Chapter III: Part 3

In the autumn of 1890 Machen returned to London and, the cottage in the Chilterns still lacking thatch or drains or some other matters, he took rooms in Guilford Street. Now it was in Guilford Street, by one account, that he was struck by the idea for _The Great God Pan_. It was, he says, on a dark and foggy afternoon, and with no delay he proceeded to lay out the story. In another place, however, he relates that it was in the summer of 1890 that he wrote the first chapter of _The Great God Pan_. Whichever it was, the tale was completed before he went to his cottage in the country. It appeared in _The Whirlwind, Vol. ii_ for 1890, which also carried _A Wonderful Woman_, _The Lost Club_ and an almost entirely unknown item—_An Underground Adventure_. Another story, _The Red Hand_, is of this period for it appeared in the Christmas number of _Chapman’s Magazine_ under the title, _The Telling of a Mystery_. These matters attended to, Machen retired to the Chilterns early in 1891.

Of his stay in the country we know remarkably little. He spent two years there and, when he returned to London in 1893, he reported that he had “found it nothing.” However that may be, he did accomplish a certain amount of work. He wrote a number of his best stories there and completed two books which he promptly destroyed. The contents of these books have not been entirely lost however, for much of what was in them came to light another day. At any rate, it was in the Chilterns that he wrote _The Inmost Light_.

This famous story was written to a special commission, one of the few he received in his life. His stories for the _Globe_ and _St. James Gazette_ had attracted, as has been noted, considerable attention, and a Miss Bradden wrote Machen, asking him to contribute a tale to an annual she was getting out. _The Inmost Light_ was written for Miss Bradden and packed off to her from the cottage in the hills. The affrighted lady returned it after what must have been one of the most rapid readings on record.

At any rate, in 1894, when “yellow bookery was at its yellowest,” John Lane of the Bodley Head published these two tales under the title _The Great God Pan_ as Volume V of the Keynote Series. There was a title page decoration by Aubrey Beardsley—this, and the imprint of the Bodley Head, indicated that the book was, as one might say today, “aimed at a particular market.” Presumably it hit the mark, for the tale achieved a fame that has lasted to this day. For this is the best known of Machen’s stories and—even though Machen deprecatingly remarks that the book had “made a storm in a tiny tot’s tea cup”—there was a considerable tempest aroused. _The Manchester Guardian_ went on record as feeling that Machen had “succeeded only in being ridiculous.” _The Lady’s Pictorial_ found it “gruesome, ghastly and dull.” The _Westminster Gazette_ decided that it was “an incoherent nightmare of sex.” Nevertheless, the book was well received and gained considerably more of a readership for Machen than had his previously published exercises in the antique. One wonders what the Boston reviewers thought of it—for the book was published by Roberts Brothers of Boston in the same year.

The _Manchester Guardian’s_ reviewer, a staunch fellow with advanced ideas, had refrained from saying more about _The Great God Pan_ “for fear of giving such a work advertisement.” This did not prove to be particularly effective for the Bodley Head was compelled to bring out a second edition in 1895. There were other editions: Grant Richards included the tale in _The House of Souls_ in 1906, and again in 1913. It was translated into the French in 1901, and reissued again by Simpkins, Marshall in 1916. Knopf brought it out in 1924, and the story has been included in numerous anthologies.

The story of _The Great God Pan_ is simple enough—but it has the touch of magic. There is a doctor with strange theories and strange knowledge. He performs an operation on the brain of a simple country girl—an operation which permits her to see, for a moment, the great god Pan, with results that were in accordance with the ancient and traditional legends concerning what might follow such a vision.

Of course we are all prone, today, to interpret literature according to our own lights, and we employ, with facility if not always felicity—the great gift of hind-sight. We may, in 1948, judge the tale neither as startling nor as horrifying as any one of a score or more pulp masterpieces. We may find Machen’s doctor not too much unlike Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll or Wells’s Dr. Moreau.

It may even be that _The Great God Pan_ doesn’t stir us a bit—although that cannot be credited. But in 1894 the story was an amazing one—and even the comfortably righteous reviewer on the _Manchester Guardian_ might have pondered, in the depths of the night, this passage: “Suppose that an electrician of today were suddenly to perceive that he and his friends have merely been playing with pebbles and mistaking them for the foundations of the world; suppose that such a man saw uppermost space lie open before the current, and words of man flash forth to the sun and beyond the sun into the system beyond, and the voices of articulate speaking men echo in the waste void that bounds our thought.”

Well, our young Manchester guardian of the public welfare very probably cried, “Bosh!”—and went resolutely back to sleep.

Machen, having written it, couldn’t sleep on it. In 1924, in a book called _The London Adventure_, Machen quotes the above passage and says, “It seems to me that the passage from _The Great God Pan_ is a distinct prophecy of ‘wireless’; and what would logic have said to it, in 1890, when that chapter was written?”

And what, for that matter, says logic in 1948—for we have perceived again, in another way, that we have been playing with pebbles and mistaking them for the foundations of the world. For now we think not only of sending sound to the outermost reaches of space—but man himself, and at speeds greater than the speed of sound.

