Part 4

The 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, above all, the little red wine. Not in any mortal vineyard did its father grape ripen; it was not nourished by the warmth of the visible sun, nor were the rains that made it swell common waters from the skies above us. Not even in the Chinonnais, earth sacred though that be, was the press made that caused its juices to be poured into the _cuve_, nor was the humming of its fermentation heard in any of the good cellars of the lower Touraine. But in that region which Keats celebrates when he sings the ‘Mermaid Tavern’ was this juice engendered—the vineyard lay low down in the south, among the starry plains where is the _Terra Turonensis Celestis_, that unimaginable country which Rabelais beheld in his vision where mighty Gargantua drinks from inexhaustible vats eternally, where Pantagruel is athirst for evermore, though he be satisfied continually. There, in the land of the Crowned Immortal Tosspots was that wine of ours vintaged, red with the rays of the Dog-star, made magical by the influence of Venus, fertilised by the happy aspect of Mercury. O rare, super-abundant and most excellent juice, fruit of all fortunate stars, by thee were we translated, exalted into the fellowship of that Tavern of which the old poet writes: _Mihi est propositum in Taberna mori!_”

Well, it was quite a thing while it lasted ... but the Rabelaisian vein petered out and Machen began to perceive that he was of Caerleon-on-Usk and not a townsman of Tours or a citizen of Chinon, and that the old grey manor-houses and the white farms of Gwent had their beauty and significance, though they were not castles in Touraine.

Meanwhile he was back at his old trade of cataloguing. He had switched employers for, when York Street would yield little more than a pound a week, Leicester Square would give thirty shillings. So back he went to cataloguing ancient books. Not that he was much good at it, nor that he preferred it above all other forms of employment. As a matter of fact he rather disapproved of the whole business and issued what almost amounts to a Manifesto to Collectors: “I don’t care two-pence,” he wrote, “whether a book is in the first edition or in the tenth; nay, if the tenth is the best edition, I would rather have it ... the only question being: is the book worth reading or not?”

Nevertheless, cataloguing seems to have been a rather flourishing trade at the time, and a profitable practice—for the publisher at any rate. For this was a remarkably literate era, and publishers pandered profitably to the popular taste ... they were busily at work discovering rare books, improving some with plates borrowed from others, issuing new and enlarged editions at the drop of a folio, and discovering the pleasures and profits to be derived from making translations—particularly from the French. In the same building occupied by Machen’s employers were the offices of Vizatelly, the publisher who was even then bringing out translations of Zola’s works. At about the same time Machen was working there, Havelock Ellis was editing the Mermaid Tavern Series of Elizabethan Dramatists for Vizatelly. Ellis notes in his _Autobiography_ that he was paid the sum of three guineas per volume—an amount he considered rather small. This may indeed have been a small amount—but he had a better deal of it than Machen who was asked, at about this time, to do a translation of the memoirs of Casanova.

The manner in which this undertaking came about was rather curious and very casual. One of the Brothers for whom he worked, and whom he does not otherwise identify in _Things Near and Far_, came to him one day with an old volume and asked Machen to translate from the place marked with a slip of paper. Machen set to work and about a year later he completed his translation of the twelve volumes of _Casanova’s Memoirs_. The place marked fell in about the fifth volume, and Machen simply translated through to the twelfth, began again at the first and worked through to the place in the fifth volume—which was “where he came in” as one says at the movies.

This monumental work, and the best translation to date of the _Memoirs_, was thrown in, as it were, with the cataloguing at thirty shillings a week. Machen simply remarks that he believes the cost to the firm to have been “strictly moderate.” Much more moderate than the three guineas per volume paid to Ellis for his editing. However, Machen was eventually offered an opportunity of profiting from his work. A few years later when the translation was about to be published, Machen was granted the privilege of investing a thousand pounds in the venture. One of the Brothers suggested that, as he was now an _interested_ party, he might wish to revise the manuscript.

Of course publishing was not quite the same game it is today ... there were publishers then who were, if not actually unscrupulous, a trifle careless in their accounting and possibly slightly unethical. Vizatelly was prosecuted and jailed as a result of his translations of Zola. Machen has remarked upon the irony of the situation—for even while Vizatelly was in jail, charged with circulating obscene literature, Zola was being well received on his trip through England. When Vizatelly died shortly thereafter the Mermaid Tavern series was taken over by another publisher without so much as a by-your-leave. Ellis’ name was removed from the volumes, and that, apparently, settled that. Ellis treated the affair with a silence he knew would not be taken as a sign of contempt. One gathers that publishers in those days were not very thin-skinned. However, in his autobiographical sketches describing these events, Machen offers not the slightest criticism of the Brothers but he did, shortly thereafter, quit the publishing business.

