Arthur Machen: Weaver of Fantasy

by William F. Gekle

3

And now we come to the point of conceding that Arthur Machen is not and never has been a “naturalist,” that is, he has never written in the manner which we have come to call naturalism or realism. A great deal of modern American and English fiction over the past forty or fifty odd years has been of this sort. It stemmed, following one of the periodical Anglo-Saxon reversions to the Gallic, from Zola, the father of naturalism. One need hardly wonder what Machen might say today of naturalism and Zola, he said it some fifty years ago in Hieroglyphics and again in The Secret Glory. And Machen was saying then a great many of the things the critics of today are just beginning to discover.

To take an excellent example; we have the case of one of our best known and most highly regarded novelists; one whose realism has begun to transcend reality so much that his last book has been called an allegory. His characters are so super-real as to be almost “arch types,” and they may eventually come to be regarded, unless they are entirely lost in the shifting of values, as sketches worthy to stand in a Dickensian gallery along with Micawber and Pickwick.

For this is assuredly the direction of our drift—we are not only turning away from naturalism and realism, we are beginning to wonder why we ever turned to them at all. For literature as a removal from the common life, or art as an interpretation rather than a portrayal of life, has little to do with either naturalism or realism. It may be that, within this very decade, we will decide that the whole trend of the past thirty or forty years has been up a dead-end street inhabited by the dead-end kids of the literary world, whose greatest talent was to shock each other with the words they chalked up on the walls and fences of their realistic little slum.

It has become increasingly obvious, even to the more advanced critics, that there had come to exist but a very narrow line between the realistic-naturalistic novel and the journalism of the day. Not so long ago it was considered the highest praise to call a novel “a significant social document.” Now it is becoming more fashionable to refer to a novel as a rather poor novel as a novel, but a significant social document. We are, it would seem, about half-way round the circle. Mr. Sinclair Lewis wrote a book a year or two ago which is also a case in point. Although the critics were unanimous in pointing out that it was a very bad novel, they admitted that it was significant. So too, the flood of books about alcoholism, insanity, race prejudice and other social problems. Most of these books defy honest criticism on almost any grounds, since almost everyone is more or less opposed to the same things these books are against.

Of course these problems do exist, and they are urgent problems indeed; but they do not necessarily constitute the stuff of great or even good literature. Nor should the importance of the problem automatically confer importance or significance upon any writer, good, bad or indifferent, who chooses to deal with it. Today’s tabloid may be as raw a slice of life as today’s top ranking best seller—but no one calls it literature. As for the revolt against “the genteel tradition,” it was a natural reaction against stuffiness, Victorian morality and overly “nice” novels—but the course taken by those who rebelled against these things was not necessarily the right one. It was, or soon became, quite as stuffy and even more unreal. Still, there is much to be said on the subject, for realism, by which we can mean honesty, cannot be, and should not be, eliminated entirely as a literary force.

It cannot be said that Dickens, that eminent Victorian, was not a realist or that he was not realistic. No Hemingway he, to be sure, but still, no Harold Bell Wright. Nor can we say of many a writer relegated to oblivion by the realists that they were not realistic. John Galsworthy wrote as realistically of the upper-middle classes as John Steinbeck writes of paisanos—and Soames Forsyte is as much a person, a real person, as the youth with the acne. Now this is a very close to the heart of the matter, for the realists, and the naturalists, have claimed that writers like Galsworthy are not realists—and of course their point would be that Galsworthy wrote of Soames Forsyte and Steinbeck wrote of bums and vagrants, of the dispossessed and the youth with the acne.

It would seem, then, that they quarreled rather with Soames than with Galsworthy—that Soames was, for some reason or other, less real than, for example, an earnest young picket-line marcher. Indeed, it has been almost a prime principle, that the realists write of the so-called “underprivileged,” and all that was needed to earn a reputation for a book was a fairly accurate portrayal of life in the less-desirable quarters of any city or town. If a few scenes of drunken quarrels, beatings by cops (classically called Cossacks) and tableaux in which oppressed mill-workers were being violently oppressed, so much the better. Of course not all realists wrote exclusively about the underprivileged. Many wrote of the upper classes, for this was considered realism too—but only if the upper classes were portrayed in an unfavorable light. So it becomes apparent that almost the whole of realism has been a social rather than a literary movement. For a time, and under special conditions, this seemed reasonable enough, but there are indications that it is in the process of being rejected as the only literary criterion.