4
A printer named Jones, who lived in the cathedral town of Hereford, one day received in the post a manuscript accompanied by a request to print one hundred copies of the poem. It was a poem. The title of the poem, Eleusinia, probably conveyed nothing to Mr. Jones, stationer, bookseller and printer of Hereford. As he struggled with the text, written in a large sprawling hand on both sides of ordinary letter paper, Mr. Jones might have wondered what our young people were coming to. Certainly the subject matter of the poem was vastly different from the Bibles, Prayer Books and Pitman’s Shorthand Manuals with which his shelves were stocked.
Fortunately for Mr. Jones, the poet pretended no knowledge of book-making. He specified no typographical niceties, he pleaded for no ornaments, he indicated no preference in paper or in binding. His one modest request, that the Greek phrase Oudeis Muomenos Odureta to appear on the title page, be set in Greek type, was withdrawn when Mr. Jones wrote him that Greek type would be extra. And so the phrase appeared in English, and with a typographical error, at no extra charge.
Mr. Jones presumably knew the young poet—remembered him as a purchaser of letter paper and note books. The Llanddewi Rectory address was, in a way, reassuring. His bill would probably be paid, but Mr. Jones must have thought the usual thoughts about “minister’s sons.” As for the poet—he preferred anonymity, the comparative anonymity of “By a Former Member of the H.C.S.” For when a sixteen page pamphlet bearing the title Eleusinia and concerning itself with the Eleusian Mysteries, is published by a Former Member of the Hereford Cathedral School it must be admitted that such anonymity is, at best, comparative. Generations of readers of novels about English public schools will realize that every other former member of the H.C.S. would know at once that the book could have been written by none other than “old Machen.”
Of course the edition of one hundred copies guaranteed that the anonymity would still remain comparative—especially since it seemed unlikely that the former membership of the H.C.S. at large would be interested enough in poetry to purchase sixteen pages of it ... and without wrappers! It is not known, exactly, what happened to ninety-nine copies of Eleusinia. Henry Danielson in his Arthur Machen: A Bibliography (1923) says that his collation was taken from what is probably the only copy extant.
The text of this first work of Arthur Machen is, naturally, as little known to the general reader as a transcription of the Rosetta Stone ... and so it is likely to remain. What is it about? Machen says of it, “this is a horrible production.” He wrote it, he adds, by turning an encyclopedia article on Eleusis into verse, “some of it blank, some of it rhymed, all of it bad.” This is Machen’s estimate of it in the notes he wrote for Danielson’s Bibliography. Nathan Van Patten lists, Beneath the Barley. A Note on the Origins of Eleusinia (1931). Whether this explains the poem or the mysteries is known only to those who have seen one of the twenty-five copies that were printed. However, in a letter written in 1945, Machen says: “It is less than nothing, but perhaps it might have suggested the entertaining question—‘Here is a boy of seventeen who is interested in the Eleusian Mysteries: what the devil will happen to him?’”
Well, Machen’s poem was published, and whatever he may have thought of it in 1923 or in 1945, his relations, in 1884, thought well enough of it to decide that journalism was the career for Arthur. It is amazing, in a way, that a pleasant little group in a country rectory should decide over a little pamphlet written “about” the pagan rites at Eleusis, that their youthful relative was destined for a career in journalism. Of course, relatives are proud of one’s books and equally proud of one’s pamphlets, even if they do not read them. And so, perhaps, the rector and his family never bothered too much about the contents of the rarest Machen item of them all. Doubtless more than one of the ninety-nine copies slowly disintegrates in a Welsh garret to this very day.