Arthur Machen: Weaver of Fantasy

1

Of recent years there has been a tendency to regard the novel as something it has become rather than what it should be. Most novels that do not fall neatly into one of several categories created by the critics and reviewers are judged to be poor novels indeed. As a matter of fact, the whole of fiction, as well as of poetry, has come to be judged according to standards which, while they may be excellent standards when applied to journalism or the so-called “documentary,” serve fiction rather poorly. It has become the custom to label all stories, novels and poetry that may fall outside the special categories set up by such standards as “escapist.” It is a convenient enough classification, and it is an apt enough description, but the word has come to be used in a rather derogatory sense.

Now it may be demonstrated by an application of these very standards that almost every one of the world’s great books, and every one of the world’s heroic poems, is “escapist.” And that is, after all, what they were intended to be. But we are concerned with the telling of a story and the manner of its telling. To tell a wonderful story in a wonderful manner, this, says Arthur Machen, is the function of the writer. There is another equally fine description of the writer’s task, this time by James Branch Cabell, another story teller of some eminence.

There is in almost all great stories a certain magic that becomes apparent from the first sentence. One picks up Moby Dick and reads: “Call me Ishmael.” There is a quality of strangeness in the name and abruptness of introduction that serves to set a mood, a mood that persists through the entire book. Many of Poe’s stories have this same strangeness and this same quality. One finds it too, in many of Machen’s stories. The opening sentence, for example of The Hill of Dreams: “The sky glowed as if great furnace doors had been opened.”

The magic of Machen depends as much upon his style as it does upon the magical things of which he writes. His finest stories appeal to an essential and basic desire for “escape” from the common life. They depend for their effect upon that willing suspension of disbelief of which Coleridge wrote (and for which Coleridge is known by far too many who would turn its meaning to their own uses), a suspension of disbelief which it is Mr. Machen’s happy fortune to bring about almost at will.

And yet, apparently, there is much more to it than the mere suspension of disbelief—it is rather a desire to accept such matters as may be set forth, whether or not they challenge belief—simply because they make an appeal to instinctive belief. One doesn’t have to try very hard to believe in the existence of certain powers, especially those which cannot be, or have not yet been, explained as any known existing force. From this point onward the development of a story by Machen may hinge upon the manner of telling as well as upon the selection of the materials for the tale. There must be no fumbling of the matter, no crude effects, no creaky props, no bolstering up by the shabby tricks and melodramatic artifices of the penny dreadfuls. Machen’s magic is very simply achieved. In each of his tales an improbable, but not implausible, theme is stated; usually one that is based upon something involving an instinctive belief, for example: the existence of “little people,” the continuance of some ancient power under certain circumstances, and in explaining certain occurrences or events for which no rational explanation exists. Folk tales, superstitions, local legends and mythology, most of these embody certain elements in which most of us have at least an instinctive belief. Then, too, a great deal of Mr. Machen’s own particular magic is achieved through his ability to see things and to present things that are “removed from the common life.”

Most of Machen’s characters are not unusual people, they are not especially “peculiar” in any accepted sense except as they may be affected by certain occurrences in the earlier development of the story. For example, the young man in The Novel of the White Powder, the boy in The Novel of the Black Seal, and the Vaughan girl in The Great God Pan. But for the most part his characters are, or were, very ordinary people; ordinary, that is, in the sense that Dyson and Phillips, and even Lucian Taylor, are quite ordinary people. Indeed the very ordinariness of some of these people becomes the starting point of an entire sequence of extraordinary events. Just as it was the ordinary qualities of a young married couple visiting relatives of a Sunday night in a dull, stodgy, respectable suburb of London that resulted in the strange story called A Fragment of Life.

Machen’s characters are completely believable, whatever events may occur, simply because of their very ordinary qualities. Lucian Taylor, the “hero” of The Hill of Dreams, an introvert we would call him today, was a normal school boy who did not conform too well to the rigors of the Public School System, and whose solitary home life conditioned him to react as he did to the strangeness of his environment and to succumb to the influences, real or imagined, of the Roman ruins near his home. To the development of such a simple and ordinary character, in this particular story, must be added one very important magical element—the influence of landscape upon character.

For the peculiar potency of Machen’s magic owes much, if not most of its force, to landscape and to the subtle influence of the weird topography of his stories. Many of Machen’s most telling effects are achieved through the mere portrayal of a brooding landscape, the sombre background of mountains, the deep, rutted lanes that run along between head-high hedges, solitary hilltops shimmering in heat waves, old grey houses that sit somberly at the edge of the forest and rivers that coil in slow esses through forests and skirt the walls of mountains. There is no doubt that the wild Welsh countryside had this effect upon Machen himself.

