Preface

The other day I said to a friend, "I have just been reading in proof

a volume of short stories by an author named Richard Middleton. He is

dead. It is an extraordinary book, and all the work in it is full of

a quite curious and distinctive quality. In my opinion it is very

fine work indeed."

It would be so simple if the business of the introducer or

preface-writer were limited to such a straightforward, honest, and

direct expression of opinion; unfortunately that is not so. For most

of us, the happier ones of the world, it is enough to say "I like

it," or "I don't like it," and there is an end: the critic has to

answer the everlasting "Why?" And so, I suppose, it is my office,

in this present instance, to say why I like the collection of tales

that follows.

I think that I have found a hint as to the right answer in two of

these stories. One is called "The Story of a Book," the other "The

Biography of a Superman." Each is rather an essay than a tale, though

the form of each is narrative. The first relates the sad bewilderment

of a successful novelist who feels that, after all, his great work

was something less than nothing.

He could not help noticing that London had discovered the

secret which made his intellectual life a torment. The

streets were more than a mere assemblage of houses,

London herself was more than a tangled skein of streets,

and overhead heaven was more than a meeting-place of

individual stars. What was this secret that made words

into a book, houses into cities, and restless and

measurable stars into an unchanging and immeasurable

universe?

Then from "The Biography of a Superman" I select this very striking

passage:--

Possessed of an intellect of great analytic and

destructive force, he was almost entirely lacking

in imagination, and he was therefore unable

to raise his work to a plane in which the mutually

combative elements of his nature might have been

reconciled. His light moments of envy, anger, and

vanity passed into the crucible to come forth

unchanged. He lacked the magic wand, and his work

never took wings above his conception.

Now compare the two places; "the streets were more than a mere

assemblage of houses;" . . . "his light moments . . . passed into the

crucible to come forth unchanged. He lacked the magic wand." I think

these two passages indicate the answer to the "why" that I am forced

to resolve; show something of the secret of the strange charm which

"The Ghost-Ship" possesses.

It delights because it is significant, because it is no mere

assemblage of words and facts and observations and incidents, it

delights because its matter has not passed through the crucible

unchanged. On the contrary, the jumble of experiences and impressions

which fell to the lot of the author as to us all had assuredly been

placed in the athanor of art, in that furnace of the sages which is

said to be governed with wisdom. Lead entered the burning of the

fire, gold came forth from it.

This analogy of the process of alchemy which Richard Middleton has

himself suggested is one of the finest and the fittest for our

purpose; but there are many others. The "magic wand" analogy comes to

much the same thing; there is the like notion of something ugly and

insignificant changed to something beautiful and significant.

Something ugly; shall we not say rather something formless transmuted

into form! After all, the Latin Dictionary declares solemnly that

"beauty" is one of the meanings of "forma" And here we are away from

alchemy and the magic wand ideas, and pass to the thought of the

first place that I have quoted: "the streets were more than a mere

assemblage of houses," The puzzle is solved; the jig-saw--I think

they call it--has been successfully fitted together, There in a box

lay all the jagged, irregular pieces, each in itself crazy and

meaningless and irritating by its very lack of meaning: now we see

each part adapted to the other and the whole is one picture and one

purpose.

But the first thing necessary to this achievement is the recognition

of the fact that there is a puzzle. There are many people who go

through life persuaded that there isn't a puzzle at all; that it was

only the infancy and rude childhood of the world which dreamed a vain

dream of a picture to be made out of the jagged bits of wood, There

never has been a picture, these persons say, and there never will be

a picture, all we have to do is to take the bits out of the box, look

at them, and put them back again. Or, returning to Richard

Middleton's excellent example: there is no such thing as London,

there are only houses. No man has seen London at any time; the very

word (meaning "the fort on the lake") is nonsensical; no human eye

has ever beheld aught else but a number of houses; it is clear that

this "London" is as mythical and monstrous and irrational a concept

as many others of the same class. Well, people who talk like that are

doubtless sent into the world for some useful but mysterious process;

but they can't write real books. Richard Middleton knew that there

was a puzzle; in other words, that the universe is a great mystery;

and this consciousness of his is the source of the charm of "The

Ghost Ship."

