Chapter IV: Part 4

Mr Arthur Machen has his full circle of readers, who will be delighted with this sumptuous edition which Mr Secker has so ably prepared. It is limited to a thousand sets; five hundred of which have gone to America. Mr Machen loves the unusual and the mysterious. They appeal to his imagination and set him thinking on a train of thought which seems without end. Someone has said that few men can more agreeably fill a column. The remark finds justification in these volumes. This gift is the strength and weakness of his writing. It might be said of Mr Machen that he has at once too much and too little imagination. Too much, that his ideas flow on like the summer brook; too little, that his style lacks incisiveness and the power of expressing instantaneously some thought.

“The Great God Pan” is a fair example of this weakness. He tells us in “Far Off Things” that he was persuaded to write this tale of horror by a wish to “pass on the vague, indefinable sense of awe and mystery and terror” that he had received in childhood days spent in the valley of the Usk, above Newbridge. The feeling that all the best in human beings is built on a treacherous morass which may engulf it at any moment has often been expressed. Mr Machen’s effort does not compare with Stevenson’s “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” Its terror is dissipated through failure to bring any definite incident of horror before the reader. The alternative would have been to envelop the story in such a wealth of strangeness that the impression would have been created through atmosphere; the method of Poe. Mr Machen is neither sufficiently dramatic nor sufficiently keyed to the weirdness of his tale. It certainly lacks resemblance to the dark gravity of deep woods.

From a consideration of this point we notice another peculiarity in Mr Machen’s work. It is not plagiarism, but the ignoring of any reference to ideas which other men have worked upon. True, there is no monopoly of thought, but we are led sometimes right up to a thought which has been superbly expressed before. It would seem more natural if Mr Machen directed us to the poet or writer instead of enlarging in his own words on that idea. It would certainly be more effective from the point of view of art.

It may be that we are somewhat critical. There is much to enjoy and admire in these books with ever a word for the weak and distressed, and the fascinating hint of “worlds unrealised.” But library editions are becoming increasingly popular, and we wonder whether they may not be overdone. These fine books are delightful to handle, but the thought creeps in if their matter is quite up to the high standard of production; whether anything but the very best should find a home in these limited editions, which rise so readily in mere marketable value. Still, Mr Machen has his admirers. No doubt they will think nothing too good as a home for his thoughts.

[Sidenote: _Manchester Guardian_]

In “Far Off Things” Mr Arthur Machen describes his rambling boyhood on the borderland of South Wales and his adolescence (a rather sad affair of lonely lodging and penurious journalism in London) as far as the publication of his first book. His memories have been laid up in lavender, and they emerge rather heavily scented. The result is the praise of old and simple things in a style that has too glib an antiquarianism to be pleasing over a long stretch. The reader finds himself predicting Mr Machen’s reaction to each situation as it arises and trying to forestall the phrase which the author’s sentimental conservatism will use. For instance, when he describes how his mother made “fermety” or “frumenty” in the autumn he must allude to it as “a very honourable dish and a most ancient and Christian pottage.” One feared in advance some such pomposity. It is the more pity because Mr Machen is sensitive as well as sentimental, and when he allows his memories to flow in unprinked English he achieves a beauty apt to the object he describes, notably in his landscapes of the Usk Valley and the surrounding hills.

[Sidenote: _The Outlook_]

Literature and the journalist do not always rub shoulders nowadays; at all events few people look to find anything claiming to be prose in the misprinted, smudgy sheets of our raucous evening Press, unless, perhaps, in newspapers published North of the Trent. So that it does not promise well to read in Mr Machen’s preface that his new book appeared seven years ago in one of the best-known London evening papers under the title “Confessions of a Literary Man.” It sounds like Mr Bennett all over again, and misgiving increases when he adds that the confessions were written to editorial order when he was a reporter. It is an old truth that Fleet Street has ruined more good writers than Fleet Street ever made. Only at a first glance does Mr Machen appear to be an exception, for in spite of the extraordinary quality and power of his present book, though it challenges comparison with Gissing’s best work and surpasses it in parts, Mr Machen is quite clearly not the writer he might have been. “Far Off Things” is one of the most entertaining and familiar books one remembers; a vivid autobiographical chapter, condensed and complete in much less than two hundred pages, but it is without that distinctive art that makes Mr Gosse’s “Father and Son” one of the great pieces of autobiography of this or any time, and it has not just that sense for the right word in the right place which knits language into abiding literature. He cannot wrestle with the conventional:—

Now winter has its splendours; but with what joy do we welcome
the yearly miracle of spring. We and the whole earth exult
together as though we had been delivered from prison, the
hedgerows and the fields are glad, and the woods are filled
with singing; and men’s hearts are filled with an ineffable
rapture. Israel once more has come out of Egypt, from the house
of bondage.

That is the prose of the best journalism, but not the prose of the man who is, first and foremost, expressing the pure content of his mind with all his mind’s power through the power of words.

But the real charm of the book lies elsewhere, chiefly in the zest with which he describes the places he has loved and the people he remembers, the curious, quiet anecdotes, his sense of poetry in all things, and, especially, his literary enthusiasms. Cervantes and Scott come into his range, and even De Quincey, who “wrote in the great manner because he thought in the great manner.” He is inspiriting about Carlyle, and there is a tone of voice meant for the detractors of that great man in the quiet statement: “I know not any man of these days that is worthy to dust Carlyle’s hat or to clean his pipe for him.” But the journalist comes out badly in that sentence. The best thing in the book is his description of the Strand as it was in the ’eighties, and there is a curious parallel with one of Mr W. H. Davies’ best poems when he writes of Gwent and Twyn Barlwm. He is equally happy proving that the Rosicrucians never existed as in describing the conventional garret of authorhood’s infancy, and there is one magnificent anecdote of a lesson in Welsh pronunciation:—

I said, “Yn oes oesodd”—from ages to ages. “That is right,”
said my Welsh friend, “speak it so that it makes a sound like
the wind about the mountains.”

