Chapter FourA NOBLE PROFESSION
“I reflected, then, on my want of prospects, and I determined to embark in literature.”“Really, that was strange. You seem in pretty comfortable circumstances, though.”“Though! what a satire upon a noble profession!”
“I reflected, then, on my want of prospects, and I determined to embark in literature.”
“Really, that was strange. You seem in pretty comfortable circumstances, though.”
“Though! what a satire upon a noble profession!”
This bit of dialogue takes place in one of those chance encounters with which several of Machen’s tales begins. It might well have ensued between Machen and some compatriot of far-off Gwent as they met in a London street early in that daringly decadent decade.
For Machen, having served an apprenticeship in grangerizing and cataloguing, having composed calendars and made translations “on the house” and having written a story that fluttered the dovecotes and published a book that stirred up a tempest in a tiny tot’s teacup, was definitely a literary man—or at least he pursued the practice of letters. He had cause, in later years, to give the choice more serious thought than he had in the 90’s. He had cause to reflect upon it, but never did he regret the choice—if choice it was. For if ever a man’s destiny lay in the art and the practice of letters,that man was Machen. And of course he knew this—he knew it in the lonely room in Clarendon Road and in the downstairs parlor at Llanddewi. And he knew it years later when, in computing his earnings for twenty-odd years labor, he found the sum to be not in excess of £635. And of course he knew it even when he wondered, as he some times did, if he had failed in his art.
Machen had in him, besides the seeds of his destiny, more than a bit of that delightful fellow Dyson whom he created somewhat to his own image and likeness. Dyson, you will recall, was “a man of letters, and an unhappy instance of talents misapplied. With gifts that might have placed him in the flower of his youth among the most favored of Bentley’s favorite novelists, he had chosen to be perverse; he was, it is true, familiar with scholastic logic but he knew nothing of the logic of life and he flattered himself with the title of artist, when he was in fact but an idle and curious spectator of other men’s endeavors. Amongst many delusions, he cherished one most fondly, that he was a strenuous worker, and it was with a gesture of supreme weariness that he would enter his favorite resort, a small tobacco shop in Great Queen Street, and proclaim to anyone who cared to listen that he had seen the rising and setting of two successive suns.”
But this isn’t Machen! Of course it isn’t! Nor am I suggesting that Dyson is a portrait of the artist as a young man. But if you will recall for a moment Machen’s obvious fondness for his creature, Dyson, his almost paternal acceptance of Dyson’s pomposities and his benevolent air in setting down Dyson’s latest preposterous formula, you willrealize, I think, that Machen was the model, and that he rather relished poking a bit of fun at himself, his younger self at any rate.
Well then, early in the 90’s Machen had his trip abroad and his cottage in the country and his gradually accumulated legacies. And now he was, at last, about to have his rooms in Grays Inn and his summers in the south of France. He was indeed a man of letters!
The Three Impostors, even though it failed to set Fleet Street afire, did add to Machen’s stature. It gave him something of a reputation in certain quarters which, if not exactly fashionable at the moment, were not on the side of the Philistines. The failure, if it was one, ofThe Three ImpostorsMachen attributes to a contemporary crisis in literary circles. “There were,” he says mildly, “scandals in ’95—which had made people impatient with reading matter that was not obviously and obtrusively ‘healthy.’”
The several tales or episodes that make upThe Three Impostors, while they may be neither obviously “healthy” nor obtrusively “healthy,” were much less unwholesome than most of the literature that was then circulating in London. Based for the most part on early Celtic folk-lore and legends of the Welsh border, they developed the theme of primitive races, of “little people” who have, in some out of the way places, managed to survive to the present day.
