This hardness and brutality, these abrupt transitions, constitute the individuality of Verhaeren's poetry. At bottom it is nothing else than an accentuated masculinity. The voice, the music, is guttural, deep, raucous, masculine; the body of his poem has, like a man's body, the beautiful movement of strength, but in repose gestures that are often hard and which only in passion regain their compelling beauty. Whereas French lyric poetry, so to speak, had imitated the female body, the delicate grace of its soft yielding lines; whereas its first concern was harmony; Verhaeren's poem strove only for the rhythm of movement, only for the proud and vigorously ringing stride of a man, his leaping and running, the fighting display of his strength. This is not the only reason why the French have so long repudiated him. For where we delight in an echo from the German in his language, they feel the harshness of the Teutonic undertone; where we find a consonance with the German ballad, a re-birth of the German ballad as though it were awakening from the dreams of childhood, they see an opposition to the native tradition. And in fact, the farther Verhaeren has proceeded in his development, both in his personality and in his verse, the more the French varnish has peeled off his Teutonic perception. It was only in the time of his first dependence on tradition that his poetry was hardly to be distinguished from that of other writers in French. The farther he receded from the French standpoint, the more he unconsciously approached German art. To-day, perhaps, a return to classicism is perceptible in his poetry. The neologisms are not so audacious; the images are more schematic; the whole poem is calmer and more clarified. This, however, is by no means a cowardly compromise with a shattered tradition, no repentant return to the fold; it is the same phenomenon we meet in a similar manner in the late poems of Goethe, Schiller, Hugo, and Swinburne; the effect of the cooling of the blood in age; the yielding of sensuous perception to intellectual ideas. The victor has lost the fighter's brutality; the man in his maturity no longer needs revolt but a conception of the world--harmony. Here, as in Verhaeren's whole evolution, his verse is the most delicately sensitive indicator of the psychic revulsion, the perfect proof of a poetic and organic development which is really inward and dependent only on the laws of his blood. FOOTNOTES: [1] 'L'Heure Mauvaise' (_Au Bord de la Route_). [2] 'Poor words a-hungered in the working day.'--Rainer Maria Rilke, _Mir sur Feier._ [3] Albert Mockel, _Émile Verhaeren_. [4] _Ibid._ (_Ibid._). VERHAEREN'S DRAMA Toute la vie est dans l'essor. É.V., _Les Forces Tumultueuses._