“Why were you so determined not to draw him?” I asked.
“Draw him? Him? How can one draw a man who doesn’t exist?”
“He is dim,” I admitted. But my mot juste fell flat. Rothenstein repeated that Soames was non-existent.
Still, Soames had written a book. I asked if Rothenstein had read “Negations.” He said he had looked into it, “but,” he added crisply, “I don’t profess to know anything about writing.” A reservation very characteristic of the period! Painters would not then allow that any one outside their own order had a right to any opinion about painting. This law (graven on the tablets brought down by Whistler from the summit of Fujiyama) imposed certain limitations. If other arts than painting were not utterly unintelligible to all but the men who practiced them, the law tottered—the Monroe Doctrine, as it were, did not hold good. Therefore no painter would offer an opinion of a book without warning you at any rate that his opinion was worthless. No one is a better judge of literature than Rothenstein; but it wouldn’t have done to tell him so in those days, and I knew that I must form an unaided judgment of “Negations.”
Not to buy a book of which I had met the author face to face would have been for me in those days an impossible act of self-denial. When I returned to Oxford for the Christmas term I had duly secured “Negations.” I used to keep it lying carelessly on the table in my room, and whenever a friend took it up and asked what it was about, I would say: “Oh, it’s rather a remarkable book. It’s by a man whom I know.” Just “what it was about” I never was able to say. Head or tail was just what I hadn’t made of that slim, green volume. I found in the preface no clue to the labyrinth of contents, and in that labyrinth nothing to explain the preface.
Lean near to life. Lean very near—nearer.
Life is web and therein nor warp nor woof is, but web only.
It is for this I am Catholick in church and in thought, yet do let swift Mood weave there what the shuttle of Mood wills.
These were the opening phrases of the preface, but those which followed were less easy to understand. Then came “Stark: A Conte,” about a midinette who, so far as I could gather, murdered, or was about to murder, a mannequin. It was rather like a story by Catulle Mendès in which the translator had either skipped or cut out every alternate sentence. Next, a dialogue between Pan and St. Ursula, lacking, I rather thought, in “snap.” Next, some aphorisms (entitled “Aphorismata” [spelled in Greek]). Throughout, in fact, there was a great variety of form, and the forms had evidently been wrought with much care. It was rather the substance that eluded me. Was there, I wondered, any substance at all? It did now occur to me: suppose Enoch Soames was a fool! Up cropped a rival hypothesis: suppose I was! I inclined to give Soames the benefit of the doubt. I had read “L’Après-midi d’un Faune” without extracting a glimmer of meaning; yet Mallarmé, of course, was a master. How was I to know that Soames wasn’t another? There was a sort of music in his prose, not indeed, arresting, but perhaps, I thought, haunting, and laden, perhaps, with meanings as deep as Mallarmé’s own. I awaited his poems with an open mind.
And I looked forward to them with positive impatience after I had had a second meeting with him. This was on an evening in January. Going into the aforesaid domino-room, I had passed a table at which sat a pale man with an open book before him. He had looked from his book to me, and I looked back over my shoulder with a vague sense that I ought to have recognized him. I returned to pay my respects. After exchanging a few words, I said with a glance to the open book, “I see I am interrupting you,” and was about to pass on, but, “I prefer,” Soames replied in his toneless voice, “to be interrupted,” and I obeyed his gesture that I should sit down.
I asked him if he often read here.
“Yes; things of this kind I read here,” he answered, indicating the title of his book—“The Poems of Shelley.”
“Anything that you really”—and I was going to say “admire?” But I cautiously left my sentence unfinished, and was glad that I had done so, for he said with unwonted emphasis, “Anything second-rate.”
I had read little of Shelley, but, “Of course,” I murmured, “he’s very uneven.”
“I should have thought evenness was just what was wrong with him. A deadly evenness. That’s why I read him here. The noise of this place breaks the rhythm. He’s tolerable here.” Soames took up the book and glanced through the pages. He laughed. Soames’s laugh was a short, single, and mirthless sound from the throat, unaccompanied by any movement of the face or brightening of the eyes. “What a period!” he uttered, laying the book down. And, “What a country!” he added.