The nature of the tales does indeed tend toward the horrific and even the “unhealthy,” but the manner of their telling and the presence of the almost “deadpan” Dysonin most of these episodes results in a rather curious blend of pedantry and unpleasantness. Moreover, so faithfully did Machen follow a Stevensonian pattern that even the Marquis of Queensbury, had he not been otherwise occupied at the moment, could have taken no offense. It would seem, then, that it was this almost sedate treatment that failed to set the bookstalls ablaze. A less restrained publisher than John Lane would have had Beardsley do the illustrations for the book—with quite predictable results. There are those, Grant Richards and George Bernard Shaw among them, who suggest that Lane was rather afraid of Beardsley—and not without reason. For Beardsley was an unpredictable and vindictive chap. He was once criticized for having drawn a Pierrot for a cover design of the “Savoy”—it was not the sort of thing, he was told, that would appeal to the British public.
A sketch of John Bull was substituted, accepted and sent out to subscribers. It was then discovered that Beardsley had taken his revenge by subtly indicating that John Bull was in a condition in which no Briton would willingly appear in public. For such sophomoric shenanigans Lane had given Beardsley the sack. There was never any question of Beardsley illustratingThe Three Impostors, nor could there be any question of the result. NeverthelessThe Three Impostorsrates perhaps third among Machen’s works, and has been frequently reprinted.
The story did cause publishers, from time to time, to ask Machen if he had something else in “the manner ofThe Three Impostors.” This was not as flattering to the author’s vanity as might seem. Having gone through the taleonce Machen had no wish to “re-cook the cabbage which was already boiled to death.” Nevertheless, one doesn’t speak thus bluntly to publishers—even when they solicitously seek manuscripts. There was another and, on the whole, very attractive proposition. Two gentlemen, obviously with an eye for such things, proposed a new weekly paper for which, they further proposed, Mr. Machen and a Mr. Wells should do a series of stories—and in their familiar manner, of course. Thus Mr. Machen was to do a series of horror stories in the manner ofThe Three Impostorsand Mr. Wells was to do stories in the manner ofThe Time Machine.
The Time Machinehad appeared about the same time asThe Great God Pan. While Machen’s story was stirring up its teacup tempest, a young gentleman named H. G. Wells had made a very real, and a most deserved sensation with a book calledThe Time Machine. Mr. Wells had written his story at a time when he was living from hand to mouth as a journalist at lodgings in Kent. And so the new paper, to be called theUnicorn, was to feature the works of these two young men who had recently created something new and exciting and not, as was too often the case in those days, unfit for general circulation.
Machen admitted that he was cheered and elated at the prospect ... until he began to re-cook the cabbage. Possibly Mr. Wells felt the same way, for theUnicornceased to exist before a single one of Machen’s tales (he wrote four of them) appeared in it, while Mr. Wells contributed but one story, calledThe Cone.
Machen realized that the Stevensonian had been done to a turn—and so he had done with it—there would now besomething new. He had already writtenThe Shining PyramidforThe Unknown World, edited by his friend A. E. Waite, and one or two other tales—but now, once again—and this time there was no doubt about it—The Great Romance.
Once again there was the question—what was it to be about? Machen labored mightily over the beginnings of this new book. He sat at his Japanese bureau in his rooms at Grays Inn, he roamed the deserted streets and squares of Bloomsbury and pondered at great length the problem—what would it be like?
I suppose Dyson would have sympathized deeply with these soul searchings and solitary soliloquies—for Dyson, too, had often wondered what his books would be like, and Dyson hadhisJapanese bureau. At any rate, and before too long, Machen had the idea. His book would be “a Robinson Crusoe of the mind” ... and for such a book, Machen had traveled well.
Machen had at last decided, and for the second time in his life, to write the Great Romance. The first time it had turned out to beThe Chronicle of Clemendy, that light-hearted collection of tales having nothing whatever to do with the Great Romance he had decided to write, and having nothing in it of the loneliness of his life in London. This time it becameThe Hill of Dreams, and one knows in reading it that this also is not the Great Romance: for Machen could not have decided to writeThe Hill of Dreamsany more than he could have decided to write a “Robinson Crusoe” of the soul—even though he tells us that this is precisely what he had decided to do. It is perhaps a coincidence,and a very fortunate one, that the book did turn out to be just that.
