“_I reflected, then, on my want of prospects, and I determined
to embark in literature._”
“_Really, that was strange. You seem in pretty comfortable
circumstances, though._”
“_Though! what a satire upon a noble profession!_”
1
This bit of dialogue takes place in one of those chance encounters with
which several of Machen’s tales begins. It might well have ensued between
Machen and some compatriot of far-off Gwent as they met in a London
street early in that daringly decadent decade.
For Machen, having served an apprenticeship in grangerizing and
cataloguing, having composed calendars and made translations “on the
house” and having written a story that fluttered the dovecotes and
published a book that stirred up a tempest in a tiny tot’s teacup, was
definitely a literary man—or at least he pursued the practice of letters.
He had cause, in later years, to give the choice more serious thought
than he had in the 90’s. He had cause to reflect upon it, but never did
he regret the choice—if choice it was. For if ever a man’s destiny lay in
the art and the practice of letters, that man was Machen. And of course
he knew this—he knew it in the lonely room in Clarendon Road and in the
downstairs parlor at Llanddewi. And he knew it years later when, in
computing his earnings for twenty-odd years labor, he found the sum to be
not in excess of £635. And of course he knew it even when he wondered, as
he some times did, if he had failed in his art.
Machen had in him, besides the seeds of his destiny, more than a bit
of that delightful fellow Dyson whom he created somewhat to his own
image and likeness. Dyson, you will recall, was “a man of letters, and
an unhappy instance of talents misapplied. With gifts that might have
placed him in the flower of his youth among the most favored of Bentley’s
favorite novelists, he had chosen to be perverse; he was, it is true,
familiar with scholastic logic but he knew nothing of the logic of life
and he flattered himself with the title of artist, when he was in fact
but an idle and curious spectator of other men’s endeavors. Amongst many
delusions, he cherished one most fondly, that he was a strenuous worker,
and it was with a gesture of supreme weariness that he would enter his
favorite resort, a small tobacco shop in Great Queen Street, and proclaim
to anyone who cared to listen that he had seen the rising and setting of
two successive suns.”
But this isn’t Machen! Of course it isn’t! Nor am I suggesting that Dyson
is a portrait of the artist as a young man. But if you will recall for
a moment Machen’s obvious fondness for his creature, Dyson, his almost
paternal acceptance of Dyson’s pomposities and his benevolent air in
setting down Dyson’s latest preposterous formula, you will realize, I
think, that Machen was the model, and that he rather relished poking a
bit of fun at himself, his younger self at any rate.
Well then, early in the 90’s Machen had his trip abroad and his cottage
in the country and his gradually accumulated legacies. And now he was, at
last, about to have his rooms in Grays Inn and his summers in the south
of France. He was indeed a man of letters!
2
_The Three Impostors_, even though it failed to set Fleet Street afire,
did add to Machen’s stature. It gave him something of a reputation
in certain quarters which, if not exactly fashionable at the moment,
were not on the side of the Philistines. The failure, if it was one,
of _The Three Impostors_ Machen attributes to a contemporary crisis in
literary circles. “There were,” he says mildly, “scandals in ’95—which
had made people impatient with reading matter that was not obviously and
obtrusively ‘healthy.’”
The several tales or episodes that make up _The Three Impostors_, while
they may be neither obviously “healthy” nor obtrusively “healthy,”
were much less unwholesome than most of the literature that was then
circulating in London. Based for the most part on early Celtic folk-lore
and legends of the Welsh border, they developed the theme of primitive
races, of “little people” who have, in some out of the way places,
managed to survive to the present day.
The nature of the tales does indeed tend toward the horrific and even
the “unhealthy,” but the manner of their telling and the presence of the
almost “deadpan” Dyson in most of these episodes results in a rather
curious blend of pedantry and unpleasantness. Moreover, so faithfully did
Machen follow a Stevensonian pattern that even the Marquis of Queensbury,
had he not been otherwise occupied at the moment, could have taken no
offense. It would seem, then, that it was this almost sedate treatment
that failed to set the bookstalls ablaze. A less restrained publisher
than John Lane would have had Beardsley do the illustrations for the
book—with quite predictable results. There are those, Grant Richards and
George Bernard Shaw among them, who suggest that Lane was rather afraid
of Beardsley—and not without reason. For Beardsley was an unpredictable
and vindictive chap. He was once criticized for having drawn a Pierrot
for a cover design of the “Savoy”—it was not the sort of thing, he was
told, that would appeal to the British public.