There is another thought that might have bothered the young man of Manchester. A character in the story has quoted Oswaldus Crollius, “In every grain of wheat there lies hidden the soul of a star.” Now in 1894 the reviewer, any reviewer, even the Bostonian, would have muttered something about “muddled mysticism” and skipped over the sage utterance of Oswaldus to get along into the “incoherent nightmare of sex.” What Machen thought of this in ’94 we do not know—but in 1923 or thereabouts he wrote that he thought this a wonderful saying; “a declaration, I suppose that all nature is one, manifested under many forms; and so far as I can gather, modern science is rapidly coming around to the view of this obscure speculator of the XVII century; and, in fact, to the doctrine of the Alchemists.”

Now this was a brave thing to say—even in 1923. The muddled mysticisms of the ’90’s is today’s theorum—as has been amply demonstrated. The most fantastic fable or the most ingenious fiction of one decade may become the newest discovery in the laboratory of today.

2

The sojourn in the Chilterns was not as unproductive as Machen has implied. He had written perhaps more than we shall ever know—most of his stories lived with him for years before they were written, and a book or two destroyed did not cease to exist. Many of his best tales were born and others matured in the Chiltern cottage. Still, two years in the country seemed quite enough.

When Machen returned to London in 1893 he was a man of property or, if not property in the Galsworthian sense, of substance in his own. For the various legacies from deceased Scottish relations that might have meant so much a few years earlier, had been coming through and accumulating, and there were now between three and four thousand pounds in the bank. The days of Clarendon Road, of green tea and stale bread and tobacco, were over and there were rooms in Great Russel Street and later in Gray’s Inn. There was Benedictine in the buffet and a growing circle of friends and companions.

The possession of several thousand pounds presented problems—at least the semi-important one of how to invest it. After looking about for a “good thing,” in a characteristically casual way, Machen thought of the Brothers—that courteous pair under whose benevolent auspices he had translated Casanova in a basement. They had, as Machen knew, a proposition now and then, and he thought perhaps they might have suggestions. They had, as it happened, an excellent one. The _Memoirs of Casanova_, which he had translated some years before, was about to be published. A thousand pounds invested in the project might be a good thing indeed. Machen had at least that much confidence in the Brothers, or in his own work—at any rate, he invested. It was then that one of the Brothers, the more benevolent of the two no doubt, suggested that he might, since he was now financially interested, wish to polish up here and there.

Machen was content, however, to limit his contribution to the translation and the thousand pounds, and let him polish who so desired.

The monumental memoirs came out in 1894. Machen’s translation was the first in the English language and, I believe, the only complete one to this day. So it is likely to remain until some unsuspecting scholar may once more be imposed upon, or some highly solvent professor or richly subsidized fellow undertakes the task.

3

Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, Fanny to her friends and Scheherezade to her husband, shared or perhaps inspired her husband’s view of London as a fabulous Bagdad of the West, a city of encounters in which all things were probable—even such things as might rival the tales of the Arabian Nights Entertainment.

Stevenson, that prince of story tellers, who knew as well as any man how to invent marvelous tales and to tell them in a marvelous manner, occupied himself and Fanny during an illness by creating _The Dynamiter_. The book was published in 1885 and came to Machen’s attention at some time before or during his retreat to the Chilterns.

Machen had been under the Stevensonian influence for some years. In 1890 he published a story, _The Lost Club_, which exhibits marked family resemblance to one of the early adventures in the _New Arabian Nights_. At any rate the _Three Impostors_, Machen’s next book, is derived from Stevenson’s _Dynamiter_, and was written somewhere in this period when _The Great God Pan_ was creating a stir. The manuscript was sent, late in the winter of 1894, to Heinemann who expressed interest, enthusiasm, and then, unaccountably, regrets. The reader in the publisher’s office had been wonderfully encouraging and gloriously flattering. It was better, said Heinemann excitedly, than Stevenson’s best. Even a man as modest as Machen marveled at his artistry—and marveled still more when, early in 1895, the House of Heinemann returned his manuscript with the usual regrets and the usual phrase about being unable to use the enclosed manuscript.

And so, later that year, _The Three Impostors_ was issued by John Lane, once again in the Keynote Series and once again with the title page decoration by Beardsley. It failed, Machen says, to set Fleet Street afire—but it is, of course, one of his best stories.

Once again, as with so many of Machen’s stories, there were those who wrote to inquire whether there was not some foundation of fact, some basis of truth upon which the tale had been built. So willing are men to suspend their disbelief! People were forever asking him if his stories were not based upon some legend current in his part of the country and, of course, there were those who were willing to relate incidents and occurrences which closely paralleled the fantastic fictions of Machen’s inventions.

_The Three Impostors_ combined a number of popular elements. There was, first of all, a portrait of America, or the American West, as rugged and rough and uncouth as any Briton could desire. It rivaled and even surpassed, in some respects, Stevenson’s Western episode in _The Dynamiter_. The Stevenson story had also served as a model for the Mormon episode in Conan Doyle’s _A Study in Scarlet_. The resemblances here are even more marked than in Machen’s tale. As a matter of fact, Christopher Morley has suggested (in the Saturday Review late in 1947) that Doyle found the Mormon episode in his occiput following a reading of _The Dynamiter_ on a rainy evening in 1885. However this may be, _The Three Impostors_ is a remarkable and absorbing story, even if it did not do as well as _The Great God Pan_—but it has done remarkably well in the fifty-odd years since it was written.

Back in 1923 Knopf published _The Three Impostors_ in the famous yellow binding, and again in 1930 in a Borzoi Pocket Edition. In his introduction to the latter book Machen wrote:

“In the course of a quarter of a century, I have received a good many letters of serious enquiry about _The Three Impostors_. My correspondents ask me in various terms and turns of phrase whether there is any foundation for the strange circumstances and tales narrated in the book.... I began to get them pretty soon after _The Three Impostors_ was published in 1895. Then, on the whole, I was rather displeased than pleased at the question.... I was strongly inclined to resent the implication that I had embroidered rather than invented.”

Machen pointed out that the events described in his book not only did not happen, but could not have happened. That, at least, was his attitude just after he had written the book. In later years he changed his mind, for in the Nineteen-twenties he wrote, “I have had experiences which debar me from returning the absolute negative of earlier years.... These experiences of mine were trifling enough, but they suggest the possibility of far greater things and far more extraordinary things for those with the necessary qualifications.... I am inclined to urge that the things which I have known may suggest the probable existence of a world very far and remote from the world of common experience.

“It may turn out after all that the weavers of fantasy are the veritable realists.”

4

Just why _The Three Impostors_, certainly not the most sensational story published in that sensational year, should have inspired such widespread belief, or at least so much willing suspension of disbelief, is not too difficult to understand. The story concerns itself largely with matters having to do with superstitions and, even if the superstitions involved were not familiar ones, they had something of the common quality of all superstitions based on folk-lore.

The story is told through a series of episodes, in the manner made popular by Stevenson and Doyle. Certain episodes are represented as being taken from the journals of some of the characters concerned; others are set forth in lengthy interviews with still other interested (and interesting) characters. The story is not overburdened with machinery and technical tricks, it manages to hang together without evident strain.

Some of the episodes could stand by themselves as tales in the Gothic genre—indeed, some of them have so appeared in anthologies and collections. It is in the telling of these tales that Machen’s skill as a story teller becomes evident. There is no one manner, but several, and each is peculiarly Machen’s own—with clever overtones and undertones of parody and satire. The satire, be it noted, is directed always at the manner and never the matter of the tale.

As for the subject matter, _The Three Impostors_ concerns the Little People and strange powers that have persisted until this very day and other speculations. If we accept, as did William Gregg, F.R.S., who figures in one of the stories, the theory that much of the folk-lore of the world is but exaggeration of things that really happened, we are well on our way to accepting _The Three Impostors_ as wholeheartedly as did the people who wrote Machen such curious letters back in 1895. Such is Machen’s magic, moreover, that we are easily persuaded into accepting almost anything.

_The Three Impostors_ also introduces one of the most engaging figures in English literature. Mr. Dyson is not as well known, perhaps, as Henry Ryecroft or Stephen Daedalus or Charteris, but he has, it may be, as fine a future as they.

Mr. Dyson (if he had a first name, I cannot recall ever having read it) is a “man of letters” who, in pursuit of his quiet profession (the chase of the phrase, he called it) does a great deal of wandering about odd quarters of London. He stumbles into and out of the most amazing adventures, none of which appreciably affect his composure and seldom indeed is he startled out of his pompous pedantry.

Dyson’s companion in adventure and the recipient of his pronouncements is a Mr. Charles Phillips. Phillips is somewhat younger than Dyson, but they shared a certain gravity of character and pomposity of manner that made them mutually acceptable. They met frequently in each other’s rooms or in the tobacco shop in Queen Street where “their talk robbed the tobacconist’s profit of half its charm.” Dyson exalted the claims of pure imagination, while Phillips insisted that all literature ought to have a scientific basis.

This precious pair, who shared silence as amiably as they conversed, wander sedately enough through the astonishing episodes involving the Young Man With Spectacles, Miss Lally, the sinister Mr. Davis and others. They are encountered in several other tales of this period. Dyson is actually an old acquaintance. He first made his bow, and a very courtly gesture it was, in _The Red Hand_ or _The Shining Pyramid_, whichever tale, in truth, came first; but it is in _The Three Impostors_ that we really came to know him. We shall meet again.

_Chapter Four_

A NOBLE PROFESSION

“_I reflected, then, on my want of prospects, and I determined
to embark in literature._”

“_Really, that was strange. You seem in pretty comfortable
circumstances, though._”

“_Though! what a satire upon a noble profession!_”

1

This bit of dialogue takes place in one of those chance encounters with which several of Machen’s tales begins. It might well have ensued between Machen and some compatriot of far-off Gwent as they met in a London street early in that daringly decadent decade.