Machen was, as we have seen, a very careful man with his models. He could write in the manner of Thomas Browne, or Robert Herrick, or William Morris, or Robert Stevenson, and very carefully did he cultivate their manner. When he had perfected the manner, and made use of it, the design was there but the substance had altered. However meticulously he might labor perfecting the model, making no conscious effort to improve upon it, he could not prevent a transmutation from taking place. This is apparent even inThe Three Impostorsfor, even though the pattern is recognizable, and even though it is studied and carefully contrived, there are elements, so strong is the triumph of mind over manner, that make it peculiarly Machen’s own and not Stevenson’s.
The new book, Machen says, was born in a phrase encountered in Charles Whibley’s introduction toTristram Shandy. Whibley described the work as being “a picaresque of the mind.” And so Machen said to himself,“I will write a Robinson Crusoe of the soul.” This was no mere decision; it was, rather, a demonstration of the fact that there is an affinity of the mind, some minds, for an idea, some ideas.The Hill of Dreams, the picaresque of the mind, the Crusoe of the soul, was at the heart of Machen’s Great Romance. It responded to a phrase for which it had a natural affinity and so the Great Romance,The Hill of Dreams, was born.
“It was,” wrote Machen, “to represent loneliness not of body on a desert island, but loneliness of soul and mind and spirit in the midst of myriads and myriads of men. Ihad some practical experience of this state to help me: not altogether in vain had I been constrained in Clarendon Road and to have my habitation in the tents of Notting Hill Gate. I immediately marked down all these old experiences as a valuable asset in the undertaking of my task: I knew what it was to live on a little in a little room, what it meant to pass day after day, week after week, month after month through theinextricabilis terrorof the London streets, to tread a grey labyrinth whose path had no issue, no escape, no end. I had known as a mere lad how terrible it was on a gloomy winter evening to go out because a little room had become intolerable, to go out walking through those multitudinous streets, to see the light of kindly fires leaping on the walls, to see friendly faces welcoming father, or husband, or brother, to hear laughter or a song sounding from within, perhaps to catch half glimpses of the faces of the lovers as they looked out, happy, into the dark night. All this had been my daily practice and habit for a long while: I was qualified then, in a measure, to describe the fate of a Robinson Crusoe cast on the desert island of the tremendous and terrible London.”
The writing of this book occupied Machen from the autumn of 1895 to the spring of 1897. It went very slowly. For one thing, Machen discovered that the style he had so carefully cultivated for the telling of the improbable tale ofThe Three Impostorshad to be just as carefully destroyed and every mannerism eradicated. He had become fluent in the Stevensonian vein—now he found himself writing with uncertainty, nothing flowed easily and naturally. His pen could not keep pace with his mind and his mind was racingrapidly through the garden of Avallaunius in far-off Gwent. ForThe Hill of Dreamswas to be about, if it was about anything, a boy’s wanderings and imaginings in a mysterious place he had found, or dreamed he had found, in the Roman ruins near Caerleon.
Chapters were written and rewritten, his day’s output varied from perhaps three lines to three folios. At last the book was finished in the spring of 1897. He had been at it, quite steadily, for almost two years, with a summer in Brittany in 1896, most of which he spent thinking of the book lying untouched in his room in London. In March 1897 Grant Richards wrote him to ask for his next manuscript. Mr. Richards, a new publisher, and anxious, no doubt, to get off on the right foot, wanted something “in the manner ofThe Three Impostors.” He got, instead,The Hill of Dreams. Richards returned the book along with a paternal letter pointing out to Machen the error of his ways and urging him not to jeopardize his reputation by publishing such a book. Several other publishers subsequently did the same and the book remained for years as it was, still titledThe Garden of Avallaunius, and still not published. And then in 1907, after ten years, Grant Richards changed his mind and publishedThe Garden of Avallaunius, but he insisted also upon changing the title on the plea, perhaps justified, that no one would properly pronounce “Avallaunius.” It may be, however, thatThe Garden of Avallauniusdid appear in print before the Richards edition.
