Part 8
But it really doesn’t matter. And, further, I have a suspicion that it is often much more interesting “behind” than “in front.” I have seen some very fine theatrical storms in my time; they did these things very well in the days of the elder Irving at the Lyceum, but I never enjoyed any of those tempests half so much as a storm I once watched from the wings, while Sir Frank Benson was playing King Lear. Everything, of course, was pitchy dark, save where a farthing light was glimmering in some odd corner. By this light crouched a squat form, that of the assistant stage-manager. In one hand he held the Prompt Copy of the Play, with all the cues duly indicated in it. He held it up as close as he could to the miserable glimmer, and had evidently as much as he could do to see the script with its various interlineetions and noughts and crosses, and all sorts of queer hieroglyphics which mean a great deal to a stage-manager’s eye. But in the other hand he held a drumstick, and coming nearer I saw that the big drum was beside him on the boards, and that near at hand dim figures stood ready for some mysterious service. A voice is heard from somewhere:
“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow You cataracts and hurricanes, spout Till you have drench’d your steeples, drown’d the cocks, You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head; and then, all-shaking thunder--”
And so on. And all the while the man with the big drum was commenting on the text. At certain points, bang! would come the drumstick on the drum, and that gave the cue to the man who stood by the thunder-sheet, which he caused to waggle violently, and at the same moment “Props” released his lightnings. It was far better behind than in front, to my taste, at all events. And so a man of letters of very great distinction once said to me:
“I’ve been reading your ‘Great God Pan.’ I didn’t make much of it. Confused, it seemed to me. But when I read the Introduction, I said to myself: ‘Good heavens! Here’s a man who writes as well as I do!’”
And I may say that the literary gentleman meant this as a very great compliment; indeed so it was.
Well, we have been speaking a little of the stage. And in the earlier rehearsals of a play a good deal is taken for granted, or indicated by the gentleman in charge. I am speaking of the old days, be it understood, and of the Shakespearean Touring Company in the provinces. The company is assembling in the wings in small groups, one strolling in after another, some of them with the cheerful look of those who have partaken of refreshment. On the whole the men keep together, and the women talk to each other. The curtain is down, and by it is a deal table and a couple of Windsor chairs--or it may be a couple of golden thrones. At the table sit the stage-manager and his assistant, occupied with the prompt copies and various documents connected with the business of the morning. Above their heads burns the T-piece; piping in the shape of a capital T, with the top bar pierced and flaming with gas-jets. The stage-manager looks at his watch. “Five past eleven! All ready for the Procession! March off.”
The stage-manager has risen from his Windsor chair--or throne, as the case may be--and is looking up stage with his back to the curtain. As he says, “March off,” he indicates the music that isn’t there:
“Too-too, too-too--too-too, tootery-too, too-too,” in something like the time and tune of the music as it will be “on the night”; stamping with one foot on the stage to increase the realism of the performance. The old stage direction reads something like: “A sennet within. Culverins shot off,” and accordingly the stage-manager interrupts his “too-tooing” at intervals:
“Too-too, tootery-too! Bang!” bringing his practicable foot down on the boards with a terrific crash.
“Too-too-too, too-too: Bang!”
Then: “March over. Flourish of Trumpets. Tara-tara-tara, ta-ta-ta. Curtain up! Tara-tara, ta-ta-ta-ta-tara. Procession on.”
The Procession of Knights and Ladies which has been forming in the dusty obscurity of the wings begins to advance and cross an imaginary line which marks the place where the scenery will be on the night. They make more especially for a position up stage (L.U.E.) where there will be, at the proper time, a Gothic archway. The “taras” are still going on. They are violently interrupted.
“Where’s the Rush-strewer?” howls the stage-manager. “Mr. Machen! (fff) Mr. Machen! Lobbit! (to the hovering call-boy) Call Mr. Machen! (To the Procession) Go back. I am going to have this done properly, if we have to stay all day for it.”
The call-boy rushes violently into the darkness. His voice is heard vociferating “Mr. Machen!” in passages and on stairs. Finally, Mr. Machen appears, looking flurried or sulky, as the case may be. The stage-manager, who had been discussing beer with Mr. Machen a short quarter of an hour before, in a friendly and familiar manner, is now, very properly, distant and official.
“Mr. Machen, I wish you would contrive to be more punctual. Better be an hour too soon on the stage than a second too late. You can’t learn to act, you know, by staying away from rehearsal!”
