a storm in a Tiny Tot’s teacup. And about the same time, a young
gentleman named H. G. Wells had made a very real, and a most deserved
sensation with a book called “The Time Machine”; a book indeed. And a
new weekly paper was projected by Mr. Raven Hill and Mr. Girdlestone,
a paper that was to be called “The Unicorn.” And both Mr. Wells and
myself were asked to contribute; I was to do a series of horror
stories. I won’t deny that I swelled a little and was cheered and
elated by the fact of my being asked to write by anybody; nay, I
really tried my best to feel important and puffed up. And then I
set about writing that series of tales of horror. I was not puffed
up for long. As I say, I had realised that for me the Stevensonian
manner was ended. And now I was to begin all over again; to recook
that cabbage which was already boiled to death! I wrote four stories
in a kind of agony, my pen shrieking “rubbish!” at me with every
stroke. I remember literally sobbing in a kind of hysteria of despair
with my head on my hands; and this shews that there are some men
who cannot be helped. The only thing that got me through at all
was an endeavour to transplant the manner of Apuleius into English
soil; but the four tales were sorry things when all was said. I
was glad when “The Unicorn” ceased to exist after two or three
numbers, before a single one of those tales of mine had appeared in
it. Mr. Wells had one story in “The Unicorn,” “The Cone,” which he
reprinted in the collection called “The Country of the Blind.” Such
was the affair, and I think it explains the irritation which I have
always experienced when I have been asked to write a continuation
of “The Three Impostors,” or something in the manner of “The Three
Impostors.” I knew that all this was done and ended; that, for me,
the vein was worked out and exhausted: utterly. I shall always recur
to the metaphor of the white road that you see from afar climbing
over the hill into unconjectured regions. For me that is literature;
the journey of discovery; the finding of a new world. When once I
have toiled painfully up that long road, and have stood on the other
side of the dark wood, and have looked upon the land beyond; then
all the joy, all the delight and thrill and wonder are over for me.
Columbus could not discover America twice. I never can say to myself:
“Look here! Let’s pretend that we’ve never been this way before,
that we don’t know in the least what’s beyond that turn of the road,
that anything may happen beyond that pine tree.” It won’t do.
And that is one reason why I beg my bread in my sixtieth year.
For, all that I have written on this matter is, doubtless, very
fine; but we must confess that when it is a case of literature being
exchanged for the money of the publisher--and the public--the affair
becomes a commercial one. And, in business, you buy a brand. Let me
try to imagine it! I am a wealthy man, and I have found and my guests
have found that last hamper of Champagne admirable. I go to my wine
merchant and order another hamper of the same vintage. Nay, he has
not got it; he will be happy to supply me with a wine of entirely
different character; or, to press the analogy a little extravagantly,
he no longer deals in Champagne at all, he doesn’t think much of
Champagne, it is an elegant lemonade, as one of Murger’s characters
expresses it, but he will be delighted to send me six dozen of a rare
Château wine of Bordeaux, an infinitely finer wine, as he assures me.
But I want Champagne! I am not going to stand such treatment for one
moment! The man must be mad! _De me fabula narratur_; all my life I
have been pressing my Bordeaux on people who had begun to think that
there might be something to be said for my small Champagne.
And I quite see the point. I have never read one of the horror
stories of Mr. W. W. Jacobs, though I am told that they are
admirable. For me, Mr. Jacobs must speak through an everlasting
Night Watchman, through an eternal countryman draining the last dregs
of his beer on the settle at the _Cauliflower_: with these immortals
I am happy.
“The Three Impostors” was published by John Lane some time in 1895.
But before sending the manuscript to Mr. Lane, I had tried Mr.
Heinemann. The firm wrote me a most delightful letter, full of the
most charming things, which I had some difficulty in swallowing,
though an author’s throat is capable of astounding feats where
praise is concerned. I was to go and see them, and I did so, my
heart beating high. I saw a member of the firm. He was better than
the letter for a swelling soul. He read extracts from the reader’s
report, and these were more splendid still. He outlined delightful
terms; he pressed on me the necessity of my having something on
account of royalties in advance: a happy possibility that had not
even dawned on me in 1894–95. He hoped that the House of Heinemann
might ever have the privilege of publishing my beautiful books.
