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-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