Frank Norris, an early apostle of realism, wrote, while he was still at college, this analysis of realism and of Zola: “Naturalism, as understood by Zola, is but a form of romanticism after all ... the naturalist takes no note of common people, common in so far as their interests, their lives and the things that occur in them are common, are ordinary. Terrible things must happen to the characters of the naturalistic tale. They must be twisted from the ordinary, wrenched from the quiet, uneventful round of everyday life and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama that works itself out in unleashed passions, in blood and in sudden death.”
There are many provocative passages on this subject in Machen. Take, for example, these thoughts expressed in Machen’s The Art of Dickens:
“... it is not the main point in the finest literature to draw people so well that the reader begins to think that they must be ‘real’ people, and that the author is a sort of journalist with supernatural means of finding all the facts about them.”
“If we want to go to Margate, it would be idle to take a fairy barque, and simili modo it would be but faint praise of a Gothic cathedral to say that it was quite weather proof.”
“What does it profit a painter to delineate a tree which is very like a tree, unless it is something much more—unless it is also the symbol and the revelation of some great secret of nature? If this were not so, then the camera would be superior of Turner, and the shorthand writer would look down from his desk on poor blind Homer, who talks of gods and goddesses of fairy isles, and giants with one eye in their foreheads.”
4
Vincent Starrett many years ago made the statement that there was little humor in Arthur Machen’s works. Of humor, in the broadest Mark Twain, or even in the gentle Stephen Leacock vein, there is very little. But there is in almost all of Machen a wry, dry humor with perhaps a rather bitter taste. There are passages, even in The Hill of Dreams that are as humorous as anything by Leacock. One reads his account of the publishing business as it was in his day with a realization that Machen is as much at home in satire as in sorcery. His autobiographical books are filled with humor, this time not so bitter. Many of his essays employ humor and satire in generous doses. Shortly after the publication of The Hill of Dreams and The House of Souls Arthur Machen wrote several essays on the subject of the Holy Graal. These essays, the first of which appeared under the editorship of A. E. Waite, aroused quite a bit of attention and resulted in a certain amount of controversy in antiquarian circles. The Graal legends through their association with Arthur and Caerleon had been of great interest to Machen from his earliest years.
He knew every legend and every theory in the literature of the Graal. His first essay was at variance with some of the new theories that were then springing up. Chief among these was the theory that the Graal legends had their basis in a fertility cult which persisted in Wales right up until Norman times. Machen promptly branded this theory as absurd. “Let us grant,” he wrote, “that the question of fertility, which is the question of life, both for ourselves and for our cabbages, is behind everything. If we go far back enough, it is clear that we can do nothing in this world if we are so unlucky as to be dead: and this applies equally to the Phallic hypothesis of the origin of everything, which can be worked in very well with the fertility hypothesis. The whole point of a great many of the rites in fertility ceremonies seems to be built about the hypothesis that fertility could be enduced by certain ceremonies that were expected to put nature in a mood to be fertile.” And then Machen quotes from one of the experts who clung to this hypothesis, “Just as the sailor imitates the wind that he desires by whistling for it, so did the countrymen imitate the trees in the wood by making a mock tree called the Maypole.”
Machen seems willing enough to accept these theories but he asks, “What light shall we gain as to the actual emotions and intent of the seventeenth or sixteenth century people who danced about the Maypole? I venture to say none whatever ... they were not addressing any invocation to the woods or anything else. They were being jolly or merry at a certain time of the year in a traditional manner. For all I know, our learned people may decide that the game of marbles was originally a reminder to the spheres to keep on rolling. If I am told so, I shall not deny the doctrine, but I shall maintain that the boys who play marbles on London pavements know nothing of it. Granted this hypothetical origin of marbles, it has nothing whatever to do with the game of the twentieth century.”
The note books of Arthur Machen, as fragmentarily revealed in The London Adventure, are as fascinating as are the notebooks of Hawthorne, which as a matter of fact they much resemble. For example there are many notes concerned with patterns—and these bear a direct relationship with the earlier material in this chapter. Most of the notes concern labyrinths, mazes, spirals and whorls. He asks the question: Why was this form common to all primitive art? And then, in almost the same place in his note book one finds the sentence: “Literature began with charms, incantations, spells, songs of mystery, chants of religious ecstasy, the Bachic chorus, the rune, the mass.” This sentence is the basis for Hieroglyphics. It is, according to Machen, the thesis of the book fairly well summed up in one sentence.