book—‘The Poems of Shelley.’
‘Anything that you really’—and I was going to say ‘admire?’ But I cautiously left my sentence unfinished, and was glad that I had done so, for he said, with unwonted emphasis, ‘Anything second-rate.’
I had read little of Shelley, but ‘Of course,’ I murmured, ‘he’s very uneven.’
‘I should have thought evenness was just what was wrong with him. A deadly evenness. That’s why I read him here. The noise of this place breaks the rhythm. He’s tolerable here.’ Soames took up the book and glanced through the pages. He laughed. Soames’ laugh was a short, single and mirthless sound from the throat, unaccompanied by any movement of the face or brightening of the eyes. ‘What a period!’ he uttered, laying the book down. And ‘What a country!’ he added.
I asked rather nervously if he didn’t think Keats had more or less held his own against the drawbacks of time and place. He admitted that there were ‘passages in Keats,’ but did not specify them. Of ‘the older men,’ as he called them, he seemed to like only Milton. ‘Milton,’ he said, ‘wasn’t sentimental.’ Also, ‘Milton had a dark insight.’ And again, ‘I can always read Milton in the reading-room.’
‘The reading-room?’
‘Of the British Museum. I go there every day.’
‘You do? I’ve only been there once. I’m afraid I found it rather a depressing place. It—it seemed to sap one’s vitality.’
‘It does. That’s why I go there. The lower one’s vitality, the more sensitive one is to great art. I live near the Museum. I have rooms in Dyott Street.’
‘And you go round to the reading-room to read Milton?’
‘Usually Milton.’ He looked at me. ‘It was Milton,’ he certificatively added, ‘who converted me to Diabolism.’
‘Diabolism? Oh yes? Really?’ said I, with that vague discomfort and that intense desire to be polite which one feels when a man speaks of his own religion. ‘You—worship the Devil?’
Soames shook his head. ‘It’s not exactly worship,’ he qualified, sipping
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