Part 7

And as I was saying, as with the taverns, so with the papers. When I wrote a little for them, in 1890 or thereabouts, it was allowable to assume a certain amount of literacy, a certain knowledge in the reader. Now that is over. I know the case of a man who, I am certain, pretends ignorance that he may continue to be employed. As it happens, he is an expert in food and drink; but I have known him number Beaujolais with the wines of Bordeaux in a newspaper article, and speak of curry powder and pickles as ordinary ingredients in veal and ham pie. I believe he knows much better; but he has probably found out that a misstatement or two gives an easy careless air that is much admired. Nobody can call a writer of this kind a pedant. A highly accomplished journalist said to me a few years ago: “Always remember that we appeal, not to the cabman, but to the cabman’s wife.” And another instance, though I am afraid it is somewhat tinged with self-praise. I had written a brief article for the “Evening News” on a topic that had been given to me; I was to explain _why_ it is that a “mean street” of to-day is, generally, hideous and appalling, while a row of sixteenth-century cottages is, generally, a delight to see. I did as I always do when I can, I took the particular instance and placed it under a general principle. I said the chief horror of the modern street was not to be sought in the poverty of the design, though that was, doubtless, bad enough, but in the fact that in the street of to-day each house is a replica of the other, so that the effect to the eye is, if the street be long enough, the prolongation of one house to infinity, in an endless series of repetitions. And I pointed out that even if you admired some particular picture or statue immensely, it would be rather awful to traverse a long gallery in which the picture or the statue were repeated again and again as far as the eye could see. And then, on the other hand, I shewed how the sixteenth-century cottages were each of them individuals, each with some slight difference from the cottage next door, each with its variety in door or window or pent-house. And hence, I urged, a continual slight surprise to the beholder, and taking the supposed row as a whole, that strangeness in the proportion which Bacon declared, most profoundly, to be necessary to the highest beauty. Well, I got this with difficulty into the prescribed 500 words--“nobody will read anything over 500 words”--and said to myself: “Now that Patmore is dead, nobody else could have written that article. But ... there will be a row.” There was. Lord Northcliffe gave the little essay the honour of a special mention in one of his famous _communiqués_--as I believe they were called. He spoke of it with venom as “a wiseacre article.” I am sure he was perfectly right from his point of view. The fault was mine. “When I am in Rome, I fast on Saturdays,” said one of the Fathers.

Things have changed indeed. I was mentioning Coventry Patmore. In the Introduction to the “Religio Poetæ,” a collection of short essays of the profoundest wisdom, he acknowledges his obligations to Greenwood, once editor of the “St. James’s Gazette.” Some of these essays had appeared in that journal: the fact is quite stupefying considered in the light of the journalism of to-day. Education increases; ignorance grows deeper.

* * * * *

Let me not be understood as claiming that my newspaper work of thirty-two years ago was characterised by the profoundest wisdom. Very far from it; my articles were harmless and agreeable enough, I think, in a small way; and writing them, I first began to get a hint of my true subject; the country of my childhood and my youth. And I thus began to move away from the exotic Rabelaisian influence, both as to manner and to matter: to perceive that not the splendid Loire but the humble Soar brook, winding and shining in deep valleys and obscured by dark alder thickets, was my native stream. I began to see that I was a citizen of Caerleon-on-Usk, and not of Tours or 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. There was something of all this, of course, in “The Chronicle of Clemendy,” the Great Romance which was neither great nor a romance; but in this everything was viewed and everything expressed in an exotic medium: now I saw that a blossoming thorn bush in the valley of the Soar and the nightingale singing in it and the river level about Caerleon and the red fires of sunset over the mountain in the west were all in themselves and by themselves fit matter for the work; that they needed not to be disguised in a French literary habit of four hundred years ago.

It was in this summer of 1890 that I wrote the first chapter of “The Great God Pan.” I have told the whole story in the Introduction to the latest edition of that fantasy, which is published by Messrs. Simpkin, Marshall, and whether I should weary my readers I know not, but I do know that I should weary myself if I told it all over again. The tale was written in bits, in the intervals between severe literary cramps, as I have mentioned in this present volume, and it was published by Mr. John Lane, of the Bodley Head, at the end of 1894, when yellow bookery was at its yellowest. And it aroused a certain amount of attention. There was a storm--in a doll’s teacup.

The other day a friend of mine said genially to me:

“I have just been reading that ‘Great God Pan’ of yours over again, and I really don’t see that there’s much in it to make a sensation of.”

I am sure he was quite right. But a sensation there was, of a minor kind. It had some mysterious property in it, this little book, which caused good men to froth at the mouth, greatly to my delight. I have quoted a good many of the reviews in the Introduction to the Simpkin, Marshall edition: things like this:

“We are afraid he only succeeds in being ridiculous. The book is, on the whole, the most acutely and intentionally disagreeable we have yet seen in English. We could say more, but refrain from doing so for fear of giving such a work advertisement.”--“Manchester Guardian.”

