Something may now be said as to the means with which Verhaeren attains
his vision, with which he seeks to represent the inner passionateness of
things, with which he evokes enthusiasm. Let us first of all try to
establish whether Verhaeren is what is called a master of language.
Verhaeren's command of language is not by any means unlimited. Both in
his words and in his rhymes there is constant repetition which sometimes
borders on monotony; but on the other hand there is a strangeness, a
newness, an unexpectedness of wording which is almost unexampled in
French lyric poetry. An enrichment of the language, however, does not
proceed from neologisms alone; a word may become alive by the
unexpectedness of a new application, by a transposition of the meaning,
as Rainer Maria Rilke, for instance, has often done in the German lyric.
To redeem 'die armen Worte, die im Alltag darben,'[2] and consecrate
them anew to poetry, is perhaps a higher merit than creating new words.
Now Verhaeren has above all, by the Flemish sense of language which he
inherited, imported a certain Belgian timbre into French lyric poetry.
Personally, it is true, he is almost ignorant of Flemish; nevertheless,
by the vague music familiar to him from his childhood's days, by a
certain guttural tone, he has imported a nuance which is perhaps less?
perceptible to the foreigner than to a Frenchman. At this point I should
like to call Maurice Gauchez as a witness and borrow the most salient
examples from his extraordinarily interesting monograph. Among the
neologisms for which Gauchez suggests a foreign origin he quotes the
following: les baisers rouges, les plumes majuscules, les malades
hiératiques, la statue textuelle, les automnes prismatiques, le soir
tourbillonaire, les solitudes océans, le ciel dédalien, le cœur
myriadaire de la foule, les automnes apostumes, les vents vermeils, les
navires cavalcadeurs, les gloires médusaires. And he rightly points out
how much certain of Verhaeren's verbs might enrich the French language:
enturquoiser, rauquer, vacarmer, béquiller, s'enténébrer, se futiliser,
se mesquiniser, larmer. But I for my part cannot look upon the
enrichment here accruing from racial instinct as the essential thing in
his verbal art: it only gives it a local colour, without really
explaining what is astonishingly modern in his diction. Verhaeren has
been a great creator of new things for the French lyric, above all by
his extension of its range of subjects, by his renewal of poetic
reality, by recruiting new forces for poetry in the domain of technical
science. _The great part of the new blood for his language came not so
much from Flemish as from science_. A man who writes poems on the
Exchange, on the theatre, on science, who sings factories and railway
stations, cannot ignore their terminology. He must borrow certain
technical expressions from the vocabulary of science, certain
pathological terms from medicine; he must extend the glossary of the
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