Verhaeren was one of those men who feel all their life long “l’envie” (to use his own admirably expressive phrase), “l’envie de tailler en drapeaux l’étoffe de la vie.” The stuff of life can be put to worse uses. To cut it into flags is, on the whole, more admirable than to cut it, shall we say, into cerecloths, or money-bags, or Parisian underclothing. A flag is a brave, a cheerful and a noble object. These are qualities for which we are prepared to forgive the flag its over-emphasis, its lack of subtlety, its touch of childishness. One can think of a number of writers who have marched through literary history like an army with banners. There was Victor Hugo, for example—one of Verhaeren’s admired masters. There was Balzac, to whose views of life Verhaeren’s was, in some points, curiously akin. Among the minor makers of oriflammes there is our own Mr. Chesterton, with his heroic air of being for ever on the point of setting out on a crusade, glorious with bunting and mounted on a rocking-horse. The flag-maker is a man of energy and 156strong vitality. He likes to imagine that all that surrounds him is as large, as full of sap and as vigorous as he feels himself to be. He pictures the world as a place where the colours are strong and brightly contrasted, where a vigorous chiaroscuro leaves no doubt as to the true nature of light and darkness, and where all life pulsates, quivering and taut, like a banner in the wind. From the first we find in Verhaeren all the characteristics of the tailor of banners. In his earliest book of verse, Les Flamands, we see him already delighting in such lines as
Leurs deux poings monstrueux pataugeaient dans la pate.
Already too we find him making copious use—or was it abuse?—as Victor Hugo had done before him, of words like “vaste,” “énorme,” “infini,” “infiniment,” “infinité,” “univers.” Thus, in “L’Ame de la Ville,” he talks of an “énorme” viaduct, an “immense” train, a “monstrueux” sun, even of the “énorme” atmosphere. For Verhaeren all roads lead to the infinite, wherever and whatever that may be.
Les grand’routes tracent des croix
A l’infini, à travers bois;
Les grand’routes tracent des croix lointaines
A l’infini, à travers plaines.
157Infinity is one of those notions which are not to be lightly played with. The makers of flags like it because it can be contrasted so effectively with the microscopic finitude of man. Writers like Hugo and Verhaeren talk so often and so easily about infinity that the idea ceases in their poetry to have any meaning at all.
I have said that, in certain respects, Verhaeren, in his view of life, is not unlike Balzac. This resemblance is most marked in some of the poems of his middle period, especially those in which he deals with aspects of contemporary life. Les Villes tentaculaires contains poems which are wholly Balzacian in conception. Take, for example, Verhaeren’s rhapsody on the Stock Exchange:
Une fureur réenflammée
Au mirage............