Chapter V: Part 5

This seems to be the great fault that is found, by such men as these, with the novels of that era. They were not so judged in the Nineteen-Twenties. The sentiments expressed by Arthur Machen in _Hieroglyphics_, and echoed in Cabell’s _Beyond Life_, were rather widely accepted at the time, not only by a large portion of the reading public, but also by members of the more critical profession. Dyson, however much he may have fussed with his pipes and his pencils, his notes and his notions, expressed what was the literary credo of the day; “I will give you the task of a literary man in a nutshell—to create a wonderful story and to tell it in a wonderful manner.” And so Cabell and Wylie and Fitzgerald and Hume and Wilder and many others created wonderful stories. In this time of man and to this manner of writing Machen was admirably suited.

People who found New York in the Twenties as fabulous a city as Machen and Stevenson found London in their day, were delighted with the yellow-bound books that came out under the Borzoi imprint. For many a speakeasy in the mid-Forties, or in the Village, offered possibilities as extraordinary as Stevenson’s _Suicide Club_ or _The Lost Club_ of Machen. Indeed there are undoubtedly those who can recall when their favorite haunt disappeared over-night and then, as if by magic, reappeared in the brownstone house across the street. The city parks, as yet uninhabited by muggers, were magical places after midnight and lonely as the sunken lanes of Avalon. Those who delighted in the doings of Dyson and the adventures of the Young Man in Spectacles were enchanted by the curious byways of London, and they shared the satirical views of the dyspeptic Doctor Stiggins and the Hermit of Barnsbury. It pleased immense numbers of people who tired of Dreiser to find, in _Hieroglyphics_, this perfect reflection of their own attitude: “Imagine having to spend twenty years with _such_ people.”

The crash in the fall of 1929 was followed by a stunned silence—and presently one began to hear the hoof beats of the four frightening Horsemen and the voices of the economical evangelists crying, and wreaking, havoc.

The realists began to be heard because realism seemed to be what people wanted—politically, at any rate. The polemics disguised as novels began to appear in greater and ever-increasing numbers. It has since become obvious that realism of this sort was a one-way street to despair—and it was the realists, not the now-silent “romanticists,” who were called, in their own time, “The Irresponsibles.” But with the rise of the proletarian novel, the heroic mill-hand and the long, dreary lines of the unemployed, the period came to an end. Machen, along with the others, ceased to be read except by those who re-read him, or discovered him in the dusty bookshops where the yellow binding gleamed from the darkest corner.

_Chapter Seven_

MACHEN’S MAGIC

1

Of recent years there has been a tendency to regard the novel as something it has become rather than what it should be. Most novels that do not fall neatly into one of several categories created by the critics and reviewers are judged to be poor novels indeed. As a matter of fact, the whole of fiction, as well as of poetry, has come to be judged according to standards which, while they may be excellent standards when applied to journalism or the so-called “documentary,” serve fiction rather poorly. It has become the custom to label all stories, novels and poetry that may fall outside the special categories set up by such standards as “escapist.” It is a convenient enough classification, and it is an apt enough description, but the word has come to be used in a rather derogatory sense.

Now it may be demonstrated by an application of these very standards that almost every one of the world’s great books, and every one of the world’s heroic poems, is “escapist.” And that is, after all, what they were intended to be. But we are concerned with the telling of a story and the manner of its telling. To tell a wonderful story in a wonderful manner, this, says Arthur Machen, is the function of the writer. There is another equally fine description of the writer’s task, this time by James Branch Cabell, another story teller of some eminence.

There is in almost all great stories a certain magic that becomes apparent from the first sentence. One picks up _Moby Dick_ and reads: “Call me Ishmael.” There is a quality of strangeness in the name and abruptness of introduction that serves to set a mood, a mood that persists through the entire book. Many of Poe’s stories have this same strangeness and this same quality. One finds it too, in many of Machen’s stories. The opening sentence, for example of _The Hill of Dreams_: “The sky glowed as if great furnace doors had been opened.”

The magic of Machen depends as much upon his style as it does upon the magical things of which he writes. His finest stories appeal to an essential and basic desire for “escape” from the common life. They depend for their effect upon that willing suspension of disbelief of which Coleridge wrote (and for which Coleridge is known by far too many who would turn its meaning to their own uses), a suspension of disbelief which it is Mr. Machen’s happy fortune to bring about almost at will.

And yet, apparently, there is much more to it than the mere suspension of disbelief—it is rather a desire to accept such matters as may be set forth, whether or not they challenge belief—simply because they make an appeal to _instinctive belief_. One doesn’t have to try very hard to believe in the existence of certain powers, especially those which cannot be, or have not yet been, explained as any known existing force. From this point onward the development of a story by Machen may hinge upon the manner of telling as well as upon the selection of the materials for the tale. There must be no fumbling of the matter, no crude effects, no creaky props, no bolstering up by the shabby tricks and melodramatic artifices of the penny dreadfuls. Machen’s magic is very simply achieved. In each of his tales an improbable, but not implausible, theme is stated; usually one that is based upon something involving an instinctive belief, for example: the existence of “little people,” the continuance of some ancient power under certain circumstances, and in explaining certain occurrences or events for which no rational explanation exists. Folk tales, superstitions, local legends and mythology, most of these embody certain elements in which most of us have at least an instinctive belief. Then, too, a great deal of Mr. Machen’s own particular magic is achieved through his ability to see things and to present things that are “removed from the common life.”

