Chapter VI: Part 6

It should be pointed out that _Hieroglyphics_, that excellent volume of literary criticism having little to do with passion, in or out of the desert, bears the illuminating subtitle: “_A Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature_.” And _this_ ecstasy is of the mind—it is an exultation of the spirit of men. It is, to go back to the more descriptive phrase, the removal from the common life.

This pattern exists everywhere in Machen, sometimes it is developed by the characters and circumstances in his tales, or again it is carried out by argument or analysis in his essays, but always, upon closer examination, the grand design is apparent.

One may read, for example, the essay called _The Hidden Mystery_ and find that it is almost exactly the same as _The Mystic Speech_. And then one reads _The Secret Glory_ and finds, once again, the same theories, the same logic, the same figures and the same conclusions, expressed and explained as only Machen can set them down. This may send the casual reader, or even the amateur bibliographer, hunting from volume to volume with pencil and reading glass, for there seems to be indeed a hidden mystery, a mystic speech, a glorious secret in these passages and paragraphs.

Actually, of course, one is merely becoming aware of the pattern, and one is becoming impressed with the simplicity and the one-ness of everything Machen ever wrote. Of course there are actual resemblances between the essays mentioned and strong connections between them and the book. For the essays were written years before, and one of them was actually delivered as a lecture before the learned Quest Society of London. They are all a part of the book that is now known as _The Secret Glory_.

_Chapter Nine_

THE VERITABLE REALISTS

1

Our modern civilization is, if nothing else, a well-documented one. No sooner were we at war than we began to talk about the post-war world. Our introduction to the marvels of the post-war world began very shortly after Pearl Harbor. Prophets sprang up in every advertising agency and began to lead us into the promised land of the push button and the ever-present plastics—where every prospect was pleasantly postwar-ish and only man seemed likely to remain vile, as indeed he proved by brilliantly discovering how to smash the atom. It was significant that the art of propaganda, perfected to the point of art by the original perpetrators of the war, should become the means of showing us the wondrous shape of things to come.

So well indoctrinated were our people, so thoroughly documented had we become, that it occurred to many to venture opinions on the state of man in this almost perfect state of the future. It was obvious, even to the prophets, that man would engage in activities other than pushing buttons to start and to stop things, to change climate or a record, to launch a war, a ship or a new hydro-electric plant. It seemed obvious, even to the prophets, that there might be malice in this wonderland.

Man, with more leisure than ever before, would undoubtedly manage to stir up more trouble than ever before. And while we certainly were not going to sell apples on street corners, we knew enough, we said, to look for an increase in crime, a new wave of disillusionment and, most certainly, a new point of view.

We were quite resigned to these things. We were prepared to usher in a brave new world to the tune of some fantastic Gotterdammerung in the Bavarian Redoubt. The suicide of the Austrian Corporal was anti-climax indeed, since everyone knew, had known for years, that he had it in him. Things shuddered to a slow halt in Europe and the post-war world seemed about to be launched with nothing more stupendous in the offing than the truth about V-1, 2 and 3. The atom’s howl at Hiroshima came as the cataclysmic climax.

Well, then, once again we had fought in a great war and once again had emerged comparatively victorious. Because victors always anticipate a certain course of events which, we have yet to learn, never follow victory, we had already anticipated the cynicism that was to follow. At least we have learned to anticipate the cynicism, and that of course is an achievement. It represents, one must admit, progress. In developing and enlarging upon our visions of the push-button world we had not neglected to include the conception of push-button wars. This could be called the crowning cynicism—and a less disillusioned world might well do so.

But it is probable that our cynicism is really not quite so bitter as it was the last time, because one isn’t really cynical at discovering that what one never believed in does not exist. At any rate we felt, and perhaps we still do, that there was a pattern to be followed. We have had some prior knowledge of the pattern—it was becoming familiar to us. There might be, of course, some slight variations here and there. For example: in tracing out the pattern before, our cynicism resulted in an escape into realism—and this time it might result in an escape from realism. Cynicism in 1947 or 1948 might very well be an isotope of uranium 235, with a few unknown qualities but with a predictably high escape-velocity.

The post-war era seems to be fairly familiar. The political scene conforms in a great many respects—but our reactions do not. That we will do exactly the same thing about exactly the same problem is not only unthinkable, it is extremely unlikely. Blunder we very probably will, but we will have found new ways of blundering. After all, we do progress. And this time we can blunder with no more effort than is required to push a button. It might be argued, then, that it is extremely unimportant to ponder about the sort of things that will be written in this postwar world—escapist or realist. But that one may predict, in the face of this reality, an escape from realism seems at once probable and inevitable—and there are certain indications that seem to favor the inevitable.

Superficially we might consider that a number of critics and writers have remarked upon certain similarities between the late Forties and the early Twenties. And, so linked have the two decades become, a mere mention of the Twenties leads inevitably to a rediscovery of the Nineties. The Modern Library, which was more than just a publishing venture in the 1920’s, began its series of reprints with Oscar Wilde’s _Dorian Gray_. One of the first in a recent cycle of films developed about psychological themes was a somewhat sinister version of _Dorian Gray_. A recent theatrical season featured simultaneous presentations of a play about the Twenties and of several about the Nineties. Indeed, _The Importance of Being Earnest_—a likely title that!—gave fashion its first really fashionable color since before the war. Yellow, said a foremost fashion magazine was _The Color_. To be sure, these are only superficial similarities. That Wilde was revived in the Twenties and in the late Forties is a manifestation without much meaning in itself. That Yellow became a favorite color of the season was perhaps no more than a reaction to our khaki consciousness of the war years ... but there were other, and more significant, indications.