“Better than the best of Stevenson”; thus he read from the optimistic
reader’s report. Thus elated, glorious, happy indeed, went down
Mr. Arthur Machen, man of letters--now there could be no doubt of
it!--from the amiable office, even into Bedford Street, seen for the
first time to be a shining thoroughfare, a veritable golden pathway
of Paradise, leading to the golden Strand, nay, to the golden world,
where all desires were accomplished, and the faithful servant is
rewarded: “Enter thou into the joy of thy Publisher.”
After all, I said to myself, the old toils, the old labours, those
unhappy nights, those sick days of despair were not altogether
wasted. Indeed, I tried to do my best; indeed, I grudged no labour;
indeed, I was patient and tore up the sorry page; I knew that I must
persevere and still persevere. And I knew that the other books were
well meant but futile after all; that I had not really touched the
mark, though I pretended that I had, and did my best to persuade
myself that it was so. But now; “I have really written something that
is good, that is, even, very good; that one of the best publishers in
London praises and praises highly.” I never thought of the money that
all this must mean, that never entered a moment into my mind; my only
meditation was that for fifteen years I had done all I could do, and
that now I was to enter into my reward. O golden Strand, that day,
golden Great Russell Street when I came home to tell my news, golden
happy world which rewards at last all humble faithful endeavour:
golden world inhabited by good men, by publishers of all men most
good.
It was a pure matter of form; the waiting for the agreement, a matter
of a week or so, as the kind gentlemen in the office informed me. And
in three weeks, somewhere about the middle of January, 1895, came
the MS. of “The Three Impostors” back to me, with a formal, printed
slip from the House of Heinemann, regretting that it was unable to
accept the enclosed manuscript. Well does A. E. Waite declare that
there is an element of waggery in the constitution of the universe.
Never did the proud policeman in the old pantomime, foiled by the
buttered slide of the clown, come down with a thump so boisterously
undignified. So, rolling in the mud, I lay sprawling, my legs in the
air. I was silly enough to write a somewhat exasperated letter to
my friend in the office. He answered me in a befitting manner, in a
tone of grave rebuke: he said that if I had realised the cares of the
publisher’s life I would not have written “so caustically.”
_Chapter VIII_
“The Three Impostors” came back then from Messrs. Heinemann, and
as soon as I got over the little bump I have just mentioned, I
thought that I would try to make the book a bit better. One of the
“novels” or introduced tales displeased me, so I am sure it must have
been very bad indeed. I am not certain, but I think it was about
a benevolent City man, of considerable means, who occupied an old
red brick house somewhere at the back of Acton and occasionally, I
suppose at the full moon, turned into a were-wolf. I can see nothing
against the plot; and I believe there is a considerable body of
unimpeachable evidence in favour of the hypothesis that the human
consciousness is occasionally displaced by the bestial consciousness:
the Malays, for instance, are apt at times to fancy themselves
wild cats and to behave accordingly. But, somehow, it wouldn’t do.
The transformation of the City man was highly unsatisfactory and
unconvincing: so I tore up the tale, and wrote instead of it the
surprising narrative of Professor Gregg and his disastrous search for
the fairies among the hills of my native country. In the machinery
of the story I introduced a hypothesis that was then new; I think I
read of it in some paper written by Sir Oliver Lodge. The theory was,
that when the lights are low, or turned out, at the spiritualist
séance, and objects are found, when the lights go up, to have been
brought from all quarters of the room and laid in the centre of the
table; or when the people sitting in the dark round the table hear
the piano near the door being played, the theory was that these
marvels are not necessarily due to the presence and intervention of
ghosts. I believe that it was the case of Eusapia Palladino that was
engaging Sir Oliver Lodge’s attention just then; and he advanced the
striking hypothesis that the piano was played and the objects fetched
from the sideboard by a kind of extension of the medium’s body. I
forget whether the distinguished Professor used the instance; but
I know that the impression conveyed to my mind was that something
happened similar to the protrusion and withdrawal of a snail’s horns:
Eusapia’s arm became twice or thrice its usual length, performed the
required feat whatever it was, and then shrank again to its normal
size. This hypothesis was novel in those days; now it is widely known
and credited amongst spiritualists. They have found a name for the
mysterious substance which projects itself from the medium’s body: it
is called ectoplasm. In all probability the whole theory is a pack of
nonsense, and the “phenomena” are the tricks of clever cheats: still,
what do we know? At all events, I worked it all into my fairy tale,
mixing up the old view that the fairy tales, the stories of Little
People, are in fact traditions of the aborigines of these islands,
small, dark men who took refuge under the hills from the invading
Celt with this view of the capacities of the human body, and my
view, still newer, that the fairies may still be found under the
hills, and that they are far from being pleasant little people. That
was the recipe for the tale, and I give it in spite of a friendly
rebuke I once received from poor H. B. Irving. He was talking to me
about the Introduction I had written to “The Great God Pan.”
