1
In the late 1880’s Arthur Machen had, as he said, “Rabelais on the
brain.” He had been for some years under the spell of the gargantuan
tales and of Balzac’s _Contes Drolatiques_—and perhaps even more under
the spell, literarily if not literally, of the Holy Bottle and the magic
of Touraine and whatever it is about the land of France that so beguiles
the young of the Anglo-Saxon peoples.
It was under the Rabelaisian influence that Machen had written his “great
Romance,” _The Chronicle of Clemendy_, and made his translation of the
_Heptameron_. And finally he had undertaken to translate and publish an
even more difficult and bizarre book—_Le Moyen de Parvenir_ by Beroalde
de Verville.
This book, rather highly prized by collectors of at least two sorts,
is incredibly dull. No fault of Machen’s certainly, although he might
have permitted it to remain untranslated. Still, he was at the stage and
of an age when this sort of thing had an appeal. And so he translated
and published it in not one, but two editions. There was a large paper
edition and an “ordinary” edition—both preceded by a very small edition
(four copies) of a portion of the book under the title _The Way to
Attain_.
Now of course every Machen bibliography lists this title, and many a
Machenite has wished he might obtain a copy. Actually, it is one of
the least important of Machen’s works. For this is merely a portion
of _Le Moyen de Parvenir_—and very probably not an important part at
that. Bibliographers, bibliophiles and bibliomaniacs are at liberty to
go quietly mad in their quest for this queer little item. For queer it
is—Machen himself cannot quite explain its existence. The four copies
were issued in 1889, presumably by the Dryden Press who were to publish
the complete work. A dispute over something or other arose and the
project was dropped—at least by the Dryden Press. All four copies,
apparently, are in the safe-keeping of Danielson, or they were at one
time.
The other two editions were privately printed at Carbonnek in 1890 under
the title of _Fantastic Tales_. There have been other editions, de luxe
if not luxurious, for what is sometimes known as “the trade.” It may be
assumed that the writer holds no very high opinion of this work. But then
neither does Machen. He has described the book as being somewhat like a
cathedral constructed entirely of gargoyles—as plain a warning as any
ever given by an author regarding one of his works.
This fantastic collection of “discourses ... on Reformation politics
... many tales, some pointless, a few amusing” while it may provide
puzzles, pleasure and profit for bibliophiles, is important only in
that it marks the finish of the Rabelaisian influence upon Machen. Not
that this influence was ever “Rabelaisian” in the usual sense ... it
was rather like that of various French poets and novelists of several
generations over still other generations of English and American writers.
During certain periods our younger writers and “intellectuals” would have
Verlaine on the brain, or Baudelaire in their bonnets, but eventually
they would go back to writing stark novels about Sussex or Sauk Center,
or Wales or Wisconsin or the moors of the Missouri.
The extent of this enthusiasm and the depth of this influence may be
estimated from the following rhapsody delivered by Ambrose Meyrick in
_The Secret Glory_. “Let me celebrate, above all, the little red wine.
Not in any mortal vineyard did its father grape ripen; it was not
nourished by the warmth of the visible sun, nor were the rains that
made it swell common waters from the skies above us. Not even in the
Chinonnais, earth sacred though that be, was the press made that caused
its juices to be poured into the _cuve_, nor was the humming of its
fermentation heard in any of the good cellars of the lower Touraine.
But in that region which Keats celebrates when he sings the ‘Mermaid
Tavern’ was this juice engendered—the vineyard lay low down in the south,
among the starry plains where is the _Terra Turonensis Celestis_, that
unimaginable country which Rabelais beheld in his vision where mighty
Gargantua drinks from inexhaustible vats eternally, where Pantagruel is
athirst for evermore, though he be satisfied continually. There, in the
land of the Crowned Immortal Tosspots was that wine of ours vintaged,
red with the rays of the Dog-star, made magical by the influence of
Venus, fertilised by the happy aspect of Mercury. O rare, super-abundant
and most excellent juice, fruit of all fortunate stars, by thee were we
translated, exalted into the fellowship of that Tavern of which the old
poet writes: _Mihi est propositum in Taberna mori!_”
Well, it was quite a thing while it lasted ... but the Rabelaisian vein
petered out and Machen began to perceive that he was of Caerleon-on-Usk
and not a townsman of Tours or a citizen 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.