And, as he says himself, the spirit of that sentence is very near to the heart of true literature. Mr Machen knows what true literature is. There is a good critic in the man who can define realism as “the depicting of eternal, inner realities—the ‘things that really are’ of Plato—as opposed to the description of transitory, external surfaces; the delusory masks and dominoes with which the human heart hides and drapes itself.” Though he is digressive he is never garrulous, even when he writes about food and drink, and he does that well enough to whet the reader’s appetite.

“Far Off Things,” if it is not a great book, is a book too good to be read lightly. It contains a great deal of wisdom and more than a little humour. The author throws out hints of a book yet to be written, in which hills and valleys, woods and rivers, sunrise and sunset will be described so that a story is suggested to the reader; something of Wordsworth’s method, and certainly a method of poetry, though Mr Machen does not seem to realise it in that way. Such a book he has in his mind, and if, when it comes, it improves on “Far Off Things,” Mr Machen will have done his work better than he knew.

[Sidenote: _Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury_]

Mr Arthur Machen is a modest man: he says so himself; but his modesty is of that most profitable kind—to the world, we mean, of course—which inspired Montaigne, Cowley, “Elia,” and other famous “egoists.” In “Things Near and Far” he continues the tale he began in “Far Off Things,” published a few months ago, the tale of his life, outer and inner, public and private. He is, it is increasingly evident, a man of letters, a complete man of letters, and nothing but a man of letters. The landmarks of his life are either one or other of his books, or one or other of the events out of which a book is to grow. He has a positive flair for making literary capital out of life. He is a very appreciative collector of experiences, and always has plenty to say on any point; he is fairly fertile in ideas, though no great thinker; and he is interested and can communicate his interest—even in his own books and the reviews they called forth. That notable modesty of his takes on, by the way, in presence of those reviews, an aspect too like self-complacency to leave us quite assured of his ingenuousness. There are, however, many books less worth 7s. 6d. than this.

[Sidenote: _Daily News_]

“Far Off Things,” by Arthur Machen. “Heaven lies about us in our infancy.” Nevertheless, few sensitive men recall a really happy boyhood. Mr Machen is one of them. The only child of the rector of Caerleon-on-Usk, in the romantic solitudes of Gwent, he looks back on his earliest days as a secluded yet intense experience. The power of association is strong; and the vein of mysticism which characterises Mr Machen’s writings both derives from, and is heightened by, the gleam of such fond recollection. With Sir Thomas Browne, he finds those years “a miracle ... which to relate were not a history, but a piece of poetry.”

We all know that the author of such diversities in unity as “Hieroglyphics,” “The Great God Pan,” and “The Bowmen,” is a thoroughly illogical and genial spirit. The incredibly genuine sense of wonder that runs through his excursions in practical journalism somehow prevents us from being irritated as we ought to be. His new book is good, if not a “piece of poetry.” We are glad to have his apologia, it is oddly convincing. It must be a great and unbalancing thing to find miracles all the way.

When Mr Machen writes of his studies, his early yearning for London, and the hard times he knew in the capital, it is in the same untroubled spirit. His temperament is unchanged through all these years. “Omnia exeunt in mysterium”—the thought brings him the mystic’s consolation. If one loves the unfathomable, why go about to probe it? Yet he demands realism from literature: De Quincey was his first idol by virtue of this possession. The old inference is made clear again. The mystic lives not in experience, but in the aura with which he encases it. To us others this way of acceptance is an illusion, an escape from the perplexed soul. But can we make anything better of life?

THE REFLECTIONS OF A MAN OF SELF-CONCEIT

[Sidenote: _The Boston Evening Transcript_]

An extremely pleasant philosophy harboured by literary folk of a certain class in regard to the stress of bread-winning is that there is monotony about such a humdrum occupation. It is not agreeable to work at something you hate when you long to be literarily productive. Nevertheless, despite Carl Van Vechten’s sympathetic explosions all over the yellow cover of this book, we wonder just how much self-respect and inclination may war with each other in a young man’s soul when the young man lives as Mr Machen did in his youth. A book called “The Anatomy of Tobacco” was an early effort. That achieved, he seems to have lived on his father, a clergyman who had no money. He speaks of the situation thus: “My mother had been a hopeless invalid for fifteen years; my father’s health had failed, and he had become very deaf; the poor living of Llanddewi Fach had grown poorer still through the agricultural smash of 1880; he was in dire and perpetual straits for money; he underwent most of the mortifications which are allotted to the poor. It makes me grieve to this day to remember with what piteous sadness he would lean his head on his hand; he had lost hope.”

Thus Mr Machen summarises his family’s situation financially. He does not appear to have been much comfort to his father. He speaks now of “grieving.” Better indeed if he had done a little honest work. He goes to London. He reads manuscripts for a bookseller. Some intelligent people like that sort of occupation. He calls it a “weary business.” In fact, this book is filled with complaints, constant, unstinted in their outgo, because he, Arthur Machen, could not do exactly what he wished to do, on all occasions. There is a good deal of what we might term the pseudo-classic touch to his style. He likes to pose as an intellectual deserving of immortality. He is not content to be one of our leading contemporaries. He prefers, as in one instance, to “abide by the verdict of M. Octave Uzanne, who is said, I believe, to be a good judge of letters. He said that it (a certain work called ‘The Chronicle of Clemendy’) was ‘le renouveau de la Rennaissance,’ and that I was sure of my place beside Rabelais and Boccaccio, on the serene immortal seats.”

