_THINGS NEAR AND FAR_
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE TERROR
THE BOWMEN
DR. STIGGINS
THE GREAT RETURN
HIEROGLYPHICS
THE HOUSE OF SOULS
Including THE GREAT GOD PAN and THE THREE IMPOSTORS
THE HILL OF DREAMS
THE CHRONICLE OF CLEMENDY
WAR AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH
THE SECRET GLORY
FAR OFF THINGS
_THINGS NEAR & FAR_
_BY ARTHUR MACHEN_
_LONDON: MARTIN SECKER_
_Printed in Great Britain_
LONDON: MARTIN SECKER LTD. (1923)
_Chapter I_
The road from Newport to Caerleon-on-Usk winds, as it comes near to
the old Roman, fabulous city, with the winding of the tawny river
which I have always supposed must be somewhat of the colour of the
Tiber. This road was made early in the nineteenth century when
stage-coaching came to perfection, for the old road between the two
towns passed over the Roman bridge--blown down the river by a great
storm in the seventeen-nineties--and climbed the break-neck hill to
Christchurch. Well, this new road as I remember it was terraced, as
it were, high above the Usk to the west, and above it to the east
rose a vast wood, or what seemed a vast wood in 1870, called St.
Julian’s Wood, of some fame as a ghostly place. It was cut down long
ago by an owner who thought timber of high growth better than ghosts.
On the one side, then, the steep dark ascent of St. Julian’s Wood;
on the other, the swift fall of the bank to the yellow river, where,
likely enough, there would be a man in a coracle fishing for salmon.
And then there came a certain turn, where suddenly one saw the long,
great wall of the mountain in the west, and the high dome of Twyn
Barlwm, a prehistoric tumulus; and down below, an island in the green
meadows by the river, the little white Caerleon, shining in the sun.
There is a grey wall on one side of it, a very old and mouldering
wall to look at, and indeed it is old enough, for it is all that
remains of the Roman wall of Isca Silurum, headquarters of the Second
Augustan Legion.
But there, white in the sun of some summer afternoon of fifty years
ago or so, Caerleon still stands for me shining, beautiful, a little
white city in a dream, with the white road coming down the hill, from
Newport, down out of St. Julian’s Wood, and so to the level river
meadows, and so winding in a curve and coming to the town over the
bridge.
That is my vision of the place where I was born; no doubt the
recollection of driving home beside my father on some shining summer
afternoon of long ago; but of later years another vision of the same
white town and white road has come to me. I have “made this up,” as
the children say, though, no doubt, it is all true. The time now
goes back from the early ’seventies to the early ’fifties, and two
young ladies are setting out from the Vicarage--it stood practically
in the churchyard, pretty well in the position of that other, that
illustrious Vicarage at Haworth, and my Aunt Maria could never see
any reason why a vicarage should not be in a churchyard--the two
young ladies closed the Vicarage door, and made their way down the
deserted street, where the grass was green between the cobble-stones,
and so passed over the bridge and into the Newport road. They were
going to meet John, home from Jesus College, Oxford; and no doubt
they talked eagerly of how well John was doing at Oxford, and
wondered when he would be ordained, and where his first curacy would
be, and what a good clergyman he would make, and how they hoped he
would marry somebody nice, and what a pity it was that John was not
at home when Mr. Tennyson came to Caerleon and stayed at the Hanbury
Arms, and smoked a black clay tobacco pipe with his feet on the
mantelpiece; very odd, but poets always were odd people and “Airy
Fairy Lilian” was very pretty. The Vicar had called of course, and
had been a little shocked at the pipe; still, Papa was always so
amiable and ready to make allowances.
“Your grandfather,” Aunt Maria said to me years afterwards, “was
a most amiable man, but he could not bear radishes or the _Adeste
fideles_.”
Well, the two young ladies, Anne and Maria, shading themselves from
the heat of the sun with their fringed parasols, pace decorously
along the Newport road discussing these and many other matters;
parish-matters, of helping poor people and old people and sick
people; county matters, the great doings that there would be at the
Park when Sir (?) Hanbury Leigh was to have a great party from London
on August 12th to shoot grouse on the mountain; Church matters; how
a Mr. Leonard had just been given the living of Kemeys Commander and
had actually been heard to say, “I call myself a Catholic priest”
and, in spite of the Creeds, wasn’t that going rather far? And what
would John say to that? And, somehow, I fancy the talk came circling
again and again back to John, and how glad he would be to be at home
again, and how lucky it was that Mrs. Williams Pantyreos had come in
that very morning because John always said that he never got butter
like the Pantyreos butter anywhere, and how it was to be hoped that
the weather would keep up till Wednesday when they were all going to
drive to Aunt Mary’s at Abergavenny--except Mamma, who said, “Young
gadabout ne’er won a clout”--and how this beautiful sunshine must be
doing Cousin Blanche’s cough a great deal of good: John would like to
see Cousin Blanche again.
