The Arthur Machen Megapack: 25 Classic Works (3 page)

After that, there would seem to be no need for further comment on “The Hill of Dreams.” But there is—there is!

Quite as important as what Mr. Machen says is his manner of saying it. He possesses an English prose style which in its mystical suggestion and beauty is unlike any other I have encountered. There is ecstacy in his pages. Joris-Karl Huysmans in a really good translation suggests Machen better, perhaps, than another; both are debtors to Baudelaire.
¹

The “ecstasy” one finds in Machen’s work (of which more anon) is due in no small degree to his beautiful English “style”—an abominable word. But Machen is no mere word-juggler. His vocabulary, while astonishing and extensive, is not affectedly so. Yet his sentences move to sonorous, half-submerged rhythms, swooning with pagan color and redolent of sacerdotal incense. What is the secret of this graceful English method? It is this: he achieves his striking results and effects through his noteworthy gift of selection and arrangement. I had reached this conclusion, I think, before I encountered a passage from “The Hill of Dreams,” which clinched it:

“Language, he understood, was chiefly important for the beauty of its sounds, by its possession of words, resonant, glorious to the ear, by its capacity, when exquisitely arranged, of suggesting wonderful and indefinable impressions, perhaps more ravishing and further removed from the domain of strict thought than the impressions excited by music itself. Here lay hidden the secret of suggestion, the art of causing sensation by the use of words.”

Was it ever better expressed? He defines his method and exhibits its results at the same time. And dipping almost at random into the same volume, here is a further example of the method:

“Slowly and timidly he began to untie his boots, fumbling with the laces, and glancing all the while on every side at the ugly, misshapen trees that hedged the lawn. Not a branch was straight, not one was free, but all were interlaced and grew one about another; and just above ground, where the cankered stems joined the protuberant roots, there were forms that imitated the human shape, and faces and twining limbs that amazed him. Green mosses were hair, and tresses were stark in grey lichen; a twisted root swelled into a limb; in the hollows of the rooted bark he saw the masks of men… As he gazed across the turf and into the thicket, the sunshine seemed really to become green, and the contrast between the bright glow poured on the lawn and the black shadows of the brake made an odd flickering light in which all the grotesque postures of stem and root began to stir; the wood was alive. The turf beneath him heaved and sunk as with the deep swell of the sea…”

And:

“He could imagine a man who was able to live on one sense while he pleased; to whom, for example, every impression of touch, taste, hearing, or seeing should be translated into odor; who at the desired kiss should be ravished with the scent of dark violets, to whom music should be the perfume of a rose garden at dawn.”

This is not prose at all, but poetry, and poetry of a high order. And it is from such beautiful manipulation of words, phrases, and rhythms that Machen attains his most clairvoyant and arresting effects in the realms of horror, dread, and terror; from the strange gesturings of trees, the glow of furnace-like clouds, the somber beauty of brooding fields, and valleys all too still, the mystery of lovely women, and all the terror of life and nature seen with the understanding eye.

So much for Arthur Machen as a novelist, It is a fascinating subject, but it is also an extensive one, and the curious, tenuous quality of his work may lead one into indiscretions.

The peculiar philosophy of Arthur Machen is set down in
Hieroglyphics
and in
Dr. Stiggins: His Views and Principles
. The first chapter of the latter work is a scathing satire on certain foibles and idiosyncracies of the American people—such as lynching, vote-buying, and food-adulteration—but as it is, on the whole, a polemical volume which, by the nature of the subjects it treats, can have less permanent interest than the author’s other work, it may be put to one side; although as a specimen of Machen’s impeccable prose it must not be ignored.

In
Hieroglyphics
he returns to those ecstasies mentioned in
The White People
and gives us further definitions. The word ecstasy is merely a symbol; it has many synonyms. It means rapture, adoration, a withdrawal from common life, the other things. “Who can furnish a precise definition of the indefinable? They (the ‘other things’) are sometimes in the song of a bird, sometimes in the whirl of a London street, sometimes hidden under a great, lonely hill. Some of us seek them with most hope and the fullest assurance in the sacring of the mass, others receive tidings through the sound of music, in the color of a picture, in the shining form of a statue, in the meditation of eternal truth.”

Hieroglyphics
is Arthur Machen’s theory of literature, brilliantly exposited by that “cyclical mode of discoursing” that was affected by Coleridge. In it he promulgates the admirable doctrine that fine literature must be, in effect, an allegory and not the careful history of particular persons. He seeks a mark of division which is to separate fine literature from mere literature, and finds the solution in the one word ecstasy (or, if you prefer, beauty, wonder, awe, mystery, sense of the unknown, desire for the unknown), with this conclusion: “If ecstasy be present, then I say there is fine literature, if it be absent, then, in spite of all the cleverness, all the talents, all the workmanship and observation and dexterity you may show me, then, I think, we have a product (possibly a very interesting one) which is not fine literature.”

Following this reasoning, by an astonishing sequence of arguments, he proceeds to the bold experiment of proving “Pickwick” possessed of ecstasy, and “Vanity Fair” lacking it. The case is an extreme one, he admits, deliberately chosen to expound his theory to the nth degree. The analytical key to the test is found in the differentiation between art and artifice, a nice problem in such extreme instances as Poe’s “Dupin” stories and Stevenson’s
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, as Mr. Machen points out. By this ingenious method
The Odyssey
,
Oedipus
,
Le Morte D’Arthur
,
Kubla Khan
,
Don Quixote
, and
Rabelais
immediately are proven fine literature; a host of other esteemed works merely, if you like, good literature.

Pantagruel
by a more delicate application of the test becomes a finer work than
Don Quixote
, and in the exposition of this dictum we come upon one of the mountain peaks of Machen’s amazing philosophy.