Machen’s first book, it will be remembered, was written by one “Leolinus Silurensis”—and Machen frequently calls himself a “Silurist.” For Gwent, in the old days, the days before Arthur and before the Romans, was the home of the Silures, one of the three great tribes in this last corner of the West. The Silures seem to have been more Iberian than Celtic—they dwelled in the Black Mountains and along the estuary of the Severn. It was, then, this dark and ancient land that formed the background of Machen’s life and most of his work. Machen explains, and illustrates, the influence of his homeland in Far Off Things:

“This, then, was my process: to invent a story which would recreate those vague impressions of wonder and awe and mystery that I myself had received from the form and shape of the land of my boyhood and youth; and as I thought over this and meditated on the futility—or comparative futility—of the plot however ingenious, which did not exist to express emotions of one kind or another, it struck me that it might be possible to reverse the process. Could one describe hills and valleys, woods and rivers, sunrise and sunset, buried temples and mouldering Roman walls so that a story should be suggested to the reader? Not, of course, a story of material incidents, not a story with a plot in the ordinary sense of the term, but an interior tale of the soul and its emotions; could such a tale be suggested in the way I have indicated? Such is to be the plan of the great book which is not yet written.”

But of course this book was written, not once but over and over again. One finds its content in almost everything Machen ever wrote. One discovers too, the influence of landscape upon Machen and his work. One notes the feeling for landscape as much in his work as in the work of Poe or Coleridge or Hawthorne. One day, no doubt, a learned scholar will write a lengthy monograph upon what might be called The Influence of Landscape Upon the Creative Imagination. There are already many footnotes available for such a work.

Machen recognized this influence, it became apparent to him as he walked in the land of the Silures and as he read in the evenings in the drawing room at Llandewi. This snug, old fashioned “parlour” in the Rectory was the treasure house of the Machens. Here were their china and silver, and here the books gathered by the Rector and his forebears. It was here that Arthur Machen, on his vacations from school at Hereford, discovered the wonders of Waverly and DeQuincy. Here, too, was Parker’s Glossary of Gothic Architecture. This book initiated Machen into the spirit of Gothic and, as he says, “that is one of the most magical of all initiations.” Gothic meant to Arthur Machen “the art of the supreme exaltation, of the inebriation of the body and soul and spirit. It is not resigned to dwell calmly, stoically, austerely on the level plains of this earthy life, since its joy is in this, that it has stormed the battlements of heaven. And so its far-lifted vaults and its spires rush upward, and its pinnacles are like a wood of springing trees. And its hard stones, its strong based pillars break out as it were into song, they blossom as the rose; all the secrets of the garden and the field and the wood have been delivered unto them.”

Machen early developed this sense of wonder in the land. In his reading he discovered, in the age of Coleridge and Wordsworth, the “renaissance of wonder.” His taste for Scott and DeQuincy and Coleridge and Poe and Hawthorne and Parker; his taste, in short, for the “Gothic,” supports and explains this. For landscape and its influence are important elements in that which we have come to call “Gothic” ... and it is this Gothic-ness that is also one of the elements in Machen’s magic.

2

And then of course there is the final test of the story-teller’s magic. Mr. Machen’s inventions have frequently been taken for truth. The tale of the Bowmen at Mons is the classic example. Machen has told how he received letters following the publication of some of his books—letters in which the writers sought explanations of the stories, letters which were undoubtedly prompted by a belief in some basic truth on which they suspected the story had been built.

Many years ago Vincent Starrett wrote, in his preface to the Chicago edition of The Shining Pyramid, that there were three Machens—Machen the Saint, Machen the Sorcerer and Machen the Critic. It is, of course, Machen the Sorcerer whose work is most popular, or shall we say, the best known. Machen himself once wrote: “Sorcery and Sanctity, these are the only true realities.” We might interpret these to mean religion and science—although it is doubtful if all of the admirers of Arthur Machen make this interpretation. At any rate it is the works of Machen the Sorcerer that have been most widely anthologized. These are the stories one finds classified under such headings as “supernatural stories, tales of terror, horror stories” and the like.

Let us admit that supernatural fiction, supernatural tales, have quite a respectable lineage. It must not be imagined, as some intellectuals do, that the tale of terror is something to which only the readers of pulp magazines are addicted. The supernatural tale has been the subject of several excellent studies. One has only to mention the work of such admirable scholars as Dorothy Scarborough, Edith Birkhead, Montague Summers and Eino Railo.

It has been said by some of these scholarly investigators that almost every English writer of any importance has, at one time or another, written at least one story or novel that fits somewhere into one of these categories. And then, of course, the scholarly investigators proceed to give reasons for the interest in such stories, and they point out that the interest as well as the belief in such matters is always in direct proportion to the ruggedness of the terrain. And they also list, as evidence of the extent of their research, the means whereby the best effects may be achieved in this particular field. Basically these have to do with landscape, architecture, antiquity and a whole collection of odds and ends, of props and stage settings that form the background for the venerable school of Gothic literature started many years ago by Horace Walpole in The Castle of Otranto.