2

For almost a decade Machen had been in London, and for most of that time he had been writing. But he had written rather imitatively; he had, as he says, “been wearing costume in literature. The rich, figured English of the earlier 17th Century had a peculiar attraction....” Whether this was unnatural affectation or natural affinity, he wrote in this fashion—essays, verse, tales, epistols dedicatory. He even kept, for many years, a diary written in this manner. _The Anatomy of Tobacco_ was an “exercise in the antique,” the _Chronicle_ tried to be mediaeval, _Le Moyen_ was in the ancient mode, the _Heptameron_ a mere finger-exercise in the composition of a period piece. At this point Machen decided to write in the modern manner.

In 1890 Machen began to make an approach to journalism. His Welsh relations were probably gratified when his pieces and stories began to appear in the Globe and the St. James Gazette. He was still a long way from adopting journalism as a profession or career, but he had decided to do some writing in “the modern manner” and the papers seemed to offer an outlet.

Journalism was then, as it is now, a wonderfully agitated world in which editors knew what their readers wanted and were determined to see that they got it—whether they liked it or not. Oddly enough, an editor’s staff never seems to have this happy faculty of knowing what the readers want, but they do know what their editors want—and so everyone is mildly unhappy about it excepting the editors—and it is questionable whether an editor is ever really happy, or ever deserves to be.

At any rate Machen wrote, on an average, about as much drivel as the average journalist must, and about as many silly stories as most journalists have to. Of course it was not as bad as it might have been, or as bad as it became later, for, according to Machen, editors in the 1890’s presumed a certain standard of education and culture in their readers. This tendency has been overcome, however, and along with certain other technical improvements the press as it existed during Machen’s time was much as it is today.

His success at writing for the Globe and an acceptance by the St. James Gazette started him on short stories. These appeared mostly in the Gazette whose rate of payment was commendably higher than the Globe’s. The connection did not last too long for one of the stories created quite a stir.

Reading it now one wonders at that, and when one remembers a few of the tales that were to flourish in the decade to follow, Machen’s little story of _The Double Return_ seems harmless enough. The tale is rather reminiscent of _The Guardsman_—you will remember the success of the Lunts in that play on the stage and on the screen. Machen’s tale lacked the amorousness or even the intent of _The Guardsman_, it merely told of a man returning home after three weeks in the country.

“Back so soon?” asked his wife.

“I’ve been in the country for three weeks,” said he, rather put out.

“I know,” she said, “but you returned last night.”

“Indeed not, I spent last night at Plymouth on my way back from the country,” said the husband.

Whereupon his wife accused him of being playful and showed him his cigarette case he had left behind him when he left the house this very morning. Well, the husband had lost the cigarette case in the country some days before, and he _had_ spent the night in Plymouth on his way back to London, and so he couldn’t have returned on the previous night. There had been a man at his hotel or inn who rather resembled him and so on. The upshot of it all was that shortly thereafter the husband went to America, which seems to have been the thing to do in such cases. A rather harmless little story, not even a boudoir scene or a hint of one. But _The Double Return_ aroused as much interest in the nineties as the most daring double entendre might today.

Oscar Wilde, no amateur at arousing the public, said to Machen, “Are you the author of that story that fluttered the dovecotes? I thought it very good.” Well, flutter the dovecotes it did, and one did not flutter the dovecotes with impunity, at least so far as the St. James Gazette was concerned. Machen no longer appeared in its august pages. This may or may not have caused Machen concern. He was also doing stories for some of the “society” papers and wrote in this same year _The Lost Club_, so very similar to Stevenson’s story of the Suicide Club, _A Wonderful Woman_ and others.

The year 1890 happens to be a year of some significance generally, for it opens the decade of the delicate decadents, sometimes known as the Yellow Book Boys.

Among the many books that have been written about the Eighteen Nineties is a small and, on the whole, less pretentious volume than most. This is Bernard Muddiman’s _Men of the Nineties_. In it one finds this brief mention of Machen: “Arthur Machen, in those days, belonged to the short story writers with Hubert Crackanthorpe, who was the great imaginative prose writer of the group.”

Alas, poor Hubert! Who knows him today as a great imaginative prose writer? Who, for that matter, knows poor Hubert at all, save for those who may look into the bound volumes of the Yellow Book to be found occasionally in the Public Library (under the somewhat bewildering though accurate classification of “Magazines”)?

