Seven Men | Page 6

was a fool! Up cropped a rival hypothesis: suppose I was! I inclined to give Soames the 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 passed a table at which sat a pale man with an open book before him. He looked from his book to me, and I looked back over my shoulder with a vague sense that I ought to have recognised 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' 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.'
`Ah, yes.... But I had rather gathered from the preface to "Negations" that you were a--a Catholic.'
`Je l'etais a cette epoque. Perhaps I still am. Yes, I'm a Catholic Diabolist.'
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 shan'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. There were `passages'