Chapter EightTHE PATTERN
Toward the close of the first quarter of this century Mr. Alfred Knopf, being ready to reissueThe Anatomy of Tobacco, asked Arthur Machen to write a new introduction for the volume. TheAnatomyhad been written some forty-three years before and it seemed time a new edition and a new introduction were called for. TheAnatomyis a slight book, and a rather dull and pretentious one, turned out as a sort of sophomoric exercise under the influence of Burton and other pedantic antiquarians. Machen had no objection to writing a new introduction to the book of “Leolinus Siluriensis” and so he sat down at once to do so.
Most of Machen’s work, and certainly all of the best of it, had already been written and published ... there was no Great Romance on the fire just then. Several years before he had written his memoirs, or come as close to writing them as he ever would.The Confessions of a Literary Manappeared serially in the London Evening News through several months of 1915. Secker issued theConfessionsin 1922 asFar Off Things. A year later Machen wroteThings Near and Far; another two years later cameThe London Adventure. These three books are Machen’sautobiography, although it has been said that almost everything he ever wrote was, to a great extent, autobiographical. At any rate, Machen saw the books in print and occupied himself with journalism, which he detested, and with thinking over the books he had written which, on the whole, he rather enjoyed. And so when, in the 1920’s, he began the New York Adventure, Machen sat down and wrote not one but a whole series of new introductions. There is no nonsense about these introductions, and no “graceful writing.” The introduction to the new edition of theAnatomybegins quite simply:
“It struck me once, during a long meditation on literature, that every man who has written has had but one idea in his head. To the best of my recollection, the particular example in my mind at the time was Edgar Allen Poe, who executed a wonderful series of variations on one theme.”
Now this idea had been in Machen’s mind for a great many years. A year or two before completing his introduction for Mr. Knopf he had been engaged in writing a book calledThe London Adventure. The book contains much material that is found in neither theConfessionsnor inThings Near and Far. While writing the book he became intrigued with some old note books he had kept many years before. In reading them he was reminded of a story by Henry James,The Pattern on the Carpet, in which is expressed the notion of a man of letters who had written many books and was quite surprised to find that one of his admirers had failed to recognize that all these tales of his were variations on one theme; that a common pattern, like the pattern of an eastern carpet ran through them all.In the story the novelist died suddenly without revealing the nature of the pattern. Nor does Henry James, in whose works one might also trace a common pattern. He too leaves it to his readers to discover for themselves the mystery of this one design, latent in a whole shelf of books.
Machen himself has such a pattern, and such a theme. It occurs again and again in all of his works, in his short stories as well as in his novels: in the slightest of his essays as well as inHieroglyphics. This theme he defines in several places quite briefly and simply. It is, he says, “The sense of the eternal mysteries, the eternal beauty hidden beneath the crust of common and commonplace things: hidden and yet burning and glowing continuously if you care to look with purged eyes.”
We have noted, several times over, Machen’s preoccupation with a Great Romance. Many years ago he wrote, “There is a great book that I am hoping to write one of these fine days. I have been hoping to write it, I may say, since 1898, or ’99, and somewhere about the later year I did write as many as a dozen pages. Themagnum opusso far conducted did not wholly displease me, and yet it was not good enough to urge me forward in the task. And so it has languished ever since then, and I am afraid I have lost the manuscript that contained all that there was of it long ago. Seriously, of course, it would not have been a great book if it had been ever so prosperously continued and ended; but it would have been at least a curious book, and even now I feel conscious of warm desire at the thought of writing it—some day. For the idea came to me as follows:
“I had been thinking at the old century end of the work that I had done in the fifteen years or so before, and it suddenly dawned upon me that this work, pretty good or pretty bad, or as it may be, had all been the expression of one formula, one endeavor. What I had been doing was this: I had been inventing tales in which and by which I had tried to realize my boyish impressions of that wonderful magic Gwent.”