One thing all of these tales have in common is, naturally enough, strangeness. A strangeness in landscape, a strangeness in character. Basically too, one supposes, these stories are written about, and because of, men’s fears. That is why they are called ghost stories, or horror stories, or tales of terror. This fear is not merely a fear of the dead returned, but of the past. For these stories concern themselves, even when not with actual ghosts, with past glories, past powers, past civilizations, and ancient ceremonies.

It is not that man seeks to frighten himself that he reads these stories and is fascinated by them. Psychologists, of one sort or another, have said that the popularity of ghost stories and mystery novels can be traced to a desire to enjoy vicariously the precarious situations in which characters in these tales find themselves; and that by substituting themselves for the characters involved the readers may obtain a certain stimulation which is lacking in their humdrum, calm and civilized lives. This, it seems to me, is not particularly true. It is rather because the past is the past—simply that and nothing more. For the past is the one thing man can never alter, although it has become fashionable for us to try even that. The present is here, the future is attainable and forseeable and it may even be influenced. The past is unattainable and will always remain so, therefore man remains fascinated by it. The more shrouded in the mists of time and of antiquity, the more fascinating. Man does not read of the past to frighten himself any more than he drinks in order to experience a hang-over. Nor does the average reader of supernatural stories identify himself with primitive men’s fears any more than he identifies himself with the abstract forces for good or evil when reading detective stories. Man is a curious creature and his curiosity leads him into strange places. His curiosity concerning his amazing curiosity leads him to even stranger conclusions.

This preoccupation with the Past is part of man’s eternal preoccupation with Time; is now, and always shall be, world without end; from the days of the early Greeks, who knew that Chronos was the father of great Jupiter himself—the parent of the father of the Gods. Many years ago J. W. Dunne wrote a strange and tantalizing book, An Experiment with Time, a book much remarked by critics and book reviewers in the practice of their trade, but seldom quoted beyond a mere mention of its title. This is an extraordinary book, perhaps out-dated now, in this age of the supersonic and the expanding universe and the expanding ego. Nevertheless, H. G. Wells and Kipling have been influenced by it; and many another creator of the marvelous and the wonderful. One may read many strange and wonderful books, one may even read strong and powerful and significant books—but one never forgets such books and plays written about the Time theme as The Time Machine and Berkeley Square, Priestley’s I Have Been Here Before, Ford Madox Ford’s Ladies Whose Bright Eyes and many others.

3

The magic of Machen is due no less to his wonderful style than to his wonderful material. In these days when one can scarcely speak of style without being considered stuffy and perhaps even pedantic, to praise a writer for his style is almost to damn him with faint praise. This is undoubtedly because we have had no stylists for the last several decades, for which, on the whole, we may well be grateful! It is possible that stylists fell into disrepute because so many of them, in the past, concealed a tremendous vacuum and a cavernous nothingness beneath and behind a facile facade of fluency.

Yet Arthur Machen has a distinctive style, the perfection of which, while it appeals to the pedantic and soothes the scholarly, must be apparent even to the readers of those horrendous anthologies which have reprinted Machen while the scholars were busily interring him in their fascinating mausoleums. This matter of style is rather a tricky one. It is the sort of thing of which one might say, as some have, and when all definitions fail, “Either one has it, or—one hasn’t!” However feelingly and with whatever academic finality this axiom may be delivered—style is obviously more than that, and more than the man. More, too, than words and a certain way of putting them together, and much more than a mere choice of words or dexterity in manipulating them. We have come to think that many of these things do constitute style. Indeed, a certain publisher recently hailed a new book (one of his own, of course) as being in the “tradition of the English Stylists.” Simply because the writer employed, here and there, a compound-complex sentence, composed with a certain felicity and manufactured of polysyllabic words or those with a certain antique charm. It is felt, then, that a matter of phrases makes a Fielding—which is no more the case than that the use of a quotation from Donne makes a writer one to stand with the Elizabethans.

Style is, like so many other things, more apparent in the breach than in the observance, which comes perilously close to the didactic dictum, “Either you have it, or—you haven’t.” But not quite. To be sure, every written word or group of words has style, even roadsigns, notices of trespass, mayors’ proclamation, editorials in the Daily Worker, even soap operas have style. The most popular writers of pot-boilers have a style—and many of them have so pronounced a style that they can be and have been recognizably parodied.

It might be said of a good style that it is one that cannot be parodied. An examination of Machen’s style would indicate that it is, in his case at least, quite true. For Machen’s style is a blend of many things; of words with magic connotation, of sentences that create moods, of passages that suggest, subtly and almost unconsciously, the exact atmosphere for which they were intended. Mr. Machen is a master at evoking the willing suspension of disbelief, and he does it without employing any of the stock properties listed by Coleridge and other authorities as having the proper connotative value for the creation of a “Gothic” mood or atmosphere.

