Part 7

A schoolboy is also the central figure in “The Secret Glory,” by Arthur Machen. But Ambrose Meyrick is an unusual boy, not at all the sort of boy to conform to the average type turned out at such a public school as Lupton. It is to be hoped, by the way, that not many schools are like Lupton, or at least that there are not any public schoolmasters like Mr Horbury, who takes such a savage delight in using the cane.

Mr Machen’s satire on the public school system, and especially public school games, is a little too heavy-handed to be effective. Neither boys nor masters are very convincing, and now and then the story gets lost in the mystical atmosphere with which Mr Machen surrounds his hero. Altogether “The Secret Glory” is rather an incoherent and tiresome production, and certainly does not represent Mr Machen at his best. Schoolboys and mysticism do not mix.

[Sidenote: _Liverpool Daily Courier_]

Mr Arthur Machen has attempted an ambitious character study in “The Secret Glory.” He has also tried to give us a new version of the Grail, introducing a mystical cup preserved in a cottage in Wales. But neither the character nor the cup are very convincing, and it must be said that Mr Machen has this time failed to get into his story any deep sense of the mystical. His principal character, Ambrose Meyrick, is a queer chap, as he is meant to be, but there is no reason why he should be as irresponsible as he is, and less reason why he should finish up by getting himself crucified somewhere in Asia. These improbabilities would matter less, however, if Mr Machen had made Meyrick vital, and his adventures interesting. The story never runs with sufficient sequence to ensure this. It is all confused with propaganda, and very bitter propaganda at that, against the public schools, and criticism of Welsh Nonconformity when it combines religious revival fervour with sensuality. Mr Machen knows how to tell a story, but he does not demonstrate that capacity in this work.

[Sidenote: _Sheffield Daily Telegraph_]

Ambrose Meyrick said that “people who pushed ... always reminded him of the hungry little pigs fighting for the largest share of the wash”—but though a reasonable aversion to Extravertism is comprehensible, it is really unnecessary to be so exaggerated an introvert as the hero of “The Secret Glory,” by Arthur Machen. Ambrose carried his mental “Secret Doctrine” to perverse, even morbid, excesses; he lived in a _paysage intérieur_ peopled by mystics and martyrs, and visions of the jewelled Grail hidden by the descendant of Celtic Saints in some humble cottage on the Welsh mountains; and all this was naturally incompatible with the brutal facts of life at an English public school. An unpleasant school, certainly, but not more so than most.

It is to be assumed that Ambrose possessed a sense of humour, since he could enjoy, and even parody, Rabelais, but there is scant evidence of the quality otherwise than as stated. Extracts from his famous book, “In Praise of Taverns,” are equally unconvincing.

Some of Mr Machen’s arguments on religion are interesting. “In my heart,” he says, “I have always doubted whether moderate Anglicanism be Christianity in any sense, whether it even deserves to be called a religion at all,” and he objects to Protestantism because of the fundamental heresy on which it “builds its objection to what is called Ritual. I suppose this heresy is called Manichee; it is a charge of corruption and evil made against the visible universe, which is affirmed to be not ‘very good’ but ‘very bad’—or, at all events, too bad to be used as the vehicle of spiritual truth.... Incense, vestments, candles, all ceremonies, processions, rites—all these things are miserably inadequate; but they do not abound in the horrible pitfalls, misapprehensions, errors, which are inseparable from speech of men used as an expression of the Church.”

Mr Machen is trying to present Celtic Paganism in the guise of Christianity, he confuses the Greek philosophy of restraint, “Nothing in excess,” with a mere negation. There is very little glory in the book. It is concerned with the tortuous byways of a perverse soul through which the free wind from the mountains has never blown.

[Sidenote: _The Morning Post_]

Though issued as fiction, this is not a novel. It is composite of story, autobiography, essay, satire, philosophy, criticism, poetry, and too formless to be brought within any literary mode. Presumably it was not written all of a piece, and that just yesterday. Spatchcocked passages point to times when there were as yet no Boches, only Boers, and “’E dunno where ’e are” was still a music-hall ditty. These were the days of Ambrose Meyrick’s youth, true; but—though this need not (and will not) trouble the shade of Mr Blackmore—the most consistent romancer, as to time and place, would not now suggest the Valley of the Doone as even a bogus field for the adventure of the Sangraal. Other times, other fashions, even in that high Quest. Pieced or wrought whole, the book nevertheless is unified by one idea. The “secret glory” of its title is the imaginative life, to which its every line and circumstance is meant as acclamation and appeal.

