green as our northern seas sometimes put on near the land, the
scented rosemary growing as a weed by the roadside, the walls of
Avignon seen by sunset light, the great Roman arenas, still in use
for bull-fights, a matter not remote from their original purpose,
the Temple of Diana at Nîmes, no ruin, but a perfect building into
which the priest of Diana might well enter as you viewed the portal
from the modern street; and above all the splendour of that southern
sun shining on white rocks, on the dark cypresses, on the white arch
which looked as clear and fine as if it had been built a year, which
was eighteen hundred years old or more: all these are Provence; not
at all forgetting the Bouillabaisse which Pascal makes in the Old
Port, Pascal who roasts his incomparable partridges before a fire of
vine boughs. More than once I felt that I had made a journey rather
in time than space, that these black cypresses and clear white walls
and green and silvery olives were present not in our day but in the
old Roman world.
The last few days of my visit to Provence I spent in a little hotel
at a place called Roucas Blanc, not far from Marseilles. The hotel,
sheltered by the white rock and the dark green woods, had been built
on the very verge of the sea, and in the morning I would open the
door-window of my apartment and stand on a platform, but a few feet
above the water. I would lean over the low wall, and wonder at
the jewelled glory of the Mediterranean blue beneath the mounting
sun--and my heart was at home, in Gray’s Inn, in my old Japanese
bureau, in the litter of papers that awaited me there, in the
wretched book that I was struggling to make. _Aqui esta encerrado el
alma del licenciado._ What have I said of the paradox of life, that
its actualities are so nauseous that men will do anything to escape
from them? And here was I, free to enjoy the sun on the Provençal
sea and the wonder of the Roman world, hankering after the world of
anguish and difficulty and disappointment that I had made for myself
in grim Verulam Buildings, amidst the London fogs.
And so I got back and found that the labour of months had been
wasted, and set to work to break and remake. The book was finished,
somehow, in the March of 1897, and just then, as if he had come upon
his cue, a new publisher, Mr. Grant Richards, wrote to me asking if
I had any manuscripts that I should like to have published. I saw
him and left “The Hill of Dreams” with him. He did not take long to
make up his mind about it. He would have none of it, and he wrote
advising me by no means to publish the book; for, he said, it would
do me no credit. What he meant was that it was not in the least like
“The Three Impostors,” and it took him ten years before he saw light
on the subject, for it was the firm of Grant Richards that published
“The Hill of Dreams” in 1907.
Some amusing reviews appeared. The “Daily Graphic” said, very truly,
that the book was not of much practical interest, and the “Outlook”
confirmed this dictum by stating that there was “scarcely a place
for it in the widest utilitarian view.” “Will readily impress a
reader of quiet tastes,” declared the gentler “Scotsman.” “Nothing
that more quickly tends to tedium,” corrected the “Manchester
Guardian”: naturally enough, if the “Athenæum” was right in saying
that “the main matter of regret is the utter formlessness and the
arid inhumanity of his work.” “Well written, but written not quite
well enough,” was the fatal sentence of the “Chronicle.” And so on,
and so on. I will not disguise the fact that some of the notices were
very good indeed; but it has always been the other sort of review
that has heartened me, and so forthwith I set about writing a book
in high spirits. This turned out to be “The Secret Glory,” which was
published in the spring of 1922. This book also was on the whole very
well reviewed, though it is as queer as queer can be--I am afraid I
must say that the bridge is not nearly so well kept now as in the
brave days of old. But one reviewer stood out boldly, and him I will
quote in full, and so make an end of talking about reviews, which
some authors jeer at, which I treasure with reverent care.
“Even if we wished, we could not tell the story of ‘The
Secret Glory.’ Mr. Machen manages to combine an onslaught
on the public-school system with some watery Paterian
mysticism. Personally, we have an equal dislike of those
who belaud and those who denigrate the public-school
system. Besides, ‘there ain’t no sich person’; there are
as many systems as there are public schools. But Ambrose
Meyrick, if he could have been jerked for a moment by
his creator into a semblance of real existence, would
justify the worst outrages wrought upon him by his equally
incredible _alma mater_. He is a sentimental philanderer
with æsthetic Catholicism, a mystical Celtic dreamer, a
Soho Bohemian (before Soho was ruined, of course); but
these crimes are as nothing compared to his incorrigible
penchant for ‘poetic prose.’ Mr. Machen has encouraged him
in it. He will have a great deal more to answer for in the
day of judgment than the schoolmaster who tried to beat him
out of it.”
There! That notice, which appeared in “The Nation and the Athenæum,”
was signed by Mr. J. Middleton Murry, generally recognised as being
one of the most eminent literary critics of the day, if he is not
rather to be accounted as the most eminent literary critic of the
day. He is also, as a fellow-writer assured me, regarded as “the
leader of the younger intelligentsia.” Anyhow, I like a man who
speaks his mind. I try to do so myself, sometimes.
And “there!” again. I think I have written enough about the manner in
which I thought of my books, the manner in which I wrote my books,
the manner in which I broke down more or less lamentably in the
beginning, the middle and the end of my books, the manner in which
they were welcomed by eager publishers, and the manner in which they
finally tottered into print and were acclaimed by the Press. Enough
has been said on all these topics, and perhaps a good deal too much
for the patience of a weary world.
Let us now be brief on this matter. The year 1898 I spent in the
service of “Literature,” a weekly journal that had just been started
by “The Times.” In 1899 I wrote “Hieroglyphics” and “The White
People,” and the first chapter of “A Fragment of Life.” Then a great
sorrow which had long been threatened fell upon me: I was once more
alone.
_Chapter IX_
It was somewhere about the autumn of 1899 that I began to be
conscious that the world was being presented to me at a new angle.
I find now an extreme difficulty in the choice of words to convey
my meaning; “a new angle” is clumsy enough, “here in this world he
changed his life” is far too high in its associations; but there
certainly came to be a strangeness in the proportion of things, both
in things exterior and interior. And it is in these latter that I
held and still hold that the true wonder, the true mystery, the
true miracle reside. There is the old proverb, of course: “Seeing
is believing” and, for once, the old proverb is widely astray. All
phenomenal perception is apt to be deceitful, and very often is
deceitful. This is in the nature of things, as Berkeley pointed out
a very long time ago. That castle tower that looks round in the
distance is found to be square when you get a little nearer to it;
the red and golden glory and the magic architecture of the sunset
cloud would change, if you were in it, into something like a London
fog. And if it be objected: “Yes, exactly; when you are far away
from an object you see it incorrectly, but when you come near it
you see it correctly”--that is not so. If you were near enough to
the tower, with your nose within six inches of it, you only see a
certain limited extent of stone surface; the tower, qua tower, has
entirely disappeared. But you see the stone surface accurately? No,
you don’t. The ant crawling up it has a wildly different vision and
perception of that stone surface from your vision and perception; and
a microscope gives yet another vision, different from either; and as
magnification must be infinite in potentiality, though not _in actu_,
it is quite clear that no one can ever see the truth of any external
object presented to the eyes: there must always be, in theory and
perhaps, eventually, in fact, another microscope of still higher
magnifying power, which will entirely change the aspect of the thing
seen. And thus, without tedious specification and example of all the
other senses, I mustn’t even call the poker stiff, lest the man in
the chair on the other side of the fire take it up and tie it into a
knot before my eyes, proving that I have been talking foolishly. And
get the rarest Bordeaux that money can buy, and offer Bill the navvy
a glass; and watch his face as he calls for ale to wash that muck,
that ... something muck, out of his mouth.
All this, of course, is mere philosophic A B C, and if I thought this
book likely to penetrate into philosophic circles I should apologise
for a clumsy rehash of Berkeley’s irresistible conclusions; but I do
not think that the readers of “Mind” will trouble themselves about
me; and I am afraid that those of us who have not been rectified by
the study of philosophy are still inclined to think that seeing is
believing and that some things are hard and others soft, and so on.