I asked rather nervously if he didn’t think Keats had more or less held his own against the drawbacks of time and place. He admitted that there were “passages in Keats,” but did not specify them. Of “the older men,” as he called them, he seemed to like only Milton. “Milton,” he said, “wasn’t sentimental.” Also, “Milton had a dark insight.” And again, “I can always read Milton in the reading-room.”
“The reading-room?”
“Of the British Museum. I go there every day.”
“You do? I’ve only been there once. I’m afraid I found it rather a depressing place. It—it seemed to sap one’s vitality.”
“It does. That’s why I go there. The lower one’s vitality, the more sensitive one is to great art. I live near the museum. I have rooms in Dyott Street.”
“And you go round to the reading-room to read Milton?”
“Usually Milton.” He looked at me. “It was Milton,” he certificatively added, “who converted me to Diabolism.”
“Diabolism? Oh, yes? Really?” said I, with that vague discomfort and that intense desire to be polite which one feels when a man speaks of his own religion. “You—worship the Devil?”
Soames shook his head.
“It’s not exactly worship,” he qualified, sipping his absinthe. “It’s more a matter of trusting and encouraging.”
“I see, yes. I had rather gathered from the preface to ‘Negations’ that you were a—a Catholic.”
“Je l’étais a cette époque. In fact, I still am. I am a Catholic diabolist.”
But this profession he made in an almost cursory tone. I could see that what was upmost in his mind was the fact that I had read “Negations.” His pale eyes had for the first time gleamed. I felt as one who is about to be examined, viva voce, on the very subject in which he is shakiest. I hastily asked him how soon his poems were to be published.
“Next week,” he told me.
“And are they to be published without a title?”
“No. I found a title at last. But I sha’n’t tell you what it is,” as though I had been so impertinent as to inquire. “I am not sure that it wholly satisfies me. But it is the best I can find. It suggests something of the quality of the poems—strange growths, natural and wild, yet exquisite,” he added, “and many-hued, and full of poisons.”
I asked him what he thought of Baudelaire. He uttered the snort that was his laugh, and, “Baudelaire,” he said, “was a bourgeois malgré lui.” France had had only one poet—Villon; “and two-thirds of Villon were sheer journalism.” Verlaine was “an épicier malgré lui.” Altogether, rather to my surprise, he rated French literature lower than English. There were “passages” in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. But, “I,” he summed up, “owe nothing to France.” He nodded at me. “You’ll see,” he predicted.
I did not, when the time came, quite see that. I thought the author of “Fungoids” did, unconsciously of course, owe something to the young Parisian decadents, or to the young English ones who owed something to them. I still think so. The little book, bought by me in Oxford, lies before me as I write. Its pale-gray buckram cover and silver lettering have not worn well. Nor have its contents. Through these, with a melancholy interest, I have again been looking. They are not much. But at the time of their publication I had a vague suspicion that they might be. I suppose it is my capacity for faith, n
ot poor Soames’s work, that is weaker than it once was.
TO A YOUNG WOMAN
Thou art, who hast not been!
Pale tunes irresolute
And traceries of old sounds
Blown from a rotted flute
Mingle with noise of cymbals rouged with rust,
Nor not strange forms and epicene
Lie bleeding in the dust,
Being wounded with wounds.
For this it is
That in thy counterpart
Of age-long mockeries
Thou hast not been nor art!
There seemed to me a certain inconsistency as between the first and last lines of this. I tried, with bent brows, to resolve the discord. But I did not take my failure as wholly incompatible with a meaning in Soames’s mind. Might it not rather indicate the depth of his meaning? As for the craftsmanship, “rouged with rust” seemed to me a fine stroke, and “nor not” instead of “and” had a curious felicity. I wondered who the “young woman” was and what she had made of it all. I sadly suspect that Soames could not have made more of it than she. Yet even now, if one doesn’t try to make any sense at all of the poem, and reads it just for the sound, there is a certain grace of cadence. Soames was an artist, in so far as he was anything, poor fellow!
