Chapter IV: Part 4

“This was in last August, or to be more precise, in the last Sunday of last August. There were terrible things to be read on that hot Sunday morning between meat and mass. It was in the _Weekly Dispatch_ that I saw the awful account of the retreat from Mons. I no longer recollect the details, but I have not forgotten the impression that was then made in my mind. I seemed to see a furnace of torment and death and agony and terror seven times heated, and in the midst of the burning was the British Army. In the midst of the flame, consumed by it and yet aureoled in it, scattered like ashes and yet triumphant, martyred and forever glorious. So I saw our men with a shining about them, so I took these thoughts with me to church, and, I am sorry to say, was making up a story in my head while the Deacon was singing the Gospel.” Well—that is the genesis of _The Bowmen_ or, if you insist, _The Angels of Mons_.

It was murmured and hinted and suggested and whispered in all sorts of quarters, Machen says, that before he wrote the tale he had “heard something.” The most decorative of these whisperings was this: “I know for a fact that the whole thing was given him in typescript by a lady-in-waiting.” And, presumably, as is the custom with all popular legends, most everyone had a cousin or a brother-in-law who had been there. By the time the story had been reprinted in parish periodicals and spread by word of pulpit, it began to seem to Machen that he had failed in the art of letters. There began to be variations on the theme—such as one in which the German dead were found to be punctured with arrow wounds. The occultists next had a go at it, then the scientists began to talk learnedly of “mass hallucination.”

The legend was then translated into several languages including, at any rate, the French. The shining figure of St. George became, variously, St. Michael the Archangel and St. Joan of Arc. The Germans, for security reasons no doubt, offered no opinion or explanation of their abrupt halt or of the tale. However, as Machen observes, “Other versions of the story appeared in which a cloud interposed between the attacking Germans and the defending British. In some examples the cloud served to conceal our men from the advancing enemy; in others, it disclosed shining shapes which frightened the horses of the pursuing German cavalry. St. George, it will be noted, has disappeared—he persisted some time longer in certain Roman Catholic variants—and there are no more bowmen, no more arrows. But so far angels are not mentioned; yet they are ready to appear, and I think I have detected the machine which brought them into the story.

“In _The Bowmen_ my imagined soldier saw ‘a long line of shapes, with a shining about them.’ And Mr. A. P. Sinnett, writing in the May (1915) issue of _The Occult Review_, reporting what he had heard, states that ‘those who could see said they saw ‘a row of shining beings’ between the two armies.’ Now I conjecture that the word ‘shining’ is the link between my tale and the derivative from it. In the popular view shining and benevolent supernatural beings are angels and nothing else, and so, I believe, the Bowmen of my story have become ‘the Angels of Mons.’ In this shape they have been received with respect and credence everywhere, or almost everywhere.”

Pamphlets were published, as is usual in such cases. The Theosophists published an “answer to Mr. Arthur Machen.” Another worker in the field collected “numerous Confirmations, Testimonies, Evidences of the Wounded” and other materials in an “authentic record” of the event. The furore died out after the war and the Angels of Mons rested in legend with only sporadic appearances in the pages of the Sunday supplements. Within a few years the legend had graduated to the sphere of science or pseudo-scientific study.

2

In 1930 there was published in London a book called _The Mystery and Lore of Apparitions, with Some Account of Ghosts, Spectres, Phantoms and Boggerts in Early Times_ by Harold Shaylor, an investigator in various fields of the marvelous.

The Frontispiece of this comfortably plump volume is “from a Drawing by A. Forestier, reproduced by kind permission from the Illustrated London News.” The sketch shows eight or nine soldiers in a trench in the foreground firing at advancing hordes of Germans. To the right and standing above the parapet of the trench are three gigantic bowmen, helmeted and with swords at their sides, launching arrows (visible in the sketch) at the Germans. A fourth bow and part of an arm are visible at the extreme right. The Germans are falling in great numbers, at least one is visibly pierced by an arrow.

Within the book, among the many marvels, we find this:

“Considerable discussion took place in the Press during the autumn of 1914 and the early part of 1915, with respect to the phenomena said to have been seen at the Battle of Mons.

“The publications of these stories brought forth many others of a similar character, the veracity of which appears to be unquestioned, and it will be found interesting to compare them with some of the accounts of phantom armies told in the preceding pages” (of Mr. Shaylor’s collection).

There follows then a story told by a non-commissioned officer who was in the retreat from Mons on or about August 28th, 1914. The weather was hot and clear and, between eight and nine in the evening, this officer was with a group of others on guard duty. An officer came up and asked if they had seen anything “startling.” Two men were sent forward to see if they could discover what the officer meant. They returned with nothing untoward to report. The officer then came back and, “taking me and some others a few yards away, showed us the sky. I could see quite plainly in mid-air,” says the non-commissioned officer, “a strange light which seemed to be quite distinctly outlined and was not a reflection of the moon, nor were there any clouds in the neighborhood. The light became brighter and I could see quite distinctly three shapes, one in the center having what looked like outspread wings, the other two were not so large, but were quite plainly distinct from the center one. They appeared to have a long, loose, hanging garment of a golden tint and they were above the German line facing us. We stood watching them for about three-quarters of an hour. All the men with me saw them, and other men came up from groups who also told us they had seen the same thing. I remember the day, because it was a day of terrible anxiety for us. Later on the Uhlans attacked us and we drove them back with heavy losses. It was after this engagement, when we were dog-tired, that the vision appeared to us.”

Thus the story of the non-commissioned officer as told to Mr. Thompson. Another account of spectral figures is recounted by a private of the Lancashire Fusiliers. He is supposed to have given an account of his experience to a Sister in a hospital. “It’s true, Sister, we all saw it. First there was a sort of yellow mist like, sort of rising before the Germans as they came to the top of the hill. Come on like a solid wall they did. The next minute comes this funny cloud of light and when it clears off, there’s a tall man with yellow hair in golden armour, on a white horse, holding up his sword and his mouth open. The men knew it was St. George. Hadn’t they seen him with his sword on every ‘quid’ they’d ever seen?”

Thus the Lancashire Fusilier in Mr. Thompson’s 1930 account. Machen encountered him just as the Putnam edition was on the presses in 1915. In a Postscript to that edition of _The Bowmen_, Machen refers to an article called _The Angelic Leaders_ written by a Miss Phyllis Campbell. Miss Campbell relates that she was a nurse in France where there came into her care a Lancashire Fusilier (the same one presumably, mentioned by Thompson). He said he had seen St. George on a white horse, leading the British at Vitry-le-Francaise, when the Allies turned. His story was corroborated by a wounded R.F.A. man who was present. The R.F.A. man said he saw a tall man with yellow hair, in golden armour, on a white horse, holding his sword up, and his mouth open (as if, comments Machen, he was saying, “Come on, boys! I’ll put the kybosh on the devils!”) This figure was bareheaded and the R.F.A. man and the Fusilier knew that he was St. George, because he was exactly like the figure of St. George on the sovereigns. “Hadn’t they seen him with his sword on every ‘quid’ they’d ever had?”

The difference between having a quid and seeing one may be significant. At any rate, Machen makes a rather telling point concerning his Lancashire Fusilier. The soldiers are said to have known it was St. George by his exact likeness to the figure on the sovereign. This strikes Machen as being odd because the apparition is described as being bareheaded and in armour while the St. George on the sovereign or quid is just the reverse, since he is quite naked except for a short cape flying from the shoulders and a helmet. So—the evidence of the quid they’d either had or seen scarcely presents sufficient identification of the saint.

A final vision is presented in C. J. Thompson’s book—this one by a soldier in an artillery battery in a letter dated June 26th, 1915. He describes a being like an angel with outstretched wings surrounded by a luminous cloud which appeared between the advancing Germans and the British. The artillery man further states, “with regard to the stories which you have heard about angels and spirits, they may be right but of course you must remember that trench work is mind-straining as well as nerve-racking and that may account for a lot of these stories.”

And indeed, Mr. Thompson ascribes most of these visitations, visions and miracles to nerve strain or mass hallucination.

It will be noted that the legend had, by this time, divorced itself completely from its creator. Mr. Thompson makes no mention of Arthur Machen, either as the reporter or creator of this astonishing event. Nor do Thompson’s _Acknowledgments_ or _Index_ contain any mention of Machen, Arthur; or of his published works. Of course the tale of _The Bowmen_ was first published in a newspaper, the London _Evening News_ for September 29, 1914, for which paper Machen was then a reporter. Mr. Machen may have been included in Mr. Thompson’s inclusive word “Press.”

3

However, the curious turnings and twistings of legend are not yet finished. The miracles of 1915 became the mass hallucinations of 1930, and the creator of the slight story of _The Bowmen_ had been quite forgotten in the furore attending each of them. But by far the most curious circumstance in the whole curious affair is contained in the most recent, to my knowledge, mention of the Mons legend. It occurs in an article by Meyer Berger, entitled _Legends of the War_, published in _Harper’s Bazaar_ in January, 1944.

Mr. Berger is an extremely competent correspondent for the _New York Times_. As a matter of fact, it was out of respect for Mr. Berger’s worth as a correspondent that I saved from salvage the magazine in which his article appeared. Early in the spring of 1944 I was cleaning out the winter’s accumulation of magazines and newspapers and readying them for the next paper pick-up. The baroque _Bazaar_ is not, usually, to my taste, but seeing Berger’s name over an article I placed the magazine to one side and took it up to read some nights later.

The article concerns _legends_ of the war. Mr. Berger remarks, sensibly, that war nurtures in the soldier some dormant sense that opens the door to superstition, to mysticism, and to visions of the supernatural. He then outlines the various legends of the White Lady on various fronts, the Christ in Flanders legend and, of course, the Angel of Mons. Mr. Berger uses the singular, and so one supposes, there is an Angel of Mons legend as well.

Mr. Berger outlines the legend briefly, explaining that there was no earthly reason for the Jerries to have stopped the pursuit, but stop they did—and the wherefore of this astonishing halt forms the basis for the story.

“Arthur Machen said later,” continues the Berger article, “that he conceived the legend of the Angel of Mons as he daydreamed in church over the news of the German’s miraculous halt.” This is not quite what Machen said, of course. Machen explained that he conceived the story of the Bowmen as he brooded in church over the news of the British _retreat_. Berger goes on to relate that when Machen’s story appeared in the London _Evening News_ as fiction it was, to his (Machen’s) astonishment, taken up and spread all over the world as something that actually happened. “There is no reason,” remarks Berger, “to question his explanation.”

On the other hand Berger spoke in France with Tommies who swore that, Machen or no Machen, they saw the Angel at Mons, though not as he described it in his piece. “The Machen story said that when the British were hardest pressed at Mons, there appeared in the heavens, above the battlefield, an unusual cloud formation. This changed into a giant likeness of St. George, flanked by rows of medieval English bowmen whose flights of arrows killed virtually all the German horde. When the bodies were examined there was no sign of a wound.”

Whatever this may be, it is _not_ the Machen story. Machen has no cloud, no giant St. George ... only “a long line of shapes with a shining about them.” Mr. Berger also talked with a Sergeant Coombs of the King’s Royal Rifles at an English base hospital in Trouville. Coombs swore he had seen the Angel of Mons and Berger had reason to believe him, “if only because he wore the Mons Star.” Coombs describes “a kind of triple cloud” ... a large center cloud with two clouds at either side. They had no particular shape at first but they gradually became a great angel ... “the two smaller clouds were enormous wings, and the angel spread its wings as if it were signalling the jerries to stop where they were.”

This seraphic semaphore is a refinement that had not previously appeared in any of the many versions of the legend. One of the legend’s variations, writes Berger, “has a faintly humorous side.” It appeared in the _North American Review_ in August, 1915.

“It told of a soldier, hard-pressed with the rest at Mons and ready to drop, who found himself murmuring, ‘Adest Anglis Sanctus Georgius.’ He knew no Latin and he didn’t know what moved him to the utterance. Even as it came to his lips, he recalled that he had seen it lettered on a plate in a vegetarian restaurant in London, before he was called up to service. It means, roughly, ‘May St. George be a present help to England.’ Something like an electric shock convulsed the soldier and his shock-packed ears dimly heard men around him shouting, ‘St. George for Merrie England.’ From that point, the story followed the Machen pattern—archers appeared in the sky and the Germans dropped by thousands.”

Now this version, with the “faintly humorous side,” which appeared according to Mr. Berger in the _North American Review_ in August, 1915, _is_ the Machen story. Whether or not the North American Review version was written by Machen I have been unable to discover. There are differences, of course, even in the very condensed portion offered by Berger. The _North American’s_ soldier knew no Latin ... he merely recited, incorrectly at that, and at a very propitious moment, a motto he had seen in a vegetarian restaurant. Machen’s soldier, although he had apparently patronized that very same vegetarian restaurant, did know Latin “and other useless things.”

And so the legend of the legend of the Angel or Angels of Mons continues to grow out of Arthur Machen’s tale of _The Bowmen_.

4

In 1915, possibly because he was then writing _Far Off Things_ and was in a mood reminiscent, Arthur Machen declared that he had failed in the art of literature. Most good writers have felt, at one time or another, a similar sense of failure—or at least of mild frustration. Presumably they have a particular instance in mind, certainly Machen had his. It was simply because his tale of the Bowmen had been accepted as truth.

Now it may seem to many a triumph of art that one’s work is held to be so life-like and so real that it is generally accepted as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Our realists, for example, are said to feel that way. They consider the verdict of veracity the highest critical success. They have mirrored life and that, so help them, was what they had set out to do!

Machen felt differently about it. His invention, his creation, was not only accepted as being true, but his inventiveness and creativeness were denied him. His magic had been judged mere journalism and that, to Machen, or to any other creative artist, meant failure. However this may be, Machen did not fail in his other legends of the war. Possibly because he called some of them legends—perhaps because the public felt their “willing suspension of disbelief” already supported too great a load—at any rate Machen’s further inventions were permitted to remain inventions and he was accorded a considerable, if not fanatical, amount of praise.

These other tales, _The Soldier’s Rest_, _The Monstrance_, _The Dazzling Light_, had in them the very elements that should have appealed to those who make legends of inventions. They offered much in the way of tradition blended with mysticism, a mixture that should have drawn credence from a much less tradition-loving people than the British. Perhaps there was too much mysticism in these tales—anything less subtle than a warrior saint might not appeal to the Church Militant.

But surely _Drake’s Drum_, or the tale called _Munitions of War_ had the stuff of legend in them, and tradition too. Layed on, as a matter of fact, with the trowel. _Drake’s Drum_ should have become one of the glorious legends of the sea-girt Britons, the race of mariners. This is the tale that relates the events that took place off Scapa Flow, when the British Navy awaited the German High Fleet in November, 1918 to accept their surrender. There were rumours that the Germans might possibly fight and the crews of the British ships stood at “Battle Stations.” Then, as the first German ship appeared through the mist, a drum began to beat in the “Royal Oak.” And it beat and it rolled from then until the entire German Fleet was encircled and helpless. Of course the unauthorized drumming was investigated, but with all hands at Battle Stations, and especially upon such a momentous occasion, it was hardly possible, and highly improper, that there might be anyone aboard ship with the time and the inclination to beat a drum. However, neither drum nor drummer were located and there was no choice but to believe that what everyone had been hearing was Drake’s Drum—“the audible manifestation of the spirit of the Great Sea Captain, present at this hour of tremendous victory of Britain on the Sea.”

Now this is certainly a tale that should have appealed to the Britons, as indeed it did, but they refused to raise it to the status of a legend. Then too, the story appeared in 1919, by which time England had less urgent need of legends. In any case, the perfidious Teutons had by that time scuttled their ships at Scapa Flow.