“This book is gruesome, ghastly, and dull ... the majority of readers will turn from it in utter disgust.”--“Lady’s Pictorial.”

“These tricks have also their ludicrous side.”--“Guardian.”

And so forth. It is very well, but I cannot help saying, as an old craftsman and an old reviewer, that it might have been better. I have no fault to find with the technique of the “Guardian”; but the “Lady’s Pictorial” should have left out the “gruesome” and the “ghastly” and also, I am inclined to think, the “disgust.” There are readers who like the gruesome and the ghastly; there are readers whose curiosity is stimulated by the term “disgust.” I am afraid, for example, that if the account of legal proceedings, civil or criminal, is headed “Disgusting Details,” there are minds so prurient as to be rather attracted than repelled, and I am sure that the gentle scribe of the “Lady’s Pictorial” did not wish to paint my little book in attractive colours. And so with the “Manchester Guardian.” “Ridiculous” is admirable; but “acutely and intentionally disagreeable” is something of a signal set to attract those prurient readers whose existence I have regretted; and the last sentence says too much. Mr. Harry Quilter, something of a figure in those days, did better. He pointed out in an article in the “Contemporary Review”--also something of a figure in those days--that the only explanation he could give of such favourable notices as the book had received was that the author must have a great many friends engaged in journalism. I wrote a temperate letter to Mr. Quilter in which I said I was very sorry, but I didn’t know any journalists at all--which happened to be the truth. He wrote back to remind me, as he said, that there was “an Inmost Light to which you may yet be true”--“The Inmost Light” is the title of a tale which was included in the first edition of “The Great God Pan.”

--One of the saddest books in the world is Mrs. Gaskell’s wonderful “Life of Charlotte Brontë.” But there is one tragi-comical touch. Poor valiant, simple, stricken Charlotte was being entertained in town by Mr. and Mrs. Smith. There was a dinner-party, given, I suppose, in her honour, and she writes to an old friend:

“There were only seven gentlemen at dinner besides Mr. Smith, but of these five were critics--men more dreaded in the world of letters than you can conceive. I did not know how much their presence and conversation had excited me till they were gone, and the reaction commenced. When I had retired for the night, I wished to sleep--the effort to do so was vain. I could not close my eyes. Night passed; morning came, and I rose without having known a moment’s slumber.”

Who were these terrible five? We do not know, and it is possible enough that if we heard their names we should not have heard of their names, though, likely enough, George Henry Lewes was one of them. It is odd and pathetic too to think that a great woman such as Charlotte Brontë should have allowed the brilliant repartees and tremendous reputation of George Henry Lewes to break her rest. And just before this passage there is another, as strange and as pathetic. A severe review of “Shirley” appeared in “The Times.” Mr. and Mrs. Smith kindly “mislaid” the paper. But Charlotte insisted on pressing the thorn to her bosom. She would see “The Times.”

“Mrs. Smith took her work, and tried not to observe the countenance, which the other tried to hide between the huge sheets; but she could not help becoming aware of tears stealing down the face and dropping on the lap.”

And all over a review, an unfavourable review! It is very strange, or, at least, it seems so to me, since, like Jim the nigger, I don’t never cry ska’sely over reviews, and I have always contrived to get my usual sleep.

But I have left out one curious specimen of the “Great God Pan” reviews, a specimen which leads up to a curious passage. The “Westminster Review” said:

“It is an incoherent nightmare of sex and the supposed horrible mysteries behind it, such as might conceivably possess a man who was given to a morbid brooding over these matters, but which would soon lead to insanity if unrestrained ... innocuous from its absurdity.”

I was talking over old literary doings and the affairs of the ’nineties with a friend one day in the spring of 1921. My friend was asking me about my early books and their reception. I gave him a lurid account of the castigations which I had received on account of “The Great God Pan.”

“Why,” said I, “the ‘Westminster’ practically told me that if I didn’t take care I should end up in a lunatic asylum.”

“Well,” replied the man, meaning to be funny, “haven’t you? I understood you were at Carmelite House?”

“No,” I returned, also meaning to be funny, “I haven’t. All the lunatic asylums that I’ve heard of have been managed by a _doctor_.”

