Enoch Soames | Page 5

occurs to you that he was a fool? It didn't to me. I was young, and
had not the clarity of judgment that Rothenstein already had. Soames
was quite five or six years older than either of us. Also--he had written
a book. It was wonderful to have written a book.
If Rothenstein had not been there, I should have revered Soames. Even
as it was, I respected him. And I was very near indeed to reverence
when he said he had another book coming out soon. I asked if I might
ask what kind of book it was to be.
"My poems," he answered. Rothenstein asked if this was to be the title
of the book. The poet meditated on this suggestion, but said he rather
thought of giving the book no title at all. "If a book is good in itself--"
he murmured, and waved his cigarette.
Rothenstein objected that absence of title might be bad for the sale of a
book.
"If," he urged, "I went into a bookseller's and said simply, 'Have you
got?' or, 'Have you a copy of?' how would they know what I wanted?"
"Oh, of course I should have my name on the cover," Soames answered
earnestly. "And I rather want," he added, looking hard at Rothenstein,
"to have a drawing of myself as frontispiece." Rothenstein admitted
that this was a capital idea, and mentioned that he was going into the
country and would be there for some time. He then looked at his watch,
exclaimed at the hour, paid the waiter, and went away with me to
dinner. Soames remained at his post of fidelity to the glaucous witch.
"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 Fuji-yama) 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 Mendes 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 not occur to me: suppose Enoch Soames was a
fool! Up cropped a rival hypothesis: suppose I was! I inclined to give
Soames the