“And what,” asked the younger man, “are they?” He pointed to a long
row of books plainly bound in yellow with faded blue and almost
indecipherable titles. The Host felt a warmer glow than the brandy alone
could have produced. “They are,” he said reverently, “my Machens.”
“Your whats?” asked the younger man absently. He had caught sight of a
promising looking volume, enticingly entitled _Aphrodite_, on a lower
shelf. The Host intercepted the glance, recognized the symptoms of
failing interest and, with skill born of experience, drew his chair
before the _Aphrodite_ and pulled out a lapfull of the yellow books.
The younger man, not too obviously disappointed, concentrated on his
small globular glass of _Asbach Uralt_. “Who,” he asked in tones that
matched his look, “is Machen?”
“Arthur Machen,” began the Host in a voice that matched _his_ look, “he
is the ... he’s, well ... look!” He gestured to the shelves. “Fifteen
books, and there are more, and you’ve never even heard of him. Fifteen of
the most wonderful books in the English language, and you ask who he is!”
“Well,” said the young man with pardonable irritation, “just who is he?”
The Host settled back in his chair, fighting hard for composure and
coherence. “Arthur Machen,” he began again, and with every evidence of
a strong determination to speak calmly, “is the man who has written
more fine things than any dozen living authors you may care to mention.
That may strike you as a rather broad and rash statement, but I am in
a mood to shoot the works. And there are others, Highly Connected and
Well Thought Of Persons, who have indicated much the same opinion.
Arthur Machen has been appreciated by some of our best known composers
of ‘literary appreciations.’ Unfortunately, this sort of praising is
often akin to, and almost as effective as, burying. To the popular mind,
a writer who has been appreciated by a duly accredited appreciator is a
pet of the pedants, a delight of the dilettantes and nothing more. And,
indeed, the titles found on some of the books containing these little
essays in literary appreciation are often suggestive of archeological
exploration rather than of due honor to a living author. I have in mind,
specifically, two books whose titles seem to connote research into a
particularly distant past. _Buried Caesars_ and _Excavations_, those two
books you see there; they would tell you in a much more literary style,
and with considerable technical flourish, just who and what Arthur Machen
was and is. But I am not minded to ask you to read them at present.
“I think,” resumed the Host generously gesturing toward the decanter
and his friend’s glass, “that the time has come for a new and revised
estimate of Arthur Machen. Would that I had the time, talent and/or
the temerity to undertake the task! Let us, meanwhile, acknowledge but
pass by these appreciators of Machen, at least for the moment. He has
attracted the attention and been subject to the discussion of Vincent
Starrett, Carl Van Vechten, James Branch Cabell and others. He has even
attracted the notice of such literary titans as Tiffany Thayer and Burton
Rascoe. He has been crowned by that arbiter elegantiarum of American
manners, morals and mentality, Walter Winchell, who once described Arthur
Machen as ‘tops among the literati.’ This last, I fear, is not a critical
estimate per se, but an indication of a vogue in certain quarters.
“Despite the fact that Mr. Machen has been ‘discovered’ by at least two
of our most indefatigable bolster-uppers of literary reputations and
revealers-of-lights-under-baskets; despite his having been exhumed and
placed on exhibition upon a platform built for two, Machen remains yet to
be properly appreciated and honored by a wider public. Perhaps he never
will be, and perhaps it is best so. Machen once wrote that if a great
book is really popular it is sure to owe its popularity to entirely wrong
reasons. And I, for one, tremble to think of what Hollywood might do to
Machen.” The Host paused briefly for replenishment.
“Far too often these appreciations have degenerated into what I have in
my more bitter moments mentally called _Match-Machen_. An execrable pun,
I grant you, but concerning a matter that is, to my mind, as offensive.
I refer to the practice of certain appreciators who, in the execution of
their self-appointed duties find it, for some reason or other, necessary
to devise improbable genealogies to demonstrate their own wide literary
knowledge and their conception of the subject of their labors. We find,
for example, _Mr. X_ in the act of appreciating a book by _Mr. Y_.
“How does he go about it? Why, he merely tells you that _Mr. Y_ is the
literary son of _A_ out of _B_, whose maternal grandmother was _C_, and
whose second-cousin is _D_. Another trick is to pretend that _Mr. Y’s_
work is a play ... with music by _R_, scenery by _S_, costumes by _T_
and lyrics by _W_. In short, you come away without the slightest notion
about _Mr. Y_. But you have learned that _Mr. X_ knows a great deal,
apparently, about the doings of _Messrs. A, B, C, D, R, S, T and W_. Do
you follow me?”
