And here are seen the dangers of pathos. The first danger, that into which, for instance, Victor Hugo fell, was the emptiness, the hollowness of the feeling, the covering over of a void by a mighty gesture; enthusiasm resulting from a deliberate method, and not forced by inner feeling. Empty phrasing is and remains the first danger of the pathetic poem. The triteness of words 'plus sonores que solides'[4] is the second. Here, however, in this new pathos, there is another and a new peril, that of the over-heating of feeling, that of excessive, unhealthy exaltation, which must then of necessity yield to exhaustion. No man can be in a constant fever of excitement, in an unremitting state of exaltation. And in these poems there is the will to unceasing ecstasy. By the pathos, too, the purely lyrical values of the poem often fall into danger. The will to be clear often forces the poet to a triteness of wording; the terseness necessitates frequent repetition; the impulse to build up an organic ecstasy often leads to excessive length. Owing to its glaring, clear colours the language loses that mystical element of lyric verse--the incommensurable, as Goethe called it--that magic hint of a secret thing fleeing from the crowd and the light of day. But at the same time this pathos signifies an immense enrichment of lyric resources, a transvaluation of the word, by the very fact that it is not exclusively intended for print but for declamation as well. The pathetic poem is not, like the lyric poem, a crystallised impression; it is not at the same time question and answer to itself; it is the expectation of an answer. The great pathos, therefore, grows with success, and involuntarily mingles in the poem the craving and the answer of the poet's time. The voice of the poet is always as strong as the call that goes out to him. Verhaeren found this new pathos in the course of his development, because he no longer felt the voice of the crowd, of cities, and of all the new things as a hindrance to his lyric poetry, but as a challenge, as a rhetorical exhortation. And the more the world around us becomes ponderous, grandiose, and passionate--the more it becomes heroic in the concentration of its strength (heroic in that new strength that Emerson preached)--so much the more, too, must lyric poetry in the new sense, perhaps in Verhaeren's sense, be pathetic. Gigantic impressions cannot be forced into petty impressions; vast conceptions cannot be split up into mean fragments; a loud appeal needs a loud answer. All art is more dependent than we are aware on its epoch. The same secret dependence between demand and production seems to exist in the sphere of art as exists in commerce. Laws that escape our knowledge and cannot be prisoned in formulae can sometimes be glimpsed, hazy as a presentiment, in fugitive intuition. FOOTNOTES: [1] 'Le Tribun' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_). [2] Albert de Bersaucourt, _Conférence sur Emile Verhaeren._