[Sidenote: _East Anglian Daily Times_]
This is the first complete novel by the author of “The House of Souls.”
When writing of that work we expressed regret at the prominence accorded
to an unhealthy atmosphere. The suggestions of hideous survivals in the
under-world were not pleasant reading, and it is our duty to insist
that their repetition in the present work is deplorable. No good can be
effected by a discussion of such esoteric matters, and we could have
wished that Mr Machen had refrained from introducing such horrors into
his book. The story purports to be “a study of the temperament of a
young literary man, whose dreams lead him into strange places, and bring
him to a strange sequel.” Expressed more plainly, the plot is that of a
crazy youth who undergoes some particularly unpleasant experiences, and
finally commits suicide. Frankly speaking, it was the best thing that
could have happened, for the “dreams” of this young man were repulsive.
If the reading public must have this kind of mental food, we can only
deplore the taste; but we protest with all possible strength against
the dissemination of such sickly, and in some sense horrible ideas, as
form the basis of Mr Machen’s latest effort. It is not denied that the
author writes cleverly. That, however, forms an additional reason why his
talents should be employed in producing something more admirable than
“The Hill of Dreams” can be said to be.
[Sidenote: _The Outlook_]
It is safe to compliment Mr Arthur Machen upon having produced a book
that stands, and will perhaps continue to stand, quite alone in English
fiction. Fellows might be found for it in the modern letters of Germany
and France, but not even the most determined of our own symbolists has
produced such an elaborate account of the adventures of an exclusively
æsthetic nature in the rough world. But apart from such praise as that
acknowledgment confers, it is not at all easy to put a value on Mr
Machen’s “Hill of Dreams.” It is written in a simple yet studied English
that conveys in the deeper passages of the book as much of magic as
words can impart; yet the whole work is so unreal and so charged with
spiritual disease that there is scarcely a place for it in the widest
utilitarian view. Beyond an impression of intense agony of the soul,
it leaves little behind it, and there is nothing to the purpose that
a critic can say except that the book evidently answered to something
in the writer, and may answer to something in others. The growth of
Lucian Taylor’s fervently mystic and quite inhuman nature, perfectly
pure, perfectly egoistic, is traced with power. Most of his outward
tragedy is that of the artist’s struggle with the world, and of his
association with gross and ordinary British barbarians, whose manners are
described with a cleverness and a rancour in which we can find nothing
but weakness; the inward story—if such a web of shadows can be called a
story—is one of some strange insight into the obscurity of an essential
evil in nature, of a strange development of the passion of love in the
soul of the ascetic of art, of his sufferings, his dreams, and of his
final destruction by the shadowy power of ill that laid its hands upon
him as a child, on the hill where once the Romans camped. An undefined
horror penetrates all the story, like an invisible vapour. It is an
extraordinary performance and a work of art; but art fallen, we think, on
unclean and fatal days.
[Sidenote: _Birmingham Gazette and Express_]
... There is much fine writing, but probably few other than literary
craftsmen will follow with patience the detailed story of his striving
after perfection in the use of language. The most pleasing part of the
book is that which treats of his love for and idealisation of the simple,
womanly country girl, Annie Morgan. It is scarcely a “healthy” book, but
it is evidently the work of a man who has thought deeply and suffered
much.
[Sidenote: _Manchester Courier_]
It would be hard to classify “The Hill of Dreams,” by Arthur Machen, for
it is both unprecedented and unusual. Moreover, it is unpleasing and
unconvincing, though its writer possesses a wealth of imagery and a power
not often met with. The little story there is concerns the life of Lucian
Taylor, but the plot of the book is but a peg on which the author hangs
a detailed study of temperament. Lucian is a “dreamer,” with literary
aspirations. His early life is devoid of all humanising influences, and
his character is only explicable, and then not very satisfactorily so,
when this is remembered. Despite education and cultivation, Lucian never
possesses any feelings which a barbarian might not be expected to have.
He never imposes the least restraint on his natural susceptibility, and
both as a boy and a man is a sensualist. After living a life of failure,
in which, apart from his vivid dreams, a passion for a country girl is
the only important event, he commits suicide. The reader is left in doubt
whether Lucian was a genius neglected by an unappreciative world or a
fool totally incapable of understanding the beauty of the world. The
writing of the book is astonishingly versatile. At times there is the
gruesomeness of Poe, at others the charm of Hawthorne. The descriptions
of country scenery show a love of the picturesque, and the chapters on
London life a knowledge of the seamy side of nature. Though there is
splendid capability shown in the book, it will not make a wide appeal
because of its want of humanity.