Most of Machen’s characters are not unusual people, they are not especially “peculiar” in any accepted sense except as they may be affected by certain occurrences in the earlier development of the story. For example, the young man in _The Novel of the White Powder_, the boy in _The Novel of the Black Seal_, and the Vaughan girl in _The Great God Pan_. But for the most part his characters are, or were, very ordinary people; ordinary, that is, in the sense that Dyson and Phillips, and even Lucian Taylor, are quite ordinary people. Indeed the very ordinariness of some of these people becomes the starting point of an entire sequence of extraordinary events. Just as it was the ordinary qualities of a young married couple visiting relatives of a Sunday night in a dull, stodgy, respectable suburb of London that resulted in the strange story called _A Fragment of Life_.

Machen’s characters are completely believable, whatever events may occur, simply because of their very ordinary qualities. Lucian Taylor, the “hero” of _The Hill of Dreams_, an introvert we would call him today, was a normal school boy who did not conform too well to the rigors of the Public School System, and whose solitary home life conditioned him to react as he did to the strangeness of his environment and to succumb to the influences, real or imagined, of the Roman ruins near his home. To the development of such a simple and ordinary character, in this particular story, must be added one very important magical element—the influence of landscape upon character.

For the peculiar potency of Machen’s magic owes much, if not most of its force, to landscape and to the subtle influence of the weird topography of his stories. Many of Machen’s most telling effects are achieved through the mere portrayal of a brooding landscape, the sombre background of mountains, the deep, rutted lanes that run along between head-high hedges, solitary hilltops shimmering in heat waves, old grey houses that sit somberly at the edge of the forest and rivers that coil in slow esses through forests and skirt the walls of mountains. There is no doubt that the wild Welsh countryside had this effect upon Machen himself.

Machen’s first book, it will be remembered, was written by one “Leolinus Silurensis”—and Machen frequently calls himself a “Silurist.” For Gwent, in the old days, the days before Arthur and before the Romans, was the home of the Silures, one of the three great tribes in this last corner of the West. The Silures seem to have been more Iberian than Celtic—they dwelled in the Black Mountains and along the estuary of the Severn. It was, then, this dark and ancient land that formed the background of Machen’s life and most of his work. Machen explains, and illustrates, the influence of his homeland in _Far Off Things_:

“This, then, was my process: to invent a story which would recreate those vague impressions of wonder and awe and mystery that I myself had received from the form and shape of the land of my boyhood and youth; and as I thought over this and meditated on the futility—or comparative futility—of the plot however ingenious, which did not exist to express emotions of one kind or another, it struck me that it might be possible to reverse the process. Could one describe hills and valleys, woods and rivers, sunrise and sunset, buried temples and mouldering Roman walls so that a story should be suggested to the reader? Not, of course, a story of material incidents, not a story with a plot in the ordinary sense of the term, but an interior tale of the soul and its emotions; could such a tale be suggested in the way I have indicated? Such is to be the plan of the great book which is not yet written.”

But of course this book was written, not once but over and over again. One finds its content in almost everything Machen ever wrote. One discovers too, the influence of landscape upon Machen and his work. One notes the feeling for landscape as much in his work as in the work of Poe or Coleridge or Hawthorne. One day, no doubt, a learned scholar will write a lengthy monograph upon what might be called _The Influence of Landscape Upon the Creative Imagination_. There are already many footnotes available for such a work.

Machen recognized this influence, it became apparent to him as he walked in the land of the Silures and as he read in the evenings in the drawing room at Llandewi. This snug, old fashioned “parlour” in the Rectory was the treasure house of the Machens. Here were their china and silver, and here the books gathered by the Rector and his forebears. It was here that Arthur Machen, on his vacations from school at Hereford, discovered the wonders of Waverly and DeQuincy. Here, too, was Parker’s _Glossary of Gothic Architecture_. This book initiated Machen into the spirit of Gothic and, as he says, “that is one of the most magical of all initiations.” Gothic meant to Arthur Machen “the art of the supreme exaltation, of the inebriation of the body and soul and spirit. It is not resigned to dwell calmly, stoically, austerely on the level plains of this earthy life, since its joy is in this, that it has stormed the battlements of heaven. And so its far-lifted vaults and its spires rush upward, and its pinnacles are like a wood of springing trees. And its hard stones, its strong based pillars break out as it were into song, they blossom as the rose; all the secrets of the garden and the field and the wood have been delivered unto them.”

Machen early developed this sense of wonder in the land. In his reading he discovered, in the age of Coleridge and Wordsworth, the “renaissance of wonder.” His taste for Scott and DeQuincy and Coleridge and Poe and Hawthorne and Parker; his taste, in short, for the “Gothic,” supports and explains this. For landscape and its influence are important elements in that which we have come to call “Gothic” ... and it is this Gothic-ness that is also one of the elements in Machen’s magic.

