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There are, sometimes, certain superficial resemblances between the works of imaginative writers that are outside the province and beyond the charge of plagiarism. An age produces a culture, a culture produces works of art, and all the while the individual consciousness, or sub-consciousness, feeds upon and is nourished by the raw materials and the basic elements of the culture. For in any age there are bound to exist certain individuals in whom combinations of common experience develop along certain lines and who may be expected to react in almost predictable patterns to identical stimulae ... just as certain identical combinations of chemical elements may be expected to react in identical manner under identical circumstances. Which is, after all, no major discovery but merely a restatement of the obvious fact that lies behind the continuity of any culture, or even, on a smaller scale, of any literary movement, or on occasion, of something less significant than a literary movement.
This fact also lies behind the periodical resurgence of certain ideals of culture or revivals of interest in certain abstractions such as realism, naturalism, romanticism and the like. And it explains, in individuals, the influence one writer may have over another, or the appeal of certain types of material to certain similar individuals.
Superficial resemblances are a common manifestation of spiritual relationships. Some years ago a rather clever critic of music wrote a book called Music for the Man Who Enjoys Hamlet. Now, the resemblance between people who enjoy Hamlet no doubt extends to a great many things other than the stage and Shakespeare and music, and, for all we know, it might even be established that such people have a mutual preference for a specific cocktail or a certain brand of cigarette. Our critic did not attempt to prove this, he contented himself with discussing music of a type to soothe the Hamlet-enjoying intellect. And so the superficial resemblances between Poe and Coleridge and DeQuincy extend far beyond a need or addiction, accidental or otherwise, to stimulants of one sort or another. The lines that connect and link these individuals, feature for feature, element for element, with an incomplete analogy here, and a broken chain there, would no doubt resemble a physicist’s laboratory model of the atomic structure of the very newest isotope of the most recently discovered element.
Perhaps individuals themselves constitute the electrons and protons of a cultural atom. We might link individuals of a certain sort, the men who enjoy Hamlet, for example, or Poe, DeQuincy, Hawthorne, Coleridge, and find isotopes here too—Brockden-Brown, Walter Scott, Tieck, Machen, Sheil, Stevenson, Wells and so on and so on. And we would find that these elements or individuals had certain affinities, certain properties in common. They are not alike merely in that they wrote in a certain fashion, or that they wrote about more or less similar ideas, or that the moods they created were more or less identical. There are certain other qualities, perhaps insignificant, but revealing.
Poe, like Coleridge, was fond of designing title pages and planning magazines and journals of a very literary sort. We find that Poe and Coleridge shared a facility for creating exotic and quite unreal localities. For example Coleridge’s Pleasure Palace of Kubla Khan and Poe’s Domain of Arnheim are very similar in conception. The conception of tremendous wealth appealed, in a most impractical way, to both Poe and Coleridge. And, finally, both shared a great liking for names of Oriental origin ... there is no distance at all, on the literary map, between Xanadu and the kingdom by the sea; and the River Alph or one of its tributaries, empties into the tarn of Auber. Machen’s own landscape is not too far removed. It was first peopled by the dark people who came from Defrobani, which is to say the City of the Golden Domes, far to the east on the shores of Marmora. And Machen’s eternal preoccupation with a Great Romance is akin in many ways to Poe’s grandiose schemes for epic compositions no less than it is to the complete unpublished works of Coleridge.
There was magic in these men and in their manner of telling a tale. There was, in each of them, an ability to create that which made its strongest appeal to that love of strangeness in most men’s minds.
DeQuincy, alone in London; Hawthorne, so solemnly settled in Salem, Coleridge surrounded by blue-stockings and blue lakes; Poe in his erratic course from salon to saloon ... these men made magic of a sort no realist could ever devise. Machen’s magic is of this sort.