employment of these good men. I went into the country, up on the
Children Hills. We neither saw nor heard anything of each other. But
all the while those legacies of which I have spoken came dropping
slow, and in 1893, when I had made up my mind to return to London,
I think I must have had in bank something between three and four
thousand pounds. I was assailed by an unworthy pang of prudence, by
one of the foolish notions that the world’s people take for wisdom.
It struck me that this living on capital, taking the pieces of eight
by fistfuls out of the chest, would never do; that the money ought to
be invested, preferably in some business in which I could contribute
work as well as money. I looked about me, I advertised, I saw some
people in the City and found nothing promising from my point of view,
though I found here and there such curiosities as London, I believe,
only affords. For example, in a very dim sort of cock-loft in an
old house in the heart of the City, I hit upon a firm of general
agents who had answered my advertisement. There were two of them:
one, a young, rosy, out-in-the-open sort of man, the other elderly,
frock-coated, with a kind of dissenting beard on his chin. He talked
of the version of Horace’s odes that he was shortly bringing out at
his own expense, and discussed with me the true pronunciation of the
Latin language with much intelligence. The junior partner’s talk was
of trawling, and indeed he said that the firm was a sort of trawling
concern--in City waters.
But nothing came of it, and at last I bethought me of the Brothers.
Brother Charles was as genial as ever. He saw my point. He said: “We
are going to issue Casanova at last; why not put a thousand pounds
into that for a start?” I agreed, and the matter was settled. And
then, very nervously, with a good deal of hesitation, with a certain
difficulty in the choice of words, Brother Charles said:
“Of course, Mr. Machen, we quite recognise the ... er ...
circumstances in which you made your most admirable translation
of the book. It was ... er ... in a manner ... er ... task-work;
yes, _task-work_. Well ... the case is now, to a certain degree ...
altered; you have an interest in the prosperity of the venture, and,
in short, we rather wondered whether you would like to ... to ...
_revise_ your manuscript.”
“Mr. Charles,” I replied, “I did the job as well as I could; and I
don’t think I can make it any better.”
_Chapter VII_
Beroalde de Verville proved to be what the elder members of the
theatrical profession used to call “a pill.” Only the other day I
was reading a French account of this author. The critic said in the
course of his remarks that many people who had gone to the “Moyen
de Parvenir” in search of unpleasantness had turned back from the
quest, deterred by the difficulty of the language. And I don’t
know that it is more difficult for a modern Frenchman than for an
Englishman. It is written in a sort of Babylonish dialect which is
not exactly French though it looks like it; as Meredith looks like
English to the casual glance. And then, it is not only difficult,
but obscure; not only are the sentences queerly constructed, but the
subject-matter is of a highly dubious and cloudy character: when you
have found out what Beroalde is saying, you begin to wonder what he
is saying it about. And, then, there are bits of old dialect peppered
about this excessively odd volume. I remember coming upon two words:
“iquent hesne.” I sat down in front of them, and looked at them
from every angle. I don’t know how I found out at last that “iquent
hesne” was a sort of seventeenth-century French “Zummerzet” for
“cette chêne”--“thicky oāk.” Again the “Moyen” is thick with puns,
of the kind that used to be called in the golden days of Burlesque
“outrageous”: and the time I wasted in trying to turn these silly
French tricks into sillier English contortions! On the whole, I would
say that “Le Moyen de Parvenir” in literature is as a cathedral
constructed entirely of gargoyles would be in architecture. Rabelais
is full of gargoyles, “apes and owls and antics,” as he calls them,
on the outside of the jar. But within, as he rightly claims, there
are precious medicines, aromatic balms of singular power and virtue.
And so far as I can judge, Beroalde is all oddity and nothing else.
He cost me a year’s hard labour; the version was issued and is now
valued by collectors; and that is all that need be said.