When all is said and done, however, it must be admitted that Machen’s style is merely a reflection of his faith in the credo of a literary man as set forth by the admirable Dyson. And here, of course, we come to the crux of the matter, and as close as we may to an explanation of Machen’s magic which cannot, after all, be appraised in rational terms. In that wonderful book called Hieroglyphics Machen poses a series of questions:

Machen agrees that one cannot express art of any kind in the terms of rationalism, and that “If literature be a kind of dignified reporting, in which the reporter is at liberty to invent new incidents and leave out others, and to arrange all in the order that pleases him best; then, let us have as much “common sense” and “rationalism” as you please ... but if literature is a mysterious ecstasy, the withdrawal from all common and ordinary conditions ... [we had better] confess that with its first principles logic has nothing to do.... For if Rationalism be the truth, then all literature ... is simply lunacy.”

4

There are, sometimes, certain superficial resemblances between the works of imaginative writers that are outside the province and beyond the charge of plagiarism. An age produces a culture, a culture produces works of art, and all the while the individual consciousness, or sub-consciousness, feeds upon and is nourished by the raw materials and the basic elements of the culture. For in any age there are bound to exist certain individuals in whom combinations of common experience develop along certain lines and who may be expected to react in almost predictable patterns to identical stimulae ... just as certain identical combinations of chemical elements may be expected to react in identical manner under identical circumstances. Which is, after all, no major discovery but merely a restatement of the obvious fact that lies behind the continuity of any culture, or even, on a smaller scale, of any literary movement, or on occasion, of something less significant than a literary movement.

This fact also lies behind the periodical resurgence of certain ideals of culture or revivals of interest in certain abstractions such as realism, naturalism, romanticism and the like. And it explains, in individuals, the influence one writer may have over another, or the appeal of certain types of material to certain similar individuals.

Superficial resemblances are a common manifestation of spiritual relationships. Some years ago a rather clever critic of music wrote a book called Music for the Man Who Enjoys Hamlet. Now, the resemblance between people who enjoy Hamlet no doubt extends to a great many things other than the stage and Shakespeare and music, and, for all we know, it might even be established that such people have a mutual preference for a specific cocktail or a certain brand of cigarette. Our critic did not attempt to prove this, he contented himself with discussing music of a type to soothe the Hamlet-enjoying intellect. And so the superficial resemblances between Poe and Coleridge and DeQuincy extend far beyond a need or addiction, accidental or otherwise, to stimulants of one sort or another. The lines that connect and link these individuals, feature for feature, element for element, with an incomplete analogy here, and a broken chain there, would no doubt resemble a physicist’s laboratory model of the atomic structure of the very newest isotope of the most recently discovered element.

Perhaps individuals themselves constitute the electrons and protons of a cultural atom. We might link individuals of a certain sort, the men who enjoy Hamlet, for example, or Poe, DeQuincy, Hawthorne, Coleridge, and find isotopes here too—Brockden-Brown, Walter Scott, Tieck, Machen, Sheil, Stevenson, Wells and so on and so on. And we would find that these elements or individuals had certain affinities, certain properties in common. They are not alike merely in that they wrote in a certain fashion, or that they wrote about more or less similar ideas, or that the moods they created were more or less identical. There are certain other qualities, perhaps insignificant, but revealing.

Poe, like Coleridge, was fond of designing title pages and planning magazines and journals of a very literary sort. We find that Poe and Coleridge shared a facility for creating exotic and quite unreal localities. For example Coleridge’s Pleasure Palace of Kubla Khan and Poe’s Domain of Arnheim are very similar in conception. The conception of tremendous wealth appealed, in a most impractical way, to both Poe and Coleridge. And, finally, both shared a great liking for names of Oriental origin ... there is no distance at all, on the literary map, between Xanadu and the kingdom by the sea; and the River Alph or one of its tributaries, empties into the tarn of Auber. Machen’s own landscape is not too far removed. It was first peopled by the dark people who came from Defrobani, which is to say the City of the Golden Domes, far to the east on the shores of Marmora. And Machen’s eternal preoccupation with a Great Romance is akin in many ways to Poe’s grandiose schemes for epic compositions no less than it is to the complete unpublished works of Coleridge.

There was magic in these men and in their manner of telling a tale. There was, in each of them, an ability to create that which made its strongest appeal to that love of strangeness in most men’s minds.

DeQuincy, alone in London; Hawthorne, so solemnly settled in Salem, Coleridge surrounded by blue-stockings and blue lakes; Poe in his erratic course from salon to saloon ... these men made magic of a sort no realist could ever devise. Machen’s magic is of this sort.