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And then we have the testimony of C. Lewis Hind, a sort of literary journalist who once saw Machen plain. Mr. Hind did essays and sketches of literary people about London and collected them into books called Authors and I and More Authors and I. He remembers having met Machen once at a dinner given for Sir Frank Benson and members of his Shakespearean Repertoire Company; he also recalls having seen Machen “slouching through the interminable corridors of the Evening News.”
An article on Machen, published in one of his collections, he credits to a letter from Vincent Starrett. Mr. Starrett’s enthusiasm apparently moved Hind to do a piece on Mr. Machen. The encounter described in the article was, apparently, a chance encounter of the sort in which Machen himself delighted.
Mr. Hind had gone, one evening, to call upon an acquaintance who lived in one of the London Inns of Court. While he was peering at the names inscribed on the oak door the door was opened—by Arthur Machen! “My friend was not in, but the author of Hieroglyphics and I had some good, rapid talk. He is an admirable monologist when in the mood (see Hieroglyphics). For some reason or other I have a vivid recollection of that brief encounter—the open door, the snug room beyond, the books and a lamp, warmth and stillness, and Arthur Machen standing in the passage—smiling and talking, ready to talk but also ready to go back to his folios.”
Machen was, according to Mr. Hind, “a heavily built man, with a large genial, yet brooding, clean-shaven face; a good companion, I think, but one who keeps many of his thoughts to himself.” Mr. Hind was, in short, charmed and impressed, but he obviously did not consider Arthur Machen a V.I.P. It would be interesting to read Machen on Hind.
One of the most curious estimates of Machen is made by Professor Cornelius Weygandt in his A Century of the English Novel. Professor Weygandt admires Machen somewhat for his essays, and classifies him as a “lesser late Victorian” along with Baring-Gould, Quiller-Couch, Marie Corelli, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Walter Pater and others—a very curious group indeed!
The professor devotes a full page to Machen, which is not at all bad, and well above the average, for lesser late Victorians! Machen’s great fault, the professor finds, is that he is not a story-teller, he has not taught himself the craft. He has little sense of the creation of character and his own life is, obviously, very narrow. As an essayist, however, concedes the Professor, Machen is often a bringer of delight. The Hill of Dreams, on the other hand, is saved from futility only by some good writing. So sayeth Professor Weygandt.
Wagenknecht, in his Cavalcade of the English Novel, is much more to my taste than the austere professor. He introduces Machen as “one of the most remarkable examples of sustained devotion to creative work in literary history.” He finds that Machen reveals a gift for breathless narrative to match LeFanu’s, but he feels that this quality is lacking in the book generally regarded as Machen’s masterpiece—The Hill of Dreams. Nevertheless, Wagenknecht considers Machen “important,” he rates him with Blackwood and de la Mare, and has included Machen’s The Terror in his collection Six Novels of the Supernatural published a few years ago by Viking.