[Sidenote: _Birmingham Post_]
Mr Arthur Machen’s is hardly the sort of story that is likely to win
admiration from the average reader of current fiction. Perhaps it is as
well, for “The Hill of Dreams” is not a healthy book, and the power of
fascination that it exercises is tempered with a certain instinctive
feeling of repugnance. Let it be said at once that it does fascinate.
It is filled with passages of rare beauty. Mr Machen understands the
magic of words; his sentences are as silk shot with rich, variegated, and
harmonious colour; they have a fine rhythmic flow also; and page after
page is filled with “a procession of images” (we quote the author’s own
words), “now of rapture and ecstasy and now of terror and shame, floating
in a light that is altogether phantasmal and unreal.” So far as charm of
language and beauty of imagery go—and they go far—the season is hardly
likely to see the rival of Mr Machen’s novel. The weakness is that all
this accumulated beauty is something fantastic, exotic, and bizarre. Mr
Machen leads us through a forest of flowers; but they are _fleurs de
mal_, in Baudelaire’s phrase, sprung from miasmatic ground, and spreading
a perfume by which the atmosphere is vitiated. Through his power of
conjuring up visions of the world of long ago and living in a dreamland
of his own Lucian Taylor claims some kinship with Du Maurier’s “Peter
Ibbetson.” By the circumstances of his death he stands related to the
English opium-eater. But Mr Machen has neither Du Maurier’s light touch
and sense of humour nor De Quincey’s stern insistence on the penalties
of such visionary delights. His attitude is too accurately that which
another exquisite artist, Ernest Dowson, assumed in the sonnet, now
fairly well known, “To One in Bedlam”:—
Oh, lamentable brother! if these pity thee,
Am I not fain of all thy lone eyes promise me—
Half a fool’s kingdom, far from men who sow and reap
All their days vanity.
So Dowson sang; and in the same mood Mr Machen seems inclined, throughout
the greater part of his book at any rate, to hold up his invertebrate
hero—or victim—as a subject for sympathy and admiration. “Invertebrate”
is too weak a word. Most of Lucian’s peculiarities are definable in
the terminology of specialists in mental alienation. He is a sufferer
from what an expert witness in the American “cause célèbre” of the
day called lately “exaggerated ego.” Echolalia (in his attempts at
authorship), melancholia, visual and auditory hallucinations—all these
familiar phenomena of an unbalanced mind does he exhibit; and doubtless
the specialist in such diseases might trace more. It is because his
attitude towards this “lamentable brother” is too nearly that of Ernest
Dowson and too far from that of (say) De Quincey that Mr Machen has
failed to produce a piece of great literature which is above all things
sane and level-headed. On the other side of the scales must be put a
fertile imagination, a great deal of acute psychological analysis, and
an extraordinary sensitiveness to impressions of natural beauty. These
are sufficiently enviable endowments, which one hopes to see Mr Machen
exercising in the future on some more happily treated subject.
[Sidenote: _Newcastle Chronicle_]
Mr Machen’s story is all about a young man who adds to a temperament
naturally neurotic a passion for examining the inner workings of his own
mind, and a dislike for nourishing food. This combination of qualities
reduces him to a skeleton, and enables him to see visions and dream
dreams of the most fantastic variety. Those who are familiar with Mr
Machen’s work will recognise in such a subject one particularly suited to
his _métier_. Step by step he traces, with fine imagination, the workings
of the disordered brain until the inevitable end of complete madness and
death is reached. Only Mr Machen, perhaps, would not have us believe that
his hero is mad; preferring if anything to think that he is of a sanity
and clear-sightedness altogether denied to the devotees of plain living
and plain thinking.
[Sidenote: _Morning Post_]
Mr Machen has chosen for his book one of those subjects that depend
entirely on their treatment for their success or failure. “The Hill of
Dreams” provides an analysis of the character of an imaginative young
man consumed with literary aspirations. Unfortunately, the treatment of
this theme is marred by the two faults of exaggeration and monotonous
insistence on the psychological note of alternate despair and exultation.
The delineation of moods must be made variable if it is to be palatable
to the reader; otherwise weariness of the mind ensues as a necessary
consequence. Lucian Taylor’s continuous habit of selfish introspection
ultimately leads him to madness and “death by misadventure,” but these
misfortunes do not induce sympathy in the reader when he has become
satiated with the morbidity which itself brought them about. At the same
time, the book has style and is full of so many well-written descriptions
of scenery that one is inclined to forget about the dreamer and only to
dwell in fancy on the beautiful “Hill of Dreams” which prompted his
visions.
