Chapter II: Part 2

I do not know whether Mr Arthur Machen is to be described as an actor who amuses his leisure with writing books or as an author who fills up his evenings by appearing on the stage. He was a member of the Benson Company and is now to be seen in a small part in “Paolo and Francesca.” He wrote some years ago a clever, disagreeable book, “The Great God Pan.” He now publishes “Hieroglyphics,” which has attracted me (it is just as well to confess frankly the queer reasons which prompt one to take up new books) by its quiet binding and clear type. Unfortunately the type is clearer than the matter. The book proves to be a discussion, in the form of a monologue, of the question, What is Literature? But the monologue is verbose and the reasoning circuitous—Mr Machen prefers to call it, after Coleridge, a “cyclical mode of discoursing”—indeed the question is not so much argued as begged. It would be unfair to Mr Machen to compare him with Tolstoy, who in putting a similar question, “What is Art?” has been as lucid and logical as Euclid himself. Apparently Mr Machen does not want to be logical. He says that there are only two parties in the world, the Rationalists and the Mystics, and as he happens to “plump for” mysticism, he despises logic as one of the vain shibboleths of the other party.

Now it is this partisan attitude, this desire to see only one side of the truth, which I think spoils Mr Machen’s book. There is room in this world for both rationalists and mystics (as well as for rationalist mystics and mystical rationalists), and neither side can claim all literature for its own. Being a mystic, Mr Machen finds the touchstone of all real or, as he calls it, fine literature, as distinguished from mere reading-matter, in “ecstasy.” What does he mean by that? “Substitute, if you like, rapture, beauty, adoration, wonder, awe, mystery, sense of the unknown, desire of the unknown. All and each will convey what I mean; for some a particular one term may be more appropriate than another, but in every case there will be that withdrawal from the common life and the common consciousness which justifies my choice of ‘ecstasy’ as the best symbol of my meaning. I claim, then, that here we have the touchstone which will infallibly separate the higher from the lower in literature, which will arrange the innumerable multitude of books in two great divisions, which can be applied with equal justice to a Greek drama, an eighteenth-century novelist, and a modern poet, to an epic in twelve books, and to a lyric in twelve lines.” Well, of course, “higher” and “lower” here are mere question-begging terms. If you choose to call what appeals to the sense of the mysterious “high” and what appeals to some other sense “low,” there is nothing to prevent you. But all that you have established by your classification is the fact that you, being what you are, prefer one sort of thing to the other sort. This is not criticism, it is mere personal whim.

The essential whimsicality of Mr Machen’s classification comes out when he proceeds to illustrate it by specific examples. “Pickwick,” it seems, is literature, while “Vanity Fair” is not. Homer and Dickens are on the same shelf—the shelf labelled “literature”—while Jane Austen and George Eliot are on a lower shelf, labelled “reading matter.” Why? Because the authors in the second class only give us pictures of life, adroit rearrangements of what we know; they do not appeal to our sense of the miraculous, our craving for the unknown, like the writers of the first class. “Pickwick” is not a representation of life; “the book is rather the suggestion of another life, beneath our own or beside our own, and the characters, those queer, grotesque people, are queer for the same reason that the Cyclops is queer, and the dragons and dwarfs of mediæval romance are queer. We are withdrawn from the common ways of life; and in that withdrawal is the beginning of ecstasy.” What is here said about “Pickwick” is true, so far as it goes, though the comparison with the “Odyssey” is rather forced. All _picaresque_ novels—“Gil Blas” or “Roderick Random” or “Pickwick” or “Lavengro”—have something in common with the “Odyssey,” but not much. The “Odyssey” still remains noble poetry, and these others still remain rather ignoble prose. And no parallelism between the “Odyssey” and “Pickwick” will persuade me that the true _differentia_ of the latter is its sense of mystery. It is for the fun of the book that the world cherishes it. But, like other mystics—notably M. Maeterlinck—Mr Machen seems to be somewhat lacking in a sense of humour. For proof of that, you have only to read him complaining of the “limitations” of Miss Austen’s characters or complacently calling the creator of Mrs Poyser “poor draggle-tailed George Eliot.”

One imagines for the moment that Mr Machen is really a humorist of a very subtle kind when he compares the brandy-and-water drinking in “Pickwick” with the Dionysiac orgies from which Greek tragedy sprang. He drags in Rabelais with his _dive bouteille_. “After all, what does this Bacchic cultus mean? We have seen that under various disguises the one spirit appeared in Greece, in the France of the Renaissance, and in Victorian England, and that in each instance there is an apparent glorification of drunkenness.... We are to conclude that both the ancient people and the modern writers recognised Ecstasy as the supreme gift and state of man, and that they chose the Vine and the juice of the Vine as the most beautiful and significant symbol of that Power which withdraws a man from the common life and the common consciousness, and taking him from the dust of the earth, sets him in high places, in the eternal world of ideas.” The “symbolism” of Mr Pickwick’s milk-punch! The “ideas” of a drunken man! Into such absurdities do writers fall when, like Mr Machen, they set out with the preconceived notion that all great literature is a form of mysticism, instead of quietly examining the question without any preconceived notions at all.

