Part 9

M. Machen connut bien des vicissitudes; il fut reporter, puis libraire, et il put ainsi satisfaire son goût insatiable de livres rares et curieux, et en particulier d’ouvrages occultes du moyen âge;—il fut traducteur,—il compila des catalogues; mais il continua toujours, malgré toutes les difficultés d’une vie laborieuse, à écrire et à proclamer la permanence de la beauté.

Il est pourtant curieux de noter qu’à côté de ce mystère de la beauté, il fut également pénétré par le mystère de l’horrible: et l’influence de Poë est nettement apparente dans ses deux œuvres de jeunesse, “The Great God Pan” et “The Three Impostors.” Pourtant sa conception de l’horrible diffère de celle de Poë, en ce que le pessimisme morbide de ce dernier l’entraînait, ainsi que ses lecteurs, vers un désespoir sans fond. M. Machen, dans sa foi, persiste à voir le soleil et la beauté filtrer à travers les ténèbres les plus denses et la plus terrible hideur.

L’œuvre la plus curieuse de M. Machen est, nous semble-t-il, “The Hill of Dreams,” dont le héros, Lucian Taylor, est un des caractères les plus troublants du roman anglais moderne. Lucian vit une vie de rêves peuplée de présences invisibles pour les autres: il circule dans l’aujourd’hui sans y appartenir; sa sensualité, éveillée par les caresses d’une petite paysanne perverse, qui ensuite se marie bien sagement avec un bon fermier,—se transforma, sous l’effet de son imagination et de son désir, en un étrange mysticisme maladif. Lucian ne vivra désormais que par son imagination qui est féconde et morbide, et sur laquelle la “magie celte” exerce une influence puissante. Sa plus grande joie fut désormais de “rêver,”—laissant son esprit errer parmi des idées à demi imaginées et délicieuses, en permettant à son cerveau vierge de vagabonder à sa guise. D’une sensibilité qui allait s’exaspérant avec les années, Lucian se retrancha de plus en plus dans sa thébaïde spirituelle, inaccessible à tous les êtres qui l’entouraient. Dans Caermaen, dans sa propre maison, on le considéra comme un demifou. Mais que lui importait?

“Il se plongea de plus en plus dans ses livres; tout ce qui était ancien et désuet était devenu son domaine. Dans le dégoût qu’il éprouvait pour les stupides questions habituelles: ‘Cela rapportera-t-il? A quoi bon?’—il ne voulait lire que ce qui était étrange et inutile. La pompe et le symbolisme de la Kabbalah,—pleine de suggestions de choses encore plus terribles,—les mystères de la Rose-Croix de Fludd, les énigmes de Vaughan,—les rêves des alchimistes, faisaient sa joie. Tels étaient ses compagnons avec les collines et les bois, les ruisseaux et les étangs solitaires.... Parfois, lorsqu’il était plongé dans ses livres, une flamme de plaisir montait en lui tout à coup, lui révélant toute une province, tout un continent inconnu de sa nature, brûlant et embrasé,—et devant ce triomphe et cette exaltation il reculait, un peu apeuré. Il était devenu ascète dans son isolement studieux et mélancolique, et la fusion de pareilles extases l’effrayait.”

Lucian se met à écrire et ses tourments redoublent, car il “devinait les immenses difficultés de la carrière littéraire, sans les comprendre clairement.” De ses longues promenades solitaires à travers les bois silencieux et crépusculaires, balayés par le grand vent, il “revenait rempli de pensées, d’émotions et d’imaginations mystiques qu’il souhaitait ardemment traduire grâce au mot écrit”; mais il ne peut le faire, et connaît toutes les amertumes.

“Et dans ces moments-là, la vision habituelle du paysage l’alarmait, et les sauvages collines, arrondies comme des dômes, et les bois sombres lui paraissaient les symboles de quelque secret terrible de la vie intérieure,—de cet étranger, lui-même.”

C’est ainsi que Lucian se débat et souffre dans les rets de sa propre imagination, alimentée par toute son hérédité celtique, qui crée autour de lui des visions tour à tour mystiques ou païennes, sacrées ou charnelles, qui torturent et broient son âme et son corps.

