Introduction - Peter Lang
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Introduction
Émile Verhaeren (1855–1916), fin de siècle poet, critic and homme de lettres, was
a tireless advocate of all that was new in the arts at a time when Belgium rivaled
Paris as a centre of the avant garde.1 Attentive and ever curious, Verhaeren was
constantly appraising, assessing, evaluating artists by the hundreds, whether in
Paris or Brussels, Amsterdam or London, Cassel, Munich or Vienna. Paul Aron,
an eminent scholar of the 1890s of Belgium, published in 1997 a two-volume
anthology of Verhaeren’s writings on art, salon reviews and critiques that runs
for more than a thousand pages.2 As collected by Aron, Verhaeren’s earliest pub-
lications date from 1881—only his tragic and untimely death in 1916 foreclosed
his voluminous output. From the vast outreach of his criticism—and his reviews
are replete with aperçus on Monet, Rodin, Ensor, Meunier, Seurat, Moreau, Kh-
nopff, the Symbolists and les decadents alike—the present anthology selects and
groups those essays in which the poet explores Van Eyck, Memling and the
early Netherlandish painters and the Northern Baroque, writings that have not
been sufficiently scrutinized by the art historical community, although they are
amongst his most powerful and revelatory essays. Focusing on Flemish, Dutch
and German art of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, Verhaeren’s impassioned
studies on les primitifs are in their rich apperceptions amongst the most instructive
of the period. Yet, these essays, expressive of Verhaeren’s enduring interests in
the masters of the Early Modern period, have been waylaid by history.3 The pres-
ent translation attempts to resurrect these all but forgotten works.
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It is odd, if not curious, that Verhaeren’s most persuasive and insightful es-
says on Grünewald, one in 1886 and another in 1894—essays as revealing as J.
K. Huysmans oft-quoted panegyrics of 1891 and 1904 on the painter from Is-
enheim—have not found a place in the Grünewald canon, while those of Huys-
mans are “always” cited.4 Verhaeren’s critiques of Bruegel and Memling, Rubens
and Rembrandt—not to mention his commentaries on Jan van Eyck, Roger Van
der Weyden, Jacob Jordaens, Jan Steen, Ruysdael and others—have all suffered
a similar fate. Neglect has been their lot. The most egregious omission of all,
however, is Verhaeren’s lengthy 1904 monograph on Rembrandt, a detailed and
nuanced study that reviews the publications that preceded his own on Rembrandt
and explores his musings on the Dutch master,5 insights that go back to the 1880s
and recur in one way or another in his studies of the Early Modern period.
***
Émile Verhaeren’s long and probing essay on Rembrandt van Rijn opens with
a startling image. In the first few introductory sentences, Verhaeren likens the
master from Leiden to a “naked and tormented” Christ (il apparaît nu et tourmenté),
a hapless being suffering a “swarm of ants” (autant de fourmis) (Aron 2:820) in the
guise of critics scouring his life and uneven fortunes, images that set the stage for
what is to come, a sympathetic portrait of Rembrandt as an outcast, rebuffed by
his peers and pilloried by history. With the metaphor of intrusive critics vilifying
Rembrandt as ants, Verhaeren’s conjures a searing picture that tells us as much
about Verhaeren himself as it does about Rembrandt.
For Verhaeren too had suffered the acrimony of querulous critics. At odds
with the establishment, Verhaeren, a poet and critic whose protean pen defined,
with other fecund Belgian writers of his day—Maeterlinck and Rodenbach come
to mind—what Verhaeren in an essay of 1908 on his beloved Ensor would nos-
talgically recall as a “heroic, seemingly legendary time” ([un] temps héroïque—quasi
légendaire) (2:873).6 And though years had passed since Verhaeren and his fellow
poets shared the limelight with the likes of Ensor, Minne, Rops and Khnopff, the
years had not effaced the pain he and his cohorts had known, nor effaced the in-
dignities they had suffered at the hands of vociferous critics who never hesitated
to denigrate their work. Belgium in the 1880s and 1890s had not only betrayed
him, it had betrayed his entire generation. Verhaeren knew this, had personally
lived through this betrayal. Thus in a particularly vivid diatribe, Verhaeren attacks
les conservateurs ou directeurs bruxellois, underlining his despair at their philistine in-
eptitude. Passionately addressing his readers as a lawyer would address his jury
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summing up his case, Verhaeren, writing for La Nation in 1891—and we can see
him gesticulating—cries out,
Ces gens, voyez vous, n’ont pas l’ardeur, n’ont pas la fièvre, n’ont pas la haute joie esthé-
tiques; il leur manque la flamme et la ferveur de leur charge; ils font leur besogne non
pas comme des volontaires, mais comme des soudoyés. Ils savent être convenablement
banals—à part cela, rien.… Ils sont séniles, incurablement. Au fond ils ignorent l’art; ils
en parlent, mais ils ne le sentent pas (1:477–8).7
Those people, you see, don’t have the passion, the fever, the high joy of aesthetics; they
are missing the flame and fervor of their charge; they do their job not like volunteers, but
like mercenaries. They know how to be conveniently banal—other than that, nothing….
They are incurably senile. In truth, they ignore art; they give it lip service, but they do
not feel it.
With curators, critics, collectors and public alike ignoring art, giving it lip ser-
vice when it served their needs, Belgium never embraced the avant-garde. With
its eyes shut towards the future Verhaeren could conclude: La Belgique has long
been hostile aux lettres—this last sentiment expressed not in 1891 with La Nation
as the above, but in 1908 in Verhaeren’s Ensor.8
But all this was a déjà vu, it had happened once before, and it had happened to
his hero from Leiden. For as Belgium was hostile aux lettres and denied its nascent
masters, so “Holland in the XVII century distanced itself from Rembrandt. She
neither understood, nor stood by him, nor did she acclaim him” ([l]a Hollande au
XVIIe siècle s’est éloignée de Rembrandt. Elle ne l’a ni compris, ni soutenu, ni célébré) (2:821).
