Arthur Machen: Weaver of Fantasy

by William F. Gekle

And this same pattern occurs in most of his stories. Among his notes we find this, “The maze was not only the instrument but the symbol of ecstasy; it was a pictured ‘inebriation,’ the sign of some age old process that gave the secret bliss to men, that was symbolized also by dancing, by lyrics with their recurring burdens, and their repeated musical phrases: a maze, a dance, a song: three symbols pointing to one mystery.”

It would require a thorough examination of the notebook of Arthur Machen, if such a thing were possible, by a man with the skill and scholarship of a John Livingston Lowes to trace and to tell the complete story of the pattern in Arthur Machen. Yet here, in brief, and in all his works, the pattern is everywhere apparent.

There are, undoubtedly, those who prefer Machen the essayist to Machen the story teller. Certainly his greatest work, Hieroglyphics, is sufficient reply to those who have tried to dismiss Machen as the creator of “shockers” concerned with demonology and sensational horror stories. The delightful pieces that appeared serially in the Lyons Mail and the Illustrated News and the London Graphic would please even the Manchester Guardian or A. E. Houseman, who once wrote that he found Machen not quite to his taste. His essays on the Grail legend are authoritative without being archeological, witty without being flippant or, what would have been unbearable, satirical.

And yet, in the essays no less than in the stories, the pattern is there and is recognizable. One is forever running across a phrase or a notion one has encountered before—some where, some time, some place—and the place usually turns out to be another Machen essay. For the pattern of Machen’s thinking is as obvious as the pattern in the rug; as obvious, and as simple, as the definitions supplied in Hieroglyphics. The pattern is, as we know, summed up in the phrase: “removal from the common life.” It may be simplified further in the one word: “ecstasy.”

Now the word “ecstasy” has caused some confusion in the minds of certain of Machen’s detractors as well as among his admirers. There was a tendency, in the Twenties, as well as in the Nineties, to give the word “ecstasy” a connotation or a meaning similar to that employed by the popular novelists of the time. “Ecstasy” seemed to many to be the “ecstasy” of the pallid, perverted creatures of the Cafe Royale and, later, a sort of Elinor Glynn-ish, sinnish quality. It was a word much favored by the writers of romances, the practitioners of the purple phrase. And so we encounter, at times, this “novelist of ecstasy and sin” sort of nonsense.

It should be pointed out that Hieroglyphics, that excellent volume of literary criticism having little to do with passion, in or out of the desert, bears the illuminating subtitle: “A Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature.” And this ecstasy is of the mind—it is an exultation of the spirit of men. It is, to go back to the more descriptive phrase, the removal from the common life.

This pattern exists everywhere in Machen, sometimes it is developed by the characters and circumstances in his tales, or again it is carried out by argument or analysis in his essays, but always, upon closer examination, the grand design is apparent.

One may read, for example, the essay called The Hidden Mystery and find that it is almost exactly the same as The Mystic Speech. And then one reads The Secret Glory and finds, once again, the same theories, the same logic, the same figures and the same conclusions, expressed and explained as only Machen can set them down. This may send the casual reader, or even the amateur bibliographer, hunting from volume to volume with pencil and reading glass, for there seems to be indeed a hidden mystery, a mystic speech, a glorious secret in these passages and paragraphs.

Actually, of course, one is merely becoming aware of the pattern, and one is becoming impressed with the simplicity and the one-ness of everything Machen ever wrote. Of course there are actual resemblances between the essays mentioned and strong connections between them and the book. For the essays were written years before, and one of them was actually delivered as a lecture before the learned Quest Society of London. They are all a part of the book that is now known as The Secret Glory.