A sketch of John Bull was substituted, accepted and sent out to
subscribers. It was then discovered that Beardsley had taken his revenge
by subtly indicating that John Bull was in a condition in which no Briton
would willingly appear in public. For such sophomoric shenanigans Lane
had given Beardsley the sack. There was never any question of Beardsley
illustrating _The Three Impostors_, nor could there be any question of
the result. Nevertheless _The Three Impostors_ rates perhaps third among
Machen’s works, and has been frequently reprinted.
The story did cause publishers, from time to time, to ask Machen if he
had something else in “the manner of _The Three Impostors_.” This was not
as flattering to the author’s vanity as might seem. Having gone through
the tale once Machen had no wish to “re-cook the cabbage which was
already boiled to death.” Nevertheless, one doesn’t speak thus bluntly
to publishers—even when they solicitously seek manuscripts. There was
another and, on the whole, very attractive proposition. Two gentlemen,
obviously with an eye for such things, proposed a new weekly paper for
which, they further proposed, Mr. Machen and a Mr. Wells should do a
series of stories—and in their familiar manner, of course. Thus Mr.
Machen was to do a series of horror stories in the manner of _The Three
Impostors_ and Mr. Wells was to do stories in the manner of _The Time
Machine_.
_The Time Machine_ had appeared about the same time as _The Great God
Pan_. While Machen’s story was stirring up its teacup tempest, a young
gentleman named H. G. Wells had made a very real, and a most deserved
sensation with a book called _The Time Machine_. Mr. Wells had written
his story at a time when he was living from hand to mouth as a journalist
at lodgings in Kent. And so the new paper, to be called the _Unicorn_,
was to feature the works of these two young men who had recently created
something new and exciting and not, as was too often the case in those
days, unfit for general circulation.
Machen admitted that he was cheered and elated at the prospect ... until
he began to re-cook the cabbage. Possibly Mr. Wells felt the same way,
for the _Unicorn_ ceased to exist before a single one of Machen’s tales
(he wrote four of them) appeared in it, while Mr. Wells contributed but
one story, called _The Cone_.
Machen realized that the Stevensonian had been done to a turn—and so
he had done with it—there would now be something new. He had already
written _The Shining Pyramid_ for _The Unknown World_, edited by his
friend A. E. Waite, and one or two other tales—but now, once again—and
this time there was no doubt about it—_The Great Romance_.
Once again there was the question—what was it to be about? Machen labored
mightily over the beginnings of this new book. He sat at his Japanese
bureau in his rooms at Grays Inn, he roamed the deserted streets and
squares of Bloomsbury and pondered at great length the problem—what would
it be like?
I suppose Dyson would have sympathized deeply with these soul searchings
and solitary soliloquies—for Dyson, too, had often wondered what his
books would be like, and Dyson had _his_ Japanese bureau. At any rate,
and before too long, Machen had the idea. His book would be “a Robinson
Crusoe of the mind” ... and for such a book, Machen had traveled well.
3
Machen had at last decided, and for the second time in his life, to write
the Great Romance. The first time it had turned out to be _The Chronicle
of Clemendy_, that light-hearted collection of tales having nothing
whatever to do with the Great Romance he had decided to write, and having
nothing in it of the loneliness of his life in London. This time it
became _The Hill of Dreams_, and one knows in reading it that this also
is not the Great Romance: for Machen could not have decided to write _The
Hill of Dreams_ any more than he could have decided to write a “Robinson
Crusoe” of the soul—even though he tells us that this is precisely what
he had decided to do. It is perhaps a coincidence, and a very fortunate
one, that the book did turn out to be just that.
Machen was, as we have seen, a very careful man with his models. He could
write in the manner of Thomas Browne, or Robert Herrick, or William
Morris, or Robert Stevenson, and very carefully did he cultivate their
manner. When he had perfected the manner, and made use of it, the design
was there but the substance had altered. However meticulously he might
labor perfecting the model, making no conscious effort to improve upon
it, he could not prevent a transmutation from taking place. This is
apparent even in _The Three Impostors_ for, even though the pattern is
recognizable, and even though it is studied and carefully contrived,
there are elements, so strong is the triumph of mind over manner, that
make it peculiarly Machen’s own and not Stevenson’s.
The new book, Machen says, was born in a phrase encountered in Charles
Whibley’s introduction to _Tristram Shandy_. Whibley described the work
as being “a picaresque of the mind.” And so Machen said to himself,“I
will write a Robinson Crusoe of the soul.” This was no mere decision;
it was, rather, a demonstration of the fact that there is an affinity
of the mind, some minds, for an idea, some ideas. _The Hill of Dreams_,
the picaresque of the mind, the Crusoe of the soul, was at the heart
of Machen’s Great Romance. It responded to a phrase for which it had a
natural affinity and so the Great Romance, _The Hill of Dreams_, was born.
