‘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’ 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.