In the work of Verhaeren, the modern industrial city, with its spreading tentacles of devouring grime and squalor, its clanging factories, its teeming bazaars and warehouses, and all its thronging human population, is taken up triumphantly into poetry.  Verhaeren is the poet of ‘tumultuous forces’, whether they appear in the roar and clash of ’that furnace we call existence’, or in the heroic struggles of the Flemish nation for freedom.  And he exhibits these surging forces in a style itself full of tumultuous power, Germanic rather than French in its violent and stormy splendour, and using the chartered licence of the French ‘free verse’ itself with more emphasis than subtlety.

4. The Cult of Force

In Verhaeren, indeed, we are conscious of passing into the presence of power more elemental and unrestrained than the civil refinement of our Georgians, at their wildest, allows us to suspect.  The tragic and heroic history of his people, and their robust art, the art of Rembrandt, and of Teniers, vibrates in the Flemish poet.  He has much of the temperament of Nietzsche, and if not evidently swayed by his ideas, or even aware of them, and with a generous faith in humanity which Nietzsche never knew, he thinks and imagines with a kindred joy in violence: 

    ’I love man and the world, and I adore the force
     Which my force gives and takes from man and the universe.’

And it is no considerable step from him to the poets who in this third phase of our period have unequivocally exulted in power and burnt incense or offered sacrifice before the altar of the strong man.  The joy in creation which, we saw, gives its romance to so much of the realism of our time, now appears accentuated in the fiercer romance of conflict and overthrow.  Thanks largely to Nietzsche, this romance acquired the status of an authoritative philosophy—­even, in his own country, that of an ethical orthodoxy.

The German people was doubtless less deeply and universally imbued with this faith than our war-prejudice assumes.  But phenomena such as the enormous success of a cheap exposition of it, Rembrandt als Erzieher (1890) by a fervent Bismarckian, and of the comic journal Simplicissimus (founded 1895) devoted to systematic ridicule of the old-fashioned German virtues of tenderness and sympathy, indicated a current of formidable power and compass, which was soon to master all the other affluents of the national stream.

But older, and in part foreign, influences concurred to colour and qualify, while they sustained, the Nietzschean influence,—­the daemonic power of Carlyle, the iron intensity and masterful reticence of Ibsen.  This was the case especially, as is well known, in the drama.  Gerhardt Hauptmann, who painted the tragedy of the self-emancipated superman,—­as Mr. Shaw about the same time showed us his self-achieved apotheosis,—­was no doubt the most commanding (as Mr. Shaw was the most original) figure in the European drama of the early century.