Category: Biographies
It was, I suppose, during the closing months of the First World War that an urbane and witty gentleman, writing in the Confederate city of Richmond, set down these words in the course of one of his interminable, and witty and urbane, monologues: “I wonder if you are familiar w...
It was, I suppose, during the closing months of the First World War that an urbane and witty gentleman, writing in the Confederate city of Richmond, set down these words in the...
2. Part 2“In his novels, _The Three Impostors_, _The Hill of Dreams_, _The Secret Glory_, _The Terror_, _The Great Return_, and in many of his shorter stories: _The Great God Pan_, _The...
3. Part 3In the summer of 1881 Machen was back in London in quest of a career. This one too, although it had nothing to do with figures, did not quite come off. For some time he had thou...
4. Part 4The extent of this enthusiasm and the depth of this influence may be estimated from the following rhapsody delivered by Ambrose Meyrick in _The Secret Glory_. “Let me celebrate,...
5. Part 5Why then had Machen come to London, again and again? Why had this shy and retiring scribbler left the orchards and fields of Gwent, the pleasant rectory in Caerleon, to live in...
6. Part 6“In the course of a quarter of a century, I have received a good many letters of serious enquiry about _The Three Impostors_. My correspondents ask me in various terms and turns...
7. Part 7This 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 seem...
8. Part 8A final vision is presented in C. J. Thompson’s book—this one by a soldier in an artillery battery in a letter dated June 26th, 1915. He describes a being like an angel with out...
9. Part 9The House of Knopf, however, seems remarkably disinterested in its valuable property, and a valuable property it is, for not only did the series include almost all of the best o...
10. Part 10The 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”...
11. Part 11Most 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...
12. Part 12This 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 e...
13. Part 13We have arrived at a point in our literary history (or, if you prefer, our social progress, our ideological advancement, our cultural development) when there is need for a new e...
14. Part 14The dust-jacket of Hutchinson’s _Children of the Pool_ carried an “Appreciation” of Machen, one of the finest and most admirable I have ever encountered. To find it on, of all p...
15. Part 15SANGRAAL, THE, the title of at least two essays on the Grail, one of them a reply to Alfred Nutt’s “Reply to Arthur Machen,” included in Starrett’s _GLORIOUS MYSTERY_, Chicago,...
16. Part 16PRIEST AND THE BARBER, THE, introductory matter to a pamphlet written for a bookseller (George Redway) of occult literature. Published 1887. Published in Starrett’s _THE SHINING...