1
Of recent years there has been a tendency to regard the novel as
something it has become rather than what it should be. Most novels
that do not fall neatly into one of several categories created by the
critics and reviewers are judged to be poor novels indeed. As a matter of
fact, the whole of fiction, as well as of poetry, has come to be judged
according to standards which, while they may be excellent standards when
applied to journalism or the so-called “documentary,” serve fiction
rather poorly. It has become the custom to label all stories, novels
and poetry that may fall outside the special categories set up by such
standards as “escapist.” It is a convenient enough classification, and
it is an apt enough description, but the word has come to be used in a
rather derogatory sense.
Now it may be demonstrated by an application of these very standards
that almost every one of the world’s great books, and every one of the
world’s heroic poems, is “escapist.” And that is, after all, what they
were intended to be. But we are concerned with the telling of a story
and the manner of its telling. To tell a wonderful story in a wonderful
manner, this, says Arthur Machen, is the function of the writer. There
is another equally fine description of the writer’s task, this time by
James Branch Cabell, another story teller of some eminence.
There is in almost all great stories a certain magic that becomes
apparent from the first sentence. One picks up _Moby Dick_ and reads:
“Call me Ishmael.” There is a quality of strangeness in the name and
abruptness of introduction that serves to set a mood, a mood that
persists through the entire book. Many of Poe’s stories have this same
strangeness and this same quality. One finds it too, in many of Machen’s
stories. The opening sentence, for example of _The Hill of Dreams_: “The
sky glowed as if great furnace doors had been opened.”
The magic of Machen depends as much upon his style as it does upon
the magical things of which he writes. His finest stories appeal to
an essential and basic desire for “escape” from the common life. They
depend for their effect upon that willing suspension of disbelief of
which Coleridge wrote (and for which Coleridge is known by far too many
who would turn its meaning to their own uses), a suspension of disbelief
which it is Mr. Machen’s happy fortune to bring about almost at will.
And yet, apparently, there is much more to it than the mere suspension
of disbelief—it is rather a desire to accept such matters as may be set
forth, whether or not they challenge belief—simply because they make an
appeal to _instinctive belief_. One doesn’t have to try very hard to
believe in the existence of certain powers, especially those which cannot
be, or have not yet been, explained as any known existing force. From
this point onward the development of a story by Machen may hinge upon
the manner of telling as well as upon the selection of the materials for
the tale. There must be no fumbling of the matter, no crude effects, no
creaky props, no bolstering up by the shabby tricks and melodramatic
artifices of the penny dreadfuls. Machen’s magic is very simply achieved.
In each of his tales an improbable, but not implausible, theme is stated;
usually one that is based upon something involving an instinctive belief,
for example: the existence of “little people,” the continuance of some
ancient power under certain circumstances, and in explaining certain
occurrences or events for which no rational explanation exists. Folk
tales, superstitions, local legends and mythology, most of these embody
certain elements in which most of us have at least an instinctive belief.
Then, too, a great deal of Mr. Machen’s own particular magic is achieved
through his ability to see things and to present things that are “removed
from the common life.”
Most of Machen’s characters are not unusual people, they are not
especially “peculiar” in any accepted sense except as they may be
affected by certain occurrences in the earlier development of the story.
For example, the young man in _The Novel of the White Powder_, the boy
in _The Novel of the Black Seal_, and the Vaughan girl in _The Great God
Pan_. But for the most part his characters are, or were, very ordinary
people; ordinary, that is, in the sense that Dyson and Phillips, and even
Lucian Taylor, are quite ordinary people. Indeed the very ordinariness of
some of these people becomes the starting point of an entire sequence of
extraordinary events. Just as it was the ordinary qualities of a young
married couple visiting relatives of a Sunday night in a dull, stodgy,
respectable suburb of London that resulted in the strange story called _A
Fragment of Life_.
Machen’s characters are completely believable, whatever events may occur,
simply because of their very ordinary qualities. Lucian Taylor, the
“hero” of _The Hill of Dreams_, an introvert we would call him today,
was a normal school boy who did not conform too well to the rigors of
the Public School System, and whose solitary home life conditioned him
to react as he did to the strangeness of his environment and to succumb
to the influences, real or imagined, of the Roman ruins near his home.