Likewise for Verhaeren’s sorry Belgium. For as Holland neither understood nor
celebrated its greatest artist, Belgium neither understood nor celebrated its golden
age.9 Painful as it is, Belgium never favored those halcyon though difficult days dur-
ing the 1880s and 1890s when Verhaeren and his peers suffered innumerable jeers
from exasperated critics and an infuriated public.10
As Verhaeren’s lengthy study on Rembrandt reiterates time and again, Rem-
brandt had to suffer fools gladly. He had to live with the insufferable fact that la foule
(the crowd) preferred the mediocrities of les petits maîtres néerlandais to his own work.
(Il eut à subir les préférences de la foule pour les médiocres.) (2:822). The rancor of those early
years was still with him when in 1908—only four years after his Rembrandt—with his
study on Ensor, he readily quotes a piece he had written twenty or so years before.
In that essay, written in 1886 for La Jeune Belgique, he likened Belgium to an abbatoir,
a stinking slaughter house where blood ran freely, and where, with smoking entrails
and ripped stomachs, artists and spokesmen for the avant garde—like slaughtered
pigs—were suspended on meat hooks, subject to la foule and its excréments de sottise.
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… le cerveau bourgeois se dégorge par toutes ses circonvolutions. Il en jaillit des excré-
ments de sottise. Cela rapelle des opérations d’abattoir. Le porc est tué, il est suspendu,
ventre ouvert, à des tringles grossières, les boyaux sont jetés sur l’étal, fumants et flasques
(1:239).11
… the bourgeois brain spills in all its circumvolutions. Loads of excremental nonsense
gush from its pores. It recalls the machinations of the slaughterhouse. The pig is killed,
hanging from a filthy hook, stomach slit, guts spilled on a filthy floor, limp and smoking.
That was in 1886 … and though thirty or so years had passed since his initial
outburst, Verhaeren, his anger still smoldering, felt compelled to reiterate these
scornful lines in his Ensor, and even embellish them with one last angry outcry: La
bêtise belge et bourgeoise, c’est cela (2:875) (“Belgian bourgeois stupidity, that’s it”). A
telling detail needs to be underlined here, for though Verhaeren is quoting his ear-
lier comments on Ensor, he misquotes himself, a slip of the pen that underscores
his disgust with the establishment’s intransigence. Thus the 1886 essay ends the
remarks on l’abattoir with the words la bêtise belge—just a couple of words, pure
and simple (1:239). But the 1908 version of the same reads differently. Now the
bourgeois is added to the indictment (la bêtise belge et bourgeoise…), adding insult to
injury, so to speak. Time clearly had not dulled Verhaeren’s vitriol. Belgium had
not favored the avant-garde in the 1880s and 1890s and it still looked askance at
modernity as the 20th century advanced.
Just as Verhaeren had to deal with la bêtise belge, Rembrandt had to deal with
“la bêtise néerlandaise” … and, as Verhaeren stresses, it was unforgiving. In page af-
ter page of his Rembrandt, Verhaeren makes it clear that average Dutchmen found
little in the painter from Leiden they could admire—not to say, forgive. They did
not like his morals, his zest for life, his spendthrift ways. They did not even like
the way he laughed. Hence Verhaeren: “When he laughed, he scandalized all with
his rash folly. No holding back” (Quand il riait, il scandalisait par l’audace de sa folie.
Aucune retenue) (2:822).
D’outre en outre, le peintre [Rembrandt] traversait les cloisons des conventions et des
préjugés. Il froissait, heurtait, et bouleversait. En tout, il allait jusqu’au bout (2:822).
Again and again, the painter [Rembrandt] crossed the lines of convention and prejudice.
He offended, clashed with and distressed everyone. In sum, he pushed the envelope to
its limits.
And to illustrate his point, Verhaeren refers us to Rembrandt’s Ganymede of
1635, where an overfed gamin is peeing with fright as Zeus, in the guise of a
robust eagle, lifts Rembrandt’s graceless urchin on high. Rembrandt’s representa-
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tion was clearly a blasphemous interpretation of what Renaissance masters had
depicted as a beauteous youth raised to Olympian heights by a zealous god en-
amored with a graceful lad’s ineffable beauty. Before this graceless lad, however,
the question arises if Verhaeren had Michelangelo’s infamous Ganymede (1533)
in mind as he spoke of its “impudent vice.” For without finding fault Verhaeren
underscores the crudity of Rembrandt’s oil. “This was no longer a farce, it was
simply plain impudence” (Ceci n’était plus la farce, c’était le vice dans son impudeur la
plus crue) (2:822).12
It is important to note that the same bourgeois conventions Rembrandt so
brazenly flaunted were prized by his peers, even seen as sacrosanct. Verhaeren
understood this and likened Rembrandt’s situation as an “outsider” to his own.
Elaborating on the differences between Rembrandt and the bourgeoisie and pit-
ting the former against the latter, Verhaeren writes that whereas Rembrandt fa-
vored “a spontaneous, wondrously enchanting and heathenish life” (une vie spon-
tanée, féérique et païenne) (2:825), the Dutch petit bourgeois favored moderation,
“their norm being neither too much nor too little, that in effect being the ideal
norm—a tranquil, moderate and sluggish being, a practical and bourgeois per-
sonage who when all is said and done stands for the true Dutchman” (la norme,
ni trop, ni trop peu, c’est l’idéal même de cet être tranquille, modéré, lent, pratique et bourgeois
qu’est au fond tout vrai et authentique Hollandais) (2:822). Thus Verhaeren’s modest,
quiet and placid bourgeois follow well defined limitations, guidelines that say that
the Dutch are a moderate people, never given to excess, intemperance, dissipa-
tion or noise. Again, Verhaeren:
Peu de bruit. Tout est régulier, compassé, fixé, prévu. La vie y est tenue comme un papier
commercial: lignes droites et chiffres … Ce que ces novateurs rapidement assagis red-
outent le plus, c’est qu’à l’avenir on dérange encore la monotonie compassée et textuelle
de leur existence. S’ils admettent la liberté dans la pensée, ils n’admettent point la liberté
dans la conduite. Ils libèrent les idées, mais enchaînent les actes (2:825).
Hardly a sound. All is as it should be, formal, fixed, stiff, pre-arranged. Life is comparable
to a financial document: straight lines and numbers.… What the establishment fears the
most is that the future may threaten the monotony of their staid and starched existence.
If they embrace liberty in the abstract, they do not embrace it in fact. They set ideas free,
but enchain their range of action.