Mr. Machen murmurs something about “ten minutes allowed for variation of clocks.” The stage-manager grunts impatiently. Mr. Machen places himself at the head of the procession with an imaginary bundle of rushes on his left arm. The too-tooing, the banging, the tara-ing are done all over again, and at last the stage-manager announces: “Flourish over”--and the play begins.
In other words, after the little difficulties and delays that I have indicated, “The Three Impostors” was published in the Keynotes Series at the Bodley Head. It didn’t do so well as “The Great God Pan.” The title was a bad one. Then, as my French colleague, the late P. J. Toulet, said to me afterwards: “_Ce livre est trop fumiste, ou pas assez fumiste_”; the farce and the tragedy in it were not well mixed. And again, there had been some ugly scandals in the summer of ’95, which had made people impatient with reading matter that was not obviously and obtrusively “healthy”; and so, for one reason or another, “The Three Impostors” failed to set the Fleet Ditch on fire.
Whereupon I began to think about my next book. I had done, as I have said, with Stevensonianism and White Powders; now we were to have something entirely new. “Tara, tara, tara!”--in the stage-manager’s manner. This time there was to be no doubt of it. “Everybody ready for the Great Romance!”
I started fair. There was to be something different from the former books: I knew that. But I hadn’t the remotest notion of what this new book was to be about. I used to go out in the morning and pace the more deserted Bloomsbury squares and wonder very much what it would be like. I got the hint I wanted at last from a most interesting essay by Mr. Charles Whibley, written by way of Introduction to “Tristram Shandy.” Mr. Whibley was discussing the picaresque in literature. He pointed out that while “Gil Blas” and its early Spanish originals represented the picaresque of the body, and “Don Quixote” was picaresque both of mind and body, “Tristram Shandy” was picaresque of the mind alone. The wandering in that extraordinary book is, in other words, noumenal, not phenomenal. I caught hold of that notion: the thought that a literary idea may be presented from the mental as well as the physical side of things, and said to myself: “I will write a ‘Robinson Crusoe’ of the mind.” That was the beginning of “The Hill of Dreams.” It was to represent loneliness not of body on a desert island, but loneliness of soul and mind and spirit in the midst of myriads and myriads of men. I had some practical experience of this state to help me; not altogether in vain had I been constrained to dwell in Clarendon Road and to have my habitation in the tents of Notting Hill Gate. I immediately marked down all these old experiences as a valuable asset in the undertaking of my task: I knew what it was to live on a little in a little room, what it meant to wander day after day, week after week, month after month through the _inextricabilis error_ of the London streets, to tread a grey labyrinth whose paths had no issue, no escape, no end. I had known as a mere lad how terrible it was on a gloomy winter’s evening to go out because the little room had become intolerable, to go out walking through those multitudinous streets stretching to beyond and beyond, to see the light of kindly fires leaping on the walls, to see friendly faces welcoming father or husband or brother, to hear laughter or a song sounding from within, perhaps to catch a half glimpse of the faces of the lovers as they looked out, happy, into the dark night. All this had been my daily practice and use for a long while; I was qualified then, in a measure, to describe the fate of a Robinson Crusoe cast on the desert island of the tremendous and terrible London. Thus was accomplished what Garrick called, much to the Doctor’s amusement, the “first concoction” of the book.
I am sorry that I cannot trace the further steps in its elaboration with a like minuteness. All this time I was getting my green-mounted review cuttings of “The Three Impostors.” I have kept them, I know, for I keep all my reviews, but I cannot lay my hands on them. I believe, though, that their general import was that I was something of a pretentious ass and that my horrors were all humbug; and for some obscure reason, which I cannot undertake to explain, these notices cheered me on immensely in my new work.
“I cannot undertake to explain”; that is the very truth. Why should a man whose only life consists in writing books feel highly elated at being told on good authority that he is utterly and entirely incapable of doing anything of the kind; that he is clever, perhaps, in a thin sort of way, but that his most prized effects at which he has evidently toiled--as the reviewer declares--with most laborious pains miss fire completely; that his endeavours to be this, that and the other are really pathetic in their utter failure; that his lightnings and thunderings are effects of the property man? I do not know why this should be so, and perhaps if I knew I should not tell; but I think I know that there are deep things in psychology, in the real psychology, not in the muck-heap of the psycho-analytical chemists. At all events, I know that when I read a review which ended, say, with: “We can only wish Mr. Machen better luck with his next bag of thaumaturgic tricks,” I would be much uplifted, and go out and pace Mecklenburgh Square and the old graveyard by Heathcote Street in a happy mood of invention, feeling that the new book lay all simple and plain before me.
