So was I at the end of the first division "Sur la Vie" de Max Elskamp.
The second division, concerned with "Oeuvre 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: