1
Toward the close of the first quarter of this century Mr. Alfred Knopf,
being ready to reissue _The Anatomy of Tobacco_, asked Arthur Machen to
write a new introduction for the volume. The _Anatomy_ had been written
some forty-three years before and it seemed time a new edition and a
new introduction were called for. The _Anatomy_ is a slight book, and
a rather dull and pretentious one, turned out as a sort of sophomoric
exercise under the influence of Burton and other pedantic antiquarians.
Machen had no objection to writing a new introduction to the book of
“Leolinus Siluriensis” and so he sat down at once to do so.
Most of Machen’s work, and certainly all of the best of it, had already
been written and published ... there was no Great Romance on the fire
just then. Several years before he had written his memoirs, or come as
close to writing them as he ever would. _The Confessions of a Literary
Man_ appeared serially in the London Evening News through several months
of 1915. Secker issued the _Confessions_ in 1922 as _Far Off Things_.
A year later Machen wrote _Things Near and Far_; another two years
later came _The London Adventure_. These three books are Machen’s
autobiography, although it has been said that almost everything he ever
wrote was, to a great extent, autobiographical. At any rate, Machen
saw the books in print and occupied himself with journalism, which he
detested, and with thinking over the books he had written which, on the
whole, he rather enjoyed. And so when, in the 1920’s, he began the New
York Adventure, Machen sat down and wrote not one but a whole series of
new introductions. There is no nonsense about these introductions, and no
“graceful writing.” The introduction to the new edition of the _Anatomy_
begins quite simply:
“It struck me once, during a long meditation on literature, that every
man who has written has had but one idea in his head. To the best of my
recollection, the particular example in my mind at the time was Edgar
Allen Poe, who executed a wonderful series of variations on one theme.”
Now this idea had been in Machen’s mind for a great many years. A year or
two before completing his introduction for Mr. Knopf he had been engaged
in writing a book called _The London Adventure_. The book contains much
material that is found in neither the _Confessions_ nor in _Things Near
and Far_. While writing the book he became intrigued with some old note
books he had kept many years before. In reading them he was reminded of a
story by Henry James, _The Pattern on the Carpet_, in which is expressed
the notion of a man of letters who had written many books and was quite
surprised to find that one of his admirers had failed to recognize that
all these tales of his were variations on one theme; that a common
pattern, like the pattern of an eastern carpet ran through them all.
In the story the novelist died suddenly without revealing the nature
of the pattern. Nor does Henry James, in whose works one might also
trace a common pattern. He too leaves it to his readers to discover for
themselves the mystery of this one design, latent in a whole shelf of
books.
Machen himself has such a pattern, and such a theme. It occurs again and
again in all of his works, in his short stories as well as in his novels:
in the slightest of his essays as well as in _Hieroglyphics_. This theme
he defines in several places quite briefly and simply. It is, he says,
“The sense of the eternal mysteries, the eternal beauty hidden beneath
the crust of common and commonplace things: hidden and yet burning and
glowing continuously if you care to look with purged eyes.”
We have noted, several times over, Machen’s preoccupation with a Great
Romance. Many years ago he wrote, “There is a great book that I am hoping
to write one of these fine days. I have been hoping to write it, I may
say, since 1898, or ’99, and somewhere about the later year I did write
as many as a dozen pages. The _magnum opus_ so far conducted did not
wholly displease me, and yet it was not good enough to urge me forward
in the task. And so it has languished ever since then, and I am afraid
I have lost the manuscript that contained all that there was of it long
ago. Seriously, of course, it would not have been a great book if it had
been ever so prosperously continued and ended; but it would have been at
least a curious book, and even now I feel conscious of warm desire at the
thought of writing it—some day. For the idea came to me as follows:
“I had been thinking at the old century end of the work that I had done
in the fifteen years or so before, and it suddenly dawned upon me that
this work, pretty good or pretty bad, or as it may be, had all been the
expression of one formula, one endeavor. What I had been doing was this:
I had been inventing tales in which and by which I had tried to realize
my boyish impressions of that wonderful magic Gwent.”
Now this great book was not only written but it was rewritten under
various forms, in entirely different ways, and with no surface
similarities at all. For almost sixty years he had written purely to
please himself, nor did he hesitate to publish, at his own expense, the
books he wrote for his own pleasure. It was his feeling in this that
there was no reason why a beginner should not be willing to pay his own
way. And yet, as he says, it is a queer pleasure when one does write to
please oneself. For, as Machen says,
“I wrote purely to please myself; and what a queer pleasure it was!
