[Sidenote: _The Outlook_]
It is difficult to know quite what to make of Mr Machen’s two most recent
books. “Far Off Things” was a rather scrappy chapter of what might have
been an excellent autobiography not written in the first place for
publication in book form. Like the new volume it spoiled a great deal of
good material and was not organised in any way that tends to make lasting
literature. For all that, both volumes are excellent reading. There is
a great deal to be said for Mr Machen. And he himself has a great deal
to say. He is not quite at home in the twentieth century. Spiritually
he belongs to the years before the ’nineties, to Charing Cross Road as
it was in the days when he translated Casanova at the rate of thirty
shillings a week. The Strand is not what it was, and he paints the
difference for us in no uncertain terms. Nor do the modern restaurants
know their business half so well as the old chop-houses did.
So through this monstrous incursion of women with the war and
nursery hours of to-day, the old tavern life has gone; utterly
and for ever, I am afraid.
This is one of the chief grudges he urges against the modern age; and he
can give us chapter and verse for it.
Going there (to Herbert’s) in these latter days I used to
wonder why all the meats seemed to taste alike.... I had
business, oddly enough, in their kitchen. One of the cooks
showed me the joints roasting on the jack; and I perceived
that three different meats were cooking at the one fire, while
beneath, in a common pan, their juices mingled, ready for the
basting ladle. It is not much wonder, I think, that veal and
lamb and beef taste all much alike in this unhappy place, once
so high, now fallen so low.
On another occasion, when he asked for Stilton cheese, the waiter
replied that only English cheeses were supplied! And just as the food
has deteriorated, so has the journalism. “Always remember that we appeal
not to the cabman, but to the cabman’s wife,” said one of Mr Machen’s
friends, a distinguished journalist; and Mr Machen, who, to say the worst
of him, prefers the cabman, might have been a little more disgusted than
he is, and that is not a little. He does his best to fix a considerable
share of the blame for our present condition on this “monstrous
incursion of women.”
Such things as these are not, however, the main features of Mr Machen’s
confessions—for that is what his pages really are. He is most interesting
when he hints at his incidental experiences at novelist, journalist,
and actor. And here, at the same time, because of his brevity, he is
most disappointing. Mr H. B. Irving once said to him of his book “The
Great God Pan”—“You shouldn’t have done it; you destroy the illusion.
Never take people behind the scenes. I never do.” Mr Machen’s great
mistake in his two latest books is that he never takes us further than
the stage-door. Although he is telling us about himself all the time,
we learn very little about him because he does not tell us enough of
other people. We enjoy his story, but always with a sense of irritation
that he has not dotted more of the i’s and crossed more of the t’s. Time
and again, following on some succulent anecdote, he seems almost to be
about to paint for us the whole moving pageant of the ’nineties, and
just as often he turns aside to trace something else into other and less
interesting channels.
The truth is “Things Near and Far” is not really a book at all because
it was neither conceived nor written as a book. It is a collection of
amazingly good snippets, a sort of prearranged notebook that might have
borne such a title as “Towards Biography.” One feels about it as about
something that might have been, that almost was, but is not. One is left
wondering whether Mr Machen is a good journalist or a good author, for it
seems fairly evident that he cannot be both, at all events, not at the
same time, as he has tried to be in his two latest books.
[Sidenote: _Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury_]
... It is debonair, it is graceful, it is dignified and extraordinarily
at its ease, it is essentially belles-lettres; it is not much more than
that; it is not specially memorable, nor does it presage very brilliantly
of the book to come (in the indefinite future), where “an interior tale
of the soul and its emotions” is to be told through the shapes of “hills
and valleys, woods and rivers, sunrise and sunset, buried temples and
mouldering Roman walls.” Mr Machen has humour, poetic sensibility, a
sense of style; he is reflective, open to the influences of nature,
appreciative of the town’s common and uncommon interests, readily
responsive to the appeal of art and literature. What perhaps his work
lacks to make it true literature is virility, and it wants substance
to make it really worth while, though it is—this must be one’s last
word—exceedingly pleasant.
[Sidenote: _The Morning Post_]
Mr Arthur Machen has his full circle of readers, who will be delighted
with this sumptuous edition which Mr Secker has so ably prepared. It
is limited to a thousand sets; five hundred of which have gone to
America. Mr Machen loves the unusual and the mysterious. They appeal to
his imagination and set him thinking on a train of thought which seems
without end. Someone has said that few men can more agreeably fill a
column. The remark finds justification in these volumes. This gift is
the strength and weakness of his writing. It might be said of Mr Machen
that he has at once too much and too little imagination. Too much, that
his ideas flow on like the summer brook; too little, that his style lacks
incisiveness and the power of expressing instantaneously some thought.