_Munitions of War_, a story published in 1915, also has the stuff of legend, but somehow it never caught, never quite made the grade. Oh, it was successful enough as a story, but it never became a legend. Which, on the whole, pleased its creator. It tells of a traveller who went to a seaport in the West of England and how he was awakened in the night to hear vast oaths and burly voices heaving and ho-ing as they loaded ships. The language used by these stevedores had an other-century quality and the watcher in the night could only conclude that these men had loaded Nelson’s ships before Trafalgar. Had this story been written in 1942 or 1943 instead of 1915 it might have been printed in the “Welders and Steam-Fitters Gazette,” or some other house organ, and it may even have been legendized by England’s defense workers and winners of the coveted “E” award—or its British equivalent.

5

One of the longest, and by far the best, of Machen’s stories of the war period is one that made no appeal whatever to the legend-loving instincts of a people at war but which contained, as we may see in this post-war year of ’48, something of the nature of prophecy.

_The Terror_ was first published in 1917. It was obviously inspired by the reception accorded the tale of the Bowmen combined with more of Machen’s creative magic. In the opening chapter Machen refers to the rumours and legends current in the early years of the war—the Bowmen, and the Russians who traveled through Britain by night on their way to some great push or other. These absurdities, Machen points out, depended upon the newspaper for their dissemination. The events described in _The Terror_ had been held in strictest secrecy and no word had been given to the Press. For reasons of security all events connected with the Terror had been hushed up.

However, continued Machen, in a “now-it-can-be-told manner,” these were the reasons why “almost two years of war had been completed before the motionless English line began to stir.” The story of the Terror is, then, purported to be the secret of the long inactivity of the British Army.

Things were happening all over England ... very strange things. An airman had been killed under mysterious circumstances. The circumstances appeared to have been obvious enough—he seemed to have been attacked by a flock of birds, a rather mysterious matter in itself. There were other happenings here and there, and rumors of many more. After a few strange events had been reported in local papers there were no further accounts, and sometimes there was no local paper thereafter. Few people would have connected these events in any case. An airman is killed. A child chases a butterfly and is seen alive no more. There are strange stories about munitions works and fiery clouds and bees and horses and dogs. But none of these may be written up in the papers.

Well, at long last and with Machen’s usual circumambience and magic the story reveals that the mysterious deaths and strange events are being caused by animals—by cows and sheep and dogs and horses and bees and birds and moths. The explanation? Machen writes—

“... The source of the great revolt of the beasts is to be sought in a much subtler region of inquiry. I believe that the subjects revolted because the king abdicated. Man has dominated beasts throughout the ages, the spiritual has reigned over the rational through the peculiar quality and grace of spirituality that men possess, that makes a man to be that which he is. And while he maintained this power and grace, I think it is pretty clear that between him and the animals there was a certain treaty and alliance. There was supremacy on the one hand, and submission on the other.... ‘Spiritual’ signifies the royal prerogative of man, differentiating him from the beast. For long ages he had been putting off this royal robe ... he had declared, again and again, that he is not spiritual, but rational, that is, the equal of the beasts over whom he was once sovereign. He has vowed that he is not Orpheus but Caliban. But the beasts ... perceived that the throne was vacant—not even friendship was possible between them and the self-deposed monarch. If he were not king he was a sham, an impostor, a thing to be destroyed.”

But before these mysteries are resolved there is much talk of German spies, of mysterious rays, of all sorts of things that attempt to link the chain of horrors with the Germans. And in the course of these attempts to implicate the Germans in the Terror, Machen creates several hypotheses which seemed the very stuff of fiction in 1917—but which in our time must seem like prophecy.

It was in 1944 that the Viking Press issued a volume of its Portable Library devoted to _Six Novels of the Supernatural_. Machen’s tale of _The Terror_ was one of the six. Thus it happens that I re-read _The Terror_ at about the time our forces were capturing the platforms from which the robot bombs were launched at London. Now _The Terror_ has always pleased me as a tale, a diversion and, as with most of Machen’s magic, something to think about when the world is quiet and mysterious—say a midnight in October, or three o’clock of an August afternoon. Nothing is inconceivable at such times, I think, and anything can happen—or seem to happen. A long, long look at a tree or a hedge or a hillside might give rise to disturbing thoughts—and one often finds oneself looking hastily away before something actually _does_ happen.

But to return to _The Terror_. I had read it several times before and I thought I knew it quite well. But reading it in 1944 it seemed quite new. I had not remembered some things, perhaps because they seemed only incidental to the plot. They were the sort of thing one skipped over rapidly to see what would happen next, or when and where the Terror would strike again.

Well along into the story a Mr. Merrit, one of Machen’s more talkative characters, is explaining to a group of friends that “the Terror” is all part of a German plot, that there are, indeed, Germans established in England who are doing these things. And this, according to Merrit, is how it was done:

“The scheme had been prepared years before, some thought soon after the Franco-Prussian War. Moltke had seen that the invasion of England presented very great difficulties. The matter was constantly in discussion in the inner military and high political circles, and the general trend of opinion in these quarters was that at the best, the invasion of England would involve Germany in the gravest difficulties, and leave France in a position of the _tertius gaudens_. This was the state of affairs when a very high Prussian personage was approached by the Swedish professor, Huvelius.”

