The Arthur Machen Megapack: 25 Classic Works (4 page)

The day is coming when a number of serious charges will be laid against us who live in this generation, and some severe questions asked, and the fact that we will be dead, most of us, when the future fires its broadside, has nothing at all to do with the case.

We are going to be asked, post-mortem, why we allowed Ambrose Bierce to vanish from our midst, unnoticed and unsought, after ignoring him shamefully throughout his career; why Stephen Crane, after a few flamboyant reviews, was so quickly forgotten at death; why Richard Middleton was permitted to swallow his poison at Brussels; why W. C. Morrow and Walter Blackburn Harte were in our day known only to the initiated, discriminating few; their fine, golden books merely rare “items” for the collector. Among other things, posterity is going to demand of us why, when the opportunity was ours, we did not open our hearts to Arthur Machen and name him among the very great.

1
I have let this last assertion stand as part of the original article, although Mr. Machen writes me that I am in error. “I never read a line of Baudelaire,” he says, “but I have read deeply in Poe, who, I believe, derives largely from Baudelaire.” Of course, it is the other way round, Baudelaire derives from Poe, but my own assumption is rendered clear.—V. S.

THE REMEMBRANCE OF THE BARD

In the darkness of old age let not my memory fail:

Let me not forget to celebrate the beloved land of Gwent.

If they imprison me in a deep place, in a house of pestilence,

Still shall I be free, remembering the sunshine upon Mynydd Maen.

There have I listened to the song of the lark, my soul has ascended with the song of the little bird:

The great white clouds were the ships of my spirit, sailing to the haven of the Almighty.

Equally to be held in honour is the site of the Great Mountain.

Adorned with the gushing of many waters—sweet is the shade of its hazel thickets.

There a treasure is preserved which I will not celebrate;

It is glorious and deeply concealed.

If Teils should return, if happiness were restored to the Cymri,

Dewi and Dyfrig should serve his Mass; then a great marvel would be made visible.

O blessed and miraculous work! then should my bliss be as the joy of angels.

I had rather behold this offering than kiss the twin lips of dark Gwenllian.

Dear my land of Gwent: O quam dilecta tabernacula.

Thy rivers are like precious golden streams of Paradise, thy hills are as the Mount Syon.

Better a grave on Twyn Barlwm than a throne in the palace of the Saxons at Caer-Ludd.

THE PRAISE OF MYFANWY

O gift of the everlasting:

O wonderful and hidden mystery.

Many secrets have been vouchsafed to me,

I have been long acquainted with the wisdom of the trees;

Ash and oak and elm have communicated to me from my boyhood,

The birch and the hazel and all the trees of the greenwood have not been dumb.

There is a caldron rimmed with pearls of whose gifts I am not ignorant;

I will speak little of it; its treasures are known to the Bards.

Many went on the search of Caer-Pedryfan,

Seven alone returned with Arthur, but my spirit was present.

Seven are the apple-trees in a beautiful orchard;

I have eaten of their fruit which is not bestowed on Saxons.

I am not ignorant of a Head which is glorious and venerable;

It made perpetual entertainment for the warriors, their joys would have been immortal;

If they had not opened the door of the south, they would have feasted for ever,

Listening to the song of the fairy Birds of Rhiannon.

Let not anyone instruct me concerning the Glassy Isle;

In the garments of the saints who returned from it were rich odours of Paradise.

All this I knew, and yet my knowledge was ignorance.

For one day, as I walked by Caer-rhiu in the principal forest of Gwent,

I saw golden Myfanwy as she bathed in the brook Tarogi,

Her hair flowed about her; Arthur’s crown had dissolved into a shining mist.

I gazed into her blue eyes as it were into twin heavens,

All the parts of her body were adornments and miracles.

O gift of the everlasting:

O wonderful and hidden mystery:

When I embraced Myfanwy a moment became immortality.

THE HOUSE OF SOULS: AN INTRODUCTION

It was somewhere, I think, towards the autumn of the year 1889 that the thought occurred to me that I might perhaps try to write a little in the modern way. For, hitherto, I had been, as it were, wearing costume in literature. The rich, figured English of the earlier part of the seventeenth century had always had a peculiar attraction for me. I accustomed myself to write in it, to think in it; I kept a diary in that manner, and half-unconsciously dressed up my every day thoughts and common experiences in the habit of the Cavalier or of the Caroline Divine. Thus, when in 1884 I got a commission to translate the Heptameron, I wrote quite naturally in the language of my favourite period, and, as some critics declare, made my English version somewhat more antique and stiff than the original. And so “The Anatomy of Tobacco” was an exercise in the antique of a different kind; and “The Chronicle of Clemendy” was a volume of tales that tried their hardest to be mediæval; and the translation of the “Moyen de Parvenir” was still a thing in the ancient mode.

It seemed, in fine, to be settled that in literature I was to be a hanger on of the past ages; and I don’t quite know how I managed to get away from them. I had finished translating “Casanova”—more modern, but not thoroughly up to date—and I had nothing particular on hand, and, somehow or other, it struck me that I might try a little writing for the papers. I began with a “turnover” as it was called, for the old vanished Globe, a harmless little article on old English proverbs; and I shall never forget my pride and delight when one day, being at Dover, with a fresh autumn wind blowing from the sea, I bought a chance copy of the paper and saw my essay on the front page. Naturally, I was encouraged to persevere, and I wrote more turnovers for the Globe and then tried the St. James’s Gazette and found that they paid two pounds instead of the guinea of the Globe, and again, naturally enough, devoted most of my attention to the St. James’s Gazette. From the essay or literary paper, I somehow got into the habit of the short story, and did a good many of these, still for the St. James’s, till in the autumn of 1890, I wrote a tale called “The Double Return.” Well, Oscar Wilde asked: “Are you the author of that story that fluttered the dovecotes? I thought it was very good.” But: it did flutter the dovecotes, and the St. James’s Gazette and I parted.