But for Rembrandt, a free spirit (at least for Verhaeren), such strictures were
anathema. Unable to accept Rembrandt’s carefree ways, the Dutch saw him as un
monstre, a monster without a sense of propriety or decorum. Verhaeren’s quick
summary thus sketches for us a polarized situation, an equation that speaks of
Rembrandt at one end and the Dutch at the other—a situation that sets Rem-
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brandt apart from his peers, that isolates him and renders him as less than Dutch,
a being who exists en marge de l’espèce (2:824). L’espèce was, as Verhaeren under-
stood, one of them, a good bourgeois, the petits maîtres néerlandais who did not
cause trouble and
peignaient des sujets gracieux et mondains, ou bien instauraient dans leurs toiles la gaité
facile, l’espièglerie, la grivoiserie, la farce, la fête. Leur humeur était celle des buveurs
francs, des lurons échauffés, des coureurs de filles. Ils étaient bons enfants (2:822).
painted attractive and mundane subjects or filled their paintings with an easy gaiety, a
roguish frolic, smut, farce and merry making. Heavy drinkers, studs after women’s skirts.
Gay dogs all…
Rembrandt, not being a bon enfant, terrorized them. He “seemed,” as Ver-
haeren observed, “too extraordinary, too mysterious, too big for them all” (Il
apparaissait trop extraordinaire, trop mystérieux, trop grand) (2:822), plaudits meant to
extol the master from Leiden but which assured his singularity. For as Verhaeren
exalted Rembrandt’s infinite reach, the very height of the pedestal where Verhae-
ren rested his heroes’ laurels necessarily distanced him from his countrymen. As
Verhaeren phrased it: “He is not what they are; he is what they are not” (Il leur est
opposé; il est leur contraire) (2:821). Hence, not favoring what they favored and not
being one of them or being what they were not, Rembrandt was a man apart,
a loner, as Verhaeren draws his portrait. Inimically opposed to all his country-
men fancied, Rembrandt, as Verhaeren defines him, signifies the Other. Flaunting
decorum, Rembrandt is the great outlander: denying the values his peers value,
he accepts what they reject and favors what they spurn. Thus without apolo-
gies, Verhaeren forms the following equation, a relatively simple one: either Rem-
brandt embodies all that is Dutch or he does not. Verhaeren’s own words say it
most succinctly; “Either he, or they, embody Holland” (Ou bien c’est lui qui exprime
la Hollande, ou bien c’est eux) (2:821)—and “they,” for Verhaeren, were the burghers
and their allies, les petits maîtres. Hence Rembrandt’s distance from his public!
Verhaeren’s stark divide, expressly alienating Rembrandt from his Dutch
peers, is unequivocally based on his reading of Hippolyte Taine—a mid-nine-
teenth century social historian whom Verhaeren used as a straw man to concret-
ize the rift he saw between Rembrandt and his public.13 A prolix author of great
persuasion, Taine espoused a view which came to be known as la théorie tainienne
in his Philosophie de l’art dans les pays-bas of 1869, arguments that split Europe into
two camps. With Taine relying on racial theories and much talk of le milieu and
climate, Europeans are either Latins (especially those of Italian persuasion) or
“Celts” (Northerners like the Germans, Dutch and English). Favoring antitheti-
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cal contrasts, Taine draws the following line, a divide between nationalities, be-
tween North and South: as Latins are lively, imaginative and spontaneous, North-
erners—and Taine emphasizes the Dutch—are slow, plodding, and meticulous.
Hence Taine’s all too easy (but popular) binaries, of which he has much to say—
but to let Taine speak for himself:
Il reste à montrer dans leurs dehors un dernier trait qui choque particulièrement les
méridionaux, je veux dire la lenteur et la lourdeur de leurs impressions et de leurs mouve-
ments.… Il semble, quand on leur parle, qu’ils ne comprennent pas…. Aux cafés, dans
les wagons, le flegme et l’immobilité des traits sont frappants; ils n’éprouvent pas comme
nous le besoin de se remuer, de causer; ils peuvent rester fixes, pendant des heures en-
tières, en tête-à-tête avec leur pensée our leur pipe. En soirée, à Amsterdam, des dames
… immobiles dans leurs fauteuils, semblaient des statues.14
There remains for us to show one last trait of their demeanor that particularly shocks
southerners, I mean to say their slowness and the ponderousness of their movements.…
It seems, that when one speaks to them, they do not understand.… In the cafes, and in
the public trams, their sluggish ways and staid features are absolutely striking; unlike us,
they do not feel a need to stir, to talk-a-bit; they can stay still for hours at a time with
their thoughts and their pipes. In the evening, in Amsterdam, the ladies … frozen in their
chairs, seemed like statues.
Rembrandt, forever restless, was neither lent nor lourd, a trait that not only
distinguished him from his fellow burghers but encouraged him—a point key
in Verhaeren’s Rembrandt—to favor illusions, fantasies so rich and intense that
men who indulged in like excesses were “seen as mad and were locked up,” put
away (on les traiterait de fous, on les enfermerait) (2:823). Nothing illustrates this better
for Verhaeren than Rembrandt’s love for Saskia, his first wife. For according to
Verhaeren, Rembrandt’s love for Saskia knew no bounds: it swept him away, in-
flamed his zealous ardor, it unleashed, as Verhaeren phrases it, “a vibrant and fe-
verishly revived sumptuous life of glorious richness” (une vie frissonnante et nouvelle,
une vie de gloire et de richesse, de somptuosité et de fièvre) (2:827). And “what folly” (quelle
folie) (2:826) did he not commit to please his wife, readily agreeing to her every
caprice “and fantasy in that champ rouge of feminine desires,” as Verhaeren coyly
alludes to Rembrandt’s helplessness before Saskia’s enchanting wiles. Clearly, crit-
ics in general—from Taine to Eugène Fromentin to Charles Blanc and Thoré-
Burger (all whom Verhaeren cites in his Rembrandt)—in the nineteenth century
and even earlier disparaged his much publicized purchases15 and, paradoxically,
not only found him to be a spendthrift, they found him to be a miser—legend
says that even as he lay dying, he was still counting his gold.16 What is more, they
also faulted him for mingling with the poor, with destitute women and children
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and plebians of all sorts, Jews in particular.17 In short, contrary to the prevailing
opinion, Verhaeren found Rembrandt’s unconventional behavior commendable
and far from disparaging it, he found that it spoke of his singular gifts and his
generous spirit.