Professor Huvelius, according to Merrit (or Machen) was an extraordinary man. He was personally an amiable individual who gave every penny he owned to the poor, who dissipated his salary on charity and kindness. He starved himself in order to help the needy. And he wrote a book called _De Facinore Humane_, which book proved the infinite corruption of the human race.

The amiable Professor preached a cynical philosophy, the main tenets of which have a familiar sound. He held that human misery was due, by and large, to the mistaken notion that man was naturally well-disposed and kindly. Murderers, thieves and other abominable creatures are created by the false pretense and foolish credence of human virtue. And he goes on to say that kings and the rulers of people could decrease the sum of human misery to a vast extent by acting on the doctrine of human wickedness.

“War,” says the mild Professor, “which is one of the worst of evils, will always continue to exist. But a wise king will desire a brief rather than a lengthy war, a short evil rather than a long evil. And this not from the benignity of his heart towards his enemies, for we have seen that the human heart is naturally malignant, but because he desires to conquer, and to conquer easily, without a great expenditure of men or of treasure, knowing that if he can accomplish this feat his people will love him and his crown will be secure. So he will wage brief victorious wars, and not only spare his own nation, but the nation of the enemy, since in a short war the loss is less on both sides than in a long war. And so from evil will come good.”

This philosophy sounds more and more familiar as Merrit goes on to expound what he knows of the works of “Professor Huvelius.” The wise ruler will assume that the enemy is infinitely corruptible and infinitely stupid, since all men are so. The ruler then makes friends in the very council of his enemy and among the people of his enemy, bribing the wealthy and offering opportunity for still greater wealth, and winning the poor by swelling words. “For,” says the Professor, “it is the wealthy who are greedy of wealth, while the people can be gained by talking to them of liberty, their unknown god.”

At any rate, this Huvelius sold his plan to the Germans. His philosophy too, apparently, and presumably he donated the moneys thus obtained to his favorite charity. The Germans accordingly proceeded to buy lands in certain suitable places in England, secret excavations were made and in a short time there was a subterranean Germany in the heart of England. The Germans, having made themselves as secure as Crusoes, waited for “the Day.”

This, then, was the plot outlined by Machen as he carefully prepared the background for his story. It seemed not too incredible in 1915 as he worked on the book, for there were rumors even then of emplacements ready for guns discovered by British troops in Belgium and in France, and certain caves along the Aisne seemed to have been made ready for cannon.

Now all this imagining in 1915 and 1917 comes pretty close to the events of 1940. Whether the Germans had read Huvelius or Machen in the years of the Long Armistice, or confined their reading to _Mein Kampf_, which seems the more likely, they had certainly covered the ground from Eben Emael to Quisling.

At any rate, _The Terror_ is first rate reading at any time, and certainly a Machen “must.” It is too lengthy to be included in the usual bibliography—but it is readily available in Viking’s “Six Novels of the Supernatural.”

_Chapter Six_

THE YELLOW BOOKS

1

It would be unflattering indeed to imply that Arthur Machen’s books were quickly discarded by their owners, or that they had ever crowded, in any considerable numbers, the shelves of the second-hand book shops. Nevertheless it is a fact that for some years, especially in the late Twenties and early Thirties, the shelves, counters and sidewalk tables of Fourth Avenue were high-lighted for browsers by the bindings that blazed forth the magic of Machen.

Mr. Alfred Knopf who undertook in the Twenties to introduce, or to reintroduce, Arthur Machen to American readers elected, perhaps for obvious reasons, to issue the odd-sized books in a bright yellow binding. For this, as well as for his work in bringing Machen across the Atlantic, Mr. Knopf is to be thanked; but whoever designed the books, having specified an unmistakable color for the cloth binding, decided also upon a dark blue paper label with gold lettering—a combination that became, in a reasonably short time, completely indecipherable. There was, however, no mistaking a Machen—even when it turned up in the darkest corner of the most unassuming hole-in-the-wall in Fourth Avenue, Twelfth Street or lower Lexington Avenue. The adept Arthurian merely looked for the unmistakable yellow binding with its dark and indecipherable patch. It must be admitted that the production manager or book designer for Knopf planned better than he knew, for it seemed that time could not dull, nor dirt disguise, nor grime diminish the yellow of those bindings. The experienced browser could spot one at thirty feet in the dimmest corner of the dingiest shop, sandwiched though it might be between _V. V.’s Eyes_ and _The Conquest of Fear_ or buried under a pile of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian romances. A recent convert might, for a time, respond to the lure of the yellow only to find, on closer inspection, something about a eunuch by a man named Pettit, or an early Ben Hecht, or some other ordinary book bound in yellow; but in time he learned to distinguish that one especial hue. He came to know it, however faded, for it seemed to fade predictably.

Thus the yellow books issued by Knopf became the most eagerly sought-after books along Fourth Avenue. It was not too long of course, before they became scarce. Soon they were taken from tables and stacked reverently on shelves, and before very long they were behind glass doors or in the shelves behind the proprietor’s desk, or even in that holy of holies—the back room.

Today they have disappeared from Fourth Avenue. You may find, now and then, one of the Martin Secker editions, or perhaps one of the deluxe editions of the Heptameron—or even a set, fabulously priced, of the Caerleon edition. For the most part, however, the book shops are Machen-less, a condition that might be remedied, and profitably, by some enterprising publisher, or even by Mr. Knopf.