“It was,” wrote Machen, “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 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 pass day after day, week after
week, month after month through the _inextricabilis terror_ of the London
streets, to tread a grey labyrinth whose path had no issue, no escape,
no end. I had known as a mere lad how terrible it was on a gloomy winter
evening to go out because a little room had become intolerable, to go out
walking through those multitudinous streets, 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 half glimpses of the faces of the lovers as they looked
out, happy, into the dark night. All this had been my daily practice and
habit 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.”
The writing of this book occupied Machen from the autumn of 1895 to the
spring of 1897. It went very slowly. For one thing, Machen discovered
that the style he had so carefully cultivated for the telling of the
improbable tale of _The Three Impostors_ had to be just as carefully
destroyed and every mannerism eradicated. He had become fluent in the
Stevensonian vein—now he found himself writing with uncertainty, nothing
flowed easily and naturally. His pen could not keep pace with his mind
and his mind was racing rapidly through the garden of Avallaunius in
far-off Gwent. For _The Hill of Dreams_ was to be about, if it was about
anything, a boy’s wanderings and imaginings in a mysterious place he had
found, or dreamed he had found, in the Roman ruins near Caerleon.
Chapters were written and rewritten, his day’s output varied from
perhaps three lines to three folios. At last the book was finished in
the spring of 1897. He had been at it, quite steadily, for almost two
years, with a summer in Brittany in 1896, most of which he spent thinking
of the book lying untouched in his room in London. In March 1897 Grant
Richards wrote him to ask for his next manuscript. Mr. Richards, a new
publisher, and anxious, no doubt, to get off on the right foot, wanted
something “in the manner of _The Three Impostors_.” He got, instead,
_The Hill of Dreams_. Richards returned the book along with a paternal
letter pointing out to Machen the error of his ways and urging him not
to jeopardize his reputation by publishing such a book. Several other
publishers subsequently did the same and the book remained for years
as it was, still titled _The Garden of Avallaunius_, and still not
published. And then in 1907, after ten years, Grant Richards changed his
mind and published _The Garden of Avallaunius_, but he insisted also upon
changing the title on the plea, perhaps justified, that no one would
properly pronounce “Avallaunius.” It may be, however, that _The Garden of
Avallaunius_ did appear in print before the Richards edition.
In the summer of 1901 Machen wrote to a friend, a Miss Brooke-Alder: “A
certain story, translated from the English and called _Le Grande Dieu
Pan_, is now appearing in a French review. Maeterlinck is extremely
interested in it and has sent a message to the author asking him to
forward any manuscripts in order that they also may be rendered into
French. I am sending a manuscript called _The Garden of Avallaunius_
which I finished four years ago, and if the great man chances to like it,
I suppose I shall have the curious fate of finding myself a French rather
than an English author.”
Whether or not this translation and publication ever took place, I have
been unable to discover. However, the Richards edition of 1907 was the
first of almost half a score that have continued to be largely out of
print up until the present time.
4
Well, then, the Great Romance was completed in 1897—and they would have
none of it. And so it remained for another ten years, more or less, in
one of the spacious compartments of the Japanese bureau.
Machen was, at this time, living the literary life, not quite as it was
lived by the swish young men who were then breaking into print and whose
names appeared in the more sensational evening papers and on court writs,
but still, it was the literary life and still—a noble profession.
The Japanese bureau, its cubbyholes and compartments jammed with notes
and notebooks and scraps of paper, had yielded up many tales and articles
that appeared in this or that journal. Machen had already written _The
Holy Things_, _Psychology_, _Witchcraft_, _The Rose Garden_, _The
Ceremony_, _Midsummer_ and many other. He was becoming well known as the
author of a number of rather strange, rather clever stories. Sometimes
they were called “nasty” or “disagreeable” stories by outraged critics
who were quite likely to view them with an eye jaundiced by too careful
perusal of _The Yellow Book_. The Keynote Series sold quite well and
Machen’s _The Great God Pan_ and _The Inmost Light_ in Volume V, _The
Three Impostors_ and _The Iron Maid_ in Volume XIX had wide circulation.
_The Memoirs of Casanova_, published in the same year as _Pan_, though
limited to a thousand copies, brought him some reputation and recognition
on a more scholarly plane. Still, he made no fortune on these books,
then—or ever. And that was beginning to matter. He was even moved, in
1895, to enter an American short story competition. His entry, _The Red
Hand_, written for the competition, won no prize but it did appear in the
Christmas issue of _Chapman’s Magazine_ for that year.