He begins the discussion with a jest about the enormous capacity for strong drink exhibited by Mr. Pickwick and his friends, and reminds us that it was the god of wine in whose honor Sophocles wrote his dramas and choral songs, who was worshipped and invoked at the Dionysiaca; and that all the drama arose from the celebration of the Bacchic mysteries. He goes on to the “Gargantua” and “Pantagruel,” which reek of wine as Dickens does of brandy and water.

The Rabelaisian history begins: “
Grandgousier estoit bon raillard en son temps, aimant à boire net
,” and ends with the Oracle of the Holy Bottle, with the word “
Trinch… un mot panomphée, celebré et entendu de toutes nations, et nous signifie, beuvez
.” “And I refer you,” continues Machen, “to the allocution of Bacbuc, the priestess of the Bottle, at large. ‘By wine,’ she says, ‘is man made divine,’ and I may say that if you have not got the key to these Rabelaisian riddles, much of the value—the highest value—of the book is lost to you.”

Seeking the meaning of this Bacchic cultus, this apparent glorification of drunkenness in all lands and in all times, from Ancient Greece through Renascent France to Victorian England, by peoples and persons not themselves given to excess, he finds it again in the word ecstasy.

“We are to conclude that both the ancient people and the modern writers recognized ecstasy as the supreme gift and state of man, and that they chose the Vine and the juice of the Vine, as the most beautiful and significant symbol of that Power which withdraws a man from the common life and the common consciousness, and taking him from the dust of earth, sets him in high places, in the eternal world of Ideas. Let us never forget that the essence of the book (
Pantagruel
) is in its splendid celebration of ecstasy, under the figure of the Vine.”

At this point Mr. Machen places the “key” in our hands and declines further to reveal his secrets. In Mr. Pickwick’s overdose of milk punch we are to find, ultimately, “a clue to the labyrinth of mystic theology.”

By his own test we are enabled to place Arthur Machen’s greatest works on the shelf with
Don Quixote
and
Pantagruel
; by his own test we find the ecstasy of which he speaks in his own pages, under the symbol of the Vine, and under figures even more beautiful and terrible. For minor consideration he finds in Rabelais another symbolism of ecstasy:

“The shape of gauloiserie, of gross, exuberant gaiety, expressing itself by outrageous tales, outrageous words, by a very cataract of obscenity, if you please, if only you will notice how the obscenity of Rabelais transcends the obscenity of common life; his grossness is poured out in a sort of mad torrent, in a frenzy, a very passion of the unspeakable.”

In Cervantes he finds the greater deftness, the finer artifice, but he believes the conception of Rabelais the higher because it is the more remote. Pantagruel’s “More than frankness, its ebullition of grossness… is either the merest lunacy, or else it is sublime.” And the paragraph that succeeds this one in the book, perhaps it is part of the same paragraph, sums up this astonishing philosophy with a conclusion calculated to shock the Puritanic. Thus:

“Don’t you perceive that when a certain depth has been passed you begin to ascend into the heights? The Persian poet expresses the most transcendental secrets of the Divine Love by the grossest phrases of the carnal love; so Rabelais soars above the common life, above the streets and the gutter, by going far lower than the streets and the gutter: he brings before you the highest by positing that which is lower than the lowest, and if you have the prepared, initiated mind, a Rabelaisian ‘list’ is the best preface to the angelic song. (!) All this may strike you as extreme paradox, but it has the disadvantage of being true, and perhaps you may assure yourself of its truth by recollecting the converse proposition—that it is when one is absorbed in the highest emotions that the most degrading images will intrude themselves.”

And so on… The sense of the futility almost of attempting to explain Machen becomes more pronounced as I progress. You will have to read him. You will find his books (if you are fortunate) in a murky corner of some obscure second-hand bookshop.

* * * *

Arthur Machen was born in Wales in 1863. He is married and has two children. That is an astonishing thought, after reading
The Inmost Light
. It is surprising indeed to learn that he was born. He is High Church, “with no particular respect for the Archbishop of Canterbury,” and necessarily subconsciously Catholic, as must be all those “lonely, awful souls” who write ecstasy across the world. He hates puritanism with a sturdier hatred than inspires Chesterton; for a brilliant exposition of this aversion I commend readers to his mocking introduction to
The House of Souls
. That work,
The Hill of Dreams
, and
Hieroglyphics
were written between 1890 and 1900, after which their author turned strolling player and alternated for a time between the smartest theatres in London and the shabbiest music halls in London’s East End. For the last six years or so he has been a descriptive writer on the
London Evening News
.

His works not before mentioned comprise a translation (the best) of the
Heptameron
;
Fantastic Tales
, a collection of mediaeval whimsies, partly translated and partly original and altogether Rabelaisian and delightful;
The Terror
, a “shilling shocker” (his own characterization), but a finer work withal than most of the “literature” of the day, and
The Great Return
, an extraordinary short tale which may find place some day in another such collection as
The House of Souls
.

I have mentioned
The Chronicle of Clemendy
, calling it a classic, and something further should be said about that astonishing book. It is the Welsh
Heptameron
, a chronicle of amorous intrigue, joyous drunkenness, and knightly endeavor second to none in the brief muster of the world’s greatest classics. In it there is the veritable flavour of mediaeval record. Somewhat less outspoken than Balzac in his
Droll Stories
, and less verbose than Boccaccio, Machen proves himself the peer of either in gay, irresponsible, diverting, unflagging invention, while his diction is lovelier than that of any of his forerunners, including the nameless authors of those rich Arabian tapestries which were the parent tales of all mediaeval and modern facetiae.