Things near & far

By Arthur Machen

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Title: Things near and far

Author: Arthur Machen


        
Release date: March 4, 2026 [eBook #78106]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Martin Secker, 1923

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THINGS NEAR AND FAR ***




_THINGS NEAR AND FAR_




                          BY THE SAME AUTHOR


  THE TERROR
  THE BOWMEN
  DR. STIGGINS
  THE GREAT RETURN
  HIEROGLYPHICS
  THE HOUSE OF SOULS
    Including THE GREAT GOD PAN and THE THREE IMPOSTORS
  THE HILL OF DREAMS
  THE CHRONICLE OF CLEMENDY
  WAR AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH
  THE SECRET GLORY
  FAR OFF THINGS




                          _THINGS NEAR & FAR_
                          _BY ARTHUR MACHEN_


                        _LONDON: MARTIN SECKER_




                      _Printed in Great Britain_

                   LONDON: MARTIN SECKER LTD. (1923)




_Chapter I_


The road from Newport to Caerleon-on-Usk winds, as it comes near to
the old Roman, fabulous city, with the winding of the tawny river
which I have always supposed must be somewhat of the colour of the
Tiber. This road was made early in the nineteenth century when
stage-coaching came to perfection, for the old road between the two
towns passed over the Roman bridge--blown down the river by a great
storm in the seventeen-nineties--and climbed the break-neck hill to
Christchurch. Well, this new road as I remember it was terraced, as
it were, high above the Usk to the west, and above it to the east
rose a vast wood, or what seemed a vast wood in 1870, called St.
Julian’s Wood, of some fame as a ghostly place. It was cut down long
ago by an owner who thought timber of high growth better than ghosts.

On the one side, then, the steep dark ascent of St. Julian’s Wood;
on the other, the swift fall of the bank to the yellow river, where,
likely enough, there would be a man in a coracle fishing for salmon.
And then there came a certain turn, where suddenly one saw the long,
great wall of the mountain in the west, and the high dome of Twyn
Barlwm, a prehistoric tumulus; and down below, an island in the green
meadows by the river, the little white Caerleon, shining in the sun.
There is a grey wall on one side of it, a very old and mouldering
wall to look at, and indeed it is old enough, for it is all that
remains of the Roman wall of Isca Silurum, headquarters of the Second
Augustan Legion.

But there, white in the sun of some summer afternoon of fifty years
ago or so, Caerleon still stands for me shining, beautiful, a little
white city in a dream, with the white road coming down the hill, from
Newport, down out of St. Julian’s Wood, and so to the level river
meadows, and so winding in a curve and coming to the town over the
bridge.

That is my vision of the place where I was born; no doubt the
recollection of driving home beside my father on some shining summer
afternoon of long ago; but of later years another vision of the same
white town and white road has come to me. I have “made this up,” as
the children say, though, no doubt, it is all true. The time now
goes back from the early ’seventies to the early ’fifties, and two
young ladies are setting out from the Vicarage--it stood practically
in the churchyard, pretty well in the position of that other, that
illustrious Vicarage at Haworth, and my Aunt Maria could never see
any reason why a vicarage should not be in a churchyard--the two
young ladies closed the Vicarage door, and made their way down the
deserted street, where the grass was green between the cobble-stones,
and so passed over the bridge and into the Newport road. They were
going to meet John, home from Jesus College, Oxford; and no doubt
they talked eagerly of how well John was doing at Oxford, and
wondered when he would be ordained, and where his first curacy would
be, and what a good clergyman he would make, and how they hoped he
would marry somebody nice, and what a pity it was that John was not
at home when Mr. Tennyson came to Caerleon and stayed at the Hanbury
Arms, and smoked a black clay tobacco pipe with his feet on the
mantelpiece; very odd, but poets always were odd people and “Airy
Fairy Lilian” was very pretty. The Vicar had called of course, and
had been a little shocked at the pipe; still, Papa was always so
amiable and ready to make allowances.

“Your grandfather,” Aunt Maria said to me years afterwards, “was
a most amiable man, but he could not bear radishes or the _Adeste
fideles_.”

Well, the two young ladies, Anne and Maria, shading themselves from
the heat of the sun with their fringed parasols, pace decorously
along the Newport road discussing these and many other matters;
parish-matters, of helping poor people and old people and sick
people; county matters, the great doings that there would be at the
Park when Sir (?) Hanbury Leigh was to have a great party from London
on August 12th to shoot grouse on the mountain; Church matters; how
a Mr. Leonard had just been given the living of Kemeys Commander and
had actually been heard to say, “I call myself a Catholic priest”
and, in spite of the Creeds, wasn’t that going rather far? And what
would John say to that? And, somehow, I fancy the talk came circling
again and again back to John, and how glad he would be to be at home
again, and how lucky it was that Mrs. Williams Pantyreos had come in
that very morning because John always said that he never got butter
like the Pantyreos butter anywhere, and how it was to be hoped that
the weather would keep up till Wednesday when they were all going to
drive to Aunt Mary’s at Abergavenny--except Mamma, who said, “Young
gadabout ne’er won a clout”--and how this beautiful sunshine must be
doing Cousin Blanche’s cough a great deal of good: John would like to
see Cousin Blanche again.

And so on, and so on, and the two sisters walk along the white
limestone road, picking a flower now and again, for Anne paints
flowers and Maria is much interested in Botany--I am not sure whether
she had acquired Miss Pratt’s three-volume work on the subject at
that date. And the evening draws along, and the sun hangs over the
huge round of Mynydd Maen in the west, and the scents of St. Julian’s
dark, deep wood fill the stilled air; till Maria says suddenly:
“Anne! here is the omnibus at last, and, there! I believe I can see
John’s face.”

The old dim yellow and faded chocolate omnibus from the Bull--I
remember it in its last days just before they made the line, and
never will I speak of _this_ omnibus as a ’bus--comes lumbering on
its way, and the old driver, recognising the “two Miss Joneses the
Vicarage” and knowing that Master John is inside, causes it to stop.
John, a mild-looking young man with little side whiskers, gets out
and kisses his sisters; and the three then get in, and the omnibus
lumbers down the hill towards Caerleon, the three chattering of
Oxford, of plans and prospects, of Caerleon news and how happy Papa
looked at breakfast. And so the evening draws on and the shadows
deepen and the walls of white Caerleon glimmer and grow phantasmal
like the old grey Roman wall as they cross the bridge and the Usk
swims to high tide, the tawny yellow tinged with something of the
sunset redness that glows over the mountain. The three are talking
and chattering all the while, making plans for holidays and happiness
and long bright years and the joy of life--a correct joy, but still
joy--before them, and John is enquiring eagerly after Cousin Blanche
and nodding and smiling to the Bluecoat boys and girls and saying:
“I’ll unpack my box to-night and show you my prizes--Parker’s ‘Gothic
Architecture,’ in three volumes, and Hooker and a lot more,” and they
are hoping again and again that Wednesday will be fine, and Blanche
is sure to be quite well by this, and John is feeling his young
cheeks grow a little red when--it is night.

Alas! They are all dead, years and years ago. The kind Vicar and his
grim, good wife are dead. Poor Cousin Blanche perished of consumption
in her fresh youth; no summer sun could allay the racking of that
cough of hers. Anne followed her, by the same way to the same end: I
have the “Holy Dying” that John, my father, gave her. There are two
inscriptions in it; one facing the rubricated title-page, now “foxed”
with time. This runs:

                           To Anne E. Jones
                         from her affectionate
                          Brother John Edward
                        On her Birthday, and in
                        remembrance of the 29th
                          September, 1857[A]
                           April 16th, 1858.

     [A] The date, I think, of their father’s death.

The other, on the recto of the leaf, is as follows:

                       Johannes Edvardus Jones,
                         In memoriam A.E.J.J.
                         Quæ obdormivit in Jesu
                         29 mo Martii MDCCCLIX

And those of the party that lived longer knew more of sorrow, and
more of broken hopes and of dreams that never came true. And thus,
advisedly, I begin this second chapter in the story of a young man’s
dreams and hopes and adventures. _Ego quoque_--I am forgetting my
Latin tags--I, too, have walked on the white road to Caerleon.

       *       *       *       *       *

To walk a little faster, to comply, in fact, with the request of the
whiting in Lewis Carroll’s beautiful Idyll, the end of 1884 and the
beginning of 1885 found me in something of a backwater. “The Anatomy
of Tobacco,” the book I had written in the 10 by 6 cell in Clarendon
Road, Notting Hill Gate, had been published in the autumn of 1884,
and soon after I had set about the translating of the “Heptameron.”
Every evening I worked at this task till it was ended; and now it
was done, and there seemed nothing to do next. I wandered up and
down the country about Llanddewi Rectory in my old way, lost myself
in networks of deep lanes, coming out of them to view woods that
were strange and the prospect of hills that guarded undiscovered
lands. Thus on my wider and more prolonged travels, but I had haunts
near home, nooks and retreats where nobody ever came. There was an
unfrequented lane, very dark, very deep, that led from a hamlet
called Common Cefn Llwyn--the Ridge of the Grove--to Llanfrechfa,
used scarcely at all save by labouring men going to their work in
the early morning and returning in the evening. All the length of
this lane there was only one house in sight--the farms in Gwent are
mostly in the heart of the fields, remote even from the by-ways--and
this one house must have fallen into ruin eighty or a hundred years
ago. From what remained one judged that it had been the _petit
manoir_ of some dead and forgotten race of little squires; it was
of grey stone, of fifteenth-century workmanship, and the corbels
supporting the chimney were still sound and clean cut. All about
the old broken house were the ruins of the garden, apple trees and
plum trees run wild, hedges that had become brakes, a confusion of
degenerate flowers; and by the tumbledown stile that led to this
deserted place I would linger for an hour or more, wondering and
dreaming and setting my heart on the hopeless endeavour of letters.
Weather made no difference to my goings; a heavy greatcoat, boots
with soles an inch thick, and leather gaiters up to the knee, made a
wild wet winter’s day a thing to be defied and enjoyed; and indeed I
loved to get abroad on such days and see all the wells of the hills
overflowing and rushing down to swell the Soar or the Canthwr, red
and foaming, and making whirlpools of barmy froth as they fell into
the brooks. And then, when the rain changed to snow, what a delight
to stand on some high, lonely place and look out on the wide, white
land, and on the hills where the dark pines stood in a ring about
some ancient farm: to see the wonder of the icy sunlight, of the
violet winter sky. These were my great adventures, and I know not
whether in reality there are any greater, since it is a great thing
to stand on the very verges of an unknown world.

So the winter of ’84–85 went on and I dreamed and wondered and did
nothing, though I was nearing the age at which many a young man has
produced his first novel with success and acclaim. I never could
do these things, and still I cannot do them. I knew that I had no
business to be loafing and mooning about the rectory, a burden on my
poor father--the “John” of that happy return of the ’fifties had by
this time experienced sorrows and pains and miseries of all sorts.
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; nothing had
any savour for him any more. And seeing this, I was distressed to be
an additional weight in the heavy pack of sorrows and trials that he
bore daily, and I tried to get all sorts of employments for which I
was utterly unfit, which would not have harboured me for twenty-four
hours. Nothing came of these attempts, and so the time went on till
we were in June, 1885. Then there was a letter from the publisher
of “The Anatomy of Tobacco” to the effect that he thought he could
find me some odd jobs of work if I would come up to London; and so I
returned again to the well-remembered cell in Clarendon Road.

With mixed feelings. I was glad indeed at the prospect of doing
something for myself and so removing a little from the weary burden
at the rectory: but, I had not forgotten the _peine forte et dure_;
the dry bread, enough and no more than enough, the water from a
bitter runnel of a sorrowful street, the heavy weight of perpetual
loneliness. “Alone in London” has become a phrase, it is a title
associated, I think, with some flaring melodrama; but the reality is
a deadly thing. I was only twenty-two; and I shuddered a little one
June night when I went out and bade farewell to the brooks and the
woods and the flowers; to the scent of the evening air.

All sorts of odd jobs and queer jobs awaited me. I was given a
big folio book full of cuttings on a particular subject, and the
publisher asked me to make a selection from these and so compile a
book of oddments. Then, there were novels submitted to him that I
was to read and advise upon: a weary business when the said novels
were as a rule foolish things written in varieties of straggly and
scraggy scripts. But the principal business was the making of the
Catalogue. For the publisher of York Street was also a second-hand
bookseller. He had a mass of odd literature stored in a garret in
Catherine Street, and on these volumes I was let loose; my main
business being to write notes under the titles, notes describing the
content of the books and setting that content in an alluring manner
before the collector.

It was as odd a library as any man could desire to see. Occultism
in one sense or another was the subject of most of the books. There
were the principal and the more obscure treatises on Alchemy, on
Astrology, on Magic; old Latin volumes most of them. Here were books
about Witchcraft, Diabolical Possession, “Fascination,” or the Evil
Eye; here comments on the Kabbala. Ghosts and Apparitions were a
large family, Secret Societies of all sorts hung on the skirts of the
Rosicrucians and Freemasons, and so found a place in the collection.
Then the semi-religious, semi-occult, semi-philosophical sects and
schools were represented: we dealt in Gnostics and Mithraists, we
harboured the Neoplatonists, we conversed with the Quietists and
the Swedenborgians. These were the ancients; and beside them were
the modern throng of Diviners and Stargazers and Psychometrists
and Animal Magnetists and Mesmerists and Spiritualists and Psychic
Researchers. In a word, the collection in the Catherine Street garret
represented thoroughly enough that inclination of the human mind
which may be a survival from the rites of the black swamp and the
cave--or an anticipation of a wisdom and knowledge that are to come,
transcending all the science of our day.

Which? It seems to me a vast question, and I am sure it is utterly
insoluble. Of course, an enormous mass of occultism, ancient and
modern, may be brushed aside at once without the labour of any
curious investigation. Madame Blavatsky, for example, her coadjutors
and assessors and successors need not detain us. I do not mean that
every pronouncement of Theosophy is false or fraudulent. A liar is
not to be defined as a man who never by any chance speaks the truth.
A thief occasionally comes honestly by what he has. I mean that
the specific doctrines and circumstances of Theosophy: the Mahatma
stories, the saucers that fell from the ceiling, the vases that were
found mysteriously reposing in empty cupboards, the Messiahship of
a gentleman whose name I choose to forget: all this is rubbish, not
worth a moment’s consideration. And so with Spiritualism; though
in a less degree. For I am strongly inclined to believe that very
odd things do sometimes happen amongst those who “sit,” that some
queer--and probably undesirable--psychic region is entered; and all
this quite beyond and beside the intention or understanding of those
present at the séance. You never know what may happen when a small
boy pokes his fingers carelessly among the wheels and works of a
clock. But as to the profession of the Spiritualists; that they are
able to communicate with ghosts, _that_ need not trouble us. Their
photographs of fairies need not trouble us. Their revelations as to
the life of the world to come as given through the Rev. Vale Owen
need not trouble us. Though here is a “phenomenon” which seems to me
of no little interest. How can a man who is confessedly perfectly
honest and straightforward conjure himself into the belief that when
he takes up a pencil an intelligence apart from himself guides his
hand as he writes? I suppose the answer involves the doctrine of
dual or multiple personality; and _that_ is mysterious enough in all
conscience. Yet, apart from all the nonsense, apart from the state
of mind of the average Spiritualist--one of them, a very eminent
one in his day, said that the clause of the Creed: “I look for the
Resurrection of the Dead” meant “I expect to see some physical
manifestations of the departed”--apart from all this I still think as
I have said that very strange and inexplicable things do sometimes
happen. Here is nothing to do with ghosts: but the evidence that the
famous medium Home rose into the air, floated out of an open window
high on a Scottish castle tower and floated in again at another
open window: the evidence here is good; that is, if levitation,
as they call it, were a criminal offence and Home had been put on
his trial he would have been convicted. It will be seen that I am
not exactly a fanatical Spiritualist: but I had rather be of the
straightest sect of Rappers and Banjo Wielders than of that company
which understands all the whole frame and scheme of the universe
so thoroughly and completely that it is absolutely certain that
levitation is impossible, that a man cannot rise into the air unless
he is mechanically and materially impelled and supported, that no
evidence, however direct and unimpeachable, can establish this for a
fact. I do not understand the universe; consequently I do not dare to
advance any such proposition. And further; let me diminish a little a
proposition that I have only just dared to make. I have said that all
the ghost business, all the Vale Owen sort of business, is rubbish
and foolery. Well, I believe most heartily and profoundly that it
_is_ rubbish, nonsense, unveridical to the last degree; in fact, and
in the proper sense of the word, a lie. Yet; let us beware. Not one
of us understands the universe. Even in the Higher Mathematics, the
Queen of profane sciences, very odd things are reported to happen.
So, possibly, the following account may really correspond with the
truth of things.

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.” There is a
sudden scream of joy in a female voice: “Oh! darling Katy, thank you,
thank you, _thank you_! Oh, _please_, may we have the lights turned
up for a moment? Katy promised me a lock of her beautiful golden
hair, and I am _sure_ I felt it float down on my hand.” The lights
are turned up. A strand of yellow hair is, sure enough, reposing
on the lady’s hand. It had evidently been treated with spiritual
peroxide, made, no doubt, of Ethers, like the ghostly whiskey and
sodas in “Raymond.” Then the room is darkened and the Medium takes up
the tale.

“This spirit’s name is Milton. Henry--no, John Milton, the author of
the ‘Faery Queen.’ He says that he is very happy. He spends most of
his time with Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Shakespeare has confessed
to him that all his plays were written by Bacon. The evidence will be
found in a brass box under the Tube station at Liverpool Street. Pope
often has tea with him. He says they don’t use alcohol there.”

There is a sudden crash. “Avast!” comes with a roar through the
trumpet. _John King_ has returned, bringing with him an _American
Indian_ who speaks in the idiom of a Nigger Minstrel practising in
the East End of London and will call the Medium his “Midi.” Whereupon
Katy puts a beautiful warm arm round the neck of a gentleman
sitter and the gramophone plays “Abide with me.” 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 shall never believe
that it is so.

Well; there I laboured in the Catherine Street garret amidst all
this, and much more than this. Down below were the publishing
offices of old Mr. Vizetelly, who was issuing English translations
of Zola at the time, and was at last sent to gaol for publishing an
English version of “La Terre,” an obscene book that every judicious
Bishop of Central France should put in the hands of newly ordained
priests--if it is to be accepted that the physician ought to have
some knowledge of the constitutions of his patients and of the
diseases from which they are suffering. It was a sumptuous and rich
garret--a street now passes over the site of the house--filled with
that mysterious odour that used to prevail in oldish London houses
that were not too carefully swept and washed and polished, and there
day after day I worked, reading and annotating, and all alone. Now
and then in the older books I came across striking sentences. There
was Oswaldus Crollius, for example--I suppose his real name was
Osvald Kroll--who is quoted by one of the characters in “The Great
God Pan.” “In every grain of wheat,” says Oswaldus, “there lies
hidden the soul of a Star.” A wonderful saying; a declaration, I
suppose, that all matter is one, manifested under many forms; and,
so far as I can gather, modern science is rapidly coming round to
the view of this obscure speculator of the seventeenth century; and,
in fact, to the doctrine of the alchemists. But I would advise any
curious person who desires to investigate this singular chamber of
the human mind to beware of over-thoroughness. Let him dip lightly
from the vellum quarto into the leather duodecimo, glancing at a
chapter here, a sentence there; but let him avoid all deep and
systematic study of Crollius and of Vaughan, the brother of the
Silurist, and of all their tribe. For if you go too far you will be
disenchanted. Open Robert Fludd, otherwise Robertus de Fluctibus,
and find the sentence: _Transmutemini, transmutemini de lapidibus
mortuis in lapides philosophicos vivos_--Be ye changed, be ye changed
from dead stones into living and life-giving stones. This is a
great word indeed, exalted and exultant; but beware of mastering
Fludd’s system--if confusion can be called a system--of muddled
alchemy, physical science, metaphysics and mysticism. Get Knorr von
Rosenroth’s “Kabbala Denudata,” vellum, in quarto, and find out a
little about the Sephiroth: about Kether, the Crown; Tiphereth,
Beauty; Gedulah, Mercy; Geburah, Justice or Severity. Really, you
will discover very curious things, and the more easily, if instead
of Knorr von Rosenroth, you choose A. E. Waite’s “Doctrine and
Literature of the Kabalah.” It is odd, for example, to discover that
the side of Mercy is the masculine side, that Justice or Severity
is feminine; and that all will go amiss till these two are united
in Benignity. Again, it is interesting from another point of view
to discover that three of the Sephiroth are called the Kingdom, the
Victory and the Glory. Is there any connection between these and the
ancient liturgical response to the Pater Noster: “For Thine is the
Kingdom, the Power and the Glory”? And then that matter of Lilith and
Samael and the Shells or Cortices, the husks of spirits from a ruined
world that brought about the Fall of Man; the strange mystery of
that place “which is called Zion and Jerusalem”--duly here comparing
Böhme on the Recovery of Paradise when innocent man and maid are
joined in love--all this is a wonderful and fascinating region of
thought. And beautiful indeed is the saying of one of the Fathers
of Kabbalism: that when the lost Letters of Tetragrammaton, the
Divine Name, are found there shall be mercy on every side. And here,
perhaps, but not certainly, light may be thrown on certain obscure
matters of Freemasonry. Dip then, and read and wander in the Kabbala;
but do not become a Kabbalist. For if you do, you will end by
transliterating your name and the names of your friends into Hebrew
letters and finding out all sorts of marvellous things, till at last
you back Winners--which turn out to be Losers--on purely Kabbalistic
principles.

And here, by the way, I may remark that I have long meditated writing
an article called “The Aryan Kabbala,” keeping the requirements of
occult magazines strictly in view. It would make a pretty article. I
should begin by a brief note on the Hebrew Kabbala, explaining how
the Sephiroth tell in a kind of magic shorthand the whole history and
mystery of man and all the worlds from their source to their end.
The Tree of Life--as the Sephiroth arranged in a certain scheme are
called--is, in fact, I would point out, at once an account of how
all things came into being and a map and an analysis of all things
as they now are. As an occult friend once said to me by my hearth in
Gray’s Inn: “The Tree of Life can be applied to that poker.” The Tree
of Life, then, is a key to the secret generation and being of all
souls and all heavens; it will also analyse for you the little flower
growing in a cranny of the wall.

Well; this made clear, I would go on to say: “But what if there be a
Kabbala and a Tree of Life of the Aryans as well as of the Semites?
What if it tells all the hidden secrets of our beginning and our
journey and our ending? What if its august symbols are known to all
of us, in every-day and common use amongst us, remaining all the
while as undiscerned as the most sacred and mystic hieroglyphics?
What if the office boy and the grocer handle every day the signs
which tell The Secret of Secrets?”

And then, after all due amplifications and ponderous circumnavigations
it would all come out. The Aryan Kabbala is, in fact, the Decad; the
ten first numbers. They embody an age-old tradition dating from the
time when the ancestors of the Greek and the Welshman, the Persian
and the Teuton were all one people. They contained the secret mystery
religion of this primitive race, they sank by degrees from their
first august significance to become instruments of common use and
commercial convenience, just as vestments became clothes. The proof
is easy enough. Take the first number of the Decad: one in English,
ἕν (in the neuter) in Greek, unus in Latin, un (pronounced “een”) in
Welsh, ein in German. And then compare another series of words in
these languages: wine, οἶνος, vinum, gwin, wein. Then: two, δύο, duo,
dau, zwei; and compare with: water, ὕδωρ, udus, wy (and dwr) wasser.
I drop the other terms, or Sephiroth, of the Decad--in Mrs. Boffin’s
presence--and come to the last two numerals: nine, ἐννέα, novem, naw,
neun, compared with new, νέος, novus, newydd, neu. Then finally ten,
δέκα, decem, deg, zehn: compare with deck (bedeck) δόξα, decor, teg,
schön.

The conclusion, I hope, is evident: we (and all things) proceed from
Unity, which is wine, decline to Duality (or a weakened, fallen
nature), which is water. Then, after passing through many changes,
adventures, transformations, transmutations--undescribed for the
reason given--we are renovated, made New--“I will make all things
new”--in the last number but one of the Decad, and, in the final
term, which is Ten, are reunified in Beauty and Glory.

There! It seems to me wonderfully plausible, and I really think I
should have written the article and sent it to some suitable quarter.
It is all nonsense, of course, but ... does that matter?

       *       *       *       *       *

Well, all that business of the Aryan Kabbala is an absurd digression,
but it illustrates well enough the frame of mind likely to be
induced by the study of a good many of the books in the Catherine
Street garret. Take the interlude and add to it the rich odours of
the frowsy, neglected room stuffed with confusions of old books and
pamphlets, add to it the old, delightful, picturesque London that
was undisturbed in those days. Holywell Street and Wych Street were
all in their glory in 1885, a glory compounded of sixteenth-century
gables, bawdy books and matters congruous therewith, parchment
Elzevirs, dark courts and archways, hidden taverns, and ancient
slumminess. There were no great, blatant Australia Houses or Colonial
Edifices of any kind about the Strand in those times: instead, we
had the beauty and the green lawns of Clement’s Inn and the solemn
square of New Inn, and Clare Market communicating tortuously
with Great Queen Street by the most evil-smelling by-ways that I
have ever experienced--and something of jollity in the air that
seems to me to have vanished utterly. Take all these elements and
things; and you have me as I worked high up in the vanished house in
Catherine Street, preparing the Catalogue that was to be called: “The
Literature of Occultism and Archæology”--when the gas lamps in the
Strand shone with a brighter light than the arc lamps of to-day.




_Chapter II_


Such was the scene of my life in the summer of the year 1885. By my
odd jobs; a little “reading,” a little compiling and a good deal of
catalogue making, I just managed to live, earning perhaps as much
as a pound a week, one week with another. I do not remember exactly
the precise terms on which I worked, but I know that I had a good
deal of time on my hands. Part of this time I spent in trying to
learn shorthand. I can’t think why, for at this period of my life I
had no newspaper or secretarial employment in view. I am inclined to
think that trying to learn shorthand had become a mechanical habit
with me. Then, I resumed my old mooning walks out of London, going
westward usually or always, sometimes Acton way and sometimes through
Brentford--that curious, dirty, and most fascinating place--to
Osterley Park, where in those days you could walk and wander anywhere
you pleased, so long, I suppose, as you did not glue your nose to the
windows of that mansion. And then I fell to writing again.

Now here is a mystery. It is held, and very properly, that people
should keep their mouths shut unless they have something to say;
similarly that a man has no business to write unless he has something
in his heart which, he feels, cries out to be expressed. But here
was I not knowing in the least what I wanted to say, but resolved,
even at the cost of much pain and misery, to say it; that is, to
write it. There are, of course, people who are said to talk for
talking’s sake; and so, I suppose, I was suffering from the analogous
vice of writing for writing’s sake, otherwise known as the _cacoethes
scribendi_. I fancy a volume of Hazlitt had fallen into my hands;
it had strayed, very likely, into the Catherine Street library, and
at first I began to try to write essays, more or less in imitation
of this inimitable author. I need scarcely say that I made sad work
of it; and happily, no scrap of manuscript survives. And then I
fell on Rabelais and on Balzac’s “Contes Drolatiques,” and wondered
and admired hugely and studied both deeply in my long night watches
under the gas-jet in the little room in Clarendon Road. I would dine
sumptuously on half a loaf of dry bread, green tea made as I liked
it, without milk or sugar, with plenty of tobacco by way of dessert;
and then to my books and to my wonder. It was not a bad life on the
whole, sweetened as it was by the enthusiasm for letters; but the
loneliness was an oppression and sometimes a horror. Weeks passed
without any human converse beyond brief business dialogue; still,
since then I have known far worse days. Poverty and loneliness;
these are doubtless evils hard to bear; but they are light indeed;
nay, they have their dignity, and the gas-jet of Clarendon Road is
not altogether without a halo--when I weigh all this and set it in
the balances beside the intolerable degradation of the service of
Carmelite House. I often thought in those latter and most hideous
days that my case was somewhat that of a man who had been captured
by a malignant tribe of anthropoid apes or Yahoos and was by them
tormented and unspeakably degraded; and there was this additional
shame and horror: that my degradation and misery were witnessed by
rational creatures like myself. I remember how in my last year in
the employment of “The Evening News,” I was out on some idiotic
errand which led me up Wellington Street, past York Street, where
George Redway, the publisher of “The Anatomy of Tobacco” and of “The
Literature of Occultism and Archæology,” had his place of business.
In a line, pretty well, with York Street I could see that new street
which runs over the site of old Vizetelly’s office where the famous
fusty garret was. The streets--Wellington Street, Bow Street, York
Street--are not much changed in the last forty years, and the gap
formed by the new street made me see myself a cloudy young man
of twenty-two up in the air labouring amongst the dusty ancient
books; all this and all the recollections of the days of dry bread,
tea, tobacco and the hopeless but not dishonourable endeavour of
literature; all this contrasted with the shameful circumstances of my
life as a weary old man of fifty-eight, a man who had known struggles
and sorrows and losses; all this, I say, overwhelmed me suddenly. It
was almost more than I could endure.

But we go too fast. We are still in the days of the cloudy young man,
who is clear that fine literature is an infinitely noble thing, but
is not clear upon any other subject whatever. I had my queer books
in the mornings and my long lonely walks in the afternoons, and my
great books in the evening and far into the night. I remember reading
Dante in Longfellow’s translation, from beginning to end, and though
I could not by any manner of means lift up my heart and mind to the
mountain-peak of the Paradise, I divined the majesty I could not
comprehend. Don Quixote was always with me, and good company and meat
and drink and lights and fire always to me; and so I pass along the
dim London streets revolving all these mighty works, a ghostly man
amidst the hurrying multitude of the living, and go far afield under
dim trees in the West, or sit solitary on a bench near the river in
Kew Gardens, looking towards Syon; all the while in a lonely but not
an unhappy dream.

It came suddenly to me one night. I was lying awake in my bed; and
then it came to me that I would write a Great Romance. A Great
Romance! I know it is funny; but it is sorry too. I didn’t in the
least know what the said Great Romance was to be about; save this,
that Rabelais was to have something to do with it, and that my own
county, beloved Gwent, was to have much more to do with it. That does
not sound very definite; but I believe it is more definite than the
actual vision which appeared to me, for this was rather a warm and
golden and wonderful glow and radiance than any scheme for a book. I
know I lay happy and trembling for a long time and fell asleep happy
and awoke happy in the morning, and went out forthwith to buy pens
and paper. I had both already, but I felt that the occasion was more
than a special one and called for very special purchases. So, at
the stationer’s shop, near the Holland Park end of Clarendon Road, I
got ruled quarto paper, and “Viaduct” pens, and two penholders, and
I am pleased that I am writing all this with a surviving penholder
of those two; a poor old thing chewed to a stump and battered
grievously in its metallic parts. So here was paper, here was pens
and penholders; and of course the rest was easy.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was only this little difficulty. The golden and glowing vision
of the night, the announcing of the Great Romance, declined to be
more specific. It had no hints to give, it seemed, as to plot; it
still veiled the subject of this wonderful book in the dimmest, most
religious obscurity. The paper and the pens were ready; but how to
begin writing the first line? I had not the faintest notion, so I
proceeded to write Prologues and Epilogues, with commentaries on
the _magnum opus_ which was not even begun. Two of these oddities
survive, the Dedication to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, as the
Patron of men of letters; a dreadful quip founded on the old saying
about “dining with Duke Humphrey,” which meant that you had not had
any dinner. This was worked out with all elaboration and with an
attempt at the great manner of Bacon in his most magistral mood. It
ran in this vein:

     Truly, then, do we poor folk (men of letters) owe what
     service we are able to pay Your Grace, who in spite of mean
     dress and poverty (justly accounted by Mr. Hobbes for
     shame and dishonour) is pleased to entertain us at that
     board, where so great a multitude of our brotherhood has
     feasted before. For your illustrious line hath now for many
     generations made it a peculiar glory to supply the needs
     of lettered men; and as we sit at meat it seems (methinks)
     as if these mighty men of old did sit beside us and taste
     with us once more the mingled cup we drink. The ingenious
     author of Don Quixote de la Mancha must, I suppose, have
     often dined with the Duke of his age, Mr. Peter Corneille
     and Mr. Otway, Senhor Camoens, Rare Old Ben, Signori Tasso
     and Ariosto not seldom: while young Mr. Chatterton the poet
     did not only dine, but break his fast, take his morning
     draught, and sup with Your Grace’s great-grandfather, till
     at last he died of a mere repletion.

There! Very solemn and portentous fun, indeed; but what is so solemn
as a youngster of twenty-two? Canterbury Cathedral and Westminster
Abbey seem gay and light and airy by comparison. _I_ like it still,
to be sure; but then I am prejudiced, and indeed, there is one
sentence that still affects me; that phrase about “the mighty men
of old” who seem “to sit beside us and taste with us once more the
mingled cup we drink.” For in that sentence I see something of the
spirit which sustained me, the cloudy young man, the dreamy and
obscure and inarticulate young man, of those long-ago days, all
through the fire and the darkness of poverty and loneliness and
weariness and disillusion. Let us still, if you please, ride the
high horse and be as magnificent as we can: I saw myself and, to be
frank, I still see myself, as the youngest novice in a great and
noble monastic house. The novice is by no means a promising member
of the congregation, the Abbot and the Prior and the Master of the
Novices have the gravest doubts as to his vocation: the other novices
are inclined to indulge in remarks of a jocular and contemptuous
kind. But the little, obscure and despised candidate for the triple
cord sits in his low place at the board and looks at the pictures
on the walls: on the faces where torment and exultation shine with
twin fires: on Blessed Bernardus a Baculo, who was beaten to death
by the Danes in the ninth century, on the Venerable Servant of
God, Marcellinus, who was impaled by the Turk, on St. Eugenius de
Compostella, who was shut by the Moors in a horrible dungeon of filth
for forty years and at last his visage shone and gave light to the
tormentors when they came to end him, on Venerable Raymondus Anglus,
who was slowly sliced into little pieces in Cathay, on Blessed
Gregory Perrot, whom the ministers of the Virgin Queen attended to
at Tyburn in 1590: on all these brilliant successes of the convent
does the little novice gaze with admiring wonder. Well he knows
that his picture will never hang on the wall; still, and after all,
he is a member of the congregation to which these, the lucky and
happy, belonged; in a faint sort they are his brothers; they are
_commensales, cohæredes, et sodales_.

Very fine, indeed; but in the meantime I am scratching with
a somewhat hopeless pen under Clarendon Road gaslight, taking
difficulties for solution to lonely places such as Perivale, to the
unfrequented parts of Hampton Court; or else, by contrast, to the
long black High Street of Brentford, with its creeks and backwaters
of the river, where grass and flowers grow on the decks of derelict
barges. I find no oracles to help me in any of these promising
quarters; there are some very sad nights in the little room over
the dry bread, tea and tobacco and the helpless pen. Finally, in a
kind of despair, I begin something of which the first scene is to be
laid in Gwent, which, later, is to have a voyage in it--there is a
great voyage in Rabelais to the Oracle of the Holy Bottle. I read the
first chapter. It is quite hopeless; and yet I do not give up hope; I
resolve to try again.

       *       *       *       *       *

But all this time, while the Great Romance refused to move, my
worldly affairs were moving fast, and decidedly in the way of
destruction. I suppose, having finished the Catalogue, I had done
all that the publisher wanted of me. At all events, the stream of
employment, never auriferous to any great extent, dwindled and dried
up. I had a little, a very little money in hand, I could not possibly
call on those poor people at home for help; my landlady in Clarendon
Road had a hard struggle of it, I fancy, and I would not cadge on
her kindness, even though my board and lodging were far from being
luxurious. It seemed to me that at the end of the week I must just
walk out of 23 Clarendon Road and go on walking towards the West
till I couldn’t walk any longer. I admit that the plan was vague,
as vague as the plot of the Great Romance, but I could think of no
other. And in the meantime--I had three or four days before me--I
would write the Epilogue for my book: which was not yet begun.

I set about this task with the utmost relish and enjoyment. For once,
I knew what to write about; that was my own position; not in a plain
and literal manner, but after the fashion of a decorated fantasy.
It would never do to say: “Here am I, a stupid lad who is not worth
twopence to anybody, who thinks he can write and can hardly get half
a dozen words to stagger on the paper; here am I going out to die in
a ditch or to live in a ward of the workhouse”: that would never have
served. I agree with Mr. Sampson Brass in holding that the truth is
often highly unpleasant and inconvenient. Hence the Epilogue to the
unwritten book, which survives in the written book, “The Chronicle
of Clemendy,” a work which is neither great nor a romance, but which
answers the description admirably in all other respects. And as the
Dedication was made to Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, so the Epilogue
is concerned with the same nobleman. So here we are:

     A few days ago His Grace did take me aside into his
     cabinet, and looking kindly upon me (though some call him
     a stern and awful noble) said: “Why, Master Leolinus, you
     look but sickly, poor gentleman, poor gentleman, I protest
     you’re but a shadow, do not your Abbreviatures bring you
     in a goodly revenue?” (Note the elegant reference to my
     mysterious shorthand.) “Not so, Your Grace,” answered I,
     “to the present time I have abbreviated all in vain, and
     were it not for the hospitality of your table, I know not
     how I should win through.” “How goes it then with your
     Silurian Histories?” (The Great Romance.) ... “With them,
     may it please Your Grace, it fares excellently well, and
     this morning I have made an end of writing the First
     Journey, containing many agreeable histories and choice
     discourses.” “I believe indeed it will be a rare book, fit
     to read to the monks of Tintern while they dine. But yet I
     will have you lay it aside a little, since I have a good
     piece of preferment for you, an office (or I mistake you)
     altogether to your taste. What say you, Master Scholar, to
     the Lordship of an Island and no less an Island than Farre
     Joyaunce in the Western Seas? How stand you thitherwards?
     Will you take ship presently?” At hearing this, I was, as
     you may guess, half bewildered with sudden joy, that is apt
     to bring tears into the eyes of them that have toiled in
     many a weary struggle with adversity: I could but kneel and
     kiss His Grace’s hand, and say “My Lord.”

Of course, the allusions to “First Journeys” and “Silurian Histories”
were put in months later, when I had at length found out what my book
was about; at the time, October, 1885, I had not written one word of
it. So the Epilogue went on its mellifluous way, and thus ended:

     But here is my Paumier, with his parchments, to advise with
     me concerning a grant of Water Baylage to the Abbey of St.
     Michael, and also concerning the ceremonies observed in the
     island at Christmastide. He tells me that the voyage will
     surely be a rough and tempestuous one, but with the captain
     of the _Salutation_ there need be no fear. And so farewell,
     till the anchor be dropped in the Sure Haven of Farre
     Joyaunce.

And indeed, as I was writing the last page of the Epilogue, a letter
came for me. I had written to Mr. Quaritch, stating my experience
in cataloguing, and asking for employment. Mr. Quaritch wrote very
civilly stating that he did not want any cataloguers, but people
who knew how to sell books. And I wrote on to my final flourish,
with all the more relish. “Ceremonies observed in the island at
Christmastide,” indeed! Ceremonies observed at Reading Workhouse,
more likely!

But the next morning came a letter from Aunt Maria, that Maria who
had walked with Anne to meet John on the white Caerleon road. My
mother was dying; and they sent me the money for the fare, that I
might come home.




_Chapter III_


It is a debatable point, I suppose, whether life, taking it all
round, by and large, as Mr. Bixby said, is a horrible business. On
the one hand, most of us are excessively sorry to quit this world,
so, clearly, there must be something to be said for it. But, on the
other hand, how endless are the devices which we find to give a
seasoning to a dish which is, perhaps, rather insipid than nauseous.
I have eaten cold mutton with relish--after smothering it in about
half a dozen different condiments, sauces, relishes and salads. So
look at all the games we play with desperate earnestness, with a
vigour and delight and, sometimes, an asceticism which we give to no
office routine or serious employment of our lives. Perhaps we may try
and define what “life” means a little later; but, under all ordinary
and respectable conventions, I presume that the business of which
I have been dimly aware on this day of writing can in no wise be
classed as one of the serious employments of life; as, in any sense,
a vital part of life according to accepted doctrine, religious,
scientific or philosophical. The business of which, I say, I have
been dimly aware; for all I have seen of it has been Grove Road,
Grove End Road, and Circus Road and all the roads adjacent lined on
both sides with motor cars of all sizes, splendours and miseries;
the affair being the last day of the Oxford and Cambridge Cricket
Match. And, looking at all this fairly, it comes to this: here are
two wickets placed at a certain specified distance from one another
on a stretch of turf, and here are men with bats and here are men
with balls. Will the men with balls succeed in hitting the wickets,
or will the men with bats succeed in hitting those balls away to
remote parts of the turf? And on the whole: are the eleven young
men of Oxford or the eleven young men of Cambridge the smarter and
more skilled at these pursuits and in the subsidiary pursuit called
“fielding,” or the art of stopping the ball which the man has hit
with the bat from going to a remote part of the stretch of turf?
That, in the very rough, is cricket; and I want to ask the clergy
(if they have any time to spare from their self-appointed tasks of
meddling in politics, “disapproving” of bookstall novels, and serving
tables) what they honestly think Saint Paul would have said, if he
had seen twenty-two of his most promising young converts engaged in
this cricket business, applauded by a vast multitude of the saints?
I desire to put this question not with a wish to “score”--to use an
idiom of the game which we are discussing--but with an honest longing
for information. That is: will theologians maintain that the ’Varsity
Match and First Class County Cricket generally is a part of serious
life, or a serious part of life? Or, will the scientific people or
the philosophical people declare that this game, played as it is
played at Lord’s with desperate earnestness, is a necessary part of
the bodily and mental well-being of the human race? I say the game
as played at Lord’s, that is the great game; for the case of the
old-fashioned, village cricket on the green was somewhat different.
Then you had a number of people with two or three hours of leisure
before them who found a good deal of fun and relaxation and amusement
in bowling balls and hitting balls and running after balls, with
intervals of supping of ale, sitting on the bench under the shady
tree in front of the village inn; this is a very different matter
from the high cricket of our times, just as diverting yourself with a
ball, a racket and a net is remote from Mdlle. Lenglen’s game at lawn
tennis.

And these are the comparatively mild forms of sport. What of
rowing till you are blue in the face, what of climbing frightful
mountain-peaks, with half an inch of rock between you and a fall of
a thousand feet? Why do people do all these things, voluntarily,
gladly, enthusiastically? I can only suppose that they do these
things to make life tolerable, even entertaining, just as I add
tomato sauce, Worcester sauce, pickles, beetroot, cucumber and salad
to the cold mutton, to make _that_ tolerable and even appetising.
It would seem indeed that life must be an awful business, if you
have to plaster yourself on the walls of a sheer Alp before you can
endure it. This is “drowning” your cold mutton in strong sauce with a
vengeance.

And all this by way of a tentative explanation of why I ever wrote
anything at all, and still more why I have gone on writing, with
brief remissions, ever since the autumn of 1880. This problem, as
I have hinted already, is a profound mystery. For, taking first
the plain view of the man in the street, and applying his plain and
simple test, I have just been running through a list of my books from
1881 to 1922, and reckoning--it was an easy task--how much money I
have made by them. The list contains eighteen titles. Of these, the
“Heptameron,” “Fantastic Tales,” “Casanova” represent more or less
laborious translations--“Casanova” runs to twelve sizeable volumes.
And my total receipts for these eighteen volumes, 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 clear, then, that my literary
activities cannot be adequately accounted for on the hypothesis of
mere greed and money-grubbing.

And, then, taking another side of the question: consider the debit of
toil and endeavour and mortification and disappointment that these
forty-two years of book-writing have cost me. I believe that business
men, engaged in manufacture, always “write off” a considerable sum
for legitimate wear and tear and depreciation of plant. What about
the wear and tear of mind and heart and that T,e,a,r, which is
pronounced in another manner; what about the depreciation of the
plant--a highly important one--of self-confidence that my writing
has inflicted on me? I have described some of the pains I endured
when I set out to write the thing which afterwards became the
“Chronicle of Clemendy,” and that was only the beginning of months
of hard and agonizing labour. And then I remember another occasion.
The “idea” which turned into “The Great God Pan” came to me; again
that delicious glow of delight. Now at last I had got hold of a
real notion; I had a curious tale, a rare fantasy set in a rarer
atmosphere to work upon: I thrilled at my heart as the explorer
must thrill as he comes suddenly to the verge of the dark forest,
or to the summit of the high mountain and sees before him a new
and wonderful and undiscovered land. Well I remember how all this
exquisite bliss was bestowed on me, one dark and foggy afternoon of
1890–91, in rooms in Guilford Street, not far from “The Foundling.”
The foul air shone bright, the dingy street, the dingy room were
irradiated: here was happiness almost too keen to be endured. With
no delay I got notebook and pencil and proceeded to “lay out” the
story; that is, to set down the various scenes and incidents by which
the plot was to be developed. Afterwards; the writing, and on the
whole I was not altogether so ill-contented--though I daresay that I
ought to have been disgusted--till it came to the last chapter. And
that simply would not be written. I tried again and again; it was
impossible. I could hit on no incident that would convey the required
emotion; and at last I put away the uncompleted MS. in despair; I was
within an ace of tearing it to bits. But think of the suffering, the
misery, the bitter disappointment of those evenings. True it was all
a silly thing, a toy; but an authority quoted in “The Water Babies”
says that one of the saddest sights in the world is a child crying
over a broken toy. My scheme was all silly, I allow; but I had set my
heart on it, I had glowed with pride over it: and here it was all
broken to pieces in my hands, a sorry, spoilt, piteous thing. True,
I found some sort of an ending six months later; but that was not
the same. There was no fun in that. You remember the party in the
cabrioily that called on Mrs. Bardell? There was a dispute about the
precise situation of Mrs. Bardell’s house, and finally the driver,
who had dismounted, led the horse by the bridle to the house with the
red door.

     Here was a mean and low way of arriving at a friend’s
     house! No dashing up with all the fire and fury of the
     animal; no jumping down of the driver; no loud knocking at
     the door; no opening of the apron with a crash at the very
     last moment.... The whole edge of the thing had been taken
     off; it was flatter than walking.

So with me and my story: I got to the house with the red door
eventually; but the whole edge of the thing had been taken off. And
so it has been with most of my books; I get, somehow or other, to the
house with the red door, or to a house which I try to persuade myself
is just as good; but on the way in the cabrioily I have suffered so
many disappointments that I am in no condition to enjoy the pleasure
of Mrs. Bardell’s society. I remember that, in writing “The Hill of
Dreams,” I sat down every night for three weeks with blank paper
before me, trying to get the second chapter. On some nights I wrote
half a dozen lines, on other nights a couple of pages--before the
evening’s work went, hopeless, into the drawer. A few months later,
having fallen on the wrong path, I had the pleasure of casting aside
about 30,000 words that I had written; and by the time the book was
at last ended there were two neat piles of MS. in my drawer; the one
a little higher than the other. The bigger pile consisted of the
folios that I had written and had been forced to reject. And think of
what that means: a heartbreak to every other page and the comment of
the author on himself and to himself: “You fool! Why do you pass your
life in rending your heart, in trying to do the thing that you can’t
do? Why weren’t you brought up to sit by a brazier in the streets, to
see that nobody steals the planks and railings and the wood pavement:
to do something that with an effort you might be able to do?” Or, to
return to our former metaphor: “Don’t you see that you haven’t the
knack of the toy maker? Then why will you persist in trying to make
toys which always break in your hands, while you fill the air with
lamentable boohoos?”

And yet, as I have said, such has been my employment, with
intermissions, from 1880 to 1922. It was like that in 1885–86. Night
after night, when my father had knocked out his last pipe at eleven
o’clock, did I draw out my papers from the table-drawer and set them
under the lamp. Winds came from the mountain of the west and shook
the trees about the house and sighed and wailed; snows came from
the mountains of the north and whitened the terraced lawn, black
clouds drifted over Wentwood, the winter rains scourged the land; and
still I wrote on in the silent house; struggling against the bitter
conviction of my incapacity, as a man struggles and claws at the
crumbling earth when his foot has slipped and he is over the edge of
the cliff. Yet, stubborn, I wrote on late into the night, far into
the morning, and as the year advanced I often drew the heavy crimson
curtain and looked out after I had put away my papers in the drawer,
and saw a red or golden dawn streaming above the forest in the east.
And as to the work itself? Let us not enquire too curiously; though I
have always been proud of my parody of the terms of an ancient writ.
_Diem clausit extremum_, he has ended his last day, was the title of
the writ, which is moved now and then even in these days: my writ was
called _Cyathum hausit extremum_: he has drained his last cup. And
then there is the _merum et mixtum cervisium_, and the Charter of
_Terra Sabulosa_ or Sandy Soil, and the offices of Tankard Marshal
and _Clericus Spigotti_, or Clerk of the Spigot; all choice jests--to
adopt the manner of the work in question. But, as I say, let us not
enquire too curiously into the merits of “The Chronicle of Clemendy.”
I am content to abide by the verdict of M. Octave Uzanne, who is
held, I believe, to be a good judge of letters. He said that it was
“le renouveau de la Renaissance,” and that I was sure of my place
beside Rabelais and Boccaccio, on the serene, immortal seats. I am
surrendering my judgment wholly to that of M. Octave Uzanne.

By the way; I do not know how it was, but the only copy sent out
for review was addressed to “Le Livre,” which was then edited by M.
Uzanne. Somehow, no review copies found their way to the English
papers. But the MS. had been shown to a pushing young literary
gentleman, and he said that if it were properly “cut” it might make a
good Christmas book for boys.

And then, again, the question returns: why did I compel myself to
undergo all the toil and misery and disappointment that the writing
of this “Chronicle of Clemendy” involved? It was my own choice,
nobody stood over me with a stick to force me to do it. Why? Why
do men row themselves into blueness and incipient heart disease at
Henley and Putney? Why do men expose themselves to horrors, miseries
and the instant risk of death on all the most desperate mountains
of the world? The answer is the same in all these cases: that cold
mutton (or life) is in itself intolerable; that _Le Gigot de Mouton
froid, sauce Cyanide de Potasse_ is better than the same dish
_nature_.

       *       *       *       *       *

And, going further, the reason of this odd state of things is plain
enough. The fact is, that what we commonly call life is not life
at all. All the things that are considered serious, important and
vital: the faithful earning of a living, the going to the City every
morning to copy letters, keep accounts or float companies; the toils
of the Chancery barrister, of the factory hand, of the doctor, of the
shop-keeper, of the mining engineer, the affairs of all the serious
and necessary employments of life; these things are not life at all.
They are the curse of life, or, as it is sometimes called, the curse
of Adam; as the theologians might have told us if they had not
been too busy over the “curse of alcohol,” over the dubious moral
influence of “the pictures,” over the decidedly frivolous character
of the lighter fiction of the day, and the demoralising effects of
putting a bob on the winner--this dreadful offence, I believe, is
held to “harden the heart” more quickly and thoroughly than any other
method. But this curse of getting a livelihood remains profoundly
unnatural to man, in spite of his long experience of it: hence his
frantic efforts to escape from what he erroneously calls life by
running himself red in the face at Lord’s, by rowing himself blue in
the face at Henley, by drinking methylated spirit, by “putting on”
those criminal bobs, by playing mind-torturing games like chess, by
knocking small balls into small holes, by climbing Alps--and even by
writing books. He will do anything to get away from what are called
the serious facts of life and follow any track however desperate,
trivial, perilous, or painful, if only those serious facts can be
evaded and forgotten, though it be but for a few hours. And so I
wrote on, night after night, till the August of 1886 saw my task
ended; and I immediately began to think of what I could write next.




_Chapter IV_


I have just been trying to reckon up the various quarters which
I have occupied in my forty-two years on-and-off life in London.
When I first came up to town in 1880--the year when the play was
the thing--I stayed at Wandsworth in an old Georgian house near the
ugly Georgian church. I looked for it a few years ago, but I could
not find it; I suspect that shops now flourish on its site and on
the site of its grave old garden. Then, in 1881–82 I was domiciled
in a house fronting Turnham Green; here, too, were ample lawns and
gardens which, for all I know, may remain still. Clarendon Road,
as I have mentioned once or twice, entertained me in ’83, ’84, and
again in ’85, and when I returned to London at the beginning of ’87
I lodged for a time in Upper Bedford Place, Russell Square. This
place I left for an amusing reason. I had been out rather late. The
festivity was not furious; simply a little and most informal dance
given by Mrs. Augusta Webster, in those days an admired poetess; and
I suppose that it was half-past one when I got home from Hammersmith.
I was moving softly up the stairs, and was a good deal puzzled to
hear the clanking noise of metal on metal, as I passed the door of
the first-floor bedroom. However, I supposed that somebody was ill
and that the fire was being kept up. But the next morning, the
landlady addressed me gravely. She said that Mr. and Mrs. Sogden
had been very much alarmed by hearing footsteps in the middle
of the night, and had made preparations for receiving burglars;
and on the whole the landlady thought that I should be much more
comfortable at her sister’s in Great Russell Street, where no ladies
were taken and things “were more Bohemian.” And, indeed, she was
quite right. The garret--a real garret, with a sloping roof and a
dormer window--looked out on Dyott Street, the last remnant of the
old rookery of St. Giles; the house was late seventeenth century or
quite early eighteenth, and the room, with tea and bread and butter
breakfast included, only cost ten-and-six a week. Later in the year,
I moved across the street and lived for a while over a stained-glass
business; then I crossed again and lived over a tailor’s shop.
January, 1890, found me in two rooms in Soho Street--undoubted
seventeenth century, panelled, with beautifully deep wooden cornices.
And here took place the battle of the fleas.

I had moved in, as I say, early in the year, in cold weather. The
rooms seemed quite all right, and the black tom cat of the premises
was a remarkable and consistent character whom it was a privilege
to know. His daily plan of dining with every one in the house,
from his own family in the basement to the people in the attics,
finally welcoming the cat’s-meat man with loud shrieks, shewed, I
thought, Mind. And, as I say, the cornice; well, I wish that I had
been draughtsman enough to draw a section of it. Well, everything
was as pleasant as it could be; and there, at the door, was all
Soho to explore and investigate, and I suppose I need not say that
Soho offered then, and still offers, I am glad to note, a large and
curious field wherein the contemplative mind loves to expatiate.

Very well; but the weather got warmer: and the fleas appeared.
At first as single spies; and then in battalions. They swarmed
everywhere. They made life hideous and intolerable. I did not see
what was to be done. My furniture, such as it was, occupied the
rooms; it would be highly inconvenient for me to move. The advertised
specifics were useless. I isolated a flea--they were fair, large
fleas--with a little of the powder, under a wine glass and watched
his behaviour. He seemed happy, though perhaps a little torpid; he
reminded me of a stout, red-faced old gentleman who has had two or
three glasses of “hot Scotch,” and is inclined to fall asleep by
the tavern fire. Clearly, such mild measures were useless against
the busy multitudes which swarmed all over my rooms. Then, I had
a notion, a much more brilliant notion than anything that I have
known in the region of literature. I have an odd and random vein of
practicality within me, and it came out in the Soho Street emergency.
I took a large sheet of newspaper and brushed it over with treacle
and laid it on the bedroom floor and waited for an hour or two. At
the end of that time, a dozen or so of fleas were sticking fast to
the treacle. I experienced the happy glow of the inventor; and now
there was no dismal reaction. By the evening, there were at least
six dozen fleas captured and out of action. I thought I might say,
Eureka.

But then there came a difficulty. I discovered a certain property
in treacle, which, so far as I know, is not recorded in scientific
text-books. The matter of the work--to use the term of alchemy--was,
I found, susceptible to weather. In certain states of the atmosphere,
in place of being sticky, it became crystalline and as hard as glass.
I do not know whether this interesting property of treacle can be
utilised for forecasting purposes. But this hardness rendered it
useless for my immediate end. The large, fair fleas hopped on to the
trap and hopped away. I surveyed the problem anew. Again the flash
akin to genius. I thought of fly-papers and bought half a dozen. The
battle was over in a few weeks. I kept a careful daily account, and
in a month, or perhaps five weeks, I had captured over three thousand
fleas. And I had purged the first floor of 12 Soho Street utterly of
all the race. I recollect well one night’s bag. I had been to see “A
Pair of Spectacles” at the Garrick, and when I came home I found I
had got 120 fine fleas.

And then, having won this notable victory, a very odd distaste for
London came upon me. I am not joking; the sentiment had nothing to do
with the insects whom I had defeated; but, somehow, London sickened
me. Its faint, hot summer airs were an oppression, its swarming
streets a tribulation; I thought of cold wells in the hills and
running brooks and the breath of the wood and the mountain in the
early morning--and I resolved to be a countryman again. So I took a
cottage high up on the Chiltern Hills, and while certain alterations
were being made, I left for Tours, Touraine, France.

The Rabelaisian enthusiasm was still upon me. I had just issued a
translation (called “Fantastic Tales”) of that extraordinary and
enigmatic book, “Le Moyen de Parvenir,” by Beroalde de Verville, who
was a canon of Tours Cathedral. So to Touraine I went; to see the
land of Rabelais, of Beroalde, of Balzac. And the odd thing is, that
my first Sunday afternoon in Tours--I got there on a Saturday--was
a severe disappointment. The fact was that I had taken Doré’s
wonderful illustrations to the “Contes Drolatiques” for granted.
I supposed that the enchanted heights, the profound and sombre
valleys, the airy abysses of these amazing plates represented, with
a little exaggeration, perhaps, the veritable scenery of Touraine.
You remember the picture showing how that sinful little page
climbed the heights of Marmoutiers to confess his sin to the Abbot?
Well, that Sunday afternoon, early in September, 1890, I set out
from the Faisan, in the Rue Royale, to see the tremendous ascent
of Marmoutiers. I crossed the bridge over the Loire, most of it
sand with a swift stream here and there, and arrived at Portillon,
where the conductor of the steam tram was calling out “Marmoutiers,
Rochecorbon, Vouvray” in a melodious chant. But I walked along the
road to Marmoutiers. Alas! there were no terrific heights, as in the
picture. Imagine something like the high ground near the river at
Henley; nothing higher, nothing as high. Instead of the dark green
woods of Henley, golden rocks and golden earth shining in a very
happy sun; little villas, larger villas, everywhere with gardens
that were gardens indeed. Green walled closes, with rich green
lawns; fountains in the midst of them, flowering shrubs and flowery
creepers blossoming and trailing everywhere; kitchen gardens where
the peaches glowed and burned dark against the hot white walls, where
the pears on the dwarf trees were as shapes of golden honey: at
last the old _clôture_ of the Abbey of Marmoutiers with pepper-pot
turrets at intervals, close to the road, and inside the enclosure,
the modern buildings of a convent school: and the mellow, river cliff
behind all. It was delightful; but it was not a bit like Doré. I
confess, my heart sank. And then going on by the river road, I got
to Rochecorbon. Still the warm cliff overhung the road, underneath
it a small hamlet with a tavern, “A la Lanterne de Rochecorbon,” and
perched on the edge of the cliff the Lantern, an odd structure which
looked something like an ancient factory chimney, and was, I suppose,
the sole relic of the ancient castle celebrated by Balzac. It took me
some time before I could get Dora’s Touraine out of my mind and enjoy
the Touraine of actuality on its own merits. And these are many.
There were great moments on this first visit to the garden of France.

I was staying at the Faisan in the Rue Royale--that street which
Balzac, who was born in it, praises as being “always royal, always
imperial,” which in these later days has taken to calling itself the
Rue Nationale--a delicious inn indeed. I got the recommendation from
Thackeray. Philip stayed there once. He calls it the “Faisan d’Or.”
It had three courtyards, or rather a courtyard and two gardens,
both closed in by the hotel walls. You entered the courtyard under
the archway in the Rue Royale; to the left was the dining-room hung
with tapestries depicting in an ancient mode the famous castles of
Touraine; on the right was the kitchen, all bright with glowing
copper pots, and the big round cook standing at the open door or
bending over his furnace, occasionally shaking one of his pots
knowingly and beaming on you as you sat at your little table in the
courtyard as much as to say: “You will find it good.” Around this
great man were four or five boys, all in white like their chief, who
seemed to be busy all day long in washing vegetables, in chopping
meat and herbs fine for _farses_, in manifold culinary employments,
running out now and again and shaking showers from bags full of
wet lettuce or endive leaves. At the back were the stables, and on
market days the yard of the Faisan was full, like an English inn
yard, of all manner of queer traps and shandridans from the country.
And beyond this courtyard, at the back of the house, were the two
gardens, secret, retired and delicious. Such green turf was there in
these chosen places, so pleasant a music in one of them of a singing
fountain, so glowing the flowers about it with the water drops
glittering on them, so sweet the shade of overhanging boughs--there
are here and there gardens that address the heart and spirit and not
the florist, as Poe knew well.

And thinking of the Faisan at Tours and of its curious delights,
how is it that much money--one may say the wealth of the whole
world--cannot buy anything like this in London? Money will get you a
set of rooms thirty feet or so in height from floor to ceiling, it
will buy you the use of suites of furniture that make you wonder when
you wake up in the morning whether by any chance you can have turned
into Louis XV in your sleep; it will buy you bathrooms all marble and
tessellated pavement, dining-rooms as marblous and Louisquinzious as
your private suites; but delights such as are afforded by the Faisan
at Tours it will by no means buy. It is a pity; at least I think so.
But then I can never fancy that I am Louis XV even for a moment, and
that, I suppose, is the reason why I don’t like living in the style
of that monarch, why I don’t even like lunching or dining in palatial
halls built and furnished in his favourite manner. And I doubt
whether the grandest of all grand hotels in our London could furnish
you with a bottle of Vouvray Nature of a named _clos_, for any money
that your millionaire’s purse could proffer.

And the mention of that admirable amber wine of Vouvray, the wine
wherein an argent bead rises at intervals through the mellow gold,
reminds me of my first night at the Faisan. All down the tables were
portly decanters of wine, red and white. I chose red, and found it
a new sensation in wine vastly to my taste. It was, of course, an
ordinary wine, and a little wine, I think of the kind called Joué
Noble, from the place of its growth, a parish by the Cher river. It
was scented like flowers in June; it was in its entirely unpretending
way quite exquisite. I drank it with relish, and towards the end of
dinner I had accounted for about three-parts of the decanter. Swiftly
came the head waiter and bore it away and as swiftly put another and
a full decanter in its place. It was almost too much; “temperance”
enthusiasts would say a great deal too much. I thought solemnly to
myself as I smoked a grateful pipe after dinner in the courtyard:
“This night I have had as much good red wine as ever I could drink.”
And this was one of the great moments of my visit to Touraine.

And then there was Chinon. The train passes through the deep darkness
of Chinon Forest, and you leave the station and come out into the
sunlight. Here is a narrow river valley: the clear Vienne in the
middle of it; to the left a gently rising land, rich with vines;
to the right a long, golden, precipitous cliff, golden in such a
sunlight as we never see in England. As in the backgrounds of the old
Italian masters, the trees stand out clearly, vividly, distinctly
against the sky; so was it at Chinon. That long, mouldering and
golden cliff was surmounted by the walls of the old castle, golden
and mouldering also, irradiated; and from the river to the cliff the
town climbed up; narrow ways, winding ways, steep ways, and every
here and there the grey-blue _tourelles_ of the fifteenth-century
houses piercing upwards; and the dark mass of the forest stretching
far and far away beyond. And then the thought that the man who had
received one of the great visions of reality once walked these ways,
and looked on a scene that had not much changed since his time; that
the golden and rich sunlight had shone on him also, in the hour when
the amazing, terrible, tremendous figures and symbols of the vision
of Pantagruel, Panurge, Friar John, the three who are yet one came to
him, we must conjecture, in clouds and darkness and uncertainties,
as he listened to the new song of the vineyards, and the vine and
the outpoured wine: all this was made a great moment also. I sat
on a sort of bridge--if I remember--joining the two parts of the
ruined castle, sat on golden stones, and looked down on the Chinon
of the grey-blue _tourelles_, on the shining Vienne, and the gentle
vine-covered slope, and I thought of the cloudy young man stumbling
over that hard French of Rabelais far into the night, in obscure
Clarendon Road, long ago. It was not long ago; this was of ’90 and
that was of ’85, but hard pains make long years. I went down the hill
again, past the fountain, and drank the red wine of Chinon solemnly,
reverently in a dark tavern in one of the dark, narrow streets. It
was called “Le Caveau de Rabelais.”

       *       *       *       *       *

I came back to London in the autumn and took rooms in Guilford Street
till that cottage on the Chilterns should be ready for occupation.
Then from 1891 I lived in the country, and found it nothing, and
came back to London in the autumn of 1893, to an “upper part” in
Great Russell Street, a little westward of the British Museum. It was
then that I began to explore London, and to realise its vastness,
its immensities. Things are relative; I began now to appreciate
the fact that if you set out, without a map, from your house at 36
Great Russell Street and walk for an hour eastward or northward
you are in fact in an unknown region, a new world. Continually you
stand on a peak in Darien, and look out on undiscovered territories,
inhabited by peoples of whom you know nothing. I would go along
Great Russell Street, and turn up into Russell Square, and then go
by Guilford Street, crossing Gray’s Inn Road, and so find myself,
like the knight in the song, “ten leagues beyond the wide world’s
end.” I would go northward, up the Gray’s Inn Road, and then turn
to the right, descend into a valley and climb a height and so come
to a region which was to me as the ultimate parts of Libya, and the
lands of the Mountains of the Moon. I shall never forget the awe with
which I first came upon the other Baker Street, the Baker Street
which would enter no taxi-driver’s mind; those houses climbing up the
hill into Lloyd Square, stucco houses with classic pediments, but
all tottering, askew, and falling into decay; the jerry building of
1820–30. And, I remember, seeing on one of the leaning and doubtful
doors here the brass plate of someone who said that he was a “Buhl
Maker.” I wonder. Did someone really labour in this forsaken,
climbing street in that rich eighteenth-century art of brass and
tortoiseshell, fashioning curious cabinets and escritoires! How
unlikely it seemed; more unlikely than another announcement on a
modest door in the recesses of Camden Town, to the effect that here
were made Shell Boxes.

Often I went up Baker Street and stood in Lloyd’s Square and looked
down on London, on Gilbert Scott’s horrible, villainous sham-Gothic
St. Pancras Station and on all the vague, smoky, weary streets
about it. Here, one evening, the sun flamed suddenly and struck the
windows of a school below and lit fires in them: hence the lines--in
“A Fragment of Life”--entitled: “Lines written on looking down from a
Height in London on a Board School suddenly lit up by the sun.”

And here I would say that the matter of Wonder--that is the matter of
the arts--is everywhere offered to us. It is, I am sure, true, as the
feeble though pious Keble wrote, that:

    The daily round, the common task
    Will furnish all we need to ask.

And it is utterly true that he who cannot find wonder, mystery, awe,
the sense of a new world and an undiscovered realm in the places by
the Gray’s Inn Road will never find those secrets elsewhere, not in
the heart of Africa, not in the fabled hidden cities of Tibet. “The
matter of our work is everywhere present,” wrote the old alchemists,
and that is the truth. All the wonders lie within a stone’s-throw of
King’s Cross Station.

I remember that when, later on, I wrote a book on the principles
of literary criticism called “Hieroglyphics,” a good many of the
reviewers found grave fault with my dictum that all fine literature
is the work of ecstasy and the inspirer of ecstasy. “In other
words,” said these clever fellows, “a good book is a book that you
happen to like. But other people may have very different tastes
and likings; no doubt many people experience ecstasy in reading a
newspaper feuilleton. Is the feuilleton therefore fine literature?”
The objection, I hasten to say, is perfectly legitimate. Tens of
thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people, I have no doubt, read
the newspaper feuilleton in an ecstasy of delight. I once found
myself, to my dumb, almost awestruck horror, in a drawing-room where
a number of tolerably well-educated people were engaged in taking
the works of ... well, Miss Thingumbob, seriously. Doubtless, then,
there are many people who find rarities and wonders in matter that
you and I pronounce to be contemptible or detestable or just nothing
at all: my reviewers were perfectly right. But if you accept their
ruling you put an end to criticism of all sorts. I could form a large
company of coalheavers, financiers, sporting noblemen, gardeners,
journalists, ladies of quality, actors, scavengers--I was going to
add bishops, but they rarely speak the honest truth--and myself who
had very much rather not see the famous Primavera and the famous
Monna Lisa Gioconda than see them, who had rather--again I include
myself--listen to George Robey’s songs and gags and wheezes than to
“Hamlet.” But what does that prove? Simply, I suppose, that so far
as the pictures and the play are concerned my friends and myself
cannot rise to these particular heights. As an old friend of mine
once observed very well, “We all of us have some windows that are
darkened.” My friend is a musician, and remembering his maxim, I
was much diverted one day by hearing him speak with easy contempt
of the composer of “Acis and Galatea.” But it is true that each one
of us has some darkened windows: Oscar Wilde confessed to me once,
with shame be it said, that he thought absinthe a detestable drink.
But no inference can be drawn from this undoubted fact. It always
stirs in me a certain feeling of impatience when I see the solemn
correspondence, the more solemn leading articles under the dread
heading, “What is Wrong with the Church?” It is alleged, I am sure
with complete truth, that a great many people do not go to church;
and the conclusion is drawn that the Church must be very gravely
at fault. Now this may be true also--I think it is--but it is a
conclusion not to be deduced from the minor premiss, the sole premiss
stated. Scholastic logic, the only logic that is worth twopence, the
“new logic” being, as an Oxford graduate once very sensibly observed
to me, merely “nonsense about things,” is now unfashionable, so,
I suppose I shall be thought somewhat boorish for exhibiting the
newspaper syllogism at full length, supplying the suppressed major.
But here it is:

That which is unpopular is worthless.

The Church is unpopular.

Therefore, the Church is worthless. In other words, as one of the
ladies in the cabrioily--to which I have already alluded--observed:
“Most Votes carries the day.” Very well; but how does the attendance
on the pictures in the National Gallery compare with the attendance
at “the pictures”? And shall we try the experiment of “knocking”
the music-halls, the revue houses and the musical comedy houses by
running Bach’s Organ and Clavier Fugues at popular prices? Perhaps
the purse of Rockefeller might survive the experiment; certainly
no other purse would hold anything after a year of it. Mr. Walkley
of “The Times” proposes to solve the difficulty of criticism by
making the critic address himself to ὁ χαρίεις, the well-graced and
accomplished man. But who is he? Each one of us is a good judge--in
his own judgment. And technical instruction is nothing. No one in his
senses would seek anything vital as to Greek or Latin poetry from a
classical don at Oxford or Cambridge. Keats, poor, shabby John, who
had only been to a commercial academy, knew more about Greek poetry
than a wilderness of classical tutors.

But, I was going to say, all these considerations apply to the known
and recognised arts, to literature, music, painting, architecture.
In all these I am willing to admit I may be hopelessly wrong--I
have said that I had much rather hear Robey than “Hamlet”--but I
will listen to no objections or criticisms as to the Ars Magna of
London, of which I claim to be the inventor, the professor and the
whole school. Here I am artist and judge at once, and possess the
whole matter of the art within myself. For, let it be quite clearly
understood, the Great Art of London has nothing to do with any map
or guide-book or antiquarian knowledge, admirable as these are; and
indeed Peter Cunningham’s “London” is to me one of the choicest of
books. But the Great Art is a matter of quite another sphere; and
as to maps, for example, if known they must be forgotten. How would
the Odyssey have read, do you imagine, if Ulysses had been furnished
with Admiralty Charts, giving the soundings in fathoms, even to the
exact depth of water in the harbourage of Calypso’s isle? And all
historical associations; they too must be laid aside. Mr. Pickwick
at Bury St. Edmunds has nothing to do with the history of the famous
abbey. Of all this the follower of the London Art must purge himself
when he sets out on his adventures. For the essence of this art is
that it must be an adventure into the unknown, and perhaps it may be
found that this, at last, is the matter of all the arts.

And it was this art of London that I followed, while I lived in
Great Russell Street between ’93 and ’95, and still more earnestly
afterwards when I was living at Verulam Buildings, Gray’s Inn.
Sometimes I took a friend with me on my journeys, but not often.
The secret of it all was hidden from them, and they were apt to
become violent. On one grey day that I remember I had personally
conducted a man on a most interesting exploration of the obscurer
by-ways of Islington. He grew silent as the streets grew greyer
and the squares dimmer and the remoteness of the whole region from
any conceivable London that he knew filtered through his soul. His
London was Piccadilly, the Haymarket, St. James’s, and the many
polite neighbourhoods where there are flats and calls are paid and
tea is taken and literary and theatrical and artistic circles meet
and gather. But this London that was a grey wilderness, these streets
that went to the beyond and beyond, these squares which nobody that
my friend could ever have known could ever inhabit: it was all too
much for him. His face darkened with terror and hate, and with a
poisonous glance at me he struck his golden-headed cane violently on
the pavement, and stopping dead, exclaimed: “I wish to God I could
see a hansom!”

So, of course, I never took him to Barnsbury. As for Brentford,
that is the Great Magisterium, the Hidden Secret. There is a Secret
Society of those initiated in Brentford, and so darkly is the mystery
kept that there have been cases in which members have known each
other intimately for twenty years before the passwords have been
exchanged.




_Chapter V_


I have been talking of rooms in Gray’s Inn, of trips to Touraine; and
I suppose it will have become evident that the days of the Clarendon
Road cell, of dry bread and green tea meals were over. This was, in
fact, the case. Between ’87 and ’92 I “came into money,” that is,
into what I called money. My mother died in 1885, my father in 1887;
distant and ancient relatives in Scotland who had lived to fabulous
ages died at last, and thus moneys that should have come to my
mother came to me. And I was no longer the lonely man of the earlier
chapters.

Reckoning up the various sums which I inherited, I calculate that
if they had been invested I should have had enough whereon to live
narrowly and meanly for the next thirty years. Somewhere about 1921
a long lease would have fallen in, and two-thirds of my income would
have disappeared. I should then have been left with sixty pounds
a year at the outside, and even with the “aconomy” recommended by
Captain Costigan, there is very little to be done in these days with
£60 per annum. But I did not invest my fortune in sound securities.
Perhaps I might have done so if it had fallen in a lump on my lap;
but this was not the way of it. It came in bits and parcels: £700
one year, £500 eighteen months afterwards. So I adopted the simple,
manly course of putting my money as I got it into a box, as it were,
and dipping my hand into the box when I needed a few gold pieces. I
wish it were possible to do this literally: it must be magnificent
to live on a chestful of gold; but I compromised by getting a
cheque-book.

And I have always been glad that I made this business-like
arrangement. By it I was enabled to live for eleven or twelve
years under pleasant and humane conditions. Not in luxury, be it
understood, for luxury has always been utterly detestable to me.
Detestable to me, I say with emphasis; I do not say that luxury is
detestable in itself. If men like to have it so, by all means let
them dwell in marble halls, with vassals and serfs and wine-stewards
at their side. Let them be as Louisquinzious as ever they please in
their homes and at their hotels; for all I care, they may take their
ease in snuggeries, all gold and mirrors and marbles, fifty feet
high, a hundred feet high, if they like it so. But to me, a poor
clerk, all this has ever been nauseous. When I plied my sorry trade
of journalist, I disliked most things involved in that vile business,
but I hated my occasional missions to the Hôtel Splendide and the
Hôtel Glorieux. I would be sent to these places to find out, say, the
exact method employed by the new chef, M. Mirobolant, in cooking red
herrings for the famous Joy Teas in the Venetian Hall--everybody has
heard of the Joy Teas at the Splendide, and of the Joy Band of twenty
kettle-drums, fifty tea-trays, ten trombones and thirty bassoons.
Well, I would be sent to the Splendide on this errand; or, perhaps,
to the Glorieux to find out whether it were true that the principals
of the Russian Ballet sucked their morning tea through raspberry jam
and declared that this was necessary to their art. I would visit
one or other of these establishments and sit down on Louis Quinze
or Louis Seize chairs and wait there in my dingy old cloak, while
“Reception” and “Enquiries” smiled to see such an incongruous figure
before them, while the guests of the hotel smiled also as they
went in and out, till at last the manager arrived, fretful enough,
usually, at being dragged from his business or his leisure to answer
idiotic questions. I used to wonder on these Splendide or Glorieux
days what I had done to deserve such humiliations. The only thing
that somewhat consoled me was the thought that, whatever pains the
Doctor may have suffered, while he waited in Lord Chesterfield’s
outward rooms or was repulsed from that nobleman’s door, my case was
more humiliating still, since an English nobleman of race is a much
greater personage than the shiniest of hotel managers. And perhaps,
also, I fancied that I was beginning to follow a little in the
faithful steps of Venerable Raymondus Anglus, who was slowly sliced
into little pieces in Cathay.

Rather, I am afraid, in the steps of a relative of my own, some
distant Cousin Machen, whom business, I suppose, took to Cathay in
the ’fifties and ’sixties of the last century. It so fell out that
while this gentleman was in China we declared one of our infamous
Opium Wars against the Dragon Throne and the Vermilion Pencil.
Promptly the local mandarin seized Cousin Machen and put him in a
cage. They then travelled him round the Chinese “Smalls.” When the
cortège got to a village or town, my cousin’s custodians touched him
up smartly with their spears. Cousin Machen would then dance with
anguish, and, I am sure, most ungracefully, and the happy villagers,
howling with mirth, and voting Cousin Machen good goods, would pelt
the poor man with undesirable matters. He got away from them, but I
have heard my relations say that in extreme old age the mere word
“China” was enough to bring a sweat of horror pouring down his face.
And I am in a position to sympathise fully with Cousin Machen----

Well, I was saying, I think, that I never cared for luxury, and
so did not waste my bit of money on it. But if luxury tempts me
not at all, I care a great deal for homely comfort, and I lived in
considerable comfort in the days of which I am speaking. I think that
my annual budget was between four and five hundred a year, and let
me tell an amazed generation that for five hundred a year or rather
less two people could live very sufficiently in the ’eighties and
’nineties. Your saddle of mutton and your sirloin of beef were of
the best, lamb at Easter--is there anything better than spring lamb
with its skin roasted to a golden-brown?--was easily attainable;
fowls and ducks, grouse and partridges and pheasants, with now and
then that most delicious bird the woodcock, were no rarities. And
asparagus might well appear quite early in the spring, and green peas
in advance of the main crop. And sometimes one felt that it would be
amusing to go out to dinner for a change: well, the bill of the Soho
restaurant never gave an indigestion afterwards. Sometimes the Soho
dinners were quite good, they were always amusing; and in those days
there was such a thing as decent Chianti. It came to the cheerful
table in flasks of very thin glass, and between the cork and the wine
was a stratum of olive oil. This the waiter flicked off on to the
linoleum with a swift gesture. The last Chianti of this order that I
tasted was in 1902. I saw great gallon flasks of it standing in the
window of a small shop opposite the stage door of the Palace, and
bought one of these flasks--it cost six shillings, if I remember--and
bore it tenderly to my dressing-room at the St. James’s Theatre. It
was the last night of “Paolo and Francesca,” and we drank the Chianti
merrily in trunk hose and armour when the play was done. And Herbert
Dansey, who was really a noble Florentine, “degli Tassinari,” vowed
you could get no better Chianti in all Tuscany.

Or again, one didn’t fancy roast beef, and yet one didn’t want to
go out dining. There was the middle course; Salame or Mortadella,
half a round of ripe Brie and a bottle of a sufficient red or white
wine. And a half-bottle of Benedictine only cost four-and-six. And
the whole of the small banquet ran into very little: they were
cheap days, and the Income Tax was inconsiderable then. But I was
forgetting. I had no income, so I saved the expense of the tax.
And under these conditions, living very pleasantly, with a month
in France every year, I cultivated literature between 1890–1900.
I refrained, utterly, I am glad to say, from the impious folly of
wondering what would happen when the money should have come to an
end. When that day came, why, that day could see to it.

Living very pleasantly; that is, apart from my chosen sport of making
books. I have already discussed the strange paradox of writing, of
writing, that is, when it is entirely divorced from all commercial
considerations. I wrote purely to please myself; and what a queer
pleasure it was! To write, or to try to write, means involving
oneself in endless difficulties, contrarieties, torments, despairs,
and yet I wrote on, and I suppose for the reason which I have given,
the necessity laid upon most of us to create another and a fantastic
life in order that the life of actuality may be endurable. Look at
the golfer: observe how he toils and frets in that fantastic world
that he has made for himself, a world wherein he who can say, “I did
the fourth hole in two” is happy; while the wretch who had to hit the
little white ball six or seven times before it finally popped into
that fourth hole goes out wretchedly into the night. It is fantastic
nonsense; but for all that the golfers are in the right.

Still, there may be a little more in the sport of literature; and
if the golfers feel hurt by this remark, let them remember that a
man always praises his own game. We understand so little of the real
scheme of things that, for all we know, golf may be the end for which
man was made, as, according to Coleridge, snuff was the final term of
the human nose. But waiving this possibility--I think a remote one--I
would contend that literature has more in it on the whole. Being an
art as well as a sport, there is a question of making something, and
very occasionally of making something that will divert or enchant
others, besides the maker; whereas the sport which is nothing but
a sport has no such by-products as “Don Quixote” or “Pickwick.” Of
course the man who plays a game, such as golf or cricket, often gives
pleasure--or amusement, at all events--to many spectators; but when
the match is over and the last ball bowled nothing permanent remains.
So far as others are concerned the player of games is much in the
position of the player of plays. The actor thrills the house or rocks
it with laughter; but the curtain falls and all is over. We know that
the best judges of the eighteenth century found Garrick natural,
simple, affecting; but we know no more. We have pictures of Garrick
in his favourite situations; but I at least have no distinct image in
my mind of what it was really like to be in the front row of the pit
at Drury Lane and see and hear Garrick play.

And, this apart, I cannot help thinking that the pleasures of the
literary game are more intense and more exquisite than the pleasures
of the other games. I know this is a very difficult question; there
is no final answer to it. But I feel sure that the happiness of
Charles Dickens on writing the last words of “David Copperfield” was
greater than the happiness of the cricketer at Lord’s who carries
out his bat for a faultless innings of two hundred against the most
difficult bowling and the best fielding in England. I do not know
that this is so, but I conjecture that it is so, chiefly because
the joys of the writer of a great romance are so varied and so
complex in comparison with the joys of the man who has played a
perfect innings. In a sense, perhaps, the first-rate cricketer has
achieved the more perfect performance: he has met every difficulty
splendidly, his judgment as to running has been impeccable, he has
not given a single chance. The writer, on the other hand, is--I think
we may say--never perfect: consider those last chapters of “Don
Quixote”; consider Steerforth and that infernal ... woman, Agnes; the
Grandfather and Little Nell. Yet the man of the book has traversed
such an infinitely wider region than the man of the bat and ball:
he has perhaps rectified the work of the Creator and made himself
anew and made himself much better; and so he has worked with all
the world, fashioning a new life, discovering wonders where before
there were no wonders, shewing secrets that had been hidden from the
foundation of things, peering now and again, as Poe and Hawthorne
peered, into the places of thick darkness, and, above all, voyaging
into the unknown, perpetually climbing the steep white track that
vanishes over the hill.




_Chapter VI_


We are, I think, in the period 1890–1900; or, perhaps, to be more
accurate, let us say 1889–1899. Between these dates I made a
translation of “Le Moyen de Parvenir,” an early seventeenth-century
book by an odd follower of Rabelais. I wrote “The Great God Pan,”
“The Inmost Light,” “The Three Impostors,” “The Hill of Dreams,”
a short collection of experiments called “Ornaments in Jade,”
“Hieroglyphics,” “The White People,” the first part of “A Fragment of
Life,” and “The Red Hand.” As I have said, I had inherited a little
capital and spent it, and at ample leisure wrote these books and
tales, instead of doing honest work. In the words of some character
in “The Three Impostors,” I regarded my various legacies as an
endowment of research.

Now, as to the first title on this list, I was inspired to translate
“Le Moyen de Parvenir” by that earlier Rabelaisian enthusiasm, which
had lasted on. I found the book (in the original edition, I think),
a little dumpy volume, while I was in the employment of a firm of
second-hand booksellers who lived not far from Leicester Square. I
have been called a modest man in an after-dinner speech, and I hope
I am one; but I am sure I was modest in 1888. For, finding that I
could not get a “rise” on the £60 a year which York Street afforded
me, I tried Leicester Square and asked as much as £80; thirty
shillings a week. I think the firm were amused; but they gave it me,
and I set about cataloguing books for them.

I did this under odd conditions. When I made my application, the
Brothers--let us say--took me down to the place in the basement where
my work would have to be done. Once, I suppose, it had been the
underground back-kitchen of the house. The kitchen was occupied by
two other employees of the firm. One of them kept the accounts; the
other treated “foxed” plates and pages in baths and made them fresh
again, and “grangerised” and packed up books that had been bought.
And the kitchen had the illumination from the solid glass over which
people walked as they passed the shop, and some sort of air from the
outer world. But my workshop had neither one nor the other. Save for
gas, it was in total darkness. Its air was dead. And the House asked
me very fairly whether I thought I could stand it. I said I could,
and so I went to work.

I was never any good at cataloguing, real, technical cataloguing. I
was explaining the other day to a friend of mine, a most accomplished
and learned cataloguer, how I despised his work. “This business,”
I said, “of putting little slanty lines between the words of a
title-page. A pitiable job,” I proceeded, “it must be so since I
could never make anything of it.” But, the truth is, I never had any
heart for the work. I don’t care twopence whether a book is in the
first edition or in the tenth; nay, if the tenth is the best edition,
I would rather have it. To me it appears mere childishness to
consider whether Lowndes--I think that is one of the authorities--has
seen three copies of some particular book or three hundred; the
only question being: is the book worth reading or not? Then, when
it comes to measuring an Elzevir, say, with a graduated rule, and
pronouncing a little book three inches and a half high to be a “tall
copy,” my common sense revolts. In other words, I am sure that
Bibliography is a capital game, but it is not my game. I disliked
my work of cataloguing; but I loathed another branch of my work,
that was indexing. Everybody knows about “grangerising.” You take a
book, say, Smith’s “Life of Nollekens.” In it many eighteenth-century
personages are mentioned, and many London streets and public places.
The indexer has to read through the book, noting every person, every
place, and compile an index. And on this index the grangeriser, the
bookseller, goes to work hunting his stock of plates, hunting certain
well-known sources for pictures with which he can stuff the original
work. He will destroy a dozen or a hundred or a thousand other books
of less value to produce a kind of monster: “The Life of Nollekens,”
by Joseph Smith, 1 vol., 8vo., 17--. Enlarged to 3 vols. quarto, and
furnished with 250 extra illustrations, comprising portraits, views,
plans, maps, and original and facsimile letters from Blank, Dash,
Chose, and other famous persons of the period. Purple Levant Morocco
Jansenist; in watered purple silk case, gilt. Price: A great deal.

There. I am afraid I have forgotten the trick of the business and my
friend the expert cataloguer will say that it is a good thing indeed
that I have changed my trade; but it is something like that. Well,
indexing is a horrible job; a weariness, a nuisance; a matter of
covering the table with innumerable little slips of paper that flow
over on to the floor; and one must be careful and accurate, and I
have always hated being careful, and accurate--unless I happen to be
interested in what I am doing. Besides, I hold that “grangerising”
is both barbarous and silly. So I didn’t like my work, but I liked
the Brothers. They were always most courteous. Near our establishment
was a shop where a very old gentleman sold precious things. His
shop windows were made of small squares of glass. Above them was
an inscription to the effect that the firm were “Goldsmiths and
Silversmiths to Their Majesties the King and Queen and to Her Royal
Highness the Duchess of Kent.” And the old gentleman who kept this
shop wore what we call evening-dress all day long, and advanced to
meet his customers with an inclined head, his hands clasped together.
The Brothers were a good deal younger, but they were of the same
school. They had a way of putting things. For example, Brother
Charles was trying to teach me how to catalogue their very beautiful
collection of French eighteenth-century illustrated books, the sort
of books that have illustrations by Fragonard.

“And if, Mr. Machen,” said Brother Charles, “if it strikes you that
any of these plates are brilliant impressions--well, we have no
objection to your saying so.”

It may be mentioned that the firm dealt occasionally in works which
would not be suitable for the “center table” of a New England
parlour. For themselves, for their own private taste, they read
George Eliot and thought her by far the greatest novelist that the
English Nation had ever produced. I am sure that they would have held
“Peregrine Pickle”--save in the rare first impression--to be a low
book, and Dickens, I conjecture, would have struck them as funny and
vulgar. But, still, selling books was their business, and it was not
their affair as booksellers to censor the morals of the works they
sold. They dealt in rare books.

Well, one morning as I walked down from Great Russell Street to the
shop, I was reading of the trial and conviction of a minor bookseller
of Charing Cross Road. This Mr. Jackson, or whatever his name was,
had been found guilty of selling obscene books, and had been sent
to gaol, for nine months, if I remember. I mentioned the matter to
Brother Ned as I entered.

“You’ve seen about Jackson?” I said.

“Yes, Mr. Machen,” said Brother Ned, with a certain moral austerity
of demeanour that was new to me. “We _have_ seen about Mr. Jackson,
and we wish to state at once that we have no sympathy with Mr.
Jackson; none whatever. There is a _right_ way, Mr. Machen, of doing
these things and a _wrong_ way.”

Mr. Jackson, I may say, did not deal in rare books. His prices were
low, he appealed to the general public. I hasten to add that on the
whole I sympathise with the Brothers on this matter. And I add also:
that after more recent experiences of mine I am very loath to find
fault with any persons who treat those in their employment as human
beings, with the decent civilities, courtesies and considerations
that are befitting between man and man. In those days I had no
knowledge of the anthropoids; still, I appreciated the pleasant
treatment I received.

Yet, with all their pleasant manners, I am afraid that the Brothers
did not find in me the ideal cataloguer. Anyhow, one day Brother Ned
came down to my darksome place with a queer little quarto in his
hand, a quarto in a dull paper wrapper. He had it open, marked with a
slip of paper, at a certain page, and so far as I remember, without
any particular preface or explanation, he asked me to begin making
a translation of the work from that point. I said: “Certainly, Mr.
Edward,” and began to translate without more ado.

And here I may say that my career as a French translator has always
struck me as highly humorous. At the good old grammar school where
I was educated and educated very well, I think that the headmaster
thoroughly agreed with the boys that Foreign Languages were a
silly game that, for various reasons, one had to play. Education
was Latin and Greek, but a notion had arisen in these late days
that one ought to learn French, and so there was a French master.
But he wore neither cap nor gown, and so he was not a real master,
and so, again, his language was not a real language. Therefore:
poor M. Ménard! And I am afraid that he was a very bad master. If
his authority had been supported, and if we had tried our best, I
do not think we should have learned much; as it was, the French
lessons, three times a week, were a farce. I knew no French when I
left Hereford Cathedral School in 1880, that is, I could not have
conjugated the verb _Aimer_ to save my life. I had read no French to
speak of. Then, in my desolation in Clarendon Road, I had somehow
come across “Gil Blas” and had managed, being interested, to get
through it. Then, the York Street publisher had sent me down the
sixteenth-century “Heptameron” and had ordered me to translate it,
and I did so, somehow. And now, Brother Ned ordered me to translate
from the dumpy quarto which he handed me; and forthwith I set about
translating, not troubling what it was, what it was about, not caring
two straws that I had not the thread of the narrative, nor worrying
over the fact that I knew nothing whatever about the enigmatic
“M.M.” or the mysterious “C.C.” into whose singular adventures I now
plunged gaily. Thus I began the translation of the famous “Memoirs
of Casanova,” and I think the money balance between the Brothers
and myself was readjusted. For if I had been dear as a cataloguer,
at thirty shillings a week, I was decidedly cheap as a translator.
Casanova is a work that runs into twelve sizeable volumes, and the
task of turning it into English took me a year, and I think the cost
to the firm will be held to have been strictly moderate.

And what about these strange Memoirs of the charlatan adventurer?
Well, not long ago I was called upon to write an introduction to a
reissue of the version I had made in the ’eighties. I found this an
extremely difficult task. The obvious solution of the difficulty,
the writing a sort of _précis_ of the book and calling it an
Introduction, did not appeal to me. It was some time before the
“moral” of the Memoirs disengaged itself. The Introduction when
written proved to be an essay on the futility of trying to tell the
whole truth about the relations between men and women. This is what
Casanova, who was highly qualified, in a certain sense, for the
undertaking, tried to do; and the more “frank,” the more “outspoken”
his page the more the secret escapes from it; the more openly he
reveals, the more deeply he conceals the mysteries. For the fact is
that all the real secrets are ineffable; the secrets of love, and
the secrets of the wood; the secrets of the flower and the secrets
of the flame; and the secrets of the Faith. As I point out in my
Introduction, you can enumerate the scientific facts--such of them
as are known--relating to any subject. You can define a horse, for
example, as Bitzer defined it in “Hard Times.”

“Quadruped. Gramjnivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders,
four eye-teeth and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in
marshy countries sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be
shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.”

And so you may discourse of the pistils and stamens of the lilies of
the field, and divide the fowls of the air into genera and species
and sub-species and count the teeth of Keats: and when all is done,
you know--nothing. Nothing that is of the essence of your matter,
nothing of its “quiddity,” a word that we have ceased to use, I
suppose, because we have no use for it, having forgotten that there
is such a thing as that essence which is present in all things,
which indeed makes them to be what they are, which is nevertheless
unsearchable and ineffable. And all this is true, not only of the
matters which the plain man, the man in the street, is inclined to
sniff at, but of all things, of man himself and of the universe of
noumena and phenomena which is presented to him. If you talk to the
plain, practical man about Mystic Theology, Mystic Love, Poetry,
Romance, he will, very likely, brush you aside with his “In my
opinion that’s all imagination”--and serve you right for talking to
him on such subjects at all. The dear fellow has no notion of the
fact that he has never seen a point, a line, a square, or a triangle,
and that he never will see any one of these things--in this life
at all events. He has seen black marks on paper which he has been
told are lines and squares and triangles. Being at heart thoroughly
credulous, he believes what he is told, but if he will dig up his old
“Euclid” and read the definitions, he will find that no mortal eyes
can ever see a square or a circle, since a line is length without
breadth and a plane surface is length and breadth without thickness.
There is nothing in the nature of things to prevent a man from seeing
a dragon or a griffin, a gorgon or a unicorn. Nobody as a matter of
fact has seen a woman whose hair consisted of snakes, nor a horse
from whose forehead a horn projected; though very early man most
probably did see dragons--known to science as pterodactyls--and
monsters more improbable than griffins. At any rate, none of these
zoological fancies violates the fundamental laws of the intellect;
the monsters of heraldry and mythology do not exist, but there is no
reason in the nature of things nor in the laws of the mind why they
should not exist. But no man hath seen a line at any time, since the
manifestation of length without breadth is a contradiction in terms.
And the plain man is probably inclined to believe in the existence
of vulgar fractions; he may tell you that he makes use of them daily
in his calculations. But let him study the story of the race between
Achilles and the Tortoise, and note to what monstrous results his
belief in elementary arithmetic inevitably conducts him; results
which are more intolerable than a madman’s dreams.

And then, again, there are wider, more universal conceptions than
anything contained in the geometry and arithmetic books. In a little
book of mine with the bad title of “War and the Christian Faith”--the
publisher chose the title--I speak thus of Space and Time:

     “Take two insistent and unavoidable examples (of the things
     which are unsearchable and indefinable), space and time.
     No man who strolls from his arm-chair to the mantelpiece
     and watches the hands of the clock move round can deny
     the existence of either, since he has walked from point
     to point in one and seen the other measured before his
     eyes. But as to understanding space and time, what highest
     philosophy can attain to such a pitch? The limitless cannot
     so much as be imagined in the mind, nor imagined in a
     nightmare: but that space which you have traversed of some
     eight or ten feet is limitless, and must be so.

     “It is a sea without a shore. And time, that which your
     two-guinea clock ticks off for you, as you watch the dial:
     it had no beginning that you can picture; it can have no
     end save with God. You cannot understand; you must believe;
     and so on your very hearth-rug the infinites and eternities
     are before you and confront you, as truly as the clock face
     confronts you.”

And the conclusion of the whole matter is that we live and move in
a world of profound and ineffable mystery; that all things from the
most abstract to the most concrete are involved in this mystery,
and, _therefore_, that Casanova as an exponent of love is a futile
fellow. He was a Voltairean; he approached the question as he would
say without prejudices, as the foolish among us would say, without
any nonsense, or, as the still more foolish among us would say,
in a scientific spirit. And the result is exactly what might be
expected: nothing. Love is defined and expounded in the spirit of
Bitzer defining a horse; and one perceives that science misapplied is
just gibberish, nothing more or less. Otherwise, taking Casanova’s
Memoirs from a lower standpoint, they are in many places vastly
entertaining. He knew all Europe from Petersburg and Constantinople
to London and Madrid; he was familiar with the palace and the gutter;
he was the friend of Kings and philosophers and popes--and also of
the scum of the eighteenth-century earth. One cannot understand the
period as a whole without knowing Casanova.

So I translated and translated day after day; but in a few months’
time the black hole in which I worked began very violently to
disagree with me. I got ill, and it was clear that some change must
be made. The Brothers, as always, were courteous and considerate: why
not do the work at home? I assented very willingly, worked at the
task for five hours every day, and every Saturday took my parcel of
copy to the shop and got my thirty shillings, the week’s wages.

And here I must make a boast, which is not wholly a boast: the second
part of this sentence I shall explain no farther. I finished the
translation of the Memoirs, but the book was not immediately issued.
On the completion of my job the Brothers needed me no more. I imagine
that they wanted a real, expert, technical cataloguer, not a literary
man of sorts; and my having worked for them for some months at my
own home and not in the shop made it easy for them to get rid of me
quietly; rather, to let me fade away, without the least suspicion of
firmness, much less of harshness. And they were always very glad to
see me when I chose to look them up, either on business or merely as
a friendly caller. I remember, for example, that when I had finished
the translation of “Le Moyen de Parvenir” and was “subscribing” the
book with “the trade,” I called at the shop and was received with
a genial and kindly courtesy that I have not forgotten, though it
is a long time since 1890; but then I do not forget. And lest it
should be suspected by some persons that under a veil of benignity
I am “getting at” the Brothers all the time, I hasten to say that
this is not so; to say this in the strongest manner possible. True,
thirty shillings a week was not good pay for decent French-English
translating, even in 1889; but it was the wages that I had asked
myself, having been thoroughly convinced by my experiences of the
six preceding years that I was such a dismal and incapable ass that
if I just managed to escape the Governorship of the Island of Farre
Joyaunce--otherwise the ditch or the workhouse--it was as much as I
could expect. So I asked my thirty shillings a week and hoped in my
heart that it was not too much; and I am not blaming the Brothers in
the least because they did not press more upon me. And, however that
may be, they were always courteous and kindly in all communications
that passed between us; and for that they shall be in my grateful
memory so long as I live. I have said already, I think, how once
during the last year of my employment on the “Evening News,” finding
myself in old haunts of long ago, Wellington Street, Bow Street,
York Street, anguish possessed me as I remembered how I had once
starved and had known something like happiness while I toiled over
the ancient occult books in the Catherine Street garret; anguish
possessed me as I recollected the happy time in misery. And, as
I said to a friend soon afterwards: “In those days I was getting
considerably less money in a whole year than I am now getting in a
month; and yet....”

Again, I say, if our clergy would but mind their business. If instead
of enquiring into the exact cut of bodices, instead of passing
anxious hours as to the pernicious corruptions of the Fox-Trot and
the Bunny Hug, instead of working with all their hearts and souls to
make sure that no one can possibly get a glass of bitter beer after
ten o’clock, instead of unmasking the inferno of the race-course, the
utter levity of much of our railway literature; if, instead of all
this accursed drivel, cant and imbecility, they would but say Mass
and preach the Gospel, and otherwise quite abide in peace! Let them
go to the Book, and there they will find that the most horrible sin
denounced in it is neither gambling, drinking nor wantoning, but the
sin of shaming a man, of bitterly insulting him, of making him mean
in his own eyes, of making him despise his own self as something
unutterably fouled and scorned and bewrayed. What is the text?
Something like: but he that sayeth to his brother, “Thou fool,” shall
be in danger of hell fire.

I am drawing a contrast between 1889 and 1921, and hence I say that
the Brothers always treated me with the common decency due from one
human being to another, though they were rich and I was poor, though
they were men of business and I an idiot in all matters of business,
though they were masters and I was man.

And now as to the famous boast. As I said, I ceased to be in the
employment of these good men. I went into the country, up on the
Children Hills. We neither saw nor heard anything of each other. But
all the while those legacies of which I have spoken came dropping
slow, and in 1893, when I had made up my mind to return to London,
I think I must have had in bank something between three and four
thousand pounds. I was assailed by an unworthy pang of prudence, by
one of the foolish notions that the world’s people take for wisdom.
It struck me that this living on capital, taking the pieces of eight
by fistfuls out of the chest, would never do; that the money ought to
be invested, preferably in some business in which I could contribute
work as well as money. I looked about me, I advertised, I saw some
people in the City and found nothing promising from my point of view,
though I found here and there such curiosities as London, I believe,
only affords. For example, in a very dim sort of cock-loft in an
old house in the heart of the City, I hit upon a firm of general
agents who had answered my advertisement. There were two of them:
one, a young, rosy, out-in-the-open sort of man, the other elderly,
frock-coated, with a kind of dissenting beard on his chin. He talked
of the version of Horace’s odes that he was shortly bringing out at
his own expense, and discussed with me the true pronunciation of the
Latin language with much intelligence. The junior partner’s talk was
of trawling, and indeed he said that the firm was a sort of trawling
concern--in City waters.

But nothing came of it, and at last I bethought me of the Brothers.
Brother Charles was as genial as ever. He saw my point. He said: “We
are going to issue Casanova at last; why not put a thousand pounds
into that for a start?” I agreed, and the matter was settled. And
then, very nervously, with a good deal of hesitation, with a certain
difficulty in the choice of words, Brother Charles said:

“Of course, Mr. Machen, we quite recognise the ... er ...
circumstances in which you made your most admirable translation
of the book. It was ... er ... in a manner ... er ... task-work;
yes, _task-work_. Well ... the case is now, to a certain degree ...
altered; you have an interest in the prosperity of the venture, and,
in short, we rather wondered whether you would like to ... to ...
_revise_ your manuscript.”

“Mr. Charles,” I replied, “I did the job as well as I could; and I
don’t think I can make it any better.”




_Chapter VII_


Beroalde de Verville proved to be what the elder members of the
theatrical profession used to call “a pill.” Only the other day I
was reading a French account of this author. The critic said in the
course of his remarks that many people who had gone to the “Moyen
de Parvenir” in search of unpleasantness had turned back from the
quest, deterred by the difficulty of the language. And I don’t
know that it is more difficult for a modern Frenchman than for an
Englishman. It is written in a sort of Babylonish dialect which is
not exactly French though it looks like it; as Meredith looks like
English to the casual glance. And then, it is not only difficult,
but obscure; not only are the sentences queerly constructed, but the
subject-matter is of a highly dubious and cloudy character: when you
have found out what Beroalde is saying, you begin to wonder what he
is saying it about. And, then, there are bits of old dialect peppered
about this excessively odd volume. I remember coming upon two words:
“iquent hesne.” I sat down in front of them, and looked at them
from every angle. I don’t know how I found out at last that “iquent
hesne” was a sort of seventeenth-century French “Zummerzet” for
“cette chêne”--“thicky oāk.” Again the “Moyen” is thick with puns,
of the kind that used to be called in the golden days of Burlesque
“outrageous”: and the time I wasted in trying to turn these silly
French tricks into sillier English contortions! On the whole, I would
say that “Le Moyen de Parvenir” in literature is as a cathedral
constructed entirely of gargoyles would be in architecture. Rabelais
is full of gargoyles, “apes and owls and antics,” as he calls them,
on the outside of the jar. But within, as he rightly claims, there
are precious medicines, aromatic balms of singular power and virtue.
And so far as I can judge, Beroalde is all oddity and nothing else.
He cost me a year’s hard labour; the version was issued and is now
valued by collectors; and that is all that need be said.

And now--in 1890--I began to try a little journalism of the more or
less literary kind. I began, I think, by writing “Turnovers” for the
“Globe,” and miscellaneous articles for the “St. James’s Gazette,”
and at length stories for the latter paper, which was then edited by
Mr.--now Sir--Sydney Lowe. The “Globe” is extinct, the “St. James’s
Gazette” is merged and submerged in the “Evening Standard”; there
are no papers of such metal now in existence. The difference between
them and the evening papers of the day is a very simple one: the
former were meant to please the educated, the latter are designed to
entertain the uneducated, and the uneducated may be equated, very
largely indeed, with women. It is an odd paradox: there is no doubt,
I suppose, that the instruction--or, if you like, education--of women
has made immense strides in the last thirty years; and yet it is true
that when a newspaper editor says to himself: “We have an immense
number of women readers and we must see that they get what they
like,” the result is drivel. This sort of thing:

     Madame has just discovered a new craze. Jewelled clay
     pipes and shag tobacco delicately sprinkled with gold-dust
     are now quite _démodés_ when once we cross the borders of
     Balham; but my lady prides herself on her collection of
     hookahs, the water-pipes of the gorgeous East.

     It is quite the thing, I hear, amongst really smart women
     to give “Hookah Teas.” Everybody wears Oriental costume,
     and sits on cushions piled on the floor, and delicately
     draws in the aroma of the rarest Turkish Tobacco, scented
     by its passage through rosewater or lavender-water. At Lady
     Clarinda Belsize’s Hookah Tea last Wednesday, two native
     musicians played the tom-tom and the _guzla_ behind a
     curtain, or _purdah_, as I am told it is called. Of course
     _yashmaks_ were worn by all the guests.

There; it is not worth parodying. And there is another sort of
terrible tosh which deals with the doings of “The Summer Girl” and
“The Winter Girl” and “The Marathon Girl”: all of it a very feeble
imitation of the cheapest American journalism. In the ’nineties
this kind of thing existed, but it was confined to the columns of
one or two ladies’ papers. In those days, I would not say that the
editors of evening papers brought out their journals exclusively for
the benefit of the members of the best clubs of St. James’s and
Pall Mall; but I certainly should say that they had the clubs in
their mind’s eye; that they presumed a certain standard of education
and culture in their readers. All that ended when the evening
“Westminster Gazette” came to an end.

But indeed there would be little harm done if a column or two
columns or three columns were reserved for the “Hookah Tea” stuff
and the “Caravan Girl” stuff and all similar stuff. You could skip
these columns if you didn’t like them, just as I skip the racing
columns, in which I am not interested. But “the women” rule the whole
paper. Not only must the editor put in matter which he knows they
will like, he must keep out matter which he knows they won’t like.
And the result is ... the result as we know it. As the “literary
editor” of a big London paper acutely observed to me not long ago,
the case of the newspaper article is exactly as the case of chops
and steaks, beefsteak puddings and saddles of mutton that were of
old. “The women” have spoilt all. What do they know or care about
man’s food? To them there is nothing to choose between a chop fried
white and hard and greasy in the frying-pan and a chop which has
been purged of all excess by the ardent heat, beneath the gridiron,
which beneath a coat half black, half golden-brown, preserves its
delicious juices, which sizzles on the plate as William or Charles
serves it, which, opened by the eager knife, shews within a hue like
that of a blush-rose in June. These are not matters to enchant the
wayward heart of a young girl, and when once she sets foot inside
the tavern coffee-room, farewell to all such solid merits. There was
once a noble tavern called Herbert’s, famous for two generations. Men
who had spent half a lifetime in Africa or India or in the islands
of the South Seas were sustained by the thought of the beefsteak
pudding at Herbert’s. The times changed and the old tavern with them.
Going there in these later days, I used to wonder why all the meats
seemed to taste alike, why there was no distinctive and peculiar
relish about any of the dishes. I found out the reason why one day.
I had business, oddly enough, in Herbert’s kitchen. One of the cooks
shewed 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.
One night I was dining there, and a member of the party asked the
waiter to bring him some Stilton. “I beg your pardon, sir,” said the
man, “we only have _English_ cheeses.” It sounds impossible; but I
heard this with my ears. In the old days Herbert’s was exclusively
masculine in its custom; I do not know what would have happened to
that waiter then. I hardly think that his death would have been an
easy one.

But to “the women” all this is of no account. They know nothing about
man’s food, as I say, and they care less. I do not blame them; I do
not blame myself for being ignorant of the difference between Hopsac
and Gaberdine: but how would _they_ like it if I poked my nose into
their Oxford Street shops and insisted on these shops being carried
on to suit my taste?

So through this monstrous incursion of women, with the war and the
nursery hours of to-day, the old tavern life has gone; utterly and
for ever, I am afraid. A good thing has gone. The old mahogany boxes
with bright brass work and green curtains, the light twinkling in the
dark polished surfaces that were all about the room, the flaming fire
with the plates warming by it, the plain food, the best of its kind,
cooked in the best possible manner, the mighty tankards of mighty
ale, the port that _was_ port afterwards, in itself a great gift
and a curious grace, and later--say about eleven o’clock--Charles
appearing with a large china bowl and a bottle under his arm,
following up these things with lump sugar, lemons, and the hot water:
it is all over. And it is not only the good material things that have
been taken away: the good meats and the good drinks, the glowing
mahogany and the cheerful blaze and crackle of the fire: with them
has gone, I suspect, a certain genial habit of the mind and soul
which was congruous with all the circumstances of the old-fashioned
tavern, which was congruous also with good men and good books and
choice poetry, with all the rich zest and relish and unction which
made the Victorian age of letters a great age; and, in its measure,
a worthy successor to three other illustrious tavern ages: the
Shakespearian, the Caroline, and the Johnsonian. Think of Falstaff
and his tavern bill and his warning against thin potations, think of
Herrick and his address to Ben, his fond remembrance of the taverns
“where we such clusters had as made us nobly wild not mad,” think
of Johnson squeezing the orange into the bowl with antick gestures,
saying “Who’s for _poonsh_?” think of Tennyson and that blest pint of
port at the vanished Cock Tavern, think of Dickens, that great lover
of tavern feasts and immortaliser of them: think of all this, my poor
young man, and beat your breast. There are no jolly taverns for you,
and your favourite authors do not write like men--“my son Cartwright
writes all like a man,” said Ben Jonson--but like psycho-analytical
chemists.

And as I was saying, as with the taverns, so with the papers. When
I wrote a little for them, in 1890 or thereabouts, it was allowable
to assume a certain amount of literacy, a certain knowledge in
the reader. Now that is over. I know the case of a man who, I am
certain, pretends ignorance that he may continue to be employed. As
it happens, he is an expert in food and drink; but I have known him
number Beaujolais with the wines of Bordeaux in a newspaper article,
and speak of curry powder and pickles as ordinary ingredients in veal
and ham pie. I believe he knows much better; but he has probably
found out that a misstatement or two gives an easy careless air that
is much admired. Nobody can call a writer of this kind a pedant. A
highly accomplished journalist said to me a few years ago: “Always
remember that we appeal, not to the cabman, but to the cabman’s
wife.” And another instance, though I am afraid it is somewhat tinged
with self-praise. I had written a brief article for the “Evening
News” on a topic that had been given to me; I was to explain _why_
it is that a “mean street” of to-day is, generally, hideous and
appalling, while a row of sixteenth-century cottages is, generally,
a delight to see. I did as I always do when I can, I took the
particular instance and placed it under a general principle. I said
the chief horror of the modern street was not to be sought in the
poverty of the design, though that was, doubtless, bad enough, but
in the fact that in the street of to-day each house is a replica of
the other, so that the effect to the eye is, if the street be long
enough, the prolongation of one house to infinity, in an endless
series of repetitions. And I pointed out that even if you admired
some particular picture or statue immensely, it would be rather awful
to traverse a long gallery in which the picture or the statue were
repeated again and again as far as the eye could see. And then, on
the other hand, I shewed how the sixteenth-century cottages were
each of them individuals, each with some slight difference from
the cottage next door, each with its variety in door or window or
pent-house. And hence, I urged, a continual slight surprise to the
beholder, and taking the supposed row as a whole, that strangeness in
the proportion which Bacon declared, most profoundly, to be necessary
to the highest beauty. Well, I got this with difficulty into the
prescribed 500 words--“nobody will read anything over 500 words”--and
said to myself: “Now that Patmore is dead, nobody else could have
written that article. But ... there will be a row.” There was. Lord
Northcliffe gave the little essay the honour of a special mention
in one of his famous _communiqués_--as I believe they were called.
He spoke of it with venom as “a wiseacre article.” I am sure he was
perfectly right from his point of view. The fault was mine. “When I
am in Rome, I fast on Saturdays,” said one of the Fathers.

Things have changed indeed. I was mentioning Coventry Patmore. In the
Introduction to the “Religio Poetæ,” a collection of short essays of
the profoundest wisdom, he acknowledges his obligations to Greenwood,
once editor of the “St. James’s Gazette.” Some of these essays had
appeared in that journal: the fact is quite stupefying considered in
the light of the journalism of to-day. Education increases; ignorance
grows deeper.

       *       *       *       *       *

Let me not be understood as claiming that my newspaper work of
thirty-two years ago was characterised by the profoundest wisdom.
Very far from it; my articles were harmless and agreeable enough, I
think, in a small way; and writing them, I first began to get a hint
of my true subject; the country of my childhood and my youth. And I
thus began to move away from the exotic Rabelaisian influence, both
as to manner and to matter: to perceive that not the splendid Loire
but the humble Soar brook, winding and shining in deep valleys and
obscured by dark alder thickets, was my native stream. I began to
see that I was a citizen of Caerleon-on-Usk, and not of Tours or of
Chinon, and that the old grey manor-houses and the white farms of
Gwent had their beauty and significance, though they were not castles
in Touraine. There was something of all this, of course, in “The
Chronicle of Clemendy,” the Great Romance which was neither great nor
a romance; but in this everything was viewed and everything expressed
in an exotic medium: now I saw that a blossoming thorn bush in the
valley of the Soar and the nightingale singing in it and the river
level about Caerleon and the red fires of sunset over the mountain in
the west were all in themselves and by themselves fit matter for the
work; that they needed not to be disguised in a French literary habit
of four hundred years ago.

It was in this summer of 1890 that I wrote the first chapter of “The
Great God Pan.” I have told the whole story in the Introduction to
the latest edition of that fantasy, which is published by Messrs.
Simpkin, Marshall, and whether I should weary my readers I know
not, but I do know that I should weary myself if I told it all over
again. The tale was written in bits, in the intervals between severe
literary cramps, as I have mentioned in this present volume, and it
was published by Mr. John Lane, of the Bodley Head, at the end of
1894, when yellow bookery was at its yellowest. And it aroused a
certain amount of attention. There was a storm--in a doll’s teacup.

The other day a friend of mine said genially to me:

     “I have just been reading that ‘Great God Pan’ of yours
     over again, and I really don’t see that there’s much in it
     to make a sensation of.”

I am sure he was quite right. But a sensation there was, of a minor
kind. It had some mysterious property in it, this little book, which
caused good men to froth at the mouth, greatly to my delight. I have
quoted a good many of the reviews in the Introduction to the Simpkin,
Marshall edition: things like this:

     “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.”--“Manchester Guardian.”

     “This book is gruesome, ghastly, and dull ... the majority
     of readers will turn from it in utter disgust.”--“Lady’s
     Pictorial.”

     “These tricks have also their ludicrous side.”--“Guardian.”

And so forth. It is very well, but I cannot help saying, as an old
craftsman and an old reviewer, that it might have been better. I
have no fault to find with the technique of the “Guardian”; but
the “Lady’s Pictorial” should have left out the “gruesome” and
the “ghastly” and also, I am inclined to think, the “disgust.”
There are readers who like the gruesome and the ghastly; there are
readers whose curiosity is stimulated by the term “disgust.” I am
afraid, for example, that if the account of legal proceedings, civil
or criminal, is headed “Disgusting Details,” there are minds so
prurient as to be rather attracted than repelled, and I am sure that
the gentle scribe of the “Lady’s Pictorial” did not wish to paint
my little book in attractive colours. And so with the “Manchester
Guardian.” “Ridiculous” is admirable; but “acutely and intentionally
disagreeable” is something of a signal set to attract those prurient
readers whose existence I have regretted; and the last sentence
says too much. Mr. Harry Quilter, something of a figure in those
days, did better. He pointed out in an article in the “Contemporary
Review”--also something of a figure in those days--that the only
explanation he could give of such favourable notices as the book
had received was that the author must have a great many friends
engaged in journalism. I wrote a temperate letter to Mr. Quilter in
which I said I was very sorry, but I didn’t know any journalists at
all--which happened to be the truth. He wrote back to remind me, as
he said, that there was “an Inmost Light to which you may yet be
true”--“The Inmost Light” is the title of a tale which was included
in the first edition of “The Great God Pan.”

--One of the saddest books in the world is Mrs. Gaskell’s wonderful
“Life of Charlotte Brontë.” But there is one tragi-comical touch.
Poor valiant, simple, stricken Charlotte was being entertained in
town by Mr. and Mrs. Smith. There was a dinner-party, given, I
suppose, in her honour, and she writes to an old friend:

“There were only seven gentlemen at dinner besides Mr. Smith, but of
these five were critics--men more dreaded in the world of letters
than you can conceive. I did not know how much their presence and
conversation had excited me till they were gone, and the reaction
commenced. When I had retired for the night, I wished to sleep--the
effort to do so was vain. I could not close my eyes. Night passed;
morning came, and I rose without having known a moment’s slumber.”

Who were these terrible five? We do not know, and it is possible
enough that if we heard their names we should not have heard of their
names, though, likely enough, George Henry Lewes was one of them. It
is odd and pathetic too to think that a great woman such as Charlotte
Brontë should have allowed the brilliant repartees and tremendous
reputation of George Henry Lewes to break her rest. And just before
this passage there is another, as strange and as pathetic. A severe
review of “Shirley” appeared in “The Times.” Mr. and Mrs. Smith
kindly “mislaid” the paper. But Charlotte insisted on pressing the
thorn to her bosom. She would see “The Times.”

     “Mrs. Smith took her work, and tried not to observe the
     countenance, which the other tried to hide between the huge
     sheets; but she could not help becoming aware of tears
     stealing down the face and dropping on the lap.”

And all over a review, an unfavourable review! It is very strange,
or, at least, it seems so to me, since, like Jim the nigger, I don’t
never cry ska’sely over reviews, and I have always contrived to get
my usual sleep.

But I have left out one curious specimen of the “Great God Pan”
reviews, a specimen which leads up to a curious passage. The
“Westminster Review” said:

     “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 ... innocuous from its absurdity.”

I was talking over old literary doings and the affairs of the
’nineties with a friend one day in the spring of 1921. My friend was
asking me about my early books and their reception. I gave him a
lurid account of the castigations which I had received on account of
“The Great God Pan.”

“Why,” said I, “the ‘Westminster’ practically told me that if I
didn’t take care I should end up in a lunatic asylum.”

“Well,” replied the man, meaning to be funny, “haven’t you? I
understood you were at Carmelite House?”

“No,” I returned, also meaning to be funny, “I haven’t. All the
lunatic asylums that I’ve heard of have been managed by a _doctor_.”

       *       *       *       *       *

During the latter part of my stay in the country (1891–93) I wrote
two books. I have forgotten the names of both of them. They were very
bad, and I tore them up, with the exception of one episode--to put it
mildly, not a very good story--which appears in “The Three Impostors”
under the title of “The Novel of the Dark Valley.” And it was in the
early spring of 1894 that I set about the writing of the said “Three
Impostors,” a book which testifies to the vast respect I entertained
for the fantastic, “New Arabian Nights” manner of R. L. Stevenson,
to those curious researches in the by-ways of London which I have
described already, and also, I hope, to a certain originality of
experiment in the tale of terror, as exemplified in the stories of
the Professor who was taken by the fairies, and of the young student
of law who swallowed the White Powder. And when I had finished, with
a sort of recognition that I had squeezed this particular orange to
death, I remember saying to my old friend A. E. Waite: “I shall never
give anybody a White Powder again.” And then I was immediately called
on to do that very thing which I had vowed I would not do. I actually
got an “order,” and--this shews that I was a mere intruder, not a
true craftsman--I have rarely been so miserable, miserable that is,
as a man of letters, in my life.

It was like this. As I have remarked, “The Great God Pan” had made
a storm in a Tiny Tot’s teacup. And about the same time, a young
gentleman named H. G. Wells had made a very real, and a most deserved
sensation with a book called “The Time Machine”; a book indeed. And a
new weekly paper was projected by Mr. Raven Hill and Mr. Girdlestone,
a paper that was to be called “The Unicorn.” And both Mr. Wells and
myself were asked to contribute; I was to do a series of horror
stories. I won’t deny that I swelled a little and was cheered and
elated by the fact of my being asked to write by anybody; nay, I
really tried my best to feel important and puffed up. And then I
set about writing that series of tales of horror. I was not puffed
up for long. As I say, I had realised that for me the Stevensonian
manner was ended. And now I was to begin all over again; to recook
that cabbage which was already boiled to death! I wrote four stories
in a kind of agony, my pen shrieking “rubbish!” at me with every
stroke. I remember literally sobbing in a kind of hysteria of despair
with my head on my hands; and this shews that there are some men
who cannot be helped. The only thing that got me through at all
was an endeavour to transplant the manner of Apuleius into English
soil; but the four tales were sorry things when all was said. I
was glad when “The Unicorn” ceased to exist after two or three
numbers, before a single one of those tales of mine had appeared in
it. Mr. Wells had one story in “The Unicorn,” “The Cone,” which he
reprinted in the collection called “The Country of the Blind.” Such
was the affair, and I think it explains the irritation which I have
always experienced when I have been asked to write a continuation
of “The Three Impostors,” or something in the manner of “The Three
Impostors.” I knew that all this was done and ended; that, for me,
the vein was worked out and exhausted: utterly. I shall always recur
to the metaphor of the white road that you see from afar climbing
over the hill into unconjectured regions. For me that is literature;
the journey of discovery; the finding of a new world. When once I
have toiled painfully up that long road, and have stood on the other
side of the dark wood, and have looked upon the land beyond; then
all the joy, all the delight and thrill and wonder are over for me.
Columbus could not discover America twice. I never can say to myself:
“Look here! Let’s pretend that we’ve never been this way before,
that we don’t know in the least what’s beyond that turn of the road,
that anything may happen beyond that pine tree.” It won’t do.

And that is one reason why I beg my bread in my sixtieth year.

For, all that I have written on this matter is, doubtless, very
fine; but we must confess that when it is a case of literature being
exchanged for the money of the publisher--and the public--the affair
becomes a commercial one. And, in business, you buy a brand. Let me
try to imagine it! I am a wealthy man, and I have found and my guests
have found that last hamper of Champagne admirable. I go to my wine
merchant and order another hamper of the same vintage. Nay, he has
not got it; he will be happy to supply me with a wine of entirely
different character; or, to press the analogy a little extravagantly,
he no longer deals in Champagne at all, he doesn’t think much of
Champagne, it is an elegant lemonade, as one of Murger’s characters
expresses it, but he will be delighted to send me six dozen of a rare
Château wine of Bordeaux, an infinitely finer wine, as he assures me.
But I want Champagne! I am not going to stand such treatment for one
moment! The man must be mad! _De me fabula narratur_; all my life I
have been pressing my Bordeaux on people who had begun to think that
there might be something to be said for my small Champagne.

And I quite see the point. I have never read one of the horror
stories of Mr. W. W. Jacobs, though I am told that they are
admirable. For me, Mr. Jacobs must speak through an everlasting
Night Watchman, through an eternal countryman draining the last dregs
of his beer on the settle at the _Cauliflower_: with these immortals
I am happy.

“The Three Impostors” was published by John Lane some time in 1895.
But before sending the manuscript to Mr. Lane, I had tried Mr.
Heinemann. The firm wrote me a most delightful letter, full of the
most charming things, which I had some difficulty in swallowing,
though an author’s throat is capable of astounding feats where
praise is concerned. I was to go and see them, and I did so, my
heart beating high. I saw a member of the firm. He was better than
the letter for a swelling soul. He read extracts from the reader’s
report, and these were more splendid still. He outlined delightful
terms; he pressed on me the necessity of my having something on
account of royalties in advance: a happy possibility that had not
even dawned on me in 1894–95. He hoped that the House of Heinemann
might ever have the privilege of publishing my beautiful books.
“Better than the best of Stevenson”; thus he read from the optimistic
reader’s report. Thus elated, glorious, happy indeed, went down
Mr. Arthur Machen, man of letters--now there could be no doubt of
it!--from the amiable office, even into Bedford Street, seen for the
first time to be a shining thoroughfare, a veritable golden pathway
of Paradise, leading to the golden Strand, nay, to the golden world,
where all desires were accomplished, and the faithful servant is
rewarded: “Enter thou into the joy of thy Publisher.”

After all, I said to myself, the old toils, the old labours, those
unhappy nights, those sick days of despair were not altogether
wasted. Indeed, I tried to do my best; indeed, I grudged no labour;
indeed, I was patient and tore up the sorry page; I knew that I must
persevere and still persevere. And I knew that the other books were
well meant but futile after all; that I had not really touched the
mark, though I pretended that I had, and did my best to persuade
myself that it was so. But now; “I have really written something that
is good, that is, even, very good; that one of the best publishers in
London praises and praises highly.” I never thought of the money that
all this must mean, that never entered a moment into my mind; my only
meditation was that for fifteen years I had done all I could do, and
that now I was to enter into my reward. O golden Strand, that day,
golden Great Russell Street when I came home to tell my news, golden
happy world which rewards at last all humble faithful endeavour:
golden world inhabited by good men, by publishers of all men most
good.

It was a pure matter of form; the waiting for the agreement, a matter
of a week or so, as the kind gentlemen in the office informed me. And
in three weeks, somewhere about the middle of January, 1895, came
the MS. of “The Three Impostors” back to me, with a formal, printed
slip from the House of Heinemann, regretting that it was unable to
accept the enclosed manuscript. Well does A. E. Waite declare that
there is an element of waggery in the constitution of the universe.
Never did the proud policeman in the old pantomime, foiled by the
buttered slide of the clown, come down with a thump so boisterously
undignified. So, rolling in the mud, I lay sprawling, my legs in the
air. I was silly enough to write a somewhat exasperated letter to
my friend in the office. He answered me in a befitting manner, in a
tone of grave rebuke: he said that if I had realised the cares of the
publisher’s life I would not have written “so caustically.”




_Chapter VIII_


“The Three Impostors” came back then from Messrs. Heinemann, and
as soon as I got over the little bump I have just mentioned, I
thought that I would try to make the book a bit better. One of the
“novels” or introduced tales displeased me, so I am sure it must have
been very bad indeed. I am not certain, but I think it was about
a benevolent City man, of considerable means, who occupied an old
red brick house somewhere at the back of Acton and occasionally, I
suppose at the full moon, turned into a were-wolf. I can see nothing
against the plot; and I believe there is a considerable body of
unimpeachable evidence in favour of the hypothesis that the human
consciousness is occasionally displaced by the bestial consciousness:
the Malays, for instance, are apt at times to fancy themselves
wild cats and to behave accordingly. But, somehow, it wouldn’t do.
The transformation of the City man was highly unsatisfactory and
unconvincing: so I tore up the tale, and wrote instead of it the
surprising narrative of Professor Gregg and his disastrous search for
the fairies among the hills of my native country. In the machinery
of the story I introduced a hypothesis that was then new; I think I
read of it in some paper written by Sir Oliver Lodge. The theory was,
that when the lights are low, or turned out, at the spiritualist
séance, and objects are found, when the lights go up, to have been
brought from all quarters of the room and laid in the centre of the
table; or when the people sitting in the dark round the table hear
the piano near the door being played, the theory was that these
marvels are not necessarily due to the presence and intervention of
ghosts. I believe that it was the case of Eusapia Palladino that was
engaging Sir Oliver Lodge’s attention just then; and he advanced the
striking hypothesis that the piano was played and the objects fetched
from the sideboard by a kind of extension of the medium’s body. I
forget whether the distinguished Professor used the instance; but
I know that the impression conveyed to my mind was that something
happened similar to the protrusion and withdrawal of a snail’s horns:
Eusapia’s arm became twice or thrice its usual length, performed the
required feat whatever it was, and then shrank again to its normal
size. This hypothesis was novel in those days; now it is widely known
and credited amongst spiritualists. They have found a name for the
mysterious substance which projects itself from the medium’s body: it
is called ectoplasm. In all probability the whole theory is a pack of
nonsense, and the “phenomena” are the tricks of clever cheats: still,
what do we know? At all events, I worked it all into my fairy tale,
mixing up the old view that the fairy tales, the stories of Little
People, are in fact traditions of the aborigines of these islands,
small, dark men who took refuge under the hills from the invading
Celt with this view of the capacities of the human body, and my
view, still newer, that the fairies may still be found under the
hills, and that they are far from being pleasant little people. That
was the recipe for the tale, and I give it in spite of a friendly
rebuke I once received from poor H. B. Irving. He was talking to me
about the Introduction I had written to “The Great God Pan.”

“You shouldn’t have done it,” he said. “You destroy the illusion.
Never take people behind the scenes. I never do.”

But it really doesn’t matter. And, further, I have a suspicion that
it is often much more interesting “behind” than “in front.” I have
seen some very fine theatrical storms in my time; they did these
things very well in the days of the elder Irving at the Lyceum, but
I never enjoyed any of those tempests half so much as a storm I once
watched from the wings, while Sir Frank Benson was playing King Lear.
Everything, of course, was pitchy dark, save where a farthing light
was glimmering in some odd corner. By this light crouched a squat
form, that of the assistant stage-manager. In one hand he held the
Prompt Copy of the Play, with all the cues duly indicated in it. He
held it up as close as he could to the miserable glimmer, and had
evidently as much as he could do to see the script with its various
interlineetions and noughts and crosses, and all sorts of queer
hieroglyphics which mean a great deal to a stage-manager’s eye. But
in the other hand he held a drumstick, and coming nearer I saw that
the big drum was beside him on the boards, and that near at hand dim
figures stood ready for some mysterious service. A voice is heard
from somewhere:

    “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow
    You cataracts and hurricanes, spout
    Till you have drench’d your steeples, drown’d the cocks,
    You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
    Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
    Singe my white head; and then, all-shaking thunder--”

And so on. And all the while the man with the big drum was commenting
on the text. At certain points, bang! would come the drumstick
on the drum, and that gave the cue to the man who stood by the
thunder-sheet, which he caused to waggle violently, and at the same
moment “Props” released his lightnings. It was far better behind than
in front, to my taste, at all events. And so a man of letters of very
great distinction once said to me:

“I’ve been reading your ‘Great God Pan.’ I didn’t make much of it.
Confused, it seemed to me. But when I read the Introduction, I said
to myself: ‘Good heavens! Here’s a man who writes as well as I do!’”

And I may say that the literary gentleman meant this as a very great
compliment; indeed so it was.