“You shouldn’t have done it,” he said. “You destroy the illusion.
Never take people behind the scenes. I never do.”
But it really doesn’t matter. And, further, I have a suspicion that
it is often much more interesting “behind” than “in front.” I have
seen some very fine theatrical storms in my time; they did these
things very well in the days of the elder Irving at the Lyceum, but
I never enjoyed any of those tempests half so much as a storm I once
watched from the wings, while Sir Frank Benson was playing King Lear.
Everything, of course, was pitchy dark, save where a farthing light
was glimmering in some odd corner. By this light crouched a squat
form, that of the assistant stage-manager. In one hand he held the
Prompt Copy of the Play, with all the cues duly indicated in it. He
held it up as close as he could to the miserable glimmer, and had
evidently as much as he could do to see the script with its various
interlineetions and noughts and crosses, and all sorts of queer
hieroglyphics which mean a great deal to a stage-manager’s eye. But
in the other hand he held a drumstick, and coming nearer I saw that
the big drum was beside him on the boards, and that near at hand dim
figures stood ready for some mysterious service. A voice is heard
from somewhere:
“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow
You cataracts and hurricanes, spout
Till you have drench’d your steeples, drown’d the cocks,
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head; and then, all-shaking thunder--”
And so on. And all the while the man with the big drum was commenting
on the text. At certain points, bang! would come the drumstick
on the drum, and that gave the cue to the man who stood by the
thunder-sheet, which he caused to waggle violently, and at the same
moment “Props” released his lightnings. It was far better behind than
in front, to my taste, at all events. And so a man of letters of very
great distinction once said to me:
“I’ve been reading your ‘Great God Pan.’ I didn’t make much of it.
Confused, it seemed to me. But when I read the Introduction, I said
to myself: ‘Good heavens! Here’s a man who writes as well as I do!’”
And I may say that the literary gentleman meant this as a very great
compliment; indeed so it was.
Well, we have been speaking a little of the stage. And in the
earlier rehearsals of a play a good deal is taken for granted, or
indicated by the gentleman in charge. I am speaking of the old days,
be it understood, and of the Shakespearean Touring Company in the
provinces. The company is assembling in the wings in small groups,
one strolling in after another, some of them with the cheerful look
of those who have partaken of refreshment. On the whole the men keep
together, and the women talk to each other. The curtain is down, and
by it is a deal table and a couple of Windsor chairs--or it may be
a couple of golden thrones. At the table sit the stage-manager and
his assistant, occupied with the prompt copies and various documents
connected with the business of the morning. Above their heads burns
the T-piece; piping in the shape of a capital T, with the top bar
pierced and flaming with gas-jets. The stage-manager looks at his
watch. “Five past eleven! All ready for the Procession! March off.”
The stage-manager has risen from his Windsor chair--or throne, as the
case may be--and is looking up stage with his back to the curtain. As
he says, “March off,” he indicates the music that isn’t there:
“Too-too, too-too--too-too, tootery-too, too-too,” in something
like the time and tune of the music as it will be “on the night”;
stamping with one foot on the stage to increase the realism of the
performance. The old stage direction reads something like: “A sennet
within. Culverins shot off,” and accordingly the stage-manager
interrupts his “too-tooing” at intervals:
“Too-too, tootery-too! Bang!” bringing his practicable foot down on
the boards with a terrific crash.
“Too-too-too, too-too: Bang!”
Then: “March over. Flourish of Trumpets. Tara-tara-tara, ta-ta-ta.
Curtain up! Tara-tara, ta-ta-ta-ta-tara. Procession on.”