In the summer of 1901 Machen wrote to a friend, a Miss Brooke-Alder: “A certain story, translated from the English and calledLe Grande Dieu Pan, is now appearingin a French review. Maeterlinck is extremely interested in it and has sent a message to the author asking him to forward any manuscripts in order that they also may be rendered into French. I am sending a manuscript calledThe Garden of Avallauniuswhich I finished four years ago, and if the great man chances to like it, I suppose I shall have the curious fate of finding myself a French rather than an English author.”
Whether or not this translation and publication ever took place, I have been unable to discover. However, the Richards edition of 1907 was the first of almost half a score that have continued to be largely out of print up until the present time.
Well, then, the Great Romance was completed in 1897—and they would have none of it. And so it remained for another ten years, more or less, in one of the spacious compartments of the Japanese bureau.
Machen was, at this time, living the literary life, not quite as it was lived by the swish young men who were then breaking into print and whose names appeared in the more sensational evening papers and on court writs, but still, it was the literary life and still—a noble profession.
The Japanese bureau, its cubbyholes and compartments jammed with notes and notebooks and scraps of paper, had yielded up many tales and articles that appeared in this or that journal. Machen had already writtenThe Holy Things,Psychology,Witchcraft,The Rose Garden,The Ceremony,Midsummerand many other. He was becoming well known as the author of a number of rather strange, rather cleverstories. Sometimes they were called “nasty” or “disagreeable” stories by outraged critics who were quite likely to view them with an eye jaundiced by too careful perusal ofThe Yellow Book. The Keynote Series sold quite well and Machen’sThe Great God PanandThe Inmost Lightin Volume V,The Three ImpostorsandThe Iron Maidin Volume XIX had wide circulation.The Memoirs of Casanova, published in the same year asPan, though limited to a thousand copies, brought him some reputation and recognition on a more scholarly plane. Still, he made no fortune on these books, then—or ever. And that was beginning to matter. He was even moved, in 1895, to enter an American short story competition. His entry,The Red Hand, written for the competition, won no prize but it did appear in the Christmas issue ofChapman’s Magazinefor that year.
It was a quiet life. He had, in those days, few friends and few acquaintances. His life was in reading books and in writing them. That no one seemed to be publishing them was, for the moment, quite unimportant. He describes his daily routine inThings Near and Far: “Every morning after breakfast I read over what I have written the night before, correcting here and there and everywhere, generally convinced that the passage which had pleased me so much as I wrote it was, after all, not magnificent. I took the bulldog for a walk from twelve to one, and another half hour walk in the afternoon. Then two cups of tea without milk or sugar at four, and the rigor of the literary game till seven, and again after dinner till eleven. It was a life of routine, and all its adventures, difficulties, defeats and rare triumphs were those of the written page.”
This was the literary life far removed from the rarified atmosphere of the Cafe Royale and merry, mad circle of poets and artists of the Dowson, Beardsley, Conder, Crackenthorpe set who were usually contemplating Soho or suicide or both. It was the literary life of a recluse, of a Dyson, or of the brilliant monologist ofHieroglyphics. In the course of these long and thoughtful evenings when the pen scratched and the bulldog dozed and page followed page into the cubbyholes or into oblivion, Machen formulated many of the theories of art and literature which were expounded by the recluse of Barnsbury. Writing of this period some years later Machen says that literature “is one of the many ways of escaping from life, to be classified with Alpine Climbing, Chess, Methylated Spirit and Prussic Acid.” But this was written in 1915 or thereabouts, in 1897 he was less inclined to a mellow cynicism. For it was then not only an escape from life, but a means, perhaps “the only means of realizing and shewing life, or, at least certain aspects of life.”
