[Sidenote: Octave Uzanne in _Le Livre_]
Je ne sais si la dédicace de ce livre rabelaisien, je veux dire de
haulte graisse, adressée au _Right Honourable, Illustrious and Puissant
Prince_, Humphrey, duc de Glocester, chevalier de l’ordre très noble de
la Jarretière, etc., etc., est une satire barbelée ou l’hommage sérieux
d’un humoriste. Le noble duc me semble le mieux situé pour en décider,
et là dessus je m’en rapporte bien à lui. Mais ce que je constate dès
les premières pages, sans l’ombre d’un doute, c’est l’esprit, le goût
littéraire, la connaissance familière et intime de la langue jusque dans
ses sources vives, le renouveau de Renaissance, si je puis dire, qui
éclate à chaque ligne dans ce qu’écrit Mr Arthur Machen.
Des contes en eux-mêmes, je ne dis rien, sinon que, les ayant lus, je
les relirai souvent, à petites doses, sans me lasser, comme on visite
ces flacons qui contiennent une fine et réconfortante liqueur. Gervase
Perrot de Clemendy, gentleman, seigneur du manoir de Pwllcwrw,—ce qui, au
pays de Galles, je crois, veut dire “flaque de bière,”—et maréchal des
pots aux assises de l’Ale, ne m’est, je l’avoue humblement, pas autrement
connu. Il me suffit de savoir que, depuis “The Discourse of Ale,”
traduit, paraît-il, du latin, jusqu’au dernier conte des neuf joyeuses
journées, il se montre franc compère, aussi bon Gaulois qu’Anglais
rabelaisien peut l’être, gai à miracle, spirituel à plaisir, fécond en
histoires réjouissantes où les personnages n’échappent au ridicule que
par l’amour, comme le peuvent désirer et faire des créatures en chair
et en os, différentes de sexes et de natures semblables; en un mot,
tel que nous connaissons les conteurs d’Italie et de France: Boccace,
Marguerite, le seigneur des Accords, Camille Blessebois, l’Arétin,
Beroalde de Verville, le Pogge, La Fontaine, et tant d’autres, au premier
rang desquels le traducteur anglais de Marguerite de Navarre et de la
“Chronique de Clemendy” est désormais sûr de sa place....
[Sidenote: _The New York Times Book Review_]
Mr Machen, it will be recalled, is that author who, in the late ’eighties
and the early ’nineties, was so overshadowed by his contemporary, Robert
Louis Stevenson, that it is only of late years that his own varied
genius has received the praise that was its due. Machen has recently
been republished in England and in this country, but “Dog and Duck” does
not belong to his earlier work. Some of the essays may date back several
years, either in whole or in part, but it is clear that most of the
papers are new, and that such as may embody earlier material have been
elaborated and rewritten.
In “Dog and Duck” Arthur Machen has treated of nearly a score and a half
of subjects; but he has neglected to write on the subject which would be
of greatest use to his reviewer—namely, the art of being casual. For the
essay—the true essay, that is, as defined above, not the thesis essay or
the editorial—must, of all things, wear the air of absolute casuality.
In actual composition, of course, there may have been nothing of the
casual; and the very contrary is probable, painful delivery having, very
likely, followed on long gestation. But when the essay is spread upon
the pages, when the last revision of the proof has been made, it is a
literary product or it is not according as a reader will be left with the
impression that it sprang as spontaneously as Minerva from the head of
Jove. And now that we have been carried into mythology, it might not be
amiss to press the figure a little further. Minerva was the Goddess of
Wisdom; and the burden of the essay—again distinct from the thesis, the
burden of which is knowledge—is wisdom; and moreover, as Minerva, issued
full-panoplied and radiant of jewels and gold. And one thing more; the
true essay will have wit—not loud and boisterous humour, but the wit that
mellows while it stings; in short, the wit of wisdom.
To return to Arthur Machen: Does “Dog and Duck” satisfy the demands
of our questionnaire? There can be but one answer, an unqualified
affirmative. And that is why the complaint was raised that Mr Machen had
omitted an essay on the art of being casual. How does he achieve his
illusion of apparent chance, of absolute spontaneity, when we well know
that his essays must have been deliberate, as deliberate as any poem? But
let it go; the question is not to be answered of Machen any more than it
can be answered of Stevenson or of Lamb.
The title essay, it appears, has to do with an English outdoor game of
venerable age, although Americans, apparently, are unfamiliar with it. As
Chase Mallard the pastime of Dog and Duck takes on veritable antiquity.
Yet the reader will not follow Machen through any desire to learn the
technique of this simple outdoor sport; he will, however, be infected
with the gusto of the author in trailing the game itself back through
several generations, mention of it in literature, and especially—for here
one will come upon the Machen of that fascinating psycho-romantic tale,
“The Three Impostors”—in the part Dog and Duck played in a celebrated
murder trial of the eighteenth century.
