out that hitherto Belgian
literature had looked to Paris for approval, and that
no Belgian man of letters had been acknowledged
49 D
Contemporary Belgian Literature
at home until he had been recognised in the French
capital, he urges that the best way to create new
things is to aim at local colour. Little matters as
to the language, he says, whether it be lyrical or
correct, Gothic, or French of Paris : all that is
needed is that it should smack of the soil. Let it
be wild and dishevelled ; let it murder syntax and
writhe in orgies of solecisms ; what does it matter if
it leaps at the throat of reality ? Flanders and the
Walloon provinces are there, offering their flanks
swollen with delightful and curious customs. And
when the first fire is calmed, there are golden legends
to gather. There must be a Flemish school of
poetry just as there was a Flemish school of paint-
ing ; there must be poets in the manner of Teniers,
Ruysdael, Brauwer, Van Ostade to begin with ; and
they must lead the way to a Rembrandt and a
Rubens of verse.
We shall see that the programme was realised
to the full. How startling it seemed at the time,
however, is evident from the fact that Verhaeren,
who was destined more than any one else to carry
it out, sent in an article of timid protest against " the
crimson excesses of this new doctrine that sought
50
The Standard of Revolt
to break through the dykes." But the aims of the
new movement — " un petit quatre-vingt-neuf in-
tellectuel," someone called it — were settled when
another of the students, Ernst Verlant, who was
later a critic of distinction and rose to be Directeur-
General des Beaux Arts, read a paper in which he
tried to establish that the aim of art is the realisa-
tion of a moral and religious ideal. His arguments
were refuted, and the formula was proclaimed which
was to remain the first commandment in the pro-
gramme of young Belgium : l' Art pour I' Art (Art
for Art's sake). The adoption of this doctrine was
too much for the University. The conservative
students began to look upon the plotters as the
agents of Satan. Wordy battles raged. Peace
was restored for a moment, however, when a young
Belgian author, Albrecht Rodenbach's elder brother
and an old schoolfellow of Verhaeren's, paid a visit
to the University to recite his poems. This was
Georges Rodenbach, who had already had some of
his verse published in Paris.
La Semaine des £tudiants had not attained a
great age when, on their return from the summer
vacation, the iconoclasts heard the newsboys crying :
51
Contemporary Belgian Literature
" Le Type ! Buy Le Type ! " What was their horror
on finding that this new magazine was an exact
copy of their own, printed by their own printer, and
displaying the advertisements they themselves had
captured ! They found another printer, and attacked
the new-comer, especially its editor, a certain Olivier,
with might and main. But Le Type asked for no-
thing better than war to the knife. The combat
deepened ; other magazines were launched to join
in the fray; and in the beginning of 1881 the
University authorities were forced to suppress
them all.
The abominable Olivier was a mystery. At
last his true name was discovered. *' He was
quite a young man, almost a boy, handsome
as a dream, charming, brilliant, exquisite in his
waggishness and grace : his name was Maurice
Warlomont."
A few months later a new magazine appeared,
this time at Brussels. Maurice Warlomont, hence-
forth to be known by his pen-name of Max Waller,
had acquired an interest in La Jeune Revue, a
magazine of the students of Brussels, and had re-
christened it La Jeune Belgique. He had at once
52
The Standard of Revolt
recruited Georges Rodenbach, Verhaeren, Giraud,
Gilkin, Georges Eekhoud, Franz Mahutte, Henri
Maubel ; and with these contributors, who entered
literature, says Vance Thompson, like a band of
Sioux, the review soon became the chief organ of
the new literary life.
But the doctrine of Art for Art's sake which
was preached \>y La Jeune Belgique did not pass
without challenge. Edmond Picard, already a
lawyer of great reputation, opposed the maxim by
his ideas of a "social" or "revolutionary" art, of
a " useful art " (J art utile). The mission of art, he
claimed, was to destroy the abuses of a decadent
society, to clear the way for the flood-tide which
was to submerge all that was effete. This was
the programme of Picard's organ L' Art Moderne.
Between La Jeune Belgique and L' Art Moderne
there was war open and declared. In 1884 Picard's
organ began to attack the writers of La Jeune
Belgique as "Parnassians." This was equivalent
to charging them with being mock-Parisians.
Against this alleged tendency L Art Moderne de-
creed that art should be national, that a Belgian
writer should think as a Belgian and write as a
53
Contemporary Belgian Literature
Belgian. At least one duel was fought, and the two
parties proved irreconcilable.
The writers of La Jeune Belgique had no objec-
tion to being called Parnassians : they considered
that they, like the French Parnassians of 1866,
were fighting "a literary amorphism produced by
the exaggeration of moral, philanthropic, social, and
political preoccupations." They definitely affirmed
the relationship by the publication in 1887 of an
anthology of their verse : Le Parnasse de la Jeune
Belgique. This book, published at Paris by L^on
Vanier, is one of the landmarks of modern Belgian
literature. It is more than an anthology, it is, and
was intended to be, a proof paramount of the actual
existence of a new school of poetry in Belgium.
It is to be noted that it includes poems by writers
who were afterwards avowed symbolists — Andr^
Fontainas, Charles van Lerberghe, Gr^goire Le
Roy, and Maurice Maeterlinck. The directors of
La Jeune Belgique, however, were not favourably
disposed to the symbolists. Max Waller, the first
editor, refused to print vers libres and looked on
Verhaeren as a man lost and strayed. Waller died
in 1889, and was succeeded by Henri Maubel, who
54
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adhered to the policy established by the first editor.
The policy of excluding the symbolists, however,
was not approved of by all the directors, who were
now Georges Eekhoud, Albert Giraud, Francis
Nautet, Henri Maubel, and I wan Gilkin. There
were disputes ; and Valere Gille, the youngest poet
who had contributed to Le Parnasse, was appointed
editor. He was only twenty-three at the time.
Under his auspices the review was thrown open to
all and sundry, and vers litres by the French and
Belgian symbolists were accepted. In 1891 Gille
resigned, and was succeeded by Gilkin, who re-
versed Gille's policy, and in 1893 issued a new
manifesto calling upon his countrymen to practise
le culte de la forme. Gilkin, and those who sup-
ported him, were of opinion that the proximity of
Flemish made it most difficult for Belgians to keep
their French pure, and that their only salvation lay
in the cultivation of a French free from all provincial
disfiguration. Gilkin, it is evident, had reached
quite a different standpoint from that which had
inspired his manifesto in La Semaine des ^tudi-
ants. He and his party had now come to the
conclusion that, as far as literature was concerned,
55
Contemporary Belgian Literature
they were Frenchmen, not Belgians. They would
have nothing to do with anything that suggested
local conditions. They were determined to look
upon themselves as French writers inhabiting
Brussels, Ghent, or Liege, instead of Paris, Lyons,
or Marseilles. The foreign elements which, owing to
the number of symbolist poets of foreign extraction,
were forcing their way into French literature, they
regarded as harmful, and they fought against them
with more determination than even those French
critics of Paris who were the defenders of the
classical tradition. The result was a splitting of
Belgian poetry into two schools : Gilkin, Giraud,
Gille, S^verin, and others were " Parnassians " ;
Verhaeren, Maeterlinck, van Lerberghe, Fontainas,
Eiskamp, and others were vers libristes and sym-
bolists. The Parnassians rallied round La Jeune
Belgique, while the vers libristes and symbolists
wrote for U Art Moderne and several dissident
reviews, the most important of which was Albert
Mockel's La Wallonie.
Four of the best poets, Verhaeren, Georges
Rodenbach, Georges Eekhoud, and Georges
Khnopff, had refused to contribute to Le Parnasse,
56
The Standard of Revolt
so that the anthology does not represent the whole
poetic movement, but it is nevertheless a most
interesting book, full of virility and wickedness, in
the midst of which the more delicate notes of
Maeterlinck, Charles van Lerberghe, and Fernard
Severin seem out of place. The prevailing mood
is a Baudelairian pessimism : hardly one of the
poets but shows who has stood godfather to his
muse.
Some of the eighteen contributors are now, it
is true, poets of yesteryear.
Theodore Hannon is one of those minor poets
who are consistently ignored or curtly treated
by the decent historians of literature, but who
have always an intelligent public among the col-
lectors of curios. Take away his obscenity and
little remains ; but his obscenity is not vicious, it
is merely a graceful play with words ; Hannon is
not perverse, he is naughty. His licentious images
conjure up exotic picture-s : as that of lemons
bursting through thin paper, which make him
think of the pale gold breasts of Japanese girls.
Max Waller's Flilte a Siebel is poor stuff by
the side of Theodore Hannon's Rimes de Joie. The
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two books are similar in intention ; but whereas
Hannon's obscenity is that of an artist, Waller's
is the sneering cynicism of a man about town.
Emile van Arenbergh is to be taken more
seriously, though of him, too, it cannot be claimed
that he is any longer read or considered at the
value he once seemed to have. He might be
called a Philistine Baudelaire : he has the pessi-
mism, but only as much of the perversity of
Baudelaire as a judge — he was a juge de paix —
can decently make a show of. His sonnets have
an imposing frontage. Seen from afar, they have
the Heredian build ; but on closer inspection the
stones are seen to have been dug out from here
and there, not hewn from one block ; and they
are loose. Fragments are often richly coloured,
but with the learned tints of Gautier, not with the
mellow tones of the native Flemish colouring.
Valere Gille has suffered still more from time.
He is a kind of miniature Edmund Gosse ; he
is rather a librarian than a poet. His verse has
distinction, but it is a distinction of form ; and the
fact that his collection La Cithare (1897) was
crowned by the French Academy is a terrible
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The Standard of Revolt
incrimination of the French Academy. However,
some of his sonnets, derivative as they are, are
well-knit, and spread the peacock's tail with suffi-
cient pomp.
Who that reads the charming Walloon tales of
George Garnir, remembers that he was one of
the poets of the Parnasse? How many Dutch
people are aware that their favourite poetess
Helene Swarth began with French poetry in a
Belgian anthology ? Who in these days knows the
name of Leon Montenaeken .-* Who, in England
and all over the world, does not know his little
lyric, which is to be found in the Parnasse?
** La vie est vaine :
Un peu d'amour,
Un peu de haine . . .
Et puis — bonjour !
" La vie est breve :
Un peu d'espoir,
Un peu de reve . . .
Et puis — bonsoir ! "
The poets of yesteryear do not wholly die. . . .
59
CHAPTER III
CAMILLE LEMONNIER
Every five years the Belgian state awards a prize
for the best book which has appeared during the
five years preceding. In 1883 the jury decided
that during the previous half decade no work of
sufficient merit had appeared to justify their award-
ing the prize. This decision was considered by
the young writers of Belgium, who were by this
time both numerous and conscious of their own
importance, to be a deliberate insult to Camille
Lemonnier, for in the period in question he had
published four novels, two of which at all events,
Un Male and Le Mort, could not possibly by good
critics be rated as anything less than masterpieces.
It was felt that the time was come to show Lemon-
nier that he had a following among his more in
telligent countrymen, and that he was no longer
a voice crying in the wilderness. On the 27th
of May 1883 a public banquet was offered to
60
Camille Lemonnier
him at Brussels ; eloquent speeches were made ;
the newspapers thrashed out the question of the
national literature ; in short, a sensation was
created. This historic banquet, known henceforth
as le banquet du Male, marks another stage of
progress in modern Belgian literature ; for the first
time the literary men of the country had acted as
a body and publicly challenged the Philistines, who
for so long had kept literature and intellectual life
in a position of dependence on the crassest con-
ception of public morality. Henceforth authors
claimed the liberty of writing as they thought fit,
without consideration of the tender susceptibilities
of those who would fain have gagged all free
utterance and only allowed literary expression in
a pruned and official language. As to Camille
Lemonnier, he went on writing as he had always
done, luxuriantly and without restraint ; but when
the time came again for the jury to hold their
momentous deliberations, they could no longer
afford to ignore the man who had come to be
known to the Belgians as their "field-marshal of
letters," and in 1888 Lemonnier was awarded the
quinquennial prize, not, it is true, for his fine
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novels L' Hysterique or Happe- Chair, but for
La Belgique (1888), his monumental itinerary of
Belgium. And even this was not allowed to be
given as a prize in schools — it was "too lyrical,"
the official verdict ran.
In all Belgian literature there is no more out-
standing figure than Camille Lemonnier. He is
not merely the greatest Belgian novelist, he is the
greatest Belgian prose-writer ; and even if he had
been a lesser artist, if he had lost ground to the
sustained fierceness of Georges Eekhoud, or been
out-classed by the subtle imagination and the ex-
quisite refinement of Eugene Demolder, he would
still have loomed large as a great fighter for the
recognition of Belgian literature, as the general,
in short, who set the young men of letters on their
feet and led them to victory. "He alone perhaps,"
says Edmond Picard, "symbolises the Belgian
literary activity in the French language in its
entirety. He was the centre of it, the trunk, the
backbone : nearly everything has issued forth from
him, or directly or indirectly leaned on him."
Camille Lemonnier, the son of a lawyer who
hailed from Louvain, was born at Ixelles near
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Camille Lemonnier
Brussels in 1844. The name is Walloon, but both
father and mother were Flemish. A oflance at his
genealogy, however, shows that he is of mixed
extraction : his great-grandmother on his father's
side was an Italian. As a schoolboy at the
Athenee of Brussels, he showed little aptitude
for study ; but he learned Baudelaire's poems by
heart. Soon afterwards he heard Baudelaire,
then in exile in Brussels, lecture on Theophile
Gautier : it was his first glimpse of that tangible
distress of literature which he was to experience
to the full. His first newspaper article brought
him the friendship of another of the victims
of literature — Charles De Coster, whose great
champion he was to be. He entered the Univer-
sity of Brussels as a student of jurisprudence ; but
his incapacity in this sphere was so evident that
his father removed him and procured him a post
as a clerk in the provincial government of Brussels.
From this still more uncongenial employment he
ran away when he was twenty-two, determined to
live by his pen. He began by writing art criticism
for the newspapers ; this he collected in his first
book Salon de Bruxelles, which he was enabled
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by the generous assistance of a wealthy friend to
publish in 1863. This book of art criticism was
to be followed by several others, chief among them
being Histoire des Beaux- Arts en Belgique (1887)
and Les Peintres de la Vie (1888).
His father died when he was twenty-five.
With the money he inherited Lemonnier rented a
chateau on the hills near Namur, and here for some
time he lived the life which suited his robust consti-
tution and unbridled instincts, the life which he has
described in a number of his novels, in Un Male
above all, but also in Amants Joyeux and in the
novels of forest life which preach a return to the
primitive conditions of nature. " Born by mistake
between the walls of a great city," says Georges
Rency, " Lemonnier had at last found his true
homeland. It was a kind of initiation for him. In
the little domain which extended round his rustic
dwelling were gathered together the delights of a
noble river and the sturdy, stinging pleasures of
the forest. He was a hunter, an angler, and a
poacher. He lived through all the excitement of
his Male before he dreamt of writing it down. He
intoxicated himself with nature, drank it, ate his
64
Camille Lemonnier
fill of it. And when his purse was empty and he
was forced to return to a normal existence, he tore
himself away from this wild and splendid country
with a despair and bitterness that never left him."
During this period of untrammelled life in the
open Lemonnier wrote Nos Flamands (1869), a
series of aggressive essays full of enthusiasm for
the great men of his race, a fiery appeal for a
national regeneration which for the moment fell on
deaf ears, but had its effect when the time was ripe
ten years later. The book is dedicated to "the
young men of our schools and workshops," and it
bears the motto: " Nous-memes ou perir ! " (Let
us be ourselves, or perish !) a battle-cry which was
to be taken up with resounding vigour when the
fight for a national literature beofan in earnest.
The next formative force in Lemonnier's life was
the Franco-German War, which inspired him with
the pamphlet Paris-Berlin, an eloquent pleading
of the cause of France. It had an enormous
success, and was attributed to Victor Hugo, "who
did not protest." ^ Lemonnier expressed his horror
of war in a book of more permanent import, Les
^ A. Meckel, Mercure de France, April 1897.
65 E
Contemporary Belgian Literature
Charniers (1871), which has been described as
forming, with Baroness von Suttner's Down with
your Anns and Zola's La Debacle, " a triptych of
horror." "There is only one thing I execrate,"
says Lemonnier in this book, "and that is war.
This hatred in me is as indestructible as my
soul."
Les CharnierSy Lemonnier's first masterpiece,
may be said to open his first creative period.
Leon Bazalgette, in his authoritative monograph,^
divides Lemonnier's work into three distinct periods.
" The first, in which there triumphs a rich and
opulent art, uncompromising and swollen with sap,
plastic above all, filled his youth from twenty
to forty. The second, dominated by the quest
of originality and an inquiring and experimental
psychology, is the result of his maturity, from his
fortieth to his fiftieth year. At fifty he returns to
the instinct of his youth, but to an instinct which,
having traversed all the experiences of a lifetime,
now appears enriched, fortified, more supple and
wider of range, controlled by an unerring will — a
^ Camille Lemonnier (one of the series Les Celebrit^s d'Au-
/ourd'/iui), Paris, Sansot, 1904.
66
Camille Lemonnier
magnificent period of plenitude and of triumphant
fecundity, an age of re-birth ripening some of the
noblest fruits of his art."
The fine flower of the first period is Un
Male, which appeared in 1881, and at once
placed Lemonnier in the first rank of contempor-
ary novelists. It is the novel by which he is best
known : he wrote some sixty books, but to the
major part of the reading public he is "the author
of Un Male!' There would be no risk in saying
that this is the best, as it certainly is the most
famous Belgian novel. But it is more than a
novel, it is a lyric ecstasy, a poem in prose, a
panegyric of forest and farm, a litany of instinct.
The book, which was written at a farm, opens with
a wonderful description of dawn in an orchard,
where Cachapres, a poacher famed far and wide
for his prowess and agility, has spent the night.
When he awakens he sees, from where he lies, the
farmer's daughter, Germaine, opening her bed-
room window. " Then something extraordinary
happened. He looked at her, with his great teeth
bared. On his cheeks there was a broad, cajoling
smile, and his eyes seemed lost in a mist. A beast
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awoke in him, wild and tender." The story
follows up the pursuit and the capture of this
sturdy wench ; but the love events are not more
exciting than the detailed description of the
poacher's life in the forest, his snaring of animals
by night, his daring excursions to the neighbour-
ing town to dispose of the game he has killed,
his hairbreadth escapes from the gamekeepers
who are on his track. It is all realism ; but the
realism is mellowed with poetry.
There are many things in Un Male which the
memory will not let go. There are the kermesse
scenes, full of gluttony and lust. There is a
Homeric description of a fight in an inn : every
phase stands out with the vigour of Meissonier's
Une Rixe. But all the interest centres round
Cachapres in his defiant and full-blooded outlawry.
" Some folks chop wood," he says to Germaine,
"others plough; some have trades. I'm fond of
animals." Brute as he is, he is a fascinating
character, modelled to the mystery of the forest ;
and when the nets of his fate close round him,
when at last he is hunted down and hit by the
bullet of a gendarme, the novel gathers all the
68
Camille Lemonnier
elemental force of a great and inevitable tragedy.
He drags himself through the briars of a thicket
to die as a wounded beast might die ; and in his
death-throes he is tended by a ragged little wench
who has grown up like a squirrel in the woods and
has helped him in his poaching. He has hardly
noticed the little thing ; but she with her wild heart
has loved him. She will not leave him.
" She thought he was asleep and called out to him ;
he did not stir. She touched his skin, lightly : it was
already hard and horribly cold. Then she flew into a
rage and shook him as hard as she could. Flis body,
as stiff as stone, moved like a lump of something. What
was the matter with him ? She bent down over him, put
her arms round him, kissed him with her hot lips, and
felt as though a wave of love flooded her.
" She had come across dead animals l^'ing in her path,
and they had been stiff like this. . . . She did not shed a
tear. She crouched by his body, put her thin arms round
his neck, and all day long she lay with her face to his,
plunging her sharp and crazy eyes into his glassy eye-
balls. She looked at him with stupefaction. And then
she caressed him again with her burning hands. What
did it matter if he was dead, now that he was hers. The
sly stirrings of her virginity, which she had had to hide
from him when he was alive, now cast off all restraint
on this unresisting corpse. Emboldened by the dead
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man's consent, she fondled him, pressed him to her with
a savage tenderness, without horror or disgust.
" At nightfall a wild cat appeared, attracted by the
smell. She drove it away with stones. Then crows
perched on a neighbouring tree and croaked there, as
grave as judges pronouncing judgment. She screamed
to frighten them away. She returned to the hut, but
said nothing to her parents, jealously keeping her secret
for herself, and when morning dawned she went back
to him.
" When some days had passed, she saw a horrible
thing : the wound was slowly moving, with a slow undu-
lation that never stopped. . . .
" She screamed, and fell flat on her hands, with her
head in the grass."
Sad and terrible as the ending of Un Male is,
it is not a depressing book. It is saturated with
health ; it throbs v^^ith virility ; and it has the in-
spiriting force of all healthy and virile things.
Le Mort, on the other hand, has the statuesque
lugubriousness of a Dance of Death. Le Mort is
just as much a hymn to Death as Un Male is a
hymn to Life. To this extent they are companion
volumes — the medal and its reverse. Le Mort
appeared a year after Un Male, in 1882. It is
the long drav\^n-out agony of remorse of tvsro
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Camille Lemonnier
brothers, who have been driven by avarice to
murder.
The psychological series opens with L' Hystdrique
(1885). This, the best of the series as well as the
first, is the lurid story of the guilty love of a per-
verted priest for one of his flock, an anaemic girl
whose retarded puberty, breaking forth at last when
she has whipped herself into ecstasies of religious
fervour, plunges her into mystic hallucinations, in
the spasms of which she believes that her seducer
is Jesus. Splendidly drawn is the figure of the
cleric, with his sexual disgrace motived by his
descent from the Spanish conquerors of Flanders.
This priest, however, is not wholly guilty of his
hellish crimes ; there is a note of discreet sympathy
in the characterisation. It is the system, the
cloistering, which is wrong — this strong man, who
is overcome by his blood and the hypnotic sugges-
tiveness of the rising sap in springtime, might have
been a stalwart soldier, a headlongf man of action.
n HysUrique was followed by Happe-Chair
(1886), a documented study of the life of workers
in rolling-mills. This novel, which owes something
to Meunier's plastic art, has often been compared
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with Zola's Germinal, but according to Bazalgette
Lemonnier's novel was " historically anterior."
Germinal had, however, appeared the year before ;
and Happe-Chair is dedicated to Zola. It would
be hard to prove that Lemonnier was not directly
influenced, in the novels of his second period, by
Zola. There is, for one thing, the exaltation of the
milieu into a grandiose symbol. The life of the
d^guinage, sordid, and centred in creature comforts,
in L' Hystdriqiie is not excessively enforced ; but in
Happe-Chair the rolling-mill is as much an obsession
as the coal-mine is in Germinal. Nevertheless,
Lemonnier does not belong with a disciple's de-
votion to the school of Medan ; he follows the
lead, but with independence. He is less pedantic ;
he is more alive. It is difficult for him to keep the
poet down : where his work is Zolaesque, it reminds
one of La Faute de H Abbe Mouret, that intense
poem. The only novels of Lemonnier which can
fairly be censured as being in Zola's unpleasant
manner are Madame Lupar (1888) and La Fin des
Bourgeois (1892).
In 1888 Lemonnier was fined one thousand
francs and costs in Paris for his short story
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Camille Lemonriier
V Enfant du Crapaud, which had appeared in Gil
Bias, to which he contributed many of the short
stories collected in various volumes. L' Enfant du
Crapaud ^2.^ reprinted in Ceux de la Glebe (1889),
perhaps Lemonnier's best collection of short stories,
with its description of the dragging horror of the
lives of those who till the soil. E Enfant du Crapaud
was condemned in spite of the eloquence of Edmond
Picard, who had gone to Paris to defend his fellow-
countryman. Lemonnier was not frightened into
modifying his realistic method, and the next novel
of his which appeared, Le Poss^dS (1890), might
not unreasonably have shocked conservative minds,
although in justice to Lemonnier it must be said
that he was never a pornographer — he was merely
a great writer who, at all events during this psych-
ological period which stretches from E Hysterique
to Ea Faute de Mada7?te Ckafvet, thought it his
duty to dive into the motive forces of disease and
perversion and to describe life as he found it,
without palliation. Realism and Satanism were
the fashion, that is all ; and Lemonnier in his
prose went no farther than, for instance, I wan
Gilkin in his verse. Ee Possede shows the genesis
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and rapid growth of perverted sex Instincts in an
old man, a magistrate who has Hved honourably
till his fiftieth year.
A few years later Lemonnier was again prose-
cuted for immoral writing, this time at Brussels.
He was defended by Edmond Picard again, aided
by the novelist Henry Carton de Wiart ; and he
was acquitted. It was again a short story which
had given offence, L Homvte qui tue les Femmes
(reprinted in Dames de Volupte, 1892), quite a
harmless presentation of the crimes of Jack the
Ripper. Lemonnier was prosecuted for the third
time, at Bruges, for the publication of V Homme
en Amour (iSgy) ; and he was acquitted in triumph,
the occasion being seized by his friends and sym-
pathisers to do honour to his art. L'Homme en
Amour and Le Possede are really variations of the
same theme ; but the later novel is more universal
in its application, and more in the nature of a
protest against the atrophy of the sex instinct.
It forms a diptych with another novel of protest,
Georges Eekhoud's Escal- Vigor. The trial at
Bruges inspired Lemonnier with Les Deux Con-
sciences, an avowedly autobiographical novel in
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Camille Lemonnier
which he pleads his own case against his judges
and justifies his literary method. Lighter in tex-
ture is Claudme Lamour (1893), the history of a
Parisian music-hall star. L^ Arche (1894), a fire-
side idyll, a glorification of motherhood and family
life, points forward to the noble novels of the third
period. It is a feminist novel, eloquent of the
great future in store for woman when her emanci-
pation is complete. La Faute de Madame Charvet
(1895) is the opposite picture to L! Arche : ruth-
lessly it exposes the naked bones of adultery.
Now a new period, Lemonnier 's third period,
begins. It is as though he were sick of the de-
pravities he has been painting with such conscien-
tious truth, as though he had turned his back on
perversion and adultery and taken refuge in the
haunts of his youth, in the open country, at the
heart of the forest. He is again the Lemonnier
who wrote Un Male ; but chastened by his long
pilgrimage through the labyrinth of dingy streets
and with a new message intense as the religion of
an apostle. This message has all the freshness,
in his glowing presentation of it, of a new and
miraculous discovery ; and yet it is essentially
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Rousseau's preaching of the return to nature, to
instinct. There is no pretence of "philosophy":
Lemonnier does nothing more than expound a view
of life which amounts to a robust futurism. He
writes Lite Vierge (1897), which was to be the
first part of a trilogy showing the progress of man
through tribulation to the consciousness of divinity-
Here Lemonnier had intended to lead up to the
same conception of the man-god as informs the
later work of Verhaeren and Maeterlinck. No other
part of the trilogy was completed — perhaps the
plan seemed too deliberate to Lemonnier, who was
first and foremost an artist impelled by the mood
of the moment, and always more attached to the
character than to the idea. But in Adam et Eve
(1899) the legend is continued — a man who has
suffered greatly flees to the forest, and finds calm
and content in the physical activity of primitive
existence. There is the spirit of Robinson Crusoe
in Adam et Eve ; m Au Cceur Frais de la ForH
(1900) there is the witchery of The Blue Lagoon.
Two waifs, a boy and a girl, find their way from
the slums of a city to the heart of a mythical
forest ; here they learn to use their hands and
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Camille Lemonnier
their brains ; here they have their first child, and
from here they set forth to found the ideal city
of the future.
If in this series of novels there is one tendency
more evident than another, it is the tendency
to socialism — not the socialism of parties, but a
doctrine of brotherly affection and of the nobility
of labour, an intuition of the future. Socialism
is thrust openly into the foreground in Le Vent
dans les Moulhis (1901). This is more a poem
than a novel : it is a hymn to " Mother Flanders."
This Flanders, however, is not defined by names
and drawn with clear-cut lines : it is all a dream-
land, a land drowned in mists, a land of shy
and awkward dreamers, a land of kitchen gardens
and orchards, creeping canals, farms with green
shutters and red-tiled roofs, roads that run between
lines of poplars, with the river Lys meandering
through the landscape. What a different country
is this to that painted with opulent colour in the
early novels, that country of teeming fertility and
ruthless violence ! The characters, too, have grown
gentle ; they are another race. Even the militant
socialists, who, at the bidding of the gentry, are
Contemporary Belgian Literature
attacked with stones at their meetings, have more
of milk and honey than of gall.
Le Ve7it dans les Moulins is Flemish through
and through : it is informed, not by French
realism, but by Flemish mysticism. These taci-
turn peasants, who " are shaken to the marrow
by life and yet say things which belie the force
of their emotion," are akin to those of Stijn
Streuvels. A Fleming to the core is the hero,
Dries Abeels, the son of a flax merchant.
Dries is a socialist ; but he is also a rentier.
The intention is fixed in his heart to give all
he has to the poor ; he is convinced that it is
his duty to learn some manual trade and live by
the exercise of it, as those do who live and toil
around him. But, well-nourished as he is, with
his "bullock's blood," he is fond of good eating;
he is idle; he does not like early rising. In the
end his better nature prevails ; he shakes his
sloth away, rises heroically before the sun, and
binds himself apprentice to a carpenter. What
follows is a healthy glorification of manual labour,
as in the other novels of this period. He is
no longer Dries the gentleman of means ; he is
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Camille Lemonnier
Dries the carpenter — and a good carpenter at that,
for he works with love, reading poems into the
wood he handles. Now he is conscious that
" the man who does not work has no right to
the bread he eats." Now, and now only, he has
the right to preach socialism to the labourers — a
hard task, even when fortified by personal example :
for clergy and gentry are leagued against progress,
and to teach the dignity and the rights of labour
is like driving nails into beechwood.
There is scarcely a hint of sensual things in Le
Vent dans les Moulins. There is a love story ; but
it is one of great restraint and chastity. The novels
of primitive life at the heart of the forest are pure
in intention ; but their very purpose, the hymning
of natural life, leads to scenes of initiation and
marital passion, Le Vent dans les Moulins ends
with an engagement which is likely to be long ; and
with Dries content to wait for his little housekeeper.
Equally pure in tone is Le Petit Homme de Dieu
(1902). It may be called a companion volume of
Le Vejit dans les Moulins ; both are " local " novels,
hymning the soul of Flanders. But whereas Le
Vent dans les Moulins generalises the landscape,
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Le Petit Homme de Dieu centres in one dead city
— in Furnes-la-Marine (Furnes by the Sea), with
its old church of Saint Walburga, its old houses,
and its age-old customs. The dominant picture is
that of the Ommegang, the procession which from
time immemorial has been seen every year in
Furnes — the chief inhabitants proceed through the
town in solemn state, clad as New Testament
figures. Georges Rency has described the cere-
mony :
" Amid a great crowd of simple folks, fishermen and
farmers, pass in procession the characters of the Gospels.
The Wise Kings from the East are there, seeking the
stable of Bethlehem. Herod and his courtiers are plot-
ting the death of Jesus. Mary Magdalene displays her
beauty and her jewels. Christ himself appears, mounted on
a she-ass, among palms and hailed by cries of ' Hosanna ! '
Farther on he appears a second time, bending under his
cross, halting at all the stages of Calvary. Finally, the
chariot of the Ascension shows him soaring in glory
eternal. Penitents, male and female, barefoot and in
cowls, moan as they bear their gallows."
The old city is described with meticulous accu-
racy, with the quaint realism of old Flemish genre
pictures. But mysticism, not realism, emanates
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Camille Lemonnier
from the whole. The Ommegang has a subtle
influence : the influence which the Passion Play has
on the villagers of Oberammergau :
" In this strange little town of Furnes, people never
knew exactly in what period things were happening : all
the events of the day took on a sacred appearance."
The characters call one another by the names of
the personages they represent : thus, the locksmith
is Pilate to his cronies in his very shop, and the
Wise Kings from the East cannot divest them-
selves of their regal dignity even when they sit
down to their beer in the inn. But the one
who is most conscious of his sacred character is
Ivo Mabbe, the little ropemaker who takes the
part of Jesus and is for that reason known as
" Le Petit Homme de Dieu." In the intensity
of his simple piety he grows close to the mind
of the Saviour, so close that he begins to iden-
tify himself with the part he plays. This phase
of religious mania has often been described : by
Gerhart Hauptmann among others in The Apostle
and The Foolin Christ Emanuel Quint. Haupt-
mann's Christs are mad : Ivo is merely on the way
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
to madness. He only takes Christ's teaching
literally, and shocks his fellow-townsmen, who are
nothing if not "respectable," by associating with
outcasts, to whom he preaches the Gospel, which in
his mouth is identical with socialism. But the good
burghers of Furnes do not approve of socialism,
which to their minds is very far removed from
Christianity. They turn against " the little Christ-
man " :
" Since the day when for the first time he had gone into
these slums and alleys, every one had turned against him.
Herod told him clearly that he was running the risk of
losing the esteem of decent people. Pilate, the lock-
smith, had reproached him for bothering about things
which did not concern him. Some of the doctors of the
Temple laughed at him from the threshold of their doors
when he was passing, and even Joseph, the carpenter, a
holy man, avoided him."
Ivo grows the more determined in his Christi-
anity, and he persists in his ministrations to the
outcast of the earth, considering that he has the
right to repeat Christ's words. This extreme
Christianity of his, however, as he comes to see,
degenerates into a moral pride. In the end he
realises that he is not and cannot be Christ ; and
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Camille Lemonnier
that he must first of all practise humility. Now he
returns to Cordula, the rich farmer's daughter from
the dunes, who had long been betrothed to him,
but whom he had kept at a distance because she
played the part of Mary Magdalene (how could
Christ marry the sinner ?).
Another novel of Lemonnier's, La Chanson du
Carillon, has its scene in a dead city, in Bruges.
Of his other novels Le Sang et les Roses (1901)
should be mentioned. The theme is daring : a
childless husband agrees to let his wife be loved by
another man, for the sake of the child she desires
and for which her nature cries out.
Lemonnier was not a French novelist. He was
essentially a Flemish novelist : he is as much the
novelist of Flanders as Verhaeren is the poet of
Flanders. Not that he situated his novels entirely
in Flemish districts : in such novels as Happe-Chair
he has described the Walloons, and painted Walloon
scenes with perfect precision. But his whole char-
acter was Flemish, violently Flemish, both in the
realism of the earlier novels and the mysticism of
those which came later. Lemonnier travelled little,
only in France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany.
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His impressions of Germany he described in En
Allemagne, which contains valuable art criticism of
the galleries in Munich. Even when he had be-
come famous in Paris, when he was acknowledged
in Paris as one of the most distinguished of French
writers, he continued to live in Brussels, a guide,
counsellor, and friend to the tyros of literature,
encouraging the diffident to plunge into the whirl-
pool, instilling his own breezy courage into those
who drew back.
Lemonnier was a great optimist. But, unlike
Verhaeren and Maeterlinck, he had not to pass
through a stage of pessimism. His optimism was
a part of his constitution ; it is the optimism of a
healthy man.
Camille Lemonnier died* in June 191 3. He was
buried in the fulness of summer, on a hot day, and
the roses that covered his coffin scented the streets,
says George Rency, long after the procession had
passed.
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CHAPTER IV
GEORGES EEKHOUD
In poultry-fancying circles there has of late years
been a boom in the Campine fowl, a small, hand-
some bird with lovely eyes. Most of its admirers
know that it is a Belgian fowl, but few realise that
it keeps some of the qualities of the pheasant
because it is by nature a moorland fowl, a native
of the Campine (in Flemish, Kempen), that vast
stretch of rusty heather and golden broom which
lies above Antwerp, Malines, and Louvain — a
region "desolate, but full of character."
Half the province of Antwerp and more than
half of the province of Limburg belong to the
Campine. The few railway lines which cross it
have made little change in its old-world character,
and in the pagan savagery of its inhabitants.
The little towns are far scattered — Herenthals
(the capital), Diest, Sichem, Averbode. Round the
hamlets, oases of green with church spires piercing
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the sky like bayonets, graze thin cattle, tied to
posts lest they should sicken by eating too much
of the spurrey which in this desolate region takes
the place of grass and clover. Many hamlets are
unconnected by regular roads, but some sort of
communication is kept up by a service of lumber-
ing carts drawn by bullocks. The sandy wastes
are sucked down by spongy fens and blown into
hillocks held together by starved, reddish heather
and bristling broom and furze. Here and there
rise stunted larches and struggling fir plantations.
The mystery of these waste lands with their black
walls of pinewoods, their malignant mazes of paths,
their wrinkled ponds, and their incendiary sunsets
in copper skies, has been magically described by
Verhaeren in his poem "Silence"; and it is the
country which Georges Eekhoud has seized for
his own, as Thomas Hardy has seized Wessex.
" The country I love best," says Eekhoud in Les
Kermesses, " does not exist for any tourist, and doctors
will never recommend it. In this certainty my jealous
and selfish fervour takes heart. Worn by the weather,
the prey of fogs, are these plains of mine. Except for
the schorres of the polder, the region fertilised by the
alluvia of the Scheldt, few of its corners have been
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Georges Eekhoud
cleared for cultivation. One canal, starting from the
Scheldt, irrigates its heather-grown wastes and farmed
patches, and hardly a railway connects its unknown
townships with the outer world. The politician execrates
it, the merchant despises it, and it frightens and be-
wilders the legion of poor painters. The population
•remains robust, shy, obstinate, and ignorant. No music
moves me as the Flemish tongue does in their mouths.
They speak it with a rhythmical drawl, feeding its guttu-
ral syllables abundantly, and its rude consonants fall
as heavy as their fists. Their movements are slow and
well-poised ; they are broad-backed and chubby-cheeked,
sanguine, taciturn. I have never met plumper wenches,
with firmer chests or more challenging eyes than the
wenches have in this country. The lads in their blue
smocks have a determined swagger. In their drinking-
bouts they slash away with their knives. At the ker-
messe they gorge and swill with a kind of awkward
solemnity and pursue their women folks with no pretence
of decency. . . .
" They cling to the faith of their fathers, go on pil-
grimages, honour their priest, believe in the devil, in
spell-casting, and in the evil hand, that jettatura of the
north."
Georges Eekhoud was born in 1854 in Ant-
werp. His father, an official in an Insurance
Company, was a Fleming ; his mother was the
daughter of a German married to a Dutch woman.
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The father's character and early death have been
described by his son, with great tenderness, in
"Ex-Voto," one of the short stories in Les Ker-
messes. The boy was eleven when his father died,
and he was sent to school in Switzerland. His
school-life here, where he acquired a good know-
ledge of German, English, and Italian, he has
described in various parts of his work, particularly
in " Climaterie," one of the short stories collected
in Mes Com^jtunions , and in Escal-Vigor. His
schooling finished, his uncle, a candle-manufacturer
and the mayor of Borgerhout, near Antwerp, tried
to make an engineer of him. This plan failing, the
boy was sent to the Military School, but after six
months he ran away. The uncle now refused to
have anything more to do with him, but, as his
guardian, he let him have the interest on his
father's estate, about a hundred francs a month.
Not being able to make both ends meet with this
pittance, Eekhoud joined the staff of an Antwerp
newspaper. All his relations had cast him off;
but after a time his grandmother, a rich woman,
relented, and took him into her house. Here his
life was free from care ; and it was a great forma-
Georges Eekhoud
tive period, for he had the opportunity of regular
intercourse with painters and poets, and he had
leisure to read, and see life. These events of his
boyhood and youth are evidently described with
considerable truth in La Nouvelle Carthage, which
is certainly an autobiographical novel.
In 1878 Eekhoud's grandmother died and left
him a considerable fortune. His great desire had
been to be a gentleman farmer ; and he made
haste to purchase an estate in the north of
Antwerp, in the village of Cappellen, between
the polders of the Scheldt and the wastes of the
Campine. Here he hunted and lived the true
squire's life, visited all the kermesses, and acquired
that intimate knowledge of peasants and rural
customs which he turned to such good account
in his stories. But his farming was a disastrous
failure ; and he was soon without means aofain.
He went to Brussels and joined the staff of the
Etoile Beige as musical and literary critic. This
was in 1881, just at the time when the new
men were gathering there and beginning their
campaign. Eekhoud became a firm friend of
Theodore Hannon and Camille Lemonnier, and
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with them he contributed to La Boheme, a little
review which had a short life. Soon, however,
Max Waller and his fighting men arrived from
Louvain — the men who, as Vance Thompson
says, were defiantly young and wore amaranthine
waistcoats and flying scarves. La Jeiine Belgique
was launched ; and Eekhoud had found his feet.
In 1884 Les Kermesses appeared, a collection
of tales containing wonderfully vigorous descrip-
tions of local customs observed at Cappellen and
the neighbourhood. The language is violent, and
often reads like translated Flemish ; the realism
is sometimes revolting ; but several of the tales
are masterpieces. In 1886 followed Kees Doorik,
a curious kind of novel — it is rather a short story
spun out by descriptions of festivals. It may be
said at once that Eekhoud has never been able
to write a consecutive novel : all his "novels" are
made up of detachable episodes. Kees Doorik
is a foundling who is hired (bought as a slave,
according to the custom of the country, would be
more correct) by a rich farmer near Antwerp.
The farmer dies, and Kees, who by this time has
grown up into a fine young fellow with all the
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Georges Eekhoud
routine of the farm at his fingers' ends, falls in
love with his master's young widow, and hopes
to marry her. But she is seduced at a kermesse
by a scapegrace from a neighbouring village,
and Kees has to leave the farm where he has
grown up and which he cannot help regarding
as his own. There is forced symbolism in the
exposition of his love for the fields he has tilled :
la canipagne has a double meaning, " country "
and "wife," and the rather fanciful idea on which
the gruesome tragedy is based is that Kees
Doorik's love of the farmer's widow is a deser-
tion, punishable with death, of his real wife, the
country.
The last part of Kees Doorik is taken up
by a description of the "goose-riders'" festival,
a most villainous and brutal custom which shows
that the Flemings of to-day are much what they
were when the infante Cardinal Ferdinand of
Spain wrote to his brother King Philip : " Certo
que viven come bestias en esta parte " (They
certainly live like beasts in these parts). A live
goose is suspended on a kind of gallows, with
its head hanging downwards, and the villagers
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ride underneath it on their heavy cart-horses,
each snatching at the bird's head till one of
them wrenches it off. The one who performs
the feat is then crowned " King of the goose-
riders," and has the privilege of entertaining the
unsuccessful competitors to a banquet and a
great deal of drink. It is after such a festival
that Kees comes into collision with the creature
who has supplanted him in the affections of the
farmer's wife. There is a fight, and Kees
murders his rival. The description of the murder
is a good sample of Eekhoud's violence, which we
are asked to believe (and there is sufficient con-
firmation in the works of other Belgian authors
— notably in Verhaeren's poem "Peasants") is
justified by the fury of Flemish life :
" He plunged the knife into his body, drew it out,
and plunged it in again. He had previously pulled down
the fellow's clothes below the belt, so that there should
be nothing in the way of the blade. At the first thrust
the wretch shrieked: * O Kees ! Don't do that ! Mercy !
O Kees, Kees ! ' Kees took no notice. He was sitting
astride of him, and had him completely in his power.