And now--in 1890--I began to try a little journalism of the more or
less literary kind. I began, I think, by writing “Turnovers” for the
“Globe,” and miscellaneous articles for the “St. James’s Gazette,”
and at length stories for the latter paper, which was then edited by
Mr.--now Sir--Sydney Lowe. The “Globe” is extinct, the “St. James’s
Gazette” is merged and submerged in the “Evening Standard”; there
are no papers of such metal now in existence. The difference between
them and the evening papers of the day is a very simple one: the
former were meant to please the educated, the latter are designed to
entertain the uneducated, and the uneducated may be equated, very
largely indeed, with women. It is an odd paradox: there is no doubt,
I suppose, that the instruction--or, if you like, education--of women
has made immense strides in the last thirty years; and yet it is true
that when a newspaper editor says to himself: “We have an immense
number of women readers and we must see that they get what they
like,” the result is drivel. This sort of thing:
Madame has just discovered a new craze. Jewelled clay
pipes and shag tobacco delicately sprinkled with gold-dust
are now quite _démodés_ when once we cross the borders of
Balham; but my lady prides herself on her collection of
hookahs, the water-pipes of the gorgeous East.
It is quite the thing, I hear, amongst really smart women
to give “Hookah Teas.” Everybody wears Oriental costume,
and sits on cushions piled on the floor, and delicately
draws in the aroma of the rarest Turkish Tobacco, scented
by its passage through rosewater or lavender-water. At Lady
Clarinda Belsize’s Hookah Tea last Wednesday, two native
musicians played the tom-tom and the _guzla_ behind a
curtain, or _purdah_, as I am told it is called. Of course
_yashmaks_ were worn by all the guests.
There; it is not worth parodying. And there is another sort of
terrible tosh which deals with the doings of “The Summer Girl” and
“The Winter Girl” and “The Marathon Girl”: all of it a very feeble
imitation of the cheapest American journalism. In the ’nineties
this kind of thing existed, but it was confined to the columns of
one or two ladies’ papers. In those days, I would not say that the
editors of evening papers brought out their journals exclusively for
the benefit of the members of the best clubs of St. James’s and
Pall Mall; but I certainly should say that they had the clubs in
their mind’s eye; that they presumed a certain standard of education
and culture in their readers. All that ended when the evening
“Westminster Gazette” came to an end.
But indeed there would be little harm done if a column or two
columns or three columns were reserved for the “Hookah Tea” stuff
and the “Caravan Girl” stuff and all similar stuff. You could skip
these columns if you didn’t like them, just as I skip the racing
columns, in which I am not interested. But “the women” rule the whole
paper. Not only must the editor put in matter which he knows they
will like, he must keep out matter which he knows they won’t like.
And the result is ... the result as we know it. As the “literary
editor” of a big London paper acutely observed to me not long ago,
the case of the newspaper article is exactly as the case of chops
and steaks, beefsteak puddings and saddles of mutton that were of
old. “The women” have spoilt all. What do they know or care about
man’s food? To them there is nothing to choose between a chop fried
white and hard and greasy in the frying-pan and a chop which has
been purged of all excess by the ardent heat, beneath the gridiron,
which beneath a coat half black, half golden-brown, preserves its
delicious juices, which sizzles on the plate as William or Charles
serves it, which, opened by the eager knife, shews within a hue like
that of a blush-rose in June. These are not matters to enchant the
wayward heart of a young girl, and when once she sets foot inside
the tavern coffee-room, farewell to all such solid merits. There was
once a noble tavern called Herbert’s, famous for two generations. Men
who had spent half a lifetime in Africa or India or in the islands
of the South Seas were sustained by the thought of the beefsteak
pudding at Herbert’s. The times changed and the old tavern with them.
Going there in these later days, I used to wonder why all the meats
seemed to taste alike, why there was no distinctive and peculiar
relish about any of the dishes. I found out the reason why one day.
I had business, oddly enough, in Herbert’s kitchen. One of the cooks
shewed 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.
One night I was dining there, and a member of the party asked the
waiter to bring him some Stilton. “I beg your pardon, sir,” said the
man, “we only have _English_ cheeses.” It sounds impossible; but I
heard this with my ears. In the old days Herbert’s was exclusively
masculine in its custom; I do not know what would have happened to
that waiter then. I hardly think that his death would have been an
easy one.
But to “the women” all this is of no account. They know nothing about
man’s food, as I say, and they care less. I do not blame them; I do
not blame myself for being ignorant of the difference between Hopsac
and Gaberdine: but how would _they_ like it if I poked my nose into
their Oxford Street shops and insisted on these shops being carried
on to suit my taste?
