4
Vincent Starrett many years ago made the statement that there was little humor in Arthur Machen’s works. Of humor, in the broadest Mark Twain, or even in the gentle Stephen Leacock vein, there is very little. But there is in almost all of Machen a wry, dry humor with perhaps a rather bitter taste. There are passages, even in The Hill of Dreams that are as humorous as anything by Leacock. One reads his account of the publishing business as it was in his day with a realization that Machen is as much at home in satire as in sorcery. His autobiographical books are filled with humor, this time not so bitter. Many of his essays employ humor and satire in generous doses. Shortly after the publication of The Hill of Dreams and The House of Souls Arthur Machen wrote several essays on the subject of the Holy Graal. These essays, the first of which appeared under the editorship of A. E. Waite, aroused quite a bit of attention and resulted in a certain amount of controversy in antiquarian circles. The Graal legends through their association with Arthur and Caerleon had been of great interest to Machen from his earliest years.
He knew every legend and every theory in the literature of the Graal. His first essay was at variance with some of the new theories that were then springing up. Chief among these was the theory that the Graal legends had their basis in a fertility cult which persisted in Wales right up until Norman times. Machen promptly branded this theory as absurd. “Let us grant,” he wrote, “that the question of fertility, which is the question of life, both for ourselves and for our cabbages, is behind everything. If we go far back enough, it is clear that we can do nothing in this world if we are so unlucky as to be dead: and this applies equally to the Phallic hypothesis of the origin of everything, which can be worked in very well with the fertility hypothesis. The whole point of a great many of the rites in fertility ceremonies seems to be built about the hypothesis that fertility could be enduced by certain ceremonies that were expected to put nature in a mood to be fertile.” And then Machen quotes from one of the experts who clung to this hypothesis, “Just as the sailor imitates the wind that he desires by whistling for it, so did the countrymen imitate the trees in the wood by making a mock tree called the Maypole.”
Machen seems willing enough to accept these theories but he asks, “What light shall we gain as to the actual emotions and intent of the seventeenth or sixteenth century people who danced about the Maypole? I venture to say none whatever ... they were not addressing any invocation to the woods or anything else. They were being jolly or merry at a certain time of the year in a traditional manner. For all I know, our learned people may decide that the game of marbles was originally a reminder to the spheres to keep on rolling. If I am told so, I shall not deny the doctrine, but I shall maintain that the boys who play marbles on London pavements know nothing of it. Granted this hypothetical origin of marbles, it has nothing whatever to do with the game of the twentieth century.”
The note books of Arthur Machen, as fragmentarily revealed in The London Adventure, are as fascinating as are the notebooks of Hawthorne, which as a matter of fact they much resemble. For example there are many notes concerned with patterns—and these bear a direct relationship with the earlier material in this chapter. Most of the notes concern labyrinths, mazes, spirals and whorls. He asks the question: Why was this form common to all primitive art? And then, in almost the same place in his note book one finds the sentence: “Literature began with charms, incantations, spells, songs of mystery, chants of religious ecstasy, the Bachic chorus, the rune, the mass.” This sentence is the basis for Hieroglyphics. It is, according to Machen, the thesis of the book fairly well summed up in one sentence.
And this same pattern occurs in most of his stories. Among his notes we find this, “The maze was not only the instrument but the symbol of ecstasy; it was a pictured ‘inebriation,’ the sign of some age old process that gave the secret bliss to men, that was symbolized also by dancing, by lyrics with their recurring burdens, and their repeated musical phrases: a maze, a dance, a song: three symbols pointing to one mystery.”
It would require a thorough examination of the notebook of Arthur Machen, if such a thing were possible, by a man with the skill and scholarship of a John Livingston Lowes to trace and to tell the complete story of the pattern in Arthur Machen. Yet here, in brief, and in all his works, the pattern is everywhere apparent.
There are, undoubtedly, those who prefer Machen the essayist to Machen the story teller. Certainly his greatest work, Hieroglyphics, is sufficient reply to those who have tried to dismiss Machen as the creator of “shockers” concerned with demonology and sensational horror stories. The delightful pieces that appeared serially in the Lyons Mail and the Illustrated News and the London Graphic would please even the Manchester Guardian or A. E. Houseman, who once wrote that he found Machen not quite to his taste. His essays on the Grail legend are authoritative without being archeological, witty without being flippant or, what would have been unbearable, satirical.
And yet, in the essays no less than in the stories, the pattern is there and is recognizable. One is forever running across a phrase or a notion one has encountered before—some where, some time, some place—and the place usually turns out to be another Machen essay. For the pattern of Machen’s thinking is as obvious as the pattern in the rug; as obvious, and as simple, as the definitions supplied in Hieroglyphics. The pattern is, as we know, summed up in the phrase: “removal from the common life.” It may be simplified further in the one word: “ecstasy.”
Now the word “ecstasy” has caused some confusion in the minds of certain of Machen’s detractors as well as among his admirers. There was a tendency, in the Twenties, as well as in the Nineties, to give the word “ecstasy” a connotation or a meaning similar to that employed by the popular novelists of the time. “Ecstasy” seemed to many to be the “ecstasy” of the pallid, perverted creatures of the Cafe Royale and, later, a sort of Elinor Glynn-ish, sinnish quality. It was a word much favored by the writers of romances, the practitioners of the purple phrase. And so we encounter, at times, this “novelist of ecstasy and sin” sort of nonsense.
It should be pointed out that Hieroglyphics, that excellent volume of literary criticism having little to do with passion, in or out of the desert, bears the illuminating subtitle: “A Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature.” And this ecstasy is of the mind—it is an exultation of the spirit of men. It is, to go back to the more descriptive phrase, the removal from the common life.
This pattern exists everywhere in Machen, sometimes it is developed by the characters and circumstances in his tales, or again it is carried out by argument or analysis in his essays, but always, upon closer examination, the grand design is apparent.
One may read, for example, the essay called The Hidden Mystery and find that it is almost exactly the same as The Mystic Speech. And then one reads The Secret Glory and finds, once again, the same theories, the same logic, the same figures and the same conclusions, expressed and explained as only Machen can set them down. This may send the casual reader, or even the amateur bibliographer, hunting from volume to volume with pencil and reading glass, for there seems to be indeed a hidden mystery, a mystic speech, a glorious secret in these passages and paragraphs.
Actually, of course, one is merely becoming aware of the pattern, and one is becoming impressed with the simplicity and the one-ness of everything Machen ever wrote. Of course there are actual resemblances between the essays mentioned and strong connections between them and the book. For the essays were written years before, and one of them was actually delivered as a lecture before the learned Quest Society of London. They are all a part of the book that is now known as The Secret Glory.