2

And then of course there is the final test of the story-teller’s magic. Mr. Machen’s inventions have frequently been taken for truth. The tale of the Bowmen at Mons is the classic example. Machen has told how he received letters following the publication of some of his books—letters in which the writers sought explanations of the stories, letters which were undoubtedly prompted by a belief in some basic truth on which they suspected the story had been built.

Many years ago Vincent Starrett wrote, in his preface to the Chicago edition of _The Shining Pyramid_, that there were three Machens—Machen the Saint, Machen the Sorcerer and Machen the Critic. It is, of course, Machen the Sorcerer whose work is most popular, or shall we say, the best known. Machen himself once wrote: “Sorcery and Sanctity, these are the only true realities.” We might interpret these to mean religion and science—although it is doubtful if all of the admirers of Arthur Machen make this interpretation. At any rate it is the works of Machen the Sorcerer that have been most widely anthologized. These are the stories one finds classified under such headings as “supernatural stories, tales of terror, horror stories” and the like.

Let us admit that supernatural fiction, supernatural tales, have quite a respectable lineage. It must not be imagined, as some intellectuals do, that the tale of terror is something to which only the readers of pulp magazines are addicted. The supernatural tale has been the subject of several excellent studies. One has only to mention the work of such admirable scholars as Dorothy Scarborough, Edith Birkhead, Montague Summers and Eino Railo.

It has been said by some of these scholarly investigators that almost every English writer of any importance has, at one time or another, written at least one story or novel that fits somewhere into one of these categories. And then, of course, the scholarly investigators proceed to give reasons for the interest in such stories, and they point out that the interest as well as the belief in such matters is always in direct proportion to the ruggedness of the terrain. And they also list, as evidence of the extent of their research, the means whereby the best effects may be achieved in this particular field. Basically these have to do with landscape, architecture, antiquity and a whole collection of odds and ends, of props and stage settings that form the background for the venerable school of Gothic literature started many years ago by Horace Walpole in _The Castle of Otranto_.

One thing all of these tales have in common is, naturally enough, strangeness. A strangeness in landscape, a strangeness in character. Basically too, one supposes, these stories are written about, and because of, men’s fears. That is why they are called ghost stories, or horror stories, or tales of terror. This fear is not merely a fear of the dead returned, but of the past. For these stories concern themselves, even when not with actual ghosts, with past glories, past powers, past civilizations, and ancient ceremonies.

It is not that man seeks to frighten himself that he reads these stories and is fascinated by them. Psychologists, of one sort or another, have said that the popularity of ghost stories and mystery novels can be traced to a desire to enjoy vicariously the precarious situations in which characters in these tales find themselves; and that by substituting themselves for the characters involved the readers may obtain a certain stimulation which is lacking in their humdrum, calm and civilized lives. This, it seems to me, is not particularly true. It is rather because the past _is_ the past—simply that and nothing more. For the past is the one thing man can never alter, although it has become fashionable for us to try even that. The present is here, the future is attainable and forseeable and it may even be influenced. The past is unattainable and will always remain so, therefore man remains fascinated by it. The more shrouded in the mists of time and of antiquity, the more fascinating. Man does not read of the past to frighten himself any more than he drinks in order to experience a hang-over. Nor does the average reader of supernatural stories identify himself with primitive men’s fears any more than he identifies himself with the abstract forces for good or evil when reading detective stories. Man is a curious creature and his curiosity leads him into strange places. His curiosity concerning his amazing curiosity leads him to even stranger conclusions.

This preoccupation with the Past is part of man’s eternal preoccupation with Time; is now, and always shall be, world without end; from the days of the early Greeks, who knew that Chronos was the father of great Jupiter himself—the parent of the father of the Gods. Many years ago J. W. Dunne wrote a strange and tantalizing book, _An Experiment with Time_, a book much remarked by critics and book reviewers in the practice of their trade, but seldom quoted beyond a mere mention of its title. This is an extraordinary book, perhaps out-dated now, in this age of the supersonic and the expanding universe and the expanding ego. Nevertheless, H. G. Wells and Kipling have been influenced by it; and many another creator of the marvelous and the wonderful. One may read many strange and wonderful books, one may even read strong and powerful and significant books—but one never forgets such books and plays written about the Time theme as _The Time Machine_ and _Berkeley Square_, Priestley’s _I Have Been Here Before_, Ford Madox Ford’s _Ladies Whose Bright Eyes_ and many others.

3

The magic of Machen is due no less to his wonderful style than to his wonderful material. In these days when one can scarcely speak of style without being considered stuffy and perhaps even pedantic, to praise a writer for his style is almost to damn him with faint praise. This is undoubtedly because we have had no stylists for the last several decades, for which, on the whole, we may well be grateful! It is possible that stylists fell into disrepute because so many of them, in the past, concealed a tremendous vacuum and a cavernous nothingness beneath and behind a facile facade of fluency.

Yet Arthur Machen has a distinctive style, the perfection of which, while it appeals to the pedantic and soothes the scholarly, must be apparent even to the readers of those horrendous anthologies which have reprinted Machen while the scholars were busily interring him in their fascinating mausoleums. This matter of style is rather a tricky one. It is the sort of thing of which one might say, as some have, and when all definitions fail, “Either one has it, or—one hasn’t!” However feelingly and with whatever academic finality this axiom may be delivered—style is obviously more than that, and more than the man. More, too, than words and a certain way of putting them together, and much more than a mere choice of words or dexterity in manipulating them. We have come to think that many of these things _do_ constitute style. Indeed, a certain publisher recently hailed a new book (one of his own, of course) as being in the “tradition of the English Stylists.” Simply because the writer employed, here and there, a compound-complex sentence, composed with a certain felicity and manufactured of polysyllabic words or those with a certain antique charm. It is felt, then, that a matter of phrases makes a Fielding—which is no more the case than that the use of a quotation from Donne makes a writer one to stand with the Elizabethans.

Style is, like so many other things, more apparent in the breach than in the observance, which comes perilously close to the didactic dictum, “Either you have it, or—you haven’t.” But not quite. To be sure, every written word or group of words has style, even roadsigns, notices of trespass, mayors’ proclamation, editorials in the Daily Worker, even soap operas have style. The most popular writers of pot-boilers have a style—and many of them have so pronounced a style that they can be and have been recognizably parodied.

It might be said of a good style that it is one that cannot be parodied. An examination of Machen’s style would indicate that it is, in his case at least, quite true. For Machen’s style is a blend of many things; of words with magic connotation, of sentences that create moods, of passages that suggest, subtly and almost unconsciously, the exact atmosphere for which they were intended. Mr. Machen is a master at evoking the willing suspension of disbelief, and he does it without employing any of the stock properties listed by Coleridge and other authorities as having the proper connotative value for the creation of a “Gothic” mood or atmosphere.

When all is said and done, however, it must be admitted that Machen’s style is merely a reflection of his faith in the credo of a literary man as set forth by the admirable Dyson. And here, of course, we come to the crux of the matter, and as close as we may to an explanation of Machen’s magic which cannot, after all, be appraised in rational terms. In that wonderful book called _Hieroglyphics_ Machen poses a series of questions:

“Explain, in rational terms, The Quest of the Holy Graal. State
whether in your opinion such a vessel ever existed, and if you
think it did not, justify your pleasure in reading an account
of the search for it.”

“Explain, logically, your delight in color.”

“Estimate the value of Westminster Abbey in the avoirdupois
measure.”

“Faery lands forlorn. Draw a map of the district in question,
putting in principal towns and naming exports.”

Machen agrees that one cannot express art of any kind in the terms of rationalism, and that “If literature be a kind of dignified reporting, in which the reporter is at liberty to invent new incidents and leave out others, and to arrange all in the order that pleases him best; then, let us have as much “common sense” and “rationalism” as you please ... but if literature is a mysterious ecstasy, the withdrawal from all common and ordinary conditions ... [we had better] confess that with its first principles logic has nothing to do.... For if Rationalism be the truth, then all literature ... is simply lunacy.”

4

There are, sometimes, certain superficial resemblances between the works of imaginative writers that are outside the province and beyond the charge of plagiarism. An age produces a culture, a culture produces works of art, and all the while the individual consciousness, or sub-consciousness, feeds upon and is nourished by the raw materials and the basic elements of the culture. For in any age there are bound to exist certain individuals in whom combinations of common experience develop along certain lines and who may be expected to react in almost predictable patterns to identical stimulae ... just as certain identical combinations of chemical elements may be expected to react in identical manner under identical circumstances. Which is, after all, no major discovery but merely a restatement of the obvious fact that lies behind the continuity of any culture, or even, on a smaller scale, of any literary movement, or on occasion, of something less significant than a literary movement.

This fact also lies behind the periodical resurgence of certain ideals of culture or revivals of interest in certain abstractions such as realism, naturalism, romanticism and the like. And it explains, in individuals, the influence one writer may have over another, or the appeal of certain types of material to certain similar individuals.

Superficial resemblances are a common manifestation of spiritual relationships. Some years ago a rather clever critic of music wrote a book called _Music for the Man Who Enjoys Hamlet_. Now, the resemblance between people who enjoy Hamlet no doubt extends to a great many things other than the stage and Shakespeare and music, and, for all we know, it might even be established that such people have a mutual preference for a specific cocktail or a certain brand of cigarette. Our critic did not attempt to prove this, he contented himself with discussing music of a type to soothe the Hamlet-enjoying intellect. And so the superficial resemblances between Poe and Coleridge and DeQuincy extend far beyond a need or addiction, accidental or otherwise, to stimulants of one sort or another. The lines that connect and link these individuals, feature for feature, element for element, with an incomplete analogy here, and a broken chain there, would no doubt resemble a physicist’s laboratory model of the atomic structure of the very newest isotope of the most recently discovered element.

Perhaps individuals themselves constitute the electrons and protons of a cultural atom. We might link individuals of a certain sort, the men who enjoy Hamlet, for example, or Poe, DeQuincy, Hawthorne, Coleridge, and find isotopes here too—Brockden-Brown, Walter Scott, Tieck, Machen, Sheil, Stevenson, Wells and so on and so on. And we would find that these elements or individuals had certain affinities, certain properties in common. They are not alike merely in that they wrote in a certain fashion, or that they wrote about more or less similar ideas, or that the moods they created were more or less identical. There are certain other qualities, perhaps insignificant, but revealing.

