"I have not yet met a group fully divine. None has had a real consciousness, none has addressed me, saying: I exist. The day when the first group shall take its soul in its hands, as one lifts up a child in order to look in its face, that day there will be a new god upon earth. This is the god I await, with my labor of annunciation."
This excerpt from Romains gives the tone of his thought. In so far as he writes in the present tense he carries conviction. He broaches truly a "new," or at least contemporary "pathétique." He utters, in original vein, phases of consciousness whereinto we are more or less drifting, in measure of our proper sensibility.
I retain, however, my full suspicion of agglomerates.
DE BOSSCHÈRE'S STUDY OF ELSKAMP
I confessed in my February essay my inability to make anything of Max Elskamp's poetry, and I have tacitly confessed my inability to find any formula for hawking De Bosschère's own verse to any public of my acquaintance; De Bosschère's study of Elskamp, however, requires no advocacy; I do not think it even requires to be a study of Max Elskamp; it drifts as quiet canal water; the protagonist may or not be a real man.
"Ici, la solitude est plus accentuée: souvent, pendant de longues minutes, les rues sont desertes.... Les portes ne semblent pas, ainsi que dans les grandes villes, s'ouvrir sur un poumon de vie, et être une cellule vivante de la rue. Au contraire, toutes sont fermées. Aussi bien, les façades de ce quartier sont pareilles aux murs borgnes. Un mince ruban de ciel roux et gris, à peine bleu au printemps, découpe les pignons, se tend sur le marché désert et sur le puits profond des cours."
From this Antwerp, De Bosschère derives his subject, as Gautier his "Albertus" from
Un vieux bourg flamand tel que peint Teniers;
trees bathing in water.