[Sidenote: David Christie Murray in _The Referee_]
_The Philistine as Art’s Helper._—Every now and then some person rises
up in England to protest against the restrictions by which a vulgar and
uninstructed Philistinism cribs, cabins, and confines the imaginative
artist. Sometimes the protest is made by a man of genius, and whenever
that is the case it is triumphantly proved by events that there was
not the slightest real need to make it. The more daring and robust the
assault upon the proprieties the more assured is the attention of an
immediate audience. Mr Swinburne’s career affords an excellent example
of this truth. In some respects he is an artist of unique character,
but it was not by virtue of his artistry that he made at his first
coming so prodigious a noise in the world. Mr Swinburne’s admirers now
appreciate him for his literary excellences, but his earliest fame was
accorded to him because of his so delicious naughtiness. A man of genius
with a narrow intellectual field in which to disport himself, but with
extraordinary gifts of melody and energy, he has found his proper place
in the poetic hierarchy in his own lifetime, and to pretend that his fame
was retarded by his defiance of Puritanism is a task for a fool—and a
task which only a fool would undertake. The plain truth is that it is the
very shortest cut to notoriety in this country to make a mock of morals,
and there are not a few men and women who enjoy a public vogue simply
and merely because they flout the Puritan Ideal, whilst if they had been
content to ally decency with their native dullness they would never have
been heard of beyond their own doorsteps....
There has been sent to _The Referee_ for review a book the pretensions
of which I think it on several grounds desirable to examine. In an oddly
pompous preface the writer expresses his surety that his fellow-authors
will sympathise with him in the difficult task of finding for a
collection of short stories a general title which is not obviously
impertinent. He opines that the title he has chosen “will at all events
hint at the nature of the contents.” To me it afforded no remotest
suggestion, and it would be easy enough to write a book which would
justify the title with at least equal completeness whilst it would embody
the actual antithesis of its idea. Before I proceed to the exposition of
that idea it is just to set out such reasons as the author has to give
for its expression in a work of fiction. In France, we are told, “it is
agreed that imagination and fantasy are to work as they will and as they
can, and are to be judged by their own laws. He who carves gurgoyles
admirably is praised for his curious excellence in the invention and
execution of these grinning monsters; and if he is blamed it is for bad
carving, not because he has failed to produce pet lambs.” In England we
are said to judge very differently, and “Imagination itself is expected
to improve the occasion, to reform whilst it entertains, and to instruct
under the guise of story-telling.” ...
_Where to Draw the Line._—It has to be objected here that the case is too
broadly stated. It is not agreed that imagination and fantasy are to work
as they will in France. There is a certain restraining sense which now
and then moves the authorities to suppress a theatrical production like
the “Timbale d’Argent” or a serial publication like “La Nature.” Fantasy
is nowhere in any civilised community allowed an unrestricted play. There
is a point at which all modern peoples divide the endurably coarse from
the intolerably indecent and abominable. You must arrange with your own
sensibilities the precise point at which you will say to fantasy, “Thus
far shalt thou go and no further,” but every civilised man has a limit
beyond which he will not permit himself to be carried. And, what is of at
least equal importance, he has a limit beyond which he will not knowingly
allow those innocences, ignorances, and inexperiences which are under his
guardianship or control to travel....
There are many examples of literary, pictorial, and plastic art in the
hands of lovers of the curious which are kept under lock and key. The
owners are not necessarily persons of unclean mind, and they generally
exercise some discretion as to the choice of the people by whom these
objects shall be seen. The common sense of the world—not the art-hatred
of the Philistine, but just the common-sense common decency of the
world—has decided that they shall be jealously hidden from the immature
in years and experience. The argument advanced by our author is that
perfection in the presentation makes the nature of the thing presented
of little consequence, I am not disposed to attach an exaggerated value
to that contention, but even if it were wholly defensible in respect to
a work of art in itself, it is impossible to argue that it is of little
consequence to whom it shall be shown. There is nothing more sacred than
that ingenuous shame which the growth of civilisation has fostered as a
guarding instinct against the violation of the mind. I make no fight for
prudery—pruriency aping modesty, and topping frank indecency by its lie.
