Seven Men | Page 3

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This etext was prepared by Tom Weiss ([email protected]) from the version of "Seven
Men" published in 1919 by William Heinemann (London). I have omitted two of the
stories ("James Pethel" and "A.V. Laider") since they are available separately from
Project Gutenberg.
I have removed spaces that preceded semicolons, exclamation points, question marks,
and closing quotation marks. I have removed spaces that followed opening quotation
marks. I have converted paragraph formatting and ellipses to PG standard.
In this plain ASCII version, I have converted emphasis and syllable stress italics to
capitals, removed foreign italics, and removed accents.
In "Enoch Soames:" I added a missing closing quotation mark in the following phrase:
`Ten past two,' he said.
In "Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton:" I changed the opening double quote to a single
quote in: `I wondered what old Mr. Abraham Hayward... and `I knew that if I leaned
forward...

SEVEN MEN by Max Beerbohm

ENOCH SOAMES

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. I had feared
he would not be there. 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' failure
to impress himself on his decade.
I daresay 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
life-time, 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 withstand 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.