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.
Not my compassion, however, impels me to write of him. For his
sake, poor fellow, I should be inclined to keep my pen out of the ink. It
is ill to deride the dead. And how can I write about Enoch Soames
without making him ridiculous? Or, rather, how am I to hush up the
horrid fact that he WAS ridiculous? I shall not be able to do that.
Yet, sooner or later, write about him I must. You will see in due course
that I have no option. And I may as well get the thing done now.
IN the summer term of '93 a bolt from the blue flashed down on Oxford.
It drove deep; it hurtlingly embedded itself in the soil. Dons and
undergraduates stood around, rather pale, discussing nothing but it.
Whence came it, this meteorite? From Paris. Its name? Will
Rothenstein. Its aim? To do a series of twenty-four portraits in
lithograph. These were to be published from the Bodley Head, London.
The matter was urgent. Already the warden of A, and the master of B,
and the Regius Professor of C had meekly "sat." Dignified and doddering
old men who had never consented to sit to any one could not withtand this
dynamic little stranger.
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