For Machen, having served an apprenticeship in grangerizing and cataloguing, having composed calendars and made translations “on the house” and having written a story that fluttered the dovecotes and published a book that stirred up a tempest in a tiny tot’s teacup, was definitely a literary man—or at least he pursued the practice of letters. He had cause, in later years, to give the choice more serious thought than he had in the 90’s. He had cause to reflect upon it, but never did he regret the choice—if choice it was. For if ever a man’s destiny lay in the art and the practice of letters, that man was Machen. And of course he knew this—he knew it in the lonely room in Clarendon Road and in the downstairs parlor at Llanddewi. And he knew it years later when, in computing his earnings for twenty-odd years labor, he found the sum to be not in excess of £635. And of course he knew it even when he wondered, as he some times did, if he had failed in his art.

Machen had in him, besides the seeds of his destiny, more than a bit of that delightful fellow Dyson whom he created somewhat to his own image and likeness. Dyson, you will recall, was “a man of letters, and an unhappy instance of talents misapplied. With gifts that might have placed him in the flower of his youth among the most favored of Bentley’s favorite novelists, he had chosen to be perverse; he was, it is true, familiar with scholastic logic but he knew nothing of the logic of life and he flattered himself with the title of artist, when he was in fact but an idle and curious spectator of other men’s endeavors. Amongst many delusions, he cherished one most fondly, that he was a strenuous worker, and it was with a gesture of supreme weariness that he would enter his favorite resort, a small tobacco shop in Great Queen Street, and proclaim to anyone who cared to listen that he had seen the rising and setting of two successive suns.”

But this isn’t Machen! Of course it isn’t! Nor am I suggesting that Dyson is a portrait of the artist as a young man. But if you will recall for a moment Machen’s obvious fondness for his creature, Dyson, his almost paternal acceptance of Dyson’s pomposities and his benevolent air in setting down Dyson’s latest preposterous formula, you will realize, I think, that Machen was the model, and that he rather relished poking a bit of fun at himself, his younger self at any rate.

Well then, early in the 90’s Machen had his trip abroad and his cottage in the country and his gradually accumulated legacies. And now he was, at last, about to have his rooms in Grays Inn and his summers in the south of France. He was indeed a man of letters!

2

_The Three Impostors_, even though it failed to set Fleet Street afire, did add to Machen’s stature. It gave him something of a reputation in certain quarters which, if not exactly fashionable at the moment, were not on the side of the Philistines. The failure, if it was one, of _The Three Impostors_ Machen attributes to a contemporary crisis in literary circles. “There were,” he says mildly, “scandals in ’95—which had made people impatient with reading matter that was not obviously and obtrusively ‘healthy.’”

The several tales or episodes that make up _The Three Impostors_, while they may be neither obviously “healthy” nor obtrusively “healthy,” were much less unwholesome than most of the literature that was then circulating in London. Based for the most part on early Celtic folk-lore and legends of the Welsh border, they developed the theme of primitive races, of “little people” who have, in some out of the way places, managed to survive to the present day.

The nature of the tales does indeed tend toward the horrific and even the “unhealthy,” but the manner of their telling and the presence of the almost “deadpan” Dyson in most of these episodes results in a rather curious blend of pedantry and unpleasantness. Moreover, so faithfully did Machen follow a Stevensonian pattern that even the Marquis of Queensbury, had he not been otherwise occupied at the moment, could have taken no offense. It would seem, then, that it was this almost sedate treatment that failed to set the bookstalls ablaze. A less restrained publisher than John Lane would have had Beardsley do the illustrations for the book—with quite predictable results. There are those, Grant Richards and George Bernard Shaw among them, who suggest that Lane was rather afraid of Beardsley—and not without reason. For Beardsley was an unpredictable and vindictive chap. He was once criticized for having drawn a Pierrot for a cover design of the “Savoy”—it was not the sort of thing, he was told, that would appeal to the British public.

A sketch of John Bull was substituted, accepted and sent out to subscribers. It was then discovered that Beardsley had taken his revenge by subtly indicating that John Bull was in a condition in which no Briton would willingly appear in public. For such sophomoric shenanigans Lane had given Beardsley the sack. There was never any question of Beardsley illustrating _The Three Impostors_, nor could there be any question of the result. Nevertheless _The Three Impostors_ rates perhaps third among Machen’s works, and has been frequently reprinted.

The story did cause publishers, from time to time, to ask Machen if he had something else in “the manner of _The Three Impostors_.” This was not as flattering to the author’s vanity as might seem. Having gone through the tale once Machen had no wish to “re-cook the cabbage which was already boiled to death.” Nevertheless, one doesn’t speak thus bluntly to publishers—even when they solicitously seek manuscripts. There was another and, on the whole, very attractive proposition. Two gentlemen, obviously with an eye for such things, proposed a new weekly paper for which, they further proposed, Mr. Machen and a Mr. Wells should do a series of stories—and in their familiar manner, of course. Thus Mr. Machen was to do a series of horror stories in the manner of _The Three Impostors_ and Mr. Wells was to do stories in the manner of _The Time Machine_.

_The Time Machine_ had appeared about the same time as _The Great God Pan_. While Machen’s story was stirring up its teacup tempest, a young gentleman named H. G. Wells had made a very real, and a most deserved sensation with a book called _The Time Machine_. Mr. Wells had written his story at a time when he was living from hand to mouth as a journalist at lodgings in Kent. And so the new paper, to be called the _Unicorn_, was to feature the works of these two young men who had recently created something new and exciting and not, as was too often the case in those days, unfit for general circulation.