The House of Knopf, however, seems remarkably disinterested in its valuable property, and a valuable property it is, for not only did the series include almost all of the best of Machen, but almost every volume contained a preface or a foreword written especially for these editions by Mr. Machen. These comparatively recent Machen items are worth a volume of their own, a proposition warmly advanced by Mr. Joseph Vodrey but received coolly enough, thus far at least, by Mr. Knopf.

2

Machen had first appeared in print in America in 1894 when Roberts of Boston published _The Great God Pan_. There were several other Machen items published in this country prior to the Twenties. Dana Estes brought out _The Hill of Dreams_ and _The House of Souls_ not long after the Richards editions and in similar format. Putnam published _The Bowmen_ in 1915 while the controversy over the legend was still raging. There were a few others, but the Machen boom was still to come. Mr. Cabell’s tribute to Machen in _Beyond Life_, published a few years later, undoubtedly did much to create a body of readers eager for Machen.

Just how and when Mr. Alfred Knopf became interested in Machen as a literary property I do not know, one does not with impunity ask publishers why they seek out certain authors. Certainly Mr. Knopf was of the opinion that the Twenties was ripe for Machen—anyone who remembers that era would, even today, vindicate Mr. Knopf’s judgment. Yet somehow, Machen did not catch on as well as might have been expected. Or perhaps he did—for the Twenties. For this was certainly a prolific period, genius was hailed weekly and books sold by the thousands. Perhaps Machen’s books did sell quite well by the standards of the Twenties. The Knopf printings seem to have been exhausted within a remarkably short time and very rapidly disappeared from book stores until their reappearance on second-hand stalls in the Thirties. Arthur Machen is not remembered too well as one who was popular in the Twenties, but then all too few of the writers of the Twenties are remembered at all.

Who were they? Critics and commentators of the times hailed book after book, they acclaimed name after name—but most of those names are seldom mentioned in the current revival of interest in the Twenties. The “best seller” lists of the day hardly indicate that John Dos Passos, Cabell, Van Vechten, etc., etc., were what all America was reading. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis and one or two others are notable exceptions, but the real best-sellers of the time would sound unfamiliar even to students of that era. Most people were reading _The Sheik_, _If Winter Comes_, _Black Oxen_, _The Green Hat_ and _So Big_. Zane Grey and Ibanez were more widely read than Sinclair Lewis, even though _Main Street_ had created a stir. There were outlines of history and of philosophy and even the “art” of thinking was popularized. There were books about China and Africa and India—and some of them even became the centers of controversy. Storms raged over books whose very titles are unremembered today, while the books we now consider “typical” of the Twenties sold slowly—and in small editions. One discovers that Eleanor Wylie, Ellen Glasgow, Floyd Dell, E. E. Cummings and most of the others who, even though they were hailed on alternate Tuesdays and Sundays as “new stars of great magnitude in the literary firmament,” were not too widely read, despite the assistance some of them received from the newly formed book clubs. Nor are they recalled nowadays with even fond recollection by very many. It is, therefore, not surprising that Arthur Machen remains one of the more obscure writers of the American Twenties, as well as of the English Nineties.

Interest in Arthur Machen was stirring even before the Twenties, but it was principally among writers and literary people. James Branch Cabell, whose _Beyond Life_ was first published in 1919, was perhaps the first to mention in print the name of Arthur Machen and something of his work. In one of his lengthy monologues, speaking through the amiable and erudite Charteris, he says, “I wonder if you are familiar with that uncanny genius whom the London directory prosaically lists as Arthur Machen? If so, you may remember that in his maddening volume _Hieroglyphics_ Mr. Machen circumvolantly approaches to the doctrine I have just voiced—that all enduring art must be an allegory. No doubt, he does not word this axiom quite explicitly: but then Mr. Machen very rarely expresses outright that which his wizardry suggests.”

It was about this time that Starrett discovered Arthur Machen, perhaps through Cabell whose work he was among the first to praise. Starrett it was, along with Paul Jordan-Smith, who tried to popularize Arthur Machen even before the famous Knopf “yellow books” were issued. A small group gathered about Starrett and Jordan-Smith to try to prove to publishers that Machen _was_ important and that his books _were_ being collected. In 1919 Smith wrote to several publishers about Machen, but they were not interested. The group then made every effort to have Machen’s first editions rise from nothing to ridiculous heights.

They succeeded all too well in this, for as Jordan-Smith says, “There were only a few of us then, but we seemed to be many, for we were bidding against one another in a hundred shops all over Britain. We did not expect the publishers to enter the rare book field. We merely wanted them to publish new books and reprint old ones by Machen. Instead they made limited editions and spoiled the whole business.”

Mr. Starrett, who is one of the most enthusiastic of Machen’s admirers, finally did something about it on his own. In 1923 he published, with his friend Covici, a collection of Arthur Machen’s stories and essays under the title _The Shining Pyramid_. This book was published in an edition limited to 875 copies. It contained, besides the title story, a number of pieces that had not previously been published in book form, and many of which have not since been reprinted. This is one of the better collections of Machen material which deserves reprinting today. In the following year Starrett published another collection under the title _The Glorious Mystery_. This, too, contained much new material and much that has not appeared elsewhere.