[Sidenote: _P.T.O._]
Mr Arthur Machen’s first long novel, “The Hill of Dreams,” fails in
humanity. The hero’s literary struggles are desperate; the hero himself
is an abstraction. The author labours too much over his work for it to
be wholly satisfactory; we are obliged to him for the pains he takes in
these days of careless writing, but could wish the effort less apparent.
In his pictures of Welsh scenery he is at his best; in suburbia he lays
it on with a trowel, and makes himself more unhappy than ever he will
make the worthy folk he dislikes should they chance upon his book. In a
word, Mr Machen has yet to find a story, yet to create real living people.
[Sidenote: _The Scotsman_]
Mr Machen’s novel displays a singular ability in giving a sustained and
varied interest to a theme of which the material is to the last degree
simple and monotonous. He has no more story to tell than how a young man,
a country clergyman’s son, feeling that he had a gift for literature,
went up to London, and kept writing and writing and writing while he
lived in a world of dreams, quite misunderstood and untouched by the
outer world of everyday circumstance, until at last he came to kill
himself, having accomplished nothing. Such is the subject, and it seems,
thus stated, to afford little matter enough for a full-length story. But
the work goes with such a skilful psychology into the workings of the
unhappy young man’s mind, and shows such fine imaginative artistry in
varying the light and shade of his emotions and contrasting his outward
with his inward life, that it proves interesting from first to last
without even for a moment disturbing its air of soft tranquillity. It is
a story that will readily impress a reader of quiet tastes who can reach
to the more subtle refinements of fiction.
[Sidenote: _The Athenæum_]
... In the emotional adventures of the hapless youth who is a victim of a
species of nympholepsy and intellectual loneliness combined, we cannot,
after the first hundred pages, feel any adequate interest. His agonies
while engaged in the long-drawn-out struggle with his stubborn literary
gifts are too protracted, too remote from any human sentiment, to hold
the interest of the reader. Their recital is almost as monotonous as,
and far more fatiguing than, the artistic _débâcle_ of the painter in
Zola’s “L’Œuvre,” which had at least some elements of humanity. But
the spirit of place which informs the book, whether it is the forlorn,
illimitable dreariness of suburbia that the author chooses to show us, or
the mysterious and melancholy beauty of that wild Wales he knows so well,
could only have found expression at the hand of an adept. It is perhaps
a pity that so clever a writer as Mr Machen should bestow such infinite
pains on astonishing the bourgeois, who in all likelihood will never have
the privilege of reading his books; it is an obsession that brings to
mind the unprofitableness of flogging dead horses. But, after all, the
main matter for regret is the utter formlessness and the arid inhumanity
of his work. His Muse is a kind of Lilith—not a drop of her blood is
human—and thus, except from the decorative point of view, he leaves us
cold....
[Sidenote: _The Daily Graphic_]
A curious and fanciful book, which shows much misdirected ability. It
is the study of the temperament of a young man, who devotes himself to
literature, but his imagination is abnormal, and his mental condition
diseased. The book is not of much practical interest, as one feels that
his death, with which the story ends, is the best possible solution of
his difficulties.
[Sidenote: _The Daily Chronicle_]
Mr Arthur Machen has written “The Hill of Dreams,” we take it, not with a
view to saying anything in particular, but rather with a view to saying
something in a particular—almost a precious—way. We fancy that he would
not greatly object to identify himself with his hero, of whom he says:—
Language, he understood, was chiefly important for the beauty
of its sounds, by its possession of words resonant, glorious
to the ear, by its capacity, when exquisitely arranged, of
suggesting wonderful and indefinable impressions, perhaps
more ravishing and farther removed from the domain of strict
thought than the impressions excited by music itself. Here lay
hidden the sensuous art of literature, it was the secret of
suggestion, the art of causing delicious sensation by the use
of words. In a way, therefore, literature was independent of
thought; the mere English listener, if he had an ear attuned,
could recognise the beauty of a splendid Latin phrase.
One would like to have Mr Machen’s criticism of that majestic line of R.
L. Stevenson’s:—
Opulent orotundo strike the sky!
“The Hill of Dreams” is a long, and in many respects, a clever
psychological analysis and demonstration of the mind of a young
degenerate. It is a deliberate and careful study of morbidity. It is
well written, but written not quite well enough. The good writing is just
a thought too obvious; one cannot help noticing it. It has what Mr Machen
calls “the secret of suggestion,” but it suggests some things which we
would much rather had not been suggested. It is a thoughtful piece of
work though, and it is often lighted up by swift and penetrating flashes
of satire. We wish the word “sonorous” did not occur quite so often in
it. “Sonorous” is a very good and effective word in its way, but, like
“sinister,” “sombre,” and one or two others, it should be used sparingly.
It does not do to make a pet of it.
