Item 64: "‘Excuse–Permit Me,’ He Said Softly" (ca. 1919)

For someone who scoffed at Freudian psychology, Beerbohm certainly understood the power of compulsions, even when he treated these comically. Seven Men (1919), a collection of five of Beerbohm’s short stories, was filled with fictional figures driven to self-destruction—none more so than in “Enoch Soames,” a story first published in the New York-based Century Magazine. The titular character, a failed Decadent poet desperate for fame, is the pitiable victim of celebrity culture, and he pays an eternal price. In Beerbohm’s unused illustration for the 1919 volume, the devil approaches Soames and the story’s narrator (a Beerbohm self-caricature) in 1897, offering to send Soames forward 100 years, where the British Museum’s library catalogue will reveal his future glory. Soames discovers instead that he remains a perpetual nonentity, and the devil takes his soul.