“Really, that was strange. You seem in pretty comfortable circumstances, though.”
“Though! what a satire upon a noble profession!”
1
This bit of dialogue takes place in one of those chance encounters with which several of Machen’s tales begins. It might well have ensued between Machen and some compatriot of far-off Gwent as they met in a London street early in that daringly decadent decade.
For Machen, having served an apprenticeship in grangerizing and cataloguing, having composed calendars and made translations “on the house” and having written a story that fluttered the dovecotes and published a book that stirred up a tempest in a tiny tot’s teacup, was definitely a literary man—or at least he pursued the practice of letters. He had cause, in later years, to give the choice more serious thought than he had in the 90’s. He had cause to reflect upon it, but never did he regret the choice—if choice it was. For if ever a man’s destiny lay in the art and the practice of letters, that man was Machen. And of course he knew this—he knew it in the lonely room in Clarendon Road and in the downstairs parlor at Llanddewi. And he knew it years later when, in computing his earnings for twenty-odd years labor, he found the sum to be not in excess of £635. And of course he knew it even when he wondered, as he some times did, if he had failed in his art.
Machen had in him, besides the seeds of his destiny, more than a bit of that delightful fellow Dyson whom he created somewhat to his own image and likeness. Dyson, you will recall, was “a man of letters, and an unhappy instance of talents misapplied. With gifts that might have placed him in the flower of his youth among the most favored of Bentley’s favorite novelists, he had chosen to be perverse; he was, it is true, familiar with scholastic logic but he knew nothing of the logic of life and he flattered himself with the title of artist, when he was in fact but an idle and curious spectator of other men’s endeavors. Amongst many delusions, he cherished one most fondly, that he was a strenuous worker, and it was with a gesture of supreme weariness that he would enter his favorite resort, a small tobacco shop in Great Queen Street, and proclaim to anyone who cared to listen that he had seen the rising and setting of two successive suns.”
But this isn’t Machen! Of course it isn’t! Nor am I suggesting that Dyson is a portrait of the artist as a young man. But if you will recall for a moment Machen’s obvious fondness for his creature, Dyson, his almost paternal acceptance of Dyson’s pomposities and his benevolent air in setting down Dyson’s latest preposterous formula, you will realize, I think, that Machen was the model, and that he rather relished poking a bit of fun at himself, his younger self at any rate.
Well then, early in the 90’s Machen had his trip abroad and his cottage in the country and his gradually accumulated legacies. And now he was, at last, about to have his rooms in Grays Inn and his summers in the south of France. He was indeed a man of letters!
2
The Three Impostors, even though it failed to set Fleet Street afire, did add to Machen’s stature. It gave him something of a reputation in certain quarters which, if not exactly fashionable at the moment, were not on the side of the Philistines. The failure, if it was one, of The Three Impostors Machen attributes to a contemporary crisis in literary circles. “There were,” he says mildly, “scandals in ’95—which had made people impatient with reading matter that was not obviously and obtrusively ‘healthy.’”