The Arthur Machen Megapack: 25 Classic Works (154 page)

I confess all this seems A B C to me, though I see you are still inclined to think me a little paradoxical—not to say sophistical—but it grows more difficult when one gets to the question of the “interesting” or “absorbing” book. As I said “interesting” seems such an ambiguous word. It may stand for that æsthetic emotion produced, say, by the Œdipus; it may denote the wide-eyed attention of the butcher’s wife listening to the story of my landlady as to the love-affairs of the grocer’s daughter—and there are many books which are, virtually, “Tales of My Landlady” printed and bound. We must really then omit “interesting” in our account of the possible criteria of fine art; the word as it were cancels itself out, because it may mean on the one hand the possession of the highest artistic value, or on the other it may serve as epithet for a book which gratifies the lowest curiosity. You know there are books which the French have kindly named “romans à clef”; and I suppose there is no more miserable form of book-making. The receipt is easy enough. The grocer’s daughter, to whose amours I alluded just now, is really named Miss Buggins, and the gentleman is Mr Tibb. Well, suppose that my landlady, relating their lyric to the butcher’s wife, should, with a knowing wink, profess to tell the story of Miss Ruggins and Mr Ribb—she would simply be composing a
roman à clef
without knowing it. You might say that it is hardly worth while to labour the point, that such “interest” as this is wholly and lamentably inartistic—that it is the very contrary to all true art—but it is not long since a person of some literary note, in criticising the “Heptameron,” stated that its chief value lay in the fact that one could identify the persons who tell the stories and those also of whom they were told!

But there is another interest of a much higher kind, and that is the sensational. We have done some excellent books of this sort in England, and perhaps you will understand the class I mean when I say that a novel of this description is hard to lay down, and harder still to take up again when you have once found out the secret. This is not high art; you are always at liberty to put down “Lycidas,” but then you are compelled to take it up again and again, and the secret of “Lycidas” is always a secret, and one never fails to experience the joy of an artistic surprise. Still the books I mean sometimes show very high artifice, and in itself, perhaps, the quality that I am talking about, the power of exciting a vivid curiosity, an earnest desire to know what is to come next is not, like the vulgar
roman à clef
curiosity, in actual disaccord from the purpose of art. Indeed I imagine that this trick of stimulating the curiosity may be made subservient to purely æsthetic ends, it may become a handmaid to lead one towards that desire of the unknown which I think was one of the synonyms I gave you for the master word—Ecstasy. Still, though the trick is a good one, it will not, by itself, make fine art. You may discover so much by reading the “Moonstone,” that monument of ingenuity and absurdity. On the face of it all detective stories come under this heading: formally, no doubt, they must all be reckoned as tricks, and they may vary from the infinitely ingenious to the infinitely imbecile, and so far as I remember, the famous French tales of detection verge towards the lower rather than the higher ground. But I am inclined, not very logically, perhaps, to make an exception in favour of Poe’s Dupin, and to place him almost in the sphere of pure literature. Logically, he is a detective, but I almost think that in his case the detective is a symbol of the mystagogue. As I say, I should be pressed hard if I were asked to make out my case in terms and syllogisms, but if you require me to do so, I would say first of all that the atmosphere of Dupin—and you must remember that in literature everything counts; it is not alone the plot, or the style that we have to consider—has to me hints of that presence which I have called ecstasy. Listen to this:

“It was a freak of fancy in my friend (for what else shall I call it?) to be enamoured of the Night for her own sake; and into this
bizarrerie
, as into all his others, I quietly fell; giving myself up to his wild whims with a perfect
abandon
. The sable divinity would not herself dwell with us always; but we could counterfeit her presence. At the first dawn of the morning we closed all the massive shutters of our old building; lighting a couple of tapers which, strongly perfumed, threw out only the ghastliest and feeblest of rays. By the aid of these we then buried our souls in dreams—reading, writing, or conversing, until warned by the clock of the advent of the true Darkness. Then we sallied forth into the streets, arm in arm, continuing the topics of the day, or roaming far and wide until a late hour, seeking amid the wild lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of mental excitement which quiet observation can afford.”

And again; in the stories themselves, in the conduct of M. Dupin’s detective processes, I find a faint suggestion of the under-consciousness or other consciousness of man, a mere hint, not, I think, expressed in so many words, rather latent than patent, that if you would thoroughly understand the rational man you must have sounded the irrational man, the mysterious companion that walks beside each one of us on the earthly journey. Of course the artifice in the Dupin stories is of the very highest kind, but for the reasons I have given I am inclined to think that there is more than artifice, and the shadow, at all events, of art itself.

But this exceptional case of Poe’s detective tales only leads us back to the main proposition—that the power of exciting a very high sensational interest does not, in itself, mark out a book as being fine literature. I think I proved the proposition by my instance of the “Moonstone,” but if that does not convince you, we might demonstrate this theorem in the same way as we demonstrated the other one about the “literature” that produces its effect on the emotions. We have only to send out a series of telegrams, or we may even glance at the newspaper, and follow a case in the Central Criminal Court. Or we may affirm, more generally, that life often offers many highly absorbing and highly interesting spectacles, but that life is not art, and therefore, that literature which fails to rise above the level of life, or rather, to penetrate beneath the surface of life, is not fine literature in our sense of that term. A gold nugget may be as pure and fine as you like, but it is not a sovereign; it lacks the stamp; and it is the business of art to give its stamp and imprint to the matter of life.