The 1890’s was perhaps the most widely and well publicized decade in history, surpassing, in this respect at least, the ’Twenties of our own century. The 1890’s spawned geniuses where the 1920’s only discovered genius. The analogy between these decades can be carried to even greater lengths and indeed it will be, in a later chapter, for the ’Twenties also rediscovered Arthur Machen.

But for all poor Muddiman’s eulogy of Hubert in his slender volume eulogizing the men of the Nineties, the late Mr. Crackanthorpe was _not_ the great imaginative prose writer of the group. Nor was the prolific Henry Harland, whose contributions to the Yellow Book were in the New Style—with French phrases popping up half a dozen to the page and French women putting in appearance among the good English spinneys, and representative members of the New Woman being forthright and outspoken for all their “flutter of curls at the brow” and garden hats and “merry peals of laughter.” Mr. Harland sprinkled his prose with French phrases, giving them a naughty air (just as, in the Twenties, French phrases were used to give novels a sophisticated air) and his heroes were made “interesting” rather than solid or adventurous or empire building. They, the “interesting” chaps, thought of women as “handsome” or “good-looking” rather than beautiful or lovely. Such words were reserved for inanimate things—things animal, vegetable or mineral, but never the feminine. They further thought of women in terms of “what a _woman_ she is!” Like that, with an air of invincible surprise. No, it was not Hubert, nor yet Henry, who was the great imaginative prose writer of the group—it was Arthur Machen. But then Muddiman may have been right after all, for Machen was not truly of the group of writers who practiced the purple phrase, who wrote in pastels and who composed pastiches in praise of practically nothing.

It may come as something of a surprise to many admirers of Machen to know that he was a contemporary of the Yellow Book crowd. Perhaps it will come as something of a relief to know that Machen was not a member of the group, despite the fact that his first book of stories appeared in this period, issuing from the Bodley Head with a title page by Beardsley. Machen never wrote for the Yellow Book. But for that matter, neither did Wilde. Still, yellow bookery was rampant at the time and since it is sometimes said that a man is the product of his age, it might be well to skirt along the well travelled path trod by the delicate decadents, their critics and appraisers and appreciators.

Osburt Burdett, Holbrook Jackson, Richard LeGallienne and other more talented and serious students have gone over the period with admirable thoroughness. The magnifying glass has been placed over every one of Beardsley’s drawings and even the most moribund of the minor poets has been the subject of at least one monograph. Still, it will be interesting to review briefly what has been said of the men of the Nineties, if only because it may be applied, with certain changes and reservations, to the Twenties and, for that matter, to the period which we are about to enter. For the birth of the Atomic Age, for all its violent and destructive debut, cannot have been more shocking, in some respects, than the impact of the coterie of the green carnation upon the Victorianism of the Nineties.

The group known as the Yellow Book boys, or the men of the Nineties, or the delicate decadents were, as Donald Davidson has remarked, “time-conscious” to an intense degree. They were nearing the end of a century, just as the men of the Twenties lived through the end of an epoch and the men of the Forties enter a new one. There is still, you see, this strange analogy between the “Tragic Generation” as the men of the Nineties called themselves, and the “Lost Generation” as the men of the Twenties called themselves. Whether or not there will be a continuing analogy between the three decades is an interesting speculation, but quite beyond the scope of this study. Or is it?

The men of the Nineties were time-conscious to an intense degree and they were self-conscious to an even greater degree. Being young men, for one thing, and acutely aware of the Victorianism of their Victorian age for another, and rather preoccupied with the importance of being earnest and alive in the closing years of a century for still another, they were rather more self-conscious than most young men.

Now it is an odd thing, when one considers it, that the young and self-conscious members of the Anglo-Saxon races, in whatever age, discover in themselves a remarkable affinity and a positive predilection for the culture and customs of France. This happens time and again, and whenever it does happen it is accompanied by a profound contempt for the Anglo-Saxonishness of their Anglo-Saxon contemporaries and compatriots. No doubt there are excellent reasons for this. It is a strange thing, but it is by no means unusual, since it has happened with something very much like regularity ever since William the Norman crossed the Channel—and perhaps even before that.

The Saxon nobles who set themselves apart from the peasantry were probably the first to adopt the manners and language of the Norman court. Almost any intrigue current at the time, or for the next few centuries, seemed the more likely to succeed if it acquired a dash of the Gallic. Even in that most English of all English periods, the age of Elizabeth, the young blades and the intellectuals felt the more dashing and, presumably, the more intellectual for a smattering of French oaths and a short time spent in the courts or chateaux of France, or the alleys and marketplaces of Paris.