Poe, like Coleridge, was fond of designing title pages and planning magazines and journals of a very literary sort. We find that Poe and Coleridge shared a facility for creating exotic and quite unreal localities. For example Coleridge’s Pleasure Palace of Kubla Khan and Poe’s Domain of Arnheim are very similar in conception. The conception of tremendous wealth appealed, in a most impractical way, to both Poe and Coleridge. And, finally, both shared a great liking for names of Oriental origin ... there is no distance at all, on the literary map, between Xanadu and the kingdom by the sea; and the River Alph or one of its tributaries, empties into the tarn of Auber. Machen’s own landscape is not too far removed. It was first peopled by the dark people who came from Defrobani, which is to say the City of the Golden Domes, far to the east on the shores of Marmora. And Machen’s eternal preoccupation with a Great Romance is akin in many ways to Poe’s grandiose schemes for epic compositions no less than it is to the complete unpublished works of Coleridge.

There was magic in these men and in their manner of telling a tale. There was, in each of them, an ability to create that which made its strongest appeal to that love of strangeness in most men’s minds.

DeQuincy, alone in London; Hawthorne, so solemnly settled in Salem, Coleridge surrounded by blue-stockings and blue lakes; Poe in his erratic course from salon to saloon ... these men made magic of a sort no realist could ever devise. Machen’s magic is of this sort.

_Chapter Eight_

THE PATTERN

1

Toward the close of the first quarter of this century Mr. Alfred Knopf, being ready to reissue _The Anatomy of Tobacco_, asked Arthur Machen to write a new introduction for the volume. The _Anatomy_ had been written some forty-three years before and it seemed time a new edition and a new introduction were called for. The _Anatomy_ is a slight book, and a rather dull and pretentious one, turned out as a sort of sophomoric exercise under the influence of Burton and other pedantic antiquarians. Machen had no objection to writing a new introduction to the book of “Leolinus Siluriensis” and so he sat down at once to do so.

Most of Machen’s work, and certainly all of the best of it, had already been written and published ... there was no Great Romance on the fire just then. Several years before he had written his memoirs, or come as close to writing them as he ever would. _The Confessions of a Literary Man_ appeared serially in the London Evening News through several months of 1915. Secker issued the _Confessions_ in 1922 as _Far Off Things_. A year later Machen wrote _Things Near and Far_; another two years later came _The London Adventure_. These three books are Machen’s autobiography, although it has been said that almost everything he ever wrote was, to a great extent, autobiographical. At any rate, Machen saw the books in print and occupied himself with journalism, which he detested, and with thinking over the books he had written which, on the whole, he rather enjoyed. And so when, in the 1920’s, he began the New York Adventure, Machen sat down and wrote not one but a whole series of new introductions. There is no nonsense about these introductions, and no “graceful writing.” The introduction to the new edition of the _Anatomy_ begins quite simply:

“It struck me once, during a long meditation on literature, that every man who has written has had but one idea in his head. To the best of my recollection, the particular example in my mind at the time was Edgar Allen Poe, who executed a wonderful series of variations on one theme.”

Now this idea had been in Machen’s mind for a great many years. A year or two before completing his introduction for Mr. Knopf he had been engaged in writing a book called _The London Adventure_. The book contains much material that is found in neither the _Confessions_ nor in _Things Near and Far_. While writing the book he became intrigued with some old note books he had kept many years before. In reading them he was reminded of a story by Henry James, _The Pattern on the Carpet_, in which is expressed the notion of a man of letters who had written many books and was quite surprised to find that one of his admirers had failed to recognize that all these tales of his were variations on one theme; that a common pattern, like the pattern of an eastern carpet ran through them all. In the story the novelist died suddenly without revealing the nature of the pattern. Nor does Henry James, in whose works one might also trace a common pattern. He too leaves it to his readers to discover for themselves the mystery of this one design, latent in a whole shelf of books.

Machen himself has such a pattern, and such a theme. It occurs again and again in all of his works, in his short stories as well as in his novels: in the slightest of his essays as well as in _Hieroglyphics_. This theme he defines in several places quite briefly and simply. It is, he says, “The sense of the eternal mysteries, the eternal beauty hidden beneath the crust of common and commonplace things: hidden and yet burning and glowing continuously if you care to look with purged eyes.”

We have noted, several times over, Machen’s preoccupation with a Great Romance. Many years ago he wrote, “There is a great book that I am hoping to write one of these fine days. I have been hoping to write it, I may say, since 1898, or ’99, and somewhere about the later year I did write as many as a dozen pages. The _magnum opus_ so far conducted did not wholly displease me, and yet it was not good enough to urge me forward in the task. And so it has languished ever since then, and I am afraid I have lost the manuscript that contained all that there was of it long ago. Seriously, of course, it would not have been a great book if it had been ever so prosperously continued and ended; but it would have been at least a curious book, and even now I feel conscious of warm desire at the thought of writing it—some day. For the idea came to me as follows:

“I had been thinking at the old century end of the work that I had done in the fifteen years or so before, and it suddenly dawned upon me that this work, pretty good or pretty bad, or as it may be, had all been the expression of one formula, one endeavor. What I had been doing was this: I had been inventing tales in which and by which I had tried to realize my boyish impressions of that wonderful magic Gwent.”