This preoccupation with literature extended even to his employment, for through 1898 Machen worked on the staff of “Literature,” a weekly paper published by the Times. This seems to have been not too happy an association, for he says he had been harassed and worried for a whole year in the office of “Literature,” and that he was in high spirits in May 1899 when he was released from this bondage.
Besides, there were a great many important things to be done. There was, of course, another Great Romance. Like its predecessors this one did not quite come off, or it was never quite finished. What there was of it was eventuallypublished asThe White People. There were other irons on the hearth, and one of these had been heated and re-heated many times before; but it was never quite forged or beaten into shape.
This is the story we know asA Fragment of Life. It is, in its present state, a mere fragment of a great work. Machen had lived with the idea for ten years or more, for the story was born in another tale published in the Globe or the Gazette or some other paper in 1890 under the titleThe Resurrection of the Dead, which was not quite what Machen intended when he originally called itResurrectio Mortuorum.
This story is about a man who one day recovered his “ancestral consciousness.” The idea had long fascinated Machen, perhaps because he was forever on the verge of recovering his own “ancestral consciousness,” or perhaps because he had never quite lost it. At any rate, it was always close to him, it greatly influenced his daily life because he never became used to the contrast between “raw London suburbs and the old gray houses under the forest near the river” in Gwent.
This, andThe White People, seemed to have been of the greatest importance to him. Neither was finished in that century—nor were they ever completely finished. Yet in this time he wrote and completed one of the best of his books, and one of the finest books of our time.Hieroglyphicswas finished in 1899 and it joined the fragments and the beginnings of the Great Romances that had been written and put aside in that repository of Great Romances—the Japanese bureau.
OfHieroglyphicswe shall have much to say later, forit is of greater significance in this twentieth century than in the nineteenth century in which it was written.
Now we are come to the end of the year 1899—the turn of the century. This was, as has been previously noted, an intensely time-conscious era. The birth of the twentieth century was awaited with perhaps more interest and excitement than had attended similar events in the past. For one thing, everyone was conscious of the enlightenment of their age, progress was almost as much a byword in the Nineties as it became in the Nineteen-Twenties and the early Nineteen-Forties. And, of course, there was the minor satisfaction of knowing that it was quite likely to be the only turn of the century within the memory of living man. Prophets of doom had their say and their day along with those who proclaimed new glory and new heights and new horizons. It was, to be sure, a well-heralded and eagerly awaited event. That a mere clock should unemotionally tick so momentous a second!
The more memorable men of the notorious Nineties were, for the most part, either dead or dying, visibly decaying or decently interred. They passed, most of them, mercifully before the significant second struck.
This was a year of great significance in the life of Arthur Machen. For in this year “a great sorrow which had long been threatened fell upon me; I was once more alone.” And in another place, he writes, “... and then my life was dashed into fragments. I ceased to write. I travelled.”
Again and again he refers to this event, in his twoautobiographical books and in several of the forewords and prefaces he later wrote for re-issues of his earlier books. Always the references are veiled in mystery or followed by a recital of strange experiences and a cloud of mysticism that conceals, as it was intended, the shattering event.
What was this event? There are a few who know, but they are not likely to reveal what they know. As recently as 1947, less than a year before he died, Machen wrote in a letter, “Even now it is painful to recall. I would rather you did not refer to it.”
Since this is not intended as a biography, nor a Life, we shall not pursue the matter. There is this much more to be said, that may give some clue to the events of the year 1900. Machen wrote inThings Near and Far,
“I can set down the facts, or rather such of them as I remember, but I am quite confident that I am not, in the real sense of the word, telling the truth; that is, I am not giving any sense of the very extraordinary atmosphere in which I lived in the year 1900, of the curious and indescribable impression which the events of these days made upon me; the sense that everything had altered, that everything was very strange, that I lived in daily intercourse with people who would have been impossible, unimaginable, a year before; that the figure of the world was changed utterly for me—of all this I can give no true picture dealing as I am with what I called facts. I maintained long ago inHieroglyphicsthat facts as facts do not signify anything or communicate anything; and I am sure that I was right, when I confess that, as a purveyor of exact information, I can make nothing of the year 1900. But avoiding the facts, I have got a greatdeal nearer the truth in the last Chapter ofThe Secret Glory, which describes the doings and feelings of two young people who are paying their first visit to London.Inever bolted up to town with the house master’s red haired parlour maid; but truth must be told in figures.”
