“I will try to make myself clear,” said the Host selecting a volume from the shelves.
“Here we have an essay about a man called, let us say Blank. The author of this little essay will tell you that a passage of Blank’s prose suggests one of the more poignant episodes out of de Maupassant, set to music by Tchaikowski against a background of Gaugain’s Tahitian belles. Have you any idea what Blank’s prose is like?”
“No,” said the young man morosely.
“Good! Listen then to this. It is Vincent Starrett on Machen: ‘Joris Karl Huysmans, in a thoroughly good translation, perhaps remotely suggests Machen, both are debtors to Baudelaire.’ Now, does that tell you anything about Machen?”
“No, it does not!” said the young man. “But then, neither have you!”
“Quite true,” nodded the Host affably. “I am often carried away. But we have ably demonstrated my contention.” The younger man looked decidedly restless. “Um!”
“Know then,” said the Host relishing the sound of his voice, “that Arthur Machen, born in 1863, the son of a Welsh clergyman, first swam into the public ken early in the last decade of the last century—a fact which the public largely failed to appreciate until some years later. His earlier works were translations of the Heptameron, the Memoirs of Casanova, and several other large and, I should think, rather dull old works. But the most important were two remarkably unique books called The Anatomy of Tobacco and The Chronicle of Clemendy.
“Most of Machen’s best work was written before 1901—and in that year he temporarily deserted literature for the stage. Machen’s most productive period then, from 1890 to 1901, affords a curious and striking contrast with what was assumed to be the important literature and the important literary group of the time. The 1890’s in England were celebrated, although few people grow festive about it now, for the Yellow Book Boys, that delightful coterie of delicate decadents who glorified the carnation and the pansy. But after the maddest music had died away, and the reddest wine had been drunk, Cynara and Dorian fluttered to the shelves and Oscar and Hubert and Adelbert retired into a certain pastel-shaded obscurity from which they emerge from time to time as a new volume of memoirs is published. The period still commands a certain amount of academic attention—and yet the best books of that period were written not by these ‘Men of the Nineties,’ but by Arthur Machen. A chap named Muddiman, whose book you see there, wrote his history of these fellows and mentions Machen but briefly: ‘Arthur Machen, in those days, belonged to the short story writers with Hubert Crackanthorpe, who was the great imaginative prose writer of the group.’ Alas, poor Hubert! Who knows him now! Holbrook Jackson and Richard Le Gallienne ignore Machen completely. And perhaps rightly so. Machen was not of the group, nor of the period. But here I wish to digress briefly....
“These delicate contemporaries of Machen derived from the French Symbolistes, who derived from Mallarme and Baudelaire, both of whom were admittedly influenced by Poe. It has been said that Machen was also influenced by Poe. The difference, if you will credit me, is that Poe’s influence, in as far as it exists, came to Machen direct. When it came to the others of the group it had been filtered through Gallic gravel and Symbolistic sand.