I asked him what he thought of Baudelaire. 🔊 He uttered the snort that was his laugh, and, "Baudelaire," he said, "was a bourgeois malgré lui." 🔊 France had had only one poet—Villon; "and two thirds of Villon were sheer journalism." 🔊 Verlaine was "an épicier malgré 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-gray 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's work, that is weaker than it once was. 🔊