To the development of such a simple and ordinary character, in this
particular story, must be added one very important magical element—the
influence of landscape upon character.
For the peculiar potency of Machen’s magic owes much, if not most of its
force, to landscape and to the subtle influence of the weird topography
of his stories. Many of Machen’s most telling effects are achieved
through the mere portrayal of a brooding landscape, the sombre background
of mountains, the deep, rutted lanes that run along between head-high
hedges, solitary hilltops shimmering in heat waves, old grey houses that
sit somberly at the edge of the forest and rivers that coil in slow esses
through forests and skirt the walls of mountains. There is no doubt that
the wild Welsh countryside had this effect upon Machen himself.
Machen’s first book, it will be remembered, was written by one “Leolinus
Silurensis”—and Machen frequently calls himself a “Silurist.” For Gwent,
in the old days, the days before Arthur and before the Romans, was the
home of the Silures, one of the three great tribes in this last corner
of the West. The Silures seem to have been more Iberian than Celtic—they
dwelled in the Black Mountains and along the estuary of the Severn. It
was, then, this dark and ancient land that formed the background of
Machen’s life and most of his work. Machen explains, and illustrates, the
influence of his homeland in _Far Off Things_:
“This, then, was my process: to invent a story which would recreate
those vague impressions of wonder and awe and mystery that I myself had
received from the form and shape of the land of my boyhood and youth;
and as I thought over this and meditated on the futility—or comparative
futility—of the plot however ingenious, which did not exist to express
emotions of one kind or another, it struck me that it might be possible
to reverse the process. Could one describe hills and valleys, woods and
rivers, sunrise and sunset, buried temples and mouldering Roman walls so
that a story should be suggested to the reader? Not, of course, a story
of material incidents, not a story with a plot in the ordinary sense of
the term, but an interior tale of the soul and its emotions; could such a
tale be suggested in the way I have indicated? Such is to be the plan of
the great book which is not yet written.”
But of course this book was written, not once but over and over again.
One finds its content in almost everything Machen ever wrote. One
discovers too, the influence of landscape upon Machen and his work. One
notes the feeling for landscape as much in his work as in the work of
Poe or Coleridge or Hawthorne. One day, no doubt, a learned scholar
will write a lengthy monograph upon what might be called _The Influence
of Landscape Upon the Creative Imagination_. There are already many
footnotes available for such a work.
Machen recognized this influence, it became apparent to him as he walked
in the land of the Silures and as he read in the evenings in the drawing
room at Llandewi. This snug, old fashioned “parlour” in the Rectory was
the treasure house of the Machens. Here were their china and silver,
and here the books gathered by the Rector and his forebears. It was
here that Arthur Machen, on his vacations from school at Hereford,
discovered the wonders of Waverly and DeQuincy. Here, too, was Parker’s
_Glossary of Gothic Architecture_. This book initiated Machen into the
spirit of Gothic and, as he says, “that is one of the most magical of
all initiations.” Gothic meant to Arthur Machen “the art of the supreme
exaltation, of the inebriation of the body and soul and spirit. It is
not resigned to dwell calmly, stoically, austerely on the level plains
of this earthy life, since its joy is in this, that it has stormed the
battlements of heaven. And so its far-lifted vaults and its spires rush
upward, and its pinnacles are like a wood of springing trees. And its
hard stones, its strong based pillars break out as it were into song,
they blossom as the rose; all the secrets of the garden and the field and
the wood have been delivered unto them.”
Machen early developed this sense of wonder in the land. In his reading
he discovered, in the age of Coleridge and Wordsworth, the “renaissance
of wonder.” His taste for Scott and DeQuincy and Coleridge and Poe and
Hawthorne and Parker; his taste, in short, for the “Gothic,” supports
and explains this. For landscape and its influence are important
elements in that which we have come to call “Gothic” ... and it is this
Gothic-ness that is also one of the elements in Machen’s magic.
2
And then of course there is the final test of the story-teller’s magic.