So through this monstrous incursion of women, with the war and the
nursery hours of to-day, the old tavern life has gone; utterly and
for ever, I am afraid. A good thing has gone. The old mahogany boxes
with bright brass work and green curtains, the light twinkling in the
dark polished surfaces that were all about the room, the flaming fire
with the plates warming by it, the plain food, the best of its kind,
cooked in the best possible manner, the mighty tankards of mighty
ale, the port that _was_ port afterwards, in itself a great gift
and a curious grace, and later--say about eleven o’clock--Charles
appearing with a large china bowl and a bottle under his arm,
following up these things with lump sugar, lemons, and the hot water:
it is all over. And it is not only the good material things that have
been taken away: the good meats and the good drinks, the glowing
mahogany and the cheerful blaze and crackle of the fire: with them
has gone, I suspect, a certain genial habit of the mind and soul
which was congruous with all the circumstances of the old-fashioned
tavern, which was congruous also with good men and good books and
choice poetry, with all the rich zest and relish and unction which
made the Victorian age of letters a great age; and, in its measure,
a worthy successor to three other illustrious tavern ages: the
Shakespearian, the Caroline, and the Johnsonian. Think of Falstaff
and his tavern bill and his warning against thin potations, think of
Herrick and his address to Ben, his fond remembrance of the taverns
“where we such clusters had as made us nobly wild not mad,” think
of Johnson squeezing the orange into the bowl with antick gestures,
saying “Who’s for _poonsh_?” think of Tennyson and that blest pint of
port at the vanished Cock Tavern, think of Dickens, that great lover
of tavern feasts and immortaliser of them: think of all this, my poor
young man, and beat your breast. There are no jolly taverns for you,
and your favourite authors do not write like men--“my son Cartwright
writes all like a man,” said Ben Jonson--but like psycho-analytical
chemists.
And as I was saying, as with the taverns, so with the papers. When
I wrote a little for them, in 1890 or thereabouts, it was allowable
to assume a certain amount of literacy, a certain knowledge in
the reader. Now that is over. I know the case of a man who, I am
certain, pretends ignorance that he may continue to be employed. As
it happens, he is an expert in food and drink; but I have known him
number Beaujolais with the wines of Bordeaux in a newspaper article,
and speak of curry powder and pickles as ordinary ingredients in veal
and ham pie. I believe he knows much better; but he has probably
found out that a misstatement or two gives an easy careless air that
is much admired. Nobody can call a writer of this kind a pedant. A
highly accomplished journalist said to me a few years ago: “Always
remember that we appeal, not to the cabman, but to the cabman’s
wife.” And another instance, though I am afraid it is somewhat tinged
with self-praise. I had written a brief article for the “Evening
News” on a topic that had been given to me; I was to explain _why_
it is that a “mean street” of to-day is, generally, hideous and
appalling, while a row of sixteenth-century cottages is, generally,
a delight to see. I did as I always do when I can, I took the
particular instance and placed it under a general principle. I said
the chief horror of the modern street was not to be sought in the
poverty of the design, though that was, doubtless, bad enough, but
in the fact that in the street of to-day each house is a replica of
the other, so that the effect to the eye is, if the street be long
enough, the prolongation of one house to infinity, in an endless
series of repetitions. And I pointed out that even if you admired
some particular picture or statue immensely, it would be rather awful
to traverse a long gallery in which the picture or the statue were
repeated again and again as far as the eye could see. And then, on
the other hand, I shewed how the sixteenth-century cottages were
each of them individuals, each with some slight difference from
the cottage next door, each with its variety in door or window or
pent-house. And hence, I urged, a continual slight surprise to the
beholder, and taking the supposed row as a whole, that strangeness in
the proportion which Bacon declared, most profoundly, to be necessary
to the highest beauty. Well, I got this with difficulty into the
prescribed 500 words--“nobody will read anything over 500 words”--and
said to myself: “Now that Patmore is dead, nobody else could have
written that article. But ... there will be a row.” There was. Lord
Northcliffe gave the little essay the honour of a special mention
in one of his famous _communiqués_--as I believe they were called.