And so on, and so on, and the two sisters walk along the white
limestone road, picking a flower now and again, for Anne paints
flowers and Maria is much interested in Botany--I am not sure whether
she had acquired Miss Pratt’s three-volume work on the subject at
that date. And the evening draws along, and the sun hangs over the
huge round of Mynydd Maen in the west, and the scents of St. Julian’s
dark, deep wood fill the stilled air; till Maria says suddenly:
“Anne! here is the omnibus at last, and, there! I believe I can see
John’s face.”
The old dim yellow and faded chocolate omnibus from the Bull--I
remember it in its last days just before they made the line, and
never will I speak of _this_ omnibus as a ’bus--comes lumbering on
its way, and the old driver, recognising the “two Miss Joneses the
Vicarage” and knowing that Master John is inside, causes it to stop.
John, a mild-looking young man with little side whiskers, gets out
and kisses his sisters; and the three then get in, and the omnibus
lumbers down the hill towards Caerleon, the three chattering of
Oxford, of plans and prospects, of Caerleon news and how happy Papa
looked at breakfast. And so the evening draws on and the shadows
deepen and the walls of white Caerleon glimmer and grow phantasmal
like the old grey Roman wall as they cross the bridge and the Usk
swims to high tide, the tawny yellow tinged with something of the
sunset redness that glows over the mountain. The three are talking
and chattering all the while, making plans for holidays and happiness
and long bright years and the joy of life--a correct joy, but still
joy--before them, and John is enquiring eagerly after Cousin Blanche
and nodding and smiling to the Bluecoat boys and girls and saying:
“I’ll unpack my box to-night and show you my prizes--Parker’s ‘Gothic
Architecture,’ in three volumes, and Hooker and a lot more,” and they
are hoping again and again that Wednesday will be fine, and Blanche
is sure to be quite well by this, and John is feeling his young
cheeks grow a little red when--it is night.
Alas! They are all dead, years and years ago. The kind Vicar and his
grim, good wife are dead. Poor Cousin Blanche perished of consumption
in her fresh youth; no summer sun could allay the racking of that
cough of hers. Anne followed her, by the same way to the same end: I
have the “Holy Dying” that John, my father, gave her. There are two
inscriptions in it; one facing the rubricated title-page, now “foxed”
with time. This runs:
To Anne E. Jones
from her affectionate
Brother John Edward
On her Birthday, and in
remembrance of the 29th
September, 1857[A]
April 16th, 1858.
[A] The date, I think, of their father’s death.
The other, on the recto of the leaf, is as follows:
Johannes Edvardus Jones,
In memoriam A.E.J.J.
Quæ obdormivit in Jesu
29 mo Martii MDCCCLIX
And those of the party that lived longer knew more of sorrow, and
more of broken hopes and of dreams that never came true. And thus,
advisedly, I begin this second chapter in the story of a young man’s
dreams and hopes and adventures. _Ego quoque_--I am forgetting my
Latin tags--I, too, have walked on the white road to Caerleon.
* * * * *
To walk a little faster, to comply, in fact, with the request of the
whiting in Lewis Carroll’s beautiful Idyll, the end of 1884 and the
beginning of 1885 found me in something of a backwater. “The Anatomy
of Tobacco,” the book I had written in the 10 by 6 cell in Clarendon
Road, Notting Hill Gate, had been published in the autumn of 1884,
and soon after I had set about the translating of the “Heptameron.”
Every evening I worked at this task till it was ended; and now it
was done, and there seemed nothing to do next. I wandered up and
down the country about Llanddewi Rectory in my old way, lost myself
in networks of deep lanes, coming out of them to view woods that
were strange and the prospect of hills that guarded undiscovered
lands. Thus on my wider and more prolonged travels, but I had haunts
near home, nooks and retreats where nobody ever came. There was an
unfrequented lane, very dark, very deep, that led from a hamlet
called Common Cefn Llwyn--the Ridge of the Grove--to Llanfrechfa,
used scarcely at all save by labouring men going to their work in
the early morning and returning in the evening. All the length of
this lane there was only one house in sight--the farms in Gwent are
mostly in the heart of the fields, remote even from the by-ways--and
this one house must have fallen into ruin eighty or a hundred years
ago. From what remained one judged that it had been the _petit
manoir_ of some dead and forgotten race of little squires; it was
of grey stone, of fifteenth-century workmanship, and the corbels
supporting the chimney were still sound and clean cut. All about
the old broken house were the ruins of the garden, apple trees and
plum trees run wild, hedges that had become brakes, a confusion of
degenerate flowers; and by the tumbledown stile that led to this
deserted place I would linger for an hour or more, wondering and
dreaming and setting my heart on the hopeless endeavour of letters.
Weather made no difference to my goings; a heavy greatcoat, boots
with soles an inch thick, and leather gaiters up to the knee, made a
wild wet winter’s day a thing to be defied and enjoyed; and indeed I
loved to get abroad on such days and see all the wells of the hills
overflowing and rushing down to swell the Soar or the Canthwr, red
and foaming, and making whirlpools of barmy froth as they fell into
the brooks. And then, when the rain changed to snow, what a delight
to stand on some high, lonely place and look out on the wide, white
land, and on the hills where the dark pines stood in a ring about
some ancient farm: to see the wonder of the icy sunlight, of the
violet winter sky. These were my great adventures, and I know not
whether in reality there are any greater, since it is a great thing
to stand on the very verges of an unknown world.