The Procession of Knights and Ladies which has been forming in the
dusty obscurity of the wings begins to advance and cross an imaginary
line which marks the place where the scenery will be on the night.
They make more especially for a position up stage (L.U.E.) where
there will be, at the proper time, a Gothic archway. The “taras” are
still going on. They are violently interrupted.
“Where’s the Rush-strewer?” howls the stage-manager. “Mr. Machen!
(fff) Mr. Machen! Lobbit! (to the hovering call-boy) Call Mr. Machen!
(To the Procession) Go back. I am going to have this done properly,
if we have to stay all day for it.”
The call-boy rushes violently into the darkness. His voice is heard
vociferating “Mr. Machen!” in passages and on stairs. Finally, Mr.
Machen appears, looking flurried or sulky, as the case may be. The
stage-manager, who had been discussing beer with Mr. Machen a short
quarter of an hour before, in a friendly and familiar manner, is now,
very properly, distant and official.
“Mr. Machen, I wish you would contrive to be more punctual. Better be
an hour too soon on the stage than a second too late. You can’t learn
to act, you know, by staying away from rehearsal!”
Mr. Machen murmurs something about “ten minutes allowed for variation
of clocks.” The stage-manager grunts impatiently. Mr. Machen places
himself at the head of the procession with an imaginary bundle of
rushes on his left arm. The too-tooing, the banging, the tara-ing
are done all over again, and at last the stage-manager announces:
“Flourish over”--and the play begins.
In other words, after the little difficulties and delays that I have
indicated, “The Three Impostors” was published in the Keynotes Series
at the Bodley Head. It didn’t do so well as “The Great God Pan.”
The title was a bad one. Then, as my French colleague, the late P.
J. Toulet, said to me afterwards: “_Ce livre est trop fumiste, ou
pas assez fumiste_”; the farce and the tragedy in it were not well
mixed. And again, there had been some ugly scandals in the summer of
’95, which had made people impatient with reading matter that was
not obviously and obtrusively “healthy”; and so, for one reason or
another, “The Three Impostors” failed to set the Fleet Ditch on fire.
Whereupon I began to think about my next book. I had done, as I have
said, with Stevensonianism and White Powders; now we were to have
something entirely new. “Tara, tara, tara!”--in the stage-manager’s
manner. This time there was to be no doubt of it. “Everybody ready
for the Great Romance!”
I started fair. There was to be something different from the former
books: I knew that. But I hadn’t the remotest notion of what this new
book was to be about. I used to go out in the morning and pace the
more deserted Bloomsbury squares and wonder very much what it would
be like. I got the hint I wanted at last from a most interesting
essay by Mr. Charles Whibley, written by way of Introduction to
“Tristram Shandy.” Mr. Whibley was discussing the picaresque in
literature. He pointed out that while “Gil Blas” and its early
Spanish originals represented the picaresque of the body, and “Don
Quixote” was picaresque both of mind and body, “Tristram Shandy” was
picaresque of the mind alone. The wandering in that extraordinary
book is, in other words, noumenal, not phenomenal. I caught hold
of that notion: the thought that a literary idea may be presented
from the mental as well as the physical side of things, and said to
myself: “I will write a ‘Robinson Crusoe’ of the mind.” That was the
beginning of “The Hill of Dreams.” It was to represent loneliness
not of body on a desert island, but loneliness of soul and mind
and spirit in the midst of myriads and myriads of men. I had some
practical experience of this state to help me; not altogether in vain
had I been constrained to dwell in Clarendon Road and to have my
habitation in the tents of Notting Hill Gate. I immediately marked
down all these old experiences as a valuable asset in the undertaking
of my task: I knew what it was to live on a little in a little room,
what it meant to wander day after day, week after week, month after
month through the _inextricabilis error_ of the London streets, to
tread a grey labyrinth whose paths had no issue, no escape, no end.
I had known as a mere lad how terrible it was on a gloomy winter’s
evening to go out because the little room had become intolerable,
to go out walking through those multitudinous streets stretching to
beyond and beyond, to see the light of kindly fires leaping on the
walls, to see friendly faces welcoming father or husband or brother,
to hear laughter or a song sounding from within, perhaps to catch a
half glimpse of the faces of the lovers as they looked out, happy,
into the dark night. All this had been my daily practice and use for
a long while; I was qualified then, in a measure, to describe the
fate of a Robinson Crusoe cast on the desert island of the tremendous
and terrible London. Thus was accomplished what Garrick called, much
to the Doctor’s amusement, the “first concoction” of the book.