Machen admitted that he was cheered and elated at the prospect ... until he began to re-cook the cabbage. Possibly Mr. Wells felt the same way, for the _Unicorn_ ceased to exist before a single one of Machen’s tales (he wrote four of them) appeared in it, while Mr. Wells contributed but one story, called _The Cone_.

Machen realized that the Stevensonian had been done to a turn—and so he had done with it—there would now be something new. He had already written _The Shining Pyramid_ for _The Unknown World_, edited by his friend A. E. Waite, and one or two other tales—but now, once again—and this time there was no doubt about it—_The Great Romance_.

Once again there was the question—what was it to be about? Machen labored mightily over the beginnings of this new book. He sat at his Japanese bureau in his rooms at Grays Inn, he roamed the deserted streets and squares of Bloomsbury and pondered at great length the problem—what would it be like?

I suppose Dyson would have sympathized deeply with these soul searchings and solitary soliloquies—for Dyson, too, had often wondered what his books would be like, and Dyson had _his_ Japanese bureau. At any rate, and before too long, Machen had the idea. His book would be “a Robinson Crusoe of the mind” ... and for such a book, Machen had traveled well.

3

Machen had at last decided, and for the second time in his life, to write the Great Romance. The first time it had turned out to be _The Chronicle of Clemendy_, that light-hearted collection of tales having nothing whatever to do with the Great Romance he had decided to write, and having nothing in it of the loneliness of his life in London. This time it became _The Hill of Dreams_, and one knows in reading it that this also is not the Great Romance: for Machen could not have decided to write _The Hill of Dreams_ any more than he could have decided to write a “Robinson Crusoe” of the soul—even though he tells us that this is precisely what he had decided to do. It is perhaps a coincidence, and a very fortunate one, that the book did turn out to be just that.

Machen was, as we have seen, a very careful man with his models. He could write in the manner of Thomas Browne, or Robert Herrick, or William Morris, or Robert Stevenson, and very carefully did he cultivate their manner. When he had perfected the manner, and made use of it, the design was there but the substance had altered. However meticulously he might labor perfecting the model, making no conscious effort to improve upon it, he could not prevent a transmutation from taking place. This is apparent even in _The Three Impostors_ for, even though the pattern is recognizable, and even though it is studied and carefully contrived, there are elements, so strong is the triumph of mind over manner, that make it peculiarly Machen’s own and not Stevenson’s.

The new book, Machen says, was born in a phrase encountered in Charles Whibley’s introduction to _Tristram Shandy_. Whibley described the work as being “a picaresque of the mind.” And so Machen said to himself,“I will write a Robinson Crusoe of the soul.” This was no mere decision; it was, rather, a demonstration of the fact that there is an affinity of the mind, some minds, for an idea, some ideas. _The Hill of Dreams_, the picaresque of the mind, the Crusoe of the soul, was at the heart of Machen’s Great Romance. It responded to a phrase for which it had a natural affinity and so the Great Romance, _The Hill of Dreams_, was born.

“It was,” wrote Machen, “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 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 pass day after day, week after week, month after month through the _inextricabilis terror_ of the London streets, to tread a grey labyrinth whose path had no issue, no escape, no end. I had known as a mere lad how terrible it was on a gloomy winter evening to go out because a little room had become intolerable, to go out walking through those multitudinous streets, 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 half glimpses of the faces of the lovers as they looked out, happy, into the dark night. All this had been my daily practice and habit 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.”

The writing of this book occupied Machen from the autumn of 1895 to the spring of 1897. It went very slowly. For one thing, Machen discovered that the style he had so carefully cultivated for the telling of the improbable tale of _The Three Impostors_ had to be just as carefully destroyed and every mannerism eradicated. He had become fluent in the Stevensonian vein—now he found himself writing with uncertainty, nothing flowed easily and naturally. His pen could not keep pace with his mind and his mind was racing rapidly through the garden of Avallaunius in far-off Gwent. For _The Hill of Dreams_ was to be about, if it was about anything, a boy’s wanderings and imaginings in a mysterious place he had found, or dreamed he had found, in the Roman ruins near Caerleon.

Chapters were written and rewritten, his day’s output varied from perhaps three lines to three folios. At last the book was finished in the spring of 1897. He had been at it, quite steadily, for almost two years, with a summer in Brittany in 1896, most of which he spent thinking of the book lying untouched in his room in London. In March 1897 Grant Richards wrote him to ask for his next manuscript. Mr. Richards, a new publisher, and anxious, no doubt, to get off on the right foot, wanted something “in the manner of _The Three Impostors_.” He got, instead, _The Hill of Dreams_. Richards returned the book along with a paternal letter pointing out to Machen the error of his ways and urging him not to jeopardize his reputation by publishing such a book. Several other publishers subsequently did the same and the book remained for years as it was, still titled _The Garden of Avallaunius_, and still not published. And then in 1907, after ten years, Grant Richards changed his mind and published _The Garden of Avallaunius_, but he insisted also upon changing the title on the plea, perhaps justified, that no one would properly pronounce “Avallaunius.” It may be, however, that _The Garden of Avallaunius_ did appear in print before the Richards edition.