He spoke of it with venom as “a wiseacre article.” I am sure he was
perfectly right from his point of view. The fault was mine. “When I
am in Rome, I fast on Saturdays,” said one of the Fathers.
Things have changed indeed. I was mentioning Coventry Patmore. In the
Introduction to the “Religio Poetæ,” a collection of short essays of
the profoundest wisdom, he acknowledges his obligations to Greenwood,
once editor of the “St. James’s Gazette.” Some of these essays had
appeared in that journal: the fact is quite stupefying considered in
the light of the journalism of to-day. Education increases; ignorance
grows deeper.
* * * * *
Let me not be understood as claiming that my newspaper work of
thirty-two years ago was characterised by the profoundest wisdom.
Very far from it; my articles were harmless and agreeable enough, I
think, in a small way; and writing them, I first began to get a hint
of my true subject; the country of my childhood and my youth. And I
thus began to move away from the exotic Rabelaisian influence, both
as to manner and to matter: to perceive that not the splendid Loire
but the humble Soar brook, winding and shining in deep valleys and
obscured by dark alder thickets, was my native stream. I began to
see that I was a citizen of Caerleon-on-Usk, and not of Tours or of
Chinon, and that the old grey manor-houses and the white farms of
Gwent had their beauty and significance, though they were not castles
in Touraine. There was something of all this, of course, in “The
Chronicle of Clemendy,” the Great Romance which was neither great nor
a romance; but in this everything was viewed and everything expressed
in an exotic medium: now I saw that a blossoming thorn bush in the
valley of the Soar and the nightingale singing in it and the river
level about Caerleon and the red fires of sunset over the mountain in
the west were all in themselves and by themselves fit matter for the
work; that they needed not to be disguised in a French literary habit
of four hundred years ago.
It was in this summer of 1890 that I wrote the first chapter of “The
Great God Pan.” I have told the whole story in the Introduction to
the latest edition of that fantasy, which is published by Messrs.
Simpkin, Marshall, and whether I should weary my readers I know
not, but I do know that I should weary myself if I told it all over
again. The tale was written in bits, in the intervals between severe
literary cramps, as I have mentioned in this present volume, and it
was published by Mr. John Lane, of the Bodley Head, at the end of
1894, when yellow bookery was at its yellowest. And it aroused a
certain amount of attention. There was a storm--in a doll’s teacup.
The other day a friend of mine said genially to me:
“I have just been reading that ‘Great God Pan’ of yours
over again, and I really don’t see that there’s much in it
to make a sensation of.”
I am sure he was quite right. But a sensation there was, of a minor
kind. It had some mysterious property in it, this little book, which
caused good men to froth at the mouth, greatly to my delight. I have
quoted a good many of the reviews in the Introduction to the Simpkin,
Marshall edition: things like this:
“We are afraid he only succeeds in being ridiculous. The
book is, on the whole, the most acutely and intentionally
disagreeable we have yet seen in English. We could say
more, but refrain from doing so for fear of giving such a
work advertisement.”--“Manchester Guardian.”
“This book is gruesome, ghastly, and dull ... the majority
of readers will turn from it in utter disgust.”--“Lady’s
Pictorial.”
“These tricks have also their ludicrous side.”--“Guardian.”
And so forth. It is very well, but I cannot help saying, as an old
craftsman and an old reviewer, that it might have been better. I
have no fault to find with the technique of the “Guardian”; but
the “Lady’s Pictorial” should have left out the “gruesome” and
the “ghastly” and also, I am inclined to think, the “disgust.”
There are readers who like the gruesome and the ghastly; there are
readers whose curiosity is stimulated by the term “disgust.” I am
afraid, for example, that if the account of legal proceedings, civil
or criminal, is headed “Disgusting Details,” there are minds so
prurient as to be rather attracted than repelled, and I am sure that
the gentle scribe of the “Lady’s Pictorial” did not wish to paint
my little book in attractive colours. And so with the “Manchester
Guardian.” “Ridiculous” is admirable; but “acutely and intentionally
disagreeable” is something of a signal set to attract those prurient
readers whose existence I have regretted; and the last sentence
says too much. Mr. Harry Quilter, something of a figure in those
days, did better. He pointed out in an article in the “Contemporary
Review”--also something of a figure in those days--that the only
explanation he could give of such favourable notices as the book
had received was that the author must have a great many friends
engaged in journalism. I wrote a temperate letter to Mr. Quilter in
which I said I was very sorry, but I didn’t know any journalists at
all--which happened to be the truth. He wrote back to remind me, as
he said, that there was “an Inmost Light to which you may yet be
true”--“The Inmost Light” is the title of a tale which was included
in the first edition of “The Great God Pan.”