Comme fond, contre lequel se détache si douloureusement le pâle visage tourmenté de Lucian, M. Machen a brossé, avec une ironie mordante, mais sobre, un tableau de la société bourgeoise de Caermaen;—et le contraste entre la placidité prosaïque et repue des “county families” et l’âme inquiète du fils du pasteur, est indiqué par quelques traits fins et satiriques qui prouvent que M. Machen n’a point perdu son humour à feuilleter avec amour les bouquins poussiéreux d’autrefois.

Son dernier livre, “The Secret Glory,” est l’histoire d’un autre jeune Gallois, Ambrose Meyrick, qui s’efforce, _lui_, d’accorder sa nature pleine d’élans, de curiosités et d’aspirations vers un idéal tout gothique, avec la routine conventionnelle prescrite et acceptée. Inutile de dire qu’il échoue. Mais ce livre est aussi la critique âpre et passionnée de ces “public schools” qui sont l’orgueil de l’Angleterre, et dans lesquels M. Machen ne voit, assez justement, que des machines à broyer toute individualité, et il condamne sévèrement l’esprit de ces grands centres d’éducation, où toute “excentricité est impitoyablement réprimée, où toute conscience individuelle est détruite.” Pourtant Ambrose Meyrick échappe à temps à l’annihilation de sa personnalité, car il découvre la _gloire secrète_ qu’il porte en lui, et cela le sauvera. La terre entière devient pour lui “un sanctuaire,” toute vie un rite et une cérémonie dont le but tend à la possession de la sainteté mystique,—la découverte du Graal. Pour cela seulement,—pour quelle autre raison? toutes choses ont été créées? C’est de cela que le petit oiseau chante dans le buisson, en émettant quelques notes faibles et plaintives dans les soirées crépusculaires, comme si son petit cœur regrettait ne pouvoir élever que de si piteuses louanges. C’était cela aussi que célébrait la splendeur de l’aube blanche sur les collines,—le souffle des bois à l’aurore. C’était cela qui était figuré dans le cérémonial rouge du couchant, lorsque des flammes brillaient au-dessus du dôme de la grande montagne et que des roses semblaient s’épanouir dans les plaines lointaines du ciel. C’était cela aussi le secret que connaissaient les endroits obscurs des bois; le mystère du soleil sur la hauteur, et chaque petite fleur, chaque petite fougère, chaque roseau était chargé de célébrer secrètement ce sacrement. Ayant compris ces vérités, “tout ce qui était beau et merveilleux fit dorénavant partie pour lui de la sainteté; toute la gloire de la vie était dans le service du sanctuaire.”

L’œuvre de M. Machen est inégale et parfois confuse,—mais il s’en dégage toujours un charme étrange et pénétrant,—une espèce de fascination qui provient sans doute de l’extase dont elle est tout imprégnée. Car l’extase, nous dit-il dans son essai intitule “Hieroglyphics,” est révélatrice de l’art véritable; celui qui ne cherche à exprimer que le quotidien, le visible, l’ordinaire, usurpe le titre d’artiste,—qui n’appartient qu’à ceux qui savent croire à l’invisible, en se fiant à leur imagination et à leur désir, et tendre de tout leur être vers l’inconnu. Car l’art, pour M. Machen, ne remplace pas la religion: il en est une forme!

[Sidenote: _The Daily Telegraph_]

Wonderful indeed are the changes and chances of the literary life! Many years ago—let us say thirty—a judicious student of fiction who happened upon one of Mr Arthur Machen’s early books might well have thought to himself, “There can be no keeping down an imagination and a power of style like these. Whether one likes it or not, this man’s work is literature, and some meed of fame will undoubtedly be his.” A generation which had revelled in “The New Arabian Nights” and in “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” must, it seemed certain, have rewards in store for the writer of “The Three Impostors” and “The Great God Pan.”

And then year after year went by, and Arthur Machen remained practically unknown. One or two more of his singular books appeared, written exclusively to satisfy himself, and in total disregard of the existence of any school of public taste. The mystical tragedy of modern life called “The Hill of Dreams” is not a book for everybody; but it is undeniably the outpouring of a strangely gifted spirit.