Rembrandt was never stymied by conventions. They never hampered him,
for if he had been constrained by them he never would have painted an aber-
rant canvas like the Night Watch (1642). “Never has a work,” writes Verhaeren,
“appeared so enigmatic … and so distressing” (La ‘Ronde de nuit,’ et jamais oeuvre
n’apparut aussi énigmatique … et aussi bouleversante) (2:836). Seemingly defeated by
the work’s quixotic possibilities, Verhaeren arrives at a most unexpected conclu-
sion—namely, that it is indeed possible that as Rembrandt was at work on the
canvas he did not fully grasp his own intentions. Was he cognizant of his own
actions? Was he painting a dream, a vision that eluded him?
A quelle heure, pour quel motif, dans quel ordre, en quelle ville ces hommes sont-ils réu-
nis? … Personne n’a pu jusqu’à présent dénouer les milles noeuds de cette énigme. On se
heurte aux conjectures et l’on peut se demander si Rembrandt lui-même a su quel sujet il
traitait. Il est possible qu’il n’ait traduit qu’un rêve … (2:836).
Just when, why, in what order, and in what city had these men come together? … No
one has yet unraveled the myriad knots of this enigma. Conjectures lead us nowhere, and
one can only ask oneself if Rembrandt knew what he was doing. He was possibly only
translating a dream…
Might he have dreamt it all18—a fanciful conclusion that tells us as much
about Verhaeren’s readiness to probe unknown and unseen territories as it does
about his understanding of Rembrandt.
Disdain of all matters quotidian, fancy, revery and dreaming are at the heart
of Verhaeren’s study of Rembrandt. Studying Verhaeren’s pages, Rembrandt’s pen-
chant for living in a private sphere of his own, a world beyond the reach of his
peers comes up time and again. Neither les petits peintres néerlandais nor the staid
burghers that denounced him for his fanciful reveries could impose their views
on him. Thus Verhaeren’s unapologetic references to le rêve: [il] se créera … une
existence de rêve; (2:824)… Il vit dans un monde de rêve … (2:826); … le rêve intérieur qu’il
porte en lui (2:832); ([d’autres] étaient comme lui les prisonniers de leurs rêves (2:833) (“[he]
shall create [for himself] … a life of dreams.… He lives in a world of dreams….
the inner dream he carries in him … [others] were like him prisoners of their
own dreams”) … and many more such citations can be found scanning his text.
Verhaeren’s emphasis on Rembrandt and le rêve as praiseworthy, singles him out
from the pack of nineteenth century Rembrandt devotees. Eugène Fromentin’s
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many pages on Rembrandt in his Les Maîtres d’autrefois of the mid-1870s,19 for
one, explicitly faults Rembrandt for the very qualities Verhaeren lauded. Thus
where Verhaeren could unabashedly praise Rembrandt for living in the world
of his imagination ([v]ivant naturellement dans le monde de son imagination) (2:833),
Fromentin doused such views with caustic skepticism. True, Fromentin agreed
with Verhaeren that Rembrandt was a unique case—here he echoes Hippolyte
Taine, arguing that “on this point, as with all the others, [Rembrandt] sees, thinks
and acts otherwise” (sur ce point comme sur tous les autres, [Rembrandt] voit, pense et agit
différemment).20 But though he readily calls him a génie he often tempers his praise
with the word bizarre (strange), an adjective that smacks of disapproval if not in-
comprehension. Reduced to a caricature, Rembrandt, as ce génie bizarre,21 indulges
in bizarrerie(s)22 and lives dans un milieu de revêries bizarres23—thus even if Fromentin
concedes that Rembrandt is affected by dreams, those dreams are strange, bizarre.
Verhaeren’s Rembrandt is free of these admonitions. He would never append
the word “bizarre” to Rembrandt’s name. Fromentin clearly saw Rembrandt’s
singular manners as unacceptable (and we must not forget that Fromentin was
not alone in this, but that this was the prevailing view on Rembrandt when Ver-
haeren’s work was published in 1904). Whereas Fromentin viewed Rembrandt’s
idiosyncratic ways as odd or grotesque, Verhaeren lauded them. Their discussions
of Rembrandt’s Night Watch, and in particular of the young fleeting personage
clad in a yellow light moving brusquely to one side, highlights their different ap-
proaches towards the master from Leiden. Puzzled by this figure who stalks the
canvas, all but an apparition, both Fromentin and Verhaeren wonder who she
might be. What is her role? Why is she there? And why her prominent pride of
place? Verhaeren, in contradistinction to Fromentin, asks these questions with an
empathetic voice. He refers to her fleeting form as “a sort of princess dressed
in gold and silk” ([une] sorte de princess vêtue d’or et de soie) (2:836), a naine, or slight
figure who somehow has lost her way into the canvas. But where Verhaeren sees
a princess in golden raiments, a dazzling being clad in mystery, Fromentin sees
a grotesque and shapeless creature who is barely human: “This smallish figure,”
he writes with disdain, “appears to have nothing human. She is bland and almost
shapeless” (cette figurine affecte de n’avoir rien d’humain. Elle est incolore, presque informe),24
and appears to be no taller than a doll seemingly wearing “rags” (des loques), tat-
ters and trash from the street, a low life creature from “the Jews’ quarters, from
rag-tag knaves and roques, the bohème or the theatre” (elle vient de la juiverie, de la
friperie, du théâtre ou de la bohème).25 Unattractive and benighted, this petite personne,
wizened and child-like, at home between men’s legs—“who glides one does not
know why between the legs of the guards” (qui se glisse on ne sait trop pourquoi entre
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les jambes des gardes)26 [the obscene implications of these words say much for Fro-
mentin’s views]—carries about her waist a belt with a dangling white rooster (un
coq blanc) that seems for all the world like a “money belt” (une escarcelle).27 Her ap-
pearance is thus bizarre,28 as bizarre as those supposedly misshapen misers from
la juiverie, Jews whom Rembrandt presumably cosseted.