It seemed to me, when first I read “Fungoids,” that, oddly enough, the diabolistic side of him was the best. Diabolism seemed to be a cheerful, even a wholesome influence in his life.
NOCTURNE
Round and round the shutter’d Square
I strolled with the Devil’s arm in mine.
No sound but the scrape of his hoofs was there
And the ring of his laughter and mine.
We had drunk black wine.
I scream’d, “I will race you, Master!"
“What matter,” he shriek’d, “to-night
Which of us runs the faster?
There is nothing to fear to-night
In the foul moon’s light!”
Then I look’d him in the eyes,
And I laugh’d full shrill at the lie he told
And the gnawing fear he would fain disguise.
It was true, what I’d time and again been told:
He was old—old.
There was, I felt, quite a swing about that first stanza—a joyous and rollicking note of comradeship. The second was slightly hysterical, perhaps. But I liked the third, it was so bracingly unorthodox, even according to the tenets of Soames’s peculiar sect in the faith. Not much “trusting and encouraging” here! Soames triumphantly exposing the Devil as a liar, and laughing “full shrill,” cut a quite heartening figure, I thought—then! Now, in the light of what befell, none of his other poems depresses me so much as “Nocturne.”
I looked out for what the metropolitan reviewers would have to say. They seemed to fall into two classes: those who had little to say and those who had nothing. The second class was the larger, and the words of the first were cold; insomuch that
Strikes a note of modernity.... These tripping numbers.
—The Preston Telegraph
was the only lure offered in advertisements by Soames’s publisher. I had hoped that when next I met the poet I could congratulate him on having made a stir, for I fancied he was not so sure of his intrinsic greatness as he seemed. I was but able to say, rather coarsely, when next I did see him, that I hoped “Fungoids” was “selling splendidly.” He looked at me across his glass of absinthe and asked if I had bought a copy. His publisher had told him that three had been sold. I laughed, as at a jest.
“You don’t suppose I care, do you?” he said, with something like a snarl. I disclaimed the notion. He added that he was not a tradesman. I said mildly that I wasn’t, either, and murmured that an artist who gave truly new and great things to the world had always to wait long for recognition. He said he cared not a sou for recognition. I agreed that the act of creation was its own reward.
His moroseness might have alienated me if I had regarded myself as a nobody. But ah! hadn’t both John Lane and Aubrey Beardsley suggested that I should write an essay for the great new venture that was afoot—“The Yellow Book”? And hadn’t Henry Harland, as editor, accepted my essay? And wasn’t it to be in the very first number? At Oxford I was still in statu pupillari. In London I regarded myself as very much indeed a graduate now—one whom no Soames could ruffle. Partly to show off, partly in sheer good-will, I told Soames he ought to contribute to “The Yellow Book.” He uttered from the throat a sound of scorn for that publication.
Nevertheless, I did, a day or two later, tentatively ask Harland if he knew anything of the work of a man called Enoch Soames. Harland paused in the midst of his characteristic stride around the room, threw up his hands toward the ceiling, and groaned aloud: he had often met “that absurd creature” in Paris, and this very morning had received some poems in manuscript from him.
“Has he no talent?” I asked.