Well, we have been speaking a little of the stage. And in the
earlier rehearsals of a play a good deal is taken for granted, or
indicated by the gentleman in charge. I am speaking of the old days,
be it understood, and of the Shakespearean Touring Company in the
provinces. The company is assembling in the wings in small groups,
one strolling in after another, some of them with the cheerful look
of those who have partaken of refreshment. On the whole the men keep
together, and the women talk to each other. The curtain is down, and
by it is a deal table and a couple of Windsor chairs--or it may be
a couple of golden thrones. At the table sit the stage-manager and
his assistant, occupied with the prompt copies and various documents
connected with the business of the morning. Above their heads burns
the T-piece; piping in the shape of a capital T, with the top bar
pierced and flaming with gas-jets. The stage-manager looks at his
watch. “Five past eleven! All ready for the Procession! March off.”

The stage-manager has risen from his Windsor chair--or throne, as the
case may be--and is looking up stage with his back to the curtain. As
he says, “March off,” he indicates the music that isn’t there:

“Too-too, too-too--too-too, tootery-too, too-too,” in something
like the time and tune of the music as it will be “on the night”;
stamping with one foot on the stage to increase the realism of the
performance. The old stage direction reads something like: “A sennet
within. Culverins shot off,” and accordingly the stage-manager
interrupts his “too-tooing” at intervals:

“Too-too, tootery-too! Bang!” bringing his practicable foot down on
the boards with a terrific crash.

“Too-too-too, too-too: Bang!”

Then: “March over. Flourish of Trumpets. Tara-tara-tara, ta-ta-ta.
Curtain up! Tara-tara, ta-ta-ta-ta-tara. Procession on.”

The Procession of Knights and Ladies which has been forming in the
dusty obscurity of the wings begins to advance and cross an imaginary
line which marks the place where the scenery will be on the night.
They make more especially for a position up stage (L.U.E.) where
there will be, at the proper time, a Gothic archway. The “taras” are
still going on. They are violently interrupted.

“Where’s the Rush-strewer?” howls the stage-manager. “Mr. Machen!
(fff) Mr. Machen! Lobbit! (to the hovering call-boy) Call Mr. Machen!
(To the Procession) Go back. I am going to have this done properly,
if we have to stay all day for it.”

The call-boy rushes violently into the darkness. His voice is heard
vociferating “Mr. Machen!” in passages and on stairs. Finally, Mr.
Machen appears, looking flurried or sulky, as the case may be. The
stage-manager, who had been discussing beer with Mr. Machen a short
quarter of an hour before, in a friendly and familiar manner, is now,
very properly, distant and official.

“Mr. Machen, I wish you would contrive to be more punctual. Better be
an hour too soon on the stage than a second too late. You can’t learn
to act, you know, by staying away from rehearsal!”

Mr. Machen murmurs something about “ten minutes allowed for variation
of clocks.” The stage-manager grunts impatiently. Mr. Machen places
himself at the head of the procession with an imaginary bundle of
rushes on his left arm. The too-tooing, the banging, the tara-ing
are done all over again, and at last the stage-manager announces:
“Flourish over”--and the play begins.

In other words, after the little difficulties and delays that I have
indicated, “The Three Impostors” was published in the Keynotes Series
at the Bodley Head. It didn’t do so well as “The Great God Pan.”
The title was a bad one. Then, as my French colleague, the late P.
J. Toulet, said to me afterwards: “_Ce livre est trop fumiste, ou
pas assez fumiste_”; the farce and the tragedy in it were not well
mixed. And again, there had been some ugly scandals in the summer of
’95, which had made people impatient with reading matter that was
not obviously and obtrusively “healthy”; and so, for one reason or
another, “The Three Impostors” failed to set the Fleet Ditch on fire.

Whereupon I began to think about my next book. I had done, as I have
said, with Stevensonianism and White Powders; now we were to have
something entirely new. “Tara, tara, tara!”--in the stage-manager’s
manner. This time there was to be no doubt of it. “Everybody ready
for the Great Romance!”

I started fair. There was to be something different from the former
books: I knew that. But I hadn’t the remotest notion of what this new
book was to be about. I used to go out in the morning and pace the
more deserted Bloomsbury squares and wonder very much what it would
be like. I got the hint I wanted at last from a most interesting
essay by Mr. Charles Whibley, written by way of Introduction to
“Tristram Shandy.” Mr. Whibley was discussing the picaresque in
literature. He pointed out that while “Gil Blas” and its early
Spanish originals represented the picaresque of the body, and “Don
Quixote” was picaresque both of mind and body, “Tristram Shandy” was
picaresque of the mind alone. The wandering in that extraordinary
book is, in other words, noumenal, not phenomenal. I caught hold
of that notion: the thought that a literary idea may be presented
from the mental as well as the physical side of things, and said to
myself: “I will write a ‘Robinson Crusoe’ of the mind.” That was the
beginning of “The Hill of Dreams.” It was to represent loneliness
not of body on a desert island, but loneliness of soul and mind
and spirit in the midst of myriads and myriads of men. I had some
practical experience of this state to help me; not altogether in vain
had I been constrained to dwell in Clarendon Road and to have my
habitation in the tents of Notting Hill Gate. I immediately marked
down all these old experiences as a valuable asset in the undertaking
of my task: I knew what it was to live on a little in a little room,
what it meant to wander day after day, week after week, month after
month through the _inextricabilis error_ of the London streets, to
tread a grey labyrinth whose paths had no issue, no escape, no end.
I had known as a mere lad how terrible it was on a gloomy winter’s
evening to go out because the little room had become intolerable,
to go out walking through those multitudinous streets stretching to
beyond and beyond, to see the light of kindly fires leaping on the
walls, to see friendly faces welcoming father or husband or brother,
to hear laughter or a song sounding from within, perhaps to catch a
half glimpse of the faces of the lovers as they looked out, happy,
into the dark night. All this had been my daily practice and use for
a long while; I was qualified then, in a measure, to describe the
fate of a Robinson Crusoe cast on the desert island of the tremendous
and terrible London. Thus was accomplished what Garrick called, much
to the Doctor’s amusement, the “first concoction” of the book.

I am sorry that I cannot trace the further steps in its elaboration
with a like minuteness. All this time I was getting my green-mounted
review cuttings of “The Three Impostors.” I have kept them, I know,
for I keep all my reviews, but I cannot lay my hands on them. I
believe, though, that their general import was that I was something
of a pretentious ass and that my horrors were all humbug; and for
some obscure reason, which I cannot undertake to explain, these
notices cheered me on immensely in my new work.

“I cannot undertake to explain”; that is the very truth. Why should
a man whose only life consists in writing books feel highly elated
at being told on good authority that he is utterly and entirely
incapable of doing anything of the kind; that he is clever, perhaps,
in a thin sort of way, but that his most prized effects at which he
has evidently toiled--as the reviewer declares--with most laborious
pains miss fire completely; that his endeavours to be this, that
and the other are really pathetic in their utter failure; that his
lightnings and thunderings are effects of the property man? I do
not know why this should be so, and perhaps if I knew I should not
tell; but I think I know that there are deep things in psychology, in
the real psychology, not in the muck-heap of the psycho-analytical
chemists. At all events, I know that when I read a review which
ended, say, with: “We can only wish Mr. Machen better luck with his
next bag of thaumaturgic tricks,” I would be much uplifted, and go
out and pace Mecklenburgh Square and the old graveyard by Heathcote
Street in a happy mood of invention, feeling that the new book lay
all simple and plain before me.

So, thus cheered and highly comforted, I went on my daily tours about
the Bloomsbury squares, about waste places abutting on the King’s
Cross Road, about the wonderlands of Barnsbury, taking with me the
problem of this great book that was to be made; this book that was
to be the better part of me. Why, it was only the other day that a
friend, who is curious like myself, in the remaining oddities of
London, took me for a short stroll near the Gray’s Inn Road.

“I think,” said he, “that I can show you something that you will
like.”

In his voice was the pride of the collector, who takes his keys,
opens his safe, and draws out the rich case, containing “Pickwick”
in the original numbers, with the cancelled plates, unopened leaves,
all the advertisements preserved, perfect condition, autograph letter
signed “Charles Dickens,” giving the source of the character of Sam
Weller in separate portfolio: all the pride of one who possesses such
a treasure was in the voice of my friend.

He led me round corner after corner, by turns and ways that became
more and more obscure. Then, elated, he said: “There!”

In the by-street I saw a queer house, standing in a sunken yard away
from the pavement. It was painted in cream colour, and grotesque
heads, intended to be mediæval, were peppered over its frontage. I
knew it well.

“I never expected to see that again,” I said. “I thought it would
have been pulled down long ago; like the ‘Rows’ that once led from
Great Coram Street. And, unless I am mistaken, we shall find Hebrew
letters inscribed on plaster shields applied to the house front.”

The Hebrew inscriptions were still there; very faint, but still
there. I had last seen them in ’95–’96 when I was entangled in the
most intricate problems of “The Hill of Dreams.”

I have told already some of the troubles of the book: the battle of
the second chapter, the notion sought in vain for three weeks: the
affair of the fifth chapter when I lost my way completely and wrote
many thousands of words that had to be rejected. Nearly all the
journey, from the autumn of 1895 to the spring of 1897, there were
doubts and trials and questionings: after all, was it not hopeless;
would it not be better to tear it up and start afresh on a new book?
In the summer of 1896, when I was in the thick of these perplexities,
I spent a month in Provence and Languedoc, visiting places the very
names of which are incantations: Arles, Avignon, Nîmes, Montpellier,
Beaucaire, famed Tarascon by Rhone; and I saw how the sun can shine
on the white cliff road by Marsilho--to give the city its Provençal
name, which you must pronounce, as near as may be, Mar-see-yo-ho.
And the changing of the colours of the sea there, as the sun sank
and brief twilight gathered and the moon rose: here were marvels and
beauties that sank deeply into the heart.

A wonderful land, indeed. The olive garths, of such a silvery, dim
green as our northern seas sometimes put on near the land, the
scented rosemary growing as a weed by the roadside, the walls of
Avignon seen by sunset light, the great Roman arenas, still in use
for bull-fights, a matter not remote from their original purpose,
the Temple of Diana at Nîmes, no ruin, but a perfect building into
which the priest of Diana might well enter as you viewed the portal
from the modern street; and above all the splendour of that southern
sun shining on white rocks, on the dark cypresses, on the white arch
which looked as clear and fine as if it had been built a year, which
was eighteen hundred years old or more: all these are Provence; not
at all forgetting the Bouillabaisse which Pascal makes in the Old
Port, Pascal who roasts his incomparable partridges before a fire of
vine boughs. More than once I felt that I had made a journey rather
in time than space, that these black cypresses and clear white walls
and green and silvery olives were present not in our day but in the
old Roman world.

The last few days of my visit to Provence I spent in a little hotel
at a place called Roucas Blanc, not far from Marseilles. The hotel,
sheltered by the white rock and the dark green woods, had been built
on the very verge of the sea, and in the morning I would open the
door-window of my apartment and stand on a platform, but a few feet
above the water. I would lean over the low wall, and wonder at
the jewelled glory of the Mediterranean blue beneath the mounting
sun--and my heart was at home, in Gray’s Inn, in my old Japanese
bureau, in the litter of papers that awaited me there, in the
wretched book that I was struggling to make. _Aqui esta encerrado el
alma del licenciado._ What have I said of the paradox of life, that
its actualities are so nauseous that men will do anything to escape
from them? And here was I, free to enjoy the sun on the Provençal
sea and the wonder of the Roman world, hankering after the world of
anguish and difficulty and disappointment that I had made for myself
in grim Verulam Buildings, amidst the London fogs.

And so I got back and found that the labour of months had been
wasted, and set to work to break and remake. The book was finished,
somehow, in the March of 1897, and just then, as if he had come upon
his cue, a new publisher, Mr. Grant Richards, wrote to me asking if
I had any manuscripts that I should like to have published. I saw
him and left “The Hill of Dreams” with him. He did not take long to
make up his mind about it. He would have none of it, and he wrote
advising me by no means to publish the book; for, he said, it would
do me no credit. What he meant was that it was not in the least like
“The Three Impostors,” and it took him ten years before he saw light
on the subject, for it was the firm of Grant Richards that published
“The Hill of Dreams” in 1907.

Some amusing reviews appeared. The “Daily Graphic” said, very truly,
that the book was not of much practical interest, and the “Outlook”
confirmed this dictum by stating that there was “scarcely a place
for it in the widest utilitarian view.” “Will readily impress a
reader of quiet tastes,” declared the gentler “Scotsman.” “Nothing
that more quickly tends to tedium,” corrected the “Manchester
Guardian”: naturally enough, if the “Athenæum” was right in saying
that “the main matter of regret is the utter formlessness and the
arid inhumanity of his work.” “Well written, but written not quite
well enough,” was the fatal sentence of the “Chronicle.” And so on,
and so on. I will not disguise the fact that some of the notices were
very good indeed; but it has always been the other sort of review
that has heartened me, and so forthwith I set about writing a book
in high spirits. This turned out to be “The Secret Glory,” which was
published in the spring of 1922. This book also was on the whole very
well reviewed, though it is as queer as queer can be--I am afraid I
must say that the bridge is not nearly so well kept now as in the
brave days of old. But one reviewer stood out boldly, and him I will
quote in full, and so make an end of talking about reviews, which
some authors jeer at, which I treasure with reverent care.

     “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 Catholicism, a mystical 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 him
     out of it.”

There! That notice, which appeared in “The Nation and the Athenæum,”
was signed by Mr. J. Middleton Murry, generally recognised as being
one of the most eminent literary critics of the day, if he is not
rather to be accounted as the most eminent literary critic of the
day. He is also, as a fellow-writer assured me, regarded as “the
leader of the younger intelligentsia.” Anyhow, I like a man who
speaks his mind. I try to do so myself, sometimes.

And “there!” again. I think I have written enough about the manner in
which I thought of my books, the manner in which I wrote my books,
the manner in which I broke down more or less lamentably in the
beginning, the middle and the end of my books, the manner in which
they were welcomed by eager publishers, and the manner in which they
finally tottered into print and were acclaimed by the Press. Enough
has been said on all these topics, and perhaps a good deal too much
for the patience of a weary world.

Let us now be brief on this matter. The year 1898 I spent in the
service of “Literature,” a weekly journal that had just been started
by “The Times.” In 1899 I wrote “Hieroglyphics” and “The White
People,” and the first chapter of “A Fragment of Life.” Then a great
sorrow which had long been threatened fell upon me: I was once more
alone.




_Chapter IX_


It was somewhere about the autumn of 1899 that I began to be
conscious that the world was being presented to me at a new angle.
I find now an extreme difficulty in the choice of words to convey
my meaning; “a new angle” is clumsy enough, “here in this world he
changed his life” is far too high in its associations; but there
certainly came to be a strangeness in the proportion of things, both
in things exterior and interior. And it is in these latter that I
held and still hold that the true wonder, the true mystery, the
true miracle reside. There is the old proverb, of course: “Seeing
is believing” and, for once, the old proverb is widely astray. All
phenomenal perception is apt to be deceitful, and very often is
deceitful. This is in the nature of things, as Berkeley pointed out
a very long time ago. That castle tower that looks round in the
distance is found to be square when you get a little nearer to it;
the red and golden glory and the magic architecture of the sunset
cloud would change, if you were in it, into something like a London
fog. And if it be objected: “Yes, exactly; when you are far away
from an object you see it incorrectly, but when you come near it
you see it correctly”--that is not so. If you were near enough to
the tower, with your nose within six inches of it, you only see a
certain limited extent of stone surface; the tower, qua tower, has
entirely disappeared. But you see the stone surface accurately? No,
you don’t. The ant crawling up it has a wildly different vision and
perception of that stone surface from your vision and perception; and
a microscope gives yet another vision, different from either; and as
magnification must be infinite in potentiality, though not _in actu_,
it is quite clear that no one can ever see the truth of any external
object presented to the eyes: there must always be, in theory and
perhaps, eventually, in fact, another microscope of still higher
magnifying power, which will entirely change the aspect of the thing
seen. And thus, without tedious specification and example of all the
other senses, I mustn’t even call the poker stiff, lest the man in
the chair on the other side of the fire take it up and tie it into a
knot before my eyes, proving that I have been talking foolishly. And
get the rarest Bordeaux that money can buy, and offer Bill the navvy
a glass; and watch his face as he calls for ale to wash that muck,
that ... something muck, out of his mouth.

All this, of course, is mere philosophic A B C, and if I thought this
book likely to penetrate into philosophic circles I should apologise
for a clumsy rehash of Berkeley’s irresistible conclusions; but I do
not think that the readers of “Mind” will trouble themselves about
me; and I am afraid that those of us who have not been rectified by
the study of philosophy are still inclined to think that seeing is
believing and that some things are hard and others soft, and so on.
And, no doubt, there is a kind of relative and highly inferior sort
of truth in these propositions: don’t knock your head against a stone
wall, for instance, is a perfectly sound bit of practical advice,
since, considered in relation to your skull, the stone wall is hard
and will hurt. And so with “seeing is believing”: in nine hundred and
ninety-nine cases out of a thousand you will be absolutely correct in
saying: “Hullo! There’s old Secretan walking up the garden path.” But
there is that thousandth--or millionth--case in which it turns out
that old Secretan was busy in Tibet or busy dying at the moment you
were quite certain that you saw him approaching the hall-door of The
Cedars: and then where is your “seeing is believing” maxim? I had a
curious instance of this in the midst of the famous “Angels of Mons”
controversy. An officer of very high distinction wrote to me from
the front, and described a most remarkable experience which had been
vouchsafed to him and to others during the retreat of August, 1914.
The battle of Le Cateau was fought on August 26th. My correspondent’s
division, as he writes--his letter is quoted at length in the
Introduction to the second edition of “The Bowmen”--was heavily
shelled, “had a bad time of it,” but retired in good order. It was on
the march all the night of the 26th, and throughout August 27th, with
only about two hours’ rest.

“By the night of the 27th we were all absolutely worn out with
fatigue--both bodily and mental fatigue. No doubt we also suffered
to a certain extent from shock; but the retirement still continued
in excellent order, and I feel sure that our mental faculties were
still quite sound and in good working condition. On the night of
the 27th I was riding along in the column with two other officers.
We had been talking and doing our best to keep from falling asleep
on our horses. As we rode along I became conscious of the fact
that, in the fields on both sides of the road along which we were
marching, I could see a very large body of horsemen. These horsemen
had the appearance of squadrons of cavalry, and they seemed to be
riding across the fields and going in the same direction as we were
going, and keeping level with us. The night was not very dark, and I
fancied that I could see squadron upon squadron of these cavalrymen
quite distinctly. I did not say a word about it at first, but I
watched them for about twenty minutes. The other two officers had
stopped talking. At last one of them asked me if I saw anything in
the fields. I then told him what I had seen. The third officer then
confessed that he too had been watching these horsemen for the past
twenty minutes. So convinced were we that they were really cavalry
that, at the next halt, one of the officers took a party of men out
to reconnoitre, and found no one there.... The same phenomenon was
seen by many men in our column.... I myself am absolutely convinced
that I saw these horsemen; and I feel sure that they did not exist
only in my imagination.”

Now I have not the faintest notion what really happened to the
Colonel, to the two officers and to many of the men in the column.
What concerns us for the moment is that these people were at
first perfectly certain that they saw sensible objects, that is,
cavalrymen, and then were perfectly certain that there were no
sensible objects to see; and therefore it may be concluded from this
instance and from many instances, of like sort, that the senses are
deceptive; that the world of the senses is very largely a world
of illusion and delusion. To give a sharp example of what I mean:
I would say that the old story of the oak and the dryad is much
nearer to the real and final truth about the oak than the scientific
classification and description of the tree in a manual of Dendrology.
Not that I believe that a spirit in the shape of a beautiful woman
of another order of being to our own is somehow bound up with the
life of the oak tree; but I do believe that the truth about the oak
tree--as about all else--is a great mystery, which is quite beyond
the purview of all sensible--that is scientific--perception and
enquiry.

And so, when I speak of that singular rearrangement of the world
into which I entered in the late summer of 1899, I do not desire to
lay much stress on the sensible, or material, phenomena which were
presented to me. I marvel, but I marvel with caution, remembering the
manifold deceits of the senses, the phantasmagoria or shadow show
that they are always displaying before us; remembering also that when
the super-normal is manifested it is usually, in nine cases out of
ten, irrelevant and insignificant. For example, in the case of old
Secretan, seen walking up the path to the hall-door of The Cedars,
but discovered afterwards to have an undoubted _alibi_, either on his
dying bed or in Tibet. Suppose the latter case, suppose that Secretan
returns and that you collar him and ask him if he remembers what he
was doing about five o’clock of the afternoon of June 28th.

“What makes you ask that?” he may reply, likely enough. “I thought it
rum at the time. Here’s the entry in my diary. ‘June 28th. Had rank
goat and tea with rancid butter in it in the afternoon. Thought of
the jolly tea and tennis parties at The Cedars and wondered how old
Jones was getting on in the City.’”

And, it seems shocking, but it is probably the truth, that if
Secretan had been really engaged, not in Tibet but in dying, his
thought, the force which projected his shadow on that gravel path of
The Cedars, Thames Ditton, was: “Beastly taste in my mouth! Wish I
could get round to old Jones’s and wash it out with a glass of his
pre-war whiskey. Eh?” ... and the silence.

And all this, as I say, is irrelevant and insignificant; and then
again the rats and snakes and other objects seen by the delirium
tremens patient; they really don’t matter--save to the patient
aforesaid, who, of course, is quite sure that they are there. So,
again, I distrust the senses, and though I wondered and still wonder,
I make nothing much of the great gusts of incense that were blown in
those days into my nostrils, of the odours of rare gums that seemed
to fume before invisible altars in Holborn, in Claremont Square,
in grey streets of Clerkenwell, of the savours of the sanctuary
that were perceived by me in all manner of grim London wastes and
wanderings. One would like to think of the Knights of the Grail who
were ware of the “odour of all the rarest spiceries in the world”
before the Vision was given to them: but ... if one is not a Knight
of the Grail, but far otherwise?

Then, again, there was that morning, a bright, keen morning of
November it seems in my recollection, when I was walking up Rosebery
Avenue with a friend, and suddenly became aware of a strange
sensation, and as suddenly recollected the old proverb: “walking on
air.” I remember thinking at the time: “this is incredible”; and yet
it was a fact. The pavement of that horrible street had suddenly
become, not air, certainly, but resilient; the impact of my feet upon
it was buoyant; the sensation was delicious. I may mention that that
very morning I had made a certain interior resolution; but I do not
venture for one moment to connect this with that; I only tell what
happened to me. I make no deductions, nor do I venture to conclude
anything: remembering always that neither seeing nor smelling nor
feeling is necessarily believing. But so it was, exactly as I have
told it.

And then there was one afternoon in my sitting-room at 4 Verulam
Buildings, Gray’s Inn. I was sitting in my chair, and the wall
trembled and the pictures on the wall shook and shivered before my
eyes, as if a sudden wind had blown into the room. Let me hasten
to say that there was no wind, no actual wind, that is; and that I
knew at the time that there was no wind, and was, in consequence,
not a little alarmed, not knowing what would happen next. And I
must already correct my phrase: I have said that the pictures on
the wall opposite to the window that looked on the garden of the
Inn “shook and shivered.” It is not quite just: 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. 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 now comes a puzzle. We are highly composite beings. We all know
that a stomach-ache may make a man very miserable, and I believe
that science is beginning to admit that misery may give a man a very
bad stomach-ache. There are old phrases about a “sinking heart,”
and a man’s heart being “in his boots.” Well, it seems that the
heart does not sink, but that the stomach does, when subjected to
certain emotional perturbations. Only this morning I was reading in
the paper of new radiographic experiments which showed that under
certain stimulations of horror or fear or grief the stomach sometimes
falls from one to three inches, and the doctor who was conducting
the experiments declared that there was the brighter side; that he
had mentioned possible “pints of bitter” to some of his subjects,
with the result that there was a perceptible and upward movement
of the organ in question. And so the play goes round in a ring,
with a constant action and reaction of the physical and mental--or
psychical, or spiritual--and it will often be difficult to say where
the prime cause resides: in the stomach, in the brain, or in the
immortal spirit. I have already professed my belief that the true
wonder, the true miracle are of the spirit, not of the body; I here
confess that in certain cases I find it difficult to disentangle
the two worlds of our apprehension, that is to say definitely that
the sensible thing, the phenomenal thing, is always and invariably
without any true significance.

And so with that afternoon’s work in Gray’s Inn. The shivering
pictures that seemed on the point to dissolve and return into
chaos, the sensible thrill of delight that accompanied this strange
manifestation--I had forgotten that part of the experience--such
phenomena as these may be producible, for all I know, by drugs. You
can, at all events, see far more wonderful things than anything that
I saw by taking a sufficient dose of Anhelonium Lewinii and then
shutting your eyes. But....

I had better begin at the beginning. That afternoon I was in a state
of very dreadful misery and desolation and dereliction of soul. It
is strange, but the most dreadful pangs of grief are generally, I
think, bearable in the moment of their impact. With the wounds of the
spirit, it is as with the wounds of the body; a certain anæsthesia
accompanies the actual fall of the blow. I once fell backwards from
some little height, and my skull lighting on the edge of a brick,
I remained unconscious for more than half an hour. And I remember
distinctly that the sensation at the very moment of the crash was
that of being lifted and gently laid on the softest of all downy
pillows; it was only when I raised myself slowly, not in the least
aware that I had been unconscious, that I felt the pain of the great
bleeding wound at the back of my head, and a dismal, heavy throbbing
of the brow. So with the wounds of the soul; I had borne what had to
be borne with some measure of solidity and stolidity; the torture
of six years of lamentable expectation had, as I supposed, seared
and burned my spirit into dull, insensitive acquiescence: but I was
mistaken. A horror of soul that cannot be uttered descended upon me,
on that dim, far-off afternoon in Gray’s Inn; I was beside myself
with dismay and torment; I could not endure my own being. And then a
process suggested itself to me, as having the possibility of relief,
and without crediting what I had heard of this process or indeed
having any precise knowledge of it or of its results, I did what had
to be done--I hasten to add without any more exalted motives than
those which urge a man with a raging toothache to get laudanum and
take it with all convenient speed. I suffered from a more raging pain
than that of any toothache, and I wanted that pain to be dulled; that
was all.