So the winter of ’84–85 went on and I dreamed and wondered and did
nothing, though I was nearing the age at which many a young man has
produced his first novel with success and acclaim. I never could
do these things, and still I cannot do them. I knew that I had no
business to be loafing and mooning about the rectory, a burden on my
poor father--the “John” of that happy return of the ’fifties had by
this time experienced sorrows and pains and miseries of all sorts.
My mother had been a hopeless invalid for fifteen years, my father’s
health had failed and he had become very deaf, the poor “living”
of Llanddewi Fach had grown poorer still through the agricultural
smash of 1880, he was in dire and perpetual straits for money, he
underwent most of the mortifications which are allotted to the poor.
It makes me grieve to this day to remember with what piteous sadness
he would lean his head on his hand; he had lost hope; nothing had
any savour for him any more. And seeing this, I was distressed to be
an additional weight in the heavy pack of sorrows and trials that he
bore daily, and I tried to get all sorts of employments for which I
was utterly unfit, which would not have harboured me for twenty-four
hours. Nothing came of these attempts, and so the time went on till
we were in June, 1885. Then there was a letter from the publisher
of “The Anatomy of Tobacco” to the effect that he thought he could
find me some odd jobs of work if I would come up to London; and so I
returned again to the well-remembered cell in Clarendon Road.
With mixed feelings. I was glad indeed at the prospect of doing
something for myself and so removing a little from the weary burden
at the rectory: but, I had not forgotten the _peine forte et dure_;
the dry bread, enough and no more than enough, the water from a
bitter runnel of a sorrowful street, the heavy weight of perpetual
loneliness. “Alone in London” has become a phrase, it is a title
associated, I think, with some flaring melodrama; but the reality is
a deadly thing. I was only twenty-two; and I shuddered a little one
June night when I went out and bade farewell to the brooks and the
woods and the flowers; to the scent of the evening air.
All sorts of odd jobs and queer jobs awaited me. I was given a
big folio book full of cuttings on a particular subject, and the
publisher asked me to make a selection from these and so compile a
book of oddments. Then, there were novels submitted to him that I
was to read and advise upon: a weary business when the said novels
were as a rule foolish things written in varieties of straggly and
scraggy scripts. But the principal business was the making of the
Catalogue. For the publisher of York Street was also a second-hand
bookseller. He had a mass of odd literature stored in a garret in
Catherine Street, and on these volumes I was let loose; my main
business being to write notes under the titles, notes describing the
content of the books and setting that content in an alluring manner
before the collector.
It was as odd a library as any man could desire to see. Occultism
in one sense or another was the subject of most of the books. There
were the principal and the more obscure treatises on Alchemy, on
Astrology, on Magic; old Latin volumes most of them. Here were books
about Witchcraft, Diabolical Possession, “Fascination,” or the Evil
Eye; here comments on the Kabbala. Ghosts and Apparitions were a
large family, Secret Societies of all sorts hung on the skirts of the
Rosicrucians and Freemasons, and so found a place in the collection.
Then the semi-religious, semi-occult, semi-philosophical sects and
schools were represented: we dealt in Gnostics and Mithraists, we
harboured the Neoplatonists, we conversed with the Quietists and
the Swedenborgians. These were the ancients; and beside them were
the modern throng of Diviners and Stargazers and Psychometrists
and Animal Magnetists and Mesmerists and Spiritualists and Psychic
Researchers. In a word, the collection in the Catherine Street garret
represented thoroughly enough that inclination of the human mind
which may be a survival from the rites of the black swamp and the
cave--or an anticipation of a wisdom and knowledge that are to come,
transcending all the science of our day.
Which? It seems to me a vast question, and I am sure it is utterly
insoluble. Of course, an enormous mass of occultism, ancient and
modern, may be brushed aside at once without the labour of any
curious investigation. Madame Blavatsky, for example, her coadjutors
and assessors and successors need not detain us. I do not mean that
every pronouncement of Theosophy is false or fraudulent. A liar is
not to be defined as a man who never by any chance speaks the truth.