It was a quiet life. He had, in those days, few friends and few
acquaintances. His life was in reading books and in writing them.
That no one seemed to be publishing them was, for the moment, quite
unimportant. He describes his daily routine in _Things Near and Far_:
“Every morning after breakfast I read over what I have 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 twelve to one,
and another half hour walk in the afternoon. Then two cups of tea without
milk or sugar at four, and the rigor of the literary game till seven, and
again after dinner till eleven. It was a life of routine, and all its
adventures, difficulties, defeats and rare triumphs were those of the
written page.”
This was the literary life far removed from the rarified atmosphere of
the Cafe Royale and merry, mad circle of poets and artists of the Dowson,
Beardsley, Conder, Crackenthorpe set who were usually contemplating Soho
or suicide or both. It was the literary life of a recluse, of a Dyson, or
of the brilliant monologist of _Hieroglyphics_. In the course of these
long and thoughtful evenings when the pen scratched and the bulldog
dozed and page followed page into the cubbyholes or into oblivion,
Machen formulated many of the theories of art and literature which were
expounded by the recluse of Barnsbury. Writing of this period some years
later Machen says that literature “is one of the many ways of escaping
from life, to be classified with Alpine Climbing, Chess, Methylated
Spirit and Prussic Acid.” But this was written in 1915 or thereabouts, in
1897 he was less inclined to a mellow cynicism. For it was then not only
an escape from life, but a means, perhaps “the only means of realizing
and shewing life, or, at least certain aspects of life.”
This preoccupation with literature extended even to his employment,
for through 1898 Machen worked on the staff of “Literature,” a weekly
paper published by the Times. This seems to have been not too happy an
association, for he says he had been harassed and worried for a whole
year in the office of “Literature,” and that he was in high spirits in
May 1899 when he was released from this bondage.
Besides, there were a great many important things to be done. There was,
of course, another Great Romance. Like its predecessors this one did not
quite come off, or it was never quite finished. What there was of it was
eventually published as _The White People_. There were other irons on
the hearth, and one of these had been heated and re-heated many times
before; but it was never quite forged or beaten into shape.
This is the story we know as _A Fragment of Life_. It is, in its present
state, a mere fragment of a great work. Machen had lived with the idea
for ten years or more, for the story was born in another tale published
in the Globe or the Gazette or some other paper in 1890 under the title
_The Resurrection of the Dead_, which was not quite what Machen intended
when he originally called it _Resurrectio Mortuorum_.
This story is about a man who one day recovered his “ancestral
consciousness.” The idea had long fascinated Machen, perhaps because he
was forever on the verge of recovering his own “ancestral consciousness,”
or perhaps because he had never quite lost it. At any rate, it was always
close to him, it greatly influenced his daily life because he never
became used to the contrast between “raw London suburbs and the old gray
houses under the forest near the river” in Gwent.
This, and _The White People_, seemed to have been of the greatest
importance to him. Neither was finished in that century—nor were they
ever completely finished. Yet in this time he wrote and completed one
of the best of his books, and one of the finest books of our time.
_Hieroglyphics_ was finished in 1899 and it joined the fragments and the
beginnings of the Great Romances that had been written and put aside in
that repository of Great Romances—the Japanese bureau.
Of _Hieroglyphics_ we shall have much to say later, for it is of greater
significance in this twentieth century than in the nineteenth century in
which it was written.
5
Now we are come to the end of the year 1899—the turn of the century.
This was, as has been previously noted, an intensely time-conscious
era. The birth of the twentieth century was awaited with perhaps more
interest and excitement than had attended similar events in the past.
For one thing, everyone was conscious of the enlightenment of their age,
progress was almost as much a byword in the Nineties as it became in
the Nineteen-Twenties and the early Nineteen-Forties. And, of course,
there was the minor satisfaction of knowing that it was quite likely
to be the only turn of the century within the memory of living man.
Prophets of doom had their say and their day along with those who
proclaimed new glory and new heights and new horizons. It was, to be
sure, a well-heralded and eagerly awaited event. That a mere clock should
unemotionally tick so momentous a second!
The more memorable men of the notorious Nineties were, for the most part,
either dead or dying, visibly decaying or decently interred. They passed,
most of them, mercifully before the significant second struck.
This was a year of great significance in the life of Arthur Machen. For
in this year “a great sorrow which had long been threatened fell upon me;
I was once more alone.” And in another place, he writes, “... and then my
life was dashed into fragments. I ceased to write. I travelled.”