And, no doubt, there is a kind of relative and highly inferior sort
of truth in these propositions: don’t knock your head against a stone
wall, for instance, is a perfectly sound bit of practical advice,
since, considered in relation to your skull, the stone wall is hard
and will hurt. And so with “seeing is believing”: in nine hundred and
ninety-nine cases out of a thousand you will be absolutely correct in
saying: “Hullo! There’s old Secretan walking up the garden path.” But
there is that thousandth--or millionth--case in which it turns out
that old Secretan was busy in Tibet or busy dying at the moment you
were quite certain that you saw him approaching the hall-door of The
Cedars: and then where is your “seeing is believing” maxim? I had a
curious instance of this in the midst of the famous “Angels of Mons”
controversy. An officer of very high distinction wrote to me from
the front, and described a most remarkable experience which had been
vouchsafed to him and to others during the retreat of August, 1914.
The battle of Le Cateau was fought on August 26th. My correspondent’s
division, as he writes--his letter is quoted at length in the
Introduction to the second edition of “The Bowmen”--was heavily
shelled, “had a bad time of it,” but retired in good order. It was on
the march all the night of the 26th, and throughout August 27th, with
only about two hours’ rest.
“By the night of the 27th we were all absolutely worn out with
fatigue--both bodily and mental fatigue. No doubt we also suffered
to a certain extent from shock; but the retirement still continued
in excellent order, and I feel sure that our mental faculties were
still quite sound and in good working condition. On the night of
the 27th I was riding along in the column with two other officers.
We had been talking and doing our best to keep from falling asleep
on our horses. As we rode along I became conscious of the fact
that, in the fields on both sides of the road along which we were
marching, I could see a very large body of horsemen. These horsemen
had the appearance of squadrons of cavalry, and they seemed to be
riding across the fields and going in the same direction as we were
going, and keeping level with us. The night was not very dark, and I
fancied that I could see squadron upon squadron of these cavalrymen
quite distinctly. I did not say a word about it at first, but I
watched them for about twenty minutes. The other two officers had
stopped talking. At last one of them asked me if I saw anything in
the fields. I then told him what I had seen. The third officer then
confessed that he too had been watching these horsemen for the past
twenty minutes. So convinced were we that they were really cavalry
that, at the next halt, one of the officers took a party of men out
to reconnoitre, and found no one there.... The same phenomenon was
seen by many men in our column.... I myself am absolutely convinced
that I saw these horsemen; and I feel sure that they did not exist
only in my imagination.”
Now I have not the faintest notion what really happened to the
Colonel, to the two officers and to many of the men in the column.
What concerns us for the moment is that these people were at
first perfectly certain that they saw sensible objects, that is,
cavalrymen, and then were perfectly certain that there were no
sensible objects to see; and therefore it may be concluded from this
instance and from many instances, of like sort, that the senses are
deceptive; that the world of the senses is very largely a world
of illusion and delusion. To give a sharp example of what I mean:
I would say that the old story of the oak and the dryad is much
nearer to the real and final truth about the oak than the scientific
classification and description of the tree in a manual of Dendrology.
Not that I believe that a spirit in the shape of a beautiful woman
of another order of being to our own is somehow bound up with the
life of the oak tree; but I do believe that the truth about the oak
tree--as about all else--is a great mystery, which is quite beyond
the purview of all sensible--that is scientific--perception and
enquiry.
And so, when I speak of that singular rearrangement of the world
into which I entered in the late summer of 1899, I do not desire to
lay much stress on the sensible, or material, phenomena which were
presented to me. I marvel, but I marvel with caution, remembering the
manifold deceits of the senses, the phantasmagoria or shadow show
that they are always displaying before us; remembering also that when
the super-normal is manifested it is usually, in nine cases out of
ten, irrelevant and insignificant. For example, in the case of old
Secretan, seen walking up the path to the hall-door of The Cedars,
but discovered afterwards to have an undoubted _alibi_, either on his
dying bed or in Tibet. Suppose the latter case, suppose that Secretan
returns and that you collar him and ask him if he remembers what he
was doing about five o’clock of the afternoon of June 28th.
“What makes you ask that?” he may reply, likely enough. “I thought it
rum at the time. Here’s the entry in my diary. ‘June 28th. Had rank
goat and tea with rancid butter in it in the afternoon. Thought of
the jolly tea and tennis parties at The Cedars and wondered how old
Jones was getting on in the City.’”