I really think then that we have disposed of perhaps the most generally received of artistic fallacies—that books are to be judged by their power of reproducing in the reader those feelings of grief, interest, curiosity, and so forth which he experiences or may experience in his everyday life, which he really does experience in greater or less degree every time he talks to a friend, takes up a newspaper, or receives a telegram. It comes to this again and again, doesn’t it, that Art and Life are two different spheres, and that the Artist with a capital A is not a clever photographer who understands selection in a greater or less degree.

But before we go on with our work and see what can be done with other literary “solvents” I want to make a digression. I should have made it before, if you had pulled me up at the proper cue, and that was when I spoke of “interest” as a highly ambiguous term, the fruitful parent of “undistributed middles.” You see how the unscrupulous sophist would bend this word to his dark work, don’t you? It would be, I suppose, something like this:

A very high degree of interest [of the artistic kind] is the mark of fine literature.

But, the “Moonstone” excites a very high degree of interest [of the sensational kind].

Therefore
, the “Moonstone” has the mark of fine literature.

You note the “paltering” with the word, its use now in one sense, and now in another; and if that sort of thing were allowed we should have Wilkie Collins placed among the Immortals before we knew where we were. But hasn’t it occurred to you that nearly all the terms we are using are patient of the same vile uses? You remember that we began with “literature” itself, as a monstrous example of ambiguity, sheltering as it did both the publications of the Anti-Everything Society and the Song of Ulysses’ Wandering; even now we are trying to track the monster to his den in spite of his manifold turnings and disguises. In the meanwhile, for the sake of clearness, we agreed to prefix the epithet “fine” to the word when we meant the “Odyssey” class, though if we say “fine” so often I am afraid we run the risk of being thought superfine. However one must run all risks in the cause of making oneself understood; and so I say you ought to have pulled me up when I talked about “art” and “books that appealed to the emotions.” My “art” may not be the same as your “art,” and “emotions” are still more dangerous in the same way.

I think I made some attempt to deal with “art” as I was talking. I contrasted it with “artifice,” and my phrase “Artist with a big A” was another hint to you that the word must be handled cautiously. You know that in ordinary conversation we say that bees have “the art” or “an art” of making hexagonal cells of wax, that wasps have an art of making a sort of paper for their nests, that there is an art of logic, an art of cookery, an art in making a gravel path. Now in each of these instances the word really speaks of the adaptation of means to ends. In the case of the bees and wasps there is a slightly different
nuance
of meaning, because they make their cells and their paper just as a bird builds its nest, through the influence of forces which to us are occult, which we conveniently sum up under the word instinct. In the arts of cookery and pathmaking there is a conscious employment of certain means towards the securing of certain ends; and it is at least possible that the swallow, gathering its materials and shaping them, has at the moment nothing but a blind impulse, similar to that of hunger—we all know when we are hungry and we all know what to do in such a case, but we do not all know the physiology of the stomach and the gastric juices, and perhaps not one of us knows the whole secret of inanition and nutrition. We simply eat because we want to eat, not because we wish to supply ourselves with a certain quantity of peptones; and so perhaps the swallow gathers her nest and shapes it, without the consciousness of the eggs and the little birds that are to follow. But I need not remind you that there are plenty of well authenticated instances of animals who have consciously used means to secure ends, and thus “art” in its common significance is not even an exclusively human faculty. When, for example, the bees find themselves in danger of being left queenless, they administer what has been called “royal food” to a common grub, and that which would have been a worker becomes a queen; and in this case the bees are as much “artists” as the cook who puts a particular ingredient into a dish with the view of obtaining a particular flavour.

Now, then, let us apply all this to our matter. I daresay you have often heard a book praised for its “great art,” and if you have read it you will have discovered that its “art” is simply contrivance, the very adaptation of means to ends that we have been discussing. “The art with which the mystery is carefully kept in the background,” “the art by which the two characters are contrasted throughout the volume,” “the highly artistic manner in which Fernando and the heroine are brought together on the last page”—these, you see clearly, are contrivances, artifices, in no way differing in degree from the contrivances of the man who makes the garden path, of the cook who “dusts in” just a suspicion of lemon-rind, of the bee who administers the “royal food.” This “art” then is a totally different thing from our Art with the capital letter, with the epithet “fine,” or “high” before it; and in future when I mean “adaptation of means to ends,” I shall always say “artifice”; while “art” will be retained and set apart for higher uses.

And now as to “emotion.” Here, I think, you ought to have been down on me. You might have said: “You declare that the appeal to the emotions is not a test of fine literature. But to what then does Homer appeal? What is the “Œdipus” but an appeal to the emotions? What is all exquisite lyric poetry but the cry of the emotions, set to music?” I suppose that, as a matter of fact, you understood my real meaning by the instance I gave; the anguish of a wife at the loss of a husband; you saw that what I wanted to say was this: that fine literature does not content itself with repeating, or mimicking, the emotions of private, personal, everyday life. Still, I should have gone into the matter more fully then, and as I did not do so, we had better see what can be done now. And do you know that I believe that the best approach we can make to a rather subtle question will be a somewhat indirect one? Just now I was talking about Poe’s Dupin stories, and I tried, rather vaguely, to justify my tentative inclusion of them in the higher class of letters, by pointing out that Poe seemed to hint at the “other-consciousness” of man, and to suggest, at least, the presence of that shadowy, unknown, or half-known companion who walks beside each one of us all our days. I tried to realise the image of a man, followed or rather attended, by a spiritual fellow, treading a path parallel with but different from his own; and now I want you to carry out this image into the sphere of words. Already you must have a hint of it. One might draw a figure; something like this:

Fine Literature. “Literature.”

Art. Artifice.

Emotion. Feelings.

And before I go into the special question, let me extend the list; it will explain itself.

Romance, romantic. A “Romantic” Affair in the West End.