In the summer of 1901 Machen wrote to a friend, a Miss Brooke-Alder: “A certain story, translated from the English and called _Le Grande Dieu Pan_, is now appearing in a French review. Maeterlinck is extremely interested in it and has sent a message to the author asking him to forward any manuscripts in order that they also may be rendered into French. I am sending a manuscript called _The Garden of Avallaunius_ which I finished four years ago, and if the great man chances to like it, I suppose I shall have the curious fate of finding myself a French rather than an English author.”

Whether or not this translation and publication ever took place, I have been unable to discover. However, the Richards edition of 1907 was the first of almost half a score that have continued to be largely out of print up until the present time.

4

Well, then, the Great Romance was completed in 1897—and they would have none of it. And so it remained for another ten years, more or less, in one of the spacious compartments of the Japanese bureau.

Machen was, at this time, living the literary life, not quite as it was lived by the swish young men who were then breaking into print and whose names appeared in the more sensational evening papers and on court writs, but still, it was the literary life and still—a noble profession.

The Japanese bureau, its cubbyholes and compartments jammed with notes and notebooks and scraps of paper, had yielded up many tales and articles that appeared in this or that journal. Machen had already written _The Holy Things_, _Psychology_, _Witchcraft_, _The Rose Garden_, _The Ceremony_, _Midsummer_ and many other. He was becoming well known as the author of a number of rather strange, rather clever stories. Sometimes they were called “nasty” or “disagreeable” stories by outraged critics who were quite likely to view them with an eye jaundiced by too careful perusal of _The Yellow Book_. The Keynote Series sold quite well and Machen’s _The Great God Pan_ and _The Inmost Light_ in Volume V, _The Three Impostors_ and _The Iron Maid_ in Volume XIX had wide circulation. _The Memoirs of Casanova_, published in the same year as _Pan_, though limited to a thousand copies, brought him some reputation and recognition on a more scholarly plane. Still, he made no fortune on these books, then—or ever. And that was beginning to matter. He was even moved, in 1895, to enter an American short story competition. His entry, _The Red Hand_, written for the competition, won no prize but it did appear in the Christmas issue of _Chapman’s Magazine_ for that year.

It was a quiet life. He had, in those days, few friends and few acquaintances. His life was in reading books and in writing them. That no one seemed to be publishing them was, for the moment, quite unimportant. He describes his daily routine in _Things Near and Far_: “Every morning after breakfast I read over what I have written the night before, correcting here and there and everywhere, generally convinced that the passage which had pleased me so much as I wrote it was, after all, not magnificent. I took the bulldog for a walk from twelve to one, and another half hour walk in the afternoon. Then two cups of tea without milk or sugar at four, and the rigor of the literary game till seven, and again after dinner till eleven. It was a life of routine, and all its adventures, difficulties, defeats and rare triumphs were those of the written page.”

This was the literary life far removed from the rarified atmosphere of the Cafe Royale and merry, mad circle of poets and artists of the Dowson, Beardsley, Conder, Crackenthorpe set who were usually contemplating Soho or suicide or both. It was the literary life of a recluse, of a Dyson, or of the brilliant monologist of _Hieroglyphics_. In the course of these long and thoughtful evenings when the pen scratched and the bulldog dozed and page followed page into the cubbyholes or into oblivion, Machen formulated many of the theories of art and literature which were expounded by the recluse of Barnsbury. Writing of this period some years later Machen says that literature “is one of the many ways of escaping from life, to be classified with Alpine Climbing, Chess, Methylated Spirit and Prussic Acid.” But this was written in 1915 or thereabouts, in 1897 he was less inclined to a mellow cynicism. For it was then not only an escape from life, but a means, perhaps “the only means of realizing and shewing life, or, at least certain aspects of life.”

This preoccupation with literature extended even to his employment, for through 1898 Machen worked on the staff of “Literature,” a weekly paper published by the Times. This seems to have been not too happy an association, for he says he had been harassed and worried for a whole year in the office of “Literature,” and that he was in high spirits in May 1899 when he was released from this bondage.

Besides, there were a great many important things to be done. There was, of course, another Great Romance. Like its predecessors this one did not quite come off, or it was never quite finished. What there was of it was eventually published as _The White People_. There were other irons on the hearth, and one of these had been heated and re-heated many times before; but it was never quite forged or beaten into shape.

This is the story we know as _A Fragment of Life_. It is, in its present state, a mere fragment of a great work. Machen had lived with the idea for ten years or more, for the story was born in another tale published in the Globe or the Gazette or some other paper in 1890 under the title _The Resurrection of the Dead_, which was not quite what Machen intended when he originally called it _Resurrectio Mortuorum_.

This story is about a man who one day recovered his “ancestral consciousness.” The idea had long fascinated Machen, perhaps because he was forever on the verge of recovering his own “ancestral consciousness,” or perhaps because he had never quite lost it. At any rate, it was always close to him, it greatly influenced his daily life because he never became used to the contrast between “raw London suburbs and the old gray houses under the forest near the river” in Gwent.