He crushed George's hips between his thighs, as though
he were riding a stallion. With one hand he held his
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Georges Eekhoud
enemy fast by the throat, to keep him from crying out,
and with the other he slashed away at him, as though
he were hacking with a pick in the polder. His victim's
groans died down. To silence him altogether, he thrust
his knife, for the last time, into his neck, as you do
when you slaughter a pig. . . ."
Les Milices de Saint- Fra^i^ois (1886) is another
tale of the Campine. Les Nouvelles Kermesses
(1887) is quite different in style to Les Kermesses.
These tales are in ordinary French, smooth and
somewhat insipid, not at all in the rough and
jolting language Eekhoud had hammered out for
himself from Flemish rhythms. There is interior
evidence that the stories are older in date than
the first collection of Kermesses. The first story,
for instance, reads like a close imitation of Con-
science. Another story, " Bon pour le service,"
a poignant picture of military life in Belgium, is
very interesting at the present time. Everyone
who has lived in Belgium knows that the army
is despised, and that to have to join the army is
to lose caste.
"In all these vagabonds in uniform he found the
same passive character. They all looked as if they had
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been flung out of their orbit. In their eyes was the
expression of a caged beast, far from its native clime.
To whatever branch of the service they belonged, they
were all sheep-like in their ways, awkward, humiliated,
abashed. Instinctively they made way and yielded the
causeway to the civilian. They wore, not the uniform
of the soldier, but the livery of the pariah. Instead
of representing an army, of breathing out the patriotism
of a nation, of incarnating the best of the nation's blood
and youth, they were conscious of playing the part of
mercenaries. They were considered everywhere as re-
fuse, as a burden, as people who don't work. When
times were calm, these soldiers of a neutral country
were apt to be confused with indigents kept by the
public rates, with the inmates of workhouses and orphan-
ages. This did not prevent the civilians from expecting
that the conscripts would in case of strikes fire on their
brothers of the mines and factories."
La NoMvelle Carthage is a very ambitious book.
It aims at reproducing the whole life of Antwerp
in recent times :
" To paint Antwerp, with its own life, its port, its
river, its sailors, its dock-labourers, its plump women,
its rosy children whom Rubens in olden times had
thought plastic and appetising enough to fill his Para-
dises and Olympias, to paint this magnificent breed in
its ways, its costume, its atmosphere, with scrupulous
and fervent care of its special customs and morals, with-
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Georges Eekhoud
out neglecting any of the correlations which accentuate
and characterise it, to interpret the very soul of this
city of Rubens with a sympathy bordering on assimi-
lation."
Eekhoud laboured hard to carry out this crowded
programme ; and the result is a book full of in-
terest, but not a novel. It is rather a collection
of descriptive essays leavened by autobiography
literally transcribed and fired by a fierce spirit of
anarchism. The book begins after the funeral of
Laurent Paridael's father, when the orphan is taken
to live with his uncle, a retired officer in the Engi-
neers (as Eekhoud's own uncle was), who is now
a rich manufacturer. There is a Zolaesque de-
scription of the candle factory in a chapter which
might be detached and issued as a socialist pam-
phlet. To Eekhoud the workmen are helots, and
the employers heartless scamps. The machinery
is diabolical, a monster always on the watch to
seize and pulverise those who tend it. In the
factory the toilers are slaves, and as soon as they
are out of it they behave like beasts.
It is a curious kind of socialism, to take sides
with the workman against the master, and then
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make him out to be a swine. And with sympathy
for his swinishness, one is afraid. There are, how-
ever, one or two examples of partly decent work-
people in the novel ; but these characters are
obviously spurious — they are imitations, no doubt,
of types in Dickens, one of Eekhoud's favourite
authors. Eekhoud could never have conceived a
clean-limbed socialist like the chauffeur in Bernard
Shaw's Don Juan. But Eekhoud is more of an
anarchist than a socialist ; and the whole doctrine
of La Nouvelle Carthage tends, with regard both
to morals and politics, to anarchism.
Antwerp is above all a great commercial city,
and it was this aspect which was bound to take
the foremost part in the novel. Here again
Eekhoud is far from being entirely successful.
He is too one-sided in his outlook on life. With
his artist's eyes he sees the picturesqueness of the
busy life on the quays ; these dockers in all their
dirt are for him types of masculine beauty {beaute
male is an obsession with him) ; and he describes
their activity with all the zest and glow of Homer
describing a battle scene. But he has no com-
prehension of mercantile life as a whole. For the
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Georges Eekhoud
sake of relief, perhaps, he introduces a pair or so
of honest merchants ; but it is quite evident that
he looks upon merchants as a class with the bitter
hate of a jaundiced anarchist. From such a stand-
point it was quite impossible that he could create
an adequate picture of a great commercial city :
for this, idealism would be needed. There is more
genius in Georges Eekhoud's little finger than in
the whole body of Thomas Mann or Rudolf Herzog ;
yet these two German authors have succeeded
admirably where Eekhoud has failed : Mann has
transferred Lubeck with all its charm and old-
world atmosphere to the pages of his Buddenbrooks,
and Herzog in Die Hanseaten has given a fasci-
nating picture of the strain and stress and the
far-seeing aims of Hamburg merchants. Nothing
could be more dull and unlikely than Eekhoud's
description of a day on the Antwerp Exchange.
He gives us detail added to detail ; but they do
not fuse — we only get a glimpse of the outward
aspect of the Exchange. How much more vivid
is Verhaeren's symbolistic vision of The Exchange !
The poet gets at the soul of the thing ! And yet
even this chapter is redeemed by a fine ending :
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all the retailing of routine leads up to the hammer-
ing of a dishonest merchant, and here Eekhoud
is in his element — it is no longer a question of
commercial life, there is physical violence to de-
scribe, and the narration becomes dramatic and
animated.
The later chapters of La Nouvelle Carthage
should be considered as a series of essays. The
hero moves through them in a shadowy sort of
way ; but by this time all interest in this irritating
anarchist has been lost. There is a magnificent
description of emigrants arriving at Antwerp and
embarking for America ; those from the Campine
with sprigs of heather in their caps, and with hand-
fuls of Campine sand sewn into sacks, by way
of scapulars. Absolutely unwarranted by the
structure of the book, and yet perhaps the finest
thing in it, is the chapter called " Le Rietdijk."
The Rietdijk is (or was) a street in Antwerp con-
taining such property as that which Mrs. Warren
derived profit from in Brussels. Verhaeren has
described such houses in his poem "L'Etal" (The
Butcher's Stall).
Les FusilUs de Malines (1890) is hardly a
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Georges Eekhoud
novel either. It is not even a historical novel,
though it relates history with a novelist's imagina-
tion. It describes how the peasants of the Cam-
pine, when the Jacobins introduced conscription in
1798, rose in rebellion, marched on Malines, and
took it by a lucky chance, only to be captured
immediately by the French, and mowed down or
shot as rebels. The scenes of slaughter are splen-
did ; but taken as a whole the book is rather thin.
Mes Communions is a collection of tales, most
of them so weak that they may be juvenile work
which has at last found a publisher. Some of
them are swamped with maudlin sentiment which
is not natural to Eekhoud and is clearly due
to imitation of Conscience. Some of the stories,
however, are sufficiently revolutionary in concep-
tion : " Burch Mitsu " has been reprinted as an
anarchist tract, and some of the tales show that
morbid palliation of sodomy which brands Eekhoud
beyond redemption. It is significant that he takes
as a motto for the book that passage from Suspiria
de Profundis in which De Quincey confesses that
the few individuals who had disgusted him were
flourishing people of good repute, whereas he
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recollected with pleasure and good-will all the
rascals he had ever known.
Cycle Patibulaire (1892) is as robust as Mes
Communions is weak. One of the tales it is com-
posed of, " Hiep-Hioup," is a masterpiece of morbid
psychology. A gamekeeper, who on the death
of his elder brother had been recalled from the
priests' seminary to take his father's post, and who
retains the deferential manners of a priest, falls
madly in love with a light-o'-love, and in the end
he shoots her. The other tales of the volume relate
such cases of carnal aberration. ** Gentille " is
the life-story of a farmer's daughter who falls in
love with a noted smuggler on the Flemish coast,
in the district about Coxyde, Lombaertzyde, and
Furnes ; she runs away to him and follows him
about on the dunes like a faithful dosf. The
smuggler is caught and dies in prison ; and the
son the woman bears him grows up a hereditary
blackguard. To her son she transfers the love
she had felt for the father : it is not at all
maternal love. The end is bestial : the wretch
brings filthy little girls in from the slums and
loves them in the presence of his mother, who is
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Georges Eekhoud
jealous of his caresses. " Le Quadrille du Lan-
cier " is a preliminary study for the bacchanalia
of Escal- Vigor.
Eekhoud had to appear in the Belgian law-
courts to answer for Escal- Vigo7'- (1899). He was
acquitted. It is not so much a palliation as a
glorification of sodomy. The book is its own
condemnation : the love-scenes with the boy are
ridiculous in the extreme. The curious thing is
that Eekhoud should have lent colour to the
charge of depicting his own character by sending
the hero to school in Switzerland and by endowing
him with other personal qualities. Kehlmark, the
hereditary "count of the dike" in some imaginary
island off the west coast of Flanders, has, like
Eekhoud, inherited the property of his grand-
mother, and, like Eekhoud, he is an anarchist in
his views of society. In this partial identification
of himself with the hero of his book, however,
Eekhoud probably does no more than show his
withering contempt for public opinion, for, so far
as information is available, he is an inoffensive
man in his private life, and dowered with solid
citizen virtues. Kehlmark has been taught by his
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love of art to appreciate masculine beauty. On
the island over which he has hereditary jurisdiction
he takes a fancy for a young rascal who idles away
his time sunning himself on the dunes, and has
learned to play the bugle :
" Kehlmark watched the bugle-player, who was more
robust and slender than the other boys, and had a
complexion of amber, velvet eyes under long black lashes,
a fleshy and very red mouth, nostrils dilated by a mys-
terious olfactory sensuality, and black, dense hair. The
lines of his body were brought out by the wretched
dress which adhered to his shape as the fur sticks to
the elastic limbs of feline animals. His body, delicately
poised and twitching to and fro, seemed to be following
the undulations of the music and performing a very slow
dance, like the shivering of aspens, in summer nights
when the breeze is but the breathing of plants. The
statuesque posture of this young rustic, who with the
muscular relief of his mates combined a subtle perfection
of outline, reminded Kehlmark exactly of Franz Hals's
B,eed Player. His heart felt oppressed, he held his
breath, the prey of too great a fervour."
This passage may serve to [explain and (to
some extent) excuse the book. To begin with,
no one will deny that it is an excellent piece of
description. Then, it is evidently the transposi-
tion of a well-known picture. Belgian literature
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Georges Eekhoud
is full of such transpositions. The example best
known in England is Maeterlinck's Massacre of
the Innocents. So that in such a book as E seal-
Vigor, which cannot too strongly be condemned
from the moral point of view, the correct stand-
point of criticism is to regard the highly coloured
prose as essentially a poetisation of pictures. Even
where the picture cannot be identified, the art of
the description has evidently been taught by paint-
ing or sculpture.
The culmination of the tragedy is appalling,
and cannot even be hinted at. Recounted in
words, the story of the vengeance of the women
of the island is terrible indeed. But it would be
hypocritical not to allow that Eekhoud by the
resistless force and emotional fury of his descrip-
tion has gone far to justify his daring. If it is not
morality, it is art. And after all, Eekhoud has
only done in prose what Jordaens and Rubens and
other artists did on canvas. This chapter of the
pagan kermesse is a picture of bacchanalia, that
is all ; and as a picture, it is superb.
In Les Libertms d'Anvers something very
much like sexual mania runs riot. Ostensibly, it
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is a picturesque resumd of the history of Antwerp
through the ages, with special reference to the
sexual anarchists who at various periods have
preached their "religion" and recruited a following.
As a novel, it is absurd ; as an olla podrida of
history, anarchism, obscenity, and local colour it
has a certain charm. The pictorial part is again
most brilliant. The centrepiece of this succes-
sion of pictures is the Joyous Entry of Charles V
into Antwep.
Other novels of Eekhoud are La Faneuse
cC Amour and L Autre Vue. He has written con-
siderably on the Elizabethans ; his Ati Siecle de
Shakespeare has done something to popularise
Shakespeare studies in Belgium. That Eekhoud
is not an exact scholar, however, is shown by the
fact that he speaks of Ben Johnson. (Maeter-
linck, another Belgian Shakespearean, talks of
Ben Jhonson). He has translated Beaumont and
Fletcher's Philaster and Marlowe's Edward II ;
and he has written a tragedy of Perkin Warbeck,
a fellow- Fleming in whom he celebrates the quali-
ties of the race.
Eekhoud is a perplexing personality. He
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Georges Eekhoud
attracts ; he repels. He may be admired ; he
cannot be loved. He has the most energetic
style of all Belgian writers ; no one considers him
a stylist. Appreciation of his descriptive powers
is tempered by surprise at the clumsiness of his
construction. He is overflowing with matter ; and
yet he repeats himself constantly — he seems to
consider that what he has once written has per-
manent and incontrovertible value as a document,
to which the reader may be referred for further
information. To give one instance of this irritat-
ing habit : the passage quoted from Les NoMvelles
Kermesses, relating the contempt felt in Belgium
for soldiers, is reproduced in La Nouvelle Carthage
— with some additional information it is true, as
that in Antwerp girls refuse to dance with soldiers
at the popular balls. Eekhoud's artistry is in de-
scription, not in construction. He is not a crafts-
man, he is a genius.
He is full of matter ; but his matter has a
great sameness. He is a rebel ; and he can create
rebels. Gentlefolks he cannot create, for he mis-
judges them. He has a fixed idea that the rogue
and the vagabond is a free man, while the bourgeois
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is hidebound in custom ; and the elucidation of this
idea is the main purpose of his best work. At
first, the unexpectedness of the doctrine dazzles
like a fine paradox ; in the long run it palls. A
great writer interprets life, which is infinite in
variety ; Eekhoud interprets a phase of life, the
only phase he can see. But in his own limited
range, in his championing of the outlaws of society
and of Campine peasants, he is an acknowledged
master.
It may be doubted whether his conception of
the Campine peasant is strictly true to life ; it is
hardly likely that a whole race of agricultural
labourers should be so violent and lustful as they
are in Eekhoud's showing. The fact that all the
characters he is in sympathy with are fleshy ("gars
charnus," " plantureuses dimes," " seins volumi-
neux," "bras muscles," "hanches de taure" — such
expressions recur ad nauseam) need not be charged
against him ; the men and woman in the paintings
of Rubens and Jordaens are just as fleshy. It is
Eekhoud's generalisation of character which pro-
vokes protest.
In his wonderful tales of vagabonds, criminals,
io6
Georges Eekhoud
pariahs, soldiers, tramps, and beggars, Eekhoud
can be compared only with Gorky. Probably
Gorky's vagabonds are more true to life, for, after
all, Eekhoud is an author who has specialised in
such people — he is not and cannot be one of them.
In other words, his conception of the unclassed is
an artist's conception, one that he has dreamed
himself into, and in which he believes passionately,
but which is nevertheless a dream. He sees the
picturesque exterior, rags and dirt and all ; and
in his anti-social fervour (which is an attitude,
sincere no doubt, but still an attitude) he uses the
vagabond as an object lesson.
On the whole, Georges Eekhoud must be con-
sidered as a man of genius who has lost control
of his genius. He has not fulfilled the promise
of Les Kermesses and Kees Doorik. He should
have given us a stage of men, each distinct from
the other ; he should have schooled himself into
a Shakespearean variety ; but he has cloistered
himself with the abnormal and the horrible, he
has made himself the Belgian Webster, become
a glittering and flattering mirror of violence and
perversity.
107
CHAPTER V
^MILE VERHAEREN
Of all the men whom the war has forced into
the forefront of public interest, there is none
who deserves his accretion of fame more than
Emile Verhaeren. But the war has not estab-
lished, it has only widened, his reputation. Even
in England, the last stronghold of intellectual
apathy, he has been known to poetry-lovers for
the last twenty years. He has been acclaimed
in far-away Japan ; one of his books {Images
Japonaises) was published in Tokio in 1900.
The one book of travel-pictures he has written
{Espana Negra^ translated by Dario de Regoyos,
Barcelona, 1899) ^^^ ^° ^^i^ day only be had in
Spanish. In Russia he has been extensively
translated, and he is in that country regarded as
the great iconoclast of modern poetry who, more
than Nietzsche, more than Maeterlinck, has opened
the avenues of literature to the doctrines of power
108
!^mile Verhaeren
and of the epic grandeur of everyday life. But
the country in which he has had the greatest
influence is Germany. The Germans, indeed, do
not conceal the fact that they regard him as a
German poet who by accident writes in French.
He is a native of Flanders, and Flanders is
German, for the Flemings are a German race ;
therefore Verhaeren is a German poet. They
have translated him ; they have written books
about him ; they have organised lecturing tours
for him throughout the length and breadth of the
German Empire, and everywhere given him looo
marks a lecture ; they have feted, applauded, in-
terpreted, and — annexed him. And when they
came to Brussels, they paid him the supreme
compliment of bringing his name with them on
the black list of proposed hostages. They would
have shown their further appreciation of his great-
ness by shooting him like a dog. Not finding
him at Brussels, they are said to have destroyed
his cottage near Mons, with its priceless docu-
ments and art treasures, the collections of a life-
time. However, Verhaeren is at this moment
busy at a new book. La Belgiqiie Sanglante
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
(Belgium's Agony), which is not likely to be
welcome to his thousands of German admirers.
Nevertheless, the Germans are not altogether
wrong in emphasizing the Germanic element in
Verhaeren's work. None of the Flemish writers
is more German and less French than he. In
him the qualities of his race are sharply accentu-
ated ; and his very appearance (with his bony
face and huge, drooping moustaches) is that of
one of the Goths who sacked Rome. The racial
characteristics of the Flemings are identical with
those of the Germans ; a certain heaviness in
thought and expression, a marked lack of the
sense of humour, an imperturbable and obstinate
conceit. The prevailing characteristic in either
case is that of violence — a violence of habit which
runs to waste in the drunkenness and gluttony
we see unashamedly pictured in Flemish genre-
pictures, a violence of expression which in litera-
ture shapes itself according to the mind of the
writer into a fibrous strength or a flabby coarse-
ness. "The Flemings are brutal," Verhaeren will
say in the emphasis of his conversation ; and the
merest acquaintance with Flemish life or literature
no
Emile Verhaeren
proves him to be right — the Flemings are brutal
in the same degree as their near kinsmen the
Prussians are cruel. We must expect, then, to
find in Flemish literature what we find in Flemish
painting — brutality and violence. This is not to
be understood as unqualified censure — all expres-
sions of praise or blame are relative, and from
the point of view of a robust criticism violence
in literature is merely a criterion of strength.
Nietzsche's blonde beast must be violent ; the
superman must be violent. At all events, a great
deal of recent German criticism has laboured
this point ; and it is not therefore surprising that
the Germans should have pounced on Verhaeren
and annexed him as a German superman, as one
whose writings are full of German vigour, though
the language in which he writes is the language
of mental poison and physical degeneracy.
It is no secret that the flamingants look upon
those Flemings who write in French as renegades,
as traitors to the national cause. To many of their
countrymen, therefore, Maeterlinck and Verhaeren
are traitors. This is not the place to dilate upon
the tragic strife between party and party in Belgium
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— a strife which would be better called a class-
war, a foolish class-war which may yet cause
untold mischief even when the Germans are driven
beyond the Rhine. But the existence and the
savagery of this race-warfare must be recognised
before one can get a clear idea of Belgian litera-
ture. It would be ridiculous in the extreme to
regard Maeterlinck and Verhaeren as French
writers ; they are Flemish writers who write in
French ; and to understand them aright in their
degree of importance as Belgian writers we must
establish the fact that they are champions of
French culture in a country where the Parlia-
mentary majority and the paramount influence of
the national Church were, consciously or uncon-
sciously, paving the way for an alliance or a
union with Germany.
If it were merely a question of literature, one
might regret that all the Flemings do not write
in Flemish. The Flemings are right in their
battle-cry: " De taal is het volk" (The language
is the nation, the language is the man). From the
phonetician's point of view, language is the pro-
duct of the organs of speech ; from the point of
112
Emile Verhaeren
view of the historian of literature, language is the
product of the blood and the heart and the mind.
Just as individuals speak with the rhythms of
their individuality — the violent man with violent
emphasis, the gentle man with a gentle lisp or
drawl — so nations mould their language into an
expression of their national idiosyncrasies. The
Danes, for instance, an aesthetic and indolent race,
have swallowed nearly all their consonants and
effeminised the virile old Norse tongue of their
ancient sagas into a language of faintly breathed
vowels, into a language without a backbone ; the
practical English have eliminated the superfluities
of grammar to the same extent as the scientifically-
minded and theorising Germans have kept theirs
intact ; the French have refined and clarified their
language to the very measure of their own super-
refinement and logical clearness of thought ; and
the Flemings (like the Germans) have preserved
the clashing consonants and the uncouth gutturals,
the resonant vowels and the voluminous verbs of
their ancient Saxon speech, so that it is to this
day a language that rings with the pristine vigour
of broad-limbed and muscular men ; a language
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
sated with violence, it is true, but with the vio-
lence of virility. When robust, vehement men,
therefore, like Maeterlinck or Verhaeren, express
themselves in delicate French they run the risk
of losing a great part of their force.
When the ponderous thought of a Maeterlinck
or the onrushing vehemence of a Verhaeren is
confined in the delicate meshes of the French
sentence it often seems as though the envelope
were overweighted, as though the bag were bulg-
ing. Maeterlinck, at all events, reads noticeably
better in an English or German translation than
in the original, and the unctuous style of his
essays, which seems as though some corpulent
priest were being borne along in a sedan chair,
bestowing blessings, as he passes, on kneeling
crowds, would not have been possible in Flemish.
But there is another feature of the Flemish
character besides strength ; this is, its inherent
chiaroscuro^ the half-lights of its mysticism, the
colouring gloomed by shadow which is the secret
of Rembrandt's pictures. Maeterlinck, who is
pre-eminently a mystic, has finely illuminated this
trait of Flemish in the preface to his translation
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Emile Verhaeren
of Ruysbroeck ; in Flemish, he says, "the words
are really lamps behind the ideas, whereas in
French the ideas have to light up the words."
Maeterlinck and Verhaeren, then, have certainly
lost strength and the fascination of the half-lights
they might have had in their native language.
Great as they are in French, they would have
been still greater in Flemish. But at this period
of history there is something far greater than
national literature ; there is the question of national
life itself, and the service which such men as
Maeterlinck and Verhaeren by writing in French
have rendered to the cause of the national life
of Belgium, which can only exist as a bulwark
against Germany, has been inestimable.
As a matter of fact, Verhaeren himself never
took the trouble to make himself master of Flemish.
When he was a child, French was always spoken
in the house, although his parents were Flemings ;
and he only learned Flemish when he went to the
elementary school of his native village, St. Amand
(on the Scheldt near Antwerp). He might, of
course, if he had been a Flemish patriot in the
meaning of the flamingants, have been at pains
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to perfect himself in the language which was
spoken around him ; but, according to his own
account, it would always have been a foreign
language to him. And yet, according to authori-
tative French critics, his French has never been
pure. His French, some of them seem to think,
is a translated Flemish. To give one example,
he finds it possible to write : Les touj'ours mimes
Jours, meaning les jours qui sont toujours les
nihnes. This phrase is certainly Germanic in
structure ; in German, for instance, it would be
die immer gleichen Tage. But Verhaeren, in his
conversation, will say that such ungrammatical ex-
pressions are not imitations of the Flemish idiom
at all, but absolutely necessary to him in order to
render the sudden impulse of his feeling : his dis-
tortions of grammar have been intentional ; his
Verhaerenese is as deliberate as Carlylese. Les
jours qui sont toujours les memes is a circuitous
phrase in comparison with the dramatic vigour of
les toujours memes jours. French purists will
never admit the right of a " barbarian " (Ver-
haeren has repeatedly been called a barbarian by
French critics) to use an adverb as an adjective ;
Ii6
£mile Verhaeren
but he may possibly succeed in forcing his inno-
vations on them in various instances of his word-
coining. Here again he is as daring and as
picturesque as Carlyle ; and some of the words
he has coined (we must remember that few French
writers dare to coin words) have already been
accepted : for instance, les villes tentaculaires
(tentacular towns).
In Les Tendresses Premieres Verhaeren has
related the story of his boyhood at Saint-
Amand. His father was a retired draper from
Brussels. The house in which he was born
(in 1855) was on the road from Termonde to
Antwerp, and from the windows the ships could
be seen passing along the river — " the massive
and lethargic Scheldt" — that was always at the
back of the boy's thoughts. It was an old-world
house, with oak and mahogany furniture. From
the windows of the attic Termonde was visible —
Termonde, which seemed the end of the world.
Behind the house was an orchard full of old pear-
trees, which in springtime looked like a flock of
white birds trailing their wings in the sun. And
the great flower-garden ! — Verhaeren's description
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makes it seem a wonderful place, a garden with
golden beeches and silver aspens, and with great
cocks cut in the holly and yew of the hedges. Over
the lawn roamed two Numidian cranes, and three
crazy peacocks whose spread tails were like the
sunset. To the poet-child the garden and the
strange birds were a dream of Paradise, a burn-
ing fever of beauty as long as the summer lasted.
His companions were the barefoot village urchins,
with whom, in the autumn, he went robbing the
orchards. And they went swimming in the hidden
creeks of the Scheldt, where the grass grew as
high as a wall, and after the swim they would dry
themselves on the dike's velvet flanks. And little
Verhaeren was on familiar terms with all the petty
tradesmen of the place — the bellringer, the car-
penter, the blacksmith, and the other artisans whose
handicraft he was to magnify in the grandiose sym-
bols of Les Villages Ilhtsoires.
Near the house was his uncle's oilworks. The
intention was that in due course Verhaeren should
succeed his uncle. But, his schooling at Ghent
completed, the young man showed no inclination to
be an oil-manufacturer, and he was sent to Louvain
ii8
Emile Verhaeren
to study jurisprudence. In 1881 he passed his
final, and set up as a barrister at Brussels. But
Edmond Picard, for whom he worked as a stagi-
aire, saw that he would never make a lawyer and
advised him to find something more congenial.
As a matter of fact it was already clear to Ver-
haeren that he could be nothing but a man of
letters ; and after the publication of Les Flani-
««^<?^ (Flemish Women) in 1883 the way was clear.
The book was hailed with abuse (one critic said
the young poet had "burst like an abscess," and
another called him the "Raphael of dirt"), but
— it was hailed, and henceforth Verhaeren had a
name.
Verhaeren himself has in his riper years more
or less disowned this first book of his. He is
wrong ; and those critics of his are wrong who
regard it as a mere collection of juvenilia. It
has faults ; but they are only the faults of un-
restraint, and there is unrestraint in Verhaeren's
ripest work. The poems are packed with vigour
— in Verhaeren's own language they are gorged
with sap, they are explosions of energy. The
only question for the critic is whether they are
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not too pictorial. But Les Flamandes is not
more a succession of pictures than many another
Flemish book which is praised as such. Ver-
haeren's idea at the time he wrote it was to
produce in verse exactly such pictures as Teniers,
Jordaens, and other Flemish artists had produced
on canvas, in other words, genre pictures. Now
in a picture gallery a picture is a picture ; it need
not necessarily suggest an idea. And anything
that can be seen can be painted. As far as painted
pictures are concerned, there is little restriction of
subject. But, say the critics, if you write a word-
picture, the picture must suggest an idea. And
you cannot write word-pictures of anything you
like : you must confine yourself to what is pleasant.
As for the first objection, there is an idea
behind the pictures of the book, the idea that
the Flemings of olden times were a much more
robust race than the Flemings of our own days.
Verhaeren was already unconsciously occupied
by the idea of the superman ; only, instead of
placing the superman in the future, he found
him in the past. The old Flemish artists were
supermen, because they were such tremendous
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Emile Verhaeren
eaters and drinkers, because they created master-
pieces between two drinking-bouts. (The idea
is naive ; but Verhaeren, it may be said at once,
is essentially naive.) Apart from the idea, however,
the poems are rich with the very thing that makes
a poem — with the something we have no word for
and which the Germans call Stimmung. There
is a mood of the greatest artistic refinement in
some of the poems [L'Ah^euvoir, for instance — a
picture of cattle being watered at sunset), and even
where the diction is coarse to the last limit of
decency there is a brazen strength in the raw
images which lifts the poem above vulgarity. Take
the sonnet :
THE BAKING OF THE BREAD
The servants for the Sunday bake the bread,
Of the best milk and wheat ; their brows bent low,
And elbows bared and at an angle, shed
The sweat with which they steam into the dough.
Yea, they are wet all over in their haste ;
The sweat is running down their dangling breasts ;
Their two huge fists are wading in the paste,
And moulding it in rounds like flesh of breasts.
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The bakehouse heats its crimson flames outside ;
And from a plank's end, two by two, they slide
The soft, white loaves into their proper places.
But when the door is opened, like a pack
Of hot, red hounds, the flames force out a track,
And, roaring, leap to bite the wenches' faces.
Or that of the pigs running through the
orchard close, and filling it with their grunting's
hollow din, while their milky paps dangle in rows
and trail along the grass ; rooting in the midden
and snifiing the simmering liquid that makes their
skins " dither and grlimmer like a crimson rose."
. . . Such a sonnet as this may be called " un-
pleasant" by squeamish critics; but it might well
be justified as a Flemish idyll — an idyll of pigs.
And after all, these fleshy swine bathed in burning
sunshine are not more provocative than some of
the glaring canvases of Rubens — pigs or Greek
goddesses, it is all a matter of flesh in the end.
There is not a trace of coarseness in Les
Moines (1886). Here the exaltation is ascetic.
After the "explosion of life" that Les Flamandes
had been for Verhaeren, a reaction had come.
Not exactly a religious reaction (the faith of his
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Emile Verhaeren
fathers had gone for ever), but a return to the
romance of the ritual, to the symbols of mystic
fervour.
In Les Moines actual experiences of monastery
life are drawn upon : the poet had spent three
weeks in the monastery of Forges, near Chimay.
He shared the life of the monks, and it was hoped
in the monastery itself that he would remain.
But all the evidence available shows that Ver-
haeren, having collected his stock of impressions,
was very glad to get away to more substantial
fare than the monks' table afforded ; and there is
further evidence that he made up for lost feasts
by very copious eating. The result was a ruined
digestion, which is perhaps the main cause of the
appalling pessimism which blackens the pages of
the next collections of his poems.
The German theorists have taken up the poet's
legend here, and from the poems of his three
books Les Soirs (1887), Les Debacles (1888), and
Les Flambeaux Noirs (1890), made out a case for
what they call his "pathological period." He
was evidently ill for a long time ; but one may
doubt whether the exasperated despair and the
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pretence of madness which make the atmosphere
of the books have more than a literary genuine-
ness. The fact is that this kind of thing was
the fashion at the time. One has only to read
the reviews of those days to find a pessimism and
maladies quite as excruciating as those of Ver-
haeren. A notorious example is Maeterlinck's
Serves Ckaudes, a most dismal display of dirges
by a man who perhaps never felt ill in his life,
but who had great business ability and the knack
of supplying the demand. Georges Rodenbach
was another sick man who popularised poetic
disease. The Satanism of Giraud and Gilkin
was another phase of the fashion. The truth is,
Schopenhauer was in the air. . . . Some of the
poets had actually read him. ... It was the Jln-
de-szecleism of which we have read so much. In
the March- April number of La Wallonie in 1891
appeared a kind of prose-poem by Verhaeren,
which contains the essence of all the " patho-
logical " poems:
" I had arrived at such a susceptibility," runs the
sketch, " that I would rush home like one demented,
shut myself up in my room, thrust my fists into my
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Emile Verhaeren
eyes and remain a long time in this posture, to drive
more and more darkness into my eyeballs. I worked
myself into sadnesses of ink, into rages of gimlets
through a thousand metals ; not only my eyes, but my
ears, my sense of touch, of taste, my whole body, was
torture to me : I felt acids under my tongue and thorns
under my nails, . . .
" I did not dare to look at myself in the mirror.
Was I not myself infected with that universal disease
which exasperated me in others ? My room, happily,
was old and quite dislocated with departed memories,
rather a thought than a thing to me. I only contem-
plated it through some dream or other dreamt in such
and such a corner. . . . My room was thus a precious
retreat, in which I cloistered myself for days together. . . .
" One evening, a song ascending from the deserted
street, so desperately incoherent and void of sense that
any dream-spider whatsoever might have woven its web
in the threads of it, I had the curiosity to look out, all
of a sudden. Fever was whipping my pulse ; I felt
myself burning, tell me, towards what madness ? Below,
under an oblique slash of gas, near a gas-lamp, a pale
face, with a hole of blood for a mouth, was groaning up
to me notes broken Hke its teeth. And in that face
in the air I saw distinctly two holes on each side of
the nose, two holes that had been stopped, as though
hastily mended. The blind man stared without seeing
me, with his head obstinately lifted towards the alms
that might rain on him from the windows, a head lament-
ably stretched at the top of his neck, his head, oh ! this
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head of distress and misery as old as a century and
beaten with wind and scraped with rain and as though
of stone against death.
" Temptation suddenly scorched me with its red iron.
I ran towards my dressing-table : ' This man, he at
least no longer felt all the horror of his life, he saw it
no longer, all the hideousness of his body, all the
monstrous ugliness of the world.' And without reflect-
ing, without the courage to do it, in an extreme fit of
exasperation I seized my scissors and more immediately
still, frantic, with I know not what pride in myself, I
gouged my eyes out like two marbles in front of the
mirror."
The extravagance of this nightmare is so
obvious that there can be no question of taking it
seriously as an indication of Verhaeren's physical
and mental state at the time he wrote it. It has
not the sincerity of certain prose poems inspired
by opium. It is simply a flaunting display of
" spleen," that very artificial condition of mental
distress which the poets of the hour had distilled
from a poem by Baudelaire. In the poems of
Verhaeren's trilogy, however, there is a sustained
coherence of the impression which lends an air of
reality to the philosophical structure which critics
have reared by taking a passage here and there.
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Emile Verhaeren
Stefan Zweig's analysis of the poet's longing for
death and approach to madness is itself a poem.
The German critic rightly points out the leitmotiv
of the trilogy : the will to suffer {" To suffer for
oneself, alone, but voluntarily"). But this very
insistence of the will betokens viororous Intel-
lectual activity : here is none of the apathy of
disease. The poet carefully notes all the phases
of his exasperation, notes them with inspired
imagery, in rhythms new to French poetry :
" Mes jours toujours plus lourds s'en vont roulant leur
cours."
He whips himself into an illusion of madness,
watches the corpse of his reason floating down
the Thames, and cries out: "When shall I have
the atrocious joy of seeing madness attacking my
brain nerve by nerve ? "
" He has measured all the deeps of the spirit/' Stefan
Zweig interprets, " but all the words of religion and
science, all the elixirs of life, have been powerless to
save him from this torment. He knows all sensations,
and there was no greatness in any of them ; all have
goaded him, none have exalted or raised him above
himself. And now his heart yearns ardently for this
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last sensation of all. He is tired of waiting for it, he
will go out to meet it : ' I will go out to meet madness
and its suns.' He hails madness as though it were a
saint, as though it were his saviour ; he forces himself
' to believe in madness as in a faith.' . . . Here the
highest state of despair is reached ; the black banner of
death and the red one of madness are intertwined. With
unprecedented logic Verhaeren, despairing of an inter-
pretation of life, has exalted senselessness as the sense
of the universe. But it is just in this complete inversion
that victory lies. ... It is just at the moment when
the sick man cries out like one being crucified, ' I am he
who is immensely lost,' that he is redeemed and de-
livered. Just this idea, ' to violate one's disease every
hour, to curse it, and to love it,' is nothing else than
the idea of his life, to master all resistance by a bound-
less love, ' to love fate in its very rage ' ; never to shun
a thing, but to take everything and enhance it till it
becomes creative, ecstatic pleasure ; to welcome every
suffering with fresh readiness."
It may well be that Verhaeren in this trilogy-
has created the classic epic of disease. This may
still be true even if it should be proved by some
future biographer that Verhaeren never had a
pathological period except on paper. Certain it
is that individual poems are magnificent in their
metallic imagery, their raw colouring (as with
J28
Emile Verhaeren
great dabs of red and black and gold), the daring
onomatopoeia of their rhymes. What a landscape
this tortured visionary, this "sick wolf," unrolls!
" It can hardly be called a landscape of earth," says
Zweig. " It is a grandiose landscape of dreams, horizons
as though on some other planet, as though in one of
those worlds which have cooled into moons, where the
warmth of the earth has died out and an icy calm chills
the vast far-seen spaces deserted of man. . . . Here all
the colours of life are burnt out, not a star shines down
from this steel-grey metallic sky ; only a cruel, freezing
moon glides across it from time to time like a sardonic
smile. These are books of pallid nights, with the im-
mense wings of clouds closing the sky, over a narrowed
world, in which the hours cling to things like heavy and
clammy chains. They are works filled with a glacial
cold. * It is freezing . . . ' one poem begins, and this
shuddering tone pierces like the howling of dogs ever
and ever again over an illimitable plain. The sun is
dead, dead are the flowers, the trees ; the very marshes
are frozen in these white midnights : ' And the heart is
gripped by the fear of an immortal winter and of a great
God of a sudden, glacial and splendid.' "
It is of particular interest to us in England
that a great part of these three books was written
in London, where Verhaeren spent some time in
great loneliness, knowing no English, and collect-
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ing impressions, not only for the trilogy of disease,
but also for the greater trilogy of the tentacular
city which was to come later. One of his favour-
ite occupations in London is said to have been
travelling to problematic destinations on the under-
ground : this, no doubt, was as near as he could
get to Hell.
In " Les Villes," one of the poems of Les Flam-
beaux NoirSy the poet, after describing London,
exclaims : " Here is the City in gold of red
alchemies, where thou canst melt thy mind in a
new crucible."
This poem is a first expression of the new ideas
which were to end his pessimistic phase. Verhaeren
is by his very nature an optimist ; it is a need of
his nature to be able to believe and to worship
with fervour. His break with the Roman Catholic
faith caused him great suffering. There was an-
other source of his malady. He had been brought
up in the country, he had been reared on the open
air. But when he settled in Brussels, the life of
the city began to tell on him. He had to adapt
his constitution to town life, and for a long time
his constitution refused to be adapted. Then when
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he fled from Belgium altogether to see the great
cities of the world, he felt like a child astray in
the wilderness. Even to-day there is something
of an astonished child about Verhaeren. Every-
thing is wonderful to him ; these streets of London,
for instance, through which we pass mechanically,
are to him colossal manifestations of human power ;
motor-cars, shops, factories, canals, museums, the
passing of crowds — "poured as from a bent full
bottle's neck" — railway stations, docks, ships —
what ordinary, meaningless words these are to us,
and to him what storehouses of romance! But in
the days of his illness he walked about among all
this romance in absolute bewilderment. It was too
immense for him to grasp the meaning of it.
It is perhaps not easy for the normal town-
dweller to understand why Verhaeren should have
fallen a prey to mental exasperation when he was
plunged into the conditions of modern cities. And
yet, if we were to think of it, what an awful thing a
great city is ! A modern city is something absolutely
terrible ! Probably most of us are awed and over-
whelmed by Mont Blanc ; but if dimensions are
measured by terms of power, what a pigmy Mont
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Blanc is ! If we were suddenly transplanted to
some pathless forest in Central Africa we should
be bewildered, overwhelmed ; but we walk through
London without feeling in the least upset. Ver-
haeren, however, had to become conscious of the
horror of great cities in order that he might inter-
pret them to coming generations, in order that he
might make others in their turn conscious of the
magnitude and the sublimity of modern conditions.
For we have got to become conscious of them.
We do not sufficiently realise that ideals are chang-
ing, that the epic of the past cannot be the epic
of the future. We need not go as far as the Italian
futurists who in their zeal for the future demand
the utter destruction in men's memory of the past,
who demand that the greasy leprous palaces of
Venice shall be razed to the ground — we do not
need to deny the past, but we do need to see
that the pace of change is in our days so rapid
that in one generation the face of the universe
is transformed. Verhaeren's task has been to teach
us to look at the change without fear, knowing
that whatever mechanical inventions accelerate the
pace of living the human organisation can adapt
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Emile Verhaeren
itself infinitely, and that if the world changes, man
will change too. All is well ; because it cannot
be otherwise.
But Verhaeren is first and foremost a poet, and
one might think : it is well to be reconciled with
mechanical inventions, to believe that "factories
thundering in the unseizable rhythm of petrified
exertion," workshops, motor-cars, and all these in-
expressibly ugly things are necessary in the chain
of human progress, but by all the teaching of the
ancients and moderns, what is to become of poetry ?
Poetry is the expression of beauty ; and therefore
ugly things cannot be expressed in poetry. But
modern inventions and the results of them are
ugly, cries out the aesthete : they are impossible in
poetry. For poetry we must go to the classical,
the romantic, the idyllic past. The falseness of
this attitude Verhaeren by his example proved.
He too had turned to the past for the inspiration
of his Flemish genre-scenes and the pathetic figures
of his monks. But in the cosmopolitan searchings
which followed he had learned to look at the world
with different eyes. He had discovered new ideals
of beauty. The beauty of a thing does not lie in
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its outward form, but in the power it expresses.
For Verhaeren, henceforth, the motive spring of
poetry is energy. Poets had sought harmony ;
Verhaeren now seeks energy. To the old poets
a roaring factory was repulsive, grotesque ; to
Verhaeren the panting in multiplied effort of the
machinery has the rhythms of stupendous poetry.
Viewed from this standpoint, all that had bewildered
him in the modern City becomes intelligible, and
inevitable in the progress of man to godhead ; he
sees that a modern poet must not only be recon-
ciled with modern conditions but must discover
their epic grandeur, and hail mechanical inventions
as the poets of old hailed great victories. Follow-
ing unconsciously in the track of Walt Whitman
(his great forerunner whom he had not read),
Verhaeren now turns his cosmic pain into cosmic
joy, and strikes out into new paths of poetry which
are destined to be the great highways of the verse
to be.
The books in which Verhaeren sang his in-
spired vision of the new city are Les Campagnes
Hallucinees (1893) and Les Villes Tentaculaires
(1895). These are, probably, his most important,
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Emile Verhaeren
as they are his most suggestive, books. Les Cani-
pagnes Hallucinees, " the hallucinated countryside,"
describes the desertion of the country for the town.
The villagers can always at night see the glare
of the city on the horizon, and Verhaeren per-
sonifies this City as an octopus stretching out its
tentacles to drain the life's blood of the country.
It is a magnificent and lurid vision.
" Cities have sprung up like mushrooms," says Stefan
Zweig again. " Millions have conglomerated. But where
have they come from ? From what sources have these
immense masses suddenly streamed into the mighty
reservoirs? The answer is quick to come. The heart
of the city is fed with the oozing blood of the country.
The country is impoverished. As though they were hal-
lucinated, the peasants migrate to where gold is minted,
to the town that in the evenings flames across the
horizon ; to where alone riches lie, and power. They
march away with their carts, to sell their last stick of
furniture, their last rags ; they march away with their
children, to let them perish in the factories ; they march
away to dip their hands in this roaring river of gold.