Mr. Machen’s inventions have frequently been taken for truth. The tale
of the Bowmen at Mons is the classic example. Machen has told how he
received letters following the publication of some of his books—letters
in which the writers sought explanations of the stories, letters which
were undoubtedly prompted by a belief in some basic truth on which they
suspected the story had been built.
Many years ago Vincent Starrett wrote, in his preface to the Chicago
edition of _The Shining Pyramid_, that there were three Machens—Machen
the Saint, Machen the Sorcerer and Machen the Critic. It is, of course,
Machen the Sorcerer whose work is most popular, or shall we say, the
best known. Machen himself once wrote: “Sorcery and Sanctity, these are
the only true realities.” We might interpret these to mean religion and
science—although it is doubtful if all of the admirers of Arthur Machen
make this interpretation. At any rate it is the works of Machen the
Sorcerer that have been most widely anthologized. These are the stories
one finds classified under such headings as “supernatural stories, tales
of terror, horror stories” and the like.
Let us admit that supernatural fiction, supernatural tales, have quite
a respectable lineage. It must not be imagined, as some intellectuals
do, that the tale of terror is something to which only the readers of
pulp magazines are addicted. The supernatural tale has been the subject
of several excellent studies. One has only to mention the work of such
admirable scholars as Dorothy Scarborough, Edith Birkhead, Montague
Summers and Eino Railo.
It has been said by some of these scholarly investigators that almost
every English writer of any importance has, at one time or another,
written at least one story or novel that fits somewhere into one of these
categories. And then, of course, the scholarly investigators proceed to
give reasons for the interest in such stories, and they point out that
the interest as well as the belief in such matters is always in direct
proportion to the ruggedness of the terrain. And they also list, as
evidence of the extent of their research, the means whereby the best
effects may be achieved in this particular field. Basically these have to
do with landscape, architecture, antiquity and a whole collection of odds
and ends, of props and stage settings that form the background for the
venerable school of Gothic literature started many years ago by Horace
Walpole in _The Castle of Otranto_.
One thing all of these tales have in common is, naturally enough,
strangeness. A strangeness in landscape, a strangeness in character.
Basically too, one supposes, these stories are written about, and because
of, men’s fears. That is why they are called ghost stories, or horror
stories, or tales of terror. This fear is not merely a fear of the
dead returned, but of the past. For these stories concern themselves,
even when not with actual ghosts, with past glories, past powers, past
civilizations, and ancient ceremonies.
It is not that man seeks to frighten himself that he reads these stories
and is fascinated by them. Psychologists, of one sort or another, have
said that the popularity of ghost stories and mystery novels can be
traced to a desire to enjoy vicariously the precarious situations in
which characters in these tales find themselves; and that by substituting
themselves for the characters involved the readers may obtain a certain
stimulation which is lacking in their humdrum, calm and civilized lives.
This, it seems to me, is not particularly true. It is rather because the
past _is_ the past—simply that and nothing more. For the past is the
one thing man can never alter, although it has become fashionable for
us to try even that. The present is here, the future is attainable and
forseeable and it may even be influenced. The past is unattainable and
will always remain so, therefore man remains fascinated by it. The more
shrouded in the mists of time and of antiquity, the more fascinating. Man
does not read of the past to frighten himself any more than he drinks
in order to experience a hang-over. Nor does the average reader of
supernatural stories identify himself with primitive men’s fears any more
than he identifies himself with the abstract forces for good or evil when
reading detective stories. Man is a curious creature and his curiosity
leads him into strange places. His curiosity concerning his amazing
curiosity leads him to even stranger conclusions.
This preoccupation with the Past is part of man’s eternal preoccupation
with Time; is now, and always shall be, world without end; from the
days of the early Greeks, who knew that Chronos was the father of
great Jupiter himself—the parent of the father of the Gods. Many years
ago J. W. Dunne wrote a strange and tantalizing book, _An Experiment
with Time_, a book much remarked by critics and book reviewers in the
practice of their trade, but seldom quoted beyond a mere mention of its
title. This is an extraordinary book, perhaps out-dated now, in this
age of the supersonic and the expanding universe and the expanding ego.