To write, or to try to write, means involving oneself in endless
difficulties, contrarieties, torments, despairs, and yet I wrote on, and
I suppose for the reason which I have given, the necessity laid upon most
of us to create another and a fantastic life in order that the life of
actuality may be endurable.”
In these excerpts from Machen’s autobiographical sketches one encounters
over and over again certain keywords: ‘escape,’ ‘common life,’ ‘eternal
mysteries,’ ‘removal’ and so on. And these same key words are, of course,
the underlying themes of every story he ever wrote. They constitute the
criteria by which he judged the literature of past and present as well.
2
Machen had been brought up on Scott and Coleridge, Hawthorne and Poe and
all the authors one would naturally expect a school boy to encounter
in an English public school in the 1880’s. In addition to these there
were the books he found in the rectory at Llanddewi. These included one
especially significant book by Parker on Gothic architecture.
We have already noted that Machen early became aware of the beauty
of the Gothic and that he was all of his life more or less under its
influence. His conception of the Gothic was not quite the same as Horace
Walpole’s. It stemmed rather from Parker and from Coleridge, from whom
he learned that there is “in the spectacle of external nature something
much more than mere pleasantness or sensuous beauty.” The rugged terrain
of the land of the Silures would seem to offer little of pleasantness or
sensuous beauty ... yet it did act upon Machen in much the same way that
such a landscape had acted upon the imagination of such a lyrical poet
as, for example, Wordsworth.
As a matter of fact, Machen did not hesitate to refer to Walpole’s “sham
Gothic,” and he assumes that Walpole had a sort of “vague idea that there
was something in a particular architecture of a particular era which was
somehow or other curious and admirable.” Machen further remarks that one
cannot possibly compare the school of Coleridge in its appreciation of
nature with the school of Walpole in its appreciation of the Gothic. And
then, he poses a question in which there lies the answer to his own and
to many another writer’s problem. “May it not be that Coleridge and his
fellows were but the forerunners of a new doctrine which was not fully
revealed to them.”
We have remarked that Machen employs none of the traditional trappings
of the Gothic tale. There are no clankings and bumpings and ghosties in
the night. There are no ruined castles, no hermits in caves. Instead we
find deserted houses in Lambeth and in Clerkenwell, and sometimes the
houses are not even deserted. Nor are they occupied by monks or knights
or old families in whose closets lurk the most deplorable of skeletons.
The typical Gothic “hero,” either the sardonic Byronic or the melancholy
Manfred type is never encountered. Machen’s heroes, if such they be, are
rather ordinary young men like Lucian Taylor and Ambrose Meyrick, or
perhaps you may wish to call the ever-present Dyson and the companionable
Phillips heroes. There are, of course, sinister characters in Machen.
Mr. Davies, outwardly ordinary, is as black a villain as can be found
anywhere in the whole school of Otranto. Miss Lally, or Miss Leicester,
are as horrific in their own quiet way as any harpy or hag encountered in
the novels of Radcliff.
Arthur Machen is much more closely related in his work to Hawthorne and
Poe than he is to his English contemporaries and predecessors. As Paul
Elmer More has noted, Hawthorne and Poe are the only two writers in
America who have won almost universal renown as artists, and that these
two are each, in their own manner, a sovereign in that strange region of
emotion which we name the weird. Their achievement, as Mr. More points
out, is not at all like the Gothic novel introduced by Horace Walpole.
There is little in them of the revival of medieval superstition and gloom
which marked the rise of romanticism in Europe.
The unearthly visions of Poe and Hawthorne were not the results of
literary whim or unbridled individualism but, according to Mr. More, were
deeply rooted in American history. Now this is a rather strange matter,
for there is nothing nationalistic in the nature of the work of these
American writers. It follows a well established tradition, but it is not
the tradition of the English school of the Gothic revival. It was greatly
influenced by Germanic mysticism, just as Coleridge was influenced
by Teutonic theory. These American writers seem to have missed the
dilettantism that was associated with the Gothic revival in England. In
this they are very close to Machen and his work. Both these writers were
greatly influenced by their surroundings and by the influence of their
own native landscape. The personal alchemy of each one transmuted the
elements of that landscape and created a time and place that never were.