The fields are deserted. Only the fantastic figures of
idiots stagger along lonely paths ; the abandoned flour-
mills are empty, and only turn when the wind smites
against them. Fever rises from the marshes, where the
water, no longer gathered into dikes, spreads putrefaction
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and pestilence. Beggars drag themselves from door to
door, with the country's barrenness reflected in their
eyes ; and to these last lingering cultivators come the
emigration agents, and entice them to seek a far-distant
hope."
The villages die. Everything streams to Oppido-
magnum, as Verhaeren calls the great city. ** All
the roads lead to the town," he sings :
" This is the many-tentacled town,
This is the flaming octopus.
The ossuary of all of us.
At the country's end she waits,
Feeling towards the old estates.
" Meteoric gas-lamps line
Docks where tufted masts entwine ;
A river of pitch and naphtha rolls
By wooden bridges, mortared moles ;
And the raw whistles of the ships
Howl with fright in the fog that grips :
With a red signal light they peer
Towards the sea to which they steer.
Quays with clashing buffers groan ;
Carts grate o'er the cobble-stone ;
Bridges opening lift a vast
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Emile Verhaeren
Gibbet till the ships have passed ;
Letters of brass inscribe the world,
On roofs, and walls, and shop-fronts curled,
Face to face in battle massed.
" Wheels file and file, the drosky plies,
Trains are rolling, effort flies ;
And like a prow becalmed, the glare
Of gilded stations here and there ;
And, from their platforms, ramified
Rails beneath the city glide.
In tunnels and in craters, whence
They storm in network flashing thin
Out into hubbub, dust and din.
" This is the many-tentacled town.
"The street, with eddies tied like ropes
Around its squares, runs out and gropes
Along the city up and down,
And runs back far enlaced, and lined
With crowds inextricably twined.
Whose mad feet beat the flags beneath.
Whose eyes are filled with hate, whose teeth
Snatch at the time they cannot catch.
Lust roars and leaps from breast to breast,
Whipped to a rage uproarious,
To a blind crush of limbs in quest
Of the pleasure of gold and phosphorus ;
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And in and out wan women fare,
With sexual symbols in their hair.
The atmosphere of reeking dun
At times recedes towards the sun,
As though a loud cry called to Peace
To bid the deafening noises cease ;
But all the City puffs and blows
With such a violent snort and flush,
That the dying seek in vain the hush
Of silence that eyes need to close.
" Such is the day — and when the eves
With ebony hammers carve the skies,
Over the plain the City heaves
Her shimmer of colossal lies ;
Her haunting, gilt desires arise ;
Her radiance to the stars is cast ;
She gathers her gas in golden sheaves ;
Her rails are highways flying fast
To the mirage of happiness
That strength and fortune seem to bless ;
Like a great army swell her walls ;
And all the smoke she still sends down
Reaches the field in radiant calls."
It is a terrifying vision, this of the City as a
whole ; and in other poems Verhaeren paints
pictures no less horrific of the various phases of
the City's activity — the Exchange, the brothel, the
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Emile Verhaeren
bazaar, the music hall, factories and workshops,
machinery, labour. But, while showing us things
as they are, the poet proclaims their necessity.
The City, loathsome as some of its manifestations
are, is necesssary ; for the City is progress. The
Country, with its idylls and its old-time peace and
beauty, must die, or only exist at a slave's ransom,
for it is the foe of progress. In herself the City
concentrates energy, " red strength and new light,"
to inflame with fever and fecund fury the brains
of those (heroes, scholars, artists, apostles, adven-
turers) who pierce the wall of mystery that glooms
the world, discover new laws, and subdue the vast
forces of life imprisoned in matter.
This — the necessary conquest of the Country
by the City — is the main idea of Verhaeren's riper
work. It proved a very fertile idea, and led, in a
further series of famous books {Les Visages de la
Vie, 1899 5 ^^^ Forces Ttwtultueuses, 1902 ; La
Multiple Splendettr, 1906 ; Les Rytkmes Souverains,
1 9 10; Les Blh Mouvants, 19 12), to the develop-
ment of various poetic themes — the beauty of
mechanical things, the gospel of admiration, salva-
tion by ecstasy, and other doctrines, all of which
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have been patiently tabulated and pigeon-holed by
Stefan Zweig (the authorised interpreter).
Les Villages Illusoires (1895) is a part of the
series in so far as it symbolises, in some of its
poems, Verhaeren's reconciliation with the world.
But it is rather different in style to the other books
— less inspired perhaps, but more restrained and
more full of the matter of poetry as traditionally
conceived. It is the only book of Verhaeren's in
which he is a symbolist ; but his symbols are so
clear and broadly outlined that they need no inter-
pretation. There is, for instance, the poem of the
ferryman, who struggles manfully against the storm
to reach the opposite bank whence he is pitifully
hailed, only to find, when his oars are broken and
his rudder is gone, that he is still where he started
from. Beaten as he is, however, he has not let
go of the green reed between his teeth. How
inspiriting is this picture of will-power that clings
to hope ! More desolate in the murk of its land-
scape is the symbol of the fishermen hopelessly
befogged in the night of ignorance and selfishness :
the dank fog chokes everything and buries the
moon :
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Emile Verhaeren
" But flickering lanterns now and then
Light up and magnify the backs,
Bent obstinately in their smacks,
Of the old river fishermen.
Who all the time from last sunset,
For what night's fishing none can know,
Have cast their black and greedy net,
Where silent, evil waters flow.
And never helping one another,
Never brother hailing brother.
Never doing what they ought.
For himself each fisher's thought :
And the first draws his net, and seizes
All the fry of his poverty ;
And the next drags up, as keen as he,
The empty bottoms of diseases ;
Another opens out his net
To griefs that on the surface swim ;
And another to his vessel's rim
Pulls up the flotsam of regret.
" The river churns, league after league,
Along the dikes, and runs away.
As it has done so many a day,
To the far horizon of fatigue ;
Upon its banks skins of black clay
By night perspire a poison draught :
The fogs are fleeces far to waft.
And to men's houses journey they.
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" Why in the dark do they not hail each other ?
Why does a brother's voice console not brother ?
" No, numb and haggard they remain,
With vaulted back and heavy brain,
With, by their side, their little light
Rigid in the river's night.
Like blocks of shadow there they are,
And never pierce their eyes afar
Beyond the acrid, spongy wet ;
And they suspect not that above,
Luring them with a magnet's love,
Stars immense are shining yet."
Verhaeren is essentially a masculine poet, and
women do not understand him. Many of his
poems which deal with women and love are vio-
lently, outrageously erotic ; but they are not love-
poems. It was not till after his marriage that
Verhaeren wrote love- poems ; and from these {Les
Heures Claires, 1896 ; Les Heures d Apres-viidi,
1905; Les Heztres du Soir, 191 1) violence is ex-
cluded.
" These little pages," says Zweig, " are the privacy
of his personal life, the confession of a passion which is
great indeed, but veiled as it were with a delicate shame.
, . . And in truth, it is impossible to imagine anything
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Emile Verhaeren
more touching than the sight of this mighty fighter here
lowering his resonant voice to the soft breathings of
devotion. These verses are quite simple, spoken low, as
though wild and too passionate words might imperil so
noble a feeling, as though a strong man, a brutal man,
who is afraid of hurting a delicate woman with a touch
accustomed to bronze, should lay his hand on hers only
softly, most cautiously."
They are poems of love sequestered :
" In the cottage where our peaceful love reposes,
With its dear old furniture in shady nooks.
Where never a prying witness on us looks.
Save through the casement panes the climbing roses,
" So sweet the days are, after olden trial.
So sweet with silence is the summer time,
I often stay the hour upon the chime
In the clock of oak-wood with the golden dial.
" And then the day, the night is so much ours.
That the hush of happiness around us starts
To hear the beating of our clinging hearts.
When on your face my kisses fall in showers."
Verhaeren is a lyrist pure and simple. Where-
ever he has tried his hand at anything else than
poems he has, comparatively speaking, failed. His
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art criticism, especially his book on Rembrandt, is
often interesting as a revelation of himself. His
literary criticism is generous and all-embracing ;
he has no eyes for faults or littleness, but his com-
plete intelligence of all literary genres inspires him
with Illuminating touches. His dramas have not
conquered the stage, and they never will, though
several of them have been performed with a fair
measure of success. Even Arthur Symon's trans-
lation {The Dawn) could not make Les Aubes
(1898) more than passably interesting, though it
has some importance in the chain of Verhaeren's
work as completing Les Campagnes Hallucin^es
and Les Villes Tentaculaires by showing the final
reconciliation of the town and the country, after a
siege of Oppidomagnum. At the present moment,
too, The Dawn has points of interest in its
prophecy of the ending of war by the triumph
of socialism : only when war disappears, says the
great tribune (apparently modelled on Verhaeren's
friend and fellow-worker Emile Vandervelde) who
is the hero of the tragedy, will all other injustices
disappear too — the hate of the country for the city,
of poverty for gold, of distress for power. Only
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Emile Verhaeren
when races learn to embrace each other will the
world cease to bristle with nations, armed and
tragic and deadly, on the frontiers. Le Cloitre
(1900) has dramatic moments of some power, and
it is a pity that the melodramatic acting during its
recent production in London should have created
a wrong impression. Miss Horniman's production
in Manchester of Osman Edwards's rendering was
a more genuine success, and was approved by the
not easily satisfied critics of the Manchester Guar-
dian. In Philippe II (1904) Verhaeren had (after
De Coster) a great opportunity of contrasting the
black asceticism of Spain with the rubicund joy in
life of Flanders ; he shows us Philip, a religious
maniac, spying on his son, while he himself is spied
upon by the monks of the Inquisition. Helene de
Sparte is fine in conception : he would show us
Helen returned to Sparta with a heart sick of the
love she has inspired and endured, longing to end
her days in peace, " a woman who tends a hearth
with slow and gentle hands " ; but peace is denied
her (for she is Beauty) — all hands stretch out to
seize her, lust flames round her, and when she
cries out for death the satyrs of the woods and
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the nymphs of the rivers assail her, and Jupiter
himself snatches her up to the sky.
Verhaeren is a world-poet ; his theme is the
cosmos. But for one part of his work at least his
native province of Flanders claims him as her own
and calls him her national poet. Toute la Flandre
is a series of five books {^Les Tendresses Premi^res^
1904 ; La Guirlande des Dunes, 1907 ; Les Hdros^
1908 ; Les Petites Villes a Pignons, 1909 ; Les
Plaines, 191 2) in which he celebrates his native
land in the present and in the past. La Guirlande
des Dunes has now (like Lemonnier's Le Petit
Homme de Diezi) an absorbing and pathetic in-
terest. The dunes that in these poems are a " gar-
land " are now soaked with blood ; multitudinous
cannon have thundered for months over these
canals ; and " this sad but sweet corner " is now
a desert. One poem rolls out the saga of the
immemorial towers of Nieuport and Lisweghe and
Furnes, the towers that rise out of the sea-mists
** like widows weeping in the winds of old winters."
Wars with the rolling thunder of their guns raged
round them, very long ago, and yet they stand, . . .
They symbolise, these hoary, battle-stained towers,
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Emile Verhaeren
the indestructible heroism of Flanders, the measure-
less mourning of her departed days, all the his-
tory of a tenacious land.
Great claims are made for Verhaeren by his
admirers, and it is perhaps inevitable that he should
run the risk of being over-estimated. In England
at the present moment he is certainly read a
great deal ; and he is sure to become more famous
during the next few years. The great danger is,
not so much that he will be over-estimated, as that
those parts of his work which have comparatively
little value will be excessively lauded to the detri-
ment of his vital poems. It may be questioned
whether, as far as ideas are concerned, he has
contributed anything indisputably original to that
body of poetic material which passes into the public
consciousness and becomes commonplace, except
his great visualisation of the contest between the
City and the Country. This one aspect of his
work, however, is far-reaching, and it is continued
in the chief revolutionary phases of contem-
porary poetry. From Verhaeren's spiritualisation
of matter and his ecstatic hailing of the future
proceed both the unanism of Jules Romains and
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the extravagances of Marinetti. Verhaeren's in-
fluence is perhaps just beginning. Whether he will
always be considered at his present value may
be doubted. He has often, and rightly, been
compared with Victor Hugo. He has Hugo's
international fame ; he has Hugo's rhetoric and
sweeping gestures. Like Hugo, he is a spectacular
poet, a poet whose words can be unrolled as
banners and carried along by parties with a pro-
gramme. But Victor Hugo, who was all this
and perhaps more, has fallen into disrepute. His
poetry was rhetoric, we are told. However, it
has not yet been definitely fixed to what extent
rhetoric may be allowed in poetry ; and if the
investigation were mathematically made it would
probably be found that the greater part of the
poetic masterpieces of the world consists of rhetoric.
The likelihood is that when all deductions are
made Verhaeren will remain ; as Victor Hugo
remains.
In one respect Verhaeren is vastly inferior to
Victor Hugo : the range of his vocabulary is ex-
ceedingly narrow. His stock words recur with a
frequency that is almost entertaining. But, after
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6mile Verhaeren
all, words are of less importance than sensations,
images, emotions ; and in these Verhaeren is
rich indeed. He is so much the richer in these
essentials of poetry as his domain was practically-
undiscovered : he has been the first to mint the
poetry of a new world. But even here we must
be careful not to claim too much for him. The
very fact that he was a discoverer implies that he
is a stranger ; he is not native-born in the new
world, and there is always the feeling that he is
not quite acclimatised. Critics have not sufficiently
realised the fact that Verhaeren is so astonished
by the beauty of action, of mechanical force, that
he stands outside it. He sees it with the eyes
of the spectator, of the painter. It has so much
the greater effect on him as he has not the depth
of a philosopher, but the naivete of a wondering
child. To him it is all a miracle. The mightier
poet of the new world will have grown up in it,
and will have eyes for manifestations which are
less obvious.
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CHAPTER VI
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
It is said that Madame Maeterlinck has a con-
siderable library, all her own, which consists en-
tirely of works written about her husband in all
languages. Undoubtedly Maeterlinck has been
one of the most discussed writers of modern times ;
and though of late years there has been a reaction
against the over-estimation in which he was held
for a period, he still remains one of the great
forces of international literature. His books are
translated, sometimes before they appear in
French, into the chief languages of the world ;
and even when what he writes is feeble, it is
discussed everywhere as though it were the pro-
nouncement of an oracle. From the selling point
of view, his position is impregnable. He has
been attacked, by the venom of Jesuits, the innu-
endoes of the envious, and the sarcasm of critics
who object on principle to literature that has a
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Maurice Maeterlinck
popular appeal ; but Maeterlinck sits secure behind
his vast public, a mandarin rich and petted and
spoiled. He is in some quarters the target of
poisoned darts merely because, as one of his
critics says, he is " glutted with glory and
gold," as though this taunt of a too great fond-
ness for the world's goods could not be hurled
at nearly all Belgian men of letters, who are
apt to be business men first and literary men
after.
There is a modicum of truth in the belief that
a writer whose genius is profoundly original is not
likely to find an extensive public ; but, on the
other hand, permanent residence in Grub Street
is not an essential criterion of literary merit, and
there are several cases in our own times, beside
Maeterlinck, of great writers who have amassed
riches. In Belgian literary circles, it is true, there
is a feeling that Maeterlinck has been unduly suc-
cessful, while Lemonnier and Verhaeren, writers
of at least equal value, have been condemned to
comparative poverty. However, Maeterlinck may
here be taken at his face value as a prince of
letters in the sense that such and such a business
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man (it may be for adventitious reasons) is known
as a " merchant prince."
Maurice Maeterlinck, the son of a retired
notary in easy circumstances, was born in Ghent
in 1862. His schooldays at Sainte-Barbe were
the most painful in his existence : he would not
begin life again, he has said, at the price of
another seven years at that Jesuit institution.
Maeterlinck, however, had congenial schoolfellows
in Charles van Lerberghe and Gr^goire Le Roy ;
and the three clubbed together and subscribed to
La Jeune Belgique, to which in 1883 Maeterlinck
contributed his first poem to be printed. After
Sainte-Barbe, Maeterlinck took his law degree at
the university of his native city, but, having in
those days neither voice nor presence, he soon gave
up his attempts to practise. In 1886 he resided for
seven months in Paris. He made the acquaintance
of Mallarme ; and he courted Villiers de I'lsle-
Adam. Of more immediate service to him were a
group of young writers who were just about to
launch La Pleiade. To this review Maeterlinck
contributed Le Massacre des Innocents, the only
short story of his which has been published. It
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Maurice Maeterlinck
is an excellent piece of work, and the manner of
it, if Maeterlinck had followed it up, might have
led to a new realism, coarser in outline and more
grotesque than the realism which Eugene Demolder
was to develop by a similar method of transposing
pictures.
On his return to Belgium Maeterlinck was in-
troduced by Georges Rodenbach to the directors
of La Jeune Belgique, to which he contributed
several of the poems published in 1889 under
the title of Serves Chatides (Hothouses). Serres
Chaudes is still a famous book, and to many
people it represents one of the best collections of
Belgian verse. That, however, is an impossible
view ; the little volume has historical significance
in the history of the Symbolist movement, and it
is interesting as marking a stage in Maeterlinck's
career ; but as poetry, weighing its intrinsic value, it
is not to be mentioned in the same breath as any
volume of Verhaeren's, Charles van Lerberghe's,
Max Elskamp's, or Albert Giraud's. Serres
Chaudes may justly be called "decadent": these
are poems which consistently exploit a pretence
of disease. Maeterlinck, so far as is known,
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was as healthy a man as ever shouldered a rifle
in the Garde Civique of Ghent ; but during his
stay in Paris he had seen in which direction the
wind was blowing, and his mind was sufficiently
adaptable to devise plausible lays of mental fever.
Indeed, the poems have so authentic a ring that
German theorists have inferred from them that
he, like Verhaeren, must have passed through a
period of mental crisis. In both cases, no doubt,
there was business method in the madness. But
a suspected insincerity need not detract from the
genuineness of the poems : most poetry is feigning,
and if the atmosphere is produced, biographical
agreement can be dispensed with. And there is
certainly an atmosphere in Ser^^es Chaudes.
Maeterlinck chose to regard the human soul as
a lorn lily sweltering in a hothouse, amid the
fauna of remorse and the slow palms of longing.
The mood of listless apathy and sick brooding is
finely rendered by chaotic but appropriate images :
"O weariness blue in the breast!
Wedding the better sight,
In the weeping, wan moonhght,
Of my blue dreams with languor oppressed !
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Maurice Maeterlinck
" This weariness blue evermore,
Where through the deep windows green,
As in a hothouse are seen,
With moon and with glass covered o'er,
" The mighty forests undying
Whose nightly forgetfulness,
Like a dream motionless.
On the roses of passion is lying ;
" Where rises a slow water-beam,
Mingling the moon and the sky
In a glaucous, eternal sigh,
Monotonous as a dream."
Other poems in Serres Chaitdes are written in
a species of drawling blank verse directly imitated
from Walt Whitman's "barbarous yawp." They
aim at creating a new kind of poetry by stringing
successive images together. The effect is as a
rule rather silly :
" O bell-glasses !
Plants from afar for ever sheltered !
While the wind outside is blowing my senses about !
All a valley of the soul for ever stirring not !
And the heat shut in at noon !
And images, glimpsed clinging to the glass !
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" Raise none of them !
Some have been fixed above old rays of the moon.
Peer through their foliage :
There is a tramp, it may be, on the throne,
It seems that corsairs on the pond are waiting,
It seems that troglodytes are marching serried to
the siege of cities.
"And some are covering olden snows.
And some are covering olden rains.
(Pity the sweating sultriness !)
I hear the swell of festive anthems on a famished
Sunday,
There is an ambulance amid the harvest,
And the King's daughters all are straying in a
season of lean fare through fields !
" But mostly look at those that dent the verge !
Carefully they are covering olden tempests.
Oh ! Somewhere there must be a vast fleet on a
marsh !
And I believe that swans have hatched out ravens !
(You hardly glimpse things through the moistness),
A virgin with hot water waters ferns,
A troop of little girls is watching in his cell the
hermit,
My sisters slumber deep in a poisonous cave 1
" Wait for the moon and the winter.
On these bell-glasses scattered over the ice ! "
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Maurice Maeterlinck
It is easy to laugh at such experiments as this.
But if nothing was achieved, much was attempted.
MaeterHnck's mind had considerable subtlety, and
the very failures of his youthful dreaming are to
this day rich in suggestiveness. We know what
his intentions were in writing Serres Chaudes,
for Charles van Lerberghe, the confidant and ac-
complice of his artistic schemes, revealed them in
La Wallonie for July 1889.
" His verses with their violet tones," says van Ler-
berghe, '' white with electricity, full of phosphorus and
the wind of storm, opened out in our lovely evenings of
festival a succession of new horizons, sinister and silent.
. . . Here decadent sensations have reached the exasper-
ation of their strength, the last burst blooms of their
fever, and these poems of Serres Chaudes are the supreme
black flowers of our day's overheated and diseased spirit.
In the rays of this absolute radiance all is transformed.
The air is hot and stifling. The dreamer pales, and his
hands, moist with fever, palpitate ; he is on the confines
of a strange country of death and madness ; his eyes are
charged with a sulphuric light which discovers a world
of mysteries. . . . The poet's rare magic makes you see
and feel beyond sensations ; he has the intuition of sen-
sations ; in sensations he discovers symbols, analogies,
forebodings, sympathies, and antipathies hitherto unex-
plored. He pierces to the depth of things, sees joy in
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grief, grief in joy, the supernatural in the natural, every-
where and always he finds horror, things unfinished and
things exhausted, the danger of living, the difficulty of
living. Instead of seizing the harmonies of things, he
hearkens to their intimate discordance, to their broken
relations. He renders the shadows that wrap every
mirage and which are indeed its very essence and cause,
and in the shadows he perceives the glittering of heavens
invisible. . . . To render this vision by a material image,
there seems to be, in the midst of a strange Dutch garden,
the basin of a warm fountain, motionless and inert and
suffering, flowered with the sublime nymphaeaceae of tor-
por : ' Et torpenti multa relinquitur miseria.' Here in a
night of tempest nature is reflected. Things appear to
emerge from the fountain's depths : they are only re-
fracted rays, but their obstinate images in the end have
poisoned the water, have troubled its essence, by mingling
with it : symbols of their griefs, the light of their dark-
ness. And this something above and beyond that we
perceive at the heart of the images, in and around them,
the mirror that shows more than it reflects, ' a glass which
shows us many more ' — this is the soul itself, warm,
motionless and suffering. . . . The soul, like Saint Cecilia
immured in her boiling bath, has said its prayer ; it grows
strangely pale, its eyes are in death, its hands are on the
waters of madness, but the orchids of its crown shall not
wither. They rejoice above it, a company of angels in
the raptures and perfumes of the firmament.
" Maeterlinck is no chlorotic lover of pale roses and
nightshades. His ideal is green rather. His style is
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Maurice Maeterlinck
robust, bitter, harsh, without softness, without distinctions
of shade; it blends a barbarian polychrome with the
speckled dark of the styles of decadence. Most of his
verses are formed of contrasts, of elements which both
attract and repel each other. They are the positive and
the negative poles of things. . . . Some of the poems
have the heaviness of summer evenings ; they are the
warm rain ; the sky rolling up its thunder ; the odour of
hot harvests. Others have the cold fluctuations of mer-
cury, the phosphorescent skins of panthers, the poison of
hemlock and belladonna, the elasticity of breasts moist
and firm, the effervescence and the mephitic stagnation
of pools. . . ."
There could be no better interpretation, not
only of the dream of overcharged sensations which
Serves Chaudes purports to be, but of Maeterlinck's
early dramas, of Rodenbach's sick reveries, of
Verhaeren's pathological trilogy, and of all the
other phases of artistic perversion evolved by the
Belgian poets of those days.^
Serres Chaudes as now published is aug-
mented by Qidnze Chansons, fifteen songs, some
of them embedded in the dramas as well, which
^ Pessimistic books were so numerous in the 'eighties that Celestin
Demblon, in a review of Coffin's Impressioiis et Sensations {La Wal-
lonie, Aug. 1888) called them "a new plague of Egypt," and foresaw
the necessity of discovering an energetic insecticide.
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have a languid distinction of their own. Veiled
with mystery as they are, several of them, like the
following, have the charm of folksongs :
" And if he come back some day,
What shall be said to him ? —
One for him waited, say,
Until her eyes grew dim, . . .
" And if again he spake,
And did not know me more ? —
Like a sister answer make,
He might be suffering sore. . . .
" And if he would be told
Where you are dwelling now ? —
Give him my ring of gold,
And bend your silent brow. . . .
" And if he miss the clock's tick.
And see the dust on the floor ? —
Show him the lamp's burnt wick.
Show him the open door. . . .
" And if his last he saith,
And ask how you fell asleep ? —
Tell him I smiled in death,]
For fear lest he should weep. . . ."
Sei^'es Chaudes would have remained the pos-
session of a few inquiring spirits if Maeterlinck had
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Maurice Maeterlinck
not, on the 24th of August 1890, been skyrocketed
into fame by Octave Mirbeau in one of the most
astounding examples of puff on record. Mirbeau,
in Mallarme s study, had laid his hands on a copy
of Maeterlinck's La Princesse Maleine, the first of
the dramas, of which thirty copies had just been
turned out by Maeterlinck himself, with the aid
of a friend, on a hand-press. "What's this?"
asked Mirbeau. " A masterpiece," Mallarme an-
swered ; "you read it." Mirbeau read it, and
ere long his eulogy appeared in Figaro^ a
newspaper to which Maeterlinck was destined to
contribute many of his essays ere they were
strung together to appear in book form. The
critique runs as follows :
" I know nothing of M. Maurice Maeterlinck. I
know not whence he is nor how he is. Whether he
is old or young, rich or poor, I know not. I only know
that no man is more unknown than he ; and I know
also that he has created a masterpiece, not a master-
piece labelled masterpiece in advance, such as our young
masters publish every day, but an admirable and an
eternal masterpiece, a masterpiece which is sufficient to
immortalise a name, and to make all those who are
a-hungered for the beautiful and the great rise up and
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call this name blessed ; a masterpiece such as honest
and tormented artists have sometimes, in their hours of
enthusiasm, dreamed of writing, and such as up to the
present not one of them has written. In short, M.
Maurice Maeterlinck has given us the greatest work of
genius of our time, and the most extraordinary and the
most simple also, comparable — and — shall I dare to say
it ? — superior in beauty to whatever is most beautiful
in Shakespeare. This work is called La Princesse
Maleine. Are there in all the world twenty persons
who know it ? I doubt it."
Probably Max Nordau was as near the truth
when he called the drama "a Shakespearean
anthology for children or Patagonians " ; but
Mirbeau's praise, though injudicious, was sincere.
It made Maeterlinck, who before long was being
discussed in two hemispheres as " the Belgian
Shakespeare." The label was of course absurd,
but as an advertising medium it struck the eye.
There are, it is true, points of similarity between
La Princesse Maleine and several of Shakespeare's
plays, especially with Hamlet, but they are merely
external. Maeterlinck's play is boyish enough,
but it is original both in conception and execution.
Maeterlinck was already obsessed by the ideas
which caused him to christen his early plays
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Maurice Maeterlinck
** Little Dramas for Marionettes " : human beings
are puppets moved to and fro by Fate, the Show-
man behind the scenes. (Fitzgerald's Omar had
put the matter in a stanza.) It is no use struggling
against the Showman's manipulation. The puppets
do not act, they are made to act. They them-
selves are hardly conscious of what they do : they
move "like deaf somnambulists constantly being
roused from a nightmare." The language Maeter-
linck puts into their mouths (how far removed
from Shakespeare's sonorous rhetoric !) is delicately
adapted to this conception : they stammer short
sentences, which hostile critics have compared
with Ollendorfian dialogue. It would be unfair
to take a passage at haphazard to afford an ex-
ample of this marionette manner ; but there can
be no objection to detaching a scene which in
itself is genuinely dramatic, the murder scene in
the play :
Princess Maleines room. The princess is sitting motionless
on her bed, listening in terror : enter the King and
Queen Anne. . . . The storm grows louder.
The King. Let us go away ! I can hear her heart
beating here !
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Anne. Proceed ; . . . are you losing your wits ?
The King. She is looking at us, oh ! oh !
Anne. Come, she is a little girl ! . . . Good evening,
Maleine. . . . Don't you hear me, Maleine ! We have
come to bid you good night. . . . Are you ill, Maleine ?
Don't you hear me ? Maleine ! Maleine !
[Maleine makes a sign that she hears.
The King. Ah!
Anne. What a fright you give me ! . . . Maleine !
Maleine ! Have you lost your voice ?
Maleine. Good . . . eve . . . ning ! . . .
Anne. Ah ! So you are alive ; . . . have you all
you need ? . . . I must take my cloak off. {She lays her
cloak on a piece of furniture, and approaches the bed.) . . .
Let me see. . . . Oh ! this pillow is very hard. . . .
Let me arrange your hair. . . .Why do you look at me
like that, Maleine ? Maleine ? . . . Let me fondle you
a little. . . . Where does it hurt you ? You are shivering
as though you were going to die. . . . Why, you are
making the whole bed tremble ! . . . I have only come
to fondle you a little. . . . Don't look at me like that !
You ought to be fondled at your age; I am going to be
your poor mama. . . . Let me arrange your hair. . . .
Come, lift your head up a little ; I will tie your hair with
this. . . . Lift your head a little. . . . So.
[She passes a string round her neck.
Maleine (Jumping down from the bed). Ah ! What
have you put round my neck ?
Anne. Nothing ! Nothing ! It's nothing ! Don't
scream !
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Maurice Maeterlinck
Maleine. Ah ! Ah !
Anne. Stop her ! Stop her !
The King. What? What ?i
Anne. She is going to scream ! She is going to
scream !
The King. I can't !
Maleine. You are going to ! . . . you are going to ! . . .
Anne (setzmg Maleine). No ! No !
Maleine. Mother ! Mother ! Nurse ! Nurse ! Hjalmar !
Hjalmar ! Hjalmar !
Anne {to the King). Where are you ?
The King. Here ! Here !
Maleine {following Anne upon her knees). Wait !
Wait a Uttle ! Anne ! Madame ! King ! King ! King !
Hjalmar ! . . . Not to-day ! . . . No ! No ! Not now ! . . .
Anne. Are you going to follow me round the world
on your knees ? [She pulls the string.
Maleine {falling in the middle of the room). Mother !
... Oh ! Oh ! Oh ! [The King sits down.
Anne. She doesn't stir. It's all over. . . . Where
are you ! Help me ! She is not dead. . . . You have
sat down !
The King. Yes ! Yes ! Yes !
Anne. Hold her feet ; she is struggling. She is
going to get up. . . .
The King. Which feet ? Which feet ? Where are they?
Anne. There ! There ! There ! Pull !
The King. I can't ! I can't !
Anne. Come, don't make her suffer needlessly !
[Here the hail rattles suddenly against the windows.
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The King. Ah!
Anne. What have you done ?
The King. At the windows ! . . . They are knocking
at the windows !
Anne. They are knocking at the windows ?
The King. Yes ! Yes ! With millions of fingers !
oh ! millions of fingers ! [Another squall.
Anne. They are hailstones !
The King. Hailstones ?
Anne. Yes.
The King. Are they hailstones ?
Anne. Yes, I saw them. . . . Her eyes are glazing.
The King. I want to go away ! I am going away !
I am going away !
Anne. What? What? Wait! Wait! She is
dead. \Here a gust of wind blows a window open
violently and a vase containing a lily falls
noisily down into the room.
This passage will serve to show how naively
Maeterlinck piles up the horror. Princess Maleine
is thoroughly immature in its dependence on ex-
traneous effect, but the half a dozen plays which
follow are stripped clean of theatrical business and
rely on a concentrated simplicity and naturalness
of diction to bring out the anguish of a single
tragic situation. Of L Intruse (The Intruder),
Les Avetigles (The Sightless), Interieur (Interior),
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Maurice Maeterlinck
and La Mort de Tintagiles (The Death of Tinta-
giles) it cannot be exaggeration to say that they
are masterpieces for all time. Maeterlinck himself
in his preface to his collected plays {Theatre,
1901-02), defines his aims:
" In these plays faith is held in enormous powers,
invisible and fatal. No one knows their intentions, but
the spirit of the drama assumes they are malevolent,
attentive to all our actions, hostile to smiles, to life, to
peace, to happiness. Destinies which are innocent but
involuntarily hostile are here joined, and parted to the
ruin of all, under the saddened eyes of the wisest, who
foresee the future, but can change nothing in the cruel
and inflexible games which Love and Death practise
among the living. And Love and Death and the other
powers here exercise a sort of sly injustice, the penalties
of which — for this injustice awards no compensation —
are perhaps nothing but the whims of Fate. . . .
" This Unknown takes on, most frequently, the form
of Death. The infinite presence of Death, gloomy, hypo-
critically active, fills all the interstices of the poem. To
the problem of existence no reply is made except by the
riddle of its annihilation."
In The Intruder the members of a family are
in a room next to one in vi^hich the mother, who
has just been confined, is lying. One of them
is the blind grandfather. He is restless, irritable.
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There are strange noises : all of them can be
explained by natural causes, and yet, in the sus-
pense of the hour, they are eerie. The sharpening
of a scythe is heard outside ; it must be the
gardener about to mow the grass. The lamp
burns badly. The house-dog crouches at the back
of his kennel. The grandfather is sure someone
has come in, and is sitting among them. Midnight
strikes, and they seem to hear somebody hastily
rising. In a few seconds the door of the adjoin-
ing chamber is opened, and the Sister of Charity
appears on the threshold and makes the sign of
the Cross to announce that her patient is dead.
In The Sightless the curtain rises on a group
of blind people, six men and six women, who are
sitting round an old priest. His face is as livid
as wax ; his lips are violet and half open ; his
eyes seem to be bleeding. The blind people talk,
querulously, and we learn that the emaciated old
priest is their guide, without whom they are
helpless. He has brought them into the forest,
because he wanted to see the island for the last
time before the sunless winter set in. He has
left them for a time, they think, and they are
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Maurice Maeterlinck
impatiently waiting for him to return and take
them home. He may have lost his way, they
fear. It is night ; they hear the wind raging in
the tree-tops, and the sea thudding on the rocks.
Now there is a noise of pattering feet in the dead
leaves, and the asylum dog comes and lays its
muzzle on the knees of one of the blind men.
He feels that it is pulling him, and when he rises
it leads him to the priest. He touches the priest's
face, and knows that the guide is dead.
The symbolism of The Sightless is not hard to
unravel. We are prisoners on a little island, where
we can hear the mighty waters of the Ocean of
Infinity roaring evermore. We had a guide —
Religion — that still seems to be present among
us, but is dead. . . . We are lost in the dense
dark forest of enigmas. . . .
The inner meaning of Les Sept Princesses (The
Seven Princesses) is as difficult to decipher as that
of The Sightless is easy. In this drama Maeter-
linck has taken his symbols, not from the problems
of everyday life, but from the arcana of ascetic
mysticism. Seven sisters are sleeping in a marble
hall whose doors are locked. A Prince comes,
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home returning from long exile, and through the
thick window panes he gazes in rapt longing at
the loveliest sister, who sleeps in the middle
of the others, Ursula, whom he has loved since
boyhood. He finds his way into the hall through
an underground passage, past the tombs of the
dead. Six princesses awaken, but not Ursula.
She has died of her longf waitino;. . . . Maeter-
linck may have had the idea of the Buddhists in
his mind, according to which the soul consists of
seven elements, the central one being Psyche, that
is, the real self, the deepest and most essential part
of our being, which is unknowable, which no earthly
ideal can awaken from its slumber.
Pelleas et Melisande, on the other hand, though
like the other plays it is the dramatisation of a
mystical idea, the idea that Fate drives his pup-
pets, like a flock of sheep, over the mazy roads
of Love to the bourne of Death, almost reaches
human characterisation. It may still be said of
the characters, as Mr. Yeats said of them, that
they are ** naked and pathetic shadows already half
vapour, and sighing to one another upon the last
abyss." But Love humanises even disembodied
170
Maurice Maeterlinck
spirits (what could be more human than the clinging
together of Paola and Francesca in the Inferno?);
and it is possible in this drama of Maeterlinck's to
disregard the philosophic idea altogether, and read
the story as another and equally poignant version
of those famous tales in which a young wife wedded
to a crabbed and ageing husband loves that hus-
band's brother. " Hostile destinies are joined in
innocence and parted to the ruin of all." But in
the conception of Maeterlinck as a mystic there
is no question of adultery in the loves of Pelleas
and Melisanda : the soul is inviolately pure and
cannot sin ; and in harmony with the conception
there is a childlike chastity in all the converse of
the lovers. This remoteness from the flesh makes
Pelleas and Melisanda unactable ; and though it
has been frequently played it shapes itself on the
stage, fatally, as melodrama. It is excruciating
to see it debased in this country even by some
of the best actors we have : the symbolism is
coarsened into absurdity, and the gentle words,
as of souls feeling out to each other through the
dark, are shouted and whined with the traditional
accents and weighted with sensational vulgarity.
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Attempts have been made to preserve the atmos-
phere of the dramas for marionettes by stretching
a gauze curtain between the audience and the
players; but it would need more than that to save
such a scene as the following from outright murder.
Pelleas surprises Melisanda combing her hair at
the window of a tower :
Pelleas. Come out of the shadow, Melisanda, so that
I may see your hair undone.
\_Melisanda bends down from the window.
Pelleas. Oh ! Melisanda ! . . . oh ! you are beauti-
ful !.. . you are beautiful like that ! . . . Bend down I
Bend down ! Let me come nearer to you. . . .
Melisanda. I cannot come nearer. ... I am bend-
ing down as far as I can. . . .
Pelleas. I cannot climb higher. . . . Give me at
least your hand this evening . . . before I go away. . . .
I am going away to-morrow. . . .
Melisanda. No, no, no. . . .
Pelleas. Yes, yes ; I am going away, I shall go
away to-morrow. . . . Give me your hand, your little
hand on my lips. . . .
Melisanda. I will not give you my hand if you are
going away. . . .
Pelleas. Give it to me, give it to me. . . .
Melisanda. You will not go away ? . . . I see a rose
in the dark. . . .
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Maurice Maeterlinck
Pelleas. Where ? . . . I only see the branches of
the willow overhanging the wall. . . .
Melisanda. Lower down, lower down, in the garden ;
down there, in the dark green.
Pelleas. It is not a rose. ... I will go and see
by and by, but give me your hand first ; your hand
first. . . .
Melisanda. Here then, here then. ... I cannot
bend down farther. . . .
Pelleas. My lips cannot reach your hand. . . .
Melisanda. I cannot bend down farther. ... I am
near falling. . . . Oh ! oh ! My hair is going down the
tower ! . . .
[Her hair overturns all of a sudden^ while she
is bending down, and floods Pelleas.
Pelleas. Oh ! oh ! what is this ? . . . Your hair,
your hair is coming down to me ! . . . All your hair,
Melisanda, all your hair has fallen from the tower ! I
am holding it in my hands, I am touching it with my
lips. ... I am holding it in my arms, I am winding it
round my neck. ... I shall not open my hands again
this night. . . .
Melisanda. Let me go ! let me go ! . . . You are
going to make me fall ! . . .
Pelleas. No, no, no. ... I have never seen hair
like yours, Melisanda ! . . . See, see ; it comes from so
high, and it floods me to the heart. ... It is warm and
gentle as though it were falling from the sky ! . . . I
cannot see the sky through your hair. . . . Look, look,
my hands cannot hold it. ... It is fleeing from me, it
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is fleeing from me into the willow branches. ... It is
escaping from me on all sides. ... It is trembling and
stirring and palpitating in my hands like a golden bird ;
and it loves me, it loves me a thousand times more than
you do !
Melisanda. Let me go, let me go, somebody might
come. . . .
Pelleas. No, no, no ; I will not set you free this
night. . . . You are my prisoner for this night ; all the
night, all the night. . . .
Melisanda. Pelleas ! Pelleas ! . . .
Pelleas. You shall not go away any more. ... I
kiss all your body when I kiss your hair, and in the
midst of its flames I suffer no longer. . . . Do you hear
my kisses ? . . . They rise along a thousand meshes of
gold. . . .
Melisanda. I hear steps. . . . Let me go ! ... It
is Golaud ! . . .
Pelleas. Wait ! Wait ! . . . Your hair is caught
in the branches. . . . Wait, wait ! ... It is dark. . . .
^Enfer Golaud.
Golaud. What are you doing here ?
Pelleas. What am I doing here ? . . . I . . .
Golaud. You are children. . . . Melisanda, do not
bend down in that way from the window, you will
fall. . . . Do you not know that it is very late ? . . .
It is near midnight. . . . Do not play like this in the
dark. . . . You are children. . . . {Laughing nervously.)
What children ! . . . What children ! . . .
[Exit with Pelleas.
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Maurice Maeterlinck
Scenes of this nature, from which passion is
banned and where only the stirrings of the soul,
fathoms below consciousness, are suggested, are not
dramatic in the accepted sense of the dramatic.
Any other dramatist would have made the husband,
Golaud, act violently ; but the clash of words would
be physical, and with the physical the dramas for
marionettes are not concerned. It will escape no
one that the picture of the girl with her long golden
hair falling down the tower and into the branches
of the willow is saturated with the atmosphere of
the Pre-Raphaelites, and the same is obvious of
many other pictures in the marionette dramas.
This is not astonishing, for Maeterlinck had covered
the walls of his study (a friend of his in those
days tells me) with pictures from Walter Crane's
books for children ; and he had brought them
nearer to his own dream by framing them under
green-tinted glass. It is astonishing altogether
what an influence Walter Crane and Kate Green-
away have had on the Belgian symbolists ; to this
very day the Belgian poets, if they are discussing
British art, will speak first of these two artists.
It would be easy to exaggerate the influence of
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the Pre-Raphaelite poetry : so far as my own
knowledge goes, only Maeterlinck, Charles van
Lerberghe, Mockel, and Andr6 Fontainas knew
English sufficiently well to be able to appreciate
Rossetti's poetry. But some scholar should write a
thesis on the influence of Walter Crane and Kate
Greenaway, whose art needed no translation. . . .
Alladine et Palomides symbolises the idea that
man is apt to dream himself into an unreal world.
Happiness is a mirage. We seem, in our moments
of enchanted delight, to be prisoned in a great blue
vault ablaze with jewels and wreathed with roses ;
but let a ray of the pitiless light of truth shine in
through the roof and the jewels lose their glitter
and the roses are seen to be the phosphorescent
stains of decaying rubbish. Far more successful
in execution is Interior^ a dramatic tour de force
which dispenses with action and is somewhat in
the nature of a peep-show interpreted by outsiders
as the pantomime proceeds. It is probably the
best thing that Maeterlinck has done : less charged
with poetry and mystery than several of the other
dramas, but more compact and poignant. From
a garden we look into a lamp-lit room where a
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Maurice Maeterlinck
family are sitting, resting in the peace of the
evening. One of the daughters of the family has
drowned herself, and an old man has come in
advance of the corpse to break the news. From
the garden we see him enter the house, and by
the movements of the family we see the effect of
his news.
The Death of Tintagiles is the most harrowing
as it is the most eerie of Maeterlinck's dramas.