2

There have been, this past year or so, a number of articles appearing in various literary journals, and even of late in the more popular magazines, the burden of which seems to be something between a call for a new estimate of literature and a prediction that such an estimate is in the making. Certainly the recent years, during which more books were read by more people than at any time in history, have given practicing writers the wider audience they had, for centuries dreamed about. The writers for small cliques have had every opportunity to expand their cliques. The writers for the masses had such a market as even the most popular of them had never imagined. The Big Names ran to bigger printings than even a publisher had dreamed of. That we were in the midst of an almost world wide paper shortage seemed at least the most obvious result of this promiscuous reading and writing. But what have been its literary effects?

Have the realists gained in favor as they predicted, and had been predicting for years, that they would? Have the proletarian novelists grown in stature now that, at long last, the proletariat were not only reading but buying books? Have the multitudinous novels about the Common Man, the Little Man, the Man in the Street, been widely accepted by the Common Man, the Little Man, the Man in the Street? In this, the Century of the Common Man, such a conclusion would seem to have been foregone. The writers for the Common Man, spurred on by the foregone-ness of their conclusions, became commoner and commoner—but the Common Man began to show that he had developed a few rather uncommon tastes indeed. Aside from the comic books, which he consumed by the shipload (and they can scarcely be called realistic), he has done all sorts of queer things. He has granted the greatest gift in his power, sales running to a million or more, to a book about a lady and an egg, and to a group of the most outrageously escapists novels that have ever cluttered up a publisher’s list. Historical novels which were neither good history nor good novels, became the new opium of the masses. Lusty rogues and busty wenches went through their amorous routine with a dream of empire in their roving eyes. The Common Man went in heavily for mediaeval glamour and colonial swashbuckling. This may be explained on the always convenient grounds that the popular taste is lamentably lacking in it.

What about the intellectuals? They have shown a remarkable predilection for mystery novels with overtones of Kraft-Ebing and undertones of Freud. The “psychological” novel has enjoyed a vogue on a grand scale, and most popular novelists have had a shot at it themselves. Several novelists of a generation or two ago have been revived. Henry James has been the subject of half a dozen serious studies and most of his novels, the less boring ones, have been republished, re-reviewed and hailed as masterpieces by the Sunday reviewers. Trollope, too, has undergone the full treatment. The 1920’s have been rediscovered once again, this time complete with cartoons and photographs. We may anticipate that Charles Dickens will shortly become the subject of an intense and enthusiastic revival.

The _Saturday Review_ has called for new gods. _Life_ magazine demands to know whether or not fiction has a future, thinks not. The ladies’ fashion magazines, progressing rapidly in the opposite direction, present a gallery of “Significant writers” with photographs only slightly less rococo than their elegantly gowned caryatids, including one precious young fellow in a checkered weskit and the most engaging bangs.

In short, the Little Man, having digested an overdose of reading matter, seems about to form certain dietary preferences, and they are not going to be along the anticipated lines. Now this is not to be greatly wondered at. In any period of intense literary activity (and we must use the term very loosely), when, in short, “publishers will put covers on almost anything,” two things are bound to happen. The more popular novels set new records for sales and for bad writing. New writers are rushed into print before they’ve bothered to become good, and old established writers are tempted and inevitably, invariably and immediately succumb to the lure of mass sales. They are tricked into competing on the commonest possible grounds with the homesteaders. The more intellectual writers from their peaks in Darien gaze down upon ever widening horizons and find it difficult to focus upon anything of significance. They, too, are tricked into deserting their small, comfortable cliques and finally, after preliminary castings about, fall back upon the reliable old revival, or they hail with delirious delight some new master. Then, when this stage has been reached, a reaction sets in.

The awesome sight of so very many bad novels shocks even those who had succeeded in shocking themselves into insensibility. The critics are appalled by the flood they have helped to loose and, while waiting for the waters to abate, they keep themselves dry and in fairly good spirits by chanting a litany composed of the names of Tolstoy, Zola, Dostoievski, Gorki, Swift, Proust, Stendahl and a number of traditional but largely unreadable masters. Now and again they discover a sort of Cardiff Giant and exhibit it reverently to the masses. Books are written, critical studies composed, translations arranged for, editions planned. Critics, scholars, publishers and others solemnly take part in the usual ceremonies attendant upon the presentation of a new writer named, let us say, Smerv.

Alois Smerv is, or was, a Montenegran mystic. Comparatively little is known about his work, most of it has never been published, none of it can be readily understood. Nevertheless his name finds its way into practically every review devoted to anything but juveniles. Smerv seems to have been obsessed by most of the commoner manifestations made famous by various Viennese psycho-analysts. It is said that his books, had they ever been published, would have attracted the unfavorable attention of the fascist authorities and would undoubtedly have resulted in his expulsion from his homeland or his installation in a concentration camp. This, of course, is pure supposition, all that we know for certain is that Smerv died of acute myopia in 1942 in an obscure town in the Balkans. His note books, scrap books, ration books and a mess of mss. found their way into the sympathetic hands of an international litterateur—with the inevitable result. This, then, is one of our latest literary idols.