“But slightly,” confessed the younger man with that candor born of brandy.
“I will try to make myself clear,” said the Host selecting a volume from
the shelves.
“Here we have an essay about a man called, let us say Blank. The author
of this little essay will tell you that a passage of Blank’s prose
suggests one of the more poignant episodes out of de Maupassant, set to
music by Tchaikowski against a background of Gaugain’s Tahitian belles.
Have you any idea what Blank’s prose is like?”
“No,” said the young man morosely.
“Good! Listen then to this. It is Vincent Starrett on Machen: ‘Joris Karl
Huysmans, in a thoroughly good translation, perhaps remotely suggests
Machen, both are debtors to Baudelaire.’ Now, does that tell you anything
about Machen?”
“No, it does not!” said the young man. “But then, neither have you!”
“Quite true,” nodded the Host affably. “I am often carried away. But we
have ably demonstrated my contention.” The younger man looked decidedly
restless. “Um!”
“Know then,” said the Host relishing the sound of his voice, “that Arthur
Machen, born in 1863, the son of a Welsh clergyman, first swam into the
public ken early in the last decade of the last century—a fact which the
public largely failed to appreciate until some years later. His earlier
works were translations of the _Heptameron_, the _Memoirs of Casanova_,
and several other large and, I should think, rather dull old works. But
the most important were two remarkably unique books called _The Anatomy
of Tobacco_ and _The Chronicle of Clemendy_.
“Most of Machen’s best work was written before 1901—and in that year he
temporarily deserted literature for the stage. Machen’s most productive
period then, from 1890 to 1901, affords a curious and striking contrast
with what was assumed to be the important literature and the important
literary group of the time. The 1890’s in England were celebrated,
although few people grow festive about it now, for the Yellow Book Boys,
that delightful coterie of delicate decadents who glorified the carnation
and the pansy. But after the maddest music had died away, and the
reddest wine had been drunk, Cynara and Dorian fluttered to the shelves
and Oscar and Hubert and Adelbert retired into a certain pastel-shaded
obscurity from which they emerge from time to time as a new volume of
memoirs is published. The period still commands a certain amount of
academic attention—and yet the best books of that period were written
not by these ‘Men of the Nineties,’ but by Arthur Machen. A chap named
Muddiman, whose book you see there, wrote his history of these fellows
and mentions Machen but briefly: ‘Arthur Machen, in those days, belonged
to the short story writers with Hubert Crackanthorpe, who was the great
imaginative prose writer of the group.’ Alas, poor Hubert! Who knows him
now! Holbrook Jackson and Richard Le Gallienne ignore Machen completely.
And perhaps rightly so. Machen was not of the group, nor of the period.
But here I wish to digress briefly....
“These delicate contemporaries of Machen derived from the French
Symbolistes, who derived from Mallarme and Baudelaire, both of whom were
admittedly influenced by Poe. It has been said that Machen was also
influenced by Poe. The difference, if you will credit me, is that Poe’s
influence, in as far as it exists, came to Machen direct. When it came to
the others of the group it had been filtered through Gallic gravel and
Symbolistic sand.
“So much for Machen’s literary history. No one could possibly tell it
better than he has in _Things Near and Far_ and _Far Off Things_—his two
autobiographical collections. Nor is any literary history as simply told.
It is not one of your tremendous collections of anecdotes concerning
‘literary figures of the day.’ It is the story of a lonely man who
wanted, more than anything else, to write. And then—you must read Machen.
All of him. I know of no other writer whose entire output can be so
heartily recommended.
“You will realize, as you read, that when people use such names as Poe,
Stevenson, Blackwood, and Henry James, they are but vaguely gesturing
in the general direction of Machen’s own weird landscape. It is a land
as strange as the misty mid-region of Weir where lies the dank tarn of
Auber, the measureless caverns where runs the sacred river Alph. But
it is like none of these. The young man of Gwent has created his own
landscape, a strange country spread out under a sky that glows as if
great furnace doors had been opened, bordered by tall grey mountains,
traversed by streams that coil their esses through silent woods. It is
my fancy to think I have a picture of that country, painted by another
genius. You see that Van Gogh hanging there?” The Host indicated a large
framed print of writhing cypresses under a swirling sky. “On quiet
November nights I sit here and look into it, half expecting to see young
Meyrick or Lucian Taylor come down the hillside.