Verhaeren’s naine des legends (2:836) belongs to a totally different order. She
speaks of wonder, of fabled lore, of wondrous tales entranced and wide-eyed
children know best, tales that awaken the imagination and appear with fairy-
like magic as Rembrandt’s fleeting naine in the forefront of his canvas. Certainly,
whoever and whatever she is, she is not for Verhaeren a misshapen Jewess with a
money belt as Fromentin insinuates—an insinuation that pointedly alludes to the
distaste so many commentators since the 18th century had for Rembrandt, who
they said inexplicably cared for Jews, vile though they be.29
Verhaeren’s text has none of these deplorable insinuations. Unlike his nine-
teenth century predecessors, Fromentin surely being one of them, Verhaeren
would not sully his exalted view of Rembrandt by soiling his hero’s name with
such base tall-tales. But sordid, mean and degrading stories followed Rembrandt
into the days of the Dreyfus affair, when anti-Dreyfusards—especially Édouard
Drumont—all but equated Dreyfus with Rembrandt. For as Dreyfus, a Jew
whose had stirred endless debate in France and Belgium since late 189430 when
he was accused of treason for selling France’s most treasured military secrets
for money, so Rembrandt had long been accused of selling out his friends and
family for money. Jews, after all, had no compunctions to do whatever it takes to
amass gold, as Édouard Drumont’s vastly popular La France Juive said. Drumont’s
two-volume affair of 1886 courses with encyclopedic breadth from one sordid
anti-semitic incident to another, ignoble tales that spread lies and that demean
the end-goal of their noxious attention, unsuspecting and unwary subjects like
Rembrandt.31
Weaving his fabrications with expert chicanery, Drumont wrote that Rem-
brandt naturally congregated with Jews because of his inordinate miserliness.
Valuing gold above all else, even his canvases, Rembrandt favors yellow because
yellow is the color of gold, says Drumont in a truly inventive burst of anti-Jewish
fantasy. Thus when it comes to defiling Jews—and Rembrandt—Drumont is
unequivocally hateful: “His [Rembrandt’s] oeuvre has a Jewish color, it is yellow,
a warm and eager yellow that seems to reflect the gold playing upon a forgotten
corner in an old narrow lane from the middle ages” (Son oeuvre [Rembrandt’s] a la
couleur juive, elle est jaune de ce jaune ardent et chaud qui semble comme le reflet de l’or jouant
sur une vieille rouelle du moyen âge oubliée dans un coin).32 But Drumont’s spiteful rheto-
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ric does not quite end here—on the contrary. Having dragged ces Juifs de Rembrandt
through forgotten dark alleys, he congregates them outside the synagogue on a
Sabbath, “chatting on their various businesses … discussing the value of the guil-
der” (causant d’affaires au sortir de la synagogue, s’entretenant du cours du florin),33 espe-
cially incendiary calumniations since all this casual talk revolving around money
and business takes place outside the synagogue and not outside the stockmarket.
All this allows Drumont to conclude: If you want to know about Jews, study
Rembrandt! “It is Rembrandt that one must … contemplate, study, scrutinize,
search, analyze if one truly wants to see a Jew” (C’est Rembrandt quil faut … contem-
pler, étudier, scruter, fouiller, analyser si l’on veut bien voir le Juif).34 And the Jew we see,
from Drumont’s sketch of Rembrandt, is a miser, a man who lives in wretched,
filthy quarters hoarding everything from gold to worthless bibelots:
… Rembrandt vécut constamment avec Israël. Son atelier même, encombré d’objets
d’art, véritable capharnaum d’étoffes et de bibelots, ressemble à ces boutiques de bro-
canteurs au fond desquelles l’oeil un moment désorienté finit par distinguer un vieillard
sordide au nez crochu.35
… Rembrandt constantly lived with Jews. His atelier bursting with objets d’arts, a veritable
hodge-podge of fabrics, stuff and trinkets of all sorts, looks like a small second-hand
shop of minor goods where somewhere lost in its recesses one can make-out after awhile,
for one’s eye needs to get adjusted to the mess, a sordid old man with a hooked nose.
And so likening Rembrandt’s atelier to a pawnshop inhabited by a grotesque
old man—our imagination sees him wearing rags, in surround of dust and stale
air—Drumont’s hook-nosed Rembrandt is not unlike most Jews with their nez
recourbé, their horrid physiognomy often climaxing with “one arm shorter than
the other” (un bras plus court que l’autre).36 Curiously, Drumont cites the 18th cen-
tury physiologist Lavater as his source for these outlandish remarks, a source
Fromentin might himself have known as he reduced the girlish woman in Rem-
brandt’s Night Watch to a colorless shadow, a figure presque informe … qui [n’a] rien
d’humain37 (a shapeless being … who [has] nothing human about her).
How far Verhaeren’s vision of Rembrandt is from all this!38 Where Drumont
reduces Rembrandt to a greedy, close-fisted miser whose life circles around Jews
and money, Verhaeren sees Rembrandt’s passion for collecting, for amassing
silks, furs, Oriental costumes, prints from Italy, and much much more, as a means
to transcend the constrictions of life and to transport himself into a rich fantasy
world, a world of wondrous “enchantments and fanciful chimeras” (de féérie et de
chimère) (2:841), as Verhaeren phrases it. Verhaeren’s coupling wonder, fantasies,
and enchantment with chimeras is at once startling and altogether appropriate.39
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In sum, where Rembrandt was roundly faulted for fraternizing with Jews, de-
meaning himself by associating ever too freely with riff-raff, and in the midst of
his riches living the life of a miser, getting by with “a piece of cheese” (un morceau
de fromage) and some “pickled herring” (un hareng salé)40 for a meal—it was said,
to cite but one of the many legends all-but-synonymous with his name, that he
lived “like a lout with nothing, like a bear” (comme un rustre, comme un ours),41 to
quote Blanc’s 1863 Rembrandt where Blanc is debating the pros and cons of Rem-
brandt’s greediness—Verhaeren viewed Rembrandt’s easy familiarity with Jews as
a means to affirm his hold on l’étrange et le surnaturel (the odd and the uncanny).