So, thus cheered and highly comforted, I went on my daily tours about the Bloomsbury squares, about waste places abutting on the King’s Cross Road, about the wonderlands of Barnsbury, taking with me the problem of this great book that was to be made; this book that was to be the better part of me. Why, it was only the other day that a friend, who is curious like myself, in the remaining oddities of London, took me for a short stroll near the Gray’s Inn Road.
“I think,” said he, “that I can show you something that you will like.”
In his voice was the pride of the collector, who takes his keys, opens his safe, and draws out the rich case, containing “Pickwick” in the original numbers, with the cancelled plates, unopened leaves, all the advertisements preserved, perfect condition, autograph letter signed “Charles Dickens,” giving the source of the character of Sam Weller in separate portfolio: all the pride of one who possesses such a treasure was in the voice of my friend.
He led me round corner after corner, by turns and ways that became more and more obscure. Then, elated, he said: “There!”
In the by-street I saw a queer house, standing in a sunken yard away from the pavement. It was painted in cream colour, and grotesque heads, intended to be mediæval, were peppered over its frontage. I knew it well.
“I never expected to see that again,” I said. “I thought it would have been pulled down long ago; like the ‘Rows’ that once led from Great Coram Street. And, unless I am mistaken, we shall find Hebrew letters inscribed on plaster shields applied to the house front.”
The Hebrew inscriptions were still there; very faint, but still there. I had last seen them in ’95–’96 when I was entangled in the most intricate problems of “The Hill of Dreams.”
I have told already some of the troubles of the book: the battle of the second chapter, the notion sought in vain for three weeks: the affair of the fifth chapter when I lost my way completely and wrote many thousands of words that had to be rejected. Nearly all the journey, from the autumn of 1895 to the spring of 1897, there were doubts and trials and questionings: after all, was it not hopeless; would it not be better to tear it up and start afresh on a new book? In the summer of 1896, when I was in the thick of these perplexities, I spent a month in Provence and Languedoc, visiting places the very names of which are incantations: Arles, Avignon, Nîmes, Montpellier, Beaucaire, famed Tarascon by Rhone; and I saw how the sun can shine on the white cliff road by Marsilho--to give the city its Provençal name, which you must pronounce, as near as may be, Mar-see-yo-ho. And the changing of the colours of the sea there, as the sun sank and brief twilight gathered and the moon rose: here were marvels and beauties that sank deeply into the heart.
A wonderful land, indeed. The olive garths, of such a silvery, dim green as our northern seas sometimes put on near the land, the scented rosemary growing as a weed by the roadside, the walls of Avignon seen by sunset light, the great Roman arenas, still in use for bull-fights, a matter not remote from their original purpose, the Temple of Diana at Nîmes, no ruin, but a perfect building into which the priest of Diana might well enter as you viewed the portal from the modern street; and above all the splendour of that southern sun shining on white rocks, on the dark cypresses, on the white arch which looked as clear and fine as if it had been built a year, which was eighteen hundred years old or more: all these are Provence; not at all forgetting the Bouillabaisse which Pascal makes in the Old Port, Pascal who roasts his incomparable partridges before a fire of vine boughs. More than once I felt that I had made a journey rather in time than space, that these black cypresses and clear white walls and green and silvery olives were present not in our day but in the old Roman world.
The last few days of my visit to Provence I spent in a little hotel at a place called Roucas Blanc, not far from Marseilles. The hotel, sheltered by the white rock and the dark green woods, had been built on the very verge of the sea, and in the morning I would open the door-window of my apartment and stand on a platform, but a few feet above the water. I would lean over the low wall, and wonder at the jewelled glory of the Mediterranean blue beneath the mounting sun--and my heart was at home, in Gray’s Inn, in my old Japanese bureau, in the litter of papers that awaited me there, in the wretched book that I was struggling to make. _Aqui esta encerrado el alma del licenciado._ What have I said of the paradox of life, that its actualities are so nauseous that men will do anything to escape from them? And here was I, free to enjoy the sun on the Provençal sea and the wonder of the Roman world, hankering after the world of anguish and difficulty and disappointment that I had made for myself in grim Verulam Buildings, amidst the London fogs.