“It is curious to go over some of these former estimates of Arthur
Machen. One first reads them through in a fine enthusiasm at finding
someone else who has read Machen and found him good. But even those who
praise him the most, fail to express, or even to hint at the ‘quiddity’
of Machen. They seem to find him so far beyond their powers to praise
that they often resort to picayunish criticism. Thus we find Vincent
Starrett mildly complaining about an absence of cloud descriptions in
Machen. Or about a lack of humor. True, you’ll find no Maxfield Parrish
sky castles, no James Gould Fletcher touches, no rotogravure alto-cirrus
formations. But if ever a man could imply clouds without using the very
word, Machen can. And although Machen has not yet introduced a pair of
jolly grave-diggers to coax us back into our seats or cajole us into
combing back our bristling hair, you will find he has humor.
“There does exist, however, a problem in classifying Machen—it seems
to exist only a necessary evil. Essentially, I suppose, Machen is what
might be called a Gothic novelist. He has been linked so often with the
recognized practitioners of the Gothic style and tradition. You’ll find
no ivy-covered ruins, no deserted abbeys, no ravens, no baying mastiffs,
not even a sinister monk—and we must rule out those jolly tosspots, the
monks of Abergavenny. I daresay Machen would prefer to be known as a
Silurist. His ruins are those of an older time, older even than the ruins
of the golden city of the Roman legions.
“Vincent Starrett calls Machen the Novelist of Ecstasy and Sin—making
him sound rather like a Messalinaen Lady Novelist. Mr. Van Vechten too,
at least in his decadent novel _Peter Whiffle_, seizes upon Mr. Machen
from much the same viewpoint, and makes Machen an asset in the character
of his precious Peter. And all too frequently, in discussing Machen, the
spirit of Baudelaire raises its ugly head. Novelist of Sin, forsooth!
‘Evil, be thou my good!’ What rot! And there are those, apparently, who
would classify some of Machen’s tales as ‘erotica.’ Baudelaire, bosh! As
well point out the resemblance between a lane in Gwent and a lupanar in
Paris! No—Machen is neither a Gothic novelist nor a writer of delectable
indelicacies. Machen’s tag must be sought for in hieroglyphics of his own
devising.
“The ‘quiddity’ of Machen, the one quality that pervades all his work,
is that of ‘ecstasy.’ It is not the ecstasy of the lyric lady-novelist.
Mr. Starrett seems to think it is a technical device, since he finds it
is ‘due in no small degree to his beautiful English style.’ Mr. Machen’s
own idea of this quality is that it is ‘a removal from the common life.’
And that brings me to _Hieroglyphics_, a book that should be a text-book
in all our Universities. But perhaps not—no, surely not. Because in
this book of Machen’s you will find set forth, once and for all, the
difference between reading matter and fine literature. And such a book
cannot fail to make enemies, nor to create false ideas even among its
friends. Mr. Starrett says: ‘It is Arthur Machen’s theory of literature
and life, brilliantly exposited by that cyclical mode of discoursing that
was affected by Coleridge. In it he suggests the admirable doctrine of
James Branch Cabell that fine literature must be, in effect, an allegory
and not the careful history of particular persons.’ Mr. Cabell, who is,
according to Mr. Starrett, Machen’s literary son, set forth his literary
credo in _Beyond Life_ some seventeen years after the publication of
_Hieroglyphics_. In it, Mr. Cabell expresses admirably, and with his
famed urbanity, many of the truths he learned at his father’s knee. One
is as pleased with Cabell’s literary progenitor as with his prose.
“Just one more quotation. It is my favorite quotation to end quotations
about literary credos or the mechanics of creation. Mr. Machen, in _The
Three Impostors_ says: ‘... I will give you the task of a literary man in
a phrase. He has got to do simply this—to invent a wonderful story, and
to tell it in a wonderful manner.’
“In his novels, _The Three Impostors_, _The Hill of Dreams_, _The
Secret Glory_, _The Terror_, _The Great Return_, and in many of his
shorter stories: _The Great God Pan_, _The White People_, in all his
creative work, Machen has shown himself the master of his own precept.
In _Hieroglyphics_ Machen noted the difference between reading matter
that related facts about a character or a group of characters, and fine
literature that symbolizes certain eternal and essential elements in
human nature by means of incidents. You will find, then, that these
wonderful stories are not merely startlingly original conceptions of
heroes and heroines taking part in unusual events. That many of these
plots and inventions are uncanny and fantastic does not place them in the
‘thriller’ class—having nothing more to say than the latest detective
story. It would be absurd to think of _The Great God Pan_, for example,
as merely a story about the discovery that Pan is not dead, or that
Priapic cults may still flourish. No, it’s not so simple as that. There
are other elements present, and chiefest of these is that quality of
ecstasy. There are symbols and representations of a higher order, no
cheap mysticism, no spiritualistic clap-trap. And finally there is in
these stories an element of something that prompts belief.