A thief occasionally comes honestly by what he has. I mean that
the specific doctrines and circumstances of Theosophy: the Mahatma
stories, the saucers that fell from the ceiling, the vases that were
found mysteriously reposing in empty cupboards, the Messiahship of
a gentleman whose name I choose to forget: all this is rubbish, not
worth a moment’s consideration. And so with Spiritualism; though
in a less degree. For I am strongly inclined to believe that very
odd things do sometimes happen amongst those who “sit,” that some
queer--and probably undesirable--psychic region is entered; and all
this quite beyond and beside the intention or understanding of those
present at the séance. You never know what may happen when a small
boy pokes his fingers carelessly among the wheels and works of a
clock. But as to the profession of the Spiritualists; that they are
able to communicate with ghosts, _that_ need not trouble us. Their
photographs of fairies need not trouble us. Their revelations as to
the life of the world to come as given through the Rev. Vale Owen
need not trouble us. Though here is a “phenomenon” which seems to me
of no little interest. How can a man who is confessedly perfectly
honest and straightforward conjure himself into the belief that when
he takes up a pencil an intelligence apart from himself guides his
hand as he writes? I suppose the answer involves the doctrine of
dual or multiple personality; and _that_ is mysterious enough in all
conscience. Yet, apart from all the nonsense, apart from the state
of mind of the average Spiritualist--one of them, a very eminent
one in his day, said that the clause of the Creed: “I look for the
Resurrection of the Dead” meant “I expect to see some physical
manifestations of the departed”--apart from all this I still think as
I have said that very strange and inexplicable things do sometimes
happen. Here is nothing to do with ghosts: but the evidence that the
famous medium Home rose into the air, floated out of an open window
high on a Scottish castle tower and floated in again at another
open window: the evidence here is good; that is, if levitation,
as they call it, were a criminal offence and Home had been put on
his trial he would have been convicted. It will be seen that I am
not exactly a fanatical Spiritualist: but I had rather be of the
straightest sect of Rappers and Banjo Wielders than of that company
which understands all the whole frame and scheme of the universe
so thoroughly and completely that it is absolutely certain that
levitation is impossible, that a man cannot rise into the air unless
he is mechanically and materially impelled and supported, that no
evidence, however direct and unimpeachable, can establish this for a
fact. I do not understand the universe; consequently I do not dare to
advance any such proposition. And further; let me diminish a little a
proposition that I have only just dared to make. I have said that all
the ghost business, all the Vale Owen sort of business, is rubbish
and foolery. Well, I believe most heartily and profoundly that it
_is_ rubbish, nonsense, unveridical to the last degree; in fact, and
in the proper sense of the word, a lie. Yet; let us beware. Not one
of us understands the universe. Even in the Higher Mathematics, the
Queen of profane sciences, very odd things are reported to happen.
So, possibly, the following account may really correspond with the
truth of things.
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.” There is a
sudden scream of joy in a female voice: “Oh! darling Katy, thank you,
thank you, _thank you_! Oh, _please_, may we have the lights turned
up for a moment? Katy promised me a lock of her beautiful golden
hair, and I am _sure_ I felt it float down on my hand.” The lights
are turned up. A strand of yellow hair is, sure enough, reposing
on the lady’s hand. It had evidently been treated with spiritual
peroxide, made, no doubt, of Ethers, like the ghostly whiskey and
sodas in “Raymond.” Then the room is darkened and the Medium takes up
the tale.
“This spirit’s name is Milton. Henry--no, John Milton, the author of
the ‘Faery Queen.’ He says that he is very happy. He spends most of
his time with Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Shakespeare has confessed
to him that all his plays were written by Bacon. The evidence will be
found in a brass box under the Tube station at Liverpool Street. Pope
often has tea with him. He says they don’t use alcohol there.”
There is a sudden crash. “Avast!” comes with a roar through the
trumpet. _John King_ has returned, bringing with him an _American
Indian_ who speaks in the idiom of a Nigger Minstrel practising in
the East End of London and will call the Medium his “Midi.” Whereupon
Katy puts a beautiful warm arm round the neck of a gentleman
sitter and the gramophone plays “Abide with me.” 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 shall never believe
that it is so.
Well; there I laboured in the Catherine Street garret amidst all
this, and much more than this. Down below were the publishing
offices of old Mr. Vizetelly, who was issuing English translations
of Zola at the time, and was at last sent to gaol for publishing an
English version of “La Terre,” an obscene book that every judicious
Bishop of Central France should put in the hands of newly ordained
priests--if it is to be accepted that the physician ought to have
some knowledge of the constitutions of his patients and of the
diseases from which they are suffering. It was a sumptuous and rich
garret--a street now passes over the site of the house--filled with
that mysterious odour that used to prevail in oldish London houses
that were not too carefully swept and washed and polished, and there
day after day I worked, reading and annotating, and all alone. Now
and then in the older books I came across striking sentences. There
was Oswaldus Crollius, for example--I suppose his real name was
Osvald Kroll--who is quoted by one of the characters in “The Great
God Pan.” “In every grain of wheat,” says Oswaldus, “there lies
hidden the soul of a Star.” A wonderful saying; a declaration, I
