Enoch Soames | Page 7

There were "passages" 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-gray 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'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