It encouraged communion with his own visions, and “like [a] seer” (comme [un]
illuminée), he came to grips with le rêve intérieur qu’il porte en lui (2:832) (the inner
dream within him)—a rêve which others rejected and which assured his isolation,
in fact, his ostracism.
From all this, it is clear that Rembrandt was the butt of much vicious criticism
starting in the eighteenth century and going on through the nineteenth century,
cruel, angry denunciations that demeaned and debased his person. Viewed as
an unsavory rogue by Houbraken, Fromentin, and so many others who devoted
long pages to his art and life, Rembrandt stood out as a scapegrace in the world
of seventeenth century Dutch painting.42 But for Verhaeren at least, Rembrandt
was beyond such public scourging and though defamed by his 19th century crit-
ics, they could not endlessly excoriate him because they all acknowledged his
primacy in the world of art. He was, they unanimously concurred, the greatest
painter of his day. In turn, this allowed Verhaeren to arrive at a most unlikely
conclusion: Rembrandt was, in his light, free of restraints—the restraints that
intimidated his fellow burghers even as they lived by them. Never hemmed in by
conventions, Rembrandt, on the contrary, was a free spirit, a man, as Verhaeren
argued, whose genius transcended time and any given situation: “Rembrandt
could have been born anywhere” (Rembrandt aurait pu naître n’importe où.) (2:821).
And so, for Verhaeren, Rembrandt was not necessarily Dutch; he could have
been born in a different place, in a different milieu—a proposition that allows us
to posit the thought—one, I believe, that was Verhaeren’s own—that Rembrandt
could have been a colleague, a fellow artist working with him in Brussels in the
1880s and 1890s. Rembrandt was, for Verhaeren, an artist like himself, an art-
ist who had been besieged by the pharisaic many and who had withstood their
assault. Before these arguments, Verhaeren’s conclusion is seemingly inevitable:
“[Rembrandt] is from nowhere because he is from everywhere” ([Rembrandt]
est de nulle part, parce qu’il est de partout) (2:821)—a position congruent with Ver-
haeren’s own, one that says Rembrandt not only transcended his own time but
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transcended time itself: “He is the past, the present, the future” (Il est le passé, le
présent, le futur) (2:824).
Was Verhaeren blinded by his own adulation? Is all this mere hyperbole?
In part, surely. But for Verhaeren to see Rembrandt as a comrade, one who had
known derision as he had known derision, is not that farfetched. Verhaeren had
opened his essay on Rembrandt by declaiming that Holland had abandoned him,
that she neither “understood, nor stood by him, nor acclaimed him” (Elle ne l’a
ni compris, ni soutenu, ni célébré) (2:821). How often had this happened to him and
others in Verhaeren’s Belgium! In “Le Milieu belge,” an essay written in the fall
of 1896, Verhaeren battered Belgium for its disdain of the arts: “one only has to
breathe l’atmosphere belge for eight days to feel diminished, impaired” ([ont se] sentis
diminués et amoindris, rien qu’à respirer pendant huit jours l’atmosphère belge).43 Le mileu,
he wrote, which elsewhere enhances life, “gives nothing [here], it takes away; it
does not build, it razes all” (ne donne rien [ici], il enlève; il ne redresse point, il aplatit).44
His own work had just borne its measure of criticism. La Jeune Belgique, an avant
garde journal that had previously supported him, now denounced him: “…he is
incapable of logically bridging two thoughts” (…il est incapable d’établir logiquement
un rapport entre deux idées),45 wrote its editor, Albert Giraud. And, again Giraud:
“the French of France, M. Verhaeren has neither studied it nor understood it.
French words go awry in his mouth” (le français de France, M. Verhaeren ne l’a ni
étudié ni compris.… Les mots français lui tordent la bouche).46 Betrayed, Verhaeren could
only conclude—a conclusion shared by many Belgian writers and artists—that
“[b]etween the writer and the masses in Belgium there lies not only incompatibil-
ity, there lies disdain” ([e]ntre la foule belge et l’écrivain il y a non seulement incompatibilité;
il y a dédain).47
Then again l’événement Maeterlinck of the early 1890s confirmed what he
must have known all along. One needs to backtrack a moment to sketch the
main events. The young Maeterlinck, a fellow writer from Ghent (which was
Verhaeren’s home town as well), had just published in quick succession his great
early works, Serres chaudes and La princesse Maleine.48 Verhaeren had enthusiastically
praised them in L’Art moderne, but evidently, these reviews fell on deaf-ears. Then,
a year later, Octave Mirbeau, writing for the French daily, Le Figaro, discovered
Maeterlinck anew. That was all that was needed. Mirbeau’s lavish praise spun
things around—what had been dormant became the talk of the town, Maeter-
linck became an overnight sensation and success now stalked his every move.
Verhaeren was nonplussed. Why did his reviews fall flat and not Mirbeau’s? Did
Mirbeau have more cachet than he because the former was French and not Bel-
gian (as was Verhaeren)? Even Mirbeau was embarrassed by the turn of events.
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Compelled to scold Belgium for favoring an outsider’s words over their own,
Mirbeau acerbically quipped:
C’est d’autant plus inconceivable et scandaleux à moi, que j’aurais dû savoir ce que tout
le monde sait … c’est-à-dire qu’il n’y a pas de poètes en Belgique, qu’il n’y a rien en Bel-
gique, et même que la Belgique n’existe pas.49
Moreover, it’s inconceivable and scandalous for me, that I should have known what the
whole world knows … that is to say that there are no poets in Belgium, that there is noth-
ing in Belgium, and even that Belgium does not exist.
Hence Mirbau’s sardonic conclusion:
Et mieux vaudrait vendre des saumures, surtout si des écrivains français, impolitiques ou
malintentionnés, se mettent à soutenir cet insoutenable paradoxe qu’il existe sur le globe
terrestre une Belgique, dans cette Belgique, des Belges, et, parmi ces Belges, des poètes,
et des poètes de talent!50
And it would be better to sell pickles on the street, especially if French writers, impolitic
or with bad intentions, insist on sustaining the unsustainable paradox that there exists on
this globe a Belgium, and that in this Belgium, Belgians, and amidst these Belgians, poets,
and poets of talent!