suppose, that all matter is one, manifested under many forms; and,
so far as I can gather, modern science is rapidly coming round to
the view of this obscure speculator of the seventeenth century; and,
in fact, to the doctrine of the alchemists. But I would advise any
curious person who desires to investigate this singular chamber of
the human mind to beware of over-thoroughness. Let him dip lightly
from the vellum quarto into the leather duodecimo, glancing at a
chapter here, a sentence there; but let him avoid all deep and
systematic study of Crollius and of Vaughan, the brother of the
Silurist, and of all their tribe. For if you go too far you will be
disenchanted. Open Robert Fludd, otherwise Robertus de Fluctibus,
and find the sentence: _Transmutemini, transmutemini de lapidibus
mortuis in lapides philosophicos vivos_--Be ye changed, be ye changed
from dead stones into living and life-giving stones. This is a
great word indeed, exalted and exultant; but beware of mastering
Fludd’s system--if confusion can be called a system--of muddled
alchemy, physical science, metaphysics and mysticism. Get Knorr von
Rosenroth’s “Kabbala Denudata,” vellum, in quarto, and find out a
little about the Sephiroth: about Kether, the Crown; Tiphereth,
Beauty; Gedulah, Mercy; Geburah, Justice or Severity. Really, you
will discover very curious things, and the more easily, if instead
of Knorr von Rosenroth, you choose A. E. Waite’s “Doctrine and
Literature of the Kabalah.” It is odd, for example, to discover that
the side of Mercy is the masculine side, that Justice or Severity
is feminine; and that all will go amiss till these two are united
in Benignity. Again, it is interesting from another point of view
to discover that three of the Sephiroth are called the Kingdom, the
Victory and the Glory. Is there any connection between these and the
ancient liturgical response to the Pater Noster: “For Thine is the
Kingdom, the Power and the Glory”? And then that matter of Lilith and
Samael and the Shells or Cortices, the husks of spirits from a ruined
world that brought about the Fall of Man; the strange mystery of
that place “which is called Zion and Jerusalem”--duly here comparing
Böhme on the Recovery of Paradise when innocent man and maid are
joined in love--all this is a wonderful and fascinating region of
thought. And beautiful indeed is the saying of one of the Fathers
of Kabbalism: that when the lost Letters of Tetragrammaton, the
Divine Name, are found there shall be mercy on every side. And here,
perhaps, but not certainly, light may be thrown on certain obscure
matters of Freemasonry. Dip then, and read and wander in the Kabbala;
but do not become a Kabbalist. For if you do, you will end by
transliterating your name and the names of your friends into Hebrew
letters and finding out all sorts of marvellous things, till at last
you back Winners--which turn out to be Losers--on purely Kabbalistic
principles.
And here, by the way, I may remark that I have long meditated writing
an article called “The Aryan Kabbala,” keeping the requirements of
occult magazines strictly in view. It would make a pretty article. I
should begin by a brief note on the Hebrew Kabbala, explaining how
the Sephiroth tell in a kind of magic shorthand the whole history and
mystery of man and all the worlds from their source to their end.
The Tree of Life--as the Sephiroth arranged in a certain scheme are
called--is, in fact, I would point out, at once an account of how
all things came into being and a map and an analysis of all things
as they now are. As an occult friend once said to me by my hearth in
Gray’s Inn: “The Tree of Life can be applied to that poker.” The Tree
of Life, then, is a key to the secret generation and being of all
souls and all heavens; it will also analyse for you the little flower
growing in a cranny of the wall.
Well; this made clear, I would go on to say: “But what if there be a
Kabbala and a Tree of Life of the Aryans as well as of the Semites?
What if it tells all the hidden secrets of our beginning and our
journey and our ending? What if its august symbols are known to all
of us, in every-day and common use amongst us, remaining all the
while as undiscerned as the most sacred and mystic hieroglyphics?
What if the office boy and the grocer handle every day the signs
which tell The Secret of Secrets?”
And then, after all due amplifications and ponderous circumnavigations
it would all come out. The Aryan Kabbala is, in fact, the Decad; the
ten first numbers. They embody an age-old tradition dating from the
time when the ancestors of the Greek and the Welshman, the Persian
and the Teuton were all one people. They contained the secret mystery
religion of this primitive race, they sank by degrees from their
first august significance to become instruments of common use and
commercial convenience, just as vestments became clothes. The proof
is easy enough. Take the first number of the Decad: one in English,
ἕν (in the neuter) in Greek, unus in Latin, un (pronounced “een”) in
Welsh, ein in German. And then compare another series of words in
these languages: wine, οἶνος, vinum, gwin, wein. Then: two, δύο, duo,
dau, zwei; and compare with: water, ὕδωρ, udus, wy (and dwr) wasser.
I drop the other terms, or Sephiroth, of the Decad--in Mrs. Boffin’s
presence--and come to the last two numerals: nine, ἐννέα, novem, naw,
neun, compared with new, νέος, novus, newydd, neu. Then finally ten,
δέκα, decem, deg, zehn: compare with deck (bedeck) δόξα, decor, teg,
schön.
The conclusion, I hope, is evident: we (and all things) proceed from
Unity, which is wine, decline to Duality (or a weakened, fallen
nature), which is water. Then, after passing through many changes,
adventures, transformations, transmutations--undescribed for the
reason given--we are renovated, made New--“I will make all things
new”--in the last number but one of the Decad, and, in the final
term, which is Ten, are reunified in Beauty and Glory.
There! It seems to me wonderfully plausible, and I really think I
should have written the article and sent it to some suitable quarter.
It is all nonsense, of course, but ... does that matter?