I have compared this orthodox view of life and the

universe and the fine art that results from this view to the solving

of a puzzle; but the analogy is not an absolutely perfect one. For if

you buy a jig-saw in a box in the Haymarket, you take it home with

you and begin to put the pieces together, and sooner or later the

toil is over and the difficulties are overcome: the picture is clear

before you. Yes, the toil is over, but so is the fun; it is but poor

sport to do the trick all over again. And here is the vast

inferiority of the things they sell in the shops to the universe: our

great puzzle is never perfectly solved. We come across marvellous

hints, we join line to line and our hearts beat with the rapture of a

great surmise; we follow a certain track and know by sure signs and

signals that we are not mistaken, that we are on the right road; we

are furnished with certain charts which tell us "here there be

water-pools," "here is a waste place," "here a high hill riseth," and

we find as we journey that so it is. But, happily, by the very nature

of the case, we can never put the whole of the picture together, we

can never recover the perfect utterance of the Lost Word, we can

never say "here is the end of all the journey." Man is so made that

all his true delight arises from the contemplation of mystery, and

save by his own frantic and invincible folly, mystery is never taken

from him; it rises within his soul, a well of joy unending.

Hence it is that the consciousness of this mystery, resolved into the

form of art, expresses itself usually (or always) by symbols, by the

part put for the whole. Now and then, as in the case of Dante, as it

was with the great romance-cycle of the Holy Graal, we have a sense

of completeness. With the vision of the Angelic Rose and the sentence

concerning that Love which moves the sun and the other stars there is

the shadow of a catholic survey of all things; and so in a less

degree it is as we read of the translation of Galahad. Still, the

Rose and the Graal are but symbols of the eternal verities, not those

verities themselves in their essences; and in these later days when

we have become clever--with the cleverness of the Performing Pig--it

is a great thing to find the most obscure and broken indications of

the things which really are. There is the true enchantment of true

romance in the Don Quixote--for those who can understand--but it is

delivered in the mode of parody and burlesque; and so it is with the

extraordinary fantasy, "The Ghost-Ship," which gives its name to this

collection of tales. Take this story to bits, as it were; analyse it;

you will be astonished at its frantic absurdity: the ghostly galleon

blown in by a great tempest to a turnip-patch in Fairfield, a little

village lying near the Portsmouth Road about half-way between London

and the sea; the farmer grumbling at the loss of so many turnips; the

captain of the weird vessel acknowledging the justice of the claim

and tossing a great gold brooch to the landlord by way of satisfying

the debt; the deplorable fact that all the decent village ghosts

learned to riot with Captain Bartholomew Roberts; the visit of the

parson and his godly admonitions to the Captain on the evil work he

was doing; mere craziness, you will say?

Yes; but the strange thing is that as, in spite of all jocose tricks

and low-comedy misadventures, Don Quixote departs from us with a

great light shining upon him; so this ghost-ship of Richard

Middleton's, somehow or other, sails and anchors and re-sails in an

unearthly glow; and Captain Bartholomew's rum that was like hot oil

and honey and fire in the veins of the mortals who drank of it, has

become for me one of the _nobilium poculorum_ of story. And thus did

the ship put forth from the village and sail away in a great tempest

of wind--to what unimaginable seas of the spirit!

The wind that had been howling outside

like an outrageous dog had all of a sudden

turned as melodious as the carol-boys of a

Christmas Eve.

We went to the door, and the wind burst it

open so that the handle was driven clean into

the plaster of the wall. But we didn't think

much of that at the time; for over our heads,

sailing very comfortably through the windy

stars, was the ship that had passed the

summer in landlord's field. Her portholes

and her bay-window were blazing with lights,

and there was a noise of singing and fiddling

on her decks. "He's gone," shouted landlord

above the storm, "and he's taken half the

village with him!" I could only nod in

answer, not having lungs like bellows of

leather.

I declare I would not exchange this short, crazy, enchanting fantasy

for a whole wilderness of seemly novels, proclaiming in decorous

accents the undoubted truth that there are milestones on the

Portsmouth Road.

Arthur Machen.