The war broke out in 1914, and Mr Machen invented a fable about the “Angels of Mons” which flew all round the English-speaking world, and was passionately believed by vast multitudes of simple people to be a plain account of an actual miracle; so that its fabricator naturally got no credit for them, and met, indeed, with no little abuse for strenuously declaring that the story was a lie of his own imagining. Then there came out a curious essay in mystical Christianity, about the coming of the Holy Grail to a secluded place in Wales. Next appeared a gruesome little nightmare of a story about an attempted revolt, during the war, of the animals against mankind, the truth about which was supposed, in the tale, to have been rigorously suppressed by the censorship. Then the oddest, certainly, of all that class of recent fiction which has occupied itself with savage criticism of the English public school system and spirit.

Still nothing seemed likely to win a wide recognition for this peculiar talent. And then, quite suddenly, one began to hear it talked about on all sides among literary people, and especially those of whom Mr Machen was by this time old enough to be the father. Now, after a remarkably brief period of celebrity, as these things go, his “Collected Works” appear in nine stately volumes, beautiful with wide margins and severely tasteful binding; an edition such as any writer living might be proud of, and any lover of the externals as well as the substance of books might delight to see on his shelves.

It is only too likely that recognition in this very substantial form has come too late to give Mr Machen more than a fraction of the pleasure which it would once have yielded. Indeed, one may say it is certain; for the two volumes of reminiscences included in this edition are sometimes very painful, though always quite absorbing reading. There is nothing in them so petty as mere embitterment; but they are the writings of a man who has suffered deeply. Most deeply, perhaps, during those recent years of journalistic hack-work of which he definitely declines to give any straightforward account, but of which melancholy glimpses are to be had from time to time in one of the most discursive works of autobiography ever penned. These were the years of acknowledged, and apparently final and irredeemable, failure, and they can hardly be lived down at such an age as Mr Machen has reached.

Success was denied to his earlier books, it may be surmised, because there was so much less feeling then than exists now for the spirit of poetic mysticism which went along with the gruesomeness of those extraordinary tales. They were dismissed by some as “morbid,” and perhaps they were, although morbidity, by all accounts, is the last quality which one would attribute to Mr Machen as a man. But the horrors of sorcery and the embodiment of evil were mingled here with a feeling for beauty and a severity of style which became more and more apparent in Mr Machen’s later books; and all through his work runs that thread of sombre preoccupation with the life of the spirit which, contrasted as it is with an unusually vivid perception of the colour and detail of the life about him, makes his personal reminiscences so strangely interesting, and even his tales of diabolism more plausible than a man merely attempting to exploit a popular liking for “the supernatural” could possibly have made them.

Mr Machen’s talent is certainly one of the most marked and individual that has appeared in his generation of English writers.

UP FROM THE RANKS OF GRUB STREET AUTHORSHIP

[Sidenote: Robert Hillyer in _The New York Times Book Review_]

Ten years ago weekly explorations of second-hand bookshops in Boston never failed to yield me a copy of the American reprints by Dana Estes & Co. of Arthur Machen’s “House of Souls” and his “Hill of Dreams.” They were a regular feature of the rubbish counter. For these I usually had to pay about 50 cents a copy—though I bought one “Hill of Dreams,” which I still possess, for 10 cents. I must have purchased about twenty of these books. I gave them to friends, I lent them to friends—it does not matter which; the volumes disappeared one way or another. It seemed at the time a method within my means of bestowing great riches on the people I liked or admired. Few of my friends went away without their copy of a book they had never heard of, but which they would read for friendship’s sake. When I had only two copies of “The Hill of Dreams” left, and could find no more, I decided to suppress my prodigal instincts, but a burst of generosity brought on by some green chartreuse disposed of one of the two. The other one, saved by the banishment decreed to monastic liquor, is still with me.

