Seven Men | Page 7

in Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. But `I,' he summed up, `owe nothing to France.' He nodded at me. `You'll see,' he predicted.
I did not, when the time came, quite see that. I thought the author of `Fungoids' did--unconsciously, of course--owe something to the young Parisian decadents, or to the young English ones who owed something to THEM. I still think so. The little book--bought by me in Oxford--lies before me as I write. Its pale grey buckram cover and silver lettering have not worn well. Nor have its contents. Through these, with a melancholy interest, I have again been looking. They are not much. But at the time of their publication I had a vague suspicion that they MIGHT be. I suppose it is my capacity for faith, not poor Soames' 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' 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 stroll'd 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' 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 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 throughout.... These tripping numbers.--Preston Telegraph
was the only lure offered in advertisements by Soames' publisher. I had hopes 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