We quote the above from Mr Machen because it is wholly typical of the man. Another remark in reference to George Moore’s “A Mummer’s Wife” shows his attitude toward the age in which he lives equally well. He complains because no good novel of stage life has been written. And then he adds that in the old days, the days of the Crummles Company, it would have been easier. That is nonsense. This age and generation is adequate for all, provided some effort at adaptation is made by those of us who have been too overburdened by the weight of the glorious past. A good novel can be written as well in the twentieth century as in the seventeenth, provided some one has the brains to compass it. The whole book shows the reflections of a conceited man of mediocre ability, who buries his talent in the ashes of the past, mumbles over it incessant Latin quotations, pats himself on the back because he knows so much Latin to quote and then ... is continually irritated because the world hurries by without digging into the ashes, or listening respectfully to his incantations.—D. F. G.

[Sidenote: Maurice Hewlett in _The Evening Standard_]

... “To be in the Strand,” he says, sighing, “was like drinking punch and reading Dickens.” So it was—but one can read Dickens the better without the punch, either within or without the pages. It was a strange chapter of literary history where human happiness could not be imagined or pictured without too much to eat and too much to drink. I will be sentimental with almost anyone, for the mingling of tears is as wholesome a vent as the chiming of laughter—but I cannot cry over the bad smells of yesteryear to save my life. When I remember Holywell Street I turn with thanksgiving to Charing Cross Road. It is nothing to write home about—but you can feel the wind in it. So much for that....

DOG AND DUCK

[Sidenote: Laurence Housman in _Now and Then_]

The brief essay is a friendly form of literature; it enables the writer to say zestfully just what is in his mind to say, and no more. The moment his zest diminishes he can leave off, and another day start fresh on a new subject. So, in small measure, it gives us the man, the natural everyday furnishings of his brain, the room he lives in, the mental paraphernalia with which his taste for life has surrounded him.

The brief essay is, therefore, a personal test of character. Its writer need not make you, or even wish to make you agree with his opinions, he may have that type of minority mind which prefers to annoy people; he may be unlovable, provocative, sceptical, superstitious—I could string you any number of unvirtuous qualities from which a good brief essay may be compounded—but he must be himself, he must be interesting, and he must have a point of view.

I have not the pleasure, or the pain, of Mr Machen’s personal acquaintance. I do not know whether I should like him; but I do know that he would interest me—that he is himself, and that he has a point of view. I think that often we should differ and sometimes quarrel, that his point of view occasionally invites as much ridicule as it casts on others, that it is now and then inconsistent. But the inconsistency is all of a piece with the character: he has a mind with a certain focus, outside which the view becomes blurred, perhaps a little distorted. It is the kind of mind which Mr Chesterton invented for himself, the better to attract attention to the good which God had given him: he has a mind credulous toward folk-lore and the past, incredulous toward modern history and science; but he does not explain why folk-lore should be believed and modern history rejected—beyond giving us a few instances where folk-lore has been proved true, and modern history proved false; as to which one need only say that the means for correcting modern history are more abundantly to hand than those for correcting folk-lore. He is a romantic, and has a romantic detestation for the impossibilities of Euclid, whom he therefore dismisses as unworthy of the wise man’s consideration. But I could be just as romantic in favour of Euclid, on those very same grounds. It is only by giving it impossible things to believe that Euclid provides the human brain with foothold for clear logical thinking. It is only, as Mr Chesterton might say, by accepting the impossible that man can attain to true belief. It is on those lines that theology has provided us with a spiritualised Euclid of its own: and only by believing in its impossibilities shall we ever get to eternal life—which in itself is to the human mind an impossible condition, unless miserable science, through the theories of Einstein, is now going to help us to accept it. It is quite possible to be as romantic in one’s acceptance of science as Mr Machen is in his acceptance of folk-lore.

But it is when Mr Machen is sceptical of human nature’s ability to recapture the good it has let go that I quarrel with him most. As surely as I could train an intelligent child to be superstitious about going under a ladder, so surely could I train it to enjoy the bracing and rhythmical exercise of the Morris dance, on which Mr Machen throws a black and a wicked doubt for which I do not readily forgive him.

This only means that in his twenty-eight essays, his _Dogs_ and his _Ducks_, Mr Machen has not always scored a complete “Duck,” and brought his point home with conviction. For the meaning of which I refer the reader to the first essay, which gives the book its unexplained title. But every one of them is interesting and attractive, even when provocative.

[Sidenote: _New York Herald_]

Some twenty-odd little essays by Arthur Machen have been gathered into a book carrying the title of the first essay, “Dog and Duck” (Knopf), on its cover. This singular combination refers to an ancient game that is still played in a Georgian setting in London, but before Machen gets through describing the game he takes the reader through a famous criminal trial of the eighteenth century. Carl Van Vechten says for the publisher that these essays are “in the Dickens manner,” but we found little of that savour in “Roast Goose” or “Martinmas” or “Christmas Mumming,” just the kind of subjects Dickens wrote about but in a so different manner and spirit. But, on their own merits, they make very agreeable reading.

