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Of recent years there has been a tendency to regard the novel as something it has become rather than what it should be. Most novels that do not fall neatly into one of several categories created by the critics and reviewers are judged to be poor novels indeed. As a matter of fact, the whole of fiction, as well as of poetry, has come to be judged according to standards which, while they may be excellent standards when applied to journalism or the so-called “documentary,” serve fiction rather poorly. It has become the custom to label all stories, novels and poetry that may fall outside the special categories set up by such standards as “escapist.” It is a convenient enough classification, and it is an apt enough description, but the word has come to be used in a rather derogatory sense.
Now it may be demonstrated by an application of these very standards that almost every one of the world’s great books, and every one of the world’s heroic poems, is “escapist.” And that is, after all, what they were intended to be. But we are concerned with the telling of a story and the manner of its telling. To tell a wonderful story in a wonderful manner, this, says Arthur Machen, is the function of the writer. There is another equally fine description of the writer’s task, this time by James Branch Cabell, another story teller of some eminence.
There is in almost all great stories a certain magic that becomes apparent from the first sentence. One picks up Moby Dick and reads: “Call me Ishmael.” There is a quality of strangeness in the name and abruptness of introduction that serves to set a mood, a mood that persists through the entire book. Many of Poe’s stories have this same strangeness and this same quality. One finds it too, in many of Machen’s stories. The opening sentence, for example of The Hill of Dreams: “The sky glowed as if great furnace doors had been opened.”
The magic of Machen depends as much upon his style as it does upon the magical things of which he writes. His finest stories appeal to an essential and basic desire for “escape” from the common life. They depend for their effect upon that willing suspension of disbelief of which Coleridge wrote (and for which Coleridge is known by far too many who would turn its meaning to their own uses), a suspension of disbelief which it is Mr. Machen’s happy fortune to bring about almost at will.
And yet, apparently, there is much more to it than the mere suspension of disbelief—it is rather a desire to accept such matters as may be set forth, whether or not they challenge belief—simply because they make an appeal to instinctive belief. One doesn’t have to try very hard to believe in the existence of certain powers, especially those which cannot be, or have not yet been, explained as any known existing force. From this point onward the development of a story by Machen may hinge upon the manner of telling as well as upon the selection of the materials for the tale. There must be no fumbling of the matter, no crude effects, no creaky props, no bolstering up by the shabby tricks and melodramatic artifices of the penny dreadfuls. Machen’s magic is very simply achieved. In each of his tales an improbable, but not implausible, theme is stated; usually one that is based upon something involving an instinctive belief, for example: the existence of “little people,” the continuance of some ancient power under certain circumstances, and in explaining certain occurrences or events for which no rational explanation exists. Folk tales, superstitions, local legends and mythology, most of these embody certain elements in which most of us have at least an instinctive belief. Then, too, a great deal of Mr. Machen’s own particular magic is achieved through his ability to see things and to present things that are “removed from the common life.”
Most of Machen’s characters are not unusual people, they are not especially “peculiar” in any accepted sense except as they may be affected by certain occurrences in the earlier development of the story. For example, the young man in The Novel of the White Powder, the boy in The Novel of the Black Seal, and the Vaughan girl in The Great God Pan. But for the most part his characters are, or were, very ordinary people; ordinary, that is, in the sense that Dyson and Phillips, and even Lucian Taylor, are quite ordinary people. Indeed the very ordinariness of some of these people becomes the starting point of an entire sequence of extraordinary events. Just as it was the ordinary qualities of a young married couple visiting relatives of a Sunday night in a dull, stodgy, respectable suburb of London that resulted in the strange story called A Fragment of Life.
Machen’s characters are completely believable, whatever events may occur, simply because of their very ordinary qualities. Lucian Taylor, the “hero” of The Hill of Dreams, an introvert we would call him today, was a normal school boy who did not conform too well to the rigors of the Public School System, and whose solitary home life conditioned him to react as he did to the strangeness of his environment and to succumb to the influences, real or imagined, of the Roman ruins near his home. To the development of such a simple and ordinary character, in this particular story, must be added one very important magical element—the influence of landscape upon character.
For the peculiar potency of Machen’s magic owes much, if not most of its force, to landscape and to the subtle influence of the weird topography of his stories. Many of Machen’s most telling effects are achieved through the mere portrayal of a brooding landscape, the sombre background of mountains, the deep, rutted lanes that run along between head-high hedges, solitary hilltops shimmering in heat waves, old grey houses that sit somberly at the edge of the forest and rivers that coil in slow esses through forests and skirt the walls of mountains. There is no doubt that the wild Welsh countryside had this effect upon Machen himself.
Machen’s first book, it will be remembered, was written by one “Leolinus Silurensis”—and Machen frequently calls himself a “Silurist.” For Gwent, in the old days, the days before Arthur and before the Romans, was the home of the Silures, one of the three great tribes in this last corner of the West. The Silures seem to have been more Iberian than Celtic—they dwelled in the Black Mountains and along the estuary of the Severn. It was, then, this dark and ancient land that formed the background of Machen’s life and most of his work. Machen explains, and illustrates, the influence of his homeland in Far Off Things:
“This, then, was my process: to invent a story which would recreate those vague impressions of wonder and awe and mystery that I myself had received from the form and shape of the land of my boyhood and youth; and as I thought over this and meditated on the futility—or comparative futility—of the plot however ingenious, which did not exist to express emotions of one kind or another, it struck me that it might be possible to reverse the process. Could one describe hills and valleys, woods and rivers, sunrise and sunset, buried temples and mouldering Roman walls so that a story should be suggested to the reader? Not, of course, a story of material incidents, not a story with a plot in the ordinary sense of the term, but an interior tale of the soul and its emotions; could such a tale be suggested in the way I have indicated? Such is to be the plan of the great book which is not yet written.”
But of course this book was written, not once but over and over again. One finds its content in almost everything Machen ever wrote. One discovers too, the influence of landscape upon Machen and his work. One notes the feeling for landscape as much in his work as in the work of Poe or Coleridge or Hawthorne. One day, no doubt, a learned scholar will write a lengthy monograph upon what might be called The Influence of Landscape Upon the Creative Imagination. There are already many footnotes available for such a work.
Machen recognized this influence, it became apparent to him as he walked in the land of the Silures and as he read in the evenings in the drawing room at Llandewi. This snug, old fashioned “parlour” in the Rectory was the treasure house of the Machens. Here were their china and silver, and here the books gathered by the Rector and his forebears. It was here that Arthur Machen, on his vacations from school at Hereford, discovered the wonders of Waverly and DeQuincy. Here, too, was Parker’s Glossary of Gothic Architecture. This book initiated Machen into the spirit of Gothic and, as he says, “that is one of the most magical of all initiations.” Gothic meant to Arthur Machen “the art of the supreme exaltation, of the inebriation of the body and soul and spirit. It is not resigned to dwell calmly, stoically, austerely on the level plains of this earthy life, since its joy is in this, that it has stormed the battlements of heaven. And so its far-lifted vaults and its spires rush upward, and its pinnacles are like a wood of springing trees. And its hard stones, its strong based pillars break out as it were into song, they blossom as the rose; all the secrets of the garden and the field and the wood have been delivered unto them.”
Machen early developed this sense of wonder in the land. In his reading he discovered, in the age of Coleridge and Wordsworth, the “renaissance of wonder.” His taste for Scott and DeQuincy and Coleridge and Poe and Hawthorne and Parker; his taste, in short, for the “Gothic,” supports and explains this. For landscape and its influence are important elements in that which we have come to call “Gothic” ... and it is this Gothic-ness that is also one of the elements in Machen’s magic.