And, it seems shocking, but it is probably the truth, that if
Secretan had been really engaged, not in Tibet but in dying, his
thought, the force which projected his shadow on that gravel path of
The Cedars, Thames Ditton, was: “Beastly taste in my mouth! Wish I
could get round to old Jones’s and wash it out with a glass of his
pre-war whiskey. Eh?” ... and the silence.
And all this, as I say, is irrelevant and insignificant; and then
again the rats and snakes and other objects seen by the delirium
tremens patient; they really don’t matter--save to the patient
aforesaid, who, of course, is quite sure that they are there. So,
again, I distrust the senses, and though I wondered and still wonder,
I make nothing much of the great gusts of incense that were blown in
those days into my nostrils, of the odours of rare gums that seemed
to fume before invisible altars in Holborn, in Claremont Square,
in grey streets of Clerkenwell, of the savours of the sanctuary
that were perceived by me in all manner of grim London wastes and
wanderings. One would like to think of the Knights of the Grail who
were ware of the “odour of all the rarest spiceries in the world”
before the Vision was given to them: but ... if one is not a Knight
of the Grail, but far otherwise?
Then, again, there was that morning, a bright, keen morning of
November it seems in my recollection, when I was walking up Rosebery
Avenue with a friend, and suddenly became aware of a strange
sensation, and as suddenly recollected the old proverb: “walking on
air.” I remember thinking at the time: “this is incredible”; and yet
it was a fact. The pavement of that horrible street had suddenly
become, not air, certainly, but resilient; the impact of my feet upon
it was buoyant; the sensation was delicious. I may mention that that
very morning I had made a certain interior resolution; but I do not
venture for one moment to connect this with that; I only tell what
happened to me. I make no deductions, nor do I venture to conclude
anything: remembering always that neither seeing nor smelling nor
feeling is necessarily believing. But so it was, exactly as I have
told it.
And then there was one afternoon in my sitting-room at 4 Verulam
Buildings, Gray’s Inn. I was sitting in my chair, and the wall
trembled and the pictures on the wall shook and shivered before my
eyes, as if a sudden wind had blown into the room. Let me hasten
to say that there was no wind, no actual wind, that is; and that I
knew at the time that there was no wind, and was, in consequence,
not a little alarmed, not knowing what would happen next. And I
must already correct my phrase: I have said that the pictures on
the wall opposite to the window that looked on the garden of the
Inn “shook and shivered.” It is not quite just: trembled, dilated,
became misty in their outlines; seemed on the point of disappearing
altogether, and then shuddered and contracted back again into their
proper form and solidity: that is the closest description of what I
witnessed: with a shaking heart, and with a sense that something, I
knew not what, was also being shaken to its foundations. This is all
wonderful? I suppose that it is; but let me here say firmly that I
consider an act of kindness to a wretched mangy kitten to be much
more important.
But now comes a puzzle. We are highly composite beings. We all know
that a stomach-ache may make a man very miserable, and I believe
that science is beginning to admit that misery may give a man a very
bad stomach-ache. There are old phrases about a “sinking heart,”
and a man’s heart being “in his boots.” Well, it seems that the
heart does not sink, but that the stomach does, when subjected to
certain emotional perturbations. Only this morning I was reading in
the paper of new radiographic experiments which showed that under
certain stimulations of horror or fear or grief the stomach sometimes
falls from one to three inches, and the doctor who was conducting
the experiments declared that there was the brighter side; that he
had mentioned possible “pints of bitter” to some of his subjects,
with the result that there was a perceptible and upward movement
of the organ in question. And so the play goes round in a ring,
with a constant action and reaction of the physical and mental--or
psychical, or spiritual--and it will often be difficult to say where
the prime cause resides: in the stomach, in the brain, or in the
immortal spirit. I have already professed my belief that the true
wonder, the true miracle are of the spirit, not of the body; I here
confess that in certain cases I find it difficult to disentangle
the two worlds of our apprehension, that is to say definitely that
the sensible thing, the phenomenal thing, is always and invariably
without any true significance.