In an old castle in a deep valley whelmed with
shadow (the Valley of the Shadow of Death)
dwells an old Queen. She has sent over the sea
for Tintagiles, a little boy whose two sisters, who
have always lived in the castle, guess that she in-
tends to kill him. Even in sleep they hold him
in their arms ; and it is when they are asleep that
the Queen's servants snatch the child from them.
One of the sisters follows to the end of a corridor,
which is closed by a massive iron door, on which
in her desperation she smashes the lamp she carries
and scratches the nails from her fingers. Behind
the door she hears the boy crying that hands are
at his throat ; and then she hears the fall of a
little body. We are in exile here in the Valley
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of the Shadow of Death, the play suggests ; we
are at the mercy of a grim and silent force, against
whose cruel will the most frenzied resistance is
vain. We must trail our existence blindly, with-
out daring to understand what happens.
The mysticism which inspired these dramas
of Maeterlinck forms the weft of his collection of
essays Le Trdsor des Humbles (The Treasure of
the Humble), which was published in 1896. The
essays, if they do not carry conviction, have a
dreamy charm and sometimes a wistful beauty.
Maeterlinck, following Emerson, preaches the
heroism of everyday life ; unfolds his theories
of active and passive silence — the latter is silence
sleeping, the former is the language of the soul ;
and revives the doctrines of quietism to absolve
the soul of man from the transient sins of the body.
Such passages as the following would not seem
so illogical as they do if they could be interpreted
by a learned commentary locating the theory in
the ecstatic reveries of the mystics proper — very
remote dreamers such as Ruysbroeck, whose
Ornament of the Spirit's Marriage Maeterlinck
translated from the old Flemish :
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Maurice Maeterlinck
" What would happen if our soul suddenly became
visible and had to advance in the midst of her assembled
sisters, despoiled of her veils, but charged with her most
secret thoughts, and trailing behind her the most mys-
terious acts of her life that nothing could express ? What
would she blush for ? What would she wish to hide ?
Would she, like a modest woman, cast the long mantle
of her hair over the numberless sins of the flesh ? She
knew nothing of them, and these sins have never reached
her. They were committed a thousand leagues away from
her throne, and the soul of the Sodomite even would pass
through the midst of the crowd without suspecting any-
thing, and bearing in its eyes the transparent smile of a
child. It had taken no part in the sin, it was pursuing
its life on the side where light reigns, and it is this life
alone that it will remember."
One of the essays deals with "interior beauty,"
and this doctrine is hunted to death in Azlavaine
et Selysette, the first of MaeterHnck's plays into
which the senses intrude, the first of his plays
which, in spite of some lingering beauty in the
character of Selysette, must be rejected as inclin-
ing to be meretricious. In this play and in most of
those which follow the chief character is an eman-
cipated female with a mouth full of very boring
talk about "beauty," "wisdom," and "happiness."
Maeterlinck has turned the corner ; come out of
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the dark into the sunshine, say some ; left his
ivory tower of poetry for the dusty mart of inter-
national commonplace, say others. At all events,
his appeal is henceforth more popular ; his artistry
is less exclusive. Aglavaine and Selysette is a
problem play : like Hauptmann's Lonely Lives,
or (to go farther back) like Goethe's absurd Stella,
it poses the question whether it should not be
possible for a man to have two wives. Maeterlinck,
or rather Aglavaine, sees a happy solution if the
two women can manage to love each other as well
as the man ; in the present play, it is true, the
plan does not prove feasible, although the two
women are on billing and cooing terms, for Sely-
sette, the good little wife, kills herself to make way
for the emancipated monstrosity. It was disastrous
for Maeterlinck's art that Selysette did not act as
the wronged woman on the stage is entitled to do,
for if she had poisoned or stabbed her rival perhaps
Aglavaine would not have cropped up again as
Ariane, as Monna Vanna, as Mary Magdalene.
Nothing could demonstrate Maeterlinck's insuffi-
ciency as a dramatist (in the ordinary accepta-
tion of the word) more than his utter failure,
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Maurice Maeterlinck
as soon as he abandoned his symbolic puppets
and attempted characters of flesh and blood, to
create any other woman than this barrel-organ
of wisdom.
It would appear that these roles were created
for Madame Georgette Leblanc, a French opera-
singer who made her debut as an actress as Monna
Vanna. To her Maeterlinck dedicated his second
book of essays, Sagesse et Destinee (Wisdom and
Destiny), which appeared in 1898. It is a chain
of thoughts many of which contradict the substance
of The Treasure of the Humble. Whereas the latter
book had been concerned with the unconscious
and the subconscious, Wisdom and Destiny deals
mainly with the conscious. In The Treasure of
the Hu7nble the essayist had spoken of **the
august, everyday life of a Hamlet . . . , who has
the time to live because he does not act " ; in
Wisdom and Destiny we read of " the miserable
blindness of Hamlet," who was responsible for the
tragedy because of his failure to act. Action
hinders life in the first book ; in the second, action
is accelerated thinking. '* Life has no other object
than death," we had been taught ; now we hear
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that life is more important than death, and that
misfortune is less important than happiness.
Happiness was what humanity was made for,
and we ought to have doctors to cure misery,
just as we have doctors to cure illness. One
of the essays of The Treasure of the Humble
had taught ( in harmony with the dramas for
marionettes) that all existence is subject to fate,
and that there is no star of happiness, no destiny
of joy. Now we hear that if predestination
exists, it only exists in character, which can be
modified.
There is a tendency among the higher critics
to accept, condescendingly. The Treasure of the
Humble, as an expression of philosophic lyrism,
but to reject Wisdo7it and Destiny and the essays
collected in later books, as an effeminate optimism
quite as illogical as the mysticism of the earlier
essays. Maeterlinck's optimism is certainly languid,
and often unconvincing ; and optimism should be
invigorating and proof against the assaults of
amateur argument. Nevertheless, Wisdom and
Destiny, and all Maeterlinck's popular philosophy,
has a distinct, if transient value. It sets up a
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Maurice Maeterlinck
plausible code of conduct which can be partly
followed even by people who do not want to make
themselves ridiculous by posing as "sages." It
fights deep-rooted prejudices. It is anti-ascetic
— a morbid virtue may be more harmful than
a healthy vice, it tells us. It makes for will-
power : if we cannot divert events, we can at
all events decide what form these events shall
take within ourselves. We are the masters of
our fate. . . .
In Le Temple Enseveli (The Buried Temple),
Le Do2ible Jardin (The Double Garden), V Intelli-
gence des Fleurs (Life and Flowers), this unctuous
optimism (for all his hatred of the Jesuits Maeter-
linck has never rid himself of their manner) is
developed in the direction of a faith in the future
which tallies with that of Verhaeren. The future
is full of bounties which the genius of man shall
bring to the light; The pivot of the world seemed
to us of old to be formed of spiritual powers ; to-
day we know that it is made of purely material
enero;ies. We shall solve the riddle of existence
by studying concrete things. We shall do as the
flowers do, strain upwards from the dark soil to
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a blossoming in the light. What religions call
divine is the brain of man.
But in animals and flowers and plants we can
trace the intelligence which is supreme in ourselves ;
and in La Vie des Abeilles (The Life of the Bee)
Maeterlinck shows us what is most important in our
own substance, that extraordinary matter of the
brain which transfigures blind necessity, organises
and multiplies life and makes it more beautiful, and
checks the obstinate force of death. The bees are
socialists, for in the hive the individual is nothing.
The hive of to-day is perfect, though pitiless ; it
merges the individual in the republic. The bees
have will-power, which subordinates everything to
the future.
La Mori (Death) is probably the least satisfy-
ing of Maeterlinck's books of essays, though it
procured him the honour (and the advertisement)
of being placed on the Index. He shocked many
people by pleading that doctors should have power
and discretion to end a patient's life wherever hope
was impossible, and others by proclaiming that
if the punishment for not believing in the God of
the Bible is eternal damnation, this is a far less
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Maurice Maeterlinck
punishment than being compelled to endure the
presence through eternity of such a tyrant.
Of Maeterlinck's plays other than those which
have been discussed only Monna Vanna (1902)
and L'Oiseau Bleu (1909) deserve study. Joyzelle
(1903) is a tangle of absurdities ; Mary Magdalene
(1910) is even worse than Paul Heyse's play on the
same subject, from which it unblushingly borrows.
Monna Vanna owes a great deal of its reputa-
tion in this country to the fact that its production
is forbidden. The reason is apparently that in
one scene the heroine is understood to be naked
under her cloak, which the course of the action
may compel her to cast off at any moment. Of
course the Lord Chamberlain would know, if he
read the play, that she does not go farther than
making a movement to throw her cloak aside ;
but the audience might have to endure an un-
healthy tension. Whether Maeterlinck calculated
on this tension or not, is not clear ; but the ascetic
Maeterlinck of the first period would not have
conceived the situation. The motive of the play,
that a woman may nobly sacrifice her chastity to
save a beleaguered city, is repulsive, but sufficiently
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harmless in its presentation ; and Monna Vanna
must be condemned rather on the score of being
tedious than of being obscene.
As to The Blue Bird, opinions differ strangely.
To some it is a charming allegory, full of the
deepest meaning and of truths forcefully conveyed
even to simple minds ; to others it is a hodge-
podge of commonplace and obese complacency.
It is at all events a palatable epitome of the doc-
trines elaborated by Maeterlinck in his essays, spun
round the main theme that the blue bird of happi-
ness, often sought in the distances of romance, is
only to be found at home.
One should be chary of attaching too much
importance to the attacks on Maeterlinck which
are the fashion in certain places. It is not neces-
sarily a hall-mark of mediocrity to have been
awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, although,
it is true, there would be some grounds for the
assertion. But neither must the reaction be ignored
as transient, for there is point in many of the
arguments by which the Maeterlinck of the second
phase is assailed. The greatest blow was dealt
by Louis Dumont - Wilden, in an essay which
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Maurice Maeterlinck
appeared in La Nouvelle Revue Franfaise, and is
now reprinted in L'Esprit Europden. Literary
glory, says this most pungent of Belgian critics
(who, by the way, is like Maeterlinck himself a
native of Ghent), is conferred by an elite of readers ;
but the elite has gradually escaped from Maeter-
linck's seductive influence. The mysticism and
pessimism of the earlier books had the fascination
of rare poetry ; but the optimism which so con-
fidently pervades the later essays is a soothing
syrup which is no food for men. Maeterlinck had
for a time dreamed himself into the poetic atmos-
phere of the symbolists, but the formula of his art,
distinguished and new as it was, only permitted
him a restricted range of very simple and primitive
feelings which were soon exhausted, and in the
end the comfortable complacency of the Belgian
middle classes drew him back into his native ele-
ment. Now he settled down to grind out his
"philosophy without tears" to a public whose
dearest wish is to believe " that the first of all
duties is to be happy." "Of course," continues
Dumont-Wilden, "one must do justice to his ample
rhetoric laden with images, and admit that it has
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sometimes the cradling charm of a beautiful sermon.
However, as the work proceeds, the design takes
shape. All that is painful is avoided. Maeter-
linck, very wise by this time, has become the
moralist of the very wise. He is the charitable
sage of ordinary days and ordinary people. To
those who do not go to mass his books are what
manuals of devotion are to the pious. He is the
Doctor All's-for-the-Best of souls without piety.
He satisfies that need of religion which survives
the decadence of religions ; by means of a vague
idealism purged of faith he fabricates an ideal for
positivists, offers a shadow of the divine to those
who have resolved to dispense with the divine."
All this is not without plausibility ; but it is
evidently quite as easy to under-estimate Maeter-
linck as to over-estimate him. The fact probably
is that Maeterlinck — an ascetic, even if a calcu-
lating ascetic, by nature — has been unfortunate
in the shaping of his life, and too submissive in
temperament to preserve the originality which un-
doubtedly marks his work as far as The Treasu7'e of
the Humble. Aglavaine and Selysette was nothing
less than a catastrophe. It ended him as a dramatist
i88
Maurice Maeterlinck
in the running for a front place among the world's
dramatists. To put the matter in a nutshell, his
genius was killed by " happiness." His doom as
an artist was sealed when he gave up dreaming
in order to "live." Since then the world has been
too much with him. . . .
189
CHAPTER VII
THE SYMBOLIST POETS
There is no distinction to be made between the
Belgian symbolists and the French symbolists
except that the Belgians, true to the doctrine of
individualism which is one of the main tenets
of the symbolist school, write poetry which is
unmistakably Belgian. The poetry of the Belgian
symbolists is the poetry of Belgian moods.
Of no Belgian poet is this more true than of
Georges Rodenbach, although he was the only
Belgian poet who has been accepted in Paris at
his actual value. Born at Tournai in 1855, he was
brought up at Bruges and Ghent, and took his
doctor's degree in jurisprudence in the latter city.
He practised for some time in Brussels, but left
Belgium in 1887, and settled in Paris, where he
died in 1898. A handsome man, a dandy, an
aesthete, a causeur^ he had become a favourite in
Parisian drawing-rooms ; he was an intimate friend
190
The Symbolist Poets
of Edmond de Goncourt and Stephane Mallarme ;
and his melancholy poetry, which kept the Par-
nassian form while creating a new atmosphere by
a discreet symbolism, had a wide circle of admirers
among those to whom the more uncompromising
symbolist poets were stertorous barbarians.
But though he made himself at home in Paris,
he remained a Fleming to the end ; and his poetry
is Flemish through and through. He is a Flemish
mystic, quite as much as Maeterlinck was in his
early years. He is haunted by Flemish images ;
his soul is ever dreaming in an old Flemish city
where the stricken stone of the grey houses is
mirrored in green canals lit by the white plumage
of stately swans ; he longs for the infinite silence
of Bruges-la-Morte, the city that was buried in
the tomb of her quays when the pulse of the sea
was stayed in her and the arteries of her canals
grew cold ; he has lost his religious faith, but at
heart he is still a worshipper in the old Catholic
fanes whose steeples in their stone frocks project
their shadow along the cobbled streets, in the city
where from innumerable convents there breathes a
cold scorn of the secret roses of the flesh, where
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at every street corner, in shrines of glass or wood,
stand statues of the Virorin clad in velvet cloaks.
*• Toute cit6 est un etat dame," he says ; and his
own soul he identifies with Bruges. Above all,
he finds a dream-peace in the b^guinages, those
sanctuaries within the sanctuary, those haunts of
quiet in the quiet town, with their red-paved en-
closures, where the priest, when the bell calls the
b^guines to evensong, seems like the Saviour in a
garden of virgins.
With such an obsession as this, his books could
not be other than morbid. It is poetry in a closed
room, where the light only filters through muslin
curtains ; it is a music awed by the foreboding of
death ; it is a gallery of grey tints. It is all filled
with that sickness of life which was an attitude of
the symbolists ; with the pessimism which fermented
into a fever of hallucination in Maeterlinck and
brought Verhaeren to the verge of (literary) mad-
ness. Le Regne dtc Silence {1891) and Les Vies
Encloses (1896), the volumes in which the best of
Rodenbach's poetry is contained, must ever be
monuments of Belgian art by the side of Sevres
Chaudes and the three volumes of Verhaeren's
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The Symbolist Poets
pathological period, even though the cult of virility
and optimism, which has in our days overcome
that fin-de-siecle despondency of the symbolists,
refuses to be spellbound by the subtle imagery
and trailing rhythms of this poet of yesteryear.
What fascination there is in Rodenbach's lethargic
reveries may be gathered from this one poem :
" You are my sisters, souls that dwell apart,
In dreams half dreamt in listlessness of heart,
Cloistered in towns whose glories have grown pale.
Old towns that drowse along their rivers frail ;
O souls whose silence is a worshipping ;
Souls pierced by noise ; who love no other thing
Save that which might have been and shall not be ;
Fed with the Host and Holy Chrism are ye,
Mystics whose sad youth dreamed of sailing hence
To some far city, fabulous, immense.
But now dream only with these waters wan,
These waters slow that silence swoons upon. . . .
And round you rolls itself the angelus,
As round a spinning-wheel the soft wool does !
Sisters of mine more than of any other.
Sisters of mine are you in Silence, our Mother ! "
Rodenbach sings only of depressing things.
He yields to his depression in the same measure
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
as Verhaeren resists his. Characteristic of each
poet are the verses they have dedicated to the
rain. In Verhaeren's vision the rain is a force
sinister but wild with energy :
" The water drips hour after hour,
The spouts gush, and the trees shower. . . .
Rivers o'er rotten dikes are brimming
Upon the meadows where drowned hay is swimming ;
The wind is whipping walnut trees and alders,
And big black oxen wading stand
Deep in the water of the polders,
And bellow at the writhen sky. . . ."
Rodenbach's vision is weary and anaemic :
" O the rain ! O the rain ! O the slow water thread,
Which Time unwinds from his black spindles still,
As though the years had kept their tears to shed.
While on young autumn leans the evening, sick and ill!
O the rain ! O the slow skeins of the water thread !
" Who shall say the sombre mourning of the firmament ?
Cemetery road where like dirge verses
Murk clouds move somnolent.
Corpses of stars jumbled along in hearses,
Who shall say the sombre mourning of the firmament ?
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The Symbolist Poets
" On dark and empty streets of mourning the rain drips,
Dripping for ever through our chill remorse,
Like tears for dead things ever on our lips.
Like tears falling from the closed eye of a corse,
On dark and empty streets of mourning the rain drips.
" The rain is over our old dreams a net,
And in its water meshes prisoner takes
Their wings, until these songsters die of fret.
Of longing for the light, of lingering aches,
The rain is over our old dreams a net.
" Like a wet flag drooping against its pole.
With griefs awakening that have long been quenched,
The dark rain penetrates and soaks our soul,
Until it is a rag discoloured, drenched,
Like a wet rag drooping against its pole."
This last image, of a soul like a wet rag, is
sufficiently curious ; and Rodenbach's vv^ork teems
with such ideas, which as a rule, however, are
rendered tolerable by the general mood of the
poem. To say, for instance, that the moon in the
clouds is like a bosom peering forth from white
linen seems to be as extravagant as that jocular
comparison of one of Mr. Wells's heroines who,
when she first donned evening dress, felt like a ham
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in its frill ; but in his poem " The Milky Moon "
Rodenbach makes the idea plausible enough :
" The moon is showing, in the sky of night,
A chaste bosom, as a nurse might do,
To feed the caprice of those dreamers who
Love to be drinking in its milky light.
" Enough to nourish me, who also lie
And sleep by night upon this ample breast
Of recommencements ruined and distressed. . . .
And like fresh linen round it is the sky."
Rodenbach's best poems are those in which he
can take his images from the architecture and the
specific atmosphere of Flemish towns, as in this
of "Belfry Petals":
" In the languorous morning of a country town
The belfry chimes, chimes with the tender dyes
Of the dawn looking with a sister's eyes,
The belfry chimes, and on the roofs throws down
Its pale, diaphanous music flower by flower,
Crumbling them on black gables like handfuls
Of dewy sounds the wind sweeps up and culls,
Music of morning falling from the tower,
Like faded wreaths far falling wet with tears,
Invisible lilies falling from the yore.
In such slow petals, petals pale and frore,
They seem shed on the dead brow of the years."
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The Symbolist Poets
Or in "Old Bells":
" Bells I have known that noiseless went their way,
Poor bells that lived in little sordid turrets,
And seemed to be lamenting that their spirits
Could never be at rest by night or day.
" Bells of a suburb, coughing, broken down ;
Old women visiting at evening's hour
Each other, you had said, from tower to tower.
Tottering along in their worn-out bronze gown."
Rodenbach's Brtiges-la-Morte is a famous novel.
Everybody vi^ho visits Bruges is supposed to have
it v^ith him, in order to read himself into the
Stimmung of the town. The book does indeed
suggest an atmosphere, but only by violent images,
too vivid and rare for prose. Thus, slander in
dead cities grows like the grass among the cobble-
stones ; all day long the belfry bells swing their
black unseen censers, whence a smoke of sound
unrolls ; the church organ spreads out a dark
velvet ; the gables of the houses are in the shape
of crosses ; the wind is filled with bells ; the shadow
of the church towers is too heavy ; the hero goes
ft
to the hospital of St. John to bathe his feverish
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retina in its white walls ; the gardens in the court-
yards of the hospital are padded with box. These
images (some of them absurd in translation, but
not unnatural in the setting of the original) are
varied with a true poet's skill ; they change as the
moods change.
As to the theme of the novel, it is negligible.
It is for the sake of the poetry that the book is
read. Nay, the theme is more than negligible,
it is ridiculous. Hugues has lost his wife, whom
he loved passionately. While she was lying dead
he had cut off the long plaits of her hair; and,
settling with his mourning in Bruges, he keeps
the hair in a glass case. After five years he meets
a woman in the streets who seems to him the very
image of his dead wife. He accosts her; and
soon she is his mistress. But — if she has the
body, she has not the soul of his dead wife. He
denies her admittance to the house where he keeps
the plait of hair ; but at last she finds a pretext
to inspect the mysterious rooms, sees the hair,
lifts the glass case, and brandishes the plait aloft.
To Hugues it seems a sacrilege that this vulgar
actress should touch the relic of his dead saint ;
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The Symbolist Poets
and — he strangles her with the tresses she has
profaned.
The scene of another novel of Rodenbach's,
Le Carillonneur, is likewise in Bruges. The hero,
Joris Borluut, is an architect, whose life is devoted
to restoring the crumbling masonry of the city.
In his love of its far-famed chimes he also acts as
a bellringer. His wife's sister is in love with him,
and one day she yields to her passion when under
the influence of religious suggestion. The rest
of the book describes her repentance, and that
of Borluut.
There was for some years a cult of Rodenbach.
It was followed by the inevitable reaction ; and
some of us in recent years have been told not to
read him at all. His best friends have not been
loyal to his memory ; they have allowed him to
fall into neglect without protest. He is one of
those poets who lend themselves to cheap criti-
cism ; he wrote a great deal of poor stuff, as all
pampered poets do ; but he has written a certain
number of flawless poems ; he has created a
legend, the legend of "the dead city," of an ideal
Flanders dying in devout prayer ; and he (great
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
talker as he was) devised before Maeterlinck a
ritual of silence which is ever a quiet refuge for
hearts sick of what sometimes seems the blatant,
dusty optimism of the present fashion. Some day,
when people are sick of violence, there will be a
Rodenbach revival.
Georges Rodenbach, as everybody knows, was
Verhaeren's schoolfellow at the College of Sainte-
Barbe in Ghent. A few years later three other
future poets were schoolfellows in the same un-
willing nursery of Belgian verse. These were
Maurice Maeterlinck, Charles van Lerberghe, and
Gr^goire Le Roy.
Charles van Lerberghe will perhaps never be
appreciated as he should be in English-speaking
lands. He is a poets' poet. . . . While we are
lauding Maeterlinck and Verhaeren to the skies,
the other Belgian poets smile. Ask a Belgian
writer who is the greatest poet of his nation, and
the answer is pretty sure to be : Charles van
Lerberghe.
Of course, it is rather foolish to fix the values
of poets in superlatives. So much would depend,
for instance, on what one means by "poet." Ver-
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The Symbolist Poets
haeren, no doubt, is a greater writer than van
Lerberghe — he has a vaster sweep, he is nearer
the beating heart of the present, he appeals to
multitudes, whereas van Lerberghe is the poet of
a few. The great mass of Verhaeren's poetry is
rhetoric ; in Charles van Lerberghe, on the other
hand, there is not a trace of rhetoric. Van Ler-
berghe's lyrics cannot be recited, they can only
be sung. Victor Hugo and Verhaeren are im-
mense poets ; Verlaine and van Lerberghe are
intense poets. . . It is the eternal rivalry between
the popular poet and the divine poet, between
Byron and Shelley.
Charles van Lerberghe was born in Ghent in
1 86 1. His parents died while he was quite a boy,
and Maeterlinck's uncle then acted as his guardian.
He first attracted attention by the verses he con-
tributed to La PUiade in 1886; and the most
fascinating poems in Le Parnasse de la Jeune
Belgique are his. In Paris he became known
when, in 1892, his little play "for marionettes,"
Les Flaireurs, was acted at the Theatre d'Art.
It had appeared in La Wallonie for 1889, just a
year before Maeterlinck's L'Intrtcse appeared in
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
the same review. The two dramas have much in
common : the dialogue is vaguely similar, though
much more rapid and energetic in van Lerberghe's
play ; and the main idea, the coming of Death to
a sick person, is the same in both. Charges of
plagiarism have been made against both writers,
but particularly against Maeterlinck, who accord-
ing to the innuendoes of some writers derived all
that makes his originality from his bosom friend.
The truth is known only to Maeterlinck himself
and to Albert Mockel, the custodian of van
Lerberghe's memoirs. The truth no doubt is that
the two friends discussed the idea, and treated it
by common accord each in his own way. As a
matter of fact, Maeterlinck helped van Lerberghe
in the composition of his play : one of the most
vivid touches — the stage direction : " The blind is
raised, the window is lit up, and the shadow of
the hearse is projected on the wall " — is by
Maeterlinck.
Van Lerberghe was a desultory student, but
his mind was very scholarly. He had periods of
intense and chambered study, and, apart from his
university degree of Doctor of Philosophy, ac-
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The Symbolist Poets
quired at Brussels, his reading of the ancients had
made him a good classic. (Most of the Belgian
writers are hardly scholars in the English sense,
though practically every one of them has all the
history of art at his fingers' ends.) In 1898
appeared his first volume of verse, Entrevisions,
which at once placed him in the front rank of
contemporary lyrists. They are lyrics which by
a selection of titles suggest the atmosphere of the
Song of Songs. But they are more than love-
songs. In Entrevisions Love himself is prisoned
in music. It is all a music of suggestion ; nothing
is clearly expressed. The images are sensuous ;
but the feeling they awaken is not sensuous. Love
is etherealised ; the body is a shadow ; here soul
calls to soul.
After the publication of Entrevisions van Ler-
berghe travelled considerably. He stayed in
London, 'and there, probably, he read Rossetti,
whose influence on his work is discernible. But
the chief formative influence in his mature work
is that of his stay in Italy. On his way there he
made a halt in Berlin, where Stefan Georofe took
him about. Some of the letters he wrote on this
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tour have been published ; ^ they are exceedingly-
interesting, full of malice and very much to the
point, not in the least nebulous, as from his poetry
one would have expected them to be. Here is an
impression of Berlin :
" I rather like Berlin. It is what they call in German
eine grosse Stadt ; freely translated, a gross town. The
monuments are pompous, classical, imperial ; the streets
are symmetrical, populous, interminable, stupid, but amus-
ing. The famous * Under den Linden ' is a vast boule-
vard where I did in fact notice various trees. This
morning I saw something fine : soldiers returning from
the Kaiser's palace, but what soldiers ! Giants (at least
they seemed so in the fog) wrapped in long cloaks, and
with metal helmets surmounted by eagles with spread
wings. They were carrying white banners with golden
eagles, which were crowned, I don't know why, with
laurel leaves. A scene from the middle ages. And this
is the twentieth century. But all that relates to the army
here has a real greatness. They have put a lot of their
genius into that."
In Rome, where he stayed seven months, he
worked at his new volume of verse. La Chanson
d hve (The Song of Eve), and his comedy Pan.
Albert Mockel joined him, and they went to-
^ Lm. Vie Intellectuelle, Jan., Feb., March 1913.
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The Symbolist Poets
gether to Florence, where, in the beautiful sur-
roundings of an old manor where Galileo once lived,
La Chanson d Eve made progress. One of van
Lerberghe's letters throws light on the composition
of his masterpiece :
"All my poems, as Maeterlinck and other people have
said, are pictures. My Song of Eve is just as much
painted as it is sung, so they say, and they are quite
right. " I used to spend hours in the morning, hours of
ecstatic adoration, before paintings like Botticelli's Birth
of Venus or Leonardi's Annunciation, and then I would
return to my Eve's garden at the Torre del Gallo with
my eyes dazzled."
On his return to Belgium he obtained an
appointment under the Government as an attache
at the Musee du Cinquantenaire, with the magnifi-
cent salary of 1200 francs per annum! He very
soon scandalised his family by relinquishing this
position.
The Mercure de France treated him generously
enough when, on the publication of La Chanson
dEve in 1904, they gave him 500 francs for the
first edition ; but evidently he could not hope to
live by literature. Pan was acted at the Theatre
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
de rCEuvre and published by the Mercure in
1906, and the comedy attracted attention at home
and abroad ; but in September of the same year
van Lerberghe was struck down by the mental
illness which ended in a tragically early death
a year later. His family were mainly concerned
with saving his soul, which, as they thought, had
been lost by the blasphemies of Pan, and accord-
ing to their account he was " converted " on his
deathbed.
Some day, it is to be hoped, a detailed
biography of van Lerberghe, together with his
correspondence and memoirs, will be issued. (His
delightful Contes, too, of which several have ap-
peared in Vers et Prose and other journals, need
collecting.) None of the Belgians is more inter-
esting as a man. He was not at all the angel,
the ethereal dreamer one would imagine him to
be from his poems.
He was a grown man, not at all an eternal
cherub ; he was big of bone, with the frame of an
athletic Englishman, a great eater and drinker,
and (apparently) a great lover. Those who have
read his verse and imagined their own picture of
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The Symbolist Poets
him are bound to be shocked when they first see
his portrait. He had the appearance of a big,
awkward farmer ; and he had a habit of blushing
when spoken to.
La Chanson d' n^ve is the purest work of poetry
in Belgian literature. There is not a line which
could be rendered in verse ; there is not a stanza
which could even approximately be translated into
any language. The poem must be taken as it is,
with its incomparably musical rhythms, its visions
of white limbs emerging for a moment from the
morning mists in an enchanted garden, its delicate
suggestions of the rapture and sadness of human
life as determined by the awakening and the
blossoming and the withering of love. It is the
song of Eve, because Eve was woman, and woman
is the flower of Paradise, the fate of man. "It is
the divine youth of the first woman," says Albert
Mockel in his masterly critique, " but it is at the
same time the eternal legend of the maiden who
awakens from innocence to love, to the intoxication
of understandinor and the sadness of knowledge."
We have at the commencement Eve awakening
in the Garden of Eden to the things around her,
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with which she is one : she is the sun that dazzles
her eyes, she is the flowers she breathes, and she
does not know where she ends and where she
begins. She is the angel spirit come to a be-
wildering earth from where she knows not, and
we do not see her in the full light of day — she is
a voice sweetly singing the mysteries of existence ;
we do not see Eve, we see her shadow :
" In a perfume of white roses
She sits, dream-fast ;
And the shadow is beautiful as though an angel there
were glassed.
" The gloam descends, the grove reposes ;
The leaves and branches through,
On the gold Paradise is opening one of blue.
" A last faint wave breaks on the darkening shore.
A voice that sang just now is murmuring.
A murmuring breath is breathing . . , now no more.
" In the silence petals fall. . , ."
" Eve is everywhere present," says Jean Dominique,^
" radiant, innocent, and beautiful. Angels guide her feet,
and they are so eager to guard her from ill that their
encircling wings meet round her shoulders. She speaks,
and her voice, like that of princesses in fairy tales, breathes
^ Le Thyrse, March 1913.
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The Symbolist Poets
roses ; and her laughter rings out in radiance. She
kisses the ashes on a bed of leaves, and her scented
breath kindles the flame again. . . . Then Eve meets
the bird of Desire. She cannot help but follow it, she
is weary, but as she approaches the bird, it flies farther
away, ever farther among the tree-tops. For the first
time she feels that her smile withers, and the chaste
shadow of melancholy falls across her girl's voice."
This is the hour of temptation. Danger is lurk-
ing in the woods and waters, but his hyacinthine
hair is wreathed with roses, and his face is like the
face of Love. She knows that her own body is a
garden of Eden flowered with all perfumes to call
thither the Elect :
" Art thou waking, my perfume sunny,
My perfume of gilded bees.
Art thou floating along the breeze,
My perfume of sweet honey ?
" In the hush of the gloam, when my feet
Roam through the rich garden-closes.
Dost thou tell I am coming, thou smell
Of my lilies, and my warm roses ?
" Am I not like in this gloam a
Cluster of fruit concealed
By the leaves, and by nothing revealed,
Save in the night its aroma ?
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
" Does he know, now the hour is dim,
That I am half opening my hair,
Does he know that it scents the air.
Does its odour reach to him ?
" Does he feel I am straining my arms ?
And that the lilies of my valleys
Are dewy with passion-balm
That for his touching tarries ? "
Men come to her, and she says, full of pity
and tenderness :
" They can speak nothing yet,
But often their eyes are wet :
I am all things they ever have desired . . .
A dewy rose in the dawn am I. . . .
They are tired, so tired, . . .
They have long been coming to where I lie. . . ."
" Thus," to continue Jean Dominique's interpretation
(which is all a-tremble with a loving penetration), " though
nothing has troubled the unconsciousness and the sim-
plicity of the man and the woman, by the same miracle
of nature that in virgin forests bends down the flowering
crown of a tree over another that it is to fertilise — thus,
in this landscape of Eden a sacred song unites those who
were created for Love and Death — and for our sister.
Melancholy.''
The third book, La Faute, bears this maxim
210
The Symbolist Poets
of Nietzsche : All is innocence. Eve has not
sinned, she has fulfilled the destiny of woman —
and man. Before, her eyes had seen the outer
world ; now her soul finds the inner world. She
is complete, and she has completed her mate. But,
having reached the height of her ascent, she must
descend — to Death. The shadows fall over Eden,
and the angel Azrael comes.
It is a thankless criticism of La Chanson (T ^ve
to say that it is nebulous, that the intention does
not emerge clearly. To those who have an ear
for verbal music but who are too mentally idle to
unravel the runes of a symbol, it might have the
effect of music without words. Even that would
be something ; but those who do not care for the
obvious in poetry find much more than subtle
melodies in this masterpiece of a great poet.
There is no obscurity in Pan, at all events.
The obscurantists were quick to find the meaning,
and to denounce it. By this comedy, far and away
the best in Belgian literature, van Lerberghe made
himself impossible in official Belgium and in ortho-
dox society (to which by upbringing he belonged).
And yet the play is no more than a rollicking pre-
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sentation of Pantheism. Perhaps van Lerberghe
was the only Belgian poet of his generation who
might have developed into a great dramatist ; the
characters of Pan at all events, including the de-
lightful bouc communal, have the red life's blood
of the stage. But owing to its risky character
Pan can never be a repertory play.
The name of Grdgoire Le Roy is indissolubly
associated with those of Maeterlinck and van Ler-
berghe. It was at his house that van Lerberghe
was struck down in September 1906 ; and it was
Le Roy who revealed Maeterlinck to the circle of
La PUiade in Paris, when he read his friend's
story The Massacre of the Innocents to them.
Gr^goire Le Roy, who was born in 1862 in Ghent,
has had many irons in the fire, and it is only in
recent years that, obtaining an appointment (after
official insults) as Librarian of the Acad^mie Royale
des Beaux-Arts at Brussels, he has settled down
to write poems and tales. He abandoned juris-
prudence to study painting (for a time in Paris) ;
he abandoned painting to be an electrical engineer
("Gregoire I'electrique " van Lerberghe calls him
quizzingly in his correspondence) ; and he aban-
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The Symbolist Poets
doned that profession, apparently to be a dreamer.
In 1887 appeared his little volume of verse, La
Chanson du Soir (edition of twenty copies — avis
aux amateurs /). Mon Coeur pleure (T autrefois fol-
lowed, in an Mition de luxe,^ in 1889. These two
volumes are now united in La Chanson du Pauvre,
a not voluminous yellow-back published by the
Mercure de France. It would be idle to claim
too much importance for these poems. They have
a distinctive charm, a cachet of pensive melancholy.
But, with the exception of a few, they are not
markedly original in phrasing or rhythm. Gregoire
Le Roy is the poet of an attitude : he is (even in
his earlier years) "the silvery sentimentalist of old
age " dreaming of the things of the past, an eman-
cipated moralist offering sage counsels to incon-
siderate youth. One of his poems, Le Pass^ qui
File (The Spinster Past), is the favourite poem of
Belgian reciters ; it is as ubiquitous as Longfellow's
Psalm of Life; more than any other Belgian poem
it has become a folksong. It is that rare thing,
a poem of simple and popular appeal written by
*• With drawings by Fernand KhnopfF and a frontispiece by
Georges Minne.
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
a Primitive Symbolist (but Gregoire Le Roy never
wrote Mallarmese — he adopted the stock figures
of speech and the assonances of the symbolist
tribe, but not their remoteness and complexity) :
" The old woman spins, and her wheel
Is prattling of old, old things ;
As though to a doll she sings,
And memories over her steal.
" The hemp is yellow and long,
The old woman spins the thread,
Bending her white weary head
Over the wheel's lying song.
" The wheel goes round with a whirl.
The yellow hemp is unwound.
She turns it round and round.
She is playing like a girl.
" The yellow hemp is unwound.
She sees herself a girl.
As blonde as the skeins that whirl,
She is dancing round and round.
" The wheel rolls round with a whirr,
And the hemp is humming as well,
She hears an old lover tell
And whisper his love for her.
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The Symbolist Poets
" Her tired hands rest above
The wheel, her spinning is done ;
And with the hemp are spun
Her memories of love."
For about twenty years Le Roy published no-
thing new. Then he became editor of Le Masque ;
and his talent seemed to take on a new lease of
youth, which enabled him to revive his legend of
dreamful eld. La Cou7^onne des Sows (191 1) has
a new note of wise tenderness, of contentment with
nature under the very wings of Death.
This legendary greybeard's recollections of
olden days have now a dulled regret of physical
sensations :
" My poor hands, so wan and faded,
Agile once as a bird,
My rhythms of speech you aided,
And by my brain you were stirred ;
" Poor wrinkled hands, like two
Old women worn and wizened,
My thoughts run on, but you
In listlessness are prisoned.
" Yet I bless you, my hands, now that strife
Is done, and the heart reposes ;
You taught me the touch of roses,
And the caresses of life."
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
But it needed Le Rouet et la Besace (The
Spinning- Wheel and the Wallet) to discover
all the fascination of Gregoire Le Roy's mystic
Muse. This ddition de luxe is ornamented by the
poet's own drawings — wonderful pictures which
actually seem to be more laden with poetry than
the poems themselves. Here is the hearth corner,
with the cane-bottomed chair and the spinning-
wheel and the wallet ; and the wallet, dreaming of
all the roads of the earth, chides the spinning-
wheel for its love of the hearth-corner. Here is
the picture of a lonely cottage half hidden behind
a row of poplar-trees, set in the midst of bare, flat
fields that seem to stretch to infinity, and the
legend is : " Will he come ? " — Somebody is wait-
ing for somebody to come, watching the horizon,
wearily. Here are Flemish houses, all higgledy-
piggledy with their gables and their skylights,
overshadowing a Flemish river, where boats are
gliding on to the sea in an endless procession :
perhaps -one of them will bring happiness to the
watcher at the window ; perhaps happiness has
already glided past. . . . Here is the end of a
village with a broken-down old pilgrim come home
216
The Symbolist Poets
at last : do you remember, lady, the pensive poet
who was your guest long ago ? He has pilgrimed
round his heart and the world, and now he is the
old man who has come back to you. . . . Here
are the black masts of a great ship against the
setting sun, and serried ranks of emigrants marching
thither — the poet has seen them passing and passing
to their far adventures ; as for him, he has never
left his home and his little garden. But he has
seen everything, and his wandering soul is tired
of everything, and his ship, his little barque, is
waiting to take him to the farther shore. Here — a
drawing of almost unendurable sadness — is an old
man playing a guitar in a deserted, cobbled street ;
his cloak and beard are ragged, his face is haggard
with hopeless despair — and he is singing of love.
\i Le Rouet et la Besace is an old man's book,
it proves that Gregoire Le Roy had to grow old
before he could realise his legend. It is stronger,
because it is sadder, than the books of the poet's
youth. After all, in those days, autrefois was the
future.
There is a sage's gentle philosophy, too, in
Joe Trimborn (19 13), the collection of short stories
217
Contemporary Belgian Literature
which must have come as a surprise to those
who thought Le Roy was a lyrist pure and
simple. They would be among the most remark-
able of Belgian short stories if only by virtue of
their quaint humour. Perhaps it is not betraying
too much of a secret if one mentions, too, that
Contes d'Apres Minuit (Brussels, 191 3), a book
of grotesque stories with a satirical vein, are by
Gregoire Le Roy. If one may read between the
lines of the preface, they owe something to the
collaboration of Charles van Lerberghe.
Albert Mockel is as complex as Gregoire Le
Roy is simple. There is an outward show of
simplicity in his learned verse, due to his imitation
of old folksongs, but the appearance is very de-
ceptive. His first volume of verse, Chantefable
unpen naive, which had considerable influence on
the symbolist movement, is as difficult to explore
as a virgin forest. But if it is a virgin forest of
packed and tufted ideas, there is a delirious music
singing in the branches, and to the strayed reveller
who is lost therein and beguiled it does not seem
to be at all important to find a path out of the
wood.
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The Symbolist Poets
Meckel was editor, at Liege, of La Wallonie
when Chantefable tin peu naive gave him his
captaincy in the symbolist army. La Wallonie
was one of the most important of the symbolist
reviews, for France as well as for Belgium. In
its pages are to be found poems by the most
distinguished French and Belgian poets of the
day, side by side with the promising work of Bel-
gian writers — Auguste Vierset, Hector Chainaye,
Cdestin Demblon, Jules Destree — who have since
been more or less lost to literature in the busy
tides of journalism or politics. With Liege
Mockel's whole life is connected : he was born in
the province (1866), he was educated there, and,
though for some years he has resided in Paris
and the neighbourhood, he has returned periodi-
cally to conduct his Walloon campaign. With
Jules Destree he is a leader of those Belgians
who see a national peril in the machinations of
the Flemings ; and in the interest of the cause he
has so much at heart he has written and set to
music his famous Chant de la Wallonie, a party
cry which may yet (unless the war brings sager
counsels) become a battle cry. Strange to say,
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
this ardent champion of French culture against
Germanic culture is himself of German descent !
Mockel's ripest verse which has so far been
published in book form is contained in Clarth
(1902), though fragments have appeared from time
to time in journals of a new volume, La Flam'me
Irnmortelle. One of the best poems in Clartds is
the " Song of Running Water." It sings the
transitoriness of all that is : everything flows away-
like a river, impelled beyond the bounds of time
by resistless desire.
The symbols of some of the other poems are
more transparent. " The Goblet," for instance,
is Woman, or (more narrowly) the Courtesan :
" Every hand that touches me I greet
With kisses welcoming, caresses sweet.
" Thus in my crystal's naked beauty, I —
With nothing save a little gold as on my lips a dye —
Give myself wholly to the mouth unknown
That seeks the burning of my own.
"Queen of joy, — queen and slave —
Mistress that taken passes on again,
Mocking the love she throws to still
Desire, I have blown madness at my pleasure's will
To the four winds that rave.
220
The Symbolist Poets
" Say you that I am vain ?
List!
I am feeble, scarcely I exist. . . .
Yet listen : for I can be everything.
" This mouth, that never any kiss could close,
Capriciously in subtle fires it blows.
The jewelled garlands of a shadowy blossoming.
" For the lover drunken on my lips that burn.
Whether he pour in turn
The wines of gold and flame or love's wave to my rim.
Drinks from my soul for ever strange to him
A queenly splendour or the radiance of the skies,
Or fury scorching where the harmful ruby lies
In the bitter counsel of my jealous topazes.
'' And, tears or joy, delirium, daring drunkenness,
From all this passion that to his is married
Nothing of me will gush unto his arid
Lips, save the simple and the limpid light
Whose gleam is wedded to my empty chalice.
