Part 10

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:—

The room is in total darkness. One of the sitters proclaims with exultation that his nose has been tweaked by Joey, who, on this side, was a clown. John King, understood to have been a master mariner, sings “Tom Bowling” in a falsetto voice through a speaking trumpet. On this Cardinal Newman, known to be a lover of music, is gratified, and utters the word “Benedictine.” ... “This spirit’s name is Milton. Henry—no, John Milton, the author of the ‘Faery Queen.’ He says that they are very happy.... All repeat the Lord’s Prayer, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle expresses his intense gratification.... Well, it may be so. But I hope it isn’t, and I never shall believe that it is so.”

And the Oriental fanatics receive small comfort at Mr Machen’s hands:—

There is one thing that I hope I may be spared, that is the comment of the Oriental Occult Ass.... I do hope nobody will say, “Why, this is only Ruja-Puja! You get it all in the first chapter of the Anangasataga Raja! It’s all perfectly elementary. Little Hindu children learn their A.B.C. out of it in the Svanka Visatvara.”

Despite his contempt for the physical phenomena of the Spiritists, Mr Machen concedes their possibility. His one question remains: Is this of consequence? And he puts the same question concerning his own experience. During a fit of the most uncontrollable melancholy, he sat down in his apartment in London, and attempted, by some mental process which he does not describe, to rid himself of depression. Suddenly the pictures on the wall

trembled, dilated, became misty in their outlines; seemed on the point of disappearing altogether, and then shuddered and contracted back again into their proper form and solidity; that is the closest description of what I witnessed: with a shaking heart, and with a sense that something, I knew not what, was also being shaken to its foundations.

He was filled with dread, yet, at the same time, with an almost unendurable ecstasy. For a moment the fear of death was upon him. Then gradually the fright passed, leaving him in an exalted and serene frame of mind that lasted for an entire year. Concerning the physical phenomenon of the pictures, he remarks:—

This is all wonderful? I suppose that it is; but let me here say firmly that I consider an act of kindness to a wretched mangy kitten to be much more important.

But the year of peace that followed was, decidedly, of consequence, since he was lifted above the petty emotions that degrade and destroy humanity, and he saw life in its true colours. His implied conclusion is, therefore, that no occult experience is of any consequence in itself; its sole value is to enhance the dignity, decency and happiness of the human race.

All of Mr Machen’s fiercest satirical passages against humanity are dictated not by hatred but love of humanity. Nothing is so maddening as to behold a beloved being or race of beings degenerate into Yahoos. We observe the same quality in Swift, who was the most virulent of satirists because he was, fundamentally, the tenderest of humanitarians. When Mr Machen is at his bitterest, we find no desire for vengeance; merely an infuriated, baffled perplexity that his fellows should sink so low. And even this emotion he reserves for types; for individuals he exhibits a friendliness, a conviviality, an understanding, which are worthy of the rich variety of his nature.

Indeed, though the mystical side of his character is the most interesting and the satirical the most entertaining, his Rabelaisian gusto for the good things of life sets them both off to advantage. He can recreate London or Touraine with a phrase or give us the play of sunlight on the brim of an old cup filled with clear wine. All phases of life interest him, since he has entered into more of them than most men. For example, in the opening years of the present century he was one of a company of strolling players. The single chapter he devotes to this pilgrimage might well be expanded into a sort of Thespian Lavengro. And in literature, all of whose halls, ante-rooms and little dark corridors are known to him, we always find him where we should wish to find him—on the side of rapture and care against emotionalism and slovenliness. For to him “Literature is the sensuous art of causing exquisite impressions by means of words”:—

To win the secret of words, to make a phrase that would murmur of Summer and the bee, to summon the wind into a sentence, to conjure the odour of the night into the surge and fall and harmony of a line; this was the tale of the long evenings, of the candle flame white upon the paper and the eager pen.

His style approaches the gift of music, and will repel such readers as consider words to be utilitarian vessels for measuring out their quart or bushel of meaning. But those who find reality in “Kubla Khan,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” or the “Dream Fugue” will find it also in the books of Arthur Machen, who is of that small group of Coleridge, De Quincey, Sir Thomas Browne, Poe and Malory—a group where each is a master. In a vision we use the language of vision, and if on waking we would interpret what we have seen and heard into the language of waking, we can only suggest. If we state, the magic slips out between the syllables. By the marvellous orchestration of his prose, its undertones and overtones, Mr Machen has suggested to us his vision of the battle between Light and Darkness—a vision that is far more real than this seeming reality which shifts with the passing years. It is not strange that he has been misconstrued as the artist of Terror and of Madness; he has seen so clearly the titanic war in the troubled spirit of the world, compared to which all the wars that have scarred the body of the world are but as the twitching of a sleeper in whose brain the nightmare rages. And, because of the same limitation which makes Dante’s “Inferno” infinitely more convincing than his “Paradiso,” Arthur Machen’s lurid darkness shines with a grander beauty than his open day. For this reason the superficial minded will persist in calling that great book “The Hill of Dreams” a “morbid” piece of work.

Objections of this sort, which entirely overlook the real robustness of the author’s nature, grow fainter and fainter as the world swings around to his point of view. In brief, Mr Machen’s outlook on life is similar to his opinion of occult phenomena: external facts, valueless in themselves, are only important as they affect the imagination or spirit of man. They are merely the symbols of the great sacrament that lies behind them. For him, literature became the escape from circumstance, and he could not, if he would, relinquish it or write what was not in him.

And my total receipts for these eighteen volumes, he says, for these forty-two years of toil, amount to the sum of six hundred and thirty-five pounds. That is, I have been paid at the rate of fifteen pounds and a few shillings per annum. It seems dear, then, that my literary activities cannot be adequately accounted for on the hypothesis of mere greed and money-grubbing.

It is this kind of devotion that gives us our masterpieces, this slow-burning, indomitable desire, independent of all consideration but the building up, phrase by phrase, of an enduring structure. That America, long the source of uninspired materialism, should recognise so fully the value of Mr Machen’s work, is a happy augury for the future of our literature.

THE CHRONICLE OF CLEMENDY

[Sidenote: Octave Uzanne in _Le Livre_]

Je ne sais si la dédicace de ce livre rabelaisien, je veux dire de haulte graisse, adressée au _Right Honourable, Illustrious and Puissant Prince_, Humphrey, duc de Glocester, chevalier de l’ordre très noble de la Jarretière, etc., etc., est une satire barbelée ou l’hommage sérieux d’un humoriste. Le noble duc me semble le mieux situé pour en décider, et là dessus je m’en rapporte bien à lui. Mais ce que je constate dès les premières pages, sans l’ombre d’un doute, c’est l’esprit, le goût littéraire, la connaissance familière et intime de la langue jusque dans ses sources vives, le renouveau de Renaissance, si je puis dire, qui éclate à chaque ligne dans ce qu’écrit Mr Arthur Machen.

Des contes en eux-mêmes, je ne dis rien, sinon que, les ayant lus, je les relirai souvent, à petites doses, sans me lasser, comme on visite ces flacons qui contiennent une fine et réconfortante liqueur. Gervase Perrot de Clemendy, gentleman, seigneur du manoir de Pwllcwrw,—ce qui, au pays de Galles, je crois, veut dire “flaque de bière,”—et maréchal des pots aux assises de l’Ale, ne m’est, je l’avoue humblement, pas autrement connu. Il me suffit de savoir que, depuis “The Discourse of Ale,” traduit, paraît-il, du latin, jusqu’au dernier conte des neuf joyeuses journées, il se montre franc compère, aussi bon Gaulois qu’Anglais rabelaisien peut l’être, gai à miracle, spirituel à plaisir, fécond en histoires réjouissantes où les personnages n’échappent au ridicule que par l’amour, comme le peuvent désirer et faire des créatures en chair et en os, différentes de sexes et de natures semblables; en un mot, tel que nous connaissons les conteurs d’Italie et de France: Boccace, Marguerite, le seigneur des Accords, Camille Blessebois, l’Arétin, Beroalde de Verville, le Pogge, La Fontaine, et tant d’autres, au premier rang desquels le traducteur anglais de Marguerite de Navarre et de la “Chronique de Clemendy” est désormais sûr de sa place....

[Sidenote: _The New York Times Book Review_]

Mr Machen, it will be recalled, is that author who, in the late ’eighties and the early ’nineties, was so overshadowed by his contemporary, Robert Louis Stevenson, that it is only of late years that his own varied genius has received the praise that was its due. Machen has recently been republished in England and in this country, but “Dog and Duck” does not belong to his earlier work. Some of the essays may date back several years, either in whole or in part, but it is clear that most of the papers are new, and that such as may embody earlier material have been elaborated and rewritten.

In “Dog and Duck” Arthur Machen has treated of nearly a score and a half of subjects; but he has neglected to write on the subject which would be of greatest use to his reviewer—namely, the art of being casual. For the essay—the true essay, that is, as defined above, not the thesis essay or the editorial—must, of all things, wear the air of absolute casuality. In actual composition, of course, there may have been nothing of the casual; and the very contrary is probable, painful delivery having, very likely, followed on long gestation. But when the essay is spread upon the pages, when the last revision of the proof has been made, it is a literary product or it is not according as a reader will be left with the impression that it sprang as spontaneously as Minerva from the head of Jove. And now that we have been carried into mythology, it might not be amiss to press the figure a little further. Minerva was the Goddess of Wisdom; and the burden of the essay—again distinct from the thesis, the burden of which is knowledge—is wisdom; and moreover, as Minerva, issued full-panoplied and radiant of jewels and gold. And one thing more; the true essay will have wit—not loud and boisterous humour, but the wit that mellows while it stings; in short, the wit of wisdom.

To return to Arthur Machen: Does “Dog and Duck” satisfy the demands of our questionnaire? There can be but one answer, an unqualified affirmative. And that is why the complaint was raised that Mr Machen had omitted an essay on the art of being casual. How does he achieve his illusion of apparent chance, of absolute spontaneity, when we well know that his essays must have been deliberate, as deliberate as any poem? But let it go; the question is not to be answered of Machen any more than it can be answered of Stevenson or of Lamb.

The title essay, it appears, has to do with an English outdoor game of venerable age, although Americans, apparently, are unfamiliar with it. As Chase Mallard the pastime of Dog and Duck takes on veritable antiquity. Yet the reader will not follow Machen through any desire to learn the technique of this simple outdoor sport; he will, however, be infected with the gusto of the author in trailing the game itself back through several generations, mention of it in literature, and especially—for here one will come upon the Machen of that fascinating psycho-romantic tale, “The Three Impostors”—in the part Dog and Duck played in a celebrated murder trial of the eighteenth century.

Yet, if Machen is entertaining and enlivening when he discourses upon antique sports, he is none the less so when he directs a flashing eye on “Valentines and Other Things,” when he turns to the matter of holidays—as he does more than once—when he talks of April Fool, of Twelfth Night, of fogs, of February stars, of the vice of making collections (to which we all are prone), to the matter of splendour, to the art of unbelief. In his best vein—though to single out any one essay from the teeming sheaf is invidious—is the one to which he gives the title “The Poor Victorians.”

We all know [he writes] what the poor Victorians were like. We have heard all about them over and over again. To begin with, they were prim. They were proper. They went to bed early. Their only form of revelry consisted in tea parties. The laws of their lives were dictated to them by maiden ladies and the vicar’s wife. As for the arts in the Victorian era, they could not properly be said to exist. Nobody spoke out: nobody dared to be “daring.” No picture was painted that went beyond the vision of the Young Person. No poem that the curate could possibly dislike was ever written. As to love, the word was, beware! Above all, there must be no faintest hint of the vital things, of any sort of realities. And so on and so on, the general conclusion being that the Victorians couldn’t write, couldn’t paint, couldn’t think, and couldn’t properly be said to be alive at all.

And thus, having stated the case of the moderns against the Victorians, Mr Machen suddenly whisks from his pocket several documents. The first is a love poem by the Victorian Tennyson that does not in the least remind the essayist of Miss Pinkerton’s Academy for Young Ladies or the vicar’s drawing-room. And then, lest this be a little solemn, he adduces one of Swinburne’s stanzas on “lazy, laughing, languid Jenny,” who was equally “fond of a kiss and fond of a guinea.” And from this frankness he turns to Rossetti; then to Dickens. He finds that there were theatres in Victoria’s day, and theatre parties; that there were also supper parties, and rich food, and Burgundy. And, finally, having presented the evidence, he comes to the summing up.

The truth is, of course, that the Victorian Age, more especially the early and mid-Victorian Ages, were times of jollity and times of liberty, both in life and in letters. Those people who took a dozen oysters in the Haymarket at midnight and strolled off to Covent Garden would not have believed that their grandsons would submit to be smacked and sent to bed like naughty children. And as in life, so in letters. What the mid-Victorians wrote, whether it were well or ill, was written with a relish. We have lost all that. Cubism, Vorticism, Post-Impressionism; verse that doesn’t scan and doesn’t rhyme; novels that make one think of a stupid post-mortem or a dissection: that is what we have in place of Tennyson, Swinburne, Rossetti, Dickens, Thackeray, the pre-Raphaelites and the great illustrators of this despised age, the wood-cutters whose work has become to us miraculous. Those poor Victorians!

Arthur Machen is himself—outside of this volume—a late Victorian; so that this is a defence and an excoriation by one who not only knows what he is talking about, but whose emotions have been aroused by the slurs cast upon his people. And there is one phrase of his defence that we shall do well to linger over for a moment: “Whether they wrote well or ill it was written with a relish.” It is the relish for life—the relish of letters—that Machen in the “Dog and Duck” essays would have us recapture, would help us to recapture. And this is important: as he himself says, too few of our present-day writers either care to relish life or evince any desire that their readers should relish letters. Indeed, this is a phase of English literature which seemed, in the main, to end with Stevenson, and Machen’s little book is one of the few modern volumes able in any degree to win it back to us. Thus is “Dog and Duck” literature in the highest sense.

In more than one essay does Machen go back even further than to Stevenson; his little homilies on customs, and especially those on viands and potations, remind one of Dickens. When he discusses “Roast Goose: With a Dissertation on Apple Sauce and Sage and Onions,” he even outdoes Lamb himself. And all these papers are shot with shafts of wit, stuffed with matured advice; and if Machen, as a philosopher, might fail in a rigid test, even the most quarrelsome of metaphysicians will be forced to bow before his sagacity.

There is a curious note appended to the final essay of the book, a paper on what the author calls “The Art of Unbelief.” The editor of _The Lyons Mail_, who had accepted and printed all of the preceding essays, refused this one with the words:—

I cannot deal with the enclosed.... I am afraid my readers would not understand it; ... a mass of dissertation, some of which I would not ask our linotype operators to translate.

The essay deals with the survival of the primitive capacity for myth-making, a recrudescence of which Machen discovers in the absurd legends surrounding the death of Lord Kitchener which appear to have gained credence in some circles in which intelligence in respect to other matters has generally been shown. But either the “linotype operators” of _The Lyons Mail_ are a peculiarly susceptible force of workers, or—and, one will conclude, more probably—the editor was strangely deficient in a sense of humour. Mr Machen, however, turns the matter off with the good nature one would expect of him; the good nature which is characteristic of the book. “Such are the amenities,” he says, “of that highway which Sir Philip Gibbs has so delightfully called ‘the Street of Adventure.’”