Poe especially, and to a far greater extent, was affected by landscape
not only of his native Virginia but of every place he ever visited. Some
years ago John Cowper Powys, a visiting, but much more sympathetic than
usual, Englishman commented upon this aspect of the writings of Poe:
“For myself, as a traveller for a score of years between all of Edgar
Allen Poe’s particular cities, and knowing the country round them a good
deal better than I know my own, I confess—though it may be because of
a kindred sensibility toward the ghostly, the weird, and the horror
hinting: I have found even in those districts, though of course far
more in the deeper south, elements here and there that correspond with
disturbing closeness to the frightening things in his imaginary landscape.
“But it is not from those pine haunted woods and those morasses and those
treacherous estuaries and those Lethean wharfs that the darker vistas and
more troubling visions of Poe’s inspirations comes.
“They are conjured up from the symbols of pre-incarnate tremblings that
we all find written on the nerves of our race—though only a few abnormal
individuals can render articulate these hieroglyphics of holy terror.
“... We all conceal within us, inherited from an immemorial past, a
secret yearning to enjoy by some magical shortcut the hidden potencies of
nature. A responsive pulse begins to beat irrepressibly within us when
Faust makes the sign of the Macrocosm, for there is not one among us for
whom the idea of forbidden joys and an unnatural power over the forces of
nature has not got a seductive appeal.”
Machen made this comment in a letter on the subject of the Gothic novel.
“The fact is, I believe, that all the Gothic romances are sham Gothic
romances. I mean that the people who put back their period into the
middle ages, had hardly the faintest notion of what life in the middle
ages, in a Gothic castle was really like. This, let me note, is nothing
against their books as literature or else we should be laughing at a
highly esteemed writer for supposing that ninth century life at Elsinore
had the remotest resemblance to the life which is depicted in _Hamlet_.”
3
The books of Arthur Machen which have gained the greatest amount of
attention are, naturally enough, the more sensational stories in which
he touches upon themes that approach what is, or what has been in the
past, forbidden territory. It seems odd that Arthur Machen, whose works
have been so generally neglected, should have been scolded on occasion
by various critics for his use of sexual themes. Actually there is no
sexuality as such in any of Arthur Machen’s books. It does enter into
some of the stories through the medium of mythology, Roman or Celtic,
and sometimes aboriginal. And yet, such a critic as the gentle A. E.
Houseman, could write of him, “Mixing up religion and sexuality is not a
thing I am fond of.” Mr. Houseman, had he possessed something of Machen’s
scholarship, would have perceived that religion and sexuality were not
mixed up by Arthur Machen but rather by his own Celtic or Teutonic or
Scandinavian ancestors. It is the more surprising, however, that such
opinions as that expressed by the later great poet have not resulted in
greater popularity for at least some of the work of Arthur Machen.
By far the most important elements in the pattern that runs through
Machen’s work are the very ones he himself expressed many years ago, “The
sense of the eternal mysteries and the eternal beauty hidden beneath the
crust of common and commonplace things.”
The reputation of Arthur Machen undoubtedly rests most securely on a
single book, _Hieroglyphics_, and on perhaps a half dozen of his essays.
His definition of what constitutes fine literature is, even today, beyond
dispute. His thoughts on realism, or naturalism, a movement that was only
just beginning to be felt in his youth have been admirably expressed in a
passage in his book _The Secret Glory_.
“Of course, he said, (Ambrose Meyrick) I take realism to mean absolute
and essential truthfulness of description, as opposed to merely
conventional treatment. Zola is a realist not—as the imbeciles suppose
because he described—well, rather minutely—many unpleasant sights and
sounds and smells and emotions, but because he was a poet, a seer;
because, in spite of his pseudo philosophies, his cheap materialisms,
he saw the true heart, the reality of things. Take _La Terre_, do you
think it is realistic because it describes minutely, and probably
faithfully, the event of a cow calving? Not in the least; the local vet
who was called in could probably do all that as well or better. It is
realistic because it goes behind all the brutality, all the piggeries and
inhumanities, of those frightful people, and shows us the strange, mad,
transcendent passion that lay behind all those things—the wild desire for
the land—a longing that burned, that devoured, that inflamed, that drove
men to hell and death as would a passion for a goddess who might never be
attained. Remember how ‘La Beauce’ is personified, how the earth swells
and quickens before one, how every clod and morsel of the soil cries for
its service and its sacrifice and its victims—I call that realism.