3

And now we come to the point of conceding that Arthur Machen is not and never has been a “naturalist,” that is, he has never written in the manner which we have come to call naturalism or realism. A great deal of modern American and English fiction over the past forty or fifty odd years has been of this sort. It stemmed, following one of the periodical Anglo-Saxon reversions to the Gallic, from Zola, the father of naturalism. One need hardly wonder what Machen might say today of naturalism and Zola, he said it some fifty years ago in _Hieroglyphics_ and again in _The Secret Glory_. And Machen was saying _then_ a great many of the things the critics of today are just beginning to discover.

To take an excellent example; we have the case of one of our best known and most highly regarded novelists; one whose realism has begun to transcend reality so much that his last book has been called an allegory. His characters are so super-real as to be almost “arch types,” and they may eventually come to be regarded, unless they are entirely lost in the shifting of values, as sketches worthy to stand in a Dickensian gallery along with Micawber and Pickwick.

For this is assuredly the direction of our drift—we are not only turning away from naturalism and realism, we are beginning to wonder why we ever turned to them at all. For literature as a removal from the common life, or art as an interpretation rather than a portrayal of life, has little to do with either naturalism or realism. It may be that, within this very decade, we will decide that the whole trend of the past thirty or forty years has been up a dead-end street inhabited by the dead-end kids of the literary world, whose greatest talent was to shock each other with the words they chalked up on the walls and fences of their realistic little slum.

It has become increasingly obvious, even to the more advanced critics, that there had come to exist but a very narrow line between the realistic-naturalistic novel and the journalism of the day. Not so long ago it was considered the highest praise to call a novel “a significant social document.” Now it is becoming more fashionable to refer to a novel as a rather poor novel _as_ a novel, _but_ a significant social document. We are, it would seem, about half-way round the circle. Mr. Sinclair Lewis wrote a book a year or two ago which is also a case in point. Although the critics were unanimous in pointing out that it was a very bad novel, they admitted that it was significant. So too, the flood of books about alcoholism, insanity, race prejudice and other social problems. Most of these books defy honest criticism on almost any grounds, since almost everyone is more or less opposed to the same things these books are against.

Of course these problems do exist, and they are urgent problems indeed; but they do not necessarily constitute the stuff of great or even good literature. Nor should the importance of the problem automatically confer importance or significance upon any writer, good, bad or indifferent, who chooses to deal with it. Today’s tabloid may be as raw a slice of life as today’s top ranking best seller—but no one calls it literature. As for the revolt against “the genteel tradition,” it was a natural reaction against stuffiness, Victorian morality and overly “nice” novels—but the course taken by those who rebelled against these things was not necessarily the right one. It was, or soon became, quite as stuffy and even more unreal. Still, there is much to be said on the subject, for realism, by which we _can_ mean honesty, cannot be, and should not be, eliminated entirely as a literary force.

It cannot be said that Dickens, that eminent Victorian, was not a realist or that he was not realistic. No Hemingway he, to be sure, but still, no Harold Bell Wright. Nor can we say of many a writer relegated to oblivion by the realists that they were not realistic. John Galsworthy wrote as realistically of the upper-middle classes as John Steinbeck writes of paisanos—and Soames Forsyte is as much a person, a _real_ person, as the youth with the acne. Now this is a very close to the heart of the matter, for the realists, and the naturalists, have claimed that writers like Galsworthy are not realists—and of course their point would be that Galsworthy wrote of Soames Forsyte and Steinbeck wrote of bums and vagrants, of the dispossessed and the youth with the acne.

It would seem, then, that they quarreled rather with Soames than with Galsworthy—that Soames was, for some reason or other, less real than, for example, an earnest young picket-line marcher. Indeed, it has been almost a prime principle, that the realists write of the so-called “underprivileged,” and all that was needed to earn a reputation for a book was a fairly accurate portrayal of life in the less-desirable quarters of any city or town. If a few scenes of drunken quarrels, beatings by cops (classically called Cossacks) and tableaux in which oppressed mill-workers were being violently oppressed, so much the better. Of course not all realists wrote exclusively about the underprivileged. Many wrote of the upper classes, for this was considered realism too—but only if the upper classes were portrayed in an unfavorable light. So it becomes apparent that almost the whole of realism has been a social rather than a literary movement. For a time, and under special conditions, this seemed reasonable enough, but there are indications that it is in the process of being rejected as the only literary criterion.

4

Of the novelists whose names have formed a sort of literary litany this past decade or two: Hemingway, Dos Passos, Farrell, Faulkner, Caldwell and Steinbeck—the work of Steinbeck offers most in the way of material for analysis according to the lights of both realists and romanticists. For Steinbeck has been hailed as a great realist, and it was he who first seems to have transcended reality, and certainly he comes closest to approaching the “removal from the common life” postulated by Machen as the prime requisite for the creative writer. _The Grapes of Wrath_ was and is a wonderful book—as great a piece of journalism as has been produced in an age that specializes in that peculiar literary form—the documentary; and it was saved from being mere competent journalism, or even inspired journalism, by characterization alone. Here again we must look to Machen for, if not a direct reference to Steinbeck, at least an applicable parallel.

