How differently is Verhaeren conceived in the Teutonic mind! The Austrian poet, Stefan Zweig,[2] has written an interesting book on the Belgian, an elaborate study of his personality and works, which substantiates my claim that people speak much more successfully about themselves than about others. Herr Zweig appreciates Verhaeren highly (and let me tell you sub rosa, my friend, that his general estimation of the Poet is but a pale echoing of the brilliant Léon Bazalgette in his book _Les célébrités d’aujourd hui_); he considers him the greatest poet living, he names him _the_ European poet in the same sense as Whitman is _the_ American poet. Soon, however, he falls into the Teutonic fallacy of preciseness-by-all-means, of violently accurate definitions which _must_ suit the facts, else—_desto schlimmer für die Fakten_. He wishes us to believe with him that Verhaeren is the poet of socialism, of democracy, that he has proclaimed his great Aye to contemporary life, with its greed, factories, and smoke; that a poet who wants “to be necessary to our time must feel that everything in this time is necessary, and therefore beautiful.” Thus with the German skill in fencing with Hegelian dialectics the critic endeavors to persuade us that Verhaeren must needs love modern life in all its aspects, that he is enraptured with all manifestations of contemporary spirit, from the urban “multitude” to that most hideous platitude, the Eiffel Tower. Mr. Zweig has utterly failed to see that Verhaeren does not feel the present, the contemporary, that he lives spiritually in the past and in the future, while the fleeting present is for him but a _symbol_, an alphabet of monstrous hieroglyphs, the mysteries of which he interprets prophetically. Has he not expressed his endless despair and maddening grief over the tragedy of the all-absorbing monster-city? Has the world not been to him a Golgotha, “an eternal illusion”? To Mr. Zweig Verhaeren is a happy, satisfied lover of all and everything. The poet and the painter, Maximilian Voloshin (one of whose poems appeared in THE LITTLE REVIEW), relates his impression of the Belgian: “When you see him for the first time you notice before anything else a deep furrow cleaving his brow, resembling two wide-spread wings of a flying bird. This furrow is himself. In it is his sorrow, his flight.” I wonder whether Mr. Zweig has observed the furrow; or did he deliberately overlook it in order to save his “structure”? [2] _Emile Verhaeren_, by Stefan Zweig. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.]