“Of course, there may be people who think that if you describe a pigsty
well you are a realist, and if you describe an altar well you are
romantic.... I do not know that the mental processes of Cretins form a
very interesting subject for discussion.”
Frank Norris, an early apostle of realism, wrote, while he was still at
college, this analysis of realism and of Zola: “Naturalism, as understood
by Zola, is but a form of romanticism after all ... the naturalist
takes no note of common people, common in so far as their interests,
their lives and the things that occur in them are common, are ordinary.
Terrible things must happen to the characters of the naturalistic
tale. They must be twisted from the ordinary, wrenched from the quiet,
uneventful round of everyday life and flung into the throes of a vast and
terrible drama that works itself out in unleashed passions, in blood and
in sudden death.”
There are many provocative passages on this subject in Machen. Take, for
example, these thoughts expressed in Machen’s _The Art of Dickens_:
“... it is not the main point in the finest literature to draw people so
well that the reader begins to think that they must be ‘real’ people,
and that the author is a sort of journalist with supernatural means of
finding all the facts about them.”
“If we want to go to Margate, it would be idle to take a fairy barque,
and _simili modo_ it would be but faint praise of a Gothic cathedral to
say that it was quite weather proof.”
“What does it profit a painter to delineate a tree which is very like
a tree, unless it is something much more—unless it is also the symbol
and the revelation of some great secret of nature? If this were not so,
then the camera would be superior of Turner, and the shorthand writer
would look down from his desk on poor blind Homer, who talks of gods and
goddesses of fairy isles, and giants with one eye in their foreheads.”
4
Vincent Starrett many years ago made the statement that there was little
humor in Arthur Machen’s works. Of humor, in the broadest Mark Twain, or
even in the gentle Stephen Leacock vein, there is very little. But there
is in almost all of Machen a wry, dry humor with perhaps a rather bitter
taste. There are passages, even in _The Hill of Dreams_ that are as
humorous as anything by Leacock. One reads his account of the publishing
business as it was in his day with a realization that Machen is as much
at home in satire as in sorcery. His autobiographical books are filled
with humor, this time not so bitter. Many of his essays employ humor and
satire in generous doses. Shortly after the publication of _The Hill of
Dreams_ and _The House of Souls_ Arthur Machen wrote several essays on
the subject of the Holy Graal. These essays, the first of which appeared
under the editorship of A. E. Waite, aroused quite a bit of attention and
resulted in a certain amount of controversy in antiquarian circles. The
Graal legends through their association with Arthur and Caerleon had been
of great interest to Machen from his earliest years.
He knew every legend and every theory in the literature of the Graal. His
first essay was at variance with some of the new theories that were then
springing up. Chief among these was the theory that the Graal legends had
their basis in a fertility cult which persisted in Wales right up until
Norman times. Machen promptly branded this theory as absurd. “Let us
grant,” he wrote, “that the question of fertility, which is the question
of life, both for ourselves and for our cabbages, is behind everything.
If we go far back enough, it is clear that we can do nothing in this
world if we are so unlucky as to be dead: and this applies equally to
the Phallic hypothesis of the origin of everything, which can be worked
in very well with the fertility hypothesis. The whole point of a great
many of the rites in fertility ceremonies seems to be built about the
hypothesis that fertility could be enduced by certain ceremonies that
were expected to put nature in a mood to be fertile.” And then Machen
quotes from one of the experts who clung to this hypothesis, “Just as the
sailor imitates the wind that he desires by whistling for it, so did the
countrymen imitate the trees in the wood by making a mock tree called the
Maypole.”
Machen seems willing enough to accept these theories but he asks,
“What light shall we gain as to the actual emotions and intent of the
seventeenth or sixteenth century people who danced about the Maypole? I
venture to say none whatever ... they were not addressing any invocation
to the woods or anything else. They were being jolly or merry at a
certain time of the year in a traditional manner. For all I know, our
learned people may decide that the game of marbles was originally a
reminder to the spheres to keep on rolling. If I am told so, I shall not
deny the doctrine, but I shall maintain that the boys who play marbles
on London pavements know nothing of it. Granted this hypothetical origin
of marbles, it has nothing whatever to do with the game of the twentieth
century.”
