Enoch Soames | Page 6

benefit of the doubt. I had read "L'Apres-midi d'un faune"
without extracting a glimmer of meaning; yet Mallarme, 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 Mallarme'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'etais a cette epoque. 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 malgre lui."
France had had only one poet--Villon; "and two thirds of Villon were
sheer journalism." Verlaine was "an epicier malgre lui." Altogether,
rather to my surprise, he rated French literature lower than English.