For Steinbeck’s characters, the Joads, the Paisanos, the Hermit with his dogs, the bums in _Cannery Row_—these are all figures of such proportion and created in such a perspective as that described by Machen in his essay on Dickens. Machen points out that Dickens was a symbolist ... no such persons as Pickwick or Micawber ever walked the earth. “They are creatures,” says Machen, “of the world of vision, of that other world which is beside us always, which transcends the sight of unpurged eyes.” And then Machen goes on to define the “true realist” as one who symbolizes “by means of phenomena, eternal verities.”

This deftness of Steinbeck’s in drawing portraits has led him into trouble with his devoted critics for whom, apparently, realism can be carried to extremes. A case in point is the Colonel in _The Moon is Down_. This German, if not Nazi, officer, it will be recalled, was quite a controversial figure back in the war days when the book was published. Now the Colonel had every right, actually and literarily, whether as an actual person or an imagined one, to act as he did. It may have been a none too happy choice for Steinbeck—he could have given us the Eric Von Stroheim figure we all expected of him, but he gave us instead the Major Stanhope type. This was not a very popular choice with the ardent and articulate admirers of Mr. Steinbeck’s realism.

Then there was the matter of _Lifeboat_, a motion picture shown during the war. Mr. Steinbeck did the script, or worked on it, or did whatever it is established writers do in Hollywood. At any rate Steinbeck was taken to task by at least one film critic and not a few columnists who stepped out of their roles long enough to have a look at the films. The story, a Hitchcock natural, involved a group of people thrown together in a lifeboat. Among the group was a German submarine officer—perhaps the Captain. The thing that angered the erstwhile admirers, confounded the critics and dismayed the defenders of Democracy, was that the German was portrayed as the most capable man aboard the lifeboat. Not only did he show qualities of leadership which were found to be detestably proficient, but other members of the crew, all Allies of one sort or another, were shown to be a confused and sometimes cowardly lot. This outrageous invention by a man with a reputation for realism upset the critics and the columnists. No less an authority than the American Sybil cried out against the extravagance of the invention in which an officer and a seaman was permitted to exercise both authority and seamanship. Of course most of these outcries may be attributed to the fact that we were then at war with both the confoundedly charming Colonel and the confoundedly capable Captain.

Nevertheless everyone breathed easier when _Cannery Row_ was announced as a return to the “early Steinbeck” even though, by this time, realists everywhere had become aware of a chink in the armor, and the left-wing critics took a decidedly dim view of the light-hearted way in which Steinbeck’s social outcasts took their social ostracism.

When _The Wayward Bus_ rattled onto the literary scene the critics scanned the faces of the passengers as eagerly as relatives waiting at the depot. Sure enough—there were cries of recognition from several groups. One crowd hailed the youth with the acne—Johnny had come marching home again to swell the ranks of the realists. Others, remembering the Colonel and the Captain, recognized at least a lineal descendant in the girl who sat in wine glasses. She was, for a girl who sat in wine glasses, sufficiently incredible to belong to the gallery of allegorical figures set up for the specific purpose of puzzling the proletarians. And so the bus pulled in with apparently the right character for almost everyone waiting at the depot.

This somewhat didactic digression, while it seems to have no direct bearing upon either Arthur Machen or his works, is offered in explanation of some of the theories expressed in _Hieroglyphics_—under the subtitle, if you wish, of _The Ultimate Fate of a Realist_.

5

We have arrived at a point in our literary history (or, if you prefer, our social progress, our ideological advancement, our cultural development) when there is need for a new estimate of the task and aims of our modern literature or at least the re-establishment of certain values and standards previously set aside.

We must once again divorce literature from life, if by that we will understand that literature is not, and never was supposed to be, a mirror held up before our common life. We must discard the so-called “true-to-life” standard by which our critical attitudes have been governed for so many years. Above all, we must renounce the propaganda psychosis, and we must admit that even good propaganda is never literature and that even great literature is seldom propaganda. We have those, of course, who will rise to point out that such and such a book or novel or play was excellent propaganda for such and such a cause or event. To which we may answer: it was not so conceived. For the glibness with which the word propaganda is used is rivalled only by the glibness of the propagandists themselves. To make a case for any work of literature as a bit of effective propaganda for any cause is to distort and debase the purpose for which it was created.

There is much too much to do with literature today that has nothing to do with literature at all. We must learn again that the weavers of fantasy are, after all, the veritable realists. For it must be admitted that we have at hand ample evidence that this is so.

There is realism in great literature, but realism alone does not make great literature. The writer, or observer, who sees an event or an occurrence, however rare or moving an event it may be, who is moved to write about it merely to describe, with minute realism, what he had observed is no more creating literature than the earnest New Englander who writes to the Times or the Globe to report the first robin. But Arthur Machen has said these things before—and said them better.

