Enoch Soames | Page 3

with most word processors); OR
[*] You provide, or agree to also provide on request at no additional
cost, fee or expense, a copy of the etext in its original plain ASCII form
(or in EBCDIC or other equivalent proprietary form).
[2] Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this "Small
Print!" statement.

[3] Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the net profits
you derive calculated using the method you already use to calculate
your applicable taxes. If you don't derive profits, no royalty is due.
Royalties are payable to "Project Gutenberg Association / Benedictine
University" within the 60 days following each date you prepare (or
were legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent periodic)
tax return.
WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU
DON'T HAVE TO?
The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time, scanning
machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty free copyright
licenses, and every other sort of contribution you can think of. Money
should be paid to "Project Gutenberg Association / Benedictine
University".
*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN
ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*

Enoch Soames
A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties
By MAX BEERBOHM

When a book about the literature of the eighteen-nineties was given by
Mr. Holbrook Jackson to the world, I looked eagerly in the index for
Soames, Enoch. It was as I feared: he was not there. But everybody else
was. Many writers whom I had quite forgotten, or remembered but
faintly, lived again for me, they and their work, in Mr. Holbrook
Jackson's pages. The book was as thorough as it was brilliantly written.
And thus the omission found by me was an all the deadlier record of
poor Soames's failure to impress himself on his decade.
I dare say I am the only person who noticed the omission. Soames had
failed so piteously as all that! Nor is there a counterpoise in the thought
that if he had had some measure of success he might have passed, like
those others, out of my mind, to return only at the historian's beck. It is

true that had his gifts, such as they were, been acknowledged in his
lifetime, he would never have made the bargain I saw him make--that
strange bargain whose results have kept him always in the foreground
of my memory. But it is from those very results that the full piteousness
of him glares out.
Not my compassion, however, impels me to write of him. For his sake,
poor fellow, I should be inclined to keep my pen out of the ink. It is ill
to deride the dead. And how can I write about Enoch Soames without
making him ridiculous? Or, rather, how am I to hush up the horrid fact
that he WAS ridiculous? I shall not be able to do that. Yet, sooner or
later, write about him I must. You will see in due course that I have no
option. And I may as well get the thing done now.
IN the summer term of '93 a bolt from the blue flashed down on Oxford.
It drove deep; it hurtlingly embedded itself in the soil. Dons and
undergraduates stood around, rather pale, discussing nothing but it.
Whence came it, this meteorite? From Paris. Its name? Will
Rothenstein. Its aim? To do a series of twenty-four portraits in
lithograph. These were to be published from the Bodley Head, London.
The matter was urgent. Already the warden of A, and the master of B,
and the Regius Professor of C had meekly "sat." Dignified and
doddering old men who had never consented to sit to any one could not
withtand this dynamic little stranger. He did not sue; he invited: he did
not invite; he commanded. He was twenty-one years old. He wore
spectacles that flashed more than any other pair ever seen. He was a wit.
He was brimful of ideas. He knew Whistler. He knew Daudet and the
Goncourts. He knew every one in Paris. He knew them all by heart. He
was Paris in Oxford. It was whispered that, so soon as he had polished
off his selection of dons, he was going to include a few undergraduates.
It was a proud day for me when I--I was included. I liked Rothenstein
not less than I feared him; and there arose between us a friendship that
has grown ever warmer, and been more and more valued by me, with
every passing year.
At the end of term he settled in, or, rather, meteoritically into, London.
It was to him I owed my first knowledge of that forever-enchanting
little world-in-itself, Chelsea, and my first acquaintance with Walter
Sickert and other August elders who dwelt there. It was Rothenstein
that took me to see, in Cambridge Street, Pimlico, a young