--One of the saddest books in the world is Mrs. Gaskell’s wonderful
“Life of Charlotte Brontë.” But there is one tragi-comical touch.
Poor valiant, simple, stricken Charlotte was being entertained in
town by Mr. and Mrs. Smith. There was a dinner-party, given, I
suppose, in her honour, and she writes to an old friend:
“There were only seven gentlemen at dinner besides Mr. Smith, but of
these five were critics--men more dreaded in the world of letters
than you can conceive. I did not know how much their presence and
conversation had excited me till they were gone, and the reaction
commenced. When I had retired for the night, I wished to sleep--the
effort to do so was vain. I could not close my eyes. Night passed;
morning came, and I rose without having known a moment’s slumber.”
Who were these terrible five? We do not know, and it is possible
enough that if we heard their names we should not have heard of their
names, though, likely enough, George Henry Lewes was one of them. It
is odd and pathetic too to think that a great woman such as Charlotte
Brontë should have allowed the brilliant repartees and tremendous
reputation of George Henry Lewes to break her rest. And just before
this passage there is another, as strange and as pathetic. A severe
review of “Shirley” appeared in “The Times.” Mr. and Mrs. Smith
kindly “mislaid” the paper. But Charlotte insisted on pressing the
thorn to her bosom. She would see “The Times.”
“Mrs. Smith took her work, and tried not to observe the
countenance, which the other tried to hide between the huge
sheets; but she could not help becoming aware of tears
stealing down the face and dropping on the lap.”
And all over a review, an unfavourable review! It is very strange,
or, at least, it seems so to me, since, like Jim the nigger, I don’t
never cry ska’sely over reviews, and I have always contrived to get
my usual sleep.
But I have left out one curious specimen of the “Great God Pan”
reviews, a specimen which leads up to a curious passage. The
“Westminster Review” said:
“It is an incoherent nightmare of sex and the supposed
horrible mysteries behind it, such as might conceivably
possess a man who was given to a morbid brooding over
these matters, but which would soon lead to insanity if
unrestrained ... innocuous from its absurdity.”
I was talking over old literary doings and the affairs of the
’nineties with a friend one day in the spring of 1921. My friend was
asking me about my early books and their reception. I gave him a
lurid account of the castigations which I had received on account of
“The Great God Pan.”
“Why,” said I, “the ‘Westminster’ practically told me that if I
didn’t take care I should end up in a lunatic asylum.”
“Well,” replied the man, meaning to be funny, “haven’t you? I
understood you were at Carmelite House?”
“No,” I returned, also meaning to be funny, “I haven’t. All the
lunatic asylums that I’ve heard of have been managed by a _doctor_.”
* * * * *
During the latter part of my stay in the country (1891–93) I wrote
two books. I have forgotten the names of both of them. They were very
bad, and I tore them up, with the exception of one episode--to put it
mildly, not a very good story--which appears in “The Three Impostors”
under the title of “The Novel of the Dark Valley.” And it was in the
early spring of 1894 that I set about the writing of the said “Three
Impostors,” a book which testifies to the vast respect I entertained
for the fantastic, “New Arabian Nights” manner of R. L. Stevenson,
to those curious researches in the by-ways of London which I have
described already, and also, I hope, to a certain originality of
experiment in the tale of terror, as exemplified in the stories of
the Professor who was taken by the fairies, and of the young student
of law who swallowed the White Powder. And when I had finished, with
a sort of recognition that I had squeezed this particular orange to
death, I remember saying to my old friend A. E. Waite: “I shall never
give anybody a White Powder again.” And then I was immediately called
on to do that very thing which I had vowed I would not do. I actually
got an “order,” and--this shews that I was a mere intruder, not a
true craftsman--I have rarely been so miserable, miserable that is,
as a man of letters, in my life.