Meanwhile he was back at his old trade of cataloguing. He had switched
employers for, when York Street would yield little more than a pound a
week, Leicester Square would give thirty shillings. So back he went to
cataloguing ancient books. Not that he was much good at it, nor that
he preferred it above all other forms of employment. As a matter of
fact he rather disapproved of the whole business and issued what almost
amounts to a Manifesto to Collectors: “I don’t care two-pence,” he wrote,
“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 ... the only question
being: is the book worth reading or not?”
Nevertheless, cataloguing seems to have been a rather flourishing trade
at the time, and a profitable practice—for the publisher at any rate. For
this was a remarkably literate era, and publishers pandered profitably
to the popular taste ... they were busily at work discovering rare
books, improving some with plates borrowed from others, issuing new and
enlarged editions at the drop of a folio, and discovering the pleasures
and profits to be derived from making translations—particularly from
the French. In the same building occupied by Machen’s employers were
the offices of Vizatelly, the publisher who was even then bringing
out translations of Zola’s works. At about the same time Machen was
working there, Havelock Ellis was editing the Mermaid Tavern Series of
Elizabethan Dramatists for Vizatelly. Ellis notes in his _Autobiography_
that he was paid the sum of three guineas per volume—an amount he
considered rather small. This may indeed have been a small amount—but he
had a better deal of it than Machen who was asked, at about this time, to
do a translation of the memoirs of Casanova.
The manner in which this undertaking came about was rather curious and
very casual. One of the Brothers for whom he worked, and whom he does not
otherwise identify in _Things Near and Far_, came to him one day with
an old volume and asked Machen to translate from the place marked with
a slip of paper. Machen set to work and about a year later he completed
his translation of the twelve volumes of _Casanova’s Memoirs_. The place
marked fell in about the fifth volume, and Machen simply translated
through to the twelfth, began again at the first and worked through to
the place in the fifth volume—which was “where he came in” as one says at
the movies.
This monumental work, and the best translation to date of the _Memoirs_,
was thrown in, as it were, with the cataloguing at thirty shillings a
week. Machen simply remarks that he believes the cost to the firm to
have been “strictly moderate.” Much more moderate than the three guineas
per volume paid to Ellis for his editing. However, Machen was eventually
offered an opportunity of profiting from his work. A few years later
when the translation was about to be published, Machen was granted the
privilege of investing a thousand pounds in the venture. One of the
Brothers suggested that, as he was now an _interested_ party, he might
wish to revise the manuscript.
Of course publishing was not quite the same game it is today ... there
were publishers then who were, if not actually unscrupulous, a trifle
careless in their accounting and possibly slightly unethical. Vizatelly
was prosecuted and jailed as a result of his translations of Zola. Machen
has remarked upon the irony of the situation—for even while Vizatelly
was in jail, charged with circulating obscene literature, Zola was
being well received on his trip through England. When Vizatelly died
shortly thereafter the Mermaid Tavern series was taken over by another
publisher without so much as a by-your-leave. Ellis’ name was removed
from the volumes, and that, apparently, settled that. Ellis treated the
affair with a silence he knew would not be taken as a sign of contempt.
One gathers that publishers in those days were not very thin-skinned.
However, in his autobiographical sketches describing these events, Machen
offers not the slightest criticism of the Brothers but he did, shortly
thereafter, quit the publishing business.
2
For almost a decade Machen had been in London, and for most of that time
he had been writing. But he had written rather imitatively; he had, as
he says, “been wearing costume in literature. The rich, figured English
of the earlier 17th Century had a peculiar attraction....” Whether
this was unnatural affectation or natural affinity, he wrote in this
fashion—essays, verse, tales, epistols dedicatory. He even kept, for many
years, a diary written in this manner. _The Anatomy of Tobacco_ was an
“exercise in the antique,” the _Chronicle_ tried to be mediaeval, _Le
Moyen_ was in the ancient mode, the _Heptameron_ a mere finger-exercise
in the composition of a period piece. At this point Machen decided to
write in the modern manner.
