his absinthe. ‘It’s more a matter of trusting and encouraging.’      

       ‘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 

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