“He has an income. He’s all right.” Harland was the most joyous of men and most generous of critics, and he hated to talk of anything about which he couldn’t be enthusiastic. So I dropped the subject of Soames. The news that Soames had an income did take the edge off solicitude. I learned afterward that he was the son of an unsuccessful and deceased bookseller in Preston, but had inherited an annuity of three hundred pounds from a married aunt, and had no surviving relatives of any kind. Materially, then, he was “all right.” But there was still a spiritual pathos about him, sharpened for me now by the possibility that even the praises of “The Preston Telegraph” might not have been forthcoming had he not been the son of a Preston man. He had a sort of weak doggedness which I could not but admire. Neither he nor his work received the slightest encouragement; but he persisted in behaving as a personage: always he kept his dingy little flag flying. Wherever congregated the jeunes féroces of the arts, in whatever Soho restaurant they had just discovered, in whatever music-hall they were most frequenting, there was Soames in the midst of them, or, rather, on the fringe of them, a dim, but inevitable, figure. He never sought to propitiate his fellow-writers, never bated a jot of his arrogance about his own work or of his contempt for theirs. To the painters he was respectful, even humble; but for the poets and prosaists of “The Yellow Book,” and later of “The Savoy,” he had never a word but of scorn. He wasn’t resented. It didn’t occur to anybody that he or his Catholic diabolism mattered. When, in the autumn of ’96, he brought out (at his own expense, this time) a third book, his last book, nobody said a word for or against it. I meant, but forgot, to buy it. I never saw it, and am ashamed to say I don’t even remember what it was called. But I did, at the time of its publication, say to Rothenstein that I thought poor old Soames was really a rather tragic figure, and that I believed he would literally die for want of recognition. Rothenstein scoffed. He said I was trying to get credit for a kind heart which I didn’t possess; and perhaps this was so. But at the private view of the New English Art Club, a few weeks later, I beheld a pastel portrait of “Enoch Soames, Esq.” It was very like him, and very like Rothenstein to have done it. Soames was standing near it, in his soft hat and his waterproof cape, all through the afternoon. Anybody who knew him would have recognized the portrait at a glance, but nobody who didn’t know him would have recognized the portrait from its bystander: it “existed” so much more than he; it was bound to. Also, it had not that expression of faint happiness which on that day was discernible, yes, in Soames’s countenance. Fame had breathed on him. Twice again in the course of the month I went to the New English, and on both occasions Soames himself was on view there. Looking back, I regard the close of that exhibition as having been virtually the close of his career. He had felt the breath of Fame against his cheek—so late, for such a little while; and at its withdrawal he gave in, gave up, gave out. He, who had never looked strong or well, looked ghastly now—a shadow of the shade he had once been. He still frequented the domino-room, but having lost all wish to excite curiosity, he no lo
nger read books there. “You read only at the museum now?” I asked, with attempted cheerfulness. He said he never went there now. “No absinthe there,” he muttered. It was the sort of thing that in old days he would have said for effect; but it carried conviction now. Absinthe, erst but a point in the “personality” he had striven so hard to build up, was solace and necessity now. He no longer called it “la sorcière glauque.” He had shed away all his French phrases. He had become a plain, unvarnished Preston man.
Failure, if it be a plain, unvarnished, complete failure, and even though it be a squalid failure, has always a certain dignity. I avoided Soames because he made me feel rather vulgar. John Lane had published, by this time, two little books of mine, and they had had a pleasant little success of esteem. I was a— slight, but definite—“personality.” Frank Harris had engaged me to kick up my heels in “The Saturday Review,” Alfred Harmsworth was letting me do likewise in “The Daily Mail.” I was just what Soames wasn’t. And he shamed my gloss. Had I known that he really and firmly believed in the greatness of what he as an artist had achieved, I might not have shunned him. No man who hasn’t lost his vanity can be held to have altogether failed. Soames’s dignity was an illusion of mine. One day, in the first week of June, 1897, that illusion went. But on the evening of that day Soames went, too.
I had been out most of the morning and, as it was too late to reach home in time for luncheon, I sought “the Vingtième.” This little place—Restaurant du Vingtième Siècle, to give it its full title—had been discovered in ’96 by the poets and prosaists, but had now been more or less abandoned in favor of some later find. I don’t think it lived long enough to justify its name; but at that time there it still was, in Greek Street, a few doors from Soho Square, and almost opposite to that house where, in the first years of the century, a little girl, and with her a boy named De Quincey, made nightly encampment in darkness and hunger among dust and rats and old legal parchments. The Vingtième was but a small whitewashed room, leading out into the street at one end and into a kitchen at the other. The proprietor and cook was a Frenchman, known to us as Monsieur Vingtième; the waiters were his two daughters, Rose and Berthe; and the food, according to faith, was good. The tables were so narrow and were set so close together that there was space for twelve of them, six jutting from each wall.
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