This, and _The White People_, seemed to have been of the greatest importance to him. Neither was finished in that century—nor were they ever completely finished. Yet in this time he wrote and completed one of the best of his books, and one of the finest books of our time. _Hieroglyphics_ was finished in 1899 and it joined the fragments and the beginnings of the Great Romances that had been written and put aside in that repository of Great Romances—the Japanese bureau.

Of _Hieroglyphics_ we shall have much to say later, for it is of greater significance in this twentieth century than in the nineteenth century in which it was written.

5

Now we are come to the end of the year 1899—the turn of the century. This was, as has been previously noted, an intensely time-conscious era. The birth of the twentieth century was awaited with perhaps more interest and excitement than had attended similar events in the past. For one thing, everyone was conscious of the enlightenment of their age, progress was almost as much a byword in the Nineties as it became in the Nineteen-Twenties and the early Nineteen-Forties. And, of course, there was the minor satisfaction of knowing that it was quite likely to be the only turn of the century within the memory of living man. Prophets of doom had their say and their day along with those who proclaimed new glory and new heights and new horizons. It was, to be sure, a well-heralded and eagerly awaited event. That a mere clock should unemotionally tick so momentous a second!

The more memorable men of the notorious Nineties were, for the most part, either dead or dying, visibly decaying or decently interred. They passed, most of them, mercifully before the significant second struck.

This was a year of great significance in the life of Arthur Machen. For in this year “a great sorrow which had long been threatened fell upon me; I was once more alone.” And in another place, he writes, “... and then my life was dashed into fragments. I ceased to write. I travelled.”

Again and again he refers to this event, in his two autobiographical books and in several of the forewords and prefaces he later wrote for re-issues of his earlier books. Always the references are veiled in mystery or followed by a recital of strange experiences and a cloud of mysticism that conceals, as it was intended, the shattering event.

What was this event? There are a few who know, but they are not likely to reveal what they know. As recently as 1947, less than a year before he died, Machen wrote in a letter, “Even now it is painful to recall. I would rather you did not refer to it.”

Since this is not intended as a biography, nor a Life, we shall not pursue the matter. There is this much more to be said, that may give some clue to the events of the year 1900. Machen wrote in _Things Near and Far_,

“I can set down the facts, or rather such of them as I remember, but I am quite confident that I am not, in the real sense of the word, telling the truth; that is, I am not giving any sense of the very extraordinary atmosphere in which I lived in the year 1900, of the curious and indescribable impression which the events of these days made upon me; the sense that everything had altered, that everything was very strange, that I lived in daily intercourse with people who would have been impossible, unimaginable, a year before; that the figure of the world was changed utterly for me—of all this I can give no true picture dealing as I am with what I called facts. I maintained long ago in _Hieroglyphics_ that facts as facts do not signify anything or communicate anything; and I am sure that I was right, when I confess that, as a purveyor of exact information, I can make nothing of the year 1900. But avoiding the facts, I have got a great deal nearer the truth in the last Chapter of _The Secret Glory_, which describes the doings and feelings of two young people who are paying their first visit to London. _I_ never bolted up to town with the house master’s red haired parlour maid; but truth must be told in figures.”

6

Back in 1880, while his family were making plans for him, plans involving the Royal College of Surgeons, Machen used to walk to the Pontypool Road station to pick up the London papers. On his way back he would rest for awhile, (it was an eight mile walk) under the hedges and turn to the theatrical pages which seemed to him by far the most interesting parts of the paper, and the stage the most fascinating part of the Fabulous City of the West. And so, in a sense, he followed the bright lights to London, and then, having arrived there, set to work in the dark caves (HERE DWELL PUBLISHERS) of Chandos Street, Leicester Square and Catharine Street.

There is not the slightest bit of evidence that Machen ever thought longingly of footlights and grease paint or, for that matter, that he ever even thought of them at all after he arrived in London. Yet here in 1901 he dons buskins or whatever and prepares to tread the boards, and in a travelling company. His first engagements were with the Benson Shakesperean Company and with them he travelled the length and breadth of England for several season. He seems to have enjoyed it all tremendously, although it does not seem to have affected or influenced his later work. As a matter of fact, with the exception of a brief chapter and a half in one of his autobiographical books, he does not refer to his career on the stage at any great length. Sufficient unto the days....

And then one day, perhaps when the trees were beginning to put forth, Machen resumed the London Adventure. In 1902, and without fanfare of any sort, Grant Richards brought out a remarkable book with a strange title. It was called _Hieroglyphics_, and it was subtitled _A Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature_, by Arthur Machen. The book was born, as so many books are, while the author was reviewing books for a weekly journal. It was written in the happy period following his release from “the detestable office life” and as a perfectly normal reaction against it, and it remains to this day one of the best, and the least known and the most sadly neglected books of English criticism.

A noted publisher once told Machen that _Hieroglyphics_ had “influenced the whole standpoint of English literary criticism.” One wishes it had! At any rate, Machen read proofs of the book while playing in “The Varsity Belle,” and he read reviews of it while playing in “Paolo and Francesca.” And then, when _Hieroglyphics_ seemed unlikely to set Fleet Street afire, or even to start a small blaze in one of the University debating clubs, Machen began once more to write and to publish.