In 1890 Machen began to make an approach to journalism. His Welsh
relations were probably gratified when his pieces and stories began to
appear in the Globe and the St. James Gazette. He was still a long way
from adopting journalism as a profession or career, but he had decided to
do some writing in “the modern manner” and the papers seemed to offer an
outlet.
Journalism was then, as it is now, a wonderfully agitated world in which
editors knew what their readers wanted and were determined to see that
they got it—whether they liked it or not. Oddly enough, an editor’s
staff never seems to have this happy faculty of knowing what the readers
want, but they do know what their editors want—and so everyone is mildly
unhappy about it excepting the editors—and it is questionable whether an
editor is ever really happy, or ever deserves to be.
At any rate Machen wrote, on an average, about as much drivel as the
average journalist must, and about as many silly stories as most
journalists have to. Of course it was not as bad as it might have been,
or as bad as it became later, for, according to Machen, editors in the
1890’s presumed a certain standard of education and culture in their
readers. This tendency has been overcome, however, and along with certain
other technical improvements the press as it existed during Machen’s time
was much as it is today.
His success at writing for the Globe and an acceptance by the St. James
Gazette started him on short stories. These appeared mostly in the
Gazette whose rate of payment was commendably higher than the Globe’s.
The connection did not last too long for one of the stories created quite
a stir.
Reading it now one wonders at that, and when one remembers a few of the
tales that were to flourish in the decade to follow, Machen’s little
story of _The Double Return_ seems harmless enough. The tale is rather
reminiscent of _The Guardsman_—you will remember the success of the Lunts
in that play on the stage and on the screen. Machen’s tale lacked the
amorousness or even the intent of _The Guardsman_, it merely told of a
man returning home after three weeks in the country.
“Back so soon?” asked his wife.
“I’ve been in the country for three weeks,” said he, rather put out.
“I know,” she said, “but you returned last night.”
“Indeed not, I spent last night at Plymouth on my way back from the
country,” said the husband.
Whereupon his wife accused him of being playful and showed him his
cigarette case he had left behind him when he left the house this very
morning. Well, the husband had lost the cigarette case in the country
some days before, and he _had_ spent the night in Plymouth on his way
back to London, and so he couldn’t have returned on the previous night.
There had been a man at his hotel or inn who rather resembled him and so
on. The upshot of it all was that shortly thereafter the husband went to
America, which seems to have been the thing to do in such cases. A rather
harmless little story, not even a boudoir scene or a hint of one. But
_The Double Return_ aroused as much interest in the nineties as the most
daring double entendre might today.
Oscar Wilde, no amateur at arousing the public, said to Machen, “Are you
the author of that story that fluttered the dovecotes? I thought it very
good.” Well, flutter the dovecotes it did, and one did not flutter the
dovecotes with impunity, at least so far as the St. James Gazette was
concerned. Machen no longer appeared in its august pages. This may or may
not have caused Machen concern. He was also doing stories for some of the
“society” papers and wrote in this same year _The Lost Club_, so very
similar to Stevenson’s story of the Suicide Club, _A Wonderful Woman_ and
others.
The year 1890 happens to be a year of some significance generally, for it
opens the decade of the delicate decadents, sometimes known as the Yellow
Book Boys.
Among the many books that have been written about the Eighteen Nineties
is a small and, on the whole, less pretentious volume than most. This
is Bernard Muddiman’s _Men of the Nineties_. In it one finds this brief
mention of Machen: “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 today as a great imaginative prose
writer? Who, for that matter, knows poor Hubert at all, save for those
who may look into the bound volumes of the Yellow Book to be found
occasionally in the Public Library (under the somewhat bewildering though
accurate classification of “Magazines”)?