Yet, if Machen is entertaining and enlivening when he discourses upon
antique sports, he is none the less so when he directs a flashing eye on
“Valentines and Other Things,” when he turns to the matter of holidays—as
he does more than once—when he talks of April Fool, of Twelfth Night, of
fogs, of February stars, of the vice of making collections (to which we
all are prone), to the matter of splendour, to the art of unbelief. In
his best vein—though to single out any one essay from the teeming sheaf
is invidious—is the one to which he gives the title “The Poor Victorians.”
We all know [he writes] what the poor Victorians were like. We
have heard all about them over and over again. To begin with,
they were prim. They were proper. They went to bed early.
Their only form of revelry consisted in tea parties. The laws
of their lives were dictated to them by maiden ladies and
the vicar’s wife. As for the arts in the Victorian era, they
could not properly be said to exist. Nobody spoke out: nobody
dared to be “daring.” No picture was painted that went beyond
the vision of the Young Person. No poem that the curate could
possibly dislike was ever written. As to love, the word was,
beware! Above all, there must be no faintest hint of the vital
things, of any sort of realities. And so on and so on, the
general conclusion being that the Victorians couldn’t write,
couldn’t paint, couldn’t think, and couldn’t properly be said
to be alive at all.
And thus, having stated the case of the moderns against the Victorians,
Mr Machen suddenly whisks from his pocket several documents. The first
is a love poem by the Victorian Tennyson that does not in the least
remind the essayist of Miss Pinkerton’s Academy for Young Ladies or the
vicar’s drawing-room. And then, lest this be a little solemn, he adduces
one of Swinburne’s stanzas on “lazy, laughing, languid Jenny,” who was
equally “fond of a kiss and fond of a guinea.” And from this frankness he
turns to Rossetti; then to Dickens. He finds that there were theatres in
Victoria’s day, and theatre parties; that there were also supper parties,
and rich food, and Burgundy. And, finally, having presented the evidence,
he comes to the summing up.
The truth is, of course, that the Victorian Age, more
especially the early and mid-Victorian Ages, were times of
jollity and times of liberty, both in life and in letters.
Those people who took a dozen oysters in the Haymarket at
midnight and strolled off to Covent Garden would not have
believed that their grandsons would submit to be smacked and
sent to bed like naughty children. And as in life, so in
letters. What the mid-Victorians wrote, whether it were well
or ill, was written with a relish. We have lost all that.
Cubism, Vorticism, Post-Impressionism; verse that doesn’t scan
and doesn’t rhyme; novels that make one think of a stupid
post-mortem or a dissection: that is what we have in place
of Tennyson, Swinburne, Rossetti, Dickens, Thackeray, the
pre-Raphaelites and the great illustrators of this despised
age, the wood-cutters whose work has become to us miraculous.
Those poor Victorians!
Arthur Machen is himself—outside of this volume—a late Victorian; so that
this is a defence and an excoriation by one who not only knows what he
is talking about, but whose emotions have been aroused by the slurs cast
upon his people. And there is one phrase of his defence that we shall
do well to linger over for a moment: “Whether they wrote well or ill
it was written with a relish.” It is the relish for life—the relish of
letters—that Machen in the “Dog and Duck” essays would have us recapture,
would help us to recapture. And this is important: as he himself says,
too few of our present-day writers either care to relish life or evince
any desire that their readers should relish letters. Indeed, this is
a phase of English literature which seemed, in the main, to end with
Stevenson, and Machen’s little book is one of the few modern volumes able
in any degree to win it back to us. Thus is “Dog and Duck” literature in
the highest sense.
In more than one essay does Machen go back even further than to
Stevenson; his little homilies on customs, and especially those on
viands and potations, remind one of Dickens. When he discusses “Roast
Goose: With a Dissertation on Apple Sauce and Sage and Onions,” he even
outdoes Lamb himself. And all these papers are shot with shafts of wit,
stuffed with matured advice; and if Machen, as a philosopher, might fail
in a rigid test, even the most quarrelsome of metaphysicians will be
forced to bow before his sagacity.
There is a curious note appended to the final essay of the book, a paper
on what the author calls “The Art of Unbelief.” The editor of _The Lyons
Mail_, who had accepted and printed all of the preceding essays, refused
this one with the words:—
I cannot deal with the enclosed.... I am afraid my readers
would not understand it; ... a mass of dissertation, some of
which I would not ask our linotype operators to translate.
The essay deals with the survival of the primitive capacity for
myth-making, a recrudescence of which Machen discovers in the absurd
legends surrounding the death of Lord Kitchener which appear to have
gained credence in some circles in which intelligence in respect
to other matters has generally been shown. But either the “linotype
operators” of _The Lyons Mail_ are a peculiarly susceptible force
of workers, or—and, one will conclude, more probably—the editor was
strangely deficient in a sense of humour. Mr Machen, however, turns the
matter off with the good nature one would expect of him; the good nature
which is characteristic of the book. “Such are the amenities,” he says,
“of that highway which Sir Philip Gibbs has so delightfully called ‘the
Street of Adventure.’”