I have had my say in _The Referee_ more than once already about those
egregious persons who from time to time seek an _arbiter elegantiarum_ in
the police-courts. But I stand for cleanliness in art, and, above all,
I stand for it in the modern novel, and not only because the novel goes
into the hands of boys and girls whose premature introduction to certain
dark places cannot fail to have disastrous results....
_A Public Pleasaunce._—Now here, of course, is an excellent opportunity
for those ladies and gentlemen who think it one of the privileges of Art
to be indecent to ask if I expect the writer of the novel to address
herself or himself exclusively to the Young Person—if I intend to tie
his or her soaring genius to a boy’s coat-tails or a girl’s pinafore.
I say in answer to that query that it is not I who choose the medium
through which the writers concerned have elected to reveal their genius
to the world. I say that having chosen that medium for themselves they
cannot rightly ignore certain responsibilities which the choice imposes
upon them. The field of the novelist is a very spacious pleasure-ground
indeed, and you may legitimately lay out in it almost any sort of garden
plot or plantation, and may erect in it almost any sort of palace or
cottage or mansion. But it is an open space, and it is dedicated to the
delectation of the public. Incidentally the wanderer in its precincts
may be instructed or warned or spiritually lifted, but his purpose in
going there is primarily to be entertained. The operating theatre and the
dissecting-room are out of place there, though there are some people who
can take their pleasure in such places and get no harm. Most out of place
of all conceivable things in a pleasure-ground which is free to everybody
is the mural picture gallery of the unburied cities....
_An Intrusion on Privacy._—When I was a boy I was taken by a middle-aged
fool who ought to have known better into a waxwork anatomical museum
at a rural wake. The sight left an evil taste on my mental palate for
years and years. A rural wake is no place for an anatomical museum. That
was a day of days, and Wombwell’s menagerie and that booth of Thespis
which belonged to Messrs Bennet and Patch, and the swinging-boats and
the merry-go-rounds, and the gingerbread stalls and the spangled lady
on the slack wire, and Mr Merriman and the shooting-galleries, and the
whole gay, harmless medley make clear pictures in my mind this minute,
though the rain and sunshine of a half-century have made many another of
memory’s paintings dim. And the anatomical museum poisoned everything.
The contention I desire to combat is that a literary craftsman has some
right to intrude the most hateful side of his mind upon others because
he is an artist. But who says he is an artist? A man may write fiction
and be no more of an artist than a ledger clerk. “He who carves gurgoyles
admirably is praised for his curious excellence in the invention and
execution of those grinning monsters; and if he is blamed he is blamed
for bad carving, not because he has failed to produce pet lambs.” But has
he who carves “gurgoyles” the double right to carve revolting shapes and
to plump them down in the public pleasure-ground for any unsuspecting
wayfarer to sicken at?...
_A Buried Symbolism._—I offer a most emphatic denial to the assumption
that “imagination and fantasy” are anywhere justly to be “allowed to
work as they can and will,” so long as their product is exposed for
unrestricted sale in market overt. If I am to give fantasy free play I
can quite easily imagine things which would excite the loathing of a
savage. In every society which has raised itself above the intellectual
level of the hog there are certain things which are not currently
spoken of. There were certain obscure obscenities with which the
ancients surrounded Nature-Worship. They expressed imaginatively the
primal forces, and the emblems employed to represent them were candid
and unashamed. Their open exposure and popular exhibition were the
characteristic originally of a time of purest savagery and animalism.
As civilisation grew these emblems became conventionalised, and finally
they ceased to be symbolic. Some are in frequent use to-day, but their
meaning is so completely lost to the popular mind that every modern
cemetery displays an entire perversion of the meaning of one of them.
Now, the root-idea of the book under consideration is the survival of all
those old obscure obscenities into modern life. “It is in the character
of a sober portrayer of a certain side of life,” writes the author in his
own person, “that I hope to add to the pleasure of many pleasant Sunday
afternoons.” I am armed beforehand against the simpering suggestion that
I am impenetrable to the subtleties of irony. Solomon to the contrary
notwithstanding, it is sometimes good to answer a controversialist
according to his argument....