You will find, in the closing pages of _Hieroglyphics_, this passage, which seems an excellent closing passage for this digressive chapter:

“Have you noticed how many of the greatest writers, so far from desiring that compliment of ‘fidelity to life,’ do their best to get away from life, to make their books, in ordinary phraseology, ‘unreal.’ I do not know whether anybody has compared the facts before or made the only possible inference from them; but you remember how Rabelais professes to derive his book from a little mouldy manuscript, found in a tomb, how Cervantes beginning to _propria persona authoris_, breaks off and discovers the true history of _Don Quixote_ in the Arabic Manuscript of Cid Hamet Benengeli, how Hawthorne prologizes with the custom-house at Salem, and lights, in an old lumber-room, on the documents telling him the story of _The Scarlet Letter_. _Pickwick_ was the transcript of the ‘Transactions’ or ‘Papers’ of the Pickwick Club, and Tennyson’s _Morte d’Arthur_ shelters itself, in the same way, behind the personality of an imaginary writer. There is a very profound significance in all this, and you find a trace of the same instinct in the Greek Tragedies, where the final scene, the peripeteia, is not shown on the stage, but described by a ‘messenger.’ The fact is that the true artist, so far from being the imitator of life, endures some of his severest struggles in endeavoring to get away from life, and until he can do this he knows that his labor is all in vain.”

_Chapter Ten_

THINGS NEAR AND FAR

1

The original outline for this book included a chapter to be called “Hieroglyphics.” This was to be composed largely of what other writers had said or written about Arthur Machen. It seemed a good title and a sound enough notion, and certainly there has been enough said and written about Machen to compose a fine chapter indeed.

And then it occurred to me that there was a rather cynical note being struck here, that the use of that particular word in such a connection might imply (and I am quite sure that at one time it was meant to imply) a certain lack of respect for some of the material to be grouped under that heading. Much has been written about Machen, not as much, certainly, as one would like to see; and some of it, unfortunately, is the sort of thing with which one cannot agree. As, for example, the views of the anonymous Manchester guardian, the reviews of some of the early books as they appeared in London newspapers, and the estimates of Miss Dorothy Scarborough in her otherwise excellent book about the supernatural elements in English literature.

On the other hand: one cannot always agree with the idolizers and the cultists. These are, at times, even more annoying and sometimes rather embarrassing.

The admirers of Arthur Machen are probably as heterogeneous a collection as one is likely to find anywhere outside the membership lists of the Book of the Month Club, the Literary Guild and a distinguished After Shave Club. There are, among the more ardent Arthurians, poets and pedants, dilettantes and divorcees, men of letters and three-letter men from the universities, reviewers and romanticists, critics and connoisseurs, columnists and collectors of every description—a rare assemblage that numbers sincere admirers, warm friends, not a few dreads and some drolls. Mr. Machen’s works are known to the Librarians at Yale and at Stanford. They are known also to the librarians at Liggetts and Walgrens—for recently several anthologies have appeared on the forty-nine cent table and several Machen stories have made the grade in the corner drug store through the medium of the quarter pocketbooks. This is passing strange company for a man whose first editions were published in Vigo Street under the Sign of the Bodley Head and whose American triumphs were under the auspices of the aristocratic Borzoi.

Mr. Machen’s published works have fared as variously. His stories have appeared in anthologies whose sales have run into thousands, and there is noted in Van Patten’s bibliography a small work published in an edition of two copies.

How does one decide upon an edition of two copies? It must be admitted that, to his fervent admirers at least, the peddling of Machen to the millions along with the malteds and lunches at Liggetts is to be preferred to the arch-conservativeness that confines a Machen item to a very limited edition of two copies. It may cause shudders to run up and down the arthritic vertebrae of many a venerable Machenite to suggest such a thing, but I find myself wishing that Winchell would one day give Machen “the works.” And who knows but that he may? With realism and the realists in disorder, if not retreat, in disarray if not utter rout, with realism seen from a rapidly shifting focal point, with reviewers suggesting that the work and the world of our realists may be, after all, allegory—who knows but the Sunday Night Sage may not admonish Americans from coast to coast to demand from their bookseller a copy of _Dog and Duck_, or the _Anatomy of Tobacco_ (LSMFT) or even _Hieroglyphics_?

Such unscholarly suggestions may seem unworthy, may even draw the fire of many Machenites who will deeply resent such facetious flippancy—but they are offered merely as an antidote to the equally absurd and equally unworthy tactics of some collectors who come to praise and to bury Machen in the same devout breath.

I must confess that, while I envy certain men and mausoleums the possession of many a Machen item, I am pleased beyond measure to find _The Great God Pan_ or _The Cosy Room_ or _The Novel of the White Powder_ in the gaudiest, grizzliest anthology of horror stories displayed for the delight of the drug store trade.

However, to return to the Arthurians, whether of the cultivated or the common garden variety. The response to a prospectus describing this volume when it was in its projected state was enlightening. There were letters on fine paper bearing the crests of famous colleges and libraries, there were scribbled notes from, obviously, “stfans” in Kansas City, Dallas, Scranton and the Coast. These letters did affect the construction of this book in one important respect. I determined then to add to the book a bibliography that would direct the reader of Machen to the stories and essays of Machen wherever they may be found. The scholars and the specialists know in which vaults the more valuable manuscripts are under lock and key. Let them rest in peace. One day, perhaps, they will be released and they will be read as it was intended, by the man who wrote them, that they should be. Meanwhile it may be amusing to compile a list of the unlikely and out of the way corners of literature in which there are mentions of Machen—and to the true Machenite the mere mention of Machen is rewarding.

We’ve wandered from Wilde to Winchell, but there are many more unexpected encounters awaiting the ardent Arthurian. For example, Tiffany Thayer, _enfant terrible_ of the late Twenties and early Thirties, whose books were rather lurid things, made use of Machen in certain passages. We find, if we dredge deep enough, a passing reference to Machen, and one that might conceivably outrage the true believer.