His old friend, A. E. Waite, a distinguished writer in the field of the occult and the mystic, began to publish Machen’s stories. Waite, who was also manager for Horlick’s Malted Milk, had managed to persuade the malted milk magnate to sponsor or subsidize a magazine. This was certainly the strangest commercial venture on record, for the magazine published material concerning the occult and mystical topics that appealed to Waite. Horlick was, presumably, happy to see his name on the cover and on the masthead of the magazine. It was in this esoteric little journal that some of Machen’s work first appeared ... _The White People_, _A Fragment of Life_ and, at long last, _The Garden of Avallaunius_.

Machen remarks, somewhere, that he did not know that the sale of Malted Milk was unfavorably affected by the publication of these tales. As a matter of fact, the stories were quite well received. Such things get around and, in 1906, Grant Richards collected the best of them, plus _Pan_, _The Inmost Light_, _The Red Hand_ and published them in a book called _The House of Souls_. Richards had changed his mind about Machen, but apparently with reservations, for in 1906 another Machen book, _Dr. Stiggins_, appeared, but under the device of a little-known publisher. This book is, in effect, an amplification of some views set forth in the Preface to _The House of Souls_. Mr. Richards wouldn’t touch this, but he did bring out _The Hill of Dreams_ in the following year.

And then there was another change in Machen’s life. He fell into journalism ... something that had once been devoutly wished for by the dear, dead folk of Caerleon.

_Chapter Five_

THE LEGEND OF A LEGEND

1

When the Allied armies achieved the break-through at Saint Lo some few years ago in that war we call Second, our armored columns fanned out over the Brittany peninsula and thrust deep into the river valleys of France. Most of us watched the drive for Paris, shook our heads over that nasty business at Avranches, and breathed more freely when Paris fell. From then on it was largely a matter of following, as closely as the security blackout permitted, Patton’s progress toward the Rhine and the star-shaped forts at Metz.

Few of us were then aware of the column under Hodges that began first to probe, then to thrust northward into Belgium. At the time it was briefly noted that our push to the Belgian border was even more rapid than the German drive southward in 1940. And so our entry into and beyond Mons passed almost unnoticed. Even the Germans were not too well aware of it, apparently, for it was outside Mons, you will recall, that German tanks were waved on by American MPs and obligingly clanked into bivouac areas with the General Shermans and the half-tracks of the American First Army.

There were, if I remember correctly, and I am sure that I do, one or two references to the Angel of Mons incident of the last war, but these were merely notes in passing. The mere mention of Mons meant Machen to me, and I suppose that, like many another Machenite, I waited with something like bated breath for a sign of some sort, or a sequel to the legend that had been born just thirty years ago that very month of September.

And, I suppose, devout Machenites the world over re-read in that September of 1944, the invented tale of the wonderful Welshman, the tale that was at first called simply, _The Bowmen_ and which came to be called, by popular demand, _The Angels of Mons_.

It was one of the strangest stories of that first World War and a story pure and simple it was. But it so captured and fired the imagination of all Englishmen, and of the world, that people were unwilling for it to remain merely a magical tale by a Welshman writing strange tales in the city of London. People must have their miracles, and so Machen’s invention of the Bowmen became one of the hallowed legends of the war. You may remember the story, for you must have heard it, in one version or another, even if you had never even heard of Arthur Machen.

_It was during the Retreat of the Eighty Thousand_, the tale begins. The English were in danger of annihilation. At a particularly important point in the line the German guns had thundered and shrieked all morning. Finally, their numbers greatly reduced, the English saw a tremendous host moving against them. German infantry—as far as the eye could see. Well—the English fought on. One of the riflemen, who happened to know Latin and other useless things, recalled a motto he had once seen in a restaurant, _Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius_, which motto he said, uttered or shouted. As he did so he felt “something between a shudder and a shock” and behold! the roar of battle died down to a gentle murmur and a great voice and a shout louder than the thunder cried, “Array, Array, Array!” This was followed by other battlecries in English and in French—cries to Saint George. And then he saw, “beyond the trench, a long line of shapes, with a shining about them. They were like men who drew the bow,” and their arrows flew toward the German host. Who, as it happened, were stopped in their tracks.

Now this invention served its purpose, no less than any inspirational tale or legend or truth or half-truth. But it became a matter of great controversy because, as it happened, Arthur Machen, when questioned about it, blithely revealed that there was not an ounce of truth in it. The story was pure invention, a piece of fiction which was not, he added, entirely to his satisfaction as a writer.

This discrediting of a miracle soon got abroad, and there was a great hue and cry and indeed a notable hullabaloo about the matter. Machen was taken to task ... the clergy thundered against him and many a pulpit was pounded by many a pudgy ecclesiastical fist. Gentle ladies began to produce “evidence” that the event had actually taken place—that they had had it from a soldier who was there. A great many witnesses, once or twice removed, were found and quoted. The controversy grew and with it the legend.

As for Machen, he finally wrote a preface to a new American edition to _The Bowmen_, now called _The Angels of Mons_, published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1915. In it he wrote: