[Sidenote: _Manchester Guardian_]
It is a little difficult to know what kind of readers “The Secret Glory”
is intended to please, and there is a temptation to believe that its
author wrote it simply and solely for his own amusement. The greatest
works of art are no doubt those in which an artist insists on satisfying
his own standard of taste, but Mr Machen’s game on this occasion seems
to have been rather that of “letting himself go.” He begins with a vivid
indictment of the English public school, but does not produce either
an original or a convincing picture of its faults and failings; and he
then proceeds to cut the painter and to launch forth into a juvenile
description of a juvenile escapade in London which his schoolboy hero,
half mystic, half Bohemian, is supposed to share with a young lady of
his choice, though not of his class—the whole embroidered with wonderful
pæans to punch and poetry, surrounded with a sort of religious halo,
and penetrated with a peculiar flavour of what one might call inebriate
innocence. There are perhaps deep lessons to be drawn from the perusal
of these singular heroics, but we have not succeeded in discovering or
profiting by them. The narrative itself is allusive and obscure. Huge
jokes are supposed to be concealed on one side, and on the other the
profound, impenetrable import of things. But, judging by what is actually
communicated to us, we remain in doubt whether what is withheld was
either very funny or very significant.—B. S.
[Sidenote: _Punch_]
I have always understood that what St Paul calls “visions and revelations
of the Lord” were sent to forward their recipients’ progress in virtue;
and that if glimpses of the supernatural resulted in _Schwärmerei_, or
sin, they were the work of the Devil. On this hypothesis there is no
doubt whatever concerning the origin of “The Secret Glory,” a latter-day
variant of the Holy Grail revealed in a Welsh farmhouse to the boy
_Ambrose Meyrick_ and his father; although its exposition is accompanied
(if I may credit Mr Arthur Machen) by a vision of “The Mystery of
Mysteries.” _Ambrose_, still harping on his mystic experiences, is sent
to an exquisitely odious public school, where he becomes first a cowed
and isolated dreamer and last a furtive and malicious rebel. Both
reverie and rebellion are natural enough, the school being what it is,
but they are not particularly creditable to a devotee of “The Mystery of
Mysteries.” Nor is a _liaison_ with a sympathetic parlour-maid, though
this is set down as part and parcel of the “wonders.” Nor is _Ambrose’s_
subsequent career, which continues a marvel of irresponsibility until his
extremely unconvincing martyrdom at the hands of “miscreants” in Asia.
And, talking of irresponsibility, I cannot help wishing that Mr Machen
himself, who shows considerable savage humour in his guerilla campaign
against the public school system, would occasionally come to closer grips
with one or other of the problems his extravaganza has evoked.
[Sidenote: Forrest Reid in _The Daily Herald_]
In “The Secret Glory” the happenings are neither sober nor probable,
yet the effect is prosaic and even tedious. Here, again, it is all a
matter of treatment, or, rather, in Mr Machen’s case, of the absence of
treatment, for he has left his subject a mere kernel rattling in the
dry shell of didacticism. I have seldom been so disappointed in a book.
What has happened to Mr Machen? Have we gained a missionary and lost
an artist? His gift was always narrow, apt to lead him woefully astray
when he departed from the presentation of states of abnormal, or morbid,
consciousness; but it was vivid, haunting, and intensely individual. “The
Secret Glory” is little more than an elaborate tract in which Mr Machen
champions mediævalism and tilts at his usual windmills—the public school
system, athletics, suburban life, etc.
[Sidenote: _The Outlook_]
In “The Secret Glory” Mr Machen attempts to describe the rebellion of
a Celtic mystic against Anglicanism and the public school traditions.
I say “attempts,” because neither Anglicanism nor education interests
him sufficiently to make him barb his satire. But the mysticism excites
his dark and fantastic imagination, and there are bursts, in the
latter half of the book, of successful paradox. Ambrose Meyrick, who
had seen the “Holy Chalice of Teilo sant,” and had an affection for
Gothic architecture, was well whipped for absconding from football
practice. Thenceforth he exerted himself to be in all things the most
loyal Luptonian, but at night he walked in strange places and heard the
voices that outsing the Fairy Birds of Rhiannon. After winning a Balliol
Scholarship and performing some remarkable cricket at the Oval, he broke
away and joined a troupe of actors, and was for ever lost to Lupton and
its like. An effect of a kind Mr Machen certainly produces. He incants
Welsh names, and, as so often on lighter ground, he displays a great
power of giving a queer twist to the least uncanny events. Naturally, he
fails to inform us what there was so remarkable in the Welsh Church which
was ruined by “the Yellow Hag of Pestilence, the Red Hag of Rome, and the
Black Hag of Geneva”; consequently, he fails to show why Ambrose should
not have had all the spiritual experience desired in his own school
chapel. True, Lupton Chapel was built in 1840, and the neighbourhood was
slummy. But, then, Ambrose was capable of ecstasy in Bloomsbury and Soho.
