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Title: Precious balms
Compiler: Arthur Machen
Release date: December 4, 2025 [eBook #77402]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Spurr & Swift, 1924
Credits: Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PRECIOUS BALMS ***
[Illustration: _265 copies of this book have been printed_
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_This is No. 62._
_Signature_
_Arthur Machen_]
Precious Balms
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
ELEUSINIA
THE ANATOMY OF TOBACCO
THE CHRONICLE OF CLEMENDY
THE GREAT GOD PAN
THE THREE IMPOSTORS
HIEROGLYPHICS
DR STIGGINS
THE HOUSE OF SOULS
THE HILL OF DREAMS
THE BOWMEN
THE GREAT RETURN
THE TERROR
WAR AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH
THE SECRET GLORY
FAR OFF THINGS
THINGS NEAR AND FAR
THE SHINING PYRAMID
STRANGE ROADS
DOG AND DUCK
Precious Balms
By Arthur Machen
_Let the righteous smite me friendly and reprove me, but let not
their precious balms break my head._—Ps. cxli
London: Spurr & Swift
123 Pall Mall, S.W.1 1924
_Printed in Great Britain
by Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh_
MELINA PLACE
LONDON
_May 1, 1924_
_My dear Spurr_,
_I am grieved, indeed, to hear your news about “Precious Balms.” You
say that during your recent visit to America, you were made acquainted
with some very serious misconceptions as to a phrase in the “Precious
Balms” prospectus. This document stated that for a certain period I was
“languishing in the cells of Carmelite House, serving a term of eleven
years’ ‘hard’ for a series of obscure crimes.” And now you tell me that
in the United States, this small piece of jocularity has been taken in
the most serious way. People were anxious to be informed as to the exact
nature of the crimes aforesaid, and confused Carmelite House with such
establishments as The Tombs, Sing Sing, Pentonville and Wandsworth._
_I am extremely sorry. I had no intention of hurting anybody’s feelings.
I hope you will present my sincere regrets and apologies—in the proper
quarters._
_Yours sincerely_,
_ARTHUR MACHEN_
_Harry Spurr, Esq. Messrs Spurr & Swift Pall Mall, London_
CONTENTS
PAGE
_Introduction_ ix
_The Great God Pan and The Three Impostors_ 1
_Hieroglyphics_ 37
_The House of Souls_ 56
_The Hill of Dreams_ 89
_The Secret Glory_ 108
_Far Off Things and Things Near and Far_ 121
_Dog and Duck_ 139
_The Other Side_ 151
INTRODUCTION
Now and again I glance at the correspondence columns of a paper devoted
to the affairs of those interested in writing—and find to my astonishment
that authors have a great dislike of unfavourable criticism. I note, for
example, the letter of a hurt and angry man, who protests that he has
had hard measure from the critic of the _Cosmopolitan_, that the _Daily
Mercury_ has clearly not read more than three pages of his book, that
“Judex” in the _Lyre_ says he is ignorant of the elements of prosody:
“a harsh judgment,” the poor man exclaims, “when directed against one
who has the privilege of signing himself ‘M.A. Oxon.’” And sometimes the
reviewer is entreated to remember that authors have their living to get;
the suggested inference being, as I suppose, that the critic should do
nothing but praise the books submitted to him. In fact, there are, it
seems, authors who conceive that a word of blame is a word of injury, and
that a harsh notice is a hardship.
In my opinion, nothing can be farther from the truth. Could anything be
duller than a monotonous song of praise? Is it not obvious that there is
no sport in easy paths? If this were not so, what would become of the
Alpine Clubs? A mountaineer would not thank you for a free excursion
ticket to Romney Marsh or the Bedford Level. Opposition, whether it be
that of a mountain side or a body of critical opinion, is one of the
chiefest zests and relishes of life; and so profoundly have I felt this
that for the last thirty years I have hoarded up my “notices,” with a
very special eye of favour on those “notices” which are foolishly termed
bad. Foolishly, for many reasons, some of which I have suggested; but
chiefly because there is only one sort of notice that is really bad,
and that is no notice at all. I do not know whether there are critical
writers who desire to extinguish, make to cease, and bring to nought
this, that or the other author; but if there be such, I take it that they
are far too skilled in their craft to think that a man can be blotted
out by a column of words, be they fierce or jeering. Silence is the only
fatal sentence; from that there is no appeal, for it there is no remedy.
But this must be done thoroughly; and here I would submit is the error of
the critic of _The Referee_, the late David Christie Murray, who will be
found quoted in the chapter devoted to “The House of Souls.” The writer
desired to “slate” the book with all his heart, and devoted the entire
front page of his paper to that excellent endeavour. He compared the book
to an obscene waxwork anatomical museum at a country fair: “it poisoned
everything.” He was light: he said it was all “baby-Satanic-tommy-rot,”
that it was “buried nastiness.” He declared that I was taking the
ha’pence of the public and making a very decent “(and most indecent)”
living by exhibiting the bestial side of my nature. All very well; but
the critic tried to combine the method of the hearty attack with the
method of silence: he neither mentioned the name of the book nor that
of the author. This was faulty technique: for the next few months the
Editor of _The Referee_ was pestered by correspondents who wanted to know
all about it; to ascertain for themselves the extent of the author’s
depravity.
A more delicate method was employed—in perfect good faith, very
likely—by _The Bystander_. Here the critic gave the name of the book and
of the author, and praised the stories. _But he pretended that I had no
existence._ He said that he had a very strong suspicion that I was, in
reality, Mr Montagu Wood, the author of “A Tangled I.” He added that Mr
Montagu Wood’s humour was recognised in “Pop” at Eton, and afterwards at
the Canning Club at Oxford.
Now, let us be fair. Honour to whom honour is due; I confess that the
dart of this reviewer penetrated my armour. I was genuinely annoyed—I was
a lad of 44 at the time—at being practically wiped out of existence. But,
on calm reflection, I wonder what Mr Wood thought of it. Perhaps he, too,
was not over-pleased. But I shall always think of _The Bystander_ with
the respect that one gives to a cunning craftsman.
There are some very tolerable examples to be found in the collection
relating to “The Great God Pan” and “The Three Impostors.” Of course I
reject the violent, especially the morally violent. These are not in
the true tradition of the fine art of reviewing. When _The Manchester
Guardian_ said that “The Great God Pan” was “the most acutely and
intentionally disagreeable” book it had seen in English, the _Guardian_
blundered. Deplorable as it may be, we must confess that such a sentence
constitutes a valuable free advertisement; and _The Manchester Guardian_
did not desire to advertise the work. Indeed it said so; and thus
blundered again. And so again _The Lady’s Pictorial_: “Men and women
who are morbid and unhealthy in mind may find something that appeals
to them.” This is all wrong. Again we must deplore the anfractuosities
of human nature; but to say that a book is morbid and unhealthy is to
perform the office of a spielman, not of a censor.
No; the way to go about it, if you must leave the safe way of silence,
is to take things lightly. Thus, in _The National Observer_: “In all the
glory of the binder’s and printer’s arts we have two tales of no great
distinction.” So _The Sketch_: “his bogles don’t scare”; _The Daily
Chronicle_: “his horror, we regret to say, leaves us quite cold”; _The
Observer_: “one shakes with laughter rather than with dread.” All these
are very well; and another manner is, I think, successful. The _Belfast
News Letter_ suggested that “sensationalism is the order of the day, and
must be pandered to to make the author’s pot boil.” There is something
intimate in this knowledge of the author’s very disastrous private
affairs which has a strange, elusive charm. Another favourite of mine
is Mr Walkely’s review of “Hieroglyphics” in _The Morning Leader_: here
again you will find intimate knowledge of the writer’s life which could
not have been gathered from title pages. Thus, the opening sentence:
“I do not know whether Mr Machen is to be described as an actor who
amuses his leisure with writing books or as an author who fills up his
evenings by appearing on the stage.” But the article which follows,
though decisive as to the demerits of the book under review, is much
too long. Brevity in these affairs is of the utmost importance. If you
want to say that an author is an unimportant ass, you should say it in a
paragraph, not in a column.
Other reviews which I should like to recommend to the notice of the
_virtuoso_ are _The Manchester Guardian_ on “The Hill of Dreams,” and on
“Far Off Things”; also _The Boston Evening Transcript_ review of “Things
Near and Far.” The heading of this article is: “The Reflections of a
Man of Self-Conceit.” The article displays my mean, sponging, irritable
nature in a very masterly manner. And the very choice collection of
“Outlook” reviews should not be neglected. And I have said that in my
opinion the review of vehement denunciation is not of the highest merit:
but I except Mr Murry’s notice of “The Secret Glory” in _The Nation and
Athenæum_. There is a completeness about it which satisfies.
* * * * *
Finally, it would not be honest to conceal that there is another side to
this as to most other questions. I have had “good” reviews in my day, and
I give a few specimens of these. The writers of these articles I leave
to the judgment of their own conscience. I only hope that, in the words
of Mr Pecksniff, they have not voluntarily deserted the flowery paths of
purity and peace.
THE GREAT GOD PAN AND THE THREE IMPOSTORS
[Sidenote: _The Observer_]
... He imagines for us the horrible results of attempting by means of a
surgical experiment to make a young woman “see the god Pan.” Interference
with the nerve centres of the young woman’s brain turns her into an
idiot; but that is not the worst of it, for she becomes in due course
the mother of a sort of she-devil who goes through life frightening
people out of their wits, and eventually causes a “terrible epidemic
of suicide” amongst fashionable men about town. What is it about this
mysterious heroine which sends the friends of her girlhood crazy, which
ruins her husband “body and soul,” and which causes her later admirers
to go out and hang themselves—this is never definitely explained. The
intention evidently is to make us shudder by vague allusions to “awful
unspeakable elements,” which are “triumphant in human flesh,” and produce
“a horror one dare not name.” It is not Mr Machen’s fault, but his
misfortune, that one shakes with laughter rather than with dread over
the contemplation of his psychological bogey. His art has been hampered
by the limitations imposed upon it through his having to leave his
ingenious horror “indescribable” and “unutterable” from first to last.
Mr Aubrey Beardsley has no doubt come gallantly to the rescue with the
admirably-realised repulsiveness of the nymph designed by him as an
appropriate frontispiece. But the general effect of “The Great God Pan,”
as well as of the kindred tale which follows it in “The Inmost Light,”
is, we fear, hardly so creepy as it would have been if it had dared to be
intelligible.
[Sidenote: _The Daily Chronicle_]
... His horror, we regret to say, leaves us quite cold. Gallant gentlemen
commit suicide at the mere sight of the accursed thing; here be murders,
inquests, alarums and excursions—and our flesh obstinately refuses
to creep. Why? Possibly because we have had a surfeit of this morbid
thaumaturgy of late, and “ken the biggin’ o’t.” Possibly, too, because,
while Mr Machen describes the (literally) panic terror of the various
people who behold the monster, he never lets us have so much as a
glimpse of the monster for ourselves. How can we be petrified unless we
see Medusa’s head? To be told that others have been turned to stone won’t
do. That is only what the soldier said: it is not evidence....
[Sidenote: _Belfast News Letter_]
... Sensationalism is the order of the day, and must, we suppose, be
pandered to to make the author’s pot boil; but, despite the ability in
this direction—for the conception is cleverly carried out—we fail to see
why such absurdities should be presented to intelligent readers. The
Great God Pan, with his syrinx, cloven hoof, and pointed ears, may have
been a serious bogey to the rustics Theocritus sings about; but to call
in this mythical monstrosity’s aid to work on our _fin-de-siècle_ nerves
is far-fetched, to say the least of it. Mr Machen’s ability is worthy
of a better _motif_ than mystifying innocent people about the devil, or
poking fun at his intellectual admirers about the unseen.
[Sidenote: _The Westminster Gazette_]
If Mr Arthur Machen’s object were to make our flesh creep, we can only
speak for ourselves and say that we have read the book without an
emotion. There are nameless horrors hinted at in every other page, which
make other people turn green and sick, but it is beyond the power of the
most susceptible reader to shudder at the shudders of these fictional
people. The story is, in fact, most elaborately absurd—so absurd, indeed,
as to save it from the less agreeable charge of being nasty, as it would
inevitably be if Mr Machen meant us to take it seriously. We can at
least congratulate him on having failed in the courage to make plain
the mysterious horrors which are supposed to be in the background of
this story, but the result is to leave an inchoate and confused series
of impressions, as of a man who is trying to tell a story and fails
to express himself. What the intention of the writer could possibly
have been we cannot even conjecture. Mr Machen was possibly under the
impression that he was writing a new “Jekyll and Hyde,” but “The Great
God Pan” is as meaningless as an allegory as it is absurd from any other
point of view.
[Sidenote: _The Echo_]
Mr Arthur Machen’s story, “The Great God Pan,” published by Mr John
Lane, is a failure and an absurdity. His meaning, if there is any, seems
to be the presentation, or rather the suggestion, of Pan as a hideous
being or force behind nature, of which being the men who fall victims to
an abandoned woman that appears in various disguises and under various
_aliases_ in the story catch glimpses, from the mere fact that they have
yielded to her power—the obscene nature deity revealing himself in the
person of the said woman.... Mr Machen tells us that the victims saw the
horrors, but that is not enough. Doubtless the horrors would turn out to
be mere grotesques, even if we did see them. Not the ghost of a “creepy”
feeling will this story produce in the mind of anybody who reads it.
[Sidenote: _The Speaker_]
... If we may believe Mr Machen, those doings are of the most horrible
character; but as he omits to tell us what they are, and leaves us
merely with the impression that she is “a bold, bad woman” of a very
ordinary description, we are compelled to take her special horrors upon
trust. Fortunately for everybody, and for the readers of the story in
particular, she comes to a speedy end, though whether she is hanged
or dissolved into “a substance as jelly” the record fails to explain.
All that we know is that Mr Machen writes of this unfortunate female
as if he were in deadly earnest and she were something too terrible
to be plainly revealed. There is another story, called “The Inmost
Light,” bound up with “The Great God Pan.” It deals with a lady who is
represented as having been in every way as horrible as the heroine of
the first tale; but as the only explicit fact recorded of her is that
she frightened the passers-by by the faces she made at the window of her
husband’s house, the reader is left as much in the dark about her as he
is about her sister in misfortune....
[Sidenote: _The Sketch_]
Mr Machen’s “Great God Pan” (John Lane) is concerned more with the
nerves than with the imagination. We respect such things as, aiming at
the ghastly, do actually make us afraid in the dark and give us hideous
dreams. Mr Machen’s inhuman conceptions are put into ingenious forms, and
exhibit many different clevernesses; only, his bogles don’t scare. In his
next attempt, however, he may come out on the right side.
[Sidenote: W. L. Courtney in _The Daily Telegraph_]
“Really,” laughed the Hostess, “is the Yellow Book a disease?”
“Assuredly,” said the Physician, “a very virulent form of jaundice, due
to an imperfect digestion and a morbid condition of liver.”
“Yes,” continued the Philosopher, meditatively, “and ‘Theodora’ is a
form of typhoid, due to ethical blood poisoning. ‘Little Eyolf’ and ‘The
Rat-Wife’ are varieties of cerebral mania, Mr Aubrey Beardsley’s figures
are salient examples of locomotor ataxy, and as for ‘The House of Shame’
and ‘The Great God Pan’—well, there are some kinds of maladies which are
not mentioned outside medical treatises!”
[Sidenote: _The Manchester Guardian_]
The meaning of “The Great God Pan,” by Arthur Machen, is very carefully
veiled, and on the whole we are inclined to think it is quite as well
that it is so, since such glimpses as we are vouchsafed of it are
singularly repulsive. In fact, so far as we have been able to make out,
to shock would seem to have been Mr Machen’s sole intention. To achieve
this desirable end he has ransacked the dark and hidden corners of Greek
mythology, and so piled up innuendo and suggestion, to say nothing of
the mere vulgar horror of five mysterious suicides and other unspeakable
crimes, that we are afraid he only succeeds in being ridiculous. The
book is, on the whole, the most acutely and intentionally disagreeable we
have yet seen in English. We could say more, but refrain from doing so
for fear of giving such a work advertisement. The same remarks apply to
“The Inmost Light,” the second story in the book, in only slightly lesser
degree.
[Sidenote: _The Queen_]
“The Great God Pan” comes near being a book of genius with its
originality and weirdness; but it distinctly misses it, because Mr Machen
has not the power of indicating, even by a hint, the nature of the horror
which made strong men destroy themselves rather than live with such a
memory. There are two stories in the book, both dealing with villainous
doctors, who make surgical experiments with the brains of living women in
the hope, apparently, of turning human beings into devils. In each case
the result is terrifying beyond human endurance, according to Mr Machen,
but he does not succeed in imparting any of the terror to his readers....
[Sidenote: _The Westminster Gazette_]
_The English School of Diabolists._—I pass now to the fourth class, that
of the lurid and nonsensical. These, I take it, are written under the
inspiration of the French School of Diabolists. That school, as the
reader knows, is possessed with ideas of black magic, spirits of evil,
devils become incarnate, and numerous other nightmares of corruption.
You are introduced to modern alchemists who use Latin incantations,
pour mysterious fluids out of green phials, and by the black arts
transform men into monsters, or penetrate the corrupt mysteries of
their being. Several English imitators of this school have come into
my hands recently, but the wildest is, perhaps, Mr Machen’s “Great God
Pan,” published in the Keynotes Series. Here we have a physician who
practises the black art, and by an operation on the brain releases for
the time being the spirit of a woman, that she may visit the spirit world
and “see the Great God Pan.” She awakes, a lunatic “convulsed with an
unknowable terror.” Shortly afterwards she has a child whom we gather
from certain lurid hints to be a she-devil incarnate. “When the House of
Life is thrown open there may enter in that for which we have no name,
and human flesh may become the veil of a horror one dare not express.”
(That is Mr Machen’s favourite style. The unnameable, the unknowable, the
inexpressible, and the unmentionable have a nameless fascination for
him.) ...
_Sex-Mania Incoherent._—The wild absurdity of all this really makes
comment superfluous. But note the sex-mania in it all. It is an
incoherent nightmare of sex and the supposed horrible mysteries behind
it, such as might conceivably possess a man who was given to a morbid
brooding over these matters, but which would soon lead to insanity if
unrestrained. I imagine, however, that Mr Machen’s desire has simply been
to emulate certain French practitioners in this line; indeed, the fact
that he is so often reduced to gasping negatives proves that he has not
made it clear even to himself what he is after. His work is innocuous
from its absurdity, but the type is most truly decadent....
[Sidenote: _The National Observer_]
In all the glory of the binder’s and printer’s arts, we have two tales
of no great distinction. Indeed paper and form are worthy of much better
things. We look for literature and find the old, old tale of man or woman
who is possessed of a devil. Mr J. Sheridan Le Fanu made our youthful
scalp tingle years ago with something of the nature (but infinitely
cleverer) of these tales. The doctor who performs weird operations we
have met before but not one so fortunate as the hero of “The Inmost
Light,” the second story in this volume. For this gentleman digs for the
soul and finds it in the convenient form of an opal—a dangerous theory
surely. Men have committed murder for less. Dr Black murders his own
wife, quite unnecessarily it appears to us, and it is her soul in the
form of a jewel which he keeps for inexplicable reasons in a leather case
in the back parlour of a toy shop in London. Mr Machen does his very
best to thrill, and relates his horrors in a style which should carry
conviction but fails. The incidents are too loosely strung together, and
the form of narration, bringing in as it does characters who take no part
in the central idea of the tale, inevitably cools the interest of the
reader. Again, there is no motive assigned to any action except a vague
love of science which certainly fails to convince. Men do not pursue an
idea as does Villiers in the first story—doctors do not kill their wives
as does Dr Black in the second tale—without strong incentive, and it is
painfully obvious that in the present case their actions are a mere
necessity to the author. Mr Machen writes somewhat conventionally and
without affectation. It is in construction that he is as yet markedly
deficient.
[Sidenote: _The Lady’s Pictorial_]
This book is gruesome, ghastly, and dull. Mr Machen has done his best
with an impossible subject, but although men and women who are morbid
and unhealthy in mind may find something that appeals to them in the
description of Dr Raymond’s experiment and its results, the majority of
readers will turn from it in utter disgust. From first to last there is
not one human touch in the story, and not a trace of psychology to awaken
our interest in the actions of any one of the characters. Dr Raymond’s
apparent conviction that to see the Great God Pan would make up for any
loss or suffering entailed by the sight, is almost childish; and as I
waded through the dull list of horrors, which the too vivid imagination
of Mr Machen inspired him to write, I bethought me of the curious old
legend, so exquisitely told in verse by Mrs Browning, of the death of
“The Great God Pan.” It was waste of time for Mr Machen to bring him to
life again....
[Sidenote: _The Guardian_]
Mr Machen has apparently tried to produce a novelty in fiction by
borrowing from Mr Conan Doyle some of the tricks of style of his
detective stories, and uniting them with the rather gruesome studies in
dehumanisation which Mr Stevenson justified by the fine turn he gave
them in his “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” and Mr Rudyard Kipling essayed
less successfully in “The Mark of the Beast.” According to Mr Machen’s
postulate, “a slight lesion in the grey matter” of the brain is all that
is needed to “level utterly the solid wall of sense,” and enable “a
spirit to gaze on a spirit-world.” Fantastically enough, this is called
“seeing the god Pan,” with whom it appears to us to have about as much
to do as the vulgar figure which Mr Aubrey Beardsley has placed on the
title-page. The result on a lady of seeing the god Pan is that people
feel cold shivers when they look on her, and that she initiates her male
acquaintances into mysteries which either kill them outright with horror
or send them home to commit suicide—also that she herself has eventually
to be put to death by her husband or the amateur detective, and turns
into all sorts of remarkable shapes in the process. Mr Machen frequently
informs us that his story is very terrible, and tries to keep up the
mystery by breaking off every now and then as if his tale were too dread
for words—but these tricks have also their ludicrous side. Perhaps the
most discreditable paragraph in a not very creditable book is the “note”
at the end of the first story, asserting that the woman of whom it is
told “was born on August 5th, 1865, at the Red House, Breconshire, and
died on July 25th, 1888, in her house in a street off Piccadilly, called
Ashley Street in the story.” Mr Machen should make his choice between the
art of fiction and penny-a-lining.
[Sidenote: _The Cork Examiner_]
... Arthur Machen wants to thrill us, and sets about his task by mixing
surgical experiments, devil-possessed women of weird beauty, Latin
phrases, and fantastic art, reminiscent of craftsmen of ages agone, into
a pottage which, for our part, we find mawkish. The trick of the thing is
at once apparent. Ever so many circumstances, feelings, sights, thoughts,
etc., are unutterable, unnameable, unknowable, and unwhisperable, and
there are nameless horrors by the hundred.... In our judgment this is
what children call “a frightened story,” and, as an artistic piece of
fiction, it calls for no serious consideration.
[Sidenote: _The Chronicle_]
With this new volume Mr Machen boldly challenges comparison with Mr
Stevenson’s “Dynamiters.” The plan of the book is the same; that is to
say, a number of short stories are woven into the fabric of a long one.
Mr Machen’s literary method, too, is not unlike Stevenson’s; there is the
same careful turning of the phrase, the nice choice of epithets, the use
of certain words in their correct, but not in their common meaning.... Mr
Machen’s intention in all these stories is to give us a grue, to curdle
our blood, to make us think twice and thrice ere we mount the stairs and
face the possible horror awaiting us in our dimly-lighted bedroom. Well,
all we can say is that he has failed where few writers have succeeded.
Edgar Allan Poe has done this thing over and over again. Le Fanu did it
once; so did the author of a volume called “Phantasms” reviewed in these
columns some months ago; but here the delightful thrill never quite comes
off. Mr Machen lacks the power to create the necessary atmosphere, the
atmosphere in which we shiver with apprehension as we breathe it. We all
know how in dreams events in themselves commonplace and trifling enough,
suddenly become ghastly, horrible, soul-devastating. And all because
of our own state of mind. Now an author must somehow or other produce
that state of mind in us before he puts us face to face with his creepy
situation. He must compel “poetic faith” in us as Coleridge has it; bring
us into the mental condition in which we are ready to believe anything.