The note books of Arthur Machen, as fragmentarily revealed in _The London
Adventure_, are as fascinating as are the notebooks of Hawthorne, which
as a matter of fact they much resemble. For example there are many notes
concerned with patterns—and these bear a direct relationship with the
earlier material in this chapter. Most of the notes concern labyrinths,
mazes, spirals and whorls. He asks the question: Why was this form common
to all primitive art? And then, in almost the same place in his note book
one finds the sentence: “Literature began with charms, incantations,
spells, songs of mystery, chants of religious ecstasy, the Bachic chorus,
the rune, the mass.” This sentence is the basis for _Hieroglyphics_. It
is, according to Machen, the thesis of the book fairly well summed up in
one sentence.
And this same pattern occurs in most of his stories. Among his notes
we find this, “The maze was not only the instrument but the symbol of
ecstasy; it was a pictured ‘inebriation,’ the sign of some age old
process that gave the secret bliss to men, that was symbolized also by
dancing, by lyrics with their recurring burdens, and their repeated
musical phrases: a maze, a dance, a song: three symbols pointing to one
mystery.”
It would require a thorough examination of the notebook of Arthur Machen,
if such a thing were possible, by a man with the skill and scholarship of
a John Livingston Lowes to trace and to tell the complete story of the
pattern in Arthur Machen. Yet here, in brief, and in all his works, the
pattern is everywhere apparent.
There are, undoubtedly, those who prefer Machen the essayist to Machen
the story teller. Certainly his greatest work, _Hieroglyphics_, is
sufficient reply to those who have tried to dismiss Machen as the creator
of “shockers” concerned with demonology and sensational horror stories.
The delightful pieces that appeared serially in the Lyons Mail and the
Illustrated News and the London Graphic would please even the Manchester
Guardian or A. E. Houseman, who once wrote that he found Machen not quite
to his taste. His essays on the Grail legend are authoritative without
being archeological, witty without being flippant or, what would have
been unbearable, satirical.
And yet, in the essays no less than in the stories, the pattern is there
and is recognizable. One is forever running across a phrase or a notion
one has encountered before—some where, some time, some place—and the
place usually turns out to be another Machen essay. For the pattern of
Machen’s thinking is as obvious as the pattern in the rug; as obvious,
and as simple, as the definitions supplied in _Hieroglyphics_. The
pattern is, as we know, summed up in the phrase: “removal from the common
life.” It may be simplified further in the one word: “ecstasy.”
Now the word “ecstasy” has caused some confusion in the minds of
certain of Machen’s detractors as well as among his admirers. There was
a tendency, in the Twenties, as well as in the Nineties, to give the
word “ecstasy” a connotation or a meaning similar to that employed by
the popular novelists of the time. “Ecstasy” seemed to many to be the
“ecstasy” of the pallid, perverted creatures of the Cafe Royale and,
later, a sort of Elinor Glynn-ish, sinnish quality. It was a word much
favored by the writers of romances, the practitioners of the purple
phrase. And so we encounter, at times, this “novelist of ecstasy and sin”
sort of nonsense.
It should be pointed out that _Hieroglyphics_, that excellent volume
of literary criticism having little to do with passion, in or out of
the desert, bears the illuminating subtitle: “_A Note Upon Ecstasy in
Literature_.” And _this_ ecstasy is of the mind—it is an exultation of
the spirit of men. It is, to go back to the more descriptive phrase, the
removal from the common life.
This pattern exists everywhere in Machen, sometimes it is developed by
the characters and circumstances in his tales, or again it is carried
out by argument or analysis in his essays, but always, upon closer
examination, the grand design is apparent.
One may read, for example, the essay called _The Hidden Mystery_ and
find that it is almost exactly the same as _The Mystic Speech_. And then
one reads _The Secret Glory_ and finds, once again, the same theories,
the same logic, the same figures and the same conclusions, expressed
and explained as only Machen can set them down. This may send the
casual reader, or even the amateur bibliographer, hunting from volume
to volume with pencil and reading glass, for there seems to be indeed a
hidden mystery, a mystic speech, a glorious secret in these passages and
paragraphs.
Actually, of course, one is merely becoming aware of the pattern, and one
is becoming impressed with the simplicity and the one-ness of everything
Machen ever wrote. Of course there are actual resemblances between the
essays mentioned and strong connections between them and the book. For
the essays were written years before, and one of them was actually
delivered as a lecture before the learned Quest Society of London. They
are all a part of the book that is now known as _The Secret Glory_.
_Chapter Nine_