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The books of Arthur Machen which have gained the greatest amount of attention are, naturally enough, the more sensational stories in which he touches upon themes that approach what is, or what has been in the past, forbidden territory. It seems odd that Arthur Machen, whose works have been so generally neglected, should have been scolded on occasion by various critics for his use of sexual themes. Actually there is no sexuality as such in any of Arthur Machen’s books. It does enter into some of the stories through the medium of mythology, Roman or Celtic, and sometimes aboriginal. And yet, such a critic as the gentle A. E. Houseman, could write of him, “Mixing up religion and sexuality is not a thing I am fond of.” Mr. Houseman, had he possessed something of Machen’s scholarship, would have perceived that religion and sexuality were not mixed up by Arthur Machen but rather by his own Celtic or Teutonic or Scandinavian ancestors. It is the more surprising, however, that such opinions as that expressed by the later great poet have not resulted in greater popularity for at least some of the work of Arthur Machen.
By far the most important elements in the pattern that runs through Machen’s work are the very ones he himself expressed many years ago, “The sense of the eternal mysteries and the eternal beauty hidden beneath the crust of common and commonplace things.”
The reputation of Arthur Machen undoubtedly rests most securely on a single book, Hieroglyphics, and on perhaps a half dozen of his essays. His definition of what constitutes fine literature is, even today, beyond dispute. His thoughts on realism, or naturalism, a movement that was only just beginning to be felt in his youth have been admirably expressed in a passage in his book The Secret Glory.
“Of course, he said, (Ambrose Meyrick) I take realism to mean absolute and essential truthfulness of description, as opposed to merely conventional treatment. Zola is a realist not—as the imbeciles suppose because he described—well, rather minutely—many unpleasant sights and sounds and smells and emotions, but because he was a poet, a seer; because, in spite of his pseudo philosophies, his cheap materialisms, he saw the true heart, the reality of things. Take La Terre, do you think it is realistic because it describes minutely, and probably faithfully, the event of a cow calving? Not in the least; the local vet who was called in could probably do all that as well or better. It is realistic because it goes behind all the brutality, all the piggeries and inhumanities, of those frightful people, and shows us the strange, mad, transcendent passion that lay behind all those things—the wild desire for the land—a longing that burned, that devoured, that inflamed, that drove men to hell and death as would a passion for a goddess who might never be attained. Remember how ‘La Beauce’ is personified, how the earth swells and quickens before one, how every clod and morsel of the soil cries for its service and its sacrifice and its victims—I call that realism.
“Of course, there may be people who think that if you describe a pigsty well you are a realist, and if you describe an altar well you are romantic.... I do not know that the mental processes of Cretins form a very interesting subject for discussion.”
Frank Norris, an early apostle of realism, wrote, while he was still at college, this analysis of realism and of Zola: “Naturalism, as understood by Zola, is but a form of romanticism after all ... the naturalist takes no note of common people, common in so far as their interests, their lives and the things that occur in them are common, are ordinary. Terrible things must happen to the characters of the naturalistic tale. They must be twisted from the ordinary, wrenched from the quiet, uneventful round of everyday life and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama that works itself out in unleashed passions, in blood and in sudden death.”
There are many provocative passages on this subject in Machen. Take, for example, these thoughts expressed in Machen’s The Art of Dickens:
“... it is not the main point in the finest literature to draw people so well that the reader begins to think that they must be ‘real’ people, and that the author is a sort of journalist with supernatural means of finding all the facts about them.”
“If we want to go to Margate, it would be idle to take a fairy barque, and simili modo it would be but faint praise of a Gothic cathedral to say that it was quite weather proof.”
“What does it profit a painter to delineate a tree which is very like a tree, unless it is something much more—unless it is also the symbol and the revelation of some great secret of nature? If this were not so, then the camera would be superior of Turner, and the shorthand writer would look down from his desk on poor blind Homer, who talks of gods and goddesses of fairy isles, and giants with one eye in their foreheads.”