5
Now we are come to the end of the year 1899—the turn of the century. This was, as has been previously noted, an intensely time-conscious era. The birth of the twentieth century was awaited with perhaps more interest and excitement than had attended similar events in the past. For one thing, everyone was conscious of the enlightenment of their age, progress was almost as much a byword in the Nineties as it became in the Nineteen-Twenties and the early Nineteen-Forties. And, of course, there was the minor satisfaction of knowing that it was quite likely to be the only turn of the century within the memory of living man. Prophets of doom had their say and their day along with those who proclaimed new glory and new heights and new horizons. It was, to be sure, a well-heralded and eagerly awaited event. That a mere clock should unemotionally tick so momentous a second!
The more memorable men of the notorious Nineties were, for the most part, either dead or dying, visibly decaying or decently interred. They passed, most of them, mercifully before the significant second struck.
This was a year of great significance in the life of Arthur Machen. For in this year “a great sorrow which had long been threatened fell upon me; I was once more alone.” And in another place, he writes, “... and then my life was dashed into fragments. I ceased to write. I travelled.”
Again and again he refers to this event, in his two autobiographical books and in several of the forewords and prefaces he later wrote for re-issues of his earlier books. Always the references are veiled in mystery or followed by a recital of strange experiences and a cloud of mysticism that conceals, as it was intended, the shattering event.
What was this event? There are a few who know, but they are not likely to reveal what they know. As recently as 1947, less than a year before he died, Machen wrote in a letter, “Even now it is painful to recall. I would rather you did not refer to it.”
Since this is not intended as a biography, nor a Life, we shall not pursue the matter. There is this much more to be said, that may give some clue to the events of the year 1900. Machen wrote in Things Near and Far,
“I can set down the facts, or rather such of them as I remember, but I am quite confident that I am not, in the real sense of the word, telling the truth; that is, I am not giving any sense of the very extraordinary atmosphere in which I lived in the year 1900, of the curious and indescribable impression which the events of these days made upon me; the sense that everything had altered, that everything was very strange, that I lived in daily intercourse with people who would have been impossible, unimaginable, a year before; that the figure of the world was changed utterly for me—of all this I can give no true picture dealing as I am with what I called facts. I maintained long ago in Hieroglyphics that facts as facts do not signify anything or communicate anything; and I am sure that I was right, when I confess that, as a purveyor of exact information, I can make nothing of the year 1900. But avoiding the facts, I have got a great deal nearer the truth in the last Chapter of The Secret Glory, which describes the doings and feelings of two young people who are paying their first visit to London. I never bolted up to town with the house master’s red haired parlour maid; but truth must be told in figures.”