Chapter III: Part 3

_The Naked Untruth._—In pursuit of this purpose of adding to the pleasure of pleasant Sunday afternoons our author introduces his reader to a girl-child in a modern rural neighbourhood in Wales whose mind is unutterably debauched by her nurse, and who at the age of five has for her playmate the very bodily devil of licentiousness. The girl thrives under tuition to such advantage that when she comes to her demoniac womanhood she has arrived at a knowledge of evil so complete that the revelation of it drives men of the world to whom it is displayed to suicide. Speaking for myself, I can aver quite honestly that this sort of baby-Satanic-tommy-rot will not add to the pleasure of many pleasant Sunday afternoons. It is offered, as I have said already, with a kind of pomp, as a protest against the degraded state into which imagination and fantasy have slipped under the withering influences of Puritanism. Puritanism is as a red rag to the author. We all know, so he tells us, “how Hampden died that England might be free, first under the martial law of the Great Protector, and afterwards under the Whig oligarchy.” We are instructed that the Puritans hanged witches in Salem, and flogged the Quakers, baptised foals in cathedrals, hewed down the statues of the saints, shut up the theatres, and gave us the English Sunday. It is not quite a true bill. Hampden did not die for martial law and the _beaux yeux_ of the Whigs. Nor did the Puritans—a really forbidding body of men, to my fancy, amongst whom I wouldn’t have lived for any money—spend all their energies in hanging witches and baptising foals in cathedrals. Like many a tribe which went before them, and many another which has followed after, they obscured a noble cause by gross excesses. But it does not become a professed Iconoclast to get dancing-mad at the sight of a hammer in another man’s hand....

_The Little Pig._—It is an assured thing in our author’s mind that English Puritanism is going to take exception to his work. On the ground that it is a needless and offensive resurrection of the buried nastiness of early heathendom, I think it very likely that he is right. I was never very much of a Puritan myself, but my taste and inclination take me to the Puritan side for once. There was a dear old philosopher of a village doctor whom I knew years ago when I lived in the Belgian Ardennes. We were talking of the pornographies of French art one night, and with a shake of his wise old head he said, “Il y a, dans l’âme de chacun de nous, un petit cochon qui se grandit vite.” I know my own little pig, and though I am compelled to find him house-room I have no liking for him, and I certainly have no desire that his manners should be corrupted by association with the little pigs of other people....

I have myself been a modest market-gardener in the field of fiction now these thirty years, and I have been careful never to introduce my little pig to anybody who has come to look at my very humble patch. I try to keep him unseen and lonely in his sty. My attempt to starve him out of existence has unhappily met with but indifferent success; but I’ll be hanged if I will take anybody’s ha’pence to make a show of him. I decline to put him on exhibition either for praise or pudding. And yet I know that I could make a very decent (and most indecent) living out of him. For my little pig is not at all like your little pig, and it is the master-passion of the Artist to be different. We all know that a good half of the talk we hear about Art for Art’s sake, with its accompanying malediction on the English Puritan, means nothing more than that the artist is setting the little pig on view for the gratification of a prurient vanity.—MERLIN.

[Sidenote: _The Athenæum_]

... Like Poe, Mr Machen sets himself to make the reader’s flesh creep; like Hawthorne, he abounds with subtle and suggestive symbolism, and, had neither of these writers existed, his work would thrill the reader even more ingeniously, although it lacks the originality of the one and the poetic austerity and wealth of imagination of the other. He deals in ancient mysteries; he is for ever hinting at the macabre, the sinister, the unspeakable. His puppets peep and mutter through an atmosphere of forbidden knowledge and obscure rites of remote antiquity, which, however, he would seem to suggest are not so remote as they ought to be, after all. He is an adept in the art of elusiveness—so much so, indeed, that some of his most horrific endings fail of their proper effect, and the piled-up agony topples to a fall, leaving the reader with just the ghost of a suspicion of the author’s sincerity, and a haunting reminiscence of turnip-headed spectres and clanking chains....

[Sidenote: _The Saturday Review_]

Mr Machen adds three new stories to the contents of two earlier volumes, and introduces the collection by a preface which is perhaps the best thing in the book. We remember reading “The Great God Pan” when it first appeared, and discussing it with brother-undergraduates. Most of us thought that the story was interesting chiefly as illustrating the difficulties which beset an ambitious English writer who wishes to describe transcendental beastliness. Probably we were right. Mr Machen’s literary monomania takes the form of postulating that behind the veil of matter, in the centre of the material universe, resides an obscene and terrible power, the revelation of which brings to mortals infamy and madness. This pretty fancy is hardly relevant to his spirited attack on Puritanism, for the Puritans had a lively sense of the demoniac. As regards the execution of the stories, Mr Machen has style, and a talent for the fantastic (though “The Three Impostors” is in its scheme reminiscent of Stevenson), but he has not the power of creating horror. One feels that he is carving gargoyles (to borrow his phrase) just for fun, and his readers’ blood will not run cold, though possibly their gorges may rise.

