[Sidenote: Robert Hillyer in _The New York Times Book Review_]
Ten years ago weekly explorations of second-hand bookshops in Boston
never failed to yield me a copy of the American reprints by Dana Estes &
Co. of Arthur Machen’s “House of Souls” and his “Hill of Dreams.” They
were a regular feature of the rubbish counter. For these I usually had
to pay about 50 cents a copy—though I bought one “Hill of Dreams,” which
I still possess, for 10 cents. I must have purchased about twenty of
these books. I gave them to friends, I lent them to friends—it does not
matter which; the volumes disappeared one way or another. It seemed at
the time a method within my means of bestowing great riches on the people
I liked or admired. Few of my friends went away without their copy of a
book they had never heard of, but which they would read for friendship’s
sake. When I had only two copies of “The Hill of Dreams” left, and could
find no more, I decided to suppress my prodigal instincts, but a burst
of generosity brought on by some green chartreuse disposed of one of the
two. The other one, saved by the banishment decreed to monastic liquor,
is still with me.
And beside it on the shelf is Mr Knopf’s new edition of the book. “The
Hill of Dreams” will never again be found on the rubbish counter; the old
red edition is a collector’s rarity; the new yellow one is a substantial
proof of the advance of good literature in America. During the last
ten years Mr Machen’s art has been recognised; he is almost the only
example of a fine writer rescued from oblivion in his own lifetime. Yet
he has made no concession to the world in general. He has not changed
a word of “The Hill of Dreams” since he wrote it twenty-six years ago.
It is the same book—a failure in 1907, rubbish in 1913, a success in
1923. Obviously, the world has made concessions to the ideas which he
represents.
The triumph of mechanism, which is shown in its full glory by the
late war and the wars that follow it, has, like all bad tyrannies,
engendered a reaction. For years isolated voices were raised against it,
but they spoke in syllables that were incomprehensible to the minds of
men spellbound by the wonder of Things. In differing accents, protests
came from writers as diverse in talent as Samuel Butler, Walter Pater
and Arthur Machen. People took it for granted that such protests were
the inevitable whine of the Old Order against Progress, an explanation
at once so simple and inclusive that it could dispose of any objection
calculated to disturb their satisfaction in the machinery of manufacture
and the machinery of life. The world, indeed, was fast stampeding into a
herd which would not tolerate the existence of unconverted individuals.
Then suddenly the machine itself went wrong, and threatened, like the
machine in the ballad, to transform its inventor into sausage meat.
There was a wild flight of worshippers from the crumbling shrine of
Moloch—whither? Into Spiritism, Bahaism, neo-Buddhism; into every cult,
in fact, that offered even a temporary shelter from desperation. This
headlong rout into faddism of all sorts was a superficial earnest that
the mind of the race was turning, had in fact turned, back toward an
acknowledgment of the final mystery of life.
Of this mystery, Arthur Machen has from the first been the consistent
exponent. His mind is that of a medieval Christian; a liberal monk,
perhaps, who has taken many an appreciative peek at the classics in the
library of the foundation. To him all that is beautiful builds walls of
the celestial city in the mind of man; all that makes war against that
beauty is unutterably evil. There is no middle ground. And “The Hill of
Dreams” is the epic of this spiritual battle.
In the new introduction, written for the new edition, the author tells us
that he intended to write a Robinson Crusoe of the soul: the soul, and
not the body of a man, solitary amid an alien sea. It would have been
impossible for Mr Machen to write any other sort of Robinson Crusoe, for
he never leaves the material world untransmuted; everything becomes,
either for good or for evil, the shadow of an overwhelming portent. Thus
“The Hill of Dreams” shows us life, carnal and ethereal, as heightened
by the oversensitive imagination of the hero, Lucian Taylor. The boy
grows up in the outland country between Wales and England; all the
glamour and terror of ancient forests become a part of him. Left largely
to himself by his pathetically frustrate father, the vicar, and repelled
by the lapses of taste and decency in the provincial society around him,
he wanders over the domed hills under violently blue Summer skies, the
hard glare of Winter and the sad wet twilight of Autumn, while the Roman
past and the Celtic past, whose ruined fortresses and tumuli are only
half-concealed by the moss and the thicket, gradually take possession
of his imagination and ally themselves in his mind with an already
established love of medieval lore, ecclesiastic and occult. All hidden
beauties become his preoccupation, but, driven inward by the vicious
sordidness of actuality, corruption also fascinates him. Year by year
this struggle between the rapture of the inner life and the staleness
of the outer aggravates an intolerable situation to be solved only by
expressing it all in adequate style. But words fail, and the reasonable
mind finally collapses under the weight of the imaginative.
It is obvious that Mr Machen does not want Lucian to become the victim
of this combat between modern existence and the life of the imagination.
He staves off the conclusion again and again until, forced by the
inevitable, he yields his hero to fate. His unwillingness to surrender
the youth may be accounted for by the fact that, up to a certain point,
Lucian’s life was his life—his autobiography—a circumstance which has
made the book suspiciously bitter in spots. He satirises the moneyed,
the hypocritical, the snobbish, with a fine cruelty and vivid fidelity
to life—but are these shoddy creatures, after all, worthy of so much
attention? Yes, perhaps—if their mere existence is an obstacle to the
higher sanity. And they are such an obstacle to Lucian, who magnifies
their imbecile gestures of futility into really monstrous evils. They are
a part of that wall of loneliness which isolates a naturally friendly and
convivial spirit, driving it in upon itself, until all the beauties that
it loves become, for lack of some one to share them, horrors and madness.
Fortunately for Mr Machen, he is of stronger stuff than the hero of his
masterpiece. In his two-volume autobiography, “Far Off Things,” which
appeared last Fall, and “Things Near and Far,” which has just been
published, he describes the loneliness which enhedged him and the means
he took to cope with it. Now in his middle fifties, he can look back over
that struggle with no bitterness, but certainly with no complacency. One
cannot be complacent before the materialism of modern life, which not
only fails to help a man whose interests are elsewhere, but will not even
tolerate him if it knows him for what he is.
Like Lucian, Mr Machen was born in the Welsh borderland, faced poverty in
its fearfullest form—“genteel” poverty—went to London hoping to obtain
the necessities of life by writing, and ended by nearly starving to death
on the wages of tutoring, translating and cataloguing second-hand books.
In bookshops, he came in contact with alchemical and occult works which
were to influence, though not dominate, all his later writing. Much of
the interest of “Things Near and Far” lies in his treatment of various
phases of mysticism, from its faddish to its serious manifestation. Very
wisely, as I think, he has carefully guarded himself against seizure as
an “adept” by any Spiritistic or pseudo-Oriental cult. In his burlesque
description of a séance, he closes the doors of Spiritism against him:—
The room is in total darkness. One of the sitters proclaims
with exultation that his nose has been tweaked by Joey, who,
on this side, was a clown. John King, understood to have been
a master mariner, sings “Tom Bowling” in a falsetto voice
through a speaking trumpet. On this Cardinal Newman, known
to be a lover of music, is gratified, and utters the word
“Benedictine.” ... “This spirit’s name is Milton. Henry—no,
John Milton, the author of the ‘Faery Queen.’ He says that they
are very happy.... All repeat the Lord’s Prayer, and Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle expresses his intense gratification.... Well, it
may be so. But I hope it isn’t, and I never shall believe that
it is so.”