And so I got back and found that the labour of months had been wasted, and set to work to break and remake. The book was finished, somehow, in the March of 1897, and just then, as if he had come upon his cue, a new publisher, Mr. Grant Richards, wrote to me asking if I had any manuscripts that I should like to have published. I saw him and left “The Hill of Dreams” with him. He did not take long to make up his mind about it. He would have none of it, and he wrote advising me by no means to publish the book; for, he said, it would do me no credit. What he meant was that it was not in the least like “The Three Impostors,” and it took him ten years before he saw light on the subject, for it was the firm of Grant Richards that published “The Hill of Dreams” in 1907.
Some amusing reviews appeared. The “Daily Graphic” said, very truly, that the book was not of much practical interest, and the “Outlook” confirmed this dictum by stating that there was “scarcely a place for it in the widest utilitarian view.” “Will readily impress a reader of quiet tastes,” declared the gentler “Scotsman.” “Nothing that more quickly tends to tedium,” corrected the “Manchester Guardian”: naturally enough, if the “Athenæum” was right in saying that “the main matter of regret is the utter formlessness and the arid inhumanity of his work.” “Well written, but written not quite well enough,” was the fatal sentence of the “Chronicle.” And so on, and so on. I will not disguise the fact that some of the notices were very good indeed; but it has always been the other sort of review that has heartened me, and so forthwith I set about writing a book in high spirits. This turned out to be “The Secret Glory,” which was published in the spring of 1922. This book also was on the whole very well reviewed, though it is as queer as queer can be--I am afraid I must say that the bridge is not nearly so well kept now as in the brave days of old. But one reviewer stood out boldly, and him I will quote in full, and so make an end of talking about reviews, which some authors jeer at, which I treasure with reverent care.
“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 Catholicism, a mystical 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 him out of it.”
There! That notice, which appeared in “The Nation and the Athenæum,” was signed by Mr. J. Middleton Murry, generally recognised as being one of the most eminent literary critics of the day, if he is not rather to be accounted as the most eminent literary critic of the day. He is also, as a fellow-writer assured me, regarded as “the leader of the younger intelligentsia.” Anyhow, I like a man who speaks his mind. I try to do so myself, sometimes.
And “there!” again. I think I have written enough about the manner in which I thought of my books, the manner in which I wrote my books, the manner in which I broke down more or less lamentably in the beginning, the middle and the end of my books, the manner in which they were welcomed by eager publishers, and the manner in which they finally tottered into print and were acclaimed by the Press. Enough has been said on all these topics, and perhaps a good deal too much for the patience of a weary world.
Let us now be brief on this matter. The year 1898 I spent in the service of “Literature,” a weekly journal that had just been started by “The Times.” In 1899 I wrote “Hieroglyphics” and “The White People,” and the first chapter of “A Fragment of Life.” Then a great sorrow which had long been threatened fell upon me: I was once more alone.
_Chapter IX_
It was somewhere about the autumn of 1899 that I began to be conscious that the world was being presented to me at a new angle. I find now an extreme difficulty in the choice of words to convey my meaning; “a new angle” is clumsy enough, “here in this world he changed his life” is far too high in its associations; but there certainly came to be a strangeness in the proportion of things, both in things exterior and interior. And it is in these latter that I held and still hold that the true wonder, the true mystery, the true miracle reside. There is the old proverb, of course: “Seeing is believing” and, for once, the old proverb is widely astray. All phenomenal perception is apt to be deceitful, and very often is deceitful. This is in the nature of things, as Berkeley pointed out a very long time ago. That castle tower that looks round in the distance is found to be square when you get a little nearer to it; the red and golden glory and the magic architecture of the sunset cloud would change, if you were in it, into something like a London fog. And if it be objected: “Yes, exactly; when you are far away from an object you see it incorrectly, but when you come near it you see it correctly”--that is not so. If you were near enough to the tower, with your nose within six inches of it, you only see a certain limited extent of stone surface; the tower, qua tower, has entirely disappeared. But you see the stone surface accurately? No, you don’t. The ant crawling up it has a wildly different vision and perception of that stone surface from your vision and perception; and a microscope gives yet another vision, different from either; and as magnification must be infinite in potentiality, though not _in actu_, it is quite clear that no one can ever see the truth of any external object presented to the eyes: there must always be, in theory and perhaps, eventually, in fact, another microscope of still higher magnifying power, which will entirely change the aspect of the thing seen. And thus, without tedious specification and example of all the other senses, I mustn’t even call the poker stiff, lest the man in the chair on the other side of the fire take it up and tie it into a knot before my eyes, proving that I have been talking foolishly. And get the rarest Bordeaux that money can buy, and offer Bill the navvy a glass; and watch his face as he calls for ale to wash that muck, that ... something muck, out of his mouth.