Arthur Machen: Weaver of Fantasy

by William F. Gekle

Machen’s characters are completely believable, whatever events may occur, simply because of their very ordinary qualities. Lucian Taylor, the “hero” of The Hill of Dreams, an introvert we would call him today, was a normal school boy who did not conform too well to the rigors of the Public School System, and whose solitary home life conditioned him to react as he did to the strangeness of his environment and to succumb to the influences, real or imagined, of the Roman ruins near his home. To the development of such a simple and ordinary character, in this particular story, must be added one very important magical element—the influence of landscape upon character.

For the peculiar potency of Machen’s magic owes much, if not most of its force, to landscape and to the subtle influence of the weird topography of his stories. Many of Machen’s most telling effects are achieved through the mere portrayal of a brooding landscape, the sombre background of mountains, the deep, rutted lanes that run along between head-high hedges, solitary hilltops shimmering in heat waves, old grey houses that sit somberly at the edge of the forest and rivers that coil in slow esses through forests and skirt the walls of mountains. There is no doubt that the wild Welsh countryside had this effect upon Machen himself.

Machen’s first book, it will be remembered, was written by one “Leolinus Silurensis”—and Machen frequently calls himself a “Silurist.” For Gwent, in the old days, the days before Arthur and before the Romans, was the home of the Silures, one of the three great tribes in this last corner of the West. The Silures seem to have been more Iberian than Celtic—they dwelled in the Black Mountains and along the estuary of the Severn. It was, then, this dark and ancient land that formed the background of Machen’s life and most of his work. Machen explains, and illustrates, the influence of his homeland in Far Off Things:

“This, then, was my process: to invent a story which would recreate those vague impressions of wonder and awe and mystery that I myself had received from the form and shape of the land of my boyhood and youth; and as I thought over this and meditated on the futility—or comparative futility—of the plot however ingenious, which did not exist to express emotions of one kind or another, it struck me that it might be possible to reverse the process. Could one describe hills and valleys, woods and rivers, sunrise and sunset, buried temples and mouldering Roman walls so that a story should be suggested to the reader? Not, of course, a story of material incidents, not a story with a plot in the ordinary sense of the term, but an interior tale of the soul and its emotions; could such a tale be suggested in the way I have indicated? Such is to be the plan of the great book which is not yet written.”

But of course this book was written, not once but over and over again. One finds its content in almost everything Machen ever wrote. One discovers too, the influence of landscape upon Machen and his work. One notes the feeling for landscape as much in his work as in the work of Poe or Coleridge or Hawthorne. One day, no doubt, a learned scholar will write a lengthy monograph upon what might be called The Influence of Landscape Upon the Creative Imagination. There are already many footnotes available for such a work.

Machen recognized this influence, it became apparent to him as he walked in the land of the Silures and as he read in the evenings in the drawing room at Llandewi. This snug, old fashioned “parlour” in the Rectory was the treasure house of the Machens. Here were their china and silver, and here the books gathered by the Rector and his forebears. It was here that Arthur Machen, on his vacations from school at Hereford, discovered the wonders of Waverly and DeQuincy. Here, too, was Parker’s Glossary of Gothic Architecture. This book initiated Machen into the spirit of Gothic and, as he says, “that is one of the most magical of all initiations.” Gothic meant to Arthur Machen “the art of the supreme exaltation, of the inebriation of the body and soul and spirit. It is not resigned to dwell calmly, stoically, austerely on the level plains of this earthy life, since its joy is in this, that it has stormed the battlements of heaven. And so its far-lifted vaults and its spires rush upward, and its pinnacles are like a wood of springing trees. And its hard stones, its strong based pillars break out as it were into song, they blossom as the rose; all the secrets of the garden and the field and the wood have been delivered unto them.”

Machen early developed this sense of wonder in the land. In his reading he discovered, in the age of Coleridge and Wordsworth, the “renaissance of wonder.” His taste for Scott and DeQuincy and Coleridge and Poe and Hawthorne and Parker; his taste, in short, for the “Gothic,” supports and explains this. For landscape and its influence are important elements in that which we have come to call “Gothic” ... and it is this Gothic-ness that is also one of the elements in Machen’s magic.

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And then of course there is the final test of the story-teller’s magic. Mr. Machen’s inventions have frequently been taken for truth. The tale of the Bowmen at Mons is the classic example. Machen has told how he received letters following the publication of some of his books—letters in which the writers sought explanations of the stories, letters which were undoubtedly prompted by a belief in some basic truth on which they suspected the story had been built.

Many years ago Vincent Starrett wrote, in his preface to the Chicago edition of The Shining Pyramid, that there were three Machens—Machen the Saint, Machen the Sorcerer and Machen the Critic. It is, of course, Machen the Sorcerer whose work is most popular, or shall we say, the best known. Machen himself once wrote: “Sorcery and Sanctity, these are the only true realities.” We might interpret these to mean religion and science—although it is doubtful if all of the admirers of Arthur Machen make this interpretation. At any rate it is the works of Machen the Sorcerer that have been most widely anthologized. These are the stories one finds classified under such headings as “supernatural stories, tales of terror, horror stories” and the like.