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The magic of Machen is due no less to his wonderful style than to his wonderful material. In these days when one can scarcely speak of style without being considered stuffy and perhaps even pedantic, to praise a writer for his style is almost to damn him with faint praise. This is undoubtedly because we have had no stylists for the last several decades, for which, on the whole, we may well be grateful! It is possible that stylists fell into disrepute because so many of them, in the past, concealed a tremendous vacuum and a cavernous nothingness beneath and behind a facile facade of fluency.
Yet Arthur Machen has a distinctive style, the perfection of which, while it appeals to the pedantic and soothes the scholarly, must be apparent even to the readers of those horrendous anthologies which have reprinted Machen while the scholars were busily interring him in their fascinating mausoleums. This matter of style is rather a tricky one. It is the sort of thing of which one might say, as some have, and when all definitions fail, “Either one has it, or—one hasn’t!” However feelingly and with whatever academic finality this axiom may be delivered—style is obviously more than that, and more than the man. More, too, than words and a certain way of putting them together, and much more than a mere choice of words or dexterity in manipulating them. We have come to think that many of these things do constitute style. Indeed, a certain publisher recently hailed a new book (one of his own, of course) as being in the “tradition of the English Stylists.” Simply because the writer employed, here and there, a compound-complex sentence, composed with a certain felicity and manufactured of polysyllabic words or those with a certain antique charm. It is felt, then, that a matter of phrases makes a Fielding—which is no more the case than that the use of a quotation from Donne makes a writer one to stand with the Elizabethans.
Style is, like so many other things, more apparent in the breach than in the observance, which comes perilously close to the didactic dictum, “Either you have it, or—you haven’t.” But not quite. To be sure, every written word or group of words has style, even roadsigns, notices of trespass, mayors’ proclamation, editorials in the Daily Worker, even soap operas have style. The most popular writers of pot-boilers have a style—and many of them have so pronounced a style that they can be and have been recognizably parodied.
It might be said of a good style that it is one that cannot be parodied. An examination of Machen’s style would indicate that it is, in his case at least, quite true. For Machen’s style is a blend of many things; of words with magic connotation, of sentences that create moods, of passages that suggest, subtly and almost unconsciously, the exact atmosphere for which they were intended. Mr. Machen is a master at evoking the willing suspension of disbelief, and he does it without employing any of the stock properties listed by Coleridge and other authorities as having the proper connotative value for the creation of a “Gothic” mood or atmosphere.
When all is said and done, however, it must be admitted that Machen’s style is merely a reflection of his faith in the credo of a literary man as set forth by the admirable Dyson. And here, of course, we come to the crux of the matter, and as close as we may to an explanation of Machen’s magic which cannot, after all, be appraised in rational terms. In that wonderful book called Hieroglyphics Machen poses a series of questions:
“Explain, in rational terms, The Quest of the Holy Graal. State whether in your opinion such a vessel ever existed, and if you think it did not, justify your pleasure in reading an account of the search for it.”
“Explain, logically, your delight in color.”
“Estimate the value of Westminster Abbey in the avoirdupois measure.”
“Faery lands forlorn. Draw a map of the district in question, putting in principal towns and naming exports.”
Machen agrees that one cannot express art of any kind in the terms of rationalism, and that “If literature be a kind of dignified reporting, in which the reporter is at liberty to invent new incidents and leave out others, and to arrange all in the order that pleases him best; then, let us have as much “common sense” and “rationalism” as you please ... but if literature is a mysterious ecstasy, the withdrawal from all common and ordinary conditions ... [we had better] confess that with its first principles logic has nothing to do.... For if Rationalism be the truth, then all literature ... is simply lunacy.”