Now this great book was not only written but it was rewritten under various forms, in entirely different ways, and with no surface similarities at all. For almost sixty years he had written purely to please himself, nor did he hesitate to publish, at his own expense, the books he wrote for his own pleasure. It was his feeling in this that there was no reason why a beginner should not be willing to pay his own way. And yet, as he says, it is a queer pleasure when one does write to please oneself. For, as Machen says,
“I wrote purely to please myself; and what a queer pleasure it was! To write, or to try to write, means involving oneself in endless difficulties, contrarieties, torments, despairs, and yet I wrote on, and I suppose for the reason which I have given, the necessity laid upon most of us to create another and a fantastic life in order that the life of actuality may be endurable.”
In these excerpts from Machen’s autobiographical sketches one encounters over and over again certain keywords: ‘escape,’ ‘common life,’ ‘eternal mysteries,’ ‘removal’ and so on. And these same key words are, of course, the underlying themes of every story he ever wrote. They constitutethe criteria by which he judged the literature of past and present as well.
Machen had been brought up on Scott and Coleridge, Hawthorne and Poe and all the authors one would naturally expect a school boy to encounter in an English public school in the 1880’s. In addition to these there were the books he found in the rectory at Llanddewi. These included one especially significant book by Parker on Gothic architecture.
We have already noted that Machen early became aware of the beauty of the Gothic and that he was all of his life more or less under its influence. His conception of the Gothic was not quite the same as Horace Walpole’s. It stemmed rather from Parker and from Coleridge, from whom he learned that there is “in the spectacle of external nature something much more than mere pleasantness or sensuous beauty.” The rugged terrain of the land of the Silures would seem to offer little of pleasantness or sensuous beauty ... yet it did act upon Machen in much the same way that such a landscape had acted upon the imagination of such a lyrical poet as, for example, Wordsworth.
As a matter of fact, Machen did not hesitate to refer to Walpole’s “sham Gothic,” and he assumes that Walpole had a sort of “vague idea that there was something in a particular architecture of a particular era which was somehow or other curious and admirable.” Machen further remarks that one cannot possibly compare the school of Coleridge in its appreciation of nature with the school of Walpole in its appreciation of the Gothic. And then, he posesa question in which there lies the answer to his own and to many another writer’s problem. “May it not be that Coleridge and his fellows were but the forerunners of a new doctrine which was not fully revealed to them.”
We have remarked that Machen employs none of the traditional trappings of the Gothic tale. There are no clankings and bumpings and ghosties in the night. There are no ruined castles, no hermits in caves. Instead we find deserted houses in Lambeth and in Clerkenwell, and sometimes the houses are not even deserted. Nor are they occupied by monks or knights or old families in whose closets lurk the most deplorable of skeletons. The typical Gothic “hero,” either the sardonic Byronic or the melancholy Manfred type is never encountered. Machen’s heroes, if such they be, are rather ordinary young men like Lucian Taylor and Ambrose Meyrick, or perhaps you may wish to call the ever-present Dyson and the companionable Phillips heroes. There are, of course, sinister characters in Machen. Mr. Davies, outwardly ordinary, is as black a villain as can be found anywhere in the whole school of Otranto. Miss Lally, or Miss Leicester, are as horrific in their own quiet way as any harpy or hag encountered in the novels of Radcliff.
Arthur Machen is much more closely related in his work to Hawthorne and Poe than he is to his English contemporaries and predecessors. As Paul Elmer More has noted, Hawthorne and Poe are the only two writers in America who have won almost universal renown as artists, and that these two are each, in their own manner, a sovereign in that strange region of emotion which we name theweird. Their achievement, as Mr. More points out, is not at all like the Gothic novel introduced by Horace Walpole. There is little in them of the revival of medieval superstition and gloom which marked the rise of romanticism in Europe.
The unearthly visions of Poe and Hawthorne were not the results of literary whim or unbridled individualism but, according to Mr. More, were deeply rooted in American history. Now this is a rather strange matter, for there is nothing nationalistic in the nature of the work of these American writers. It follows a well established tradition, but it is not the tradition of the English school of the Gothic revival. It was greatly influenced by Germanic mysticism, just as Coleridge was influenced by Teutonic theory. These American writers seem to have missed the dilettantism that was associated with the Gothic revival in England. In this they are very close to Machen and his work. Both these writers were greatly influenced by their surroundings and by the influence of their own native landscape. The personal alchemy of each one transmuted the elements of that landscape and created a time and place that never were.