The 1890’s was perhaps the most widely and well publicized decade in
history, surpassing, in this respect at least, the ’Twenties of our own
century. The 1890’s spawned geniuses where the 1920’s only discovered
genius. The analogy between these decades can be carried to even greater
lengths and indeed it will be, in a later chapter, for the ’Twenties also
rediscovered Arthur Machen.
But for all poor Muddiman’s eulogy of Hubert in his slender volume
eulogizing the men of the Nineties, the late Mr. Crackanthorpe was _not_
the great imaginative prose writer of the group. Nor was the prolific
Henry Harland, whose contributions to the Yellow Book were in the New
Style—with French phrases popping up half a dozen to the page and
French women putting in appearance among the good English spinneys, and
representative members of the New Woman being forthright and outspoken
for all their “flutter of curls at the brow” and garden hats and “merry
peals of laughter.” Mr. Harland sprinkled his prose with French phrases,
giving them a naughty air (just as, in the Twenties, French phrases
were used to give novels a sophisticated air) and his heroes were made
“interesting” rather than solid or adventurous or empire building. They,
the “interesting” chaps, thought of women as “handsome” or “good-looking”
rather than beautiful or lovely. Such words were reserved for inanimate
things—things animal, vegetable or mineral, but never the feminine. They
further thought of women in terms of “what a _woman_ she is!” Like that,
with an air of invincible surprise. No, it was not Hubert, nor yet Henry,
who was the great imaginative prose writer of the group—it was Arthur
Machen. But then Muddiman may have been right after all, for Machen was
not truly of the group of writers who practiced the purple phrase, who
wrote in pastels and who composed pastiches in praise of practically
nothing.
It may come as something of a surprise to many admirers of Machen to know
that he was a contemporary of the Yellow Book crowd. Perhaps it will
come as something of a relief to know that Machen was not a member of
the group, despite the fact that his first book of stories appeared in
this period, issuing from the Bodley Head with a title page by Beardsley.
Machen never wrote for the Yellow Book. But for that matter, neither did
Wilde. Still, yellow bookery was rampant at the time and since it is
sometimes said that a man is the product of his age, it might be well to
skirt along the well travelled path trod by the delicate decadents, their
critics and appraisers and appreciators.
Osburt Burdett, Holbrook Jackson, Richard LeGallienne and other more
talented and serious students have gone over the period with admirable
thoroughness. The magnifying glass has been placed over every one of
Beardsley’s drawings and even the most moribund of the minor poets has
been the subject of at least one monograph. Still, it will be interesting
to review briefly what has been said of the men of the Nineties, if only
because it may be applied, with certain changes and reservations, to the
Twenties and, for that matter, to the period which we are about to enter.
For the birth of the Atomic Age, for all its violent and destructive
debut, cannot have been more shocking, in some respects, than the impact
of the coterie of the green carnation upon the Victorianism of the
Nineties.
The group known as the Yellow Book boys, or the men of the Nineties,
or the delicate decadents were, as Donald Davidson has remarked,
“time-conscious” to an intense degree. They were nearing the end of a
century, just as the men of the Twenties lived through the end of an
epoch and the men of the Forties enter a new one. There is still, you
see, this strange analogy between the “Tragic Generation” as the men of
the Nineties called themselves, and the “Lost Generation” as the men of
the Twenties called themselves. Whether or not there will be a continuing
analogy between the three decades is an interesting speculation, but
quite beyond the scope of this study. Or is it?
The men of the Nineties were time-conscious to an intense degree and
they were self-conscious to an even greater degree. Being young men, for
one thing, and acutely aware of the Victorianism of their Victorian age
for another, and rather preoccupied with the importance of being earnest
and alive in the closing years of a century for still another, they were
rather more self-conscious than most young men.
Now it is an odd thing, when one considers it, that the young and
self-conscious members of the Anglo-Saxon races, in whatever age,
discover in themselves a remarkable affinity and a positive predilection
for the culture and customs of France. This happens time and again, and
whenever it does happen it is accompanied by a profound contempt for the
Anglo-Saxonishness of their Anglo-Saxon contemporaries and compatriots.