The truth is Mr Machen’s new dichotomy of Literature and Not-Literature is simply the old dichotomy of Romanticism and Realism. Pater defined the Romantic as the element of strangeness in beauty, and what Mr Machen is in fact pleading for is the recognition of nothing but Romantic Literature as great or fine literature. In other words he wants to narrow down recognised terms to fit the limitations of his particular tastes. Well, it won’t do. He calls himself, somewhat obtrusively, a Catholic, and says that “literature is the expression, through the æsthetic medium of words, of the dogmas of the Catholic Church.” Keeping the word “catholic” untainted by any sectarian meaning, I should be inclined to say that “catholicity of taste” is precisely what Mr Machen lacks.

[Sidenote: _The Academy_]

... Enter Mr Machen in the part of Boswell to a talker both “literary” and “obscure,” who offers a test whereby to separate literature from “fine” literature or, in effect, talent from genius. One listens respectfully to a reading hermit, because, on the face of it, a hermit’s opinions should be matured by study and conceived in the calm of one who rolls no logs and grinds no axes. But, to get an unpleasant thing said once and for all, Mr Machen’s hermit is an indolent person, careless of accuracy, who has grudged the labour of justifying some extraordinary depreciations. He is, in fact, for all his anonymity, an egoist, whose object seems to be brilliance rather than elucidation....

[Sidenote: _The Bristol Mercury_]

“Hieroglyphics” is a somewhat figurative title for the latest book of Mr Arthur Machen, author of “The Great God Pan.” It reproduces a series of monologues by and conversations with a kind of philosophical literary hermit whom the author discovered in a quaint old house at Barnsbury, an almost mythical region lying between Pentonville and the Caledonian Road. Now and again one discerns a faint and far-away flavour of Coleridge and Lamb in the dissertations, but the philosophy is not of the most profound....

[Sidenote: _The Globe_]

It is to be hoped that the title of this book, by no means a happy one, will not deter anybody from making its acquaintance. For it is a very readable book—at least, it will be found so by all who take any interest in things literary. It might very well have been called, “What, really, is Literature?”—a large question, which the author, Mr Arthur Machen, does not succeed in answering convincingly. His main theory is summed up in one of his sentences, early in the volume: “If Ecstasy be present, then I say there is fine literature; if it be absent, then, in spite of all the cleverness, all the talents, all the workmanship and observation and dexterity you may show me, then, I think, we have a product (possibly a very interesting one), which is not fine literature.” How this theory works out in practice is seen in another sentence: “Here is ‘Pickwick,’ and here is ‘Vanity Fair’; and, applying my test, I set ‘Pickwick’ beside the ‘Odyssey,’ and ‘Vanity Fair’ on top of the political pamphlet.” It is impossible to treat with seriousness such propositions; but that is no reason why “Hieroglyphics” should be neglected. There is a good deal in it, mostly incidental, with which we quite agree—such as, for example, the judgment passed on “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” The book is suggestive and therefore interesting. Mr Machen ascribes it to an “obscure literary hermit,” whose conversations he professes to reproduce; but there is no apparent necessity for such machinery. Mr Machen should have the courage of his opinions—if they are his. Anyway, “Hieroglyphics” can be recommended to the well-read and the thoughtful.

[Sidenote: _The Daily Mail_]

Mr Arthur Machen, after diligently applying a microscope to sundry literary reputations, has detected a number of spots, which he enumerates in “Hieroglyphics.” This sheaf of essays is undeniably clever; but it leaves an impression of cynical iconoclasm, which sees false gods in books which have fallen under the curse of popular approval. Mr Machen finds, for instance, that Jane Austen’s works are not literature, and that Dickens reeks of Camden Town. Nevertheless, the book is piquant reading, and contains some shrewd pieces of analysis.

[Sidenote: _Pilot_]

The device by which vendors of patent wares tempt curiosity by giving them some curious name is hardly worth the imitation of men of letters, and we admire neither Mr Machen’s title nor his other artifice of throwing what he has to say into the form of monologues delivered by a Coleridge-loving hermit in Barnsbury. His theme is the old one of “What constitutes Literature?” and his answer is given in the single word Ecstasy. The process by which the answer is reached has the merit of simplicity. Literature is explained to mean “fine literature” and (in an unguarded moment) “imaginative literature.” “Ecstasy” is “the withdrawal, the standing apart from common life,” and it is obvious that this is only our old friend “imagination” under a new and less happy name. Thus only imaginative literature deserves to be called literature, and what constitutes imaginative literature is the quality of imagination, a conclusion which we can reach without going to Barnsbury, but which yet, ere it is attained, gives Mr Machen occasion for passing some excellent criticisms on the books he reviews. Thus he illustrates his axiom, “Only the Idea is pure art; with Plot and Construction and Style there is an alloy of artifice,” by some admirable remarks on Stevenson’s “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” and comes near the root of the matter in his criticisms of Mr Hardy and Mr Meredith. That he recognises his quality of “ecstasy” in “Pickwick,” despite its cockney atmosphere, is creditable to his generosity. That he adopts “Vanity Fair,” which he never tires of reading, as the supreme instance of “observation expressed with artifice” (and, therefore, outside his definition of “literature”), shows some blindness. Take away Thackeray’s deep religious feeling, and the criticism would be true, but by the same process the “Agamemnon” may be reduced to the rank of a bad French novel, and the “Œdipus Rex” to a tale of horrors. To blunder thus seems the Nemesis of the straining after novelty which has made Mr Machen attribute the worth of literature to its possession of “ecstasy,” and the ambiguous definition he has given to this word. To stand apart, not from common life, but from the common view of life, is surely the criterion of true literature, and we are surprised that Mr Machen should come so near as he does to making the subject rather than the vision (we are careful not to say the “treatment”) of it the main test.

