Some day many people will speak of Verhaeren's art; many love it to-day already. But I believe that nobody will be able to love the poet in the same degree as many to-day love the art of his life, this unique personality, as people love something that can be lost and never restored. If one at first seems to find a discord between the modesty, gentleness, and heartiness of his humanity, and the wildness, heroism, and hardness of his art, one at last discovers their _unity in experience, in feeling_. When one closes the door after a conversation with him, or one of his books after the last page, the prevailing impression is the same: enhanced joy in life, enthusiasm, confidence in the world, an intensified feeling of pleasure which shows life in purer, kindlier, and more magnificent forms. This idealising effect of life goes out equally strong from his person and from his work; every sort of contact with him, with the poet, with the man, seems to enrich life, and teaches one to apply to him in his turn the appreciation he always so readily had for all the gifts of life--gratitude ever renewed and boundlessly intensified in passion. FOOTNOTES: [1] Vielé-Griffin, biographical note to Mockel's _Verhaeren._ THE EUROPEAN IMPORTANCE OF HIS WORK Futur, vous m'exaltez comme autrefois mon Dieu! É.V., 'La Prière.' The last force of everybody, the force which finally decides the effect, which alone and first of all is able to strain his work or his activity to the highest possibility, is the feeling of responsibility. To be responsible, and to feel that one is responsible, is equivalent to looking at one's whole life as a vast debt, which one is bound to strive with all one's strength to pay off; is equivalent to surveying one's momentary task on earth in the whole range of its significance, importance, and periphery, in order then to raise one's own inherent possibilities and capacities to their most complete mastery. For most people this earthly task is outwardly restricted in an office, in a profession, in the fixed round of some activity. With an artist, on the other hand, it is what one might call an infinite dimension which can never be attained; his task is therefore an unlimited, an eternal longing, a longing that never weakens. Since his duty can really only be to express himself with the greatest possible perfection, this responsibility coincides with the demand that he should bring his life, and with his life his talent, to the highest perfection, that he should, in Goethe's sense, 'expand his narrow existence to eternity.' The artist is responsible for his talent, because it is his task to express it. Now the higher the idea of art is understood, the more art feels its task to be the task of bringing the life of the universe into harmony, so much the more must the feeling of responsibility be intensified in a creative mind.