* * * * *

During the latter part of my stay in the country (1891–93) I wrote two books. I have forgotten the names of both of them. They were very bad, and I tore them up, with the exception of one episode--to put it mildly, not a very good story--which appears in “The Three Impostors” under the title of “The Novel of the Dark Valley.” And it was in the early spring of 1894 that I set about the writing of the said “Three Impostors,” a book which testifies to the vast respect I entertained for the fantastic, “New Arabian Nights” manner of R. L. Stevenson, to those curious researches in the by-ways of London which I have described already, and also, I hope, to a certain originality of experiment in the tale of terror, as exemplified in the stories of the Professor who was taken by the fairies, and of the young student of law who swallowed the White Powder. And when I had finished, with a sort of recognition that I had squeezed this particular orange to death, I remember saying to my old friend A. E. Waite: “I shall never give anybody a White Powder again.” And then I was immediately called on to do that very thing which I had vowed I would not do. I actually got an “order,” and--this shews that I was a mere intruder, not a true craftsman--I have rarely been so miserable, miserable that is, as a man of letters, in my life.

It was like this. As I have remarked, “The Great God Pan” had made a storm in a Tiny Tot’s teacup. And about the same time, a young gentleman named H. G. Wells had made a very real, and a most deserved sensation with a book called “The Time Machine”; a book indeed. And a new weekly paper was projected by Mr. Raven Hill and Mr. Girdlestone, a paper that was to be called “The Unicorn.” And both Mr. Wells and myself were asked to contribute; I was to do a series of horror stories. I won’t deny that I swelled a little and was cheered and elated by the fact of my being asked to write by anybody; nay, I really tried my best to feel important and puffed up. And then I set about writing that series of tales of horror. I was not puffed up for long. As I say, I had realised that for me the Stevensonian manner was ended. And now I was to begin all over again; to recook that cabbage which was already boiled to death! I wrote four stories in a kind of agony, my pen shrieking “rubbish!” at me with every stroke. I remember literally sobbing in a kind of hysteria of despair with my head on my hands; and this shews that there are some men who cannot be helped. The only thing that got me through at all was an endeavour to transplant the manner of Apuleius into English soil; but the four tales were sorry things when all was said. I was glad when “The Unicorn” ceased to exist after two or three numbers, before a single one of those tales of mine had appeared in it. Mr. Wells had one story in “The Unicorn,” “The Cone,” which he reprinted in the collection called “The Country of the Blind.” Such was the affair, and I think it explains the irritation which I have always experienced when I have been asked to write a continuation of “The Three Impostors,” or something in the manner of “The Three Impostors.” I knew that all this was done and ended; that, for me, the vein was worked out and exhausted: utterly. I shall always recur to the metaphor of the white road that you see from afar climbing over the hill into unconjectured regions. For me that is literature; the journey of discovery; the finding of a new world. When once I have toiled painfully up that long road, and have stood on the other side of the dark wood, and have looked upon the land beyond; then all the joy, all the delight and thrill and wonder are over for me. Columbus could not discover America twice. I never can say to myself: “Look here! Let’s pretend that we’ve never been this way before, that we don’t know in the least what’s beyond that turn of the road, that anything may happen beyond that pine tree.” It won’t do.

And that is one reason why I beg my bread in my sixtieth year.

For, all that I have written on this matter is, doubtless, very fine; but we must confess that when it is a case of literature being exchanged for the money of the publisher--and the public--the affair becomes a commercial one. And, in business, you buy a brand. Let me try to imagine it! I am a wealthy man, and I have found and my guests have found that last hamper of Champagne admirable. I go to my wine merchant and order another hamper of the same vintage. Nay, he has not got it; he will be happy to supply me with a wine of entirely different character; or, to press the analogy a little extravagantly, he no longer deals in Champagne at all, he doesn’t think much of Champagne, it is an elegant lemonade, as one of Murger’s characters expresses it, but he will be delighted to send me six dozen of a rare Château wine of Bordeaux, an infinitely finer wine, as he assures me. But I want Champagne! I am not going to stand such treatment for one moment! The man must be mad! _De me fabula narratur_; all my life I have been pressing my Bordeaux on people who had begun to think that there might be something to be said for my small Champagne.

And I quite see the point. I have never read one of the horror stories of Mr. W. W. Jacobs, though I am told that they are admirable. For me, Mr. Jacobs must speak through an everlasting Night Watchman, through an eternal countryman draining the last dregs of his beer on the settle at the _Cauliflower_: with these immortals I am happy.

“The Three Impostors” was published by John Lane some time in 1895. But before sending the manuscript to Mr. Lane, I had tried Mr. Heinemann. The firm wrote me a most delightful letter, full of the most charming things, which I had some difficulty in swallowing, though an author’s throat is capable of astounding feats where praise is concerned. I was to go and see them, and I did so, my heart beating high. I saw a member of the firm. He was better than the letter for a swelling soul. He read extracts from the reader’s report, and these were more splendid still. He outlined delightful terms; he pressed on me the necessity of my having something on account of royalties in advance: a happy possibility that had not even dawned on me in 1894–95. He hoped that the House of Heinemann might ever have the privilege of publishing my beautiful books. “Better than the best of Stevenson”; thus he read from the optimistic reader’s report. Thus elated, glorious, happy indeed, went down Mr. Arthur Machen, man of letters--now there could be no doubt of it!--from the amiable office, even into Bedford Street, seen for the first time to be a shining thoroughfare, a veritable golden pathway of Paradise, leading to the golden Strand, nay, to the golden world, where all desires were accomplished, and the faithful servant is rewarded: “Enter thou into the joy of thy Publisher.”