[Sidenote: _The Morning Post_]

... He talks (like the Walrus) of many things, of office boys, of Coleridge, of words that end in “ings”; of Homer and of Dickens, of literature, of art; of books that bore and “lonely” books, which have “a soul apart.” ...

[Sidenote: _The Star_]

“By what rule are we ... to judge exactly in the case of any particular book whether it is literature or not?” When I read that question in Mr Arthur Machen’s new book “Hieroglyphics” I pricked up my ears. Here at last, I thought, is the divining rod for which I have yearned. No longer need I vex my soul over the judgments delivered here every Saturday. Fancy a rule which will make me infallible! What is it? “A single word.” Out with it! “Ecstasy.” Is that all? “Substitute, if you like, rapture, beauty, adoration, wonder, awe, mystery, sense of the unknown, desire for the unknown”—Stop! these words are not “substitutes” or synonyms. They are, I suspect, merely amplifications of another word, romance. Your solution, in fact, is merely a statement of your attitude. You are a romanticist, and I like you, for I am one myself. But your golden rule does not help me, for it leaves me still under the necessity of questioning my own soul. By “ecstasy” you mean YOUR ecstasy, not MY ecstasy. For every man has his own private ecstasy. When you get to work I find that your ecstasy is whimsical. You earmark words and use them in a Machenian sense. You prefer to speak of “feelings” when you mean “the things of life,” and you reserve “emotion” for “the influence produced (_sic_) in man by fine art.” I challenge the distinction. It is arbitrary. “Thus it will be with emotion that we witness the fall of Œdipus, the madness of Lear, while we feel for our friends and ourselves in misfortune.” This will never do. “Emotion” is simply a poor Latin synonym for the fine Saxon word “feeling.” How on earth can I confine my “emotions” to literature and my “feelings” to life? No, Mr Machen, your sophistry won’t help me to discover masterpieces for the readers of that “great pale bird,” _The Star_.

And, really, your “ecstasy” leads you a mad dance. It makes you rate “George Egerton” above George Meredith. Mr Meredith, you say, “not only fails in the body of art but even more conspicuously in the soul of it.” Clearly, your ecstasy is not mine. While you shut Meredith out of literature you let “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” scrape in! After that, nothing you say surprises me. Indeed, it is a relief when you damn Thackeray with Meredith, and canonise Dickens with—Miss Wilkins. For by this time I realise that you have gone MUST. Your “ecstasy” is merely the motor-car in which your preferences go out for a nocturnal ride without a light at seventy miles an hour. It is a very good vehicle if safely used. It is by no means new either. Mr Watts-Dunton has been employing it for a quarter of a century. Why, his famous discovery of “the renascence of wonder” has become a critical commonplace. Indeed, so thoroughly has it permeated criticism that the phrase is used as literary shorthand for the great generalisation which it connotes. You have, indeed, turned the shorthand into charming “Hieroglyphics,” but you go astray in the application. Your “ecstasy” over that “thick white cloud” in the Tale of Gabriel Grub is quite funny. And if you identify the brandy-and-water scenes in “Pickwick” with the Bacchic cultus, what about Jos Sedley’s rack punch? What about Mr Meredith’s glorifications of old port? But much shall be forgiven you because you are a good Pantagruelist, though I think it is a mistake to identify Pantagruelism either with Dionysus and the Greek drama on the one hand or with Dickens and “Pickwick” on the other. Falstaff is the only piece of real Pantagruelism in our literature. And now, let me advise everybody to read “Hieroglyphics.” It is brilliantly written, it bubbles over with pugnacities, and it is alive in every line.

[Sidenote: _Glasgow Herald_]

... The author’s main desire seems to be to utter a series of elaborate paradoxes, and he does utter them in a somewhat conceited fashion. Mr Machen has no doubt got hold of part of the truth, for it is indubitable that the sense of ecstasy, or whatever else one chooses to call it, is a main cause of æsthetic charm. As certainly, however, it is not the whole secret of literature, which admits much more of the pure intellect than Mr Machen will acknowledge. If there were nothing more in fine literature than he will allow, then our masterpieces of prose and poetry would be nothing more than so many pieces of music; but fine literature and fine music are of course very different things. One judges theories by their results, and there must be something radically wrong about a doctrine which excludes Pope and Thackeray from the fine literary canon—which makes them “artifice” and not “art.” There is something wrong also about the critic who permits himself such trivial impertinences as “the egregious M. Voltaire,” “poor draggle-tailed George Eliot,” “our great false prophet Bacon, a wretch infinitely more guilty than Hobbes.” Even dramatically, as the utterances of an obscure literary hermit, such things are not witty—nor yet funny, except in an unconscious way. There are, indeed, better things in the book, and the author succeeds at times in saying a clever thing, as in truth, considering the earnestness of his efforts in that direction, it were hard if he did not. But, on the whole, the essay is the expression of a thoroughly false, unwholesome, and effeminate theory of literature.