An even more strange, and not too flattering, reference is found in one of the books of William Seabrooke. Mr. Seabrooke, who visited strange places and saw strange things, once visited, as a client, and I violate no confidence, an asylum. Since Mr. Seabrooke wrote a book about his experiences therein, any hesitation on my part would be a needless delicacy.

Mr. Seabrooke’s mention of Machen is even given a title: Self-Portrait of a Dementia Praecox Case on First Reading the works of Machen. The “self-portrait” follows: “Sweet spirits of my own dementia praecox! womb-wailing guide calls reechoing throughout sub-cavernousterraneous! fuga, fugae. Corncopios fugalations in depths arbeitung verstaltheight.... I have just read _The Hill of Dreams_! By the brazen buttocks of that brimstone bellona who lolls in lakes of lava, never in my life have I read or even imagined that such a piece of escapist literature existed. He is superior to Dunsany and to Algernon Blackwood who though almost not an escapist may be classed with them. The book is filled with black magic. The man’s powers of psychotic invention are almost unbelievable and his familiarity with certain phenomena of abnormal psychology is creepy. Are you acquainted with Tchaikovski’s scherzi? especially the waltz-scherzo of his Fifth? It moves in this same weird, uncanny way. Now I wish I were dead....”

Seabrooke’s d.p. exhibits astonishing lucidity toward the end, is apparently versed in intellectual small talk, and displays a familiarity with the works of James Joyce as well.

It is sometimes fascinating to compare different reactions to certain of Machen’s tales. Basil Davenport writing in the _Saturday Review_ some years ago noted: “... there are some stories which portray a non-moral fall into a moral gulf; someone’s foot quite innocently slips, and there is no stopping above the bottom of hell ... that is what makes Mr. Arthur Machen’s stories supreme of their kind ... and such a story of irrational, irresistible temptation as Mr. Machen’s _The White People_ ... about a little girl whose nurse happens to be a witch, and who becomes a devil-worshipper without the least idea of what she is doing.” Carl Van Vechten says of this same story: “Was ever a more malignantly depraved story written than _The White People_ (which it might be profitable to compare with Henry James’s _The Turn of the Screw_?).”

Mr. Carl Van Vechten’s _Peter Whiffle_ probably did as much to popularize Arthur Machen in the Twenties as any score of reviewers, but it also had the effect of rarifying Machen and conditioning him for a specific audience. It was Mr. Van Vechten’s (or rather, Peter’s) audience more than it was Machen’s. It was this audience, I think, that prompted Walter Winchell to report, breathlessly, that Arthur Machen was “tops among the literati.” Peter was a delightfully “naughty” character—there were so many of them in the Twenties! When he spoke of Machen he was speaking mostly about Peter. Nevertheless he was an able press agent. Said Peter, in part, and to paraphrase a phrase, we quote:

“It is a byword of the day that one only takes from a work of art what one brings to it, and how few readers can bring to Machen the requisite qualities, how few readers have gnosis! Machen evokes beauty out of horror, mystery and terror. He suggests the extremes of the terrible, the vicious, the most evil, by never describing them. His very reserve conveys the infinity of abomination.... But his expression soars so high, there is such ecstasy in his prose, that we are not meanly thrilled or revolted by his necromancy; rather we are uplifted and exalted by his suggestion of impurity and corruption, which leads us to ponder over the mysterious connection between man’s religious and sensual natures.” From this point on Peter’s bizarre rhapsody over Machen includes references to so many Florentine painters, Arabian necromancers, Asiatic messiahs and French Symbolistes that the average Machenite loses sight of his idol in the confusing blaze of intellectual pyrotechnics.

2

And then we have the testimony of C. Lewis Hind, a sort of literary journalist who once saw Machen plain. Mr. Hind did essays and sketches of literary people about London and collected them into books called _Authors and I_ and _More Authors and I_. He remembers having met Machen once at a dinner given for Sir Frank Benson and members of his Shakespearean Repertoire Company; he also recalls having seen Machen “slouching through the interminable corridors of the Evening News.”

An article on Machen, published in one of his collections, he credits to a letter from Vincent Starrett. Mr. Starrett’s enthusiasm apparently moved Hind to do a piece on Mr. Machen. The encounter described in the article was, apparently, a chance encounter of the sort in which Machen himself delighted.

Mr. Hind had gone, one evening, to call upon an acquaintance who lived in one of the London Inns of Court. While he was peering at the names inscribed on the oak door the door was opened—by Arthur Machen! “My friend was not in, but the author of _Hieroglyphics_ and I had some good, rapid talk. He is an admirable monologist when in the mood (see _Hieroglyphics_). For some reason or other I have a vivid recollection of that brief encounter—the open door, the snug room beyond, the books and a lamp, warmth and stillness, and Arthur Machen standing in the passage—smiling and talking, ready to talk but also ready to go back to his folios.”

Machen was, according to Mr. Hind, “a heavily built man, with a large genial, yet brooding, clean-shaven face; a good companion, I think, but one who keeps many of his thoughts to himself.” Mr. Hind was, in short, charmed and impressed, but he obviously did not consider Arthur Machen a V.I.P. It would be interesting to read Machen on Hind.

One of the most curious estimates of Machen is made by Professor Cornelius Weygandt in his _A Century of the English Novel_. Professor Weygandt admires Machen somewhat for his essays, and classifies him as a “lesser late Victorian” along with Baring-Gould, Quiller-Couch, Marie Corelli, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Walter Pater and others—a very curious group indeed!

