is already the deepest leitmotiv of Verhaeren's work, the key to unlock the gates of it. For the idea is nothing else than the idea of his life, to master all resistance by a boundless love, 'aimer le sort jusqu'en ses rages';[21] 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. Even this cry for madness, no doubt the extreme document of human despair, is an immense yearning for clearness; in this tortured disgust with illness cries a joy in life perhaps else unknown in our days; and the whole conflict, which seems to be a flight from life, is in the last instance an immense heroism for which there is no name. Nietzsche's great saying is here fulfilled: 'For a dionysiac task a hammer's hardness, _the pleasure in destruction itself_, is most decidedly one of the preliminary conditions.'[22] And what at this period of Verhaeren's work appears still to be negative is in the higher sense a preparation for the positive, for the decisive consummation, of the later books. For that reason this crisis and the shaping of it in verse remain an imperishable monument of our contemporary literature, for it is at the same time an eternal monument to the conquest of human suffering by the power of art. Verhaeren's crisis--his exposition, for the sake of the value of life, of his inward struggle--has gone deeper than that of any other poet of our time. To this very day the sufferings of that time are graven, as though by iron wedges, in the furrows of his lofty brow; the recovery of his health and his subsequent robustness have been powerless to efface them. This crisis was a fire without parallel, a flame of passion. Not a single acquisition from the earlier days was rescued from it. Verhaeren's whole former relation to the world has broken down: his Catholic faith, his religion, his feeling for his native province, for the world, for life itself, all is destroyed. And when he builds up his work now, it must perforce be an entirely different one, with a different artistic expression, with different feelings, different knowledge, and different harmonies. This tempest has changed the landscape of his soul, where once the peace of a modest existence had prevailed, into a pathless desert. But this desert with its solitude has space and liberty for the building up of a new, a richer, an infinitely nobler world. FOOTNOTES: [1] 'L'Heure Mauvaise' (_Au Bord de la Route_). [2] 'La Barque' (_Au Bord de la Route_). [3] 'Le Gel' (_Les Soirs_). [4] 'L'Heure Mauvaise' (_Au Bord de la Route_). [5] 'Vers' (_Au Bord de la Route_). [6] 'Mourir' (_Les Soirs_). [7] 'S'amoindrir' (_Les Débâcles_). [8] 'Si Morne' (_Les Débâcles_) [9] 'Le Roc' (_Les Flambeaux Noirs_). [10] 'Insatiablement' (_Les Soirs_). [11] 'Là-bas' (_Au Bord de la Route_). [12] 'Vers le Cloître' (_Les Débâcles_). [13] 'Un Soir' (_Au Bord de la Route_). [14] 'Fleur Fatale' (_Les Débâcles_).