[Sidenote: _The Graphic_]

Mr Arthur Machen’s attractive-looking volume with above quaint title is a little difficult to understand—namely, why was it written and why published? It purports to be records of conversations listened to by the author during many visits to the house of a friend in Barnsbury. In the society of this friend, and in an “old mouldering room,” art in general, and the art of literature in particular, seem to have been very thoroughly discussed. This unnamed friend may have been an author, though Mr Machen confesses himself ignorant, but “he was always ready to defend the thesis that, all the arts being glorious, the literary art was the most glorious and wonderful of all.” Mr Machen has now constituted himself the Boswell of this Barnsbury friend, whose existence we take leave to doubt, and the result is a discursive volume of opinions, given conversationally, on literature and art—on what constitutes literature and what constitutes art, with some smashing of idols (as, for instance, George Eliot, George Meredith, and the already chipped Stevenson), all set forth with a certain amount of affectation in style by the author. Mr Machen, in point of fact, requires what he is pleased to call “ecstasy” in a book before it pleases him. He has found it in the Mr Hardy of “Two in a Tower” days, but not in the Mr Hardy who wrote “Jude,” any more than in the work of the other writers mentioned above. It is well to know, though, that he fancies he detected this quality in “Keynotes,” which circumstance may comfort Mr Meredith for his lack of it, unless, perchance, he admires that curious work. Those who would know more, however, of the ecstatic in literature must turn to the book itself.

[Sidenote: _The Pall Mall Gazette_]

Mr George Gissing’s “George Ryecroft,” in the _Fortnightly_, deals with a subject so like that of Mr Arthur Machen’s “Hieroglyphics,” that for a time one thinks that both authors must be writing of the same person. Both take as spokesman a sort of literary hermit, whose only companions are his books, and who therefore gives forth his views on men and their works with a real or assumed air of detachment. The setting, however, is a little different; for, while Mr Machen’s protagonist is a gentleman with a past, not uncomfortably buried alive in lodgings at Highbury, Mr Gissing’s is an ex-literary hack, who has been left an annuity by a thoughtful friend, and has retired to Devonshire to spend what fag-end of life the newspapers and the publishers have left to him. Yet both gentlemen prose a good deal, and awake in a contentious mind the doubt whether the general public really care so much for the opinions of literary men about books as they seem to imagine. Outside a certain circle the reign of the old favourite seems to be pretty well established, and although a new one is now and then adopted into the dynasty, the admission is always due to his own merit, and not to that of his backers.

THE HOUSE OF SOULS

[Sidenote: Thomas Lloyd in _The Sunday Sun_]

... He seeks only to entertain by what he considers legitimate forms of art. Nevertheless, there is a distinct likeness between his professor and himself—even to the suffering from overwork and brain exhaustion. The tales strike one as the work of one who has overtasked his imagination in London streets and been overcome by nightmares produced by excessive reading of the discussions of the British Association. An unusual but not uninteresting case! Time and a rest-cure may work wonders—may lead to Mr Machen’s next book being altogether as acceptable as the first story in this, and the successor to “The House of Souls” becoming a house of bodies and hearts and minds.

[Sidenote: _Academy_]

... The particular mark at which this criticism is directed is the mystical tale called “The White People.” This story, which is inset into a not particularly well-executed discussion on the nature and spiritual significance of sin, contains the narrative of a young girl, who as a child had lit somehow upon some of the secrets of Fairyland and whose initiation gradually widened as she grew. The thing is not wanting either in imagination or in a certain painful beauty of its own. It is, perhaps, the best-written piece in the book, and the childish, simple language, admirably suggested and maintained, heightens its undeniable pathos. But in the end the young girl is found dead, self-poisoned in time—whatever that may mean—and prostrate before an image which we are given vaguely to understand is symbolic of the “monstrous mythology of the (witches’) Sabbath.” We cannot satisfactorily follow the process by which this gruesome consummation is attained. Mr Machen has been inspired, no doubt, by wild, weird places. Their anciently reported spells, as Emerson has it, have crept upon him, but nowhere here does the enchantment of nature make for sober healing. And why should these influences be set to work upon a pure young spirit for sorcery rather than for sanctification? If Mr Machen should answer: Why not? we can only say how very greatly we should prefer the alternative. The other experiments with the “gurgoylesque” are at least legitimate. Weird and resourceful as they are, however, perhaps they rather fail of horror in their super-psychical parts. Nothing elsewhere in “The Great God Pan” approaches the effect produced upon the reader by the callousness of the experiment of the doctor (in the preliminary chapter) upon the brain of the girl who had once owed her life to him, and that incident is nearer to the possibilities of a lust for science than any part of the resulting coil, in which the devil became incarnate for a while and was made woman. In neither this nor the clever arabesque entitled “The Three Impostors” (which might well have been called “The Murderers’ Fantasia”) is the elaborate surrounding scroll-work quite as effective as it might be; and in the latter extravaganza we lose touch with the main event through the plethora of side tales with which it is garnished, though a word of praise is due to the various literary and artistic characters upon whose vagaries and idiosyncrasies the action indirectly hinges....