Nevertheless, H. G. Wells and Kipling have been influenced by it; and
many another creator of the marvelous and the wonderful. One may read
many strange and wonderful books, one may even read strong and powerful
and significant books—but one never forgets such books and plays written
about the Time theme as _The Time Machine_ and _Berkeley Square_,
Priestley’s _I Have Been Here Before_, Ford Madox Ford’s _Ladies Whose
Bright Eyes_ and many others.
3
The magic of Machen is due no less to his wonderful style than to his
wonderful material. In these days when one can scarcely speak of style
without being considered stuffy and perhaps even pedantic, to praise a
writer for his style is almost to damn him with faint praise. This is
undoubtedly because we have had no stylists for the last several decades,
for which, on the whole, we may well be grateful! It is possible that
stylists fell into disrepute because so many of them, in the past,
concealed a tremendous vacuum and a cavernous nothingness beneath and
behind a facile facade of fluency.
Yet Arthur Machen has a distinctive style, the perfection of which,
while it appeals to the pedantic and soothes the scholarly, must be
apparent even to the readers of those horrendous anthologies which have
reprinted Machen while the scholars were busily interring him in their
fascinating mausoleums. This matter of style is rather a tricky one. It
is the sort of thing of which one might say, as some have, and when all
definitions fail, “Either one has it, or—one hasn’t!” However feelingly
and with whatever academic finality this axiom may be delivered—style
is obviously more than that, and more than the man. More, too, than
words and a certain way of putting them together, and much more than a
mere choice of words or dexterity in manipulating them. We have come to
think that many of these things _do_ constitute style. Indeed, a certain
publisher recently hailed a new book (one of his own, of course) as being
in the “tradition of the English Stylists.” Simply because the writer
employed, here and there, a compound-complex sentence, composed with a
certain felicity and manufactured of polysyllabic words or those with a
certain antique charm. It is felt, then, that a matter of phrases makes a
Fielding—which is no more the case than that the use of a quotation from
Donne makes a writer one to stand with the Elizabethans.
Style is, like so many other things, more apparent in the breach than
in the observance, which comes perilously close to the didactic dictum,
“Either you have it, or—you haven’t.” But not quite. To be sure, every
written word or group of words has style, even roadsigns, notices of
trespass, mayors’ proclamation, editorials in the Daily Worker, even
soap operas have style. The most popular writers of pot-boilers have a
style—and many of them have so pronounced a style that they can be and
have been recognizably parodied.
It might be said of a good style that it is one that cannot be parodied.
An examination of Machen’s style would indicate that it is, in his case
at least, quite true. For Machen’s style is a blend of many things; of
words with magic connotation, of sentences that create moods, of passages
that suggest, subtly and almost unconsciously, the exact atmosphere for
which they were intended. Mr. Machen is a master at evoking the willing
suspension of disbelief, and he does it without employing any of the
stock properties listed by Coleridge and other authorities as having
the proper connotative value for the creation of a “Gothic” mood or
atmosphere.
When all is said and done, however, it must be admitted that Machen’s
style is merely a reflection of his faith in the credo of a literary man
as set forth by the admirable Dyson. And here, of course, we come to the
crux of the matter, and as close as we may to an explanation of Machen’s
magic which cannot, after all, be appraised in rational terms. In that
wonderful book called _Hieroglyphics_ Machen poses a series of questions:
“Explain, in rational terms, The Quest of the Holy Graal. State
whether in your opinion such a vessel ever existed, and if you
think it did not, justify your pleasure in reading an account
of the search for it.”
“Explain, logically, your delight in color.”
“Estimate the value of Westminster Abbey in the avoirdupois
measure.”
“Faery lands forlorn. Draw a map of the district in question,
putting in principal towns and naming exports.”
Machen agrees that one cannot express art of any kind in the terms of
rationalism, and that “If literature be a kind of dignified reporting, in
which the reporter is at liberty to invent new incidents and leave out
others, and to arrange all in the order that pleases him best; then, let
us have as much “common sense” and “rationalism” as you please ... but
if literature is a mysterious ecstasy, the withdrawal from all common
and ordinary conditions ... [we had better] confess that with its first
principles logic has nothing to do.... For if Rationalism be the truth,
then all literature ... is simply lunacy.”