Poe especially, and to a far greater extent, was affected by landscape not only of his native Virginia but of every place he ever visited. Some years ago John Cowper Powys, a visiting, but much more sympathetic than usual, Englishman commented upon this aspect of the writings of Poe:
“For myself, as a traveller for a score of years between all of Edgar Allen Poe’s particular cities, and knowing the country round them a good deal better than I know myown, I confess—though it may be because of a kindred sensibility toward the ghostly, the weird, and the horror hinting: I have found even in those districts, though of course far more in the deeper south, elements here and there that correspond with disturbing closeness to the frightening things in his imaginary landscape.
“But it is not from those pine haunted woods and those morasses and those treacherous estuaries and those Lethean wharfs that the darker vistas and more troubling visions of Poe’s inspirations comes.
“They are conjured up from the symbols of pre-incarnate tremblings that we all find written on the nerves of our race—though only a few abnormal individuals can render articulate these hieroglyphics of holy terror.
“... We all conceal within us, inherited from an immemorial past, a secret yearning to enjoy by some magical shortcut the hidden potencies of nature. A responsive pulse begins to beat irrepressibly within us when Faust makes the sign of the Macrocosm, for there is not one among us for whom the idea of forbidden joys and an unnatural power over the forces of nature has not got a seductive appeal.”
Machen made this comment in a letter on the subject of the Gothic novel. “The fact is, I believe, that all the Gothic romances are sham Gothic romances. I mean that the people who put back their period into the middle ages, had hardly the faintest notion of what life in the middle ages, in a Gothic castle was really like. This, let me note, is nothing against their books as literature or else we should be laughing at a highly esteemed writer for supposingthat ninth century life at Elsinore had the remotest resemblance to the life which is depicted inHamlet.”
The books of Arthur Machen which have gained the greatest amount of attention are, naturally enough, the more sensational stories in which he touches upon themes that approach what is, or what has been in the past, forbidden territory. It seems odd that Arthur Machen, whose works have been so generally neglected, should have been scolded on occasion by various critics for his use of sexual themes. Actually there is no sexuality as such in any of Arthur Machen’s books. It does enter into some of the stories through the medium of mythology, Roman or Celtic, and sometimes aboriginal. And yet, such a critic as the gentle A. E. Houseman, could write of him, “Mixing up religion and sexuality is not a thing I am fond of.” Mr. Houseman, had he possessed something of Machen’s scholarship, would have perceived that religion and sexuality were not mixed up by Arthur Machen but rather by his own Celtic or Teutonic or Scandinavian ancestors. It is the more surprising, however, that such opinions as that expressed by the later great poet have not resulted in greater popularity for at least some of the work of Arthur Machen.
By far the most important elements in the pattern that runs through Machen’s work are the very ones he himself expressed many years ago, “The sense of the eternal mysteries and the eternal beauty hidden beneath the crust of common and commonplace things.”
The reputation of Arthur Machen undoubtedly restsmost securely on a single book,Hieroglyphics, and on perhaps a half dozen of his essays. His definition of what constitutes fine literature is, even today, beyond dispute. His thoughts on realism, or naturalism, a movement that was only just beginning to be felt in his youth have been admirably expressed in a passage in his bookThe Secret Glory.
“Of course, he said, (Ambrose Meyrick) I take realism to mean absolute and essential truthfulness of description, as opposed to merely conventional treatment. Zola is a realist not—as the imbeciles suppose because he described—well, rather minutely—many unpleasant sights and sounds and smells and emotions, but because he was a poet, a seer; because, in spite of his pseudo philosophies, his cheap materialisms, he saw the true heart, the reality of things. TakeLa Terre, do you think it is realistic because it describes minutely, and probably faithfully, the event of a cow calving? Not in the least; the local vet who was called in could probably do all that as well or better. It is realistic because it goes behind all the brutality, all the piggeries and inhumanities, of those frightful people, and shows us the strange, mad, transcendent passion that lay behind all those things—the wild desire for the land—a longing that burned, that devoured, that inflamed, that drove men to hell and death as would a passion for a goddess who might never be attained. Remember how ‘La Beauce’ is personified, how the earth swells and quickens before one, how every clod and morsel of the soil cries for its service and its sacrifice and its victims—I call that realism.