[Sidenote: _The Manchester Guardian_]
Without a refined susceptibility to sensuous impressions there can be no
high art. But there is always a danger that the artist who recognises
this theoretically may give rein to susceptibility and sensitiveness
as such and be drawn headlong along the road to mere sensationalism.
For in art, as in everything else, the ultimate value of a sensation
lies always in its content. The fact that your sensations seem to you
“exquisite” or “delicious” no more gives them artistic than it would
give them moral import; in the one case as in the other, there is the
further question to be asked, the question what kind of person you are
who feel them so. Which question leads in its turn to other questions,
all pointing unmistakably one way. Sensation, you find, gives you no
principle either in art or in anything else. It can open no locked
doors. Take it for your guide and there can be no doubt but you will be
landed, sooner or later, in the ditch. Mr Arthur Machen in his new story
“The Hill of Dreams” drives perilously near this dangerous territory.
He recounts the life of a hypersensitive youth of whom the world is not
worthy, upon whose delicate nature the violence of healthy humanity
rasps and jars, who therefore, shut up within himself, runs riot in a
fantastic maze of morbid mystic fancies, constructs an impossible romance
out of a chance meeting with a farmer’s daughter in the dark (for whose
sake he afterwards inflicts upon himself nightly penance with a gorse
bough), and finally drifts up to London and laudanum and an untimely end.
This kind of story could only fail to be suffocating in its effect upon
the reader if the oxygen absent in the hero were supplied by some sort
of exhilaration derivable from the background against which he moves.
But he moves, alas! in an atmosphere as exquisite and as exhausted as
he is. “He knew that he himself had solved the riddle, that he held in
his hand the powder of projection, the philosopher’s stone transmuting
all it touched to fine gold, the gold of exquisite impressions.” It is
of these impressions, this “powder of projection,” that the bulk of the
narrative is composed. If your air is full of dust, it is no matter what
kind of particles the dust is made of; let it be powdered gold, the
effect is just as choking. Many objections might be advanced against a
story like “The Hill of Dreams” on the score of its subject matter: the
artist would be ready to dismiss these as ethical and irrelevant. But
the unrelieved preciosity of the style is equally open to criticism, and
this is the rock upon which the book finally founders. “Only in the Court
of Avallaunius is the true science of the exquisite to be found.” It
would be wise to leave it unmolested there; here in these lower courts,
this “land of sin and woe,” there is nothing that more quickly tends to
tedium.—B. S.
[Sidenote: Louis Weitzenkorn in _The New York World_]
Arthur Machen’s “The Hill of Dreams,” according to the introduction
included in a new American edition, was written in 1897. It was published
first in 1907. Mr Knopf would have been much fairer to Mr Machen had
he left this book to perish in the dust of things forgotten. It has a
great beauty of writing. The Machen style is clearly a deliberate and
successful attempt to get melody into prose. But it strikes us that music
is not the first element of a prose style; in fact it is one part that,
under compulsion, might be omitted without injury. After all, the poets
are entitled to something.
Our first demand from a prose work styled a novel is living characters.
Except in the last three paragraphs, not one breath of life shows up
in “The Hill of Dreams.” Mr Machen confesses his plan to have been the
writing of a “Robinson Crusoe” of the mind. As to that there is a touch
of similarity here to “Peter Ibbetson,” and more to Jack London’s “Star
Rover.” Naturally enough, Machen didn’t see this latter work of fiction
before he began his. But it is to the analogy of “Robinson Crusoe” that
we mainly object. After all, that cast-off sailor had a man Friday who
was every inch alive. Good, deadly arrows fly through Defoe’s book. Ships
and savages and hot sunlight beat down.
Whatever there is of Lucian Taylor beyond the author’s frail beating
against life, is something of a masculine and British Carol Kennicott.
That’s crowding a reputation, even a fictional one, pretty badly, but the
futile protest and final escape of Lucian Taylor through suicide doesn’t
follow as four does two plus two and as true tragedy must. Not once
does the book move us to feel for this hero, who lives like an essay in
the _Atlantic Monthly_. He and the British countryside aristocracy—the
British Main Streeters—are so many children’s toys. They are dolls that
get from one end of the room to the other only when lifted up and moved.
Machen has written this book as if he had been young and angry. He seems
to have wanted to nail his old neighbours to some sort of cross. He
forgets that the Babbitts are the very ones who read “Babbitt” and make
the author rich.
The book will not enhance Machen’s rather high reputation here. His
incident of the hanging of a dog by a set of children, not one of whom
protests, will never be swallowed, at least by American readers. The
rest of the book is just as impossible. We are willing still to take our
knowledge of Main Street Britons from Mr Bennett’s “Five Towns.”