I am sorry that I cannot trace the further steps in its elaboration
with a like minuteness. All this time I was getting my green-mounted
review cuttings of “The Three Impostors.” I have kept them, I know,
for I keep all my reviews, but I cannot lay my hands on them. I
believe, though, that their general import was that I was something
of a pretentious ass and that my horrors were all humbug; and for
some obscure reason, which I cannot undertake to explain, these
notices cheered me on immensely in my new work.
“I cannot undertake to explain”; that is the very truth. Why should
a man whose only life consists in writing books feel highly elated
at being told on good authority that he is utterly and entirely
incapable of doing anything of the kind; that he is clever, perhaps,
in a thin sort of way, but that his most prized effects at which he
has evidently toiled--as the reviewer declares--with most laborious
pains miss fire completely; that his endeavours to be this, that
and the other are really pathetic in their utter failure; that his
lightnings and thunderings are effects of the property man? I do
not know why this should be so, and perhaps if I knew I should not
tell; but I think I know that there are deep things in psychology, in
the real psychology, not in the muck-heap of the psycho-analytical
chemists. At all events, I know that when I read a review which
ended, say, with: “We can only wish Mr. Machen better luck with his
next bag of thaumaturgic tricks,” I would be much uplifted, and go
out and pace Mecklenburgh Square and the old graveyard by Heathcote
Street in a happy mood of invention, feeling that the new book lay
all simple and plain before me.
So, thus cheered and highly comforted, I went on my daily tours about
the Bloomsbury squares, about waste places abutting on the King’s
Cross Road, about the wonderlands of Barnsbury, taking with me the
problem of this great book that was to be made; this book that was
to be the better part of me. Why, it was only the other day that a
friend, who is curious like myself, in the remaining oddities of
London, took me for a short stroll near the Gray’s Inn Road.
“I think,” said he, “that I can show you something that you will
like.”
In his voice was the pride of the collector, who takes his keys,
opens his safe, and draws out the rich case, containing “Pickwick”
in the original numbers, with the cancelled plates, unopened leaves,
all the advertisements preserved, perfect condition, autograph letter
signed “Charles Dickens,” giving the source of the character of Sam
Weller in separate portfolio: all the pride of one who possesses such
a treasure was in the voice of my friend.
He led me round corner after corner, by turns and ways that became
more and more obscure. Then, elated, he said: “There!”
In the by-street I saw a queer house, standing in a sunken yard away
from the pavement. It was painted in cream colour, and grotesque
heads, intended to be mediæval, were peppered over its frontage. I
knew it well.
“I never expected to see that again,” I said. “I thought it would
have been pulled down long ago; like the ‘Rows’ that once led from
Great Coram Street. And, unless I am mistaken, we shall find Hebrew
letters inscribed on plaster shields applied to the house front.”
The Hebrew inscriptions were still there; very faint, but still
there. I had last seen them in ’95–’96 when I was entangled in the
most intricate problems of “The Hill of Dreams.”
I have told already some of the troubles of the book: the battle of
the second chapter, the notion sought in vain for three weeks: the
affair of the fifth chapter when I lost my way completely and wrote
many thousands of words that had to be rejected. Nearly all the
journey, from the autumn of 1895 to the spring of 1897, there were
doubts and trials and questionings: after all, was it not hopeless;
would it not be better to tear it up and start afresh on a new book?
In the summer of 1896, when I was in the thick of these perplexities,
I spent a month in Provence and Languedoc, visiting places the very
names of which are incantations: Arles, Avignon, Nîmes, Montpellier,
Beaucaire, famed Tarascon by Rhone; and I saw how the sun can shine
on the white cliff road by Marsilho--to give the city its Provençal
name, which you must pronounce, as near as may be, Mar-see-yo-ho.
And the changing of the colours of the sea there, as the sun sank
and brief twilight gathered and the moon rose: here were marvels and
beauties that sank deeply into the heart.