And so with that afternoon’s work in Gray’s Inn. The shivering
pictures that seemed on the point to dissolve and return into
chaos, the sensible thrill of delight that accompanied this strange
manifestation--I had forgotten that part of the experience--such
phenomena as these may be producible, for all I know, by drugs. You
can, at all events, see far more wonderful things than anything that
I saw by taking a sufficient dose of Anhelonium Lewinii and then
shutting your eyes. But....
I had better begin at the beginning. That afternoon I was in a state
of very dreadful misery and desolation and dereliction of soul. It
is strange, but the most dreadful pangs of grief are generally, I
think, bearable in the moment of their impact. With the wounds of the
spirit, it is as with the wounds of the body; a certain anæsthesia
accompanies the actual fall of the blow. I once fell backwards from
some little height, and my skull lighting on the edge of a brick,
I remained unconscious for more than half an hour. And I remember
distinctly that the sensation at the very moment of the crash was
that of being lifted and gently laid on the softest of all downy
pillows; it was only when I raised myself slowly, not in the least
aware that I had been unconscious, that I felt the pain of the great
bleeding wound at the back of my head, and a dismal, heavy throbbing
of the brow. So with the wounds of the soul; I had borne what had to
be borne with some measure of solidity and stolidity; the torture
of six years of lamentable expectation had, as I supposed, seared
and burned my spirit into dull, insensitive acquiescence: but I was
mistaken. A horror of soul that cannot be uttered descended upon me,
on that dim, far-off afternoon in Gray’s Inn; I was beside myself
with dismay and torment; I could not endure my own being. And then a
process suggested itself to me, as having the possibility of relief,
and without crediting what I had heard of this process or indeed
having any precise knowledge of it or of its results, I did what had
to be done--I hasten to add without any more exalted motives than
those which urge a man with a raging toothache to get laudanum and
take it with all convenient speed. I suffered from a more raging pain
than that of any toothache, and I wanted that pain to be dulled; that
was all.
Well, I made my experiment, expecting, very doubtfully, almost
incredulously, certain results. The results that I obtained were
totally different from my expectations. I couldn’t have hypnotised,
or “magnetised,” or mesmerised, or suggested, or Couéd, or in any
way bedevilled myself into the obtained condition for the good
reason that I had never heard of it, had no faintest notion of it,
and was, in fact, as I have stated, not a little alarmed by it,
half-thinking, if the truth be told, that I was very near to death.
I may state, by the way, that in the course of a pretty extensive
acquaintance with “occult” company, I only once heard of anything at
all comparable with this strange adventure of mine. A man was running
on, foolishly and uncritically enough, about his various occult
experiences--they were of little interest as a whole--and talked at
last of some sojourn that he had made amongst the Moors of Northern
Africa. Here, he said, he had met a man who had known wonders, and he
proceeded to tell them. There was nothing very wonderful, so far as
I can remember; but the Moor or Arab of the story had an experience
like enough to mine--I need not say that I had not mentioned it nor
so much as hinted it to my occult acquaintance. The African also had
seen the walls shiver and prepare for dissolution, had felt that
the world was shaken, and that his heart was shaken within him.
Mr. Jones-Robinson told the tale without any sense, apparently,
that it had any special significance; it was part of his occult
pack, that was all; and he went on to some sick rubbish about the
“correspondence” of the Tarot Trumps with the letters of the Hebrew
Alphabet; and this nonsense he discussed with real relish and a
high sense of its infinite importance. I think that he alone knew
the real “attribution” of the aforesaid Tarot Trumps, but he “had
received it under pledge and was not at liberty to speak”--for which
inhibition I was deeply thankful, having little patience for solemn
hanky-panky or Abracadabras of any sort. But in ending his story of
the Enchanted Moor, he said that this man, who had seen the material
world quivering and fading before his eyes, had received, in some
manner not indicated, a command or an intimation that he must “leave
everything”; and this he could not do, having a wife and children.
And I must say at once that being pretty well acquainted with
Jones-Robinson and all his type, I should have paid no more attention
to his story of the Moor than I paid to his story of the Tarot
Trumps--if it had not been for something which I knew and kept to
myself. As it was, I heard the tale and the injunction, and wondered
deeply, and still wonder.