Neither he nor his work
received the slightest encouragement; but he persisted in behaving as a
personage: always he kept his dingy little flag flying. Wherever
congregated the jeunes feroces of the arts, in whatever
Soho restaurant they had just discovered, in whatever music-hall they
were most frequently, there was Soames in the midst of them, or, rather,
on the fringe of them, a dim, but inevitable, figure. He never sought to
propitiate his fellow-writers, never bated a jot of his arrogance about his
own work or of his contempt for theirs. To the painters he was
respectful, even humble; but for the poets and prosaists of "The Yellow
Book" and later of "The Savoy" he had never a word but of scorn. He
wasn't resented. It didn't occur to anybody that he or his Catholic
diabolism mattered. When, in the autumn of '96, he brought out (at his
own expense, this time) a third book, his last book, nobody said a word
for or against it. I meant, but forgot, to buy it. I never saw it, and am
ashamed to say I don't even remember what it was called. But I did, at
the time of its publication, say to Rothenstein that I thought poor old
Soames was really a rather tragic figure, and that I believed he would
literally die for want of recognition. Rothenstein scoffed. He said I was
trying to get credit for a kind heart which I didn't possess; and perhaps
this was so. But at the private view of the New English Art Club, a few
weeks later, I beheld a pastel portrait of "Enoch Soames, Esq.
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