[Sidenote: _The Standard_]

It is a pity that Mr Machen has done several things in connection with his new volume of short stories. First and foremost, he might have very well dispensed with his preface. Mr Machen is clever, of course, but his bland references to the example of Mr Kipling and Edgar Allan Poe as “fellow-authors” does not convince—it only irritates. Also his diatribe about the Puritan elements in the English character is quite out of date. Nearly every man who has written decadent fiction within the past fifteen years has lashed himself into a similar fury because he fancies that it has been “tacitly, if not openly, ordered that the English novel is only great when it is a sermon, a tract, or a pamphlet in disguise.” The success or failure of a book is not, as Mr Machen seems to think, governed by hard-headed men of business, who have never disguised their intolerance of imagination, _quâ_ imagination, and who believe that “English fiction must justify itself either as containing useful doctrine and information, or as a manifest transcript of life as it is known to the average reader, due regard being had, of course, to the salutary conventions of the social order.” It is almost invariably limited by its own qualities. Only let Mr Machen produce a work of genius—and his fame shall be known afar. Another source of difference which we have with this writer is the inclusion of the first story, “A Fragment of Life,” in “The House of Souls.” That story, in its particular way, is almost perfect—tender, true, intimate, and restrained—in its exhibition of how a small suburban clerk and his wife came to awake from their dream of a London suburb, of daily labour, and of weary, useless little things, and saw the things that really mattered in life, with the result that “the voices of men and women came to sound with strange notes, with the echo rather of a music that came over unknown hills.” Its mystical qualities are both rare and beautiful, and, as a work of art alone, it deserves to live. But the other stories of Black Magic—of Pan, and of fauns and satyrs and other fearful wild-fowl of the occultist’s stock-in-trade—frankly, they are failures. In one aspect, they would shame any respectable sensational novelist who practises a certain amount of natural illusion. In another—they are ineffective. They do not drive home the intolerable horror of the mystery of Evil. They suggest, on the contrary, the Fat Boy in “Pickwick.” Mr Machen may have ransacked the whole British Museum for quaint and far-off ceremonies, simply to make our flesh creep, but, in sober truth, all he has accomplished is an engaging air of looking mysterious until the time comes for explanation—and then—well, then we yawn. Now, his “fellow-author,” Poe, would not have done this. If he had essayed to melt this too, too solid flesh, if he had striven to throw into atoms and reconstitute the primal elements of our existence, if he had essayed to summon the eternal spirits of evil, the blind forces of ill that are hidden in the constitution of man—we should have felt a rush of genuine terror, and the breath of genius would have touched our cheeks. As it is—Mr Machen only imparts a certain hot-house kind of atmosphere to several perfectly familiar experiments, such as an obscure operation on a girl’s brain, the secret of a wife’s disappearance, the reason why certain men of fashion are driven irresistibly to suicide, and the cause of an obscure, and, truth to tell, rather squalid murder in a deserted passage. He never makes us believe in those Black Masses, or in his theory of demoniacal possession, or in that wonderful jewel, the size of a pigeon’s egg, that glowed and glittered, and was really a woman’s soul. He should realise that poor Aubrey Beardsley, and the hot, impetuous souls that wrought as he did, are quite dead, and now should turn his attention to other and truer fragments of life.

[Sidenote: _The Bystander_]

My reference, a week or two back, to the new form of humour exploited by Mr Montagu Wood in “A Tangled I,” a humour which amusingly combined epigram and satire with literary power and imagination, has moved Mr Grant Richards, the publisher of the book, to draw my attention to another work of the same _genre_, entitled “The House of Souls,” by Mr Arthur Machen. Certainly this book, which contains about six complete novels, is a notable production. If it lacks the sparkle of Mr Wood’s book, it is, nevertheless, the fruit of a curious talent which seems to be of so very striking a resemblance to that work that I am moved to a suspicion that it is the handiwork of the same brain. “The House of Souls” stories are conceived largely with the desire to mix up the humdrum in life with the transcendental—to indicate the “appeal of Theosophy to atheists, men about town, journalists, and hard-headed men of affairs.” The touch of humour is to be observed in the descriptions in the various stories—particularly “A Fragment of Life”—of prosaic suburban ways and manners, which reveal a very intimate knowledge of the lower middle classes; and as to the Theosophical aspect of the stories, undoubtedly it is interesting to find this theme exploited in fiction, especially by so brilliant a descriptive and imaginative writer as Mr Machen. I may add here, that Mr Montagu Wood’s humour was recognised in “Pop” at Eton, and afterwards at the Canning Club at Oxford, and that his skit, published some years ago, “An Island Story,” was highly successful in those sets wherein it gained a reading. I am more than confident that his is a literary talent which will, sooner or later, reach a wide and a startled public.

[Sidenote: _Liverpool Daily Courier_]

... It is by no means a new trick, of course, but Mr Machen has it to perfection, and he is shrewd enough to heighten its effectiveness by sticking his nightmares in the very midst of the modern and the circumstantial and the familiar—by transposing Edgar Allan Poe into the key of “The New Arabian Nights.” Too obviously Poe, here and there, perhaps; and too unmistakably the manner of “The Nights”; but in these derivative days echoes of that sort will trouble none but the most fastidious of readers, and certainly not those who have a healthy appetite for robustious and not too conventional melodrama.

