4
Well, then, the Great Romance was completed in 1897—and they would have none of it. And so it remained for another ten years, more or less, in one of the spacious compartments of the Japanese bureau.
Machen was, at this time, living the literary life, not quite as it was lived by the swish young men who were then breaking into print and whose names appeared in the more sensational evening papers and on court writs, but still, it was the literary life and still—a noble profession.
The Japanese bureau, its cubbyholes and compartments jammed with notes and notebooks and scraps of paper, had yielded up many tales and articles that appeared in this or that journal. Machen had already written The Holy Things, Psychology, Witchcraft, The Rose Garden, The Ceremony, Midsummer and many other. He was becoming well known as the author of a number of rather strange, rather clever stories. Sometimes they were called “nasty” or “disagreeable” stories by outraged critics who were quite likely to view them with an eye jaundiced by too careful perusal of The Yellow Book. The Keynote Series sold quite well and Machen’s The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light in Volume V, The Three Impostors and The Iron Maid in Volume XIX had wide circulation. The Memoirs of Casanova, published in the same year as Pan, though limited to a thousand copies, brought him some reputation and recognition on a more scholarly plane. Still, he made no fortune on these books, then—or ever. And that was beginning to matter. He was even moved, in 1895, to enter an American short story competition. His entry, The Red Hand, written for the competition, won no prize but it did appear in the Christmas issue of Chapman’s Magazine for that year.
It was a quiet life. He had, in those days, few friends and few acquaintances. His life was in reading books and in writing them. That no one seemed to be publishing them was, for the moment, quite unimportant. He describes his daily routine in Things Near and Far: “Every morning after breakfast I read over what I have written the night before, correcting here and there and everywhere, generally convinced that the passage which had pleased me so much as I wrote it was, after all, not magnificent. I took the bulldog for a walk from twelve to one, and another half hour walk in the afternoon. Then two cups of tea without milk or sugar at four, and the rigor of the literary game till seven, and again after dinner till eleven. It was a life of routine, and all its adventures, difficulties, defeats and rare triumphs were those of the written page.”
This was the literary life far removed from the rarified atmosphere of the Cafe Royale and merry, mad circle of poets and artists of the Dowson, Beardsley, Conder, Crackenthorpe set who were usually contemplating Soho or suicide or both. It was the literary life of a recluse, of a Dyson, or of the brilliant monologist of Hieroglyphics. In the course of these long and thoughtful evenings when the pen scratched and the bulldog dozed and page followed page into the cubbyholes or into oblivion, Machen formulated many of the theories of art and literature which were expounded by the recluse of Barnsbury. Writing of this period some years later Machen says that literature “is one of the many ways of escaping from life, to be classified with Alpine Climbing, Chess, Methylated Spirit and Prussic Acid.” But this was written in 1915 or thereabouts, in 1897 he was less inclined to a mellow cynicism. For it was then not only an escape from life, but a means, perhaps “the only means of realizing and shewing life, or, at least certain aspects of life.”
This preoccupation with literature extended even to his employment, for through 1898 Machen worked on the staff of “Literature,” a weekly paper published by the Times. This seems to have been not too happy an association, for he says he had been harassed and worried for a whole year in the office of “Literature,” and that he was in high spirits in May 1899 when he was released from this bondage.
Besides, there were a great many important things to be done. There was, of course, another Great Romance. Like its predecessors this one did not quite come off, or it was never quite finished. What there was of it was eventually published as The White People. There were other irons on the hearth, and one of these had been heated and re-heated many times before; but it was never quite forged or beaten into shape.
This is the story we know as A Fragment of Life. It is, in its present state, a mere fragment of a great work. Machen had lived with the idea for ten years or more, for the story was born in another tale published in the Globe or the Gazette or some other paper in 1890 under the title The Resurrection of the Dead, which was not quite what Machen intended when he originally called it Resurrectio Mortuorum.
This story is about a man who one day recovered his “ancestral consciousness.” The idea had long fascinated Machen, perhaps because he was forever on the verge of recovering his own “ancestral consciousness,” or perhaps because he had never quite lost it. At any rate, it was always close to him, it greatly influenced his daily life because he never became used to the contrast between “raw London suburbs and the old gray houses under the forest near the river” in Gwent.
This, and The White People, seemed to have been of the greatest importance to him. Neither was finished in that century—nor were they ever completely finished. Yet in this time he wrote and completed one of the best of his books, and one of the finest books of our time. Hieroglyphics was finished in 1899 and it joined the fragments and the beginnings of the Great Romances that had been written and put aside in that repository of Great Romances—the Japanese bureau.
Of Hieroglyphics we shall have much to say later, for it is of greater significance in this twentieth century than in the nineteenth century in which it was written.