“The Great God Pan” is a fair example of this weakness. He tells us in
“Far Off Things” that he was persuaded to write this tale of horror by
a wish to “pass on the vague, indefinable sense of awe and mystery and
terror” that he had received in childhood days spent in the valley of the
Usk, above Newbridge. The feeling that all the best in human beings is
built on a treacherous morass which may engulf it at any moment has often
been expressed. Mr Machen’s effort does not compare with Stevenson’s “Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” Its terror is dissipated through failure to bring
any definite incident of horror before the reader. The alternative would
have been to envelop the story in such a wealth of strangeness that the
impression would have been created through atmosphere; the method of Poe.
Mr Machen is neither sufficiently dramatic nor sufficiently keyed to the
weirdness of his tale. It certainly lacks resemblance to the dark gravity
of deep woods.
From a consideration of this point we notice another peculiarity in Mr
Machen’s work. It is not plagiarism, but the ignoring of any reference
to ideas which other men have worked upon. True, there is no monopoly
of thought, but we are led sometimes right up to a thought which has
been superbly expressed before. It would seem more natural if Mr Machen
directed us to the poet or writer instead of enlarging in his own words
on that idea. It would certainly be more effective from the point of view
of art.
It may be that we are somewhat critical. There is much to enjoy and
admire in these books with ever a word for the weak and distressed, and
the fascinating hint of “worlds unrealised.” But library editions are
becoming increasingly popular, and we wonder whether they may not be
overdone. These fine books are delightful to handle, but the thought
creeps in if their matter is quite up to the high standard of production;
whether anything but the very best should find a home in these limited
editions, which rise so readily in mere marketable value. Still, Mr
Machen has his admirers. No doubt they will think nothing too good as a
home for his thoughts.
[Sidenote: _Manchester Guardian_]
In “Far Off Things” Mr Arthur Machen describes his rambling boyhood
on the borderland of South Wales and his adolescence (a rather sad
affair of lonely lodging and penurious journalism in London) as far
as the publication of his first book. His memories have been laid up
in lavender, and they emerge rather heavily scented. The result is
the praise of old and simple things in a style that has too glib an
antiquarianism to be pleasing over a long stretch. The reader finds
himself predicting Mr Machen’s reaction to each situation as it arises
and trying to forestall the phrase which the author’s sentimental
conservatism will use. For instance, when he describes how his mother
made “fermety” or “frumenty” in the autumn he must allude to it as “a
very honourable dish and a most ancient and Christian pottage.” One
feared in advance some such pomposity. It is the more pity because Mr
Machen is sensitive as well as sentimental, and when he allows his
memories to flow in unprinked English he achieves a beauty apt to the
object he describes, notably in his landscapes of the Usk Valley and the
surrounding hills.
[Sidenote: _The Outlook_]
Literature and the journalist do not always rub shoulders nowadays; at
all events few people look to find anything claiming to be prose in the
misprinted, smudgy sheets of our raucous evening Press, unless, perhaps,
in newspapers published North of the Trent. So that it does not promise
well to read in Mr Machen’s preface that his new book appeared seven
years ago in one of the best-known London evening papers under the title
“Confessions of a Literary Man.” It sounds like Mr Bennett all over
again, and misgiving increases when he adds that the confessions were
written to editorial order when he was a reporter. It is an old truth
that Fleet Street has ruined more good writers than Fleet Street ever
made. Only at a first glance does Mr Machen appear to be an exception,
for in spite of the extraordinary quality and power of his present book,
though it challenges comparison with Gissing’s best work and surpasses it
in parts, Mr Machen is quite clearly not the writer he might have been.
“Far Off Things” is one of the most entertaining and familiar books one
remembers; a vivid autobiographical chapter, condensed and complete in
much less than two hundred pages, but it is without that distinctive
art that makes Mr Gosse’s “Father and Son” one of the great pieces of
autobiography of this or any time, and it has not just that sense for
the right word in the right place which knits language into abiding
literature. He cannot wrestle with the conventional:—
Now winter has its splendours; but with what joy do we welcome
the yearly miracle of spring. We and the whole earth exult
together as though we had been delivered from prison, the
hedgerows and the fields are glad, and the woods are filled
with singing; and men’s hearts are filled with an ineffable
rapture. Israel once more has come out of Egypt, from the house
of bondage.
That is the prose of the best journalism, but not the prose of the man
who is, first and foremost, expressing the pure content of his mind with
all his mind’s power through the power of words.