There are in it, among others of rare and rich beauty, a thousand absurd lines and circumstances we could willingly blot. For Mr Machen’s own purpose, Lupton School is a prejudice; like its Headmaster it is too much “commerce with mortality.” “A deeper transport and a mightier thrill” are communicated in wise, rapturous praise of wine and humorous discourse on the marriage of Panurge. Here Nelly Foran is cunningly kept with Ambrose, aloof and aloft in a fragrant old Bloomsbury whose “stinks” in reality were neither better nor worse than the Midlands’. More understanding still of its own “secret glory” would Mr Machen’s fascinating book have been had he realised that its ecstatic vision, being of the spirit and the imagination, is as likely to occur in a “Bethel with the stucco front” as in the Celtic Church with its Cup of Sacrament. But Mr Machen, in his own exclusive way, does catch it, and for that we are grateful.

[Sidenote: Rose Macaulay in _The Daily News_]

“The Secret Glory” is, like most of Mr Machen’s books, very odd. It is the story of a mystic, of the inner and the outer life. The outer life of Ambrose Meyrick is passed at Lupton, a typically commonplace and materialistic public school, whose masters talk of “playing the game” and write horrible school songs of the “Forty Years on” type; while his inner life, which is alone of significance or importance to him, is spent in exploring mystic realms of Celtic Christian legend with or without his dead father, a Welsh architectural enthusiast. “I do not know,” writes Ambrose in later life, “how it all happened; I had been leading two eager lives. On the outside I was playing games and going up in the school with a rush, and in the inside I was being gathered more and more into the sanctuaries of immortal things.” Ambrose’s mystical adventures are described with a good deal of beauty; it is his contacts with actuality which strike one as distorted and unreal.

Both he and Mr Machen loathe public schools and all pertaining to them with such intensity that neither of them can see straight. They set up a monstrous figure of savagery and idiotcy and call him a typical schoolmaster, adding that schoolmasters are just like schoolboys, the implication being that nearly all schoolboys also are savage and imbecile. Even public schools are not really quite as bad as all that; and Mr Machen would have been more effective if he had been more temperate. There is quite enough to be said about the savagery and stupidity of schools without resorting to distortion. Psychological accuracy is not, indeed, the strength of the book, which is full of unlikely actions. For instance, was Ambrose really the kind of boy who, in his quest for beauty, would have absconded with one of the school housemaids? Surely his dead father would have told him that this was conduct unworthy of an inquirer into spiritual mysteries. But the whole book is a fantasy, and not to be judged as a tale of real life. Its curious occurrences and characters are made odder by the difficult, obscure, and fragmentary method of narration. There is, in fact, a good deal of silliness in the book, as well as some bad taste, but there is also a good deal of beauty, and the beauty and the silliness and the bad taste are all the work of a writer.

[Sidenote: Middleton Murry in _The Nation and Athenæum_]

Even if we wished we could not tell the story of “The Secret Glory.” Mr Machen manages to combine an onslaught on the public school system with some watery Paterian mysticism. Personally we have an equal dislike of those who belaud and those who denigrate the public school system. Besides, “there ain’t no sich person,” there are as many systems as there are public schools. But Ambrose Meyrick, if he could have been jerked for a moment by his creator into a semblance of real existence, would justify the worst outrages wrought upon him by his equally incredible _alma mater_.

He is a sentimental philanderer with æsthetic Catholicisms, a mystic Celtic dreamer, a Soho Bohemian (before Soho was ruined, of course); but these crimes are as nothing compared to his incorrigible penchant for “poetic prose.” Mr Machen has encouraged him in it. He will have a great deal more to answer for in the day of judgment than the schoolmaster who tried to beat it out of him.

FAR OFF THINGS AND THINGS NEAR AND FAR

[Sidenote: _The Outlook_]

It is difficult to know quite what to make of Mr Machen’s two most recent books. “Far Off Things” was a rather scrappy chapter of what might have been an excellent autobiography not written in the first place for publication in book form. Like the new volume it spoiled a great deal of good material and was not organised in any way that tends to make lasting literature. For all that, both volumes are excellent reading. There is a great deal to be said for Mr Machen. And he himself has a great deal to say. He is not quite at home in the twentieth century. Spiritually he belongs to the years before the ’nineties, to Charing Cross Road as it was in the days when he translated Casanova at the rate of thirty shillings a week. The Strand is not what it was, and he paints the difference for us in no uncertain terms. Nor do the modern restaurants know their business half so well as the old chop-houses did.

So through this monstrous incursion of women with the war and nursery hours of to-day, the old tavern life has gone; utterly and for ever, I am afraid.

This is one of the chief grudges he urges against the modern age; and he can give us chapter and verse for it.

Going there (to Herbert’s) in these latter days I used to wonder why all the meats seemed to taste alike.... I had business, oddly enough, in their kitchen. One of the cooks showed me the joints roasting on the jack; and I perceived that three different meats were cooking at the one fire, while beneath, in a common pan, their juices mingled, ready for the basting ladle. It is not much wonder, I think, that veal and lamb and beef taste all much alike in this unhappy place, once so high, now fallen so low.