The professor devotes a full page to Machen, which is not at all bad, and well above the average, for lesser late Victorians! Machen’s great fault, the professor finds, is that he is not a story-teller, he has not taught himself the craft. He has little sense of the creation of character and his own life is, obviously, very narrow. As an essayist, however, concedes the Professor, Machen is often a bringer of delight. _The Hill of Dreams_, on the other hand, is saved from futility only by some good writing. So sayeth Professor Weygandt.

Wagenknecht, in his _Cavalcade of the English Novel_, is much more to my taste than the austere professor. He introduces Machen as “one of the most remarkable examples of sustained devotion to creative work in literary history.” He finds that Machen reveals a gift for breathless narrative to match LeFanu’s, but he feels that this quality is lacking in the book generally regarded as Machen’s masterpiece—_The Hill of Dreams_. Nevertheless, Wagenknecht considers Machen “important,” he rates him with Blackwood and de la Mare, and has included Machen’s _The Terror_ in his collection _Six Novels of the Supernatural_ published a few years ago by Viking.

3

The student of Machen is not content to have read everything Machen has ever written (and there are few who have), he must also read everything that has ever been written about Arthur Machen. He may begin, naturally enough, with a study of the period in which Machen first appears. There have been quite a few books written about the Nineties, these unaccountably yield but little material on Machen. Richard LeGallienne, Holbrook Jackson and Osburt Burdett, whose studies of that period are very carefully written and copiously annotated, scarcely mention Machen at all.

One then moves on to memoirs and biographies of the men who lived and wrote in this period, and even consults the critical studies on the whole vast subject of English literature. One picks up dozens of such books and soon develops the habit of examining them from the back cover forward, for a glance at the index reveals whether the book is worth while, from this viewpoint, or not. Too often one finds mention of Macaulay, Lord; MacCarthy, Desmond; MacLeod, Fiona; even Mackenzie, Compton—but few are the mentions of Machen.

One finds too that the index of a book can be a very revealing thing indeed. We have before us, for example, the memoirs of a Literary Figure of, let us say, the 1890’s and the early 1900’s. The index indicates that our man knew everyone worth knowing. We find Shaw and More, Shelley and Kelley, Shakespeare, Rossetti and Donne, Keats and Yeats, Whistler and Wilde, Moore and Hardy and a generous sprinkling of the nobility. It would seem, from the index, that our man lived a very full and eventful life, that he was close, as they say, to the heart of things.

The book itself is rather likely to be pretty dull stuff—mostly about our man’s preoccupation with his public school and his dislike of games, the amazing and discouraging tenacity with which his great aunt in Bath clung to life, the duplicity of publishers and the simply astonishing things that can and do befall an Englishman in Naples, Nice or Florence. Throughout the book, however, one encounters reports of what Whistler said to Pennell or Pater or both; what G.B.S. wrote to the brash American journalist and how Lord Lymph responded to a quip tossed out by Lord Lissom. Hence the index. One can only conclude that reviewers, and possibly publishers, read the index more carefully than the book itself.

Occasionally, however, the slow unrewarding progress through the shelves of the public library does yield a choice bit or two and these, be it noted, more frequently in books by Americans than by Englishmen.

Mr. Grant Richards who wrote in 1895 to Arthur Machen asking if he had anything he would care to have published, has written at least two books of his experiences as one of England’s most enterprising publishers. Neither of them contained a single mention of Arthur Machen although Richards published several of Machen’s books, and at a time when Machen’s name was certainly an asset to any publisher’s list.

The index of Richards’ book about A. E. Housman (Oxford, 1942) arouses hope. There are three references to Machen. The first of these is contained in a letter from Housman to Richards. The context, in full, follows: “I don’t think Machen ought to drink port on the top of Burgundy.” One may wonder, one is tantalized, by the implications of that brief note. Does it imply that Machen did drink port on top of Burgundy—or that he merely contemplated doing so or sought advice on the advisability. If he did, were the results memorable, and in what respect? Does it imply that Housman is a purist in these matters? A Tory in tippling? Does it hint at “an incident”?

Another reference is even more brief and profoundly unimportant. “We know too that Housman read Arthur Machen and Frederick Baron Corvo.” The most significant entry is this, from another Housman letter: “Thanks to you, I believe I possess Machen’s complete works. He is always interesting (except in the _Evening News_) and to some extent good. Mixing up religion and sexuality is not a thing I am fond of, and in this book the Welsh element rather annoys me. The imitation of Rabelais is very clever.”

We know, at any rate, that Housman read Machen, quite a bit of him. He was not fond of the Welsh, nor of mixing religion and sexuality nor, for that matter, of mixing port and burgundy.

What we would like most to know from Mr. Richards, I think, is why it took him ten years to change his mind about _The Hill of Dreams_, and why he changed it when he did. Of this, unfortunately, we have no hint.

The Machen revival of the Twenties lasted through to the end of the decade and, to some, to the end of an era. Machen appeared at rare intervals in public life, preferring the countryside of Wales and the company of his friends, a great many of them Americans. Paul Jordan-Smith and Robert Hillyer and Montgomery Evans have given us sketches of Machen through this period. For the most part, however, his work was done. In the early Thirties Machen wrote a novel, _The Green Round_. It has not yet been published in this country nor is it very well known. Machen says it is “sorry stuff.” As for _Tom O’Bedlam_, it was an essay “written to order of an American.” Machen never saw the book in print.