* * * * *
Well, all that business of the Aryan Kabbala is an absurd digression,
but it illustrates well enough the frame of mind likely to be
induced by the study of a good many of the books in the Catherine
Street garret. Take the interlude and add to it the rich odours of
the frowsy, neglected room stuffed with confusions of old books and
pamphlets, add to it the old, delightful, picturesque London that
was undisturbed in those days. Holywell Street and Wych Street were
all in their glory in 1885, a glory compounded of sixteenth-century
gables, bawdy books and matters congruous therewith, parchment
Elzevirs, dark courts and archways, hidden taverns, and ancient
slumminess. There were no great, blatant Australia Houses or Colonial
Edifices of any kind about the Strand in those times: instead, we
had the beauty and the green lawns of Clement’s Inn and the solemn
square of New Inn, and Clare Market communicating tortuously
with Great Queen Street by the most evil-smelling by-ways that I
have ever experienced--and something of jollity in the air that
seems to me to have vanished utterly. Take all these elements and
things; and you have me as I worked high up in the vanished house in
Catherine Street, preparing the Catalogue that was to be called: “The
Literature of Occultism and Archæology”--when the gas lamps in the
Strand shone with a brighter light than the arc lamps of to-day.
_Chapter II_
Such was the scene of my life in the summer of the year 1885. By my
odd jobs; a little “reading,” a little compiling and a good deal of
catalogue making, I just managed to live, earning perhaps as much
as a pound a week, one week with another. I do not remember exactly
the precise terms on which I worked, but I know that I had a good
deal of time on my hands. Part of this time I spent in trying to
learn shorthand. I can’t think why, for at this period of my life I
had no newspaper or secretarial employment in view. I am inclined to
think that trying to learn shorthand had become a mechanical habit
with me. Then, I resumed my old mooning walks out of London, going
westward usually or always, sometimes Acton way and sometimes through
Brentford--that curious, dirty, and most fascinating place--to
Osterley Park, where in those days you could walk and wander anywhere
you pleased, so long, I suppose, as you did not glue your nose to the
windows of that mansion. And then I fell to writing again.
Now here is a mystery. It is held, and very properly, that people
should keep their mouths shut unless they have something to say;
similarly that a man has no business to write unless he has something
in his heart which, he feels, cries out to be expressed. But here
was I not knowing in the least what I wanted to say, but resolved,
even at the cost of much pain and misery, to say it; that is, to
write it. There are, of course, people who are said to talk for
talking’s sake; and so, I suppose, I was suffering from the analogous
vice of writing for writing’s sake, otherwise known as the _cacoethes
scribendi_. I fancy a volume of Hazlitt had fallen into my hands;
it had strayed, very likely, into the Catherine Street library, and
at first I began to try to write essays, more or less in imitation
of this inimitable author. I need scarcely say that I made sad work
of it; and happily, no scrap of manuscript survives. And then I
fell on Rabelais and on Balzac’s “Contes Drolatiques,” and wondered
and admired hugely and studied both deeply in my long night watches
under the gas-jet in the little room in Clarendon Road. I would dine
sumptuously on half a loaf of dry bread, green tea made as I liked
it, without milk or sugar, with plenty of tobacco by way of dessert;
and then to my books and to my wonder. It was not a bad life on the
whole, sweetened as it was by the enthusiasm for letters; but the
loneliness was an oppression and sometimes a horror. Weeks passed
without any human converse beyond brief business dialogue; still,
since then I have known far worse days. Poverty and loneliness;
these are doubtless evils hard to bear; but they are light indeed;
nay, they have their dignity, and the gas-jet of Clarendon Road is
not altogether without a halo--when I weigh all this and set it in
the balances beside the intolerable degradation of the service of
Carmelite House. I often thought in those latter and most hideous
days that my case was somewhat that of a man who had been captured
by a malignant tribe of anthropoid apes or Yahoos and was by them
tormented and unspeakably degraded; and there was this additional
shame and horror: that my degradation and misery were witnessed by
rational creatures like myself. I remember how in my last year in
the employment of “The Evening News,” I was out on some idiotic
errand which led me up Wellington Street, past York Street, where
George Redway, the publisher of “The Anatomy of Tobacco” and of “The
Literature of Occultism and Archæology,” had his place of business.
In a line, pretty well, with York Street I could see that new street
which runs over the site of old Vizetelly’s office where the famous
fusty garret was. The streets--Wellington Street, Bow Street, York
Street--are not much changed in the last forty years, and the gap
formed by the new street made me see myself a cloudy young man
of twenty-two up in the air labouring amongst the dusty ancient
books; all this and all the recollections of the days of dry bread,
tea, tobacco and the hopeless but not dishonourable endeavour of
literature; all this contrasted with the shameful circumstances of my
life as a weary old man of fifty-eight, a man who had known struggles
and sorrows and losses; all this, I say, overwhelmed me suddenly. It
was almost more than I could endure.