Well, I made my experiment, expecting, very doubtfully, almost
incredulously, certain results. The results that I obtained were
totally different from my expectations. I couldn’t have hypnotised,
or “magnetised,” or mesmerised, or suggested, or Couéd, or in any
way bedevilled myself into the obtained condition for the good
reason that I had never heard of it, had no faintest notion of it,
and was, in fact, as I have stated, not a little alarmed by it,
half-thinking, if the truth be told, that I was very near to death.
I may state, by the way, that in the course of a pretty extensive
acquaintance with “occult” company, I only once heard of anything at
all comparable with this strange adventure of mine. A man was running
on, foolishly and uncritically enough, about his various occult
experiences--they were of little interest as a whole--and talked at
last of some sojourn that he had made amongst the Moors of Northern
Africa. Here, he said, he had met a man who had known wonders, and he
proceeded to tell them. There was nothing very wonderful, so far as
I can remember; but the Moor or Arab of the story had an experience
like enough to mine--I need not say that I had not mentioned it nor
so much as hinted it to my occult acquaintance. The African also had
seen the walls shiver and prepare for dissolution, had felt that
the world was shaken, and that his heart was shaken within him.
Mr. Jones-Robinson told the tale without any sense, apparently,
that it had any special significance; it was part of his occult
pack, that was all; and he went on to some sick rubbish about the
“correspondence” of the Tarot Trumps with the letters of the Hebrew
Alphabet; and this nonsense he discussed with real relish and a
high sense of its infinite importance. I think that he alone knew
the real “attribution” of the aforesaid Tarot Trumps, but he “had
received it under pledge and was not at liberty to speak”--for which
inhibition I was deeply thankful, having little patience for solemn
hanky-panky or Abracadabras of any sort. But in ending his story of
the Enchanted Moor, he said that this man, who had seen the material
world quivering and fading before his eyes, had received, in some
manner not indicated, a command or an intimation that he must “leave
everything”; and this he could not do, having a wife and children.
And I must say at once that being pretty well acquainted with
Jones-Robinson and all his type, I should have paid no more attention
to his story of the Moor than I paid to his story of the Tarot
Trumps--if it had not been for something which I knew and kept to
myself. As it was, I heard the tale and the injunction, and wondered
deeply, and still wonder.

But now to our point: the connection between material or sensible
things and spiritual things, the question whether the former are
ever of any real consequence or significance. As I have said before,
the evidence that Home the medium rose “miraculously”--to adopt a
convenient shorthand--into the air seems to me good; but is such
a phenomenon of any more true consequence than the phenomenon of
Hydrogen gas rising into the air from the admixture of water, zinc
and sulphuric acid? And so, were the incense clouds that came to my
nostrils in places where, assuredly, no material incense smoked, of
consequence? Was the billowy and resilient pavement of detestable
Rosebery Avenue of consequence? Were the pictures that shivered and
wavered on the unstable wall of consequence? I do not know; but
I am sure that the state which followed this last experience was
of high consequence. For when I rose, afraid, and broke off the
process in which I had been engaged, I found to my utter amazement
that everything within had been changed. Amazement; for the utmost
that I had hoped from my experiment was a temporary dulling of the
consciousness, a brief opium oblivion of my troubles. And what I
received was not mere dull lack of painful sensation, but a peace
of the spirit that was quite ineffable, a knowledge that all hurts
and doles and wounds were healed, that that which was broken was
reunited. Everything, of body and of mind, was resolved into an
infinite and an exquisite delight; into a joy so great that--let
this be duly noted--it became almost intolerable in its ecstasy.
I remember thinking at the time: “There is wine so strong that no
earthly vessels can hold it”: joy threatened to become an agony, that
must shatter all. Emily Brontë, describing the state of Heathcliff
soon before his death, has described just such a condition; I have
often wondered how she knew of it.

But this was later. For that day and for many days afterwards I was
dissolved in bliss, into a sort of rapture of life which has no
parallel that I can think of, which has, therefore, no analogies by
which it may be made more plain. The vine and the exultation of the
vine are solemn and ancient and approved figures of the joys of the
interior life, but these are not quite to my purpose. I can only fall
back on little things, and quite material things. My chambers in
Verulam Buildings were towards the northern portion of the Inn, and
the traffic of Theobald’s Road was distinct enough, distinct enough,
often, to be an annoyance. But this night, the “ping, ping!” of the
omnibus bell, the grind of the many wheels upon the cobble-stones
sounded to me as marvellous and tremendous chords reverberating
from some mighty organ; filling the air, filling the soul and the
whole being with rapture immeasurable. And another trifle, as
insignificant, even more insignificant, perhaps. In the ordinary
state of existence the sense of touch is exercised constantly, but
almost unconsciously. Now and again it is used with intent; the
buyer of old furniture acquires a sort of thumb-and-finger craft;
he passes the tips of his fingers over the edges of the bureau or
cabinet, and they help him to decide whether the object is an antique
or a novelty. And so, I suppose, a woman choosing stuffs uses her
fingers in much the same manner, learning something about the silk
or velvet by the process. But in general, and very conveniently, you
take up pen or pencil, or place your hand on the back of the chair
without any distinct consciousness of the impact of your flesh on
these exterior objects: unless, that is, your hand encounter some
unexpected object which insists on notice, such as a pin point or a
rusty nail. But in these strange days of which I am speaking touch
became an exquisite and conscious pleasure; I could not so much as
place my hand on the table before me without experiencing a thrill
of delight which was not merely sensuous, but carried with it,
mysteriously and wonderfully, the message of a secret and interior
joy.

And one more instance. I had always been subject to headaches which
visited me at intervals of five, six or seven weeks, and invariably
lasted for twenty-four hours. The pain was distressing, and any
movement of the head raised it into a racking, throbbing agony; I
should imagine that I suffered from a kind of migraine or megrims.
Late one night during the time of which I am speaking I felt the
first approaches of one of these tiresome attacks. I said to myself:
“I wonder whether I can stop it,” and I placed the tip of the
forefinger of the left hand upon my forehead. I felt the sense as of
a dull shock: and the pain was gone. And though I have had my share
of pains and aches since then, I have never been revisited by that
particular kind of headache from that day to this.

And there was yet another matter. In a little book of mine called
“The Great Return,” which nobody has heard of, I have told how the
Holy Grail came back for a brief while to Britain after long years.
And describing some of the things that were seen and known during
that happy visitation, I have written:

“The ‘glow’ as they call it seems more difficult to explain (than
certain other matters duly related). For they say that all through
the nine days, and indeed after the time had ended, there never was
a man weary or sick at heart in Llantrisant, or in the country round
it. For if a man felt that his work of the body or the mind was going
to be too much for his strength, then there would come to him of a
sudden a warm glow and a thrilling all over him and he felt as strong
as a giant, and happier than he had ever been in his life before, so
that lawyer and hedger each rejoiced in the task that was before him,
as if it were sport and play.”

Thus in the story, and thus it was with me in fact, in that autumn
and winter of 1899–1900. It was with a singular surprise that I
read, in St. Adamnan, many years afterwards, how St. Columba’s
monks, toiling in the fields, experienced now and again the very
sensation--if it be just to speak of it as a sensation--that I have
described. They, too, weary with their work of reclaiming the barren
land of their isle, would know that sudden glow of joy and strength
and courage; and they believed that it was the prayer of their Father
in God, Columba, strengthening them and inspiring them, as he knelt
before the altar of the Perpetual Choir. And lest it be said that
I had read Adamnan when I was a boy and had forgotten all about it
consciously though I had retained it subconsciously, I must solemnly
declare that this was not the case; and that when this strange
experience first befell me, I was overwhelmed with astonishment,
and could scarcely credit that which was actually happening. I
have hesitated as to whether it should be, in strictness, called a
sensation, and I still hesitate. It seems to me, and I think that I
can trust my recollection, that the two worlds of sense and spirit
were admirably and wonderfully mingled, so that it was difficult, or
rather impossible, to distinguish the outward and sensible glow from
the inward and spiritual grace. _Magnum vere sacramentum._ And all
this, be it remembered, would fall out in dim Bloomsbury squares, in
noisy, clattering Gray’s Inn Road, in a train on the Underground,
amongst hustling crowds in common streets. I mention this, not
forgetful of a pretty severe rebuke which I received from a very high
literary quarter on account of that little book, “The Great Return,”
which I have just cited. The critic noted the fact that in my book
the Holy Grail was manifested to the common people, to common modern
people, to Welsh tradesmen and farmers. He seemed to think this very
low. It may be low, but perhaps things happen in this way sometimes;
and so with me: I, by no manner of means a knight, received joys and
knew wonders while the trams clanged along the Clerkenwell Road in
the grey winter afternoon. So it was, and it appears to me necessary
to tell the truth. As Coventry Patmore says, quoting from an earlier
writer: “Let us not deny in the darkness that which we have known in
the light.”

And beyond all this, beyond these experiences in which things of the
body and things of the spirit were mingled, there was a better world
of which I saw the verges. There was no more grief; there was no more
resentment, there was no more anger. The griefs that flood the heart
with agony, the great sorrows of life, these were seen to be but
passing trifles of no moment, like the sorrow of a little child which
is past and forgotten before its tears are dry. I remember tearing up
an old diary which I had kept in the bitter days of Clarendon Road,
a record of struggles and starvings and desolations; I tore it up
because it no longer signified anything to me. The words, I daresay,
were strong enough, but the tale had become of no meaning at all. I
glanced at one page and another of the tattered old notebook before I
rent it, with a kind of mild curiosity as to the state of mind of the
silly stranger who had written all this, and had whined so dismally.
At all events, it had nothing to do with me, and so it went into
fragments and into the fire. If it could be restored to me now, I
should read it all with interest and whine again and foam again _sæva
indignatione_; but then I have long returned into that darkness in
which, I suppose, most of our lives are spent.

       *       *       *       *       *

There is one thing that I hope I may be spared, that is the comment
of the Oriental Occult Ass. I confess that I have written all this
with difficulty, and with doubt as to the decency of writing it at
all, especially when the tale, if it is to be a true tale, makes
it necessary for me to seem to compare, for one little moment, the
saints of the company and following of St. Columba with myself. But
I do hope that 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. Why, when the Swami Vishnakanandaram Jam
Ghosh was over here last summer he mentioned all these phenomena as
things you have to forget before you set out on the Way. As he put it
so beautifully: ‘The sun arises. It gleams on the Lotus. The petals
of the _bhulji_ flower expand. The stars are no longer seen.’ Yes,
isn’t he wonderful? Fancy anybody still bothering about Keats and
those silly people!”

I hope, I say, that I shall be spared that. I can bear better I think
the (more or less) Occidental Idiot, who will speak of Shin--the
letter of the Hebrew Alphabet, not the delicate portion of our
anatomy--attribute it to the Tarot Trump called the Fool, and just
throw in a reference to Salt, Sulphur and Mercury.

As for me, I make no deductions, I infer nothing, I refrain from
saying “therefore.” Like Sancho Panza: “I come from my own vineyard;
I know nothing.” Perhaps I may venture to say that I have seen a
lousy, lazy tramp drinking from a roadside stream that drips cold and
pure from the rock in burning weather. Then the wastrel passes on his
ill way, refreshed indeed, but as lousy and lazy as ever.

_De torrente in via bibet: propterea exaltabit caput._




_Chapter X_


MR. CHARLES O’MALLEY, Castle O’Malley, Co. Galway.

That was the inscription of a card which had just been placed in my
hand, as I walked along Southampton Row--on which I found myself
stupidly gazing in real old Southampton Row, not the staring, blatant
street that bears the name now--one fine day in the summer of 1900.

Ten minutes or so before I had been taking my morning stroll in the
company of my bulldog, Juggernaut. I was accosted very politely by a
stoutish, youngish, clean-shaven gentleman, well dressed, with the
mere suspicion of an Irish accent.

He had said without preface of any kind:

“A fine dog you’ve got, sir. I should be very glad if you’d come up
with me and show it to a lady I know who lives in the flats opposite.”

I assented at once, feeling thoroughly in the scene, as they say
on the stage. I followed him and we displayed the dog Juggernaut,
certainly a noble specimen of his noble race, to the lady who, I
may say at once, was a lady, and appeared to be on terms of polite
acquaintance with the gentleman. Jug was admired, and the gentleman
and I went down into the street again. The lady had not evinced the
faintest astonishment at the introduction of a total stranger with
a bulldog into her flat. When we were both down on the pavement of
Southampton Row, the amateur of bulldogs gave me his card, and told
me that I should be welcome and more than welcome if ever I found
myself near Castle O’Malley, in County Galway. And so he vanished--if
he ever were there, as to which I held and still hold, in a fantastic
sort of way, vague doubts.

No, the flat was a perfectly quiet and unostentatious one. Nothing to
drink was produced; there were no K.O. drops. The lady did not ask me
to look in again some evening for a quiet game of cards with a few
congenial friends. Mr. O’Malley did not say that he had salvaged a
Spanish galleon wrecked beneath the rocks on which Castle O’Malley
was built, and that in consequence he had more money than he knew
what to do with. And I missed nothing from my pocket. That is one of
the reasons why I hate rationalism, since, when it is called in, in
a little difficulty or perplexity, its advices and explanations are
always so stupid, so wide of the mark, so absolutely futile. Finally,
from that day to this, I have never seen Mr. Charles O’Malley,
of Castle O’Malley, Co. Galway, nor have I heard of him. I have
forgotten to say that he did not so much as ask me my name.

I only wish that I had kept some kind of note of the very strange
period which I had entered. It came about gradually, the merging
of Syon into Bagdad; and I have a much dimmer recollection of the
latter city. For its essence, as will be seen in the anecdote of
the O’Malley, was lack of purpose, a certain fantastic confusion, a
sense that something without any ratio might happen at any moment.
Nothing began, nothing ended: strange people were apt to separate
themselves from the crowd, to engage in queer discourse without
intelligible motive or meaning, and then to sink back again, leaving
no trace behind. And when events lack logical sequence or connection,
it is difficult to retain them in the memory. But I believe that
I do remember that on this very day of the O’Malley incident ten
total strangers addressed me, without any very manifest reason and
to no discernible end. We encountered in all sorts of places, in
the street, in the restaurant, in the vanished Café de l’Europe in
Leicester Square; the strangers uttered their mysterious messages,
which to me were as incomprehensible as if they had been in cipher,
and so vanished away. Indeed, looking back, I begin to wonder whether
I were constantly being mistaken for someone else, who must have been
exactly like me; this Someone Else being evidently a prominent member
of a secret society, who would be aware of the signs and passwords of
the order. For all I know, when Mr. O’Malley praised poor old Jug--he
has long years ago gone to be a gargoyle on the parapet of some great
Gothic church of the skies--I should have answered: “Yes, he is a
fine dog, but green bulldogs with blue spots are finer.” Then, it may
be, the interview would have become coherent, and tending to some
end, and the lady in the flat would have pressed the secret panel and
have disclosed ... I really don’t know what.

That very day, I mean the day of the incident of the Bulldog, Mr.
O’Malley and the Lady in the Flat, I was sitting in the Café de
l’Europe with a friend, discussing various matters, when, as we
rose to go a young man of a somewhat colourless and unpretending
appearance, who had been sitting at the other side of the table,
suddenly observed:

“I have been very much interested, sir, in your conversation, and I
should very much like to hear more of it.”

Again, I was in the scene. I gave him my address in Gray’s Inn, and
he called to see me several times, always coming at night and staying
pretty late, asking me many questions about interior things. I think
it was only on his last visit that I found out his odd manner of
leaving the Inn, when he went away at one or half-past one in the
morning. He was ignorant of the fact that the Raymond Buildings Gate
and the Holborn Gate have watchers by them who will open the portals
all the long night; and so when he left me he would climb the spiked
wall which separates Verulam Buildings from Gray’s Inn Road and make
off into the gaslight. He, too, vanished, and I saw him no more.

It was some time earlier in this year that I became conscious of
a very odd circumstance. It will perhaps have been noticed that I
have become insensibly Stevensonian in my diction, as I have spoken
of the Incident of the Bulldog, or of this or of that. That is so
because the atmosphere in which I lived was becoming remarkably like
the atmosphere of “The Three Impostors,” which, as I have remarked,
is derived from the “New Arabian” manner of R. L. Stevenson. Not
only did strange and unknown and unexplained people start up from
every corner, from every café table, and engage me in obscure mazes
of talk, quite in the Arabian manner, but I presently became aware
that something very odd indeed was happening: certain characters in
“The Three Impostors” showed signs of coming to life, a feat which,
perhaps, they had failed to perform before. I was once talking to a
dark young man, of quiet and retiring aspect, who wore glasses--he
and I had met at a place where we had to be blindfolded before we
could see the light--and he told me a queer tale of the manner in
which his life was in daily jeopardy. He described the doings of a
fiend in human form, a man who was well known to be an expert in
Black Magic, a man who hung up naked women in cupboards by hooks
which pierced the flesh of their arms. This monster--I may say that
there is such a person, though I can by no means go bail for the
actuality of any of the misdeeds charged against him--had, for some
reason which I do not recollect, taken a dislike to my dark young
friend. In consequence, so I was assured, he had hired a gang in
Lambeth, who were grievously to maim or preferably to slaughter the
dark young man; each member of the gang receiving a retaining fee of
eight shillings and sixpence a day--a sum, by the way, that sounds
as if it were the face value of some mediæval coin long obsolete. I
listened in wonder, for there are some absurdities so enormous that
they seem to have a stunning effect on the common sense, paralysing
it for the moment and inhibiting its action. It was only when I got
home that it dawned upon me that I had been listening to the Young
Man in Spectacles, and that he came out of “The Three Impostors.”
And soon Miss Lally, another character from the book, appeared, and
like her prototype discoursed most amazing tales, was the heroine
of incredible adventures, would appear and disappear in a quite
inexplicable manner, relating always histories before unheard of, a
personage wholly diverting, enigmatic and enchanting.

And the odd thing is that it was as if these two had parts to play
for a season, and played them--till the prompter’s bell sounded,
and the curtain fell and the lights went out. Both Miss Lally and
the Young Man in Spectacles still live; but they have become useful
members of society and eminently successful, as I believe, in their
several employments. Thus do the King and Queen in the play go home
to their flats or their lodgings after the show and enjoy cold beef,
pickles and a comfortable bottle of beer.

And now I am going at last to say a good word for literature. I have
said, again and again, even to tedium, that the only good that I can
see in it is that it is one of the many ways of escaping from life,
to be classified with Alpine Climbing, Chess, Methylated Spirit and
Prussic Acid. The way I have always seen it is like this: I go out on
a Sunday afternoon in March with the black north-easter blowing to
take a walk up Gower Street. I say to myself: “O come! I can’t stand
this,” and go home and write--or try to write--a chapter in “The Hill
of Dreams.” Many people will say that the chapter is much worse than
the street, and I daresay that they are right; but, anyhow, it was
different: it was, for me, the nearest way out of Gower Street and
the black north-easter. But I believe that there may be a little
more in literature than this. It is certainly the escape from life;
but perhaps it is also the only means of realising and shewing life,
or, at least, certain aspects of life. Here is an example to my hand.
Here am I, not trying to write literature, but doing my best to tell
a true tale, and I find that I can make nothing of it. I can set
down the facts, or rather such of them as I remember, but I am quite
conscious that I am not, in the real sense of the word, telling the
truth; that is, I am not giving any sense of the very extraordinary
atmosphere in which I lived in the year 1900, of the curious and
indescribable impression which the events of those days made upon
me; the sense that everything had altered, that everything was very
strange, that I lived in daily intercourse with people who would have
been impossible, unimaginable, a year before; that the figure of the
world was changed utterly for me--of all this I can give no true
picture, dealing as I am with what are called facts. I maintained
long ago in “Hieroglyphics” that facts as facts do not signify
anything or communicate anything; and I am sure that I was right,
when I confess that, as a purveyor of exact information, I can make
nothing of the year 1900. But, avoiding the facts, I have got a good
deal nearer to the truth in the last chapter of “The Secret Glory,”
which describes the doings and feelings of two young people who are
paying their first visit to London. _I_ never bolted up to town with
the house-master’s parlour-maid; but truth must be told in figures.

There is one episode of this period of which I may say a little
more, that is the affair of the Secret Society. Putting two and two
together, a good many years after the event, I am inclined to think
that it was a mere item in the programme of strange and Arabian
entertainment that was being produced for my benefit: the Secret
Society was of the same order as the Incident of Mr. O’Malley and
the Adventure of the Young Man who always left by the Spiked Wall,
only of a more gorgeous and elaborate kind. And I must confess that
it did me a great deal of good--for the time. To stand waiting at
a closed door in a breathless expectation, to see it open suddenly
and disclose two figures clothed in a habit that I never thought to
see worn by the living, to catch for a moment the vision of a cloud
of incense smoke and certain dim lights glimmering in it before the
bandage was put over the eyes and the arm felt a firm grasp upon it
that led the hesitating footsteps into the unknown darkness: all this
was strange and admirable indeed; and strange it was to think that
within a foot or two of those closely curtained windows the common
life of London moved on the common pavement, as supremely unaware of
what was being done within an arm’s length as if our works had been
the works of the other side of the moon. All this was very fine; an
addition and a valuable one, as I say, to the phantasmagoria that was
being presented to me. But as for anything vital in the secret order,
for anything that mattered two straws to any reasonable being, there
was nothing of it, and less than nothing. Among the members there
were, indeed, persons of very high attainments, who, in my opinion,
ought to have known better after a year’s membership or less; but the
society as a society was pure foolishness concerned with impotent
and imbecile Abracadabras. It knew nothing whatever about anything
and concealed the fact under an impressive ritual and a sonorous
phraseology. It had no wisdom, even of the inferior or lower kind, in
its leadership; it exercised no real scrutiny into the characters of
those whom it admitted, and so it is not surprising that some of its
phrases and passwords were to be read one fine morning in the papers,
their setting being one of the most loathsome criminal cases of the
twentieth century.

And yet it had and has an interest of a kind. It claimed, I may say,
to be of very considerable antiquity, and to have been introduced
into England from abroad in a singular manner. I am not quite certain
as to the details, but the _mythos_ imparted to members was something
after this fashion. A gentleman interested in occult studies was
looking round the shelves of a second-hand bookshop, where the works
which attracted him were sometimes to be found. He was examining a
particular volume--I forget whether its title was given--when he
found between the leaves a few pages of dim manuscript, written
in a character which was strange to him. The gentleman bought the
book, and when he got home eagerly examined the manuscript. It was
in cipher; he could make nothing of it. But on the manuscript--or,
perhaps, on a separate slip laid next to it--was the address of a
person in Germany. The curious investigator of secret things and
hidden counsels wrote to this address, obtained full particulars,
the true manner of reading the cipher and, as I conjecture, a sort
of commission and jurisdiction from the Unknown Heads in Germany to
administer the mysteries in England. And hence arose, or re-arose, in
this isle the Order of the Twilight Star. Its original foundation was
assigned to the fifteenth century.

I like the story; but there was not one atom of truth in it. The
Twilight Star was a stumer--or stumed--to use a very old English
word. Its true date of origin was 1880–1885 at earliest. The “Cipher
Manuscript” was written on paper that bore the watermark of 1809 in
ink that had a faded appearance. But it contained information that
could not possibly have been known to any living being in the year
1809, that was not known to any living being till twenty years later.
It was, no doubt, a forgery of the early ’eighties. Its originators
must have had some knowledge of Freemasonry; but, so ingeniously
was this occult fraud “put upon the market” that, to the best of my
belief, the flotation remains a mystery to this day. But what an
entertaining mystery; and, after all, it did nobody any harm.

It must be said that the evidence of the fraudulent character of the
Twilight Star does not rest merely upon the fact that the Cipher
Manuscript contained a certain piece of knowledge that was not in
existence in the year 1809. Any critical mind, with a tinge of occult
reading, should easily have concluded that here was no ancient order
from the whole nature and substance of its ritual and doctrine. For
ancient rituals, whether orthodox or heterodox, are founded on one
_mythos_ and on one _mythos_ only. They are grouped about some fact,
actual or symbolic, as the ritual of Freemasonry is said to have
as its centre certain events connected with the building of King
Solomon’s Temple, and they keep within their limits. But the Twilight
Star embraced all mythologies and all mysteries of all races and all
ages, and “referred” or “attributed” them to each other and proved
that they all came to much the same thing; and that was enough! That
was not the ancient frame of mind; it was not even the 1809 frame of
mind. But it was very much the eighteen-eighty and later frame of
mind.

I must say that I did not seek the Order merely in quest of odd
entertainment. As I have stated in the chapter before this, I had
experienced strange things--they still appear to me strange--of body,
mind and spirit, and I supposed that the Order, dimly heard of, might
give me some light and guidance and leading on these matters. But, as
I have noted, I was mistaken; the Twilight Star shed no ray of any
kind on my path.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was towards the end of 1900 that I perceived that as I had lost
sight of the admirable Syon, so Bagdad was wearing badly enough. I
have seen from the train the architecture of the “White City” in
these recent years. It was never anything at its best, assuredly;
never anything save foolishness. Still, lit up on a summer night,
with its extravagant towers and walls, pavilions and domes and
minarets, with all its fretted and fantastic work, with its still
lakes and pouring waterfalls; in those old days before the war I have
no doubt that it symbolised joy and enchantment to young and simple
hearts. But afterwards, when long neglect had told upon it, when
winter rains had wept upon its walls and soot showers had drifted
on its pavilions, when the summer suns had scorched its whiteness,
and black March winds had torn its feigned embroideries and false
ornaments, when many autumn storms had beat upon its plaster
battlements and the waterfalls were stilled and the lakes were become
obscene pits of slime and rubbish--what an ugly mockery it stood
there, an idiot’s city fallen into ruin, a scenic fairyland in evil
days. So my Bagdad became like the “White City,” magic down at heel,
its enchantments silly and clumsy tricks, its mystic architecture a
shabby sham, its strange encounters, meetings with people who turned
out to be bores or worse than bores. You know the story of the fairy
gold: at night the man who had had happy commerce with the People
of the Hills found himself enriched with boundless and wonderful
treasure; but in the morning the marvel of gold had all turned into a
heap of dead leaves; such was my case.