[Sidenote: _Illustrated London News_]

“My dear Sir,” says Dyson in “The House of Souls,” “I will give you the task of a literary man in a phrase. He has got to do simply this: to invent a wonderful story and to tell it in a wonderful manner.” Judged by this test Mr Arthur Machen can scarcely be said to have made literature. As the reader is conducted, Sherlock Holmes fashion, through the House of Souls (there are six storeys to it) its wicked arabesques, its old cabinets and prehistoric flints and faded pocket-books, wear an unconvincing, property air. When wonderful gentlemen like Dyson having drawn from some antique bureau a tattered paper or a black seal, and presenting it for a chum’s inspection the chum exclaims, “Take it away; never speak of this again. Are you made of stone, man? Why, the dread and horror of death itself, the thoughts of the man who stands in the keen morning air on the black platform, bound, the bell tolling in his ears, and waits for the harsh rattle of the bolt, are as nothing compared to this. I will not read it; I should never sleep again!”—then is the breath held, and the mind prepared for any delicious thrill. But the Manuscript at length, or the black seal fully deciphered, prove well-nigh soporific. And both lack the power of evoking that spiritual terror which, leaving Hawthorne and Poe and Coleridge out of the comparison, surrounds “The Island of Dr Moreau,” by Mr Wells, and is imprinted in “The Mark of the Beast,” by Mr Kipling.

[Sidenote: _Birmingham Gazette and Express_]

... Whilst admiring the literary workmanship and the weird fancifulness of it all, one wonders what it means and why the tales were ever written. Do they purport to be works of imagination only, then the author has sought a singularly repulsive form of expression for his undoubted talent; do they seek to promulgate a theory concerning the link between the human and the bestial, between the natural and the supernatural in its most depraved possibilities of manifestation, then we would prefer to remain in ignorance, debating for not one moment the reasonableness or otherwise of such a theory. Really and truly, these awful stories strongly suggest the half-mad imaginings of a degenerate mind steeped in morbidity. They are too completely nauseous ever to have been permitted the publicity of print, and we sincerely trust they will secure few readers.

[Sidenote: _Literary World_]

... But when our author attempts to handle such occult matters as are treated of in “The Great God Pan,” he seems to lose his footing. He succeeds in giving his readers an impression of very disagreeable horrors, but he does not succeed in giving verisimilitude to his record. We feel ourselves in the presence merely of a somewhat morbid imagination. Mr Machen does not reveal, as he leads us to hope, any real arcana.

[Sidenote: _East Anglian Daily Times_]

... We have conscientiously perused the 500 pages which the volume contains, and our conclusion is that we would not willingly repeat the experience. We have supped full with horrors, and the lurid abominations which are very plainly hinted at have sickened us. It is probable that there are some whose literary digestion is strong enough to swallow such pabulum with impunity; but we fancy that the great majority of readers will rise from the book with a shudder of loathing. Certainly persons of a sensitive temperament ought not to read the gruesome tales after dusk....

[Sidenote: _Light_]

... The promise of the first story is not redeemed, and the book is given up to the blacker side of magical beliefs, wrapped up in a garb suggestive of “Sherlock Holmes.” It is not Spiritualism, and we prefer to believe that there is no truth in such auto-suggested horrors. The book professes to indicate “the dangers of unauthorised research,” but no such dangers as are here presented beset the path of the earnest and conscientious Spiritualist investigator.

[Sidenote: _Speaker_]

Mr Arthur Machen writes a somewhat curious preface to his collection of decadent stories in which he attempts to turn the Puritan’s flank in an ingenious manner. He claims that “it is entirely from the Puritan standpoint that I wish to rest my plea for these tales of mine ... almost every page contains a hint (under varied images and symbols) of a belief in a world that is not that of ordinary everyday experience.... I contend that as an English novelist I am within my right in doing so; since Science, the guide of Life, has done as much, has admitted many transcendental conceptions into her scheme of things.” This is a neat apology for the subject matter, which may be summarised by the line, “the flesh is aghast at the half-heard murmurs of horrible things,” but it may surprise the author to be told that in these clever artificial and decidedly sickly romances, penned apparently under the joint influence of Oscar Wilde’s and Aubrey Beardsley’s artistic example, he has proved his Puritan heritage better than he knows. There has always seemed to us something a little pathetic in the desperate attempt of the small school of young Oxford hedonists to break away from the moral code of the healthy Philistine and encounter and glorify the mysterious forbidden pleasures of Sin. For their world was an artificial make-believe affair, with an exhausted atmosphere, in which affectation stood in the place of real pleasure. We can respect in a measure the Puritan who cries out that pleasure is a sin, because he shows us thereby that it has a secret fascination for him, but the man who can only enjoy pleasure by making out to himself that it is a sin shows himself a Puritan _manqué_. We are not surprised, therefore, to find that Mr Arthur Machen’s stories fail to thrill us, because the artificial horrors and nameless sins in which they abound are all carefully concocted and have practically no correspondence with the sins or horrors of real life. That is where our young school of modern hedonists fails in art; it is divorced from nature, and its would-be spontaneity is palpably a carefully laboured, artificial affair. And this is a great pity, for the refined sense of beauty that the young hedonist starts with possessing can only create a stale preciosity when it is divorced from the freshness of nature. Practically all the stories in “The House of Souls” are so much labour thrown away, and the more carefully studied are their “nameless horrors,” the more meaningless are they, and the worse as art. Take, for example, the story “The Inmost Light.” Here is a most deliberate attempt to make our flesh creep, and the only result is to make the reader exclaim “stuff and nonsense.” A certain Dr Black secludes himself with his beautiful wife in his house at Harlesden, and makes experiments in “occult science”:—

