August 31, 1916 
LAND & WATER 
17 
Verhaeren and His Lesson 
By J. W. Scott 
"^"M" "THEN we speak of Belgium's greatest living 
m ^L i wi'iter, the name which at onre springs to the 
^'^ minds of those who know the field is Emil 
T ▼ Verhaeren. His title to fame, we may say, is 
this : that he has tried to make his generation fall in 
love with the modern world. And his position is interest- 
ing because it shows a way of meeting a problem which 
presses very urgently upon us at the present time. 
The problem is that of mechanism — of Prussianism, if 
you wjll, in its spiritual shape. To many thinking minds 
this is the most serious thing that the past two years have 
brought before us. There are those in our midst who are 
more troubled about the Prussianism which is in our- 
selves, and which is all about us, than they are about 
Germany. They feel that Prussianism is a side of modern 
life, that it is the source of all the unloveliness of modern 
life, and that it is perhaps ineradicable. Prussianism to 
them is not a thing of flesh and blood. It is a spirit ; 
and a spirit which seems to have settled over all the 
modern world. They would call it the spirit of the 
machine. 
Where do we find this spirit ? Spirit-like it is apt to 
elude us. It is very apt itself to remain unseen and to be 
visible only in its effects. Yet it is not very hard to detect 
if we know what to look for. Wherever you have irre- 
sponsiveness, inadaptability to new circumstances, there 
you have the spirit of machinery. A machine is a 
structure which works in just one wa3^ takes its own 
time, and follows a self-repeating law. This spirit of the 
machine has invaded our life. 
Political Mechanism 
Many things, we make bold to say, are mechanical 
besides the Prussian mind. Our own political life is 
mechanical. Parliaments arc machines in that they do 
not react to the circumstances they are addressing. 
People urge a measure of reform. After incalculable 
speaking, writing and agitating. Parliament at length 
takes it up, debates about it for a quarter of a century, 
and passes it into law only when the situation which 
called it forth is all changed and the need for it is gone. 
The trouble is that you are dealing with a machine, and 
you have to wait on it working, even if the measure is 
meanwhile becoming useless. It would not, be so bad 
if the thing would even stop, but it won't. It has been 
adjusted to this move, and on it must go, no hurry and 
no pause. 
All modern life is shot through with organisations 
which work in this way. The German military system 
is there ; it is a machine all furbished up for action ; 
turn the button which starts it, and thereafter all control 
is taken out of your hands. It starts itself, it starts all 
the other machines, and nothing can stop them except 
a breakdown somewhere. 
The modern world is full of things which, once started, 
go of themselves. A trades-union leader decides upon a 
strike. He cannot stop it next day if he likes, any more 
than the Kaiser could have stopped the German war- 
machine the day after he let it loose. He can stop the 
strike when it is ready to be stopped by such as he, and 
not an hour sooner. It is the same story everywhere. 
There is freedom of action at the beginning, but none 
is to be seen at the end. As a free individual you make 
the first little move ; you touch the spring ; but after 
that things take their own course, deaf to all vows, 
supplications and prayers. 
We have had many counsellors who have urged us to 
fight this spirit of machinery, in the name of all that we 
hold spiritually dear. What harm is there in it ? Well, 
at any rate, it is inimical to beauty. Being the death 
of freedom it is the death of art also. For the soul of art 
is freedom. But surely of all attitudes to this pheno- 
menon, that of Verhaeren is the most courageous and 
inspiriting. For his plan is nothing less than this : To 
confront the monster, draw the mask from off his face 
and show him to have been no such monster after all. 
Verhaeren would compel the machinery-ridden life of 
the modern world to supply the very beauty it would 
stamp out. His attitude is a quiet and firm reversal of 
the method of most champions of the spirit of beauty. 
Go up to modern life boldly, he says in effect, and look 
at the play of its forces and the sweep of its movements. 
You will see much beauty, of the pale pathetic anti- 
quarian type, being trampled and' crushed ; but also 
you will see all the sublimities. There is a strange and 
persuasive note of hope here whose force, if we pause for 
a moment, we shall feel'; a hope for the modern world on 
its artistic side, and not on that side only. 
The Beauty of Individualism 
The machinery in our midst is undoubtedly fitted to 
deprive us of something ; of a beauty which we want to 
preserve ; because at bottom it is more than beauty, it is 
life itself. Beauty is not a conscious necessity of life to 
everybody. Not all men are possessed, like Verhaeren, 
of the pure artistic spirit which lives on it. Even if 
beauty were threatened with extinction in their time, 
few perhaps would feel as he did that their very soul was 
like to perish ; and practically none would reach the 
point that he reached, that of being shattered in their 
phj'sical frame and literally brought nigh unto death. 
But there is a kind- of beauty, the loss of which would 
be a calamity to all ; and the machinery in our midst is 
calculated to deprive us of it. 
We refer to that accidental, undesigned and wholly 
unconscious beauty which Nature has. It enters into many 
of the objects made by man. It is the source of the charm 
of old things produced by the hand before machinery 
was known. An old cathedral has this undesigned 
beauty. It is naive before us. It is like nature in that 
it does not mean to be beautiful, any more than a moun- 
tain or a crag does. A beauty of exactly this sort — • 
visible to those who had the eye to see it, but felt even 
by those who did not sec — resided long ago in the com- 
monest things made by hand in an environment which 
was machinery-free. There was an element of beauty 
and of interest in hand-made tools, hand-made orna- 
ments, hand-hewn stones, which was quite accidental. 
It was a point on which neither the buyer of the article 
nor the seller probably set any store. But all the same 
as William Morris has said, it was there ; and it regularly 
made its appearance in such work as if by some natural law. 
This is the beauty which is sUpping from our grasp. 
It is more than mere beauty.- It is really a life in the 
material object," to which the touch of machinery at once 
puts an end. The machine-made structure has no delights 
of surprise for us. There is no undesigned balance and 
counter-balance of parts in it, none of the accidental un- 
evennesses of surface or touches of originality which 
attach to hand-made things ; none, in short, of those 
features in which the author leaves the imprint of his 
character on his work. And all this is loss to us — dead 
loss, even to the uninstructed mind which could not tell 
us of it. For the trace of the maker's hand in the object 
is what made its dead material glisten with a little touch 
of real human life. Machinery may make a more 
efficient article. It can never infuse these associations. 
The article coming from machinery's dead hand has 
no story in it. There is no record of human thought and 
skill guiding the tool to fair or faulty execution. It 
suggests nothing but the monotonous beat of a self-repeat- 
ing process, turning out things of uniform quality on an 
unchanging scale day after day ad infinitum. 
Acceptation of Mechanism 
Where, then, shall we seize again this lost thing, and 
how preserve it from decay ? especially as this which we 
are on the point of losing is no mere connoisseur's play- 
thing, is no less indeed than the life which is in our 
surroundings, and is at root the same life without which 
no act is morally good and no thought is significant. 
The machine in our life is what is doing the mischief. 
There seems no way finally to get the better of it except, 