[Sidenote: _Boston Transcript_]

This collection of rambling essays represents a late phase of its author’s work and presents an interesting contrast with some of the earlier books recently reissued as the result of the growth of a Machen cult in this country. The newer Machen is revealed as a less eccentric, healthier, but not less sensitive writer than the old. There is in “Dog and Duck” and its companion essays little trace of the author’s former prepossession with things occult and ghastly, while his more pleasing qualities as a writer are fairly well represented. When Machen writes with a gentle regret for things past or passing, such as old sports and old enjoyments, or the disappearance of the vulgar Valentine and the “fogs of yesteryear,” he is altogether charming.

A number of the essays have a satiric tinge, often sharply pointed and telling, as in “Simnel Cakes,” wherein Machen pays his respects to the professional etymologist, or “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” with its observations of the development of the popular idea of a fairy. Elsewhere there is a good deal of matter that is trite and obvious, as when the author demonstrates that Shakespeare was a practical man of the theatre rather than a university “don,” or that the Victorians were not strait-laced on all occasions. Briefly, in a number of the essays one perceives the journalist writing to fill space. There is much in the book that will not enhance Machen’s reputation as a man of letters.

[Sidenote: _The Manchester Guardian_]

The suspicion which assails the reader who is familiar with the present state of the “first edition” market as he takes up Mr Machen’s new book of essays is very natural. In a note on the dust-cover is the announcement that the issue is limited to less than a thousand copies, and that the author has autographed a considerable number of them. This, taken in conjunction with the news from America that at the auction of Mr John Quinn’s library two first-edition copies of Mr Machen’s earlier works were sold at impressive figures, irresistibly suggests that one, at all events, of the immediate purposes of “Dog and Duck” has been to “catch the market.” If this be so, then the modern craze for book-collecting has for once been useful. The essays are selected from the author’s most recent journalism, and the reader will have rich enjoyment in them. A characteristic corn-cob atmosphere is created in the very first pages, describing with a quiet and mellow humour the ancient pastime of “Dog and Duck,” which is so simple, we are assured, that only a soft india-rubber ball and a garden surrounded by an unbroken path are needed; yet it takes a lifetime for the player to become an expert. Dissertations on valentines, simnel cakes, old port, the only good way to make chocolate, fogs in November, and Shakespeare, Bacon, collops, and astrology follow handsomely; and through them all we have ample evidence that Mr Machen has kept intact his creed that, in his own language, “it is the love of splendour—the splendid robe, the splendid word, the splendid picture—which constitutes the vital distinction between man and brute. Many beasts have reason, the faculty of using means for a certain end. But only man has art, which is the love of splendour and the desire to create it.” The wistful note introduced a year since into his “Things Near and Far” develops occasionally into a page-long phase of sighing ostentatiously and regretting angrily, for he cannot help remembering the glories of his own youth in London that are no more.—T. M.

[Sidenote: _The Times Literary Supplement._]

About most of the essays in Mr Arthur Machen’s “Dog and Duck”: A London Calendar et cetera, there is a graceful tenuousness which compares interestingly with the fiercer note of the other few. While he is gravely and reflectively tuning his discursive pen to the changing seasons of the year, he is grave, tenderly reminiscent, a trifle elderly. He discourses of the New Year and French influence in Scotland, of bygone valentines in February, of March and simnel cakes, of May and the decay of joy, of July and why young men row races at Henley, of roast goose in September, of first fogs in October, and so forth. These essays, with the charming account of the (we suspect) apocryphal game of Dog and Duck which constitutes the first, are nearly all in the wistful note which is characteristic of this author.

Mr Machen excels at the picturesque-peevish, when he complains that the joys which he knew in his youth are no more, that joy has vanished like the fogs and horse-omnibuses, that the race of Englishmen has perished to give place to a generation of inmates for a convalescent home. Then all of a sudden he flares up, and the hidden reason seems to be that some misguided doctor once tried to put Mr Machen on a diet: at all events the flare-up takes the form of violent diatribes against any interference in the name of science, health, or intelligence with the freedom of the stomach to indulge in wine, beer, stout, roast beef, kidneys, oysters, and other fleshly delights. At one moment he attacks poor old superseded Euclid under this inspiration, at another he satirically concludes that on scientific principles we had all better spend Christmas in gaol; and he will fire off a broadside at any moment against those who object to self-indulgence, who disbelieve in a primitive roystering Shakespeare, and who show any tendency to explain away anything at all. They hate life, says Mr Machen; but apparently he himself confesses to finding the actualities of life repulsive. One must get away from them somehow, then; young men do it by rowing themselves blue in the face, pure scientists by turning to abstractions, applied scientists by interfering with old ideas, and Mr Machen by imagining that he knew what Merrie England was like, somewhere about Caerleon in the day of Chaucer. Now he need never be dull, for he can revile the present in musical language.

[Sidenote: H. P. Collins in _The Outlook_]

Mr Machen has the one great requisite of a popular journalist: he holds the reader’s attention from the beginning to the end of his article, and holds it no longer. He is never dull; and he is never profound. To adopt a simile from the ingenious old game of “Dog and Duck” into which he initiates us: he brings his ball to rest between the chases without going to earth in “grounds” or “green,” scores five points or maybe ten—he never rounds the last corner and attains the Duck for a score of forty.

Mr Machen has a spirited and genial manner; but it does not proceed from a really robust and consistent personality. He is akin to Mr Chesterton in his gusto, his love of good fare, and his faith in medievalism and Merrie England; but he has none of Mr Chesterton’s wit and intellectual vigour. In “Far Off Things” the author’s mystical attitude brought him through in a qualified triumph; it has thinned unawares to sentimentality in these laments for valentines in February, Victorian bonhomie, and the fogs of yesteryear. He is vexed with Hewlett for his dislike of “the universe in general and human nature in particular”! It is nothing to the cheery tribe of Machen that there are and always have been those to whom history is not a pretty game, those who cannot afford milk-punch and those who cannot stomach roast goose and sage-and-onion. What Mr Machen, for all his gestures, cannot stomach is reality. He lives in a world not of experience but of legend, where it will please many to visit him.

It is with relief, though as must needs be a touch of sadness, that one turns from Mr Machen to these posthumous essays of Maurice Hewlett. From rose-coloured and enervating mists we pass to the keen air of Wiltshire and the keener stimulus of the voice that is now still.

[Sidenote: Richard Church in _The Nation and Athenæum_]

Mr Machen is a good journalist because he writes clearly and simply, and, for some reason or other, makes us finish reading his articles. We may think that his god, Commonsense, is often an uncommon fool, a creature of shallow thought and indolent prejudice, but we read on and enjoy the author’s company—often with a yawn. It is boring to hear that the world of to-day is degenerate, that the spirit of joy left England somewhere about the time of Elizabeth; for such talk recalls the conversation of the clubs, and the bores who always buttonhole us when we are particularly depressed by the weather or the political situation. Mr Machen is inclined to overdo this old “stunt” of the golden days of thirty, forty, fifty, five hundred years ago. In one article after another it appears, like the conventional “sea-runs” in the Norse and Keltic folktales. Our exasperation may be due to the fact that these articles are read one after another in the book, whereas they should be, and originally were, scattered in the periodical Press. Mr Machen has a hearty way with him, and a humorous and observant eye which informs a mind never weary of the pageant of passing events. In his description of old scenes and games, of personal adventures, of the flotsam and jetsam incidental to the daily life of his neighbour—and all the world is his neighbour—he is delightful and Dickensian. When he dogmatises he tends to become “lowbrow,” which is equally as unpleasant as being “highbrow.” The publisher is to be congratulated on the perfect production of this book.

THE OTHER SIDE

[Sidenote: Marc Logé in _La Revue Hebdomadaire_]

La littérature anglaise contemporaine possède peu de figures plus curieuses ni plus sincères que celle de M. Arthur Machen, mystique et satiriste, lettré et rêveur, qui traverse le prosaïsme de la vie moderne comme un étranger revenant de très loin,—du moyen âge pour le moins—et qui se trouve sans cesse choqué, peiné et dépaysé par ce qu’il voit et entend. L’œuvre de M. Machen compte déjà une vingtaine de volumes, dont plusieurs sont fort recherchés par les bibliophiles pour leur rareté. Et il vient de publier deux nouveaux récits,—autobiographiques ceux-là,—“Things Near and Far” et Arthur Machen, une “Bibliographie,” agrémentée de notes et de souvenirs, qui éclairent singulièrement sa si originale personnalité.

M. Arthur Machen passa une grande partie de sa jeunesse dans un presbytère du pays de Galles, dont l’ambiance mystique a mis sur sa pensée une empreinte ineffaçable. Il a, toute sa vie, été hanté par le profond mystère de la beauté, et toutes ses œuvres sont comme frémissantes d’un émerveillement incessant, qu’il s’efforce de communiquer à ses lecteurs. Et ce n’est pas sa faute si ceux-ci ne connaissent point le charme de Caermaen la Blanche, ou la magie du doux pays de Gwent. Ses héros, dont la jeunesse ardente et tourmentée doit ressembler, on le devine, beaucoup à celle de M. Machen, laissèrent envahir leurs âmes rares et étranges par des rêves que les gens sensés et ordinaires qualifieraient de folies. Mais M. Machen excelle à dépeindre ce qui se trouve “sur les confins mêmes de l’inconnu.” C’est pourquoi il aime pardessus toute la Nature.

Pourtant l’impérieuse nécessité de la vie l’obligea à quitter ses bois, ses collines et ses montagnes de Galles pour Londres, où l’on vit ce mystique exercer consciencieusement à Fleet Street le métier de journaliste qui lui répugnait. Il possédait heureusement le don de s’intéresser à tout, même à ce qui lui déplaisait le plus. Mais, comme il l’a dit lui-même dans le _Lignes écrites en contemplant d’une hauteur de Londres une école communale éclairée par le soleil_,—“celui qui n’éprouve ni émerveillement ni mystère, ni crainte, ni le sentiment d’un monde nouveau, ni d’un royaume inconnu dans les environs de Gray’s Inn Road, ne découvrira jamais ces secrets,—ni au cœur de l’Afrique ni dans les cités cachées du Thibet. ‘La matière de notre travail est partout présente,’ disaient les anciens alchimistes; toutes les merveilles se trouvent à un pas de la gare de King’s Cross” ... Peut-être, lorsqu’elles sont transmuées par le soleil!...

M. Machen connut bien des vicissitudes; il fut reporter, puis libraire, et il put ainsi satisfaire son goût insatiable de livres rares et curieux, et en particulier d’ouvrages occultes du moyen âge;—il fut traducteur,—il compila des catalogues; mais il continua toujours, malgré toutes les difficultés d’une vie laborieuse, à écrire et à proclamer la permanence de la beauté.

Il est pourtant curieux de noter qu’à côté de ce mystère de la beauté, il fut également pénétré par le mystère de l’horrible: et l’influence de Poë est nettement apparente dans ses deux œuvres de jeunesse, “The Great God Pan” et “The Three Impostors.” Pourtant sa conception de l’horrible diffère de celle de Poë, en ce que le pessimisme morbide de ce dernier l’entraînait, ainsi que ses lecteurs, vers un désespoir sans fond. M. Machen, dans sa foi, persiste à voir le soleil et la beauté filtrer à travers les ténèbres les plus denses et la plus terrible hideur.

L’œuvre la plus curieuse de M. Machen est, nous semble-t-il, “The Hill of Dreams,” dont le héros, Lucian Taylor, est un des caractères les plus troublants du roman anglais moderne. Lucian vit une vie de rêves peuplée de présences invisibles pour les autres: il circule dans l’aujourd’hui sans y appartenir; sa sensualité, éveillée par les caresses d’une petite paysanne perverse, qui ensuite se marie bien sagement avec un bon fermier,—se transforma, sous l’effet de son imagination et de son désir, en un étrange mysticisme maladif. Lucian ne vivra désormais que par son imagination qui est féconde et morbide, et sur laquelle la “magie celte” exerce une influence puissante. Sa plus grande joie fut désormais de “rêver,”—laissant son esprit errer parmi des idées à demi imaginées et délicieuses, en permettant à son cerveau vierge de vagabonder à sa guise. D’une sensibilité qui allait s’exaspérant avec les années, Lucian se retrancha de plus en plus dans sa thébaïde spirituelle, inaccessible à tous les êtres qui l’entouraient. Dans Caermaen, dans sa propre maison, on le considéra comme un demifou. Mais que lui importait?

“Il se plongea de plus en plus dans ses livres; tout ce qui était ancien et désuet était devenu son domaine. Dans le dégoût qu’il éprouvait pour les stupides questions habituelles: ‘Cela rapportera-t-il? A quoi bon?’—il ne voulait lire que ce qui était étrange et inutile. La pompe et le symbolisme de la Kabbalah,—pleine de suggestions de choses encore plus terribles,—les mystères de la Rose-Croix de Fludd, les énigmes de Vaughan,—les rêves des alchimistes, faisaient sa joie. Tels étaient ses compagnons avec les collines et les bois, les ruisseaux et les étangs solitaires.... Parfois, lorsqu’il était plongé dans ses livres, une flamme de plaisir montait en lui tout à coup, lui révélant toute une province, tout un continent inconnu de sa nature, brûlant et embrasé,—et devant ce triomphe et cette exaltation il reculait, un peu apeuré. Il était devenu ascète dans son isolement studieux et mélancolique, et la fusion de pareilles extases l’effrayait.”

Lucian se met à écrire et ses tourments redoublent, car il “devinait les immenses difficultés de la carrière littéraire, sans les comprendre clairement.” De ses longues promenades solitaires à travers les bois silencieux et crépusculaires, balayés par le grand vent, il “revenait rempli de pensées, d’émotions et d’imaginations mystiques qu’il souhaitait ardemment traduire grâce au mot écrit”; mais il ne peut le faire, et connaît toutes les amertumes.

“Et dans ces moments-là, la vision habituelle du paysage l’alarmait, et les sauvages collines, arrondies comme des dômes, et les bois sombres lui paraissaient les symboles de quelque secret terrible de la vie intérieure,—de cet étranger, lui-même.”

C’est ainsi que Lucian se débat et souffre dans les rets de sa propre imagination, alimentée par toute son hérédité celtique, qui crée autour de lui des visions tour à tour mystiques ou païennes, sacrées ou charnelles, qui torturent et broient son âme et son corps.

Comme fond, contre lequel se détache si douloureusement le pâle visage tourmenté de Lucian, M. Machen a brossé, avec une ironie mordante, mais sobre, un tableau de la société bourgeoise de Caermaen;—et le contraste entre la placidité prosaïque et repue des “county families” et l’âme inquiète du fils du pasteur, est indiqué par quelques traits fins et satiriques qui prouvent que M. Machen n’a point perdu son humour à feuilleter avec amour les bouquins poussiéreux d’autrefois.

Son dernier livre, “The Secret Glory,” est l’histoire d’un autre jeune Gallois, Ambrose Meyrick, qui s’efforce, _lui_, d’accorder sa nature pleine d’élans, de curiosités et d’aspirations vers un idéal tout gothique, avec la routine conventionnelle prescrite et acceptée. Inutile de dire qu’il échoue. Mais ce livre est aussi la critique âpre et passionnée de ces “public schools” qui sont l’orgueil de l’Angleterre, et dans lesquels M. Machen ne voit, assez justement, que des machines à broyer toute individualité, et il condamne sévèrement l’esprit de ces grands centres d’éducation, où toute “excentricité est impitoyablement réprimée, où toute conscience individuelle est détruite.” Pourtant Ambrose Meyrick échappe à temps à l’annihilation de sa personnalité, car il découvre la _gloire secrète_ qu’il porte en lui, et cela le sauvera. La terre entière devient pour lui “un sanctuaire,” toute vie un rite et une cérémonie dont le but tend à la possession de la sainteté mystique,—la découverte du Graal. Pour cela seulement,—pour quelle autre raison? toutes choses ont été créées? C’est de cela que le petit oiseau chante dans le buisson, en émettant quelques notes faibles et plaintives dans les soirées crépusculaires, comme si son petit cœur regrettait ne pouvoir élever que de si piteuses louanges. C’était cela aussi que célébrait la splendeur de l’aube blanche sur les collines,—le souffle des bois à l’aurore. C’était cela qui était figuré dans le cérémonial rouge du couchant, lorsque des flammes brillaient au-dessus du dôme de la grande montagne et que des roses semblaient s’épanouir dans les plaines lointaines du ciel. C’était cela aussi le secret que connaissaient les endroits obscurs des bois; le mystère du soleil sur la hauteur, et chaque petite fleur, chaque petite fougère, chaque roseau était chargé de célébrer secrètement ce sacrement. Ayant compris ces vérités, “tout ce qui était beau et merveilleux fit dorénavant partie pour lui de la sainteté; toute la gloire de la vie était dans le service du sanctuaire.”

L’œuvre de M. Machen est inégale et parfois confuse,—mais il s’en dégage toujours un charme étrange et pénétrant,—une espèce de fascination qui provient sans doute de l’extase dont elle est tout imprégnée. Car l’extase, nous dit-il dans son essai intitule “Hieroglyphics,” est révélatrice de l’art véritable; celui qui ne cherche à exprimer que le quotidien, le visible, l’ordinaire, usurpe le titre d’artiste,—qui n’appartient qu’à ceux qui savent croire à l’invisible, en se fiant à leur imagination et à leur désir, et tendre de tout leur être vers l’inconnu. Car l’art, pour M. Machen, ne remplace pas la religion: il en est une forme!

[Sidenote: _The Daily Telegraph_]

Wonderful indeed are the changes and chances of the literary life! Many years ago—let us say thirty—a judicious student of fiction who happened upon one of Mr Arthur Machen’s early books might well have thought to himself, “There can be no keeping down an imagination and a power of style like these. Whether one likes it or not, this man’s work is literature, and some meed of fame will undoubtedly be his.” A generation which had revelled in “The New Arabian Nights” and in “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” must, it seemed certain, have rewards in store for the writer of “The Three Impostors” and “The Great God Pan.”

And then year after year went by, and Arthur Machen remained practically unknown. One or two more of his singular books appeared, written exclusively to satisfy himself, and in total disregard of the existence of any school of public taste. The mystical tragedy of modern life called “The Hill of Dreams” is not a book for everybody; but it is undeniably the outpouring of a strangely gifted spirit.

The war broke out in 1914, and Mr Machen invented a fable about the “Angels of Mons” which flew all round the English-speaking world, and was passionately believed by vast multitudes of simple people to be a plain account of an actual miracle; so that its fabricator naturally got no credit for them, and met, indeed, with no little abuse for strenuously declaring that the story was a lie of his own imagining. Then there came out a curious essay in mystical Christianity, about the coming of the Holy Grail to a secluded place in Wales. Next appeared a gruesome little nightmare of a story about an attempted revolt, during the war, of the animals against mankind, the truth about which was supposed, in the tale, to have been rigorously suppressed by the censorship. Then the oddest, certainly, of all that class of recent fiction which has occupied itself with savage criticism of the English public school system and spirit.

Still nothing seemed likely to win a wide recognition for this peculiar talent. And then, quite suddenly, one began to hear it talked about on all sides among literary people, and especially those of whom Mr Machen was by this time old enough to be the father. Now, after a remarkably brief period of celebrity, as these things go, his “Collected Works” appear in nine stately volumes, beautiful with wide margins and severely tasteful binding; an edition such as any writer living might be proud of, and any lover of the externals as well as the substance of books might delight to see on his shelves.

It is only too likely that recognition in this very substantial form has come too late to give Mr Machen more than a fraction of the pleasure which it would once have yielded. Indeed, one may say it is certain; for the two volumes of reminiscences included in this edition are sometimes very painful, though always quite absorbing reading. There is nothing in them so petty as mere embitterment; but they are the writings of a man who has suffered deeply. Most deeply, perhaps, during those recent years of journalistic hack-work of which he definitely declines to give any straightforward account, but of which melancholy glimpses are to be had from time to time in one of the most discursive works of autobiography ever penned. These were the years of acknowledged, and apparently final and irredeemable, failure, and they can hardly be lived down at such an age as Mr Machen has reached.

Success was denied to his earlier books, it may be surmised, because there was so much less feeling then than exists now for the spirit of poetic mysticism which went along with the gruesomeness of those extraordinary tales. They were dismissed by some as “morbid,” and perhaps they were, although morbidity, by all accounts, is the last quality which one would attribute to Mr Machen as a man. But the horrors of sorcery and the embodiment of evil were mingled here with a feeling for beauty and a severity of style which became more and more apparent in Mr Machen’s later books; and all through his work runs that thread of sombre preoccupation with the life of the spirit which, contrasted as it is with an unusually vivid perception of the colour and detail of the life about him, makes his personal reminiscences so strangely interesting, and even his tales of diabolism more plausible than a man merely attempting to exploit a popular liking for “the supernatural” could possibly have made them.

Mr Machen’s talent is certainly one of the most marked and individual that has appeared in his generation of English writers.

UP FROM THE RANKS OF GRUB STREET AUTHORSHIP

[Sidenote: Robert Hillyer in _The New York Times Book Review_]

Ten years ago weekly explorations of second-hand bookshops in Boston never failed to yield me a copy of the American reprints by Dana Estes & Co. of Arthur Machen’s “House of Souls” and his “Hill of Dreams.” They were a regular feature of the rubbish counter. For these I usually had to pay about 50 cents a copy—though I bought one “Hill of Dreams,” which I still possess, for 10 cents. I must have purchased about twenty of these books. I gave them to friends, I lent them to friends—it does not matter which; the volumes disappeared one way or another. It seemed at the time a method within my means of bestowing great riches on the people I liked or admired. Few of my friends went away without their copy of a book they had never heard of, but which they would read for friendship’s sake. When I had only two copies of “The Hill of Dreams” left, and could find no more, I decided to suppress my prodigal instincts, but a burst of generosity brought on by some green chartreuse disposed of one of the two. The other one, saved by the banishment decreed to monastic liquor, is still with me.

And beside it on the shelf is Mr Knopf’s new edition of the book. “The Hill of Dreams” will never again be found on the rubbish counter; the old red edition is a collector’s rarity; the new yellow one is a substantial proof of the advance of good literature in America. During the last ten years Mr Machen’s art has been recognised; he is almost the only example of a fine writer rescued from oblivion in his own lifetime. Yet he has made no concession to the world in general. He has not changed a word of “The Hill of Dreams” since he wrote it twenty-six years ago. It is the same book—a failure in 1907, rubbish in 1913, a success in 1923. Obviously, the world has made concessions to the ideas which he represents.

The triumph of mechanism, which is shown in its full glory by the late war and the wars that follow it, has, like all bad tyrannies, engendered a reaction. For years isolated voices were raised against it, but they spoke in syllables that were incomprehensible to the minds of men spellbound by the wonder of Things. In differing accents, protests came from writers as diverse in talent as Samuel Butler, Walter Pater and Arthur Machen. People took it for granted that such protests were the inevitable whine of the Old Order against Progress, an explanation at once so simple and inclusive that it could dispose of any objection calculated to disturb their satisfaction in the machinery of manufacture and the machinery of life. The world, indeed, was fast stampeding into a herd which would not tolerate the existence of unconverted individuals. Then suddenly the machine itself went wrong, and threatened, like the machine in the ballad, to transform its inventor into sausage meat. There was a wild flight of worshippers from the crumbling shrine of Moloch—whither? Into Spiritism, Bahaism, neo-Buddhism; into every cult, in fact, that offered even a temporary shelter from desperation. This headlong rout into faddism of all sorts was a superficial earnest that the mind of the race was turning, had in fact turned, back toward an acknowledgment of the final mystery of life.

Of this mystery, Arthur Machen has from the first been the consistent exponent. His mind is that of a medieval Christian; a liberal monk, perhaps, who has taken many an appreciative peek at the classics in the library of the foundation. To him all that is beautiful builds walls of the celestial city in the mind of man; all that makes war against that beauty is unutterably evil. There is no middle ground. And “The Hill of Dreams” is the epic of this spiritual battle.

In the new introduction, written for the new edition, the author tells us that he intended to write a Robinson Crusoe of the soul: the soul, and not the body of a man, solitary amid an alien sea. It would have been impossible for Mr Machen to write any other sort of Robinson Crusoe, for he never leaves the material world untransmuted; everything becomes, either for good or for evil, the shadow of an overwhelming portent. Thus “The Hill of Dreams” shows us life, carnal and ethereal, as heightened by the oversensitive imagination of the hero, Lucian Taylor. The boy grows up in the outland country between Wales and England; all the glamour and terror of ancient forests become a part of him. Left largely to himself by his pathetically frustrate father, the vicar, and repelled by the lapses of taste and decency in the provincial society around him, he wanders over the domed hills under violently blue Summer skies, the hard glare of Winter and the sad wet twilight of Autumn, while the Roman past and the Celtic past, whose ruined fortresses and tumuli are only half-concealed by the moss and the thicket, gradually take possession of his imagination and ally themselves in his mind with an already established love of medieval lore, ecclesiastic and occult. All hidden beauties become his preoccupation, but, driven inward by the vicious sordidness of actuality, corruption also fascinates him. Year by year this struggle between the rapture of the inner life and the staleness of the outer aggravates an intolerable situation to be solved only by expressing it all in adequate style. But words fail, and the reasonable mind finally collapses under the weight of the imaginative.

It is obvious that Mr Machen does not want Lucian to become the victim of this combat between modern existence and the life of the imagination. He staves off the conclusion again and again until, forced by the inevitable, he yields his hero to fate. His unwillingness to surrender the youth may be accounted for by the fact that, up to a certain point, Lucian’s life was his life—his autobiography—a circumstance which has made the book suspiciously bitter in spots. He satirises the moneyed, the hypocritical, the snobbish, with a fine cruelty and vivid fidelity to life—but are these shoddy creatures, after all, worthy of so much attention? Yes, perhaps—if their mere existence is an obstacle to the higher sanity. And they are such an obstacle to Lucian, who magnifies their imbecile gestures of futility into really monstrous evils. They are a part of that wall of loneliness which isolates a naturally friendly and convivial spirit, driving it in upon itself, until all the beauties that it loves become, for lack of some one to share them, horrors and madness.

Fortunately for Mr Machen, he is of stronger stuff than the hero of his masterpiece. In his two-volume autobiography, “Far Off Things,” which appeared last Fall, and “Things Near and Far,” which has just been published, he describes the loneliness which enhedged him and the means he took to cope with it. Now in his middle fifties, he can look back over that struggle with no bitterness, but certainly with no complacency. One cannot be complacent before the materialism of modern life, which not only fails to help a man whose interests are elsewhere, but will not even tolerate him if it knows him for what he is.

Like Lucian, Mr Machen was born in the Welsh borderland, faced poverty in its fearfullest form—“genteel” poverty—went to London hoping to obtain the necessities of life by writing, and ended by nearly starving to death on the wages of tutoring, translating and cataloguing second-hand books.

In bookshops, he came in contact with alchemical and occult works which were to influence, though not dominate, all his later writing. Much of the interest of “Things Near and Far” lies in his treatment of various phases of mysticism, from its faddish to its serious manifestation. Very wisely, as I think, he has carefully guarded himself against seizure as an “adept” by any Spiritistic or pseudo-Oriental cult. In his burlesque description of a séance, he closes the doors of Spiritism against him:—