_The Naked Untruth._—In pursuit of this purpose of adding to the
pleasure of pleasant Sunday afternoons our author introduces his reader
to a girl-child in a modern rural neighbourhood in Wales whose mind is
unutterably debauched by her nurse, and who at the age of five has for
her playmate the very bodily devil of licentiousness. The girl thrives
under tuition to such advantage that when she comes to her demoniac
womanhood she has arrived at a knowledge of evil so complete that the
revelation of it drives men of the world to whom it is displayed to
suicide. Speaking for myself, I can aver quite honestly that this sort
of baby-Satanic-tommy-rot will not add to the pleasure of many pleasant
Sunday afternoons. It is offered, as I have said already, with a kind
of pomp, as a protest against the degraded state into which imagination
and fantasy have slipped under the withering influences of Puritanism.
Puritanism is as a red rag to the author. We all know, so he tells us,
“how Hampden died that England might be free, first under the martial
law of the Great Protector, and afterwards under the Whig oligarchy.” We
are instructed that the Puritans hanged witches in Salem, and flogged
the Quakers, baptised foals in cathedrals, hewed down the statues of the
saints, shut up the theatres, and gave us the English Sunday. It is not
quite a true bill. Hampden did not die for martial law and the _beaux
yeux_ of the Whigs. Nor did the Puritans—a really forbidding body of men,
to my fancy, amongst whom I wouldn’t have lived for any money—spend all
their energies in hanging witches and baptising foals in cathedrals. Like
many a tribe which went before them, and many another which has followed
after, they obscured a noble cause by gross excesses. But it does not
become a professed Iconoclast to get dancing-mad at the sight of a hammer
in another man’s hand....
_The Little Pig._—It is an assured thing in our author’s mind that
English Puritanism is going to take exception to his work. On the ground
that it is a needless and offensive resurrection of the buried nastiness
of early heathendom, I think it very likely that he is right. I was never
very much of a Puritan myself, but my taste and inclination take me to
the Puritan side for once. There was a dear old philosopher of a village
doctor whom I knew years ago when I lived in the Belgian Ardennes. We
were talking of the pornographies of French art one night, and with a
shake of his wise old head he said, “Il y a, dans l’âme de chacun de
nous, un petit cochon qui se grandit vite.” I know my own little pig, and
though I am compelled to find him house-room I have no liking for him,
and I certainly have no desire that his manners should be corrupted by
association with the little pigs of other people....
I have myself been a modest market-gardener in the field of fiction
now these thirty years, and I have been careful never to introduce my
little pig to anybody who has come to look at my very humble patch. I
try to keep him unseen and lonely in his sty. My attempt to starve him
out of existence has unhappily met with but indifferent success; but
I’ll be hanged if I will take anybody’s ha’pence to make a show of him.
I decline to put him on exhibition either for praise or pudding. And yet
I know that I could make a very decent (and most indecent) living out of
him. For my little pig is not at all like your little pig, and it is the
master-passion of the Artist to be different. We all know that a good
half of the talk we hear about Art for Art’s sake, with its accompanying
malediction on the English Puritan, means nothing more than that the
artist is setting the little pig on view for the gratification of a
prurient vanity.—MERLIN.
[Sidenote: _The Athenæum_]
... Like Poe, Mr Machen sets himself to make the reader’s flesh creep;
like Hawthorne, he abounds with subtle and suggestive symbolism, and,
had neither of these writers existed, his work would thrill the reader
even more ingeniously, although it lacks the originality of the one
and the poetic austerity and wealth of imagination of the other. He
deals in ancient mysteries; he is for ever hinting at the macabre,
the sinister, the unspeakable. His puppets peep and mutter through an
atmosphere of forbidden knowledge and obscure rites of remote antiquity,
which, however, he would seem to suggest are not so remote as they ought
to be, after all. He is an adept in the art of elusiveness—so much so,
indeed, that some of his most horrific endings fail of their proper
effect, and the piled-up agony topples to a fall, leaving the reader with
just the ghost of a suspicion of the author’s sincerity, and a haunting
reminiscence of turnip-headed spectres and clanking chains....
[Sidenote: _The Saturday Review_]
Mr Machen adds three new stories to the contents of two earlier volumes,
and introduces the collection by a preface which is perhaps the best
thing in the book. We remember reading “The Great God Pan” when it
first appeared, and discussing it with brother-undergraduates. Most
of us thought that the story was interesting chiefly as illustrating
the difficulties which beset an ambitious English writer who wishes to
describe transcendental beastliness. Probably we were right. Mr Machen’s
literary monomania takes the form of postulating that behind the veil
of matter, in the centre of the material universe, resides an obscene
and terrible power, the revelation of which brings to mortals infamy and
madness. This pretty fancy is hardly relevant to his spirited attack
on Puritanism, for the Puritans had a lively sense of the demoniac.