“... each night I had stolen a step nearer to that great abyss
which I was to bridge over, the gulf between the world of
consciousness and the world of matter.... In that work from
which even I doubted to escape with life, life itself must
enter; from some human being there must be drawn that essence
which men call the soul, and in its place (for in the scheme
of the world there is no vacant chamber)—in its place would
enter in what the lips can hardly utter, what the mind cannot
conceive without a horror more awful than the horror of death
itself. And when I knew this, I knew also on whom that fate
would fall; I looked into my wife’s eyes. Even at that hour, if
I had gone out and taken a rope and hanged myself, I might have
escaped, and she also, but in no other way. At last I told her
all. She shuddered, and wept, and called on her dead mother for
help, and asked me if I had no mercy and I could only sigh. I
concealed nothing from her; I told her what she would become,
and what would enter in where her life had been; I told her of
all the shame and all the horror.... That night she came down
to my laboratory, and there, with shutters bolted and barred
down, with curtains drawn thick and close, so that the very
stars might be shut out from the sight of that room, while the
crucible hissed and boiled over the lamp, I did what had to be
done, and led out what was no longer a woman. But on the table
the opal flamed and sparkled with such light as no eyes of man
have ever gazed on, and the rays of the flame that was within
it flashed, and glittered, and shone even to my heart. My wife
had only asked one thing of me; that when there came at last
what I had told her, I would kill her. I have kept my promise.”
Page 286.

This passage is a very fair sample of the school to which Mr Machen belongs, and it illustrates its utter artificiality. No thrill can possibly come, because there is falsity in every line and human nature is violated at every turn. The leading idea of the opal gaining an unholy lustre from the commission of an evil deed is paltry in itself, and the whole psychological interest should lie in the study of the man’s warped human instincts. But Dr Black is a lay figure in whom we do not even begin to believe, and so the piled-up structure of horror appears childishly inept. And so with the description of the strange sins in the story of “The Three Impostors.” The strange sins are not real sins, that is why they fail to interest even a morbid imagination. If the author would go into the street and pick up with the first wastrel he meets and describe faithfully the workings of the man’s mind, he would thrill us fifty times more than can this collection of concocted effects all alien to the truth of life, and so all remote from human feeling. In its horror of nature, indeed, our young hedonistic school shows but another phase of the old Puritan’s distrust of art.

AN IMPURE IDEAL

A CHALLENGE TO PURITANISM

[Sidenote: David Christie Murray in _The Referee_]

_The Philistine as Art’s Helper._—Every now and then some person rises up in England to protest against the restrictions by which a vulgar and uninstructed Philistinism cribs, cabins, and confines the imaginative artist. Sometimes the protest is made by a man of genius, and whenever that is the case it is triumphantly proved by events that there was not the slightest real need to make it. The more daring and robust the assault upon the proprieties the more assured is the attention of an immediate audience. Mr Swinburne’s career affords an excellent example of this truth. In some respects he is an artist of unique character, but it was not by virtue of his artistry that he made at his first coming so prodigious a noise in the world. Mr Swinburne’s admirers now appreciate him for his literary excellences, but his earliest fame was accorded to him because of his so delicious naughtiness. A man of genius with a narrow intellectual field in which to disport himself, but with extraordinary gifts of melody and energy, he has found his proper place in the poetic hierarchy in his own lifetime, and to pretend that his fame was retarded by his defiance of Puritanism is a task for a fool—and a task which only a fool would undertake. The plain truth is that it is the very shortest cut to notoriety in this country to make a mock of morals, and there are not a few men and women who enjoy a public vogue simply and merely because they flout the Puritan Ideal, whilst if they had been content to ally decency with their native dullness they would never have been heard of beyond their own doorsteps....

There has been sent to _The Referee_ for review a book the pretensions of which I think it on several grounds desirable to examine. In an oddly pompous preface the writer expresses his surety that his fellow-authors will sympathise with him in the difficult task of finding for a collection of short stories a general title which is not obviously impertinent. He opines that the title he has chosen “will at all events hint at the nature of the contents.” To me it afforded no remotest suggestion, and it would be easy enough to write a book which would justify the title with at least equal completeness whilst it would embody the actual antithesis of its idea. Before I proceed to the exposition of that idea it is just to set out such reasons as the author has to give for its expression in a work of fiction. In France, we are told, “it is agreed that imagination and fantasy are to work as they will and as they can, and are to be judged by their own laws. He who carves gurgoyles admirably is praised for his curious excellence in the invention and execution of these grinning monsters; and if he is blamed it is for bad carving, not because he has failed to produce pet lambs.” In England we are said to judge very differently, and “Imagination itself is expected to improve the occasion, to reform whilst it entertains, and to instruct under the guise of story-telling.” ...