“Of course, there may be people who think that if you describe a pigsty well you are a realist, and if you describe an altar well you are romantic.... I do not know that the mental processes of Cretins form a very interesting subject for discussion.”
Frank Norris, an early apostle of realism, wrote, while he was still at college, this analysis of realism and of Zola: “Naturalism, as understood by Zola, is but a form of romanticism after all ... the naturalist takes no note of common people, common in so far as their interests, their lives and the things that occur in them are common, are ordinary. Terrible things must happen to the characters of the naturalistic tale. They must be twisted from the ordinary, wrenched from the quiet, uneventful round of everyday life and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama that works itself out in unleashed passions, in blood and in sudden death.”
There are many provocative passages on this subject in Machen. Take, for example, these thoughts expressed in Machen’sThe Art of Dickens:
“... it is not the main point in the finest literature to draw people so well that the reader begins to think that they must be ‘real’ people, and that the author is a sort of journalist with supernatural means of finding all the facts about them.”
“If we want to go to Margate, it would be idle to take a fairy barque, andsimili modoit would be but faint praise of a Gothic cathedral to say that it was quite weather proof.”
“What does it profit a painter to delineate a tree whichis very like a tree, unless it is something much more—unless it is also the symbol and the revelation of some great secret of nature? If this were not so, then the camera would be superior of Turner, and the shorthand writer would look down from his desk on poor blind Homer, who talks of gods and goddesses of fairy isles, and giants with one eye in their foreheads.”
Vincent Starrett many years ago made the statement that there was little humor in Arthur Machen’s works. Of humor, in the broadest Mark Twain, or even in the gentle Stephen Leacock vein, there is very little. But there is in almost all of Machen a wry, dry humor with perhaps a rather bitter taste. There are passages, even inThe Hill of Dreamsthat are as humorous as anything by Leacock. One reads his account of the publishing business as it was in his day with a realization that Machen is as much at home in satire as in sorcery. His autobiographical books are filled with humor, this time not so bitter. Many of his essays employ humor and satire in generous doses. Shortly after the publication ofThe Hill of DreamsandThe House of SoulsArthur Machen wrote several essays on the subject of the Holy Graal. These essays, the first of which appeared under the editorship of A. E. Waite, aroused quite a bit of attention and resulted in a certain amount of controversy in antiquarian circles. The Graal legends through their association with Arthur and Caerleon had been of great interest to Machen from his earliest years.
He knew every legend and every theory in the literature of the Graal. His first essay was at variance with someof the new theories that were then springing up. Chief among these was the theory that the Graal legends had their basis in a fertility cult which persisted in Wales right up until Norman times. Machen promptly branded this theory as absurd. “Let us grant,” he wrote, “that the question of fertility, which is the question of life, both for ourselves and for our cabbages, is behind everything. If we go far back enough, it is clear that we can do nothing in this world if we are so unlucky as to be dead: and this applies equally to the Phallic hypothesis of the origin of everything, which can be worked in very well with the fertility hypothesis. The whole point of a great many of the rites in fertility ceremonies seems to be built about the hypothesis that fertility could be enduced by certain ceremonies that were expected to put nature in a mood to be fertile.” And then Machen quotes from one of the experts who clung to this hypothesis, “Just as the sailor imitates the wind that he desires by whistling for it, so did the countrymen imitate the trees in the wood by making a mock tree called the Maypole.”
Machen seems willing enough to accept these theories but he asks, “What light shall we gain as to the actual emotions and intent of the seventeenth or sixteenth century people who danced about the Maypole? I venture to say none whatever ... they were not addressing any invocation to the woods or anything else. They were being jolly or merry at a certain time of the year in a traditional manner. For all I know, our learned people may decide that the game of marbles was originally a reminder to the spheres to keep on rolling. If I am told so, I shall not deny thedoctrine, but I shall maintain that the boys who play marbles on London pavements know nothing of it. Granted this hypothetical origin of marbles, it has nothing whatever to do with the game of the twentieth century.”