After all, I said to myself, the old toils, the old labours, those unhappy nights, those sick days of despair were not altogether wasted. Indeed, I tried to do my best; indeed, I grudged no labour; indeed, I was patient and tore up the sorry page; I knew that I must persevere and still persevere. And I knew that the other books were well meant but futile after all; that I had not really touched the mark, though I pretended that I had, and did my best to persuade myself that it was so. But now; “I have really written something that is good, that is, even, very good; that one of the best publishers in London praises and praises highly.” I never thought of the money that all this must mean, that never entered a moment into my mind; my only meditation was that for fifteen years I had done all I could do, and that now I was to enter into my reward. O golden Strand, that day, golden Great Russell Street when I came home to tell my news, golden happy world which rewards at last all humble faithful endeavour: golden world inhabited by good men, by publishers of all men most good.

It was a pure matter of form; the waiting for the agreement, a matter of a week or so, as the kind gentlemen in the office informed me. And in three weeks, somewhere about the middle of January, 1895, came the MS. of “The Three Impostors” back to me, with a formal, printed slip from the House of Heinemann, regretting that it was unable to accept the enclosed manuscript. Well does A. E. Waite declare that there is an element of waggery in the constitution of the universe. Never did the proud policeman in the old pantomime, foiled by the buttered slide of the clown, come down with a thump so boisterously undignified. So, rolling in the mud, I lay sprawling, my legs in the air. I was silly enough to write a somewhat exasperated letter to my friend in the office. He answered me in a befitting manner, in a tone of grave rebuke: he said that if I had realised the cares of the publisher’s life I would not have written “so caustically.”

_Chapter VIII_

“The Three Impostors” came back then from Messrs. Heinemann, and as soon as I got over the little bump I have just mentioned, I thought that I would try to make the book a bit better. One of the “novels” or introduced tales displeased me, so I am sure it must have been very bad indeed. I am not certain, but I think it was about a benevolent City man, of considerable means, who occupied an old red brick house somewhere at the back of Acton and occasionally, I suppose at the full moon, turned into a were-wolf. I can see nothing against the plot; and I believe there is a considerable body of unimpeachable evidence in favour of the hypothesis that the human consciousness is occasionally displaced by the bestial consciousness: the Malays, for instance, are apt at times to fancy themselves wild cats and to behave accordingly. But, somehow, it wouldn’t do. The transformation of the City man was highly unsatisfactory and unconvincing: so I tore up the tale, and wrote instead of it the surprising narrative of Professor Gregg and his disastrous search for the fairies among the hills of my native country. In the machinery of the story I introduced a hypothesis that was then new; I think I read of it in some paper written by Sir Oliver Lodge. The theory was, that when the lights are low, or turned out, at the spiritualist séance, and objects are found, when the lights go up, to have been brought from all quarters of the room and laid in the centre of the table; or when the people sitting in the dark round the table hear the piano near the door being played, the theory was that these marvels are not necessarily due to the presence and intervention of ghosts. I believe that it was the case of Eusapia Palladino that was engaging Sir Oliver Lodge’s attention just then; and he advanced the striking hypothesis that the piano was played and the objects fetched from the sideboard by a kind of extension of the medium’s body. I forget whether the distinguished Professor used the instance; but I know that the impression conveyed to my mind was that something happened similar to the protrusion and withdrawal of a snail’s horns: Eusapia’s arm became twice or thrice its usual length, performed the required feat whatever it was, and then shrank again to its normal size. This hypothesis was novel in those days; now it is widely known and credited amongst spiritualists. They have found a name for the mysterious substance which projects itself from the medium’s body: it is called ectoplasm. In all probability the whole theory is a pack of nonsense, and the “phenomena” are the tricks of clever cheats: still, what do we know? At all events, I worked it all into my fairy tale, mixing up the old view that the fairy tales, the stories of Little People, are in fact traditions of the aborigines of these islands, small, dark men who took refuge under the hills from the invading Celt with this view of the capacities of the human body, and my view, still newer, that the fairies may still be found under the hills, and that they are far from being pleasant little people. That was the recipe for the tale, and I give it in spite of a friendly rebuke I once received from poor H. B. Irving. He was talking to me about the Introduction I had written to “The Great God Pan.”

“You shouldn’t have done it,” he said. “You destroy the illusion. Never take people behind the scenes. I never do.”