Part 5

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

AN IMPURE IDEAL

A CHALLENGE TO PURITANISM

[Sidenote: David Christie Murray in _The Referee_]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Sidenote: _The Athenæum_]

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

[Sidenote: _The Saturday Review_]

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

[Sidenote: _Tribune_]

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

[Sidenote: _Manchester Guardian_]

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

THE HILL OF DREAMS

[Sidenote: _East Anglian Daily Times_]

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

[Sidenote: _The Outlook_]