Here is the very feel of a storm:
Un poing d'effroi toni les villages;
Les hauts chochers, dans les lointains,
Envoient l'écho de leurs tocsins
Bondir de plage en plage.
Such a storm may well typify all of Verhaeren's work before the war—that storm which was to lick up cities and meadows and leave, in him, "the finest flower of a ruined country."
Albert Samain is like the slow trickle of water from a faucet in comparison with the giant billow preceding him in the book. Yet the lover of biography will delight in the story of this lonely, sensitive life as revealed by the tender touch of the author. She calls him a minor poet, and says of his work: "It is chamber-music, as tenuous and plaintive as that played by old eighteenth-century orchestras." It is full of charm, but too often it lacks the bold stroke of origination; Elle écoute la vie—au loin—comme la mer has a familiar flavor. The dedication of Au Jardin de l'Infante is beautiful, yet Cautier might have written it. He too uses the rhyme, even extols it in his verse. And isn't this lovely?
De vers silencieux, et sans rythme et sans trame,
Où la rime sans bruit glisse comme one rame.
I forget who has said: "L'âme n'existe par sour ellemême, ou du moins on ne peut la connaître, mais elle reflète celles qui s'y mirent." Here we have Remy de Gourmont. He said: "The sole excuse which a man can have for writing is to write down himself, to unveil for others the sort of world which mirrors itself in his individual glass." The
[204]