" What matter ? I have given Desire his cloudland palace.
And on my courtesan's bare breast
Love lets the hope of his diaphanous flight
Languish, and softly rest. . . .
And I laugh, the fragile, frivolous sister of Eve !
For me in nights of madness drunken hands upheave
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
Higher than all foreheads to the constellated skies,
And then I am the sudden star of lies,
That into troubled joys darts deep its radiant gleam —
The sweet, perfidious happiness of Dream."
Meckel's prose is more widely read than his
verse. Unfortunately, much of the good prose he
wrote for La Wallonie and other journals, at the
time when he was described by Celestin Demblon
as "a Walloon dandy, outrageously intellectual and
despotically symbolistic," has not been quarried by
the publishers. A little book of his in which he
caricatured his colleagues and himself, Les Fmn-
istes Wa//ons, appeared in 1887; but, like Chante-
fable, this book cannot now be got for love or
money. (It is doubly a collector's book: it is a
document in the history of the symbolist move-
ment, and its very beautiful frontispiece was the
first published work of Armand Rassenfosse.) His
volumes of criticism which still remain on sale are
Propos de Litt^rature (1894), a meticulous com-
parison and interpretation of Henri de Regnier and
Francis Viele-Griffin ; Eniile Verhaeren (1895);
Stiphane Mallarmd (1899), the most authoritative
criticism extant of the origins and aims of sym-
222
The Symbolist Poets
boHsm ; Charles van Lerberghe (1904), adequate
as an interpretation but not sufficiently extensive
as biography ; and Victor Rousseau, a book on the
great Belgian sculptor who during the war has been
the guest of Lord Milner. Very rarely indeed has
Mockel written criticism which has been belied by
time. What he has once said, holds good in spite
of all apotheoses and reactions.
The prose-writers of La Wallonie affected Mal-
larmese. In other words their style was affected.
Mallarmese prose as written by Mallarme was a
miracle of Stimmung, something absolutely original,
the weft and woof of a rare personality ; but the
imitative prose of his admirers, tainted often by a
farther aberration in the direction of Ren^ Ghil, is
sometimes curious, sometimes diverting, and some-
times appalling. Albert Mockel and several others,
however, became great virtuosos in this " symphonic
prose," although it should be noted that in their
riper years they returned to a saner style. What
they were trying to do was to write poetry in
prose : even Mockel's criticism is often in the
nature of a prose poem, and that is what gives
it a more permanent value than the voluminous
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
academic criticism of such lucid and shallow writers
as Faguet. Mockel is as much a stylist as Walter
Pater was.
" Nothing is nearer a very lyrical song," says
Mockel in the preface to his Contes pour les En-
fants dHier (1908), "than a violently burlesque
tale." This is a theory, by the most logical and
conscientious theorist of Belgian literature, a theorist
whose works are usually exemplifications of his
theories. But the Contes pour les E^ifants d'Hier
(Tales for the Children of Yesterday) have not the
appearance of having sprung from a theory ; they
seem rather to have been born of sheer delight
in the burlesque ; and in this case probably the
theory was deduced from the completed work.
The symbolists, it must be admitted, rode theories
to death — indeed, some of the most gifted of them
theorised themselves to death ; but these tales of
Mockel at all events are fresh with the greenness
of the tree of life. From Edmund Gosse they
won Mockel the title of "a Belgian Ariosto"; and
there is adventure enough in them to justify the
praise, but it is the playful Gallic wit and the
224
The Symbolist Poets
sclntillant satire that make the great merit of the
book.
La Wallonie lasted seven years — a long life
for a review which printed nothing but literature.
As it declined, another Liege journal, Florealy
founded in 1892 by Paul G^rardy, progressed
apace, cheered on and congratulated even by its
dying rival. Paul Gerardy is a curious case. He
is a Prussian subject, born in the year of blood at
Saint- Vith near Malmedy. His culture is certainly
half German. One of his best books, A la Gloire
de Bocklin^ is lyric praise of a German painter.
And he has written German poetry of distinction,
which is all gathered into the harvest of that
masterful chief of formalists, Stefan George.
And yet Gerardy hates Prussia, like a true Belgian ;
and his French poetry is more likely to live than
his German poetry. His verses, which are col-
lected in Roseaux (1898), have the naivete of folk-
songs. How simple and subtle is " Of Sad Joy " :
" I am angry with you, little girl,
Because of your gracious smiles.
And your restful lips, and teeth of pearl,
And the black glitter of your great eyes.
225 p
Contemporary Belgian Literature
" I am angry with you, but on my knees,
For when I went away, in happy wise.
Far from you, far as goes the breeze,
I could think of nothing but of your eyes.
" I was timid, I never looked back.
And I went singing as madmen do,
To forget your eyes, alack !
But my song was all about you."
" Some Sonof or Other " is a little snatch of
music that holds all the melancholy of the symbolist
attitude :
" The song of moonlight all
That trembles as aspens shake.
The thrush sang it at the evenfall
To the listening swan on the blue lake.
" It is all of love and distress.
And of joy and love, and then
There are sobs of gold and weariness.
And ever comes joy back again.
" Far, far away flew the thrush,
And the swan went pondering
All the new words, by lily and rush,
With his head underneath his wing."
G^rardy is the one satirist of the Belgians.
(Courouble deals rather in caricature ; and the satire
226
The Symbolist Poets
of Mockel's Contes pour les Enfants d Hier is
softened by the grotesqueness of burlesque). Les
Garnets du Roi (1903) is a delightful satire on the
late King Leopold — so delightful that his Majesty
himself is said to have read it with immense gusto.
Le Chinois tel quon le parle (1903) shows up the
Belgian magistracy. A satire which will no doubt
be reprinted and have a long lease of life is S.
M. Patacake^ Enipereur dOccitanie (1904); the
hero is the German Emperor. Gdrardy, by the
way, is the editor of the new Belgian paper, La
Belgique Nouvelle.
Another poet of Li^ge is Isi-Collin, who founded
the review Antee, which published much new work
of importance, including translations of Arthur
Symons. Antee was the organ of the " id^o-
realiste " school. Isi-Collin's La ValUe Heureuse
(1903) garners the harvest of a quiet eye: here
are notations of nature pregnant with the very
essence of poetry. The verse has a stately build
(Isi-Collin, like Paul Gerardy, has learnt much
from Mockel — these three might be grouped to-
gether as the Liege school) ; it has the music of
an organ heard from afar.
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
La Vall'ee Heureuse, with its frontispiece by
Armand Rassenfosse, is a book for collectors of
beautiful editions (those true bibliophiles who handle
their treasures with loving fingers and rarely risk
soiling the thick pages by reading them). For
these people Isi-Collin's La Divine Rencontre, pub-
lished by Desoer at Liege in 191 3, is a prize
beyond estimation. The printing and the orna-
mentation are so beautiful that the contents almost
seem to fade into insignificance. And yet there
is purport in this chiselled prose : a pantheist
steeped in modernism goes forth into the forest
and meets Pan himself. They have some con-
versation, but— the pantheist does not understand
Pan, and he returns to town, to the pantheism
of his three-franc-fifty yellow-backs ... for your
modern pantheist is "sincerely artificial and arti-
ficially sincere." (** If you were an animal, well
and good," says Nietzsche, " but to be an animal
you would have to be innocent.") Sisyphe et le
Juif Errant, finally, is a dramatic dialogue pub-
lished in 1 9 14, and produced by The Pioneer
Players in London on March 7th, 191 5.
When literary men are gathered together and
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The Symbolist Poets
the futile question is asked : Who is the greatest
of Belgian poets ? there would be some who would
leap over Charles van Lerberghe and give the
highest rank to that tender and delicate dreamer
cloistered in Antwerp, Max Elskamp, he whose
voice, once vibrating with a very frenzy of happi-
ness, has now grown silent in sadness. Elskamp
is not so powerful as Verhaeren, for he sings in
a tower of ivory, not in the roaring world ; he is
not so perfect a melodist as van Lerberghe, but
by how slight a degree does he come second ! And
he has qualities which no other poet has : if van
Lerberghe shadows forth the soul of Man and
Woman, the sources of being, the rapture of con-
summation, the sadness of knowledge, Elskamp
images the universe in his own happy Flanders,
the Flanders of Holy Church, mirrors his own
soul (which is the soul of Man) in that of his native
city of Antwerp. All the joy of pure and contrite
hearts wells up in the verse of Max Elskamp, in
his anthems of the Sabbath — for the Sabbath is
joy ; and when he weaves, like a black thread in
a golden woof, the weariness of the working-days
(which are death) into the singing ecstasy of his
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fervour, it is only such a weariness as a saintly
worshipper feels in the week's dust, because the
Sabbath with its peace and devotion is long in
coming, and even so he consoles with the promise
of a Sunday that shall aye endure, "and all at
the heart of a far domain." No one can mistake
the very passion of ecstasy there is in the darkest-
coloured of Max Elskamp's songs :
" Oh, Mary Mother, be a black-robed nun . . .
Now is the season of all suffering come . . ."
— is not that a call to the ecstasy of suffering,
suffering which is a source of joy eternal, and
therefore itself a joy? Sunday bells ring all
through the melodies of this dizzily dreaming
mystic, in Flanders with its poplar-shaded ways
by the sea that kisses the yellow dunes.
The highest praise that can be given to any
poet is to say that he is original, that he himself
and no other man is all he has sung. Of Max
Elskamp this can be said with confidence. An
academic critic with his ferreting nose and unseeing
eyes might trace the outward shape of the stanzas,
some of the tricks of diction, the enchanting asson-
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The Symbolist Poets
ances which disgust one for ever with the formalist's
welter of close-fitting rhymes, to the quaint irregu-
larities of the folksong. It needs no great read-
ing to find out that Georges Khnopff, another
Flemish mystic on whose frail verse the dust of
neglect is gathering now, had fashioned such sym-
bolist hymns before Elskamp ; but the inner music,
all the miracle of meaning, all the fervour of the
song rising to a height where the human voice can
go no farther and must rest — all this is Elskamp's
own, and there is nothing at all like it in any other
man's verse.
Max Elskamp was born of a French mother
and a Flemish father in 1862 in Antwerp, in a
street where the flags of the Consulates tell of dis-
tant lands whence come the ships " clustered like
a choir" in the harbour. He grew up among
merchandise (for his grandfather was a shipper) ;
and commerce was a dream to him. Dominical
(1892) was his first book. It was a beautiful edition
with a cover ornamented by Henry Van de Velde,
that great Flemish artist who, finding scant en-
couragement in his own country, emigrated to
Germany and there, continuing the work of William
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Morris, inaugurated a new era in decorative art.^
Van de Velde, too, ornamented the next three
volumes of Elskamp : Salutations, dont dAngel-
iques (1893); En Symbole vers l' Apostolat (1895);
and Six Chansons de Pauvre Homme (1896).
These four books are collected in La Louange de
la Vie, published by the Mercure de France in 1898.
The next volume of verse, Enluminures (1898), is
illustrated by the poet himself.
Few symbolist authors need interpreting more
than Max Elskamp. It is not that his symbols
are recondite — as a matter of fact they are so
restricted that a little familiarity makes them
seem quite natural and clear. The difficulty is
that he makes use of local customs and of
fragments of old ballads. As an example of his
difficulty, a famous poem from Dominical might
be taken :
" And the town of My thousand souls,
Do you sleep, do you sleep ?
It is Sunday, My women folks,
And My town, do you sleep ?
^ Henry Van de Velde's most important criticism is in German
{^Essays, Insel-Verlag, Leipzig, 19 lo).
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The Symbolist Poets
" And you Jews, the shame of My alleys,
Do you sleep, do you sleep ?
— Antiquities and Laces —
Even the Jews, do you sleep ?
" And you, My gentle candle-merchants,
Do you sleep, do you sleep ?
While Her litanies soar to the Virgin,
Do you sleep, do you sleep ?
" Steeples, your hours have been stolen.
Do you sleep, do you sleep ?
Friar Jacques, in the habitation
Of what sleep do you sleep ?
" Good people, this is the Sabbath
And the windows with frost are hoar.
In the city that the flags of
The Consulates are hanging o'er."
The general sense, even in the rude transla-
tion, should be clear at first reading. The Virgin
is bending over a Flemish city, which the last line
localises as Antwerp ; it is a Sabbath morning
bright with hoar-frost ; and the virgin is waiting
for the bells to begin and ring Her good people
to Church. That is the mood, a mood of glad
expectancy of the joys of the Sabbath, the first
hush of the ecstasy of worship. But the essence
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of this poem is its blending of the mood with a
most delicate humour. That gay words and posi-
tive chafiing should be placed in the mouth of the
Holy Virgin is quite in the spirit of the old Flem-
ish songs which are ever at the back of Max
Elskamp's mind — in the folksong the humour would
very likely have been coarse : Elskamp refines it,
that is all. The virgin, then, waiting for the incense
of Her bells, chides Her women for lying abed ;
She mocks the Jews in the old curiosity shops
in the side streets ; nay, the very merchants of Her
holy candles are still sleeping ; the steeples seem
to think that their bells have gone on their
annual pilgrimage to Rome ; and even Friar Jacques
is sleeping yet, he of the old song that every-
body knows :
" Frere Jacques, Frere Jacques,
Dormez-vous, dormez-vous ?
Sonnez les matines,
Bim ! Bam ! Bourn ! "
(Notice the assonance in the folksong — vous :
Bourn: Elskamp has many such.) The last stanza
has the superb musical climax of so many of
Elskamp's songs : at this moment, one imagines,
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The Symbolist Poets
the bells ring out, Friar James having run up
into the belfry tower three steps at a time at
the Virgin's gentle chiding ; and now the good
burghers' dames come forth, and the candle-mer-
chant is ready with his wares, and the Jews in
the by-streets peer out over the curios and the
old lace in their shop-windows, and the sun shines
out on the hoar-frost and the waving banners of
the Consulates.
That is the manner of the poems in La Louange
de la Vie. You must know the key-words; then
your heart can dance along with the verse, dance
as the very trees dance when joy (or Sunday) is
in the land.
There is not in Elskamp's verse the sudden
shock of the sublime, but there is the continuous
thrill of images full of grace and charm. Poem
sings to poem ; the music swells and sinks ; the
whole book is a peal of belfry bells. Everything
is in harmony with the Roman Catholic ritual ;
and the good Catholics find nothing offensive in
the playful spirit that makes symbols of the Virgin
and Jesus, and expresses an artist's disgust with
ugly things by dreaming that the Mother of God
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looks down on drunken soldiers reeling through
the streets of Antwerp and mourns :
"And I am sad as with the brandy
Which brings the soldiers late to barracks,
Upon the Sunday drunk with brandy,
Within My streets all full of soldiers,
I have the sadness of much brandy."
Enluminures is merely a continuation of La
Louange de la Vie. All Elskamp's work is this
Song of Praise ; all his poems illuminate the manu-
script of Life in its holy moods. One of the
poems of this volume seems to me to be the very
finest of those songs which ring rhymes on a
religious anachronism :
" And Mary reads a Gospel-page,
With folded hands in the silent hours,
And Mary reads a Gospel-page,
Where the meadow sings with flowers.
" And all the flowers that star the ground,
In the far emerald of the grass,
Tell Her how sweet a life they pass,
With simple words of dulcet sound.
" And now the angels in the cloud.
And the birds too in chorus sing.
While the beasts graze, with foreheads bowed,
The plants of scented blossoming.
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The Symbolist Poets
" And Mary reads a Gospel-page,
The pealing hours She overhears,
Forgets the time, and all the years,
For Mary reads a Gospel-page.
"And masons building cities go
Homeward in the evening hours,
And o'er gilt cocks on belfry towers
Clouds and breezes pass and blow."
There may be people to whom these symbols
may seem childish. They are not childish, but
they are childlike. What a naive symbol is that
of the Jews — "Jews of shame with grey hair" —
eyesores in a world where Jesus is all rosy and
the sky all azure. Elskamp is not necessarily an
anti-Semite — all that he does is (for the purpose
of poetry) to look at Jews "as those in Brittany
and childhood do." The jaundiced Protestant,
too, would be wrong if he thought the Gospel
that Max Elskamp preaches a glaringly Roman
Catholic gospel. Let it be whispered that Max
Elskamp is a freethinker. . . .
But orthodox Roman Catholic poets there are
in Belgium, the poets who have written for Le
Spectateur Catholique and Durendal. The chief
of them are : Victor Kinon, Thomas Braun,
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
Georges Ramaekers, and Pierre Nothomb. Victor
Kinon was associated from its first number with
Le Spectateur Catholique, a review started by the
essayist Edmond de Bruyn, who with Max Elskamp
established the Museum of Folklore at Antwerp.
Kinon's lyric verse is collected in V Ame des
Saisons (1909). The prevailing note is (if an
epigram may be risked) one of realistic mysticism.
There are songs which outwardly are in Elskamp's
manner ; but the world they move in is real, not
Elskamp's dream-world. Kinon's religious fervour
has almost the directness of a Salvation Army
preacher :
" Boiled, boiled again, and carbonized
Be the old serpent of sin and lies !
• • • • *
Pulverized, trod under feet,
Be the old serpent of deceit ! "
But there is another note : that of simplicity in
the description of nature, the simplicity of which
Francis Jammes is the great master. Kinon (who
in spite of his surname is a Fleming) has the
vivid colouring of his race :
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The Symbolist Poets
" The stainless snow and the blue,
Lit by a pure gold star,
Nearly meet ; but a bar
Of fire separates the two.
" A rime-frosted black pinewood,
Raising, as waves roll foam.
Its lances toothed like a comb.
Dams the horizon's blood.
" In the tomb of blue and white
Nothing stirs save a crow.
Unfolding, solemnly slow,
Its silky wing black as night."
Some of his literary criticism (though he is one
of the acknowledged mouthpieces of his Church,
his verdicts are never intolerant) is collected in
Portraits cP Auteurs (1910).
The influence of Francis Jammes is obvious
and confessed in the poetry of Thomas Braun,
who has, moreover, written a little book on the
master of Orthez {Des Poetes Simples: Francis
Jammes). Braun is a Walloon of German descent,
but he must be part Fleming, for Verhaeren is
his uncle. The fine flower of his genius blooms
for evermore in his Le Livre des Benedictions^ a
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
beautifully printed and illustrated book produced
in 1900 under the auspices of Le Spectateur Catho-
lique. These quaint benedictions of the nuptial
ring, of the child, of the house, of bread, wine,
beer, cheese, &c., summon up all the technical
details of the subject to make them sing a robust
poetry. Over the Benediction of Beer is a foam-
ing mug wreathed with the Flemish legend '* Bier
in de voile Pot," and the invocation to the Lord,
"Quam ex adipe frumenti producere dignatus es."
What a jolly religion this Roman Catholicism
of Flanders is! Here is an invocation full of
reverence — hands folded by the foaming mug —
which rolls out the names of the national brews
as though the Great Brewer of all — for His are
the malt and the hops and the glucose and all the
other ingredients — were personally familiar with
the taste of each. There is the same monk's
humour (as of a genuinely pious Friar Tuck) in
" The Benediction of the Cheeses " :
*' When from the void, good Lord, this earth You raised,
You made vast pasture-lands where cattle grazed,
Where shepherds led their flocks, and shore their fleeces.
And scraped their hides, and cut them into pieces,
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The Symbolist Poets
When they had eaten all their nobler flesh,
Which with earth's virgin odour still was fresh.
O'er Herve's plateaux our cattle pass, and browse
The ripe grass which the mist of summer bows.
And over which the scents of forests stream.
They give us butter, curds, and milk, and cream.
God of the fields, Your cheeses bless to-day,
For which Your thankful people kneel and pray.
Let them be fat or light, with onions blent,
Shallots, brine, pepper, honey ; whether scent
Of sheep or fields is in them, in the yard
Let them, good Lord, at dawn be beaten hard ;
And let their edges take on silvery shades
Under the most red hands of dairymaids ;
And, round and greenish, let them go to town
Weighing the shepherd's folding mantle down ;
Whether from Parma or from Jura heights,
Kneaded by august hands of Carmelites,
Stamped with the mitre of a proud abbess.
Flowered with the fragrance of the grass of Bresse,
From Brie, hills of the Vosges, or Holland's plain,
From Roquefort, Gorgonzola, or from Spain !
Bless them, good Lord ! Bless Stilton's royal fare,
Red ^ Cheshire, and the tearful, cream Gruyere !
Bless Kantercaas, and bless the Mayence round.
Where aniseed and other grains are found ;
Bless Edam, Pottekees, and Gouda then,
And those that we salute with ' Sir,' ^ like men."
^ The Dutch cheese which goes by the name of " Cheshire "
is red.
' Refers to the French cheese called " Monsieur fromage."
241 Q
Contemporary Belgian Literature
There is a more cosmopolitan strangeness in
Philatelie (1910). It is a rhymed catalogue of
stamps, that is all ; but there is poetry in the
rhymes. How playful and tender is this Dutch
stamp :
" Pauvre petite Wilhelmine,
tulipe des pays des Cimbres,
eus-tu toujours si fraiche mine
et tant de joie que sur ces timbres ? "
In Fumee d' Ardenne (191 2) we have a Thomas
Braun who has grown elegiac. It is good verse,
but it has not the strangeness and the almost un-
conscious humour of the Benedictions. It is a
hunter's book, written in the Ardennes during the
long vacation of the Law Courts. For Thomas
Braun is not some portly abbot with a well-stocked
cellar, he is a busy lawyer in Brussels. He is
represented in the British Museum catalogue by
a learned book on commercial law — by this and
no other. . . . And yet he is poet sufficiently im-
portant to have had a book written on him —
Thomas Braun, by Albert de Bersaucourt (Paris,
1913)-
Symbolism runs riot in the verse of Georges
242
The Symbolist Poets
Ramaekers {Le Chant des Trois Regnes, 1906 ;
Les Saisons Mystiques, 19 10). His Roman Catho-
lic fervour knows no bounds ; but the poetry he
reads into his sectarian symbols is so striking that
he may well be read with pleasure by the very
heretics he denounces as mushrooms :
" In the autumnal thicket, thinned
Along its mournful arches by the wind,
No longer to dead twigs but sapwood quick,
Corrupting trunks that time left whole.
The reeking parasites in millions stick,
Like to the carnal ill that gnaws the soul
Of those who at the feet of women fawn.
" And Hell has blessed their countless spawn.
" And though they cannot reach the surging tops
Of the unshaken columns of the Church,
In spreading crops
The parasites with poison smirch
And mottle with strange stains the fruits
The Monstrance ripens in the groves of Rome.
" Trusting that ancient orchard's sainted roots,
Whoever of the leprous apples eats
Shall feel his faith grow darkened with a gloam
That filters heresy's corroding sweets.
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
" More hideous than saprophytes,
And therefore for the sacrilege more fit,
Upon the Corn and Vinestock sit
Minute and miserable parasites ;
And o'er the Eucharist their tiny bellies.
To eat and crimson it, have crept.
Their occult plague has for three hundred years
Eaten the very hope of mystic ears,
Wherever the Christian harvester has slept."
(This admission must surely be rather encouraging
to the heretics whose venene putrescence Ramaekers
would no doubt like to burn with a flame more
consuming than that of his verse. But note now
how he trounces the German higher critics, who
breed the spawn :)
" And while, in the land of heavy, yellow beers,
In the brewing-vat of barren exegeses
Some new-found yeast for ever effervesces.
The saints whose blood turns sick and rots,
Waiting till a second Nero shall
For their cremation light a golden carnival,
Behold their bodies decked with livid spots."
Ramaekers has such a command of the most
unexpected and rash images, which create a style
as though in his heart-felt sincerity he had made
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The Symbolist Poets
all the extravagances of burlesque seem the simple
and inevitable expression of his fervour, that
one would wish him to write an epic denuncia-
tion of the German invasion of his country.
There would be more force in his indigfnation
than there is in Pierre Nothomb's Les Barbares
en Belgique (19 15). Nothomb's Notre Dame
du Matin is comparatively restrained in its mys-
ticism, though the poems seem to blend the
Virgin Mary and some earthly maiden. They
are poems of religious exaltation troubled, as
spring proceeds to summer, by the first stirrings
of a shy sensuality. It is a book for the pure in
heart.
The most Mallarmean of the Belgian symbolists
is Andr^ Fontainas. He settled in Paris in 1888,
and was (like Mockel) a close friend of Mallarme.
His poems, which are collected in Crepuscules (1897)
and La Nef Desemparee (1908) are Pre-Raphaelite
in colourincr :
*&
" With right arm on the open casement rim,
The negro king Cophetua, with sad mien,
And eyes that do not see, looks at the green
Autumnal ocean rolling under him.
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
" His listless dream goes wandering without goal ;
He is not one who would be passion's slave ;
And no remorse, nor memory from its grave
May haunt the leisure of his empty soul.
" He does not hear the melancholy chaunt
Of girls who beg before him, hollow, gaunt
With fainting, coughing in the mellow sun,
" And unawares, he knows not how it came.
He feels within his hardened heart a flame,
And burns his eyes at the eyes of the youngest one."
It is not the subtle and gorgeous colouring of his
verse, however, which makes Fontainas one of the
most permanently interesting of Belgian poets : he
is past master of that mystery, that breathed in-
tangible suggestion, for which the symbolists lived
charmed lives. The utmost refinement of the
theme, the most floatingly musical expression of
the idea, the rarest words, the most hidden "corre-
spondencies " — all this, for which the symbolists
most fervently strove, Fontainas achieved. What
magic there is in his " Sea-scape : "
" Under basaltic porticoes of calm sea-caves,
Heavy with alga and the moss of fucus gold,
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The Symbolist Poets
In the occult slow shaking of sea waves,
Among the alga in proud blooms unfold
The cups of pride of silent, slender gladioles. . . .
" The mystery wherein dies the rhythm of the waves
In gleams of kisses long and calm unrolls,
And the red coral whereon writhes the alga cold
Stretches out arms that bleed with calm flowers, and
beholds
Its gleams reflected in the rest of waves.
** Now here you stand in gardens flowered with alga, cold
In the nocturnal, distant song of waves.
Queen whose calm, pensive looks are glaucous gladioles,
Raising above the waves their light-filled bowls,
Among the alga on the coral where the ocean rolls."
A poet who has published surprisingly little
{L'Ame en Exil, 1895), but who is yet in the inner
circles of poets ranked with the best, is Georges
Marlow. He is of Ena;lish descent. One migfht
say of him that he writes too well to write much.
Some of his poems are saturated with an almost
intolerable pain. He is a true brother in song of
Gregoire Le Roy : both poets express a melancholy
which verges on helplessness, Marlow with more
intensity and less artlessness. Marlow's Souls of
the Evening evokes some street in a dead Flemish
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
city near a canal ; and the weary poet wandering
there (weary with a heart pent full of Christian
charity and tender regret) hears the voices of old
women singing hymns while they spin :
" While the spindle merrily sings,
Old women sing your complaint,
The gas-lamps are misty and faint,
And the night to the water clings.
" Now Jesus walks where greens
The dark, cobbled alley, and rests
His poor, pierced hands on the breasts
Of dreaming Magdalenes ;
" And of every orphan child.
And of houses holy with prayer,
Mary Mother has care . . .
Sing, Jesus meek and mild
" Stands in your doorways' gloom.
And hears your hymn beseech. . . .
Let the honey of his speech
Your desolate hearts perfume ! . . .
" The Shepherd of straying sheep
Shall lead you home to the fold . , .
But your soul, old women, must weep.
Remembering its wounds of old,
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The Symbolist Poets
" Love, and the heart's long burn,
The wounds of hope ever sick,
And childhood's dreams falling quick,
Shed and dead turn by turn.
" Lord, on old women have pity,
Whose soul, fair fragile toy.
Touched by the kiss of the city.
Dreams of the Sun of Joy ! "
There is one Belgian woman poet. This is Jean
Dominique, who has published : La Gaule Blanche
(1903); L' Anemone des Mers (1906); L! Aile
MouilUe ( 1 909) ; and Le Pttits d' Azu7' ( 1 9 1 2) . The
name, of course, is a pseudonym, but it is common
knowledge that she who has made it famous is an
elementary teacher in Brussels — a willing teacher
of little children, for she loves them. Like her
great master, Charles van Lerberghe, she is a
poets' poet ; the masses will not pierce her secrets.
How should the reading public understand such
delicate tracery as :
" My sylvan soul, so full of nests and warm.
Remembering thy flown birds with pangs how keen,
Shalt thou not ever, in parched summer's breath.
Hang like a humming heart and keep the swarm
Of gilded bees bearing their golden queen
Upon their orphan heart more sad than death ? . . .
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
" And shalt thou ever of ecstatic nights,
And of the royal Summer crossing earth,
Know but the printed foot in amorous flights
Of the red fawn, and shadow-dappled mirth ? . . .
" Soul whom the Winter too shall cross ere long,
And, after. Passion's Spring as bindweeds strong.
More sad than death shalt thou not ever seize
This little orphan, golden queen, in state
Borne round the world upon the eddying breeze
By many a thousand longings that vibrate ? . . ."
Of recent collections of verse by the younger
men, one of the most outstanding is Chant Provin-
cial {i(^i 2,) by Jules Delacre. With tender melan-
choly it sings the aspects of a provincial town :
the loneliness of hearts that dream of distant voy-
ages but are cabined in musty rooms ; the waste
places where nettles grow by factories ; religious
processions with ridiculous people sweating along
in their finery ; taverns rich and poor, taverns filthy
and luxurious — taverns everywhere ; convents and
schools ; the lives of young mothers dulled by
maternity ; misery and snatched happiness and the
ache of longing. All this the poet sings :
" For the young teacher's sake
Who, in the new pinewood of the primary school,
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The Symbolist Poets
Where chromos glare,
Leads the long chorus of the alphabet,
And dreams, in the warm reek of wretchedness, . . .
" And for the conscript's sake
Come from his village where the heather clothes the rock.
He chooses in the stationer's shop,
A heart made of forget-me-nots, upon a cloud. . . .
"And for the servant's sake
Whose shining hands are worn with water.
And for the iron bed where rests her heart
Under the attic window of the loft
Full of the moon and of the scent of soap. . . .
" And for the sake of old maids in the afternoon
Endlessly mending meagre things
In rooms for ever closed.
Among old birds that warble.
Dogs in wool and family spites. • . .
" And for the sake of clerks in livid offices
That smell of acrid ink and dust ;
And for the bankrupt manufacturer
Who, on the threshold of his ruin, hears
The motor stopping in his factory. ...
" And for the station-master in the rain,
With not a hope of travel whistling trains away ;
And for the young bride's sake whose life runs weary
In the new furniture of a dull marriage :
For all your sakes, you whom I love
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
" Because your happiness is buried hopelessly
In flats and basement dwellings self-contained ;
For this black labourer's sake who has no profit
Of any of the joys of heaven and earth
And calls to me and says he is my brother. . . .
" Yes, for the sake of all these things. . . .'
Finally, there is a vein of rich ore in the wilder-
ness of Prosper Roidot's verse [Les Poemes
Pacifiques : La Lumiere des Buis). He is a poet
who is nearer genius than talent ; but his genius
is troubled, and only flashes with a dark, spasmodic
flame.
252
CHAPTER VIII
THE PARNASSIAN POETS
An interest almost pathetic attaches to the poets
who upheld the banner of the Parnassian School.
The vers libre, we are told, is as dead as a
door-nail : even Verhaeren has now returned to
the traditional metres. This may be true ; but
the fact remains that the great poetry, the poetry
that will remain, in Belgian literature, was written
by the verslibristes in their prime. At least one
of the Parnassian poets, Albert Giraud, is a poet
of the first rank, while Fernand Severin has an
evasive distinction which will always keep some of
his poems in the anthologies ; but one feels that
even these poets have been hampered and held
down by the shackles of an arbitrary prosody.
Giraud is first and foremost a colourist : it is
not for nothing that he is a Fleming. There is
almost an orgy of colouring, for instance, in his
poem "Cordovans" :
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
" You leathers red with autumn's, victory's dyes !
In some old oratory's night you blaze,
Where sleeps the heavy splendour of dead days ;
You with your hues of epic, evening skies,
Mysterious as fiery meres of gold.
You dream of those who trailed their swords, and bowed
Above your cushions stamped with wafers proud
Their gashed tanned faces in the days of old,
With an odour of adventure in their capes.
Red leathers whom the peace of hangings drapes,
You are like tragic sunsets ! Worn were ye
By legendary heroes, who enriched
The kings they served, and all the world bewitched,
And who upon a copper, kindled sea,
You Cordovans dyed deep with war and pride,
Embarked in summer cool of eventide !
You are chimerical with gathered lives ;
Of new Americas you guard the gleams,
You sunk in dazzled and vermilion dreams,
In you the soul of ancient suns survives ! "
Giraud is a poet who is home-sick for the past.
In Hors dti Siec/e (1888), La Guirlande des Dieux
(1910), and La Frise EmpourprSe (191 2), he
evokes the magnificence of the Renaissance,
mourns its dead glories, purples his canvas with
pictures of its vice. Pride is the keynote of his
music — a contemptuous pride which is far removed
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The Parnassian Poets
from the austere impassibility of the French Par-
nassians. "The abject multitude I detest," cries
out the poet; "no cry from the present shall
cross my threshold ; and I will build myself a
monument of pride wherein to bury myself from
the godless crowd. I will work alone, in austere
silence, nourishing my mind with ancient truths,
and I will sleep, with my mouth full of earth, in
the purple of the days I have called to life again."
There is a great personal grief in these nobly
chiselled poems of Giraud : a grief deepened by
bitter experience after the playful melancholy of
his first books, Pierrot Lunaire and Pierrot Nar-
cisse, which show his consummate mastery of intri-
cate measures. Fitted to the poet's pride and
grief is the full-mouthed resonance of his vocabu-
lary : "under the pride of his blood proud and
splendid words rear in his voice like stallions."
He has interpreted himself in his poignant poem
"Resignation":
" I have fought against myself, I have cried in pain,
Writhed breathless in my wounded spirit's night.
And with my life in rags, a piteous sight,
I come out of the Hell which is my brain.
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" I know full well to-day, my dream was mad ;
My love of autumn was a crime, no doubt ;
And like a nail I tear the yearning out
That my too simple heart for childhood had.
" My cross ! Lance in my side ! I bring to you
This verse like Christmas evenings white and calm,
When the sovran palpitation of the palm
Hovers against the heaven's freezing blue ;
" This verse whereinto all my grief shall pass,
Verse of a man resigned, misunderstood,
Verse into which my love must shed its blood.
Long bleeding, like a sunset in stained glass."
Poetry like stained glass windows ! Nothing
else could characterise Giraud's style so well.
But the stained glass windows of his poems are
not filled with saints. His characters are by pre-
ference voluptuous and vicious princes, cardinals,
soldiers. His scenes of vice have a seductive
glamour, and under their envelope of impersonal
description peers the vehement and audacious ap-
proval of the poet. Giraud is an unashamed
Satanist, the most brilliant heir of Baudelaire.
Belgian Satanism — the most intellectual ex-
pression of Satanism (for Maurice Rollinat's poetry :
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The Parnassian Poets
is mere dirt) — derives directly from Baudelaire's
Fleurs du Mai. It was a fateful day for I wan
Gilkin when Albert Giraud at Louvain thrust this
most eventful of modern books of verse into his
hand. Giraud had saturated his mind with the
exhalations of these poisonous flowers ; Gilkin was
overwhelmed by them. Giraud found a refuge
from the horror of the present (which to him was
only horrible because it was ugly) in the spectacular
depravity of the Renaissance ; Gilkin burrowed
himself into the poisoned present, and dreamed
a vision of Hell on Earth by the side of which
all the other pessimistic books of the period are
feeble and tame. He declares his purpose in
" Psychology " :
" A surgeon, I the souls of men dissect,
Bending my feverish brow above their shameless
Perversions, sins, and vices, all their nameless
Primitive lusts and appetites unchecked.
" Upon my marble men and women spread
Their open bellies, where I find the hidden
Ulcers of passions filthy and forbidden.
And probe the secret wounds of dramas dread.
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" Then, while my arms with scrofulous blood are
dyed,
'' I note in poems clear with scrupulous art
What my keen eyes in these dark deeps descried.
" And if I need a subject, I am able
To stretch myself on the dissecting table,
And drive the scalpel into my own heart."
He describes himself as a wicked gardener
casting his seeds into hasty brains and watching
the flowering of his poison. His denunciation of
the modern city is absolutely without relief — " Un-
clean city," he hails it, " thou sewer wherein, with
mud between their teeth and leprosy in their
bodies, fetid carcasses croak, grimacing rites
grotesque with age. . . ." He calls the capital "a
dolorous fruit whose bursten skin and too ripened
pulp dye their rich rottenness with green gold,
violet, and red phosphorus ; a fruit oozing a sickly
sweet, thick, cancerous juice. . . ." He reviles the
city, but his chiding hints of a perverse love :
"The penitent of cities damned am I.
In shameful taverns where rank liquors flow,
And in new Sodoms viciously aglow.
Where outrage hides its lusts with murder nigh,
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The Parnassian Poets
" I watch in flaring nights with mournful eye,
And shuddering hear what monsters still we grow.
And all the crimes of men oppress me so
I call for vengeance to the angered sky.
"Wrathful as prophets went in Holy Writ,
I walk with haggard cheek in public places,
Confessing sins that I do not commit.
" And the Pharisees cry out with upturned faces :
I thank Thee, God, that I am not as this
Infamous poet by Thy judgment is ! "
Unhappiness is to him a mental rapture : " Be
sad ; love unhappiness," whispers to him the black-
winged angel that bends over his pillow, " un-
happiness has the savour of a noble and impure
virgin." His view of man's activity is withering :
man, crawling through his native mud, is a vulgar
tool of flesh perpetuating flesh, a mere ring of
the vital Beast that writhes its long snake's belly
through the infinite.
A hint of these exasperated images is sufficient
to show that they overshoot the mark of poetry.
Gilkin's La Nuit (his only book of verse that
counts) is exceedingly interesting as the most out-
spoken elaboration of Satanistic pessimism ; but it
has about the same relation to poetry as very
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good scene-painting has to the painting of an artist
— it has glamour and great effect when seen from
a distance and in its proper historical perspective ;
but it will not bear too close inspection. At all
events it has one great quality — it proves the
absurdity (as a poetic system) of " Satanism," a
perversion of the mind which Baudelaire's and
Giraud's poetry almost seem to justify.
" Giraud has seen his beautiful poems," said
Albert Mockel in an old criticism, " Fernand
Sdverin has /e/^ his." In other words, Giraud is
a Fleming ; Severin is a Walloon. To English
readers, Severin's exquisitely refined poetry must
seem somewhat morbid in its feeling. He is
another poet of an attitude : he is dowered with
"the gift of youth"; he is cloistered in his vir-
ginity ; he holds anaemic converse with his pale
visions. Did ever any poet declare his love of
studious solitude with a quainter pretentiousness
(which nevertheless reads poetically true) than
Severin in his "Sovran State".-*
" In nights impure moans one with fever stricken :
' Lord ! let a maiden bring me, for I sicken,
Water and grapes, and quench my thirst with them.
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The Parnassian Poets
" ' Spring water ! Fruits of a virgin vine ! And let
Her fresh and virgin hands lie on the fret
Of my King's brow burnt by its diadem.'
" O pitiful crown upon a head so lowly !
Does the unquiet night allegiance show thee ?
Thou King of beautiful lands that never were.
" * O stars among the trees ! O waters pale !
Comes the expected dawn in opal veil ?
Pity the tired and lonely sufferer :
" ' And grant me, Lord, after the night out-drawn,
The sleep and boon of Thy forgiving dawn ;
And let Thy chosen heart no longer bleed ! '
" But answer makes the Lord in stern denial :
' Leave thou, for nobler verse, to pain and trial
Thy heart, the open book the angels read.' "
This is a proud conception, a poet-king doomed
by God to virginity for poetry's sake ; but Severin
has reached the opposite extreme of humiHty in
his " The Lily of the Valley" :
" I feel my heart for ever dying, bruised
By all the love it never will have used,
Dying in silence, and with angels by.
As simply as in cradles infants die,
Infants that have no speech.
O God-given heart,
Guarded by vigilant seraphim thou art !
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Nothing shall soil thy natal raiment ! Thou,
Rest thee content with no kiss on thy brow,
Save of maternal summer eves, and die
In thy desire and thy virginity.
Thy sacrifice has made thee shy and proud ;
Thy life with very emptiness is bowed.
Made to be loved, loved thou shalt never be.
Though many maids would stretch their arms to thee,
As to the Prince who through their fancies rides.
Alas ! and thou hast never known these brides ;
To thee they come not when calm evening falls,
The pensive maids to whom thy longing calls ;
And thou art dying of thy love unused.
Poor sterile heart, my heart for ever bruised ! "
These attitudinal poems (there is every evidence
that they are sincere) have a seductive charm ;
and they are rendered all the more fascinating by
the antique Racinian language in which they trail
their pathetic notes — as though some neurotic
aesthete of our own days should write plaintive
poems of modern nerves in the diction of Pope.
And S6verin's nature poems, though ostensibly
more mature, have the same note of shrinking
averseness from the world. His nearest approach
to a manly independence is crystallised in his
poem " A Sage " :
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The Parnassian Poets
" He knows dreams never kept their promise yet.
Henceforth without desire, without regret,
He cons the page of sober tenderness
In which some poet, skilled in life's distress,
Breathed into olden, golden verse his sighs.
Sometimes he lifts his head, and feeds his eyes,
With all the wonderment that wise men know,
On fields, and clouds that over forests go,
And with their calmness sated in his thought.
He knows how dearly fair renown is bought :
He, too, in earlier days of stinging strength,
Sought that vain victory to find at length
Sadness at his desire's precipitous brink. . . .
Of what avail, he thought, to act and think,
When human joy holds all in one rapt look ?
His mind at peace reads Nature like a book.
He smiles, remembering his youth's unrest,
And, though none know it, he is wholly blest."
Severin's poems are collected in one volume :
Poemes {1908). But this book, unfortunately,
does not include the first item in the poet's works,
Le Lys (1888), which is a collector's prize.
Of the young Albertian Parnassians, Raymond
Limbosch is at least one of the most promising.
His Faunesques (19 14) contains verse of distinction.
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CHAPTER IX
EUGfeNE DEMOLDER
After Lemonnier and Eekhoud the most dis-
tinguished of the Flemish novelists is Eugene
Demolder, of whom it might be said that he is
the greatest painter in Belgian literature. He
was for some time a jnge de paix^ and in his
memoirs, Sotts la Robe, he has given us interesting
sketches of judicial and literary life in Belgium,
with portraits which live and breathe of eminent
colleagues — Picard, Vandervelde, and others.
Demolder's style has already been referred to :
it consists from first to last in a most cunning
transposition of pictures. Demolder's knowledge
of painting must be immense ; and he is able to
reproduce in words not merely the outlines and
colours of a picture, but the very soul of its
meaning.
It is not difficult to find the models for the
book that made him known, Les Contes d' Yper-
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Eugene Demolder
damme (1891), now published in one volume with
another book, Les R^cits de Nazareth, as La
Ldgende d Yperdanune ; probably he derived in-
spiration from Maeterlinck's Massacre of the
Innocents (which is a transposition of Breughel's
picture of the same name) and Balzac's J^sus-
Christ en Flandre. Yperdamme is some mythical
village on the Flemish coast.