And here I am moved to wonder, as I often wonder, whether what we
call “fairy tales” do not in fact contain a curious wisdom and the
secrets of a very strange and mysterious psychology. Take this old
tale of the fairy gold and its transmutation into ugly rubbish, as
an example. To most of us it is a tale and nothing more than a tale;
without any reason, without any meaning, without any sort of sense
or significance in it. We accept it just as a piece of picturesque
fancy and nothing more; the turning of the magic gold into leaves
was just a happy notion of the unknown and remote individual who
made up the story. But suppose that there is something more than
this: rather, something quite different from this. I am well aware,
of course, of the various explanations of the fairy mythology;
the fairies are the gods of the heathen come down in the world:
Diana become Titania. Or the fairies are a fantasy on the small,
dark people who dwelt in the land and under the land before the
coming of the Celts; or they are “elementals,” spirits of the four
elements: there are all these accounts, and, for all I know, all
may be true, each in its measure. But is it possible that there is,
now and then, a more hidden and interior sense in some of the tales
of the fairyland and the fairies? I am inclined to think that this
may be so; that the stories may be--occasionally, not always by any
means--the veils of certain rare interior experiences of mankind;
experiences, I may say, which are best avoided. The gold faded into
dead leaves; it may be more than an idle tale. At any rate, it was a
very dismal disenchantment to me when I woke up and found that I was
not the Commander of the Faithful, that the fair Circassian was, in
fact, a native not of Circassia but of Clapham, that Bagdad was not
Bagdad at all, but a London “Exhibition” fallen into very bad repair
and urgently in need of tacks and whitewash. The Palace was not
habitable; rain was coming in through cracks and rents in the marble
that was plaster on the head of him who for a time had been Haroun
Alraschid, who now began to suspect that his real style and title
was Silly Fool. And then I went on the stage, which is a world of
illusion certainly, but of a much less harmful illusion than that of
plaster-Bagdad and fairy gold and the hall under the hill.

I have wondered at times why there is no good novel of the stage.
But a little consideration shews that there can be no such thing.
George Moore wrote long ago a clever book called “A Mummer’s Wife.”
It is a capital book, and I should think a very faithful impression
of a “Cloches de Corneville” touring company in the early ’eighties.
I would say of an individual “Cloches de Corneville” company, for
the characters strike one as portraits of particular people; there
is nothing of the universal about the book, nothing of the essence
of the stage life. And it is probably impossible to write the real
novel of the stage, for the good reason that the stage is not one but
many. In the old days, in the days of the Crummles Company, it would
have been easier. The actor of those days was supposed, till he had
proved his supreme eminence in one particular line of business, to
be capable of all. He was to play “Hamlet,” he was also to go on in
the Farce, he was to dance a hornpipe between the acts, he was always
to be ready with a song; and, again, unless he were a very eminent
actor indeed, he very rarely associated with people beyond the
range of the call-boy’s voice. The stage in those days was a world
apart, and the men and women who trod it a race apart; the actor was
a type, just as the sailor of Smollett’s day was a type. But all
that is long over; it would be very difficult to find a general
formula to cover the life of the stage to-day. Commodore Trunnion
viewed all existence as a voyage on board one of His Majesty’s
ships; and I knew a stage-manager who, playing skittles, avowed his
determination to bring down “that O.P. skittle”; but the Commodore
is dead, and the stage-manager is dying. In fact I should say that
the average actor of to-day is far from being gratified when he is
recognised as an actor; rather he is inclined to be ashamed of his
profession. I remember that as I was talking to two stage friends
on a London pavement an old man who was selling laces and studs
and such matters in the gutter implored us to buy: “I was an actor
once myself, gentlemen.” I perceived that my friends were very far
from being pleased. I think that the poor old man would have done
better if he had said: “I was an officer in the Guards once myself,
gentlemen.” So, in brief, the actors are no longer the race apart of
the old days; they mix with all sorts of people and have, naturally,
become very much like all sorts of people. Some of them think that
the change is for the better, others disagree. I venture no judgment
save this: that they are certainly less picturesque, because less
differenced than of old, and thus it is that nobody is likely to do
much good with a story of the stage.

I daresay that few people outside the profession are aware that the
old players had a language of their own, or rather a language which
they shared with another and a widely different craft. Not merely
the technical language of the stage, though that had its curiosities
too. For example, I once heard George Alexander at rehearsal say
to one of the company: “Too much of the old, Smith, too much of the
old!” And Smith, though he had been for many years on the stage,
told me afterwards that he had never heard the phrase before, and
didn’t know what it meant. I knew what it meant, having associated,
like Mr. Lillyvick, with members of the theatrical profession in the
provincial, that is more or less, the less fortunate grade. “The old”
means the melodramatic style of acting, the manner which used to be
associated with the name of Barry Sullivan. When an actor said, “I
gave them a bit of the old,” he meant that he exaggerated somewhat
both in his tones and in the business of the scene; in other words,
that he made it “big” and “broad.”

But this is not the language I mean. Once on a provincial tour I
found that the stage-manager had somehow heard of my connection with
literature, and was inclined, in consequence, to suspect me a little
of being, as we should say now, a “high-brow” and to resent the
supposed fact. So I put him through an examination. I asked if he
knew what “omees” were, in particular as to the character signified
by the phrase “omee of the carser.” Then as to the idioms “nunty
munjare” and “nunty dinnari” and so on. He broke down badly, but he
put away his evil suspicions from that moment; he knew that if I had
written books in my day I had turned over a new leaf and had become a
reformed character: I knew the curious speech better than he did. It
is barbarous Italian, and was the lingo of old-fashioned actors and
thieves.




_Chapter XI_


It is a very odd experience to go on the stage at the age of
thirty-nine. It is, of course, unpractical, since at that age a
man is too old to learn the business properly; but it is a great
entertainment. The change was so extreme. I had always lived a
very quiet life. I had few friends, few acquaintances. My life was
in reading books and in writing them. All my preoccupations were
literary. Every morning after breakfast I went over what I had
written the night before, correcting here and there and everywhere,
generally convinced that the passage which had pleased me so much as
I wrote it was, after all, not magnificent. I took the bulldog for
a walk from 12 to 1, and another half-hour walk in the afternoon.
Then two cups of tea without milk or sugar at 4, and the rigour of
the literary game till 7, and again after dinner till 11. It was a
life of routine, and all its adventures, difficulties, defeats and
rare triumphs were those of the written page. I did not know a single
actor, and had no curiosity as to the actor’s life, circumstances,
customs or manners. And then, one afternoon in February, 1901, I
found myself stuck up with a number of ladies and gentlemen on a
thing like a greenhouse flower-pot stand, and we were all required
to express suitable and varied emotions as Shylock appealed for the
fulfilment of the bond which Antonio had given him. This was the
first thing I had tried to do on the stage, and I believe it was
the most difficult. No doubt Mr.--afterwards Sir Frank--Benson was
right in saying that it was the only way to learn how to act; but
gesture, facial expression, pantomime, the knack of knowing how to be
individual and yet to join in effectively with the crowd; all these
things are extremely difficult, very much more difficult than the art
of speaking an effective line effectively.

But--very likely because the change from my former way of living
was so tremendous in every respect--I found the life an enchanting
one. Of course I could not have begun under happier auspices; nay, I
could not have begun under any auspices half so happy. It has been
said, I think, more than once, and said by men far more qualified
to speak than I, that if it had not been for the Benson Company,
acting as an ordered art, with its technique and tradition, would
pretty well have perished out of England. The old stock companies
were gone, with their manifold opportunities for learning the actor’s
craft. The young man who went on the stage probably walked on for
six months or a year in a London production, and unless he were an
exceptionally bright young fellow he learned very little. Perhaps,
if he were lucky, he was promoted from a thinking part to a speaking
one and uttered the line: “You don’t say so!” every night; but still
he learned very little. If he became a good actor under this régime,
it was a case of genius triumphing over circumstance. Of course good
actors come from everywhere: from the academies, from melodramas
travelling in the fit-ups, from the chorus of the musical play, from
the ranks of the walkers-on in the long London run; but, as I say,
these are cases of greatness overcoming difficulties. But under the
training provided by the Benson Company it was a man’s fault if he
did not learn to act; it was pretty definite proof that there was no
acting in his composition. I remember Henry Ainley saying in this
very year, 1901: “Well, in the last fortnight I have played twelve
different parts, and if that won’t teach a man how to act, nothing
will.” This, I may say, was at the end of the Festival Season at
Stratford-on-Avon, a strenuous and a delightful time.

But, as I say, I could have entered on the boards under no happier
auspices. There was a constant succession of small parts, so graded
with due tenderness both to the beginner and the audience that not
much harm could be done by uneasy awkwardness, and much good was
certain to be gained by the beginner. For example, I have a suspicion
that the whole pack of us on that flower-pot stand in “The Merchant,”
all of us beginners, were about as bad as bad can be; but it really
signified little. The people in front were looking at Shylock and
Portia, not at us; and I don’t suppose that our incapacity diminished
to any calculable extent the public entertainment. Then in the next
piece, “As You,” I was a Forest Lord with a line. I had to say to the
Banished Duke: “I’ll bring you to him straight,” and Oscar Asche took
pains to show me that I must speak it as I moved up stage with my
back to the audience; but the fortunes of the play hardly depended on
that line, while I was beginning to grow a slight seed of confidence.

And how all this was an utterly different world from anything that I
had ever conjectured; I cannot express the gulf that yawned between
the old and the new. In the former years I struggled with words and
phrases and sentences and shades of meaning implied by them: now I
strove to understand how something like an attenuated pigtail could
become a highly probable fifteenth-century beard and moustaches in a
couple of minutes, when skilled hands were laid upon it. And I was
occupied with R.U.E. and L.U.E. and 5 and 8, and how to stand so that
you command the stage as F. R. B. instructed me, and the endeavour to
take in and profit by the kindly tips and hints and cautions given
by the elder members of the company: here was a holiday, indeed, for
a man who had tried to tear the secret of literature from the thorn
castle where it is concealed, who had torn his hands and his heart
sadly enough in the endeavour.

I have mentioned the tips and hints of the Elder Brethren amongst
the Bensonians. This was a great part of the discipline and
instruction of the course. It was not only what Benson said at
rehearsal, it was also what Asche or Rodney or Brydone or Swete said
after the rehearsal or after the show, and often what they said
was, quite rightly, highly uncomplimentary. I remember when Henry
Herbert--“starring” in America now, I believe--was playing in “King
John,” it fell to him to pronounce the lines which speak of painting
the lily and gilding refined gold. He spoke them, as I thought,
with great spirit; but Brydone--dead not long ago--took him apart
afterwards and talked to him for half an hour or more as to the grave
mistake he had committed.

“You spoke the lines as if they were beautiful poetry,” said Brydone,
“and, indeed, they are. If you had been reciting them your reading
would have been quite right; but not in the scene, on the stage.
So-and-so--I have forgotten the name of the part--is raging against
King John; he isn’t thinking of the poetic beauty of the words he is
using.”

Now, I do not presume to judge whether Brydone were right or wrong in
this criticism; such matters are too high for my small experience as
an actor; but consider the enormous value to the beginner of living
in such an atmosphere of thought and observation and consideration of
the things of the theatre. Herbert may have come eventually to the
conclusion that he had been right after all, and that Brydone was
wrong; but, anyhow, he had worried the question out and weighed it in
his mind, and looked at it and around it; and all that, it seems to
me, is the very air in which good craftsmanship is born and nurtured
and grows great and flourishes.

And so, apart from these after-confabulations and dressing-room
counsels, a rehearsal in the Benson Company has always struck me as
a liberal education in the player’s art. Benson himself--the “Pa”
of the affectionate and reverent remembrance of many hundreds of
his grateful sons and scholars--has always been an imaginative poet
of a high order; though somehow he has never written any poetry.
Instead, he has produced Shakespeare, and perhaps he has chosen the
better way. He has illuminated his text admirably, and his way was
not to come down to the theatre with the whole scheme of things cut
and dried in his head, with every intonation, every bit of business
and every position settled immutably beforehand, but rather to
approach the play, scene by scene, with a liberal and open spirit.
The main conception he doubtless brought with him, but any light he
could find in the process of rehearsal he would welcome heartily, no
matter whether it came from one of the elder brethren or from the
newest member of the company. For example, during the rehearsals of
“King John” we had come to the scene wherein the Legate, Pandulph,
reconciles the King to Holy Church. I was talking to the Legate at
the wings during some brief interval, and ventured very tentatively
to describe the symbolical embrace known as the Kiss of Peace as a
possibly effective bit of business in the reconciliation scene. The
Legate, interested, asked me to show him how it was done, and we went
through the business. But Benson, who seemed to be considering other
matters down stage, had noticed what we were about, and he called
out: “I like that: we’ll do it.” And done it was; and I had been a
little over two months in the company and on the stage!

And another instance, taken from the same play, of a Bensonian
rehearsal of those days. The scene was the discovery of the dead
body of Prince Arthur. I had to say:

    “What wilt thou do, renowned Faulconbridge,
    Second a villain and a murderer?”

Whereon Hubert furiously interposed:

    “Lord Essex, I am none!”

And then I had to draw the cloak away from the corpse and exclaim:

    “Who killed this Prince?”

And thereupon a debate arose. Should the words be spoken before
the removal of the cloak? Should the cloak be removed before the
uttering of the line? Should word and action be simultaneous? The
point was discussed with the utmost earnestness, as a matter of
vital importance, and I, feeling that I was in mighty deep waters,
suggested in all humility that I should speak the words with an
indicative gesture and that Hubert should step forward, appalled,
and remove the cloak and discover the body of the Prince. But this
started another subsidiary debate, and the rehearsal breaking off at
this point, Brydone (Hubert) and Frank Rodney (Faulconbridge) were
left on the Stratford stage, walking up and down, and wondering,
in muttered undertones, whether it would be within the limits of
possibility and stage propriety for Hubert to snatch that cloak
away. Their faces were grave, earnest and perplexed. Outside in the
sunshine by the Avon I encountered “Pa.” He looked at me with a
certain waggishness in his eye, as if he suspected bewilderment on my
part, and said:

“Well, Mr. Machen, what do you think about it yourself?”

“Indeed, sir,” I replied, “I don’t venture to have any opinion.”

And I meant what I said, for I didn’t think then, and I don’t think
now, that it befits the entered apprentice to express his opinion, or
presume to have any opinion, in the presence of past masters.

Now it may be thought that I am “guying” the Company methods in this
matter of Prince Arthur’s funeral cloak. I am not doing anything
of the sort. I only wish I had gone on in the craft, and were now
myself entitled to walk up and down the stage, debating just such
a point. The matter in itself was, no doubt, small enough: a stage
management in a hurry would have given a ruling and the scene would
have proceeded; but under a stage-management in a hurry what would
have become of the vivid interest taken in the smallest circumstance
of the play by the whole company, from F. R. Benson downward?

And, by the way, I trust I am not giving the impression that the
Bensonians of that day were a body of solemn pedants? I have not
yet forgotten my admiration, my almost awestruck admiration, at
seeing the manner in which the man who was to play King John drank
home-brewed ale in a triangular parlour of the Windmill on the
afternoon before the production. He drank in the manner of the
ancient heroes, and he gave a very good performance at night.

But the Stratford Festival drew to its dose. On the last Saturday
we were rehearsing in the morning, playing in the afternoon and
playing again in the evening. Some time in the course of the day I
was told that I was to play Nym in the “Merry Wives” on Monday night
at Worcester. I bought the play and looked at the part and got the
cuts from the Prompt Book--and I wonder why I didn’t drown myself in
the Avon after the show as the easiest way out of the difficulty;
and if anyone wants to know why, let him read the part of Nym in
“The Merry Wives of Windsor,” and ask himself how he would like to
learn that queer gibberish and learn how to play it in a couple
of days, he having had three months’ experience of the stage. But
instead of drowning myself in the Avon, I ... refreshed myself at a
famous tavern of the town together with about half the company; and I
think we heard the chimes at two o’clock in the morning, and it was
reported that old George Weir, on being asked “to write something” in
the hostess’s book had written the words: “When my cue comes call me
and I will answeir.”

And that reminds me: At the Bensonian dinner in the year in which
this great actor, George Weir, died, F. R. Benson began his speech.
His manner commanded the cessation of applause, and he raised one
hand, and held it high, and said:

“This year, one amongst us has answered the summons of the call-boy
of the stars.”

       *       *       *       *       *

But to return to my small business. On the Sunday we travelled to
Worcester, and I spent the rest of the day in a desperate struggle
with Nym and “the humour of bread and cheese,” and “that’s the humour
of it,” in endeavouring to get into my memory phrases which are not
merely old but old-fashioned, for Nym, like Touchstone, discourses
for the most part Elizabethan catchwords which, three hundred years
before, were “certain of a laugh,” which the process of time and
fashion has made meaningless, and phrases such as these are very
difficult to learn.

But I learned them somehow or other on the Sunday, and the next
morning came to the one and only rehearsal. It was not on the stage,
more important things were happening there, but in the travellers’
samples room of one of the Worcester inns. Of course there was no
scenery, no costumes, no “props” of any kind. A few chairs indicated
the set, quite sufficiently, I may say to a man of experience, but
dubiously enough to a man of next to no experience. Thus, when
it came to my last exit, the Assistant Stage-Manager gave his
instructions somewhat as follows:

“After you have said the last words to Page, turn round and go up
the flight of steps L.C., here, between these chairs. When you have
got to the top, turn again and say to Page, over his shoulder: ‘My
name is Nym, and Falstaff loves your wife.’ Then exit Left along the
terrace.”

Simplicity itself, to an actor, but somewhat horrifying to a
beginner. And then two or three of the principals were not
there--they were rehearsing other scenes, very likely, on the stage,
and the Prompter’s: “Mr. Rodney will come on on that cue from the
right upper entrance, where that table is, and you go up to him and
meet him Centre and say so and so, and then he speaks the line so and
so and you cross to the Right”--with much more to the same effect.
And my breath was queer and catchy, even though it was only the
rehearsal, and I wondered what my voice and I would be like at night!

Well, I was paralysed with stage-fright. But I got through, somehow;
and I hope the Old Woman of the Company, Miss Denvil, as admirable an
actress as George Weir was an actor, meant what she said after I had
made my Exit Left along the terrace. She smacked me heartily on the
back, and said:

“There! I always say the nervous ones are the best!”

So the tour went on, and in the course of it I received an odd bit
of promotion. I descended from the flower-pot stand in the Trial
Scene of the “Merchant” and became the Clerk of the Court. I think
he speaks one line and reads a letter, and that is all. It is hardly
to be called a part; if the man who had to do it failed at the last
moment the Business Manager or, more likely, his assistant, would be
summoned and robed in the black habit and the square cap. He would be
told the line and given the letter, and that would be all right. It
was so small a thing that the man who “played” it was supposed not to
care to do so under his own name, so I was either not in the bill at
all or else I appeared as “Mr. Walter Plinge,” the Mrs. Harris of the
Benson Company, who often came in useful on occasions like this, or
when there was a case of “doubling.” There was such a person, but I
believe he kept a tavern frequented by the Company.

And so I was the Clerk of the Court, and solemnly proceeded to
consider within myself what a Compleat Clerk of the Court should
be like. I determined, firstly, that the boy at the back of the
gallery should hear what I said; but this is a general rule--and by
no means the least important--which applies to all acting. My second
resolution was that a really convincing Clerk would not take the
faintest interest in the very emotional procedure which seems to have
characterised the strict court of Venice. He would listen to all
the pleadings and all the agonies with a stolid countenance. When
the Doge spoke of “brassy bosoms” and “hearts of flint” and “gentle
answer, Jew” and so forth, the Clerk would become stonier and stonier
in his indifference, possibly reflecting inwardly that he had always
thought that the appointment was a purely political one, and that now
he was sure of it. “Ad captandum arguments,” “Old Bailey rhetoric,”
“Buzfuz on the Bench,” “Trying to throw dust in the eyes of the Jew,”
such phrases, translated, of course, into choice Venetian dialect,
might be supposed to flit through the purely legal and formalistic
mind of the Clerk. As for the young advocate, whose credentials the
Clerk had been obliged to proclaim, well, frankly, the Clerk could
not understand how the Doge, politician as he was, could permit such
unprofessional rubbish as the “Quality of mercy” speech to be uttered
in court at all. “Mountain pines,” “wag their high tops,” “twice
blest,” “crowned monarch better than his throne”: really, really!
What was the Bar coming to? The Clerk’s face and attitude have become
perfectly stony in their supreme indifference; he might be a thousand
miles away.

But! What is that? The Bond bad in law? The plaintiff debarred from
recovering, and not only that, but, _ipso facto_, liable to criminal
proceedings of a highly penal character? Now, indeed, the Clerk of
the Court is interested. Not that he cares twopence for Antonio or
for Shylock either; but there does seem distinctly to be a flaw.
The young Advocate must have a technical mind, that greatest of all
blessings. The Clerk pricks up his ears, as if he were a terrier
advised of the presence of a rat; he is intensely awake; he consults
his authorities on the table before him; he is really inclined to
think that a highly important point is at issue; he believes that the
question, or something very much like it, was raised in the Dogeship
of Bragadin, _c._ 1150. At length the Clerk of the Court is all alive.

I thought of all that, and I tried to render it as best I could.
And I only mention this trivial nonsense because, to the best of my
belief, it is the only instance in which I have found that doing my
best and sparing no pains brought me the faintest sort of reward.
As a rule, in my experience, the mere fact of taking pains has been
rewarded with the malignity of scoundrels and the insults of fools.

But in this extraordinary and, as I must say, miraculous affair it
was otherwise. The tour of the Benson Company drew to its close. It
was now hot summer and we were playing a _matinée_, I think on the
Whitsuntide Bank Holiday, in some theatre on the south side of the
river; some theatre which in all probability is now devoted to “the
pictures.” It was glorious weather, there were few people in the
house, and as one of the ladies of the company observed cheerfully in
the wings, “People who come to see Shakespeare on an afternoon like
this ought to have their noses rubbed in it.” Ah, the good, gross
gaiety: how few people have as this lady had, and has, the true art
of it! Her remark did me a lot of good that languid, heated afternoon
in the half-empty theatre; and I believe that the Clerk of the
Court--we were playing the “Merchant”--was a shade wearier than usual
in his utter boredom and contempt of the whole proceedings: till his
moment came.

And a few days later Henry Ainley was saying to me in our
dressing-room: “I am engaged by Alexander to play Paolo next year.
And, do you know, Alexander said to me: ‘You’ve got a remarkably good
actor in your Company; and I couldn’t even find his name in the cast.
He was playing the Clerk of the Court that afternoon: he was very
good indeed.’”

The great George Alexander to speak thus of the little beginner
in his little shadow of a part! Well, I suppose all such taps
are vanities; but there was a very happy man that night in the
dressing-room, and he plied the spirit-gum and fixed on his beard for
the part of the Major-Domo in the “Shrew”--two lines--with trembling,
unsteady, rapturous fingers.

A few weeks later I was engaged to play a small part in “Paolo and
Francesca,” but that was for the early spring of 1902, and I had to
fill in. So I joined a pastoral or open-air company (almost all of
whom were Bensonians), and played with them for three weeks. Then I
met a friend in the Strand and said “I want a shop,” and found myself
rehearsing next day the part of a comic Irish servant in a sketch
called “The Just Punishment”--an entirely preposterous playlet. We
did a fortnight of it--two houses a night--at the Hoxton Varieties
and another East-End hall, the name of which I have forgotten. At
the Varieties I dressed with a very pleasant black man; the rats ran
about the dressing-rooms and passages like kittens. And the audience!
There was no question of their being all right till you began to
bore them. You made your entrance as the curtain went up, and found
the whole house in an uproar. Most of it was lighthearted hilarity,
some of it was argument, and they argue very forcibly in Hoxton,
occasionally with broken bottles. The actor’s business was to drown
them, and get them to listen, and amuse them--if he could--and very
capital training it was. But the sketch was not booked on--and no
wonder--so I went to Mr. Denton’s in Maiden Lane. He sent me to Mr.
Charles Terry, who was taking out a melodrama called “The Silent
Vengeance,” written by Mr. Harry Grattan round the personality of
Mr. Silward, that wonderful animal impersonator. From first to
last I played three parts in “The Silent Vengeance”--a solicitor,
a doctor and a barber--and it only ran six weeks. But for the last
week of the run I had been rehearsing the part of an old actor in
the farcical comedy of “The Varsity Belle.” Then at the end of a
fortnight, for one reason or another, I had to change this rôle for
that of a University Don; and there were over two hundred cues in
the first act, and I had only a week for study! The manager was an
entirely honest but boorish fellow, and I gave him my notice; “bunged
in my notice” would be more idiomatic. The day I left “The Varsity
Belle” company I got an engagement from an old Bensonian friend to
play for a fortnight or so in Old Comedy down in the western country,
and a delightful engagement it turned out. We all knew each other,
or very soon got to know each other, and we drank beer and played
skittles in tumbledown alleys behind old inns, and brewed bowls of
punch, and in spite of these wild practices acted, I think, decently.
Poor Ernest Cosham was the Comedian and Mr. Leon Quartermaine played
the juvenile leads; and I hope he has not forgotten a famous game of
Blind Hookey in a little inn at Westbury-on-Avon, the only card game
that I ever enjoyed. And the morning after our last performance I
went up from Andover to town and listened to Stephen Phillips reading
his play, “Paolo and Francesca,” to the assembled company. I had been
a year on the stage, and I think I had had as varied an experience as
falls to the lot of most beginners.

       *       *       *       *       *

And here there is a great gap. There were other adventures on the
stage; but enough, I think, has been said of these things. I have
just told of that happy moment of June, 1901, when Henry Ainley
repeated to me George Alexander’s kindly praise of my acting. And,
indeed, that was bliss, but I believe that I received the promise
of a happiness that should be deeper and more lasting one morning
towards the end of August, 1921. For that morning brought a letter
ending my career as a journalist.

       *       *       *       *       *

Poor George Sampson got into grievous trouble over his innocent
speculations as to so innocent a thing as an underpetticoat. I
propose, therefore to say nothing about the craft of journalism,
which I followed for many years.

Save only this: _Eduxit me de lacu miseriæ, et de luto fæcis. Et
statuit super petram pedes meos: et direxit gressus meos._


                                THE END


                      Printed in Great Britain at
     _The Mayflower Press, Plymouth_. William Brendon & Son, Ltd.


Transcriber’s Note:

Words may have multiple spelling variations or inconsistent
hyphenation in the text. These have been left unchanged unless
indicated below. Jargon, dialect, obsolete and alternative spellings
were left unchanged. Three misspelled words were corrected.
Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like
this_. Unprinted or partially printed letters and punctuation,
were corrected.



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