Now this great book was not only written but it was rewritten under various forms, in entirely different ways, and with no surface similarities at all. For almost sixty years he had written purely to please himself, nor did he hesitate to publish, at his own expense, the books he wrote for his own pleasure. It was his feeling in this that there was no reason why a beginner should not be willing to pay his own way. And yet, as he says, it is a queer pleasure when one does write to please oneself. For, as Machen says,

“I wrote purely to please myself; and what a queer pleasure it was! To write, or to try to write, means involving oneself in endless difficulties, contrarieties, torments, despairs, and yet I wrote on, and I suppose for the reason which I have given, the necessity laid upon most of us to create another and a fantastic life in order that the life of actuality may be endurable.”

In these excerpts from Machen’s autobiographical sketches one encounters over and over again certain keywords: ‘escape,’ ‘common life,’ ‘eternal mysteries,’ ‘removal’ and so on. And these same key words are, of course, the underlying themes of every story he ever wrote. They constitute the criteria by which he judged the literature of past and present as well.

2

Machen had been brought up on Scott and Coleridge, Hawthorne and Poe and all the authors one would naturally expect a school boy to encounter in an English public school in the 1880’s. In addition to these there were the books he found in the rectory at Llanddewi. These included one especially significant book by Parker on Gothic architecture.

We have already noted that Machen early became aware of the beauty of the Gothic and that he was all of his life more or less under its influence. His conception of the Gothic was not quite the same as Horace Walpole’s. It stemmed rather from Parker and from Coleridge, from whom he learned that there is “in the spectacle of external nature something much more than mere pleasantness or sensuous beauty.” The rugged terrain of the land of the Silures would seem to offer little of pleasantness or sensuous beauty ... yet it did act upon Machen in much the same way that such a landscape had acted upon the imagination of such a lyrical poet as, for example, Wordsworth.

As a matter of fact, Machen did not hesitate to refer to Walpole’s “sham Gothic,” and he assumes that Walpole had a sort of “vague idea that there was something in a particular architecture of a particular era which was somehow or other curious and admirable.” Machen further remarks that one cannot possibly compare the school of Coleridge in its appreciation of nature with the school of Walpole in its appreciation of the Gothic. And then, he poses a question in which there lies the answer to his own and to many another writer’s problem. “May it not be that Coleridge and his fellows were but the forerunners of a new doctrine which was not fully revealed to them.”

We have remarked that Machen employs none of the traditional trappings of the Gothic tale. There are no clankings and bumpings and ghosties in the night. There are no ruined castles, no hermits in caves. Instead we find deserted houses in Lambeth and in Clerkenwell, and sometimes the houses are not even deserted. Nor are they occupied by monks or knights or old families in whose closets lurk the most deplorable of skeletons. The typical Gothic “hero,” either the sardonic Byronic or the melancholy Manfred type is never encountered. Machen’s heroes, if such they be, are rather ordinary young men like Lucian Taylor and Ambrose Meyrick, or perhaps you may wish to call the ever-present Dyson and the companionable Phillips heroes. There are, of course, sinister characters in Machen. Mr. Davies, outwardly ordinary, is as black a villain as can be found anywhere in the whole school of Otranto. Miss Lally, or Miss Leicester, are as horrific in their own quiet way as any harpy or hag encountered in the novels of Radcliff.

Arthur Machen is much more closely related in his work to Hawthorne and Poe than he is to his English contemporaries and predecessors. As Paul Elmer More has noted, Hawthorne and Poe are the only two writers in America who have won almost universal renown as artists, and that these two are each, in their own manner, a sovereign in that strange region of emotion which we name the weird. Their achievement, as Mr. More points out, is not at all like the Gothic novel introduced by Horace Walpole. There is little in them of the revival of medieval superstition and gloom which marked the rise of romanticism in Europe.

The unearthly visions of Poe and Hawthorne were not the results of literary whim or unbridled individualism but, according to Mr. More, were deeply rooted in American history. Now this is a rather strange matter, for there is nothing nationalistic in the nature of the work of these American writers. It follows a well established tradition, but it is not the tradition of the English school of the Gothic revival. It was greatly influenced by Germanic mysticism, just as Coleridge was influenced by Teutonic theory. These American writers seem to have missed the dilettantism that was associated with the Gothic revival in England. In this they are very close to Machen and his work. Both these writers were greatly influenced by their surroundings and by the influence of their own native landscape. The personal alchemy of each one transmuted the elements of that landscape and created a time and place that never were.

Poe especially, and to a far greater extent, was affected by landscape not only of his native Virginia but of every place he ever visited. Some years ago John Cowper Powys, a visiting, but much more sympathetic than usual, Englishman commented upon this aspect of the writings of Poe:

“For myself, as a traveller for a score of years between all of Edgar Allen Poe’s particular cities, and knowing the country round them a good deal better than I know my own, I confess—though it may be because of a kindred sensibility toward the ghostly, the weird, and the horror hinting: I have found even in those districts, though of course far more in the deeper south, elements here and there that correspond with disturbing closeness to the frightening things in his imaginary landscape.

“But it is not from those pine haunted woods and those morasses and those treacherous estuaries and those Lethean wharfs that the darker vistas and more troubling visions of Poe’s inspirations comes.