At the same time, perhaps even before Starrett was preparing to publish his collections, Alfred Knopf became interested in Arthur Machen and wrote him with an offer to publish anything of his he could find. Apparently Knopf’s negotiations coincided, in point of time at any rate, with Starrett’s plans. In 1925 Machen published in London a collection called _The Shining Pyramid_. The book was published simultaneously in New York by Alfred Knopf. It contained an introduction in which Machen wrote: “_The Shining Pyramid_ is the result of a collaboration. Two years ago an American man of letters, full of industry, rummaged in old papers, magazines and manuscripts owing their origin to me, and produced as a result of his labors a volume published at Chicago, called _The Shining Pyramid_. The American gentleman, I may say, did not disturb my peace by consulting me as to the content of the book in question. Then, in 1924, pleased, I suppose, with the results of his toils, he rummaged a little more, and, using the same methods, produced a second volume of scraps and odds and ends from my workshop. This book he entitled _The Glorious Mystery_.”

Knopf had, by this time, published quite a number of Machen’s earlier books. Three books were published in 1922, four in 1923, four in 1924 and four in 1925, of which _The Shining Pyramid_, with its introduction, was one. The “yellow books” were finding their way to the more discriminating and discerning readers in America.

The publication of two books bearing the same title, one issuing from Chicago, the other from London and New York, stirred up a controversy. How far this went and how it terminated is not public knowledge. In April of 1924 Knopf circulated to the trade a letter on the Alfred A. Knopf-Arthur Machen versus Covici-McGee-Vincent Starrett controversy. According to Paul Jordan-Smith the whole thing was the result of a misunderstanding. “This much I know. Starrett had been given the manuscripts of two or more books to get published as he could, at a time when publishers were shy of Machen. Years ago I saw them and at least one letter advising Starrett to do what he thought best about publishing them. Then Knopf came along with an offer to publish anything of Machen’s he could find. How Machen answered this I do not know, but he did give the rights to Knopf. But in the meantime Starrett had made arrangements with Covici, his Chicago friend and former book seller. It was unfortunate, and I fancy Machen’s poverty and Knopf’s established position made Machen want to transfer to him. Both were rather bitter. But as I recall the matter over the years I was impressed with the fact that both had acted in good faith until Knopf’s money made Machen jump. I think he would not have embarrassed Starrett if he had not been utterly lacking in money and had not had two small children to feed.”

Apparently the whole matter was settled amiably, for one of the subsequent Knopf editions is dedicated to Vincent Starrett. The “controversy,” such as it was, is not a matter to be revived, nor is it my intention to do so. Machen, and all who know him, owe too much to both Mr. Knopf and Mr. Starrett.

Another early worker in the Machen field was Carl Van Vechten. Besides making Machen a sort of intellectual “prop” for his precious _Peter Whiffle_, Mr. Van Vechten wrote some of the earliest appreciations of Machen. I must confess that there was a time when V. V.’s eyes seemed to me a trifle jaundiced in his estimate of Machen, and there was a time when I rather hotly resented the implications of the title _Excavations_. But time mellows most of us, Machenites especially, and I have come to regard and to welcome Mr. Van Vechten as a trail-blazer. It is true that I cannot accept some of his estimates of Machen, and I dare say I have often thought that he liked Arthur Machen for all the wrong reasons. However, let the student of Machen the Silurist decide for himself. _Excavations_, containing reprints of Van Vechten’s earlier reviews and articles, was published by the alert Mr. Knopf in 1926.

Vincent Starrett’s study of Machen is, I think, more in sympathy, or at least more to my taste. The title of the book in which his essay on Machen appears is _Buried Caesars_—it enraged me no less than _Excavations_, and at one time I regarded these books as two voices in a chorus that had come not only to praise Machen but to bury him in rather extravagant prose.

3

There has been little news of Arthur Machen or about Arthur Machen since the late 1920’s. He enjoyed a certain popularity for perhaps five years, a popularity that lingered much longer in more literary circles. For the most part Machen had disappeared from the world of literary figures just as his books had disappeared from the bookshops. That he is still read today we know, and we know too, that he has been slowly gaining new readers through the years. In 1933 Machen published his last novel, _The Green Round_. This has not yet been published in this country, although it is scheduled for publication this year by August Derleth’s “Arkham House.” In 1936 there were published in London two collections of his stories, most of which were reprints of earlier stories with the addition of some new pieces. These books are _The Children of the Pool_, published by Hutchinson, and _The Cosy Room_, published by Rich and Cowan. Within the past few years Machen’s stories have appeared in anthologies put together by Dorothy Sayers, Somerset Maughan, Phillip Van Doren Stern, Will Cuppy and, of all people, Boris Karloff!

August Derleth, the youthful sage of Sac Prarie, has been more active than anyone else in recent years in his efforts to spread the magic of Machen. Back in 1937, in the November issue of Ben Abramson’s “Reading and Collecting,” Derleth published an article on Machen, to which was appended a bibliography by Nathan Van Patten. Derleth’s article, the first to appear in almost a decade, followed the pattern of most previous articles about Machen. But Derleth has gone beyond prose. He has, from time to time, included Machen’s more macabre pieces in his various collections of supernatural stories. He has also published, or is planning to publish, reprints of several Machen books.