" It is the curious city," says Eugene Gilbert, " that
we see in the pictures of Breughel and Jan Steen, the
city overlooked by its high cathedral whose delicate
tracery sparkles with hoar-frost, the city girdled with
moats over which, in hard frosts, red-faced skaters glide
along in their warm clothing,"
To this old-world Flemish city the events nar-
rated in the Gospels are transferred in a series of
grotesque and naive anachronisms. Thus we have
the miraculous draught of fishes, and the fishermen
are Flemish, such fishermen as you may see to-day
on the dunes about Ostend. There is the eve of
the Nativity, with the farmers and fishermen coming
from Furnes and Coxyde and Dixmude to Beth-
lehem, and they are " mounted on great horses
without harness and without saddles, holding on
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firmly " (as in pictures that everyone will remember)
" to the manes of the animals, whose nostrils are
steaming." At Bethlehem the church door is open,
and all the stained glass windows are flowered with
light ; midnight mass is being celebrated. On the
Flight to Egypt Joseph and Mary and the Child
come to the dunes, and then the farms with the
great red roofs fade from sight, and soon they come
to the mouth of the Scheldt and to Flushing. It
is at Yperdamme that the Massacre of the Inno-
cents begins, and as soon as the murdering bands
come into the streets of the city, the Black Virgin,
the fishermen's miraculous tutelary saint, weeps in
the cathedral. It is in the Campine that the
prodigal son tends swine, with his heart bleeding
to go back to his father's farm far away in fair
Brabant. Such a medley of quaint distortion may
seem absurd to those who do not know with what
delight the Flemish people love to familiarise the
Gospels. Flemish art and Flemish literature are
full of things of this kind — keeping the gross realism
of mediaeval ignorance as in Pol de Mont's cycle
of ballads " Of Jesus," or subtly modernised and
the vehicle of a delicate symbolism as in Max
266
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Eugene Demolder
Elskamp's magic verses. There is only one charge
to be made against La Legende dYperdamme: it
postulates an attitude of naivetd, and the naivete
is strangled by the conscious and elaborate art
of the narration. Demolder was emerging ; but
he is not yet sufficiently master of his method to
hide the process of his labour. The same might
be said of Le Royaume autkentique du grand
Saint Nicolas, ostensibly a Christmas tale for
children.
In La Route d Enter aude, surely one of the
most brilliant novels of this century, he is past
master of his manner. The book is an uninter-
rupted chain of pictures, the originals of which even
a layman can recognise. The scene is in Holland
in the seventeenth century. Kobus Barent, a
miller's son in a quiet village on the Meuse near
Dordrecht, is a born painter, and instinct teaches
him to draw. The old miller does not approve
of painting, but in the end he lets him go, and
finds a master for him at Haarlem. This is Frantz
Krul, a famous painter of portraits and genre
pictures. Krul is apparently modelled on Jan
Steen :
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" Frantz Krul, with his jovial face barred by a brown
moustache curled upwards at the ends, a ruddy face, large
laughing eyes rolling under his forehead, over which a lock
or so falls negligently, curved nose, sensual as a satyr's,
arched mouth, gluttonous and bantering — the mouth of
a man who loves to make a festivity of life — Frantz Krul,
with his square shoulders and broad trunk, is handling
the brush with agility in front of a huge canvas."
Lessing tried to prove that the painting of a
picture in words is an impossibility, for, he thought,
the mind can only take in one detail at a time,
and the parts of the picture fade from the interior
eye as the description proceeds. Lessing's reason-
ing was sound ; but his conclusion would seem
to be controverted by Demolder's transpositions.
Possibly it is because one almost always recollects
the canvas Demolder is transcribing. Who, for
instance, can read the description of Frantz Krul's
jovial face and burly figure without recalling Jan
Steen's portrait of himself?
At Haarlem Kobus pursues his studies, as
much in taverns as in the atelier, for Krul and
his pupils are great drinkers, and lovers of rich
viands, "and 'the rest,' as La Fontaine said, in
a word of excessive shamefulness." (The joke is
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Eugene Demolder
from another tale of Demolder's, L'Agonie cP Albion,
the hero of which is a Dutchman who hates the
British, on account of the atrocities they committed
in the Boer War.) Kobus falls in love with Krul's
model Siska, a courtesan. She is a dark-skinned
woman of Spanish parentage, which is the reason
why she has not the short legs that the Haarlem
women have. She had been found wrapped up
in a brown rag, at the time of the war with Spain ;
and fishermen had reared her in the wind of the
sea, and she had grown up like a goat among the
sand-grasses. Her first lover was a sailor-boy
who was killed by an English bullet at the mouth
of the Thames. In the end she was carried off
by an officer of the Dutch fleet ; and after that
she wore silk. Kobus shuts his eyes to her past,
and goes with her to Amsterdam, where he ex-
periences all the raptures of passion and all the
agonies of jealousy and despair — for Siska must
live, and live in luxury, and her lover earns little
or nothing. But what is the intrigue to the superb
evocation of Amsterdam, with its ramparts and
gables and towers, the forest of masts in the port,
its labyrinth of canals, its smells of turf and tar
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and brine and spices, its herrings and smoked eels,
its warehouses and taverns and brothels, its mer-
chants and art-dealers ! Siska is wonderful ; here
is a woman of bad character painted with such
charm and freshness that one cannot be angry
with her at her worst. But it is an auspicious
day for Kobus when, deserting him, she sets sail
for the Spanish Main in the company of a Spanish
captain. Kobus, a sadder and a wiser man, returns
to his old father and the old mill, and achieves
fame as a painter while pursuing the nerve-reposing
avocation of a miller. (This is in the tradition :
Jan Steen was a brewer, Goyen sold tulips, Van
de Cappelle was a dyer, and Joost van den Vondel
wrote his poetry in the back parlour while his good
wife sold stockings in the shop.)
And the hidden meaning ? For Demolder was
a symbolist, one of the primitives, as may be seen
by the way he awakens sonorities on canvas. It
is this : the fate of Kobus is that of his country.
His childhood dreamed by the marshes, along the
banks of rivers, under the willows. Then he fought
his fight with the strange, dark woman, with Spain ;
and he was near being worsted. But when by the
27Q
Eugene Demolder
strength of his nature he had overcome her, and
recovered from the poison of her, he returned to
his toil and his art, and became a rich burgher,
and married Gesina, the rich bailiff's daughter,
and had chocolate and peaches for breakfast every
morning, and lived happy ever after! "That is
the history of Holland."
La Route cT £7neraude (The Road to the Colours
of Hope) is packed with adventure : it is a novel
in the sense accepted by circulating libraries. The
characters (Rembrandt is one — he is sold up in
the course of the story) are fascinating in them-
selves ; they are a gallery of living men and women.
But what is the adventure, what is the gallery of
men and women, to the gallery of paintings that
illuminate the book ? Paintings that are never
hung in the wrong place, but which seem to be
in the only place where they could possibly be.
Here is a picture of a soldier with the light on
his sword — is it not more out of place in a frame
on a wall than seen as an episode in the daily
life of a street .'*
" Farther on a soldier is walking. Planted in boots
widened at the knees, he throws his cloak over his
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shoulder to show the broad embroidered belt that squeezes
his waist ; a plume waves from his bonnet ; his sword,
the handle of which he grips, resembles, as soon as he
leaves the shadow of the walls, a wand of fire."
Kobus has to choose between tw^o schools of
painting, that of jolly Frantz Krul and that of the
man with the vague bitterness on his lips and the
eyelids swollen with long labour. Rembrandt
himself, in a conversation with Krul, contrasts the
two styles :
" Verily it is a joy to conjure forth sanguine glories,
flashes of rosy flesh. Your temperament drives you
to it, moreover. Nudity for you must be triumphant
and luxuriant. Your ideal is a Venus of firm out-
hnes, born from the foam of the North Sea, and the
patroness of sturdy fisher folk and sailors. And you
love to immortalise drinkers in their cups, bedizened
banquets, festival costumes with orange-tinted scarves.
But don't you think, Krul, that an emaciated body hides
a beauty just as great? It is a different beauty. I
swear to you, when a beggar-woman, feverish and trem-
bling, disrobes in my atelier, I experience an artistic
emotion just as great as if she were Helen or Cleopatra.
In the legend of her lean limbs I read the painful
chronicle of her life, her resignation in humble tasks,
the exhaustion come of her repeated maternity : I see
all human sadness, which is immense, in her tired spine
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Eugene Demolder
and wasted frame. And tenderly I apply myself, with
all the compassion that grips me, to interpret' the sombre
lassitude of her muscles, the traces of her clothing, of
burdens she has carried, of diseases that leave marks of
grief as tears do on the face, I render the pale, yellow
tone of her skin, with the red spots that give it the
desolate tints of autumn, and with the folds that trace
lax curves in her flesh. And is not that life too ? Is
there nothing but joy in the world ? By the side of one
peony that blooms, is there not another that withers and
sheds its petals ? And does not a dying woman, amid
the wrinkled agony of her colours, perform a function
quite as deep as the harmony of things ? "
Les Patins de la Reine de Hollande is a highly-
embroidered version, charged with symbolism, of
the old legend of a girl brought up in complete
ignorance of sex and from whom, when puberty
comes, the facts of life cannot be hidden. Through
all the bright colouring of the book runs like a
black thread the idea that Death skates alone the
dizzy roads of life with Sex. Walburge, the
orphaned daughter of the Comte de Rupelmonde,
grows up in solitude in a castle on the Scheldt.
She is guarded by a faithful serving-woman,
Bertrane. They are sequestered from the world ;
temptation and danger are far away. But the
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longing of awakened instinct comes to the girl,
and now the world seems to beleaguer the castle.
Walburge is assailed by vague desires. She sits
at her casement watching the sea-gulls flying to
the sea, which, Bertrane tells her, is as vast as
the sky. She sees caravans of merchants passing,
bearing perfumes of Araby, blades of Toledo,
carpets from Smyrna, Cordovan leather. They
are sunburnt under their silk turbans, and they
caress their beards nonchalantly. She would fain
see what they bear in their boxes ; but she is too
poor, Bertrane says. Walburge cannot be kept
any longer in imprisonment, and one day, when
the Scheldt is frozen hard, Bertrane brings her a
pair of magic skates which the Queen of Holland
used to wear when she was sixteen and went to
see her lover. Bertrane has another pair for her-
self. Now Walburge sets forth to see Flanders.
Soon they are aware that a companion has
joined them, and is skating along with them. It
is Death. They come to a city, which is filled
to overflowing with people making merry : it is
carnival time. Death picks up a flute, and,
dancing with a crimson galloon round his temples,
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Eugene Demolder
leads a troop of drunken revellers to the brothel.
It is the Dance of Death. Death blows his green
breath into the faces of the burghers, and they
fall down and die : it is the Plague. Walburge
skates on and on, to the Fairy Prince who is
coming to meet her. She cannot stay, for she is
Passion faring forth to the arms of Fate. But
Bertrane is left behind, for she is Resignation,
whom Passion must abandon. Walburge finds her
Prince, and he tells her how he has braved the
angry waves to seek her. " The wind," he says,
"lifted round my bark the furious lace that it tears
from the blue breast of the sea." He threw back
his cloak, and bared his cuirass, which shone like
a mirror. In it the young Countess of Flanders
saw her fair hair reflected, and her eyes that were
the colour of pale cornflowers, and her lips like
fresh coral : so that it seemed to her that she was
living in the very heart of her betrothed. And
they go to his castle in the Land of Spring.
Le Jardinier de la Pompadotir may well be
flowered, for it is the book of the soul of a
gardener, who loves Madame de Pompadour, and
raises the flowers with which, and her own bloom,
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
she snares the heart of King Louis. Demolder
wrote this novel at Essonnes in the province of
Seine-et-Oise, and here he received an unexpected
visit from Maeterlinck, to whom he had sent the
first copy, and who had at once set out in his
motor-car to point out that dahlias were mentioned
among the flowers nurtured by Madame de Pom-
padour's gardener — a flower which, as everybody
knows, had not been introduced into Europe at
that period. The flower-pictures are delightful.
Here is one, of tuberoses, a new flower, just
arrived from Italy :
" Jasmin stopped in front of two tuberoses. White
on their long green stalks and blushing, as though ashamed
of the voluptuousness that breathed from their corollas,
they offered themselves and their heady scent in the
midst of a group of streaked bromelias that seemed
smitten with the newcomers.
" ' Caress them ! They are nice to touch,' said M.
Leturcq. . . .
" Jasmin resumed his journey, greatly marvelling.
These tuberoses ! It seemed to him as though he had
been present at the deshabille of a princess on her
wedding day, in one of those fairy tales he read in the
evenings. And he was the bridegroom ! He had
touched the white flesh : his hand was still quite per-
fumed with it."
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Eugene Demolder
In the background the revolution smoulders ;
and there is a shadow over the gay scenes where
the monarch sports himself with his minions and
his dames.
Demolder's colouring is equally rich in his one
book of travel, UEspagne e7t Auto. His playlet,
La Mori aux Berceaux^ which places the Massacre
of the Innocents in a mediaeval castle, is at least
curious.
At the lowest estimate, Demolder is a writer
of great power. No other Belgian prose-writer
has so brilliant a style. Perhaps there is not a
more luminous colourist in any literature. All his
works are flooded with light : they are illuminated
texts. There is shadow here and there ; but it is
only such shadow as you might have in an orchard
on a day of blazing sunshine.
He will probably never be translated into
English, for in this country he would be con-
sidered obscene. He revels in sexual images, and
(to English eyes) impossible situations. But he
is never filthy. Eekhoud is distinctly filthy ; but
Demolder's obscenity is quite different. His is a
laughing effrontery, a most delicate idealisation of
sexual sensations.
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For Eugene Demolder praise must not be
stinted. If he has faults, they are venial. He
disarms criticism by his debonair and unassuming
manner, by his jovial unconcern (he is the Jan
Steen of Belgian literature), as who should say :
" All this, ladies and gentlemen, is for your
pleasure, not your betterment. I leave preaching
to the jaundiced, while myself I laugh and grow
fat." Life is sad, he makes Rembrandt say :
but the lowering clouds bring storms, and the
storms pass, and the sun shines out again. Jan
Steen may listen to Rembrandt, and love and
reverence him, and yet remain Jan Steen, and
delight in God's warm sunshine, and in good
cheer, and " the rest "...
278
CHAPTER X
FLEMISH NOVELISTS AND DRAMATISTS
Georges Virr£:s is usually bracketed with Eek-
houd as a novelist of the Campine. This region
(but more to the east) is the invariable scene of
his tales ; and in the preface to La Glebe H^ro'ique
he proclaims that he is as devoted as Eekhoud is
to these wastes of heather. But there is a great
difference between the two : while Eekhoud is a
rebel against all authority, including that of the
Church, Georges Virres is a pious Roman Catholic.
This fundamental difference in ideas would be
sufficient to prevent any great similarity in the
works of the two authors ; but they have the same
love of the Campine peasants, and in the main
details their conceptions of this primal race agree.
Both are full of sympathy for the hard lot of those
who spend their lives reclaiming the waste. Virres,
like Eekhoud, shows the Campine peasants in
their violent fits, and there is much of death and
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fatality in his work also ; but to him the peasants
of his race are in the first place mystics, as devoted
to pilgrimages and religious processions as they
are to kerniesses.
The style of Virres is somewhat sluggish, but
his slow-moving periods lead to climaxes. He is
above all an observer of character and customs.
His Hoin77zes et Ckoses d'Azijourd'hui, for instance,
is pre-eminently a collection of folklore, full of little
pictures illustrating quaint customs and beliefs,
as for instance that in certain Limburg villages
widows cling to the coffin and in the cemetery
go through an old pantomime of quarrelling for it
with the gravedigger.
Virres began his series of Campine tales with
En Pleine Terre, The book is warm with
affection for the land and its people, but the
style is too laboured and lyrical. The prose sings
too much ; the images are a medley. The same
holds good of La Bruyere Ardente, in which
the colours flame like sunsets over purple heaths.
L'lnconnu Tragique tells of an epidemic which
carries off the cattle of a district in the Campine.
In their terror the peasants pray to God to avert
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Flemish Novelists and Dramatists
the plague, and it seems to be passing when, one
evening, one of them loses control of himself and
creates a scene in a tavern, with the result, as it
seems to them, that the Lord hardens His heart
and the wind of corruption blows over the land.
In La Glebe Heroique we follow the fortunes of
the peasants' rebellion which Eekhoud describes
in Les FusilUs de Malines. In Les Gens de Tiest
Virres paints with great precision and delicate
irony the little town of Tongres, where he has
lived for over twenty years. Tiest and the neigh-
bourhood appear again in Le Cxur Timide (19 12),
the hero of which is a young squire of irresolute
character — a Belgian type taken from actual life,
for many Belgians of good family are somnolent
and dreamy. The melancholy of the book is
relieved by the humorous episode of an electoral
campaign, in which the socialists cut a sorry figure.
Virres, himself a squire, has in this novel drawn
masterly portraits of the Belgian gentry.
Lemonnier, Eekhoud, Demolder, and Virres
belong to the older generation. Of the younger
generation of French-writing Flemings, two stand
out above the rest. These are Horace van Offel
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and Franz Hellens, the first a native of Antwerp,
the second a native of Ghent.
I have quoted Eekhoud's corrosive satire on
the way the national army is regarded by the
Belgians. This impression is amply confirmed by
the military tales {line Arm^e de Pauvres ; Les
Enfermds ; Le Retour aux Lumieres) of Horace
van Offel, this other Antwerp rebel, who derives his
knowledge from actual service in the army. He
sees the degradation of the conscript ; he paints the
longing of sensitive men whom the law of the
land forces into the position of pariahs. But the
tales are not all of military life : Van Offel feels for
the poor as well as for the conscript, and he is able
to describe the lower classes with first-hand know-
ledge, for he has worked as a labourer at Lille.
He has written excellent stories of low life in
Antwerp (houses of ill-fame, bars and barmaids,
etc.) The older generation produced very few
effective plays ; now in King Albert's reign there
are signs of a coming harvest, and Van Offel is
one of the most promising of the young dramatists.
His plays Les Intellectuels, LJOiseau Mdcanique^
La Victoire, Le Loup, Une Nuit de Shakespeare
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Flemish Novelists and Dramatists
are far better plays than the dramatic efforts of
most of the veterans. Une Nuit de Shakespeare
is one of the most interesting and original of the
plays which have Shakespeare for a hero.
Franz ^Hellens is nothing if not original. He
is a new writer in every sense of the term. En
Ville Morte (1906), his first book, is a sombre
evocation of Ghent. Les Hors-le-Vent (1909) is a
strange book, Rembrandtesque, tortured — a collec-
tion of studies in Gothic prose. Hellens never
makes any pretence of telling a story : he is a
painter, but a painter who thinks, and paints his
thought on the canvas. He does not paint things
as the eye sees them, but as the mood sees them ;
and in his case the mood is determined not by
the heart, but by the brain. In other words, he
is a cerebral impressionist. He does not belong
to the impressionist school : his impressionism is the
inevitable product of his character, which is a primi-
tive Flemish character, that is, a character made
up of mysticism. But Hellens' mysticism, deprived
of religion, appears in his first two books as a
Pagan fatalism full of glow and colour. Hellens
might be called a Maeterlinck in colours.
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Perhaps the best thing in Les Hors-le- Vent is
" Les Soirs de Gand," a chain of nocturnes giving
the aspects of Ghent by night.
In " Salles d'Attente," another chapter of the
book, Hellens symbolises the misery of life help-
less between dingy reality (the city) and the mystery
of the unknown (the bourne of the railway) : he
assembles a crowd of wretches — navvies, porters,
strikers, soldiers — in the waiting-room of a railway
station. Here the waifs of the city are waiting
for the things that never come, the things that are
lost in the mists of time, but forgetting their very
longing in the comfort of a public fire. Among
them is Valerie Droefkind, an old newsvendor.
The poor old woman sits there dreaming, with the
men spitting all round her (and what bitter thoughts
they must have, she thinks, to spit like that without
saying anything), and through her mind pass such
memories as Villon rhymed into his ballad of " La
belle Heaulmiere."
In Les ClarUs Latentes (19 12) the colours are
brighter : the light that was hidden in the darkness
shines forth, and the world is beautiful. There
is less vehemence and greater concentration in the
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Flemish Novelists and Dramatists
style of this book: whereas in Les Hors-le-Vent
the images, troubled, grotesque, careered in a mad
dance to exhaustion, in Les Clartds Latentes the
description is slow, clear, calm. A sunny joy in
life has taken the place of the angry fatalism of
the earlier books. There is a certain depth of
thought in Hellens, and there is a fund of ideas
veiled (and sometimes hidden from the searcher)
in the symbolism of Les Claries Latentes. But
(as is usually the case with Flemish writers) it is
the picture rather than the idea which remains in
the memory.
Of another Albertian writer, Ferdinand Crom-
melynck, I do not know whether he is a Fleming
or a Walloon, but the surname appears Flemish.
His father was a famous actor. Crommelynck is
one of those young men who write something or
other and are at once hailed as geniuses ; every-
thing that they write afterwards is discussed in
all its bearings and is famous in the literary cafes
(a feature of Brussels as of Paris) before it is
published. Crommelynck's much-praised poem
La Vengeance de Papillons^ is a throw-back, in
^ Le Masque, Oct.-Nov. 1910.
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Meckel's rhythms, to the manner of the symbolist
Primitives ; it is a very melodious jumble of Swin-
burnian colours and images from which no clear
sense emerges, though it seems to be an elabora-
tion of the commonplace from Schopenhauer that
when a flower blooms it is withering. It is in
the drama that Crommelynck has done his best
work. Beside an airy trifle, Nous nirons plus au
bois, he has written three remarkable plays, Le
Sculpteur de Masques, Le Chemin des Conquetes, and
Le Marchand de Regrets. All the plays except
the last are in verse. They would be masterpieces
if it were not for a few slips or inconsistencies :
for instance, in Le Marchand de Regrets Anne-
Marie nestles close to the miller, who is quite
white with flour, and the flour does not come off
on to her clothes. Crommelynck's style bears
some relation to the earlier style of Franz Hellens :
it is a style intensely black in its lines, a Gothic
style, that is, imposing, and wreathed with gro-
tesque and vivid ornamentation. The atmosphere
is saturated with horror, much as in the murder
scenes of Maeterlinck's La Princesse Maleine —
only, Crommelynck's horror grips, while Maeter-
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Flemish Novelists and Dramatists
linck's (in the play in question) never quite gets
away from the melodramatic. Crommelynck's
dramas have the o-reat virtue of conciseness : there
is not a word too much, and every word tells.
In Belgium itself there is a consensus of
opinion that the most important Belgian dramatist
is Gustave van Zype. His dramas, as pessimistic
and realistic as those of Ibsen, deal with social
problems ; they betray a rather conservative bias.
Van Zype is a conscientious and interesting writer,
although (let us say the worst) he is a trifle stodgy.
His most important dramas are : Le Patrimoine,
Tes Pere-ei-Mere, La Souveraine, Les Stapes, Le
Goziffre, Les Liens. The last play created a sen-
sation when it was produced at Brussels in 191 2.
The problem is the heredity of disease. Grandal
is a scholar whose father and grandfather were
drunkards and maniacs. He himself has hitherto
escaped without scathe, but after an honourable
life of labour, and while he is still absorbed in
studies which will benefit mankind, he feels the
beginnings of mental disease. At this stage his
son falls in love with a girl who is herself neurotic
and the last of her race. The old scholar tries
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
to prevent the marriage, but his wife, determined
that her son shall not be robbed of his happiness,
persuades Grandal that he is not the father of her
son. This is more than his reason can bear. The
drama is not unfit to be ranked with Strindberg's
The Father. Van Zype's stories are preoccupied
with the same social problems as his dramas. La
Revelation, for instance, is an anti-Malthusian
novel. A young married couple agree to have
no children, but after a few years there is an
accident, and the baby is the revelation — of
happiness.
The popular success which has been persist-
ently denied to Van Zype's terribly earnest dramas
was achieved by Paul Spaak's Kaatje. On its
first production it ran for fifty nights — a stupendous
run in Belgium (Van Zype's Les Liens lasted
fifteen nights, and that was considered a gratifying
success). Spaak's other dramas are A Damme en
Flandre ; Baldus et Josifta ; Camille.
288
CHAPTER XI
WALLOON NOVELISTS AND DRAMATISTS
How unsatisfactory the term " Belgian " is when
applied to literature is seen at once when one com-
pares the Flemish novelists with their fellow-crafts-
men in the Walloon districts. In characterising
the Flemish novelist, it is not the substance of the
story, nor the handling of the plot, nor the psych-
ology that needs weighing, it is the quality of the
painting. This is not the case with the Walloon
novelists (or rather co7tteurs, for the short story is
the rule, and the novels are usually short stories
lengthened). With them, it is the sentiment and
the idea which must be considered. " Sentiment "
is the correct word; "emotion" might mean too
much, and "feeling" would be too strong a term.
There is plenty of feeling in the Flemish novelists :
tender feeling in Lemonnier, Demolder, and Virres,
fierce feeling in Eekhoud and Horace van Offel.
The Walloon writers are too refined and cerebral
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
for feeling in this extreme sense : if they have
feeling, it is a gentle emotion, and they play with
it, analyse it, consider it in the light of memory,
mock at it with gentle irony. And they never lose
sight of the idea, which is the base of the work.
Their symbolism rolls itself round an idea and
invites interpretation, whereas Flemish symbolism
veils a mystery from profane eyes. But the Wal-
loons do not follow up a series of ideas till they
form a logical chain, a philosophical entity. There
is nothing in any Walloon tale-writer like the con-
ception of life which Lemonnier's warmth of feeling
engendered. The ideas which preoccupy the
Walloon writers are detached and evanescent.
But the ideas are there, in each separate tale,
bright and glancing. Louis Delattre, in his fasci-
nating Le Pays Wallon, has illuminated the Wal-
loon character by a fine image. At the end of
every Walloon village, he says, there is a quarry,
and to his mind the stone-cutters typify the quali-
ties of his race, their pleasure in bringing hidden
things to the light of day, in striking the white
light of the idea from the hard stone.
Louis Delattre, perhaps the most soberly bril-
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Walloon Novelists and Dramatists
liant of the Walloon conteurs, began, in the very-
days when the pretentious prose of the symbolists
was the fashion, with recollections of childhood
narrated in a perfectly simple style. These tales
are somewhat intangible, but marked by a subtle
and delicate charm. His later work, La Lot de
Pecke, Le Parfum des Buis, is more poignant.
Georges Rency has sketched Delattre's evolution :
"A chalky road in Entre-Sambre-et-Meuse, an or-
chard in blossom, a cottage on a hill, children playing
at marbles in the Church porch, an old woman smiling
at the westering sun. ... A whole host of images, with
exquisite godsends of feeling, this is Delattre in his
Contes de mon Village, Les Miroirs de Jeunesse, Une Rose
a la Bouche. The tales of these three collections are born
of the sap of instinct. The form may be somewhat
hazy, but there is no trace in them of effort. Every-
thing gushes forth from its source in the very life of
the writer. He draws with full hands from his heart,
which is overflowing with emotion and fragrance and
delicate memories : and it is as though he had plunged
his hands into a wicker basket full of green vegetables
and field flowers and ripe fruit. The confiident optimism
of these first stories is in some sort unconscious, in-
voluntary. You would say that Delattre, when he wrote
them, had no knowledge of pain and wretchedness. He
is happy and he thinks that everybody is happy. His
conception of the world is like that of a child at play,
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who imagines that playing is the great affair in Hfe.
But the years pass. A crisis comes in this existence,
a moral crisis concerning which we shall never know
anything, for Delattre is one of those authors who fight
shy of personal confession. For some years there is
silence, complete silence : it seems as though the writer
were exhausted. Suddenly he reappears, begins to pub-
lish again. In a few years he issues fifteen volumes,
about two a year. . . . Now, you feel, Delattre knows
pain and wretchedness ; but he has weighed tears and
smiles, and it is the latter which are heavier in the scales.
Yes, suffering there is in existence, great suffering, but,
when all is said and done, life is better than non-exist-
ence, and suffering, however acute, is preferable to stag-
nation and weariness." '
Delattre is never exciting. Adventure would
seem trivial to this intelligent writer, who is an
interpreter of life, a poet of the heart, not a spinner
of yarns. The substance of La Loi de Peche,
which is a whole novel, not a tale, is merely this :
two cousins love each other, but the boy is timid,
and the girl is won by another man, whereupon
the boy returns to his native village to live on his
memories. One of the stories of Le Parfum des
Buis is typical of that love of the bizarre which
^ La Vie Intellectiielle^ Jan. 191 2.
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Walloon Novelists and Dramatists
sometimes leads Walloon writers astray : a bull
has killed the only son of a farmer, his mother
goes out of her mind, and her madness takes a
curious form : she has the beast led before her
every day, so that she can take hold of its head
and embrace it. This is not ridiculous in Delattre's
tale.
Georges Garnir situated the scene of his first
stories (Contes d Marjolaine, Les Charneux, La
Ferme aux Grives) in the Ardennes, round about
Liege. These tales have the "sentimentality and
the simple charm of Delattre's early work. Later,
Garnir settled in Brussels, and wrote tales i^A la
Boule Plate, Le Conse^uateur de la Tour Noire)
in which he encroached on Leopold Courouble's
province, and caricatured the Philistines of the
capital.
Hubert Krains began with fantastic tales of
horror {Histoires Liinatiques ; Les Bons Parents)^
which read as though his ambition was to be the
Belgian E. T. A. Hoffmann. In " Croquis Noc-
turne," for instance, he describes a village hemmed
in with poplars in a hot night in August, an owl
peering from a barn, insects flitting against the
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trees, while a woman slips out of a turreted castle
and glides, frightened by the rustling of her black
dress, through the park. It is the unexpectedness
of the ending which produces the thrill :
"In front of her the road, narrower and narrower,
streaks like a thin grey ribbon the mass of shadow
heaped between the arched branches of two parallel
hedges. With one hand she nervously presses her
breast as if to calm the palpitations of her heart, and
her eyes, uneasy and feverish, search the darkness where
vague things seem to wave silently to and fro.
" By and bye she can make out, on the right, emerging
from the thistles and brambles that choke the ditch, a
shapeless stone cross.
" Instinctively, the woman rushes forward : her feet
do not seem to touch the earth, her body sways stiffly
like a ghost, and her eyes, haggard and staring, express
a suffering more than human. Heavily she sinks down
into the brambles, which tear her dress but give way,
and, with her breasts crushed against the cold stone of
the cross, on which the moss has hung its silky fringes,
with writhing arms, with a frame shaken by the agony
of an infinite sorrow, with her head stretched upwards to
the impassible stars, she calls desperately for the lover
who for her sake has been slain."
Krains is often most successful in creating an
atmosphere of supreme horror, as in the story of
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Walloon Novelists and Dramatists
the old beggar who smashes a statue of Christ
and finds money hidden inside it, only to go mad
with remorse. His more mature work [Amours
Rustiques, Le Pain Noir) is marked by a minute
naturalism and a harrowing pessimism. He ex-
tracts the maximum of suffering from his subject.
" Not content with observing in order to under-
stand," says Maurice Gauchez, "he dissects in
order to explain." He would be the most cruel
and corrosive of Belgian authors if he did not
identify himself with the sufferings of his char-
acters, mostly broken-down people who are sick
to death with despair ; but he is not a realist
standing outside the world he creates — he is in
it, heart and soul ; and his tenderness for his
creatures, his all-embracing charity, lift him above
sordidness.
Maurice des Ombiaux is the most prolific as
he is the gayest of the Walloon writers. He
would be flattered if he were called the most
Walloon of the Walloons ; for he is the apostle
of the Walloon country, in which he has situated
practically all his work. *' The King of Entre-
Sambre-et-Meuse " someone has called him. Le-
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monnier could not endure the idea of being "a
cow grazing its patch of grass round its stake."
This is just what des Ombiaux takes a pride in
beinof. He is the r^p'ionaliste a outrance. " You
cannot hope to be a Lamartine," he says to the
young Belgian writers, who in recent years have
broken away from the tradition of the milieu^
"you can only be a Belgian Lamartine." Of set
purpose he has concentrated his studies on the
history, the architecture, the folklore, the scenery
of his native Hainault, and he has poured his
specialised knowledge (sometimes with monotonous
insistence) into the mould of his tales. But what-
ever mistakes his doctrine may have led him into,
no one could deny the immense variety of his
books : Contes dentre Sambre et Meuse, Mes Ton-
ne lies, Teles de Houille, Mihien d Avene, Le Joyau
de la Mitre, La Maison dOr, Nos Ruslres, Guidon
d Anderlecht, Le Matigrd, Contes d Avant P Amour,
Les Manches de Lustrine, Petit Trait'e de Havane,
etc. Some of his work is pronouncedly Rabelaisian,
but is too good-natured to be offensive. He has
the faculty of combining comedy with tragedy ; as
in Mihien d'Avene, the story of an idiot who falls
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Walloon Novelists and Dramatists
in love and murders his rival. Le Maugre is
perhaps the novel in which he has gone farthest
astray. It is all a study of local custom. It
would appear that in the district in question the
farmers deny their landlord the right of increasing
their rent, and still more that of evicting them.
If a landlord tries to exercise his legal rights,
he can find no tenant in the locality to replace
the farmer he has evicted ; and if he imports one
from another district, the immigrant's cattle are
maimed, and he and his family are murdered.
The conditions are obviously similar to those which
obtained in Ireland not long ago. Des Ombiaux
had a plenitude of excellent material to work in ;
but his obsession of elucidating local custom leads
him into the error of tracing this particular tra-
dition to the Middle Ages. The movement of the
story is excellent : we are hurried from event to
event. The characterisation is good : here are
Walloon peasants, good and bad, as they live and
breathe. And yet — it is a monotonous book, and
it disproves the whole theory of excessive region-
alism. It proves that an inventory of customs,
however accelerated by action, does not make a
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novel. But, in justice to des Ombiaux, it must
be pointed out that Le Maugr^ is rather an ex-
periment in the direction of unrelieved tragedy,
whereas the real des Ombiaux is a jolly writer
who is scarcely tinged with the prevailing melan-
choly of the Walloon writers. There is another
thing in which he differs from the rest of his
Walloon compeers : he is a colourist. For instance,
he strings a series of pictures together in Demol-
der's manner in Guidon (T Anderlecht^ an essay in
profane hagiography (the novel cheerily proposes
to relate the career of St. Guidon, one of the most
popular saints of Brabant, and the very date leaps
forward four hundred years). But — a vital point
— this rather careless writer (for at his best he is
a teeming improviser) splashes the colours about
in a way that Demolder would never dream of
doing ; he makes us see the colours, not the
picture. Describing the fair at Ypres, for instance,
he says :
" In the streets and the alleys the crowd swarmed
and swirled red, green, orange, white, violet, purple, with
blue shadows, while afar the blonde verdure of Flanders
laughed in the flat fields, under an indigo sky graced
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Walloon Novelists and Dramatists
with big white clouds as round as balls, like snowy
mountains."
Anyone who has seen Le Mm^iage de Made-
moiselle Beulemans knows that there is such a thing
as Belgian humour. But it is very, very rare.
Belgian authors take themselves so seriously. . . .
According to Eugene Gilbert, it was Leopold
Courouble who discovered Belgian humour ; and
Courouble is certainly the accredited Belgian
humorist. The book which first showed the
Belgians that a national humour was possible is
La Famille Kaekebroeck. Courouble makes his
good burghers of Brussels speak that dialect of
the French language which is known as "le parler
beige." Other books of his are: Mes Pandectes ;
Profils B lanes et Frimousses Noh'es ; hnages
dOutremer; Pauline Platbrod; Les Noces d'Or\
Le Mariage d'Hermance. In La Maison Espag-
nole, with its pictures of old Brussels life, he has
given us his autobiography.
Fernand Wicheler and Franz Fonson would
hardly have written their famous comedy, Le
Mariage de Madefnoiselle Beulemans, if La Famille
Kaekebroeck had not showed them the way. Their
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comedy is notoriously the most successful, financi-
ally, of all Belgian plays, and its characters have
become proverbial, but it is doubtful whether any
of the plays of these authors belong to literature.
Henri Maubel in his tales {^Dans File, Ames de
Couleur) and plays [^tude de Jeune Fille, Les
Racines, L'Eau et le Vin) studies the soul of girls
on the verge of womanhood. He is a philosophic
writer of the greatest refinement. He works
somewhat by Maeterlinck's gospel of silence : he
listens to the manifestations of the soul. Like
his own Abb^ Jacquelin he seeks " to bring
our own mystery home to us." Dreams may
reveal it :
" Dream," he says, " reality . . . these are words ;
the dream is real, or else we should have to deny the
brain where it is born. Dream is the light of the flames
that consume us. It is the blossoming of our desires
when they have been purified in the spirit, and it only
appears so strange and is only so powerful because it
reflects desires that the body does not seize."
Henri Maubel is the husband of Blanche
Rousseau, who has also in her dream-pictures
analysed the soul of young girls. Her volume of
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Walloon Novelists and Dramatists
short stories, Le Rabaga, is one of the most notable
books of recent years. An analysis of one of her
tales, "Grande Mademoiselle Fanny," will show
how cunningly she uses the atmosphere of fairy
tales to reveal feminine character. Angele and
Phlip are two little ragamuffins. Angele has a
doll whose name is Grande Mademoiselle Fanny.
" Shall we get married soon ? " Phlip asks one
day. " I am quite willing, if big Miss Fanny will
agree," Angele replies. They go to ask Miss
Fanny, but no answer can be got from the doll.
" She says you mustn't kiss me any more," Angele
interprets the doll's silence. " She says we must
wait. She says we can get married when you
bring me a money-box with some money in."
Phlip, nothing daunted, hires himself to a farmer,
and tends sheep for a long, long time, till he has
the money. He takes what he has earned to
Angele, and she puts the money in Miss Fanny's
pocket. "When shall we get married?" asks
Phlip. "Didn't I tell you?" answers the little
girl, "she wants a red petticoat. She wants the
red petticoat in Denis's shop-window. Be quick
and go and buy it!" "How can I," asks Phlip,
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" when I haven't got my money ? " " She says she
must have it," insists Angele. Phlip steals it,
and is put in prison. But all the time he
thinks that Angele is waiting for him, and that
when he gets back home they will be married.
When he is released, he walks a day and a night,
and a day again. And he arrives at the village.
It is an evening in May. He hides himself till
the moon comes out. Then he goes to the farm
and throws a handful of sand at the attic window.
Angele opens the window, and talks to him. She
is sorry he has had to eat dry bread. As for her,
she has had roast goose with chestnuts, and fig
jam. . . . She knows what he has come for, but,
she tells him, Miss Fanny has had another idea. . . .
now she wants the Blue Bird. Phlip sets out to
find it, crosses the ocean, and goes to where the
niggers and the Chinese live. As the years pass,
Angele sits at her window, and sometimes at night
she makes a sign to someone passing in the
shadow. Then a step is heard on the staircase
and some soldier or other pushes her door open.
He brings cakes and wine. But one evening
somebody came to the door when she was not
.^02
Walloon Novelists and Dramatists
expecting anyone. He knocked twice. Angele
opened the door . . . and there stood Phlip, He
had grown very tall, and he was sunburnt. He
was dressed as a sailor, and a bird was perched
on his fist. He did not wait for her to invite him
to come in. "Here I am," he said, "and here's
the bird." Angele saw that it was the Blue Bird.
He tells her his experiences in strange lands, and
leaves her, saying he will come back the day after
and then they can get married. The morning
after he returns to the room, and finds her waiting
in her wedding dress. She has been stitching all
night. On her head she has a straw hat. And
on the straw hat somethino- blue is stirring^. It is
the Blue Bird, stitched alive on to the straw hat.
Its wing is still beating a little, . . .
Charles Delchevalerie is one of the few sur-
vivors yet writing of the group who wrote for La
Wallonie and Flordal. Journalism has left him
little time for literature, but the "landscape
studies" of his Decors (1895), his short story
La Maison des Roses Tremieres (1898), and Images
Fraternelles (1914), a collection of vivid impres-
sions splendidly illustrated by Auguste Donnay,
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keep his name before the public. As a descriptive
writer, Delchevalerie is in the front rank. One of
his fellow-workers in the days of La Wallonie
was Celestin Demblon, who wrote Contes Milan-
coliques and Nouveaux Contes Melancoliques.
Since then he has devoted himself (like Georges
Eekhoud) to Shakespearean criticism, and (like
Maeterlinck) he has translated Macbeth.
Not all the Walloon writers are regionalists or
philosophers. The best are, decidedly. But there
is a sprinkling of romanticists — not new-romanti-
cists, in the Viennese sense, but romanticists of
the good old school of Victor Hugo. There are,
then, historical novels in Belgian literature. The
most famous is La Cite Ardente, in which Henry
Carton de Wiart, the present Minister of Justice,
unrolls the epic of the city of Li^ge. Opinions
differ as to the merit of the book, as of Les
Vertus Bourgeoises, another historical novel of
Carton de Wiart's ; but it is at all events certain
that the noblest of Belgian cities deserves a
greater epic than Henry Carton de Wiart can
write, although he got the quinquennial prize for
his production.
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Walloon Novelists and Dramatists
Another Belgian writer who owes much of his
success to official influence is Henri Davienon,
whose father is the present Minister for Foreign
Affairs. His drama La Querelle was played in
19 14 in the presence of the King and the Queen
and six Cabinet Ministers (a record for " the
Belgian theatre "). The play is also remarkable
linguistically, as Leopold Rosy pointed out in Le
Thyrse, for (in the interests of local colour — it is,
specifically, a " Belgian " play) it is written in three
languages — French, Walloon, and Beulemans.
Henri Davignon is nothing if not patriotic. He
would reconcile the two warring races of his
country, he would fuse Fleming and Walloon.
How it can be done he shows in his much-
discussed novel Un Beige (19 13): let orthodox
Flanders save the soul of free-thinking Wallonia,
and all will be well. The two races must inter-
marry, but there must be an end of all this Walloon
cynicism. This tendencious spirit guides the in-
trigue of Davignon's other novels {L'Ardennaise,
Le Prix de la Vie, Le Courage d Aimer are read-
able) ; and this young aristocrat (personally very
charming, by all accounts) takes care that the
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
Whig dogs and especially the blear-eyed socialists
get the worst of it. He has a sense of landscape ;
and anyone wishing to visit the Ardennes might
find suggestions in his novels for a profitable
itinerary.
Belgium lost, in 191 2, a promising writer in
Frangois Charles Morisseaux. He resigned a com-
mission in the army to devote himself to literature,
was director of the excellent Brussels review Le
Thyrse from 1905 to 1908, he wrote numerous
novels, tales, and plays, and he was barely thirty
when he died. As a member, for some time, of
the staff of L'£toile Beige, he rejuvenated that
family journal's literary columns. His plays, for
all the lively wit he expended in them, are hardly
likely to survive ; his novels A Travers le Vitrail,
La Blessure et l Amour, Histoire Remarquable
dAnselme Ledoux, and his volume of short stories
Bobine et Casimir are saved by their delicate irony.
Paul Andre is, like Henri Davignon, an author
who treats modern problems with an orthodox bias.
In Delphine Fousseret he hit upon an idea — the
love-sick woman of forty — which has been more
successfully handled by Karin Michaelis. It is,
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Walloon Novelists and Dramatists
however, rather as a regionalist writer, a devotee
of the Walloon country, that he has achieved
distinction {^Le Prestige, L' Impossible Liberie).
His Chers Petits Anges are studies of children ;
his Conies de la Boiie turn his recollections of
the army to account.
A sound critic of other men's work, a great
quarreller who never shows temper, even when the
hosts of the mighty move up against him (as when
recently he had the temerity to defend Maeterlinck
against the slashing onslaught of Louis Dumont-
Wilden), Georges Rency has written admirable
novels and tales {^Madeleine, L^Aieule, Conies de
la Hulotie, Frissons de Vie). Franz Mahutte, one
of the old guard of La Jeune Belgique, is caustic
and sometimes sordid in his stories Gens de Pro-
vince, Sans Horizon, Feuilles au Veni. Hubert
Stiernet is known for his Hisioires Haniees, and
Haute Plaine.
To return to the historical novel, there is a
Belgian Pierre Louys. Count Albert du Bois has
produced something akin to the French writer's
Aphrodite in his novels of ancient Greek life
Amours Antiques (the second edition was rebap-
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
tized L' Athdnienne) and Leuconoe. These are
novels for adults. The count is a rich amateur
who allows himself the luxury of writing, beside
his astonishing novels, plays in Alexandrines,
something like Racine's. If the Count is the
Belgian Pierre Louys, Maurice de Waleffe must,
by virtue of his ancient Egyptian novel Le Peplos
Vert, be called the Belgian Georg Ebers. To
complete the trio, Frangois Leonard (who has
written verse, plays, and criticism) must be called
the Belgian Wells : his Le Triomphe de rHojnme
is a terrific scientific vision of the future ; in the
last chapter, the Earth goes wrong, waggles about,
makes a rush for Vega . . . and bursts.
Prosper Henri Devos made a name by his
Monna Lisa, a novel of Bohemian life in Brussels :
two artists are rivals for th6 possession of a woman.
Devos leads a campaign against the regionalist
fashion, and he has dared to break a lance with
Maurice des Ombiaux. Auguste Rouvez, himself
an official in the Ministry of Science and Art,
has satirised the bureaucracy of the capital (as
des Ombiaux did in Les Manches de Lustrine') in
his novel Le Capitole.
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Walloon Novelists and Dramatists
Henri Liebrecht collaborated with Morisseaux
in writing plays [Miss Lili, L! Effrenee). Plays
of his own are : V Autre Moyen, UEcole des
Valets, La Main Gatiche, L' Impromptu Persan^
Gil Bias chez Monseigneur. His drama Enfant
des Flandres is an adaptation of De Coster's
Legende d Ulenspiegel. Liebrecht is greatly in
evidence in Brussels as a combative critic, very
busy in the interests of " the Belgian Theatre,"
with which his own interests are involved. He
has compiled a Histoire de la Litterature Beige
dExpression Franfaise (Brussels, 19 13); a livre
commands, but useful.
Sylvain Bonmariage (English on his mother's
side) is the enfant terrible of Belgian literature.
He is attacked to right and left, as an impudent
young coxcomb, as a farceur, as a sauteur, as a
prodigy. But Albert Giraud protects him. His
poems [Poemes, 1909) cannot be taken quite
seriously, though they are prefaced by Albert
Giraud, who describes his favourite as having
"lips Britannically shaved" and as "joining the
most English phlegm to the most French petu-
lance." The plays of this Belgian Alcibiades [Le
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
Pelican^ Tant va la Cruche a r Eau, L! Automne)
have been acted at Paris. Of his recent novel
Les Caprices du Maitre a Parisian writer who is
beyond suspicion of partiality, Eugene Montfort,
has distinctly said i^Les Marges, February 1914)
that it is pleasant and witty ; and the same may
be maintained of Bonmariage's other tales i^L Eau
qui dort, Les Aventures Merveilleuses de V Abbd
de Lassus, Attitudes, Bobette petite Sceur de la
Lune.
A writer of meagre output but considerable
talent is Ferdinand Bouch^. His long novel
Les Mourloft, which describes the tragic rivalry
of two old farmers for the love of a buxom
wench who turns out to be the daughter of
one of them (begotten on a beggar-woman in a
barn), has had the good fortune to be translated
into Flemish by Stijn Streuvels, which gives it a
a second (and probably more robust) life. Les
Mourlon admirably reproduces the life on a farm
in Hainault, Bouche's native province. His best
work, however, is contained in Chrysalides^ a
collection of short stories some of which are
nothing less than masterpieces.
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Walloon Novelists and Dramatists
Beyond all doubt, of the younger generation
of Walloon writers it is Edmond Glesener from
whom the most is to be hoped. His novel Le
C(Bur de Francois Re^ny is by some critics con-
sidered to be the best which has appeared in
recent years. It is a psychological novel of great
intensity, describing the character of a neurasthenic
weakling — a modern type. The book is painful,
perhaps cruel. In Glesener's next novels, Mon-
sieur Honore and its sequel Le Citoyen Colette,
the cruelty is lightened by irony. The two novels
together (their secondary title is Chronicle of a
Little Country^ give us a sorry picture of Belgium,
but Glesener has obviously a poor opinion of his
native country. " To Belgians," he says, " the
finest idea in the world was never worth a crown
piece." " In a country of illiterates," he says again
in Le Citoyen Colette, "it is natural that fools
should succeed." The protagonist of the two
novels, Honore Colette, is a fool, and he succeeds.
He has good looks, and he has the success of
Maupassant's Bel Ami from the moment when,
a butcher employed at the Halles aux Viandes at
Li^ge, he takes the first step upwards by marrying
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
a rich widow. He is now a rentier; and has
plenty of spare time for philandering. He throws
one of his rivals into the Meuse, fishes him out
again, and is decorated for heroism. Another step.
. . . He enters the City Guard, seduces his chiefs
wife, is invited to a Court ball. He continues to
mount, till he is elected a socialist member of
Parliament. Here ends the first novel, which took
Glesener seven years to write. In Le Citoyen
Colette we witness the decline and fall of the hero,
who ends his days in wretchedness, deserted by
his followers. But the moral effect of his fall is
lacking — one humbug goes, other humbugs take his
place. As ever in Belgium, Glesener would have us
believe. Evidently the satire must be taken with
a grain of salt. But it has its justification, as any-
one who has the least acquaintance with Belgian
life must know. Glesener has confessed that in
writing the Colette novels he always had Gil
Bias and Le Rouge et le Noir by him. Colette
is an adventurer, like the heroes of Le Sage's and
Stendhal's novels. But here the resemblance ends.
Colette is only the hero in the sense that the
novels are written round his career. In himself
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Walloon Novelists and Dramatists
he is a mean and miserable personage. He is
only interesting as a type. This, perhaps, according
to the orthodox criteria of criticism, is the defect of
the books. But Glesener did not aim at enlisting
his readers' sympathies for Colette. His idea was
to criticise Belgium, and this he does, exhibiting
pictures of each successive stage of society as
Colette ascends the ladder, giving us a synopsis
of Belgian life. And by his own showing all is
not bad in his "little country." In the hearts of
simple people he finds goodness ; in children he
finds a charm which is better than all the glitter
of high life.
If, as is expected, a new Belgium arises after
the war from the ruins of the old, a Belgium which
can no longer be charged with contempt of in-
tellect, Glesener's Chronicle of a Little Country
will perhaps assume the character of a historical
record by which the new regime will judge the
old.
313
CHAPTER XII
NOVELISTS IN FLEMISH
In Camille Lemonnier's Le Vent dans les Moulins
there is a character, Piet Baezen, who is the son
of a baker and a baker himself.
" Every morning," says the tale, " Piet put his loaves
in the oven and then out of the town he went, walking
straight in front of him, away by the tiny farms with
their green shutters. That was the only way he had
ever had of writing his tales about the poor. Nobody
before him had expressed such humble and brotherly
things. Baezen was the only person who never seemed
to imagine that his books were better even than his
bread. He wrote his books just as he kneaded his
dough, with the same silent and gentle soul, . . . They
were so sad and gentle, these tales of poor folks, that
they almost made you want to suffer yourself, to have
your nose nipped by the frost while your two hands
were as far down in your pockets as they would
go "
Piet Baezen can be no other than Stijn
Streuvels. And no wonder that Lemonnier made
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Novelists in Flemish
him a part of his book, for he had set himself
the task of singing the soul of Flanders, and the
soul of Flanders is in Stijn Streuvels. When all
is said and done, he is the true Fleming ; and all
the others, whether they write in French or
Flemish, cannot entirely get away from French
culture.
Stijn Streuvels's real name is Frank Lateur,
and he is the nephew of Guido Gezelle. His
father, after marrying Gezelle's sister, set up as
a baker at Heule, near Courtrai, and here Frank
was born in 1872. When he was about twelve
years old, the family removed to Avelghem, where
the future novelist grew up, and received such
schooling as could be had. As soon as his parents
allowed him, he stopped away from school. He
was sent to Bruges to learn baking, and when
his father died he took over the shop. He soon
acquired a great local reputation as a confectioner ;
the peasants from miles round came to him for
their fancy cakes. At four or five o'clock in the
morning he was up and working ; and in the pauses
during the baking he read and read, like David
Livingstone at the loom. His thirst for reading
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
was unquenchable ; he taught himself French,
German, English, and Russian, and spent every
available penny on books. He is said to have
read every number of the Reclambibliothek. To
save money for books, he never spent a penny
on amusements, never crossed the threshold of a
tavern (something incredible in a Flemish village !).
From his eighteenth to his twenty-eighth year he
lived like a monk.
In 1895 — he was twenty-five at the time — he
began to contribute short stories to the papers.
Soon he was discovered by Knrel van de Woestijne,
who with Cyriel Buysse and other writers had just
founded Vafi Nzi en Straks, a review which was
planned to break new ground. After some corre-
spondence Streuvels met van de Woestijne in
Ghent, and henceforward he contributed regularly
to the new review. His first book, Lenteleven
(The Life of Spring) was denounced as obscene
by the Roman Catholic journal Belfort. There
was no justification whatever for the attack, but
the article was sent to the parish priest of
Avelghem, with the result that Stijn Streuvels
was subjected to much local persecution. How-
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Novelists in Flemish
ever, the Church was powerless to injure him in
the larger world of literature ; and soon Streuvels
was able to join with other writers in launching
another review with modern ideals, Vlaanderen.
He continued to work in his bakery. He
would be busy till noon ; and in the afternoons
he would go for long walks in the neigh-
bouring villages (like Piet Baezen). At about
five o'clock he would return, shut himself up in
his cell, and work at his tales. He had nothing
to do with selling what he baked ; the shop was
attended to by the other members of the house-
hold. Gradually, in spite of his excellent cakes,
he came to have the reputation of being mad, or
what is worse, a heathen heretic. Here was a man
who avoided the taverns, and went for walks, with
no apparent object, every afternoon. And when
Streuvels began to go for his walks in the night-
time, there could no longer be any doubt. ... At
last, however, he showed some promise of recover-
ing his senses. He was going to get married.
But as it turned out his marriage provided the
" coffee-wives " with the greatest scandal of all — he
came to church in a jacket and a soft felt hat. . . .
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
A short time before his marriage his mother
had inherited a few thousand francs, and Stijn
Streuvels himself was now earning a decent in-
come by his writing, so they sold the shop and
the goodwill, and Streuvels had a villa built at
Ingoyghem, a little village at a considerable dis-
tance from any railway, but in a lovely district.
" His life here is very lonely," says Andre de
Ridder in his book on the novelist. " He does
not travel, he does not receive callers, he makes
no friends ; he does not chat with anyone in the
village. All the families in the neighbourhood
would, of course, be only too glad to have him
at their parties and dinners, but he declines all
invitations."
Streuvels's work may be divided into three
periods, that in which he records the impressions
of his early youth at Heule, that for which his
life at Avelghem provides the material, and that
which centres round Ingoyghem. The scenes of
his stories, however, are not localised by name ;
it is interior evidence which gives the indication.
The realism of the first and second periods isj
sometimes overshadowed by a vague pessimism,*]
318
Novelists in Flemish
in the third period the happy conditions of the
novelist's own rural life prevail. But everywhere
there is sunshine and shadow ; more sunshine to-
wards the end. His works are : Lenteleven (1899) ;
Zomerland ( 1 900) ; Zonnetij ( 1 900) ; Doodendans
( 1 90 1 ) ; Langs de Wegen ( 1 903 ) ; Dageit ( 1 903) ;
Minneha?tdel {igo^)\ Dorpsgeheimen (1904); Open-
lucht (1905) ; Stille Avonden (1905) ; Het Uitzicht
der Dingen (1906); De Vlassckaard {ic^oy). Of
these, Langs de Wegen and Mintiehandel are
novels — at least they appear to be so, though the
author has not actually called them "novels." In
any case, Streuvels (like so many of the Walloon
conteurs) is unable to write anything but short
stories, and what appear to be intended as novels
are really collections of independent impressions.
Even in his short stories Streuvels ignores the
exigencies of construction. " De Oogst " (The
Harvest), for instance, one of the tales in Zon-
netij, is really a couple of tales. If one detaches
the sentimental outlines, the first part is the love-
story of Rik and Lida ; but when Rik dies of
sunstroke the tale is artlessly continued by the
love-story of Lida's brother Wies, who had hitherto
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
been a subsidiary character. But the "story" is
nothing to Streuvels — and this holds good of
all his work. He is concerned merely with the
impression, the reproduction of the mood ; and he
only makes use of the story in so far as it helps to
bring out the impression. In "The Harvest" the
purpose is to describe the annual migration of
Flemish labourers to reap, drove by drove, in the
vast cornfields of France.
" De Werkman " (The Labourer) is a tragic
picture of a reaper's return from France. Manse
has been having a hard struggle to keep the house
going during her husband's absence in the reaping-
fields. At last he returns, with his pockets full of
money ; but when a visit has been paid to the
village tradesmen to pay off what is owing, a big
hole has been made in Ivo's earnings. If he can
get work for the winter months, however, all will
be well. But Ivo is one of the last labourers to
return, and all the work in the neighbourhood has
been snapped up. There is nothing for Ivo, and
those who have returned with him, to do but to
set out without a moment's delay (lest they should
arrive too late here also) for the Walloon country
520
i
Novelists in Flemish
and seek work in the hated sugar factories, where
men are herded and penned like slaves. They
dare not stay a single night with their wives and
families. During the summer months husband
and wife have longed to be together with their
children ; but the children must be fed, and Manse
has hardly time to darn her husband's old clothes
before he and his mates set off ag-ain — to a worse
slavery than before. This tragedy of disillusion-
ment is so simply told ; but the very simplicity of
the narration (there is no fine writing in Stijn
Streuvels) heightens the hopeless misery almost
beyond endurance.
Still more poignant is the realism of " Zonder
Dak " (Without a Rooftree), the first story in
Openlucht (The Air of the Open). It is early
morning in a tiny garden and a tiny hen-pen ;
Lowie, a Flemish labourer, is spending the
happiest hour of his day before he goes off to
work at the farm. The hens, the goat, the
rabbits in the hutch, the garden, the cottage —
all these are his own. He had toiled and moiled
all his life, and scraped penny by penny together
to realise the ambition of his life — to have a home
321 X
Contemporary Belgian Literature
of his own. He had built everything, bit by bit,
with his own hands. "And now," he says to his
wife, " we can be happy ! " When Lowie, this
particularly fine morning, has had a look round
his domain, and smoked his pipe, he sets out for
the farm ; but at the corner of the alder-hedge he
turns round and stands looking at his cottage in
the open field, with its white-washed walls and
thatched roof, and the top of the hen-cote and
the goat's stable peering out over the green hedge
under the pear-tree. He thinks it looks so pretty
and it is such a pleasure to look at it, and it is all
his — and then there is Wieze, his wife, and the
four children, the young rascals. . . . And off he
goes, as proud as a king, to his hard day's work.
The second part of the tale shows us Wieze dress-
ing the children and giving them their breakfast —
a Flemish interior. Then she has to go to the
grocer's, and the children are left alone to play.
They play at riding in a coach on their parents'
bed, and when they are tired of this, they climb
up to the attic, though they have been forbidden
to go there. It is dark, and they try to open the
skylight, but their little fingers cannot lift the
322
Novelists in Flemish
frame. Then they fetch a matchbox and one of
them keeps striking matches till all at once the
thatch is on fire. The neighbours arrive in time
to save the children, but the house and the sheds
are burnt down. The mother does not think of
the house — it is enough to have the children
unharmed ; but the father will not be comforted.
Nothing more must be expected of Stijn
Streuvels than such simple things as these — simple,
but deep, told in the language of everyday life,
and yet with a mastery of style. In some of his
tales ("Een beroerde Maandag," " HetDuivelstuig")
he shows a sense of humour which comes as a
relief after his prevailing seriousness : it is a heavy
Flemish humour which gathers force very slowly,
but in the end is irresistible. One thing in
Streuvels is very noticeable after reading Eekhoud
and the other Belgian novelists who write in
French. The women of Eekhoud, Lemonnier, and
the rest are almost always sensual women who call
a spade a spade. There is no hint of such things
in Stijn Streuvels's tales ; and it is evident that
either the French-writing novelists brutalise their
characters, or Stijn Streuvels idealises his. Pro-
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
bably the truth is midway. Streuvels is not mealy-
mouthed, though the peasants of some of his later
tales are obviously too refined ; his realism is
genuine and convincing. He is certainly a very
origrinal writer. The influence of the Russian
realists and of Bjornson (some of whose tales he
has translated) is perhaps discernible here and
there ; but it would be hard to bring it home.
He is weakest where he abandons the transcrip-
tion of things seen to attempt flights of imagi-
nation : Zo77ierland, for instance, is a most con-
fusing blend of poetry and reality — it is hard to
know whether the scene is in South Africa or
Flanders, whether the period is prehistoric or in
our own days.
There is no trace of the maidenly chastity of
Stijn Streuvels in the one Flemish-writing novelist
whose merit comes near equalling his. This is
Cyriel Buysse, a writer whom Maeterlinck, ever
lavish of praise, has compared to Guy de Mau-
passant. Buysse is the nephew of Rosalie and
Virginie Loveling, two sisters whose Flemish-
written tales and poems are still widely read.
He was born in a village near Ghent in 1859,
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Novelists in Flemish
and he was brought up to succeed his father, who
was a manufacturer. In his twenty-fifth year he
went to America in the interests of his firm ; and
it was during the return voyage, two years after,
that he determined to turn his back on commerce,
for which he felt no aptitude, and devote himself
to literature. He began at once to write tales,
which in due course were published. His first
novel, Het Recht van den Sterkste (1893) revealed
him as an uncompromising realist of great power.
The Right of the Strongest would have made
Zola blush. It is filthy. But the intention is clean :
Cyriel Buysse is an austere and noble artist, and if
he chooses to regard sexual passion as the most
destructive factor in life, he must be allowed the
liberty of his opinion, so long as he cannot honestly
be accused of pornography. The worst of Buysse
is not his filth, but his lack of humour. " Buysse
cannot smile," says a Dutch critic. And yet some
of the scenes in The Right of the Strongest,
the brawls in the streets of the vile slum, for
instance, are apt to raise a laugh by the grim-
visaged sternness of their narration. They remind
one of nothing so much as of The Police Gazette.
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Contemporary Belgian Literature
The purpose of the novel is sufficiently indicated
by its title. Buysse thinks that physical strength
is what shapes the life of the poor. To every
woman man is the superman. In a strange scene
where a number of women are weeding a field,
each one in turn tells, without a vestige of shame,
the story of her seduction. " All had been over-
come by force, deceit, or surprise ; and what they
recollected of it was not grief for the loss of their
honour, still less disgust at the brutality of the plot,
but rather an impression of having been fooled,
combined with an unconscious feeling of respect
for the man's strength, a feeling of necessary sub-
jection to the right of the strongest." Rape,
robbery, drink, fights, poaching, prison ; harridans
slanging one another at the doors of their filthy
hovels ; harlotry and incest — is it indeed a true
picture of life, or is it the phantasmagoria of a
too heated imagination ?
Schoppenboer (The Knave of Spades) is not
less violent, though another passion, avarice, is
brought into play. Old farmer Joncke, whose farm
has been burnt down, implores his three sons on
his deathbed not to marry, but to live together
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Novelists in Flemish
and build up the prosperity of the farm again.
(The outlines of the novel have some likeness
to Ferdinand Douche's Les Mourlon). The three
brothers carry out the old man's wishes. But Pol
Moeykens, the orphaned son of their sister, comes
to live at the farm. The brothers hate the lad,
but they cannot refuse to have him live with them,
for they fear he might claim his mother's part in
the common heritage. In course of time one of
the brothers, Jan, discovers that Pol has relations
with the servant, his own mistress. Jan broods
vengeance, and when Pol gets married and brings
his bride to live at the farm he lays his plans to
seduce her. He is caught in the act of assaulting
her, and is killed with a spade.
Sursum Corda (1894) is socialistic in tendency.
It is to some extent an autobiographical novel ;
the socialist hero is no doubt Buysse himself.
There is also autobiography in 'n Leeuw van
Vlaanderen (A Lion of Flanders) : the hero is
filled with longing to improve the lot of the
Flemish poor. His experiences in Parliament dis-
illusionise and disgust him, and he learns that what
good he is to do he must do in his private capacity,
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with none but his devoted wife to help him. Op V
Blaiiwhuis (In the Blue House) is the old story of
a girl of noble birth brought up in seclusion and
in total ignorance of the facts of life. Nature and
the beasts teach her. Daarna (Afterwards) shows
that the higher classes are as corrupt as the lower
classes. Wroeging (Remorse), Te Lande (In the
Country), Uit Vlaanderen (From the Land of
Flanders), and Van Arme Menschen (Poor Folks)
are collections of short stories, many of them of
great power.
Another Flemish-writing novelist with a con-
siderable reputation is Herman Teirlinck, who
lives at Brussels, the scene of his Het Ivoren
Aapje (The Ivory Ape). August Vermeylen,
better known as poet and critic, has written a
notable novel, De Wandelende food (The Wander-
ing Jew). An Albertian novelist whose reputation
is growing, especially in Holland, is Gustaav Ver-
meersch {Het Roilende Leven, 1901).
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CHAPTER XIII
POETS IN FLEMISH
The most important of the Flemish poets write
in French. It is useless for the fiamingants to
claim that their Flemish-writing poets are little
known abroad owing- to the mere accident that
they write in Flemish : and that on the other hand
poets like Verhaeren and Maeterlinck would have
been seen in their true proportion if they had
written in Flemish. The French-writing Flemings
do not necessarily write in French because they are
greater men than those who write in Flemish ;
but the fact remains, when values are dispassion-
ately compared by international standards, that
there are no Flemish-writing poets who reach the
height of Verhaeren or Giraud. That is not to say
that no Flemish-writing poet is worthy of the most
serious attention : as a matter of fact, the Flemish-
written poetry is often very beautiful ; and the very
qualities of the language give it a character of its
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own, a character rather of quaintness and idyllic
quiet than of strength and revolutionary ardour.
The greatest fault that can be charged against
Flemish (as against Dutch) poetry is its lack of
originality : no Flemish poet has invented a style
of his own or cogitated matter which cannot be
found at least in germ in other literatures. To
the same extent as Ledeganck imitated Byron,
Pol de Mont has imitated Tennyson and Long-
fellow and the German classics. Even the Im-
pressionists, the poets who in recent years have
denounced all the productions of their forerunners
to burn their brains out in a struggle for an un-
compromising originality, import the essence of
their manner from the German nebulousness of
Stefan George and Hugo von Hofmannsthal.
In Germany at all events one Flemish-writing
poet has had full justice done to him. Pol de
Mont has been translated into German, and his
lecturing tours in the Fatherland have helped to
make his name familiar. In his case, indeed, popu-
larity has been helped by the fact that he was one
of the acknowledged chiefs in Belgium of the Pan-
Germanist school, and that he has worked unceas-
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ingly as a writer and as an orator to spread the
German idea. His political activity has probably
been nefarious ; but we shall do no harm if we follow
the Germans in giving him his due as a poet.
Pol de Mont, whose best verse is contained
in Claribella (1893) and Iris (1894), is a senti-
mental and a sensual poet. His sentimentality
often verges on the ludicrous, but at his best he
strikes poetry out of it — a poetry which as a genre
claims a suggestive interest apart from its intrinsic
merit. We ought to admit that the very follies
of Continental poets often allow them to write
genuine poetry which our writers, restrained by a
saner but too severe tradition, could never have
conceived. An idea of Pol de Mont's sentiment-
ality and puerile images may be gathered from
his " Love lies Bleeding " :
" My love like a pale flower lies bleeding . . .
My love is withering away
Like a pale flower on stale water feeding
In a glass, for a day.
My love like a dim candle is pining,
Which, when the grey dawn flecks the skies,
Before Our Dear Lady still is shining,
All in a flowery Paradise.
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** Its delicate flame burned the night-tide through
— A fiery Hly
On a slender stem of a milk-white hue —
But now morn is chilly,
And the light burns out amid Our Dear Lady's roses,
Like a glazing eye that for ever closes.
** Now like a royal maiden is my love.
The last child of a long line : shy and tender,
Poor bird to be slain, as the cold wind slays a dove,
Trembling and pale she is, alone, in the great
splendour
Of the old grey palace. . . . She sits by the window
pane,
And sees the flowers raising their gentle heads,
And opening, opening, opening, glad of the sun and
the rain,
Like children's eyes shining in the garden beds . . .
" She knows well, there are no flowers she will cull . . .
She folds her hands together, she knows not how
Her pining, weary heart is suffering now . . .
She is tired, so tired, now that the park is full
Of birds' voices ringing, ringing, ringing, in her ears,
And secretly she weeps her sorrow in hot tears . . .
She weeps — for roses, that have never bloomed.
For the poor bird in the egg-shell entombed,
Haply for eyes that glowing sought her own.
Haply for kisses she has never known . . ."
He is a master of nature-painting, especially of
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Poets in Flemish
pastoral scenes. Take, for instance, his " Evening
Landscape" :
" Softly the day dies out behind the pines ;
Over the heathland still the red light blazes ;
But paler now and paler the sun shines
On the thin pastures dotted o'er with daisies.
" The plain is vast. The mists of evening lie
Spread at the verge in veils that shift and shimmer ;
Yonder a tree uprears to the azure sky
Its leaves that in the twilight faintly glimmer.
" Now listen ! Not a sound stirs far and wide.
The birds are silent in their leafy cover ;
Only a cricket chirps by the way-side,
And ghostly breezes o'er the landscape hover.
" Slowly, as though afraid of her own feet
On the parched grass, the shepherdess is leading
Home to the fold her flock too tired to bleat,
Red in the light the dying sun is bleeding."
One at least of his poems, "The Heart that is
Dead," reads like an echo of Swinburne :
" My heart is dead ! — And who shall lay it
In its coffin ? — My heart is dead !
Its thirst was sore, and none would allay it ;
It was hungry, and no one brought it bread . . .
My heart is dead ! And who shall lay it
In its coffin ? My heart is dead.
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" My heart is dead . . . Let it rest from its anguish
In the first best grave that can be found.
Come, all ye dear ones that saw it languish,
Come nearer, and see it laid in the ground . . .
My heart is dead . . . Let it rest from its angush
In the first best grave that can be found.
" My heart is dead ... Ye that loved it, come nearer.
Come near it now, and never more.
Tell it, though dead it is dearer and dearer,
Speak to it tenderly as of yore.
My heart is dead ... Ye that loved it, come nearer.
Come round it now, and never more.
" You brownest of maidens, the first maid that filled it,
The first love it had and the purest aye.
Close with a soft kiss the broad wound that killed it.
Kiss all the ill that it did you away.
You brownest of maidens, the first maid that filled it,
The first love it had, and the purest aye.
" You with the sea-deep eyes that smoulder,
With the kisses of fire, you dark-haired maid.
Lift it up tenderly ere it grow colder,
Take it away like a lamb that had strayed.
You with the sea-deep eyes that smoulder.
With the kisses of fire, you dark-haired maid.
" And you, of all I have loved the sweetest,
You with the eyes that are gentle and mild,
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Poets in Flemish
Lay it to sleep in the grave that is meetest,
Lay it to sleep like a little child . . .
O you, of all I have loved the sweetest,
Lay it to sleep like a little child.
" Cover it over with cypress and throw ye
Softly the soil on the heart that is dead . . .
Then in solemn silence homewards go ye,
But never remember its weedy bed . . .
Cover it over with cypress and throw ye
Softly the soil on the heart that is dead."
Much of Pol de Mont's blank verse, such as
this poem of " Ophelia," reads like Tennyson :
" Even as in May a rustling shower at noon
— While from the South the vernal sun bepaints
The falling drops with all his seven hues —
Rains like a cr3'stal cataract of light
On the green fields, and yet is melancholy,
As deeply melancholy as the face
Of a young wife that through her bridal veil
Weeps at her wedding for an earlier love ; —
Even so paced the white maid of Elsinore,
Pale as a corpse, with eyes wept red, that stared
Into an empty space, and yet she smiled.
And yet she hummed a ballad, as she passed
Through the King's deer-park to the quiet brook.
"O sun and rain together, O joy and grief
In one poor heart, O sense and folly blent . . .
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O bitter tears and pallor witnessing
A pain that is unconscious of itself . . .
But far more bitter broken song and laughter,
The wistful tokens of a mind diseased . . .
And ever laughing, ever singing, like
A little child that sings because a song,
So often heard and recollected half,
Echoes by chance along his memory —
Even so, beneath high beeches from whose boughs
The dews of morning dripped, slowly she passed.
Onward without a will, and brake and culled
The wildflowers of the meadow — like a child.
"But where the tufted grasses by the brook
Are hung with jewels of splashed foam, and surge
Like tiny waves when the west wind is blov/ing,
She stayed her listless feet and sang no more,
And, playing, she cast the wildflowers into the water,
With wide blue eyes watching them as they fell
And wakened shining circles in the waves
That rippled to the sedges of the shore.
" But the last wildflower of her gaudy bunch —
A silver-hearted daisy with no scent —
First pensively she held it to her nose,
And then she put the green stalk into her mouth,
Heaved a deep sigh and to her temples pressed
Her delicate hands, hummed the old ballad again.
And then — stretching her arms out like a child
That fights with sleep — she stared and stared at the sun
That shot his watery rays from the dull West.
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Poets in Flemish
" Then from the reeds a dragon-fly flew up,
With gold-green belly and black shining wings.
Laughing she snatched at it with shimmering hands . . .
Then she unbraided all her golden hair
And shuddered . . .
With a loud splash she fell
On the still water. Gurgling bubbles rose
From the deep mud, and here and there a fish
Showed twinkling fins that swam to the farther shore.
" And all was silent, all the leaves were still !
In blue dreams sank the evening, the soft gloam
Phantastically dimmed the shapes of things
Till wood and hill and house and castle tower
Faded afar in the half-dark of a dream,
And soon themselves seemed visions, empty dreams.
" But slowly in the clouded grey of the sky
A narrow moon ventured her pallid face
And wept her long pale argent rays upon
The white maid floating down the quiet brook,
Still with the daisy in her lips, the while
Around her head the glory of her hair
Was billowing — Hke a golden aureole . . ."
But his blank verse has sometimes a more
German rudeness. His "Veteran of Worth"
might have been written by LiHencron :
** It haunts my memory.
It was at Worth,
On the sixth of August in the year of blood.
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At evening, six o'clock. We wandered through
The far-stretched battlefield to see if haply
Any yet lived amid so many dead.
Our quest was vain : cold, dumb, and motionless
Lay every body, as though bathed in blood.
" And in a field of hops we came upon
A sight of horror : in a sea of blood
— I know the word is a commonplace, I know —
There lay a whole battalion, man for man,
Of the blue soldiers from Bavaria,
Lying with upturned faces on their backs,
Mowed down, a whole battalion, dead, all dead.
Only the Colonel's horse, a dappled grey,
A big, strong horse, was fighting still with death.
It neighed, its voice seemed human in its pain,
Like a complaint, it rolled about in blood.
And stretched its twitching feet into the air.
" And see : quite near the dead, quite near the blood.
Nay, in the midst of it, there lay untouched
And freshly green, one patch of meadow land,
Hardly a foot across from side to side,
And over it a bright red poppy flower
Cradled its unstained petals, and in them,
Laden and drunk with honey, hummed a bee.
" And the frail poppy and the humming bee,
Full five miles round, were the only living things
That the wild battle had in pity spared."
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Poets in Flemish
Perhaps Pol de Mont's best work is a series
of poems Of Jesus, in which he tells the story
of the Saviour's birth. These poems are imita-
tions of old Flemish ballads, and they keep the
unevenness and the absurd anachronisms of the
originals. Mary and Joseph are an honest Flemish
couple who talk and act just as such a couple might
do in our own day. Here is "The Journey to
Bethlehem " :
" Mary and Joseph in winter time
Were summoned to Bethlehem ;
His was a poor man's house, and there were
No shoes for either of them.
" It hailed and it snowed and the drifts lay high —
'Twould have moved a stone to pity ;
Gentle Mary said with a sigh :
* I shall never get to the city.
" * My limbs feel so heavy, dear Joseph,
Farther I cannot win ;
Let us go to the farmhouse yonder,
And ask them to take us in.'
" They dragged their way through slush and snow ;
She was leaning on his arm.
She said : * Do not let me fall, Joseph,
Before we reach the farm.'
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" Now the farm was the burgomaster's house ;
He was locking the door for the night.
Joseph said : ' Do not turn us away !
Have pity on our plight !
" * Grant us a place at your hearthstone,
And straw for our weary heads ! '
Said the burgomaster : * This is no inn !
You must go to the inn for beds,'
" There was a stable a long mile away —
Mary was moaning and crying.
Joseph cheered her : *' Take heart, dear wife ! '
But she was almost dying.
" And when they came to the stable at last,
It was a wretched house ;
And at the manger, tethered fast,
There were asses and cows.
" It was cold, and Joseph heaped dry dung and straw,
And struck a fire with his steel.
Mary moaned : * If we only had milk,
To make an evening meal ! '
" Joseph went out to fetch water,
But the well was frozen up :
He brake the ice with his good long staff,
And so there was water to sup.
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Poets in Flemish
" But when he came back to the stable,
Bringing that water cold,
A Babe lay in our Dear Lady's lap.
Naked, sweet to behold.
" Mary said : ' My Babe, my Lord !
Emmanuel Thy name shall be.
Kneel, Joseph, kneel, and worship the Babe !
Now we are freed from poverty.' "
More reverently comical is "In the Stable," a
perfect example of a Flemish carol :
" He woke up his son at the dead of the night,
The burgomaster of Bethlehem :
* Go now to the stable where beggars lodge.
And bring me news of them,
" ' An old man is there and a gentle maid :
We do not know who they are ;
Harmless they seem, but they may be thieves ;
We must not trust them too far ! '
" The son loosed the mastiff from the chain,
Took his knotty stick in his hand,
And gripping his pipe between his teeth
Strode away o'er his father's land.
" And when he came to the Chapel, lo !
Just over the stable shone
The brightest and the loveliest star
He ever had looked upon.
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" And when he came to the cross-roads, hark !
A choir of cherubs was singing
All round that lowly stable there,
And viols and harps were ringing.
" And when he came to the stable door,
He heard great trumpets blowing.
And between the stable and the sky
Angels were coming and going.
" He turned him back to his father, and said :
* Oh this is a happy morn !
In the stable where cattle and beggars lie,
A Saviour to us is born ! ' "
A contemporary of Pol de Mont is Victor de
la Montagne (born 1854). He writes charming
little songs such as " Love's Meandering " :
" As the purling brook to the sea goes.
As to my heart the blood.
So my every thought to thee flows.
To thee, my own true love.
" As the purling brook in the sea winds
Into a gulf of pride.
So my every thought in thee finds
Its meaning magnified.
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"And as in my heart my blood is
Cleansed of the dross of its fire,
In thee my yearning studies
A pureness of desire.
" As the purling brook to the sea goes,
As to my heart the blood,
So my every thought to thee flows,
To thee, my own true love."
With v^hat a strange familiarity the Flemish
poets "play in the straw v^^ith the infant of Beth-
lehem " may be seen again from the following
poem by Edmond van Offel (born at Antwerp
1871). He calls it simply " A Little Song " :
" Sweet Jesus jumps out of His little bed.
And sends all the bed-clothes flying.
" — ' O Jesus dear, take my heart on Your breast,
My heart that is weeping and sighing ! '
" Sweet Jesus robes the city in white.
In white like the bride at the altar.
" — *0 Jesus dear, take my soul to Your side,
And never again shall it falter ! '
" Sweet Jesus lays the fields to sleep.
The fields that are weary and ailing.
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" — ' O Jesus, give me my innocence back,
And keep my poor feet from failing ! ' "
In this "little song" there is of course more
than meets the eye, and generally Edmond van
Offel secretes himself in the panoply of a refined
symbolism. Atmosphere, not meaning :
" Afternoon broods o'er the green,
And everything were fain to sleep,
Because the sun will not be seen.
Over all a silence deep ;
All ears are closed, and there is not
One step upon the parched grass plot.
And everything were fain to sleep.
Because the sun will not be seen.
" The young woman does her hair.
But with no care, but with no will.
Great joy is lying stiff and still,
Still as the parched green carpet, where
The last flower Hes sick and ill.
In dead, dry leaves and dusty green.
Great joy is lying stiff and still,
Because the sun will not be seen.
" The young woman does her hair.
But with no will, but with no care.
She fain would sleep, but cannot sleep ;
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She fain would go, but knows not where,
And lays her fair young flesh in the green,
And cannot dream, and cannot weep.
" — The sun to-day shall not be seen . . .
The young woman lays her limbs
Where the grey dust the greensward dims.
And when the purple satyr leaps
Out of the reeds that do not sway,
The listless nymph runs not away.
The satyr stands amazed, and creeps
Into the chilly reeds again,
His heart more heavy than with pain.
" And everything is sick and still,
Because the sun is tired and ill ..."
He can, however, strike the popular note, as in
" A Song- of Praise," one of the best knov^n of
modern Flemish poems :
" I hold my sweet young love so dear
With all the strength that fills me,
With all my will, with all the pride,
With all the fire that thrills me.
" I hold my love so warmly dear
In earnest striving ever ;
Crowned she dwells by all my hope
At the heart of my endeavour.
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" She is a mother when I grieve,
A child to play with my leisure,
To my thinking she is a sweet sister,
And a good wife for my pleasure.
" Where'er she goes, she bears my heart
Close nested in her attire ;
Where'er she breathes, she lives in the light
Of my limitless desire.
" And all the building my hands do
Shall be my truelove's dwelling,
A Palace rising round my love.
Magnificent beyond telling.
" I hold my love so dear with all
For which my soul has striven ;
The deepest and the best of me
To her alone is given."
Victor de Meyere (born 1873), ^^^> combines
a modern subtlety with a more popular appeal, as
in his " Night's Gentleness" :
" A gentleness breathed from everywhere
Round all things now is flowing,
Floating and hovering in the air,
And softened lights now are glowing.
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I
Poets in Flemish
"A perfume as of crushed desire
From the thick of the bushes is sighing . . .
The soul of something is moaning low,
And in the foliage dying . . .
" Something, too, is dying in me . . .
Something in me is weeping —
Something that seeks for sweet words to soothe
My eyes till they are sleeping . . .
" And heavier, heavier on my lips
The stifled silence is weighing.
Because there wells forth from my heart
A pity beyond all saying
" For the man who walks his path alone,
Who has no loved one to cheer him.
No bosom where he can rest his head.
No love in the night-tide near him . . ."
The poets who are the paladins of modernity
are Prosper van Langendonck (born at Brussels
1862), August Vermeylen (born at Brussels 1872),
and Karel van de Woestijne (born at Ghent
1878). They v^ere associated in the foundation
of the review Va7i nu e7i Straks in 1893. They
are impressionists rather than symbolists, and very
few of their countrymen understand them. But
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obscurity can only be charged against van de
Woestijne, the greatest of the three ; and his
obscurity is the measure of his depth. There is
no obscurity in these three mood-paintings by
van Lanofendonck :
I
" I am strange at heart . . . Whelmed and bedimmed as
when
November vapour the chill forest loads.
I am sad at heart, like one whose breast forebodes,
Though choked with tears, it never will weep again.
" I am sick at heart . , , O that the strength of men
Ne'er girt me ! O to be free from all that goads,
To pierce the whence and whither of the roads,
And why life lures us first and baulks us then.
" From ocean's deeps we climb to seek the air
And the free light, with frantic gasping breath,
Only to meet the ice-crust of despair,
And breathless there to hang 'tween life and death.
" I am sad at heart, like one whose breast forebodes,
Though choked with tears, it never will weep again"
II
" It is my heart that beats in the black tower.
Above the streets deserted in the rain ;
Pent in its narrow cell it throbs amain.
Panting, in this quiet evening hour.
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Poets in Flemish
" It is my heart that moans in the black tower,
Weeping into the piteous air its pain
In cries of grief for ever born again,
And falling o'er deaf houses like a shower.
" Listen ! It is my heart that they are tearing !
My worn-out heart, whose passionate despairing,
Uttering the whole world's pain, cries out for pity !
" And high o'er those that rend it, raised above
All ecstasies of human hate and love
It sheds its helpless anguish o'er the city."
Ill
" In pain I bore you, but with double bliss
I have cherished you, and warmed you with my fire.
Called you the children of my heart's desire,
Despite my womb's most bitter agonies.
" My children ! On your brow has burnt my kiss !
I have cared for you with love that could not tire,
And reared you to be full of holy ire,
And fierce in battle where injustice is —
" But now, when all my fire in you should flare.
Yea, ali the passion that my spirit boasts.
Your hopeless misery my affection thwarts I
" Why will you, with your eyes that stare and stare.
Close in upon me like a ring of ghosts ?
— O children of my spirit, O ray thoughts ! "
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In mood-painting, too, lies August Vermeylen's
strength :
BRUGES
I . Litanies
" O ! in the dusk of these sepulchral chapels
The singsong of these long, long litanies !
The candles shine before the crape-veiled Cross
Whereon a Christ is dying, centuries old,
With a thin writhing body, black with blood.
Deep in the dusk the great tall candles shine
And conjure forth shadows that come and go
Upon the motionless capes and sombre hoods
Of old, old women that with yellow hands
Folded, incessantly reiterate
The singsong of their long, long litanies.
" It is a distant humming of faint voices.
The tremulous singsong of these litanies ;
A lamentation murmured quietly —
Trailing, with its timid ' Pray for us ! '
Returning ever, a persistent wail
For penance in the nightmare of a sin . . .
It is a faint far humming of dead voices.
Moaning humility and wretchedness,
Dumb pain, the undying pain of all the world ! . . .
O ! in the dusk of these sepulchral chapels
Old women singing these long litanies,
These mumbled prayers, for souls in purgatory !
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Poets in Flemish
2. Saturday Evening
" This seems an evening of long, long ago . . .
The bells are tolling for the dying sun.
Through lofty windows bleed the last sunbeams,
And slowly, wave by wave, into the church
Stream shadows. Slowly, slowly the bells strew
The heart-pain of this evening o'er the land . . .
" Now, like a dying heart, that hardly beats
Its last tired throbs . . . — Then silence. Far and
wide . . .
Only a hollow footfall seems afar
To trail its way o'er cemetery stones.
" My thoughts pace on as silent widows do.
The evening filters through into my soul . . ."
Karel van de Woestijne defies translation and
quotation. He is the Mallarme of the Flemings.