Well, then, the men of the Nineties acquired their smattering of French and their translations of Baudelaire and Verlaine and felt the better for them ... much as our men of the Twenties rode the cattle-boats to the Left Bank and wrote the “only American literature” of their day. Little magazines sprang up in the Nineties, verse grew steadily more _libre_, and there was little difference, spiritually at any rate, between the Bodley Head in 1890 and the Shakespeare Head in 1920 or thereabouts. Another lost, tragic generation of self-conscious Anglo-Saxons had “found themselves”—and France.

3

To return to the Nineties. There were those, even then, who suspected that something was up in the state of English literature. Grave and scholarly men analyzed the state of affairs and speculated on causes and results. If the young men were pleased with themselves there were others who were not. There was a certain looseness of thinking and of phrasing that was not universally approved. The burden of such critical attitudes is a familiar one—it is the one that attends all new movements in literature, following change as the night follows the day.

The first and best expressed of these critical appraisals appeared in, of all places, the first volume of the _Yellow Book_ itself. Advocating “Reticence in Literature,” Arthur Waugh wrote: “During the last quarter of a century ... the English man of letters has been indulging, with an entirely new freedom, his national birthright of outspokenness, and during the last twelve months there have been no uncertain indications that this freedom of speech is degenerating into license which some of us cannot but view with regret and apprehension.” A familiar note, an old refrain!

“The writers and the critics of contemporary literature have, it would seem, alike lost their heads; they have gone out into the byways and hedges in search of the new thing, and have brought into the study and subjected to the microscope mean objects of the roadside, whose analysis may be of value to science but is absolutely foreign to art.”

Mr. Waugh then proceeds to make the point that every great productive period of literature has been the result of some internal or external revulsion of feeling, some current of ideas. The great periods of productivity had been those when the national mind had been directed to some vast movement of emancipation, the discovery of new countries, the defeat of old enemies, the opening of fresh possibilities. But, Waugh remonstrates, the past quarter of a century had been sterile of important improvements, there had been no new territories and no new knowledge. Because of this sterility the minds of writers had been thrown back upon themselves and the most characteristic literature of the day had become introspective.

“Following one course,” says Waugh, “it has betaken itself to that analytical fiction which we associate primarily with America; following another course, it has sought for subject matter in the discussing of passions and sensations, common, doubtless, to every age of mankind, interesting and necessary, too, in their way, but passions and sensations hitherto disassociated with literature.”

It will be noted that Waugh attributes a certain regrettable trend to American sources, but then he later says that the tendency for literary frankness had its origins in Swinburne. Despite the accuracy of many points made by Waugh, it must be noted that the world in 1890 was not quite the uneventful place it seemed to him. There had been, it is true, no wars of any consequence for a fortnight or two, no Armada threatened, no European paranoiac gazed balefully across the Channel and regicide was, for that moment, happily unthought of. Such things were, so long as Victoria sat on the throne, unthinkable—especially the latter.

But Darwin’s _Origin of the Species_ had been written some years before, and Karl Marx, who also had something of a London adventure, had written a book with the stodgy title _Das Kapital_, and the Webbs and the Socialists and the Fabians were quietly preparing their various ideologies. Things were brewing, even though under the surface, and no one paid them much heed, least of all the “irresponsibles” of the Nineties.

These things meant little to Waugh, apparently, and seemed of no particular consequence. They seemed of even less consequence to the delicate decadents who were staging a well publicized literary rebellion of their own. It is not our intention to go further into the matter nor to list the peculiarities of these practitioners of pastel prose, nor to relate the peccadillos of its precocious and precious poets. We content ourselves with observing that Arthur Machen had little to do with them, either as individuals or as a group.

4

From that day in June 1880 when he first walked in the Strand with his father, Arthur Machen was fascinated by London. He did not always love the city, nor was he ever moved to apostrophise London as young writers have frequently written of Paris. Anyone who reads _Things Near and Far_ and _Far Off Things_ will wonder, perhaps, why he returned to the city time and again, and why he spent so much of his life there. One is appalled by the dismal history of those years, by the portrayal of the lonely days spent in damp basements and musty garrets pouring over old books for the endless catalogues, and by the lonelier nights in that small room in the Clarendon Road. The long walks through obscure quarters of London and the endless explorations of the suburbs were often the last refuge of desperation and depression. The encounters and experiences with publishers and employers were disillusioning enough, the friendlessness of London was an even greater hardship. You will find all of this in these two books of sketches and reminiscences—but they are only incidentally there. For though Machen plainly states his loneliness and relates the hardships and disillusionments he endured, he neither emphasizes nor dramatizes them, and if this seems to us a sad story it is merely that we are appalled by it, and not because Machen has said, “See how wretched were my days, how lonely my nights!”