Enoch Soames | Page 7

my capacity for faith, not 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