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For almost a decade Machen had been in London, and for most of that time he had been writing. But he had written rather imitatively; he had, as he says, “been wearing costume in literature. The rich, figured English of the earlier 17th Century had a peculiar attraction....” Whether this was unnatural affectation or natural affinity, he wrote in this fashion—essays, verse, tales, epistols dedicatory. He even kept, for many years, a diary written in this manner. The Anatomy of Tobacco was an “exercise in the antique,” the Chronicle tried to be mediaeval, Le Moyen was in the ancient mode, the Heptameron a mere finger-exercise in the composition of a period piece. At this point Machen decided to write in the modern manner.
In 1890 Machen began to make an approach to journalism. His Welsh relations were probably gratified when his pieces and stories began to appear in the Globe and the St. James Gazette. He was still a long way from adopting journalism as a profession or career, but he had decided to do some writing in “the modern manner” and the papers seemed to offer an outlet.
Journalism was then, as it is now, a wonderfully agitated world in which editors knew what their readers wanted and were determined to see that they got it—whether they liked it or not. Oddly enough, an editor’s staff never seems to have this happy faculty of knowing what the readers want, but they do know what their editors want—and so everyone is mildly unhappy about it excepting the editors—and it is questionable whether an editor is ever really happy, or ever deserves to be.
At any rate Machen wrote, on an average, about as much drivel as the average journalist must, and about as many silly stories as most journalists have to. Of course it was not as bad as it might have been, or as bad as it became later, for, according to Machen, editors in the 1890’s presumed a certain standard of education and culture in their readers. This tendency has been overcome, however, and along with certain other technical improvements the press as it existed during Machen’s time was much as it is today.
His success at writing for the Globe and an acceptance by the St. James Gazette started him on short stories. These appeared mostly in the Gazette whose rate of payment was commendably higher than the Globe’s. The connection did not last too long for one of the stories created quite a stir.
Reading it now one wonders at that, and when one remembers a few of the tales that were to flourish in the decade to follow, Machen’s little story of The Double Return seems harmless enough. The tale is rather reminiscent of The Guardsman—you will remember the success of the Lunts in that play on the stage and on the screen. Machen’s tale lacked the amorousness or even the intent of The Guardsman, it merely told of a man returning home after three weeks in the country.
“Back so soon?” asked his wife.
“I’ve been in the country for three weeks,” said he, rather put out.
“I know,” she said, “but you returned last night.”
“Indeed not, I spent last night at Plymouth on my way back from the country,” said the husband.
Whereupon his wife accused him of being playful and showed him his cigarette case he had left behind him when he left the house this very morning. Well, the husband had lost the cigarette case in the country some days before, and he had spent the night in Plymouth on his way back to London, and so he couldn’t have returned on the previous night. There had been a man at his hotel or inn who rather resembled him and so on. The upshot of it all was that shortly thereafter the husband went to America, which seems to have been the thing to do in such cases. A rather harmless little story, not even a boudoir scene or a hint of one. But The Double Return aroused as much interest in the nineties as the most daring double entendre might today.
Oscar Wilde, no amateur at arousing the public, said to Machen, “Are you the author of that story that fluttered the dovecotes? I thought it very good.” Well, flutter the dovecotes it did, and one did not flutter the dovecotes with impunity, at least so far as the St. James Gazette was concerned. Machen no longer appeared in its august pages. This may or may not have caused Machen concern. He was also doing stories for some of the “society” papers and wrote in this same year The Lost Club, so very similar to Stevenson’s story of the Suicide Club, A Wonderful Woman and others.
The year 1890 happens to be a year of some significance generally, for it opens the decade of the delicate decadents, sometimes known as the Yellow Book Boys.
Among the many books that have been written about the Eighteen Nineties is a small and, on the whole, less pretentious volume than most. This is Bernard Muddiman’s Men of the Nineties. In it one finds this brief mention of Machen: “Arthur Machen, in those days, belonged to the short story writers with Hubert Crackanthorpe, who was the great imaginative prose writer of the group.”
Alas, poor Hubert! Who knows him today as a great imaginative prose writer? Who, for that matter, knows poor Hubert at all, save for those who may look into the bound volumes of the Yellow Book to be found occasionally in the Public Library (under the somewhat bewildering though accurate classification of “Magazines”)?
The 1890’s was perhaps the most widely and well publicized decade in history, surpassing, in this respect at least, the ’Twenties of our own century. The 1890’s spawned geniuses where the 1920’s only discovered genius. The analogy between these decades can be carried to even greater lengths and indeed it will be, in a later chapter, for the ’Twenties also rediscovered Arthur Machen.
But for all poor Muddiman’s eulogy of Hubert in his slender volume eulogizing the men of the Nineties, the late Mr. Crackanthorpe was not the great imaginative prose writer of the group. Nor was the prolific Henry Harland, whose contributions to the Yellow Book were in the New Style—with French phrases popping up half a dozen to the page and French women putting in appearance among the good English spinneys, and representative members of the New Woman being forthright and outspoken for all their “flutter of curls at the brow” and garden hats and “merry peals of laughter.” Mr. Harland sprinkled his prose with French phrases, giving them a naughty air (just as, in the Twenties, French phrases were used to give novels a sophisticated air) and his heroes were made “interesting” rather than solid or adventurous or empire building. They, the “interesting” chaps, thought of women as “handsome” or “good-looking” rather than beautiful or lovely. Such words were reserved for inanimate things—things animal, vegetable or mineral, but never the feminine. They further thought of women in terms of “what a woman she is!” Like that, with an air of invincible surprise. No, it was not Hubert, nor yet Henry, who was the great imaginative prose writer of the group—it was Arthur Machen. But then Muddiman may have been right after all, for Machen was not truly of the group of writers who practiced the purple phrase, who wrote in pastels and who composed pastiches in praise of practically nothing.
It may come as something of a surprise to many admirers of Machen to know that he was a contemporary of the Yellow Book crowd. Perhaps it will come as something of a relief to know that Machen was not a member of the group, despite the fact that his first book of stories appeared in this period, issuing from the Bodley Head with a title page by Beardsley. Machen never wrote for the Yellow Book. But for that matter, neither did Wilde. Still, yellow bookery was rampant at the time and since it is sometimes said that a man is the product of his age, it might be well to skirt along the well travelled path trod by the delicate decadents, their critics and appraisers and appreciators.
Osburt Burdett, Holbrook Jackson, Richard LeGallienne and other more talented and serious students have gone over the period with admirable thoroughness. The magnifying glass has been placed over every one of Beardsley’s drawings and even the most moribund of the minor poets has been the subject of at least one monograph. Still, it will be interesting to review briefly what has been said of the men of the Nineties, if only because it may be applied, with certain changes and reservations, to the Twenties and, for that matter, to the period which we are about to enter. For the birth of the Atomic Age, for all its violent and destructive debut, cannot have been more shocking, in some respects, than the impact of the coterie of the green carnation upon the Victorianism of the Nineties.
The group known as the Yellow Book boys, or the men of the Nineties, or the delicate decadents were, as Donald Davidson has remarked, “time-conscious” to an intense degree. They were nearing the end of a century, just as the men of the Twenties lived through the end of an epoch and the men of the Forties enter a new one. There is still, you see, this strange analogy between the “Tragic Generation” as the men of the Nineties called themselves, and the “Lost Generation” as the men of the Twenties called themselves. Whether or not there will be a continuing analogy between the three decades is an interesting speculation, but quite beyond the scope of this study. Or is it?
The men of the Nineties were time-conscious to an intense degree and they were self-conscious to an even greater degree. Being young men, for one thing, and acutely aware of the Victorianism of their Victorian age for another, and rather preoccupied with the importance of being earnest and alive in the closing years of a century for still another, they were rather more self-conscious than most young men.
Now it is an odd thing, when one considers it, that the young and self-conscious members of the Anglo-Saxon races, in whatever age, discover in themselves a remarkable affinity and a positive predilection for the culture and customs of France. This happens time and again, and whenever it does happen it is accompanied by a profound contempt for the Anglo-Saxonishness of their Anglo-Saxon contemporaries and compatriots. No doubt there are excellent reasons for this. It is a strange thing, but it is by no means unusual, since it has happened with something very much like regularity ever since William the Norman crossed the Channel—and perhaps even before that.
The Saxon nobles who set themselves apart from the peasantry were probably the first to adopt the manners and language of the Norman court. Almost any intrigue current at the time, or for the next few centuries, seemed the more likely to succeed if it acquired a dash of the Gallic. Even in that most English of all English periods, the age of Elizabeth, the young blades and the intellectuals felt the more dashing and, presumably, the more intellectual for a smattering of French oaths and a short time spent in the courts or chateaux of France, or the alleys and marketplaces of Paris.
Well, then, the men of the Nineties acquired their smattering of French and their translations of Baudelaire and Verlaine and felt the better for them ... much as our men of the Twenties rode the cattle-boats to the Left Bank and wrote the “only American literature” of their day. Little magazines sprang up in the Nineties, verse grew steadily more libre, and there was little difference, spiritually at any rate, between the Bodley Head in 1890 and the Shakespeare Head in 1920 or thereabouts. Another lost, tragic generation of self-conscious Anglo-Saxons had “found themselves”—and France.