And beside it on the shelf is Mr Knopf’s new edition of the book. “The Hill of Dreams” will never again be found on the rubbish counter; the old red edition is a collector’s rarity; the new yellow one is a substantial proof of the advance of good literature in America. During the last ten years Mr Machen’s art has been recognised; he is almost the only example of a fine writer rescued from oblivion in his own lifetime. Yet he has made no concession to the world in general. He has not changed a word of “The Hill of Dreams” since he wrote it twenty-six years ago. It is the same book—a failure in 1907, rubbish in 1913, a success in 1923. Obviously, the world has made concessions to the ideas which he represents.

The triumph of mechanism, which is shown in its full glory by the late war and the wars that follow it, has, like all bad tyrannies, engendered a reaction. For years isolated voices were raised against it, but they spoke in syllables that were incomprehensible to the minds of men spellbound by the wonder of Things. In differing accents, protests came from writers as diverse in talent as Samuel Butler, Walter Pater and Arthur Machen. People took it for granted that such protests were the inevitable whine of the Old Order against Progress, an explanation at once so simple and inclusive that it could dispose of any objection calculated to disturb their satisfaction in the machinery of manufacture and the machinery of life. The world, indeed, was fast stampeding into a herd which would not tolerate the existence of unconverted individuals. Then suddenly the machine itself went wrong, and threatened, like the machine in the ballad, to transform its inventor into sausage meat. There was a wild flight of worshippers from the crumbling shrine of Moloch—whither? Into Spiritism, Bahaism, neo-Buddhism; into every cult, in fact, that offered even a temporary shelter from desperation. This headlong rout into faddism of all sorts was a superficial earnest that the mind of the race was turning, had in fact turned, back toward an acknowledgment of the final mystery of life.

Of this mystery, Arthur Machen has from the first been the consistent exponent. His mind is that of a medieval Christian; a liberal monk, perhaps, who has taken many an appreciative peek at the classics in the library of the foundation. To him all that is beautiful builds walls of the celestial city in the mind of man; all that makes war against that beauty is unutterably evil. There is no middle ground. And “The Hill of Dreams” is the epic of this spiritual battle.

In the new introduction, written for the new edition, the author tells us that he intended to write a Robinson Crusoe of the soul: the soul, and not the body of a man, solitary amid an alien sea. It would have been impossible for Mr Machen to write any other sort of Robinson Crusoe, for he never leaves the material world untransmuted; everything becomes, either for good or for evil, the shadow of an overwhelming portent. Thus “The Hill of Dreams” shows us life, carnal and ethereal, as heightened by the oversensitive imagination of the hero, Lucian Taylor. The boy grows up in the outland country between Wales and England; all the glamour and terror of ancient forests become a part of him. Left largely to himself by his pathetically frustrate father, the vicar, and repelled by the lapses of taste and decency in the provincial society around him, he wanders over the domed hills under violently blue Summer skies, the hard glare of Winter and the sad wet twilight of Autumn, while the Roman past and the Celtic past, whose ruined fortresses and tumuli are only half-concealed by the moss and the thicket, gradually take possession of his imagination and ally themselves in his mind with an already established love of medieval lore, ecclesiastic and occult. All hidden beauties become his preoccupation, but, driven inward by the vicious sordidness of actuality, corruption also fascinates him. Year by year this struggle between the rapture of the inner life and the staleness of the outer aggravates an intolerable situation to be solved only by expressing it all in adequate style. But words fail, and the reasonable mind finally collapses under the weight of the imaginative.

It is obvious that Mr Machen does not want Lucian to become the victim of this combat between modern existence and the life of the imagination. He staves off the conclusion again and again until, forced by the inevitable, he yields his hero to fate. His unwillingness to surrender the youth may be accounted for by the fact that, up to a certain point, Lucian’s life was his life—his autobiography—a circumstance which has made the book suspiciously bitter in spots. He satirises the moneyed, the hypocritical, the snobbish, with a fine cruelty and vivid fidelity to life—but are these shoddy creatures, after all, worthy of so much attention? Yes, perhaps—if their mere existence is an obstacle to the higher sanity. And they are such an obstacle to Lucian, who magnifies their imbecile gestures of futility into really monstrous evils. They are a part of that wall of loneliness which isolates a naturally friendly and convivial spirit, driving it in upon itself, until all the beauties that it loves become, for lack of some one to share them, horrors and madness.