Back in 1880, while his family were making plans for him, plans involving the Royal College of Surgeons, Machen used to walk to the Pontypool Road station to pick up the London papers. On his way back he would rest for awhile, (it was an eight mile walk) under the hedges and turn to the theatrical pages which seemed to him by far the most interesting parts of the paper, and the stage the most fascinating part of the Fabulous City of the West. And so, in a sense, he followed the bright lights to London, and then, having arrived there, set to work in the dark caves (HERE DWELL PUBLISHERS) of Chandos Street, Leicester Square and Catharine Street.
There is not the slightest bit of evidence that Machen ever thought longingly of footlights and grease paint or, for that matter, that he ever even thought of them at all after he arrived in London. Yet here in 1901 he dons buskins or whatever and prepares to tread the boards, and in a travelling company. His first engagements were with the Benson Shakesperean Company and with them he travelled the length and breadth of England for several season. He seems to have enjoyed it all tremendously, although it does not seem to have affected or influenced his later work. As a matter of fact, with the exception of a brief chapter and ahalf in one of his autobiographical books, he does not refer to his career on the stage at any great length. Sufficient unto the days....
And then one day, perhaps when the trees were beginning to put forth, Machen resumed the London Adventure. In 1902, and without fanfare of any sort, Grant Richards brought out a remarkable book with a strange title. It was calledHieroglyphics, and it was subtitledA Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature, by Arthur Machen. The book was born, as so many books are, while the author was reviewing books for a weekly journal. It was written in the happy period following his release from “the detestable office life” and as a perfectly normal reaction against it, and it remains to this day one of the best, and the least known and the most sadly neglected books of English criticism.
A noted publisher once told Machen thatHieroglyphicshad “influenced the whole standpoint of English literary criticism.” One wishes it had! At any rate, Machen read proofs of the book while playing in “The Varsity Belle,” and he read reviews of it while playing in “Paolo and Francesca.” And then, whenHieroglyphicsseemed unlikely to set Fleet Street afire, or even to start a small blaze in one of the University debating clubs, Machen began once more to write and to publish.
His old friend, A. E. Waite, a distinguished writer in the field of the occult and the mystic, began to publish Machen’s stories. Waite, who was also manager for Horlick’s Malted Milk, had managed to persuade the malted milk magnate to sponsor or subsidize a magazine. This was certainly the strangest commercial venture on record, for themagazine published material concerning the occult and mystical topics that appealed to Waite. Horlick was, presumably, happy to see his name on the cover and on the masthead of the magazine. It was in this esoteric little journal that some of Machen’s work first appeared ...The White People,A Fragment of Lifeand, at long last,The Garden of Avallaunius.
Machen remarks, somewhere, that he did not know that the sale of Malted Milk was unfavorably affected by the publication of these tales. As a matter of fact, the stories were quite well received. Such things get around and, in 1906, Grant Richards collected the best of them, plusPan,The Inmost Light,The Red Handand published them in a book calledThe House of Souls. Richards had changed his mind about Machen, but apparently with reservations, for in 1906 another Machen book,Dr. Stiggins, appeared, but under the device of a little-known publisher. This book is, in effect, an amplification of some views set forth in the Preface toThe House of Souls. Mr. Richards wouldn’t touch this, but he did bring outThe Hill of Dreamsin the following year.
And then there was another change in Machen’s life. He fell into journalism ... something that had once been devoutly wished for by the dear, dead folk of Caerleon.