[Sidenote: _Tribune_]

The Great God Pan is finding himself extremely popular among the novelists just now. It was Mr Benson who began it, earlier in the year, and since that time the number of novels in which we are vouchsafed manifestations of the goat-god—complete even to the hoofs, and with an attendant murky odour thrown in—increases almost daily. Of course it is natural enough, for nobody, not even a novelist, knows much about Pan, whence unlimited possibilities of mystery and thrills. Mr Arthur Machen is one of those who see in him all the possibilities of a “hair-raiser.” Were it not disrespectful it might be said that “The House of Souls” is exactly the kind of book which would have been written by the Fat Boy in Pickwick, had he been possessed of literary ability. Had he also been, be it said, familiar with the works of Robert Louis Stevenson. For never was book more obviously written with the desire “to make your flesh creep.” What with Pans and witches and mysterious keepers of treasures in hills, the half-dozen stories contain quite a population of queer folk, not one of which but has the potentiality of raising the hair upon the reader’s head, until it resembles the quills upon a more than usually fretful porcupine. Potentialities only, however, for, truth to tell, the author never quite succeeds in raising our hair. He tells us either too much or too little. He so constantly hints at quite unmentionable horrors that we find ourselves mistrusting them, and when he does occasionally, greatly daring, venture to unveil a horror or two, they are a wee bit disappointing. This is, of course, as much the fault of the subject as of the author. None of us can take the great God Pan, nor witches, nor warlocks, very seriously nowadays—even if surgeons with alarming surgical instruments are introduced into the same story to keep them in countenance by their up-to-date associations. Because we know very well that did Pan put in a bodily appearance in a British wood to-day he would be given in charge by a stolid and unemotional gamekeeper for trespassing in pursuit of game. Pan was killed by the Game Laws, if not before, and not all the King’s horses and all the King’s men can put him together again—alas! Of the various stories in the volume “The Inmost Light” comes the nearest to being convincing, while lovers of Stevenson would feel interested in the story series, “The Three Impostors,” which at times is very successfully reminiscent of that writer.

[Sidenote: _Manchester Guardian_]

The stories in the volume entitled “The House of Souls,” by Arthur Machen, are all addressed to the ancient purpose of making the reader’s flesh creep. It is a favourite pastime for easy people to play with fear; from time immemorial men have amused their leisure by sitting round the fire capping horrors. It is not, we may concede, a very high form of art, but any essay in this kind must stand or fall by its success in imputing horror. Mr Machen has written a rather arrogant preface, in which the following passage occurs: “He who carves gargoyles 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.” Conceded! We may even call it a necessary postulate of the reviewer; if he is writing of gargoyles he has no business to say, “I do not like gargoyles”; he must look for the curious excellence in invention and execution, and it is not to be found in Mr Machen’s work. He understands what has long been known, that the emotion of fear is best induced by vagueness; he insists—rather heavily, indeed—on the mysterious power of the spirit, but he has not felt it; too often the horror adumbrated in his vagueness is no more than physically disgusting. Conjuring tricks with the grey matter of the brain, burning and mutilating of live bodies are the clumsy devices of an unimaginative man. The restrained intensity of feeling and economy of suggestion in such scenes as those of Maeterlinck’s early plays are infinitely more moving than these violent assaults.—H. M. S.

THE HILL OF DREAMS

[Sidenote: _East Anglian Daily Times_]

This is the first complete novel by the author of “The House of Souls.” When writing of that work we expressed regret at the prominence accorded to an unhealthy atmosphere. The suggestions of hideous survivals in the under-world were not pleasant reading, and it is our duty to insist that their repetition in the present work is deplorable. No good can be effected by a discussion of such esoteric matters, and we could have wished that Mr Machen had refrained from introducing such horrors into his book. The story purports to be “a study of the temperament of a young literary man, whose dreams lead him into strange places, and bring him to a strange sequel.” Expressed more plainly, the plot is that of a crazy youth who undergoes some particularly unpleasant experiences, and finally commits suicide. Frankly speaking, it was the best thing that could have happened, for the “dreams” of this young man were repulsive. If the reading public must have this kind of mental food, we can only deplore the taste; but we protest with all possible strength against the dissemination of such sickly, and in some sense horrible ideas, as form the basis of Mr Machen’s latest effort. It is not denied that the author writes cleverly. That, however, forms an additional reason why his talents should be employed in producing something more admirable than “The Hill of Dreams” can be said to be.

[Sidenote: _The Outlook_]

It is safe to compliment Mr Arthur Machen upon having produced a book that stands, and will perhaps continue to stand, quite alone in English fiction. Fellows might be found for it in the modern letters of Germany and France, but not even the most determined of our own symbolists has produced such an elaborate account of the adventures of an exclusively æsthetic nature in the rough world. But apart from such praise as that acknowledgment confers, it is not at all easy to put a value on Mr Machen’s “Hill of Dreams.” It is written in a simple yet studied English that conveys in the deeper passages of the book as much of magic as words can impart; yet the whole work is so unreal and so charged with spiritual disease that there is scarcely a place for it in the widest utilitarian view. Beyond an impression of intense agony of the soul, it leaves little behind it, and there is nothing to the purpose that a critic can say except that the book evidently answered to something in the writer, and may answer to something in others. The growth of Lucian Taylor’s fervently mystic and quite inhuman nature, perfectly pure, perfectly egoistic, is traced with power. Most of his outward tragedy is that of the artist’s struggle with the world, and of his association with gross and ordinary British barbarians, whose manners are described with a cleverness and a rancour in which we can find nothing but weakness; the inward story—if such a web of shadows can be called a story—is one of some strange insight into the obscurity of an essential evil in nature, of a strange development of the passion of love in the soul of the ascetic of art, of his sufferings, his dreams, and of his final destruction by the shadowy power of ill that laid its hands upon him as a child, on the hill where once the Romans camped. An undefined horror penetrates all the story, like an invisible vapour. It is an extraordinary performance and a work of art; but art fallen, we think, on unclean and fatal days.

[Sidenote: _Birmingham Gazette and Express_]

... There is much fine writing, but probably few other than literary craftsmen will follow with patience the detailed story of his striving after perfection in the use of language. The most pleasing part of the book is that which treats of his love for and idealisation of the simple, womanly country girl, Annie Morgan. It is scarcely a “healthy” book, but it is evidently the work of a man who has thought deeply and suffered much.

[Sidenote: _Manchester Courier_]

It would be hard to classify “The Hill of Dreams,” by Arthur Machen, for it is both unprecedented and unusual. Moreover, it is unpleasing and unconvincing, though its writer possesses a wealth of imagery and a power not often met with. The little story there is concerns the life of Lucian Taylor, but the plot of the book is but a peg on which the author hangs a detailed study of temperament. Lucian is a “dreamer,” with literary aspirations. His early life is devoid of all humanising influences, and his character is only explicable, and then not very satisfactorily so, when this is remembered. Despite education and cultivation, Lucian never possesses any feelings which a barbarian might not be expected to have. He never imposes the least restraint on his natural susceptibility, and both as a boy and a man is a sensualist. After living a life of failure, in which, apart from his vivid dreams, a passion for a country girl is the only important event, he commits suicide. The reader is left in doubt whether Lucian was a genius neglected by an unappreciative world or a fool totally incapable of understanding the beauty of the world. The writing of the book is astonishingly versatile. At times there is the gruesomeness of Poe, at others the charm of Hawthorne. The descriptions of country scenery show a love of the picturesque, and the chapters on London life a knowledge of the seamy side of nature. Though there is splendid capability shown in the book, it will not make a wide appeal because of its want of humanity.

[Sidenote: _Birmingham Post_]

Mr Arthur Machen’s is hardly the sort of story that is likely to win admiration from the average reader of current fiction. Perhaps it is as well, for “The Hill of Dreams” is not a healthy book, and the power of fascination that it exercises is tempered with a certain instinctive feeling of repugnance. Let it be said at once that it does fascinate. It is filled with passages of rare beauty. Mr Machen understands the magic of words; his sentences are as silk shot with rich, variegated, and harmonious colour; they have a fine rhythmic flow also; and page after page is filled with “a procession of images” (we quote the author’s own words), “now of rapture and ecstasy and now of terror and shame, floating in a light that is altogether phantasmal and unreal.” So far as charm of language and beauty of imagery go—and they go far—the season is hardly likely to see the rival of Mr Machen’s novel. The weakness is that all this accumulated beauty is something fantastic, exotic, and bizarre. Mr Machen leads us through a forest of flowers; but they are _fleurs de mal_, in Baudelaire’s phrase, sprung from miasmatic ground, and spreading a perfume by which the atmosphere is vitiated. Through his power of conjuring up visions of the world of long ago and living in a dreamland of his own Lucian Taylor claims some kinship with Du Maurier’s “Peter Ibbetson.” By the circumstances of his death he stands related to the English opium-eater. But Mr Machen has neither Du Maurier’s light touch and sense of humour nor De Quincey’s stern insistence on the penalties of such visionary delights. His attitude is too accurately that which another exquisite artist, Ernest Dowson, assumed in the sonnet, now fairly well known, “To One in Bedlam”:—

Oh, lamentable brother! if these pity thee,
Am I not fain of all thy lone eyes promise me—
Half a fool’s kingdom, far from men who sow and reap
All their days vanity.

So Dowson sang; and in the same mood Mr Machen seems inclined, throughout the greater part of his book at any rate, to hold up his invertebrate hero—or victim—as a subject for sympathy and admiration. “Invertebrate” is too weak a word. Most of Lucian’s peculiarities are definable in the terminology of specialists in mental alienation. He is a sufferer from what an expert witness in the American “cause célèbre” of the day called lately “exaggerated ego.” Echolalia (in his attempts at authorship), melancholia, visual and auditory hallucinations—all these familiar phenomena of an unbalanced mind does he exhibit; and doubtless the specialist in such diseases might trace more. It is because his attitude towards this “lamentable brother” is too nearly that of Ernest Dowson and too far from that of (say) De Quincey that Mr Machen has failed to produce a piece of great literature which is above all things sane and level-headed. On the other side of the scales must be put a fertile imagination, a great deal of acute psychological analysis, and an extraordinary sensitiveness to impressions of natural beauty. These are sufficiently enviable endowments, which one hopes to see Mr Machen exercising in the future on some more happily treated subject.

[Sidenote: _Newcastle Chronicle_]

Mr Machen’s story is all about a young man who adds to a temperament naturally neurotic a passion for examining the inner workings of his own mind, and a dislike for nourishing food. This combination of qualities reduces him to a skeleton, and enables him to see visions and dream dreams of the most fantastic variety. Those who are familiar with Mr Machen’s work will recognise in such a subject one particularly suited to his _métier_. Step by step he traces, with fine imagination, the workings of the disordered brain until the inevitable end of complete madness and death is reached. Only Mr Machen, perhaps, would not have us believe that his hero is mad; preferring if anything to think that he is of a sanity and clear-sightedness altogether denied to the devotees of plain living and plain thinking.

[Sidenote: _Morning Post_]

Mr Machen has chosen for his book one of those subjects that depend entirely on their treatment for their success or failure. “The Hill of Dreams” provides an analysis of the character of an imaginative young man consumed with literary aspirations. Unfortunately, the treatment of this theme is marred by the two faults of exaggeration and monotonous insistence on the psychological note of alternate despair and exultation. The delineation of moods must be made variable if it is to be palatable to the reader; otherwise weariness of the mind ensues as a necessary consequence. Lucian Taylor’s continuous habit of selfish introspection ultimately leads him to madness and “death by misadventure,” but these misfortunes do not induce sympathy in the reader when he has become satiated with the morbidity which itself brought them about. At the same time, the book has style and is full of so many well-written descriptions of scenery that one is inclined to forget about the dreamer and only to dwell in fancy on the beautiful “Hill of Dreams” which prompted his visions.

[Sidenote: _P.T.O._]

Mr Arthur Machen’s first long novel, “The Hill of Dreams,” fails in humanity. The hero’s literary struggles are desperate; the hero himself is an abstraction. The author labours too much over his work for it to be wholly satisfactory; we are obliged to him for the pains he takes in these days of careless writing, but could wish the effort less apparent. In his pictures of Welsh scenery he is at his best; in suburbia he lays it on with a trowel, and makes himself more unhappy than ever he will make the worthy folk he dislikes should they chance upon his book. In a word, Mr Machen has yet to find a story, yet to create real living people.

[Sidenote: _The Scotsman_]

Mr Machen’s novel displays a singular ability in giving a sustained and varied interest to a theme of which the material is to the last degree simple and monotonous. He has no more story to tell than how a young man, a country clergyman’s son, feeling that he had a gift for literature, went up to London, and kept writing and writing and writing while he lived in a world of dreams, quite misunderstood and untouched by the outer world of everyday circumstance, until at last he came to kill himself, having accomplished nothing. Such is the subject, and it seems, thus stated, to afford little matter enough for a full-length story. But the work goes with such a skilful psychology into the workings of the unhappy young man’s mind, and shows such fine imaginative artistry in varying the light and shade of his emotions and contrasting his outward with his inward life, that it proves interesting from first to last without even for a moment disturbing its air of soft tranquillity. It is a story that will readily impress a reader of quiet tastes who can reach to the more subtle refinements of fiction.

[Sidenote: _The Athenæum_]

... In the emotional adventures of the hapless youth who is a victim of a species of nympholepsy and intellectual loneliness combined, we cannot, after the first hundred pages, feel any adequate interest. His agonies while engaged in the long-drawn-out struggle with his stubborn literary gifts are too protracted, too remote from any human sentiment, to hold the interest of the reader. Their recital is almost as monotonous as, and far more fatiguing than, the artistic _débâcle_ of the painter in Zola’s “L’Œuvre,” which had at least some elements of humanity. But the spirit of place which informs the book, whether it is the forlorn, illimitable dreariness of suburbia that the author chooses to show us, or the mysterious and melancholy beauty of that wild Wales he knows so well, could only have found expression at the hand of an adept. It is perhaps a pity that so clever a writer as Mr Machen should bestow such infinite pains on astonishing the bourgeois, who in all likelihood will never have the privilege of reading his books; it is an obsession that brings to mind the unprofitableness of flogging dead horses. But, after all, the main matter for regret is the utter formlessness and the arid inhumanity of his work. His Muse is a kind of Lilith—not a drop of her blood is human—and thus, except from the decorative point of view, he leaves us cold....

[Sidenote: _The Daily Graphic_]

A curious and fanciful book, which shows much misdirected ability. It is the study of the temperament of a young man, who devotes himself to literature, but his imagination is abnormal, and his mental condition diseased. The book is not of much practical interest, as one feels that his death, with which the story ends, is the best possible solution of his difficulties.

[Sidenote: _The Daily Chronicle_]

Mr Arthur Machen has written “The Hill of Dreams,” we take it, not with a view to saying anything in particular, but rather with a view to saying something in a particular—almost a precious—way. We fancy that he would not greatly object to identify himself with his hero, of whom he says:—

Language, he understood, was chiefly important for the beauty
of its sounds, by its possession of words resonant, glorious
to the ear, by its capacity, when exquisitely arranged, of
suggesting wonderful and indefinable impressions, perhaps
more ravishing and farther removed from the domain of strict
thought than the impressions excited by music itself. Here lay
hidden the sensuous art of literature, it was the secret of
suggestion, the art of causing delicious sensation by the use
of words. In a way, therefore, literature was independent of
thought; the mere English listener, if he had an ear attuned,
could recognise the beauty of a splendid Latin phrase.

One would like to have Mr Machen’s criticism of that majestic line of R. L. Stevenson’s:—

Opulent orotundo strike the sky!

“The Hill of Dreams” is a long, and in many respects, a clever psychological analysis and demonstration of the mind of a young degenerate. It is a deliberate and careful study of morbidity. It is well written, but written not quite well enough. The good writing is just a thought too obvious; one cannot help noticing it. It has what Mr Machen calls “the secret of suggestion,” but it suggests some things which we would much rather had not been suggested. It is a thoughtful piece of work though, and it is often lighted up by swift and penetrating flashes of satire. We wish the word “sonorous” did not occur quite so often in it. “Sonorous” is a very good and effective word in its way, but, like “sinister,” “sombre,” and one or two others, it should be used sparingly. It does not do to make a pet of it.

[Sidenote: _The Manchester Guardian_]

Without a refined susceptibility to sensuous impressions there can be no high art. But there is always a danger that the artist who recognises this theoretically may give rein to susceptibility and sensitiveness as such and be drawn headlong along the road to mere sensationalism. For in art, as in everything else, the ultimate value of a sensation lies always in its content. The fact that your sensations seem to you “exquisite” or “delicious” no more gives them artistic than it would give them moral import; in the one case as in the other, there is the further question to be asked, the question what kind of person you are who feel them so. Which question leads in its turn to other questions, all pointing unmistakably one way. Sensation, you find, gives you no principle either in art or in anything else. It can open no locked doors. Take it for your guide and there can be no doubt but you will be landed, sooner or later, in the ditch. Mr Arthur Machen in his new story “The Hill of Dreams” drives perilously near this dangerous territory. He recounts the life of a hypersensitive youth of whom the world is not worthy, upon whose delicate nature the violence of healthy humanity rasps and jars, who therefore, shut up within himself, runs riot in a fantastic maze of morbid mystic fancies, constructs an impossible romance out of a chance meeting with a farmer’s daughter in the dark (for whose sake he afterwards inflicts upon himself nightly penance with a gorse bough), and finally drifts up to London and laudanum and an untimely end. This kind of story could only fail to be suffocating in its effect upon the reader if the oxygen absent in the hero were supplied by some sort of exhilaration derivable from the background against which he moves. But he moves, alas! in an atmosphere as exquisite and as exhausted as he is. “He knew that he himself had solved the riddle, that he held in his hand the powder of projection, the philosopher’s stone transmuting all it touched to fine gold, the gold of exquisite impressions.” It is of these impressions, this “powder of projection,” that the bulk of the narrative is composed. If your air is full of dust, it is no matter what kind of particles the dust is made of; let it be powdered gold, the effect is just as choking. Many objections might be advanced against a story like “The Hill of Dreams” on the score of its subject matter: the artist would be ready to dismiss these as ethical and irrelevant. But the unrelieved preciosity of the style is equally open to criticism, and this is the rock upon which the book finally founders. “Only in the Court of Avallaunius is the true science of the exquisite to be found.” It would be wise to leave it unmolested there; here in these lower courts, this “land of sin and woe,” there is nothing that more quickly tends to tedium.—B. S.

[Sidenote: Louis Weitzenkorn in _The New York World_]

Arthur Machen’s “The Hill of Dreams,” according to the introduction included in a new American edition, was written in 1897. It was published first in 1907. Mr Knopf would have been much fairer to Mr Machen had he left this book to perish in the dust of things forgotten. It has a great beauty of writing. The Machen style is clearly a deliberate and successful attempt to get melody into prose. But it strikes us that music is not the first element of a prose style; in fact it is one part that, under compulsion, might be omitted without injury. After all, the poets are entitled to something.

Our first demand from a prose work styled a novel is living characters. Except in the last three paragraphs, not one breath of life shows up in “The Hill of Dreams.” Mr Machen confesses his plan to have been the writing of a “Robinson Crusoe” of the mind. As to that there is a touch of similarity here to “Peter Ibbetson,” and more to Jack London’s “Star Rover.” Naturally enough, Machen didn’t see this latter work of fiction before he began his. But it is to the analogy of “Robinson Crusoe” that we mainly object. After all, that cast-off sailor had a man Friday who was every inch alive. Good, deadly arrows fly through Defoe’s book. Ships and savages and hot sunlight beat down.

Whatever there is of Lucian Taylor beyond the author’s frail beating against life, is something of a masculine and British Carol Kennicott. That’s crowding a reputation, even a fictional one, pretty badly, but the futile protest and final escape of Lucian Taylor through suicide doesn’t follow as four does two plus two and as true tragedy must. Not once does the book move us to feel for this hero, who lives like an essay in the _Atlantic Monthly_. He and the British countryside aristocracy—the British Main Streeters—are so many children’s toys. They are dolls that get from one end of the room to the other only when lifted up and moved.

Machen has written this book as if he had been young and angry. He seems to have wanted to nail his old neighbours to some sort of cross. He forgets that the Babbitts are the very ones who read “Babbitt” and make the author rich.

The book will not enhance Machen’s rather high reputation here. His incident of the hanging of a dog by a set of children, not one of whom protests, will never be swallowed, at least by American readers. The rest of the book is just as impossible. We are willing still to take our knowledge of Main Street Britons from Mr Bennett’s “Five Towns.”

THE SECRET GLORY

[Sidenote: _Manchester Guardian_]

It is a little difficult to know what kind of readers “The Secret Glory” is intended to please, and there is a temptation to believe that its author wrote it simply and solely for his own amusement. The greatest works of art are no doubt those in which an artist insists on satisfying his own standard of taste, but Mr Machen’s game on this occasion seems to have been rather that of “letting himself go.” He begins with a vivid indictment of the English public school, but does not produce either an original or a convincing picture of its faults and failings; and he then proceeds to cut the painter and to launch forth into a juvenile description of a juvenile escapade in London which his schoolboy hero, half mystic, half Bohemian, is supposed to share with a young lady of his choice, though not of his class—the whole embroidered with wonderful pæans to punch and poetry, surrounded with a sort of religious halo, and penetrated with a peculiar flavour of what one might call inebriate innocence. There are perhaps deep lessons to be drawn from the perusal of these singular heroics, but we have not succeeded in discovering or profiting by them. The narrative itself is allusive and obscure. Huge jokes are supposed to be concealed on one side, and on the other the profound, impenetrable import of things. But, judging by what is actually communicated to us, we remain in doubt whether what is withheld was either very funny or very significant.—B. S.

[Sidenote: _Punch_]

I have always understood that what St Paul calls “visions and revelations of the Lord” were sent to forward their recipients’ progress in virtue; and that if glimpses of the supernatural resulted in _Schwärmerei_, or sin, they were the work of the Devil. On this hypothesis there is no doubt whatever concerning the origin of “The Secret Glory,” a latter-day variant of the Holy Grail revealed in a Welsh farmhouse to the boy _Ambrose Meyrick_ and his father; although its exposition is accompanied (if I may credit Mr Arthur Machen) by a vision of “The Mystery of Mysteries.” _Ambrose_, still harping on his mystic experiences, is sent to an exquisitely odious public school, where he becomes first a cowed and isolated dreamer and last a furtive and malicious rebel. Both reverie and rebellion are natural enough, the school being what it is, but they are not particularly creditable to a devotee of “The Mystery of Mysteries.” Nor is a _liaison_ with a sympathetic parlour-maid, though this is set down as part and parcel of the “wonders.” Nor is _Ambrose’s_ subsequent career, which continues a marvel of irresponsibility until his extremely unconvincing martyrdom at the hands of “miscreants” in Asia. And, talking of irresponsibility, I cannot help wishing that Mr Machen himself, who shows considerable savage humour in his guerilla campaign against the public school system, would occasionally come to closer grips with one or other of the problems his extravaganza has evoked.

[Sidenote: Forrest Reid in _The Daily Herald_]

In “The Secret Glory” the happenings are neither sober nor probable, yet the effect is prosaic and even tedious. Here, again, it is all a matter of treatment, or, rather, in Mr Machen’s case, of the absence of treatment, for he has left his subject a mere kernel rattling in the dry shell of didacticism. I have seldom been so disappointed in a book. What has happened to Mr Machen? Have we gained a missionary and lost an artist? His gift was always narrow, apt to lead him woefully astray when he departed from the presentation of states of abnormal, or morbid, consciousness; but it was vivid, haunting, and intensely individual. “The Secret Glory” is little more than an elaborate tract in which Mr Machen champions mediævalism and tilts at his usual windmills—the public school system, athletics, suburban life, etc.

[Sidenote: _The Outlook_]

In “The Secret Glory” Mr Machen attempts to describe the rebellion of a Celtic mystic against Anglicanism and the public school traditions. I say “attempts,” because neither Anglicanism nor education interests him sufficiently to make him barb his satire. But the mysticism excites his dark and fantastic imagination, and there are bursts, in the latter half of the book, of successful paradox. Ambrose Meyrick, who had seen the “Holy Chalice of Teilo sant,” and had an affection for Gothic architecture, was well whipped for absconding from football practice. Thenceforth he exerted himself to be in all things the most loyal Luptonian, but at night he walked in strange places and heard the voices that outsing the Fairy Birds of Rhiannon. After winning a Balliol Scholarship and performing some remarkable cricket at the Oval, he broke away and joined a troupe of actors, and was for ever lost to Lupton and its like. An effect of a kind Mr Machen certainly produces. He incants Welsh names, and, as so often on lighter ground, he displays a great power of giving a queer twist to the least uncanny events. Naturally, he fails to inform us what there was so remarkable in the Welsh Church which was ruined by “the Yellow Hag of Pestilence, the Red Hag of Rome, and the Black Hag of Geneva”; consequently, he fails to show why Ambrose should not have had all the spiritual experience desired in his own school chapel. True, Lupton Chapel was built in 1840, and the neighbourhood was slummy. But, then, Ambrose was capable of ecstasy in Bloomsbury and Soho. No, Ambrose’s unhappiness is too like that of Mr Bultitude when, in “Vice Versa,” this gentleman took his son’s place at Dr Grimstone’s academy, and proceeds from an intelligible dislike of small boys.

[Sidenote: _The Evening Standard_]

A schoolboy is also the central figure in “The Secret Glory,” by Arthur Machen. But Ambrose Meyrick is an unusual boy, not at all the sort of boy to conform to the average type turned out at such a public school as Lupton. It is to be hoped, by the way, that not many schools are like Lupton, or at least that there are not any public schoolmasters like Mr Horbury, who takes such a savage delight in using the cane.

Mr Machen’s satire on the public school system, and especially public school games, is a little too heavy-handed to be effective. Neither boys nor masters are very convincing, and now and then the story gets lost in the mystical atmosphere with which Mr Machen surrounds his hero. Altogether “The Secret Glory” is rather an incoherent and tiresome production, and certainly does not represent Mr Machen at his best. Schoolboys and mysticism do not mix.

[Sidenote: _Liverpool Daily Courier_]

Mr Arthur Machen has attempted an ambitious character study in “The Secret Glory.” He has also tried to give us a new version of the Grail, introducing a mystical cup preserved in a cottage in Wales. But neither the character nor the cup are very convincing, and it must be said that Mr Machen has this time failed to get into his story any deep sense of the mystical. His principal character, Ambrose Meyrick, is a queer chap, as he is meant to be, but there is no reason why he should be as irresponsible as he is, and less reason why he should finish up by getting himself crucified somewhere in Asia. These improbabilities would matter less, however, if Mr Machen had made Meyrick vital, and his adventures interesting. The story never runs with sufficient sequence to ensure this. It is all confused with propaganda, and very bitter propaganda at that, against the public schools, and criticism of Welsh Nonconformity when it combines religious revival fervour with sensuality. Mr Machen knows how to tell a story, but he does not demonstrate that capacity in this work.

[Sidenote: _Sheffield Daily Telegraph_]

Ambrose Meyrick said that “people who pushed ... always reminded him of the hungry little pigs fighting for the largest share of the wash”—but though a reasonable aversion to Extravertism is comprehensible, it is really unnecessary to be so exaggerated an introvert as the hero of “The Secret Glory,” by Arthur Machen. Ambrose carried his mental “Secret Doctrine” to perverse, even morbid, excesses; he lived in a _paysage intérieur_ peopled by mystics and martyrs, and visions of the jewelled Grail hidden by the descendant of Celtic Saints in some humble cottage on the Welsh mountains; and all this was naturally incompatible with the brutal facts of life at an English public school. An unpleasant school, certainly, but not more so than most.

It is to be assumed that Ambrose possessed a sense of humour, since he could enjoy, and even parody, Rabelais, but there is scant evidence of the quality otherwise than as stated. Extracts from his famous book, “In Praise of Taverns,” are equally unconvincing.

Some of Mr Machen’s arguments on religion are interesting. “In my heart,” he says, “I have always doubted whether moderate Anglicanism be Christianity in any sense, whether it even deserves to be called a religion at all,” and he objects to Protestantism because of the fundamental heresy on which it “builds its objection to what is called Ritual. I suppose this heresy is called Manichee; it is a charge of corruption and evil made against the visible universe, which is affirmed to be not ‘very good’ but ‘very bad’—or, at all events, too bad to be used as the vehicle of spiritual truth.... Incense, vestments, candles, all ceremonies, processions, rites—all these things are miserably inadequate; but they do not abound in the horrible pitfalls, misapprehensions, errors, which are inseparable from speech of men used as an expression of the Church.”

Mr Machen is trying to present Celtic Paganism in the guise of Christianity, he confuses the Greek philosophy of restraint, “Nothing in excess,” with a mere negation. There is very little glory in the book. It is concerned with the tortuous byways of a perverse soul through which the free wind from the mountains has never blown.

[Sidenote: _The Morning Post_]

Though issued as fiction, this is not a novel. It is composite of story, autobiography, essay, satire, philosophy, criticism, poetry, and too formless to be brought within any literary mode. Presumably it was not written all of a piece, and that just yesterday. Spatchcocked passages point to times when there were as yet no Boches, only Boers, and “’E dunno where ’e are” was still a music-hall ditty. These were the days of Ambrose Meyrick’s youth, true; but—though this need not (and will not) trouble the shade of Mr Blackmore—the most consistent romancer, as to time and place, would not now suggest the Valley of the Doone as even a bogus field for the adventure of the Sangraal. Other times, other fashions, even in that high Quest. Pieced or wrought whole, the book nevertheless is unified by one idea. The “secret glory” of its title is the imaginative life, to which its every line and circumstance is meant as acclamation and appeal.

There are in it, among others of rare and rich beauty, a thousand absurd lines and circumstances we could willingly blot. For Mr Machen’s own purpose, Lupton School is a prejudice; like its Headmaster it is too much “commerce with mortality.” “A deeper transport and a mightier thrill” are communicated in wise, rapturous praise of wine and humorous discourse on the marriage of Panurge. Here Nelly Foran is cunningly kept with Ambrose, aloof and aloft in a fragrant old Bloomsbury whose “stinks” in reality were neither better nor worse than the Midlands’. More understanding still of its own “secret glory” would Mr Machen’s fascinating book have been had he realised that its ecstatic vision, being of the spirit and the imagination, is as likely to occur in a “Bethel with the stucco front” as in the Celtic Church with its Cup of Sacrament. But Mr Machen, in his own exclusive way, does catch it, and for that we are grateful.

[Sidenote: Rose Macaulay in _The Daily News_]

“The Secret Glory” is, like most of Mr Machen’s books, very odd. It is the story of a mystic, of the inner and the outer life. The outer life of Ambrose Meyrick is passed at Lupton, a typically commonplace and materialistic public school, whose masters talk of “playing the game” and write horrible school songs of the “Forty Years on” type; while his inner life, which is alone of significance or importance to him, is spent in exploring mystic realms of Celtic Christian legend with or without his dead father, a Welsh architectural enthusiast. “I do not know,” writes Ambrose in later life, “how it all happened; I had been leading two eager lives. On the outside I was playing games and going up in the school with a rush, and in the inside I was being gathered more and more into the sanctuaries of immortal things.” Ambrose’s mystical adventures are described with a good deal of beauty; it is his contacts with actuality which strike one as distorted and unreal.

Both he and Mr Machen loathe public schools and all pertaining to them with such intensity that neither of them can see straight. They set up a monstrous figure of savagery and idiotcy and call him a typical schoolmaster, adding that schoolmasters are just like schoolboys, the implication being that nearly all schoolboys also are savage and imbecile. Even public schools are not really quite as bad as all that; and Mr Machen would have been more effective if he had been more temperate. There is quite enough to be said about the savagery and stupidity of schools without resorting to distortion. Psychological accuracy is not, indeed, the strength of the book, which is full of unlikely actions. For instance, was Ambrose really the kind of boy who, in his quest for beauty, would have absconded with one of the school housemaids? Surely his dead father would have told him that this was conduct unworthy of an inquirer into spiritual mysteries. But the whole book is a fantasy, and not to be judged as a tale of real life. Its curious occurrences and characters are made odder by the difficult, obscure, and fragmentary method of narration. There is, in fact, a good deal of silliness in the book, as well as some bad taste, but there is also a good deal of beauty, and the beauty and the silliness and the bad taste are all the work of a writer.

[Sidenote: Middleton Murry in _The Nation and Athenæum_]

Even if we wished we could not tell the story of “The Secret Glory.” Mr Machen manages to combine an onslaught on the public school system with some watery Paterian mysticism. Personally we have an equal dislike of those who belaud and those who denigrate the public school system. Besides, “there ain’t no sich person,” there are as many systems as there are public schools. But Ambrose Meyrick, if he could have been jerked for a moment by his creator into a semblance of real existence, would justify the worst outrages wrought upon him by his equally incredible _alma mater_.

He is a sentimental philanderer with æsthetic Catholicisms, a mystic Celtic dreamer, a Soho Bohemian (before Soho was ruined, of course); but these crimes are as nothing compared to his incorrigible penchant for “poetic prose.” Mr Machen has encouraged him in it. He will have a great deal more to answer for in the day of judgment than the schoolmaster who tried to beat it out of him.

FAR OFF THINGS AND THINGS NEAR AND FAR

[Sidenote: _The Outlook_]

It is difficult to know quite what to make of Mr Machen’s two most recent books. “Far Off Things” was a rather scrappy chapter of what might have been an excellent autobiography not written in the first place for publication in book form. Like the new volume it spoiled a great deal of good material and was not organised in any way that tends to make lasting literature. For all that, both volumes are excellent reading. There is a great deal to be said for Mr Machen. And he himself has a great deal to say. He is not quite at home in the twentieth century. Spiritually he belongs to the years before the ’nineties, to Charing Cross Road as it was in the days when he translated Casanova at the rate of thirty shillings a week. The Strand is not what it was, and he paints the difference for us in no uncertain terms. Nor do the modern restaurants know their business half so well as the old chop-houses did.

So through this monstrous incursion of women with the war and
nursery hours of to-day, the old tavern life has gone; utterly
and for ever, I am afraid.

This is one of the chief grudges he urges against the modern age; and he can give us chapter and verse for it.

Going there (to Herbert’s) in these latter days I used to
wonder why all the meats seemed to taste alike.... I had
business, oddly enough, in their kitchen. One of the cooks
showed me the joints roasting on the jack; and I perceived
that three different meats were cooking at the one fire, while
beneath, in a common pan, their juices mingled, ready for the
basting ladle. It is not much wonder, I think, that veal and
lamb and beef taste all much alike in this unhappy place, once
so high, now fallen so low.

On another occasion, when he asked for Stilton cheese, the waiter replied that only English cheeses were supplied! And just as the food has deteriorated, so has the journalism. “Always remember that we appeal not to the cabman, but to the cabman’s wife,” said one of Mr Machen’s friends, a distinguished journalist; and Mr Machen, who, to say the worst of him, prefers the cabman, might have been a little more disgusted than he is, and that is not a little. He does his best to fix a considerable share of the blame for our present condition on this “monstrous incursion of women.”

Such things as these are not, however, the main features of Mr Machen’s confessions—for that is what his pages really are. He is most interesting when he hints at his incidental experiences at novelist, journalist, and actor. And here, at the same time, because of his brevity, he is most disappointing. Mr H. B. Irving once said to him of his book “The Great God Pan”—“You shouldn’t have done it; you destroy the illusion. Never take people behind the scenes. I never do.” Mr Machen’s great mistake in his two latest books is that he never takes us further than the stage-door. Although he is telling us about himself all the time, we learn very little about him because he does not tell us enough of other people. We enjoy his story, but always with a sense of irritation that he has not dotted more of the i’s and crossed more of the t’s. Time and again, following on some succulent anecdote, he seems almost to be about to paint for us the whole moving pageant of the ’nineties, and just as often he turns aside to trace something else into other and less interesting channels.

The truth is “Things Near and Far” is not really a book at all because it was neither conceived nor written as a book. It is a collection of amazingly good snippets, a sort of prearranged notebook that might have borne such a title as “Towards Biography.” One feels about it as about something that might have been, that almost was, but is not. One is left wondering whether Mr Machen is a good journalist or a good author, for it seems fairly evident that he cannot be both, at all events, not at the same time, as he has tried to be in his two latest books.

[Sidenote: _Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury_]

... It is debonair, it is graceful, it is dignified and extraordinarily at its ease, it is essentially belles-lettres; it is not much more than that; it is not specially memorable, nor does it presage very brilliantly of the book to come (in the indefinite future), where “an interior tale of the soul and its emotions” is to be told through the shapes of “hills and valleys, woods and rivers, sunrise and sunset, buried temples and mouldering Roman walls.” Mr Machen has humour, poetic sensibility, a sense of style; he is reflective, open to the influences of nature, appreciative of the town’s common and uncommon interests, readily responsive to the appeal of art and literature. What perhaps his work lacks to make it true literature is virility, and it wants substance to make it really worth while, though it is—this must be one’s last word—exceedingly pleasant.

[Sidenote: _The Morning Post_]