On another occasion, when he asked for Stilton cheese, the waiter replied that only English cheeses were supplied! And just as the food has deteriorated, so has the journalism. “Always remember that we appeal not to the cabman, but to the cabman’s wife,” said one of Mr Machen’s friends, a distinguished journalist; and Mr Machen, who, to say the worst of him, prefers the cabman, might have been a little more disgusted than he is, and that is not a little. He does his best to fix a considerable share of the blame for our present condition on this “monstrous incursion of women.”

Such things as these are not, however, the main features of Mr Machen’s confessions—for that is what his pages really are. He is most interesting when he hints at his incidental experiences at novelist, journalist, and actor. And here, at the same time, because of his brevity, he is most disappointing. Mr H. B. Irving once said to him of his book “The Great God Pan”—“You shouldn’t have done it; you destroy the illusion. Never take people behind the scenes. I never do.” Mr Machen’s great mistake in his two latest books is that he never takes us further than the stage-door. Although he is telling us about himself all the time, we learn very little about him because he does not tell us enough of other people. We enjoy his story, but always with a sense of irritation that he has not dotted more of the i’s and crossed more of the t’s. Time and again, following on some succulent anecdote, he seems almost to be about to paint for us the whole moving pageant of the ’nineties, and just as often he turns aside to trace something else into other and less interesting channels.

The truth is “Things Near and Far” is not really a book at all because it was neither conceived nor written as a book. It is a collection of amazingly good snippets, a sort of prearranged notebook that might have borne such a title as “Towards Biography.” One feels about it as about something that might have been, that almost was, but is not. One is left wondering whether Mr Machen is a good journalist or a good author, for it seems fairly evident that he cannot be both, at all events, not at the same time, as he has tried to be in his two latest books.

[Sidenote: _Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury_]

... It is debonair, it is graceful, it is dignified and extraordinarily at its ease, it is essentially belles-lettres; it is not much more than that; it is not specially memorable, nor does it presage very brilliantly of the book to come (in the indefinite future), where “an interior tale of the soul and its emotions” is to be told through the shapes of “hills and valleys, woods and rivers, sunrise and sunset, buried temples and mouldering Roman walls.” Mr Machen has humour, poetic sensibility, a sense of style; he is reflective, open to the influences of nature, appreciative of the town’s common and uncommon interests, readily responsive to the appeal of art and literature. What perhaps his work lacks to make it true literature is virility, and it wants substance to make it really worth while, though it is—this must be one’s last word—exceedingly pleasant.

[Sidenote: _The Morning Post_]

Mr Arthur Machen has his full circle of readers, who will be delighted with this sumptuous edition which Mr Secker has so ably prepared. It is limited to a thousand sets; five hundred of which have gone to America. Mr Machen loves the unusual and the mysterious. They appeal to his imagination and set him thinking on a train of thought which seems without end. Someone has said that few men can more agreeably fill a column. The remark finds justification in these volumes. This gift is the strength and weakness of his writing. It might be said of Mr Machen that he has at once too much and too little imagination. Too much, that his ideas flow on like the summer brook; too little, that his style lacks incisiveness and the power of expressing instantaneously some thought.

“The Great God Pan” is a fair example of this weakness. He tells us in “Far Off Things” that he was persuaded to write this tale of horror by a wish to “pass on the vague, indefinable sense of awe and mystery and terror” that he had received in childhood days spent in the valley of the Usk, above Newbridge. The feeling that all the best in human beings is built on a treacherous morass which may engulf it at any moment has often been expressed. Mr Machen’s effort does not compare with Stevenson’s “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” Its terror is dissipated through failure to bring any definite incident of horror before the reader. The alternative would have been to envelop the story in such a wealth of strangeness that the impression would have been created through atmosphere; the method of Poe. Mr Machen is neither sufficiently dramatic nor sufficiently keyed to the weirdness of his tale. It certainly lacks resemblance to the dark gravity of deep woods.

From a consideration of this point we notice another peculiarity in Mr Machen’s work. It is not plagiarism, but the ignoring of any reference to ideas which other men have worked upon. True, there is no monopoly of thought, but we are led sometimes right up to a thought which has been superbly expressed before. It would seem more natural if Mr Machen directed us to the poet or writer instead of enlarging in his own words on that idea. It would certainly be more effective from the point of view of art.

It may be that we are somewhat critical. There is much to enjoy and admire in these books with ever a word for the weak and distressed, and the fascinating hint of “worlds unrealised.” But library editions are becoming increasingly popular, and we wonder whether they may not be overdone. These fine books are delightful to handle, but the thought creeps in if their matter is quite up to the high standard of production; whether anything but the very best should find a home in these limited editions, which rise so readily in mere marketable value. Still, Mr Machen has his admirers. No doubt they will think nothing too good as a home for his thoughts.