No doubt there are excellent reasons for this. It is a strange thing, but
it is by no means unusual, since it has happened with something very much
like regularity ever since William the Norman crossed the Channel—and
perhaps even before that.
The Saxon nobles who set themselves apart from the peasantry were
probably the first to adopt the manners and language of the Norman court.
Almost any intrigue current at the time, or for the next few centuries,
seemed the more likely to succeed if it acquired a dash of the Gallic.
Even in that most English of all English periods, the age of Elizabeth,
the young blades and the intellectuals felt the more dashing and,
presumably, the more intellectual for a smattering of French oaths and a
short time spent in the courts or chateaux of France, or the alleys and
marketplaces of Paris.
Well, then, the men of the Nineties acquired their smattering of French
and their translations of Baudelaire and Verlaine and felt the better for
them ... much as our men of the Twenties rode the cattle-boats to the
Left Bank and wrote the “only American literature” of their day. Little
magazines sprang up in the Nineties, verse grew steadily more _libre_,
and there was little difference, spiritually at any rate, between the
Bodley Head in 1890 and the Shakespeare Head in 1920 or thereabouts.
Another lost, tragic generation of self-conscious Anglo-Saxons had “found
themselves”—and France.
3
To return to the Nineties. There were those, even then, who suspected
that something was up in the state of English literature. Grave and
scholarly men analyzed the state of affairs and speculated on causes
and results. If the young men were pleased with themselves there were
others who were not. There was a certain looseness of thinking and of
phrasing that was not universally approved. The burden of such critical
attitudes is a familiar one—it is the one that attends all new movements
in literature, following change as the night follows the day.
The first and best expressed of these critical appraisals appeared in,
of all places, the first volume of the _Yellow Book_ itself. Advocating
“Reticence in Literature,” Arthur Waugh wrote: “During the last quarter
of a century ... the English man of letters has been indulging, with
an entirely new freedom, his national birthright of outspokenness, and
during the last twelve months there have been no uncertain indications
that this freedom of speech is degenerating into license which some of us
cannot but view with regret and apprehension.” A familiar note, an old
refrain!
“The writers and the critics of contemporary literature have, it would
seem, alike lost their heads; they have gone out into the byways and
hedges in search of the new thing, and have brought into the study and
subjected to the microscope mean objects of the roadside, whose analysis
may be of value to science but is absolutely foreign to art.”
Mr. Waugh then proceeds to make the point that every great productive
period of literature has been the result of some internal or external
revulsion of feeling, some current of ideas. The great periods of
productivity had been those when the national mind had been directed to
some vast movement of emancipation, the discovery of new countries, the
defeat of old enemies, the opening of fresh possibilities. But, Waugh
remonstrates, the past quarter of a century had been sterile of important
improvements, there had been no new territories and no new knowledge.
Because of this sterility the minds of writers had been thrown back upon
themselves and the most characteristic literature of the day had become
introspective.
“Following one course,” says Waugh, “it has betaken itself to that
analytical fiction which we associate primarily with America; following
another course, it has sought for subject matter in the discussing of
passions and sensations, common, doubtless, to every age of mankind,
interesting and necessary, too, in their way, but passions and sensations
hitherto disassociated with literature.”
It will be noted that Waugh attributes a certain regrettable trend to
American sources, but then he later says that the tendency for literary
frankness had its origins in Swinburne. Despite the accuracy of many
points made by Waugh, it must be noted that the world in 1890 was not
quite the uneventful place it seemed to him. There had been, it is true,
no wars of any consequence for a fortnight or two, no Armada threatened,
no European paranoiac gazed balefully across the Channel and regicide
was, for that moment, happily unthought of. Such things were, so long as
Victoria sat on the throne, unthinkable—especially the latter.
But Darwin’s _Origin of the Species_ had been written some years
before, and Karl Marx, who also had something of a London adventure,
had written a book with the stodgy title _Das Kapital_, and the Webbs
and the Socialists and the Fabians were quietly preparing their various
ideologies. Things were brewing, even though under the surface, and
no one paid them much heed, least of all the “irresponsibles” of the
Nineties.