Again and again he refers to this event, in his two autobiographical
books and in several of the forewords and prefaces he later wrote for
re-issues of his earlier books. Always the references are veiled in
mystery or followed by a recital of strange experiences and a cloud of
mysticism that conceals, as it was intended, the shattering event.
What was this event? There are a few who know, but they are not likely
to reveal what they know. As recently as 1947, less than a year before
he died, Machen wrote in a letter, “Even now it is painful to recall. I
would rather you did not refer to it.”
Since this is not intended as a biography, nor a Life, we shall not
pursue the matter. There is this much more to be said, that may give some
clue to the events of the year 1900. Machen wrote in _Things Near and
Far_,
“I can set down the facts, or rather such of them as I remember, but I
am quite confident 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 these 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 I 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 great deal nearer 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 red haired parlour maid; but truth must be
told in figures.”
6
Back in 1880, while his family were making plans for him, plans involving
the Royal College of Surgeons, Machen used to walk to the Pontypool Road
station to pick up the London papers. On his way back he would rest for
awhile, (it was an eight mile walk) under the hedges and turn to the
theatrical pages which seemed to him by far the most interesting parts of
the paper, and the stage the most fascinating part of the Fabulous City
of the West. And so, in a sense, he followed the bright lights to London,
and then, having arrived there, set to work in the dark caves (HERE DWELL
PUBLISHERS) of Chandos Street, Leicester Square and Catharine Street.
There is not the slightest bit of evidence that Machen ever thought
longingly of footlights and grease paint or, for that matter, that he
ever even thought of them at all after he arrived in London. Yet here
in 1901 he dons buskins or whatever and prepares to tread the boards,
and in a travelling company. His first engagements were with the Benson
Shakesperean Company and with them he travelled the length and breadth of
England for several season. He seems to have enjoyed it all tremendously,
although it does not seem to have affected or influenced his later work.
As a matter of fact, with the exception of a brief chapter and a half in
one of his autobiographical books, he does not refer to his career on the
stage at any great length. Sufficient unto the days....
And then one day, perhaps when the trees were beginning to put forth,
Machen resumed the London Adventure. In 1902, and without fanfare of any
sort, Grant Richards brought out a remarkable book with a strange title.
It was called _Hieroglyphics_, and it was subtitled _A Note Upon Ecstasy
in Literature_, by Arthur Machen. The book was born, as so many books
are, while the author was reviewing books for a weekly journal. It was
written in the happy period following his release from “the detestable
office life” and as a perfectly normal reaction against it, and it
remains to this day one of the best, and the least known and the most
sadly neglected books of English criticism.
A noted publisher once told Machen that _Hieroglyphics_ had “influenced
the whole standpoint of English literary criticism.” One wishes it had!
At any rate, Machen read proofs of the book while playing in “The Varsity
Belle,” and he read reviews of it while playing in “Paolo and Francesca.”
And then, when _Hieroglyphics_ seemed unlikely to set Fleet Street afire,
or even to start a small blaze in one of the University debating clubs,
Machen began once more to write and to publish.
His old friend, A. E. Waite, a distinguished writer in the field of the
occult and the mystic, began to publish Machen’s stories. Waite, who
was also manager for Horlick’s Malted Milk, had managed to persuade
the malted milk magnate to sponsor or subsidize a magazine. This was
certainly the strangest commercial venture on record, for the magazine
published material concerning the occult and mystical topics that
appealed to Waite. Horlick was, presumably, happy to see his name on the
cover and on the masthead of the magazine. It was in this esoteric little
journal that some of Machen’s work first appeared ... _The White People_,
_A Fragment of Life_ and, at long last, _The Garden of Avallaunius_.
Machen remarks, somewhere, that he did not know that the sale of Malted
Milk was unfavorably affected by the publication of these tales. As a
matter of fact, the stories were quite well received. Such things get
around and, in 1906, Grant Richards collected the best of them, plus
_Pan_, _The Inmost Light_, _The Red Hand_ and published them in a book
called _The House of Souls_. Richards had changed his mind about Machen,
but apparently with reservations, for in 1906 another Machen book, _Dr.
Stiggins_, appeared, but under the device of a little-known publisher.
This book is, in effect, an amplification of some views set forth in the
Preface to _The House of Souls_. Mr. Richards wouldn’t touch this, but he
did bring out _The Hill of Dreams_ in the following year.
And then there was another change in Machen’s life. He fell into
journalism ... something that had once been devoutly wished for by the
dear, dead folk of Caerleon.
_Chapter Five_