And so as officials and public alike would neither see nor believe the advent
of their own countrymen, Verhaeren—who like Maeterlinck had suffered mar-
tyrdom at the hands of his peers—would champion a fellow martyr, Rembrandt.
He would defend him from the philistine multitudes, those who had soiled his
reputation and “stripped him bare” (on l’a déshabillé) (2:820) with their overzealous
critiques laden with preposterous allegations whose sole goal was to immolate his
person as Verhaeren’s peers had so often immolated his person.51 He would res-
cue Rembrandt with his book as he would rescue with his pen all the beleaguered
souls who believed in the arts in Belgium. He would advise them all—including
Rembrandt, if only he were listening—not to struggle with the masses, nor even
to stand apart from them, but to fuse their soul in humanity’s soul (la fusion de son
âme dans l’âme humaine totale), to strive for
[une] existence lyrique … où on se chante et où l’on se crie par dessus les têtes, par au
delà des villes, plus loin que les échos de cette heure de siècle, là bas, au loin, vers l’infini.52
a lyrical existence … where one sings, and where one screams over others’ heads, beyond
the cities, farther than the echoes of our own time, over there, afar, towards the infinite.
Striving for l’infini, seeking là bas, the milieu recedes onto the horizon. No
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longer will the avant-garde—Rembrandt and artists like himself included—be
intimidated by their milieu, no longer will it have the power to cast them out, to
demean them. On the contrary. Instead of a towering and fearful master who
overpowers them, Rembrandt with (we imagine) Verhaeren at his side, shall over-
power it. With their soul at one with the infinite, the milieu no longer matters.
Alors qu’importe le milieu; on ne le voit plus53 (“And so, the milieu no longer counts;
[out of mind], one longer sees it”).
And indeed, as Verhaeren’s Rembrandt never ceases to argue, Rembrandt did
not “see” his milieu, he was not overwhelmed by it. How could he bother with
it, when it was not even there? He had gone beyond it, transcended its limits, [au]
dessus [des] têtes, au delá des villes. As such, if only figuratively, Rembrandt had left
Amsterdam long ago, and was now navigating sites unknown, “stroll[ing] where
dreams prevail” (il se promène en des sites de songe) (2:823), forever favoring “a life of
sumptuous and imaginary dreams” (une existence de rêve, une existence fastueuse, imagi-
naire…) (2:824). His “milieu,” as Verhaeren’s “milieu,” was within him: “He lives
in a marvelous world borne by his imagination, which for him is his real milieu”
[my italics] (Il vit dans un monde supérieur et merveilleux que son imagination porte en elle
et qui devient son vrai milieu à lui) (2:823). Thus, as Verhaeren ceaselessly reiterates,
his canvases are always “seduced” by his dreams, his fantaisie. “Wild imaginings
continue to seduce his canvases” (Dans ses toiles, la fantaisie la plus entière continue à
le séduire) (2:836), a pervasive fantasy, as Verhaeren says, that informs his work,
distinguishes him from his peers and defines him in contrast to his great contem-
porary, Peter Paul Rubens.
***
With the two—Rembrandt and Rubens—in his line of sight, as they often were,
Verhaeren again and again labels Rembrandt a visionnaire, a man who lived in a
monde de féerie, while Peter Paul Rubens—who died in 1640 when Rembrandt, at
the apogee of his career, was about to embark on his Night Watch—was a genius
fécondé par sa race (2:848), a man whose life was inextricably linked to his milieu,
nurturing its native energies. Viewing Rembrandt and Rubens as dialectical op-
posites, Verhaeren, with admirable insight, turns from one to the other:
Il [Rubens] est une plante admirable, poussée en un sol riche et favorable et dont les
graines dispersées au vent germent où elles tombent. Rembrandt, plante très rare et soli-
taire, semble résorber toute sa force pour s’élancer plus haut, croître plus profond, au
risque d’être improductive et stérile (2:849).
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He [Rubens] is an admirable plant, thriving in rich soil whose seeds, dispersed by the
winds, germinate where they fall. Rembrandt is other: an isolated and most rare plant,
he gathers all his powers to lunge forward, delving deeper, risking unfruitful and un-
productive phases.
Verhaeren often coupled Rubens and Rembrandt if only because of their
differences. As pendants informing and complementing one another, lessons
are learned as Verhaeren weighed their singularities. Where Rembrandt, for
Verhaeren, objected to Tainean views on race and the milieu, Rubens affirmed
them; where one was a solitaire, the other was at ease amongst others; and where
one struggled to ward off failure, the other strode effortlessly from glory to
glory. And finally and perhaps most tellingly, Rubens was a gentleman, a refined
connoisseur, while Rembrandt was a ragamuffin, an incorrigible scapegrace.
Verhaeren phrases it thus in his Rubens of 1903 (republished with minor modi-
fications in 1910):54
On connaît le Rubens de Munich, où il se représente en compagnie de sa première femme
Isabelle Brant, et l’on admire par-dessus tout le Rubens de Windsor, si magnifiquement
coiffé de son feutre. Toutefois jamais Rubens ne s’est, comme Rembrandt, montré en
habit d’atelier, vêtu d’une défroque et turbané d’une vague toque graisseuse et sale.… Il
[Rubens] se soigne, s’attife, semble se complaire à se regarder … avec un souci de tenue,
sinon de parade.55
We know the Rubens from Munich, where he portrays himself by his first wife Isabella
Brant. And one admires above all the Rubens from Windsor, so magnificently coiffed in
his felt hat. However, unlike Rembrandt, Rubens never presents himself in an atelier’s
garb, wearing a frock and turbaned with some sort of dirty greasy rag.… He [Rubens]
attends to his person, rigs himself out, apparently delighting in his looks … dressing with
care, if not with pomp.