Fortunately for Mr Machen, he is of stronger stuff than the hero of his masterpiece. In his two-volume autobiography, “Far Off Things,” which appeared last Fall, and “Things Near and Far,” which has just been published, he describes the loneliness which enhedged him and the means he took to cope with it. Now in his middle fifties, he can look back over that struggle with no bitterness, but certainly with no complacency. One cannot be complacent before the materialism of modern life, which not only fails to help a man whose interests are elsewhere, but will not even tolerate him if it knows him for what he is.

Like Lucian, Mr Machen was born in the Welsh borderland, faced poverty in its fearfullest form—“genteel” poverty—went to London hoping to obtain the necessities of life by writing, and ended by nearly starving to death on the wages of tutoring, translating and cataloguing second-hand books.

In bookshops, he came in contact with alchemical and occult works which were to influence, though not dominate, all his later writing. Much of the interest of “Things Near and Far” lies in his treatment of various phases of mysticism, from its faddish to its serious manifestation. Very wisely, as I think, he has carefully guarded himself against seizure as an “adept” by any Spiritistic or pseudo-Oriental cult. In his burlesque description of a séance, he closes the doors of Spiritism against him:—

The room is in total darkness. One of the sitters proclaims with exultation that his nose has been tweaked by Joey, who, on this side, was a clown. John King, understood to have been a master mariner, sings “Tom Bowling” in a falsetto voice through a speaking trumpet. On this Cardinal Newman, known to be a lover of music, is gratified, and utters the word “Benedictine.” ... “This spirit’s name is Milton. Henry—no, John Milton, the author of the ‘Faery Queen.’ He says that they are very happy.... All repeat the Lord’s Prayer, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle expresses his intense gratification.... Well, it may be so. But I hope it isn’t, and I never shall believe that it is so.”

And the Oriental fanatics receive small comfort at Mr Machen’s hands:—

There is one thing that I hope I may be spared, that is the comment of the Oriental Occult Ass.... I do hope nobody will say, “Why, this is only Ruja-Puja! You get it all in the first chapter of the Anangasataga Raja! It’s all perfectly elementary. Little Hindu children learn their A.B.C. out of it in the Svanka Visatvara.”

Despite his contempt for the physical phenomena of the Spiritists, Mr Machen concedes their possibility. His one question remains: Is this of consequence? And he puts the same question concerning his own experience. During a fit of the most uncontrollable melancholy, he sat down in his apartment in London, and attempted, by some mental process which he does not describe, to rid himself of depression. Suddenly the pictures on the wall

trembled, dilated, became misty in their outlines; seemed on the point of disappearing altogether, and then shuddered and contracted back again into their proper form and solidity; that is the closest description of what I witnessed: with a shaking heart, and with a sense that something, I knew not what, was also being shaken to its foundations.

He was filled with dread, yet, at the same time, with an almost unendurable ecstasy. For a moment the fear of death was upon him. Then gradually the fright passed, leaving him in an exalted and serene frame of mind that lasted for an entire year. Concerning the physical phenomenon of the pictures, he remarks:—

This is all wonderful? I suppose that it is; but let me here say firmly that I consider an act of kindness to a wretched mangy kitten to be much more important.

But the year of peace that followed was, decidedly, of consequence, since he was lifted above the petty emotions that degrade and destroy humanity, and he saw life in its true colours. His implied conclusion is, therefore, that no occult experience is of any consequence in itself; its sole value is to enhance the dignity, decency and happiness of the human race.

All of Mr Machen’s fiercest satirical passages against humanity are dictated not by hatred but love of humanity. Nothing is so maddening as to behold a beloved being or race of beings degenerate into Yahoos. We observe the same quality in Swift, who was the most virulent of satirists because he was, fundamentally, the tenderest of humanitarians. When Mr Machen is at his bitterest, we find no desire for vengeance; merely an infuriated, baffled perplexity that his fellows should sink so low. And even this emotion he reserves for types; for individuals he exhibits a friendliness, a conviviality, an understanding, which are worthy of the rich variety of his nature.