These things meant little to Waugh, apparently, and seemed of no
particular consequence. They seemed of even less consequence to the
delicate decadents who were staging a well publicized literary rebellion
of their own. It is not our intention to go further into the matter nor
to list the peculiarities of these practitioners of pastel prose, nor to
relate the peccadillos of its precocious and precious poets. We content
ourselves with observing that Arthur Machen had little to do with them,
either as individuals or as a group.
4
From that day in June 1880 when he first walked in the Strand with his
father, Arthur Machen was fascinated by London. He did not always love
the city, nor was he ever moved to apostrophise London as young writers
have frequently written of Paris. Anyone who reads _Things Near and
Far_ and _Far Off Things_ will wonder, perhaps, why he returned to the
city time and again, and why he spent so much of his life there. One
is appalled by the dismal history of those years, by the portrayal of
the lonely days spent in damp basements and musty garrets pouring over
old books for the endless catalogues, and by the lonelier nights in
that small room in the Clarendon Road. The long walks through obscure
quarters of London and the endless explorations of the suburbs were
often the last refuge of desperation and depression. The encounters and
experiences with publishers and employers were disillusioning enough, the
friendlessness of London was an even greater hardship. You will find all
of this in these two books of sketches and reminiscences—but they are
only incidentally there. For though Machen plainly states his loneliness
and relates the hardships and disillusionments he endured, he neither
emphasizes nor dramatizes them, and if this seems to us a sad story it is
merely that we are appalled by it, and not because Machen has said, “See
how wretched were my days, how lonely my nights!”
Why then had Machen come to London, again and again? Why had this shy and
retiring scribbler left the orchards and fields of Gwent, the pleasant
rectory in Caerleon, to live in the great stone city on the Thames?
Perhaps it was because his Welsh blood stirred within him and drove him
to see the White Tower under which, centuries ago, they had buried the
head of Bran, facing to the sea to guard against invasion. Perhaps it
was to see the city that had been a city even before the legions came,
the city fortified by King Llud, brother to Caesar’s great opponent,
Cassibelaunus, for whom the city was called Caer Llud and later Caer
London and then Londinium and Londres by the foreigners; that king who
was buried at the gates still called Ludgate in his honor. Or perhaps
it was because in London one could walk into a book shop and ask for
Swinburne’s _Songs Before Sunrise_ as casually as one might walk into the
Hanbury Arms in Caerleon and ask for ale.
For London was first and always a fascinating city to Machen. It is
apparent in every page of his books. This countryman who could never
forget his beloved country, delighted in the twistings and turnings of
the streets and roads that led through London and eventually emerged from
straggling suburbs into open fields. He notes with pleasure the streets
whose crossings and corners he knew in the ’eighties and ’nineties; he
misses them when, thirty years later, they have been absorbed by some
great block of buildings. He remembers the facades, if such edifices
could be dignified by the term, of the raw, red-brick villas that were
then springing up all about London. He remembers the restaurants and even
the menus, the taverns and the dwellings in the older sections of London,
and the queer individuals and even queerer incidents he encountered over
several decades.
London was for many years (and perhaps it still is) a city in which
anything might happen. Strange encounters, mysterious strangers—these
seemed to abound in the backwaters and byways of London. The city became
to Machen a sort of Stevensonian Bagdad-on-the-Thames ... and he found in
its streets and lanes, its Inns and Courts, the materials that went into
_The Three Impostors_, _The London Adventure_, _A Fragment of Life_ and
many another story.