“_The Great God Pan_ is a story much more improbable, more fantastic than
_Frankenstein_ or _The Strange Case of M. Valdemar_. And it is not a
mere pseudo-scientific story—it is believable. You do not believe that?
Yet Machen wrote a story more fantastic still. A story with no possible
explanation, scientific or otherwise, in short, nothing less than
miraculous vision could have explained it. And that story was, and still
is, widely accepted as true. The tale of the _Bowmen_ at Mons, a simply
written story, no flourishes, no elaborate atmosphere; yet with that
quality of ecstasy, that quiddity of Machenism, has won belief. Quite
recently, in a shop, I came across a volume that was an anthology of
Myths, mysteries, visions and the like, and in it appeared the story of
the Bowmen. It was not Machen’s story, however, and there was no mention
whatever of Arthur Machen. It had been set down as an authentic legend,
documented and sworn to by this one and that one who claimed to have been
there. I daresay it will, in time, join such distinguished company as
the Walls of Jericho and Joshua’s obedient sun.
“Yes, you must read Machen. All of him. It has been implied that there is
a sameness about Machen’s work. But do not imagine that you will read the
same story, told and retold. You will come to realize that there is in
Machen a definite pattern. He has said that most men, as well as writers,
are men of one idea. And most writers create tales that are variations on
one theme, that a common pattern, like the pattern of an Eastern carpet,
runs through them all. And Machen’s pattern? You will see, when you read
him, that literature ‘began with charms, incantations, spells, songs of
mystery, chants of religious ecstasy, the Bacchic chorus, the Rune, the
Mass.’ And Machen has taken as his symbol and pattern the devices and
signs of ecstasy, of the removal from the common life. The dance—the
maze—the spiral—the wheel—the vine, and wine, these are the outward signs
of ecstasy, the patterns of Machen.
“One book in particular you must read—_The Hill of Dreams_, without
a doubt one of the finest novels ever written. From the first grand
sentence a spell is laid upon you. It has never failed to thrill me—it is
like the master theme of a symphony—it is as magical as the opening notes
of the _Good Friday_ music in _Parsifal_. But there—I have fallen into
the ways of those whom I have derided. And I have kept you quite later
than I intended.”
The Host rose, stretched, and poured out a brace of nightcaps. The
younger man, who had listened patiently to this lengthy monologue,
gratefully accepted his brandy, sipped rather too avidly, for listening
is also a thirsty business, and said, “Why do you suppose Arthur Machen
is so little known? I mean, he sounds marvelous—but, after all, people
can’t help it if they don’t know about him.”
“That,” responded the Host sadly, “is one of the Mysteries of Mysteries.
Perhaps Machen writes too ‘circumvolantly’ as Cabell says, for our
critics. Or perhaps, as Van Vechten says, ‘one only takes from a work of
art what one brings to it—and how few readers can bring to Machen the
requisite qualities.’ Perhaps our critics are more apt to be impressed
by clever young men who go about swimming classical streams, fishing for
tarpon, or fighting in the fashionable war of the moment. The general
public, unfortunately, knows Machen, if at all, through the inclusion
of several of his stories in anthologies of mystery and horror stories.
Which is about on a par with using Shelley’s _Indian Serenade_ as a
filler in a pulp confession magazine.
“A short time ago in London there was a dinner party in celebration of
the seventy-fifth birthday of a writer. The guest of honor made the
customary speech—but it was such a speech as has seldom been heard from
a feted author. It was tragic, it could have been, and should have been,
bitter—but all was gently said. After toiling in the fields of literature
for over forty-two years, after having produced eighteen volumes of rare
quality, he had earned but £635. That man was Arthur Machen.”
“He is still living?” asked the young man.
“Yes,” replied the Host gravely. “I should like to make a pilgrimage
to his home. But you must go. Take these with you. Read them. I fear
I have told you little about Arthur Machen. Nor am I the only one has
confessed such a feeling of inadequacy to cope with Machen. But I find
comfort in what a very capable writer once said of another remarkable
writer of Gothic Tales. It will be, I promise you, my final quotation of
the evening. Dorothy Canfield once wrote, in a preface to _Seven Gothic
Tales_: ‘The person who has set his teeth into a kind of fruit new to him
is usually as eager as he is unable to tell you how it tastes. It is not
enough for him to be munching away on it with relish. No, he must twist
his tongue trying to get its strange new flavor into words, which never
yet had any power to capture colors or tastes.’ And now, mind the step
going out. It’s rather darkish.”
_Chapter One_