. . . This elegy might be attempted :
" Child, your white face is chanting memories,
And the sweet story of your days and mine,
Which in our life like quiet gardens lay
Bathed in the tender twilight dying out ;
While around gardens green the heavens are
A quiet robe of shadows calm and slow,
And while among the trees the last bird's voice
Glows in a long-drawn elegy that sinks
Slowly, and revives, and sinks again . . .
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" Now, O my child, no song lives round us, and no
Peace-days like quiet gardens round us live ;
No twilight weaves around our mingling dream,
And shadows sad steal round our parted limbs . . .
"And in the night I see, last comfort, only
Your tired white face still trembling, all in tears . . ."
Or this wistful musing :
" How should I know whether ray love in you shall sink,
O child,
You that are calm and simply tender like the eve round
grassy graves . . .
For who that sets out with a heart that nothing craves,
Who knows what woman shall refresh his lips
With juicy fruits and love's sweet, restful gifts ?
" For see, I think of you, though you are strange to me,
although.
Simple, calm, and tender you are living in my soul.
Although no fears of love seize on your quiet breath to ^Ij
make it race,
Although your gestures do not seek my life :
I think of your grey eye, calm in your white face."
** A Song of Fever " presents no difficulties :
" It is so sad, this raining in the autumn.
This beautiful rain in the autumn, out of doors,
— How heavy all the flowers are in the autumn ;
— And the oM rain running along the panes . . .
352
Poets in Flemish
Gray in the grayness stand the trees and sway,
The trees that are shivering so and rustling tears ;
— And it is the wind, and it so droll a way
Of singing and sighing in the crowns of the trees . . .
" Now I am waiting for the shufQing tread,
I am waiting for the ancient picture of peace,
Old good gray mother comfort round the deep bed
Where the warm fever is dreaming it is alight.
And the thick tears burst through their weight of
lead . . .
" . . . It is so sad that I must be wretched now
— It is so sad this raining in the autumn . . .''
353
CHAPTER XIV
ESSAYISTS, CRITICS, AND SCHOLARS
Of Belgian essayists the prince is of course
Maeterlinck, and it might have been expected that
his success would have produced imitators. This
is not the case, however. The other Belgian
essayists who have any reputation have each a
style of their own, and no motto of the olden
days has been kept more in honour from year to
year than Lemonnier's Soy ons nous. Unfortunately
the essayists are for the most part lost in the sea
of journalism ; but those whose essays have been
collected and issued in book form are tangible per-
sonalities with something new to offer.
The most eminent, after Maeterlinck, is Edmond
Picard. He is an author whom it is very hard to
characterise. He has written enormously, and it
might have been equally pertinent to discuss him
as a dramatist, for his plays {^Jericho, Psuke, Le
Jure, Fatigue de Vivre, Ambidextre Journaliste^
354
Essayists, Critics, and Scholars
La Joyeuse Entree de Charles-le-Temeraire) have
some claim to originality : they aim at creating a
"theatre of ideas." But their discussions are only
another manifestation of the unresting activity —
political, social, philosophic, critical — of a man who
must have his finger in every pie. All he has
written is only interesting as an expression of the
multiple mind of Edmond Picard ; and perhaps
when his personal influence — he is a Maecenas and
great fomenter of literary work — has passed away
his works will fall out of literature. But at all
events he is at the moment one of the first of
Belgians as he is one of the most prominent citizens
of Brussels. His books of travel {^En Congo lie ^ El
Moghreb al Aksa, Monseigneur le Mont Blanc) are
well known, but his most popular work are the
the four volumes of his Scenes de la Vie Judici-
aire {^Paradoxe sur I'Avocat ; La Forge Roussel ;
L' Amiral ; Mon Oncle le Jurisconsulte\ in which,
by examples from everyday life, he interprets the
spirit of law. " Uncle Picard " is, moreover, famous
in Belgium as the apostle of Belgian nationalism.
" Belgian " is for him not a merely geographical
term with no inner meaning, but the name of
355
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something markedly individual among the nations
of the world. Other writers have divided ' ' Belgian"
into two parts; "Flemish" — i.e. Dutch; and
"Walloon" — i.e. French. Picard will have none
of this ; there are, according to him, and there
must be, Belgians ; and he wishes the Belgians to
be conscious and proud of their national character-
istics. His adversaries twit him with having in-
vented rdme beige, the Belgian soul ; but the
war should have proved that he was a far-sighted
patriot.
Another politician who is a stylist of great re-
finement is the socialist leader, Jules Destr^e. He
began with poems in prose, Les Ckimeres (1889),
a book full of the pessimism of the period, full
of disgust with life, a companion volume to Gilkin's
La Nziit. He has written a psychological and
social novel : Le Secret de Frederic Marcinal, and
a study of Belgium's black country : Le Bon-Dieu-
des-Gaulx. Quelqties Histoires de Misericorde are
a collection of socialist tales. Other works of his
are Lettres a Jeanne (1887); Imagerie Japonaise
(1889) ; Journal des Destree (1892). But probably
his best work is contained in Discours Parle-
356
Essayists, Critics, and Scholars
mentaires and in the essays of Semailles (191 3).
Destree is also a distinguished art critic, and
he has done much to popularise art among the
masses.
Like Destree's Les C/mneres^ Arnold Coffin's
books are black with pessimism. His style is
iced with the hatred of the follies of our time.
His fiction [Journal d' Andre, 1885 ; Delzh^e Moris;
Maxine, 1887) is thinly veiled self-analysis, not
radically different from that in the essays of his
Impressions et Sensations (1888).
A writer of rare books with restricted editions,
James Vandrunen is known as a stylist who with
patient words colours exquisite reveries. He is a
writer for the few ; and that is his glory. Elles !
(1887) is an analysis of love which decides against
the vulgarity of the dream's materialisation and
finds its refined and melancholy delights in an
intellectual Mormonism. Les Forets (1888) are
impressionistic essays which describe forests with
a very delicate artistry matched by the form of
the book itself — it is printed in green, blue, red,
silver, pink, and black letters on terra-cotta paper.
Quilleboeuf (1888) is a vieillerie e^i bleu et noir,
357
Contemporary Belgian Literature
a piece of literary tapestry figuring an old rock
n the Seine in Normandy. He has also written
books of travel {Eit Pays Wallon^ 1 900 ; Heures
Africaines, 19 10). A book on Vandrunen has
been written by Auguste Vierset, one of the
brilliant writers of La Wallonie. Another essay-
ist who chisels every sentence is Eugene Baie
{^Epopee Flamande ; Sub Umbra et sjib Rosa) ; it
is perhaps the highest praise to say that he is
hardly read by any except his fellow-craftsmen, to
whom he is a master.
Among the younger essayists the most subtle
is perhaps Charles Bernard, a lawyer and journalist
in 'Antwerp. Leon Souguenet (a Frenchman by
birth, but long resident in Belgium) is a force in
journalism ; he has written literary criticism (Les
Monstres Beiges, 1904), a book on London i^A la
D^couverte de Londres, 1909), and ixiLa Victoire des
Vaincus he has collaborated with Louis Dumont-
Wilden, the most noted of contemporary Belgian
critics. Dumont-Wilden has written tales ( Visages
de Decadence ; Coins de Bruxelles ; Le Coffre aux
Souvenirs) ; a species of guide-book, La Belgique
Illustree ; and much art criticism {Le Portrait en
358
Essayists, Critics, and Scholars
France ; Fernand Khnop^). His Les Soucis des
Derniers Soirs is a series of subtle dialogues in
which philosophic doubt is probed and tortured.
Dumont-Wilden is Edmond Picard's classic anta-
gonist : far from believing in rdme belge^ he is more
French than the French themselves, and his book
of essays L' Esprit Etiropeen has since the out-
break of the war been awarded a large sum of
money by the French Government. It is one of
those books which the war has made more topical ;
and in its way it is a prophecy of the French
victory. The author follows, with shrewd obser-
vation, the growth of "the French spirit" in
Europe, and analyses the causes of its ascendency.
In the Middle Ages, he establishes, there was
something that could be called a European spirit ;
and if the nations of Europe were to be threatened
by Islam or by the yellow races it might appear
again. But this European spirit was held together
by the Roman Catholic religion, and the Reforma-
tion destroyed the unity. Since Luther, Europe
has been nothing more than a collection of states
each of which, indifferent to any moral unity,
strives to impose its domination by conquest. The
359
Contemporary Belgian Literature
birth of the new spirit was in humanism : religion
had been nationaUsed, humanism is international.
The history of Hterature proves that in this new
bond of nations France took the lead, and that all
the nations accepted her hegemony. The empire
of the mind is French ; the empire of taste is
French. French culture is the only higher culture.
The end of the eighteenth century marked the
apogee of the intellectual domination of France in
Europe. Everywhere French culture was super-
posed on national and popular culture. With the
Revolution it seemed to lose its prestige. Europe
had willingly submitted to the ascendency of the
French aristocracy ; it was hostile to the French
democracy. After 1870 it seemed for a time as
if the nations would succeed in escaping from the
fascination of French culture. But they did not
succeed, and their efforts only went to show the
helplessness of rival cultures. Obviously, if there
were no French spirit, there would be no European
spirit, that is to say, there would be no single
culture which could be superposed on the various
national cultures. A business man might object
that Germany and Great Britain are supreme, as
360
Essayists, Critics, and Scholars
far as economic power is concerned ; but political
economy, with its vulgar utilitarianism and its in-
difference for the things of the mind, will never
be able to create a culture. A culture is always
the product of an elite, and gold does not repre-
sent an elite. In reality, the new European spirit
is being created by a cosmopolitan elite composed
of idle people, dilettanti, artists, great lords, and
adventurers. The Jews have imported a new
element into it ; Slavs and Germans are more
numerous in this company than Frenchmen. But
this world none the less expresses itself in French,
and its culture is French. Nietzsche, who in-
vented the " good European," foresaw a species
of individual who should be " essentially super-
national, and who, as a distinctive sign, would
possess, physiologically speaking, a maximum of
faculties and of assimilative force." But Nietzsche
also foresaw reactions in the direction of accentu-
ated national feelincf ; and we have seen such re-
actions in recent years. Even the little countries
are claiming to be themselves ; and in France for
some time we have been witnesses of a sort of
reconstitution of the national feeling whose sudden
361
Contemporary Belgian Literature
explosion is to-day striking all Europe with aston-
ishment. There is a fever in France which shows
that she has, besides the feeling of right and
justice, the passion of war. Certain of the "good
Europeans " are disturbed by this manifestation.
They love France, but a humiliated France, only
on condition that France is i\\& gr^sculus of modern
Europe. But the young generation of Frenchmen
want none of that. They prefer the hatred of
Europe to its scornful affection. France is be-
ginning to realise that she can only count upon
herself.
Another essay of the book discusses " culture."
This is a German word which does not sound well
in French. The Germans invented it because it
was their idea to blend moral influence and political
influence. No one can adopt German culture
without working for the extension of the German
Empire. French civilisation, on the other hand,
remains indifferent to French politics, and that is
why it is European. Just as in former times the
worst enemies of France, Frederick the Great,
Catherine of Russia, were French in spirit, so
to-day the nations that are the political enemies of
362
Essayists, Critics, and Scholars
France speak her language. But German science,
German literature, German art, German civilisation
are all instruments of German politics. On ac-
count of this German attitude it is urgent to
defend this liberty of the mind, this humanity,
this French culture. And for the Gallic race the
best means of defence is to take the offensive.
When France defends herself, she defends Europe !
Much of this seems almost trite to-day ; but
the war has only proved how wideawake this
Belgian writer was to the new French spirit.
Dumont-Wilden illustrates his argument by bril-
liant profiles of men who stood to Europe for the
French spirit — the Prince de Ligne, that Belgian
soldier who fought for Austria and was one of the
finest conversationalists of his day, as he was the
forefather of modern Belgian literature ; Talley-
rand ; Stendhal ; Maurice Barres ; Andre Gide.
Maeterlinck he takes as a representative of the
pseudo-French spirit.
Of the historians of Belgian literature none
has done better work than Francis Nautet, whose
Histoire des Lettres Beiges d Expression Frangaise
was unfortunately never completed. It is a valu-
363
Contemporary Belgian Literature
able book which has become very rare ; and a
reprint is one of the needs of the hour. Nautet
was in the swim of the movement in the 'eighties,
and his enthusiasm, as Verhaeren says, "joyously
harnessed itself in front of the car of the first
harvests of our art." Maurice Gauchez apparently
aims at being the Belgian Remy de Gourmont ;
the three heavy volumes oi Le Livre des Masques
Beiges are modelled on the French Livres des
Masques. The portraits are interesting ; and some-
thing can be gleaned from the criticism, though
one refuses to believe that even a little country like
Belgium, where admission to the literary caf^s and
a nodding acquaintance with the lions seem to entitle
a writer to fame, can produce such multitudinous
hordes of geniuses. Gauchez has also written a
serviceable book on Verhaeren. His poetry {Images
de Hollande, 191 2 ; Pays ages Suisses, 191 3) is
laboured and cold. Eugene Gilbert's criticism is
somewhat biassed by his Roman Catholic stand-
point, but his critical essays [En Marge de quelques
Pages ; France et Belgique) are often illuminating.
In Les Lettres Frangaises dans la Belgique d Au-
J our d' huHi (^06) he has written the handiest manual
364
Essayists, Critics, and Scholars
of modern Belgian letters. Firmin van den Bosch
(now a member of the International Tribunal in
Egypt) is a critic of equal reputation and similar
tendencies [Essais de Critiqzie Catholique ; Les
Let Ires et la Vie; Coups de Plumes; Impressions
de Litterature Contemporaine\
The representative Belgian writer of books of
travel is Jules Leclercq. His latest volume is La
Finlande aux m,ille Lacs (19 14); other books of
his are Les ties Foriunees, Au Pays de Paul et
Virginie, Java ; but he is an inveterate globe-
trotter, and he has described his experiences in
nearly every part of the world.
It would require a whole book to deal with the
art critics of Belgium. There would not be much
risk in assuming that every writer of distinction
has one or more books of art criticism to his
credit. (Maeterlinck is the only exception that
occurs to one.) Of the writers in Flemish, there
is a multitude of books by Max Rooses and Pol
de Mont, some of which have been translated
into English. Of the many who write in French,
Fierens-Gevaert might be singled out for special
mention. He makes art criticism a romance. One
365
Contemporary Belgian Literature
of his best books is La Peinture au Musee de
Bruxelles.
Of the academic scholars there are few who
have an international reputation. The academic
life of Belgium is the least satisfactory aspect of
its intellectual activity. Professors are apparently
appointed because they are orthodox and sup-
porters of the Government ; originality is vetoed.
There are, however, some Belgian scholars of
distinction. In philosophy Georges Dwelshauers
has a considerable reputation, at all events in
Belgium. The two scholars who have first-class
importance as men of letters are the historian
Henri Pirenne and the philologist Maurice Wil-
motte.
Henri Pirenne was born at Verviers, was the
disciple at the University of Liege of Godefroid
Kurth, the author of Les Origines de la Civilisa-
tion Moderne, continued his studies in Paris,
Leipzig, and Berlin, and in 1889 established his
reputation by his specialist work Histoire de la
Constitution de la Ville de Dinant. His Les
Anciennes Democraties des Pays-Bas, dealing with
the establishment of trading centres, is more
366
Essayists, Critics, and Scholars
popular in tone. Appointed Professor of History at
Ghent, he devoted his best energies to the writing
of his Histoire de Belgique (four volumes, 1899-
191 1 ), which was published in German before it
appeared in French. This history has in Belgium
itself had something of the popular success which
that of Macaulay achieved in England. The
Belgians are notoriously poor readers, owing
perhaps to the mediocrity of their educational in-
stitutions — the great Belgian writers have their
public in France and (alas !) in Germany ; but
Pirenne is a Belgian writer who is actually read
at home. The education of an officer is not com-
plete till he has read the national historian ; and
the History is in great demand as a prize in schools
and colleges. Parties go to the work to justify
their theories ; Edmond Picard's party in particular
finds in it the confirmation of the theory that
Belgium exists and that there are and always
have been Belgians. Pirenne himself is free from
party bias ; he is a scientific historian, a Walloon
with a scholar's extensive knowledge of the Flemish
language and of Flemish literature, a cosmopolitan
who can see the part which Germany and France
367
Contemporary Belgian Literature
together have had in the making of Belgium.
He says :
" Like our soil, formed by the alluvia of rivers coming
from France and Germany, our national culture is a sort
of syncretism in which can be found, blended and modified
the one by the other, the genius of two races. Solicited
on all sides, our culture has been broadly receptive. It is
open like our frontiers, and in it are to be found, in its
periods of blossoming, the best elements of Franco-German
civilisation richly and harmoniously assembled. It is in
this admirable receptivity, in this rare aptitude of assimila-
tion, that the originality of Belgium resides. It is this
which has enabled us to render signal services to Europe,
it is to this that our country is indebted for the possession
of a national life common to each of the two races it
contains, without sacrificing the individuality of each."
Pirenne is perhaps the only man of letters in
Belgium who has made a fortune by the sale of
his works among his own countrymen. How
extensive his sales are (for Belgium) may be seen
from the fact that more than seven hundred copies
of the fourth volume of his history were sold
in three days. With the proceeds he has built
a villa in the Ardennes. One may agree with
Firmin van den Bosch, who says : "If, some day,
Belgium were to be erased from the map of the
368
Essayists, Critics, and Scholars
world, Henri Pirenne's History of Belgium would
survive as the immortal and moving Will and
Testament of a little nation which through the
centuries affirmed the obstinate consciousness of
its destiny."
Maurice Wilmotte, a professor at the University
of Liege, a Romance philologist who ranks with
the best of those in Germany and France, and
the editor of La Revue de Belgique, is, politically,
an antagonist of Pirenne. To Pirenne, Belgium
is a blend ; Wilmotte asserts, in his La Culttire
Franfaise en Belgique (191 3) that the two races
have never blended. Each race, according to him,
keeps the originality of its temperament ; and the
task of either is to rise to the great current of
French culture. " The Belgians have no national
literature," he says.
Of one Belgian critic, the Viscount Charles de
Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, it may be said that he
invented a new manner of criticism. He was a
patient collector of first editions and of biblio-
graphical material concerning the lives of great
writers, especially of the writers of the Romantic
School. In La Veritable Histoire de "'Elle et
369 2 A
Contemporary Belgian Literature
Lui'' he throws light on the relations of Alfred
de Musset and Georges Sand. Other works of
his are : L' Histoire des CEuvres de H. de Balzac,
La Genese dun Roman de Balzac, Une Page
Perdue de H. de Balzac, Autour de H. de Balzac,
L' Histoire des CEuvres de Th. Gautier, Un Roman
cT Amour, Les Lundis dun Chercheur, Sainte-
Beuve Inconnu, Trouvailles d'un Bibliophile.
There are several other authors of distinction
who would have been worthy of enumeration in
this chapter if there had been space. There are
individual books of excellent criticism such as
Gustave Abel's Labeur de la Prose, Gerard
Harry's Maurice Maeterlinck (translated by Alfred
Allinson), J&tudes et Portraits Litteraires by
M. J. Carez, Desire Horrent's Ecrivains Beiges
dAujourdhui. Finally, the chief reviews should
be mentioned, for they contain much that has
permanent value, and much that is not reprinted
in book form (for there are so few Belgian pub-
lishers that authors, unless their work attracts
sufficient attention to catch the eye of Paris
publishers, have often to issue their books at
their own expense). The most artistic of the
370
Essayists, Critics, and Scholars
literary magazines is perhaps Le Masque, edited by
Gr^goire Le Roy and Georges Mario w. Its career
has been somewhat erratic, like its contributors, but
that is only a further claim on collectors. Georges
Rency's La Vie Intellectuelle believes devoutly in
rdme beige and the possibility of a national
literature, upholds the theory that those Belgian
authors who migrate to Paris lose caste, and sedu-
lously recommends itself and its ideals to the
present King and Queen, who are said to take an
interest in the national literature, even in so anti-
Catholic a writer as Verhaeren, who is received
at Court. La Vie Intellectuelle is a combative
review, full of zest and go. (One of the contri-
butors to its back pages, by the way, was Emile
Cammaerts, who wrote the monthly letter from
London.) Le Tkyrse, edited by Leopold Rosy,
is rather derisive of the "Belgian" ideals. It
sides with Maurice Wilmotte, and its belief in
the intellectual mediocrity of Belgium is unshak-
able. Wilmotte's Revue de Belgique is learned
and academic. L Art Moderne and La Belgique
Artistique et Litter aire are competent in their
discussion of art and literature, while Durendal is
Z1^
Contemporary Belgian Literature
the organ of the Roman Catholic men of letters.
Of the reviews in Flemish the chief are Van Nu
en Straks and Vlaanderen.
Perhaps one should say of these reviews :
They were. . . . But we may expect them to
arise from their ashes when peace comes, and it
is to be hoped that they will then be admittedly
" Belgian." For, as Stuart Merrill has said, if
Belsfium did not exist, it would have to be in-
vented.
372
BIBLIOGRAPHY (Selected) '
TRANSLATIONS FROM BELGIAN AUTHORS
The Massacre of the Innocents and other Tales by Belgian
Writers. Translated by Edith Wingate Kinder.
Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1895.
Contemporary Belgian Poetry. Selected and Translated
by Jethro Bithell. " Canterbury Poets " Series.
London: Walter Scott Publishing Co., Ltd., 191 1.
Contemporary Flemish Poetry. Selected and Translated
by Jethro Bithell. "Canterbury Poets" Series.
Walter Scott Publishing Co., Ltd., 191 5. (In
Preparation.)
Camille Lemonnier. Birds and Beasts. Translated by
A. R. Allinson ; Illustrated by E. J. Detmold.
London: George Allen & Co., Ltd., 191 1.
Emile Verhaeren. The Dawn {Les Aubes). Translated
by Arthur Symons. " Modern Plays." London :
Duckworth, 1898.
Poems by Emile Verhaeren. Selected and rendered into
English by Alma Strettel. London : John Lane,
1899.
Second Edition, 1915.
* In particular, the numerous translations of Maeterlinck's works
are omitted, as these are well known and easily accessible.
373
Contemporary Belgian Literature
fimile Verhaeren. The Cloister. Translated by Osman
Edwards. London: Constable, 191 5.
Belgium s Agony. Translated by M. T. H. Sadler.
London : Constable, 1 9 1 5 .
The Plays of J^mile Verhaeren. London: Constable, 191 5.
(Contains 77!^ Dawn, translated by Arthur Symons ;
The Cloister, translated by Osman Edwards ; Philip II,
translated by F, S. Flint ; Helen of Sparta, translated
by Jethro Bithell.)
The Love Poems of Emile Verhaeren. Translated by F. S.
Flint. London: Constable, 191 5.
ANTHOLOGIES
Pamasse de la Jeune Belgique. Paris : Leon Vanier, 1887.
Poetes Beiges d' Expression Fran^aise, par Pol de Mont.
Almelo : W. Hilarius, 1899.
Anthologies of the works of Edmond Picard, Camille
Lemonnier, fimile Verhaeren, Georges Rodenbach,
Octave Pirmez, Andre van Hasselt, Jules Destree,
Max Waller, Georges Eekhoud, Charles van Ler-
berghe, Albert Giraud, Iwan Gilkin, Eugene Demolder,
and Fernand Severin are published by the Associa-
tion des Ecrivains Beiges, Brussels.
Les Conteurs de Chez Nous, Brussels : Association des
Ecrivains Beiges.
374
Bibliography
CRITICISM
Bazalgette, Leon. Camille Lemonnier. " Les C6lebrites
d'Aujourd'hui." Paris: F. Sansot & Cie., 1904.
Entile Verhaeren. " Les Celebritds d'Aujourd'hui."
Paris: F. Sansot & Cie., 1907.
Bersaucourt, Albert de. Thomas Braun. Paris : Les
Marches de I'Est, 19 13.
Conference sur Emile Verhaeren. Paris, Jouve,
1908.
Bever, Adolphe van. Maurice Maeterlinck. "Les Cele-
britds d'Aujourd'hui." Paris: Sansot & Cie., 1904.
Bithell, Jethro. Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck.
"Great Writers" Series. London: Walter Scott
(1913)-
Bosch, Firmin van den. Essais de Critique Catholique.
Ghent: 1898.
Impressions de LiMrature Contemporaine. Brussels :
Vromant et Cie., 1905.
Les Lettres et la Vie. Brussels : Albert Dewit,
1912.
Daxhelet, A. Georges Rodenbach. Brussels : O. Scheffens,
1899.
Destree, J. Les Ecrivains Beiges Contemporains. Syllabus
d'un Cours d'Extension Universitaire. Brussels :
1897.
Gauchez, Maurice. Emile Verhaeren. Brussels : Editions
du " Thyrse," 1908.
375
Contemporary Belgian Literature
Gauchez, Maurice. Le Livre des Masques Beiges. Masques
de Franz Gailliard. Preface de J. Ernest Charles.
3 large vols. Paris and Mons : La Societe Nouvelle,
1909, 1910, 191 1.
Gilbert, Eugene. En Marge de Quelques Pages. Paris :
Plon, Nourrit et Cie., 1900,
France et Belgique. Paris : Plon, Nourrit et Cie.,
1905.
Les Lettres Frangat'ses dans la Belgique d'Aujour-
d'hui. Paris : F. Sansot & Cie., 1 906.
Iwan Gilkin. Ghent: I. Vanderpoorten, 1908.
Gilkin, Iwan. Les Origines Estudiantines de la " Jeune
Belgique" a rUniversitede Louvain. Brussels: Editions
de "La Belgique Artistique et Littdraire," 1909.
Guerin, Charles. Georges Rodenbach. Nancy : Crepin
Leblond, 1895.
Harry, Gerard. Maurice Maeterlinck. Brussels : Ch.
Carrington, 1909. {Le Massacre des Innocents,
otherwise only accessible in French in La Pleiade
for May 1886, is reprinted at the end).
A biographical study, with two essays by
M. Maeterlinck. Translated by Alfred Allinson.
London: George Allen & Sons, 19 10.
Heumann, Albert, Emile Verhaeren. Avec onze dessins
par Georges Tribout. Paris : La Belle Edition.
Le Mouvement Litteraire Beige d Expression Frangaise
depuis 1880. Preface par M. Camille Jullian, de
rinstitut. Paris: Mercure de France, 191 3.
Horrent, Desire. Ecrivains Beiges d' Aujourd' hui. Brussels :
Lacomblez, 1904.
376
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tion des ficrivains Beiges, 19 lo.
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377
Contemporary Belgian Literature
Rodrigue, G. M. Fernand Severin. Brussels : Editions
du "Thryse," 1908.
Souguenet, Leon. Les Monstres Beiges. Brussels: 1904.
Thiry, Oscar. La Miraculeuse Aventure des Jeunes
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Verlag, 19 10.
Traduit par Paul Morisse et Henri Chervet.
Paris : Mercure de France, 1 9 1 o.
Translated by Jethro Bithell. London :
Constable, 191 5.
378
NOTE
Some of the verse translations in this volume are
taken from my two books Contemporary Belgian
Poetry and Contemporary Flemish Poetry in the
" Canterbury Poets " Series, and thanks are due to
Messrs. The Walter Scott Publishing Co., Ltd., for
their authorization to quote them. I have also to
thank Mr, Heinemann for his permission to quote a
scene from La Princesse Maleine. The poems from
Georges Rodenbach's Le Regne du Silence are repro-
duced by permission of Monsieur Eugene Fasquelle.
J. B.
379
INDEX
Abel, Gustave, 370
Albert, King, 282, 371
Amiel, H. F.. 28
Amsterdam, 269—270
Anarchism, 96, 99, loi, 106, 107
Andr6, Paul, 306-307
AntSe, 227
Antwerp, 18, 20, 22, 23, 85, 87,
88, 94 fi., 103 fi., 115, 117, 229,
231, 233, 236, 238, 282, 343
Ardennes, the, 306
Arenbergh, iSmile van, 44, 58
Army, the Belgian, 93-94, 105,
282, 307
Artiste, L', 43
Art Moderne, L', 53, 56, 371
Austria, 304, 330, 363
Baie, Eugene, 358
Balzac, Honor6 de, 17, 30, 265,
370
Baudelaire, Charles, 49, 57, 58,
63, 126, 257
Bazalgette, Leon, 66
Beaumont and Fletcher, 104
" Belgian," the term, viii, 55-56,
289, 305, 355-356, 359, 367,
369. 371
Belgique Artistique et Litter aire,
La, ^71
Bemmel, Eugene van, 29
BerUn, 203-204
Bernard, Charles, 358
Bjornsen, Bjornstjerne, 16, 324
Blockx, Jan, 46
Boer War, 269
Bois, Albert du, 307-308
Bonmariage, Sylvain, 309—310
Bosch, Firmin van den, 365,
368
Bouche, Ferdinand, 3 10, 327
Braun, Thomas, 237, 239-242
Bruges, 22, 23, 24, 74, 83, 190 ff.,
197 ff-, 315. 35'>-3Si
Brussels, viii, 29, 40, 52, 56, 61,
63, 74, 84, 89, 109, 119, 130,
190, 203, 205, 212, 249, 287,
293. 299. 308," 328, 347
Bruyn, Edmond de, 238
Buysse, Cyriel, 26, 316, 324 fE.
Byron, Lord, 22, 201, 330
Cammaerts, fimile, 371
Campine, the, 32, 85-87, 89, 98,
99, 106, 279, 280
Carez, M. J., 370
Carlyle, Thomas, 116, 117
Chainaye, Hector, 219
Christianity, 81—82
Conscience, Hendrik, 20 ff., 93,
99
Coppee, Fran9ois, 49
Coster, Charles de, 28 ff., 42, 43,
63, 14s, 309
Courouble, Leopold, 293, 299
Courtrai, 23, 315
Crane, Walter, 175, 176
Croisset, Francis de, viii
Crommelynck, Ferdinand, 285-
287
Davignon, Henri, 305-306
Delacre, Jules, 250-252
Delattre, Louis, 290-293
Delchevalerie, Charles, 303-304
Deman, Edmond, 48
Demblon, Celestin, 159, 219, 222,
304
Demolder, Eugene, 62, 153,2643.,
281, 289, 298
De Quincey, 99
Destree, Jules, 219, 356-357
Devos, Prosper Henri, 308
Dickens, Charles, 96
Dominique, Jean, 208, 210, 249
Drama, see Plays, Belgian
Dumont-Wilden, Louis, 186 ff.,
307, 358 ff.
380
Index
Durendal, 237, 371
Dutch, 13, 16, 18
Dutch poetry, 330
Dwelshauers, Georges, 366
Dyck, Ernest van, 47
Ebers, Georg, 308
Edwards, Osman, 145
Eekhoud, Georges, 17, 22-23, 32,
53. 55. 62, 74, 85 fE., 277, 279,
281, 282, 289, 304, 323
Elskamp, Max, 14, 56, 153, 229 flE.,
266-267
Emerson, R. W., 178
English literature, influence of,
22, 96, 99, 104, 162, 175, 203,
. 304. 330. 333. 335
Etoile Beige, L' , 89, 306
Fierens-Gevaert, 365
Fitzgerald, Edward, 163
Flamingants, 14, 19,21,24,26, 39,
111, 115, 329
Flanders, 12, 31-32, 35, 41, jy S.,
109, 146, 199, 229, 230
Flemings, the, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19,
20, 31 ff., 104, 109 fE., 120, 219,
279 a., 289—290, 305, 314 fE.,
329 fE.
Flemish coast, 80 fE., 100, loi,
146, 265—267
Flemish language, the, 13, 15, 16,
18-20, 55, 87, 112-115
Flemish movement, 19, 22, 26, 45,
46, 219
Floreal, 225, 303
Folksongs, 160, 218, 339
Fonson, Franz, 299
Fontainas, Andre, 54, 56, 176,
245-247
Fransquillons, 14
Fredericq, Paul, 18
Free-thinking party, 19, 26, 39
French culture, 13, 14, 19, 22,
112, 220, 359 flE., 368, 369
French language, the, 12, 15, 19,
50, 55, III, 113 fiE., 329
Furnes, 80 fE., 146
Futurism, 76, 132, 147-148, 183-
184
Galileo, 205
Garnir, Georges, 59, 293
Gauchez, Maurice, 295, 364
Gautier, Theophile, 58, 63, 370
George, Stefan, 203, 225, 330
Gerardy, Paul, viii, 225—227
German culture, 13, 14, 19, 362 flE.,
368
German literature, influence of,
124, 185, 286, 330, 7,iy
Germany, 40, 109-111, 112, 115,
123, 154, 220, 225, 227, 239,
330-331. 367
Gevaert, Fierens, 365
Gezelle, Guido, 16, 23, 25, 26, 42,
43, 315
Ghent, 18, 22, 45, 118, 152, 154,
187, 190, 201, 212, 283, 284,
316, 324, 347, 367
Ghil, Rene, 223
Gilbert, Eugene, 265, 299, 364
Gilkin, Iwan, 14, 44, 47, 49, 53,
55. 56, 73. 124, 257 ff., 356
Gille, Valere, 55, 56, 58-59
Giraud, Albert, 45, 49, 53, 55, 56,
124, 153, 253-256, 309, 329
Glesener, Edmond, 311— 313
Goethe, J. W., 180
Gofhn, Arnold, 159, 357
Goncourt, Edmond de, 1 91
Gorky, Maxime, 107
Gosse, Edmund, 58, 224
Gourmont, Remy de, 364
Greenaway, Kate, 175, 176
Hannon, Theodore, 43, 57, 58,
89
Hardy, Thomas, 86
Harry, Gerard, 370
Hasselt, Andre van, 26—27
Hauptmann, Gerhart, 81, 180
Hellens, Franz, 282-285, 286
Heredia, J. M. de, 58
Herrick, Robert, 24
Herzog, Rudolf, 97
Heyse, Paul, 185
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 330
HoflEmann, E. T. A., 293
Holland, 13, 16, 18, 19, 24, 26,
36, 267 fE.
Horrent, Desire, 370
Hugo, Victor, 26, 65, 148, 201,
304
Humour, 234, 299, 323
Huysmans, Joris Karl, vii
Hymans, Louis, 43
Ibsen, Henrik, 287
Impressionists, 283, 347
381
Contemporary Belgian Literature
Ingoyghem, 26, 318
Isi -Collin, 227-228
Italy, 28, 63, 132, 203-205
Jammes, Francis, 238, 239
Jeune Belgique, La, 52 flf., 60,
152, 153- 307
Jordaens, Jakob, 103, 106, 120
Keats, John, 46
Kermesses, 89, 90, 93, 280
Khnopff, Fernand, 213, 359
Khnopff, Georges, 231
Kinon, Victor, 237-239
Kistemaeckers, Henry, viii
Krains, Hubert, 293-295
Kurth, Godefroid, 366
Lacomblez, Paul, 39
La Fontaine, Jean de, 268
Langendonck, Prosper van, 347-
349
Leblanc, Madame Georgette, 150,
181
Leclercq, Jules, 365
Ledeganck, Karel L., 22, 23,
330
Lemonnier, Camille, 39, 40, 41,
43, 60 fi., 89, 146, 151, 281, 289,
290, 314, 323, 354
Leonard, Franfois, 308
Leopold II, 227
Lerberghe, Charles van, 54, 56,
57. 152, 153. 157. 176. 200 fE.,
212, 218, 223, 229, 249
Le Roy, Gregoire, 54, 152, 200,
212 2., 247, 370
Le Sage, A. R., 312
Lessing, G. E., 268
Liebrecht, Henri, 309
Liege, 15, 21, 219, 227, 304, 311,
366
Ligne, Prince de, 363
Lihencron, Detlev von, 337
Limbosch, Raymond, 263
Livingstone, David, 315
London, vii, 129, 130, 131, 145,
203, 358
Longfellow, H. W., 213, 330
Louvain, 28, 43 ff., 62, 85, 118
Louys, Pierre, 307
Loveling, Rosalie, 324
LoveUng, Virginie, 324
Macaulay, Lord, 367
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 27, 54, 56,
57, 76, 103, 104, 108, III, 112,
114, 115, 124, 150 ff., 192, 200,
201, 202, 205, 212, 265, 276,
283, 286-287, 300, 304, 307,
324. 354, 363, 365, 370
Mahutte, Franz, 53, 307
Malines, 85, 98, 99
Mallarme, Stephane, 153, 161,
191, 222, 245, 351
Mann, Thomas, 97
Marinetti, F. T., 148
Marlow, Georges, 247, 371
Marlowe, Christopher, 104
Masqtie, Le, 215, 371
Maubel, Henri, 53, 54, 55, 300
Maupassant, Guy de, 49, 311,
324
Meunier, Constantin, 71
Merrill, Stuart, 372
Meyere, Victor de, 346-347
Michaelis, Karin, 306
Minne, Georges, 213
Mirbeau, Octave, 1 61-162
Mockel, Albert, 65, 176, 202, 204,
207, 218, 227, 245, 260, 286
Mons, 109
Mont, Pol de, 26, 45-47, 266,
330 ff., 365
Montague, Victor de la, 342-343
Montenaeken, Leon, 59
Montfort, Eugene, 310
Morisseaux, Franfois Charles, 306,
309
Morris, William, 233
Mysticism, 17, 28, 32, 80 fif., 114,
169, 178, 190 ff., 231, 238, 280,
283
Namur, 64
Nautet, Francis, 14, 55, 363-
364
Nietzsche, F. W., 108, 211, 228,
361
Nieuport, 146
Nordau, Max, 162
Nothomb, Pierre, 238, 245
Offel, Edmond van, 343—346
Offel, Horace van, 281, 289
Ombiaux, Maurice des, 295—299,
308
Optimism, 182
Owlglass, Till, 33-34
382
Index
Pan-Germanism, 40, 46, 330
Pantheism, 212, 228
Paris, vii, viii, 26, 49—50, 53, 54,
56, 84, 152, 154, 190, 201, 212,
219, 245
Parnasse de la Jeune Belgique, Le,
54 ff., 201
Parnassians, 53, 54, 56, 253 ff.
Pessimism, 28, 57, 58, 123 ff.,
159. 193. 318, 356, 357
Philip II, 36, 145
Picard, Edmond, 53, 62, 72>, 74.
119,264, 354-356, 359, 367
Pioneer Players, the, 228
Pirenne, Henri, 366—369
Pirmez, Octave, 28
Plays, Belgian, viii, 46, 104, 144-
146, 161 ff., 185-186, 211-212,
228, 277, 282-283, 286, 287-
288, 299-300, 305, 308, 309, 355
PUiade, La, 152, 201, 212
Pol de Mont, 26, 45-47, 266,
330 ff., 365
Potvin, Charies, 29, 43
Pre-RaphaeUtes, the, 175, 176,
245
Prosody, 27, 234
Rabelais, 30, 32, 296
Ramaekers, Georges, 238, 242-245
Rassenfosse, Armand, 222, 228
ReaUsm, 90, 98, 153, 318
Regnier, Henri de, 222
Rembrandt, 50. 114, 144, 271,
272, 278
Renard the Fox, 30, 33
Rency, Georges, 64, 84, 291, 307,
371
Revue de Belgique, La, 371
Rodenbach, Albrecht, 45 ff., 51
Rodenbach, Georges, 51, 53, 124,
153. 159. 190-200
Roidot, Prosper, 252
RoUinat, Maurice, 256
Romains, Jules, 147
Roman CathoUcs, 18, 23, 24, 26,
39, 112, 122-123, 130, 23s,
237 ff., 279, 316, 364-365. 372
Rooses, Max, 365
Rops, FeUcien, 29, 39
Rosny, J. H., viii
Rossetti, D. G., 176, 203
Rosy, Leopold, 305, 371
Roulers, 23, 45, 46
Rousseau, Blanche, 300-303
Rouvez, Auguste, 308
Rubens, Peter Paul, 50, 103, 106,
122
Russia, 108, 324
Ruysbroeck, Jan, 115, 178
Sainte-Beuve, C. a., 26, 370
Satanism, 124, 256 ff.
Satire, 224, 226—227
Scheldt, the, 12, 13, 21, 86, 87,
89, 115, 118, 266, 273
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 124, 286
Semaine des £tudiants, La, 49,
51-52, 55
Severin, Fernand, 56, 57, 253,
260-263
Shakespeare, 104, 162, 163, 181,
304
Shaw, G. B., 96, 98
Shelley, P. B., 201
Sociahsm, 77-79, 95, 144, 184,
281, 312, 327, 356
Sodomy, 99, loi ff.
Souguenet, Leon, viii, 358
Spaak, Paul, 288
Spain, 31, 36-38, 71, 145, 270, 277
Spectateur Catholique, Le, 237,
238, 240
Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, Charles
de, 369
Steen, Jan, 3^, 265, 267, 268, 270,
278
Stendhal, 312, 363
Stiernet, Hubert, 307
Streuvels, Stijn, 26, 33, 310, 314 ff.
Superman, the, 120
Suttner, Baroness von, 66
Symbolism, 91, 140, 169, 170, 290
Symbolists, 54, 55, 56, 153, 175,
190 ff., 270, 286
Symons, Arthur, 144, 227
Swarth, Hel^ne, 59
Swinburne, A. C., 39, 286, 333
Switzerland, viii, 88, loi
Teirlinck, Herman, 328
Teniers, David, 50, 120
Tennyson, Lord, 330, 335
Termonde, 117
Thames, the, 127
Theatre, the, see Plays, Belgian
Thompson, Vance, 53, 90
Thyrse, Le, 208, 305, 306, 371
Type, Le, 52
Till Eulenspiegel , 33-34
383
Contemporary Belgian Literature
Toumai, 190
Travel, books of, 277, 355, 357-
358, 365
Universities, 366
Van de Velde, Henry, viii, 231-
232
Vandervelde, !l6mile, 144, 264
Vandrunen, James, 357—358
Van Nu en Straks, 316, 347, 372
Verhaeren, ^iSmile, 15, 44, 47-48,
49, 50-51, S3, 54, 56, 76. 83,
86, 92, 97, 98, 108 fE., 151, 153,
159, 183, 192, 194, 200, 201,
222, 229, 239, 329, 364, 371
Variant, Ernst, 51
Vermeersch, Gustav, 328
Vermeylen, August, 328, 347, 350-
351
Verriest, Hugo, 23, 25-26, 45
Vers lihres, 55, 56, 253
Vie Intellectuelle, La, 204, 292,
371
Viele-Griffin, Francis, 222
Vierset, Auguste, 219, 358
Villiers de I'lsle-Adam, 152
Villon, Fran9ois, 284
Virrds, Georges, 32, 279-281, 289
Vlaanderen, ^17, 372
Waleffe, Maurice de, 308
Waller, Max, 52, 54, 57, 58, 90
Wallonie, La, 56, 124, 157, 159,
201, 219, 222—223, 225, 303, 304
Walloons, the, 14, 15, x6, 17, 18,
21, 219, 289 ff.
War, 65-66, 144, 362
Wells, H. G, 195, 308
Whitman, Walt, 134, 155
Wiart, Henry Carton de, 74, 304
Wicheler, Fernand, 299
Willems, J. F., 19—20
Wilmotte, Maurice, 366, 369, 371
Woestijne, Karel van de, 316, 347,
348, 351-353
Yeats, W. B., 170
Ypres, 298
Zola, ^vaile, ij, 66, 72, 95, 325
Zweig, Stefan, 127, 129, 135, 140,
142
Zype, Gustave van, 287-288
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