In 1936 there was a brief revival of interest in Machen occasioned by the publication of two collections of his stories and essays. Hutchinson brought out _The Children of the Pool_ in which there appeared seven stories not previously collected. Rich and Cowan brought out a collection called _The Cosy Room_, consisting of essays and stories collected over a period from the late 1880’s to the late 1920’s. Each of the pieces included in this collection is given a date—apparently the year in which it was written. Some of the dates supplied, presumably by Machen, give rise to bibliographical speculation. Most of these pieces had been published elsewhere although some of them, obviously “the wreckage of discarded and abandoned books,” appeared in print for the first time.

The dust-jacket of Hutchinson’s _Children of the Pool_ carried an “Appreciation” of Machen, one of the finest and most admirable I have ever encountered. To find it on, of all places, a dust-jacket! This is no publisher’s blurb but an analysis that deserves to be included in this or any book about Machen. The author of the following tribute is unknown, to me at least: “Mr. Machen creates his own world. This world is a fusion of the world that is accepted in every day reality—in which events and their causes are explicable by traditional and humdrum interpretations—and one that is distinguished not only by the weird and extraordinary effects. The author does not try to present a state of affairs so topsy-turvy and bizarre that you are intrigued merely by its very madness. The supernatural insinuates itself subtly into these stories. They have an air of common reality until the author develops their mystical undercurrents. And in this blending Mr. Machen’s art is supreme. It has an infinite capacity for producing what E. J. O’Brien describes as “a willing suspension of disbelief” [_this fine phrase has also been attributed to Dr. Canby, Bennet Cerf and, of course, Samuel Taylor Coleridge_]. That Mr. Machen’s faculty in this direction can extend beyond the circle of sympathetic readers and convince masses has been proved by the fact that his imaginative treatment of a very famous occasion was accepted by thousands of men and women as literal description. These stories offer varied excursions into realms simultaneously unfathomable and alluring, and on that account alone they are memorable. But there is also Mr. Machen’s craftsmanship, and his style which is a delight to read. A character in the book says: ‘A man must know the grammar of his business, whatever it is; the rest, if it is to be the first order, must be the work of the hidden flame within.’”

Now and then Machen did an introduction or preface for a book or collection, none of them are of particular importance as Machen “items.” In 1937 Hutchinson brought out Philip Sergeant’s _Witches and Warlocks_ with a preface by Machen. The book was, according to the publisher, suggested to Sergeant by his old friend Arthur Machen. In his introduction Machen quotes some of the theories expressed in _The White People_ and _The Great God Pan_. He hints, in other words, and in justification of his friend’s labours, that there are more things in heaven and earth than mere hawks and handsaws.

4

In the years since the publication of the “yellow books” by Knopf and the attendant enthusiasm for his works, Arthur Machen has been very little in the public eye. The Machen vogue of the 1920’s seemed to exhaust itself almost as soon as the Knopf editions were exhausted. The Caerleon Edition, published in 1923 by Seeker in London, quickly disappeared, and we entered once again upon a lengthy period of “neglect”.

Actually, Machen has not been as neglected as we might suppose. It is true that he has not been accorded the recognition that is his due, but there are hundreds, possibly thousands, who have never neglected nor forgotten Machen. The late Alfred Goldsmith, one of New York’s most amiable booksellers, wrote me, a year or two ago, that there is and always has been a constant, if small, demand for his books. Ben Abramson of the famed Argus Book Shop has his North Wall addicts who are always eager for Machen items. August Derleth, the one-man wonder of mid-western publishing circles, knows the value of a Machen story in a collection issuing from Arkham House. A new generation of booksellers on New York’s Fourth Avenue know Machen by reputation, even though many of them have never seen one of the eagerly sought-after books.

Machen himself went into retirement some years ago. For years there were gatherings at his home in St. John’s Wood, gay parties attended by writers and theatrical people and journalists—and Americans. Machen has always had a tremendous appeal for Americans—possibly because of our Hawthorne and Poe, and possibly because we managed to avoid the stagy school of the Gothic novelists which he so disliked. And Machen liked Americans, too, as Robert Hillyer related in his _Atlantic_ article. It pleased Machen that the majority of the letters he received about his works were from Americans. On one occasion he told Hillyer he would consider it a compliment to be taken “into the fold as a fellow American.”

Later, when Machen retired to Wales, there were picnics on the cliffs overlooking the sea. Robert Hillyer has given us an amusing account of one of these festive occasions in his recent article on Machen. With the coming of the war these visits were impossible, of course. Montgomery Evans, late of the U. S. Army, member of the Salmagundi Club and resident of Greenwich, was the last of Machen’s visitors before the war.

Evans had known Machen since 1923. It was his pleasant practice to give parties with the Machens on such American occasions as the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. These parties promoted Anglo-American understanding with “American food and French wine” and such guests as Augustus John, Holbrooke Jackson, Tommy Earp and others. Evans happened to be again in England when World War II broke out. Machen had written an introduction for a book Evans was about to publish. Book and introduction went to the bottom of the North Atlantic with the torpedoed _Athenia_ as Evans was bound for home when the war was only a few days old.