This was true of Machen, and it was true of other writers in that
decade. Despite the great calm postulated by Waugh, and in spite of the
tremendous vacuum in which Waugh and other eminent Victorians fondly
believed England and the world existed, there were great things stirring
... and the stirring was mostly centered about London. Being neither
pamphleteers nor journalists, the writers of that day did not boil and
bubble nor forecast trouble as they might today. To be sure, there was
considerable pother about the New Woman, and the New This and That. But
for the most part they did not try to portray their times. The poets were
quite unaware of the peasants and “bourgeoise” was merely an epithet to
be tossed at an unsympathetic critic on one of the more conservative
journals. Time-conscious they most certainly were, but they aimed only
slightly this side eternity. The delicate decadents, the most prolific
and the best publicized group of that time, scarcely bothered to mention
the undercurrents, but their very activity, their prodigious outpourings,
were one of the manifestations of the stirrings beneath the surface. Then
too, there was but one Shaw for every score of sonnetteers, one Wells for
every dozen dilettante novelists, one Machen for every daring dramatist
of the moment.
The beginnings of social-conscience and the vanguard of scientific
thought were there, obscured for the moment by the lurid vapors given off
by the writers of the purple phrase. There was, in short, a renascence of
wonder, not another revival of mediaevalism or of neo-Gothicism, but of
the wonder of things that existed behind the veil and seethed beneath the
surface.
This was reflected as much by the lack of reticence in literature as
in the development of new kinds of fiction ... fiction looking to new
horizons. Shaw had already begun to puncture the balloons of Victorian
complacency, Wells was writing of things that might come, things beyond
our time and beyond our world. Machen began to postulate the existence
of things behind the veil of common appearances. If Wells looked
forward, Machen looked backward. He created a past as strange and as
fearful as the future on some Wellsian planet. He was interested in the
strange sciences of yesterday as Wells was in the sciences of tomorrow.
Machen had read the treatises on alchemy, occult sciences, hypnotism,
spiritualism—and in all of these he found a grain of truth. Alchemy,
especially, interested him. The search for the basic power of the
universe, the power and the ability to transform metals ... he could not
dismiss completely the possibility. Machen was no scientist but he had,
like Wells, a vast respect for the potentialities of science, and a keen
instinct regarding probabilities. These men, at least, were not bringing
in “the mean objects of the roadside” and subjecting them to the cold
stare of the microscope.
Certainly we cannot afford to overlook the development of the detective
story by Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes was presented not as a member
of the existing force of law and order but as a radical departure from
it. Holmes substituted cerebration for mere procedure. There was then, in
London in the nineties, a small band of adventurers ... men who ventured
to hold new beliefs, who sought for adventure in social as well as
scientific fields, who looked forward (or backward) for strange worlds
to visit. Note how they title their tales—each chapter, each episode is
captioned in the Stevensonian manner as “The Adventure of the Speckled
Band” or “The Novel of the Black Seal.” They searched farther afield than
Paris for their magic—to the South Seas, to India, to the very Poles
themselves—even to America.
Whatever was new and strange was usable. About this time London began to
hear tales of the Mormons, and of the band called the Destroying Angels.
Stevenson had them in mind when he wrote _The Dynamiters_, Doyle used
them for his _Study in Scarlet_, and Machen used them as the genesis of
an episode of _The Three Impostors_.
Wonder was in the air—whether it was expressed by a minor poet in terms
of languishing eroticism or by Sherlock Holmes in the cataloguing of
endless varieties of cigar ash. Something was stirring and it stirred
most vigorously in London. Behind the facade of London lurked who knew
what marvels or horrors. Behind the faces of Londoners lurked who knew
what good or evil? London was filled with groups and clubs in search
of the unusual. There were suicide clubs, freak clubs, cults of the
horrible, Hellfire clubs and many others. Man, wondering about his future
and his world, wonders also about himself. The word psychology was used
hardly at all, but men were becoming aware of their minds and its quirks.
Who was there among a group, a club, who might not have been another
Jekyll?
This, then, was London in the 90’s ... a city on the threshold of still
another century. Machen could not have forgotten that it had been Caer
Llud, that the Romans had been there, and before them the Cymry. The very
stones might burst into bloom, the pavements might ripple and surge and
become as soft under foot as turf, the fogs and vapors of its chimney
pots might become clouds of fragrance as in an orchard, or of incense as
in a great cathedral.
_Chapter Three_