_Where to Draw the Line._—It has to be objected here that the case is too broadly stated. It is not agreed that imagination and fantasy are to work as they will in France. There is a certain restraining sense which now and then moves the authorities to suppress a theatrical production like the “Timbale d’Argent” or a serial publication like “La Nature.” Fantasy is nowhere in any civilised community allowed an unrestricted play. There is a point at which all modern peoples divide the endurably coarse from the intolerably indecent and abominable. You must arrange with your own sensibilities the precise point at which you will say to fantasy, “Thus far shalt thou go and no further,” but every civilised man has a limit beyond which he will not permit himself to be carried. And, what is of at least equal importance, he has a limit beyond which he will not knowingly allow those innocences, ignorances, and inexperiences which are under his guardianship or control to travel....

There are many examples of literary, pictorial, and plastic art in the hands of lovers of the curious which are kept under lock and key. The owners are not necessarily persons of unclean mind, and they generally exercise some discretion as to the choice of the people by whom these objects shall be seen. The common sense of the world—not the art-hatred of the Philistine, but just the common-sense common decency of the world—has decided that they shall be jealously hidden from the immature in years and experience. The argument advanced by our author is that perfection in the presentation makes the nature of the thing presented of little consequence, I am not disposed to attach an exaggerated value to that contention, but even if it were wholly defensible in respect to a work of art in itself, it is impossible to argue that it is of little consequence to whom it shall be shown. There is nothing more sacred than that ingenuous shame which the growth of civilisation has fostered as a guarding instinct against the violation of the mind. I make no fight for prudery—pruriency aping modesty, and topping frank indecency by its lie. I have had my say in _The Referee_ more than once already about those egregious persons who from time to time seek an _arbiter elegantiarum_ in the police-courts. But I stand for cleanliness in art, and, above all, I stand for it in the modern novel, and not only because the novel goes into the hands of boys and girls whose premature introduction to certain dark places cannot fail to have disastrous results....

_A Public Pleasaunce._—Now here, of course, is an excellent opportunity for those ladies and gentlemen who think it one of the privileges of Art to be indecent to ask if I expect the writer of the novel to address herself or himself exclusively to the Young Person—if I intend to tie his or her soaring genius to a boy’s coat-tails or a girl’s pinafore. I say in answer to that query that it is not I who choose the medium through which the writers concerned have elected to reveal their genius to the world. I say that having chosen that medium for themselves they cannot rightly ignore certain responsibilities which the choice imposes upon them. The field of the novelist is a very spacious pleasure-ground indeed, and you may legitimately lay out in it almost any sort of garden plot or plantation, and may erect in it almost any sort of palace or cottage or mansion. But it is an open space, and it is dedicated to the delectation of the public. Incidentally the wanderer in its precincts may be instructed or warned or spiritually lifted, but his purpose in going there is primarily to be entertained. The operating theatre and the dissecting-room are out of place there, though there are some people who can take their pleasure in such places and get no harm. Most out of place of all conceivable things in a pleasure-ground which is free to everybody is the mural picture gallery of the unburied cities....

_An Intrusion on Privacy._—When I was a boy I was taken by a middle-aged fool who ought to have known better into a waxwork anatomical museum at a rural wake. The sight left an evil taste on my mental palate for years and years. A rural wake is no place for an anatomical museum. That was a day of days, and Wombwell’s menagerie and that booth of Thespis which belonged to Messrs Bennet and Patch, and the swinging-boats and the merry-go-rounds, and the gingerbread stalls and the spangled lady on the slack wire, and Mr Merriman and the shooting-galleries, and the whole gay, harmless medley make clear pictures in my mind this minute, though the rain and sunshine of a half-century have made many another of memory’s paintings dim. And the anatomical museum poisoned everything. The contention I desire to combat is that a literary craftsman has some right to intrude the most hateful side of his mind upon others because he is an artist. But who says he is an artist? A man may write fiction and be no more of an artist than a ledger clerk. “He who carves gurgoyles admirably is praised for his curious excellence in the invention and execution of those grinning monsters; and if he is blamed he is blamed for bad carving, not because he has failed to produce pet lambs.” But has he who carves “gurgoyles” the double right to carve revolting shapes and to plump them down in the public pleasure-ground for any unsuspecting wayfarer to sicken at?...

_A Buried Symbolism._—I offer a most emphatic denial to the assumption that “imagination and fantasy” are anywhere justly to be “allowed to work as they can and will,” so long as their product is exposed for unrestricted sale in market overt. If I am to give fantasy free play I can quite easily imagine things which would excite the loathing of a savage. In every society which has raised itself above the intellectual level of the hog there are certain things which are not currently spoken of. There were certain obscure obscenities with which the ancients surrounded Nature-Worship. They expressed imaginatively the primal forces, and the emblems employed to represent them were candid and unashamed. Their open exposure and popular exhibition were the characteristic originally of a time of purest savagery and animalism. As civilisation grew these emblems became conventionalised, and finally they ceased to be symbolic. Some are in frequent use to-day, but their meaning is so completely lost to the popular mind that every modern cemetery displays an entire perversion of the meaning of one of them. Now, the root-idea of the book under consideration is the survival of all those old obscure obscenities into modern life. “It is in the character of a sober portrayer of a certain side of life,” writes the author in his own person, “that I hope to add to the pleasure of many pleasant Sunday afternoons.” I am armed beforehand against the simpering suggestion that I am impenetrable to the subtleties of irony. Solomon to the contrary notwithstanding, it is sometimes good to answer a controversialist according to his argument....