But I still wrote short stories, now chiefly for what were called “society” papers, which have become extinct. And one of these appeared in a paper, the name of which I have long forgotten. I had called the tale “Resurrectio Mortuorum,” and the editor had very sensibly rendered the title into “The Resurrection of the Dead.”

I do not clearly remember how the story began. I am inclined to think something in this way:

“Old Mr. Llewellyn, the Welsh antiquary, threw his copy of the morning paper on the floor and banged the breakfast-table, exclaiming: ‘Good God! Here’s the last of the Caradocs of the Garth, has been married in a Baptist Chapel by a dissenting preacher; somewhere in Peckham.’” Or, did I take up the tale a few years after this happy event and shew the perfectly cheerful contented young commercial clerk running somewhat too fast to catch the bus one morning, and feeling dazed all day long over the office work, and going home in a sort of dimness, and then at his very doorstep, recovering as it were, his ancestral consciousness. I think it was the sight of his wife and the tones of her voice that suddenly announced to him with the sound of a trumpet that he had nothing to do with this woman with the Cockney accent, or the pastor who was coming to supper, or the red brick villa, or Peckham or the City of London. Though the old place on the banks of the Usk had been sold fifty years before, still, he was Caradoc of the Garth. I forget how I ended the story: but here was one of the sources of “A Fragment of Life.”

And somehow, though the tale was written and printed and paid for; it stayed with me as a tale half told in the years from 1890 to 1899. I was in love with the notion: this contrast between the raw London suburb and its mean limited life and its daily journeys to the City; its utter banality and lack of significance; between all this and the old, grey mullioned house under the forest near the river, the armorial bearings on the Jacobean porch, and noble old traditions: all this captivated me and I thought of my mistold tale at intervals, while I was writing “The Great God Pan,” “The Red Hand,” “The Three Impostors,” “The Hill of Dreams,” “The White People,” and “Hieroglyphics.” It was at the back of my head, I suppose, all the time, and at last in ’99 I began to write it all over again from a somewhat different standpoint.

The fact was that one grey Sunday afternoon in the March of that year, I went for a long walk with a friend. I was living in Gray’s Inn in those days, and we stravaged up Gray’s Inn Road on one of those queer, unscientific explorations of the odd corners of London in which I have always delighted. I don’t think that there was any definite scheme laid down; but we resisted manifold temptations. For on the right of Gray’s Inn Road is one of the oddest quarters of London—to those, that is, with the unsealed eyes. Here are streets of 1800-1820 that go down into a valley—Flora in “Little Dorrit” lived in one of them—and then crossing King’s Cross Road climb very steeply up to heights which always suggest to me that I am in the hinder and poorer quarter of some big seaside place, and that there is a fine view of the sea from the attic windows. This place was once called Spa Fields, and has very properly an old meeting house of the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connection as one of its attractions. It is one of the parts of London which would attract me if I wished to hide; not to escape arrest, perhaps, but rather to escape the possibility of ever meeting anybody who had ever seen me before.

But: my friend and I resisted it all. We strolled along to the parting of many ways at King’s Cross Station, and struck boldly up Pentonville. Again: on our left was Barnsbury, which is like Africa. In Barnsbury semper aliquid novi, but our course was laid for us by some occult influence, and we came to Islington and chose the right hand side of the way. So far, we were tolerably in the region of the known, since every year there is the great Cattle Show at Islington, and many men go there. But, trending to the right, we got into Canonbury, of which there are only Travellers’ Tales. Now and then, perhaps, as one sits about the winter fire, while the storm howls without and the snow falls fast, the silent man in the corner has told how he had a great aunt who lived in Canonbury in 1860; so in the fourteenth century you might meet men who had talked with those who had been in Cathay and had seen the splendours of the Grand Cham. Such is Canonbury; I hardly dare speak of its dim squares, of the deep, leafy back-gardens behind the houses, running down into obscure alleyways with discreet, mysterious postern doors: as I say, “Travellers’ Tales”; things not much credited.

But, he who adventures in London has a foretaste of infinity. There is a region beyond Ultima Thule. I know not how it was, but on this famous Sunday afternoon, my friend and I, passing through Canonbury came into something called the Balls Pond Road—Mr. Perch, the messenger of Dombey & Son, lived somewhere in this region—and so I think by Dalston down into Hackney where caravans, or trams, or, as I think you say in America, trolley cars set out at stated intervals to the limits of the western world.

But in the course of that walk which had become an exploration of the unknown, I had seen two common things which had made a profound impression upon me. One of these things was a street, the other a small family party. The street was somewhere in that vague, uncharted, Balls Pond-Dalston region. It was a long street and a grey street. Each house was exactly like every other house. Each house had a basement, the sort of story which house-agents have grown to call of late a “lower ground floor.” The front windows of these basements were half above the patch of black, soot-smeared soil and coarse grass that named itself a garden, and so, passing along at the hour of four o’clock or four-thirty, I could see that in everyone of these “breakfast rooms”—their technical name—the tea tray and the tea cups were set out in readiness. I received from this trivial and natural circumstance an impression of a dull life, laid out in dreadful lines of patterned uniformity, of a life without adventure of body or soul.