No, Ambrose’s unhappiness is too like that of Mr Bultitude when, in “Vice
Versa,” this gentleman took his son’s place at Dr Grimstone’s academy,
and proceeds from an intelligible dislike of small boys.
[Sidenote: _The Evening Standard_]
A schoolboy is also the central figure in “The Secret Glory,” by Arthur
Machen. But Ambrose Meyrick is an unusual boy, not at all the sort of
boy to conform to the average type turned out at such a public school
as Lupton. It is to be hoped, by the way, that not many schools are like
Lupton, or at least that there are not any public schoolmasters like Mr
Horbury, who takes such a savage delight in using the cane.
Mr Machen’s satire on the public school system, and especially public
school games, is a little too heavy-handed to be effective. Neither boys
nor masters are very convincing, and now and then the story gets lost
in the mystical atmosphere with which Mr Machen surrounds his hero.
Altogether “The Secret Glory” is rather an incoherent and tiresome
production, and certainly does not represent Mr Machen at his best.
Schoolboys and mysticism do not mix.
[Sidenote: _Liverpool Daily Courier_]
Mr Arthur Machen has attempted an ambitious character study in “The
Secret Glory.” He has also tried to give us a new version of the Grail,
introducing a mystical cup preserved in a cottage in Wales. But neither
the character nor the cup are very convincing, and it must be said that
Mr Machen has this time failed to get into his story any deep sense
of the mystical. His principal character, Ambrose Meyrick, is a queer
chap, as he is meant to be, but there is no reason why he should be
as irresponsible as he is, and less reason why he should finish up by
getting himself crucified somewhere in Asia. These improbabilities would
matter less, however, if Mr Machen had made Meyrick vital, and his
adventures interesting. The story never runs with sufficient sequence
to ensure this. It is all confused with propaganda, and very bitter
propaganda at that, against the public schools, and criticism of Welsh
Nonconformity when it combines religious revival fervour with sensuality.
Mr Machen knows how to tell a story, but he does not demonstrate that
capacity in this work.
[Sidenote: _Sheffield Daily Telegraph_]
Ambrose Meyrick said that “people who pushed ... always reminded him of
the hungry little pigs fighting for the largest share of the wash”—but
though a reasonable aversion to Extravertism is comprehensible, it is
really unnecessary to be so exaggerated an introvert as the hero of “The
Secret Glory,” by Arthur Machen. Ambrose carried his mental “Secret
Doctrine” to perverse, even morbid, excesses; he lived in a _paysage
intérieur_ peopled by mystics and martyrs, and visions of the jewelled
Grail hidden by the descendant of Celtic Saints in some humble cottage
on the Welsh mountains; and all this was naturally incompatible with the
brutal facts of life at an English public school. An unpleasant school,
certainly, but not more so than most.
It is to be assumed that Ambrose possessed a sense of humour, since he
could enjoy, and even parody, Rabelais, but there is scant evidence of
the quality otherwise than as stated. Extracts from his famous book, “In
Praise of Taverns,” are equally unconvincing.
Some of Mr Machen’s arguments on religion are interesting. “In my
heart,” he says, “I have always doubted whether moderate Anglicanism
be Christianity in any sense, whether it even deserves to be called
a religion at all,” and he objects to Protestantism because of the
fundamental heresy on which it “builds its objection to what is called
Ritual. I suppose this heresy is called Manichee; it is a charge of
corruption and evil made against the visible universe, which is affirmed
to be not ‘very good’ but ‘very bad’—or, at all events, too bad to
be used as the vehicle of spiritual truth.... Incense, vestments,
candles, all ceremonies, processions, rites—all these things are
miserably inadequate; but they do not abound in the horrible pitfalls,
misapprehensions, errors, which are inseparable from speech of men used
as an expression of the Church.”
Mr Machen is trying to present Celtic Paganism in the guise of
Christianity, he confuses the Greek philosophy of restraint, “Nothing in
excess,” with a mere negation. There is very little glory in the book. It
is concerned with the tortuous byways of a perverse soul through which
the free wind from the mountains has never blown.
[Sidenote: _The Morning Post_]
Though issued as fiction, this is not a novel. It is composite of story,
autobiography, essay, satire, philosophy, criticism, poetry, and too
formless to be brought within any literary mode. Presumably it was not
written all of a piece, and that just yesterday. Spatchcocked passages
point to times when there were as yet no Boches, only Boers, and “’E
dunno where ’e are” was still a music-hall ditty. These were the days of
Ambrose Meyrick’s youth, true; but—though this need not (and will not)
trouble the shade of Mr Blackmore—the most consistent romancer, as to
time and place, would not now suggest the Valley of the Doone as even
a bogus field for the adventure of the Sangraal. Other times, other
fashions, even in that high Quest. Pieced or wrought whole, the book
nevertheless is unified by one idea. The “secret glory” of its title is
the imaginative life, to which its every line and circumstance is meant
as acclamation and appeal.
There are in it, among others of rare and rich beauty, a thousand absurd
lines and circumstances we could willingly blot. For Mr Machen’s own
purpose, Lupton School is a prejudice; like its Headmaster it is too much
“commerce with mortality.” “A deeper transport and a mightier thrill” are
communicated in wise, rapturous praise of wine and humorous discourse on
the marriage of Panurge. Here Nelly Foran is cunningly kept with Ambrose,
aloof and aloft in a fragrant old Bloomsbury whose “stinks” in reality
were neither better nor worse than the Midlands’. More understanding
still of its own “secret glory” would Mr Machen’s fascinating book have
been had he realised that its ecstatic vision, being of the spirit and
the imagination, is as likely to occur in a “Bethel with the stucco
front” as in the Celtic Church with its Cup of Sacrament. But Mr Machen,
in his own exclusive way, does catch it, and for that we are grateful.
[Sidenote: Rose Macaulay in _The Daily News_]
“The Secret Glory” is, like most of Mr Machen’s books, very odd. It is
the story of a mystic, of the inner and the outer life. The outer life
of Ambrose Meyrick is passed at Lupton, a typically commonplace and
materialistic public school, whose masters talk of “playing the game” and
write horrible school songs of the “Forty Years on” type; while his inner
life, which is alone of significance or importance to him, is spent in
exploring mystic realms of Celtic Christian legend with or without his
dead father, a Welsh architectural enthusiast. “I do not know,” writes
Ambrose in later life, “how it all happened; I had been leading two eager
lives. On the outside I was playing games and going up in the school
with a rush, and in the inside I was being gathered more and more into
the sanctuaries of immortal things.” Ambrose’s mystical adventures are
described with a good deal of beauty; it is his contacts with actuality
which strike one as distorted and unreal.
Both he and Mr Machen loathe public schools and all pertaining to them
with such intensity that neither of them can see straight. They set
up a monstrous figure of savagery and idiotcy and call him a typical
schoolmaster, adding that schoolmasters are just like schoolboys,
the implication being that nearly all schoolboys also are savage and
imbecile. Even public schools are not really quite as bad as all that;
and Mr Machen would have been more effective if he had been more
temperate. There is quite enough to be said about the savagery and
stupidity of schools without resorting to distortion. Psychological
accuracy is not, indeed, the strength of the book, which is full of
unlikely actions. For instance, was Ambrose really the kind of boy who,
in his quest for beauty, would have absconded with one of the school
housemaids? Surely his dead father would have told him that this was
conduct unworthy of an inquirer into spiritual mysteries. But the whole
book is a fantasy, and not to be judged as a tale of real life. Its
curious occurrences and characters are made odder by the difficult,
obscure, and fragmentary method of narration. There is, in fact, a good
deal of silliness in the book, as well as some bad taste, but there is
also a good deal of beauty, and the beauty and the silliness and the bad
taste are all the work of a writer.
[Sidenote: Middleton Murry in _The Nation and Athenæum_]
Even if we wished we could not tell the story of “The Secret Glory.”
Mr Machen manages to combine an onslaught on the public school system
with some watery Paterian mysticism. Personally we have an equal dislike
of those who belaud and those who denigrate the public school system.
Besides, “there ain’t no sich person,” there are as many systems as there
are public schools. But Ambrose Meyrick, if he could have been jerked for
a moment by his creator into a semblance of real existence, would justify
the worst outrages wrought upon him by his equally incredible _alma
mater_.
He is a sentimental philanderer with æsthetic Catholicisms, a mystic
Celtic dreamer, a Soho Bohemian (before Soho was ruined, of course); but
these crimes are as nothing compared to his incorrigible penchant for
“poetic prose.” Mr Machen has encouraged him in it. He will have a great
deal more to answer for in the day of judgment than the schoolmaster who
tried to beat it out of him.