The realists began to be heard because realism seemed to be what people wanted—politically, at any rate. The polemics disguised as novels began to appear in greater and ever-increasing numbers. It has since become obvious that realism of this sort was a one-way street to despair—and it was the realists, not the now-silent “romanticists,” who were called, in their own time, “The Irresponsibles.” But with the rise of the proletarian novel, the heroic mill-hand and the long, dreary lines of the unemployed, the period came to an end. Machen, along with the others, ceased to be read except by those who re-read him, or discovered him in the dusty bookshops where the yellow binding gleamed from the darkest corner.
Chapter Seven
MACHEN’S MAGIC
1
Of recent years there has been a tendency to regard the novel as something it has become rather than what it should be. Most novels that do not fall neatly into one of several categories created by the critics and reviewers are judged to be poor novels indeed. As a matter of fact, the whole of fiction, as well as of poetry, has come to be judged according to standards which, while they may be excellent standards when applied to journalism or the so-called “documentary,” serve fiction rather poorly. It has become the custom to label all stories, novels and poetry that may fall outside the special categories set up by such standards as “escapist.” It is a convenient enough classification, and it is an apt enough description, but the word has come to be used in a rather derogatory sense.
Now it may be demonstrated by an application of these very standards that almost every one of the world’s great books, and every one of the world’s heroic poems, is “escapist.” And that is, after all, what they were intended to be. But we are concerned with the telling of a story and the manner of its telling. To tell a wonderful story in a wonderful manner, this, says Arthur Machen, is the function of the writer. There is another equally fine description of the writer’s task, this time by James Branch Cabell, another story teller of some eminence.
There is in almost all great stories a certain magic that becomes apparent from the first sentence. One picks up Moby Dick and reads: “Call me Ishmael.” There is a quality of strangeness in the name and abruptness of introduction that serves to set a mood, a mood that persists through the entire book. Many of Poe’s stories have this same strangeness and this same quality. One finds it too, in many of Machen’s stories. The opening sentence, for example of The Hill of Dreams: “The sky glowed as if great furnace doors had been opened.”
The magic of Machen depends as much upon his style as it does upon the magical things of which he writes. His finest stories appeal to an essential and basic desire for “escape” from the common life. They depend for their effect upon that willing suspension of disbelief of which Coleridge wrote (and for which Coleridge is known by far too many who would turn its meaning to their own uses), a suspension of disbelief which it is Mr. Machen’s happy fortune to bring about almost at will.
And yet, apparently, there is much more to it than the mere suspension of disbelief—it is rather a desire to accept such matters as may be set forth, whether or not they challenge belief—simply because they make an appeal to instinctive belief. One doesn’t have to try very hard to believe in the existence of certain powers, especially those which cannot be, or have not yet been, explained as any known existing force. From this point onward the development of a story by Machen may hinge upon the manner of telling as well as upon the selection of the materials for the tale. There must be no fumbling of the matter, no crude effects, no creaky props, no bolstering up by the shabby tricks and melodramatic artifices of the penny dreadfuls. Machen’s magic is very simply achieved. In each of his tales an improbable, but not implausible, theme is stated; usually one that is based upon something involving an instinctive belief, for example: the existence of “little people,” the continuance of some ancient power under certain circumstances, and in explaining certain occurrences or events for which no rational explanation exists. Folk tales, superstitions, local legends and mythology, most of these embody certain elements in which most of us have at least an instinctive belief. Then, too, a great deal of Mr. Machen’s own particular magic is achieved through his ability to see things and to present things that are “removed from the common life.”
Most of Machen’s characters are not unusual people, they are not especially “peculiar” in any accepted sense except as they may be affected by certain occurrences in the earlier development of the story. For example, the young man in The Novel of the White Powder, the boy in The Novel of the Black Seal, and the Vaughan girl in The Great God Pan. But for the most part his characters are, or were, very ordinary people; ordinary, that is, in the sense that Dyson and Phillips, and even Lucian Taylor, are quite ordinary people. Indeed the very ordinariness of some of these people becomes the starting point of an entire sequence of extraordinary events. Just as it was the ordinary qualities of a young married couple visiting relatives of a Sunday night in a dull, stodgy, respectable suburb of London that resulted in the strange story called A Fragment of Life.