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Toward the close of the first quarter of this century Mr. Alfred Knopf, being ready to reissue The Anatomy of Tobacco, asked Arthur Machen to write a new introduction for the volume. The Anatomy had been written some forty-three years before and it seemed time a new edition and a new introduction were called for. The Anatomy is a slight book, and a rather dull and pretentious one, turned out as a sort of sophomoric exercise under the influence of Burton and other pedantic antiquarians. Machen had no objection to writing a new introduction to the book of “Leolinus Siluriensis” and so he sat down at once to do so.
Most of Machen’s work, and certainly all of the best of it, had already been written and published ... there was no Great Romance on the fire just then. Several years before he had written his memoirs, or come as close to writing them as he ever would. The Confessions of a Literary Man appeared serially in the London Evening News through several months of 1915. Secker issued the Confessions in 1922 as Far Off Things. A year later Machen wrote Things Near and Far; another two years later came The London Adventure. These three books are Machen’s autobiography, although it has been said that almost everything he ever wrote was, to a great extent, autobiographical. At any rate, Machen saw the books in print and occupied himself with journalism, which he detested, and with thinking over the books he had written which, on the whole, he rather enjoyed. And so when, in the 1920’s, he began the New York Adventure, Machen sat down and wrote not one but a whole series of new introductions. There is no nonsense about these introductions, and no “graceful writing.” The introduction to the new edition of the Anatomy begins quite simply:
“It struck me once, during a long meditation on literature, that every man who has written has had but one idea in his head. To the best of my recollection, the particular example in my mind at the time was Edgar Allen Poe, who executed a wonderful series of variations on one theme.”
Now this idea had been in Machen’s mind for a great many years. A year or two before completing his introduction for Mr. Knopf he had been engaged in writing a book called The London Adventure. The book contains much material that is found in neither the Confessions nor in Things Near and Far. While writing the book he became intrigued with some old note books he had kept many years before. In reading them he was reminded of a story by Henry James, The Pattern on the Carpet, in which is expressed the notion of a man of letters who had written many books and was quite surprised to find that one of his admirers had failed to recognize that all these tales of his were variations on one theme; that a common pattern, like the pattern of an eastern carpet ran through them all. In the story the novelist died suddenly without revealing the nature of the pattern. Nor does Henry James, in whose works one might also trace a common pattern. He too leaves it to his readers to discover for themselves the mystery of this one design, latent in a whole shelf of books.
Machen himself has such a pattern, and such a theme. It occurs again and again in all of his works, in his short stories as well as in his novels: in the slightest of his essays as well as in Hieroglyphics. This theme he defines in several places quite briefly and simply. It is, he says, “The sense of the eternal mysteries, the eternal beauty hidden beneath the crust of common and commonplace things: hidden and yet burning and glowing continuously if you care to look with purged eyes.”
We have noted, several times over, Machen’s preoccupation with a Great Romance. Many years ago he wrote, “There is a great book that I am hoping to write one of these fine days. I have been hoping to write it, I may say, since 1898, or ’99, and somewhere about the later year I did write as many as a dozen pages. The magnum opus so far conducted did not wholly displease me, and yet it was not good enough to urge me forward in the task. And so it has languished ever since then, and I am afraid I have lost the manuscript that contained all that there was of it long ago. Seriously, of course, it would not have been a great book if it had been ever so prosperously continued and ended; but it would have been at least a curious book, and even now I feel conscious of warm desire at the thought of writing it—some day. For the idea came to me as follows:
“I had been thinking at the old century end of the work that I had done in the fifteen years or so before, and it suddenly dawned upon me that this work, pretty good or pretty bad, or as it may be, had all been the expression of one formula, one endeavor. What I had been doing was this: I had been inventing tales in which and by which I had tried to realize my boyish impressions of that wonderful magic Gwent.”
Now this great book was not only written but it was rewritten under various forms, in entirely different ways, and with no surface similarities at all. For almost sixty years he had written purely to please himself, nor did he hesitate to publish, at his own expense, the books he wrote for his own pleasure. It was his feeling in this that there was no reason why a beginner should not be willing to pay his own way. And yet, as he says, it is a queer pleasure when one does write to please oneself. For, as Machen says,
“I wrote purely to please myself; and what a queer pleasure it was! To write, or to try to write, means involving oneself in endless difficulties, contrarieties, torments, despairs, and yet I wrote on, and I suppose for the reason which I have given, the necessity laid upon most of us to create another and a fantastic life in order that the life of actuality may be endurable.”
In these excerpts from Machen’s autobiographical sketches one encounters over and over again certain keywords: ‘escape,’ ‘common life,’ ‘eternal mysteries,’ ‘removal’ and so on. And these same key words are, of course, the underlying themes of every story he ever wrote. They constitute the criteria by which he judged the literature of past and present as well.