Arthur Machen: Weaver of Fantasy

by William F. Gekle

Caerleon knew the hardened legionnaires, the men who crossed the Channel other conquerors failed to cross. It knew the tread of men who followed the eagles, and it knew the patricians who came with the Pax Romana in the wake of the legions. Caerleon knew also the gallant companions of the Round Table, for it was, in those times, a seat of Arthur the King, and many a summons brought the knightly riders within its walls and many a quest sent them off across the meadows where the river wound in great esses toward the dark forests hanging along the mountainside. Nennius places the scene of at least one of Arthur’s battles at Cairlion. As for Gwent, it is now called Monmouthshire, but in those days it formed the eastern division of the kingdom of South Wales, and some identify it as one of the three divisions of Essyllwg, the country of the Silures. Caerleon itself is the very stuff of legend, and yet it exists today, as it did in the middle nineteenth century, a small and sleepy town not far from the equally legendary Severn.

In this place and in the year 1863, Arthur Machen was born—the son of a clergyman who had the poor “living” of Llanddewi Rectory. His father was John Edward Jones, who afterwards added his wife’s surname to his own, so that his son’s full signature became Arthur Llewelyn Jones Machen. Daniel Jones, Machen’s grandfather, was Vicar of Caerleon-on-Usk and his great grandfather was David Jones, Curate of St. Fagans, Glamorgan. It is not the present writer’s intention to compose a biography, “fictionized” or otherwise, of Arthur Machen. There will be none of your happy little phrases about what the “little Arthur” did, or what the “young Machen” or the “boy Machen” thought. Nor will the reader be asked to “imagine the young Arthur growing up amid the storied stones of Caerleon,” or to believe that “undoubtedly the young Arthur was influenced by the wild Welsh countryside,” or even to “assume that the boy Machen made many trips to the legendary shrines in and about Caerleon.”

Such a biography may one day be written, but one cannot refrain from hoping that it will not be. Machen has written his own biography in at least three of his books, and perhaps in all of them. The two frankly autobiographical books, Far Off Things and Things Near and Far tell most of the facts of his early life ... and they tell them with more meaning than even the most skilled and sympathetic biographer could. His novel, The Hill of Dreams, does more with the material suggested in these notes of a lifetime than the most gifted novelist of our day could attempt. The story of Lucian Taylor and his adventures, mental and physical, mystical and spiritual, in the invented town of Caermaen, is the story of Arthur Machen, beautifully told as no one else could tell it. To these books the reader is referred and, fair warning, he will be referred to them again and again!

To be sure, Machen did make those little trips about the legendary town in which he lived; he was inspired by the storied stones of Caerleon and he was influenced by the wild Welsh countryside. He was an only child and he lived in that solitude which is so often the lot of an only child. He often accompanied his father on his “parish calls” and thus he came to know every farm and every lane, every hill and every valley in the heart of Gwent along the roads that led from the rectory at Llanddewi.

When he was eleven he went away to school, passing each term as a sort of “interlude among strangers” until he could come home again to Caerleon. Was he happy or unhappy at school? Was he fond of games or of mooning about—the two alternatives, apparently, of English public school life? That story is told in The Hill of Dreams and again in The Secret Glory. Machen’s schooldays were the schooldays of Lucian Taylor and Ambrose Meyrick ... to their stories we must again refer the reader. For conjecture and invention are beyond the scope of this study and Arthur Machen is seventeen when he really enters into our particular field.

For in his seventeenth year Arthur Machen went up to London. There was a very practical purpose behind this first visit to London—he was to come up before the examiners for entrance into the Royal College of Surgeons. Whether or not the actual purpose of this visit was of great importance to Machen is one of the conjectural matters upon which we shall not speculate. The matter had been arranged and decided by family and friends—it was the necessary preliminary to a career in medicine or in surgery. Machen prepared for it by walking some three or four miles several times a week to the Pontypool Road Station to obtain copies of the London papers. These he studied with great care, devoting special attention to the theatrical pages. Not that he had ever given any particular thought to the stage or to the theater, or that he was, in the phrase of today, “stage-struck”; it was simply that the theater was typical of what London was, and of what Caerleon was not. At any rate, on a day in June 1880, he went up to London with his father. And thus began The London Adventure.

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The examiners found something Machen already knew—he had no head for figures, either arithmetical or anatomical. And apparently Machen had not the interest or the ability to acquire, within a period of time agreeable to the examiners, a proficiency in either. It must not be assumed, however, that Arthur Machen had already decided upon a career in letters, to be pursued amid the pleasures of London. He had not. Years later Machen wrote that he had no idea, when first he went to London, of a career in literature. Indeed, he had never thought of it as a career, but as a destiny.

However, he had not been in London a month before he began to write. There is nothing particularly prophetic about this, nor anything especially startling. Most young men, at one time or another, try to write. And usually their creative efforts are turned in the direction of the epic, the heroic, the classic. A young man, trying to write, almost never permits himself to indulge in a fancy for the light essay, the brief episode. It is epic or it is nothing, usually the latter. Doubtless the Freudians have an explanation for this. It would be, one supposes, a very long and very complicated explanation.

Machen had his own explanation—for his own case. He attributes it to his Celtic blood. Not that Machen thought the Celt, or the Welsh Celt at any rate, had contributed much to the world’s literature. Indeed, Machen had advanced the idea that “all impartial judges will allow that if Welsh literature were annihilated ... the loss to the world’s grand roll of masterpieces would be insignificant.” Yet he concedes a certain literary feeling that does not exist in the Anglo-Saxon ... an appreciative rather than creative faculty, lacking, perhaps, in the critical spirit but still, a delight in the noble phrase ... the music of words. And so—Machen tried, as a young man will, to write.