4
There are, sometimes, certain superficial resemblances between the
works of imaginative writers that are outside the province and beyond
the charge of plagiarism. An age produces a culture, a culture produces
works of art, and all the while the individual consciousness, or
sub-consciousness, feeds upon and is nourished by the raw materials
and the basic elements of the culture. For in any age there are bound
to exist certain individuals in whom combinations of common experience
develop along certain lines and who may be expected to react in almost
predictable patterns to identical stimulae ... just as certain identical
combinations of chemical elements may be expected to react in identical
manner under identical circumstances. Which is, after all, no major
discovery but merely a restatement of the obvious fact that lies behind
the continuity of any culture, or even, on a smaller scale, of any
literary movement, or on occasion, of something less significant than a
literary movement.
This fact also lies behind the periodical resurgence of certain ideals of
culture or revivals of interest in certain abstractions such as realism,
naturalism, romanticism and the like. And it explains, in individuals,
the influence one writer may have over another, or the appeal of certain
types of material to certain similar individuals.
Superficial resemblances are a common manifestation of spiritual
relationships. Some years ago a rather clever critic of music wrote a
book called _Music for the Man Who Enjoys Hamlet_. Now, the resemblance
between people who enjoy Hamlet no doubt extends to a great many things
other than the stage and Shakespeare and music, and, for all we know,
it might even be established that such people have a mutual preference
for a specific cocktail or a certain brand of cigarette. Our critic did
not attempt to prove this, he contented himself with discussing music of
a type to soothe the Hamlet-enjoying intellect. And so the superficial
resemblances between Poe and Coleridge and DeQuincy extend far beyond a
need or addiction, accidental or otherwise, to stimulants of one sort
or another. The lines that connect and link these individuals, feature
for feature, element for element, with an incomplete analogy here, and
a broken chain there, would no doubt resemble a physicist’s laboratory
model of the atomic structure of the very newest isotope of the most
recently discovered element.
Perhaps individuals themselves constitute the electrons and protons of
a cultural atom. We might link individuals of a certain sort, the men
who enjoy Hamlet, for example, or Poe, DeQuincy, Hawthorne, Coleridge,
and find isotopes here too—Brockden-Brown, Walter Scott, Tieck, Machen,
Sheil, Stevenson, Wells and so on and so on. And we would find that
these elements or individuals had certain affinities, certain properties
in common. They are not alike merely in that they wrote in a certain
fashion, or that they wrote about more or less similar ideas, or that the
moods they created were more or less identical. There are certain other
qualities, perhaps insignificant, but revealing.
Poe, like Coleridge, was fond of designing title pages and planning
magazines and journals of a very literary sort. We find that Poe and
Coleridge shared a facility for creating exotic and quite unreal
localities. For example Coleridge’s Pleasure Palace of Kubla Khan and
Poe’s Domain of Arnheim are very similar in conception. The conception
of tremendous wealth appealed, in a most impractical way, to both Poe
and Coleridge. And, finally, both shared a great liking for names of
Oriental origin ... there is no distance at all, on the literary map,
between Xanadu and the kingdom by the sea; and the River Alph or one of
its tributaries, empties into the tarn of Auber. Machen’s own landscape
is not too far removed. It was first peopled by the dark people who came
from Defrobani, which is to say the City of the Golden Domes, far to the
east on the shores of Marmora. And Machen’s eternal preoccupation with a
Great Romance is akin in many ways to Poe’s grandiose schemes for epic
compositions no less than it is to the complete unpublished works of
Coleridge.
There was magic in these men and in their manner of telling a tale.
There was, in each of them, an ability to create that which made its
strongest appeal to that love of strangeness in most men’s minds.
DeQuincy, alone in London; Hawthorne, so solemnly settled in Salem,
Coleridge surrounded by blue-stockings and blue lakes; Poe in his erratic
course from salon to saloon ... these men made magic of a sort no realist
could ever devise. Machen’s magic is of this sort.
_Chapter Eight_