[Sidenote: _Manchester Guardian_]

In “Far Off Things” Mr Arthur Machen describes his rambling boyhood on the borderland of South Wales and his adolescence (a rather sad affair of lonely lodging and penurious journalism in London) as far as the publication of his first book. His memories have been laid up in lavender, and they emerge rather heavily scented. The result is the praise of old and simple things in a style that has too glib an antiquarianism to be pleasing over a long stretch. The reader finds himself predicting Mr Machen’s reaction to each situation as it arises and trying to forestall the phrase which the author’s sentimental conservatism will use. For instance, when he describes how his mother made “fermety” or “frumenty” in the autumn he must allude to it as “a very honourable dish and a most ancient and Christian pottage.” One feared in advance some such pomposity. It is the more pity because Mr Machen is sensitive as well as sentimental, and when he allows his memories to flow in unprinked English he achieves a beauty apt to the object he describes, notably in his landscapes of the Usk Valley and the surrounding hills.

[Sidenote: _The Outlook_]

Literature and the journalist do not always rub shoulders nowadays; at all events few people look to find anything claiming to be prose in the misprinted, smudgy sheets of our raucous evening Press, unless, perhaps, in newspapers published North of the Trent. So that it does not promise well to read in Mr Machen’s preface that his new book appeared seven years ago in one of the best-known London evening papers under the title “Confessions of a Literary Man.” It sounds like Mr Bennett all over again, and misgiving increases when he adds that the confessions were written to editorial order when he was a reporter. It is an old truth that Fleet Street has ruined more good writers than Fleet Street ever made. Only at a first glance does Mr Machen appear to be an exception, for in spite of the extraordinary quality and power of his present book, though it challenges comparison with Gissing’s best work and surpasses it in parts, Mr Machen is quite clearly not the writer he might have been. “Far Off Things” is one of the most entertaining and familiar books one remembers; a vivid autobiographical chapter, condensed and complete in much less than two hundred pages, but it is without that distinctive art that makes Mr Gosse’s “Father and Son” one of the great pieces of autobiography of this or any time, and it has not just that sense for the right word in the right place which knits language into abiding literature. He cannot wrestle with the conventional:—

Now winter has its splendours; but with what joy do we welcome the yearly miracle of spring. We and the whole earth exult together as though we had been delivered from prison, the hedgerows and the fields are glad, and the woods are filled with singing; and men’s hearts are filled with an ineffable rapture. Israel once more has come out of Egypt, from the house of bondage.

That is the prose of the best journalism, but not the prose of the man who is, first and foremost, expressing the pure content of his mind with all his mind’s power through the power of words.

But the real charm of the book lies elsewhere, chiefly in the zest with which he describes the places he has loved and the people he remembers, the curious, quiet anecdotes, his sense of poetry in all things, and, especially, his literary enthusiasms. Cervantes and Scott come into his range, and even De Quincey, who “wrote in the great manner because he thought in the great manner.” He is inspiriting about Carlyle, and there is a tone of voice meant for the detractors of that great man in the quiet statement: “I know not any man of these days that is worthy to dust Carlyle’s hat or to clean his pipe for him.” But the journalist comes out badly in that sentence. The best thing in the book is his description of the Strand as it was in the ’eighties, and there is a curious parallel with one of Mr W. H. Davies’ best poems when he writes of Gwent and Twyn Barlwm. He is equally happy proving that the Rosicrucians never existed as in describing the conventional garret of authorhood’s infancy, and there is one magnificent anecdote of a lesson in Welsh pronunciation:—

I said, “Yn oes oesodd”—from ages to ages. “That is right,” said my Welsh friend, “speak it so that it makes a sound like the wind about the mountains.”

And, as he says himself, the spirit of that sentence is very near to the heart of true literature. Mr Machen knows what true literature is. There is a good critic in the man who can define realism as “the depicting of eternal, inner realities—the ‘things that really are’ of Plato—as opposed to the description of transitory, external surfaces; the delusory masks and dominoes with which the human heart hides and drapes itself.” Though he is digressive he is never garrulous, even when he writes about food and drink, and he does that well enough to whet the reader’s appetite.

“Far Off Things,” if it is not a great book, is a book too good to be read lightly. It contains a great deal of wisdom and more than a little humour. The author throws out hints of a book yet to be written, in which hills and valleys, woods and rivers, sunrise and sunset will be described so that a story is suggested to the reader; something of Wordsworth’s method, and certainly a method of poetry, though Mr Machen does not seem to realise it in that way. Such a book he has in his mind, and if, when it comes, it improves on “Far Off Things,” Mr Machen will have done his work better than he knew.

[Sidenote: _Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury_]