“They are conjured up from the symbols of pre-incarnate tremblings that we all find written on the nerves of our race—though only a few abnormal individuals can render articulate these hieroglyphics of holy terror.

“... We all conceal within us, inherited from an immemorial past, a secret yearning to enjoy by some magical shortcut the hidden potencies of nature. A responsive pulse begins to beat irrepressibly within us when Faust makes the sign of the Macrocosm, for there is not one among us for whom the idea of forbidden joys and an unnatural power over the forces of nature has not got a seductive appeal.”

Machen made this comment in a letter on the subject of the Gothic novel. “The fact is, I believe, that all the Gothic romances are sham Gothic romances. I mean that the people who put back their period into the middle ages, had hardly the faintest notion of what life in the middle ages, in a Gothic castle was really like. This, let me note, is nothing against their books as literature or else we should be laughing at a highly esteemed writer for supposing that ninth century life at Elsinore had the remotest resemblance to the life which is depicted in _Hamlet_.”

3

The books of Arthur Machen which have gained the greatest amount of attention are, naturally enough, the more sensational stories in which he touches upon themes that approach what is, or what has been in the past, forbidden territory. It seems odd that Arthur Machen, whose works have been so generally neglected, should have been scolded on occasion by various critics for his use of sexual themes. Actually there is no sexuality as such in any of Arthur Machen’s books. It does enter into some of the stories through the medium of mythology, Roman or Celtic, and sometimes aboriginal. And yet, such a critic as the gentle A. E. Houseman, could write of him, “Mixing up religion and sexuality is not a thing I am fond of.” Mr. Houseman, had he possessed something of Machen’s scholarship, would have perceived that religion and sexuality were not mixed up by Arthur Machen but rather by his own Celtic or Teutonic or Scandinavian ancestors. It is the more surprising, however, that such opinions as that expressed by the later great poet have not resulted in greater popularity for at least some of the work of Arthur Machen.

By far the most important elements in the pattern that runs through Machen’s work are the very ones he himself expressed many years ago, “The sense of the eternal mysteries and the eternal beauty hidden beneath the crust of common and commonplace things.”

The reputation of Arthur Machen undoubtedly rests most securely on a single book, _Hieroglyphics_, and on perhaps a half dozen of his essays. His definition of what constitutes fine literature is, even today, beyond dispute. His thoughts on realism, or naturalism, a movement that was only just beginning to be felt in his youth have been admirably expressed in a passage in his book _The Secret Glory_.

“Of course, he said, (Ambrose Meyrick) I take realism to mean absolute and essential truthfulness of description, as opposed to merely conventional treatment. Zola is a realist not—as the imbeciles suppose because he described—well, rather minutely—many unpleasant sights and sounds and smells and emotions, but because he was a poet, a seer; because, in spite of his pseudo philosophies, his cheap materialisms, he saw the true heart, the reality of things. Take _La Terre_, do you think it is realistic because it describes minutely, and probably faithfully, the event of a cow calving? Not in the least; the local vet who was called in could probably do all that as well or better. It is realistic because it goes behind all the brutality, all the piggeries and inhumanities, of those frightful people, and shows us the strange, mad, transcendent passion that lay behind all those things—the wild desire for the land—a longing that burned, that devoured, that inflamed, that drove men to hell and death as would a passion for a goddess who might never be attained. Remember how ‘La Beauce’ is personified, how the earth swells and quickens before one, how every clod and morsel of the soil cries for its service and its sacrifice and its victims—I call that realism.

“Of course, there may be people who think that if you describe a pigsty well you are a realist, and if you describe an altar well you are romantic.... I do not know that the mental processes of Cretins form a very interesting subject for discussion.”

Frank Norris, an early apostle of realism, wrote, while he was still at college, this analysis of realism and of Zola: “Naturalism, as understood by Zola, is but a form of romanticism after all ... the naturalist takes no note of common people, common in so far as their interests, their lives and the things that occur in them are common, are ordinary. Terrible things must happen to the characters of the naturalistic tale. They must be twisted from the ordinary, wrenched from the quiet, uneventful round of everyday life and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama that works itself out in unleashed passions, in blood and in sudden death.”

There are many provocative passages on this subject in Machen. Take, for example, these thoughts expressed in Machen’s _The Art of Dickens_:

“... it is not the main point in the finest literature to draw people so well that the reader begins to think that they must be ‘real’ people, and that the author is a sort of journalist with supernatural means of finding all the facts about them.”

“If we want to go to Margate, it would be idle to take a fairy barque, and _simili modo_ it would be but faint praise of a Gothic cathedral to say that it was quite weather proof.”

“What does it profit a painter to delineate a tree which is very like a tree, unless it is something much more—unless it is also the symbol and the revelation of some great secret of nature? If this were not so, then the camera would be superior of Turner, and the shorthand writer would look down from his desk on poor blind Homer, who talks of gods and goddesses of fairy isles, and giants with one eye in their foreheads.”

