Seabrooke’s d.p. exhibits astonishing lucidity toward the end, is apparently versed in intellectual small talk, and displays a familiarity with the works of James Joyce as well.
It is sometimes fascinating to compare different reactions to certain of Machen’s tales. Basil Davenport writing in the Saturday Review some years ago noted: “... there are some stories which portray a non-moral fall into a moral gulf; someone’s foot quite innocently slips, and there is no stopping above the bottom of hell ... that is what makes Mr. Arthur Machen’s stories supreme of their kind ... and such a story of irrational, irresistible temptation as Mr. Machen’s The White People ... about a little girl whose nurse happens to be a witch, and who becomes a devil-worshipper without the least idea of what she is doing.” Carl Van Vechten says of this same story: “Was ever a more malignantly depraved story written than The White People (which it might be profitable to compare with Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw?).”
Mr. Carl Van Vechten’s Peter Whiffle probably did as much to popularize Arthur Machen in the Twenties as any score of reviewers, but it also had the effect of rarifying Machen and conditioning him for a specific audience. It was Mr. Van Vechten’s (or rather, Peter’s) audience more than it was Machen’s. It was this audience, I think, that prompted Walter Winchell to report, breathlessly, that Arthur Machen was “tops among the literati.” Peter was a delightfully “naughty” character—there were so many of them in the Twenties! When he spoke of Machen he was speaking mostly about Peter. Nevertheless he was an able press agent. Said Peter, in part, and to paraphrase a phrase, we quote:
“It is a byword of the day that one only takes from a work of art what one brings to it, and how few readers can bring to Machen the requisite qualities, how few readers have gnosis! Machen evokes beauty out of horror, mystery and terror. He suggests the extremes of the terrible, the vicious, the most evil, by never describing them. His very reserve conveys the infinity of abomination.... But his expression soars so high, there is such ecstasy in his prose, that we are not meanly thrilled or revolted by his necromancy; rather we are uplifted and exalted by his suggestion of impurity and corruption, which leads us to ponder over the mysterious connection between man’s religious and sensual natures.” From this point on Peter’s bizarre rhapsody over Machen includes references to so many Florentine painters, Arabian necromancers, Asiatic messiahs and French Symbolistes that the average Machenite loses sight of his idol in the confusing blaze of intellectual pyrotechnics.
2
And then we have the testimony of C. Lewis Hind, a sort of literary journalist who once saw Machen plain. Mr. Hind did essays and sketches of literary people about London and collected them into books called Authors and I and More Authors and I. He remembers having met Machen once at a dinner given for Sir Frank Benson and members of his Shakespearean Repertoire Company; he also recalls having seen Machen “slouching through the interminable corridors of the Evening News.”
An article on Machen, published in one of his collections, he credits to a letter from Vincent Starrett. Mr. Starrett’s enthusiasm apparently moved Hind to do a piece on Mr. Machen. The encounter described in the article was, apparently, a chance encounter of the sort in which Machen himself delighted.
Mr. Hind had gone, one evening, to call upon an acquaintance who lived in one of the London Inns of Court. While he was peering at the names inscribed on the oak door the door was opened—by Arthur Machen! “My friend was not in, but the author of Hieroglyphics and I had some good, rapid talk. He is an admirable monologist when in the mood (see Hieroglyphics). For some reason or other I have a vivid recollection of that brief encounter—the open door, the snug room beyond, the books and a lamp, warmth and stillness, and Arthur Machen standing in the passage—smiling and talking, ready to talk but also ready to go back to his folios.”
Machen was, according to Mr. Hind, “a heavily built man, with a large genial, yet brooding, clean-shaven face; a good companion, I think, but one who keeps many of his thoughts to himself.” Mr. Hind was, in short, charmed and impressed, but he obviously did not consider Arthur Machen a V.I.P. It would be interesting to read Machen on Hind.
One of the most curious estimates of Machen is made by Professor Cornelius Weygandt in his A Century of the English Novel. Professor Weygandt admires Machen somewhat for his essays, and classifies him as a “lesser late Victorian” along with Baring-Gould, Quiller-Couch, Marie Corelli, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Walter Pater and others—a very curious group indeed!