un seul personnage à faces multiples et antinomiques.' For, like the images of Indian gods, they have a hundred arms, but their cry is in unison; their will is simple; their energy is uniform; one and the same is their heart, 'le cœur myriadaire et rouge de la foule.'[2] A hundred years of life in communion, a hundred years of distress in common, of hope in common, have welded them together into one unity, into one new feeling. Sleepless and restless like a dangerous animal lies the multitude in the monster cities; all the passions of individual man are hers, vanity, hunger, anger; she has all vices and crimes in common with her smallest member, man; only, everything in her is intensified to unknown magnitudes. Everything in her passions is stupendously superdimensional, beyond calculation, and, in a new sense, divine. For just as the gods of old were formed after the image of man, save that they represented man's strength and intelligence magnified to the hundredth degree, the multitude is the synthesis of individual forces, the most prolific accumulation of passion. With the multitude the individual comes into being, and without her he perishes. Consciously or unconsciously, every man is subject to her power. For the modern man is no longer free from the influence of others, as the tiller of the fields was in olden days, or the shepherd, or the hunter, each of whom was dependent only on the anger of heaven, the whims of the earth, on weather and hailstorms, on chance, which he clad in the august image of his god. The modern man is in all his feelings determined by the world around him, set in his place in the ranks, and moved with the ranks like a shuttle to and fro; he is a dependent in his instincts. We all feel socially; we cannot think away the others who are round us and in front of us any more than we can think away the air that nourishes us. We can flee from them, but we cannot flee away from what has penetrated us from them. For the multitude rules us like a force of nature, nourishes us with its feelings. The unsocial man is a fiction. Just as little as in a great city one can shut off one's room entirely from the noise, the rhythm of the street, just so little can one think isolatedly, just so little can the soul keep itself at a distance from the great intellectual excitements of the multitude. Verhaeren himself made the attempt in the days when he wrote the verses: Mon rêve, enfermons-nous dans ces choses lointaines Comme en de tragiques tombeaux.[3]