I had really gone to Brussels on purpose to meet Verhaeren, but Camille Lemonnier, the fine and now unjustly forgotten author of Un Mâle, one of whose novels I had myself translated into German, told me regretfully that Verhaeren seldom left the little village where he lived to come to Brussels, and was not in that city now. To make up for my disappointment, he gave me valuable introductions to other Belgian artists. So I saw the old master Constantin Meunier, the greatest sculptor of the time to depict labour and a heroic labourer in his own field, and after him van der Stappen,[4] whose name is now almost forgotten in the history of art. But what a friendly man that small, chubby-cheeked Fleming was, and how warmly he and his tall, broad, cheerful Dutch wife welcomed their young visitor. He showed me his work, and we talked about art and literature for a long time that bright morning. The couple’s kindness soon banished any awkwardness on my part. I told them frankly how disappointed I had been in Brussels to miss seeing the very man for whose sake I had really come to Belgium, Emile Verhaeren.
Had I said too much? Had I said something silly? I noticed both van der Stappen and his wife smiling slightly and glancing surreptitiously at each other. I felt that my words had set off some secret understanding between them. Feeling embarrassed, I said I must be going, but they wouldn’t hear of it, and insisted on my staying to lunch. Once again that odd smile passed between their eyes. I felt that if there was some kind of secret here, then it was a friendly one, and was happy to abandon my original plan of going on to Waterloo.
It was soon lunchtime, we were already in the dining room—on the ground floor, as in all Belgian houses—where you looked out on the street through stained-glass panes, when suddenly a shadowy figure stopped, sharply outlined, on the other side of the window. Knuckles tapped on the stained glass, and the doorbell rang a loud peal. “Le voilà,” said Mme van der Stappen, getting to her feet, and in he came with a strong, heavy tread. It was Verhaeren himself. I recognised the face that had long been familiar to me from his pictures at first glance. Verhaeren was their guest to lunch today, as he very often was, and when they heard that I had been looking for him in vain they had agreed, in that quick exchange of glances, not to tell me but to let his arrival take me by surprise. And now there he was before me, smiling at the success of their trick when he heard about it. For the first time I felt the firm grip of his sinewy hand, for the first time I saw his clear and kindly gaze. He came—as always—into the house as if full of vigour and enthusiasm. Even as he ate heartily, he kept talking. He had been to see friends, he told us, they had gone to a gallery, he still felt inspired by that visit. This was his usual manner of arrival, his state of mind intensified by chance experiences anywhere and everywhere, and this enthusiasm was his established habit. Like a flame, it leapt again and again from his lips, and he was master of the art of emphasising his words with graphic gestures. With the first thing he said, he reached into you because he was perfectly open, accessible to every newcomer, rejecting nothing, ready for everyone. He sent his whole being, you might say, out to meet you again and again, and I saw him make that overwhelming, stormy impression on many other people after experiencing it for myself on that first meeting. He knew nothing about me, but he already trusted me just because he had heard that I appreciated his works.
After lunch and that first delightful surprise came a second. Van der Stappen, who had long been meaning to fulfil an old wish of his own and Verhaeren’s, had been working for days on a bust of the poet, and today was to be the last sitting. My presence, said van der Stappen, was a very lucky chance, because he positively needed someone to talk to Verhaeren—who was only too inclined to fidget—while he sat for the sculptor so that his face would be animated as he talked and listened. And so I looked deeply into his face for two hours, that unforgettable face with its high forehead, ploughed deeply by the wrinkled furrows of his bad years, his brown, rust-coloured hair falling over it, the hard, stern structure of his features surrounded by brownish weather-beaten skin, his chin jutting like a rock and above the narrow lips, large and lavish, his drooping moustache in the Vercingetorix style. All his nervousness was in his hands—those lean, firm, fine and yet strong hands where the veins throbbed strongly under the thin skin. The whole weight of his will was expressed in his broad, rustic shoulders; the intelligent, bony head almost seemed too small for them. Only when he was moving did you see his strength. If I look at the bust of him now—and van der Stappen never did anything better than the work of that day—I know how true to life it is, and how fully it catches the essence of the man. It is documentary evidence of literary stature, a monument to unchanging power.
In those three hours I learnt to love the man as I have loved him all the rest of my life. There was a confidence in him that did not for a moment seem self-satisfied. He did not mind about money; he would rather live in the country than write a line meant only for the day and the hour. He did not mind about success either, did not try to increase it by granting concessions or doing favours or showing cameraderie—his friends of the same cast of mind were enough for him. He was even independent of the temptation so dangerous to a famous man when fame at last came to him at the zenith of his life. He remained open in every sense, hampered by no inhibitions, confused by no vanity, a free and happy man, easily giving vent to every enthusiasm. When you were with him, you felt inspired in your own will to live.
So there he was in the flesh before me, young as I then was—a poet such as I had hoped to find him, exactly as I had dreamt of him. And even in that first hour of our personal acquaintance my decision was taken; I would put myself at the service of this man and his work. It was a bold decision, for this hymnodist of Europe was little known at the time in Europe itself, and I knew in advance that translating his monumental body of poetry and his three-verse dramas would keep me from writing my own work for two or three years. But as I determined to devote all my power, time and passion to someone else’s work, I was giving myself the best thing imaginable—a moral mission. My vague seeking, my own attempts, now had a point. And if I am asked today to advise a young writer who has not yet made up his mind what way to go, I would try to persuade him to devote himself first to the work of someone greater, interpreting or translating him. If you are a beginner there is more security in such self-sacrifice than in your own creativity, and nothing that you ever do with all your heart is done in vain.
In the two years that I spent almost exclusively in translating the poetry of Verhaeren and preparing to write a biography of him, I travelled a good deal at various times, sometimes to give public lectures. And I had already received unexpected thanks for my apparently thankless devotion to Verhaeren’s work; his friends abroad noticed me, and soon became my friends too. One day, for instance, the delightful Swede Ellen Key came to see me—a woman who, with extraordinary courage in those still blind and backward times, was fighting for the emancipation of women, and in her book The Century of the Child pointed a warning finger, long before Freud, at the mental vulnerability of young people. Through her, I was introduced to the poetic circle in Italy of Giovanni Cena, and made an important friend in the Norwegian Johan Bojer. Georg Brandes, international master of the history of literature, took an interest in me, and thanks to my promotion of it the name of Verhaeren began to be better known in Germany than in his native land. Kainz, that great actor, and Moissi gave public recitations of his poems in my translation. Max Reinhardt produced Verhaeren’s Les Moines—The Monks—on the German stage. I had good reason to feel pleased.