4

Vincent Starrett many years ago made the statement that there was little humor in Arthur Machen’s works. Of humor, in the broadest Mark Twain, or even in the gentle Stephen Leacock vein, there is very little. But there is in almost all of Machen a wry, dry humor with perhaps a rather bitter taste. There are passages, even in _The Hill of Dreams_ that are as humorous as anything by Leacock. One reads his account of the publishing business as it was in his day with a realization that Machen is as much at home in satire as in sorcery. His autobiographical books are filled with humor, this time not so bitter. Many of his essays employ humor and satire in generous doses. Shortly after the publication of _The Hill of Dreams_ and _The House of Souls_ Arthur Machen wrote several essays on the subject of the Holy Graal. These essays, the first of which appeared under the editorship of A. E. Waite, aroused quite a bit of attention and resulted in a certain amount of controversy in antiquarian circles. The Graal legends through their association with Arthur and Caerleon had been of great interest to Machen from his earliest years.

He knew every legend and every theory in the literature of the Graal. His first essay was at variance with some of the new theories that were then springing up. Chief among these was the theory that the Graal legends had their basis in a fertility cult which persisted in Wales right up until Norman times. Machen promptly branded this theory as absurd. “Let us grant,” he wrote, “that the question of fertility, which is the question of life, both for ourselves and for our cabbages, is behind everything. If we go far back enough, it is clear that we can do nothing in this world if we are so unlucky as to be dead: and this applies equally to the Phallic hypothesis of the origin of everything, which can be worked in very well with the fertility hypothesis. The whole point of a great many of the rites in fertility ceremonies seems to be built about the hypothesis that fertility could be enduced by certain ceremonies that were expected to put nature in a mood to be fertile.” And then Machen quotes from one of the experts who clung to this hypothesis, “Just as the sailor imitates the wind that he desires by whistling for it, so did the countrymen imitate the trees in the wood by making a mock tree called the Maypole.”

Machen seems willing enough to accept these theories but he asks, “What light shall we gain as to the actual emotions and intent of the seventeenth or sixteenth century people who danced about the Maypole? I venture to say none whatever ... they were not addressing any invocation to the woods or anything else. They were being jolly or merry at a certain time of the year in a traditional manner. For all I know, our learned people may decide that the game of marbles was originally a reminder to the spheres to keep on rolling. If I am told so, I shall not deny the doctrine, but I shall maintain that the boys who play marbles on London pavements know nothing of it. Granted this hypothetical origin of marbles, it has nothing whatever to do with the game of the twentieth century.”

The note books of Arthur Machen, as fragmentarily revealed in _The London Adventure_, are as fascinating as are the notebooks of Hawthorne, which as a matter of fact they much resemble. For example there are many notes concerned with patterns—and these bear a direct relationship with the earlier material in this chapter. Most of the notes concern labyrinths, mazes, spirals and whorls. He asks the question: Why was this form common to all primitive art? And then, in almost the same place in his note book one finds the sentence: “Literature began with charms, incantations, spells, songs of mystery, chants of religious ecstasy, the Bachic chorus, the rune, the mass.” This sentence is the basis for _Hieroglyphics_. It is, according to Machen, the thesis of the book fairly well summed up in one sentence.

And this same pattern occurs in most of his stories. Among his notes we find this, “The maze was not only the instrument but the symbol of ecstasy; it was a pictured ‘inebriation,’ the sign of some age old process that gave the secret bliss to men, that was symbolized also by dancing, by lyrics with their recurring burdens, and their repeated musical phrases: a maze, a dance, a song: three symbols pointing to one mystery.”

It would require a thorough examination of the notebook of Arthur Machen, if such a thing were possible, by a man with the skill and scholarship of a John Livingston Lowes to trace and to tell the complete story of the pattern in Arthur Machen. Yet here, in brief, and in all his works, the pattern is everywhere apparent.

There are, undoubtedly, those who prefer Machen the essayist to Machen the story teller. Certainly his greatest work, _Hieroglyphics_, is sufficient reply to those who have tried to dismiss Machen as the creator of “shockers” concerned with demonology and sensational horror stories. The delightful pieces that appeared serially in the Lyons Mail and the Illustrated News and the London Graphic would please even the Manchester Guardian or A. E. Houseman, who once wrote that he found Machen not quite to his taste. His essays on the Grail legend are authoritative without being archeological, witty without being flippant or, what would have been unbearable, satirical.

And yet, in the essays no less than in the stories, the pattern is there and is recognizable. One is forever running across a phrase or a notion one has encountered before—some where, some time, some place—and the place usually turns out to be another Machen essay. For the pattern of Machen’s thinking is as obvious as the pattern in the rug; as obvious, and as simple, as the definitions supplied in _Hieroglyphics_. The pattern is, as we know, summed up in the phrase: “removal from the common life.” It may be simplified further in the one word: “ecstasy.”

Now the word “ecstasy” has caused some confusion in the minds of certain of Machen’s detractors as well as among his admirers. There was a tendency, in the Twenties, as well as in the Nineties, to give the word “ecstasy” a connotation or a meaning similar to that employed by the popular novelists of the time. “Ecstasy” seemed to many to be the “ecstasy” of the pallid, perverted creatures of the Cafe Royale and, later, a sort of Elinor Glynn-ish, sinnish quality. It was a word much favored by the writers of romances, the practitioners of the purple phrase. And so we encounter, at times, this “novelist of ecstasy and sin” sort of nonsense.