But we go too fast. We are still in the days of the cloudy young man,
who is clear that fine literature is an infinitely noble thing, but
is not clear upon any other subject whatever. I had my queer books
in the mornings and my long lonely walks in the afternoons, and my
great books in the evening and far into the night. I remember reading
Dante in Longfellow’s translation, from beginning to end, and though
I could not by any manner of means lift up my heart and mind to the
mountain-peak of the Paradise, I divined the majesty I could not
comprehend. Don Quixote was always with me, and good company and meat
and drink and lights and fire always to me; and so I pass along the
dim London streets revolving all these mighty works, a ghostly man
amidst the hurrying multitude of the living, and go far afield under
dim trees in the West, or sit solitary on a bench near the river in
Kew Gardens, looking towards Syon; all the while in a lonely but not
an unhappy dream.
It came suddenly to me one night. I was lying awake in my bed; and
then it came to me that I would write a Great Romance. A Great
Romance! I know it is funny; but it is sorry too. I didn’t in the
least know what the said Great Romance was to be about; save this,
that Rabelais was to have something to do with it, and that my own
county, beloved Gwent, was to have much more to do with it. That does
not sound very definite; but I believe it is more definite than the
actual vision which appeared to me, for this was rather a warm and
golden and wonderful glow and radiance than any scheme for a book. I
know I lay happy and trembling for a long time and fell asleep happy
and awoke happy in the morning, and went out forthwith to buy pens
and paper. I had both already, but I felt that the occasion was more
than a special one and called for very special purchases. So, at
the stationer’s shop, near the Holland Park end of Clarendon Road, I
got ruled quarto paper, and “Viaduct” pens, and two penholders, and
I am pleased that I am writing all this with a surviving penholder
of those two; a poor old thing chewed to a stump and battered
grievously in its metallic parts. So here was paper, here was pens
and penholders; and of course the rest was easy.
* * * * *
There was only this little difficulty. The golden and glowing vision
of the night, the announcing of the Great Romance, declined to be
more specific. It had no hints to give, it seemed, as to plot; it
still veiled the subject of this wonderful book in the dimmest, most
religious obscurity. The paper and the pens were ready; but how to
begin writing the first line? I had not the faintest notion, so I
proceeded to write Prologues and Epilogues, with commentaries on
the _magnum opus_ which was not even begun. Two of these oddities
survive, the Dedication to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, as the
Patron of men of letters; a dreadful quip founded on the old saying
about “dining with Duke Humphrey,” which meant that you had not had
any dinner. This was worked out with all elaboration and with an
attempt at the great manner of Bacon in his most magistral mood. It
ran in this vein:
Truly, then, do we poor folk (men of letters) owe what
service we are able to pay Your Grace, who in spite of mean
dress and poverty (justly accounted by Mr. Hobbes for
shame and dishonour) is pleased to entertain us at that
board, where so great a multitude of our brotherhood has
feasted before. For your illustrious line hath now for many
generations made it a peculiar glory to supply the needs
of lettered men; and as we sit at meat it seems (methinks)
as if these mighty men of old did sit beside us and taste
with us once more the mingled cup we drink. The ingenious
author of Don Quixote de la Mancha must, I suppose, have
often dined with the Duke of his age, Mr. Peter Corneille
and Mr. Otway, Senhor Camoens, Rare Old Ben, Signori Tasso
and Ariosto not seldom: while young Mr. Chatterton the poet
did not only dine, but break his fast, take his morning
draught, and sup with Your Grace’s great-grandfather, till
at last he died of a mere repletion.
There! Very solemn and portentous fun, indeed; but what is so solemn
as a youngster of twenty-two? Canterbury Cathedral and Westminster
Abbey seem gay and light and airy by comparison. _I_ like it still,
to be sure; but then I am prejudiced, and indeed, there is one
sentence that still affects me; that phrase about “the mighty men
of old” who seem “to sit beside us and taste with us once more the
mingled cup we drink.” For in that sentence I see something of the
spirit which sustained me, the cloudy young man, the dreamy and
obscure and inarticulate young man, of those long-ago days, all
through the fire and the darkness of poverty and loneliness and
weariness and disillusion. Let us still, if you please, ride the
high horse and be as magnificent as we can: I saw myself and, to be
frank, I still see myself, as the youngest novice in a great and
noble monastic house. The novice is by no means a promising member
of the congregation, the Abbot and the Prior and the Master of the
Novices have the gravest doubts as to his vocation: the other novices
are inclined to indulge in remarks of a jocular and contemptuous
kind. But the little, obscure and despised candidate for the triple
cord sits in his low place at the board and looks at the pictures
on the walls: on the faces where torment and exultation shine with
twin fires: on Blessed Bernardus a Baculo, who was beaten to death
by the Danes in the ninth century, on the Venerable Servant of
God, Marcellinus, who was impaled by the Turk, on St. Eugenius de
Compostella, who was shut by the Moors in a horrible dungeon of filth
for forty years and at last his visage shone and gave light to the
tormentors when they came to end him, on Venerable Raymondus Anglus,
who was slowly sliced into little pieces in Cathay, on Blessed
Gregory Perrot, whom the ministers of the Virgin Queen attended to
at Tyburn in 1590: on all these brilliant successes of the convent
does the little novice gaze with admiring wonder. Well he knows
that his picture will never hang on the wall; still, and after all,
he is a member of the congregation to which these, the lucky and
happy, belonged; in a faint sort they are his brothers; they are
_commensales, cohæredes, et sodales_.