This Mr Machen never once succeeds in accomplishing. We are interested
in his stories, and pleased extremely with the exceedingly careful and
polished style in which they are told; we enjoy his humour and marvel at
his ingenuity, but that worked-for and longed-for grue never happens....
The fact is that to triumph in the particular literary line which Mr
Machen seems to have marked out for himself a certain peculiar sort
of genius is, above all things, necessary. With this peculiar sort of
genius the fates have not endowed Mr Machen, and the sooner he frankly
recognises his want of it the better, for he has many other and most
excellent literary accomplishments.
[Sidenote: _The Dundee Advertiser_]
As tragedy and comedy go hand in hand, so the weird is seldom far removed
from the ridiculous. Arthur Machen’s volume, “The Three Impostors,”
furnishes an excellent case in point. The stories it contains form
a connected narrative such as Poe himself might have evolved. These
nameless horrors, however, weirdly fascinating as they are, have
something in common with the dreaded gnomes and goblins by whose aid
intelligent nursemaids are wont to charm little folk to sleep. What place
the book will occupy in the literature of entertainment we cannot take
upon ourselves to say. We can only regret that the author’s singular
inventiveness and great story-telling gifts have been employed in so
undesirable a cause. What can any healthy-minded reader think of this:
“There, upon the floor, was a dark and putrid mass, seething with
corruption and hideous rottenness, neither liquid nor solid, but melting
and changing before our eyes, and bubbling with unctuous, oily bubbles
like boiling pitch. And out of the midst of it shone two burning points
like eyes, and I saw a writhing and stirring as of limbs, and something
moved and lifted up that might have been an arm.” Such visions have
before been given to little boys who complained of headache and divers
other pains. The family doctor generally diagnosed the case as “mince
pies and pickles.”
[Sidenote: _Punch_]
“The Three Impostors,” a novel (“Keynote” Series) by Arthur Machen, opens
well, which, by the way, is more than the book does, being a bit stiff;
but, though it has the machens of a good story in it, there is very
little worth reading after page 64.
[Sidenote: _Glasgow Herald_]
There are some books that produce a positive physical repulsion in their
reader. Mr Machen’s extremely disagreeable story is one of them. One may
be fond of the gruesome, and even take pleasure in an occasional sup of
horror, administered in the piquant and artistic style of which Poe and
Baudelaire had the secret. Mr Machen himself, in his previous volume,
led some of us to imagine that a share of the same gift might be found
in him. But “The Three Impostors” changes our view. The horror in it is
palpably and very literally sickening. Nothing but a smart turn in brisk
air can cleanse the feelings of the person who has been unfortunate
enough to read this volume through.
[Sidenote: _Black and White_]
“The Three Impostors,” by Arthur Machen, lacks the vivid sense of
actuality genius alone can impart to the grotesque. In less able hands,
as Mr Machen’s, the weird tends to merge into the ridiculous. His
connecting chain, too, is clumsily wielded, and you close the book, which
opens with cleverness and promise, with disappointment.
[Sidenote: _The Observer_]
“The Three Impostors: or, The Transmutations,” by Arthur Machen, is a
puzzling book. It is both good and bad; good in the clear presentation of
some parts of it, in clever handling of some difficult characters, and
bad because of the indefinite and unreal impression which, as a whole, it
leaves on the reader’s mind. It also reminds us a little too strongly to
be agreeable of a work with which it cannot for a moment be compared—with
Mr Stevenson’s “New Arabian Nights.” ...
[Sidenote: _Birmingham Post_]
This is a singular effort of the imagination, suggestive of a mixture
of Conan Doyle, Douglas Jerrold, and the author of the “Murders in the
Rue Morgue,” seasoned with grim touches of German mysticism. It is not
over-delightful reading, but to those, and they are legion, who are fond
of being steeped in blood and mystery the book will commend itself
highly. It is cleverly constructed, and that is about the best thing we
can say of it. No doubt the author’s true intent is all for our delight;
but, all the same, it is a matter of wonderment to us how it is that men
with evident literary talents, which might be pointed to fine issues,
should exercise their brain power in the noble cause of bewildering the
brains of other people, and this without an adequate purpose.
[Sidenote: _The Guardian_]
We never expected to see the day when we should be tempted to regret
that Stevenson had written “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” Nevertheless, when
we had waded through the pages of Mr Machen’s last production, we were
disposed to feel that even that book was dearly bought at the price of so
repulsive an imitation as that contained in “The Three Impostors.” For
the impressive and true use of the præternatural in “Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde,” we have senseless and sickening—we can use no other word—pictures
of mysterious scenes and of men returning to the bestial form which are
meant to inspire terror and intense dread, but really leave us entirely
unmoved, although he may imagine that his reader, like his hero, is
left “white and shuddering with sweat pouring from my flesh.” Language
seems almost to fail the author at times; he heaps up epithets of horror,
the words “bubbled and boiled out” of one man’s mouth “in the fury of
his emotion”; another person stands “shuddering and quaking as with the
grip of ague, sick with unspeakable agonies of fear and loathing”; a
doctor goes to see a patient, and reappears with “an unutterable horror
shining in his eyes.” If we are not mistaken members of the medical
profession would welcome the chance of investigating such a case as that
of the gentleman who took the witches’ Sabbath drug. Wearied with this
hysterical rubbish the reader hurries on to the end, to find in the last
chapter that the unfortunate youth who has got tired of the fauns and the
mysteries, and all the rest of the Greek burlesque, has been murdered
amid most horrible tortures, which, together with his sufferings, are
graphically described.
[Sidenote: _Pall Mall Gazette_]
... Mr Machen errs by never trusting sufficiently to his reader’s
imagination, and his most elaborate horrors leave us “more than usual
calm,” except when, by borrowing from Catlin, they make us feel slightly
unwell. It is impossible to admire the construction of Mr Machen’s
romance so much as if one did not know one’s Stevenson. Its framework,
with its amateurs of the odd in London; its set of characters who break
at sight into ingenious tales of absolute and elaborate falsehood with
no particular motive for using the decorative imagination; its choice
of a tobacco divan for the amateurs’ place of meeting, and sundry other
details, is curiously reminiscent of “The Dynamiter.” So, again, the
incident of the powder, strangely altered from its pure condition until
it obtained the power of “riving asunder the house of life and dissolving
the human trinity,” and giving a human form to “that which lies sleeping
within us all,” argues an uncommon boldness in the man who ventures to
use it after its being worked into “Dr Jekyll.” However, if Mr Machen
thinks he can wear the armour of Achilles with grace, that is his affair.
He has a sense of style, as witness his pictures of the deserted house
and his conception of the possible history of a street. He is strong
enough to walk alone, in fact; and we heartily wish him a little more
invention and a little less anxiety to make his reader’s flesh creep.
[Sidenote: _Saturday Review_]
Mr Machen is an unfortunate man. He has determined to be weird, horrible,
and as outspoken as his courage permits in an age which is noisily
resolved to be “’ealthy” to the pitch of blatancy. His particular
obsession is a kind of infernal matrimonial agency, and the begetting of
human-diabolical mules. He has already skirted the matter in his previous
book, “The Great God Pan,” and here we find it well to the fore again.
This time, however, it simply supplies one of a group of incoherent
stories held together in a frame of wooden narrative about a young man
with spectacles. This young man falls into a circle of Black Magicians,
who are practising indecorums and crimes at which Mr Machen dare only
hint in horror-struck whispers.... But it fails altogether to affect the
reader as it is meant to do. It fails mainly because Mr Machen has not
mastered the necessary trick of commonplace detail which renders horrors
convincing, and because he lacks even the most rudimentary conception of
how to individualise characters. The framework of the book is evidently
imitated from Mr Stevenson’s “New Arabian Nights,” a humorous form quite
unsuited, of course, to realistic horrors....
[Sidenote: _Lady’s Pictorial_]
If you like the Prologue read the stories. I did not like the Prologue,
but I was obliged to read the stories. They are a shade less odious than
“The Great God Pan,” but the comparison says but little in their favour,
for, in the former, Mr Machen gave to the world a most gruesome and
_unmanly_ book. I should like to know how the imagination of the author
would work upon clean and wholesome lines.
[Sidenote: _The Athenæum_]
... “The Three Impostors” produces on the normal waking mind much the
same effect as a hearty supper of pork chops on the dream fancies of
a person of delicate digestion: “velut ægri somnia, vanæ finguntur
species.” It is Mr Machen’s chief joy, in the words of one of his
characters, to dabble “with the melting ruins of the earthly tabernacle”;
to hint, rather than describe, the unholy joys and infamous orgies of
those whose diet is framed in accordance with the recipes of the devil’s
cookery book, and whose esoteric acquaintance with the black art enables
them to practise short cuts to the sundering of body and spirit. The
result is never agreeable, occasionally disgusting, but seldom really
blood-curdling, since in the last resort Mr Machen generally takes refuge
in a copious use of such words as “unutterable,” “hideous,” “loathsome,”
“appalling,” and so on....
[Sidenote: _The Graphic_]
... It is a pity, I think, that he does not confine himself to the
marvellous pure and simple, and eschew the gruesome—that he should not
be content with following in the footsteps of Stevenson instead of
entering into competition with Poe. For Mr Machen, though he has, it
must be admitted, an occasional inspiration of “the creepy,” is too
anxious to produce “goose-flesh” in the readers, and in his desire to
do so he is apt to seek his efforts in what I cannot but consider an
“unsportsmanlike” fashion. For instance, he is too much addicted to the
artifice of describing by telling you that things are indescribable.
This is a device which, though perhaps not absolutely illegitimate,
ought obviously to be very sparingly used; but in “The Three Impostors,”
as even more conspicuously in Mr Machen’s earlier volume in the same
series, “The Great God Pan,” it is employed to an extent which is almost
provocative of parody. A writer must, of course, leave something to our
imagination; but when we are continually meeting with creatures whose
aspect is too hideous to be portrayed in human language, who utter
words too awful to be repeated, and take part in orgies so abominable
and revolting that they must for ever remain nameless, even the most
indulgent reader may reasonably begin to feel that he is getting rather
short measure for his money.
[Sidenote: _The Echo_]
... “The Three Impostors” is plainly based on Stevenson’s “Dynamiters.”
The story opens in the same way, by a meeting of the principal characters
in a West London tobacco-shop, and we have brought before us the same
kind of house of mystery, and extraordinary men who haunt Italian
restaurants, talk in archaic language, and unceasingly tell each other
stories. Mr Machen would have stood a better chance of favourable
judgment if he had not so needlessly invited comparison with one of
Stevenson’s masterpieces. He has a powerful imagination, and a careful,
laborious style. The adventures he tells, centred around a golden coin
of Tiberius, are exciting enough to satisfy the most jaded palate.
There is no effort made to retain even a reasonable verisimilitude, and
probability is cast to the winds. A gentleman looking in an Oxford
Street bun-shop is accosted by a stranger, who takes him into an
Italian restaurant to dine. There the stranger pours out, with little
provocation, a long tale about how, when starving and shabby, he had
answered an advertisement for a private secretary, been accepted, gone
to America, and the adventures he met with there. Another sits down in
the gardens of Leicester Square, when an unknown young lady turns on
him and narrates all her family history. Some of the tales are as weird
and horrible as anything written in recent years, and there are murders
without number. Frankly, the subject matter of “The Three Impostors” is
not to our taste....
[Sidenote: _Literary World_]
... There are scoundrels who stop at nothing to get possession of magic
seals and coins; there are foul creatures that come out of man; there are
attempts to make our blood run cold. These all signally fail. We remain
unthrilled; we pass from Mr Machen to our luncheon as easily as we change
from one coat into another. He never stirs us. He tells his stories well,
and that is all. Why are we so unmoved? Does the fault reside in us or in
the author? We are willing to admit that as reviewers we run a risk of
having our sensibilities blunted. We do not cry or tremble as easily as
we wept and shook a few years ago, but we _can_ shed an occasional tear
over a book, and we _can_ shudder when the real literary magician has us
in his conduct. To this title, however, Mr Machen has no claim, a fact
which explains our passive acceptance of his tame horrors.
[Sidenote: _The New Age_]
Mr Arthur Machen’s attempts are the more ambitious and elaborate and the
least successful. He well illustrates the limitations and dangers of
this class of composition. With all his fertile fancy and constructive
ingenuity he cannot create that magic atmosphere of creepiness that
we presume it is his chief object to attain. Both “The Great God Pan”
and “The Three Impostors” are clever and ingenious stories; but as
blood-curdlers they are almost failures. All the materials are there,
none of the conjuring paraphernalia are wanting, but alas! we are not
in the least deceived by the tricks, and vainly wish that the would-be
magician would prevent us from seeing how the thing is done. The fact
is that, while recognising the value of “suggestive” writing, and the
imaginative effects to be obtained from obscure hints of “unknowable”
and “unspeakable horrors,” he works this style—that ought to be used
with fine reticence—to death, and reduces the “suggestive” theory _ad
absurdum_.
[Sidenote: Louis Weitzenkorn in _The New York Herald_]
To climb Mount Everest is a great achievement, but there is always a
secret hate in the heart of the man who did it first for the man who
ascended after him. I do not mean to write this article on Arthur Machen
and compare him to Mount Everest. Let us reserve the crests for an Ibsen,
a France or a Plato. What I mean by my first sentence is that Machen,
at present, seems to be the prized property of a very few persons. He
has escaped what Ernest Boyd is pleased to call the æsthete, 1924 model,
and sunk to the next lower circle of the intelligentsia, who have an
exceedingly happy time springing him upon the ignorami. It has not been
my achievement to have read all his work, and there is not enough genuine
entertainment in him for me to do it unless The World pays me for the
job. But I have managed to stow away “The Hill of Dreams,” “Things Near
and Far” (a truly beautiful book, by the way), “Hieroglyphics,” a volume
issued under the presentation of Vincent Starrett called “The Shining
Pyramid,” and his latest publication here, “Dog and Duck.”
Without going through the rest of his writings I feel rather confident
that I know something of him, and so far I have not yet read, in the
encomiums of his enthusiasts, the one characteristic of Machen that, to
me, lifts the man out of the ruck of those who just have a “beautiful
style.” It is idle to talk in praise of Machen’s writing, as writing. He
has polished up the language to a glittering surface. Each word he uses
is carefully chosen, so carefully, indeed, that the writing often becomes
of greater interest than the substance and the thought.
His latest volume, “Dog and Duck,” is Machen taking a day off. The
book is uninteresting except to his worshippers, it being a kind of
vaudeville, essays under such titles as “Why New Year?” “April Fool,”
“Roast Goose: With a Dissertation on Apple Sauce and Sage and Onions.”
(Notice the recurrent “ands” for a clue to the man’s careful style.) In
the volume there is nothing of the Machen which brings him, for me, out
in the first rank of the modern minors. But in “The Hill of Dreams” and
perhaps, strangely, that imitative of Stevenson, “The Three Impostors,”
there is the trade-mark of the man, a psychological insight almost
uncanny. Machen has plumbed to the foundations, not of obscenity, but of
the obscene.
For something over a decade I have watched what is known to the surface
observers of Greenwich Village as the Greenwich Villager, the type
of the kidding newspaper story, of the Webster Hall dance and the
table-d’hote, where bootleg liquor hides behind the entree. They are a
much more interesting study under the lights of Arthur Machen than the
Sunday magazines know. Nor is it true that they alone are a lost tribe
in this world. What they represent, I should say, in a rough guess, is
about 20 per cent. of the habitable Occident and more of the Orient, and
their kindred are to be found in all corners. One, specifically, is a
prominent restaurant proprietor. Another is a fairly well-known business
man, a third is an editor—in fact I could run pretty near the plane of
professions and pick out striking examples of men and women who fall in
the category discovered, so far as I know, by Arthur Machen.
It is an exceedingly difficult task to express the thing, to present with
clarity what I think Machen means in his major efforts. In “The Three
Impostors” there is an episode that symbolically pictures what I mean.
A young man is infected by some loathsome disease. As the malady grows
upon him he takes to his room, locks himself in, and his food is left at
his door. Finally his sister discovers the food is untouched. Several
days go by and the door of that room is unopened. Then the ceiling above
the inhabitants below the room begins to leak. The door of the horrible
chamber is burst, and upon the floor is a slimy mass from which two human
eyes glitter.
I think Machen has intended a symbol here. It is quite possible, of
course, that I am doing that famous trick of interpreting into an author
something he never senses. Thanking myself for the compliment, I believe,
however, that Machen has deliberately intensified a certain type of
human being, too populous, alas, and that this slime with its eyes, and
the eyes are the most significant part of the picture, is the emphatic
point Machen makes. I know this, that after reading and swallowing and
then chewing the cud of this particular fantasy I found myself casting
up accounts with the world and making of myself a kind of census-taker.
I began to remember that certain persons I knew were slimy. Perhaps if I
put it this way I would be clearer. Certain persons I knew were possessed
of a hidden sexual rottenness, and those persons fell under vastly
different indexes. Let me make it specific.
A young man, connected with the theatre, to almost every one who met
him was “clean cut, charming, boyish.” I think I, alone, held a violent
dislike for him, in spite of the fact that he was kindly, confidential,
open, toward me—an almost irresistible combination. I was accused of
jealousy. My oath of neutrality was sneered at. However, he was then
the particular idol of a particular girl. That was two years ago. A few
nights past I met that girl and asked about him.
“You never saw such a change,” she said. “His face is grotesque. Over it
is written the most bestial lines I have ever seen. Everything that was
in his soul has come out—in his face. He is horrible.”
I think Arthur Machen has penetrated to the bottom of a certain type
of man. He chooses to add to this type a touch of the unnatural or
supernatural, the latter a wrong term. He speaks of mysterious demons,
hill people, horrors that feed upon and devour human beings. He plays
upon mythology and Welsh legend, which is all very well; but beneath
this penchant for legend there is revealed in this writer a knowledge
of vile degeneracy, of inherited devilry that is as accurate as simple
mathematics. These invented demons of Machen destroy and devour. In our
own specific haunt of so-called Bohemia there exists the type of person
who devours and destroys, and beyond this section of the city there are
scattered innumerable individuals, the more dangerous because the better
disguised, men and women whose foundation is slime, who cannot be caught
and held because they slide from beneath the grasp and one says: “I
cannot quite catch hold of this person, I cannot quite pin him down, he
slips away from me, and yet I have him under my hand, I want to hold him
and it makes me sick to feel the touch of his soul.”
Those who have read “The Hill of Dreams” will recall the mystical woman
of the slums who flits in and out of the night like a bird of darkness,
who, not touching the story, gives it an odour—the odour of decay and
flesh. To me, as the book has gotten farther away from my first reading,
I get to thinking of this woman as a human skull possessed of two full,
rich, red lips, the only living thing upon the bones. Perhaps I am
heightening the symbolism of Arthur Machen, but then he has revealed in
his method specific creatures to me, creatures, however, of the same
general base, the same compound of greasy, poisonous elements.
Of course, that which Arthur Machen has been tortured with must
necessarily be expressed in symbolism. Gorgeous, magnificent symbolism
that is at once satire and tragedy. For these inhuman characteristics in
human beings present unexplored windings and twistings. So far psychology
does not light up the crooked pathways and metaphysics give little to the
pragmatic mind. This unwholesome or unholy nucleus of certain persons
is a basic quality which is not a quality, it is something which can be
felt and never named, sensed and never touched. It is directly inhuman,
remorseless, impenetrable. It is partial atavism, perhaps, but I can’t
see how much and to guess would be poetic.
All of this does not say one word to the person who has not come up
against this quality, who has not felt it, not been made aware of
“something wrong” in some one, who has not been pained and stricken with
the fear of having looked at a weird and uncanny manifestation. The place
to find it most often is in the eyes.
HIEROGLYPHICS
[Sidenote: A. B. Walkley in _The Morning Leader_]
I do not know whether Mr Arthur Machen is to be described as an actor
who amuses his leisure with writing books or as an author who fills up
his evenings by appearing on the stage. He was a member of the Benson
Company and is now to be seen in a small part in “Paolo and Francesca.”
He wrote some years ago a clever, disagreeable book, “The Great God Pan.”
He now publishes “Hieroglyphics,” which has attracted me (it is just as
well to confess frankly the queer reasons which prompt one to take up new
books) by its quiet binding and clear type. Unfortunately the type is
clearer than the matter. The book proves to be a discussion, in the form
of a monologue, of the question, What is Literature? But the monologue
is verbose and the reasoning circuitous—Mr Machen prefers to call it,
after Coleridge, a “cyclical mode of discoursing”—indeed the question is
not so much argued as begged. It would be unfair to Mr Machen to compare
him with Tolstoy, who in putting a similar question, “What is Art?” has
been as lucid and logical as Euclid himself. Apparently Mr Machen does
not want to be logical. He says that there are only two parties in the
world, the Rationalists and the Mystics, and as he happens to “plump for”
mysticism, he despises logic as one of the vain shibboleths of the other
party.
Now it is this partisan attitude, this desire to see only one side of the
truth, which I think spoils Mr Machen’s book. There is room in this world
for both rationalists and mystics (as well as for rationalist mystics and
mystical rationalists), and neither side can claim all literature for its
own. Being a mystic, Mr Machen finds the touchstone of all real or, as
he calls it, fine literature, as distinguished from mere reading-matter,
in “ecstasy.” What does he mean by that? “Substitute, if you like,
rapture, beauty, adoration, wonder, awe, mystery, sense of the unknown,
desire of the unknown. All and each will convey what I mean; for some a
particular one term may be more appropriate than another, but in every
case there will be that withdrawal from the common life and the common
consciousness which justifies my choice of ‘ecstasy’ as the best symbol
of my meaning. I claim, then, that here we have the touchstone which will
infallibly separate the higher from the lower in literature, which will
arrange the innumerable multitude of books in two great divisions, which
can be applied with equal justice to a Greek drama, an eighteenth-century
novelist, and a modern poet, to an epic in twelve books, and to a lyric
in twelve lines.” Well, of course, “higher” and “lower” here are mere
question-begging terms. If you choose to call what appeals to the sense
of the mysterious “high” and what appeals to some other sense “low,”
there is nothing to prevent you. But all that you have established by
your classification is the fact that you, being what you are, prefer
one sort of thing to the other sort. This is not criticism, it is mere
personal whim.
The essential whimsicality of Mr Machen’s classification comes out
when he proceeds to illustrate it by specific examples. “Pickwick,” it
seems, is literature, while “Vanity Fair” is not. Homer and Dickens are
on the same shelf—the shelf labelled “literature”—while Jane Austen
and George Eliot are on a lower shelf, labelled “reading matter.” Why?
Because the authors in the second class only give us pictures of life,
adroit rearrangements of what we know; they do not appeal to our sense
of the miraculous, our craving for the unknown, like the writers of the
first class. “Pickwick” is not a representation of life; “the book is
rather the suggestion of another life, beneath our own or beside our
own, and the characters, those queer, grotesque people, are queer for
the same reason that the Cyclops is queer, and the dragons and dwarfs
of mediæval romance are queer. We are withdrawn from the common ways of
life; and in that withdrawal is the beginning of ecstasy.” What is here
said about “Pickwick” is true, so far as it goes, though the comparison
with the “Odyssey” is rather forced. All _picaresque_ novels—“Gil Blas”
or “Roderick Random” or “Pickwick” or “Lavengro”—have something in
common with the “Odyssey,” but not much. The “Odyssey” still remains
noble poetry, and these others still remain rather ignoble prose. And
no parallelism between the “Odyssey” and “Pickwick” will persuade me
that the true _differentia_ of the latter is its sense of mystery. It
is for the fun of the book that the world cherishes it. But, like
other mystics—notably M. Maeterlinck—Mr Machen seems to be somewhat
lacking in a sense of humour. For proof of that, you have only to read
him complaining of the “limitations” of Miss Austen’s characters or
complacently calling the creator of Mrs Poyser “poor draggle-tailed
George Eliot.”
One imagines for the moment that Mr Machen is really a humorist of a very
subtle kind when he compares the brandy-and-water drinking in “Pickwick”
with the Dionysiac orgies from which Greek tragedy sprang. He drags in
Rabelais with his _dive bouteille_. “After all, what does this Bacchic
cultus mean? We have seen that under various disguises the one spirit
appeared in Greece, in the France of the Renaissance, and in Victorian
England, and that in each instance there is an apparent glorification
of drunkenness.... We are to conclude that both the ancient people and
the modern writers recognised Ecstasy as the supreme gift and state of
man, and that they chose the Vine and the juice of the Vine as the most
beautiful and significant symbol of that Power which withdraws a man
from the common life and the common consciousness, and taking him from
the dust of the earth, sets him in high places, in the eternal world of
ideas.” The “symbolism” of Mr Pickwick’s milk-punch! The “ideas” of a
drunken man! Into such absurdities do writers fall when, like Mr Machen,
they set out with the preconceived notion that all great literature is a
form of mysticism, instead of quietly examining the question without any
preconceived notions at all.
The truth is Mr Machen’s new dichotomy of Literature and Not-Literature
is simply the old dichotomy of Romanticism and Realism. Pater defined
the Romantic as the element of strangeness in beauty, and what Mr Machen
is in fact pleading for is the recognition of nothing but Romantic
Literature as great or fine literature. In other words he wants to narrow
down recognised terms to fit the limitations of his particular tastes.
Well, it won’t do. He calls himself, somewhat obtrusively, a Catholic,
and says that “literature is the expression, through the æsthetic medium
of words, of the dogmas of the Catholic Church.” Keeping the word
“catholic” untainted by any sectarian meaning, I should be inclined to
say that “catholicity of taste” is precisely what Mr Machen lacks.
[Sidenote: _The Academy_]
... Enter Mr Machen in the part of Boswell to a talker both “literary”
and “obscure,” who offers a test whereby to separate literature from
“fine” literature or, in effect, talent from genius. One listens
respectfully to a reading hermit, because, on the face of it, a hermit’s
opinions should be matured by study and conceived in the calm of one who
rolls no logs and grinds no axes. But, to get an unpleasant thing said
once and for all, Mr Machen’s hermit is an indolent person, careless of
accuracy, who has grudged the labour of justifying some extraordinary
depreciations. He is, in fact, for all his anonymity, an egoist, whose
object seems to be brilliance rather than elucidation....
[Sidenote: _The Bristol Mercury_]
“Hieroglyphics” is a somewhat figurative title for the latest book of Mr
Arthur Machen, author of “The Great God Pan.” It reproduces a series of
monologues by and conversations with a kind of philosophical literary
hermit whom the author discovered in a quaint old house at Barnsbury,
an almost mythical region lying between Pentonville and the Caledonian
Road. Now and again one discerns a faint and far-away flavour of
Coleridge and Lamb in the dissertations, but the philosophy is not of the
most profound....
[Sidenote: _The Globe_]
It is to be hoped that the title of this book, by no means a happy one,
will not deter anybody from making its acquaintance. For it is a very
readable book—at least, it will be found so by all who take any interest
in things literary. It might very well have been called, “What, really,
is Literature?”—a large question, which the author, Mr Arthur Machen,
does not succeed in answering convincingly. His main theory is summed up
in one of his sentences, early in the volume: “If Ecstasy be present,
then I say there is fine literature; if it be absent, then, in spite of
all the cleverness, all the talents, all the workmanship and observation
and dexterity you may show me, then, I think, we have a product (possibly
a very interesting one), which is not fine literature.” How this theory
works out in practice is seen in another sentence: “Here is ‘Pickwick,’
and here is ‘Vanity Fair’; and, applying my test, I set ‘Pickwick’ beside
the ‘Odyssey,’ and ‘Vanity Fair’ on top of the political pamphlet.” It
is impossible to treat with seriousness such propositions; but that is no
reason why “Hieroglyphics” should be neglected. There is a good deal in
it, mostly incidental, with which we quite agree—such as, for example,
the judgment passed on “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” The book is suggestive
and therefore interesting. Mr Machen ascribes it to an “obscure literary
hermit,” whose conversations he professes to reproduce; but there is
no apparent necessity for such machinery. Mr Machen should have the
courage of his opinions—if they are his. Anyway, “Hieroglyphics” can be
recommended to the well-read and the thoughtful.
[Sidenote: _The Daily Mail_]
Mr Arthur Machen, after diligently applying a microscope to sundry
literary reputations, has detected a number of spots, which he enumerates
in “Hieroglyphics.” This sheaf of essays is undeniably clever; but it
leaves an impression of cynical iconoclasm, which sees false gods in
books which have fallen under the curse of popular approval. Mr Machen
finds, for instance, that Jane Austen’s works are not literature, and
that Dickens reeks of Camden Town. Nevertheless, the book is piquant
reading, and contains some shrewd pieces of analysis.
[Sidenote: _Pilot_]
The device by which vendors of patent wares tempt curiosity by giving
them some curious name is hardly worth the imitation of men of letters,
and we admire neither Mr Machen’s title nor his other artifice of
throwing what he has to say into the form of monologues delivered by a
Coleridge-loving hermit in Barnsbury. His theme is the old one of “What
constitutes Literature?” and his answer is given in the single word
Ecstasy. The process by which the answer is reached has the merit of
simplicity. Literature is explained to mean “fine literature” and (in an
unguarded moment) “imaginative literature.” “Ecstasy” is “the withdrawal,
the standing apart from common life,” and it is obvious that this is
only our old friend “imagination” under a new and less happy name.
Thus only imaginative literature deserves to be called literature, and
what constitutes imaginative literature is the quality of imagination,
a conclusion which we can reach without going to Barnsbury, but which
yet, ere it is attained, gives Mr Machen occasion for passing some
excellent criticisms on the books he reviews. Thus he illustrates his
axiom, “Only the Idea is pure art; with Plot and Construction and Style
there is an alloy of artifice,” by some admirable remarks on Stevenson’s
“Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” and comes near the root of the matter in his
criticisms of Mr Hardy and Mr Meredith. That he recognises his quality of
“ecstasy” in “Pickwick,” despite its cockney atmosphere, is creditable
to his generosity. That he adopts “Vanity Fair,” which he never tires
of reading, as the supreme instance of “observation expressed with
artifice” (and, therefore, outside his definition of “literature”), shows
some blindness. Take away Thackeray’s deep religious feeling, and the
criticism would be true, but by the same process the “Agamemnon” may be
reduced to the rank of a bad French novel, and the “Œdipus Rex” to a tale
of horrors. To blunder thus seems the Nemesis of the straining after
novelty which has made Mr Machen attribute the worth of literature to its
possession of “ecstasy,” and the ambiguous definition he has given to
this word. To stand apart, not from common life, but from the common view
of life, is surely the criterion of true literature, and we are surprised
that Mr Machen should come so near as he does to making the subject
rather than the vision (we are careful not to say the “treatment”) of it
the main test.
[Sidenote: _The Morning Post_]
... He talks (like the Walrus) of many things, of office boys, of
Coleridge, of words that end in “ings”; of Homer and of Dickens, of
literature, of art; of books that bore and “lonely” books, which have “a
soul apart.” ...
[Sidenote: _The Star_]
“By what rule are we ... to judge exactly in the case of any particular
book whether it is literature or not?” When I read that question in Mr
Arthur Machen’s new book “Hieroglyphics” I pricked up my ears. Here at
last, I thought, is the divining rod for which I have yearned. No longer
need I vex my soul over the judgments delivered here every Saturday.
Fancy a rule which will make me infallible! What is it? “A single word.”
Out with it! “Ecstasy.” Is that all? “Substitute, if you like, rapture,
beauty, adoration, wonder, awe, mystery, sense of the unknown, desire
for the unknown”—Stop! these words are not “substitutes” or synonyms.
They are, I suspect, merely amplifications of another word, romance.
Your solution, in fact, is merely a statement of your attitude. You
are a romanticist, and I like you, for I am one myself. But your golden
rule does not help me, for it leaves me still under the necessity of
questioning my own soul. By “ecstasy” you mean YOUR ecstasy, not MY
ecstasy. For every man has his own private ecstasy. When you get to
work I find that your ecstasy is whimsical. You earmark words and use
them in a Machenian sense. You prefer to speak of “feelings” when you
mean “the things of life,” and you reserve “emotion” for “the influence
produced (_sic_) in man by fine art.” I challenge the distinction. It
is arbitrary. “Thus it will be with emotion that we witness the fall of
Œdipus, the madness of Lear, while we feel for our friends and ourselves
in misfortune.” This will never do. “Emotion” is simply a poor Latin
synonym for the fine Saxon word “feeling.” How on earth can I confine my
“emotions” to literature and my “feelings” to life? No, Mr Machen, your
sophistry won’t help me to discover masterpieces for the readers of that
“great pale bird,” _The Star_.
And, really, your “ecstasy” leads you a mad dance. It makes you rate
“George Egerton” above George Meredith. Mr Meredith, you say, “not only
fails in the body of art but even more conspicuously in the soul of
it.” Clearly, your ecstasy is not mine. While you shut Meredith out of
literature you let “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” scrape in! After that, nothing
you say surprises me. Indeed, it is a relief when you damn Thackeray with
Meredith, and canonise Dickens with—Miss Wilkins. For by this time I
realise that you have gone MUST. Your “ecstasy” is merely the motor-car
in which your preferences go out for a nocturnal ride without a light at
seventy miles an hour. It is a very good vehicle if safely used. It is by
no means new either. Mr Watts-Dunton has been employing it for a quarter
of a century. Why, his famous discovery of “the renascence of wonder” has
become a critical commonplace. Indeed, so thoroughly has it permeated
criticism that the phrase is used as literary shorthand for the great
generalisation which it connotes. You have, indeed, turned the shorthand
into charming “Hieroglyphics,” but you go astray in the application.
Your “ecstasy” over that “thick white cloud” in the Tale of Gabriel Grub
is quite funny. And if you identify the brandy-and-water scenes in
“Pickwick” with the Bacchic cultus, what about Jos Sedley’s rack punch?
What about Mr Meredith’s glorifications of old port? But much shall be
forgiven you because you are a good Pantagruelist, though I think it is
a mistake to identify Pantagruelism either with Dionysus and the Greek
drama on the one hand or with Dickens and “Pickwick” on the other.
Falstaff is the only piece of real Pantagruelism in our literature. And
now, let me advise everybody to read “Hieroglyphics.” It is brilliantly
written, it bubbles over with pugnacities, and it is alive in every line.
[Sidenote: _Glasgow Herald_]
... The author’s main desire seems to be to utter a series of elaborate
paradoxes, and he does utter them in a somewhat conceited fashion. Mr
Machen has no doubt got hold of part of the truth, for it is indubitable
that the sense of ecstasy, or whatever else one chooses to call it, is a
main cause of æsthetic charm. As certainly, however, it is not the whole
secret of literature, which admits much more of the pure intellect than
Mr Machen will acknowledge. If there were nothing more in fine literature
than he will allow, then our masterpieces of prose and poetry would be
nothing more than so many pieces of music; but fine literature and fine
music are of course very different things. One judges theories by their
results, and there must be something radically wrong about a doctrine
which excludes Pope and Thackeray from the fine literary canon—which
makes them “artifice” and not “art.” There is something wrong also
about the critic who permits himself such trivial impertinences as “the
egregious M. Voltaire,” “poor draggle-tailed George Eliot,” “our great
false prophet Bacon, a wretch infinitely more guilty than Hobbes.” Even
dramatically, as the utterances of an obscure literary hermit, such
things are not witty—nor yet funny, except in an unconscious way. There
are, indeed, better things in the book, and the author succeeds at times
in saying a clever thing, as in truth, considering the earnestness of
his efforts in that direction, it were hard if he did not. But, on the
whole, the essay is the expression of a thoroughly false, unwholesome,
and effeminate theory of literature.
[Sidenote: _The Graphic_]
Mr Arthur Machen’s attractive-looking volume with above quaint title
is a little difficult to understand—namely, why was it written and why
published? It purports to be records of conversations listened to by
the author during many visits to the house of a friend in Barnsbury.
In the society of this friend, and in an “old mouldering room,” art in
general, and the art of literature in particular, seem to have been
very thoroughly discussed. This unnamed friend may have been an author,
though Mr Machen confesses himself ignorant, but “he was always ready to
defend the thesis that, all the arts being glorious, the literary art was
the most glorious and wonderful of all.” Mr Machen has now constituted
himself the Boswell of this Barnsbury friend, whose existence we take
leave to doubt, and the result is a discursive volume of opinions, given
conversationally, on literature and art—on what constitutes literature
and what constitutes art, with some smashing of idols (as, for instance,
George Eliot, George Meredith, and the already chipped Stevenson), all
set forth with a certain amount of affectation in style by the author. Mr
Machen, in point of fact, requires what he is pleased to call “ecstasy”
in a book before it pleases him. He has found it in the Mr Hardy of “Two
in a Tower” days, but not in the Mr Hardy who wrote “Jude,” any more
than in the work of the other writers mentioned above. It is well to
know, though, that he fancies he detected this quality in “Keynotes,”
which circumstance may comfort Mr Meredith for his lack of it, unless,
perchance, he admires that curious work. Those who would know more,
however, of the ecstatic in literature must turn to the book itself.
[Sidenote: _The Pall Mall Gazette_]
Mr George Gissing’s “George Ryecroft,” in the _Fortnightly_, deals with
a subject so like that of Mr Arthur Machen’s “Hieroglyphics,” that
for a time one thinks that both authors must be writing of the same
person. Both take as spokesman a sort of literary hermit, whose only
companions are his books, and who therefore gives forth his views on men
and their works with a real or assumed air of detachment. The setting,
however, is a little different; for, while Mr Machen’s protagonist is
a gentleman with a past, not uncomfortably buried alive in lodgings at
Highbury, Mr Gissing’s is an ex-literary hack, who has been left an
annuity by a thoughtful friend, and has retired to Devonshire to spend
what fag-end of life the newspapers and the publishers have left to
him. Yet both gentlemen prose a good deal, and awake in a contentious
mind the doubt whether the general public really care so much for the
opinions of literary men about books as they seem to imagine. Outside a
certain circle the reign of the old favourite seems to be pretty well
established, and although a new one is now and then adopted into the
dynasty, the admission is always due to his own merit, and not to that of
his backers.
THE HOUSE OF SOULS
[Sidenote: Thomas Lloyd in _The Sunday Sun_]
... He seeks only to entertain by what he considers legitimate forms of
art. Nevertheless, there is a distinct likeness between his professor and
himself—even to the suffering from overwork and brain exhaustion. The
tales strike one as the work of one who has overtasked his imagination
in London streets and been overcome by nightmares produced by excessive
reading of the discussions of the British Association. An unusual but not
uninteresting case! Time and a rest-cure may work wonders—may lead to
Mr Machen’s next book being altogether as acceptable as the first story
in this, and the successor to “The House of Souls” becoming a house of
bodies and hearts and minds.
[Sidenote: _Academy_]
... The particular mark at which this criticism is directed is the
mystical tale called “The White People.” This story, which is inset into
a not particularly well-executed discussion on the nature and spiritual
significance of sin, contains the narrative of a young girl, who as a
child had lit somehow upon some of the secrets of Fairyland and whose
initiation gradually widened as she grew. The thing is not wanting
either in imagination or in a certain painful beauty of its own. It is,
perhaps, the best-written piece in the book, and the childish, simple
language, admirably suggested and maintained, heightens its undeniable
pathos. But in the end the young girl is found dead, self-poisoned in
time—whatever that may mean—and prostrate before an image which we are
given vaguely to understand is symbolic of the “monstrous mythology of
the (witches’) Sabbath.” We cannot satisfactorily follow the process
by which this gruesome consummation is attained. Mr Machen has been
inspired, no doubt, by wild, weird places. Their anciently reported
spells, as Emerson has it, have crept upon him, but nowhere here does
the enchantment of nature make for sober healing. And why should these
influences be set to work upon a pure young spirit for sorcery rather
than for sanctification? If Mr Machen should answer: Why not? we can
only say how very greatly we should prefer the alternative. The other
experiments with the “gurgoylesque” are at least legitimate. Weird and
resourceful as they are, however, perhaps they rather fail of horror in
their super-psychical parts. Nothing elsewhere in “The Great God Pan”
approaches the effect produced upon the reader by the callousness of the
experiment of the doctor (in the preliminary chapter) upon the brain of
the girl who had once owed her life to him, and that incident is nearer
to the possibilities of a lust for science than any part of the resulting
coil, in which the devil became incarnate for a while and was made woman.
In neither this nor the clever arabesque entitled “The Three Impostors”
(which might well have been called “The Murderers’ Fantasia”) is the
elaborate surrounding scroll-work quite as effective as it might be; and
in the latter extravaganza we lose touch with the main event through
the plethora of side tales with which it is garnished, though a word of
praise is due to the various literary and artistic characters upon whose
vagaries and idiosyncrasies the action indirectly hinges....
[Sidenote: _The Standard_]
It is a pity that Mr Machen has done several things in connection with
his new volume of short stories. First and foremost, he might have
very well dispensed with his preface. Mr Machen is clever, of course,
but his bland references to the example of Mr Kipling and Edgar Allan
Poe as “fellow-authors” does not convince—it only irritates. Also his
diatribe about the Puritan elements in the English character is quite
out of date. Nearly every man who has written decadent fiction within
the past fifteen years has lashed himself into a similar fury because
he fancies that it has been “tacitly, if not openly, ordered that the
English novel is only great when it is a sermon, a tract, or a pamphlet
in disguise.” The success or failure of a book is not, as Mr Machen
seems to think, governed by hard-headed men of business, who have never
disguised their intolerance of imagination, _quâ_ imagination, and who
believe that “English fiction must justify itself either as containing
useful doctrine and information, or as a manifest transcript of life as
it is known to the average reader, due regard being had, of course, to
the salutary conventions of the social order.” It is almost invariably
limited by its own qualities. Only let Mr Machen produce a work of
genius—and his fame shall be known afar. Another source of difference
which we have with this writer is the inclusion of the first story, “A
Fragment of Life,” in “The House of Souls.” That story, in its particular
way, is almost perfect—tender, true, intimate, and restrained—in its
exhibition of how a small suburban clerk and his wife came to awake from
their dream of a London suburb, of daily labour, and of weary, useless
little things, and saw the things that really mattered in life, with
the result that “the voices of men and women came to sound with strange
notes, with the echo rather of a music that came over unknown hills.” Its
mystical qualities are both rare and beautiful, and, as a work of art
alone, it deserves to live. But the other stories of Black Magic—of Pan,
and of fauns and satyrs and other fearful wild-fowl of the occultist’s
stock-in-trade—frankly, they are failures. In one aspect, they would
shame any respectable sensational novelist who practises a certain amount
of natural illusion. In another—they are ineffective. They do not drive
home the intolerable horror of the mystery of Evil. They suggest, on
the contrary, the Fat Boy in “Pickwick.” Mr Machen may have ransacked
the whole British Museum for quaint and far-off ceremonies, simply to
make our flesh creep, but, in sober truth, all he has accomplished
is an engaging air of looking mysterious until the time comes for
explanation—and then—well, then we yawn. Now, his “fellow-author,”
Poe, would not have done this. If he had essayed to melt this too, too
solid flesh, if he had striven to throw into atoms and reconstitute
the primal elements of our existence, if he had essayed to summon the
eternal spirits of evil, the blind forces of ill that are hidden in the
constitution of man—we should have felt a rush of genuine terror, and
the breath of genius would have touched our cheeks. As it is—Mr Machen
only imparts a certain hot-house kind of atmosphere to several perfectly
familiar experiments, such as an obscure operation on a girl’s brain, the
secret of a wife’s disappearance, the reason why certain men of fashion
are driven irresistibly to suicide, and the cause of an obscure, and,
truth to tell, rather squalid murder in a deserted passage. He never
makes us believe in those Black Masses, or in his theory of demoniacal
possession, or in that wonderful jewel, the size of a pigeon’s egg, that
glowed and glittered, and was really a woman’s soul. He should realise
that poor Aubrey Beardsley, and the hot, impetuous souls that wrought as
he did, are quite dead, and now should turn his attention to other and
truer fragments of life.
[Sidenote: _The Bystander_]
My reference, a week or two back, to the new form of humour exploited
by Mr Montagu Wood in “A Tangled I,” a humour which amusingly combined
epigram and satire with literary power and imagination, has moved Mr
Grant Richards, the publisher of the book, to draw my attention to
another work of the same _genre_, entitled “The House of Souls,” by Mr
Arthur Machen. Certainly this book, which contains about six complete
novels, is a notable production. If it lacks the sparkle of Mr Wood’s
book, it is, nevertheless, the fruit of a curious talent which seems
to be of so very striking a resemblance to that work that I am moved
to a suspicion that it is the handiwork of the same brain. “The House
of Souls” stories are conceived largely with the desire to mix up the
humdrum in life with the transcendental—to indicate the “appeal of
Theosophy to atheists, men about town, journalists, and hard-headed men
of affairs.” The touch of humour is to be observed in the descriptions
in the various stories—particularly “A Fragment of Life”—of prosaic
suburban ways and manners, which reveal a very intimate knowledge of the
lower middle classes; and as to the Theosophical aspect of the stories,
undoubtedly it is interesting to find this theme exploited in fiction,
especially by so brilliant a descriptive and imaginative writer as Mr
Machen. I may add here, that Mr Montagu Wood’s humour was recognised in
“Pop” at Eton, and afterwards at the Canning Club at Oxford, and that his
skit, published some years ago, “An Island Story,” was highly successful
in those sets wherein it gained a reading. I am more than confident that
his is a literary talent which will, sooner or later, reach a wide and a
startled public.
[Sidenote: _Liverpool Daily Courier_]
... It is by no means a new trick, of course, but Mr Machen has it
to perfection, and he is shrewd enough to heighten its effectiveness
by sticking his nightmares in the very midst of the modern and the
circumstantial and the familiar—by transposing Edgar Allan Poe into the
key of “The New Arabian Nights.” Too obviously Poe, here and there,
perhaps; and too unmistakably the manner of “The Nights”; but in these
derivative days echoes of that sort will trouble none but the most
fastidious of readers, and certainly not those who have a healthy
appetite for robustious and not too conventional melodrama.
[Sidenote: _Illustrated London News_]
“My dear Sir,” says Dyson in “The House of Souls,” “I will give you
the task of a literary man in a phrase. He has got to do simply this:
to invent a wonderful story and to tell it in a wonderful manner.”
Judged by this test Mr Arthur Machen can scarcely be said to have made
literature. As the reader is conducted, Sherlock Holmes fashion, through
the House of Souls (there are six storeys to it) its wicked arabesques,
its old cabinets and prehistoric flints and faded pocket-books, wear an
unconvincing, property air. When wonderful gentlemen like Dyson having
drawn from some antique bureau a tattered paper or a black seal, and
presenting it for a chum’s inspection the chum exclaims, “Take it away;
never speak of this again. Are you made of stone, man? Why, the dread
and horror of death itself, the thoughts of the man who stands in the
keen morning air on the black platform, bound, the bell tolling in his
ears, and waits for the harsh rattle of the bolt, are as nothing compared
to this. I will not read it; I should never sleep again!”—then is the
breath held, and the mind prepared for any delicious thrill. But the
Manuscript at length, or the black seal fully deciphered, prove well-nigh
soporific. And both lack the power of evoking that spiritual terror
which, leaving Hawthorne and Poe and Coleridge out of the comparison,
surrounds “The Island of Dr Moreau,” by Mr Wells, and is imprinted in
“The Mark of the Beast,” by Mr Kipling.
[Sidenote: _Birmingham Gazette and Express_]
... Whilst admiring the literary workmanship and the weird fancifulness
of it all, one wonders what it means and why the tales were ever written.
Do they purport to be works of imagination only, then the author has
sought a singularly repulsive form of expression for his undoubted
talent; do they seek to promulgate a theory concerning the link between
the human and the bestial, between the natural and the supernatural in
its most depraved possibilities of manifestation, then we would prefer
to remain in ignorance, debating for not one moment the reasonableness
or otherwise of such a theory. Really and truly, these awful stories
strongly suggest the half-mad imaginings of a degenerate mind steeped in
morbidity. They are too completely nauseous ever to have been permitted
the publicity of print, and we sincerely trust they will secure few
readers.
[Sidenote: _Literary World_]
... But when our author attempts to handle such occult matters as
are treated of in “The Great God Pan,” he seems to lose his footing.
He succeeds in giving his readers an impression of very disagreeable
horrors, but he does not succeed in giving verisimilitude to his
record. We feel ourselves in the presence merely of a somewhat morbid
imagination. Mr Machen does not reveal, as he leads us to hope, any real
arcana.
[Sidenote: _East Anglian Daily Times_]
... We have conscientiously perused the 500 pages which the volume
contains, and our conclusion is that we would not willingly repeat the
experience. We have supped full with horrors, and the lurid abominations
which are very plainly hinted at have sickened us. It is probable that
there are some whose literary digestion is strong enough to swallow such
pabulum with impunity; but we fancy that the great majority of readers
will rise from the book with a shudder of loathing. Certainly persons
of a sensitive temperament ought not to read the gruesome tales after
dusk....
[Sidenote: _Light_]
... The promise of the first story is not redeemed, and the book is
given up to the blacker side of magical beliefs, wrapped up in a garb
suggestive of “Sherlock Holmes.” It is not Spiritualism, and we prefer
to believe that there is no truth in such auto-suggested horrors. The
book professes to indicate “the dangers of unauthorised research,” but
no such dangers as are here presented beset the path of the earnest and
conscientious Spiritualist investigator.
[Sidenote: _Speaker_]
Mr Arthur Machen writes a somewhat curious preface to his collection of
decadent stories in which he attempts to turn the Puritan’s flank in
an ingenious manner. He claims that “it is entirely from the Puritan
standpoint that I wish to rest my plea for these tales of mine ...
almost every page contains a hint (under varied images and symbols) of a
belief in a world that is not that of ordinary everyday experience....
I contend that as an English novelist I am within my right in doing so;
since Science, the guide of Life, has done as much, has admitted many
transcendental conceptions into her scheme of things.” This is a neat
apology for the subject matter, which may be summarised by the line, “the
flesh is aghast at the half-heard murmurs of horrible things,” but it
may surprise the author to be told that in these clever artificial and
decidedly sickly romances, penned apparently under the joint influence
of Oscar Wilde’s and Aubrey Beardsley’s artistic example, he has proved
his Puritan heritage better than he knows. There has always seemed to
us something a little pathetic in the desperate attempt of the small
school of young Oxford hedonists to break away from the moral code of the
healthy Philistine and encounter and glorify the mysterious forbidden
pleasures of Sin. For their world was an artificial make-believe affair,
with an exhausted atmosphere, in which affectation stood in the place
of real pleasure. We can respect in a measure the Puritan who cries out
that pleasure is a sin, because he shows us thereby that it has a secret
fascination for him, but the man who can only enjoy pleasure by making
out to himself that it is a sin shows himself a Puritan _manqué_. We are
not surprised, therefore, to find that Mr Arthur Machen’s stories fail to
thrill us, because the artificial horrors and nameless sins in which they
abound are all carefully concocted and have practically no correspondence
with the sins or horrors of real life. That is where our young school
of modern hedonists fails in art; it is divorced from nature, and its
would-be spontaneity is palpably a carefully laboured, artificial affair.
And this is a great pity, for the refined sense of beauty that the young
hedonist starts with possessing can only create a stale preciosity when
it is divorced from the freshness of nature. Practically all the stories
in “The House of Souls” are so much labour thrown away, and the more
carefully studied are their “nameless horrors,” the more meaningless are
they, and the worse as art. Take, for example, the story “The Inmost
Light.” Here is a most deliberate attempt to make our flesh creep, and
the only result is to make the reader exclaim “stuff and nonsense.” A
certain Dr Black secludes himself with his beautiful wife in his house at
Harlesden, and makes experiments in “occult science”:—
“... each night I had stolen a step nearer to that great abyss
which I was to bridge over, the gulf between the world of
consciousness and the world of matter.... In that work from
which even I doubted to escape with life, life itself must
enter; from some human being there must be drawn that essence
which men call the soul, and in its place (for in the scheme
of the world there is no vacant chamber)—in its place would
enter in what the lips can hardly utter, what the mind cannot
conceive without a horror more awful than the horror of death
itself. And when I knew this, I knew also on whom that fate
would fall; I looked into my wife’s eyes. Even at that hour, if
I had gone out and taken a rope and hanged myself, I might have
escaped, and she also, but in no other way. At last I told her
all. She shuddered, and wept, and called on her dead mother for
help, and asked me if I had no mercy and I could only sigh. I
concealed nothing from her; I told her what she would become,
and what would enter in where her life had been; I told her of
all the shame and all the horror.... That night she came down
to my laboratory, and there, with shutters bolted and barred
down, with curtains drawn thick and close, so that the very
stars might be shut out from the sight of that room, while the
crucible hissed and boiled over the lamp, I did what had to be
done, and led out what was no longer a woman. But on the table
the opal flamed and sparkled with such light as no eyes of man
have ever gazed on, and the rays of the flame that was within
it flashed, and glittered, and shone even to my heart. My wife
had only asked one thing of me; that when there came at last
what I had told her, I would kill her. I have kept my promise.”
Page 286.
This passage is a very fair sample of the school to which Mr Machen
belongs, and it illustrates its utter artificiality. No thrill can
possibly come, because there is falsity in every line and human nature
is violated at every turn. The leading idea of the opal gaining an
unholy lustre from the commission of an evil deed is paltry in itself,
and the whole psychological interest should lie in the study of the man’s
warped human instincts. But Dr Black is a lay figure in whom we do not
even begin to believe, and so the piled-up structure of horror appears
childishly inept. And so with the description of the strange sins in the
story of “The Three Impostors.” The strange sins are not real sins, that
is why they fail to interest even a morbid imagination. If the author
would go into the street and pick up with the first wastrel he meets and
describe faithfully the workings of the man’s mind, he would thrill us
fifty times more than can this collection of concocted effects all alien
to the truth of life, and so all remote from human feeling. In its horror
of nature, indeed, our young hedonistic school shows but another phase of
the old Puritan’s distrust of art.
AN IMPURE IDEAL
A CHALLENGE TO PURITANISM
[Sidenote: David Christie Murray in _The Referee_]
_The Philistine as Art’s Helper._—Every now and then some person rises
up in England to protest against the restrictions by which a vulgar and
uninstructed Philistinism cribs, cabins, and confines the imaginative
artist. Sometimes the protest is made by a man of genius, and whenever
that is the case it is triumphantly proved by events that there was
not the slightest real need to make it. The more daring and robust the
assault upon the proprieties the more assured is the attention of an
immediate audience. Mr Swinburne’s career affords an excellent example
of this truth. In some respects he is an artist of unique character,
but it was not by virtue of his artistry that he made at his first
coming so prodigious a noise in the world. Mr Swinburne’s admirers now
appreciate him for his literary excellences, but his earliest fame was
accorded to him because of his so delicious naughtiness. A man of genius
with a narrow intellectual field in which to disport himself, but with
extraordinary gifts of melody and energy, he has found his proper place
in the poetic hierarchy in his own lifetime, and to pretend that his fame
was retarded by his defiance of Puritanism is a task for a fool—and a
task which only a fool would undertake. The plain truth is that it is the
very shortest cut to notoriety in this country to make a mock of morals,
and there are not a few men and women who enjoy a public vogue simply
and merely because they flout the Puritan Ideal, whilst if they had been
content to ally decency with their native dullness they would never have
been heard of beyond their own doorsteps....
There has been sent to _The Referee_ for review a book the pretensions
of which I think it on several grounds desirable to examine. In an oddly
pompous preface the writer expresses his surety that his fellow-authors
will sympathise with him in the difficult task of finding for a
collection of short stories a general title which is not obviously
impertinent. He opines that the title he has chosen “will at all events
hint at the nature of the contents.” To me it afforded no remotest
suggestion, and it would be easy enough to write a book which would
justify the title with at least equal completeness whilst it would embody
the actual antithesis of its idea. Before I proceed to the exposition of
that idea it is just to set out such reasons as the author has to give
for its expression in a work of fiction. In France, we are told, “it is
agreed that imagination and fantasy are to work as they will and as they
can, and are to be judged by their own laws. He who carves gurgoyles
admirably is praised for his curious excellence in the invention and
execution of these grinning monsters; and if he is blamed it is for bad
carving, not because he has failed to produce pet lambs.” In England we
are said to judge very differently, and “Imagination itself is expected
to improve the occasion, to reform whilst it entertains, and to instruct
under the guise of story-telling.” ...
_Where to Draw the Line._—It has to be objected here that the case is too
broadly stated. It is not agreed that imagination and fantasy are to work
as they will in France. There is a certain restraining sense which now
and then moves the authorities to suppress a theatrical production like
the “Timbale d’Argent” or a serial publication like “La Nature.” Fantasy
is nowhere in any civilised community allowed an unrestricted play. There
is a point at which all modern peoples divide the endurably coarse from
the intolerably indecent and abominable. You must arrange with your own
sensibilities the precise point at which you will say to fantasy, “Thus
far shalt thou go and no further,” but every civilised man has a limit
beyond which he will not permit himself to be carried. And, what is of at
least equal importance, he has a limit beyond which he will not knowingly
allow those innocences, ignorances, and inexperiences which are under his
guardianship or control to travel....
There are many examples of literary, pictorial, and plastic art in the
hands of lovers of the curious which are kept under lock and key. The
owners are not necessarily persons of unclean mind, and they generally
exercise some discretion as to the choice of the people by whom these
objects shall be seen. The common sense of the world—not the art-hatred
of the Philistine, but just the common-sense common decency of the
world—has decided that they shall be jealously hidden from the immature
in years and experience. The argument advanced by our author is that
perfection in the presentation makes the nature of the thing presented
of little consequence, I am not disposed to attach an exaggerated value
to that contention, but even if it were wholly defensible in respect to
a work of art in itself, it is impossible to argue that it is of little
consequence to whom it shall be shown. There is nothing more sacred than
that ingenuous shame which the growth of civilisation has fostered as a
guarding instinct against the violation of the mind. I make no fight for
prudery—pruriency aping modesty, and topping frank indecency by its lie.
I have had my say in _The Referee_ more than once already about those
egregious persons who from time to time seek an _arbiter elegantiarum_ in
the police-courts. But I stand for cleanliness in art, and, above all,
I stand for it in the modern novel, and not only because the novel goes
into the hands of boys and girls whose premature introduction to certain
dark places cannot fail to have disastrous results....
_A Public Pleasaunce._—Now here, of course, is an excellent opportunity
for those ladies and gentlemen who think it one of the privileges of Art
to be indecent to ask if I expect the writer of the novel to address
herself or himself exclusively to the Young Person—if I intend to tie
his or her soaring genius to a boy’s coat-tails or a girl’s pinafore.
I say in answer to that query that it is not I who choose the medium
through which the writers concerned have elected to reveal their genius
to the world. I say that having chosen that medium for themselves they
cannot rightly ignore certain responsibilities which the choice imposes
upon them. The field of the novelist is a very spacious pleasure-ground
indeed, and you may legitimately lay out in it almost any sort of garden
plot or plantation, and may erect in it almost any sort of palace or
cottage or mansion. But it is an open space, and it is dedicated to the
delectation of the public. Incidentally the wanderer in its precincts
may be instructed or warned or spiritually lifted, but his purpose in
going there is primarily to be entertained. The operating theatre and the
dissecting-room are out of place there, though there are some people who
can take their pleasure in such places and get no harm. Most out of place
of all conceivable things in a pleasure-ground which is free to everybody
is the mural picture gallery of the unburied cities....
_An Intrusion on Privacy._—When I was a boy I was taken by a middle-aged
fool who ought to have known better into a waxwork anatomical museum
at a rural wake. The sight left an evil taste on my mental palate for
years and years. A rural wake is no place for an anatomical museum. That
was a day of days, and Wombwell’s menagerie and that booth of Thespis
which belonged to Messrs Bennet and Patch, and the swinging-boats and
the merry-go-rounds, and the gingerbread stalls and the spangled lady
on the slack wire, and Mr Merriman and the shooting-galleries, and the
whole gay, harmless medley make clear pictures in my mind this minute,
though the rain and sunshine of a half-century have made many another of
memory’s paintings dim. And the anatomical museum poisoned everything.
The contention I desire to combat is that a literary craftsman has some
right to intrude the most hateful side of his mind upon others because
he is an artist. But who says he is an artist? A man may write fiction
and be no more of an artist than a ledger clerk. “He who carves gurgoyles
admirably is praised for his curious excellence in the invention and
execution of those grinning monsters; and if he is blamed he is blamed
for bad carving, not because he has failed to produce pet lambs.” But has
he who carves “gurgoyles” the double right to carve revolting shapes and
to plump them down in the public pleasure-ground for any unsuspecting
wayfarer to sicken at?...
_A Buried Symbolism._—I offer a most emphatic denial to the assumption
that “imagination and fantasy” are anywhere justly to be “allowed to
work as they can and will,” so long as their product is exposed for
unrestricted sale in market overt. If I am to give fantasy free play I
can quite easily imagine things which would excite the loathing of a
savage. In every society which has raised itself above the intellectual
level of the hog there are certain things which are not currently
spoken of. There were certain obscure obscenities with which the
ancients surrounded Nature-Worship. They expressed imaginatively the
primal forces, and the emblems employed to represent them were candid
and unashamed. Their open exposure and popular exhibition were the
characteristic originally of a time of purest savagery and animalism.
As civilisation grew these emblems became conventionalised, and finally
they ceased to be symbolic. Some are in frequent use to-day, but their
meaning is so completely lost to the popular mind that every modern
cemetery displays an entire perversion of the meaning of one of them.
Now, the root-idea of the book under consideration is the survival of all
those old obscure obscenities into modern life. “It is in the character
of a sober portrayer of a certain side of life,” writes the author in his
own person, “that I hope to add to the pleasure of many pleasant Sunday
afternoons.” I am armed beforehand against the simpering suggestion that
I am impenetrable to the subtleties of irony. Solomon to the contrary
notwithstanding, it is sometimes good to answer a controversialist
according to his argument....
_The Naked Untruth._—In pursuit of this purpose of adding to the
pleasure of pleasant Sunday afternoons our author introduces his reader
to a girl-child in a modern rural neighbourhood in Wales whose mind is
unutterably debauched by her nurse, and who at the age of five has for
her playmate the very bodily devil of licentiousness. The girl thrives
under tuition to such advantage that when she comes to her demoniac
womanhood she has arrived at a knowledge of evil so complete that the
revelation of it drives men of the world to whom it is displayed to
suicide. Speaking for myself, I can aver quite honestly that this sort
of baby-Satanic-tommy-rot will not add to the pleasure of many pleasant
Sunday afternoons. It is offered, as I have said already, with a kind
of pomp, as a protest against the degraded state into which imagination
and fantasy have slipped under the withering influences of Puritanism.
Puritanism is as a red rag to the author. We all know, so he tells us,
“how Hampden died that England might be free, first under the martial
law of the Great Protector, and afterwards under the Whig oligarchy.” We
are instructed that the Puritans hanged witches in Salem, and flogged
the Quakers, baptised foals in cathedrals, hewed down the statues of the
saints, shut up the theatres, and gave us the English Sunday. It is not
quite a true bill. Hampden did not die for martial law and the _beaux
yeux_ of the Whigs. Nor did the Puritans—a really forbidding body of men,
to my fancy, amongst whom I wouldn’t have lived for any money—spend all
their energies in hanging witches and baptising foals in cathedrals. Like
many a tribe which went before them, and many another which has followed
after, they obscured a noble cause by gross excesses. But it does not
become a professed Iconoclast to get dancing-mad at the sight of a hammer
in another man’s hand....
_The Little Pig._—It is an assured thing in our author’s mind that
English Puritanism is going to take exception to his work. On the ground
that it is a needless and offensive resurrection of the buried nastiness
of early heathendom, I think it very likely that he is right. I was never
very much of a Puritan myself, but my taste and inclination take me to
the Puritan side for once. There was a dear old philosopher of a village
doctor whom I knew years ago when I lived in the Belgian Ardennes. We
were talking of the pornographies of French art one night, and with a
shake of his wise old head he said, “Il y a, dans l’âme de chacun de
nous, un petit cochon qui se grandit vite.” I know my own little pig, and
though I am compelled to find him house-room I have no liking for him,
and I certainly have no desire that his manners should be corrupted by
association with the little pigs of other people....
I have myself been a modest market-gardener in the field of fiction
now these thirty years, and I have been careful never to introduce my
little pig to anybody who has come to look at my very humble patch. I
try to keep him unseen and lonely in his sty. My attempt to starve him
out of existence has unhappily met with but indifferent success; but
I’ll be hanged if I will take anybody’s ha’pence to make a show of him.
I decline to put him on exhibition either for praise or pudding. And yet
I know that I could make a very decent (and most indecent) living out of
him. For my little pig is not at all like your little pig, and it is the
master-passion of the Artist to be different. We all know that a good
half of the talk we hear about Art for Art’s sake, with its accompanying
malediction on the English Puritan, means nothing more than that the
artist is setting the little pig on view for the gratification of a
prurient vanity.—MERLIN.
[Sidenote: _The Athenæum_]
... Like Poe, Mr Machen sets himself to make the reader’s flesh creep;
like Hawthorne, he abounds with subtle and suggestive symbolism, and,
had neither of these writers existed, his work would thrill the reader
even more ingeniously, although it lacks the originality of the one
and the poetic austerity and wealth of imagination of the other. He
deals in ancient mysteries; he is for ever hinting at the macabre,
the sinister, the unspeakable. His puppets peep and mutter through an
atmosphere of forbidden knowledge and obscure rites of remote antiquity,
which, however, he would seem to suggest are not so remote as they ought
to be, after all. He is an adept in the art of elusiveness—so much so,
indeed, that some of his most horrific endings fail of their proper
effect, and the piled-up agony topples to a fall, leaving the reader with
just the ghost of a suspicion of the author’s sincerity, and a haunting
reminiscence of turnip-headed spectres and clanking chains....
[Sidenote: _The Saturday Review_]
Mr Machen adds three new stories to the contents of two earlier volumes,
and introduces the collection by a preface which is perhaps the best
thing in the book. We remember reading “The Great God Pan” when it
first appeared, and discussing it with brother-undergraduates. Most
of us thought that the story was interesting chiefly as illustrating
the difficulties which beset an ambitious English writer who wishes to
describe transcendental beastliness. Probably we were right. Mr Machen’s
literary monomania takes the form of postulating that behind the veil
of matter, in the centre of the material universe, resides an obscene
and terrible power, the revelation of which brings to mortals infamy and
madness. This pretty fancy is hardly relevant to his spirited attack
on Puritanism, for the Puritans had a lively sense of the demoniac.
As regards the execution of the stories, Mr Machen has style, and a
talent for the fantastic (though “The Three Impostors” is in its scheme
reminiscent of Stevenson), but he has not the power of creating horror.
One feels that he is carving gargoyles (to borrow his phrase) just for
fun, and his readers’ blood will not run cold, though possibly their
gorges may rise.
[Sidenote: _Tribune_]
The Great God Pan is finding himself extremely popular among the
novelists just now. It was Mr Benson who began it, earlier in the year,
and since that time the number of novels in which we are vouchsafed
manifestations of the goat-god—complete even to the hoofs, and with an
attendant murky odour thrown in—increases almost daily. Of course it is
natural enough, for nobody, not even a novelist, knows much about Pan,
whence unlimited possibilities of mystery and thrills. Mr Arthur Machen
is one of those who see in him all the possibilities of a “hair-raiser.”
Were it not disrespectful it might be said that “The House of Souls” is
exactly the kind of book which would have been written by the Fat Boy in
Pickwick, had he been possessed of literary ability. Had he also been, be
it said, familiar with the works of Robert Louis Stevenson. For never was
book more obviously written with the desire “to make your flesh creep.”
What with Pans and witches and mysterious keepers of treasures in hills,
the half-dozen stories contain quite a population of queer folk, not one
of which but has the potentiality of raising the hair upon the reader’s
head, until it resembles the quills upon a more than usually fretful
porcupine. Potentialities only, however, for, truth to tell, the author
never quite succeeds in raising our hair. He tells us either too much
or too little. He so constantly hints at quite unmentionable horrors
that we find ourselves mistrusting them, and when he does occasionally,
greatly daring, venture to unveil a horror or two, they are a wee bit
disappointing. This is, of course, as much the fault of the subject
as of the author. None of us can take the great God Pan, nor witches,
nor warlocks, very seriously nowadays—even if surgeons with alarming
surgical instruments are introduced into the same story to keep them in
countenance by their up-to-date associations. Because we know very well
that did Pan put in a bodily appearance in a British wood to-day he would
be given in charge by a stolid and unemotional gamekeeper for trespassing
in pursuit of game. Pan was killed by the Game Laws, if not before, and
not all the King’s horses and all the King’s men can put him together
again—alas! Of the various stories in the volume “The Inmost Light” comes
the nearest to being convincing, while lovers of Stevenson would feel
interested in the story series, “The Three Impostors,” which at times is
very successfully reminiscent of that writer.
[Sidenote: _Manchester Guardian_]
The stories in the volume entitled “The House of Souls,” by Arthur
Machen, are all addressed to the ancient purpose of making the reader’s
flesh creep. It is a favourite pastime for easy people to play with fear;
from time immemorial men have amused their leisure by sitting round the
fire capping horrors. It is not, we may concede, a very high form of art,
but any essay in this kind must stand or fall by its success in imputing
horror. Mr Machen has written a rather arrogant preface, in which the
following passage occurs: “He who carves gargoyles admirably is praised
for his curious excellence in the invention and execution of these
grinning monsters; and if he is blamed it is for bad carving, not because
he has failed to produce pet lambs.” Conceded! We may even call it a
necessary postulate of the reviewer; if he is writing of gargoyles he
has no business to say, “I do not like gargoyles”; he must look for the
curious excellence in invention and execution, and it is not to be found
in Mr Machen’s work. He understands what has long been known, that the
emotion of fear is best induced by vagueness; he insists—rather heavily,
indeed—on the mysterious power of the spirit, but he has not felt it; too
often the horror adumbrated in his vagueness is no more than physically
disgusting. Conjuring tricks with the grey matter of the brain, burning
and mutilating of live bodies are the clumsy devices of an unimaginative
man. The restrained intensity of feeling and economy of suggestion in
such scenes as those of Maeterlinck’s early plays are infinitely more
moving than these violent assaults.—H. M. S.
THE HILL OF DREAMS
[Sidenote: _East Anglian Daily Times_]
This is the first complete novel by the author of “The House of Souls.”
When writing of that work we expressed regret at the prominence accorded
to an unhealthy atmosphere. The suggestions of hideous survivals in the
under-world were not pleasant reading, and it is our duty to insist
that their repetition in the present work is deplorable. No good can be
effected by a discussion of such esoteric matters, and we could have
wished that Mr Machen had refrained from introducing such horrors into
his book. The story purports to be “a study of the temperament of a
young literary man, whose dreams lead him into strange places, and bring
him to a strange sequel.” Expressed more plainly, the plot is that of a
crazy youth who undergoes some particularly unpleasant experiences, and
finally commits suicide. Frankly speaking, it was the best thing that
could have happened, for the “dreams” of this young man were repulsive.
If the reading public must have this kind of mental food, we can only
deplore the taste; but we protest with all possible strength against
the dissemination of such sickly, and in some sense horrible ideas, as
form the basis of Mr Machen’s latest effort. It is not denied that the
author writes cleverly. That, however, forms an additional reason why his
talents should be employed in producing something more admirable than
“The Hill of Dreams” can be said to be.
[Sidenote: _The Outlook_]
It is safe to compliment Mr Arthur Machen upon having produced a book
that stands, and will perhaps continue to stand, quite alone in English
fiction. Fellows might be found for it in the modern letters of Germany
and France, but not even the most determined of our own symbolists has
produced such an elaborate account of the adventures of an exclusively
æsthetic nature in the rough world. But apart from such praise as that
acknowledgment confers, it is not at all easy to put a value on Mr
Machen’s “Hill of Dreams.” It is written in a simple yet studied English
that conveys in the deeper passages of the book as much of magic as
words can impart; yet the whole work is so unreal and so charged with
spiritual disease that there is scarcely a place for it in the widest
utilitarian view. Beyond an impression of intense agony of the soul,
it leaves little behind it, and there is nothing to the purpose that
a critic can say except that the book evidently answered to something
in the writer, and may answer to something in others. The growth of
Lucian Taylor’s fervently mystic and quite inhuman nature, perfectly
pure, perfectly egoistic, is traced with power. Most of his outward
tragedy is that of the artist’s struggle with the world, and of his
association with gross and ordinary British barbarians, whose manners are
described with a cleverness and a rancour in which we can find nothing
but weakness; the inward story—if such a web of shadows can be called a
story—is one of some strange insight into the obscurity of an essential
evil in nature, of a strange development of the passion of love in the
soul of the ascetic of art, of his sufferings, his dreams, and of his
final destruction by the shadowy power of ill that laid its hands upon
him as a child, on the hill where once the Romans camped. An undefined
horror penetrates all the story, like an invisible vapour. It is an
extraordinary performance and a work of art; but art fallen, we think, on
unclean and fatal days.
[Sidenote: _Birmingham Gazette and Express_]
... There is much fine writing, but probably few other than literary
craftsmen will follow with patience the detailed story of his striving
after perfection in the use of language. The most pleasing part of the
book is that which treats of his love for and idealisation of the simple,
womanly country girl, Annie Morgan. It is scarcely a “healthy” book, but
it is evidently the work of a man who has thought deeply and suffered
much.
[Sidenote: _Manchester Courier_]
It would be hard to classify “The Hill of Dreams,” by Arthur Machen, for
it is both unprecedented and unusual. Moreover, it is unpleasing and
unconvincing, though its writer possesses a wealth of imagery and a power
not often met with. The little story there is concerns the life of Lucian
Taylor, but the plot of the book is but a peg on which the author hangs
a detailed study of temperament. Lucian is a “dreamer,” with literary
aspirations. His early life is devoid of all humanising influences, and
his character is only explicable, and then not very satisfactorily so,
when this is remembered. Despite education and cultivation, Lucian never
possesses any feelings which a barbarian might not be expected to have.
He never imposes the least restraint on his natural susceptibility, and
both as a boy and a man is a sensualist. After living a life of failure,
in which, apart from his vivid dreams, a passion for a country girl is
the only important event, he commits suicide. The reader is left in doubt
whether Lucian was a genius neglected by an unappreciative world or a
fool totally incapable of understanding the beauty of the world. The
writing of the book is astonishingly versatile. At times there is the
gruesomeness of Poe, at others the charm of Hawthorne. The descriptions
of country scenery show a love of the picturesque, and the chapters on
London life a knowledge of the seamy side of nature. Though there is
splendid capability shown in the book, it will not make a wide appeal
because of its want of humanity.
[Sidenote: _Birmingham Post_]
Mr Arthur Machen’s is hardly the sort of story that is likely to win
admiration from the average reader of current fiction. Perhaps it is as
well, for “The Hill of Dreams” is not a healthy book, and the power of
fascination that it exercises is tempered with a certain instinctive
feeling of repugnance. Let it be said at once that it does fascinate.
It is filled with passages of rare beauty. Mr Machen understands the
magic of words; his sentences are as silk shot with rich, variegated, and
harmonious colour; they have a fine rhythmic flow also; and page after
page is filled with “a procession of images” (we quote the author’s own
words), “now of rapture and ecstasy and now of terror and shame, floating
in a light that is altogether phantasmal and unreal.” So far as charm of
language and beauty of imagery go—and they go far—the season is hardly
likely to see the rival of Mr Machen’s novel. The weakness is that all
this accumulated beauty is something fantastic, exotic, and bizarre. Mr
Machen leads us through a forest of flowers; but they are _fleurs de
mal_, in Baudelaire’s phrase, sprung from miasmatic ground, and spreading
a perfume by which the atmosphere is vitiated. Through his power of
conjuring up visions of the world of long ago and living in a dreamland
of his own Lucian Taylor claims some kinship with Du Maurier’s “Peter
Ibbetson.” By the circumstances of his death he stands related to the
English opium-eater. But Mr Machen has neither Du Maurier’s light touch
and sense of humour nor De Quincey’s stern insistence on the penalties
of such visionary delights. His attitude is too accurately that which
another exquisite artist, Ernest Dowson, assumed in the sonnet, now
fairly well known, “To One in Bedlam”:—
Oh, lamentable brother! if these pity thee,
Am I not fain of all thy lone eyes promise me—
Half a fool’s kingdom, far from men who sow and reap
All their days vanity.
So Dowson sang; and in the same mood Mr Machen seems inclined, throughout
the greater part of his book at any rate, to hold up his invertebrate
hero—or victim—as a subject for sympathy and admiration. “Invertebrate”
is too weak a word. Most of Lucian’s peculiarities are definable in
the terminology of specialists in mental alienation. He is a sufferer
from what an expert witness in the American “cause célèbre” of the
day called lately “exaggerated ego.” Echolalia (in his attempts at
authorship), melancholia, visual and auditory hallucinations—all these
familiar phenomena of an unbalanced mind does he exhibit; and doubtless
the specialist in such diseases might trace more. It is because his
attitude towards this “lamentable brother” is too nearly that of Ernest
Dowson and too far from that of (say) De Quincey that Mr Machen has
failed to produce a piece of great literature which is above all things
sane and level-headed. On the other side of the scales must be put a
fertile imagination, a great deal of acute psychological analysis, and
an extraordinary sensitiveness to impressions of natural beauty. These
are sufficiently enviable endowments, which one hopes to see Mr Machen
exercising in the future on some more happily treated subject.
[Sidenote: _Newcastle Chronicle_]
Mr Machen’s story is all about a young man who adds to a temperament
naturally neurotic a passion for examining the inner workings of his own
mind, and a dislike for nourishing food. This combination of qualities
reduces him to a skeleton, and enables him to see visions and dream
dreams of the most fantastic variety. Those who are familiar with Mr
Machen’s work will recognise in such a subject one particularly suited to
his _métier_. Step by step he traces, with fine imagination, the workings
of the disordered brain until the inevitable end of complete madness and
death is reached. Only Mr Machen, perhaps, would not have us believe that
his hero is mad; preferring if anything to think that he is of a sanity
and clear-sightedness altogether denied to the devotees of plain living
and plain thinking.
[Sidenote: _Morning Post_]
Mr Machen has chosen for his book one of those subjects that depend
entirely on their treatment for their success or failure. “The Hill of
Dreams” provides an analysis of the character of an imaginative young
man consumed with literary aspirations. Unfortunately, the treatment of
this theme is marred by the two faults of exaggeration and monotonous
insistence on the psychological note of alternate despair and exultation.
The delineation of moods must be made variable if it is to be palatable
to the reader; otherwise weariness of the mind ensues as a necessary
consequence. Lucian Taylor’s continuous habit of selfish introspection
ultimately leads him to madness and “death by misadventure,” but these
misfortunes do not induce sympathy in the reader when he has become
satiated with the morbidity which itself brought them about. At the same
time, the book has style and is full of so many well-written descriptions
of scenery that one is inclined to forget about the dreamer and only to
dwell in fancy on the beautiful “Hill of Dreams” which prompted his
visions.
[Sidenote: _P.T.O._]
Mr Arthur Machen’s first long novel, “The Hill of Dreams,” fails in
humanity. The hero’s literary struggles are desperate; the hero himself
is an abstraction. The author labours too much over his work for it to
be wholly satisfactory; we are obliged to him for the pains he takes in
these days of careless writing, but could wish the effort less apparent.
In his pictures of Welsh scenery he is at his best; in suburbia he lays
it on with a trowel, and makes himself more unhappy than ever he will
make the worthy folk he dislikes should they chance upon his book. In a
word, Mr Machen has yet to find a story, yet to create real living people.
[Sidenote: _The Scotsman_]
Mr Machen’s novel displays a singular ability in giving a sustained and
varied interest to a theme of which the material is to the last degree
simple and monotonous. He has no more story to tell than how a young man,
a country clergyman’s son, feeling that he had a gift for literature,
went up to London, and kept writing and writing and writing while he
lived in a world of dreams, quite misunderstood and untouched by the
outer world of everyday circumstance, until at last he came to kill
himself, having accomplished nothing. Such is the subject, and it seems,
thus stated, to afford little matter enough for a full-length story. But
the work goes with such a skilful psychology into the workings of the
unhappy young man’s mind, and shows such fine imaginative artistry in
varying the light and shade of his emotions and contrasting his outward
with his inward life, that it proves interesting from first to last
without even for a moment disturbing its air of soft tranquillity. It is
a story that will readily impress a reader of quiet tastes who can reach
to the more subtle refinements of fiction.
[Sidenote: _The Athenæum_]
... In the emotional adventures of the hapless youth who is a victim of a
species of nympholepsy and intellectual loneliness combined, we cannot,
after the first hundred pages, feel any adequate interest. His agonies
while engaged in the long-drawn-out struggle with his stubborn literary
gifts are too protracted, too remote from any human sentiment, to hold
the interest of the reader. Their recital is almost as monotonous as,
and far more fatiguing than, the artistic _débâcle_ of the painter in
Zola’s “L’Œuvre,” which had at least some elements of humanity. But
the spirit of place which informs the book, whether it is the forlorn,
illimitable dreariness of suburbia that the author chooses to show us, or
the mysterious and melancholy beauty of that wild Wales he knows so well,
could only have found expression at the hand of an adept. It is perhaps
a pity that so clever a writer as Mr Machen should bestow such infinite
pains on astonishing the bourgeois, who in all likelihood will never have
the privilege of reading his books; it is an obsession that brings to
mind the unprofitableness of flogging dead horses. But, after all, the
main matter for regret is the utter formlessness and the arid inhumanity
of his work. His Muse is a kind of Lilith—not a drop of her blood is
human—and thus, except from the decorative point of view, he leaves us
cold....
[Sidenote: _The Daily Graphic_]
A curious and fanciful book, which shows much misdirected ability. It
is the study of the temperament of a young man, who devotes himself to
literature, but his imagination is abnormal, and his mental condition
diseased. The book is not of much practical interest, as one feels that
his death, with which the story ends, is the best possible solution of
his difficulties.
[Sidenote: _The Daily Chronicle_]
Mr Arthur Machen has written “The Hill of Dreams,” we take it, not with a
view to saying anything in particular, but rather with a view to saying
something in a particular—almost a precious—way. We fancy that he would
not greatly object to identify himself with his hero, of whom he says:—
Language, he understood, was chiefly important for the beauty
of its sounds, by its possession of words resonant, glorious
to the ear, by its capacity, when exquisitely arranged, of
suggesting wonderful and indefinable impressions, perhaps
more ravishing and farther removed from the domain of strict
thought than the impressions excited by music itself. Here lay
hidden the sensuous art of literature, it was the secret of
suggestion, the art of causing delicious sensation by the use
of words. In a way, therefore, literature was independent of
thought; the mere English listener, if he had an ear attuned,
could recognise the beauty of a splendid Latin phrase.
One would like to have Mr Machen’s criticism of that majestic line of R.
L. Stevenson’s:—
Opulent orotundo strike the sky!
“The Hill of Dreams” is a long, and in many respects, a clever
psychological analysis and demonstration of the mind of a young
degenerate. It is a deliberate and careful study of morbidity. It is
well written, but written not quite well enough. The good writing is just
a thought too obvious; one cannot help noticing it. It has what Mr Machen
calls “the secret of suggestion,” but it suggests some things which we
would much rather had not been suggested. It is a thoughtful piece of
work though, and it is often lighted up by swift and penetrating flashes
of satire. We wish the word “sonorous” did not occur quite so often in
it. “Sonorous” is a very good and effective word in its way, but, like
“sinister,” “sombre,” and one or two others, it should be used sparingly.
It does not do to make a pet of it.
[Sidenote: _The Manchester Guardian_]
Without a refined susceptibility to sensuous impressions there can be no
high art. But there is always a danger that the artist who recognises
this theoretically may give rein to susceptibility and sensitiveness
as such and be drawn headlong along the road to mere sensationalism.
For in art, as in everything else, the ultimate value of a sensation
lies always in its content. The fact that your sensations seem to you
“exquisite” or “delicious” no more gives them artistic than it would
give them moral import; in the one case as in the other, there is the
further question to be asked, the question what kind of person you are
who feel them so. Which question leads in its turn to other questions,
all pointing unmistakably one way. Sensation, you find, gives you no
principle either in art or in anything else. It can open no locked
doors. Take it for your guide and there can be no doubt but you will be
landed, sooner or later, in the ditch. Mr Arthur Machen in his new story
“The Hill of Dreams” drives perilously near this dangerous territory.
He recounts the life of a hypersensitive youth of whom the world is not
worthy, upon whose delicate nature the violence of healthy humanity
rasps and jars, who therefore, shut up within himself, runs riot in a
fantastic maze of morbid mystic fancies, constructs an impossible romance
out of a chance meeting with a farmer’s daughter in the dark (for whose
sake he afterwards inflicts upon himself nightly penance with a gorse
bough), and finally drifts up to London and laudanum and an untimely end.
This kind of story could only fail to be suffocating in its effect upon
the reader if the oxygen absent in the hero were supplied by some sort
of exhilaration derivable from the background against which he moves.
But he moves, alas! in an atmosphere as exquisite and as exhausted as
he is. “He knew that he himself had solved the riddle, that he held in
his hand the powder of projection, the philosopher’s stone transmuting
all it touched to fine gold, the gold of exquisite impressions.” It is
of these impressions, this “powder of projection,” that the bulk of the
narrative is composed. If your air is full of dust, it is no matter what
kind of particles the dust is made of; let it be powdered gold, the
effect is just as choking. Many objections might be advanced against a
story like “The Hill of Dreams” on the score of its subject matter: the
artist would be ready to dismiss these as ethical and irrelevant. But
the unrelieved preciosity of the style is equally open to criticism, and
this is the rock upon which the book finally founders. “Only in the Court
of Avallaunius is the true science of the exquisite to be found.” It
would be wise to leave it unmolested there; here in these lower courts,
this “land of sin and woe,” there is nothing that more quickly tends to
tedium.—B. S.
[Sidenote: Louis Weitzenkorn in _The New York World_]
Arthur Machen’s “The Hill of Dreams,” according to the introduction
included in a new American edition, was written in 1897. It was published
first in 1907. Mr Knopf would have been much fairer to Mr Machen had
he left this book to perish in the dust of things forgotten. It has a
great beauty of writing. The Machen style is clearly a deliberate and
successful attempt to get melody into prose. But it strikes us that music
is not the first element of a prose style; in fact it is one part that,
under compulsion, might be omitted without injury. After all, the poets
are entitled to something.
Our first demand from a prose work styled a novel is living characters.
Except in the last three paragraphs, not one breath of life shows up
in “The Hill of Dreams.” Mr Machen confesses his plan to have been the
writing of a “Robinson Crusoe” of the mind. As to that there is a touch
of similarity here to “Peter Ibbetson,” and more to Jack London’s “Star
Rover.” Naturally enough, Machen didn’t see this latter work of fiction
before he began his. But it is to the analogy of “Robinson Crusoe” that
we mainly object. After all, that cast-off sailor had a man Friday who
was every inch alive. Good, deadly arrows fly through Defoe’s book. Ships
and savages and hot sunlight beat down.
Whatever there is of Lucian Taylor beyond the author’s frail beating
against life, is something of a masculine and British Carol Kennicott.
That’s crowding a reputation, even a fictional one, pretty badly, but the
futile protest and final escape of Lucian Taylor through suicide doesn’t
follow as four does two plus two and as true tragedy must. Not once
does the book move us to feel for this hero, who lives like an essay in
the _Atlantic Monthly_. He and the British countryside aristocracy—the
British Main Streeters—are so many children’s toys. They are dolls that
get from one end of the room to the other only when lifted up and moved.
Machen has written this book as if he had been young and angry. He seems
to have wanted to nail his old neighbours to some sort of cross. He
forgets that the Babbitts are the very ones who read “Babbitt” and make
the author rich.
The book will not enhance Machen’s rather high reputation here. His
incident of the hanging of a dog by a set of children, not one of whom
protests, will never be swallowed, at least by American readers. The
rest of the book is just as impossible. We are willing still to take our
knowledge of Main Street Britons from Mr Bennett’s “Five Towns.”
THE SECRET GLORY
[Sidenote: _Manchester Guardian_]
It is a little difficult to know what kind of readers “The Secret Glory”
is intended to please, and there is a temptation to believe that its
author wrote it simply and solely for his own amusement. The greatest
works of art are no doubt those in which an artist insists on satisfying
his own standard of taste, but Mr Machen’s game on this occasion seems
to have been rather that of “letting himself go.” He begins with a vivid
indictment of the English public school, but does not produce either
an original or a convincing picture of its faults and failings; and he
then proceeds to cut the painter and to launch forth into a juvenile
description of a juvenile escapade in London which his schoolboy hero,
half mystic, half Bohemian, is supposed to share with a young lady of
his choice, though not of his class—the whole embroidered with wonderful
pæans to punch and poetry, surrounded with a sort of religious halo,
and penetrated with a peculiar flavour of what one might call inebriate
innocence. There are perhaps deep lessons to be drawn from the perusal
of these singular heroics, but we have not succeeded in discovering or
profiting by them. The narrative itself is allusive and obscure. Huge
jokes are supposed to be concealed on one side, and on the other the
profound, impenetrable import of things. But, judging by what is actually
communicated to us, we remain in doubt whether what is withheld was
either very funny or very significant.—B. S.
[Sidenote: _Punch_]
I have always understood that what St Paul calls “visions and revelations
of the Lord” were sent to forward their recipients’ progress in virtue;
and that if glimpses of the supernatural resulted in _Schwärmerei_, or
sin, they were the work of the Devil. On this hypothesis there is no
doubt whatever concerning the origin of “The Secret Glory,” a latter-day
variant of the Holy Grail revealed in a Welsh farmhouse to the boy
_Ambrose Meyrick_ and his father; although its exposition is accompanied
(if I may credit Mr Arthur Machen) by a vision of “The Mystery of
Mysteries.” _Ambrose_, still harping on his mystic experiences, is sent
to an exquisitely odious public school, where he becomes first a cowed
and isolated dreamer and last a furtive and malicious rebel. Both
reverie and rebellion are natural enough, the school being what it is,
but they are not particularly creditable to a devotee of “The Mystery of
Mysteries.” Nor is a _liaison_ with a sympathetic parlour-maid, though
this is set down as part and parcel of the “wonders.” Nor is _Ambrose’s_
subsequent career, which continues a marvel of irresponsibility until his
extremely unconvincing martyrdom at the hands of “miscreants” in Asia.
And, talking of irresponsibility, I cannot help wishing that Mr Machen
himself, who shows considerable savage humour in his guerilla campaign
against the public school system, would occasionally come to closer grips
with one or other of the problems his extravaganza has evoked.
[Sidenote: Forrest Reid in _The Daily Herald_]
In “The Secret Glory” the happenings are neither sober nor probable,
yet the effect is prosaic and even tedious. Here, again, it is all a
matter of treatment, or, rather, in Mr Machen’s case, of the absence of
treatment, for he has left his subject a mere kernel rattling in the
dry shell of didacticism. I have seldom been so disappointed in a book.
What has happened to Mr Machen? Have we gained a missionary and lost
an artist? His gift was always narrow, apt to lead him woefully astray
when he departed from the presentation of states of abnormal, or morbid,
consciousness; but it was vivid, haunting, and intensely individual. “The
Secret Glory” is little more than an elaborate tract in which Mr Machen
champions mediævalism and tilts at his usual windmills—the public school
system, athletics, suburban life, etc.
[Sidenote: _The Outlook_]
In “The Secret Glory” Mr Machen attempts to describe the rebellion of
a Celtic mystic against Anglicanism and the public school traditions.
I say “attempts,” because neither Anglicanism nor education interests
him sufficiently to make him barb his satire. But the mysticism excites
his dark and fantastic imagination, and there are bursts, in the
latter half of the book, of successful paradox. Ambrose Meyrick, who
had seen the “Holy Chalice of Teilo sant,” and had an affection for
Gothic architecture, was well whipped for absconding from football
practice. Thenceforth he exerted himself to be in all things the most
loyal Luptonian, but at night he walked in strange places and heard the
voices that outsing the Fairy Birds of Rhiannon. After winning a Balliol
Scholarship and performing some remarkable cricket at the Oval, he broke
away and joined a troupe of actors, and was for ever lost to Lupton and
its like. An effect of a kind Mr Machen certainly produces. He incants
Welsh names, and, as so often on lighter ground, he displays a great
power of giving a queer twist to the least uncanny events. Naturally, he
fails to inform us what there was so remarkable in the Welsh Church which
was ruined by “the Yellow Hag of Pestilence, the Red Hag of Rome, and the
Black Hag of Geneva”; consequently, he fails to show why Ambrose should
not have had all the spiritual experience desired in his own school
chapel. True, Lupton Chapel was built in 1840, and the neighbourhood was
slummy. But, then, Ambrose was capable of ecstasy in Bloomsbury and Soho.
No, Ambrose’s unhappiness is too like that of Mr Bultitude when, in “Vice
Versa,” this gentleman took his son’s place at Dr Grimstone’s academy,
and proceeds from an intelligible dislike of small boys.
[Sidenote: _The Evening Standard_]
A schoolboy is also the central figure in “The Secret Glory,” by Arthur
Machen. But Ambrose Meyrick is an unusual boy, not at all the sort of
boy to conform to the average type turned out at such a public school
as Lupton. It is to be hoped, by the way, that not many schools are like
Lupton, or at least that there are not any public schoolmasters like Mr
Horbury, who takes such a savage delight in using the cane.
Mr Machen’s satire on the public school system, and especially public
school games, is a little too heavy-handed to be effective. Neither boys
nor masters are very convincing, and now and then the story gets lost
in the mystical atmosphere with which Mr Machen surrounds his hero.
Altogether “The Secret Glory” is rather an incoherent and tiresome
production, and certainly does not represent Mr Machen at his best.
Schoolboys and mysticism do not mix.
[Sidenote: _Liverpool Daily Courier_]
Mr Arthur Machen has attempted an ambitious character study in “The
Secret Glory.” He has also tried to give us a new version of the Grail,
introducing a mystical cup preserved in a cottage in Wales. But neither
the character nor the cup are very convincing, and it must be said that
Mr Machen has this time failed to get into his story any deep sense
of the mystical. His principal character, Ambrose Meyrick, is a queer
chap, as he is meant to be, but there is no reason why he should be
as irresponsible as he is, and less reason why he should finish up by
getting himself crucified somewhere in Asia. These improbabilities would
matter less, however, if Mr Machen had made Meyrick vital, and his
adventures interesting. The story never runs with sufficient sequence
to ensure this. It is all confused with propaganda, and very bitter
propaganda at that, against the public schools, and criticism of Welsh
Nonconformity when it combines religious revival fervour with sensuality.
Mr Machen knows how to tell a story, but he does not demonstrate that
capacity in this work.
[Sidenote: _Sheffield Daily Telegraph_]
Ambrose Meyrick said that “people who pushed ... always reminded him of
the hungry little pigs fighting for the largest share of the wash”—but
though a reasonable aversion to Extravertism is comprehensible, it is
really unnecessary to be so exaggerated an introvert as the hero of “The
Secret Glory,” by Arthur Machen. Ambrose carried his mental “Secret
Doctrine” to perverse, even morbid, excesses; he lived in a _paysage
intérieur_ peopled by mystics and martyrs, and visions of the jewelled
Grail hidden by the descendant of Celtic Saints in some humble cottage
on the Welsh mountains; and all this was naturally incompatible with the
brutal facts of life at an English public school. An unpleasant school,
certainly, but not more so than most.
It is to be assumed that Ambrose possessed a sense of humour, since he
could enjoy, and even parody, Rabelais, but there is scant evidence of
the quality otherwise than as stated. Extracts from his famous book, “In
Praise of Taverns,” are equally unconvincing.
Some of Mr Machen’s arguments on religion are interesting. “In my
heart,” he says, “I have always doubted whether moderate Anglicanism
be Christianity in any sense, whether it even deserves to be called
a religion at all,” and he objects to Protestantism because of the
fundamental heresy on which it “builds its objection to what is called
Ritual. I suppose this heresy is called Manichee; it is a charge of
corruption and evil made against the visible universe, which is affirmed
to be not ‘very good’ but ‘very bad’—or, at all events, too bad to
be used as the vehicle of spiritual truth.... Incense, vestments,
candles, all ceremonies, processions, rites—all these things are
miserably inadequate; but they do not abound in the horrible pitfalls,
misapprehensions, errors, which are inseparable from speech of men used
as an expression of the Church.”
Mr Machen is trying to present Celtic Paganism in the guise of
Christianity, he confuses the Greek philosophy of restraint, “Nothing in
excess,” with a mere negation. There is very little glory in the book. It
is concerned with the tortuous byways of a perverse soul through which
the free wind from the mountains has never blown.
[Sidenote: _The Morning Post_]
Though issued as fiction, this is not a novel. It is composite of story,
autobiography, essay, satire, philosophy, criticism, poetry, and too
formless to be brought within any literary mode. Presumably it was not
written all of a piece, and that just yesterday. Spatchcocked passages
point to times when there were as yet no Boches, only Boers, and “’E
dunno where ’e are” was still a music-hall ditty. These were the days of
Ambrose Meyrick’s youth, true; but—though this need not (and will not)
trouble the shade of Mr Blackmore—the most consistent romancer, as to
time and place, would not now suggest the Valley of the Doone as even
a bogus field for the adventure of the Sangraal. Other times, other
fashions, even in that high Quest. Pieced or wrought whole, the book
nevertheless is unified by one idea. The “secret glory” of its title is
the imaginative life, to which its every line and circumstance is meant
as acclamation and appeal.
There are in it, among others of rare and rich beauty, a thousand absurd
lines and circumstances we could willingly blot. For Mr Machen’s own
purpose, Lupton School is a prejudice; like its Headmaster it is too much
“commerce with mortality.” “A deeper transport and a mightier thrill” are
communicated in wise, rapturous praise of wine and humorous discourse on
the marriage of Panurge. Here Nelly Foran is cunningly kept with Ambrose,
aloof and aloft in a fragrant old Bloomsbury whose “stinks” in reality
were neither better nor worse than the Midlands’. More understanding
still of its own “secret glory” would Mr Machen’s fascinating book have
been had he realised that its ecstatic vision, being of the spirit and
the imagination, is as likely to occur in a “Bethel with the stucco
front” as in the Celtic Church with its Cup of Sacrament. But Mr Machen,
in his own exclusive way, does catch it, and for that we are grateful.
[Sidenote: Rose Macaulay in _The Daily News_]
“The Secret Glory” is, like most of Mr Machen’s books, very odd. It is
the story of a mystic, of the inner and the outer life. The outer life
of Ambrose Meyrick is passed at Lupton, a typically commonplace and
materialistic public school, whose masters talk of “playing the game” and
write horrible school songs of the “Forty Years on” type; while his inner
life, which is alone of significance or importance to him, is spent in
exploring mystic realms of Celtic Christian legend with or without his
dead father, a Welsh architectural enthusiast. “I do not know,” writes
Ambrose in later life, “how it all happened; I had been leading two eager
lives. On the outside I was playing games and going up in the school
with a rush, and in the inside I was being gathered more and more into
the sanctuaries of immortal things.” Ambrose’s mystical adventures are
described with a good deal of beauty; it is his contacts with actuality
which strike one as distorted and unreal.
Both he and Mr Machen loathe public schools and all pertaining to them
with such intensity that neither of them can see straight. They set
up a monstrous figure of savagery and idiotcy and call him a typical
schoolmaster, adding that schoolmasters are just like schoolboys,
the implication being that nearly all schoolboys also are savage and
imbecile. Even public schools are not really quite as bad as all that;
and Mr Machen would have been more effective if he had been more
temperate. There is quite enough to be said about the savagery and
stupidity of schools without resorting to distortion. Psychological
accuracy is not, indeed, the strength of the book, which is full of
unlikely actions. For instance, was Ambrose really the kind of boy who,
in his quest for beauty, would have absconded with one of the school
housemaids? Surely his dead father would have told him that this was
conduct unworthy of an inquirer into spiritual mysteries. But the whole
book is a fantasy, and not to be judged as a tale of real life. Its
curious occurrences and characters are made odder by the difficult,
obscure, and fragmentary method of narration. There is, in fact, a good
deal of silliness in the book, as well as some bad taste, but there is
also a good deal of beauty, and the beauty and the silliness and the bad
taste are all the work of a writer.
[Sidenote: Middleton Murry in _The Nation and Athenæum_]
Even if we wished we could not tell the story of “The Secret Glory.”
Mr Machen manages to combine an onslaught on the public school system
with some watery Paterian mysticism. Personally we have an equal dislike
of those who belaud and those who denigrate the public school system.
Besides, “there ain’t no sich person,” there are as many systems as there
are public schools. But Ambrose Meyrick, if he could have been jerked for
a moment by his creator into a semblance of real existence, would justify
the worst outrages wrought upon him by his equally incredible _alma
mater_.
He is a sentimental philanderer with æsthetic Catholicisms, a mystic
Celtic dreamer, a Soho Bohemian (before Soho was ruined, of course); but
these crimes are as nothing compared to his incorrigible penchant for
“poetic prose.” Mr Machen has encouraged him in it. He will have a great
deal more to answer for in the day of judgment than the schoolmaster who
tried to beat it out of him.
FAR OFF THINGS AND THINGS NEAR AND FAR
[Sidenote: _The Outlook_]
It is difficult to know quite what to make of Mr Machen’s two most recent
books. “Far Off Things” was a rather scrappy chapter of what might have
been an excellent autobiography not written in the first place for
publication in book form. Like the new volume it spoiled a great deal of
good material and was not organised in any way that tends to make lasting
literature. For all that, both volumes are excellent reading. There is
a great deal to be said for Mr Machen. And he himself has a great deal
to say. He is not quite at home in the twentieth century. Spiritually
he belongs to the years before the ’nineties, to Charing Cross Road as
it was in the days when he translated Casanova at the rate of thirty
shillings a week. The Strand is not what it was, and he paints the
difference for us in no uncertain terms. Nor do the modern restaurants
know their business half so well as the old chop-houses did.
So through this monstrous incursion of women with the war and
nursery hours of to-day, the old tavern life has gone; utterly
and for ever, I am afraid.
This is one of the chief grudges he urges against the modern age; and he
can give us chapter and verse for it.
Going there (to Herbert’s) in these latter days I used to
wonder why all the meats seemed to taste alike.... I had
business, oddly enough, in their kitchen. One of the cooks
showed me the joints roasting on the jack; and I perceived
that three different meats were cooking at the one fire, while
beneath, in a common pan, their juices mingled, ready for the
basting ladle. It is not much wonder, I think, that veal and
lamb and beef taste all much alike in this unhappy place, once
so high, now fallen so low.
On another occasion, when he asked for Stilton cheese, the waiter
replied that only English cheeses were supplied! And just as the food
has deteriorated, so has the journalism. “Always remember that we appeal
not to the cabman, but to the cabman’s wife,” said one of Mr Machen’s
friends, a distinguished journalist; and Mr Machen, who, to say the worst
of him, prefers the cabman, might have been a little more disgusted than
he is, and that is not a little. He does his best to fix a considerable
share of the blame for our present condition on this “monstrous
incursion of women.”
Such things as these are not, however, the main features of Mr Machen’s
confessions—for that is what his pages really are. He is most interesting
when he hints at his incidental experiences at novelist, journalist,
and actor. And here, at the same time, because of his brevity, he is
most disappointing. Mr H. B. Irving once said to him of his book “The
Great God Pan”—“You shouldn’t have done it; you destroy the illusion.
Never take people behind the scenes. I never do.” Mr Machen’s great
mistake in his two latest books is that he never takes us further than
the stage-door. Although he is telling us about himself all the time,
we learn very little about him because he does not tell us enough of
other people. We enjoy his story, but always with a sense of irritation
that he has not dotted more of the i’s and crossed more of the t’s. Time
and again, following on some succulent anecdote, he seems almost to be
about to paint for us the whole moving pageant of the ’nineties, and
just as often he turns aside to trace something else into other and less
interesting channels.
The truth is “Things Near and Far” is not really a book at all because
it was neither conceived nor written as a book. It is a collection of
amazingly good snippets, a sort of prearranged notebook that might have
borne such a title as “Towards Biography.” One feels about it as about
something that might have been, that almost was, but is not. One is left
wondering whether Mr Machen is a good journalist or a good author, for it
seems fairly evident that he cannot be both, at all events, not at the
same time, as he has tried to be in his two latest books.
[Sidenote: _Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury_]
... It is debonair, it is graceful, it is dignified and extraordinarily
at its ease, it is essentially belles-lettres; it is not much more than
that; it is not specially memorable, nor does it presage very brilliantly
of the book to come (in the indefinite future), where “an interior tale
of the soul and its emotions” is to be told through the shapes of “hills
and valleys, woods and rivers, sunrise and sunset, buried temples and
mouldering Roman walls.” Mr Machen has humour, poetic sensibility, a
sense of style; he is reflective, open to the influences of nature,
appreciative of the town’s common and uncommon interests, readily
responsive to the appeal of art and literature. What perhaps his work
lacks to make it true literature is virility, and it wants substance
to make it really worth while, though it is—this must be one’s last
word—exceedingly pleasant.
[Sidenote: _The Morning Post_]
Mr Arthur Machen has his full circle of readers, who will be delighted
with this sumptuous edition which Mr Secker has so ably prepared. It
is limited to a thousand sets; five hundred of which have gone to
America. Mr Machen loves the unusual and the mysterious. They appeal to
his imagination and set him thinking on a train of thought which seems
without end. Someone has said that few men can more agreeably fill a
column. The remark finds justification in these volumes. This gift is
the strength and weakness of his writing. It might be said of Mr Machen
that he has at once too much and too little imagination. Too much, that
his ideas flow on like the summer brook; too little, that his style lacks
incisiveness and the power of expressing instantaneously some thought.
“The Great God Pan” is a fair example of this weakness. He tells us in
“Far Off Things” that he was persuaded to write this tale of horror by
a wish to “pass on the vague, indefinable sense of awe and mystery and
terror” that he had received in childhood days spent in the valley of the
Usk, above Newbridge. The feeling that all the best in human beings is
built on a treacherous morass which may engulf it at any moment has often
been expressed. Mr Machen’s effort does not compare with Stevenson’s “Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” Its terror is dissipated through failure to bring
any definite incident of horror before the reader. The alternative would
have been to envelop the story in such a wealth of strangeness that the
impression would have been created through atmosphere; the method of Poe.
Mr Machen is neither sufficiently dramatic nor sufficiently keyed to the
weirdness of his tale. It certainly lacks resemblance to the dark gravity
of deep woods.
From a consideration of this point we notice another peculiarity in Mr
Machen’s work. It is not plagiarism, but the ignoring of any reference
to ideas which other men have worked upon. True, there is no monopoly
of thought, but we are led sometimes right up to a thought which has
been superbly expressed before. It would seem more natural if Mr Machen
directed us to the poet or writer instead of enlarging in his own words
on that idea. It would certainly be more effective from the point of view
of art.
It may be that we are somewhat critical. There is much to enjoy and
admire in these books with ever a word for the weak and distressed, and
the fascinating hint of “worlds unrealised.” But library editions are
becoming increasingly popular, and we wonder whether they may not be
overdone. These fine books are delightful to handle, but the thought
creeps in if their matter is quite up to the high standard of production;
whether anything but the very best should find a home in these limited
editions, which rise so readily in mere marketable value. Still, Mr
Machen has his admirers. No doubt they will think nothing too good as a
home for his thoughts.
[Sidenote: _Manchester Guardian_]
In “Far Off Things” Mr Arthur Machen describes his rambling boyhood
on the borderland of South Wales and his adolescence (a rather sad
affair of lonely lodging and penurious journalism in London) as far
as the publication of his first book. His memories have been laid up
in lavender, and they emerge rather heavily scented. The result is
the praise of old and simple things in a style that has too glib an
antiquarianism to be pleasing over a long stretch. The reader finds
himself predicting Mr Machen’s reaction to each situation as it arises
and trying to forestall the phrase which the author’s sentimental
conservatism will use. For instance, when he describes how his mother
made “fermety” or “frumenty” in the autumn he must allude to it as “a
very honourable dish and a most ancient and Christian pottage.” One
feared in advance some such pomposity. It is the more pity because Mr
Machen is sensitive as well as sentimental, and when he allows his
memories to flow in unprinked English he achieves a beauty apt to the
object he describes, notably in his landscapes of the Usk Valley and the
surrounding hills.
[Sidenote: _The Outlook_]
Literature and the journalist do not always rub shoulders nowadays; at
all events few people look to find anything claiming to be prose in the
misprinted, smudgy sheets of our raucous evening Press, unless, perhaps,
in newspapers published North of the Trent. So that it does not promise
well to read in Mr Machen’s preface that his new book appeared seven
years ago in one of the best-known London evening papers under the title
“Confessions of a Literary Man.” It sounds like Mr Bennett all over
again, and misgiving increases when he adds that the confessions were
written to editorial order when he was a reporter. It is an old truth
that Fleet Street has ruined more good writers than Fleet Street ever
made. Only at a first glance does Mr Machen appear to be an exception,
for in spite of the extraordinary quality and power of his present book,
though it challenges comparison with Gissing’s best work and surpasses it
in parts, Mr Machen is quite clearly not the writer he might have been.
“Far Off Things” is one of the most entertaining and familiar books one
remembers; a vivid autobiographical chapter, condensed and complete in
much less than two hundred pages, but it is without that distinctive
art that makes Mr Gosse’s “Father and Son” one of the great pieces of
autobiography of this or any time, and it has not just that sense for
the right word in the right place which knits language into abiding
literature. He cannot wrestle with the conventional:—
Now winter has its splendours; but with what joy do we welcome
the yearly miracle of spring. We and the whole earth exult
together as though we had been delivered from prison, the
hedgerows and the fields are glad, and the woods are filled
with singing; and men’s hearts are filled with an ineffable
rapture. Israel once more has come out of Egypt, from the house
of bondage.
That is the prose of the best journalism, but not the prose of the man
who is, first and foremost, expressing the pure content of his mind with
all his mind’s power through the power of words.
But the real charm of the book lies elsewhere, chiefly in the zest with
which he describes the places he has loved and the people he remembers,
the curious, quiet anecdotes, his sense of poetry in all things, and,
especially, his literary enthusiasms. Cervantes and Scott come into his
range, and even De Quincey, who “wrote in the great manner because he
thought in the great manner.” He is inspiriting about Carlyle, and there
is a tone of voice meant for the detractors of that great man in the
quiet statement: “I know not any man of these days that is worthy to dust
Carlyle’s hat or to clean his pipe for him.” But the journalist comes out
badly in that sentence. The best thing in the book is his description of
the Strand as it was in the ’eighties, and there is a curious parallel
with one of Mr W. H. Davies’ best poems when he writes of Gwent and Twyn
Barlwm. He is equally happy proving that the Rosicrucians never existed
as in describing the conventional garret of authorhood’s infancy, and
there is one magnificent anecdote of a lesson in Welsh pronunciation:—
I said, “Yn oes oesodd”—from ages to ages. “That is right,”
said my Welsh friend, “speak it so that it makes a sound like
the wind about the mountains.”
And, as he says himself, the spirit of that sentence is very near to the
heart of true literature. Mr Machen knows what true literature is. There
is a good critic in the man who can define realism as “the depicting of
eternal, inner realities—the ‘things that really are’ of Plato—as opposed
to the description of transitory, external surfaces; the delusory masks
and dominoes with which the human heart hides and drapes itself.” Though
he is digressive he is never garrulous, even when he writes about food
and drink, and he does that well enough to whet the reader’s appetite.
“Far Off Things,” if it is not a great book, is a book too good to be
read lightly. It contains a great deal of wisdom and more than a little
humour. The author throws out hints of a book yet to be written, in which
hills and valleys, woods and rivers, sunrise and sunset will be described
so that a story is suggested to the reader; something of Wordsworth’s
method, and certainly a method of poetry, though Mr Machen does not seem
to realise it in that way. Such a book he has in his mind, and if, when
it comes, it improves on “Far Off Things,” Mr Machen will have done his
work better than he knew.
[Sidenote: _Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury_]
Mr Arthur Machen is a modest man: he says so himself; but his modesty
is of that most profitable kind—to the world, we mean, of course—which
inspired Montaigne, Cowley, “Elia,” and other famous “egoists.” In
“Things Near and Far” he continues the tale he began in “Far Off Things,”
published a few months ago, the tale of his life, outer and inner, public
and private. He is, it is increasingly evident, a man of letters, a
complete man of letters, and nothing but a man of letters. The landmarks
of his life are either one or other of his books, or one or other of
the events out of which a book is to grow. He has a positive flair for
making literary capital out of life. He is a very appreciative collector
of experiences, and always has plenty to say on any point; he is fairly
fertile in ideas, though no great thinker; and he is interested and can
communicate his interest—even in his own books and the reviews they
called forth. That notable modesty of his takes on, by the way, in
presence of those reviews, an aspect too like self-complacency to leave
us quite assured of his ingenuousness. There are, however, many books
less worth 7s. 6d. than this.
[Sidenote: _Daily News_]
“Far Off Things,” by Arthur Machen. “Heaven lies about us in our
infancy.” Nevertheless, few sensitive men recall a really happy
boyhood. Mr Machen is one of them. The only child of the rector of
Caerleon-on-Usk, in the romantic solitudes of Gwent, he looks back on
his earliest days as a secluded yet intense experience. The power of
association is strong; and the vein of mysticism which characterises Mr
Machen’s writings both derives from, and is heightened by, the gleam of
such fond recollection. With Sir Thomas Browne, he finds those years “a
miracle ... which to relate were not a history, but a piece of poetry.”
We all know that the author of such diversities in unity as
“Hieroglyphics,” “The Great God Pan,” and “The Bowmen,” is a thoroughly
illogical and genial spirit. The incredibly genuine sense of wonder that
runs through his excursions in practical journalism somehow prevents
us from being irritated as we ought to be. His new book is good, if
not a “piece of poetry.” We are glad to have his apologia, it is oddly
convincing. It must be a great and unbalancing thing to find miracles all
the way.
When Mr Machen writes of his studies, his early yearning for London,
and the hard times he knew in the capital, it is in the same untroubled
spirit. His temperament is unchanged through all these years. “Omnia
exeunt in mysterium”—the thought brings him the mystic’s consolation.
If one loves the unfathomable, why go about to probe it? Yet he demands
realism from literature: De Quincey was his first idol by virtue of this
possession. The old inference is made clear again. The mystic lives not
in experience, but in the aura with which he encases it. To us others
this way of acceptance is an illusion, an escape from the perplexed soul.
But can we make anything better of life?
THE REFLECTIONS OF A MAN OF SELF-CONCEIT
[Sidenote: _The Boston Evening Transcript_]
An extremely pleasant philosophy harboured by literary folk of a certain
class in regard to the stress of bread-winning is that there is monotony
about such a humdrum occupation. It is not agreeable to work at something
you hate when you long to be literarily productive. Nevertheless, despite
Carl Van Vechten’s sympathetic explosions all over the yellow cover of
this book, we wonder just how much self-respect and inclination may war
with each other in a young man’s soul when the young man lives as Mr
Machen did in his youth. A book called “The Anatomy of Tobacco” was an
early effort. That achieved, he seems to have lived on his father, a
clergyman who had no money. He speaks of the situation thus: “My mother
had been a hopeless invalid for fifteen years; my father’s health had
failed, and he had become very deaf; the poor living of Llanddewi Fach
had grown poorer still through the agricultural smash of 1880; he was
in dire and perpetual straits for money; he underwent most of the
mortifications which are allotted to the poor. It makes me grieve to this
day to remember with what piteous sadness he would lean his head on his
hand; he had lost hope.”
Thus Mr Machen summarises his family’s situation financially. He does
not appear to have been much comfort to his father. He speaks now of
“grieving.” Better indeed if he had done a little honest work. He goes
to London. He reads manuscripts for a bookseller. Some intelligent
people like that sort of occupation. He calls it a “weary business.”
In fact, this book is filled with complaints, constant, unstinted in
their outgo, because he, Arthur Machen, could not do exactly what he
wished to do, on all occasions. There is a good deal of what we might
term the pseudo-classic touch to his style. He likes to pose as an
intellectual deserving of immortality. He is not content to be one of our
leading contemporaries. He prefers, as in one instance, to “abide by the
verdict of M. Octave Uzanne, who is said, I believe, to be a good judge
of letters. He said that it (a certain work called ‘The Chronicle of
Clemendy’) was ‘le renouveau de la Rennaissance,’ and that I was sure of
my place beside Rabelais and Boccaccio, on the serene immortal seats.”
We quote the above from Mr Machen because it is wholly typical of the
man. Another remark in reference to George Moore’s “A Mummer’s Wife”
shows his attitude toward the age in which he lives equally well. He
complains because no good novel of stage life has been written. And
then he adds that in the old days, the days of the Crummles Company, it
would have been easier. That is nonsense. This age and generation is
adequate for all, provided some effort at adaptation is made by those of
us who have been too overburdened by the weight of the glorious past.
A good novel can be written as well in the twentieth century as in the
seventeenth, provided some one has the brains to compass it. The whole
book shows the reflections of a conceited man of mediocre ability, who
buries his talent in the ashes of the past, mumbles over it incessant
Latin quotations, pats himself on the back because he knows so much Latin
to quote and then ... is continually irritated because the world hurries
by without digging into the ashes, or listening respectfully to his
incantations.—D. F. G.
[Sidenote: Maurice Hewlett in _The Evening Standard_]
... “To be in the Strand,” he says, sighing, “was like drinking punch
and reading Dickens.” So it was—but one can read Dickens the better
without the punch, either within or without the pages. It was a strange
chapter of literary history where human happiness could not be imagined
or pictured without too much to eat and too much to drink. I will be
sentimental with almost anyone, for the mingling of tears is as wholesome
a vent as the chiming of laughter—but I cannot cry over the bad smells of
yesteryear to save my life. When I remember Holywell Street I turn with
thanksgiving to Charing Cross Road. It is nothing to write home about—but
you can feel the wind in it. So much for that....
DOG AND DUCK
[Sidenote: Laurence Housman in _Now and Then_]
The brief essay is a friendly form of literature; it enables the writer
to say zestfully just what is in his mind to say, and no more. The moment
his zest diminishes he can leave off, and another day start fresh on
a new subject. So, in small measure, it gives us the man, the natural
everyday furnishings of his brain, the room he lives in, the mental
paraphernalia with which his taste for life has surrounded him.
The brief essay is, therefore, a personal test of character. Its writer
need not make you, or even wish to make you agree with his opinions, he
may have that type of minority mind which prefers to annoy people; he may
be unlovable, provocative, sceptical, superstitious—I could string you
any number of unvirtuous qualities from which a good brief essay may be
compounded—but he must be himself, he must be interesting, and he must
have a point of view.
I have not the pleasure, or the pain, of Mr Machen’s personal
acquaintance. I do not know whether I should like him; but I do know
that he would interest me—that he is himself, and that he has a point of
view. I think that often we should differ and sometimes quarrel, that
his point of view occasionally invites as much ridicule as it casts on
others, that it is now and then inconsistent. But the inconsistency is
all of a piece with the character: he has a mind with a certain focus,
outside which the view becomes blurred, perhaps a little distorted. It
is the kind of mind which Mr Chesterton invented for himself, the better
to attract attention to the good which God had given him: he has a mind
credulous toward folk-lore and the past, incredulous toward modern
history and science; but he does not explain why folk-lore should be
believed and modern history rejected—beyond giving us a few instances
where folk-lore has been proved true, and modern history proved false; as
to which one need only say that the means for correcting modern history
are more abundantly to hand than those for correcting folk-lore. He
is a romantic, and has a romantic detestation for the impossibilities
of Euclid, whom he therefore dismisses as unworthy of the wise man’s
consideration. But I could be just as romantic in favour of Euclid, on
those very same grounds. It is only by giving it impossible things to
believe that Euclid provides the human brain with foothold for clear
logical thinking. It is only, as Mr Chesterton might say, by accepting
the impossible that man can attain to true belief. It is on those lines
that theology has provided us with a spiritualised Euclid of its own: and
only by believing in its impossibilities shall we ever get to eternal
life—which in itself is to the human mind an impossible condition, unless
miserable science, through the theories of Einstein, is now going to
help us to accept it. It is quite possible to be as romantic in one’s
acceptance of science as Mr Machen is in his acceptance of folk-lore.
But it is when Mr Machen is sceptical of human nature’s ability to
recapture the good it has let go that I quarrel with him most. As surely
as I could train an intelligent child to be superstitious about going
under a ladder, so surely could I train it to enjoy the bracing and
rhythmical exercise of the Morris dance, on which Mr Machen throws a
black and a wicked doubt for which I do not readily forgive him.
This only means that in his twenty-eight essays, his _Dogs_ and his
_Ducks_, Mr Machen has not always scored a complete “Duck,” and brought
his point home with conviction. For the meaning of which I refer
the reader to the first essay, which gives the book its unexplained
title. But every one of them is interesting and attractive, even when
provocative.
[Sidenote: _New York Herald_]
Some twenty-odd little essays by Arthur Machen have been gathered into
a book carrying the title of the first essay, “Dog and Duck” (Knopf),
on its cover. This singular combination refers to an ancient game that
is still played in a Georgian setting in London, but before Machen gets
through describing the game he takes the reader through a famous criminal
trial of the eighteenth century. Carl Van Vechten says for the publisher
that these essays are “in the Dickens manner,” but we found little of
that savour in “Roast Goose” or “Martinmas” or “Christmas Mumming,” just
the kind of subjects Dickens wrote about but in a so different manner and
spirit. But, on their own merits, they make very agreeable reading.
[Sidenote: _Boston Transcript_]
This collection of rambling essays represents a late phase of its
author’s work and presents an interesting contrast with some of the
earlier books recently reissued as the result of the growth of a Machen
cult in this country. The newer Machen is revealed as a less eccentric,
healthier, but not less sensitive writer than the old. There is in “Dog
and Duck” and its companion essays little trace of the author’s former
prepossession with things occult and ghastly, while his more pleasing
qualities as a writer are fairly well represented. When Machen writes
with a gentle regret for things past or passing, such as old sports and
old enjoyments, or the disappearance of the vulgar Valentine and the
“fogs of yesteryear,” he is altogether charming.
A number of the essays have a satiric tinge, often sharply pointed
and telling, as in “Simnel Cakes,” wherein Machen pays his respects
to the professional etymologist, or “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” with
its observations of the development of the popular idea of a fairy.
Elsewhere there is a good deal of matter that is trite and obvious, as
when the author demonstrates that Shakespeare was a practical man of the
theatre rather than a university “don,” or that the Victorians were not
strait-laced on all occasions. Briefly, in a number of the essays one
perceives the journalist writing to fill space. There is much in the
book that will not enhance Machen’s reputation as a man of letters.
[Sidenote: _The Manchester Guardian_]
The suspicion which assails the reader who is familiar with the present
state of the “first edition” market as he takes up Mr Machen’s new
book of essays is very natural. In a note on the dust-cover is the
announcement that the issue is limited to less than a thousand copies,
and that the author has autographed a considerable number of them. This,
taken in conjunction with the news from America that at the auction
of Mr John Quinn’s library two first-edition copies of Mr Machen’s
earlier works were sold at impressive figures, irresistibly suggests
that one, at all events, of the immediate purposes of “Dog and Duck”
has been to “catch the market.” If this be so, then the modern craze
for book-collecting has for once been useful. The essays are selected
from the author’s most recent journalism, and the reader will have rich
enjoyment in them. A characteristic corn-cob atmosphere is created in the
very first pages, describing with a quiet and mellow humour the ancient
pastime of “Dog and Duck,” which is so simple, we are assured, that only
a soft india-rubber ball and a garden surrounded by an unbroken path
are needed; yet it takes a lifetime for the player to become an expert.
Dissertations on valentines, simnel cakes, old port, the only good way to
make chocolate, fogs in November, and Shakespeare, Bacon, collops, and
astrology follow handsomely; and through them all we have ample evidence
that Mr Machen has kept intact his creed that, in his own language,
“it is the love of splendour—the splendid robe, the splendid word, the
splendid picture—which constitutes the vital distinction between man and
brute. Many beasts have reason, the faculty of using means for a certain
end. But only man has art, which is the love of splendour and the desire
to create it.” The wistful note introduced a year since into his “Things
Near and Far” develops occasionally into a page-long phase of sighing
ostentatiously and regretting angrily, for he cannot help remembering the
glories of his own youth in London that are no more.—T. M.
[Sidenote: _The Times Literary Supplement._]
About most of the essays in Mr Arthur Machen’s “Dog and Duck”: A London
Calendar et cetera, there is a graceful tenuousness which compares
interestingly with the fiercer note of the other few. While he is
gravely and reflectively tuning his discursive pen to the changing
seasons of the year, he is grave, tenderly reminiscent, a trifle elderly.
He discourses of the New Year and French influence in Scotland, of bygone
valentines in February, of March and simnel cakes, of May and the decay
of joy, of July and why young men row races at Henley, of roast goose in
September, of first fogs in October, and so forth. These essays, with
the charming account of the (we suspect) apocryphal game of Dog and Duck
which constitutes the first, are nearly all in the wistful note which is
characteristic of this author.
Mr Machen excels at the picturesque-peevish, when he complains that the
joys which he knew in his youth are no more, that joy has vanished like
the fogs and horse-omnibuses, that the race of Englishmen has perished
to give place to a generation of inmates for a convalescent home. Then
all of a sudden he flares up, and the hidden reason seems to be that some
misguided doctor once tried to put Mr Machen on a diet: at all events the
flare-up takes the form of violent diatribes against any interference in
the name of science, health, or intelligence with the freedom of the
stomach to indulge in wine, beer, stout, roast beef, kidneys, oysters,
and other fleshly delights. At one moment he attacks poor old superseded
Euclid under this inspiration, at another he satirically concludes that
on scientific principles we had all better spend Christmas in gaol; and
he will fire off a broadside at any moment against those who object to
self-indulgence, who disbelieve in a primitive roystering Shakespeare,
and who show any tendency to explain away anything at all. They hate
life, says Mr Machen; but apparently he himself confesses to finding the
actualities of life repulsive. One must get away from them somehow, then;
young men do it by rowing themselves blue in the face, pure scientists
by turning to abstractions, applied scientists by interfering with old
ideas, and Mr Machen by imagining that he knew what Merrie England was
like, somewhere about Caerleon in the day of Chaucer. Now he need never
be dull, for he can revile the present in musical language.
[Sidenote: H. P. Collins in _The Outlook_]
Mr Machen has the one great requisite of a popular journalist: he holds
the reader’s attention from the beginning to the end of his article, and
holds it no longer. He is never dull; and he is never profound. To adopt
a simile from the ingenious old game of “Dog and Duck” into which he
initiates us: he brings his ball to rest between the chases without going
to earth in “grounds” or “green,” scores five points or maybe ten—he
never rounds the last corner and attains the Duck for a score of forty.
Mr Machen has a spirited and genial manner; but it does not proceed from
a really robust and consistent personality. He is akin to Mr Chesterton
in his gusto, his love of good fare, and his faith in medievalism and
Merrie England; but he has none of Mr Chesterton’s wit and intellectual
vigour. In “Far Off Things” the author’s mystical attitude brought him
through in a qualified triumph; it has thinned unawares to sentimentality
in these laments for valentines in February, Victorian bonhomie, and the
fogs of yesteryear. He is vexed with Hewlett for his dislike of “the
universe in general and human nature in particular”! It is nothing to
the cheery tribe of Machen that there are and always have been those to
whom history is not a pretty game, those who cannot afford milk-punch and
those who cannot stomach roast goose and sage-and-onion. What Mr Machen,
for all his gestures, cannot stomach is reality. He lives in a world not
of experience but of legend, where it will please many to visit him.
It is with relief, though as must needs be a touch of sadness, that one
turns from Mr Machen to these posthumous essays of Maurice Hewlett. From
rose-coloured and enervating mists we pass to the keen air of Wiltshire
and the keener stimulus of the voice that is now still.
[Sidenote: Richard Church in _The Nation and Athenæum_]
Mr Machen is a good journalist because he writes clearly and simply,
and, for some reason or other, makes us finish reading his articles.
We may think that his god, Commonsense, is often an uncommon fool, a
creature of shallow thought and indolent prejudice, but we read on and
enjoy the author’s company—often with a yawn. It is boring to hear
that the world of to-day is degenerate, that the spirit of joy left
England somewhere about the time of Elizabeth; for such talk recalls the
conversation of the clubs, and the bores who always buttonhole us when
we are particularly depressed by the weather or the political situation.
Mr Machen is inclined to overdo this old “stunt” of the golden days of
thirty, forty, fifty, five hundred years ago. In one article after
another it appears, like the conventional “sea-runs” in the Norse and
Keltic folktales. Our exasperation may be due to the fact that these
articles are read one after another in the book, whereas they should be,
and originally were, scattered in the periodical Press. Mr Machen has a
hearty way with him, and a humorous and observant eye which informs a
mind never weary of the pageant of passing events. In his description of
old scenes and games, of personal adventures, of the flotsam and jetsam
incidental to the daily life of his neighbour—and all the world is his
neighbour—he is delightful and Dickensian. When he dogmatises he tends to
become “lowbrow,” which is equally as unpleasant as being “highbrow.” The
publisher is to be congratulated on the perfect production of this book.
THE OTHER SIDE
[Sidenote: Marc Logé in _La Revue Hebdomadaire_]
La littérature anglaise contemporaine possède peu de figures plus
curieuses ni plus sincères que celle de M. Arthur Machen, mystique et
satiriste, lettré et rêveur, qui traverse le prosaïsme de la vie moderne
comme un étranger revenant de très loin,—du moyen âge pour le moins—et
qui se trouve sans cesse choqué, peiné et dépaysé par ce qu’il voit
et entend. L’œuvre de M. Machen compte déjà une vingtaine de volumes,
dont plusieurs sont fort recherchés par les bibliophiles pour leur
rareté. Et il vient de publier deux nouveaux récits,—autobiographiques
ceux-là,—“Things Near and Far” et Arthur Machen, une “Bibliographie,”
agrémentée de notes et de souvenirs, qui éclairent singulièrement sa si
originale personnalité.
M. Arthur Machen passa une grande partie de sa jeunesse dans un
presbytère du pays de Galles, dont l’ambiance mystique a mis sur sa
pensée une empreinte ineffaçable. Il a, toute sa vie, été hanté par
le profond mystère de la beauté, et toutes ses œuvres sont comme
frémissantes d’un émerveillement incessant, qu’il s’efforce de
communiquer à ses lecteurs. Et ce n’est pas sa faute si ceux-ci ne
connaissent point le charme de Caermaen la Blanche, ou la magie du doux
pays de Gwent. Ses héros, dont la jeunesse ardente et tourmentée doit
ressembler, on le devine, beaucoup à celle de M. Machen, laissèrent
envahir leurs âmes rares et étranges par des rêves que les gens sensés et
ordinaires qualifieraient de folies. Mais M. Machen excelle à dépeindre
ce qui se trouve “sur les confins mêmes de l’inconnu.” C’est pourquoi il
aime pardessus toute la Nature.
Pourtant l’impérieuse nécessité de la vie l’obligea à quitter ses
bois, ses collines et ses montagnes de Galles pour Londres, où l’on
vit ce mystique exercer consciencieusement à Fleet Street le métier
de journaliste qui lui répugnait. Il possédait heureusement le don de
s’intéresser à tout, même à ce qui lui déplaisait le plus. Mais, comme
il l’a dit lui-même dans le _Lignes écrites en contemplant d’une hauteur
de Londres une école communale éclairée par le soleil_,—“celui qui
n’éprouve ni émerveillement ni mystère, ni crainte, ni le sentiment d’un
monde nouveau, ni d’un royaume inconnu dans les environs de Gray’s Inn
Road, ne découvrira jamais ces secrets,—ni au cœur de l’Afrique ni dans
les cités cachées du Thibet. ‘La matière de notre travail est partout
présente,’ disaient les anciens alchimistes; toutes les merveilles se
trouvent à un pas de la gare de King’s Cross” ... Peut-être, lorsqu’elles
sont transmuées par le soleil!...
M. Machen connut bien des vicissitudes; il fut reporter, puis libraire,
et il put ainsi satisfaire son goût insatiable de livres rares et
curieux, et en particulier d’ouvrages occultes du moyen âge;—il fut
traducteur,—il compila des catalogues; mais il continua toujours, malgré
toutes les difficultés d’une vie laborieuse, à écrire et à proclamer la
permanence de la beauté.
Il est pourtant curieux de noter qu’à côté de ce mystère de la beauté,
il fut également pénétré par le mystère de l’horrible: et l’influence de
Poë est nettement apparente dans ses deux œuvres de jeunesse, “The Great
God Pan” et “The Three Impostors.” Pourtant sa conception de l’horrible
diffère de celle de Poë, en ce que le pessimisme morbide de ce dernier
l’entraînait, ainsi que ses lecteurs, vers un désespoir sans fond. M.
Machen, dans sa foi, persiste à voir le soleil et la beauté filtrer à
travers les ténèbres les plus denses et la plus terrible hideur.
L’œuvre la plus curieuse de M. Machen est, nous semble-t-il, “The Hill
of Dreams,” dont le héros, Lucian Taylor, est un des caractères les plus
troublants du roman anglais moderne. Lucian vit une vie de rêves peuplée
de présences invisibles pour les autres: il circule dans l’aujourd’hui
sans y appartenir; sa sensualité, éveillée par les caresses d’une petite
paysanne perverse, qui ensuite se marie bien sagement avec un bon
fermier,—se transforma, sous l’effet de son imagination et de son désir,
en un étrange mysticisme maladif. Lucian ne vivra désormais que par son
imagination qui est féconde et morbide, et sur laquelle la “magie celte”
exerce une influence puissante. Sa plus grande joie fut désormais de
“rêver,”—laissant son esprit errer parmi des idées à demi imaginées et
délicieuses, en permettant à son cerveau vierge de vagabonder à sa guise.
D’une sensibilité qui allait s’exaspérant avec les années, Lucian se
retrancha de plus en plus dans sa thébaïde spirituelle, inaccessible à
tous les êtres qui l’entouraient. Dans Caermaen, dans sa propre maison,
on le considéra comme un demifou. Mais que lui importait?
“Il se plongea de plus en plus dans ses livres; tout ce qui était ancien
et désuet était devenu son domaine. Dans le dégoût qu’il éprouvait
pour les stupides questions habituelles: ‘Cela rapportera-t-il? A quoi
bon?’—il ne voulait lire que ce qui était étrange et inutile. La pompe
et le symbolisme de la Kabbalah,—pleine de suggestions de choses encore
plus terribles,—les mystères de la Rose-Croix de Fludd, les énigmes de
Vaughan,—les rêves des alchimistes, faisaient sa joie. Tels étaient ses
compagnons avec les collines et les bois, les ruisseaux et les étangs
solitaires.... Parfois, lorsqu’il était plongé dans ses livres, une
flamme de plaisir montait en lui tout à coup, lui révélant toute une
province, tout un continent inconnu de sa nature, brûlant et embrasé,—et
devant ce triomphe et cette exaltation il reculait, un peu apeuré. Il
était devenu ascète dans son isolement studieux et mélancolique, et la
fusion de pareilles extases l’effrayait.”
Lucian se met à écrire et ses tourments redoublent, car il “devinait les
immenses difficultés de la carrière littéraire, sans les comprendre
clairement.” De ses longues promenades solitaires à travers les bois
silencieux et crépusculaires, balayés par le grand vent, il “revenait
rempli de pensées, d’émotions et d’imaginations mystiques qu’il
souhaitait ardemment traduire grâce au mot écrit”; mais il ne peut le
faire, et connaît toutes les amertumes.
“Et dans ces moments-là, la vision habituelle du paysage l’alarmait, et
les sauvages collines, arrondies comme des dômes, et les bois sombres
lui paraissaient les symboles de quelque secret terrible de la vie
intérieure,—de cet étranger, lui-même.”
C’est ainsi que Lucian se débat et souffre dans les rets de sa propre
imagination, alimentée par toute son hérédité celtique, qui crée autour
de lui des visions tour à tour mystiques ou païennes, sacrées ou
charnelles, qui torturent et broient son âme et son corps.
Comme fond, contre lequel se détache si douloureusement le pâle visage
tourmenté de Lucian, M. Machen a brossé, avec une ironie mordante, mais
sobre, un tableau de la société bourgeoise de Caermaen;—et le contraste
entre la placidité prosaïque et repue des “county families” et l’âme
inquiète du fils du pasteur, est indiqué par quelques traits fins et
satiriques qui prouvent que M. Machen n’a point perdu son humour à
feuilleter avec amour les bouquins poussiéreux d’autrefois.
Son dernier livre, “The Secret Glory,” est l’histoire d’un autre jeune
Gallois, Ambrose Meyrick, qui s’efforce, _lui_, d’accorder sa nature
pleine d’élans, de curiosités et d’aspirations vers un idéal tout
gothique, avec la routine conventionnelle prescrite et acceptée. Inutile
de dire qu’il échoue. Mais ce livre est aussi la critique âpre et
passionnée de ces “public schools” qui sont l’orgueil de l’Angleterre,
et dans lesquels M. Machen ne voit, assez justement, que des machines à
broyer toute individualité, et il condamne sévèrement l’esprit de ces
grands centres d’éducation, où toute “excentricité est impitoyablement
réprimée, où toute conscience individuelle est détruite.” Pourtant
Ambrose Meyrick échappe à temps à l’annihilation de sa personnalité,
car il découvre la _gloire secrète_ qu’il porte en lui, et cela le
sauvera. La terre entière devient pour lui “un sanctuaire,” toute vie un
rite et une cérémonie dont le but tend à la possession de la sainteté
mystique,—la découverte du Graal. Pour cela seulement,—pour quelle autre
raison? toutes choses ont été créées? C’est de cela que le petit oiseau
chante dans le buisson, en émettant quelques notes faibles et plaintives
dans les soirées crépusculaires, comme si son petit cœur regrettait
ne pouvoir élever que de si piteuses louanges. C’était cela aussi que
célébrait la splendeur de l’aube blanche sur les collines,—le souffle
des bois à l’aurore. C’était cela qui était figuré dans le cérémonial
rouge du couchant, lorsque des flammes brillaient au-dessus du dôme de la
grande montagne et que des roses semblaient s’épanouir dans les plaines
lointaines du ciel. C’était cela aussi le secret que connaissaient les
endroits obscurs des bois; le mystère du soleil sur la hauteur, et
chaque petite fleur, chaque petite fougère, chaque roseau était chargé
de célébrer secrètement ce sacrement. Ayant compris ces vérités, “tout
ce qui était beau et merveilleux fit dorénavant partie pour lui de la
sainteté; toute la gloire de la vie était dans le service du sanctuaire.”
L’œuvre de M. Machen est inégale et parfois confuse,—mais il s’en dégage
toujours un charme étrange et pénétrant,—une espèce de fascination qui
provient sans doute de l’extase dont elle est tout imprégnée. Car
l’extase, nous dit-il dans son essai intitule “Hieroglyphics,” est
révélatrice de l’art véritable; celui qui ne cherche à exprimer que
le quotidien, le visible, l’ordinaire, usurpe le titre d’artiste,—qui
n’appartient qu’à ceux qui savent croire à l’invisible, en se fiant
à leur imagination et à leur désir, et tendre de tout leur être vers
l’inconnu. Car l’art, pour M. Machen, ne remplace pas la religion: il en
est une forme!
[Sidenote: _The Daily Telegraph_]
Wonderful indeed are the changes and chances of the literary life! Many
years ago—let us say thirty—a judicious student of fiction who happened
upon one of Mr Arthur Machen’s early books might well have thought
to himself, “There can be no keeping down an imagination and a power
of style like these. Whether one likes it or not, this man’s work is
literature, and some meed of fame will undoubtedly be his.” A generation
which had revelled in “The New Arabian Nights” and in “Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde” must, it seemed certain, have rewards in store for the writer of
“The Three Impostors” and “The Great God Pan.”
And then year after year went by, and Arthur Machen remained practically
unknown. One or two more of his singular books appeared, written
exclusively to satisfy himself, and in total disregard of the existence
of any school of public taste. The mystical tragedy of modern life called
“The Hill of Dreams” is not a book for everybody; but it is undeniably
the outpouring of a strangely gifted spirit.
The war broke out in 1914, and Mr Machen invented a fable about the
“Angels of Mons” which flew all round the English-speaking world, and was
passionately believed by vast multitudes of simple people to be a plain
account of an actual miracle; so that its fabricator naturally got no
credit for them, and met, indeed, with no little abuse for strenuously
declaring that the story was a lie of his own imagining. Then there came
out a curious essay in mystical Christianity, about the coming of the
Holy Grail to a secluded place in Wales. Next appeared a gruesome little
nightmare of a story about an attempted revolt, during the war, of the
animals against mankind, the truth about which was supposed, in the tale,
to have been rigorously suppressed by the censorship. Then the oddest,
certainly, of all that class of recent fiction which has occupied itself
with savage criticism of the English public school system and spirit.
Still nothing seemed likely to win a wide recognition for this peculiar
talent. And then, quite suddenly, one began to hear it talked about on
all sides among literary people, and especially those of whom Mr Machen
was by this time old enough to be the father. Now, after a remarkably
brief period of celebrity, as these things go, his “Collected Works”
appear in nine stately volumes, beautiful with wide margins and severely
tasteful binding; an edition such as any writer living might be proud of,
and any lover of the externals as well as the substance of books might
delight to see on his shelves.
