Enoch Soames | Page 8

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 feroces of the arts, in whatever Soho restaurant
they had just discovered, in whatever music-hall they were most
frequently, 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