The late H. P. Lovecraft was an admirer of Arthur Machen’s work and a foremost exponent of the Machen manner in modern fiction. It is difficult to apply the epithet “pulp writer” to Lovecraft, but that is, after all, what he was. Recent appraisals of his work, and the publication in book form of his stories, have done much to raise him out of this category. It was Lovecraft who introduced Machen to August Derleth and to who knows how many thousands of other readers. In his essay, recently republished by Ben Abramson, _Supernatural Horror in Literature_, Lovecraft supplies one of the most up-to-date, if perhaps one-sided, appraisals of Arthur Machen’s work. Lovecraft concentrates his attention, naturally enough, on Machen’s tales of horror and the supernatural. The result is a valuable piece of Machenania but one that should be approached only by an adept. The chance reader or the casual reader would receive a rather specialized view of Machen.

4

More than one observer of the literary scene has drawn the obvious parallel between the 1890’s in England and the 1920’s in our own country. Both periods were characterized by a sharp break with tradition. In both periods the younger writers found themselves voluntary exiles from their own country and both groups selected the same European city as the scene of their exile. There are other parallels, ... the flood of “little” magazines, the cultivation of the “continental” attitude, the revival of the art for art’s sake tradition and a general letting down of the bars once again. Mr. Waugh, the 1890 Mr. Waugh, might well have written his _Reticence in Literature_ for the benefit of the new generation of bold, bad, young intellectuals.

Peter Munro Jack, writing in Malcolm Cowley’s symposium _After the Genteel Tradition_, called this the “James Branch Cabell Period,” and Alfred Kazin, in _On Native Ground_, refers to the writers of the Twenties as “The Exquisites,” while “All the Lost Generations” seems to him a suitable chapter heading to cover a brief history of the Twenties.

Mr. Jack credits it all to Cabell’s _Jurgen_ and to novels by Carl Van Vechten and Eleanor Wylie. “These books,” says Mr. Jack, “brought to our shores the very spirit of Rabelais and Voltaire, Balzac, Anatole France and Horace Walpole, Pater, Wilde, Machen, Max Beerbohm and Aldous Huxley ... and converted a barbarous literature over-night into an airy dance of verve, irony and Gallic sophistication.” Mr. Kazin also begins with _Jurgen_, which apparently ushered in “a vogue of elaborate decadence and enthusiasm, very wicked, world-weary and ornate.” Kazin goes on to indicate that “just as the pale, imitative exoticism of the late Nineties had marked not merely the beginnings of revolt against the old parochialism but a leisure-class psychology in an America that had finally attained a leisure class, so that the new literature of sophistication that came in with the James Branch Cabell School was fundamentally the ambitious baroque luxury of a period that had finally obtained a self-conscious splendor of its own.”

Mr. Kazin writes from the vantage point of 1942, and anything can happen to a critic, a book, or a period in a dozen or more years. Hindsight used to be considered superior, in some ways, to foresight—but such is the condition of the world today that this is no longer particularly true. Mr. Kazin, writing in the heyday of the four evangelists of modern American fiction—Don Passos, Hemingway, Farrell and Steinbeck, looks back upon the era of “baroque luxury” and “self-conscious splendor” with anything but nostalgia. Malcolm Cowley, contributing an essay on Dos Passos to his own symposium, an essay which preceded Kazin’s book by five years, and to which Mr. Kazin is somewhat indebted, remarks that Dos Passos had entered college in those olden baroque days, “at the beginning of a period which was later known as that of the Harvard aesthetes.” This is noted with an almost, but not quite, imperceptible touch of pride—or of snobbishness. These young Cantabrians, our boy Dos Passos among them, are reported to have acted in a manner befitting the Elizabethans, or least the men of the Nineties, or any other generation that felt it was living in a Golden Age. They read, Dos Passos still among them, Pater and _The Hill of Dreams_, and they explored the slums of Boston—which must have seemed to them at least as romantic as Cheapside or Houndsditch.

At any rate Machen was accepted and more or less widely hailed as one of the more important importations by some of the little magazines that began to spring up at this time. “The Reviewer,” one of the most important of the new journals, published Machen along with Ellen Glasgow, Joseph Hergesheimer, Ernest Boyd, Ronald Firbank, Ben Ray Redman, Edwin Muir and others. His public and enthusiastic acceptance by Van Vechten, that inveterate organizer of torchlight parades, was quite enough to launch Machen successfully with the intellectuals who, in those halcyon days, had scarcely an ideology among them.

It has been said that the writers of this period, motivated no doubt by the cynicism they either created or absorbed, or both, tended to escape from this world they never made and produced in the process of escaping some of the most exciting and readable books ever written in America. Of course neither Mr. Cowley nor Mr. Kazin draws exactly these conclusions—they are rather scornful of the Twenties and of the books produced in the Twenties.

They are both, Mr. Kazin more than Mr. Cowley since he came in later, in rather a hurry to get on to the Thirties when the Four Horsemen of the Apocryphal were beginning to gallop madly down the back-country lanes and through the congested streets of cities and the back-yards of milltowns. Nevertheless it must be apparent to even the most ideological reader of these weighty volumes that, for all their efforts at deprecating the self-conscious splendor of the period, both Mr. Cowley and Mr. Kazin manage to make the Twenties sound vastly more entertaining than the dull period to follow, when the leftist interpretation of literature placed black Marx against every novel that showed signs of having been written for the sheer pleasure of writing, or the desire to create a character or to tell a story.