"Son univers était limité par: 'le grand peuplier'; une statue de Pomone, 'le grand rocher,' et 'la grand grenouille'; ceci était un coin touffu où il y avait de l'eau et où il ne vit jamais qu'une seule grenouille, qu'il croyait immortelle." De Bosschère's next vision of Elskamp is when his subject is pointed out as "le poète décadent," for no apparent reason save that he read Mallarmé at a time when Antwerp did not. The study breaks into a cheerful grin when Elskamp tells of Mallarmé's one appearance in the sea-port:
"Le bruit et les cris qui furent poussés pendant la conférence de Mallarmé, l'arrêtèrent plusieurs fois. L'opinion du public sur sa causerie est contenue en ces quelques mots, dits par un général retraité, grand joueur de billard, et qui du reste ne fit qu'une courte absence de la salle de jeu, pour écouter quelques phrases du poète. 'Cet homme est îvre ou fou,' dit il fort haut, on quittant la salle, où son jugement fit loi. Anvers, malgré un léger masque de snobisme, qui pourrait tromper, n'a pas changé depuis. Mallarmé, même pour les avertis, est toujours l'homme îvre ou fou."
The billiard player is the one modern touch in the book; for the rest Elskamp sails with sea-captains, apparently in sailing ships to Constantinople, or perhaps one should call it Byzantium. He reads Juan de la Cruz and Young's Night Thoughts, and volumes of demonology, in the properly dim library of his maternal grandfather, "Sa passion en rhétorique fut pour Longfellow, il traduisait 'Song of (sic) Hiawatots.'"
The further one penetrates into De Bosschère's delightful narrative the less real is the hero; the less he needs to be real. A phantom has been called out of De Foe's period, delightful phantom, taking on the reality of the fictitious; in the end the author has created a charming figure, but I am as far as ever from making head or tail of the verses attributed to this creation. I have had a few hours' delightful reading, I have loitered along slow canals, behind a small window sits Elskamp doing something I do not in the least understand.
II
So was I at the end of the first division "Sur la Vie" de Max Elskamp. The second division, concerned with "Œuvre et Vie," but raised again the questions that had faced me in reading Elskamp's printed work. He has an undercurrent, an element everywhere present, differentiating his poems from other men's poems. De Bosschère scarcely helps me to name it. The third division of the book, at first reading, nearly quenched the curiosity and the interest aroused by the first two-thirds. On second reading I thought better of it. Elskamp, plunged in the middle ages, in what seems almost an atrophy, as much as an atavism, becomes a little more plausible. (For what it is worth, I read the chapter upon a day of almost complete exhaustion.)
"Or, quand la vision lâche comme une proie vidée le saint, il demeure avec les hommes."
"Entre le voyant et ceux qui le sanctifient il y a un précipice insondable. Seul l'individu est béatifié par sa croyance; mais il ne peut l'utiliser au temporel ni la partager avec les hommes, et c'est peut-être la forme unique de la justice sur terre."
The two sentences give us perhaps the tone of De Bosschère's critique "Sur le Mysticisme" of Elskamp.
It is, however, not in De Bosschère, but in La Wallonie that I found the clue to this author: