Part 4

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

[Sidenote: _The Graphic_]

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

[Sidenote: _The Pall Mall Gazette_]

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

THE HOUSE OF SOULS

[Sidenote: Thomas Lloyd in _The Sunday Sun_]

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

[Sidenote: _Academy_]

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

[Sidenote: _The Standard_]

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

[Sidenote: _The Bystander_]

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

[Sidenote: _Liverpool Daily Courier_]

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

[Sidenote: _Illustrated London News_]

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

[Sidenote: _Birmingham Gazette and Express_]

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

[Sidenote: _Literary World_]

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

[Sidenote: _East Anglian Daily Times_]

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

[Sidenote: _Light_]

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

[Sidenote: _Speaker_]

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

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