simply “Have you got?” or “Have you a copy of?” how would they know what I wanted?’      

       ‘Oh, of course I should have my name on the cover,’ Soames answered earnestly. ‘And I rather want,’ he added, looking hard at Rothenstein, ‘to have a drawing of myself as frontispiece.’ Rothenstein admitted that this was a capital idea, and mentioned that he was going into the country and would be there for some time. He then looked at his watch, exclaimed at the hour, paid the waiter, and went away with me to dinner. Soames remained at his post of fidelity to the glaucous witch.     

       ‘Why were you so determined not to draw him?’ I asked.     

       ‘Draw him? Him? How can one draw a man who doesn’t exist?’      

       ‘He is dim,’ I admitted. But my mot juste fell flat. Rothenstein repeated that Soames was non-existent.     

       Still, Soames had written a book. I asked if Rothenstein had read       ‘Negations.’ He said he had looked into it, ‘but,’ he added crisply, ‘I don’t profess to know anything about writing.’ A reservation very characteristic of the period! Painters would not then allow that any one outside their own order had a right to any opinion about painting. This law (graven on the tablets brought down by Whistler from the summit of Fujiyama) imposed certain limitations. If other arts than painting were not utterly unintelligible to all but the men who practised them, the law tottered—the Monroe Doctrine, as it were, did not hold good. Therefore no painter would offer an opinion of a book without warning you at any rate that his opinion was worthless. No one is a better judge of literature than Rothenstein; but it wouldn’t have done to tell him so in those days; and I knew that I must form an unaided judgment on       ‘Negations.’      

       Not to buy a book of which I had met the author face to face would have been for me in those days an impossible act of self-denial. When I returned to Oxford for the Christmas Term I had duly secured ‘Negations.’        I used to keep it lying carelessly on the table in my room, and whenever a friend took it up and asked what it was about I would say ‘Oh, it’s rather a remarkable book. It’s by a man whom I know.’ Just ‘what it was about’ I never was able to say. Head or tail was just what I hadn’t made of that slim green volume. I found in the preface no clue to the exiguous       

 Prev. P 6/79 next