Arthur Machen: Weaver of Fantasy

by William F. Gekle

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Machen had been brought up on Scott and Coleridge, Hawthorne and Poe and all the authors one would naturally expect a school boy to encounter in an English public school in the 1880’s. In addition to these there were the books he found in the rectory at Llanddewi. These included one especially significant book by Parker on Gothic architecture.

We have already noted that Machen early became aware of the beauty of the Gothic and that he was all of his life more or less under its influence. His conception of the Gothic was not quite the same as Horace Walpole’s. It stemmed rather from Parker and from Coleridge, from whom he learned that there is “in the spectacle of external nature something much more than mere pleasantness or sensuous beauty.” The rugged terrain of the land of the Silures would seem to offer little of pleasantness or sensuous beauty ... yet it did act upon Machen in much the same way that such a landscape had acted upon the imagination of such a lyrical poet as, for example, Wordsworth.

As a matter of fact, Machen did not hesitate to refer to Walpole’s “sham Gothic,” and he assumes that Walpole had a sort of “vague idea that there was something in a particular architecture of a particular era which was somehow or other curious and admirable.” Machen further remarks that one cannot possibly compare the school of Coleridge in its appreciation of nature with the school of Walpole in its appreciation of the Gothic. And then, he poses a question in which there lies the answer to his own and to many another writer’s problem. “May it not be that Coleridge and his fellows were but the forerunners of a new doctrine which was not fully revealed to them.”

We have remarked that Machen employs none of the traditional trappings of the Gothic tale. There are no clankings and bumpings and ghosties in the night. There are no ruined castles, no hermits in caves. Instead we find deserted houses in Lambeth and in Clerkenwell, and sometimes the houses are not even deserted. Nor are they occupied by monks or knights or old families in whose closets lurk the most deplorable of skeletons. The typical Gothic “hero,” either the sardonic Byronic or the melancholy Manfred type is never encountered. Machen’s heroes, if such they be, are rather ordinary young men like Lucian Taylor and Ambrose Meyrick, or perhaps you may wish to call the ever-present Dyson and the companionable Phillips heroes. There are, of course, sinister characters in Machen. Mr. Davies, outwardly ordinary, is as black a villain as can be found anywhere in the whole school of Otranto. Miss Lally, or Miss Leicester, are as horrific in their own quiet way as any harpy or hag encountered in the novels of Radcliff.

Arthur Machen is much more closely related in his work to Hawthorne and Poe than he is to his English contemporaries and predecessors. As Paul Elmer More has noted, Hawthorne and Poe are the only two writers in America who have won almost universal renown as artists, and that these two are each, in their own manner, a sovereign in that strange region of emotion which we name the weird. Their achievement, as Mr. More points out, is not at all like the Gothic novel introduced by Horace Walpole. There is little in them of the revival of medieval superstition and gloom which marked the rise of romanticism in Europe.

The unearthly visions of Poe and Hawthorne were not the results of literary whim or unbridled individualism but, according to Mr. More, were deeply rooted in American history. Now this is a rather strange matter, for there is nothing nationalistic in the nature of the work of these American writers. It follows a well established tradition, but it is not the tradition of the English school of the Gothic revival. It was greatly influenced by Germanic mysticism, just as Coleridge was influenced by Teutonic theory. These American writers seem to have missed the dilettantism that was associated with the Gothic revival in England. In this they are very close to Machen and his work. Both these writers were greatly influenced by their surroundings and by the influence of their own native landscape. The personal alchemy of each one transmuted the elements of that landscape and created a time and place that never were.

Poe especially, and to a far greater extent, was affected by landscape not only of his native Virginia but of every place he ever visited. Some years ago John Cowper Powys, a visiting, but much more sympathetic than usual, Englishman commented upon this aspect of the writings of Poe:

“For myself, as a traveller for a score of years between all of Edgar Allen Poe’s particular cities, and knowing the country round them a good deal better than I know my own, I confess—though it may be because of a kindred sensibility toward the ghostly, the weird, and the horror hinting: I have found even in those districts, though of course far more in the deeper south, elements here and there that correspond with disturbing closeness to the frightening things in his imaginary landscape.

“But it is not from those pine haunted woods and those morasses and those treacherous estuaries and those Lethean wharfs that the darker vistas and more troubling visions of Poe’s inspirations comes.