As regards the execution of the stories, Mr Machen has style, and a
talent for the fantastic (though “The Three Impostors” is in its scheme
reminiscent of Stevenson), but he has not the power of creating horror.
One feels that he is carving gargoyles (to borrow his phrase) just for
fun, and his readers’ blood will not run cold, though possibly their
gorges may rise.
[Sidenote: _Tribune_]
The Great God Pan is finding himself extremely popular among the
novelists just now. It was Mr Benson who began it, earlier in the year,
and since that time the number of novels in which we are vouchsafed
manifestations of the goat-god—complete even to the hoofs, and with an
attendant murky odour thrown in—increases almost daily. Of course it is
natural enough, for nobody, not even a novelist, knows much about Pan,
whence unlimited possibilities of mystery and thrills. Mr Arthur Machen
is one of those who see in him all the possibilities of a “hair-raiser.”
Were it not disrespectful it might be said that “The House of Souls” is
exactly the kind of book which would have been written by the Fat Boy in
Pickwick, had he been possessed of literary ability. Had he also been, be
it said, familiar with the works of Robert Louis Stevenson. For never was
book more obviously written with the desire “to make your flesh creep.”
What with Pans and witches and mysterious keepers of treasures in hills,
the half-dozen stories contain quite a population of queer folk, not one
of which but has the potentiality of raising the hair upon the reader’s
head, until it resembles the quills upon a more than usually fretful
porcupine. Potentialities only, however, for, truth to tell, the author
never quite succeeds in raising our hair. He tells us either too much
or too little. He so constantly hints at quite unmentionable horrors
that we find ourselves mistrusting them, and when he does occasionally,
greatly daring, venture to unveil a horror or two, they are a wee bit
disappointing. This is, of course, as much the fault of the subject
as of the author. None of us can take the great God Pan, nor witches,
nor warlocks, very seriously nowadays—even if surgeons with alarming
surgical instruments are introduced into the same story to keep them in
countenance by their up-to-date associations. Because we know very well
that did Pan put in a bodily appearance in a British wood to-day he would
be given in charge by a stolid and unemotional gamekeeper for trespassing
in pursuit of game. Pan was killed by the Game Laws, if not before, and
not all the King’s horses and all the King’s men can put him together
again—alas! Of the various stories in the volume “The Inmost Light” comes
the nearest to being convincing, while lovers of Stevenson would feel
interested in the story series, “The Three Impostors,” which at times is
very successfully reminiscent of that writer.
[Sidenote: _Manchester Guardian_]
The stories in the volume entitled “The House of Souls,” by Arthur
Machen, are all addressed to the ancient purpose of making the reader’s
flesh creep. It is a favourite pastime for easy people to play with fear;
from time immemorial men have amused their leisure by sitting round the
fire capping horrors. It is not, we may concede, a very high form of art,
but any essay in this kind must stand or fall by its success in imputing
horror. Mr Machen has written a rather arrogant preface, in which the
following passage occurs: “He who carves gargoyles admirably is praised
for his curious excellence in the invention and execution of these
grinning monsters; and if he is blamed it is for bad carving, not because
he has failed to produce pet lambs.” Conceded! We may even call it a
necessary postulate of the reviewer; if he is writing of gargoyles he
has no business to say, “I do not like gargoyles”; he must look for the
curious excellence in invention and execution, and it is not to be found
in Mr Machen’s work. He understands what has long been known, that the
emotion of fear is best induced by vagueness; he insists—rather heavily,
indeed—on the mysterious power of the spirit, but he has not felt it; too
often the horror adumbrated in his vagueness is no more than physically
disgusting. Conjuring tricks with the grey matter of the brain, burning
and mutilating of live bodies are the clumsy devices of an unimaginative
man. The restrained intensity of feeling and economy of suggestion in
such scenes as those of Maeterlinck’s early plays are infinitely more
moving than these violent assaults.—H. M. S.