Enoch Soames


A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties


By MAX BEERBOHM





When a book about the literature of the eighteen-nineties was given by
Mr. Holbrook Jackson to the world, I looked eagerly in the index for
Soames, Enoch. It was as I feared: he was not there. But everybody else
was. Many writers whom I had quite forgotten, or remembered but
faintly, lived again for me, they and their work, in Mr. Holbrook
Jackson's pages. The book was as thorough as it was brilliantly written.
And thus the omission found by me was an all the deadlier record of poor
Soames's failure to impress himself on his decade.

I dare say I am the only person who noticed the omission. Soames
had failed so piteously as all that! Nor is there a counterpoise in the
thought that if he had had some measure of success he might have
passed, like those others, out of my mind, to return only at the historian's
beck. It is true that had his gifts, such as they were, been acknowledged
in his lifetime, he would never have made the bargain I saw him
make--that strange bargain whose results have kept him always in the
foreground of my memory. But it is from those very results that the full
piteousness of him glares out.