Camille Lemonnier, the master of Verhaeren's youth, the friend of his prime, at the banquet offered by Belgium to the poet of _Toute la Flandre,_ spoke of their thirty years' friendship, and in a powerful speech expressed a striking idea. 'The time will come,' he said, 'when a man, if he is to appear with any credit before his fellow-men, will have to prove that he has been a man himself'; and then he praised Verhaeren, showing how completely his friend fulfilled this demand of the future, how wholly he had been a man, with the perfection of a great work of art. For whoever would create a great work of art, must himself be a work of art. Whoever would influence his contemporaries, not only as an artist, but morally as well, whoever would shape and raise our life to his own pattern, gives us the right to ask what manner of life his own has been, what the art of his life has been. In Verhaeren's case, there stands behind the poetic work of art the incomparable masterpiece of a great life, a wonderful, victorious battle for this art. For only a living humanity that had achieved harmony, not supple, ingenious intellectuality, could have arrived at such insight into knowledge. Verhaeren was not intrinsically a harmonious nature; he had, therefore, to make a double effort to transform the chaos of his feeling into a world. He was a restless and an intemperate man who had to tame himself; all the germs of dissipation and debauch were in his nature, all the possibilities of prodigality and self-destruction. Only a life secure in its aims, supported on a strong foundation, could force harmony from the conflicting inclinations he possessed; only a great humanity could compress such heterogeneous forces to one force. At the end and at the beginning of Verhaeren's works, at the end and at the beginning of his life, stands the same great soundness of health. The boy grew out of the healthy Flemish fields and was from his birth gifted with all the advantages of a robust race--and above all with passion. In the years of his youth he gave free rein to this passion for intemperance; he raged himself out in all directions; was intemperate in study, in drinking, in company, in his sexual life--he was intemperate in his art. He strained his strength to its uttermost limit, but he pulled himself together at the last moment, and returned to himself and the health that was his birthright. His harmony of to-day is not a gift of fate, but a prize won from life. At the critical moment Verhaeren had the power to turn round, in order, like Antæus, to recover his strength in the well of rejuvenescence of his native province and in the calm of family life.