But the real charm of the book lies elsewhere, chiefly in the zest with
which he describes the places he has loved and the people he remembers,
the curious, quiet anecdotes, his sense of poetry in all things, and,
especially, his literary enthusiasms. Cervantes and Scott come into his
range, and even De Quincey, who “wrote in the great manner because he
thought in the great manner.” He is inspiriting about Carlyle, and there
is a tone of voice meant for the detractors of that great man in the
quiet statement: “I know not any man of these days that is worthy to dust
Carlyle’s hat or to clean his pipe for him.” But the journalist comes out
badly in that sentence. The best thing in the book is his description of
the Strand as it was in the ’eighties, and there is a curious parallel
with one of Mr W. H. Davies’ best poems when he writes of Gwent and Twyn
Barlwm. He is equally happy proving that the Rosicrucians never existed
as in describing the conventional garret of authorhood’s infancy, and
there is one magnificent anecdote of a lesson in Welsh pronunciation:—
I said, “Yn oes oesodd”—from ages to ages. “That is right,”
said my Welsh friend, “speak it so that it makes a sound like
the wind about the mountains.”
And, as he says himself, the spirit of that sentence is very near to the
heart of true literature. Mr Machen knows what true literature is. There
is a good critic in the man who can define realism as “the depicting of
eternal, inner realities—the ‘things that really are’ of Plato—as opposed
to the description of transitory, external surfaces; the delusory masks
and dominoes with which the human heart hides and drapes itself.” Though
he is digressive he is never garrulous, even when he writes about food
and drink, and he does that well enough to whet the reader’s appetite.
“Far Off Things,” if it is not a great book, is a book too good to be
read lightly. It contains a great deal of wisdom and more than a little
humour. The author throws out hints of a book yet to be written, in which
hills and valleys, woods and rivers, sunrise and sunset will be described
so that a story is suggested to the reader; something of Wordsworth’s
method, and certainly a method of poetry, though Mr Machen does not seem
to realise it in that way. Such a book he has in his mind, and if, when
it comes, it improves on “Far Off Things,” Mr Machen will have done his
work better than he knew.
[Sidenote: _Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury_]
Mr Arthur Machen is a modest man: he says so himself; but his modesty
is of that most profitable kind—to the world, we mean, of course—which
inspired Montaigne, Cowley, “Elia,” and other famous “egoists.” In
“Things Near and Far” he continues the tale he began in “Far Off Things,”
published a few months ago, the tale of his life, outer and inner, public
and private. He is, it is increasingly evident, a man of letters, a
complete man of letters, and nothing but a man of letters. The landmarks
of his life are either one or other of his books, or one or other of
the events out of which a book is to grow. He has a positive flair for
making literary capital out of life. He is a very appreciative collector
of experiences, and always has plenty to say on any point; he is fairly
fertile in ideas, though no great thinker; and he is interested and can
communicate his interest—even in his own books and the reviews they
called forth. That notable modesty of his takes on, by the way, in
presence of those reviews, an aspect too like self-complacency to leave
us quite assured of his ingenuousness. There are, however, many books
less worth 7s. 6d. than this.
[Sidenote: _Daily News_]
“Far Off Things,” by Arthur Machen. “Heaven lies about us in our
infancy.” Nevertheless, few sensitive men recall a really happy
boyhood. Mr Machen is one of them. The only child of the rector of
Caerleon-on-Usk, in the romantic solitudes of Gwent, he looks back on
his earliest days as a secluded yet intense experience. The power of
association is strong; and the vein of mysticism which characterises Mr
Machen’s writings both derives from, and is heightened by, the gleam of
such fond recollection. With Sir Thomas Browne, he finds those years “a
miracle ... which to relate were not a history, but a piece of poetry.”
We all know that the author of such diversities in unity as
“Hieroglyphics,” “The Great God Pan,” and “The Bowmen,” is a thoroughly
illogical and genial spirit. The incredibly genuine sense of wonder that
runs through his excursions in practical journalism somehow prevents
us from being irritated as we ought to be. His new book is good, if
not a “piece of poetry.” We are glad to have his apologia, it is oddly
convincing. It must be a great and unbalancing thing to find miracles all
the way.
When Mr Machen writes of his studies, his early yearning for London,
and the hard times he knew in the capital, it is in the same untroubled
spirit. His temperament is unchanged through all these years. “Omnia
exeunt in mysterium”—the thought brings him the mystic’s consolation.
If one loves the unfathomable, why go about to probe it? Yet he demands
realism from literature: De Quincey was his first idol by virtue of this
possession. The old inference is made clear again. The mystic lives not
in experience, but in the aura with which he encases it. To us others
this way of acceptance is an illusion, an escape from the perplexed soul.
But can we make anything better of life?