With the differences between the two firmly established, Verhaeren finds
himself exclaiming that Rembrandt was so unlike Rubens—and unlike everyone
else, for that matter—that Rembrandt seemed to be from another planet (On
dirait qu’il arrive d’une autre planète…) (2:932). Rubens, on the contrary, was of this
earth, the rich, fertile and fecund earth of Flanders, a land peopled with vigorous
men and women. Around the time of Rubens’s birth, under the reign of Philip
II, Flanders was awash with blood, but those days were history and did not af-
fect Rubens—il ne les voyait pas, as Verhaeren observes of Rubens’s insouciance.56
Now, however, Flanders was free of its unforgiving master and finding itself
anew, rejoicing with drink, with frolic. A raucous, coarse and a full-throated rire
flamand (2:932) could be heard throughout the land—a vigorous burst of life
bristling with bawdiness that Rubens’ brush would capture with dazzling élan. Il
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aimait sa race … Il en aimait la bonhomie, la gourmandise, l’ardeur brutale et rouge (2:932)
(He loved his own … He loved bonhomie, gourmandize, and blazing, brutal
passions). Thus for Verhaeren, Rubens, “hale, hearty and vigorous,” (un homme
sain, heureux, [et] fécond) (2:932) mirrored not just his native land, his heritage (sa
race), but stood in stark contrast to Rembrandt, un isolé (2:932). These words date
from 1910 but Verhaeren had said the same in 1903—albeit with a slight but
telling variation, favoring the word “dissonant.” Hence Verhaeren in 1903: “He
[Rubens] is a genius in tune with his time, while Rembrandt … is but a wondrous
dissonant being” (Il [Rubens] est un génie que son siècle explique, tandis que Rembrandt
… n’est qu’une merveilleuse dissonance).57
Une merveilleuse dissonance! What a singular phrase, one that complements and
adds dimension to the later, an isolé. And yet these well-chosen words—nouns,
adjectives, articles—succinctly capture Verhaeren’s understanding of Rembrandt,
this master who stood apart and who could not and would not join the oth-
ers—even Rubens. For where Rembrandt, a dissonant isolé, stands apart, Rubens
shares the lustful energies of his robust countrymen: what they have, he has, their
boundless energy is his boundless energy, their joy is his joy … and, we may add,
Verhaeren’s joy. And that joy courses throughout Verhaeren’s study on Rubens,
beginning with the opening sentence of his short monograph, an encomium not
just to Rubens’s oeuvre, but to Verhaeren’s as well. L’oeuvre de ce maître est une ode
formidable à la joie (2:931)—an ode to joy that overwhelms all in its orbit. “And this
joy is not solely a spirited joy, a pensive joy … but an instinctive, sensual joy, a
Flemish joy, naïve and violent” (Et cette joie n’est point une joie d’esprit, une joie raisonnée
… mais bien une joie d’instinct, une joie sensuelle, une joie de Flamand naïf et violent) (2:931).
With rich sounding phrases, resonant with passion, Verhaeren’s Rubens, a
relatively short text, is embellished throughout with images that not only exalt
Flanders, its soil and its rich and fecund life (eg., La terre riche et belle de la Flan-
dre, ses soleils larges et fécondants) (2:936), but with images that exalt its people and
their counterparts in the Bible. Mary, for one, “no longer stands for a maid,
but stands for the women of Flanders where the earth and their spouses are
ceaselessly fertile” (n’y apparaît plus comme une vierge, mais comme un symbole de la
femme de Flandre, où la terre et les épouses sont inlassablement fertiles) (2:936). And the
infant Christ, in Verhaeren’s Flanders, has all the appeal of a juice laden fruit,
“a gorgeous heap of ripe and pulpuous fruit” (un bel amas de fruits gras et pulpeux)
(2:936). And even the East from whence the Magi come “must be like Flanders,
a land … of extravagant plenty and gourmandise” (doit être, comme la Flandre, un
pays … repue et gourmande) (2:936). Before such heady images inspired by Rubens’s
canvasses—the Louvre’s Virgin Surrounded by Angels and the Adoration of the Magi
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from Antwerp—Verhaeren underscores Rubens’s uniqueness: he is a painter
who responds only to life, who engenders and exalts it. [S]on art, he writes, sue
la vie (2:936), it secretes life it in all its pungent odors, moist and malodorous as,
I dare say, the acrid smell of a man’s underarms dancing or making love in the
hot sun.
Lauding Rubens’s “pagan nature” (sa nature païenne), Verhaeren seemingly
takes us into his confidence:
Mais c’est plus encore dans ses priapées et surtout dans ses Cortèges de Silène … que la
force de sa joie se manifeste. Ici, la violence et la fougue s’étalent comme des eaux tor-
rentueuses de fleuve, comme une galopée furieuse à travers les champs de la chair. Le
dieu épais et compact, enflé d’ombre et de vin … (2:938–39).
But it is in his priapic renderings and especially in his versions of the Cortéges of Silenus
… that the full strength of his joy lives. Here violence and lust fill the canvas like a river’s
torrential waters, like a furious gallop across fields of flesh. The god, thick and compact,
aburst with dark passion and wine …
Words, phrases and sentences that capture—and I dare say as was never
before nor since has been captured in the Rubens literature—the lustful, empa-
thetic and emphatic energy of Rubens’s vision. Readily likening Silenus’s bacchic
retinue with the bacchic kermesse—country fests known in Flanders for their lust-
ful abandon—Verhaeren notes that depiction of such feasts of the body and of
drink are “saved” from their vulgarity and low-life by Rubens’s own epic ardor,
his youth and bonhomie or, to say the same thing differently, by the epic ardor,
youth and bonhomie of Flanders. Thus we read of the Kermesse at the Louvre:
Tous les vices: gourmandise, ivrognerie, luxure, sont célébrés et chantés, en un hymne
si bruyant qu’on en néglige les paroles, pour n’en écouter que la formidable musique. Il
n’y a ni retenue, ni halte, ni sourdine. Elle éclate brutale, avec des coups de cymbales, des
ronflements de cuivre, des bondissements de grosse caisse, mais un tel art préside aux
orages des sons … (2:941).
All the vices—gluttony, stupor, lust—are sung and celebrated in such a major hymn
that one nelects what is at hand to hear the grand cacophonies of the work. There is no
holding back, neither restraint nor rest. It bursts forth with an angry clash of cymbals,
the peals of brass, the beat of heavy drums, but over this array of turbulent sounds
art presides …
And accompanying this grand cacophony is what Verhaeren calls la sarabande
moderne with rustres and maritornes, and their drunken enlacements (2: 941) (…this
heady file of rustics and kitchen wenches [and their drunken] wild couplings).
Verhaeren knew all this well and had long celebrated it. Les Flamandes of 1883—
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