It is only too likely that recognition in this very substantial form has
come too late to give Mr Machen more than a fraction of the pleasure
which it would once have yielded. Indeed, one may say it is certain; for
the two volumes of reminiscences included in this edition are sometimes
very painful, though always quite absorbing reading. There is nothing in
them so petty as mere embitterment; but they are the writings of a man
who has suffered deeply. Most deeply, perhaps, during those recent years
of journalistic hack-work of which he definitely declines to give any
straightforward account, but of which melancholy glimpses are to be had
from time to time in one of the most discursive works of autobiography
ever penned. These were the years of acknowledged, and apparently final
and irredeemable, failure, and they can hardly be lived down at such an
age as Mr Machen has reached.
Success was denied to his earlier books, it may be surmised, because
there was so much less feeling then than exists now for the spirit
of poetic mysticism which went along with the gruesomeness of those
extraordinary tales. They were dismissed by some as “morbid,” and perhaps
they were, although morbidity, by all accounts, is the last quality
which one would attribute to Mr Machen as a man. But the horrors of
sorcery and the embodiment of evil were mingled here with a feeling for
beauty and a severity of style which became more and more apparent in Mr
Machen’s later books; and all through his work runs that thread of sombre
preoccupation with the life of the spirit which, contrasted as it is with
an unusually vivid perception of the colour and detail of the life about
him, makes his personal reminiscences so strangely interesting, and even
his tales of diabolism more plausible than a man merely attempting to
exploit a popular liking for “the supernatural” could possibly have made
them.
Mr Machen’s talent is certainly one of the most marked and individual
that has appeared in his generation of English writers.
UP FROM THE RANKS OF GRUB STREET AUTHORSHIP
[Sidenote: Robert Hillyer in _The New York Times Book Review_]
Ten years ago weekly explorations of second-hand bookshops in Boston
never failed to yield me a copy of the American reprints by Dana Estes &
Co. of Arthur Machen’s “House of Souls” and his “Hill of Dreams.” They
were a regular feature of the rubbish counter. For these I usually had
to pay about 50 cents a copy—though I bought one “Hill of Dreams,” which
I still possess, for 10 cents. I must have purchased about twenty of
these books. I gave them to friends, I lent them to friends—it does not
matter which; the volumes disappeared one way or another. It seemed at
the time a method within my means of bestowing great riches on the people
I liked or admired. Few of my friends went away without their copy of a
book they had never heard of, but which they would read for friendship’s
sake. When I had only two copies of “The Hill of Dreams” left, and could
find no more, I decided to suppress my prodigal instincts, but a burst
of generosity brought on by some green chartreuse disposed of one of the
two. The other one, saved by the banishment decreed to monastic liquor,
is still with me.
And beside it on the shelf is Mr Knopf’s new edition of the book. “The
Hill of Dreams” will never again be found on the rubbish counter; the old
red edition is a collector’s rarity; the new yellow one is a substantial
proof of the advance of good literature in America. During the last
ten years Mr Machen’s art has been recognised; he is almost the only
example of a fine writer rescued from oblivion in his own lifetime. Yet
he has made no concession to the world in general. He has not changed
a word of “The Hill of Dreams” since he wrote it twenty-six years ago.
It is the same book—a failure in 1907, rubbish in 1913, a success in
1923. Obviously, the world has made concessions to the ideas which he
represents.
The triumph of mechanism, which is shown in its full glory by the
late war and the wars that follow it, has, like all bad tyrannies,
engendered a reaction. For years isolated voices were raised against it,
but they spoke in syllables that were incomprehensible to the minds of
men spellbound by the wonder of Things. In differing accents, protests
came from writers as diverse in talent as Samuel Butler, Walter Pater
and Arthur Machen. People took it for granted that such protests were
the inevitable whine of the Old Order against Progress, an explanation
at once so simple and inclusive that it could dispose of any objection
calculated to disturb their satisfaction in the machinery of manufacture
and the machinery of life. The world, indeed, was fast stampeding into a
herd which would not tolerate the existence of unconverted individuals.
Then suddenly the machine itself went wrong, and threatened, like the
machine in the ballad, to transform its inventor into sausage meat.
There was a wild flight of worshippers from the crumbling shrine of
Moloch—whither? Into Spiritism, Bahaism, neo-Buddhism; into every cult,
in fact, that offered even a temporary shelter from desperation. This
headlong rout into faddism of all sorts was a superficial earnest that
the mind of the race was turning, had in fact turned, back toward an
acknowledgment of the final mystery of life.
Of this mystery, Arthur Machen has from the first been the consistent
exponent. His mind is that of a medieval Christian; a liberal monk,
perhaps, who has taken many an appreciative peek at the classics in the
library of the foundation. To him all that is beautiful builds walls of
the celestial city in the mind of man; all that makes war against that
beauty is unutterably evil. There is no middle ground. And “The Hill of
Dreams” is the epic of this spiritual battle.
In the new introduction, written for the new edition, the author tells us
that he intended to write a Robinson Crusoe of the soul: the soul, and
not the body of a man, solitary amid an alien sea. It would have been
impossible for Mr Machen to write any other sort of Robinson Crusoe, for
he never leaves the material world untransmuted; everything becomes,
either for good or for evil, the shadow of an overwhelming portent. Thus
“The Hill of Dreams” shows us life, carnal and ethereal, as heightened
by the oversensitive imagination of the hero, Lucian Taylor. The boy
grows up in the outland country between Wales and England; all the
glamour and terror of ancient forests become a part of him. Left largely
to himself by his pathetically frustrate father, the vicar, and repelled
by the lapses of taste and decency in the provincial society around him,
he wanders over the domed hills under violently blue Summer skies, the
hard glare of Winter and the sad wet twilight of Autumn, while the Roman
past and the Celtic past, whose ruined fortresses and tumuli are only
half-concealed by the moss and the thicket, gradually take possession
of his imagination and ally themselves in his mind with an already
established love of medieval lore, ecclesiastic and occult. All hidden
beauties become his preoccupation, but, driven inward by the vicious
sordidness of actuality, corruption also fascinates him. Year by year
this struggle between the rapture of the inner life and the staleness
of the outer aggravates an intolerable situation to be solved only by
expressing it all in adequate style. But words fail, and the reasonable
mind finally collapses under the weight of the imaginative.
It is obvious that Mr Machen does not want Lucian to become the victim
of this combat between modern existence and the life of the imagination.
He staves off the conclusion again and again until, forced by the
inevitable, he yields his hero to fate. His unwillingness to surrender
the youth may be accounted for by the fact that, up to a certain point,
Lucian’s life was his life—his autobiography—a circumstance which has
made the book suspiciously bitter in spots. He satirises the moneyed,
the hypocritical, the snobbish, with a fine cruelty and vivid fidelity
to life—but are these shoddy creatures, after all, worthy of so much
attention? Yes, perhaps—if their mere existence is an obstacle to the
higher sanity. And they are such an obstacle to Lucian, who magnifies
their imbecile gestures of futility into really monstrous evils. They are
a part of that wall of loneliness which isolates a naturally friendly and
convivial spirit, driving it in upon itself, until all the beauties that
it loves become, for lack of some one to share them, horrors and madness.
Fortunately for Mr Machen, he is of stronger stuff than the hero of his
masterpiece. In his two-volume autobiography, “Far Off Things,” which
appeared last Fall, and “Things Near and Far,” which has just been
published, he describes the loneliness which enhedged him and the means
he took to cope with it. Now in his middle fifties, he can look back over
that struggle with no bitterness, but certainly with no complacency. One
cannot be complacent before the materialism of modern life, which not
only fails to help a man whose interests are elsewhere, but will not even
tolerate him if it knows him for what he is.
Like Lucian, Mr Machen was born in the Welsh borderland, faced poverty in
its fearfullest form—“genteel” poverty—went to London hoping to obtain
the necessities of life by writing, and ended by nearly starving to death
on the wages of tutoring, translating and cataloguing second-hand books.
In bookshops, he came in contact with alchemical and occult works which
were to influence, though not dominate, all his later writing. Much of
the interest of “Things Near and Far” lies in his treatment of various
phases of mysticism, from its faddish to its serious manifestation. Very
wisely, as I think, he has carefully guarded himself against seizure as
an “adept” by any Spiritistic or pseudo-Oriental cult. In his burlesque
description of a séance, he closes the doors of Spiritism against him:—
The room is in total darkness. One of the sitters proclaims
with exultation that his nose has been tweaked by Joey, who,
on this side, was a clown. John King, understood to have been
a master mariner, sings “Tom Bowling” in a falsetto voice
through a speaking trumpet. On this Cardinal Newman, known
to be a lover of music, is gratified, and utters the word
“Benedictine.” ... “This spirit’s name is Milton. Henry—no,
John Milton, the author of the ‘Faery Queen.’ He says that they
are very happy.... All repeat the Lord’s Prayer, and Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle expresses his intense gratification.... Well, it
may be so. But I hope it isn’t, and I never shall believe that
it is so.”
And the Oriental fanatics receive small comfort at Mr Machen’s hands:—
There is one thing that I hope I may be spared, that is the
comment of the Oriental Occult Ass.... I do hope nobody will
say, “Why, this is only Ruja-Puja! You get it all in the
first chapter of the Anangasataga Raja! It’s all perfectly
elementary. Little Hindu children learn their A.B.C. out of it
in the Svanka Visatvara.”
Despite his contempt for the physical phenomena of the Spiritists, Mr
Machen concedes their possibility. His one question remains: Is this of
consequence? And he puts the same question concerning his own experience.
During a fit of the most uncontrollable melancholy, he sat down in his
apartment in London, and attempted, by some mental process which he does
not describe, to rid himself of depression. Suddenly the pictures on the
wall
trembled, dilated, became misty in their outlines; seemed on
the point of disappearing altogether, and then shuddered and
contracted back again into their proper form and solidity; that
is the closest description of what I witnessed: with a shaking
heart, and with a sense that something, I knew not what, was
also being shaken to its foundations.
He was filled with dread, yet, at the same time, with an almost
unendurable ecstasy. For a moment the fear of death was upon him. Then
gradually the fright passed, leaving him in an exalted and serene
frame of mind that lasted for an entire year. Concerning the physical
phenomenon of the pictures, he remarks:—
This is all wonderful? I suppose that it is; but let me here
say firmly that I consider an act of kindness to a wretched
mangy kitten to be much more important.
But the year of peace that followed was, decidedly, of consequence,
since he was lifted above the petty emotions that degrade and destroy
humanity, and he saw life in its true colours. His implied conclusion is,
therefore, that no occult experience is of any consequence in itself; its
sole value is to enhance the dignity, decency and happiness of the human
race.
All of Mr Machen’s fiercest satirical passages against humanity are
dictated not by hatred but love of humanity. Nothing is so maddening as
to behold a beloved being or race of beings degenerate into Yahoos. We
observe the same quality in Swift, who was the most virulent of satirists
because he was, fundamentally, the tenderest of humanitarians. When Mr
Machen is at his bitterest, we find no desire for vengeance; merely an
infuriated, baffled perplexity that his fellows should sink so low. And
even this emotion he reserves for types; for individuals he exhibits a
friendliness, a conviviality, an understanding, which are worthy of the
rich variety of his nature.
Indeed, though the mystical side of his character is the most interesting
and the satirical the most entertaining, his Rabelaisian gusto for the
good things of life sets them both off to advantage. He can recreate
London or Touraine with a phrase or give us the play of sunlight on the
brim of an old cup filled with clear wine. All phases of life interest
him, since he has entered into more of them than most men. For example,
in the opening years of the present century he was one of a company of
strolling players. The single chapter he devotes to this pilgrimage might
well be expanded into a sort of Thespian Lavengro. And in literature, all
of whose halls, ante-rooms and little dark corridors are known to him, we
always find him where we should wish to find him—on the side of rapture
and care against emotionalism and slovenliness. For to him “Literature is
the sensuous art of causing exquisite impressions by means of words”:—
To win the secret of words, to make a phrase that would murmur
of Summer and the bee, to summon the wind into a sentence, to
conjure the odour of the night into the surge and fall and
harmony of a line; this was the tale of the long evenings, of
the candle flame white upon the paper and the eager pen.
His style approaches the gift of music, and will repel such readers as
consider words to be utilitarian vessels for measuring out their quart
or bushel of meaning. But those who find reality in “Kubla Khan,” “The
Fall of the House of Usher,” or the “Dream Fugue” will find it also in
the books of Arthur Machen, who is of that small group of Coleridge,
De Quincey, Sir Thomas Browne, Poe and Malory—a group where each is a
master. In a vision we use the language of vision, and if on waking
we would interpret what we have seen and heard into the language of
waking, we can only suggest. If we state, the magic slips out between the
syllables. By the marvellous orchestration of his prose, its undertones
and overtones, Mr Machen has suggested to us his vision of the battle
between Light and Darkness—a vision that is far more real than this
seeming reality which shifts with the passing years. It is not strange
that he has been misconstrued as the artist of Terror and of Madness;
he has seen so clearly the titanic war in the troubled spirit of the
world, compared to which all the wars that have scarred the body of the
world are but as the twitching of a sleeper in whose brain the nightmare
rages. And, because of the same limitation which makes Dante’s “Inferno”
infinitely more convincing than his “Paradiso,” Arthur Machen’s lurid
darkness shines with a grander beauty than his open day. For this reason
the superficial minded will persist in calling that great book “The Hill
of Dreams” a “morbid” piece of work.
Objections of this sort, which entirely overlook the real robustness of
the author’s nature, grow fainter and fainter as the world swings around
to his point of view. In brief, Mr Machen’s outlook on life is similar to
his opinion of occult phenomena: external facts, valueless in themselves,
are only important as they affect the imagination or spirit of man. They
are merely the symbols of the great sacrament that lies behind them. For
him, literature became the escape from circumstance, and he could not, if
he would, relinquish it or write what was not in him.
And my total receipts for these eighteen volumes, he says,
for these forty-two years of toil, amount to the sum of six
hundred and thirty-five pounds. That is, I have been paid at
the rate of fifteen pounds and a few shillings per annum.
It seems dear, then, that my literary activities cannot be
adequately accounted for on the hypothesis of mere greed and
money-grubbing.
It is this kind of devotion that gives us our masterpieces, this
slow-burning, indomitable desire, independent of all consideration
but the building up, phrase by phrase, of an enduring structure. That
America, long the source of uninspired materialism, should recognise so
fully the value of Mr Machen’s work, is a happy augury for the future of
our literature.
THE CHRONICLE OF CLEMENDY
[Sidenote: Octave Uzanne in _Le Livre_]
Je ne sais si la dédicace de ce livre rabelaisien, je veux dire de
haulte graisse, adressée au _Right Honourable, Illustrious and Puissant
Prince_, Humphrey, duc de Glocester, chevalier de l’ordre très noble de
la Jarretière, etc., etc., est une satire barbelée ou l’hommage sérieux
d’un humoriste. Le noble duc me semble le mieux situé pour en décider,
et là dessus je m’en rapporte bien à lui. Mais ce que je constate dès
les premières pages, sans l’ombre d’un doute, c’est l’esprit, le goût
littéraire, la connaissance familière et intime de la langue jusque dans
ses sources vives, le renouveau de Renaissance, si je puis dire, qui
éclate à chaque ligne dans ce qu’écrit Mr Arthur Machen.
Des contes en eux-mêmes, je ne dis rien, sinon que, les ayant lus, je
les relirai souvent, à petites doses, sans me lasser, comme on visite
ces flacons qui contiennent une fine et réconfortante liqueur. Gervase
Perrot de Clemendy, gentleman, seigneur du manoir de Pwllcwrw,—ce qui, au
pays de Galles, je crois, veut dire “flaque de bière,”—et maréchal des
pots aux assises de l’Ale, ne m’est, je l’avoue humblement, pas autrement
connu. Il me suffit de savoir que, depuis “The Discourse of Ale,”
traduit, paraît-il, du latin, jusqu’au dernier conte des neuf joyeuses
journées, il se montre franc compère, aussi bon Gaulois qu’Anglais
rabelaisien peut l’être, gai à miracle, spirituel à plaisir, fécond en
histoires réjouissantes où les personnages n’échappent au ridicule que
par l’amour, comme le peuvent désirer et faire des créatures en chair
et en os, différentes de sexes et de natures semblables; en un mot,
tel que nous connaissons les conteurs d’Italie et de France: Boccace,
Marguerite, le seigneur des Accords, Camille Blessebois, l’Arétin,
Beroalde de Verville, le Pogge, La Fontaine, et tant d’autres, au premier
rang desquels le traducteur anglais de Marguerite de Navarre et de la
“Chronique de Clemendy” est désormais sûr de sa place....
[Sidenote: _The New York Times Book Review_]
Mr Machen, it will be recalled, is that author who, in the late ’eighties
and the early ’nineties, was so overshadowed by his contemporary, Robert
Louis Stevenson, that it is only of late years that his own varied
genius has received the praise that was its due. Machen has recently
been republished in England and in this country, but “Dog and Duck” does
not belong to his earlier work. Some of the essays may date back several
years, either in whole or in part, but it is clear that most of the
papers are new, and that such as may embody earlier material have been
elaborated and rewritten.
In “Dog and Duck” Arthur Machen has treated of nearly a score and a half
of subjects; but he has neglected to write on the subject which would be
of greatest use to his reviewer—namely, the art of being casual. For the
essay—the true essay, that is, as defined above, not the thesis essay or
the editorial—must, of all things, wear the air of absolute casuality.
In actual composition, of course, there may have been nothing of the
casual; and the very contrary is probable, painful delivery having, very
likely, followed on long gestation. But when the essay is spread upon
the pages, when the last revision of the proof has been made, it is a
literary product or it is not according as a reader will be left with the
impression that it sprang as spontaneously as Minerva from the head of
Jove. And now that we have been carried into mythology, it might not be
amiss to press the figure a little further. Minerva was the Goddess of
Wisdom; and the burden of the essay—again distinct from the thesis, the
burden of which is knowledge—is wisdom; and moreover, as Minerva, issued
full-panoplied and radiant of jewels and gold. And one thing more; the
true essay will have wit—not loud and boisterous humour, but the wit that
mellows while it stings; in short, the wit of wisdom.
To return to Arthur Machen: Does “Dog and Duck” satisfy the demands
of our questionnaire? There can be but one answer, an unqualified
affirmative. And that is why the complaint was raised that Mr Machen had
omitted an essay on the art of being casual. How does he achieve his
illusion of apparent chance, of absolute spontaneity, when we well know
that his essays must have been deliberate, as deliberate as any poem? But
let it go; the question is not to be answered of Machen any more than it
can be answered of Stevenson or of Lamb.
The title essay, it appears, has to do with an English outdoor game of
venerable age, although Americans, apparently, are unfamiliar with it. As
Chase Mallard the pastime of Dog and Duck takes on veritable antiquity.
Yet the reader will not follow Machen through any desire to learn the
technique of this simple outdoor sport; he will, however, be infected
with the gusto of the author in trailing the game itself back through
several generations, mention of it in literature, and especially—for here
one will come upon the Machen of that fascinating psycho-romantic tale,
“The Three Impostors”—in the part Dog and Duck played in a celebrated
murder trial of the eighteenth century.
Yet, if Machen is entertaining and enlivening when he discourses upon
antique sports, he is none the less so when he directs a flashing eye on
“Valentines and Other Things,” when he turns to the matter of holidays—as
he does more than once—when he talks of April Fool, of Twelfth Night, of
fogs, of February stars, of the vice of making collections (to which we
all are prone), to the matter of splendour, to the art of unbelief. In
his best vein—though to single out any one essay from the teeming sheaf
is invidious—is the one to which he gives the title “The Poor Victorians.”
We all know [he writes] what the poor Victorians were like. We
have heard all about them over and over again. To begin with,
they were prim. They were proper. They went to bed early.
Their only form of revelry consisted in tea parties. The laws
of their lives were dictated to them by maiden ladies and
the vicar’s wife. As for the arts in the Victorian era, they
could not properly be said to exist. Nobody spoke out: nobody
dared to be “daring.” No picture was painted that went beyond
the vision of the Young Person. No poem that the curate could
possibly dislike was ever written. As to love, the word was,
beware! Above all, there must be no faintest hint of the vital
things, of any sort of realities. And so on and so on, the
general conclusion being that the Victorians couldn’t write,
couldn’t paint, couldn’t think, and couldn’t properly be said
to be alive at all.
And thus, having stated the case of the moderns against the Victorians,
Mr Machen suddenly whisks from his pocket several documents. The first
is a love poem by the Victorian Tennyson that does not in the least
remind the essayist of Miss Pinkerton’s Academy for Young Ladies or the
vicar’s drawing-room. And then, lest this be a little solemn, he adduces
one of Swinburne’s stanzas on “lazy, laughing, languid Jenny,” who was
equally “fond of a kiss and fond of a guinea.” And from this frankness he
turns to Rossetti; then to Dickens. He finds that there were theatres in
Victoria’s day, and theatre parties; that there were also supper parties,
and rich food, and Burgundy. And, finally, having presented the evidence,
he comes to the summing up.
The truth is, of course, that the Victorian Age, more
especially the early and mid-Victorian Ages, were times of
jollity and times of liberty, both in life and in letters.
Those people who took a dozen oysters in the Haymarket at
midnight and strolled off to Covent Garden would not have
believed that their grandsons would submit to be smacked and
sent to bed like naughty children. And as in life, so in
letters. What the mid-Victorians wrote, whether it were well
or ill, was written with a relish. We have lost all that.
Cubism, Vorticism, Post-Impressionism; verse that doesn’t scan
and doesn’t rhyme; novels that make one think of a stupid
post-mortem or a dissection: that is what we have in place
of Tennyson, Swinburne, Rossetti, Dickens, Thackeray, the
pre-Raphaelites and the great illustrators of this despised
age, the wood-cutters whose work has become to us miraculous.
Those poor Victorians!
Arthur Machen is himself—outside of this volume—a late Victorian; so that
this is a defence and an excoriation by one who not only knows what he
is talking about, but whose emotions have been aroused by the slurs cast
upon his people. And there is one phrase of his defence that we shall
do well to linger over for a moment: “Whether they wrote well or ill
it was written with a relish.” It is the relish for life—the relish of
letters—that Machen in the “Dog and Duck” essays would have us recapture,
would help us to recapture. And this is important: as he himself says,
too few of our present-day writers either care to relish life or evince
any desire that their readers should relish letters. Indeed, this is
a phase of English literature which seemed, in the main, to end with
Stevenson, and Machen’s little book is one of the few modern volumes able
in any degree to win it back to us. Thus is “Dog and Duck” literature in
the highest sense.
In more than one essay does Machen go back even further than to
Stevenson; his little homilies on customs, and especially those on
viands and potations, remind one of Dickens. When he discusses “Roast
Goose: With a Dissertation on Apple Sauce and Sage and Onions,” he even
outdoes Lamb himself. And all these papers are shot with shafts of wit,
stuffed with matured advice; and if Machen, as a philosopher, might fail
in a rigid test, even the most quarrelsome of metaphysicians will be
forced to bow before his sagacity.
There is a curious note appended to the final essay of the book, a paper
on what the author calls “The Art of Unbelief.” The editor of _The Lyons
Mail_, who had accepted and printed all of the preceding essays, refused
this one with the words:—
I cannot deal with the enclosed.... I am afraid my readers
would not understand it; ... a mass of dissertation, some of
which I would not ask our linotype operators to translate.
The essay deals with the survival of the primitive capacity for
myth-making, a recrudescence of which Machen discovers in the absurd
legends surrounding the death of Lord Kitchener which appear to have
gained credence in some circles in which intelligence in respect
to other matters has generally been shown. But either the “linotype
operators” of _The Lyons Mail_ are a peculiarly susceptible force
of workers, or—and, one will conclude, more probably—the editor was
strangely deficient in a sense of humour. Mr Machen, however, turns the
matter off with the good nature one would expect of him; the good nature
which is characteristic of the book. “Such are the amenities,” he says,
“of that highway which Sir Philip Gibbs has so delightfully called ‘the
Street of Adventure.’”
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