Very fine, indeed; but in the meantime I am scratching with
a somewhat hopeless pen under Clarendon Road gaslight, taking
difficulties for solution to lonely places such as Perivale, to the
unfrequented parts of Hampton Court; or else, by contrast, to the
long black High Street of Brentford, with its creeks and backwaters
of the river, where grass and flowers grow on the decks of derelict
barges. I find no oracles to help me in any of these promising
quarters; there are some very sad nights in the little room over
the dry bread, tea and tobacco and the helpless pen. Finally, in a
kind of despair, I begin something of which the first scene is to be
laid in Gwent, which, later, is to have a voyage in it--there is a
great voyage in Rabelais to the Oracle of the Holy Bottle. I read the
first chapter. It is quite hopeless; and yet I do not give up hope; I
resolve to try again.
* * * * *
But all this time, while the Great Romance refused to move, my
worldly affairs were moving fast, and decidedly in the way of
destruction. I suppose, having finished the Catalogue, I had done
all that the publisher wanted of me. At all events, the stream of
employment, never auriferous to any great extent, dwindled and dried
up. I had a little, a very little money in hand, I could not possibly
call on those poor people at home for help; my landlady in Clarendon
Road had a hard struggle of it, I fancy, and I would not cadge on
her kindness, even though my board and lodging were far from being
luxurious. It seemed to me that at the end of the week I must just
walk out of 23 Clarendon Road and go on walking towards the West
till I couldn’t walk any longer. I admit that the plan was vague,
as vague as the plot of the Great Romance, but I could think of no
other. And in the meantime--I had three or four days before me--I
would write the Epilogue for my book: which was not yet begun.
I set about this task with the utmost relish and enjoyment. For once,
I knew what to write about; that was my own position; not in a plain
and literal manner, but after the fashion of a decorated fantasy.
It would never do to say: “Here am I, a stupid lad who is not worth
twopence to anybody, who thinks he can write and can hardly get half
a dozen words to stagger on the paper; here am I going out to die in
a ditch or to live in a ward of the workhouse”: that would never have
served. I agree with Mr. Sampson Brass in holding that the truth is
often highly unpleasant and inconvenient. Hence the Epilogue to the
unwritten book, which survives in the written book, “The Chronicle
of Clemendy,” a work which is neither great nor a romance, but which
answers the description admirably in all other respects. And as the
Dedication was made to Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, so the Epilogue
is concerned with the same nobleman. So here we are:
A few days ago His Grace did take me aside into his
cabinet, and looking kindly upon me (though some call him
a stern and awful noble) said: “Why, Master Leolinus, you
look but sickly, poor gentleman, poor gentleman, I protest
you’re but a shadow, do not your Abbreviatures bring you
in a goodly revenue?” (Note the elegant reference to my
mysterious shorthand.) “Not so, Your Grace,” answered I,
“to the present time I have abbreviated all in vain, and
were it not for the hospitality of your table, I know not
how I should win through.” “How goes it then with your
Silurian Histories?” (The Great Romance.) ... “With them,
may it please Your Grace, it fares excellently well, and
this morning I have made an end of writing the First
Journey, containing many agreeable histories and choice
discourses.” “I believe indeed it will be a rare book, fit
to read to the monks of Tintern while they dine. But yet I
will have you lay it aside a little, since I have a good
piece of preferment for you, an office (or I mistake you)
altogether to your taste. What say you, Master Scholar, to
the Lordship of an Island and no less an Island than Farre
Joyaunce in the Western Seas? How stand you thitherwards?
Will you take ship presently?” At hearing this, I was, as
you may guess, half bewildered with sudden joy, that is apt
to bring tears into the eyes of them that have toiled in
many a weary struggle with adversity: I could but kneel and
kiss His Grace’s hand, and say “My Lord.”
Of course, the allusions to “First Journeys” and “Silurian Histories”
were put in months later, when I had at length found out what my book
was about; at the time, October, 1885, I had not written one word of
it. So the Epilogue went on its mellifluous way, and thus ended:
But here is my Paumier, with his parchments, to advise with
me concerning a grant of Water Baylage to the Abbey of St.
Michael, and also concerning the ceremonies observed in the
island at Christmastide. He tells me that the voyage will
surely be a rough and tempestuous one, but with the captain
of the _Salutation_ there need be no fear. And so farewell,
till the anchor be dropped in the Sure Haven of Farre
Joyaunce.
And indeed, as I was writing the last page of the Epilogue, a letter
came for me. I had written to Mr. Quaritch, stating my experience
in cataloguing, and asking for employment. Mr. Quaritch wrote very
civilly stating that he did not want any cataloguers, but people
who knew how to sell books. And I wrote on to my final flourish,
with all the more relish. “Ceremonies observed in the island at
Christmastide,” indeed! Ceremonies observed at Reading Workhouse,
more likely!
But the next morning came a letter from Aunt Maria, that Maria who
had walked with Anne to meet John on the white Caerleon road. My
mother was dying; and they sent me the money for the fare, that I
might come home.
_Chapter III_