By this sudden interference of the will the physical torture of the nerves becomes a psychic event; the illness of the body encroaches upon the intellect; the neurasthenia becomes a 'déformation morale'; the suffering schism of the poet's ego is of itself subdivided, so to speak, into two elements, one that excites pain and one that suffers pain. The psychic would fain tear itself free from the physical, the soul would fain withdraw from the tortured body: Pour s'en aller vers les lointains et se défaire De soi et des autres, un jour, En un voyage ardent et mol comme l'amour Et légendaire ainsi qu'un départ de galère![11] But the two are relentlessly bound up with each other, no flight is possible, however much disgust drives the poet to rescue at least a part of himself by snatching it into a purer, calmer, and higher state. Never, I believe, has the aversion of a sick man to himself, the will to health of a living man, been more cruel and more grandiose than in this book of a poet's diabolical revolt against himself. His suffering soul is torn into two parts. In a fearful personification the hangman and the condemned criminal wrestle for the mastery. 'Se cravacher dans sa pensée et dans son sang!'[12] and finally, in a paroxysm of fury, 'me cracher moi-même,'[13] these are the horribly shrilling cries of self-hatred and self-disgust. With all the strings of her whipped strength the soul tears to free herself from the rotting and tormented body, and her deepest torture is that this separation is impossible. In this distraction flickers already the first flame of madness. Never--if we except Dostoieffsky--has a poet's scalpel probed the wound of his ego so cruelly and so deeply, never has it gone so dangerously near to the nerve of life. And never perhaps, except in Nietzsche's _Ecce Homo!_ has a poet stepped so close to the edge of the precipice that juts above the abyss of existence, with so clear a consciousness of its vicinity, to feast on the feeling of dizziness and on the danger of death. The fire in Verhaeren's nerves has slowly inflamed his brain. But the other being, the poet in him, had remained watchful, observing the eye of madness slowly, inevitably, and as though magnetically attracted, coming nearer and nearer. 'L'absurdité grandit en moi comme une fleur fatale.'[14] In gentle fear, but at the same time with a secret voluptuous pleasure, he felt the dreaded thing approaching. For long already he had been conscious that this rending of himself had hunted his thinking from the circle of clarity. And in one grandiose poem, in which he sees the corpse of his reason floating down the grey Thames, the sick man describes that tragic foundering: Elle est morte de trop savoir, De trop vouloir sculpter la cause, --------------------------------- Elle est morte, atrocement, D'un savant empoisonnement, Elle est morte aussi d'un délire Vers un absurde et rouge empire.[15]