The note books of Arthur Machen, as fragmentarily revealed inThe London Adventure, are as fascinating as are the notebooks of Hawthorne, which as a matter of fact they much resemble. For example there are many notes concerned with patterns—and these bear a direct relationship with the earlier material in this chapter. Most of the notes concern labyrinths, mazes, spirals and whorls. He asks the question: Why was this form common to all primitive art? And then, in almost the same place in his note book one finds the sentence: “Literature began with charms, incantations, spells, songs of mystery, chants of religious ecstasy, the Bachic chorus, the rune, the mass.” This sentence is the basis forHieroglyphics. It is, according to Machen, the thesis of the book fairly well summed up in one sentence.
And this same pattern occurs in most of his stories. Among his notes we find this, “The maze was not only the instrument but the symbol of ecstasy; it was a pictured ‘inebriation,’ the sign of some age old process that gave the secret bliss to men, that was symbolized also by dancing, by lyrics with their recurring burdens, and their repeated musical phrases: a maze, a dance, a song: three symbols pointing to one mystery.”
It would require a thorough examination of the notebook of Arthur Machen, if such a thing were possible, by a man with the skill and scholarship of a John LivingstonLowes to trace and to tell the complete story of the pattern in Arthur Machen. Yet here, in brief, and in all his works, the pattern is everywhere apparent.
There are, undoubtedly, those who prefer Machen the essayist to Machen the story teller. Certainly his greatest work,Hieroglyphics, is sufficient reply to those who have tried to dismiss Machen as the creator of “shockers” concerned with demonology and sensational horror stories. The delightful pieces that appeared serially in the Lyons Mail and the Illustrated News and the London Graphic would please even the Manchester Guardian or A. E. Houseman, who once wrote that he found Machen not quite to his taste. His essays on the Grail legend are authoritative without being archeological, witty without being flippant or, what would have been unbearable, satirical.
And yet, in the essays no less than in the stories, the pattern is there and is recognizable. One is forever running across a phrase or a notion one has encountered before—some where, some time, some place—and the place usually turns out to be another Machen essay. For the pattern of Machen’s thinking is as obvious as the pattern in the rug; as obvious, and as simple, as the definitions supplied inHieroglyphics. The pattern is, as we know, summed up in the phrase: “removal from the common life.” It may be simplified further in the one word: “ecstasy.”
Now the word “ecstasy” has caused some confusion in the minds of certain of Machen’s detractors as well as among his admirers. There was a tendency, in the Twenties, as well as in the Nineties, to give the word “ecstasy” a connotation or a meaning similar to that employed bythe popular novelists of the time. “Ecstasy” seemed to many to be the “ecstasy” of the pallid, perverted creatures of the Cafe Royale and, later, a sort of Elinor Glynn-ish, sinnish quality. It was a word much favored by the writers of romances, the practitioners of the purple phrase. And so we encounter, at times, this “novelist of ecstasy and sin” sort of nonsense.
It should be pointed out thatHieroglyphics, that excellent volume of literary criticism having little to do with passion, in or out of the desert, bears the illuminating subtitle: “A Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature.” Andthisecstasy is of the mind—it is an exultation of the spirit of men. It is, to go back to the more descriptive phrase, the removal from the common life.
This pattern exists everywhere in Machen, sometimes it is developed by the characters and circumstances in his tales, or again it is carried out by argument or analysis in his essays, but always, upon closer examination, the grand design is apparent.
One may read, for example, the essay calledThe Hidden Mysteryand find that it is almost exactly the same asThe Mystic Speech. And then one readsThe Secret Gloryand finds, once again, the same theories, the same logic, the same figures and the same conclusions, expressed and explained as only Machen can set them down. This may send the casual reader, or even the amateur bibliographer, hunting from volume to volume with pencil and reading glass, for there seems to be indeed a hidden mystery, a mystic speech, a glorious secret in these passages and paragraphs.
Actually, of course, one is merely becoming aware of the pattern, and one is becoming impressed with the simplicity and the one-ness of everything Machen ever wrote. Of course there are actual resemblances between the essays mentioned and strong connections between them and the book. For the essays were written years before, and one of them was actually delivered as a lecture before the learned Quest Society of London. They are all a part of the book that is now known asThe Secret Glory.